****CULLED: Northwestern—Aff****

Counterplans
 CIL CP: Wichita State

The American supreme court ought to grant the right of intellectual property inventorship in
artificial intelligence by expanding the scope of its interpretive obligations under customary
international law
Competes and solves – it renders the same legal status through CIL instead of domestic law
Fosberg, 20 (Anna L. Fosberg, Associate at Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP. She focuses her practice primarily on
corporate and commercial litigation in the Delaware Court of Chancery. “From Siri to Sci-Fi: Are Lethal Robots People
Too?” Penn State Law Review, 4-1-2020, https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1045&context=pslr)//babcii

IHL heavily relies on the concept of custom.183 Although no definition of customary law is universally accepted,184 the
international community generally accepts international norms that emerge from consistent State practice or behavior
that, over time, becomes accepted as a legal obligation.185 Commenting on the consistency of State practice, the
International Court of Justice in North Sea Continental Shelf186 noted that State practice should be “extensive and
virtually uniform.”187 Regardless of the persuasive nature of international legal obligations, custom is not equivalent to
U.S. law on U.S. soil.188 IHL, however, is still relevant to U.S. law.189 In Hamdan v. United States, 190 for example, the
D.C. Circuit noted that Congress essentially incorporates the international laws of war into domestic law, rather than
creating a U.S. common law of war.191 In Hamdan, the court reasoned that the lack of clear consensus within customary
international law should not create a bright-line rule that requires civil or criminal liability within the U.S .192 Despite the
ambiguities of customary international law, the United Nations (U.N.) Charter, the foundational treaty of the U.N.,193
has been adhered to by almost all States.194 And even the non-member States have acquiesced in its principles,195
which reflects the highly persuasive nature of international custom. Customary international law is relevant when
evaluating corporate liability in an international context. In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 196 the Second Circuit
held that “corporate liability is not a discernable norm of customary international law.”197 The court noted that no
corporation has ever been subject to any form of liability under customary IHL.198 The U.S. Supreme Court, in
Mohamad v. Palestinian Authority,199 then extended the Kiobel decision in holding that only a natural person is an
individual who can be held liable under the Torture Victim Protection Act.200 This ruling maintains the distinction
between a natural person and other entities.201 However, some contrary precedent suggests that non-human entities
can violate, and become liable under, international customary law.202 For example, the Seventh Circuit in Flomo v.
Firestone Nat. Rubber Co.203 held that corporate liability was possible under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).204 The
Seventh Circuit disagreed with the decision in Kiobel and reasoned that even if no corporation had ever been punished
for violating customary international law, litigation can be used to enforce an international norm.205 The court noted
that tort liability is a globally common consideration when deciding in favor of corporate liability.206

Declaring CIL as prior and binding crystallizes a generalized legal order that’s necessary to respond
to existential threats.
Crootof ’16 [Rebecca; 2016; Executive Director of the Information Society Project, ISP Research Scholar, and Lecturer
in Law at Yale Law School; Harvard National Section, “Change Without Consent: How Customary International Law
Modifies Treaties,” 41 Yale J. Int'l L. 237]

This Article challenges that presumption by present ing situations where c ustomary i nternational l aw has both lessened and expanded
states' treaty rights and obligations, thereby supporting the few scholars who have posited - usually in purely theoretical works - that customary international law may

modify treaties. By advancing a doctrinal justification for such modification based on lex posterior, this Article also contributes to the growing literature question ing whether

the legitimacy of the binding nature of international legal obligations can be grounded solely in state consent . This
argument is novel to the extent that it presumes that general - rather than universal - acceptance of a new customary rule may be

sufficient to work a treaty modification , thereby avoiding the holdout problem inherent to multilateral treaty modification
under the Vienna Convention's consent-focused rules (whereby a single state can upset the consensus of the
majority). Finally, this Article advances the counterintuitive argument that this less consensual basis for treaty
modification requires a state to engage in more consensus-respecting conduct . When a state wishes to argue against
a traditional understanding of a treaty provision, the usual approach of adaptive interpretation - attempting to
reinterpret a treaty's text to permit an action previously understood as forbidden - actually encourages states to act
unilaterally and risk destabilizing the international legal order . In contrast, a state that bases its legal arg ument on
the claim that the treaty has been modified by subsequent ly developed c ustomary international law will have to
identify and engage in coalition-build ing conduct. Part I reviews how treaties were historically relatively flexible
bilateral agreements concluded against a stable background of default customary international law. While foundational
customary norms and bilateral agreements are still the norm, today's international legal structure is complicated by a
proliferation in multilateral treaties and an increasing demand for international regulation of new areas, technologies,
objects, actions, and ideas. In the absence of directly relevant treaty law, and in need of reliable guiding principles,
states are developing practices standardizing their rights and duties in these new spheres. As a result, treaty text is
increasingly running up against conflicting state action and swiftly developing customary international law. Part II
describes consent-based means of modifying treaties and concludes that these traditional methods do not legitimately
resolve all conflicts between treaty and later-in-time customary international law. Part III demonstrates that the
possibility of treaty modification by customary international law has long existed in the international legal structure and
evaluates different doctrinal justifications for such modification. Part IV employs the threatened U.S. unilateral use of
force in Syria as a case study to tease out the relative benefits and drawbacks of these different means of treaty
modification. I. A New International Legal Order Customary international law and treaty law are the two primary sources
of international legal obligations. Sometimes they operate independently, governing particular fields; sometimes they
serve as mutually reinforcing regulations; sometimes one fills the other's lacunae; sometimes they mandate apparently
contradictory actions. As this Article is concerned with how customary international may modify treaties, this Part traces
how, due to ideological, geopolitical, and technological developments, the relationship between these two sources of
international legal obligations has grown more complicated and more prone to conflict. [*242] A. The Classic Account 1.
Stable Customary International Law A rule of customary international law is recognized as existing when states generally
engage in specific actions (the "state practice" requirement) and accept that those actions are obligatory or permitted
(the "opinio juris sive necessitatis" element). Thus, unlike custom in many domestic legal systems, which derives much of
its authority from its long-standing nature, customary international law has no formal temporal requirement. Instead, a
rule of customary international law is authoritative because states generally abide by it in the belief that it is law. That
being said, because of the generalized state practice requirement, customary international law was slow to develop in a
world of limited communication and sporadic technological advances. Accordingly, historic customary international law
comprised long-established, well-known, and relatively fixed rules governing relations among all states. It regulated the
recognition of new states and state responsibilities; the exchange of diplomatic counsels and their immunities; the
conduct and resolution of wars; the creation, interpretation, and termination of treaties; and other subjects associated
with state interaction. 2. Flexible Treaties Against this background of static customary norms, states concluded [*243]
bilateral treaties - written documents memorializing agreements between two states - clarifying their respective legal
rights and duties. These treaties were relatively flexible legal regimes: they could be modified or terminated with the
consent of states parties, by the conclusion of a subsequent, conflicting treaty between the same parties, by the
denunciation of one party after a material breach by the other, or by a fundamental change in circumstances or other
supervening event resulting in the impossibility of performing a promised legal obligation. Additionally, certain types of
treaties - for example, commercial or trading treaties or treaties of alliance - were generally presumed to allow for
unilateral denunciation. Accordingly, treaties have long been celebrated as a source of adaptive positive law that reflects
states parties' needs. B. The Modern World Today's international legal structure is far more complicated . Certain
customary rules still serve as background defaults governing many areas of state interaction, and the majority of new
treaties are still bilateral. But two factors - the rise of multilat eral treaties and swift ly developing c ustomary
international law - have changed the dynamic between treaty and customary international law, resulting in treaties
sometimes being the fixed backdrop against which new state practice and norms develop. 1. Constitutive Treaties The
past century has seen a dramatic rise in multilateral treaties - treaties [*244] concluded by multiple countries that often
aspire to universal participation. As early as the 1920s, scholars were recognizing that there were "an increasing number
of multilateral treaties." According to one study, eighty-six multilateral treaties were concluded in the century between
1648 through 1748 - but more than two thousand such treaties were concluded in the twenty-five years between 1951
and 1975! This proliferation might be traced to a growing conviction that certain global problems - including
combating the training and financing of transnational terrorist organizations , minimizing human-driven climate
change , and reducing the development or use of weapons of mass destruction - are best addressed through global
solutions.

2NC --- CIL CP

2NC --- AT: PDB
1. Court primacy is key
Bruch 6 – (Carl, Attorney and Co-Director of International Programs at the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), Is
International Environmental Law Really Law?: An Analysis of Application in DomesticCourts, 23 PaceEnvtl.L. Rev. 423,
http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr/vol23/iss2/)

A. Ambiguity of International Environmental Law in Judicial Decisions As the cases cited above show, domestic courts
increasingly look to international environmental law. In some cases, the courts are clear as to the legal effect of the
particular provision of inter-national environmental law. I nternational environmental law may be binding or
persuasive. In many cases, though, the precise role of i nternational law is ambiguous , vague, or inconclusive. In these
instances, the decisions consider, cite , and discuss i nternational environmental law in support of the ultimate
holding, but the weight that the court accords international environmental law is unclear . It could serve as a cause
of action, a rule of decision, an interpretive aid, or a principle of national law notwithstanding the international
status of the principle, or as "commonsense.137 However, in many cases, the court refers to international
environmental law without ex-plaining the legal status of the specific norm within the context of the judicial decision .
A survey by Professors Bodansky and Brunn6e of experiencesof domestic courts in applying international environmental
law also noted this ambiguity. They observed that, "In a perhaps sur-prisingly large number of cases, courts refer to
norms of i nterna-tional environmental law without explaining whether they regard them as rules of decision, as an
interpretive aid, or as principles that, despite currency at the international level, are simply drawn from national
sources."'38With respect to principles of international environmental law, Professors Bodansky and Brunn~e noted that
many decisions seemed to view the principles "as reflecting 'common sense,"' par-ticularly in cases that interpreted and
applied the precautionaryprinciple.139A variety of reasons for the ambiguity might be posited.140 Insome instances, the
status of the legal provision might be unclear. For example, while many cases relate to the precautionary princi-ple,
there is controversy over whether the precautionary principle constitutes a principle of customary international law, or
if it is anelement of soft law, or if it is simply a good idea ("common-sense").14' Accordingly, courts might seek to avoid
taking a posi-tion regarding the international legal status of a particularprovision. Similarly, there might be uncertainty
within a country about the role of i nternational law in domestic judicial deci-sions.142 In other words, the domestic
legal culture may be de facto suspicious of international law. In order to avoid being over-ruled or treading
unnecessarily into controversial areas, courts might blur the specific nature of the international provision before them.
In some instances, judges might not be particularly familiarwith international law or its relationship with domestic law.
Judges often are steeped in domestic law, its operation, and its interpretation but have not been trained in
international law or practiced international law. Accordingly, they might be reluctant to apply international law, even if
they are in a monist state and thus theoretically bound to give legal effect to the relevant provi-sions of international
law. A lack of fluency regarding the precise role of international law in domestic litigation may also contributeto judges
giving more weight to international law than would bemerited under conventional legal theory (e.g., in a country with
adualist system). Even if a judge does accord appropriate weight to interna-tional law, the judge might be
intentionally vague about the ratio-nale . This might be, for example, because other judges (e.g., thoseto whom the
decision might be appealed) may be less familiar withor even hostile to international law, as discussed above.

3. The perm creates statutory support for CIL, deflecting the precedent of independent
enforceable obligations.
Kundmueller ‘2 [Michelle; May 1; Attorney specializing in constitutional law, candidate for a J.D. and M.A. in Political
Theory from the University of Notre Dame, B.A. from Flagler College; Journal of Legislation, “Note: The Application of
Customary International Law in US Courts: Custom, Convention, or Pseudolegislation?” vol. 28] III. Uses, Abuses, and
Implications of Customary International Law in Domestic Law Debates over the role of c ustomary international law in
domestic courts continue to produce differing opinions about the role of customary international law within the U.S.
legal structure. While there is general agreement that c ustomary international law plays some role, the extent of this
role remains unclear . Three of the most important of the unanswered questions are covered in this section of this
Note: (1) whether customary international law has the potential to trump federal legislation, (2) whether c ustomary
international law is federal law without empowering legislation from Congress, and (3) which political branch holds
ultimate control over the interpretation of customary international law. The resolution of these issues will determine
the power of c ustomary international law in U.S. legal systems. In doing this, it may also change the balance of power
between the respective federal branches by expanding the judiciary's ability to overrule federal law. In the final analysis,
the answers to the preceding questions will determine whether customary international law or Congress controls in
domestic legislation. The following section examines some currently viable theories about the power of customary
international law in the U.S. legal system. A. Dominance of Customary International Law over Federal Law Jordan J. Paust, who has authored a book and several law review articles on the
subject of customary international law, asserts that the incorporation [*366] of this body of law into domestic law is required by the Constitution. He claims that "customary international law has been directly incorporable,
at least for civil sanction and jurisdictional purposes, without the need for some other statutory base." 20 According to Paust, "the Founders clearly expected that the customary law of nations was binding, was supreme
law, created (among others) private rights and duties, and would be applicable in United States federal courts." 21 Based on his claims of constitutionally mandated incorporation of customary international law, Paust
delineates the areas of domestic law that this affects. In some applications, customary international law enhances the power of the "Executive under Article II, section 3 to 'take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'"
22 In other applications, customary international law restricts the Executive: "Supreme Court and other opinions have also recognized that while exercising Presidential war powers, the Executive is bound by customary
international law." 23 In addition to affecting the President and therefore indirectly the Legislative branch, Paust claims that customary international law directly shapes Congressional power because it "can limit the
exercise of an otherwise appropriate Congressional power and thus can function partly as an aid for interpreting the extent of constitutional grants of power." 24 The power of customary international law also affects the
courts, where it "may be relevant to an adequate interpretation of various sorts of Congressional power in order to functionally enhance such powers." 25 Finally, Paust claims that the "latter process of incorporation
might include an enhancement of the power of Congress under Article I, section 3, clause 18 to enact legislation 'necessary and proper for carrying into Execution . . . all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the
Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.'" 26 Because customary international law thus pervades the federal government, alternately limiting and expanding the powers of the respective
branches, it becomes a defining body of law in relationship to the federal government. Hence, Paust writes, "in the case of an unavoidable clash between fundamental human rights supported by customary international
law and a federal statute, the human rights (which have a constitutional status) [*367] must prevail." 27 In normal conflicts between codified (treaty) international law and federal statute, the last-in-time rule applies; this
rule dictates that whichever law was most recently enacted controls. 28 Paust claims that this rule dictates that, in conflicts between customary international law and federal statutes, customary international law always
controls. 29 As Paust theorizes, "customary international law would necessarily be 'last in time,' since custom is either constantly re-enacted through a process of recognition and behavior involving patterns of expectation
and practice or it loses its validity and force as law." 30 By this reasoning, custom is always a controlling authority in the face of a directly conflicting federal statute. The extent to which Paust claims that customary
international law influences and controls domestic law leads to the question of who, within the U.S. legal system, decides upon the content, interpretation, and manner of application of international law. While all three
branches of the federal government will have some indirect control in forming customary international law, it also limits the scope of each. Hence, whichever branch is empowered to control the application and
interpretation of this body of law within the domestic legal structure will be that much stronger, relative to the coordinating branches. In Paust's view, the judicial branch is responsible to "identify, clarify, and apply" this
body of law. 31 In response to concerns that this role improperly changes the balance of powers, he asserts that "it is precisely because the federal judiciary has both the power and responsibility to identify and apply
customary international law in cases otherwise properly before the courts that there is no violation of the separation of powers when federal courts apply international law while interpreting federal statutes." 32 In an
article on human rights law and domestic courts, Richard B. Lillich explores the role and the ramifications of customary international law in United States law. Like Paust, Lillich bases his understanding of the role of
customary international law on the finding that "customary international law, while not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of the law of the land to be determined and applied by the courts whenever appropriate in
making a decision." 33 Based on this, Lillich states that "the starting point in ascertaining what international human rights norms have been received into customary international law--and therefore are rules of decisions
for domestic [*368] courts--commonly is thought to be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . ." 34 The status of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a source of the customary international law rests
solely on its position as evidence of existing customary international law. Lillich admits that, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights resolution was adopted without a dissenting vote by the U.N. in 1948, it is not

Thus, to the extent Lillich is correct that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
legally binding as a treaty, as it has never been ratified. 35

reflects--at least in part--customary international law, and to the extent that both Paust and Lillich are correct that
customary international law is part of United States law which should be enforced and interpreted by the courts, it
should also "be directly enforceable in domestic courts." 36 Most c ustomary international law claims in U.S. courts
have been based on a statute which provides for such a claim. The most common example of this is the A lien Tort
Statute, which dates back to the Judiciary Act of 1789 and provides for federal jurisdiction over "any civil action by an
alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations of a treaty of the United States." 37 The point of Lillich's
suggestion is that, while there is nothing wrong with providing statutorily for the incorporation of customary
international law, as has been done in the past , it is unnecessary or redundant. The implications of Lillich's claim that
customary international law may and ought to be directly incorporated into U nited States law even without statutory
support are far reaching . He advocates that judges ought to use human rights law--and implicitly all of c ustomary
international law--without statutory support. Not only could claims be brought in federal and state courts without
the benefit of enabling statutes , but, under the mirror principle , the U nited States has an obligation, enforceable
domestically , to live up to the provisions of c ustomary international law. 38 Beyond this direct effect, which has the
potential to permit the voiding of a federal statute on the grounds that it conflicts with c ustomary international law
(as defined and recognized by the judiciary), Lillich predicts that customary international law should have the "greatest
impact on domestic law in the future by influencing the courts' approach to constitutional and statutory standards." 39
This means that the Constitution, federal law, and state law should be interpreted in light of customary international
law. As Lillich states, "litigants and judges already have invoked the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] for precisely
this purpose." 40 Lillich hails this new world of customary international law's direct and indirect incorporation into
United States law as offering "significant as well as virtually limitless possibilities for achieving greater protection of
the rights of individuals." 41

2NC --- AT: PDCP

1. Resolved = legislative
LSA 5 [Louisiana State Legislature; 2005; Governing body of the state of Louisiana; Louisiana State Legislature,
“Legislative Glossary,” https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/Glossary.aspx]

Resolution

A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating policies , and making decisions where
some other form is not required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term
" resolved ". Not subject to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. (Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules
8.11, 13.1, 6.8, and 7.4 and Senate Rules 10.9, 13.5 and 15.1)

2. the united states’ is a collective term must be all

Oakley 9 American Civil Procedure: A Guide to Civil Adjudication in US Courts, Edited by John Bilyeu Oakley, Professor
of Law at the University of California, Davis, and Vikram D. Amar, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic
Affairs of the School of Law of the University of California at Davis, Kluwer Law International, 2009, page 19

Although it is commonplace today to refer to “the United States” as a single entity and as the subject of statements
that grammatically employ singular verbs, it is important to remember that “the United States” remains in many
important ways a collective term . The enduring legal significance of the fifty states that together constitute the United States, and their essential dominion over most
legal matters affecting day-to-day life within the United States, vastly complicates any attempt to summarize the civil procedures within the United States. Within the

community of nations, the United States is a geopolitical superpower that acts through a federal government granted
constitutionally specified and limited powers. The organizing principle of the federal Constitution ,1 however, is one of
popular sovereignty , with governmental powers distributed in the first instance to republican institutions of
government organized autonomously and uniquely in each of the fifty states. Although there are substantial similarities in the organization of
state governments, idiosyncrasies abound.

3. The authority to ‘vest’ is decisively law-making and legislative in nature

Jovanovic 12 (Miodrag Jovanovic, University of Belgrade, Faculty of Law, Faculty Member, “Collective Rights: A Legal
Theory”, Cambridge University Press, Jan 12, 2012, https://books.google.com/books?id=YDkc9i_iLakC&dq=
%22power+to+vest+rights%22+%22legislature%22&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//babcii

An alternative approach to the one suggested would be to endorse the so-called ‘legal omnipotence’ argument,
according to which the plausibility of a new category of right-holder depends decisively on the will of
a law-making authority. This means that, in so far as legal authorities have power to vest rights
in whatever entities they like, legal theory might find itself conceptually analyzing and describing, say, stones, bridges,
and planets as bearers of certain rights. However, this would certainly be at odds with the common wisdom of
elementary textbooks in jurisprudence, which operate with only two traditional categories of right-holder: natural and
juristic persons. On the other hand, this does not imply that legal authorities cannot take steps towards shifting the
status of certain entities – from being objects to becoming subjects – in their legal orders. Take, for example, the
provisions of section 90a of the German civil code (Burgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB)), which goes as follows: ‘Animals are
not things. They are protected by special statutes. They are governed by the provisions that apply to things, with
the necessary modifications, except insofar as otherwise provided.’ Further-more, there are other similar provisions on
animal welfare in the German legal system that give rise to the arguments in favour of the legal personality of animals.
Nevertheless, the final say in the debate about the legal personality of animals, or various collective entities alike, is on
legal theory. I stress again that an initial incentive has always to be given by respective legislative authorities –
international and/or municipal – because legal theory cannot simply come up with a new operative legal concept out of
nowhere. However, a legal concept can be said to eventually ‘exist’ as a general legal concept – and not merely as a
concept of German, English, or Serbian law – only when it is duly constructed by general legal theory. This task, as it will
be demonstrated, requires going beyond the specific methodological apparatus of Reine Rechtslehre (method of
‘imputation’) and analytical jurisprudence (method of ‘paraphrasing’ or ‘meaning in context’).

4. ‘Legal rights’ are solely legislative

Singh, 21 (Pringle Singh, Pringle Singh is a Law graduate from Amity University., 8-1-2021, accessed on 7-18-2022,
LAWYERS GYAN, "Difference between Fundamental Rights, Legal Rights and Constitutional Rights?",
https://lawyersgyan.com/blog/difference-between-fundamental-rights-legal-rights-and-constitutional-rights/
#:~:text=On%20the%20other%20hand%2C%20Legal,every%20aspect%20of%20the%20nation.)//Babcii

On the other hand, Legal rights are those rights that are recognised by the state through its statutes. These rights are
assured by the ordinary law of the State passed by the legislature. 

2NC --- Solvency/signaling

1. Even if it isn’t codified into statutory law it is certain and clear enough for enforcement
LSG ’6 [Law Society's Gazette; 2006; “Legal Update: Law Reports,” Lexis]
Held, for the purposes of these proceedings, the court accepted that custom ary international law was, without the
need for any domestic statute or judicial decision , part of the domestic law of England and Wales, since the Crown did
not challenge that proposition. Customary international law recognised a crime of aggression and understood it with
sufficient clarity to permit the lawful trial of those accused of the crime. It did not lack the certainty of definition
required of a criminal offence. It was at least arguable that war crimes, recognised as such in c ustomary international
law, would be triable and punishable under English domestic criminal law. However, war crimes were distinct from the
crime of aggression. A crime recognised in customary international law might be assimilated into the domestic criminal
law of England and Wales. But the authorities did not support the proposition that that result followed automatically (R
v Keyn (Ferdinand) (The Franconia) (1876-77) LR 2 Ex D 63 considered and Hutchinson v Newbury Magistrates Court,
Independent, 20 November, 2000 applied).

2NC --- Spillover

Yes spillover ---
1. U.S. acceptance causes cascading revision of CIL.
Howard ’20 [David; 2020; Attorney at Baker Botts LLP, J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law; Duke Journal of
Constitutional Law and Public Policy, “A Revised Revisionist Position in the Law of Nations Debate,” Lexis]

At the Founding, the Framers viewed the law of nations as arising from positive or natural law, yet this is no longer the
case. The law of state-state relations was quite clearly the most important of the three original categories of the law of
nations, as it governed the relations between sovereign nations. This law of state-state relations created a system that
nations followed to keep the peace and promote economic connections, and is referenced and incorporated in several
constitutional provisions, such as the recognition power. However, customary international law has changed drastically
since the Founding. Fundamental technological, social, and geopolitical change can accelerate the formation of CIL in
what Professor Michael Scharf calls Grotian moments 67, or international constitutional moments. Footnote 67:
"Grotian Moment" is a term used to describe a " paradigm-shifting development in which new rules and doctrines of
customary international law emerge with unusual rapidity and acceptance ." See Michael P. Scharf, Seizing the
"Grotian Moment": Accelerated Formation of Customary International Law in Times of Fundamental Change, 43
CORNELL INT'L L.J. 439, 440 (2010). End of Footnote 67. These are large turning points in the law of nations. The law of
nations is not stagnant , and each state action --to varying degrees--affects that "general and consistent" state practice
on which CIL is defined. Because CIL is an unwritten body of law and continues to change, there is tremendous difficulty
in determining what it requires. There is even debate over what evidence should be used to define CIL. This is why
"determinations of the content of c ustomary international law implicate not only legal considerations but also
considerations of U.S. foreign policy ."
 Federalism CP: Michigan

Text: The fifty states and relevant subnational actors, including the National Governors Association,
should condition the administration of federal programs on vesting legal inventorship rights in
artificially intelligent systems that autonomously develop patent-eligible subject matter.

It competes and solves – conditioning the plan never fiats it, but results in federal adoption AND
aggressively expands dual sovereignty.
Bloomberg ’21 [Scott; September 17; Associate Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law; Social Science
Research Network, “Frenemy Federalism,” Draft Manuscript, p. 2-40]

i. Uncooperative Federalism

Dean Heather Gerken and Professor Jessica Bulman-Pozen have categorized state legalization of marijuana as an
instance of uncooperative federalism.108 In their influential 2009 essay, Uncooperative Federalism, Gerken and Bulman-
Pozen observe that scholars had traditionally conceived of our system of federalism through one of two lenses. Under
the “ state autonomy ” model of federalism, the states and the fed eral government are dual sovereign s who act as
autonomous rivals , allowing states to act as dissenters to federal policies they deem undesirable. 109 In contrast,
under the “cooperative federalism” approach, the states are like agents or servants of the federal government, dutifully
carrying out a federal program to achieve a shared objective.110

Uncooperative federalism presents a third type of relationship between the states and the federal government, one
that recognizes a principal’s or master’s dependence on their agents or servants, and the concomitant power of an
embedded agent or servant to push back against their superior. 111 Sometimes, the states do not dutifully cooperate
in administer ing a federal program, but actively seek to change or undermine that program. They are uncooperative .

Gerken and Bulman-Pozen identify three categories of state actions that constitute uncooperative federalism. The first is
“licensed” dissent, which occurs when “Congress explicitly contemplates that states will deviate from federal norms in
implementing federal policy, but states take that invitation in a direction the federal government may not
anticipate.”112 State efforts to catalyze federal welfare reform provide an example. In the 1980s, states such as
Wisconsin and Michigan utilized a waiver provision of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare
program (“AFDC”) to “recast an entitlement for poor families struggling to raise children into a temporary grant for
recipients who would quickly move into the private workforce.”113 Departing from the existing federal policy, the states
began enacting welfare-to-work requirements that required welfare recipients to actively seek employment and
terminated AFDC benefits after a set period of time.114 These uncooperative state s largely succeed ed in changing
federal welfare law when Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996.115

The second form of uncooperative federalism occurs when states exploit gaps in federal regulatory schemes. In such
cases, “the federal government does not contemplate state variation but states have sufficient discretion that they find
ways to contest federal policy .”116 Gerken and Bulman-Pozen offer California’s efforts to regulate air pollution more
stringently than the EPA as an example of this strain of uncooperative federalism. The state has successfully exploited a
narrow exception to the Clean Air Act’s preemption provision to drive federal emissions standards for decades.117

The third, and “strongest,” form of uncooperative federalism is civil disobedience, where states “simply refuse to
comply with the national program or otherwise obstruct it .”118 Gerken and Bulman-Pozen cite state pushback to the
Patriot Act as an example. After Congress passed the Act, several states enacted resolutions that prohibited their
agencies from assisting the federal government in enforcing the Act.119 This uncooperative action had real effect , as
“the fed eral government relies on the states for enforcement assistance .”120

In early 2009, the federal-state relationship regarding marijuana fit within the uncooperative federalism framework,
falling into the civil disobedience bucket.121 At that point, thirteen states had legalized medical marijuana, a costly blow
to the federal government due to its dependence on the states for assistance in enforcing marijuana prohibition.122 The
DEA, meanwhile, was “actively working to undermine the decriminalization efforts underway in California, the state with
the most nationally visible decriminalization policy.”123 Indeed, federal prosecutions of individual medical marijuana
users and marijuana businesses in California were commonplace in the early 2000s.124

ii. Increased Federal Cooperation

There is a great deal more cooperation in the federal-state marijuana relationship than there was when Gerken and
Bulman-Pozen originally described it as uncooperative federalism. Since 2009, dozens more states have legalized
medical marijuana and many have also legalized the drug for recreational use. In conjunction with these state policy
change s , the fed eral government ’s policy changed as well: It became far more cooperative with the states.

Though the fed eral government indisputably has the constitutional authority to prosecute marijuana businesses and
users operating in states where marijuana is legal, over the years it has agreed – expressly at times and tacitly at others
– to allow those businesses and users to avoid prosecution. This form of federal cooperation began with a series of DOJ
memoranda instructing U.S. Attorneys not to prosecute marijuana businesses and users acting in compliance with state
law.

In 2009, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden issued a policy memorandum to U.S. Attorneys titled “Investigations and
Prosecutions in States Authorizing the Medical Use of Marijuana.”125 The “Ogden Memo,” as it has become known,
instructed U.S. Attorneys in states that legalized medical marijuana to deprioritize the enforcement of federal marijuana
law against individuals who use medical marijuana in compliance with state law.126 As a result, the federal government
stopped prosecuting medical marijuana users unless the user failed to comply with state law in a manner that
implicated one of several “potential federal interest[s]” listed in the Ogden Memo.127

Reasserting state sovereignty counterbalances governance failures from federal encroachment –

extinction.
Mihalakas ’19 [Nasos; May 21; Global Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, LL.M. from University College
London, J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; The Federalism Project, “The Need for Governance Reform
– Symptoms vs. Cause,” https://the-federalism-project.org/2019/05/21/the-need-for-governance-reform-symptoms-vs-
cause/]

There is no doubt that we live in “challenging” times. We face ‘social challenges,’ from racial discrimination to gender
inequality, women’s rights (reproductive or otherwise) that will have to be addressed, LGBTQ issues (recognition of gay
marriage), a gun violence epidemic due to both inadequate gun control laws but also excessive violence in our society,
etc. We also face ‘economic challenges,’ like stagnant salaries and low wages, job insecurity (due to automation or
outsourcing), taxes that are too high for some and not high enough for others, mounting student debt, and yes massive
income inequality. And, of course, we do face ‘external challenges’, from nuclear proliferation in the Korean peninsula,
to ISIS and religiously motivated global terrorism , to global warming and climate change !

Yet, most of these issues are but symptoms of a greater cause. Their existence, or our inability to overcome them, is
being caused by a much greater problem in our society that unless we address soon we risk permanent societal
failures within the next 20 to 30 years.

This greater cause is our very own failing system of governance !!!
Though brilliant in its original construction by the founding fathers, our Federal system of governance (separation of
powers, check and balances, separate Federal and State governments) is grossly off track and highly unbalanced .
During the past 200 years, we witnessed a steady transfer of power away from the States and into the Federal
government, and within the Federal government we saw a similar steady concentration of power in the hands of the
Executive (the singular President), and to a certain extend the Supreme Court (due to Congressional acquiescence).

This did not happen due to some conspiracy by the ‘powerful elite’ or through interference by foreign powers. It
happened gradually (almost naturally), as a response to major failures at the State level: in dealing with slavery and
racial discrimination (see Civil War and Jim Crow laws in the south), in dealing with market failures and the need to
regulate business and provide a safety net (see Great Depression, The New Deal and the Great Society), in fighting a Cold
War with the Soviet Union (see expansion of military and intelligence services to advance US foreign policy).

Today, power and authority to deal with issues and solve problems is highly concentrated at the Federal level, away
from ordinary people and their ability to monitor let alone influence elected politicians.

There is so much power concentrated at the Federal level, and in particular in the hands of one person (the President)
that it makes Washington politicians constant targets of special interests and lobbying organizations , makes
negotiations for compromise impossible because there is so much at stake, and it has created a highly unbalanced
system (where “checks and balances” are not fully implemented and more often can’t work effectively).

Washington gridlock, dysfunction, polarization, and partisanship have led to the inability to pass a budget (balanced
or otherwise), or address the need for immigration reform, or provide for adequate healthcare coverage and
affordable prescription drugs, or even implement proper tax reform. Therefore, unless we address these ‘systemic’
failures of our system of governance, unless we implement institutional changes and fix the process, we will never get
lasting solutions to our current and future societal challenges.

Unfortunately, there is no one thing we can do, no ‘magic bullet’ that can fix the dysfunction of our Federal system of
governance (because it’s not just ‘the Federal government’ that needs reform, but also/primarily Congress and the
Judiciary). Rather, there are several things (from specific process changes through laws/regulations to Constitutional
amendments) that we will have to changes now, in order to see improvement in the function of our system of
governance in the next 20 to 30 years.

There is a parallel example to this system of governance failures, and it’s that of ‘global warming.’ Global temperatures
have been rising, due to greenhouse gases (caused by human activity – burning fossil fuels like coal and oil), presenting
an existential threat to our planet and our way of life. However, fossil fuels are not inherently evil, used by certain
people bent on the destruction of humanity! Energy from fossil fuels was instrumental in facilitating the industrial
revolution, which brought progress and technological innovations during the past 150 years, that helped the whole
world to advance, prosper, and better connect. It was not until recently that we realized that the constantly expanding
use of fossil fuels by humans is contributing to rising temperatures, and if we don’t do something now to ‘bent the
curve’, then in 20 to 30 years from now temperatures will rise to levels that can be devastating to the planets
ecosystem, and by extension us humans.

Concentration of power at the Federal level, over the past 200 years, though not inherently evil (downright necessary
and proper during some critical periods), has reached a point of pure dysfunction. The proof of the unsustainable
nature of our current system (like rising temperatures are a proof of global warming) is income inequality. During the
past 50 years, we have witnessed a steady concentration of wealth at the hands of the top 10% (and primarily the top
1%).

And although one can look at our society today statically and say: “things are still ok: there are rich people and poor
people, and we are still the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world – so what’s the problem?”… the trend keeps
going upwards: currently over 70% of our national wealth is concentrated at the hands for the top 10%. When do we
need to do something to stop this trend? When it gets to 80%, or 90%?
Democrats and Republicans (now thanks to Donald Trump) both agree on the existence of a ‘powerful elite, in cahoots
with the political establishment, bent on exploiting the middle class’… yet both party’s solution is the same: win political
power and cut or raise taxes, regulate more or less, appoint some type of judges… in essence, deal with the symptoms
and not the underlying cause!

If we want to address the underlying cause of income inequality (and outsourcing of jobs, health-care failures, racial
tensions, education funding, women’s rights, public housing, etc.), then we need to reform our system of governance,
before we can consider specific policy priorities. By fixing the legislative process, restoring proper checks, correcting the
imbalance within the government branches and returning powers back to the States … we can get on a path where we
see real results within the next 20 to 30 years.

Otherwise, gridlock and dysfunction at the Federal level will only get worse!

OFF
CP – Federalism

It competes and solves – conditioning the plan never fiats it, but results in federal adoption AND
aggressively expands dual sovereignty.
Bloomberg ’21 [Scott; September 17; Associate Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law; Social Science
Research Network, “Frenemy Federalism,” Draft Manuscript, p. 2-40]

i. Uncooperative Federalism

Dean Heather Gerken and Professor Jessica Bulman-Pozen have categorized state legalization of marijuana as an
instance of uncooperative federalism.108 In their influential 2009 essay, Uncooperative Federalism, Gerken and Bulman-
Pozen observe that scholars had traditionally conceived of our system of federalism through one of two lenses. Under
the “ state autonomy ” model of federalism, the states and the fed eral government are dual sovereign s who act as
autonomous rivals , allowing states to act as dissenters to federal policies they deem undesirable. 109 In contrast,
under the “cooperative federalism” approach, the states are like agents or servants of the federal government, dutifully
carrying out a federal program to achieve a shared objective.110

Uncooperative federalism presents a third type of relationship between the states and the federal government, one
that recognizes a principal’s or master’s dependence on their agents or servants, and the concomitant power of an
embedded agent or servant to push back against their superior. 111 Sometimes, the states do not dutifully cooperate
in administer ing a federal program, but actively seek to change or undermine that program. They are uncooperative .

Gerken and Bulman-Pozen identify three categories of state actions that constitute uncooperative federalism. The first is
“licensed” dissent, which occurs when “Congress explicitly contemplates that states will deviate from federal norms in
implementing federal policy, but states take that invitation in a direction the federal government may not
anticipate.”112 State efforts to catalyze federal welfare reform provide an example. In the 1980s, states such as
Wisconsin and Michigan utilized a waiver provision of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare
program (“AFDC”) to “recast an entitlement for poor families struggling to raise children into a temporary grant for
recipients who would quickly move into the private workforce.”113 Departing from the existing federal policy, the states
began enacting welfare-to-work requirements that required welfare recipients to actively seek employment and
terminated AFDC benefits after a set period of time.114 These uncooperative state s largely succeed ed in changing
federal welfare law when Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996.115

The second form of uncooperative federalism occurs when states exploit gaps in federal regulatory schemes. In such
cases, “the federal government does not contemplate state variation but states have sufficient discretion that they find
ways to contest federal policy .”116 Gerken and Bulman-Pozen offer California’s efforts to regulate air pollution more
stringently than the EPA as an example of this strain of uncooperative federalism. The state has successfully exploited a
narrow exception to the Clean Air Act’s preemption provision to drive federal emissions standards for decades.117

The third, and “strongest,” form of uncooperative federalism is civil disobedience, where states “simply refuse to
comply with the national program or otherwise obstruct it .”118 Gerken and Bulman-Pozen cite state pushback to the
Patriot Act as an example. After Congress passed the Act, several states enacted resolutions that prohibited their
agencies from assisting the federal government in enforcing the Act.119 This uncooperative action had real effect , as
“the fed eral government relies on the states for enforcement assistance .”120

In early 2009, the federal-state relationship regarding marijuana fit within the uncooperative federalism framework,
falling into the civil disobedience bucket.121 At that point, thirteen states had legalized medical marijuana, a costly blow
to the federal government due to its dependence on the states for assistance in enforcing marijuana prohibition.122 The
DEA, meanwhile, was “actively working to undermine the decriminalization efforts underway in California, the state with
the most nationally visible decriminalization policy.”123 Indeed, federal prosecutions of individual medical marijuana
users and marijuana businesses in California were commonplace in the early 2000s.124

ii. Increased Federal Cooperation

There is a great deal more cooperation in the federal-state marijuana relationship than there was when Gerken and
Bulman-Pozen originally described it as uncooperative federalism. Since 2009, dozens more states have legalized
medical marijuana and many have also legalized the drug for recreational use. In conjunction with these state policy
change s , the fed eral government ’s policy changed as well: It became far more cooperative with the states.

Though the fed eral government indisputably has the constitutional authority to prosecute marijuana businesses and
users operating in states where marijuana is legal, over the years it has agreed – expressly at times and tacitly at others
– to allow those businesses and users to avoid prosecution. This form of federal cooperation began with a series of DOJ
memoranda instructing U.S. Attorneys not to prosecute marijuana businesses and users acting in compliance with state
law.

In 2009, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden issued a policy memorandum to U.S. Attorneys titled “Investigations and
Prosecutions in States Authorizing the Medical Use of Marijuana.”125 The “Ogden Memo,” as it has become known,
instructed U.S. Attorneys in states that legalized medical marijuana to deprioritize the enforcement of federal marijuana
law against individuals who use medical marijuana in compliance with state law.126 As a result, the federal government
stopped prosecuting medical marijuana users unless the user failed to comply with state law in a manner that
implicated one of several “potential federal interest[s]” listed in the Ogden Memo.127

Reasserting state sovereignty counterbalances governance failures from federal encroachment –

extinction.
Mihalakas ’19 [Nasos; May 21; Global Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, LL.M. from University College
London, J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; The Federalism Project, “The Need for Governance Reform
– Symptoms vs. Cause,” https://the-federalism-project.org/2019/05/21/the-need-for-governance-reform-symptoms-vs-
cause/]

There is no doubt that we live in “challenging” times. We face ‘social challenges,’ from racial discrimination to gender
inequality, women’s rights (reproductive or otherwise) that will have to be addressed, LGBTQ issues (recognition of gay
marriage), a gun violence epidemic due to both inadequate gun control laws but also excessive violence in our society,
etc. We also face ‘economic challenges,’ like stagnant salaries and low wages, job insecurity (due to automation or
outsourcing), taxes that are too high for some and not high enough for others, mounting student debt, and yes massive
income inequality. And, of course, we do face ‘external challenges’, from nuclear proliferation in the Korean peninsula,
to ISIS and religiously motivated global terrorism , to global warming and climate change !

Yet, most of these issues are but symptoms of a greater cause. Their existence, or our inability to overcome them, is
being caused by a much greater problem in our society that unless we address soon we risk permanent societal
failures within the next 20 to 30 years.

This greater cause is our very own failing system of governance !!!

Though brilliant in its original construction by the founding fathers, our Federal system of governance (separation of
powers, check and balances, separate Federal and State governments) is grossly off track and highly unbalanced .
During the past 200 years, we witnessed a steady transfer of power away from the States and into the Federal
government, and within the Federal government we saw a similar steady concentration of power in the hands of the
Executive (the singular President), and to a certain extend the Supreme Court (due to Congressional acquiescence).

This did not happen due to some conspiracy by the ‘powerful elite’ or through interference by foreign powers. It
happened gradually (almost naturally), as a response to major failures at the State level: in dealing with slavery and
racial discrimination (see Civil War and Jim Crow laws in the south), in dealing with market failures and the need to
regulate business and provide a safety net (see Great Depression, The New Deal and the Great Society), in fighting a Cold
War with the Soviet Union (see expansion of military and intelligence services to advance US foreign policy).

Today, power and authority to deal with issues and solve problems is highly concentrated at the Federal level, away
from ordinary people and their ability to monitor let alone influence elected politicians.

There is so much power concentrated at the Federal level, and in particular in the hands of one person (the President)
that it makes Washington politicians constant targets of special interests and lobbying organizations , makes
negotiations for compromise impossible because there is so much at stake, and it has created a highly unbalanced
system (where “checks and balances” are not fully implemented and more often can’t work effectively).

Washington gridlock, dysfunction, polarization, and partisanship have led to the inability to pass a budget (balanced
or otherwise), or address the need for immigration reform, or provide for adequate healthcare coverage and
affordable prescription drugs, or even implement proper tax reform. Therefore, unless we address these ‘systemic’
failures of our system of governance, unless we implement institutional changes and fix the process, we will never get
lasting solutions to our current and future societal challenges.

Unfortunately, there is no one thing we can do, no ‘magic bullet’ that can fix the dysfunction of our Federal system of
governance (because it’s not just ‘the Federal government’ that needs reform, but also/primarily Congress and the
Judiciary). Rather, there are several things (from specific process changes through laws/regulations to Constitutional
amendments) that we will have to changes now, in order to see improvement in the function of our system of
governance in the next 20 to 30 years.

There is a parallel example to this system of governance failures, and it’s that of ‘global warming.’ Global temperatures
have been rising, due to greenhouse gases (caused by human activity – burning fossil fuels like coal and oil), presenting
an existential threat to our planet and our way of life. However, fossil fuels are not inherently evil, used by certain
people bent on the destruction of humanity! Energy from fossil fuels was instrumental in facilitating the industrial
revolution, which brought progress and technological innovations during the past 150 years, that helped the whole
world to advance, prosper, and better connect. It was not until recently that we realized that the constantly expanding
use of fossil fuels by humans is contributing to rising temperatures, and if we don’t do something now to ‘bent the
curve’, then in 20 to 30 years from now temperatures will rise to levels that can be devastating to the planets
ecosystem, and by extension us humans.
Concentration of power at the Federal level, over the past 200 years, though not inherently evil (downright necessary
and proper during some critical periods), has reached a point of pure dysfunction. The proof of the unsustainable
nature of our current system (like rising temperatures are a proof of global warming) is income inequality. During the
past 50 years, we have witnessed a steady concentration of wealth at the hands of the top 10% (and primarily the top
1%).

And although one can look at our society today statically and say: “things are still ok: there are rich people and poor
people, and we are still the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world – so what’s the problem?”… the trend keeps
going upwards: currently over 70% of our national wealth is concentrated at the hands for the top 10%. When do we
need to do something to stop this trend? When it gets to 80%, or 90%?

Democrats and Republicans (now thanks to Donald Trump) both agree on the existence of a ‘powerful elite, in cahoots
with the political establishment, bent on exploiting the middle class’… yet both party’s solution is the same: win political
power and cut or raise taxes, regulate more or less, appoint some type of judges… in essence, deal with the symptoms
and not the underlying cause!

If we want to address the underlying cause of income inequality (and outsourcing of jobs, health-care failures, racial
tensions, education funding, women’s rights, public housing, etc.), then we need to reform our system of governance,
before we can consider specific policy priorities. By fixing the legislative process, restoring proper checks, correcting the
imbalance within the government branches and returning powers back to the States … we can get on a path where we
see real results within the next 20 to 30 years.

Otherwise, gridlock and dysfunction at the Federal level will only get worse!

2NC – O/V
2 – Scope – Bottom-up regulatory innovation’s key to adapt ossified international structures to
evolving existential risks.
Weiss 22 [Charles, the first Science and Technology Adviser to the World Bank, serving in that position from 1971-86,
became Distinguished Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) at the Georgetown University
School of Foreign Service in 1997, was the director of the STIA program from 1997-2006, now Distinguished Professor
Emeritus, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “13 Playing with Fire,”
Survival Nexus: Science, Technology, and World Affairs, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 251-266]

We are needlessly allowing tech nology to take the world to the brink of disasters from accidental climate disruption,
nuclear war , and pandemics — at the same time that we are allowing the means for controlling these technologies to
erode. In effect, we are edging closer and closer to cliffs from which we have removed the guardrails . Fortunately,
people are beginning to develop— or at least to think about — protections against some of these dangers. A
technology-based model of authoritarian government is being promoted and exported as a technological, economic, and
political challenge to Western liberal democracies. The Internet and social media, conceived as vehicles for free
exchange of information and platforms for untrammeled innovation, in some countries have become instruments of
repression. At the same time, a systematic, worldwide campaign of misinformation and disinformation, spread via social
and mass media, has deliberately sown distrust in the democratic process, in government, in international institutions, in
science, in expertise of all kinds, and in the very idea that there is such a thing as truth. In the United States, the
scientific consensus concerning climate change has been overwhelmed by misinformation and disinformation spread by
political and business interests that it threatens, while public messaging regarding the CO VID-19 pandemic has been at
best mixed. All this has made it difficult for people to understand the complex and dangerous new threats to the
environment, to their health, to their security, and to democratic government. Stimulating and Guiding Technological
Change Science and technology have much to contribute to the resolution of all these issues. We need better
scientific understanding of the climate, of the ways in which diseases spread, and of the likely impact of gene drivers
and geoengineering. We need technological innovations to prevent or cure non- communicable diseases, alleviate
malnutrition, conserve resources, defend against cyberattack, and restructure our economies along more sustainable
and equitable lines. But we can not depend on science and technology to address these issues on their own . We also
need policies and institutions that not only support research and encourage technological innovation but also guide
scientific research and technological change in responsible directions . This will require both “top-down” measures by
national governments and “bottom-up” pressures from public opinion, from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
and from state and local governments that are often more directly responsive to public pressure. It will need ideas
and inspiration from businesses, universities, research institutes, individual inventors, and ordinary citizens, and support
from public opinion and from the actions and advocacy of individuals and communities. In some cases, it will require
sustained effort to resist commercial, political, and military pressures to ignore broader social and environmental
problems when investing in research and innovation and to deploy technologies before at least some of their
consequences are understood and anticipated. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the denial of the reality of
climate change in a number of countries show how even the best scientific advice can be undercut by the words and
actions of shortsighted, self-interested political leaders. We need to devise limits on technological innovations like
autonomous weapons and hypersonic missiles that can lead to unintended nuclear war . We need to restructure our
economy and redesign our cities to end, or at least to limit the use of fossil fuels and to increase the efficiency of our use
of energy and materials. We need controls on technologies like artificial intelligence, gene drivers, and
geoengineering, all of which both promise major benefits and involve great risks . We need to defend ourselves against
technology-based attacks on the values of freedom of thought, communication, innovation, and access to information
that were embodied in the original design of the Internet and social media but are now under attack. At the same time,
we need new science and technology to develop novel approaches to environmental sustainability: improved sources
of renewable energy and innovative approaches to efficient energy use. We need both to expand and to restructure our
electric energy grids to electrify our economy and to improve their efficiency, reliability, and security. We need to
restructure our agricultural economy, our urban infrastructure and our transportation systems. We need explicit
measures to ensure that everyone can participate in the benefits of technological change. We need research and
development on orphan technologies, and vaccines and cures for the diseases that mainly affect people in low- income
countries. Not a small menu. Some of these issues, like climate change , nuclear weapons , and global health , are
governed by long-standing regimes, norms , and institutions that now need strengthening and refurbishing to meet
new political, economic, and techno logical challenges. Nonproliferation and anti-missile agreements need to be
restored and extended to limit or ban development and deployment of hyper sonic missiles, destabilizing weapons that
are now under rapid development in many countries. Voluntary national limits on greenhouse gas emissions need to be
urgently increased. Time is running out, and costs will be much greater the longer we take for effective action to
mitigate and adapt to climate disruption. In the global health sphere, the system for emergency preparedness and
pandemic control needs increased and sustained political and financial support to replace the long-standing pattern of
crisis-to-crisis, feast-or-famine funding. Most low- income countries still need basic health infrastructure, both to
provide health services to their population and to identify and control epidemic disease that could spread beyond their
borders. Cyberweapons, too, can quickly get out of control and wreak enormous damage on critical infrastructure,
including the systems of command-and- control on which we would depend to prevent accidental escalation of a
localized conflict to full-scale war. Like hypersonic missiles, the response to these weapons depends on artificial
intelligence. Unlike hypersonic missiles, cyberweapons do not lend themselves to the type of verifiable arms control
regime that has so far been successful for nuclear weapons. What is more, many governments op pose any limits on the
use of cyberweapons, despite the risk they pose of acci dental escalation. Continued research and international
discussion on how these weapons can be controlled are urgent priorities. Geoengineering and gene drivers also take the
world into uncharted terri tory. Their governance is complicated by the fact that they are accessible not only to
governments, but also to private businesses, NGOs, and individuals. It is far from clear how decisions should be made
as to whether and under what circumstances these technologies should be developed, and what criteria should govern
any such decisions. Advocates for these technologies have developed roadmaps for deploying them in a way that
minimizes risks. Still, there are fundamental disagreements over whether geoengineering and gene drivers should be
developed and implemented at all, and there is substantial support for the idea that one or both should be banned
outright. Critics have called for moratoriums until the broader questions can be explored by a broad range of worldwide
stakeholders, disciplines, and cultures. However, the disagreements we have outlined will probably never be totally
resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and deployment decisions will eventually have to be made one way or the other.
The governance of the Internet and social media involves measures to pre serve the global Internet and to address those
issues of cybersecurity that are of common concern to countries with very different political systems and very different
ideas concerning civil liberties and human rights. The competition be tween authoritarian and democratic governments
over freedom of information and innovation is likely to go on for a long time, but both sides have a strong in terest in
maintaining a functioning global Internet and in avoiding catastrophic damage to information and telecommunication
systems. Several academies of science, research institutes, NGOs, and religious organ izations have proposed codes of
conduct and declarations of principle to deal with the difficult philosophical, ethical, and practical issues involved in all
these issues. These represent a useful beginning, and one may hope that they will reach the level of consensus that
would allow them to be codified into national legisla tion or international agreements. Dealing with these issues will
require respect for expertise in the fields to which we have often referred: science, technology, politics, economics,
business, law, and culture. We will need to incorporate scientific advice into decision making processes, and to
acknowledge and manage the risks and uncertainties in our understanding of the science and the technology we are
trying to manage, as well as in their ramifications for the larger society. There is also a need to edu cate governments
and the public, both on the underlying science and technology and on their links to the broader context. Finally, I would
urge that there is a need for an international obligation to identify areas for scientific research and technological
innovation that can help to resolve these issues and to support this research with adequate financial, human and
institutional resources. This last re quirement should become a general principle that should become part of the ac
cepted framework for thinking about global issues and incorporated into formal agreements on these matters as a
matter of usual practice. Dealing with complex global, technology-intensive issues like these is a tall order , especially
when they require democratic countries to find common in terest with countries with whose governments they are
otherwise deeply at odds. Nevertheless, the world has faced such issues successfully before under the arguably more
difficult conditions of the Cold War , which pitted two ideologically opposed superpowers against each other that
nevertheless managed to agree on elaborate and technically demanding measures to avoid nuclear holocaust . There
have been major innovations since the days of the Cold War that will help with these new challenges. Civil society is a
source for new ideas and new institutional arrangements. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and
epistemic communities provide scientific advice and education on climate to international negotiators and to the public.
Multi-stakeholder meetings develop “bottom-up” codes of conduct, norms, and standards that sometimes make their
way into more formal government and international declarations and eventually into national legislation and
international agreements. State and city governments combine forces across borders to deal with issues when their
national governments shrink from action. Flexible, informal, or voluntary arrangements facilitate international
cooperation in situations where binding obligations and formal agreements would be cumbersome or slow moving.
Pragmatic, informal institutional arrangements arise to manage international resources when more formal
institutions or agreements would be cumbersome or impractical . Private foundations support research in areas
neglected by governments and intergovernmental organizations. “Innovative developing countries” like India and China
develop and market profitable products for low- income people. Multinational corporations and NGOs support
innovations to meet the needs of people without market power. And a billion-dollar network of agricultural laboratories
develops improved technology for small-scale farmers in low-income countries.

2NC – TC – FoPo
That destroys US foreign policy—turns the entire aff.
Myrick 21—(Assistant Research Professor of Political Science at Duke University). Rachel Myrick. June 14, 2021.
“America Is Back—but for How Long?”. Foreign Affairs.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-06-14/america-back-how-long. Accessed 6/15/21.
During his first address to a joint session of Congress on April 28, U.S. President Joe Biden noted that in the dozens of
conversations with world leaders he’d had since taking office in January, one comment kept coming up: “We see
America is back, but for how long? ” This skepticism on the part of other heads of state is a direct response to the recent
past. Under President Donald Trump, Washington seriously challenged or outright withdrew from more than a dozen
international agreements or institutions, including the Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran
nuclear deal, and the World Health Organization. But concerns about the nature and longevity of American
commitments extend beyond Trump ’s legacy overseas. Allies of the United States are also react ing to its internal
politics and, in particular, to a deepening partisan divide that creates uncertainty about the future of U.S. foreign
policy . Observing the polarized politics on display in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, former Norwegian
Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland noted that many European leaders will “no longer take for granted that they can
trust the U.S., even on basic things.” The fears are valid. Although foreign policy has traditionally been insulated from
political polarization, that is no longer true . On such issues as multilateralism, climate change, and terrorism,
Americans are more divided than ever. The bipartisan foreign policy consensus among both voters and the politicians
they elect is eroding. But even worse, polarization has created broader, underappreciated consequences for the
U nited S tates’ ability to enact foreign policy in the first place by chipping away at a key pillar of its power: its
reputation for stability , credibility , and reliability .

2AC 1- Perm do both

1 – States must triumph in a policy conflict – the perm vaporizes opposition both by preempting the
condition AND aligning the states with the fed.
Leonard ’10 [Elizabeth; Fall 2010; Professor of Law at the University of Kansas and Visiting Professor of Law at the
University of Georgia, J.D. from the University of Georgia; Hofstra Law Review, “Rhetorical Federalism: The Value of
State-Based Dissent to Federal Health Reform,” vol. 39]

A. Uncooperative Federalism

Uncoop erative federalism, a theory articulated by Jessica Bulman-Pozen and Heather Gerken, suggests that even when
states actively refuse to cooperate with the fed eral government, their resistance may be beneficial. To understand
uncooperative federalism, it is helpful to place the theory in the context of other federalism theories. Bulman-Pozen
and Gerken offer the following matrix , which I slightly modify, in their footnote 18.

The vertical axis represents the normative position of what states should do: either they should serve as rivals or
challengers to the federal government, or they should serve as friends or allies with the federal government. The
horizontal axis identifies two strategies to facilitate healthy federal-state relations: either the power of states as
sovereigns, or the power of states as servants. The authors note that most existing scholarship falls in Box 1, the state
autonomy or dual sovereignty view of federal-state relations, or Box 4, the cooperative federalism view. Their theory
fills Box 2, the affirmative case for states as rivals and challengers from the posture of servants .
For Box 3, Bulman-Pozen and Gerken suggest Roderick Hills's "functional theory." Hills favors state autonomy not so that states can operate as dual or separate sovereigns, but so that they can bargain effectively for their
role within a cooperative, integrated federal regime. States, under their reserved powers, hold a property right to refuse to lend state administrative processes to implement federal policies, which right they can sell in a
freely negotiated trade, like any other private contractor. Cooperation is a good thing, but only when the federal government "purchases" state services through voluntary agreements.

Dual sovereignty or state autonomy, like uncooperative federalism, urges states to rival and challenge the federal government but from the posture of sovereign powers. Values associated with the dual sovereignty view
include providing alternative, more accessible forums for citizen participation in the political process. In addition, different territories may have different tastes and needs, especially on social policy matters. The diversity of
approaches creates a "political market," allowing citizenry a choice of "laws, customs, and attitudes," and ultimately, exit rights. States also serve as laboratories of democracy, experimenting and crafting solutions to
problems, which approaches can be borrowed by other states and the federal government.

The dual sovereignty scholarship recognizes the value of dissent , especially state-level dissent, within the federal
system. Dissent "contributes to the marketplace of ideas, engages electoral minorities[,] … and facilitates self-
expression." The Framers envisioned friction , clashes, and jarring as part of the constitutional design. States may act as
lobbyists and litigants, challenging federal policies and laws. Objections may be voiced by states qua states, or by states
as spokespersons for individuals.
Cooperative federalism, by contrast , envisions the federal government and states working together as partners to
address common problems or implement legislation. States serve as supportive allies, freely and voluntarily, albeit often with strong encouragement, implementing federal
policies. Conditional spending programs, such as Medicaid, are prime examples of cooperative federalism. Under its spending power, Congress entices states to enact laws or implement programs by conditioning federal
funding on states' compliance with broad federal requirements, even though the federal government cannot directly regulate states or "commandeer" state regulatory authorities to implement, administer, or enforce
federal programs. ACA employs several cooperative federalism strategies, including conditional spending, conditional preemption, grants, and contracts, to engage state cooperation in implementing the massive package
of health care reforms.

Uncooperative federalism focuses on the power that states wield precisely because of their subservient posture vis-a-
vis the federal government. The theory emphasizes the "power of the servant" and "the ways in which integration can serve as a distinct source of strength." Lacking adequate financial resources or
regulatory reach to implement comprehensive programs, the federal government often depends on states to implement and administer federal policies. Because Congress cannot simply mandate states to administer
federal programs, it must offer carrots, such as conditional funding or block grants, or sticks, such as conditional preemption or threats to usurp state implementation. In so doing, the federal government cedes
considerable power and discretion to states. For example, under Medicaid, states must comply with broad federal requirements but otherwise are free to tailor their state plans to meet their citizens' particular needs, still
receiving federal matching dollars for every state dollar spent. Even though the federal government ultimately holds the threat of revoking federal funds or taking over state programs, financial, political, and practical
realities may render that threat an empty one.

States' power as servants also derives from their integration into federal program implementation. State regulators
and policymakers have regular interaction with federal authorities in administering complex, cooperative programs.
State actors may develop subject-matter specialization within certain areas, such as environmental or health policy, which transcends federal and state lines of authority. A related source of power derives from the fact
that states serve two masters: the federal government and their state constituents. Voters' dissenting views give states the political will and capital to challenge federal policies.

Bulman-Pozen and Gerken conclude that uncooperative federalism can be useful within a well-functioning federal
system. Friction between the federal government and states fosters a rich dialogue , clarifies accountability , and
encourages political participation . Doctrinal implications of the uncooperative federalism theory suggest that
commandeering, which is considered unacceptably intrusive on state autonomy to Box 1 adherents, perhaps should be
allowed or encouraged under Box 2 because it engenders dissent. Uncooperative federalism, like state autonomy or
dual sovereignty, prefers narrow preemption but not because state power should be interpreted as broadly as possible
but, rather, as a way to create larger overlapping spheres of federal and state regulatory authority thereby ensuring
ongoing conflict and jarring .

The authors are equivocal on the value of conditional spending programs like Medicaid in advancing the uncooperative
federalism thesis. The amount of power that states wield as servants under conditional spending schemes depends on
how badly states need the federal money. If states have no real choice but to accept the federal funds, conditional
spending essentially becomes commandeering, sparking various forms of beneficial state resistance and dissent. But if
states can freely decline the federal government's offer or bargain for additional terms, little meaningful dialogue
remains. States that freely opt-out of cooperative federalism programs have little reason to object, while states that
bargain effectively may have their objections appeased .

2 – The public image will be mutual agreement, NOT strong defiance.

Gardner ’18 [James; 2018; Distinguished Professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law at the State University of
New York, J.D. from the University of Chicago, B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Yale University; William &
Mary Law Review, “The Theory and Practice of Contestatory Federalism,” vol. 60]

3. Defiance

Defiance, as I use the term here, is the nonviolent refusal of subnational governments to accept specific exercises of
power by the central government. Defiance can take many forms, but it is useful to distinguish between strong and
weak forms of defiance.

A. Strong Defiance

What I will call strong defiance consists of the open, nonviolent refusal by a subnational government to accede to
some policy or action of the national government. A subnational government may defy national power by passive
refusal to comply with disliked national policies, or by taking more elaborate, affirmative steps to undermine the
operation or success of the national policy or action at issue within its borders.

The states under study furnish many examples of strong defiance. In the United States, southern states engaged in a
lengthy period of open defiance of national enforcement of the political rights of African-Americans, including outright
disregard of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying the right to vote on account of race. Some
U.S. states repeatedly defy national constitutional protection of the right to abortion by enacting highly restrictive laws.
In Argentina during the 1990s, the government of Santa Cruz province refused repeatedly to comply with orders of the
Argentine Supreme Court requiring reinstatement of a provincial Attorney General who had been removed from office
after embarking on investigations into the activities of provincial government officials. In another incident, provincial
courts in San Luis province refused to enforce a national law regulating methods of determining the surnames of
newborns. In 2017, the Catalan government defied a series of court orders designed to prevent a referendum on
independence from Spain.

Subnational units engage from time to time in strong defiance even in states, such as Germany and Switzerland, that
have a reputation for amicable intergovernmental relations, and in which, my interlocutors assured me, such tactics
would never be used. For example, the German Land of Bavaria in 1983 enacted a law requiring the display of a crucifix
in every public school classroom. Upon challenge, the Constitutional Court ruled the law unconstitutional, but Bavaria
has since refused to comply with the order. In Switzerland, the canton of Appenzell refused for nearly two decades to
implement a 1971 national law mandating female suffrage until forced to do so by the federal courts. Similarly, the
canton of Nidwalden has refused repeatedly to comply with a national law requiring cantons to share in the storage of
nuclear waste.

B. Weak Defiance

Weak defiance, as I use the term here, refers to actions intended to thwart, undermine, or diminish the force or success
of national policies to which the subnational unit objects, but which do not rise to the level of open refusal . Use of the
tactic exploits the margin of discretion afforded to subnational units in the implementation of national policies. The
tactic can be invoked by cultivating a public appearance of compliance and cooperation with a disliked national
policy, but then implementing or following it so half-heartedly, or even downright uncooperatively, as to undermine the
policy's force and effect within the jurisdiction.

3 – No timeframe-based characterizations – the perm is simultaneous which means there’s zero

conflict between states and the fed.

2AC 2- perm do the Cp

2 – Competition should solely involve mandates – permuting effects kills ground because any action
could cause the plan.
Wood ’13 [Jamie; June 10; Writer; Avatel EVP, “The Butterfly Effect – What a Fascinating Theory!”
https://avatel.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/the-butterfly-effect-what-a-fascinating-theory/]

Every action or decision has some kind of effect on something or someone, if only in an indirect way. How we
approach these decisions or actions we take can have a huge impact, not just on those directly involved, but on others
we could hardly fathom would be affected. You never know what little action may be the tipping point for another
action and or reaction.

When you hear the words “The Butterfly Effect”, most of you will probably think of the movie. That was about the chaos
theory, meaning one series of events leads to another and the effect of changing the course of those events.

Actually the term “The Butterfly Effect”, was a phenomenon proposed in a doctoral thesis written in 1963 by Edward
Lorenz. It states that a butterfly, by flapping its wings in one place and time is able to create a major weather event in
another place and time , eventually having a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent events.

The butterfly effect suggests that cause and effect are applicable in the universe even if the pattern is indecipherable
and the precise cause of our predicaments, rooted far away in time and space, are ultimately unfathomable. More than
just an esoteric science, the chaos theory works off the concept that the relation between any two things is rarely linear
in nature, that any reaction is usually the result of an accumulation of causative factors small and large, intentional and
accidental.

3 – ‘United States’ excludes sub-federal actors.

Lageux ’91 [Ronald Rene; September 17; Federal District Court Judge; Westlaw, “Complaint of Ballard Shipping Co.,”
772 F. Supp. 721]

Claimants argue that the statute's broad , “ pre-civil war ” definition of “ U nited S tates”—meaning the several states
and territories—when applied to subsection (f)(1), gives Rhode Island a cause of action. Claimants also argue that the
provisions in subsection (f)(4), measuring liability to include costs incurred by a state government, and subsection (f)(5),
requiring a state's authorized representative to act as a trustee to recover costs of restoration, confirm that states have
standing under section 311 of the FWPCA to sue the shipowner.

2 But this selective reading of the statute misses more direct language that only supports a cause of action by the
fed eral government. The language of the statute must be given its ordinary meaning, absent clear legislative intent to
the contrary, Consumer Product Safety Comm'n v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 447 U.S. 102, 108, 100 S.Ct. 2051, 2056, 64 L.Ed.2d
766 (1980), and this Court must be chary of reading into the statute any remedies that are not expressly stated there,
Middlesex County Sewerage Auth. v. Nat'l Sea Clammers Ass'n, 453 U.S. 1, 14–15, 18, 101 S.Ct. 2615, 2623–24, 2625, 69
L.Ed.2d 435 (1981). A common-sense reading of the statute compels the conclusion that states have no standing to sue
under section 311. Subsection (f)(1) plainly makes shipowners and operators liable only “to the United States
Government” for costs incurred during the removal of oil. 33 U.S.C. § 1321(f)(1) (1988). The last sentence of this section
adds: “The United States may also bring an action against the owner or operator of such vessel....” Id. “United States
Government” and “ U nited S tates” mean the fed eral gov ernment.

The broad definition of “ U nited S tates” in subsection (a)(5)—which includes the several states but conspicuously
leaves out the federal government—would make little sense if it were applied to this context, as Claimants propose. To
apply the broad definition set forth in subsection (a)(5) wherever the term “United States” appears in section 311 would
be folly. For example, “district court of the United States,” 33 U.S.C. § 1321(b)(6)(B) (1988), can mean nothing but the
federal district courts. The meaning of “ U nited S tates” in this context is obvious , and no one would suggest that it
includes the states.

The broad definition in subsection (a)(5) relates, not to the courts empowered with jurisdiction or the sovereigns that
have standing to sue, but to the geographical scope of potential liability under section 311 of the FWPCA. See, e.g., 33
U.S.C. §§ 1321(a)(10), (a)(11), (a)(15), (a)(16), (b)(1), (b)(2)(A), (b)(3), and (b)(4). Thus, an oil spill in the Trust Territory of
the Pacific Islands may touch the “United States” and create liability under the FWPCA, but the Trust *724 Territory of
the Pacific Islands must rely on the “United States Government”—the appropriate federal authorities—to bring suit
under Section 311.

Congress could have given the states explicit, separate authority to bring suit under section 311, but it did not. In other
parts of this section, Congress recognized a distinction between the “ U nited S tates” and “a State or political
subdivision thereof.” E.g., 33 U.S.C. § 1321(a)(4) (1988). This distinction indicates that, subsection (a)(5)
notwithstanding, Congress did not intend to include the several states every time it used the words “ U nited S tates” in
section 311. When Congress intended to include the governments of the several states , it explicitly spoke of states in
addition to the “ U nited S tates.”

Additional linguistic clues support this conclusion. Congress conferred this right of action on a capitalized and singular
United States “Government, ” instead of the lower-case and plural “governments.” 33 U.S.C. § 1321(f)(1) (1988). Had
Congress used the word “governments,” this arguably could have suggested an investment in the states of authority to
bring suit under the FWPCA. But Congress chose a more restrictive word. Other usage of “United States” in section 311
—such as the phrases “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” “United States citizenship,” and “international
agreement to which the United States is a party,” 33 U.S.C. § 1321(a)(17) (1988)—provides even more evidence that
Congress assigned “United States” its ordinary meaning, except when describing the geographic scope of liability under
section 311.

While ambiguity may exist, “ U nited S tates” and “United States Government” can mean only one sovereign in the
context of subsection (f)(1), and that is the federal government .

2AC 3- Nationalized Health Services

2---It threatens cooperation on all other issues where the fed needs the states, drawing attention to
the plan and ensuring policy guidance.
Heather Gerken 17, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, JD from the University of Michigan Law
School, AB from Princeton University, and Joshua Resevz, JD from Yale Law School, BA in Political Science from Yale
University, now Civil Attorney with the Appellate Staff at the United States Department of Justice, “Progressive
Federalism: A User’s Guide”, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Number 44, Spring 2017,
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/progressive-federalism-a-users-guide/ [language modified]

Progressives have lost power in Washington. Every national institution now lies in the hands of the Republican Party.
Given the slim chances of Democrats’ winning back Congress in 2018, many think that the best progressives can do is
hunker down for the next four years, blocking legislation on the Hill and challenging it in court. It’s a depressing picture
for those on the left. No one wants to be a member of a party whose “victories” are all in the kill, whose only role in
national politics is that of the gadfly.

But if progressives can simply look outside the Beltway, they will find that they still have access to one of the most
powerful weapons in politics: federalism . Using the power they wield in states and cities across the country,
progressives can do a good deal more than mourn and obstruct. They can resist Washington overreach, shape national
policies , and force the Republicans to compromise . Cities and states have long been at the center of the fight over
national values. And it’s time progressives recognized that federalism isn’t just for conservatives.
Unfortunately, the moment one mentions federalism many progressives stop listening. The language of “states’ rights” has an ugly history, invoked to shield slavery and Jim Crow. Federalism’s checkered past led political
scientist William H. Riker to remark in 1964 that “if one disapproves of racism, one should disapprove of federalism.” Even today, many progressives think of federalism as a parochial anachronism, better suited for
stymieing change than for effecting it.

But they are making a mistake. This is not your father’s federalism. These days, state and local governments are often
led by dissenters and racial minorities, the two groups progressives think have the most to fear from federalism. And
this has allowed them to not only take advantage of the enormous power that federalism confers within their own
cities and states, but to affect national debates , influence national policy , and force national actors to the bargaining
table. Their success shows that federalism is a neutral and powerful tool for change, not an intrinsically conservative
quirk of U.S. government.
The call for progressive federalism is not a new one. In 2004, Duke law professor Ernie Young invited liberals to come to the “Dark Side” and embrace the power of the states. (And one of the authors of this essay has spent
more than a decade arguing—including in the pages of this journal— that federalism doesn’t have a political valence.) But having a Democrat in the White House was just too tempting for most progressives. They turned
their attention to Washington while neglecting what was going on in California, Massachusetts, or New York City. We suspect that most progressives aren’t even aware that the Democrats have lost 27 state legislative
chambers since 2008. But perhaps the 2016 election will help progressives shake loose the notion that D.C. is the center of the political universe.

Needless to say, though, the devil is in the details . So below we offer a “user’s guide” that identifies four ways that
progressive leaders—from Jerry Brown and Bill de Blasio to small-city mayors—can push back against federal policy
and force compromise . And, in doing so, we hope to persuade even the most fervent nationalist to become a fan of
federalism. While we fashion this as a progressive user’s guide, it could, in theory, work just as well for conservatives
should they lose the presidency in 2020. That’s precisely the point.

Types of Resistance
We often forget that the federal government’s administrative capacity is modest , relatively speaking. Excluding the
military, it employs just short of three million personnel. Its 2015 budget (excluding defense, Social Security, and
mandatory spending obligations) was less than $600 billion. Together, state and local government s [swamp] dwarf
these figures, with more than 14 million workers and a combined budget of more than $2.5 trillion.

Because of this, Washington can’t go it alone . When Congress makes a law, it often lacks the resources to enforce it.
Instead, it relies on states and localities to carry out its policies . Without those local actors, the feds cannot enforce
immigration law, implement environmental policy, build infrastructure , or prosecute drug offenses. Changing policies
in these areas—and many more —is possible only if cities and states lend a hand. This arrangement creates
opportunities for federal-state cooperation. But it also allows for “uncooperative federalism” : State and local official s
can use their leverage over the feds to shape national policy .

3---It forces federal follow-on – empirics.

Jonathan Remy Nash 16, Professor of Law at the Emory University School of Law, LLM from Harvard Law School, JD
Magna Cum Laude from New York University School of Law, BA from Columbia University, “Doubly Uncooperative
Federalism and the Challenge of U.S. Treaty Compliance”, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 55 Colum. J. Transnat'l
L. 3, Lexis

The setting of joint federal-state administration of a federal program studied by Professors Bulman-Pozen and Gerken bears strong similarities to
the setting of compliance with a duly ratified international treaty . The combination of (i) the doctrine of state responsibility
imputing - for international law purposes - to the national government treaty breaches resulting from state action (or inaction), and (ii) legal and practical limit ation s on the

federal government's ability to preclude such breach-inducing actions (and inactions) [*9] by states, conspire to provide
states with a n unavoidable, critical role in national government compliance with many treaties. Involvement of the
states in treaty compliance can thus come to resemble the role of states in the administration of a joint federal-state
program.

I coin the term "doubly uncooperative federalism" to refer to the state's exercise of its freedom to resist compliance
with a treaty duly ratified by the federal government , and it is to that undertheorized and understudied practice that this Article turns its attention. What makes
the state's behavior doubly uncooperative is the fact that the state government stands alone in opposition to both
the federal government and the international treaty . The Article makes four broad contributions.
First, the Article elucidates the undertheorized and understudied concept of doubly uncooperative federalism as a species of federal-state interaction in the context of treaty compliance. It situates doubly uncooperative
federalism within the broader swath of federal-state relations in the context of treaty compliance. It identifies the features of international and constitutional law that provide a space for doubly uncooperative federalism.
And it elucidates current examples of doubly uncooperative federalism in practice.

the Article highlights the myriad, yet underappreciated, ways - both legal and practical - in which the federal government is impotent in
Second,

the face of state action (or inaction) resulting in noncompliance . It also elucidates the uncertainty and high costs that dog
theoretically viable ways that the national gov ernment might try to compel state compliance. While others have explained how domestic
law provides opportunity for, and limitations on, the enforcement of international law, this Article surveys this territory with a focus on how the law effectively protects state dissent on treaty compliance.
Third, the Article discusses limitations that inhere in alternatives to attempts at legal compulsion. The Article addresses the possibility of creating incentives for states, and exhorting states, not to engage in doubly uncooperative federalism. The Article also discusses "workarounds" that the national government has used to try to minimize the mismatch between the international doctrine and U.S. federalism. It explores the use of "carve-outs" - that is, treaty provisions , and reservations, understandings, or declarations (collectively, "RUDs") that the government made when it entered into the treaty [*10] that purport to limit the scope of the doctrine of state responsibility - and "breach-curing treaty provisions" - that is, the attempt to apply "liability rules" to discharge treaty breaches by subfederal governmental units. The Article identifies problems with each of these approaches. Incentives may not discourage states from engaging in doubly uncoope rative federalism, and beyond that may encourage states that otherwise would not have engaged in doubly uncooperative federalism to do so (in order to receive a benefit). Exhortation is likely to be similarly unavailing. Treaty provisions and RUDs are unreliable , and may end up obscuring exactly when the treaty applies. Finally, breach-curing treaty provisions that try to
"solve" treaty breaches by offering payments of money by the federal government are also problematic: (i) money payments may not offer a sufficient disincentive against treaty noncompliance, but even granting that they might under ordina ry circumstances and (ii) the fact that the government that makes the payments (i.e., the federal government) is not the government that is choosing noncompliance (i.e., the state government) undermines any incentive effect. Fourth, the Article highlights possible consequences of a state's choice to engage in doubly uncooperative federalism. For one thing, the Unite d States may find itself in breach of its treaty obligations with the opportunity for corre ction beyond its reach. Indeed, the obstacles facing the federal government as it tries to get states to comply with international obligations may effectively render some treaty obligations nearly, or even entirely, unfulfilled. Beyond that, doubly uncooperative federalism may breed uncertainty as to whether [*11] the United States is in fact in compliance with a treaty. Indeed, to the extent that courts are called upon to rule on treaty compliance , a federal court may find no treaty violation (under domestic law) notwithstanding an international tribunal finding of a treaty breach. Such an outcome is both unseemly and destabilizing
to international law. Finally, doubly uncooperative federalism empowers states to affect the treaties, and the interpretation of treaties, to which the federal government has subscribed. The Article explains how these consequences, often viewed as quite negative, may not be significantly negative and may even include effects that might be considered to be beneficial. The Article proceeds as follows. Part I explicates doubly uncooperative federalism in theory and in practice. Part II elucidates the limitations, both legal and practical, on the federal government's ability to compel states into treaty compliance. Part III examines shortcomings with methods the federal government might use to coax states into compliance and to structure treaties so as to minimize the impact of doubly uncooperative federalism. Part IV discusses the effects, both negative and positive, of doubly uncoope rative federalism. I. Explicating Doubly Uncoope rative Federalism in Treaty Compliance In this Part, I first unpack the theoretical underpinnings of doubly uncoope rative federalism. I then turn to examples of doubly uncoope rative federalism in practice. A. Doubly Uncoope rative Federalism in Theory In this subpart, I explicate the notion of doubly uncooperative federalism in treaty compliance. To do this, I first situate doubly uncoope rative
federalism in the typology of federal-state relations over treaty compliance. After that, I describe the conditions under which doubly uncoope rative federalism might arise. To develop a typology of federal-state relations in the context of treaty compliance, we begin with a typical federal-state relationship. Although in reality the divide need not be quite so dichotomous, we can conceive of the federal and state governments acting [*12] either dissonantly or consonantly with one another. A scenario involving compliance with an international treaty introduces into the mix an additional layer of government - the international treaty. Assuming the existence of an international treaty regime, Table 1 presents a two-by-two matrix of possible combinations of the federal government - and the state government - acting in ways that are consonant, and dissonant, with the treaty regime. [TABLE OMITTED] The federal and state governments take identical views of the [*13] treaty in the upper-left-hand and lower-right- hand quadrants - that is, quadrants 1 and 4. In quadrant 1, neither the federal nor state government is partial to the treaty. The federal government does not ratify the treaty, and the state is content with that outcome. The result is no compliance with the treaty. In quadrant 4, both the federal government and
the state government endorse the treaty. The federal government ratifies the treaty, and the state works to ensure compliance. I assign the moniker "cooperative federalism" to quadrant 4: here, the international treaty, federal government, and state government are all aligned. With this alignment comes full compliance with the treaty. Quadrants 2 and 3 both describe settings where one government approves of the treaty regime and the other does not. Quadrants 2 and 3 are mirror images of one another. I label quadrant 2 "uncooperative federalism" and quadrant 3 "doubly uncooperative federalism." The relationship between the federal and state governments in both quadrants is uncoope rative. What makes quadrant 3 the home to doubly uncoope rative federalism is the fact that there the state government stands alone in opposition to the federal government and the international treaty (whereas in quadrant 2 the state government acts in opposition to the federal government's wishes, but consistently with the international treaty). In quadrant 2, the federal government does not approve of the treaty and thus does not ratify it; the state government nonetheless works to signal compliance with what the treaty would call for had it been ratified. The result is state compliance in excess of what domestic law
requires - to which I refer as "state over-compliance." Insofar as the federal government has not ratified the treaty, the state's freedom to act in conformity with the treaty regime must result from the state's autonomous sovereign power. In quadrant 3's setting of doubly uncooperative federalism, the federal government approves of and ratifies the treaty; the state government nonetheless does not take steps to ensure compliance with the ratified treaty. The overall result is compliance below the level that national government ratification of the treaty would suggest - to which I refer as "state under-compliance." Commentators have tended to focus on quadrant 4's setting of cooperative federalism - where federal and state government align to ensure (as much as possible) compliance with a ratified treaty - and [*14] quadrant 2's setting of uncooperative federalism - where state governments align with the international community (despite the federal government's failure to ratify the treaty) to produce over-compliance. In both these settings, then, state governments align with the international community (sometimes over the dissent of the federal government). In contrast, my focus here is on quadrant 3's setting of doubly uncoope rative federalism. Here, state governments dissent from the alliance of the
federal government with the international community. [*15] This results in state under- compliance. Where does the state obtain the authority to under-comply with the treaty and (by doing so) the power to put the federal government in breach of the treaty? The answer lies in the interaction between constitutional and practical limits on the federal government's ability to compel state compliance and the international law doctrine of state responsibility. As we shall see, this means that the state's ability results from a combination of its autonomous sovereign power and the fact that it is inextricably nestled in the federal government's compliance efforts. The state government's "power" to put the federal government in breach of a duly ratified treaty by virtue of its own action (or inaction) is a consequence of the doctrine of state responsibility. The doctrine delivers subnational government action (and inaction) in respect of treaty compliance to the doorstep of the national government. Thus, action (or inaction) by a state can put the United States in noncompliance with a duly ratified treaty. Under U.S. law, only when the federal government enters into a treaty that is self-executing does the treaty have "automatic domestic effect as federal law upon ratification." The terms of a non-self-executing treaty are not
incorporate d into domestic law except to the extent that Congress enacts implementing legislation. International [*16] law is blind to this distinction. Yet, under international law, the doctrine of state responsibility applies irrespe ctive of whether the treaty at issue has been incorporate d into domestic law. The doctrine of state responsibility applies whether a treaty is self-executing or non-self-executing. International treaties, treatises and other summaries of international law, and tribunal decisions all recognize the doctrine and give it a wide berth. In short, international law propounds the state responsibility doctrine in strong terms. The doctrine of state responsibility rests on an expectation [*17] that, in fact, the national government has the power to compel subnational governmental units into treaty compliance. The doctrine arose out of historical understandings, and is sometimes said to be justified on the ground that it facilitates treaty formation. But the continued vitality of that justification is open to question. [*18] The expectation on which the doctrine of state responsibility rests - that the national government is empowered to compel subnational governmental unit treaty compliance - is a fiction. For many nations, the gap between the state responsibility doctrine's assumptions about national
government power and the reality of limited national government power is generally a rather large one. And that is no less the case for the United States, where constitutional and practical limitations combine to create a substantial gap between the expectations of the doctrine of state responsibility and the reality of federal government ability to compel state treaty compliance. I offer a much more thorough catalog of these limitations in Part II; for now I provide a brief overview of constitutional limitations, and then note how practical considerations further restrain federal government action. Simply put, the doctrine of state responsibility and vertical separation-of-powers do not mesh. The U.S. Constitution establishes a federal government but also presupposes the continued existence of state governments as distinct sovereigns within the federal system. The national government is a government of limited powers, and the Tenth Amendment mandates that the powers not specifically delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people. In turn, the Supreme Court has interprete d the Tenth Amendment to give rise to the anticommandeering principle, which restricts federal legislative capacity to compel states and state officials to take affirmative steps to implement
federal law. While the federal government can create incentives for states to [*19] change their laws and "conditionally preempt" state laws that do not comply with federal requirements, it cannot absolutely mandate that the states affirmatively enact laws themselves. The same concerns of comity that animate the constitutional protection of state autonomy also may convince the federal government to refrain from undertaking action in respect of the states that the Constitution would permit. Beyond simple respect for the state governments, it may be that a desire to encourage state cooperation (writ large) discourages the government from impinging on state sovereignty even when it is constitutionally free to do so. The doctrine of state responsibility, and limitations on the federal government's ability to compel states into treaty compliance , thus provide an opportunity for states to engage in doubly cooperative federalism. But do they have a motive to do so? In fact, states may at times find it in their self-interest to flout treaty requirements. Even if the federal government endorses a treaty - and indeed even if there is a strong national constituency supportive of the treaty - that may not be enough to sway a state whose constituents feel especially strongly about behavior that violates a [*20] treaty's
provisions. Now the benefit a state (or more precise ly a state government and its officials by satisfying the preferences of the state citizenry) may gain by flouting a treaty requirement potentially may be offset by the reaction of a foreign nation (or multiple foreign nations) to that breach. Historically, the ability of a foreign nation to target a breaching subnational governmental unit for retaliation was limited: obstacles plagued efforts both to identify the responsible subnational unit and also (even if that were possible) to target successfully that subnational unit for retaliation. To a large degree, however, that is no longer the case. Still, the age of globalization bears witness to substantial incentives for subnational units to breach treaties. Diplomatic pressure from a foreign nation and economic retaliation - a foreign government's best "hammer" against a state - both may prove fruitless if either (i) the state has too little economic dealing with the foreign country for trade sanctions to matter, or (ii) whatever the size of the economic dealings put at issue, the people of the state care more about the behavior that giv es rise to the treaty breach. B. Doubly Uncooperative Federalism in Practice Part of the genesis for the Constitution was state behavior inconsiste nt with the treaties entered into by the United States under
the Articles of Confederation. But recent years have seen their own prominent examples of doubly uncooperative federalism. In this Section, I discuss two of them: the statewide legalization of marijuana [*21] as inconsistent with international narcotics treaties ratified by the U.S. government and states' failure to provide arrested foreign nationals with consular access in violation of a duly ratified international treaty. 1. State Legalization of Marijuana Consider first the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, to which the United States is a party. The Convention calls for signatories "to limit exclusively to medical and scientific purposes the production, manufacture , export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of drugs," and indeed to criminalize drug possession and trafficking. How does the decision by a growing number of states to decrimina lize marijuana - a substance that falls within the ambit of the Convention - affect the nation's compliance with the treaty? Even if the federal government continues to prohibit marijuana possession and trafficking as federal crimes, the anticommandeering principle would seem to preclude the possibility that the federal government could force states to reinstate state legislation criminaliz ing possession and distribution of marijuana. And it is [*22] doubtful that the
Court's holding in Missouri v. Holland - that Congress has greater breadth to enact laws when it acts pursuant to a ratified treaty - extends to grant Congress the greatest possible commandeering power: the power to force states to enact laws. Limits on federal government power notwithstanding, strict application of the doctrine of state responsibility would seem to mean that U.S. state actions have put the United States in breach. The doctrine is understood to apply regardless of whether the federal government has any power to control subfederal governmental units. Indeed, shortly after Colorado and Washington decrim inalized marijuana, Raymond Yans, the President of the International Narcotics Control Board, "stated that "these developments are in violation of the international drug control treaties … .'" More recently, Yury Fedotov, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told reporte rs, "I don't see how [the new laws] can be compatible with existing conventions." [*23] Others have argued that the terms of the treaty break the causal chain between a state violation of the treaty and a breach by the federal government. The Convention expressly makes the obligation to criminalize drug activity "subject to [a signatory's] constitutional limitations." Maybe, the argument goes,
the constitutional status of the anticommandeering principle thus protects the federal government from a breach. My point here is not to resolve these disputes , but rather to highlight how this setting can readily be seen as an example of uncoope rative federalism. The legalizing states' actions seems incons istent with the Single Convention; the only question is whether the Single Convention itself excuses state conduct, and thus provides an exception to the doctrine of state responsibility. 2. Rights of Arrested Foreign Nationals Another illustrative example is provided by the application of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations ("Vienna Convention") to defendants in state criminal proceedings. The Vienna Convention - to which the United States is a signatory - mandates that a national of one country arrested in another be giv en the opportunity to notify his or her national consulate of his or her arrest. In 1998, the Supreme Court held that claims raising Vienna Convention violations are subject in federal habeas review to ordinary state procedural default rules: absent a showing of cause and prejudice , the [*24] argument is waived unless the defendant raises it in a timely fashion before the state courts. Then, in a pair of rulings in the early 2000s, the International Court of Justice ("ICJ") held that the United
States had violated the Vienna Convention when state law enforcement officials failed to advise fifty-one named foreign nationals of their consular notification rights. The ICJ furthe r held that the Vienna Convention entitled those named individuals to reconside ration of their state court convictions and sentences, notwithstanding the fact that their Vienna Convention claims were procedurally defaulted under state law. At the time of these decisions, the United States was a signatory to the Optional Protocol Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes ("Optional Protocol"), which awarded jurisdiction to the ICJ to resolve "disputes arising out of the interpretation or application of the [Vienna] Convention" in suits brought by parties to the Optional Protocol. Shortly after the ICJ's second decision, the United States gave notice of its withdrawal from the Optional Protocol. Subsequent to the ICJ rulings, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its earlier holding that state procedural rules trumped Vienna Convention claims, even where the person claiming the benefit of the [*25] Convention was himself a party purportedly awarded relief by the ICJ. The Court in Medellin v. Texas acknowledged that the ICJ's decisions created a binding international legal obligation on the United States. The Medellin Court emphasized,
however, that the question before it was the distinct question of whether the ICJ's decisions had any domestic legal effect. On that score, the Court concluded that the Optional Protocol was non-self-executing and that, as a consequence , it had no domestic legal effect in the absence of implementing legislation by Congress. As such, the Texas state courts had acted appropriately in denying Medellin relief. The Medellin majority opinion highlights Texas's authority to engage in doubly uncooperative federalism. Accepting that Texas's failure to afford Medellin his consular rights clearly constituted a violation - attributable to the United States government - of the Vienna Convention, consider the extent to which Texas's decision to subject assertion of Convention rights to procedura l default constituted a second violation of law. The ICJ's decisions confirm that there was indeed a second violation, but the view from domestic law was fractured. While the Supreme Court in Medellin - as well as Justice Stevens's concurrence - acknowledged the resulting international law [*26] violation (attributable again to the United States), the Court held that the Optional Protocol - that made the ICJ's decisions binding on the United States as a matter of international law - was non-self-executing, which rendered it a nullity for purposes
of domestic law. This left Texas free not to abide by the ICJ's decisions, even though that choice put the Unite d States in breach of the Optional Protocol. The aftermath of the decision in Medellin confirms the extent to which doubly uncooperative behavior can be robust and immune from federal government efforts to modify it. Despite an executive order calling upon states to give effect to the Avena decision - and a Supreme Court Justice's plea that Texas act so as to "[protect] the honor and integrity of the Nation" - Texas refused to commute Medellin's sentence. With Congress also taking no action, the path was clear for Medellin's execution. As these examples indicate , doubly uncoope rative federalism can generate a substantial failure of treaty enforceme nt, lack of clarity over treaty compliance , and conflicting judicial pronouncements over treaty compliance. Importantly, the problem shows no signs of dissipating. To the contra ry, it seems likely that the problem will only continue to grow in the years to come. As Professor Julian Ku has explained, "As international treaties begin to regulate activities previously considered within the traditional jurisdiction of the states, treaties that result in state control over international law obligations will likely become more commonplace." And, with greater state control
over international obligations will come more opportunities for state disobedience. [*27] II. The Resilience of Doubly Uncoope rative Federalism: Constraints on the Federal Government's Ability to Compel Subnational Governments into Compliance with Treaties The previous Part discussed briefly the anticommandeering principle , and alluded to other limitations on the federal government's power to compel states into compliance with treaties into which the federal government has duly entered. In this Part, I explore those limitations, both legal and practical. Three prelim inary notes are in order. First, it is important to explain the limited scope of my claim here. I do not assert that states will never voluntarily comply with treaties on their own accord; to the contrary, they often do. My focus here is on the converse setting - where states engage in doubly uncooperative federalism and affirmatively do not comply. It is in those settings that the doctrine of state responsibility will hold the national government responsible for state noncompliance. Second, the discussion below refers (except as specifically noted) to both self-executing and non-self-executing treaties. There are two reasons for this. For one thing, as I have noted above, the doctrine of state responsibility applies irrespective of whether a treaty is self-
executing or non-self-executing. For another, the mere fact that a treaty is self-executing does not mean that would-be violations are automatically eradicated. Just because there exists in theory a domestic legal obligation does not mean that that obligation cannot be flouted. The question becomes (assuming states do not want to cooperate in treaty compliance) the extent to which, and by whom, domestic legal obligations under self-executing treaties are enforceable [*28] against states. Legal and practical limitations constrain the enforcement option. Third, I advert to the anticommandeering principle at various points throughout the discussion below. This is because - whatever the method of treaty enforceme nt and the branch(es) of the federal government on which the method relies - the anticommandeering principle to some degree at least constrains the federal government's ability to compel a state to enact a law, even if the terms of a treaty call for such state action. A. Action by the Federal Government Directly Against States 1. Federal Legislation Directed Toward the States Let us consider first the possibility of federal legislation designed to force states into treaty compliance. If Congress enacts valid legislation, that legislation displaces contrary state law under the Supremacy Clause. The question
becomes, then, how broadly Congress may legislate to enforce a treaty. To begin, Congress may act, as always, pursuant to one of its ordinary enumerated powers under Article I, and subject to the Tenth Amendment's proviso that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In the treaty context, however, current Supreme Court precedent provides an even wider berth. Justice Holmes' famous opinion in Missouri v. Holland explained that ratification of a treaty empowers Congress to act in areas that, but for the treaty, would be reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment. Owing to the Constitution's Treaty and [*29] Necessary and Proper Clauses, Congress has greater constitutional latitude to enact domestic laws when it acts pursuant to a ratified treaty. Holland's scope was limited somewhat by the 1957 decision in Reid v. Covert, where the Court held that neither a treaty, nor legislation enacted pursuant to a treaty, may contravene any provision of the Bill of Rights. Following decades of robust debate over the merits of Holland by politicians as well as legal practitioners and scholars , the Supreme Court recently indicate d in granting certiorari its willingness to reconsider Holland's vitality. In
the end, however, the Court decided the case without disturbing the holding in Holland. [*30] Thus, Holland remains good law, at least for the time being. But whatever the scope of Congress's power to enact legislation pursuant to a ratified treaty, the constitutionally prote cted role of the states in the federal system renders mandatory federal legislation less viable. Tenth Amendment anticommandeering doctrine restricts federal legislative capacity to compel states and state officials to implement federal law. At the same time, most commentators agree that the federal government's Treaty Power provides Congress with more leeway when it comes to requiring states to comply with treaty requirements. Additionally, Congress may find it possible to employ "conditional preemption" - that is, a federal law that preempts state law only to the extent that state law does not conform to treaty requirements. All that being said, the federal government's power to commandeer is at a nadir when it tries to compel a state to enact laws, even if a treaty would be violated by a state's failure to enact laws called for by the treaty regime. [*31] Indeed, that result likely obtains even if the government exercises its prerogative to enter into a self-executing treaty. The terms of a self-executing treaty automatically become part of
domestic law, and preempt inconsistent state law, by virtue of being federal law. However, a self-executing treaty cannot otherwise amend state law, nor can it mandate states to enact laws consistent with the treaty. Beyond this, even if Congress has the power to compel a state to comply with a treaty, that does not mean that Congress will exercise that prerogative. Consider the Medellin case, where the Supreme Court held both that the actions of the state of Texas put the United States in breach of an international obligation, and that the President could not unilate rally compel Texas to remedy matters. The Court's emphasis on separation-of-powers implied that Congress could act to set things right. Yet, though it had time to act after the Court invalidated the President's unilateral action, in the end, Congress [*32] did not take up that invitation. 2. Executive Order Directe d Toward the States The power of executive orders to compel state compliance with a treaty is limited. The Court in Medellin made clear that the President lacks the unilateral power to convert a non-self-executing treaty into domestic law. The Court emphasized that Congress had to be involved in a decision to make a treaty effective domestically - whether by ratifying a self-executing treaty or by enacting executing legislation pursuant to a
non-self-executing treaty. For this reason, the President's attempt to achieve the same goal via executive order ran afoul of constitutional separation of powers. The Medellin Court left open the possibility that the President might validly exercise such power in other settings, such as where a treaty was self-executing or where Congress has indicated some intent to have a non-self-executing treaty apply domestically through the enactment of executing legislation. Of course , whatever leeway the President enjoys via executive power is necessarily circums cribed by the anticommandeering [*33] principle. Surely the President cannot compel a state to act on his own if he could not achieve the same goal together with Congress. 3. Lawsuit Brought by the Federal Government Directly Against a State Consider next whether the federal government might sue to compel a state to comply with a treaty. The federal government's ability to proceed will be at its maximum in the rare settings where Congress has explicitly authorize d such actions. Consider now the possibility of having the federal government obtain an injunction against a state to compel compliance with a self-executing treaty. While sovereign immunity poses no bar, the rest of the legal landscape here is less than clear. The Supreme [*34] Court has recognized
the federal government's standing to bring such an action only in dicta. At the same time, lower federal courts have allowed such suits, to the applause of some commentators. Still, the legality of such suits is not without controversy. The federal government has argued before the ICJ that, even where action by a state might result in a breach of an international obligation, as a consequence of federalism, "Federal Government officials do not have the legal power to stop [that action] peremptorily." Indeed, the questionable legality of such suits - perhaps combined with the public reaction to such efforts - may itself be a barrie r to such litigation being pursued. Once again, it seems that the anticommandeering principle limits the national government's ability to harness the federal judiciary to compel states to enact laws (even if a treaty calls for the enactment of such laws). Were that not the case, the government would have access to an end-run around the principle. B. Private Lawsuits Against States and Their Officials If the federal government itself does not want to (or cannot) [*35] force a state to comply with a treaty, it can create in others the ability either (i) to enforce treaty requireme nts, or (ii) to create incentives for states to come into compliance. It is theoretically possible for suits to be brought against
states, state officials, intrastate governmental units (such as counties and municipalities), and those exercising color of state law. One might conceive of such suits being brought by nations who allege harm by virtue of a state breach, or by foreign nationals who allege such harm. I offer a prelim inary word on one issue that cuts across these various types of suits: state sovereign immunity. Under the Constitution, states enjoy sovereign immunity against suits by private parties in federal court, and against suits under federal law brought by private parties in state court. Congress's ability to abrogate that immunity is severely circumscribe d, emanating only from the Fourteenth Amendment. Though the Court has never addressed [*36] the issue, the consensus among commentators seems to be that the Treaty power does not give rise to any power to abrogate. The barrie rs imposed by state sovereign immunity are thus substantial. That said, Ex parte Young allows for suits against state officials (though technically not the state) for prospective injunctive relief. Additionally, sovereign immunity applies only to states, not governmental subunits within states. Thus, suits for both injunctive relief and damages can be brought against municipa l and county governments , and their officials. [*37] 1. Lawsuits by Foreign
Governments Against U.S. States One solution could be to have a foreign state that claims to be harmed by virtue of the action of a U.S. state sue the state directly in a U.S. court for relief. Professor Thomas Lee has argued that the U.S. Supreme Court in fact has original and exclusive juris diction to hear cases of this sort. The Supreme Court, however, has never so held. And, to the contra ry, the Supreme Court has held - in a case that apparently remains good law, notwithstanding Professor Lee's arguments to the contra ry - that states enjoy sovereign immunity [*38] to such suits (unless they choose to waiv e that immunity or Congress validly abrogates it). 2. Lawsuits by Foreign Citizens Against U.S. States In enacting legislation to implement treaties, Congress has allowed for private enforcement of treaty obligations. Generally, however, these implementing statutes allow for suits against private, not government, actors (perhaps because the underlying treaties themselves concern more private than government action). That said, there are generally applicable statutes on the books - statutes authoriz ing federal courts to grant habeas corpus relief, and § 1983 - that some courts and commentators argue provide the basis for private lawsuits against state governments and their subsidiaries and officials. Conside r first
federal habeas corpus review as a means to compel states to comply with treaty obligations that may arise in connection with state criminal prosecutions. A plain reading of the federal statute authorizing federal court review of state criminal convictions confirms that it is available for challenges based upon [*39] treaty violations, and the Supreme Court in Breard v. Green endorsed (if implicitly) such a reading. Lower federal courts have allowed § 2254 claims based on treaty violations to proceed only if certain conditions are met. Most courts of appeals to have examined the question have held that, for a treaty to provide the basis for a valid § 2254 claim, (i) the treaty must be self-executing, and (ii) the treaty must confer individually enforceable rights. As the Third Circuit has pointed out in the context of a federal petition under § 2241, it is hard to discern why § 2241 and § 2254 could not themselves be implementing legislation for non-self-executing treaties. After all, both sections state that [*40] relief is available where the petitioner is held "in custody in violation of the … treaties of the United States"; the language discloses no intent to limit itself to "self-executing treaties." Section 1983 is another possible avenue by which individuals aggrieved by virtue of state actors' failure to comply with treaty
requirements might seek redress. Unlike § 2254, § 1983's language makes no mention of treaty requirements. On the other hand, neither does the language foreclose application to treaties. Indeed, Supreme Court and lower court decisions have assumed, without deciding, that the "laws" to which the provision refers include duly ratified treaties. [*41] More recently, lower federal courts have confronted the issue squarely and held that the "laws" to which § 1983 refers include duly ratified treaties. Courts typically require, before § 1983 can be invoked, that the treaty (i) be self-executing, (ii) "provide rights to individuals rather than only to states," and (iii) afford a private remedy to individuals. On the other hand, with respect to the first prong, the reasoning that argues that the habeas statutes can themselves be executing legislation for non-self-executing treaties would seem equally applicable to § 1983. Even if § 1983 facially provides to an individual a cause of action for treaty enforcement, other considerations yet might limit the scope of available § 1983 relief. Consider that a plaintiff must have [*42] standing to pursue a claim for relief. This requirement will severely limit the ability of a plaintiff to obtain an injunction directing government actors to comply with a treaty, even if the plaintiff has had his or her
rights under the treaty violated by government actors. Specifically, the Supreme Court has explained that mere violation of a federal right is not a sufficient basis for standing in a suit for injunctive relief unless the plaintiff can show that such violations are almost certain to occur in all future settings, or that the government has ordered or authorized its agents to act in that way. This is a very high standard to meet. As a result, § 1983 relief is likely to be limited to damages (to the extent it is available at all). But, to the extent that a treaty provides a basis for a plaintiff to pursue damages under § 1983, that relief is unavailable when the true defendant is the state. Indeed, sovereign immunity precludes even suits for injunctions where what the injunction sought would in effect order the payment of monies out of the state treasury. Finally, the availability of qualified immunity may frustra te § 1983 claimants, including those advancing arguments grounded in treaties. Even if damages are available to claimants, it is unclear how valuable such a remedy is if the goal is treaty compliance. As an initial matter, one might question the extent to which an award of damages itself rectifies the treaty violation. On the one hand, the availability [*43] of damages protects the rights afforded by the treaty by means of a liability rule.
But commentators debate whether a damage award truly expunges a treaty violation, or simply serves as a "fallback" of sorts that leaves the original treaty breach in place (and perhaps offers the possibility of a second treaty breach if the damages are not paid). More importantly, damage awards are unlikely to be successful at inducing subfederal governmental units to change behaviors (or to deter them from adopting such behaviors in the first place) that give rise to treaty breaches (or to deter them from adopting such behaviors in the first place). First, § 1983 damage awards are likely to be too small to generate sufficiently large deterrent effects. Indeed, [*44] it has been argued that courts systematically "underprice" the damages for legal violations in cases brought against governmental units. Second, even if courts correctly "price" damage awards in treaty breach cases, scholars - most prominently Professor Daryl Levinson - have argued that even sizeable damage awards may not faze governmental units, insofar as governments do not respond to price incentives as we would expect a rational actor to respond. Monetary charges imposed on the public fisc do not change politicians' behavior; politicians deal in political capital. Third, scholars have noticed an asymmetry that makes it hard to understand why
damage awards against governments would deter government behavior giv ing rise to the awards: on the one hand, propone nts of the damage award approach assume that "governments must compensate those who lose from a regulation in order to value and internalize the costs of the measure with accuracy," and yet at the same time also inconsiste ntly assume that "governments accurately value and internalize the benefits of the measure without being compensated for such benefits by those who gain from the regulation." [*45] To put it more concretely in the treaty context, the argument in favor of § 1983 damage awards' deterre nt effect rests on the notion that internalization is required for the government to take account of the costs of its action. Presumably, however, there is some benefit from the state action that results in the treaty breach: in the Vienna Convention context, for example, perhaps the benefit is that (at least from one perspective) guilty people do not go unpunished, and perhaps that benefit is enjoyed by the people of the state. If that is true, it is unclear why the state should be expected to value the benefit even though those who truly benefit do not compensate the state for it, while at the same time the state should be expected to avoid contested behavior only if it is forced to
compensate those who suffer as a result of it. 3. Defensive Use of Treaties by Private Individuals in Lawsuits Brought by the State and State Officials It is also possible for a defendant to invoke a treaty and argue that the case against him, her, or it is inconsiste nt with the treaty. Thus, for example, a defendant can raise a treaty-based defense to a state crimina l prosecution. This tactic is available even if the treaty [*46] in question does not provide rights for individuals. So-called "defensive enforcement" in suits brought by states and state actors may help effectively enforce treaties against states. But its scope is limited to settings where the defense is relevant to a pending lawsuit and is properly raised. C. Federal Judicial Interpretation of the Interaction Between State Law and Treaties in Private Lawsuits The prope r interpretation of a treaty and the treaty's interplay with state law also may arise in a lawsuit between private litigants. For example, disputes over title to property sometimes turn on whether state law, or a treaty, produces the valid title. While the court's ruling technically only determines the rights of the litigants to the suit, the court's reasoning and broader holding may have implications for the ability of state law to frustrate treaty compliance. One might anticipate that a state court hearing such a case
might interpret state law in a way that might frustrate treaty compliance. [*47] The Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution, and statutes granting the federal courts jurisdiction, in ways that constrain state court freedom in this regard. First, the Supreme Court has long confirme d that the Constitution authorizes, and congressional statutes empower, the Court to determine the validity of state court interpretations of federal treaties. Second, the Court has furthe r understood its jurisdiction to extend not just to issues of actual treaty interpre tation, but beyond that to interpretations of state law that determine whether a treaty has application in the first place. Finally, the freedom of state courts in private litigation to frustrate treaty compliance is frustrated not only by the prospect of Supreme Court review, but by the availability of the lower federal courts as alternative fora in which to litigate cases that implicate treaty compliance. Ordinarily a state law cause of action does not "arise under" federal law within the meaning of Congress's grant of federal question jurisdiction, and thus cannot be heard in federal district court absent some other basis for jurisdiction. However, the Supreme [*48] Court has held that a state law claim "arises under" federal law - and thus can be heard in lower federal court - if
within that state law claim "a federal issue is: (1) necessarily raised, (2) actually disputed, (3) substantial, and (4) capable of resolution in federal court without disrupting the federal-state balance approved by Congress." A 2005 Supreme Court case confirms that state law actions to quiet title - much like the ones in Supreme Court cases involving the application of treaties to prope rty disputes - can "arise under" federal law and thus qualify for lower federal court juris diction. And, while the dispute in Grable qualified for federal question jurisdiction on the basis of a substantial federal statutory question, there seems little doubt that the same jurisdictional result would obtain were the substantial federal question one of potentially governing treaty law. III. Mitigating Doubly Uncoope rative Federalism If the federal government cannot, or is reluctant to, compel doubly uncoope rative subfederal governmental units to comply with a treaty, two alternative paths present themselves. First, the national government could take steps to induce (without compelling) subfederal units into treaty compliance. Second, the national government could try to address matters instead by tinkering with the treaty regime itself so as to limit the extent to which subfederal unit action (or inaction) results in national government
noncompliance. [*49] A. Inducing States out of Doubly Uncooperative Federalism There are two avenues by which the national government might seek to induce states out of doubly uncooperative federalism and into treaty compliance. The national government could reward subfederal units that opt to comply, or the national government could exhort subfederal units to comply. Neither of these alternatives seems likely to achieve widespread, let alone complete, compliance. I conside r each in turn. 1. Carrots If the stick of mandatory compliance is unavailable or undesirable, the national government could exchange the stick for a carrot. It might offer subsidies to jurisdictions that voluntarily complied with treaties. There are at least four problems here. First, giv en the growing number of treaty obligations over which state and other subfederal governmental units have influence, compensating juris dictions could prove to be an expensive proposition. Second, to the extent that wealthy jurisdictions turn out to exact large payment, some might at some point object to what would be in effect the transfer of wealth from poorer jurisdictions to wealthie r ones. Third, compensating jurisdictions that are otherwise unwilling to comply with treaty obligations may discourage other jurisdictions - that otherwise would
voluntarily comply with those obligations - from in fact complying voluntarily; in short, the payments might "crowd out" voluntary action. Last, and certainly not least, there is of course no guarantee that such an approach would actually yield substantial, let alone complete , compliance with treaty obligations. [*50] 2. Exhortation Another possibility is for the national government - or some branch or official thereof - to exhort subfederal governmental units to comply with treaty obligations. While exhortation may work in some cases, there is certainly no guarantee that exhortation will work on a regular basis. State responses to federal exhortation with respect to violations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are instructive. On the one hand, after the ICJ handed down its decision in Avena, Oklahoma's Governor agreed to commute the death sentence of an individual whose consular notification rights were denied, in part in response to "the U.S. State Department [having] urged his office to giv e careful consideration to the United States' treaty obligations." On the other hand, Texas took no such action with respect to Medellin, despite an executive order calling upon states to give effect to the Avena decision, and a Supreme Court Justice's plea that Texas act so as to "protect[] the honor and integrity of
the Nation." B. Working Around Doubly Uncooperative Federalism This subpart discusses "workarounds" - that is, ways that the federal government might try to avoid treaty breaches even in the face of a state that threatens to engage in doubly uncooperative federalism. This subpart highlights two workarounds, and the problems attendant to each. First, the federal government might resort to "carve-outs" - that is, treaty provisions or federalism-based RUDs that purport to limit the applicability of the doctrine of state responsibility. Second, the federal government might include "breach-curing treaty provisions" in treaties themselves. These provisions provide an "escape valve" under which what would otherwise be deemed a treaty breach can be cured by the federal government. Neither of these workarounds provides a full answer to state engagement in doubly uncooperative federalis

A no h consequence of doub y uncooperative federa sm can be a change n the aw State nvo vement n federa
treaty comp ance g ves states a vo ce that can mbue the r d ssent w th a force for change

The action (or naction) of a state n defy ng a treaty that the federa government has ratified s an act of d ssent t s
however the comb nation of the doctr ne of state respons b ty and the preservation of the state ro e n treaty
comp ance that converts ord nary "outs der" d ssent - n wh ch any pr vate actor m ght engage and that the federa
government can read y gnore - nto an act of wh ch the federa government s more ke y to take notice
 As an example, consider that, as a direct result of the Medellin litigation, the U nited S tates exited the Optional
[*64]

Protocol (under which the United States recognized the ICJ's jurisdiction to resolve disputes under the Vienna Convention). One can debate the normative value of this outcome, but the point remains that
Texas 's action brought to light an international tribunal's interpretation of the Vienna Convention as applied to U.S. law, and the notion that that interpretation might (though not
in the Medellin case itself) have binding effect in the United States. And that , in turn, prompted the federal government to exit the treaty
regime that purported to afford ICJ cases binding domestic effect. Presumably the United States did not agree with the ICJ's holding, and the ICJ's holding would not have emerged but for the steps taken by Texas.
Consider as well the possibility that the federal government welcomes the subversive effect of state-level marijuana
legalization. The response of the federal government to state legalization has been acquiescence. It is not a large step
to infer from that acquiescence that the federal government indeed might welcome state legalization, hoping it
might eventually generate support - both domestically and internationally - to modify the governing
international treaty regime .
Conclusion

This Article has elucidated the notion of doubly uncooperative federalism in the context of treaty compliance. Doubly uncooperative federalism arises out of the substantial gap between the expectations of the doctrine of

state responsibility and the reality of U.S. federalism. Examples of it already exist, and the likelihood is that it will only proliferate in the future. Doubly uncoop erative federalism may render
portions of treaties substantially unenforceable, reduce clarity over treaty breaches, and create an avenue for states to effect changes in the treaties , and the
interpretation of treaties, to which the U nited S tates subscribes.

4---State action creates federal follow-on by raising the political salience of the issue.
Dr. Richard Herrera 13, Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University, PhD from University of California,
Santa Barbara, and Dr. Karen Shafer, Professor at Walden University, PhD in Political Science from Arizona State
University, “Governors’ Policy Agendas Over the Long Haul: State Priorities in a National Context”, Paper Presented at
the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 9/1/2013, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2300597&download=yes

Policy Diffusion

Since Walker’s (1969) seminal article on policy diffusion, scholars have followed suit and examined how states’ policies,
particularly innovative ones, spread. Policy agendas are influenced by multiple factors and diffuse accordingly. Some of
those sources are internal to the state while others originate outside any particular state and may affect multiple states.
These external influences are termed horizontal (also called lateral) or vertical. Examples of horizontal factors include
the influences of neighboring states (Berry and Berry 1990), as well as governors’ associations both general and partisan.

Vertical factors of diffusion may start at the national level and include the President , Congress , or the federal courts
(Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2005). The vertical relationship need not be exclusively from the top down. It is possible that
states may be the stimulators of policy priorities for the national level , exemplifying states’ so-called role as
“laboratories for policy innovation” and demonstrating a bottom-up approach to policy adoption (Lowery et al. 2011).
Policies may percolate up to the federal level as well as trickle down to the states and local communities.1 In short,
“the agenda setting process seems to operate in both bottom-up and top-down fashion” (Karch 2007, 68). Though this is
likely the case, most scholarship in this area tends to examine either bottom-up or top-down diffusion, but not both.

In this study, we are concerned with the interplay between national and state policy agendas—or vertical diffusion. We
ask the following questions: is attention to particular political issues by the states demonstrated in their chief executives’
policy priorities reflected in those of national political actors? Likewise, do governors take their policy cues from
presidents and/or Congress? Finally, does the type of policy matter in the nature of the interplay between levels of
government?

Vertical Diffusion between States and Federal Actors

In their role as laboratories of democracy, increased policy attention at the state level may be a cue to the federal
government that these policy areas need national action. On the other hand, Karch, notes “National activity…is an
important causal mechanism that can foster the widespread consideration of a policy innovation by increasing its
political salience” (2007, 68). And, Berry and Berry (1999) suggest that the top-down aspect of policy diffusion should be
included in models of state policy diffusion more generally. Finally, the power of the federal government in setting the
nation’s agenda has been found in other scholarship, especially when it emanates from the President, the agenda setter
in chief. Presidents’ agendas have been shown to affect a variety of other recipients, including Congress (Eshbaugh-Soha
and Peake 2005; Edwards and Wood 1999), the public (Cohen 1995) and the media (Peake and Eshbaugh-Soha 2004;
Edwards and Wood 1999). In sum, there are reasons to expect that governors’ policy priorities may be susceptible to
national influences and influence their national counterpart. The scholarship in both areas is, however, less than
consistent.

2AC 4- Threat Fails

The counterplan’s key to political stability and social order. Any signal of the AFF is impossible in a
world of degraded federalism – also makes uncertainty and legal suits against the plan inevitable.
Murray 16 [Bill, Editor of RealClearEnergy.org in June 2015 after five years as a senior reporter with Energy Intelligence,
“Federalism's Decline: A Preexisting Condition of Our Sick Politics,” July 17, 2016,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/07/17/federalisms_decline_a_preexisting_condition_of_our_sick_politic
s__131202.html]

What Codevilla saw that Rauch misses (perhaps purposefully) is that the degradation of federalism (“states’ rights” has
become a pejorative term) over the course of the 20th century is the pre-existing condition underlying the country’s
21st century political illness . The federal system – the one that started with 13 states along the Atlantic seaboard in the
1700s – existed well before Rauch’s “informal constitutional order” coalesced and acted as the foundation upon which
the constitutional order rested well into the 20th century. Since state governments have general police powers, and
because the founders wrote the Constitution to give the federal government only “enumerated powers,” it was only
when the Supreme Court began reinterpreting the Constitution’s commerce clause in the 1930s and 1940s to
accommodate the New Deal that the regulatory power of the executive branch became too powerful for the
constitutional antibodies to contain. Codevilla is highly critical of the role President Woodrow Wilson played as the first
major vector through which pathogens entered the political bloodstream. Wilson was the first statesman to argue “that
the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society,” he wrote.
Early progressive thought concerning the rule of technical “experts” rather than elected representatives was best
articulated by Wilson well before his presidency, and the growth of executive power – often with good and noble
motives – has led to a usurpation of decentralized authority and the ability of the political system to organically self-
organize. Codevilla said progressives generally want a more straightforward, centralized political system closer to the
British Parliament, which ratifies government actions by dint of its parliamentary structure; there are no regional
provinces with general police powers in Great Britain. Yet a parliamentary system wasn’t the design of Congress by the
Framers; quite the opposite. This is why James Madison said in Federalist No. 10 that the role of Congress would be to
“refine and enlarge the public’s view” of the national interest while leaving much of the protean lawmaking to the state
legislatures. It’s these non-federal police powers that are the reason death penalty and abortion laws are different in
each U.S. state. They were also the reason that gun control laws differed significantly from state to state until two
recent Supreme Court cases largely ended state-level regulation of firearms. As a result, Rauch gets his diagnosis wrong
by focusing on the vanishing middlemen of the late 20th century. The shifting of the venues of mediation – and the
people doing the mediating – from state capitals to Washington, D.C., has undermined the political system’s historic
ability to self-organize peacefully. Unless the political system – and the elites running it – is willing to accept the
treatment options inherent in such a diagnosis, the U.S. political system will start to exhibit (if it hasn’t already) a shift
from the chronic condition that is manageable to the more acute version of political “ chaos syndrome ” that calls into
question the survivability of the American experiment .

2AC 5- Certainty
2---The counterplan’s key to political stability and social order. Any signal of the AFF is impossible in
a world of degraded federalism – also makes uncertainty and legal suits against the plan inevitable.
Murray 16 [Bill, Editor of RealClearEnergy.org in June 2015 after five years as a senior reporter with Energy Intelligence,
“Federalism's Decline: A Preexisting Condition of Our Sick Politics,” July 17, 2016,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/07/17/federalisms_decline_a_preexisting_condition_of_our_sick_politic
s__131202.html]

What Codevilla saw that Rauch misses (perhaps purposefully) is that the degradation of federalism (“states’ rights” has
become a pejorative term) over the course of the 20th century is the pre-existing condition underlying the country’s
21st century political illness . The federal system – the one that started with 13 states along the Atlantic seaboard in the
1700s – existed well before Rauch’s “informal constitutional order” coalesced and acted as the foundation upon which
the constitutional order rested well into the 20th century. Since state governments have general police powers, and
because the founders wrote the Constitution to give the federal government only “enumerated powers,” it was only
when the Supreme Court began reinterpreting the Constitution’s commerce clause in the 1930s and 1940s to
accommodate the New Deal that the regulatory power of the executive branch became too powerful for the
constitutional antibodies to contain. Codevilla is highly critical of the role President Woodrow Wilson played as the first
major vector through which pathogens entered the political bloodstream. Wilson was the first statesman to argue “that
the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society,” he wrote.
Early progressive thought concerning the rule of technical “experts” rather than elected representatives was best
articulated by Wilson well before his presidency, and the growth of executive power – often with good and noble
motives – has led to a usurpation of decentralized authority and the ability of the political system to organically self-
organize. Codevilla said progressives generally want a more straightforward, centralized political system closer to the
British Parliament, which ratifies government actions by dint of its parliamentary structure; there are no regional
provinces with general police powers in Great Britain. Yet a parliamentary system wasn’t the design of Congress by the
Framers; quite the opposite. This is why James Madison said in Federalist No. 10 that the role of Congress would be to
“refine and enlarge the public’s view” of the national interest while leaving much of the protean lawmaking to the state
legislatures. It’s these non-federal police powers that are the reason death penalty and abortion laws are different in
each U.S. state. They were also the reason that gun control laws differed significantly from state to state until two
recent Supreme Court cases largely ended state-level regulation of firearms. As a result, Rauch gets his diagnosis wrong
by focusing on the vanishing middlemen of the late 20th century. The shifting of the venues of mediation – and the
people doing the mediating – from state capitals to Washington, D.C., has undermined the political system’s historic
ability to self-organize peacefully. Unless the political system – and the elites running it – is willing to accept the
treatment options inherent in such a diagnosis, the U.S. political system will start to exhibit (if it hasn’t already) a shift
from the chronic condition that is manageable to the more acute version of political “ chaos syndrome ” that calls into
question the survivability of the American experiment .

2NC – TC – Heg
State sovereignty and policy effectiveness high now – that’s key to outcompete China.
McCormick ’21 [David and Jared Cohen; Fall; CEO of Bridgewater Associates and has served in senior positions in the
White House, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Commerce; CEO of Jigsaw and an adjunct senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as a member of the U.S. State Department's policy-planning staff;
National Affairs, “Federalism and American Power,” no. 49]

America's union is the greatest source of its strength, both at home and abroad. As such, a guiding principle of American
foreign policy has long been the need to speak and act with one voice. Yet America's domestic structure — a
decentralized, multi-layered network of national, state, and local governments — makes it unique among nations. This
arrangement could offer the country a potent source of strength on the international stage .
People typically think of our federalist system as a purely domestic phenomenon, but federalism creates the
opportunity for state and local leaders to serve their residents by acting internationally . Many of these leaders are
taking advantage of this opportunity today, and have been for some time . From South Carolina positioning itself as an
attractive destination for international automakers, to Maryland governor Larry Hogan negotiating with South Korea
for Covid-19 tests during the pandemic, subnational actors are reaching out to foreign countries on issues such as
trade, investment, public health, and the environment.

As globalization continues to render international relations an increasingly local concern, enterprising governors and
mayors are searching for opportunities abroad to serve their constituents at home. Given the latitude afforded to state
actors today, as well as the capabilities at their fingertips, we should expect them to test the limits of their power in this
realm more frequently in the coming years. The courts may step in to invalidate their actions on occasion, but barring
any major changes, Congress and the executive branch will likely remain quiet.

With some direction and support from Washington, America's states could serve as a strategic asset to the national
government as it confronts global challenges . The need for federal officials to tap subnational actors will become even
clearer as lines between the national and the international continue to blur, as states engage more directly with
foreign powers, and as economic relations become increasingly intertwined with geopolitical competition .

America's national leaders should recognize federalism as a principle that guides not only how Americans relate to
one another, but how our nation can relate to the world. Such an approach would be an exceptionally American
effort — one in keeping with the framers' vision as well as 21st-century subnational statecraft.
GUARDRAILS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The role of the states in the American republic was at the top of the framers' minds during the nation's earliest days. While they recognized that the new republic would unite the states under a single national government, as James Madison observed in Federalist 45, "the States will retain, under the proposed Constitution, a very extensive portion of active sovereignty." The result was a "partly federal and partly national" system, with the states remaining central to Americans' political life.

But the states' role in foreign affairs was not so clear. Looking back at the failure of the Articles of Confederation, Madison wrote in Federalist 42, "[i]f we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations." Thomas Jefferson agreed, writing to George Washington that the proper arrangement was "to make our states one as to all foreign concerns, preserve them several as to all merely domestic."

To ensure America spoke with one voice in foreign affairs, the framers established guardrails to restrain the states' international activity. Since the founding, the Constitution has prohibited states from regulating foreign commerce, levying tariffs, negotiating on behalf of the country, and entering treaties or other legally binding compacts with foreign nations without Congress's consent.

In the years following ratification, Congress took a lead role in supplementing these provisions through legislation. One notable example occurred after the XYZ Affair, during which Pennsylvania state senator George Logan traveled to France to negotiate with the French foreign minister without the federal government's sanction. This led to the passage of the Logan Act in 1799 to prohibit such activity. (Though rarely enforced, the act has caused controversy since).

As America became more engaged in world affairs over time, the lines between foreign and domestic became less clear, and Congress began delegating enforcement of the Constitution's guardrails to the judiciary. Federal judges tasked with this responsibility struggled to define whether state policies were lawful, or whether they unlawfully "[rewrote] our foreign policy," as the majority in United States v. Pink put it in 1942. Through a few seminal cases, including Zschernig v. Miller in 1968, the courts eventually developed what Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith called "the federal common law of foreign relations."

Judges still largely determine whether state actions contradict federal policy or impede Washington's ability to conduct foreign affairs. But they do so episodically, and with minimal guidance from policymakers. What has emerged in the meantime are 50 powerful states with significant global influence in their own right. Many state leaders regulate populations, territories, and economies that are larger than those of some G20 countries, and are naturally looking to advance the interests of their residents around the world.

FEDERALISM IN FOREIGN POLICY

The fact that America's states are important international players may be lost on many Washington officials, but it's not lost on leaders in foreign capitals. A telling example occurred in February 2020, when the Chinese consulate in Chicago sent a letter to a Wisconsin state senator requesting that he introduce a resolution praising China for being "transparent and quick in sharing key information of the [coronavirus] with the [World Health Organization] and the international community." It asked him to add that "the risk of [the] novel coronavirus to the general public in the U.S. remains low," and to encourage the federal government to work with the World
Health Organization on the matter.

The senator didn't take the consulate up on its proposal, instead introducing his own resolution stating that the Chinese Communist Party "deliberately and intentionally misled the world" on the coronavirus, and that the Wisconsin Senate "stands in solidarity with the Chinese people," who have been "held hostage by a brutal and oppressive regime for these past 70 years." For a moment, a Wisconsin official was at the center of the global competition between two of the world's premier powers.

The event highlighted a growing trend of America's great-power competitors targeting subnational actors. As is to be expected, China is the most notable character in these plays. The Chinese Communist Party's espionage efforts against U.S. mayors, police departments, universities, and other subnational entities are not only well documented, but have been occurring for some time.

Aside from being targeted by international actors, states often take their own initiative in engaging in foreign affairs. They do so particularly when their residents include large diaspora communities, as when Florida governor Ron DeSantis sent a letter to President Joe Biden requesting federal assistance to provide internet access to the people of Cuba during this summer's protests against the regime in Havana.

Within certain constraints, states can also enact their own agreements with foreign governments. California's size and wealth, which give it the status of the world's fifth-largest economy, make it an especially powerful player in this context. A recent illustration occurred after the federal government announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords in 2017. In response, California governor Jerry Brown helped launch the U.S. Climate Alliance  — a coalition of 25 states that pledged to meet America's original commitments under the accords.

The group grew out of the Under2 Coalition, which Brown started in 2015 with the minister-president of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. This coalition brought together more than 220 governments  — including those of several American states — that share the goal of keeping the global temperature rise under two degrees Celsius. Since neither agreement is legally binding, they are permissible under the Constitution's Compact Clause.

Individual states can also advocate for their own economic interests abroad, and have the ability to attract investments from around the world. While states like California, Texas, and New York boast some of the largest numbers in terms of jobs created through foreign investments, smaller states like Georgia, along with Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, support hundreds of thousands of domestic jobs this way.

To further encourage investment in their jurisdictions, states have opened offices in foreign countries staffed with representatives who are somewhat analogous to U.S. ambassadors. According to the Council of State Governments, states began establishing these offices on a large scale during the 1980s and '90s. The council's latest data indicate that today, states maintain around 200 such offices in 30 countries. The most popular location is mainland China, which boasts more than 20 U.S. state offices. While Taiwan may not be able to host official representation from the federal government, it has hosted offices from Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and other states.

On the domestic front, state leaders have used their authority to direct how and whether their residents do business with foreign actors. As of today, 33 states have passed laws that limit their contracting with and investment in companies that boycott Israel. Such state laws ensure continued economic engagement with a fellow democracy and key U.S. ally.

Finally, any state governor can call on National Guard units that are more powerful than the militaries of many countries. National guardsmen have been deployed abroad for reasons ranging from warfare to disaster relief. Recently, state Guard units have engaged in efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19. Guam and Hawaii National Guard units held a virtual subject-matter expert exchange on the virus with the Philippines' armed forces last year, while guardsmen from Nebraska and Texas shared best practices for fighting the pandemic with their counterparts in the Czech Republic.

It's not just states that are involved in such matters; America's cities are, too. New York City provides a remarkable example. Through the International Liaison Program established shortly after the September 11th attacks, New York's Police Foundation stations officers in foreign capitals to gather counter-terrorism intelligence. The city now has 18 police officers stationed abroad, and they can pop up in unexpected places: When a New Yorker ran into trouble in Thailand in 2018 and an NYPD officer showed up at his hotel room, he wondered (quite naturally) how the officer arrived so quickly.

direction from federal leaders, our nation's subnational actors can serve as a strategic
America's state and local governments have deep and varied connections abroad. Though they were never meant to serve as appendages of Washington, with some additional

asset to the United States as it confronts global challenges.

MAKING FEDERALISM AN ASSET

Today's geopolitical environment requires a foreign policy that takes advantage of every tool at our disposal.
Federalism should be counted among those tools. America's vertical s eparation of powers is exceptional among
modern nation-states, and stands in especially stark contrast to the top-down model of central planning adopted by
America's chief competitor, China. An ambitious foreign-policy agenda built around federalism would involve
leveraging states and localities to supplement our national defense, support worldwide vaccination efforts, strengthen
democratic institutions abroad, enhance America's global economic competitiveness, and more.

Leaders at the state level are already collaborating with the federal government to advance America's national-security
interests and those of its allies. A powerful case study in this regard is the Department of Defense's State Partnership
Program (SPP). The program is managed by the National Guard Bureau, executed by combatant commands, and sourced
by U.S. state and territory National Guard units. A total of 54 American states and territories participate in the program,
through which they cooperate with other nations' militaries on everything from leadership development to disaster
response.

The program began in 1993, with partnerships between the United States and three Baltic republics. After nearly three
decades of collaboration, the SPP has grown to include 89 partner nations. State Guard units have not only built trusted
international relationships, they've also increased the effectiveness of America's military partners. The benefits can be
seen most clearly in Europe, and particularly in the Baltic states, which face the continual threat of Russian aggression.

America should seek a similar strategy in the Indo-Pacific, where the military balance in the region is shifting
precariously toward China. Any effective strategy to reverse that trend must enhance relationships with regional
partners — particularly in Southeast Asia, where partnerships already exist — and strengthen the U.S. military's ability
to operate with them.

Building new partnerships and deepening existing ones in the Indo-Pacific would help America create working coalitions
to stand against Chinese aggression in the region. This effort would require greater federal funding and likely some
improvements to the oversight and management of the SPP, but the return on investment could be significant. It would
help smaller states develop their sovereign power and form binding ties with one another. Better military-to-military
relations could also help pave the way for U.S. troops to disperse more widely throughout the region — a much-
needed step for competing with China's highly touted missile- and bomber-heavy force.

2NC – IL – Top
It solves and leashes the federal government, revitalizing uncooperative federalism.
David Lieb 13, Government and Political Reporter at the Associated Press, citing Constitutional Law Professor Adam
Winkler at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Federal nullification efforts give local, federal police conflicting
orders”, 6/21/13, https://www.policeone.com/federal-law-enforcement/articles/federal-nullification-efforts-give-local-
federal-police-conflicting-orders-jATJbyrzZKGgyZeE/

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Imagine the scenario: A federal agent attempts to arrest someone for illegally selling a
machine gun. Instead , the federal agent is arrested — charged in a state court with the crime of enforcing
federal gun laws.

Farfetched? Not as much as you might think.

The scenario would become conceivable if legislation passed by Missouri's Republican-led Legislature is signed into law
by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.

The Missouri legislation is perhaps the most extreme example of a states' rights movement that has been spreading
across the nation. States are increasingly adopting laws that purport to nullify federal laws — setting up
intentional legal conflicts , directing local police not to enforce federal laws and, in rare cases, even threatening
criminal charges for federal agents who dare to do their jobs.
An Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states now have enacted local laws that directly reject or
ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for
driver's licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has
proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign
a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state.
Some states, such as Montana and Arizona, have said " no " to the feds again and again — passing states' rights
measures on all four subjects examined by the AP — despite questions about whether their "no" carries any
legal significance.

"It seems that there has been an uptick in nullification efforts from both the left and the right ," said Adam
Winkler, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who specializes in constitutional law.

Yet "the law is clear — the supremacy clause (of the U.S. Constitution) says specifically that the federal laws
are supreme over contrary state laws , even if the state doesn't like those laws," Winkler added.
The fact that U.S. courts have repeatedly upheld federal laws over conflicting state ones hasn't stopped some states
from flouting those federal laws — sometimes successfully .
About 20 states now have medical marijuana laws allowing people to use pot to treat chronic pain and other ailments
_ despite a federal law that still criminalizes marijuana distribution and possession. Ceding ground to the states,
President Barack Obama's administration has made it known to federal prosecutors that it wasn't worth their time to
target those people.

Federal authorities have repeatedly delayed implementation of the 2005 Real ID Act, an anti-terrorism law that set
stringent requirements for photo identification cards to be used to board commercial flights or enter federal buildings.
The law has been stymied, in part, because about half the state legislatures have opposed its implementation, according
to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

About 20 states have enacted measures challenging Obama's 2010 health care laws, many of which specifically reject
the provision mandating that most people have health insurance or face tax penalties beginning in 2014.

After Montana passed a 2009 law declaring that federal firearms regulations don't apply to guns made and kept in
that state, eight other states have enacted similar laws. Gun activist Gary Marbut said he crafted the Montana measure
as a foundation for a legal challenge to the federal power to regulate interstate commerce under the U.S. Constitution.
His lawsuit was dismissed by a trial judge but is now pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The states created this federal monster , and so it's time for the states to get their monster on a leash ," said
Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that local police could not be compelled to carry out provisions of a
federal gun control law. But some states are now attempting to take that a step further by asserting that
certain federal laws can't even be enforced by federal authorities.

A new Kansas law makes it a felony for a federal agent to attempt to enforce laws on guns made and owned in Kansas. A
similar Wyoming law, passed in 2010, made it a misdemeanor. The Missouri bill also would declare it a misdemeanor
crime but would apply more broadly to all federal gun laws and regulations — past, present, or future — that "infringe
on the people's right to keep and bear arms."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter in late April to the Kansas governor warning that the federal
government is willing to go to court over the new law .
"Kansas may not prevent federal employees and officials from carrying out their official responsibilities," Holder wrote.

Federal authorities in the western district of Missouri led the nation in prosecutions for federal weapons offenses
through the first seven months of the 2013 fiscal year, with Kansas close behind, according to a data clearinghouse at
Syracuse University.

Felons illegally possessing firearms is the most common charge nationally. But the Missouri measure sets it sights on
nullifying federal firearms registrations and, among other things, a 1934 law that imposes a tax on transferring machine
guns or silencers. Last year, the federal government prosecuted 83 people nationally for unlawful possession of machine
guns.

So what would happen if a local prosecutor actually charges a federal agent for doing his or her job?

"They're going to have problems if they do it — there's no doubt about it," said Michael Boldin, executive director of the
Tenth Amendment Center, a Los Angeles-based entity that promotes states' rights. "There's no federal court in the
country that's going to say that a state can pull this off."

Yet states may never need to prosecute federal agents in order to make their point.

If enough states resist , "it's going to be very difficult

 Filibuster CP: KU

1NC---CP

Filibuster CP

The United States House of Representatives and 50 democratic Senators should vest civil duties in
autonomous artificial intelligence.bThe Executive Branch, including Biden and Harris, should
publicly support the initiative. Republican senators should block the initiative via filibuster and the
Senate Parliamentarian should rule that the filibuster prevents the use of reconciliation for this
initiative.
The plan’s bipartisan deal-making saves the filibuster. The counterplan’s republican obstructionism
nukes it.
Kapur 3-24-2021, National Political Reporter @ NBC News (Sahil, “Saving the filibuster: Bipartisan group seeks to show
Senate can work,” NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/committee-save-filibuster-bipartisan-group-
seeks-show-senate-can-work-n1261935)

The survival of the Senate's effective supermajority rule to pass bills could hinge on a working group of 20 senators
that includes the most moderate members in both parties. If the group can cut deals and deliver victories , it
could become the model for lawmaking under President Joe Biden. If it fails, the Dem ocratic-led Congress will face
pressure to pursue partisan avenues to enact its ambitious agenda, including the simple-majority budget process and
nixing the filibuster. The group, evenly divided between the two parties, is off to a rough start. It was sidelined for the
$1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package. It is ill-defined and lacks a clear focus or method. It has yet to show signs of success
in the new presidency. Its ability to prove that the Senate can function under the 60-vote requirement
carries high stakes for the future of the chamber — and for politics and policymaking over the next four years. "The
argument against the filibuster is that nothing happens and it's all obstruction . And if we can make it work,
we can get legislation passed without changing the rules," said Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses
with Democrats and has worked across the aisle. Republican members of the group say they want to defuse the push to
ax the filibuster. "That's certainly our goal: to diminish the hue and cry by the left for elimination of the 60-vote rule,"
said Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas. "To say, no, there are ways in which we can work together, that the Senate can
function, and needs to."

The net-benefit solves the case. Abolishing the filibuster allows every dem priority to succeed
Jacobi 21, Professor of Law @ Northwestern (Tonja, “Why the Senate Should Abolish the Filibuster,” Bloomberg Tax,
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/why-the-senate-should-abolish-the-filibuster)

The Senate, unlike the House, still has the filibuster, a procedure used to delay or stop a vote on pending legislation that
requires 60 votes to end. Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Professor Tonja Jacobi explains why the filibuster should
be abolished and rebuts contrary arguments based on tradition and moderation. The Senate just showed what
Democrats can achieve with their new control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Senate approved a
measure Feb. 5 that will allow Democrats to pass a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan without a single Republican vote.
Every Republican senator voted against the measure. Vice President Kamala Harris (D) cast the deciding vote in the 50-
50 split Senate. There is much more for Dem ocra ts to do. Voting rights protection, an effective vaccine rollout ,
criminal justice reform, and presidential ethics and accountability reforms should all be on the agenda. But these
programs, all of which have popular support, are being held hostage to an arbitrary rule of Senate procedure: the
filibuster. The filibuster requires a super-majority of 60 out of 100 Senators to pass any bill. Senate Democrats have the
power to change this filibuster rule and they should. If the filibuster continues, every progressive policy will become
more difficult to enact and key small-d democratic reforms will be impossible because the filibuster gives the minority
Republican Party a veto on most legislation. Discussions of the filibuster may seem like technical, procedural debates
only of interest to political scientists. But in fact, abolishing the filibuster is essential to getting anything done that is
not budgetary in nature.

Filibuster-elimination saves democracy

Simon 12-31-2020 (Daniel, “End the Senate Filibuster,” NYT,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/opinion/letters/senate-filibuster.html)--ability edited

Senator Tom Udall said in his farewell address that the filibuster has caused “a deep [inaction] paralysis.” If even a few
Democratic senators refuse to back filibuster reform, the result may be not just further legislative paralysis but the loss
of our democracy itself. Republicans have spent the last decade rigging our election processes to entrench minority
rule and prevent government from responding to the will of the people. They have relentlessly attempted to keep
people opposed to them from voting, manipulated district lines to maintain legislative majorities, and protected and
encouraged the flow of big money, which warps our political priorities and erodes trust in government. Our nation
desperately needs legislation to ensure free and fair elections and to end the influence of big donors. These reforms
have passed the House in the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. But there will
never be enough Senate Republicans willing to join Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to break a
filibuster on these bills because too many Republicans will simply never agree to unrig a system that keeps them in
power. If we don’t act to save our democracy when we have the chance, we may lose it forever . I can only hope that if
it comes down to saving the filibuster or saving our democracy, the choice will be clear.

Democratic spread puts a cap on conflict, and authoritarianism makes all of their impacts more
likely
Diamond 19 – PhD in Sociology, professor of Sociology and Political Science at Stanford University (Larry, “Ill Winds:
Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency,” Kindle Edition)

The most obvious response to the ill winds blowing from the world’s autocracies is to help the winds of freedom
blowing in the other direction . The democracies of the West cannot save themselves if they do not stand with
democrats around the world. This is truer now than ever, for several reasons. We live in a globalized world, one in
which models , trends, and ideas cascade across borders . Any wind of change may gather quickly and blow with gale
force . People everywhere form ideas about how to govern—or simply about which forms of government and sources
of power may be irresistible—based on what they see happening elsewhere . We are now immersed in a fierce global
contest of ideas , information, and norms. In the digital age, that contest is moving at lightning speed, shaping how
people think about their political systems and the way the world runs. As doubts about and threats to democracy are
mounting in the West, this is not a contest that the democracies can afford to lose . Globalization, with its flows of
trade and information, raises the stakes for us in another way. Authoritarian and badly governed regimes increasingly
pose a direct threat to popular sovereignty and the rule of law in our own democracies. Covert flows of money and
influence are subverting and corrupting our democratic processes and institutions. They will not stop just because
Americans and others pretend that we have no stake in the future of freedom in the world. If we want to defend the
core principles of self-government, transparency, and accountability in our own democracies, we have no choice but to
promote them globally. It is not enough to say that dictatorship is bad and that democracy, however flawed, is still
better. Popular enthusiasm for a lesser evil cannot be sustained indefinitely. People need the inspiration of a positive
vision. Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the
common good. To make our republics more perfect, established democracies must not only adopt reforms to more fully
include and empower their own citizens. They must also support people, groups, and institutions struggling to achieve
democratic values elsewhere. The best way to counter Russian rage and Chinese ambition is to show that Moscow and
Beijing are on the wrong side of history; that people everywhere yearn to be free; and that they can make freedom work
to achieve a more just, sustainable, and prosperous society. In our networked age, both idealism and the harder
imperatives of global power and security argue for more democracy, not less. For one thing, if we do not worry about
the quality of governance in lower-income countries, we will face more and more troubled and failing states . Famine
and genocide are the curse of authoritarian states, not democratic ones. Outright state collapse is the ultimate, bitter
fruit of tyranny. When countries like Syria , Libya , and Afghanistan descend into civil war ; when poor states in Africa
cannot generate jobs and improve their citizens’ lives due to rule by corrupt and callous strongmen; when Central
American societies are held hostage by brutal gangs and kleptocratic rulers, people flee—and wash up on the shores
of the democracies. Europe and the United States cannot withstand the rising pressures of immigration unless they
work to support better, more stable and accountable government in troubled countries. The world has simply grown
too small, too flat, and too fast to wall off rotten states and pretend they are on some other planet. Hard security
interests are at stake. As even the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy makes clear, the main
threats to U.S. national security all stem from authoritarianism , whether in the form of tyrannies from Russia and
China to Iran and North Korea or in the guise of antidemocratic terrorist movements such as ISIS .1 By supporting the
development of democracy around the world, we can deny these authoritarian adversaries the geopolitical running
room they seek. Just as Russia, China, and Iran are trying to undermine democracies to bend other countries to their
will, so too can we contain these autocrats’ ambitions by helping other countries build effective, resilient democracies
that can withstand the dictators’ malevolence. Of course, democratically elected governments with open societies will
not support the American line on every issue. But no free society wants to mortgage its future to another country. The
American national interest would best be secured by a pluralistic world of free countries—one in which autocrats can no
longer use corruption and coercion to gobble up resources, alliances, and territory. If you look back over our history to
see who has posed a threat to the United States and our allies, it has always been authoritarian regimes and empires. As
political scientists have long noted, no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other— ever . It is not the
democracies of the world that are supporting international terrorism , proliferating w eapons of mass destruction, or
threatening the territory of their neighbors.
 ICJ CP: Wake

The United Nations Security Council should request an advisory opinion with binding force over the
personhood of nature be accelerated by the International Court of Justice and pass a concurrent
resolution that non-compliance constitutes an enforceable violation of Charter obligations. The
United Nations International Court of Justice, should convene and, if a dispute is present, issue a
binding advisory opinion that nature ought to be granted legal rights.
ICJ can rule on rights and duties, they’ve already expanded standing beyond states
Parvez Sattar 21, Department of Law, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Independent University, “Redefining
Personhood: A Synoptic Analysis of Human Subjectivity from Legal and Human Rights Perspective”, Beijing Law Review,
March 2021, Vol 12, No. 1

3.3. Emerging Questions of International Legal Personality

The concept of personality is unequivocally linked to the subjects of international law . As noted by Dixon, personality
is to be understood as “a body or entity recognized or accepted as being capable, of exercising international rights and
duties” ( Dixon, 2007). This means, that if an entity is said to have international legal personality , that entity is
provided with rights and duties derived from international law , and this is argued in the following sections of the
essay by providing evidence from international criminal law and international human rights law .

Significantly, the I nternational C ourt of J ustice, in the so-called Reparation for Injuries Opinion (1949), has linked the
subjects of international law directly to the international legal personality and made it clear that there may be other
subjects than states ( Harris, 2004). As pointed out by McCorquodale: “while the State is the primary subject of the
international legal system, the subjects of that system can change and expand depending on the needs of the
[international] community and the requirements of international life” ( Evans, 2018).

Rights and privileges that individual human person has been provided with under international law are of different
character. They might be claim-rights, a privilege, a power, or immunity. The fact that individuals are provided with
rights under international law, makes them subjects in their own right. The human rights sphere is incontestably the
area in which individual rights under international law is most developed .

Talking about the requirements (conditio sine qua non) for recognition and activism of non-state subjects of
international law within a given legal situation, Jan Klabbers considers personality of any such entity as “a threshold,
which must be crossed” ( Klabbers, 2010). In other words, claims and belonging to the global community of these
entities are conditional to possessing legal personality in international law .

However, how the elements of this international legal personality are defined is an increasingly complex question
that arises in the contemporary political and legal discourses, particularly in the context of recent development in
international criminal justice and the principle of universality, application of international humanitarian law and
individual responsibility for international crime as well as responsibilities for violation of norms and standards of
international human rights law ( Sattar, 2020b). Arguably, at least insofar as individual responsibility under the
universality principle is concerned, the traditional requirement of legal personality in international law is no longer a
condition precedent to entitlement to rights and duties in law-a proposition that comes in sharp contrast with the
conventionalism (that existed even in the 1990s)6 affiliated to this long-maintained normative standing.

Naturally, what follows from the argument above is: does personality (or legal personality to be precise) in
international legal discourse exclusively signifies possessing rights and obligations as in the case of the objects of PIL?
In this respect, the point of view expressed by Kelsen can be interpreted to note that the law cannot just think in terms
of rights and duties when it comes to the application of the law of nations, but also needs to be able to point to
someone or something possessing those rights and duties arising from conventional as well as emerging attributes of
subjectivity in international law ( Kelsen & Wedberg, 1945).

All nations will comply

Marshall 17 – Christopher Russell, B.A., successful candidate for Masters of Global Policy Studies, supervised by
Jeremi Suri, Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs; Professor of Public Affairs and History, and
Derek Jinks, Marrs McLean Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, “The Limits of Powerful States:
International Law’s Power to Influence the Behavior of Strong States”, May, p. 89-90,
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/63777/MARSHALL-MASTERSREPORT-2017.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y

VI. Conclusion

Intervening factors may have motivated the states in Nicaragua, The Territorial Dispute, and Armed Activities to act as
they did, but the power of international law itself was undoubtedly causal to a degree. While it may not have been
strong enough to influence compliance in and of itself, except perhaps in The Territorial Dispute, it is nonetheless
obvious that it was a factor in each states’ decision about whether to comply with the ICJ judgment. Moreover,
intervening variables in this analysis are part and parcel to the power of international law as enforcement is often
provided for by political means.

The UN Charter itself acknowledges that the Security Council may enforce decisions of the ICJ when a party fails to
comply with an ICJ judgment.698 While the Security Council has never enforced an ICJ judgment under the
provision,699 that provision indicates that ICJ decisions were intended to be enforced, failing automatic compliance,
by UN organs and other actors.700 Indeed, as have I argued before, other states can use their power to effectively
coerce states to comply with international law standards.701 Further, Constanze Schulte argues that a focus on
enforcement mechanisms does not fully grasp the power of international law to influence state behavior.702

In spite of weak enforcement mechanisms, the ICJ has a general pattern of compliance .703 This pattern is likely the
result of the impartiality of the ICJ and its production of well-reasoned and thorough opinions. To increase
compliance, the ICJ should continue to ensure that it remains impartial and that it issues decisions based on
established principles of international law. Failure to do so would delegitimize the ICJ as an institution. The ICJ should
also ensure that its judgments receive as much publicity as possible. Increased publicity should grant domestic audiences
the ability to hold their governments accountable to international law via domestic pressure. The ICJ currently has a
respectable website through which it publishes press releases regarding its proceedings in six languages: French, English,
Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian.704 Cases are readily available, as are the ICJ’s orders and the parties’ filings. The
ICJ could provide more translations of the documents it maintains. For instance, the DRC’s filings in Armed Activities are
only available in French.

The purpose of this report was to demonstrate that international law has the power to modify a state’s behavior even
when it conflicts with its immediate interests. Only in Nicaragua did a state refuse to immediately modify its behavior,
and the result was near universal condemnation and eventual de facto compliance . The three cases demonstrate that
international law’s power varies depending on the situation. In The Territorial Dispute, international law’s power was at
its highest. It was dealing with non-Western states on an issue that, while connected to armed conflict, did not address
violations of international humanitarian law. In Armed Activities, international law’s power was middling. While Uganda
ceased violating international law prior to the judgment, it had disobeyed the ICJ’s provisional measures. Likely, the
relative scale of the violence and the involvement of regional and international bodies influenced, in part, Uganda’s
behavior. But the fact that both the DRC and Uganda have continued to pursue the ICJ litigation with respect to
reparations indicates that both consider international law has the power to enforce reparations against the other or
themselves. Finally, Nicaragua represents the nadir of international law’s power. The United States’s active disobedience
was perhaps one of the greatest challenges to the ICJ’s relevance. Nevertheless, Nicaragua is notable now because it is
an outlier. And it must not be forgotten that, in the immortal words of Louis Henkin, “almost all nations observe almost
all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.”705

Compliance after the fact is critical ICJ credibility, international law, and every hotspot
United Nations General Assembly ‘18, GA/12082 25 OCTOBER 2018, GENERAL ASSEMBLY PLENARY SEVENTY-THIRD
SESSION, 24TH & 25TH MEETING (AM & PM) https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/ga12082.doc.htm

The International Court of Justice remains the highest judicial authority in the world, the General Assembly heard
today, as speakers called on all States to accept its jurisdiction and fully comply with its judgments. Kornelios Korneliou
(Cyprus), Vice President of the General Assembly, underscored that 73 years since its founding, the Court remains as
relevant as ever. Amid direct attacks against the multilateral system, global institutions and their legitimacy, the Court
serves as a testament to the principles of peace and justice. At a time when human rights abuses and conflict devastate
the lives of millions, and when tensions simmer in regions throughout the world , the adjudication of disputes between
States remains an essential role of the Court in preserving peace and security , he said. Abdulqawi A. Yusuf, President
of the International Court of Justice, presented its report covering the period between 1 August 2017 and 31 July 2018
(document A/73/4). Mr. Yusuf said the Court’s docket remained “extremely full”, with 17 contentious cases and one
advisory proceeding currently pending on its list. Over the reporting period, the Court held hearings on 6 cases,
delivered 4 judgments and issued 17 orders. Due to the Court’s increasing workload, its members decided not to
normally accept to participate in international arbitration, he said. In the ensuing discussion, delegations called on all
States to recognize the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction and abide by its judgments. Some speakers said that failure to do
so threatens the Court’s ability to pursue its mandate. “The effectiveness of the Court depends on compliance with its
judgments,” said Mexico’s representative, adding that in 2003 his Government brought its first case to the Court,
concerning the United States’ violations of article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, with respect to 54
Mexican nationals sentenced to death in various United States courts. Almost 15 years since the Court’s favourable
ruling, there has yet to be compliance with its decision and five of the Mexican nationals have been executed, he said,
making an appeal that “this won’t be the case” for Roberto Ramos Moreno, whose execution is scheduled for 14
November. Iran’s representative underlined that the Court unanimously attested to the illegality of United States
sanctions. He said that to help preserve the role of the Court, other States are expected to refrain from helping the
United States to impose any impediment to transactions involving specified items. The representative of Libya said the
Court has helped avert the use of force and war . However, the interference of some States that have not accepted its
jurisdiction has weakened its role. The international community must respect the will of the Court and meet its
obligations. Libya has appeared before the Court and abided by all its opinions even if they did not serve the country’s
interests, he noted. The representative of Cuba regretted the existence of Court judgments without enforcement, in
clear violation of Article 94 of the United Nations Charter. The refusal by some States to comply with judgments shows
the imperfections of the Court’s mechanisms and demonstrates the need to reform the United Nations system. Several
delegations involved in recent Court decisions affirmed their commitment to complying with its rulings. The
representative of Nicaragua said three of the cases highlighted in the report correspond to his country and Costa Rica.
Through those, the Court settled pending issues that will improve relations between both countries. Nicaragua is
committed to the rule of law, he said, noting that in all cases it has been a party to it has complied with the court’s
decisions. For his part, the representative of Costa Rica welcomed the Court’s judgments in the cases it was involved in
and said his country abides by the Court’s jurisdiction. He called on States to also accept the Court’s jurisdiction and to
support it in its pursuit of international peace and security. The Court cannot function effectively without absolute legal
independence and the necessary budgetary resources, he stressed. Speakers noted the Court’s increasing workload,
characterized by geographical and thematic diversity, and said it affirms its vital role as the United Nations main judicial
body in promoting international peace and security and the rule of law. The representative of Australia, also speaking
for Canada and New Zealand, said the willingness of States to entrust the Court with their disputes reflects their deep
respect for the Court and underlines its institutional significance as a mechanism for States to resolve their
disagreements peacefully . Singapore’s representative said that given the recent crisis of confidence in multilateralism,
the Court’s role in crystallizing and clarifying international law in areas as diverse as the law of the sea, territorial
sovereignty, the use of force and treaty interpretation is more important than ever. Turning specifically to security
matters, the representative of Gambia, speaking on behalf of the African Group, stressed the relevance of the Court’s
advisory opinions on matters of disarmament and nuclear weapons. He said that in its unanimous 1996 advisory opinion
on the “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons”, the Court concluded that there exists an obligation to pursue
and conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all aspects under strict and effective international control.
 RegNeg CP: Dartmouth

The United States ought to initiate negotiated rulemaking regarding [the plan] with the
participation of experts and a diverse range of affected stakeholders and implement the outcome
via participative regulation, backstopped by a neutral, non-sector-specific enforcement mechanism
with the power to revise regulations based on the participative process.

Consultative rulemaking solves. It independently avoids a surge in neo-Luddism and populism that
turns the case.
Jacob Turner 19. MA, Law, Oxford; LLM, International Law and Legal Studies, Harvard Law; Barrister, Fountain Court
Chambers; not John. “Legal Personality for AI.” Chapter 5 in Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave
MacMillan. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96235-1

3.6.4 Social Dislocation and Disenfranchisement

In recent years, various commentators have observed that in addition to the traditional “right/left” economic and
political divide (pursuant to which people and groups are seen as being, broadly, against or in favour of government
intervention), a new gulf has emerged particularly in developed economies between groups who are
“anywhere/somewhere”, “open/closed”69 or “drawbridge down/drawbridge up”.70 These categories refer to the
difference in attitudes between people who favour globalisation and multiculturalism versus people who value their
own local culture and economy and may be more resistant to what they perceive to be a loss of identity.

Various “shock” results in elections or polls, in particular the UK’s decision to leave the EU and the election of donald
Trump in the USA are often cited as examples of this trend, whereby new coalitions across the old political spectrum
formed in order to reject the established social, economic and political order—rejecting the advice of “elites” in both
cases.71 A major critique of liberal social and economic policies in the past 30–40 years is that whilst they have been
seen to benefit some members of society, large parts have come to feel increasingly disenfranchised as both economic
inequality and social rifts grow. david Goodhart writes of the two new groupings:

Anywheres dominate our culture and society. They tend to do well at school... then usually move from home to
a residential university in their late teens and on to a career in the professions... Such people have portable
‘achieved’ identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and
confident with new places and people.

Somewheres are more rooted and usually have ‘ascribed’ identities Scottish farmer, working class Geordie,
Cornish housewife based on group belonging and particular places, which is why they often find rapid change
more unsettling. one core group of Somewheres have been called the ‘left behind’ mainly older white working
class men with little education. They lost economically with the decline of well-paid jobs for people without
qualifications and culturally, too, with the disappearance of a distinct working-class culture and the
marginalisation of their views in the public conversation72

why are these trends relevant to the question of whether to grant legal personality to AI? Though this book is not
about the economic impact of AI and technological unemployment, this is undeniably a major concern for world
economies and populations. white collar jobs may be increasingly threatened by AI, but nonetheless it remains likely
that jobs requiring less skill and training will be replaced first , not least because those taking the relevant decisions
are often skilled individuals who will not be keen to cannibalize their own jobs or those of their immediate friends and
family.
Putting the two issues together, the somewhere/closed/drawbridge up group of the population may well consider it to
be adding insult to injury to be told not only that an AI entity has taken their job, but also that the AI entity is going to
be granted some form of legal rights . A new social fissure might be added to the growing list of descriptors:
Technophiles versus neo-Luddites. Referring to the nineteenth-century bands who smashed machinery fearing its
impact on their jobs, the latter term is not intended pejoratively. Technology writer Blake Snow describes (and
advocates) “reformed Luddism”, saying: “to be a reform Luddite, all you have to do is recognize the many benefits of
personal technology, but do so with an untrusting eye”.73

The Technophiles will lap up the latest AI enabled smartphone, home speaker system or smart watch. By contrast, neo-
Luddites may come to view with suspicion highly expensive consumer goods, just as they do AI systems which might
replace their jobs. It must be recognised that there is a tension, therefore, between the ideas advocated in this and the
previous chapter, which suggest moral and pragmatic reasons for protecting AI, with the need for rules on AI to march in
step with society’s views and expectations. Technology journalist and think-tank director Jamie Bartlett notes that signs
of a more violent and destructive brand of neo-Luddism may be growing, citing riots by taxi drivers against Uber in
Paris, and the burning of technology laboratories in Grenoble, Nantes and Mexico. Bartlett goes on to say of the link
between technology and these wider social trends:

I am told repeatedly in the tech startup bubble that unemployed truckers in their 50s should retrain as web
developers and machine-learning specialists, which is a convenient self-delusion . Far more likely is that, as the
tech-savvy do better than ever, many truckers or taxi drivers without the necessary skills will drift off to more
precarious, piecemeal, low-paid work.

does anyone seriously think that drivers will passively let this happen , consoled that their great-grandchildren
may be richer and less likely to die in a car crash? And what about when donald Trump’s promised jobs don’t
rematerialise, because of automation rather than offshoring and immigration? Given the endless articles
outlining how “robots are coming for your jobs”, it would be extremely odd if people didn’t blame the robots,
and take it out on them, too.74

Striking this balance is an ongoing challenge . Although the economic benefits to be gained from AI might first be
enjoyed by those who are already highly fortunate, in turn it is to be hoped that AI will bring benefits for the whole of
society. These questions of equity and distribution are outside the scope of the present work. Nonetheless, it is
suggested here that the trade-off between granting AI some rights and also ensuring that the technology remains
socially acceptable can be overcome , or at least managed effectively. The techniques for consultative rule-making set
out in Chapters 6 and 7 aim to go some way towards bridging this gap.

The counterplan unlocks a collaborative model that’s vital for effective regulation – the plan
displaces it with adversarial relations that causes regulatory failure.
Robert A. Kagan 19, Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of California, Berkeley, “9. Adversarial
Legalism and the Regulatory State,” Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law, Second Edition, Harvard University
Press, 10/08/2019, pp. 208–238 DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.4159/9780674242678

Protect us, O Government, from harm! Protect us, surrounded as we are by the side effects of dynamic capitalist
economies and modern technologies. For we dwell in fear that we and our children will ingest or inhale invisible
toxins. Agricultural chemicals , mechanized logging , industrial pollutants , and massive construction projects
threaten our remaining forests, marshes, and streams . We are vulnerable to dangerous machines and
products, deceitful promoters , discriminatory treatment, and all kinds of human error. In the name of human
decency, O Government, protect us from harm!

Versions of this fervent prayer are voiced every month in legislative hearing rooms, television programs, and the
newsletters of public interest advocacy organizations. In democracies governments take those prayers seriously . They
don’t answer every prayer, of course, but every year they commission studies to analyze risks and they enact additional
regulatory obligations into law. Governmental inspectors fan out across the community, a white-collar police force
enforcing regulations designed to prevent a wide range of harms: workplace injuries, environmental pollution, food-
borne disease, substandard care in nursing homes, and inadequate maintenance of airliners and school buses.
Regulatory officials in office buildings evaluate permit applications for factory expansions, new construction projects,
new pharmaceutical products, and new stock issues. All in all, the cumulative growth of the regulatory state has wrought
one of the most far-reaching changes in modern legal systems, proactively inserting law into every corner of society,
compelling constructive transformations in business and governmental practices, significantly reducing many risks and
forms of injustice.
Despite much political rhetoric about “over-regulation,” few politicians push hard to eliminate (as opposed to fine-tune) protective regulation programs of the kind mentioned in the
preceding paragraph. Most regulatory programs are widely regarded, by political conservatives as well as liberals, as essential correctives for serious market failures – that is, hazards and
injustices that are inadequately controlled by market incentives and liability law (Singer, 2005). Yet for several reasons. regulation remains a focus of political conflict. The first reason is that
regulation never fully answers the prayer for protection.. “Under-regulation” is inevitable. An ever-changing economy constantly generates new unregulated hazards, new openings for
heedless, greedy, or incompetent behavior. new economic pressures that tempt some businesses to take risky short-cuts. Regulatory officials are not omnipresent; they cannot detect,
correct, or punish all violations. But when serious harms slip through the gaps or around the edges of existing regulatory programs, charges and investigations occur, and the regulatory
system is decried as corrupt or tragically inadequate.

Second , regulation stimulates political conflict because the mandated regulatory requirements often impose significant costs on regulated entities. Some regulatory restrictions threaten the
market share and earnings of individual regulated firms and sometimes of whole segments of an industry. That can stimulate organized political efforts to roll back certain regulations and to
block the promulgation of new ones.

A third reason for conflict is that regulations have an inherent tendency to be overinclusive. Regulations that mandate precautionary measures often are stimulated by, and designed to
prevent, harmful practices by unscrupulous or negligent business firms. Although such firms usually are only a small minority of companies, regulations, designed to be even-handed, usually
apply not only to those “bad apples’ but to all firms in an industry, including the “good apples,” the generally responsible firms. ” For those good apples, those across-the-board regulatory
requirements often seem unnecessary, costly to comply with, and hence unreasonable (Bardach & Kagan, 1982: Ch. 3) . To use a familiar analogy: millions of law abiding, wellintentioned
people endure inconvenient security screenings designed to catch or deter a tiny number of terrorists or madmen. The constant chafing of perceived “regulatory unreasonableness, ”
stemming from having to comply with a multitude of such prophylactic regulations on different subjects, makes many business-people critical of the bureaucratic regulatory state, resistant
to its expansion, and eager to see it cut back. .That dynamic, moreover, is exacerbated by America’s distinctive “regulatory style.”

American bodies of regulatory law do not differ greatly from those of other economically advanced democracies in terms of the kinds of social problems addressed or the substantive thrust
of regulatory standards. On some subjects, American regulations are more demanding, on others less stringent (most prominently, concerning reduction of carbon emissions) (Swedlow et al,
2009; Wiener, 2007).1 But in terms of regulatory style, the United States is clearly different. American forms of regulatory law, its processes for making regulatory policy, and its

methods of enforcing regulatory rules tend to be more legalistic and more reliant on adversarial legalism . This sometimes makes American
regulation more effective than regulation in other economically advanced democracies. Sometimes it does not. But it almost always makes American regulation, viewed in

comparative perspective, more costly , more inefficient , and more inflexible . One consequence is that regulation in the U nited

S tates, viewed in cross-national comparison, more often evokes hostility , undermining the support from and cooperation by regulated
entities that are essential if the public’s reg ulatory prayer s are to be answered .
Adversarial Legalism in Action: PREMCO’s Regulatory Experience

Between 1995 and 1998 I directed a research program that conducted ten detailed case studies of multinational corporations that have similar business operations in the United States and
in Europe, Canada, or Japan. Each company studied interacts repeatedly with different national regulatory regimes with respect to the same technologies and regulatory issues. By “holding
the regulated entity constant” (or as close as one might expect to come to that condition), the research highlighted the differences in national legal regimes as they actually operate. For
example, Kazumasu Aoki and John Cioffi, authors of one of the case studies, compared the Japanese and American regulatory regimes for industrial wastes by studying the regulatory
experience of “PREMCO” (a pseudonym), a Japanese multinational corporation that manufactures precision metal parts, with facilities in many countries. PREMCO operates similar factories
in the US and Japan, generating similar manufacturing wastes—solvents, oily water, and contaminated metal particles (Aoki and Cioffi, 2000). Some of those wastes are classified as
hazardous; if disposed of improperly they can badly contaminate soil, waterways, or underground aquifers, endangering ecosystems and human health. After years of uncontrolled industrial
waste disposal, sloppy management of hazardous waste storage sites, “midnight dumping” by unscrupulous waste disposal services, and revelations of serious harm to many people, both
the United States and Japan enacted legislation that mandated rigorous waste storage and disposal methods.

It appears that PREMCO strives to be an environmentally responsible corporation. The company won EPA recognition for developing a method to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons
and trichloroethylene two years before the deadline established by the Montreal Protocol (designed to protect the earth’s ozone layer). PREMCO also instituted an aggressive corporation-
wide environmental auditing and waste reduction program, certified under the International Standards Organization’s important ISO 14000 series. Aoki and Cioffi found that in its U.S. and
Japanese factories, PREMCO had instituted similar shopfloor controls on the collection and storage of wastes, as well as controls on their shipment and disposal. The two governmental
regimes’ regulatory styles differed sharply, however. According to Aoki and Cioffi (2000: 34):

Viewed through the lenses of PREMCO’s comparative experience, American environmental regulations are more detailed and prescriptive, and American enforcement
processes, in contrast with Japan’s, emphasize the legalistic interpretation of formal regulations and the imposition of sanctions to modify economic behavior. In contrast to
Japanese waste management regulation, the complex American regulatory scheme poses more difficulties in compliance, imposes substantial additional economic costs on
regulated entities, and engenders antagonism and defensiveness on the part of firm personnel.

The Japanese mode of environmental regulation is far more coop erative and nonadversarial. “Administrative guidance”
(gyōsei shidō) reduces the Japanese regulatory system’s reliance on formal legal rules, sanction-based enforcement,
and litigious relations.2 In addition, the Japanese regulatory framework tends to emphasize (1) “performance
standards” rather than specific, mandatory methods of waste control, and (2) informal regulatory initiatives
formulated and implemented jointly by industry associations and government ministries and agencies. In comparison
with the United States, corporate antagonism towards regulators in Japan is extremely low , as the system appears to
facilitate corporate acceptance of regulatory norms. Shopfloor environmental practices as implemented in PREMCO’s
Japanese plant are equal or superior to those imposed on the U.S. factories by prescriptive American regulations.
To illustrate this contrast Aoki and Cioffi recount the experience of AMERCO— PREMCO’s U.S. subsidiary—with the environmental regulatory agency in an eastern American state in which
three AMERCO factories are located. The federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) authorized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to turn over the administration
of the mandated waste control program to state governments, so long as the state adopts each provision of RCRA, plus implementing regulations and procedures that are at least as
stringent as the federal program. The federal statute and rules, moreover, are extraordinarily detailed and prescriptive. The regional EPA office monitors state RCRA enforcement regarding
the number of violations found and penalties imposed. Comprehension as well as compliance is a primary challenge under RCRA. A U.S. Court of Appeals opinion described the effort to
comprehend RCRA a “mind-numbing journey” (American Mining Congress v. EPA, 1987).The facilities managers at two AMERCO plants estimated that they spend approximately 15 to 20
percent of their time on RCRA issues (Aoki and Cioffi, 2000). One prescriptive provision, for example, is “the twelve-hour rule,” which provides that hazardous wastes must be moved from
shopfloor collection containers to a satellite or a main storage area once every shift or every twelve hours. The state agency has classified waste oil as a hazardous waste under RCRA, which
brings most of AMERCO’s production processes within the ambit of RCRA regulations, including the twelve-hour rule.

In October 1992 state RCRA inspectors visited AMERCO Plant A, a facility that was scheduled to close two weeks later. The inspectors issued a citation to the plant manager for a number of
violations, including failures to properly collect, label, and store waste oil under the twelve-hour rule and other state RCRA provisions. AMERCO’s current management officials insisted to
Aoki and Cioffi that these violations did not result in any environmental contamination, or even in any significant environmental risks, and none was alleged by the regulators. Plant A’s
manager promised the inspector, “We’ll go ahead and fix these problems, but we’re not going to send you documentation that we have fixed the problem… since in two weeks this plant is
not going to even exist” (Id at 40-41). The regulators, write Aoki and Cioffi , “perceived ths response as evidence that AMERCO was indifferent or resistant to environmental regulation.” That
perception was colored by an earlier conflict involving AMERCO’s Plant B. PREMCO had bought Plant B in 1985, soon after it had been placed on EPA’s “Superfund” list of badly contaminated
chemical disposal sites. Years before, between 1960 and 1967, sloppy disposal or leakage from Plant B, had caused extensive contamination of soil and a municipal water supply well. By the
mid-1990s, AMERCO had been obligated to spend $14 million on cleanup and related fees, with more to come. But adversarial negotations over the details of the cleanup plan, during which
PREMCO’s Washington lawyers had employed “ aggressive negotiation and litigating tactics,” had been interpreted by state regulators evidence of “corporate hostility to environmental
obligations” (Id at 36-37)

In April 1993 state regulatory officials launched simultaneous RCRA inspections of AMERCO Plants B and C (located in different cities) and cited them for numerous violations similar to those
found in the 1992 inspection at Plant A. Once again, according to company officials and AMERCO’s outside counsel (a former state environmental agency attorney), the vast majority of these
violations posed no significant risk to the environment and none had caused any environmental contamination.

At that time, each of the three AMERCO factories regarded itself as autonomous in production, management, and regulatory affairs. But to the regulators, the failure of Plants B and C to
respond to the warning provided by the Plant A inspection was symptomatic either of persistently haphazard waste management practices or of outright defiance. Consequently, for each
violation of the twelve-hour rule, regulators cited the company not merely for violating the rule but for violating labeling, sealing, and storage requirements for hazardous wastes. Thus a
single violation immediately mushroomed into four or five violations; two-thirds of the approximately 150 citations issued following the 1993 inspections were derived from violations of the
twelve-hour rule. Subsequently, AMERCO submitted two status reports and additional correspondence confirming rectification of all violations, and in March 1994 the agency issued a notice
of compliance to both plants. Nevertheless, two months later the agency sent AMERCO a legal notice demanding $495,000 in fines for violations found during the inspections at all three
plants.

The company and its attorneys, outraged by the punitive response to its efforts to remedy the violations, argued that the regulators had grossly inflated the environmental risk factor and
thus the size of the fine. Aoki and Cioffi’s review of the litigation file convinced them that the company managers’ position was justified.3 Negotiations between AMERCO and the
government took six months and cost the company over $50,000 in attorneys’ fees—far more than the cost of remedying the original violations themselves. The government ultimately
settled for approximately $200,000—$100,000 in fines, a $10,000 donation to a local environmental group, and a credit of $92,500 in return for $185,000 in capital expenditures for new
pollution controls which addressed issues that had not constituted violations and required the company to undertake waste reduction measures not mandated by RCRA.

AMERCO also hired a new environmental manager with responsibility for coordinating environmental compliance across all plants. But the bitterness between AMERCO and the agency
reportedly persisted into the late 1990s when Aoki and Cioffi interviewed company officials, and shopfloor supervisors still regarded any possible governmental RCRA inspection with
trepidation. And in the late 1990s a statewide political backlash, led to the total repeal of the regulation that classified machine-lubricating waste oil as a hazardous waste under RCRA -- a
change that reduced the risk of overregulation but increased the risk of underregulation.

PREMCO-JAPAN’s regulatory experience could hardly be more different. Rather than employing detailed, prescriptive legal rules, Japanese environmental statutes articulate broad regulatory
goals. They are implemented through informal “administrative guidance” and customtailored agreements between individual firms and the prefects or municipal governments that enforce
the national laws (Wallace, 1995; Young, 1984). Regulators view extensive consultation with regulated industry trade associations and with individual facilities as the most important means
of formulating and achieving policy goals. Japanese law and administrative guidance, rather than prescribing the means of achieving regulatory goals—such as the U.S. twelve-hour rule—
simply require industries, in Aoki and Cioffi’s paraphrased translation, “to employ any necessary measures to prevent [hazardous wastes and ordinary wastes] from scattering, flowing away,
seeping into the ground, or emitting an offensive odor.” The sole prescriptive rule requires factories to enclose waste storage areas, post signs identifying them as such, and store wastes in
sealed containers to prevent evaporation or exposure to high temperatures.

When violations of these waste storage provisions are found, Japanese law requires regulators to issue an “improvement order” containing no financial penalties. Only if an improvement
order is ignored or if harm to human health occurs are officials authorized to seek legal sanctions—i.e., criminal penalties. But resort to formal enforcement mechanisms is discouraged and
extremely rare. Thus, in the municipality in which PREMCO’s Japanese plant is located, regulators told Aoki and Cioffi that formal sanctions have never been imposed for violation of storage
standards and, in contrast with AMERCO’s experience, regulators inspecting the Japanese plant have never formally found a violation of waste management regulations – although that
might reflect the pervasive reluctance of Japanese environmental regulators to resort to formal legal sanctions (Kitamura, 2000). 4 Japanese regulators instead focus on monitoring the firm’s
waste manifests and on waste reduction as their primary regulatory goal.

Japanese environmental law requires companies and individual facilities to appoint a senior plant official as the factory’s “pollution control supervisor” and in addition to appoint a “pollution
control manager.” These officials are then legally responsible for compliance with, and violations of, environmental regulations and orders. Here too the emphasis is on institutionalizing
responsibility for overall environmental outcomes rather than for complying with specific legal rules. According to Aoki and Cioffi (2000: 46):

In contrast with AMERCO, PREMCO has taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by the performance-based character of the Japanese waste storage standards to diffuse
environmental knowledge, training, and responsibility throughout the firm, including to shopfloor workers and supervisors. Performance-based regulation also allows greater
flexibility in compliance efforts. Perhaps as a consequence, PREMCO’s Japanese managers display none of the negative attitudes towards environmental regulation and
regulators detected among AMERCO’s managers.

The American Regulatory Style

The PREMCO case, like the other case studies in the research project from which it emerged, replicates the findings of a substantial body of comparative sociolegal studies, covering different
regulatory programs, concerning the distinctiveness of the American style of social regulation. Of course, there are a great number of regulatory programs in the United States at all levels of
government, with variation in regulatory style. While some regulatory statutes and implementing rule books, like RCRA’s, are highly prescriptive, setting out regulatory obligations in
excruciating detail, others grant implementing agencies considerable discretion to balance regulatory goals and economic considerations, depending on the particular circumstances. Some
American regulatory agencies, like ticket-issuing highway patrolmen, have a legalistic enforcement style, automatically imposing fines on detected rule violations, even those that pose no
immediate risk of harm, but many other agencies employ a more flexible enforcement style. (Kagan, 1993). Many state environmental agencies are much less likely than the U.S. EPA to
resort to formal legal penalties against or to sue serious violators ( Institute for Policy Integrity, 2017) – although that sometimes is because the agency is understaffed or less than fully
politically independent. Different regional and different state offices charged with implementing the same law have been found to employ different enforcement styles (Shover et al., 1984;
Scholz and Wei, 1986). Repeatedly, politicians and agency chiefs announce plans for making regulation more cooperative (Fiorino, 1996: Michael, 1996; Freeman, 1997).

Nevertheless, as in the Aoki and Cioffi study, whenever researchers have carefully compared specific regulatory regimes
in the United States with their counterparts in other economically advanced democracies, the American regulatory
regime has been found to entail a number of distinctive features. First, American regulatory statutes and regulations
generally are more legalistic—that is, more detailed, prescriptive, and complex (yet confusing and difficult to comply
with). Second, American regulatory regimes more often (even if not always) enforce the law legalistically: they are more
likely to issue formal legal sanctions when they encounter rule violations, and their legal penalties tend to be much more
severe. Third, relationships between regulators and regulated entities in the United States are much more often
adversarial; legal contestation of regulatory rules and decisions, in administrative appeal boards or in courts, is far more
common, both by regulated entities and by citizen advocates of stricter regulation. American regulatory statutes,
including but not limited to civil rights laws and anti-trust laws, are far more likely than similar laws in other countries
to authorize and provide incentives for private enforcement suits against violators. Fourth, regulatory rules and
methods in the United States more often are enmeshed in political controversy and conflict , as rival interests and
politicians battle over regulatory appointments and funding, and strive to lock their policy preferences into statutory
amendments or revised regulatory rules.

Regulatory state failure due to rigidity and bureaucratization ensures extinction.

Dr. Tom Pegram & Julia Kreienkamp 19, Pegram is Associate Professor in Global Governance and the Deputy
Director of the Global Governance Institute; Kreienkamp is a researcher at the UCL Global Governance Institute, where
she also works on the Horizon 2020 project Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios
(GLOBE), “Governing Complexity: Design Principles for Improving the Governance of Global Catastrophic Risks,” Global
Governance Institute, November 2019, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/global-governance/sites/global-governance/files/
governing_complex_global_catastrophic_risks_ggi_policy_brief_nov2019.pdf

Articles in the New York Magazine might ask, ‘why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe?’ (Wallace-Wells
2017). But increasingly the prospect of possible catastrophe and, in the extreme, human extinction , is informing
policymaking at the highest levels , as well as society at large (Castelloe 2018). And, many would argue, with good
reason. From climate change and ecosystem collapse , to parasitic artificial general intelligence (AGI), the misuse of
advanced biotechnologies and nuc lear weapon s , we confront daunting challenges within an increasingly
interconnected globalised civilization , where catastrophic failure anywhere could mean failure everywhere. As Martin
Wolf of the Financial Times suggests, humanity’s efforts to overcome the tragedy of the global commons ‘could prove
to be the defining story of the century’ (Wolf 2012). Martin Rees agrees, suggesting that ex istential risks make it
unlikely that humanity will reach the end of this century without major changes (Rees 2014). Governance scholars
predict a rocky road ahead, observing a move from conventional distributional politics (who gets what, when and how)
to existential politics which ‘is like distributional politics on steroids: the stakes are whose way of life gets to survive’
(Green, Hale and Colgan 2019).

Of course, global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are nothing new to scholars and practitioners working in the well-established
areas of climatology, risk management, resilience, and cognate fields.3 The scholarship is replete with typologies of
‘wicked’ (and less wicked) problems and classifications of GCRs (Alford and Head 2017; Avin et al 2018). Although rarely
addressed explicitly (Harrington 2016; Levin et al 2012), a focus on GCRs in global politics scholarship is also apparent in
the subdomains of environmental and resilience governance (e.g. Galaz 2014). There is also a substantial policy and
practitioner literature which provides sophisticated mapping, taxonomies, rolling assessments of global risks (WEF
2019), slow-developing risks (IRGC 2013), and, increasingly, what policymakers might do about them (CSER 2019).
The challenges posed by uncertainty pervade GCR assessments. 4 Other frequently invoked attributes include ‘scale,
complexity and severity’ (CSER 2019, p. 2). This scoping paper drills down on the governance implications of one of those
attributes: complexity. Why is a deeper appreciation of GCRs as complex phenomena vital to an effective governance
response? In addressing the question, this paper highlights the value of complexity theory (or perhaps, more accurately,
thinking), not simply as a contextual descriptor, but as a conceptual toolkit and mental model to inform effective GCR
governance. We explore the plausibility of classifying GCRs along a continuum of complexity. Some GCRs are highly
complex along a series of dimensions, including levels of connectivity , nonlinear dynamics , rapidly changing
circumstance , and emergent properties which produce frequent surprises (Young 2017). Chief examples include
climate change , ecological collapse and artificial general intelligence (AGI). We contend that such super-complex GCRs
plausibly present a qualitatively different set of governance challenge s to other GCRs, such as weapons of mass
destruction or pandemics.

This paper suggests that the sheer complexity of GCRs is overwhelming the organisational logic of the postwar
multilateral order. Operating within a Weberian mechanisation-bureaucratisation paradigm, its architects engineered
institutions according to certain design principles, including role definition, bureaucratic chains of command, expert
specialisation, and legal hierarchies, thus building up capacities to manage and determine complicated outcomes . This
top-down command and control approach delivered some notable successes, such as the eradication of smallpox by
the World Health Organization and control of ozone-depleting substances under the Montreal Protocol. Those core
design principles persist today, but are now increasingly rendered obsolete in the face of harder problems playing out
in complex technological, economic, ecological and social assemblages.

When it comes to preventing GCRs, inadequate governance models are also coupled to problematic structural
constraints, above all the fact that, as Weiss and Wilkinson (2014, p. 213) lament, ‘[e]verything is globalized – that is,
everything except politics’. Buckminster Fuller (1981, p. 218) captured this troubling predicament almost 40 years ago:

We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship – Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in
their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the
starboard side admirals’ league trying to sink the port side admirals’ league. If either is successful in careening
the ship to drown the “enemy” side, the whole ship will be lost.

Unfortunately, we do not currently have global governance structures predominantly built to manage collective action
problems, let alone complex GCRs. Designed to also preserve the status quo and reproduce unequal power, existing
multilateral structures are increasingly criticised as overly centralised, politicised, bureaucratic and unresponsive to
the pressing needs of the global populace (Kennedy 2016). The political lock on “rapid and far-reaching” measures is
nowhere more apparent than in preventing catastrophic global warming. As the Co-Chair of the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change Working Group III acknowledges, “limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of
chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes” (IPCC 2018). Rockström and colleagues
(2009) find that three out of nine boundaries for maintaining the sustainable ecosystems required to support human
civilisation may already have been breached. Our future governance system will have to contend with intensifying
natural and social boundaries for the preservation of human civilisation , from biosphere fragility points, to increasing
asymmetric power of individuals to affect disruption,5 exponential tech nology, hyper-concentration of wealth – and
all within imminently short er timescales than most people can intuit.

Whether or not existing governance configurations and practice can be repurposed to address super-complex GCRs is
an open question. This paper presents a knowledge overview of scholarship and practice directed towards identifying
pathways to effective GCR governance. This body of work contends that policymakers, practitioners and scholars must
throw off the shackles of old ways of thinking and embrace a complexity paradigm. Such a shift involves both revisiting
the design logics underlying how we build global governance structures, as well as adopting a complex sensibility more
capable of responding adequately to instability, surprise and extraordinary change.6 Understanding GCRs as complex –
as opposed to complicated – problems, characterised by emergent properties, unpredictability, and non-linearity, is vital
to this task. We survey an emergent governance scholarship beginning to grapple with the immense complexity of the
global system. We also draw on policy scholarship which takes seriously the implications of nonlinear system dynamics
for rethinking conventional governance practices and decision-making heuristics. According to complexity leadership
theory, while there is a residual role for traditional ‘managerial’ responses, attempts to address complex drivers of
GCRs ‘are often ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive’ (Homer-Dixon 2007, p. 30). This paper will explore
why these scholars believe that we need new ways of thinking about and understanding governance in a complex,
interconnected and rapidly changing world.
 RegNeg CP: Emory

The United States ought to create an iterative regulatory negotiating process that grant indigenous
plants with legal standing in patent claim cases and the right to sue as assignees for patent claim
validation matters

Counterplan PICs out of “vest.”

Y. Srinivasa Rao 21. M.A (English)., B.Ed., LL.M., Research Scholar in Torts., Principal Senior Civil Judge, Tirupati. "Vested
Interest and Contingent Interest". ARTICLES ON LAW. 7-18-2021. https://articlesonlaw.in/vested-interest-and-
contingent-interest/

’The meaning in Black’s Law Dictionary of the word “vested ” relied upon by Hon’ble Apex Court viz.: “fixed; accrued;
settled; absolute; complete . Having the character or given the rights of absolute ownership; not contingent; not
subject to be defeated by a condition precedent.” Rights are “vested” when right to enjoyment , present or
prospective, has become property of some particular person or persons as present interest; mere expectancy of future
benefits or contingent interest in property founded on anticipated continuance of existing laws, does not constitute
vested rights. In Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary, (International Edn.) “ vested ” is defined as: “Law held by a
tenure subject to no contingency; complete; established by law as a permanent right; vested interests .”

Regulatory negotiation ensures better outcomes---and consultation means industry says yes.
Joseph A. Siegel ‘9. Alternative Dispute Resolution Specialist and Senior Attorney for the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency Region 2 Office in New York and an Adjunct Professor at Pace Law School. “Collaborative Decision Making on
Climate Change in the Federal Government,” Pace Environmental Law Review, Volume 27, Issue 1 Special Edition 2009-
2010 Environmental Interest Dispute Resolution: Changing Times--Changing Practice,
http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=pelr.

Collaborative decision making can provide a forum for broad participation by multiple stakeholders , facilitate
cooperative learning among the participants, and result in selection of the best policy choices .15 It ensures an opening
for group creativity and innovation that is often lacking in traditional regulatory processes . Collaborative decision
making can be particularly powerful in the context of complex public policy issues , such as climate change, because it
can create a dialogue based on hope16 that can transcend the despair that leads to inaction .17 By promoting ownership
and empowerment among the stakeholders, collaborative decision-making can increase the likelihood of prompt
action while reducing the likelihood of litigation .18 While collaborative decision-making may appear to be quite
resource intensive because it often requires investment of more time upfront, it can ultimately produce results faster and with
fewer resources than traditional processes .19 As a result of up-front efforts that engender buy-in from multiple stakeholders,
decisions made through collaborative processes are more lasting and more likely to be implemented than decisions
made via traditional processes.20

Collaborative decision-making does not mean that the government cedes its authority to make decisions . It retains
ultimate authority to impose its own solutions using traditional processes . In fact, collaborative decisions may actually
thrive when the government’s authorities are clear and purposeful.21 Likewise, stakeholders retain their right to any alternatives
to the collaborative process that are otherwise available to them.22
Non-negotiated change looks like an unpredictable bolt-from-the-blue that decks business
confidence---the CP solves
Ellen Siegler 97, Senior Attorney at the American Petroleum Institute, “Regulatory Negotiations and Other Rulemaking
Processes: Strengths and Weaknesses from an Industry Viewpoint”, Duke Law Journal, April, 1997 46 Duke L.J. 1429,
Lexis

There can be benefits to participating in a successful reg neg. First, the opportunity for participants to discuss issues and
confront each other sometimes leads to a more creative and more practical regulatory approach than would have
occurred in a traditional rulemaking process, in which parties with different, adverse positions would participate largely
by submitting written comments on a proposed rule. Second, the consensus process - with its expectation of avoiding
litigation over final rule - may persuade the agency to adopt a more creative legal interpretation than it might have
otherwise adopted for the purpose of reaching a result that all parties agree makes sense. Third, a successful reg neg can
provide greater certainty than the traditional rulemaking process that a regulation will not change between agreement
and proposal or between proposal and a final rule. This certainty is extremely valuable to industry , especially if
compliance entails major construction projects, which are costly and require years of advance planning.
 States CP: Emory

The 50 states, territories and DC should vest legal rights of nature.

The counterplan competes---“the United States” is exclusively the federal government.

William Anderson 55. Was an instructor of government at Harvard until 1916, professor and chairman of the political
science department at University of Minnesota from 1916 to 1957, served as a member of the Commission on the
Organization of the Executive Branch of Government in 1947–1948, and on the Commission on Intergovernmental
Relations in 1953–1955. “The Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners?” 3/2/55. ISBN-10: 0816660050, 69-70.

On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution, just ten years after the Articles were drafted, spoke of the United
States and the people of the United States as if they already existed as one nation. "The government of the United
States" is recognized as a distinct government, in Article I, section 8, paragraph 18, of the Constitution, and evidently
as something separate from and not dependent upon the state governments; while the Congress of the United States
is spoken of as such, and never as "the United States in Congress assembled." In contrast with the term "the United
States" the framers used the phrase "the several states" to refer to the separate states and their local or particular
governments.

(Foreigners more often than Americans use the full designation, "United States of America," or the abbreviation U.S.A.,
in-stead of just United States. Although apparently plural in form the term "United States" is now used almost
exclusively in the singular. "The United States is," not "are ." It is internationally recognized as one country and one
nation, not as a plurality of states.)

Union. The preamble to the Articles designates the agreement reached between the states as "Articles of Confederation
and perpetual Union between the States of Newhampshire," etc., while the preamble to the Constitution states one of
the objectives of that document to be the formation of "a more perfect Union." In Article IV of the Constitution the term
"Union" is used twice: in section 3, "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union"; and in section 4, "The
United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government . . ."

Thus "United States" and "Union" are the only terms used in the Constitution to designate the national entity as a
whole.

States solve the provision of legal status.

Brandon L. Garrett 14, Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, “The Constitutional Standing of
Corporations,” 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. 95, December 2014, WestLaw

A. To Whom Do Constitutional Rights Attach?

Asking whether a corporation itself has standing to litigate a constitutional right in federal court is a question that
implicates the underlying legal status of the corporation and the interests accompanying it. State law defines the
status of an incorporated or other form of business entity.39 State or federal law may provide a natural person with
some type of legal status like citizenship, domicile, or marriage. State law defines the organizational requirements for
being recognized as a type of corporation or partnership , as well as the legal consequences of such status.40 A
corporation may have a very large group of shareholders and separate management if it is a public corporation with
stock that is listed, or it may be a very large corporation with private owners. A corporation may have a small group of
members (or not, if it is a sole proprietorship); in fact, the vast majority of corporations are quite small.41 Other
organizations include partnerships, owned by a group, and limited liability corporations (LLCs). LLCs are simple to create,
like partnerships, but enjoy limited liability like corporations.42 Since a corporation is a creature of state law, federal
courts may be leery of interfering with the definition of its legal status under state law.43
In contrast, federal courts play an important role in defining status relating to citizenship and immigration, which are
defined by the Fourteenth Amendment and federal law. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship rights,
making such questions of federal and constitutional concern. For example, the right to vote is “a citizen's right to
vote.”44 Legal permanent residents and other gradations of immigration status may bring with them intermediate forms
of constitutional protection.45 Juveniles do *106 not enjoy the same constitutional rights as adults, although they will
with age become full rights-bearing citizens.46 Criminal convictions may cause citizens to lose the right to vote or serve
on juries, and prisoners may have altered constitutional rights as well.47 Those questions about altered constitutional
rights as connected to citizenship status do not affect domestic corporations (though perhaps they could affect foreign
corporations) because corporations are not citizens, as the Supreme Court has held since Chief Justice John Marshall's
decision in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux.48 As a result, as Amy J. Sepinwall puts it, “[c]orporations, it goes
without saying, are neither expected nor entitled to vote, perform jury duty, or serve in the military.”49

That said, in other contexts in which state law defines legal status, the Court has set out constitutional limits on the
degree to which a state may limit access to that status or burden it . For example, the Court has recognized a
fundamental right to access to marriage .50 The Court has recognized certain rights of parents, including that parents
may constitutionally challenge state decisions to remove children from their custody, while non-parents do not enjoy
the same constitutional rights to seek custody of a child.51 A married couple may enjoy joint rights as well as obligations
of the marital status. A state adoption judgment may create parental status.52 Nor is there anything unusual about
shared property interests, or multiple *107 people bringing legal actions asserting shared or competing property
interests.53

2NC---R4---NU
States CP
1. the counterplan has the territories and states vest, not “the United States.”
William Baude 20. Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar, University of Chicago Law School.
Adjudication Outside Article III. Harvard Law Review. Volume 133 March 2020 Number 5.
https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/1511-1581_Online.pdf

Chief Justice Marshall referenced this statute in his opinion in Canter. And with the statute firmly in mind, some of the
passages in his opinion take on a different implication. For instance, Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “[t]he jurisdiction
with which they are invested, is not a part of that judicial power, which is defined in the 3d article of the
Constitution,” and that territorial courts were “incapable of receiving” that power.76 Professor Paul Bator has criticized
this claim as “metaphysical,” asking “whose judicial power is in play if not the judicial power of the United States?”77
But again, Chief Justice Marshall’s answer is quite right and consistent with nineteenth-century practice. “[T]he 3d
article of the Constitution”78 refers only to the judicial power of the United States . The Florida territorial courts could
not be vested with that power, but could be vested with a different judicial power, that of the territory of Florida .

Localities solve rights of nature norms.

Craig Kauffman 21. Pamela Martin, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Oregon, Professor of Politics at Coastal Carolina University, “The Politics of Rights of Nature
Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future,” MIT Press, Chapter 7, Pg 185, August 2021,
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/chapter-pdf/1957850/c005900_9780262366601.pdf
*RoN = Rights of Nature
These US cases differ in many respects from those covered in previous chapters, but they continue to tell a common
overall story. Local communities increasingly concerned with the degradation of local ecosystems searched for new
legal tools to expand their authority to protect the ecosystems on which they depend. Chapter 3 showed how early
RoN laws in the United States, Ecuador, and New Zealand emerged through parallel and largely independent
processes, producing distinct models for institutionalizing RoN and Earth jurisprudence norms. This chapter shows how
transnational networks that were subsequently formed facilitated new RoN legal provisions within the United States
that adapted the Nature’s rights model, causing it to evolve. Members of RoN networks helped diffuse the idea of RoN
to various localities, educating and mobilizing communities, sharing lessons learned about implementing RoN and the
implications for designing new laws, providing legal representation, and advising governing bodies and communities. Yet
RoN was given different institutional expression in each case due to the need to adapt to unique local circumstances and
challenges. The Grant Township , Highland Township , and Santa Monica cases provide examples of what RoN can look
like when implemented in a Western legal context not influenced by Indigenous cosmovision. These ordinances root
RoN within traditional US values about the right of communities to self-determination. The concept of “community” is
expanded to include both human and “natural communities,” the latter having the right to “exist, flourish, and naturally
evolve” (Grant Township 2014; Highland Township 2013). The ordinances also illustrate various pathways for pursing
RoN at the local level and the challenges this poses. Because of the US federal structure and political paralysis in
Congress, activists have focused instead on mobilizing local community support in order to codify RoN through local
ballot initiatives rather than stronger national laws. While this pathway is understandable, the subordinate status of
local ordinances presents an obstacle to the implementation of RoN. The efforts in Grant and Highland Townships
exemplify municipal-level attempts across the United States to implement RoN through dedicated community
organization and mobilization. While they show growing social support for RoN and Earth jurisprudence norms, the
cases also illustrate the limitations of trying to enforce local legal provisions through the courts. We argue, however,
that these local ordinances nonetheless constitute significant tools in norm contests not because they have proven
effective in court but because they are raising the salience of RoN within the United States and helping to mobilize
social support for normative change. The perseverance of Grant Township shows how powerful it can be to organize
and activate a social movement; its experimentation with the use of a home rule charter and the Environmental Rights
Amendment of the Pennsylvania constitution shows that the norm contest is far from over.

Solvency
1. States will fiercely resist rights of nature when they conflict with productive interests. That
triggers circumvention
Elizabeth Jane Macpherson 21. Ph.D., L.L.B., B.C.A., an associate professor at the University of Canterbury School of
Law. “THE (HUMAN) RIGHTS OF NATURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EMERGING LEGAL RIGHTS FOR RIVERS AND LAKES
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND MEXICO.” DUKE ENVIRONMENTAL LAW & POLICY FORUM.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1382&context=delpf

The U.S. experience has played out in two distinct ways. First, local communities have managed to secure fairly
expansive rights of nature protections in local government ordinances or local “Bills of Rights,”369 especially in a
context of concern about water, seemingly “flying under the radar.” Yet, the legal force of such local government
declarations of the rights of nature is uncertain , and they are unlikely to be able to compete with more secure rights
for other water users under state or federal laws, let alone the U.S. Constitution. More ambitious attempts to secure
legal rights for the Colorado River—via the court—and Lake Erie—in the State legislature—have been fiercely resisted ,
and opponents of the rights of nature have mobilized constitutional protections against local communities and
environmental activists.

Plan gets circumvented.

Laura Spitz & Eduardo Penalver 21. Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law. **Professor of Law,
Cornell Law School. 2021. “Nature’s Personhood and Pr ersonhood and Property’s Virtues.” University of New Mexico
School of Law. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1845&context=law_facultyscholarship
This kind of pragmatic, consequentialist analysis is indeed what many advocates of nature seem to be engaging in, as we
discuss at greater length below. The question for these advocates is not whether a mountain or a river is a person in any
philosophically defensible sense. It is instead whether recognizing a mountain or a river as a person will guide the legal
system to produce “better” legal outcomes, where “better” is defined in terms of the consequences for human beings.

But we are doubtful that simply calling a river a “person” would—by itself—make much difference for legal outcomes.
Recognition of personhood makes the greatest difference in legal proceedings when it changes the locus of decision-
making about actions that have an impact on the person . Recognizing a child as a separate person—as opposed to, say,
treating children as the property of their parents—can be the basis for removing decision-making authority from the
parents and putting it in the hands of a guardian ad litem who acts on behalf of the child’s best interests.79 Similarly,
recognizing a fetus as a person could become the basis for shifting decision-making about the fetus from the mother to
some third party.

The devil is in the details. The real-world impact of conferring personhood status on nonhuman entities would depend
almost entirely on the matrix of procedural and substantive rules built around that recognition. Although the law
recognizes children as persons, it defers to parental decision-making almost reflexively, stepping in only when the
parental relationship breaks down or when parental behavior is so extreme as to justify state intervention. Recognizing
trees as persons would have no impact on the treatment of trees located on private land unless some new rule shifts
decision-making about those trees from the private landowner to some third-party guardian. (We discuss the
possibilities for these sorts of shifts below, in connection with the issue of standing.)

Ultimately, then, an impact-based analysis of the wisdom of recognizing personhood in nonhuman entities turns on an
analysis of these background procedural and substantive rules. In this regard, we see two questions as paramount. The
first is: who is the relevant rule-maker? Most discussions of conferring personhood on natural resources assume that the
decision-maker who will determine the impact of that change in status is a judge. The intuition seems to be that calling a
river a person will yield different legal outcomes by forcing judges to entertain cases that would otherwise flounder on
standing grounds and by empowering (or requiring) judges to import into their evaluation of legal cases doctrines that
are drawn from other areas of the law. We set aside the undeniably important question of whether it is even desirable
to confer such unbounded discretion on judges. We turn to a discussion of the potential impacts—both procedural and
substantive—of recognizing natural resources as persons below in Parts III.A and III.B. Ultimately, our view is that
anything that could be accomplished through recognition of personhood in nature could be accomplished using existing
legal categories, and the latter is an easier lift.

Our skepticism about the substantive consequences of attributing personhood to nature leads us to consider our second
key question—would adopting the language of personhood with regard to natural resources change the politics of
environmental advocacy? That is, does the language of personhood have the power to shift the public conversation
about environmental harms and benefits in ways that environmentalists want, even in the absence of any real legal
impact? This is a question that seems almost impossible to answer in the abstract, but it is one we will consider below in
Part III.C.

A. Procedural Work

Many rights of nature advocates—including the Colorado River plaintiff— arguably claim personhood for nature in order
that natural objects may directly access certain procedural rights. These include the right to seek and receive
information, the right to participate in decision-making, and the right of access to justice (including the right to file for
injunctive relief80 and the right to present and confront evidence). For the purposes of this Article, we will discuss these
concepts in the general language of “standing,” but recognize that they involve complex and contested areas of law.81
The move to seek standing in the name of nature should not be surprising. Environmental justice organizations
attempting to bring or defend claims on behalf of nature have often been stymied by standing doctrine, particularly in
federal courts,82 and seeking standing in the name of a natural object—such as a mountain or river—is one strategy for
overcoming those earlier losses.
Perhaps the most often-cited judicial statement in favor of extending standing to nature was made by U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Douglas in Sierra Club v. Morton. 83 In that case, the Sierra Club sought:

a declaratory judgment that various aspects of [a] proposed development [of the Mineral King Valley in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains] contravene[d] federal laws and regulations governing the preservation of national parks, forests,
and game refuges, and also [sought] preliminary and permanent injunctions restraining the federal officials involved
from granting their approval or issuing permits in connection with the Mineral King project. The petitioner Sierra Club
sued as a membership corporation with “a special interest in the conservation and the sound maintenance of the
national parks, game refuges and forests of the country,” and invoked the judicial-review provisions of the
Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 701 et seq. 84

The Supreme Court held (with Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Blackmun dissenting) that the Sierra Club lacked standing
to sue because it failed to show it was adversely affected by the challenged actions. In his oft-quoted dissent, Justice
Douglas wrote, “[c]ontemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the
conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”85 His reasons rested on the view
that the question of standing would be simplified “if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be
litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate [natural] object.”86 The normative basis
for his dissent is unclear. At points, he described nature as a fictional person87— inanimate, as in the previous quote—
and at others, he described it as “living.”88 But he clearly viewed either basis as supporting his proposed ruling

Almost contemporaneously with the Court’s judgment in Sierra Club v. Morton, Christopher Stone published an article,
Should Trees Have Standing?— Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. 89 In that article and a subsequent book by the
same name, Stone argued that natural objects need standing in order to have and assert legal rights:

[F]or a thing to be a holder of legal rights, something more is needed than that some authoritative body will review the
actions and processes of those who threaten it . . . . [T]hree additional criteria must be satisfied. . . . They are, first, that
the thing can institute legal actions at its behest; second, that in determining the granting of legal relief, the court must
take injury to it into account; and third, that relief must run to the benefit of it. 90

Together, Douglas and Stone are invariably cited by those seeking personhood for natural objects.91 Two common
reasons are advanced for adopting Stone’s approach. First, certain constitutional rights are reserved to “persons,” and
therefore personhood is a necessary condition for access to those substantive constitutional rights.92 Second, this move
is necessary in order to place nature’s well-being squarely before courts, given how narrowly standing doctrine has been
applied in cases brought by concerned citizens and non-profit organizations in the past.

The first argument is true (as far as it goes) in the sense that several constitutional rights are reserved to “persons,”93
but it does not assist in the hard work of determining whether those rights make sense in the context of nature , nor
whether granting such rights would have a meaningful impact on legal outcomes—a point we take up in Part III.B, infra.
The second argument also fails to convince us. By itself, a recognition of personhood would not answer the standing
question. Personhood opens up the possibility for standing, of course, and in that sense, might be beneficial. But it is
neither required for standing, nor does it guarantee standing.94

First, not all persons have standing in all cases, even when they genuinely believe their interest is significant 95 or they
satisfy the first two prongs of constitutional standing.96 Indeed, many persons do not have standing in cases where they
sincerely believe they have a concrete interest or injury—think here of the Internal Revenue Code and the fierce fights
over which taxpayers have standing to challenge the constitutionality of specific provisions.97 Even environmental
protection statutes that provide for direct citizen action, such as the Endangered Species Act98 and the Clean Water
Act,99 have been interpreted so as to deny standing to arguably affected persons.10

Conversely, standing for nature is not necessary to open the courthouse doors to the kinds of claims Justice Douglas and
Professor Stone would have liked to see litigated. True, in the context of environmental law, standing doctrine has been
narrowed in ways that plainly limit the ability of environmental groups and concerned citizens to make environmental
protection arguments when decisions are being made that directly impact the natural environment. But there is nothing
inherent to the concept of standing that requires such an interpretation. Courts and legislatures could broaden standing
rules, and some state courts do employ very broad standing doctrines.101 Even the relatively narrow confines of the
current federal doctrine arguably leave room for a significant number of individuals and groups to assert a direct interest
in a wide range of environmental cases. Thinking back to cases like Sierra Club v. Morton, for example, it is increasingly
difficult to say that ordinary humans do not have an interest in projects with significant environmental impact, as the
lived effects of environmental degradation are increasingly obvious and accepted in our culture.102

Assuming, arguendo, that a court recognized an element of nature as a person with standing, such recognition would be
just the first step needed to make a difference for legal outcomes. Decision-makers would still need to identify
someone to speak on nature’s behalf. This raises questions about who decides who gets to speak on behalf of nature.
The decisions about both—who gets to speak, and who decides who gets to speak—will be highly contested . As the
defendant observed in the Colorado River case, the “Law of the [Colorado] River” implicates seven states, the Republic
of Mexico, dozens of Native American Tribes, the federal government, and “water user, power and environmental
groups throughout the southwestern United States ,” not to mention millions of private landowners.103 This list does
not even account for the multitude of mammals , birds, insects, trees, and other elements of nature, each of which might
have claims to standing in their own right on the plaintiff’s theory . In such a complex environment, it is not immediately
obvious who should speak on behalf of the Colorado River Ecosystem, nor how that determination would be made by a
court

Dr. Seuss made this question very easy in The Lorax. 104 But in the absence of a magical creature who announces to the
world that he “speaks for the trees,” courts are likely to turn to the same parties who currently present themselves—
landowners, neighbors, advocacy groups, responsible government agencies— and ask which ones, in any given case, are
the most appropriate to speak in court on behalf of some particular natural resource. This inquiry into who— among the
many possible voices—should speak on behalf of nature is very likely to recapitulate the kinds of inquiries raised in the
standing context and perpetuate one of the central problems the plaintiff presumably sought to solve, namely, the
tendency to approach environmental concerns from the relatively narrow perspectives of the parties before the court

In any event, the ability to enter the courtroom to speak on behalf of natural resources is itself only the first step. It is
difficult to see how problems of environmental degradation are assisted or solved by standing per se. Far more impact
would come from some change in the rules of decision-making or in the substantive interests that courts (or other
decision-makers) consider when resolving the natural resources claims. Whether recognizing the personhood of natural
resources has an impact on these substantive questions is the issue to which we now turn.105

Takes out the AFF

Kevin Westerling 20. Has served as the editor of Water Online, the Internet's premier source for water and
wastewater solutions, since 2008, 3-9-2020. "Rights Of Nature: What's In A Name?,"
https://www.wateronline.com/doc/rights-of-nature-what-s-in-a-name-0001.

Most recently, a judge in Ohio struck down the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), which was initially passed as an
amendment to the city’s municipal charter but never enacted. In his eight-page opinion, Senior U.S. District Judge Jack
Zouhary stated that "LEBOR is unconstitutionally vague and exceeds the power of municipal government in Ohio."

Were it upheld, the law would have allowed the City of Toledo and its residents to sue businesses and governments
on behalf of the lake. Further, and perhaps more damning, it would have invalidated conflicting state laws and
regulations and taken precedence over federal permits and licenses.

In addition to the matter of authority, potential financial repercussions have also produced backlash.
In Florida, there is more legislative momentum to restrict Rights of Nature laws rather than pass them . In arguing
against legal standing for nature that would potentially make a waterbody the aggrieved party in a lawsuit, Rep. Blaise
Ingoglia warned that "This will be chaos and will damage our tremendous economy.”

1. Rights of nature cases inevitably entail conflict with human rights---even in the world of the
aff, human rights will sometimes come out ahead
Joel I. Colón-Ríos 15. Lecturer in Law at Victoria University of Wellington. “Chapter 7: On the theory and practice of
the rights of nature.” https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781784719418/9781784719418.00014.xml.
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781784719425.00014

As a result, balancing the rights of nature and the rights of humans will be necessary in most cases as these rights will
frequently (if not almost always) collide. And this means that sometimes the rights of humans (for example, rights to
housing, rights of property, and so on)31 will (and should) prevail . For example, if the Court in Loja had been presented
with a situation in which no excavation materials were being deposited in the river and in which the only environmental
harm was the cutting of a limited number of trees, perhaps the court would have been correct to conclude that nature’s
rights needed to be limited in order to give way to the widening of the road.32 In fact, in the Vilcabamba case, the Court
implicitly (and perhaps unconsciously) engaged in that balancing exercise when suggesting that the widening of the road
could take place as long as a number of ‘remedial and reparative’ measures were taken.

The result of that (implicit) balancing exercise was that the negative impact on the rights of nature that would result
from the cutting of trees (which would likely involve the partial destruction of the habitats of a number of birds and
lizards) did not reach the level of importance that would justify limiting the right of the Provincial Government to
widen the Vilcabamba-Quinara road (or the right to development of the inhabitants of the province). Such a conclusion
might be sensible enough, but it is based on a balancing exercise that should have been made explicit. This is one of the
reasons why academic discussions about the scope and meaning of the rights of nature, as well as their relationship to
human rights, are necessary. Only those discussions, together with a developing body of case law, can result in a
coherent jurisprudence in this area. Otherwise, judges would be setting the basic standard of what may be considered
as a legally relevant violation (or restriction) of the rights of nature in an unprinci- pled way and, if the standard is set too
high, then only the most brutal violations of these rights will be sufficient to trigger a judicial remedy.

2. Inevitable conflicts with the Constitution cannot be resolved

Matija Zgur 20. Research Fellow (assegnistadi ricerca), University degli studi Roma Tre. "All the Earth's Legal Children.
Some Sceptical Comments about Nature's Legal Personhood," Diritto & Questioni Pubbliche: Rivista di Filosofia del
Diritto e Cultura Giuridica 20, no. 2 (December 2020): 87-102. HeinOnline.

*EJ = Earth Jurisprudence

Finally, it is unclear what the scope of EJ-informed law in legal systems ought to be. If EJ is limited to the sphere of
environment-related laws, the problem is that it gives rise to cohabita- tion of two utterly different systems of
governance: one arguing for the legal primacy of Earth- centred considerations, another based on the premise of the
supremacy of the constitution . On crucial problem in this regard is that there appears to be no criterion that would
determine which system's "rule of recognition" would (have to) prevail should the two clash. On the other hand, if EJ
principles are to pervade all areas of legal regulation, I struggle to see how certain exclusively human affairs could
ever be guided by a system that primarily derives its normative conclusions from observation of physical laws of
nature. Indeed, practical coordination prob- lems (e.g. rules of traffic), which usually require an arbitrary solution to
be agreed upon, could not find guide in the laws of nature.

The above said leads me to conclude that the radical version of EJ as a legal theory is not a viable model for the legal
systems in the Constitutional State. Its radically different under- standing of the concepts of law, rights etc. makes it,
in the final instance, incompatible with the basic precepts of our existing governance models. It is therefore excluded
from my further con- siderations in this essay.
 3. Ecuador and Bolivia prove---they’re wrong about international pressure
David Humphreys 15. Professor of environmental policy at The Open University. “Know your rights: Earth
jurisprudence and environmental politics.” International Journal of Sustainability Policy and Practice, 10(3-4) pp. 1–14.
https://oro.open.ac.uk/44136/1/__userdata_documents4_drh4_Desktop_HUMPHREYS%20KNOW%20YOUR
%20RIGHTS.pdf

Abstract: Two Andean countries – Ecuador and Bolivia – have politically recognized the rights of nature, an idea that is
also gaining traction at the sub-federal in the United States. The origins of the concept can be traced to the cultures of
indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as to the work of American legal scholar Christopher Stone. Recognition of
nature’s rights holds out the possibility of an alternative approach to environmental management and politics, as well as
to a fundamentally redefined relationship between nature and society. However, upholding rights of nature in practice
may conflict with four other sets of rights in environmental politics: the sovereign rights of the state, human rights,
property rights (or, more accurately, claims by people and organizations to property), and the rights of business
corporations . Even in Ecuador and Bolivia, the first two countries to recognize what is now known as Earth
jurisprudence, the rights of nature do not necessarily prevail over these other rights. For example, the private property
rights granted by the state may conflict with the idea that nature has rights that trump those of humans . The
challenge for those who support rights of nature is how to promote both a wider uptake of the idea among political
leaders and civil society, and a clearer long term vision of how upholding nature’s rights may be operationalized in
practice.

4. Every example would be endlessly litigated.

Ruth Barcan 20, University of Sydney, Australia, “The Campaign for Legal Personhood for the Great Barrier Reef:
Finding Political and Pedagogical Value in a Spectacular Failure of Care,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space,
vol. 3, no. 3, 09/2020, pp. 810–832

Other problems concern LP’s practicality, its reliance on an idea of a natural ‘object’, and its implications for Indigenous
Traditional Owners.

Practical problems. Before turning to the GBR specifically , it is worth pointing out the potentially cumbersome nature
of extending LP to natural ‘objects’ in general . The foundational principle – personhood – is ‘ multifaceted’ (Naffine,
2011: 15) and its jurisprudence arguably ‘marked by its uncertainty and its inconsistency’ (Naffine, 2003: 346). For
some commentators, this radical uncertainty is in fact the strength of the formalist or fictive conception of LP, giving
it ‘ creative and inclusive potential’ to bring about ‘just outcomes’ (Kyriakakis, 2015: 83). Nonetheless, in the absence
of some overarching mechanism (e.g. a bill of rights, a First Nations treaty, or constitutional recognition of nature), the
granting of personhood is piecemeal and time-consuming , having to be determined again and again for different
natural systems or sites. In the case of the GBR, though, the pointedness of this serial, individualistic mechanism might
be an advantage in the light of the Reef’s iconic stature. So, despite the problem with the LP strategy in general, it might
actually work well for the GBR.

1. At best the plan does nothing, at worst it strengthens corporate interests.

Gwendolyn J Gordon 17. Assistant Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania. “Environmental Personhood” March 7, 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2935007

Since the Ecuadorian and Bolivian regimes center holism so strongly, nature, even though metaphorically a person
(“Mother Nature”) and legally an entity, for practical purposes is not so bounded. If all of nature, including humankind, is the entity, it becomes
difficult to partition out various, and perhaps conflicting, interests in a principled way. Both the constitution of Ecuador and the Bolivian Framework Law

are hard to implement in ways that play out similarly to how one might have expected in looking at the development of
holistic theories of environmental ethics.168 A difficulty arises from this theoretical commitment: once we concede that humans are part of
nature itself, what motivates human attention to what we would otherwise conceptualize as “our” effect on “nature ”?
169

From here it is likely very easy to slide , as will for protecting the environment degrades , to a view that (perversely)
privileges what once were imagined as human interests—especially when powerful industries are doing the talking.170
Just such industrial concerns dominate the economy of Bolivia. 171 The Bolivian laws for nature were imagined to be a
strong response to climate change172 and to environmental destruction wrought by the work of extractive
industries.173 Things have not, however, turned out quite so neatly.
While the Ecuadorian and Bolivian laws generated a great deal of hope and excitement,174 and while in Bolivia the original law’s much more detailed successor was easily enacted in

2012,175 their implementation has been plagued with issues . 176 The first successful Ecuadorian rights of nature case did not
occur until 2011. 177 Even now that there are several cases wherein rights of nature arguments were used successfully, it is notable
that the cases that tend to be the losing ones tend to be ones versus large extractive interests. 178

Perhaps, then, these revolutionary-sounding

rights of nature regimes are just for show. Consider, for instance, New Zealand. Arguably,
personhood for natural features in New Zealand was an easy change that changes little . New Zealand’s environmental statute, the
Resource Management Act (RMA), already functions in parts in a manner equivalent to a rights of nature stance.179 These protections are buttressed by protections of traditional Maori
relationships to land attributable to the Treaty of Waitangi, widely seen as New Zealand’s foundational document. This document ensures that Maori conceptions of land use matter; they
affect how RMA protections of the environment play out. Thus the RMA combined with Treaty of Waitangi might be regarded as its own protector of the rights of nature, outside of entity
status.

2. Lack of enforcement makes rights of nature indifferentiable from the status quo
Julien Bétaille 19, Associate Professor of Public Law, University of Toulouse Capitole, 3/27/2019, “Rights of Nature:
Why it Might Not Save the Entire World,” Journal for European Environmental & Planning Law, Vol. 16, No. 1,
https://brill.com/view/journals/jeep/16/1/article-p35_35.xml#affiliation0

*RoN = Rights of Nature

The main thesis of this paper is that RoN will not do away with the main shortcoming of modern environmental law,
being the lack of proper enforcement. It is opined that merely acknowledging nature’s rights into legislation will in
itself not lead to a better protection of the eu’s endangered nature if not complemented with a clear commitment for
more strict enforcement. The added value of RoN needs to be measured against the three main assumptions upon
which it is based. In this respect, it is important to underline that a revision of modern environmental law could, in itself,
come forward to many of the prevailing criticism upon which RoN are based. In this article, it is substantiated that
modern environmental law is able to recognize the intrinsic value of Nature (1), second, that acknowledging RoN is not
necessarily to be equated to a “legal revolution” (2) and, third, that RoN might not live to its promise regarding saving
the world (3).

Environmental Law Revisited: Reinforcing the Intrinsic Value of Nature?

3. Courts would never agree.

Laura Spitz & Eduardo Penalver 21 **Professor of Law, University of New Mexico School of Law. **Professor of Law,
Cornell Law School. 2021. “Nature’s Personhood and Pr ersonhood and Property’s Virtues.” University of New Mexico
School of Law. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1845&context=law_facultyscholarship

Even if we could agree on what rights flowed from personhood for nature —for example, the right to “life”—the scope
and meaning of those rights are neither immediately obvious nor easily ascertainable.113 The complexity of the
Colorado River Ecosystem makes it nearly impossible to describe what “life” would look like as a “personal right” over
time. The ecosystem is necessarily comprised of immeasurable numbers of flora and fauna; is the life of each to be
measured in evaluating the life of the whole? How is a court to balance the competing rights to life presented by other
nonhuman elements of nature within the system? Are the human members of the ecosystem relevant to these
questions? This discussion points to a central problem of the rights framework in the context of rights of nature.
Environmental degradation framed as a problem that might be solved by the assertion of rights posits the rights of
nature qua person as in conflict with the rights of other persons, instead of promoting an understanding of the biotic
community, including humans and nonhumans, that ultimately succeeds (or fails) as one.114 What Stone and others
really appear to be saying is the river-as-a-river should be added into the balancing of interests considered when making
decisions that will likely impact the river’s health and survival (and consequently, our health and survival). We would go
further: the river is not simply one interest among many; it transcends the interests of us all. But that is different from
saying a river holds personal rights and points to a concern related to the dangers of rights discourse more generally.
Some argue the use of rights “reflects and produces a kind of isolated individualism that hinders social solidarity and
genuine human connection.”115 Without entering into the thicket of these arguments about the nature of human
rights, it seems to us that the concerns they raise are even more compelling in the context of nature.

Finally, given the difficulty in determining the kind, scope , and meaning of rights in this context, it seems unlikely
(although not impossible) a court would agree they exist within the framework of U.S. rights jurisprudence. Even in
Aotearoa (New Zealand), where a detailed legislative framework has been enacted for co-managing the Whanganui
River and Te Urewera Park, scholars and commentators largely agree that the granting of personhood to the river and
the park was intended to be “procedural ” in the sense of changing how decisions would be made about the
environment and not determinative of specific outcomes. New Zealand’s approach has been described as a non-
ownership model, where the incidents of ownership have been unbundled and reapportioned within a new co-
management framework.116 This framework is not meant to determine outcomes or substantive rights per se; rather,
the idea seems to be that new processes will facilitate the potential for different outcomes.

The 50 states, territories and DC uniformly should grant inventorship rights to intelligent software.

Competes. “The United States” is exclusively the federal government.

William Anderson 55. Was an instructor of government at Harvard until 1916, professor and chairman of the political
science department at University of Minnesota from 1916 to 1957, served as a member of the Commission on the
Organization of the Executive Branch of Government in 1947–1948, and on the Commission on Intergovernmental
Relations in 1953–1955. “The Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners?” 3/2/55. ISBN-10: 0816660050, 69-70.

On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution, just ten years after the Articles were drafted, spoke of the United
States and the people of the United States as if they already existed as one nation. "The government of the United
States" is recognized as a distinct government, in Article I, section 8, paragraph 18, of the Constitution, and evidently
as something separate from and not dependent upon the state governments; while the Congress of the United States
is spoken of as such, and never as "the United States in Congress assembled." In contrast with the term "the United
States" the framers used the phrase "the several states" to refer to the separate states and their local or particular
governments.

(Foreigners more often than Americans use the full designation, "United States of America," or the abbreviation U.S.A.,
in-stead of just United States. Although apparently plural in form the term "United States" is now used almost
exclusively in the singular. "The United States is," not "are ." It is internationally recognized as one country and one
nation, not as a plurality of states.)

Union. The preamble to the Articles designates the agreement reached between the states as "Articles of Confederation
and perpetual Union between the States of Newhampshire," etc., while the preamble to the Constitution states one of
the objectives of that document to be the formation of "a more perfect Union." In Article IV of the Constitution the term
"Union" is used twice: in section 3, "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union"; and in section 4, "The
United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government . . ."

Thus "United States" and "Union" are the only terms used in the Constitution to designate the national entity as a
whole.
States solve rights and duties.
Brandon L. Garrett 14, Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, “The Constitutional Standing of
Corporations,” 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. 95, December 2014, WestLaw

A. To Whom Do Constitutional Rights Attach?

Asking whether a corporation itself has standing to litigate a constitutional right in federal court is a question that
implicates the underlying legal status of the corporation and the interests accompanying it. State law defines the
status of an incorporated or other form of business entity.39 State or federal law may provide a natural person with
some type of legal status like citizenship, domicile, or marriage. State law defines the organizational requirements for
being recognized as a type of corporation or partnership , as well as the legal consequences of such status.40 A
corporation may have a very large group of shareholders and separate management if it is a public corporation with
stock that is listed, or it may be a very large corporation with private owners. A corporation may have a small group of
members (or not, if it is a sole proprietorship); in fact, the vast majority of corporations are quite small.41 Other
organizations include partnerships, owned by a group, and limited liability corporations (LLCs). LLCs are simple to create,
like partnerships, but enjoy limited liability like corporations.42 Since a corporation is a creature of state law, federal
courts may be leery of interfering with the definition of its legal status under state law.43

In contrast, federal courts play an important role in defining status relating to citizenship and immigration, which are
defined by the Fourteenth Amendment and federal law. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship rights,
making such questions of federal and constitutional concern. For example, the right to vote is “a citizen's right to
vote.”44 Legal permanent residents and other gradations of immigration status may bring with them intermediate forms
of constitutional protection.45 Juveniles do *106 not enjoy the same constitutional rights as adults, although they will
with age become full rights-bearing citizens.46 Criminal convictions may cause citizens to lose the right to vote or serve
on juries, and prisoners may have altered constitutional rights as well.47 Those questions about altered constitutional
rights as connected to citizenship status do not affect domestic corporations (though perhaps they could affect foreign
corporations) because corporations are not citizens, as the Supreme Court has held since Chief Justice John Marshall's
decision in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux.48 As a result, as Amy J. Sepinwall puts it, “[c]orporations, it goes
without saying, are neither expected nor entitled to vote, perform jury duty, or serve in the military.”49

That said, in other contexts in which state law defines legal status, the Court has set out constitutional limits on the
degree to which a state may limit access to that status or burden it . For example, the Court has recognized a
fundamental right to access to marriage .50 The Court has recognized certain rights of parents, including that parents
may constitutionally challenge state decisions to remove children from their custody, while non-parents do not enjoy
the same constitutional rights to seek custody of a child.51 A married couple may enjoy joint rights as well as obligations
of the marital status. A state adoption judgment may create parental status.52 Nor is there anything unusual about
shared property interests, or multiple *107 people bringing legal actions asserting shared or competing property
interests.53
 States CP: Hvd

The fifty United States ought to make artificial intelligence systems liable to medical standards of
care.

States can vest rights through uniform statutes even if it undercuts federal law.
Johnson 17 (Thomas E. Johnson, “Enter Sandman: The Viability of Environmental Personhood to US Soil Conservation
Efforts”, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law Vol 20, Is 1)

C. Adoption of Environmental Personhood Under US Law

Of the two approaches discussed above, New Zealand's is a more viable option in the United States. Following Ecuador's approach would require a constitutional amendment, which is

highly impracticable under the US Constitution's framework-even assuming the presence of a similar grassroots
movement to Ecuador's . If accomplished, such an approach could have a permanent effect, but ratification procedures would require the
federal government to overwhelmingly support the measure -a condition that cannot easily be fulfilled while climate
change remains a divisive issue in Congress. Direct replication of New Zealand's settlement would face the same obstacle, for it required representations by the
Crown and the enactment of national statutes to bind the agreement. However, a similar result could be accomplished on a state level without the

fed eral government's involvement .

The UCEA provides a practical illustration of this concept. States developed the UCEA to uniformly apply conservation
law in every state and "to remove common law impediments to conservation easements ." Certain federal laws
restricted its provisions, but the resulting state legislation provided interested parties with tremendous freedom to
contract for particularized easement terms and conditions.

Environmental personhood could be adopted using a similar framework. For example, a uniform statute could be
drafted that (1) permits recognition of land as an entity with legal standing under state constitutions (2) vests
ownership of the land to that entity, (3) establishes procedures to appoint and maintain a legal guardian that
represents the land's evolving interests, and (4) prescribes strategies to advance those interests in light of
environmental and economic concerns. These guiding principles would allow interested parties-including local
communities and climate change advocates- to freely contract for land's natural rights , much like the Whanganui
tribes in New Zealand or conservation easement holders in the United States.

Unlike the inflexible application of conservation easements, however, environmental personhood would establish a
legal guardian charged with the good-faith administration of the land's evolving interests. Those interests should
expressly include the adoption of soil conservation techniques, the effective implementation of which could adapt as
conservation technologies continue to advance. Moreover, the land's interests could be enforced in state courts, which
already interpret the necessary contract and real property principles that would inform environmental personhood's
implementation. Not all states might participate at first, but at least some have signaled an interest in mitigating
climate change through cap-and-trade programs. Those same states could pave the way for environmental personhood
as well. Additionally, legislatures could include tax benefits and other incentives to encourage landowners to consent
to environmental personhood-much like the UCEA did for conservation easements.
Defense
 D: Bees

Current tech solves the impact to bees

Cherney 21 – Reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Mike Cherney, “Buzz Off, Bees. Pollination Robots Are Here.” The Wall Street Journal, 7 July 2021,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzz-off-bees-pollination-robots-are-here-11625673660.

Farmers have long relied on insects, wind and even human workers to help pollinate their crops. Now, advances in
artificial intelligence are helping some startups develop another way to pollinate plants: robots.

Across the globe, startups are testing robots to pollinate everything from blueberries to almonds. And in Australia, one
company is so confident in robots’ abilities that it will soon deploy a fleet of them to pollinate tomatoes in its
greenhouses.

Pollination robots could give future farmers a significant advantage, increasing yield compared with using insects, such
as bees, and the human workers who are sometimes needed to help with certain crops. Scientists are also concerned
that insect populations are declining because of habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change and other factors, which
would make pollination robots even more important.

The robotic revolution is being sped up by so-called deep learning—a method that trains artificial neural networks that
mimic the human brain. Advances in deep learning over the past decade have vastly improved AI’s ability to recognize
images. That makes it easier for startups to develop robots that can quickly and accurately identify flowers for
pollination.

“To see it actually happening, it was quite amazing,” says Tal Kanety, a senior grower manager in the vertical-farming
unit at Costa Group Holdings Ltd. , the Australian grower which tested some robots before deciding to deploy more. “I
thought it would work, I just didn’t think it would work that well on the first go.”

The robots were developed by Israel-based Arugga AI Farming, which used deep learning. The robots autonomously
travel down a row in the greenhouse, use AI and cameras to quickly identify flowers ready for pollinating, and then blast
air at the flowers to pollinate them. The cameras and air nozzles are on a mast and can reach as high as about 13 feet.

Unlike some other crops, tomato flowers pollinate themselves once vibrations shake pollen loose, so the pollen doesn’t
need to be transferred between flowers. Costa will pay a monthly fee for Arugga to pollinate about 25 acres in its
greenhouses, and roughly 30 robots will eventually be needed to cover the full acreage. The first seven are expected to
arrive in the next few months.

In most countries, greenhouse tomato growers pay for bumblebees, which land on the flower and move their flight
muscles to create the vibration needed for the flower to pollinate—unlike honeybees, which don’t perform this so-called
buzz pollination. But in Australia, there are no bumblebees in most of the country, and strict biosecurity laws prevent
them from being imported. So Australian growers rely on human workers, who use a vibrating wand to shake the plants.

Costa tested two robots before agreeing to more, and the results were on par with the labor-intensive manual
pollination, says Mr. Kanety. He expects the robots to improve as Arugga makes refinements and hopes the robots will
eventually achieve better results than manual pollination. The robots could also limit the possibility of disease, given
that the air blast pollinates the flowers without touching them.

Deep learning involves feeding machines lots of data so the AI can learn patterns itself without requiring humans to
program knowledge into the machine. Without deep learning, a similar robot would have taken much longer to build
and the product would have been more expensive, says Iddo Geltner, Arugga’s chief executive and co-founder. Other
startups could also take advantage of deep learning , which could make it easier to develop robots that help with a
variety of farm tasks, such as picking or pruning.

“We have to have one algorithm to detect flowers anywhere in the world,” Mr. Geltner says. “We cannot teach the
robot to find flowers every time in a different greenhouse.”

Mr. Geltner says his team visited greenhouses to collect images of the yellow tomato flowers, making sure to capture
the flowers from multiple angles and under the multiple conditions that the robot might encounter: sunny or cloudy,
natural light or artificial light, for example. To capture the tens of thousands of images needed, Mr. Geltner says his
team took video and used each frame as a separate image.

Each robot now costs about $10,000 to manufacture, though costs are expected to come down as the company scales
up production, says Eytan Heller, another co-founder. Arugga hopes to later add other capabilities to its system that will
reduce labor costs for growers, such as pruning.

Other Israeli companies, including Edete Precision Technologies for Agriculture and Bumblebee AI, are also working on
robotic pollination systems for other crops, while researchers at U.S. universities are developing their own prototypes.
Investment in agricultural technology overall has grown in recent years, with startups doing everything from using
drones to collect farm data to deploying other robots to help wrangle cattle.

A syndrome called colony collapse disorder has been a problem recently for honeybees, but that hasn’t had an impact
on bumblebee production, says Karel Bolckmans, chief operating officer at Biobest, a Belgium-based company that
produces bumblebees for farmers. Mr. Bolckmans says Biobest is investing in Arugga anyway.

“People ask me, ‘Why are you guys getting involved with robots? You guys are bumblebee people.’ No, we are
pollination people,” he says. “If a robot is better than bumblebees, then robots it will be.”

Given recent advances in deep learning, the main challenge for AI researchers is getting enough training data to
sufficiently teach an algorithm, says Ian Reid, a professor at the University of Adelaide and the director of robotic vision
at the school’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Arugga’s computer-vision technique is fairly standard given
what researchers know about deep learning, but it would have taken a lot of work to make it reliable enough for the
robot to be commercially viable in a real-world setting, he says.

Prof. Reid, who isn’t involved with Arugga but reviewed its website, says the company did a good job building a robot
that does a physical task as a result of what it recognizes in an image. In other applications, like the face-detection
feature in digital cameras, simply detecting an object in the image is the end goal.

Growers in the U.S., where there are concerns that a new virus that affects tomato plants could be spread by
bumblebees, have also tested Arugga’s robots. Josh Lessing, chief technology officer at AppHarvest, which grows
greenhouse tomatoes in Kentucky and recently tried one of Arugga’s robots, says the robot beat manual pollination and
was getting competitive with the bees. He says AppHarvest would continue to work with Arugga.
 D: Biodiversity

Biodiversity loss is not existential.

Dr. John Halstead 19, PhD, University of Oxford, researcher at Founders Pledge; citing Dr. Peter Kareiva, PhD in ecology
and evolutionary biology, Cornell University, director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment & Sustainability; also citing
Valerie Carranza, PhD student in Kareiva’s lab, 5/1/2019, “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk Six Month Report:
November 2018 - April 2019,” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zbZxisJRJBCdtYvh9/centre-for-the-study-of-
existential-risk-six-month-report, pacc

Can you explain what the mechanism is whereby biodiversity loss creates existential risk? And if biodiversity loss is an existential risk, how big a risk
is it? Should 80k be getting people to go into conservation science or not?

There are independent reasons to think that the risk is negligible. Firstly, according to wikipedia, during the Eocene period ~65m years ago, there were thousands
fewer genera than today. We have made ~1% of species extinct, and we would have to continue at current rates of species
extinctions for at least 200 years to return to Eocene levels of biodiversity . And yet, even though significantly warmer than today, the
Eocene marked the dawn of thousands of new species . So, why would we expect the world 200 years hence to be inhospitable
to humans if it wasn't inhospitable for all of the species emerging in the Eocene , who are/were significantly less numerous than
humans and significantly less capable of a rational response to problems?

Secondly, as far as I am aware, evidence for pressure-induced non-linear ecosystem shifts is very limited . This is true for a range of ecosystems. Linear
ecosystem damage seems to be the norm. If so, this leaves more scope for learning about the costs of our damage to ecosystems and
correcting any damage we have done .

Thirdly, ecosystem services are overwhelmingly a function of the relations within local ecosystems, rather than of global trends in
biodiversity. Upon discovering Hawaii, the Polynesians eliminated so many species that global decadal extinction rates would have been exceptional. This has next to no bearing on
ecosystem services outside Hawaii. Humanity is an intelligent species and will be able to see if other regions are suffering from biodiversity loss

and make adjustments accordingly . Why would all regions be so stupid as to ignore lessons from elsewhere? Also, is biodiversity actually decreasing in the rich world? I
know forest cover is increasing in many places. Population is set to decline in many rich countries in the near future, and environmental impact per person is declining on many metrics.

Only 2% of species are threatened.

G. Bailey 19. “Letters | ‘Mass species extinction’ headlines are overblown and ignore success in conservation efforts”
South China Morning Post. 05-14-2019. https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3010008/mass-species-
extinction-headlines-are-overblown-and-ignore-success

David Dodwell admits he may have exaggerated just a bit when lamenting the loss of life in the seas around his idyllic
home, and is amazed at the wonderful diversity of natural life in Hong Kong (“Loud and clear alarm bell sounded on
species extinction. What now?”, May 11). I share his amazement and wonder, but it’s a shame he wasn’t able to see that
the United Nations IPBES’ (Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) claim,
that one million species are heading for extinction due to human activities, may have also been a bit of an exaggeration
– just a bit. How exactly did this UN body arrive at such a huge and frightening figure? Apparently it was referring to one
million species out of eight million , but all you see in yet more doomsday headlines is “one million species under
threat”. In fact, less than 2 per cent of bird and mammal species have gone extinct over the last few centuries. The
success stories about the revitalisation of nature and species is completely ignored. Humpback whales, for example, are
flourishing after being under threat. Others do remain under threat, and many, like the orangutan, are under threat due
to the demand for biofuels to replace fossil fuels to combat climate change. Sad, but true.
Adaptation and resilience check those impacts.
Kareiva and Carranza, 18—Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles
(Peter and Valerie, “Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back,” Futures, available online January 5,
2018, ScienceDirect, dml)

The interesting question is whether any of the planetary thresholds other than CO2 could also portend existential risks. Here the answer is not clear. One boundary often
mentioned as a concern for the fate of global civilization is biodiversity (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2012), with the proposed safety threshold being a loss of
greater than 0.001% per year (Rockström et al., 2009). There is little evidence that this particular 0.001% annual loss is a threshold—and it is hard to

imagine any data that would allow one to identify where the threshold was (Brook, Ellis, Perring, Mackay, & Blomqvist, 2013; Lenton &
Williams, 2013). A better question is whether one can imagine any scenario by which the loss of too many species leads to

the collapse of societies and environmental disasters , even though one cannot know the absolute number of
extinctions that would be required to create this dystopia. While there are data that relate local reductions in species richness to altered
ecosystem function, these results do not point to substantial existential risks . The data are small-scale experiments in
which plant productivity, or nutrient retention is reduced as species numbers decline locally (Vellend, 2017), or are local observations of
increased variability in fisheries yield when stock diversity is lost (Schindler et al., 2010). Those are not existential risks . To make the link even more

tenuous , there is little evidence that biodiversity is even declining at local scales (Vellend et al., 2013, 2017). Total planetary
biodiversity may be in decline, but local and regional biodiversity is often staying the same because species from
elsewhere replace local losses , albeit homogenizing the world in the process. Although the majority of conservation scientists are likely to flinch at this conclusion, there
is growing skepticism regarding the strength of evidence linking trends in biodiversity loss to an existential risk for
humans (Maier, 2012; Vellend, 2014). Obviously if all biodiversity disappeared civilization would end—but no one is forecasting
the loss of all species . It seems plausible that the loss of 90% of the world’s species could also be apocalyptic, but no t
one is predicting that degree of biodiversity loss either . Tragic, but plausible is the possibility of our planet suffering a loss of as many as half of its species.
If global biodiversity were halved, but at the same time locally the number of species stayed relatively stable, what would be the mechanism for
an end-of-civilization or even end of human prosperity scenario? Extinctions and biodiversity loss are ethical and spiritual
losses , but perhaps not an existential risk .
 D: Disease

No disease impact.
James Fodor 20, PhD student at the University of Melbourne, completed masters in neuroscience at the Australian
National University, research assistant in structural biology at Monash University, 5/11/2020, “Critical Review of 'The
Precipice': A Reassessment of the Risks of AI and Pandemics,” cc

As such, I believe it is important to carefully consider the probability of various proposed existential risk scenarios. In the
subsequent two sections I will consider risks of engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence.

Engineered Pandemics

Extinction level agent exists

One initial consideration that must be addressed is how likely it is that any biological pathogen can even kill enough
people to drive humanity to extinction . This places an upper limit on what any biotechnology could achieve, regardless
of how advanced. Note that here I am referring to an agent such as a virus or bacterium that is clearly biological in
nature, even if it is engineered to be more deadly than any naturally-occurring pathogen. I am not including entities that
are non-biological in nature, such as artificial nanotechnology or other chemical agents. Whilst it is impossible to
determine the ultimate limits of biology, one relevant point of comparison is the most deadly naturally-occurring
infectious disease. To my knowledge, the highest fatality rate for any infectious biological agent that is readily
transmissible between living humans is the Zaire ebolavirus , with a fatality rate of around 90%. It is unclear whether
such a high fatality rate would be sustained outside of the social and climactic environment of West Africa whence
the disease originated, but nevertheless we can consider this to be a plausible baseline for the most deadly known
human infectious pathogen. Critically, it appears unlikely that the death of even 90% of the world population would
result in the extinction of humanity . Death rates of up to 50% during the Black Death in Europe do not appear to have
even come close to causing civilisational collapse in that region, while population losses of up to 90% in Mesoamerica
over the course of the invasion and plagues of the 16th century did not lead to the end of civilization in those regions
(though social and political disruption during these events were massive).

If we think the minimal viable human population is roughly 7,000 (which is near the upper end of the figures cited by
Ord (p. 41), though rounded for simplicity), then a pathogen would need to directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of
more than 99.9999% of the current world population in order to lead to human extinction . One could argue that the
pathogen would only need to directly cause a much smaller number of deaths, with the remaining deaths caused by
secondary disruptions such as war or famine . However to me this seems very unlikely , considering that such a
devastating pathogen would significantly impair the ability of nations to wage war, and it is hard to see how warfare
would affect all areas of the globe sufficiently to bring about such significant population loss. Global famine also seems
unlikely, given that the greater the number of pandemic deaths, the more food stores would be available to survivors.
Perhaps the most devastating scenario would be a massive global pandemic followed by a full-scale nuclear war, though
it is unclear why should a nuclear exchange would follow a pandemic. One can of course devise various hypothetical
scenarios, but overall it appears to me that a pathogen would have to have an extremely high fatality rate in order to
have the potential to cause human extinction.

In addition to a high fatality rate, an extinction-level pathogen would also have to be sufficiently infectious such that it
would be able to spread rapidly through human populations. It would need to have a long enough incubation time such
that infected persons can travel and infect more people before they can be identified and quarantined. It would also
need to be able to survive and propagate in a wide range of temperatures and climactic conditions. Finally, it would
also need to be sufficiently dangerous to a wide range of ages and genetic populations , since any pockets of immunity
would render extinction considerably less likely. Overall, it is highly unclear whether any biological agent with all these
properties is even possible. In particular, pathogens which are sufficiently virulent to cause 99% or more fatality rates
are likely to place such a burden on human physiology such that they would have a short incubation time , potentially
rendering it easier to quarantine infected persons . Of course we do not know what is possible at the limits of biology,
but given the extreme properties required of such an extinction-level pathogen, in my view it is very unlikely that such a
pathogen is even possible.
 D: Oceans

The industry and ocean are sustainable---indicators are trending up. AND its especially true of
fisheries. That solves warming, disease, water scarcity, AND food shortages.
Eric Bender 21, Science Writer, "The Case for Ocean Optimism," Knowable Magazine, 08/05/2021,
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/food-environment/2021/the-case-ocean-optimism.

But there’s good news, too, says Nancy Knowlton, a coral reef biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History. In fact, she says, many marine conservation efforts around the globe are seeing good results.

“There are a lot of successes out there, and most people don’t know about them,” Knowlton says. It’s important to share
those successes, she adds, to avoid paralyzing feelings of hopelessness and to spread the knowledge of approaches that
work. That’s why she and her allies began pushing the #oceanoptimism Twitter hashtag in 2014. Organizations such as
Conservation Optimism and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative have broadened her theme, helping to share
conservation stories, findings, resolve and resources.

In marine conservation, “successful efforts typically are neither quick nor cheap and require trust and collaboration,”
Knowlton wrote in a 2020 Annual Review of Marine Science paper promoting ocean optimism. Focusing on success
stories, she stressed, helps motivate people to work toward new successes.

Here are glimpses of a few bright spots in the pitched battle for the blue planet.

Some high-profile conservation efforts are already paying off.

An international moratorium on commercial whale hunting that started in the 1980s has shown dramatic results, even
though a few species are still hunted by several countries and indigenous groups. While some whale populations remain
very much in trouble — the North Atlantic right whale, for instance, is critically endangered — others are rebounding.
The population of humpback whales in the western South Atlantic, which had dropped to around 450 in the 1950s, now
is estimated at around 25,000 — near the level scientists estimate existed before hunting began. The International
Whaling Commission estimates the global population of these whales now may be around 120,000 animals. Blue,
bowhead, fin and sei whale populations are also growing globally, according to the International Union for
Conservation of Nature.

Sea turtles are another success story. Most populations of turtles included in a recent survey were found to be
growing, even though the animals must be protected on both land and sea. In Florida, scientists estimate that the
population of green turtle nests climbed from 62 in 1979 to 37,341 in 2015. And in Texas, Kemp’s Ridley turtle nests rose
from just 1 to 353 over roughly the same time period, Knowlton notes.

Many fisheries are reasonably well managed.

In many areas, the ocean is dangerously overfished. But the world’s most valuable fisheries, which make up roughly 34
percent of global captures, are relatively healthy in general, environmental economists Christopher Costello of the
University of California at Santa Barbara and Daniel Ovando of the University of Washington in Seattle wrote in the
2019 Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Hot debates continue about the status of many species that were massively overfished for decades. But there is good
evidence that sustainable management is now being achieved for some species in some regions. According to the UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organization, 34.2 percent of the world’s marine fisheries are currently overfished, but harvests
have held relatively steady for fisheries ranging from Alaska pollock to European sardines (pilchards) to Indian mackerel
and yellowfin tuna.
On the high seas beyond national jurisdiction, fishing vessels largely operate without legal restrictions, and sometimes
hundreds of vessels will target a given region and make huge hauls. Such incidents may suggest that the unregulated
high seas “would be a tremendous threat to sustainability of the world’s fisheries,” Costello and Ovando wrote.
“Somewhat incredibly, this does not appear to be the case.” Among the likely explanations: High seas fishing accounts
for only 6 percent of global fish catch; pursuing highly mobile and unpredictable species such as tuna can be extremely
expensive; and regional fisheries management organizations do watch over many catches in the high seas.

The high seas may come under better control through a United Nations treaty on marine biodiversity, which may be
finalized next year after many years of meetings. This would greatly broaden the international resources available for
proper fisheries management anywhere on the ocean.

Moreover, technology is changing the game in fisheries enforcement, says Heather Koldewey, a senior technical
advisor at the Zoological Society of London. Organizations such as Global Fishing Watch and Ocean Mind track large
fishing vessels via satellite imaging , making it easy to track suspicious activities such as clusters of vessels in a
protected zone. In 2019, for example, after Global Fishing Watch partnered with the US Coast Guard in the Pacific, the
patrol tripled its number of fishing vessel boardings. Also in 2019, Ocean Mind joined with Interpol and several nations
and successfully tracked and seized an illegal fishing vessel in Indonesia.

There’s also hope for an end to the large governmental subsidies given to high-seas fisheries that are ecologically
unsustainable and also, by World Trade Organization assessment, don’t make economic sense. Each year, China, the
European Union, the United States and others give about $35 billion of subsidies to their fishing industries, many of
them high-seas fleets going after populations that can’t sustain the attack. Without these large subsidies, “as much as 54
percent of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable,” estimated marine biologist Enric Sala of the
National Geographic Society and his coauthors in a 2018 Science Advances paper.

Finalizing years of negotiations to reduce these subsidies will be a high priority for WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala.

Marine protected areas are rapidly expanding and could play a hugely positive role.

Marine protected areas are regions of the ocean designated to guard ecosystems that may be particularly crucial for
preserving biodiversity or withstanding specific severe threats. Almost 8 percent of the ocean has been structured as
MPAs, although less than half of that area is fully protected against fishing and loss of other resources. Coverage is
growing — for instance, in April 2021 the European Commission and 15 countries announced support for two MPAs
that would protect more than 3 million square kilometers of the Southern Ocean off Antarctica.

Safeguarding marine environments, MPAs also offer major benefits to human communities, such as reestablishing fish
populations that can be sustainably fished just outside their waters. An analysis of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine
National Monument off Hawaii, the third-largest protected area in the world, found “little, if any, negative impacts on
the fishing industry,” according to a 2020 Nature Communications article. And in Southern California, MPAs preventing
fishing in 35 percent of one coastal area led to a 225 percent increase in spiny lobster catch after just six years, scientists
reported in a 2021 Scientific Reports paper.

A worldwide “30 by 30” initiative seeks to protect at least 30 percent of the globe by 2030, with backers including the G7
group of wealthy industrial nations.

Some progress is being made in the global struggle against pollution.

OK, nothing like the progress that is needed. But there are some happy stories, although they may take decades for the
payoffs to be evident, says Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at King Abdullah Science and Technology University in Saudi
Arabia.

One example is a series of governmental restrictions that began in the 1970s to ban leaded fuels in vehicles, a major
source of ocean pollution. During a global expedition in 2010 and 2011, Duarte and colleagues looked at levels of lead
across the ocean and found they had dropped to negligible. “By banning leaded fuels, we actually restored the whole
ocean within 30 years,” he says.
Oil spilled into the ocean from tankers has also dropped dramatically over the decades, primarily due to steady
tightening of regulations and conventions like the International Maritime Organization’s International Convention for
the Prevention of Pollution from Ships.

True, plastics are a global garbage disaster. Although public awareness has climbed dramatically, as much as 23 million
metric tons of plastic waste still enter aquatic systems each year, according to a 2020 article in Science. This
megaproblem must be solved primarily upstream, in manufacture and use, says Marcus Eriksen, an environmental
scientist at 5 Gyres Institute in Santa Monica, California. “Today, the optimism is around the innovators, the private
sector rising to the challenge to fill the consumer need without the externalities of pollution,” he says. Eriksen points to
manufacturers ramping up production of innovative biomaterials such as microbially synthesized polymers called
polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, that are designed to be fully degradable by microbes in the ocean and other natural
environments.

We know how to restore crucial coastal ecosystems such as mangroves at large scale.

Vast stretches of healthy coastal ecosystems have been lost to pollution, urban expansion, conversion for aquaculture
and other human activities. But not all the news is bad — take mangroves, for instance, which make enormous
contributions to biodiversity, fisheries, storm protection and carbon storage on warm coastlines around the world.

“We’ve seen a slowdown of the losses of mangroves and in many regions of the world we’re starting to see an
increase,” says Duarte. “We are very, very capable of restoring mangroves at scale, and I think it’s doable to restore
them to almost their historical extent within the next 30 years.”

The most dramatic example, Duarte adds, is the restoration of 1,400 square kilometers of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
mangrove forest, destroyed by the US Air Force in the 1970s. “When I worked there in the late 1990s, if I wasn’t a
trained mangrove ecologist I would have thought I was in a pristine mangrove forest,” he says. “And that mangrove
sequesters an amount of carbon that is very significant compared to the emissions of Vietnam, which has a huge
positive role in mitigating climate change.”
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed roughly a quarter of a million people helped to shift international thinking
about the importance of defending and reestablishing mangrove forests, Duarte says. Judging by analyses of the
tsunami’s impact published later, “it was clear that in the villages where there was a pocket of mangrove sheltered
between the shoreline and the village, there was almost no human cost,” he says. “Even property losses were severely
reduced.”

In the Philippines, too, some mangrove forests are being recovered after decades in which half of them were lost, mostly
to aquaculture ponds or coastal development, says Koldewey. “We’ve made huge progress in science-based but
community-led mangrove restoration projects,” she says. “Within five years, they’re functioning, trapping loads of
carbon, stopping waves eroding shore or damaging people and habitats, and doing their mangrove thing.”

It’s important, though, that these efforts are done right. (To learn more, see Knowable Magazine’s article on mangrove
restoration.) Key to success, researchers have learned, are selecting the right mangrove species and planting them in the
right locations — and being sure to involve local communities.

Mangroves aren’t the only types of coastal ecosystems being renewed around the world. Salt marshes and oyster reefs
are also being restored on a large scale in Europe and the US, Duarte and colleagues note in a 2020 Nature paper. One
recent study, for example, counted 140 saltmarsh restoration projects in Europe, and massive efforts are underway in
Louisiana and Florida. “Restoration attempts of seagrass, seaweed and coral reef ecosystems are also increasing globally,
although they are often small in scale,” the Nature authors add.
Offshore wind is rapidly ramping up to deliver clean energy on a global scale.

Ocean wind technologies are proven around the world, and often are highly competitive with other energy sources,
especially with the advent of larger turbines and other engineering advances. By one estimate, this year the global
installed offshore wind capacity will climb 37 percent.

These giant offshore wind factories will deliver enormous amounts of energy with very low levels of greenhouse
gases, offering “an important potential for wind energy to really make a big contribution to going carbon neutral,”
Knowlton says. In 2019, the International Energy Agency estimated that close-to-shore offshore wind sites have the
potential to provide more than the current global electricity demand. Offshore turbines do bring ecological risks,
including damage to marine ecosystems, interference with fisheries and threats to birds, but leading environmental
groups see those risks as quite acceptable with proper design and management. “It’s past time to push for more
offshore wind,” the Sierra Club declared in March 2021.

Optimism breeds action.

Of course, marine scientists can’t forget the enormous threats to the ocean for a second. “We’re not being naive,” says
Koldewey. “There’s a lot of bad news, but we’re balancing the narrative with: How do we solve it? There are reasons to
be optimistic and everybody has a role to play in being part of the solution.”

Duarte has become more hopeful in the past few years, as growing signs of conservation success crop up around the
world, often from efforts launched decades ago. Taking on the challenge to heal the oceans will be hugely difficult, “but
if we don’t do it now, a decade from now it will be impossible,” he says. “We made a goal to stop grieving about the
ocean, to accept the loss and then engage in action — because we still have the capacity to reverse much of the losses
and turn over a healthy ocean to our grandchildren.”

Marine biodiversity is resilient

David Nield 17, freelance journalist who has been writing about technology, science, apps, gadgets and the web since
2002. Extensively citing "Impact of the Late Triassic mass extinction on functional diversity and composition of marine
ecosystems," written by Alexander M. Dunhill, William J. Foster, James Sciberras, and Richard J. Twitchett. Marine
Ecosystems Can Survive The Worst Mass Extinction Events, Study Shows. October 23, 2017.
https://www.sciencealert.com/marine-ecosystems-cling-on-to-life-through-some-of-the-worst-mass-extinction-events

Researchers have studied fossil records from the Late Triassic mass extinction, which happened around 201.3 million
years ago, and found that marine life did not fundamentally change , even though the vast proportion of species were
killed off .

The international team of researchers says that while marine species were still badly affected by the event, enough
life survived underwater to keep the ecosystems functioning. The findings could help us understand more about how
the changing climate of today could affect the planet.

"While the Late Triassic mass extinction had a big impact on the overall number of marine species, there was still
enough diversity among the remaining species that the marine ecosystem was able to function in the same way it
had before," says lead researcher Alex Dunhill from the University of Leeds in the UK.

It's thought that huge volcanic eruptions, and the subsequent warming of the planet caused by the greenhouse gases
produced, was behind the Late Triassic extinction event.

At least half the species on Earth at that time were wiped out by the rise in temperatures, and in the event's aftermath,
dinosaurs came to dominate life on our planet.

The researchers analysed fossils dated between the Middle Triassic to the Middle Jurassic periods, a time span of around
70 million years, covering life before and after the mass extinction event.
Ocean-dwelling animals were classified by how they moved, where they lived, and how they fed, and the study showed
that none of these categories of life completely disappeared after the extinction event.

That said, there were major impacts on different regions and the environment as a whole, and some specific marine
ecosystems were badly damaged.

"We're not saying nothing happened," says one of the researchers, palaeontologist William Foster from the University
of Texas at Austin. "Rather, global oceans in the extinction's aftermath were a bit like a ship manned by a skeleton
crew – all stations were operational , but manned by relatively few species ."

The idea of a skeleton crew of lifeforms keeping the lights on in an ecosystem was first raised by Foster and his colleague
Richard J. Twitchett in 2014, after another study focussed on the Late Permian mass extinction event about 252 million
years ago.

The current study found one of the hardest-hit underwater organisms were corals, and the fossil record shows it took
some 20 million years before tropical reef ecosystems recovered from the Late Triassic extinction, even though the
ecosystem as a whole carried on functioning.

With corals again under threat from rising temperatures in the modern day, the new research could provide a blueprint
for the potential damage we're going to see – and perhaps give us some clues for how to prevent it.

On a more positive note, it shows life underwater is incredibly resilient , and capable of surviving through even the
worst times of environmental upheaval on our planet.
 D: Smart Cities

Smart cities fail---graphs

Mathis & Kanik 21, *editor-in-chief of City Monitor **data reporter for City Monitor (*Sommer Mathis **Alexandra
Kanik, 2-18-2021, "Why you’ll be hearing a lot less about ‘smart cities’," City Monitor,
https://citymonitor.ai/government/budgets/why-youll-be-hearing-a-lot-less-about-smart-cities)
We’re not the first to argue that it may be time to retire the phrase “smart cities”, and the evidence of late suggests that the tech industry itself is waking up to the reality that it needs to rethink what and how it’s trying to sell to local governments.

Smart cities surfaced as a concept more than 20 years ago and served as an umbrella term to describe a large and varied set of emerging technologies that seemed destined to help metros operate more efficiently. The internet of things for municipalities has to date included everything from simple sensors that allow transportation
engineers to track cycle lane usage to full-blown smart-city operations centres that brought to mind scenes from Minority Report.

By the middle of the past decade, it was common to see vast sums of grant funding made available to local governments that were keen to join the innovation bandwagon. Smart-city challenges spurred metros of all sizes to adopt new technologies, sometimes to the good but also, it now seems clear, for the sake of becoming a
member of the growing global club of cutting-edge communities. Dozens if not hundreds of conferences, marketplaces and expos emerged to showcase the latest gee-whiz gadgets that cities could buy to transform themselves. To pursue a smart-city strategy was to be seen as relevant and forward-thinking, whether or not the
problems a local government was aiming to solve would necessarily be best served by an expensive new monitoring system or software package.

Criticism of the culture of the smart city predates the coronavirus pandemic. Concerns around privacy, of who should
own or control public data and to what extent technology is always the answer could be heard loud and clear at least
a couple of years before Covid-19 changed the world. Backlash against the practices of companies like Amazon and
Facebook helped spur the grassroots movement that ultimately contributed to the cancellation in May of a major
Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. That the urban-innovations unit embedded within Google’s parent company cited
economic uncertainty amid the onset of the pandemic as its reason for changing course was almost beside the point –
the Quayside plan had already been scaled down so significantly in the face of community pressure that its viability was
no longer clear.

The pandemic took much of the remaining air out of the smart-cities bubble. Last summer, City Monitor reported that
more smart-city project deployments would be delayed or scrapped in the face of budget and revenue uncertainty,
and that city governments were in the midst of shifting their priorities towards economic recovery and digital equity.
Since then, one of the industry’s biggest players, Cisco, announced it would pull the plug on its flagship smart-city
software.
“Obviously, a lot has changed. In this moment, the big vendors are in the midst of a pivot,” says Nigel Jacob, co-chair and co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic-innovation incubator and R&D
lab within Boston’s city hall. “They’ve all seen the challenges and the opportunities in this pandemic moment. We work very closely with some big companies, and I think they are still struggling and looking at their product
portfolio and looking to see what value they can add. I do think the field has shifted.

“When I look at some of the products that are coming from the large vendors, they were all being developed in the context of normal operating procedures. And that just isn’t true anymore, and maybe never again?”

The pandemic’s effects on the smart-cities sector

A City Monitor analysis of global smart-city deployments makes it clear that the eruption of Covid-19 in 2020 did stall
the sector’s momentum . The cumulative number of these projects initiated worldwide increased significantly
between 2011 and 2019. By 2019, there were 379 fully deployed smart-city projects in 61 countries. In 2020, just 16
countries set in motion a total of 34.

The trend becomes even clearer when broken down by region. Europe has long led the way in terms of the quantity of
smart-city deployments. Project commencements rose swiftly in Europe between 2011 and 2016, from only two to 43
initiated annually. Since 2016, Europe has added 149.

Meanwhile, the country with the most deployments to date is the US with 79. The larger North America region has 90.
Both Europe and North America saw significant dips in the number of smart-city deployments in 2020, while other
regions remained a bit steadier.

Australia, Germany and Italy were the only countries that had more smart-city deployments in 2020 than they did in 2019. Australia had the most of any country in 2020 – seven – up from six in 2019. It’s notable here that
Australia is one of the few countries that have been able to control the spread of Covid-19.

When examined through the lens of the major suppliers to government-funded smart-city projects, 2020 looks even
more like a sea change.

Of the top five global suppliers of such undertakings, only one deployed any in 2020.

The case against the phrase

A further obstacle to the global movement towards smart cities may be the name itself. Even before the pandemic, it wasn’t a particularly descriptive term. What does it actually mean, which technologies count as
“smart”, and why did this sector deserve so much attention? These questions were all present prior to 2020. In 2021, the idea that the goal of every city should be to get smarter feels painfully out of touch.

This isn’t to suggest that no useful or important smart technologies have been deployed over the past decade. Many are clearly here to stay. There’s a great deal of consensus at this point, for example, that intelligent
street-lighting systems combined with LED bulbs – which enable cities to brighten or dim street lamps based on usage – are both cost-effective and vastly more sustainable. It’s also clear that no city will be able to
meaningfully tackle its emissions goals without the widespread adoption of smart meters and digitised grids.

But as with so many other aspects of life on our planet over the past year, it is starting to feel like the end of an era.

“Part of it is that people are sick of talking about this term, ‘smart cities’,” says Story Bellows, a partner at the urban-
change management consultancy Cityfi. “People are more focused now on creating outcomes in their communities,
whether that’s using technology, whether that’s reinventing processes – kind of the layering of all of those various
approaches to making meaningful change on key indicators, whether it’s on health or equity or whatever it is. I think
there are still a lot of potential technology drivers and contributors in that, but creating a business model of smart cities
just on its own, especially within some of these really big companies, it’s hard to really operationalise and execute .”

AND aren’t sustainable

Zeine 17, Founder and CTO of Ossia. Wireless Power Pioneer. Physicist. Inventor (Hatem Zeine, 6-19-2017, “The
Problems With Smart Cities, Forbes,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/06/19/the-problems-with-
smart-cities/3/#268c6d041ffd)

The "smart city" sounds like a digital utopia, a place where data eliminates first-world hassles, dangers and injustices.
But there are some problems with smart cities , and no one, to my knowledge at least, has pointed them out. Press
coverage from Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and dozens of other publications are gleefully optimistic
about smart cities. No more traffic! Renewable energy for all! Fewer fires and disease outbreaks! Billions in savings!
Automated vegetable gardens on roofs! These are all real possibilities. Before we get too excited, however, let’s
examine the ingredients of a smart city and what they indicate about those problems.

Sensory Overload

Smart cities are based on data. If you want data, you need sensors. It’s not like roads, buildings and street lights will
wake up magically and start chatting about the weather. We need sensors to see, hear, smell, taste and feel on their
behalf. A platform can then aggregate all their data and use it to make (or propose) decisions at speeds exceeding
human capacity. Sensors will measure temperature, traffic patterns, foot traffic, air quality and infrastructure integrity
(e.g., is the bridge safe?), among many other things. Lux Research, an innovation research and advisory firm, has a
report that suggests the world will deploy 1 trillion sensors by 2020. Let's put that in perspective: If you have 1 million
people deploying sensors, each person needs to deploy a million of them within three years.

The De-Energizer Bunny

The U.S. alone buys over 3 billion batteries a year. We have not built 1 trillion batteries in the history of humankind,
yet we’re supposed to make enough batteries to power 1 trillion sensors within three years? I doubt it. Even if we
could manufacture batteries at that scale, the resulting pollution and energy consumption would offset many of the
benefits. And tell me, who would monitor and replace the batteries in, say, 1 million public sensors scattered
throughout New York City? Even the Energizer Bunny wouldn't get on board with that. Let’s say we ditch the batteries
and connect sensors to wires instead. Installing 1 trillion wires is prohibitively expensive . Whether you power those
sensors with solar, nuclear or fossil fuel energy, transmitting power from its source to a device is impractical.

Problem No. 1

The first problem with a smart city is power. We want to install millions of sensors that can retrieve useful, potentially
life-saving data. Yet with our current energy paradigms, we can’t power 1 trillion devices, let alone a million in a
single city. Thus, the smart city is a sci-fi fantasy without wireless power (i.e., power at a distance). Is our utopia dead
in the water, then? No. There are companies (including ours) developing wireless power that resembles the functionality
of Wi-Fi but for power. We can solve the problem as quickly as societies unwire power distribution. Once sensors receive
power wirelessly, we’ve cleared the main obstacle to a smart city. We can then ask practical questions: How do we
mitigate rush-hour traffic based on the data? How do we reduce particulate matter in our indoor and outdoor air?
Where are pollutants coming from and how might we stop them? How do we prevent meat contamination at a nearby
food processing plant from becoming a city-wide health crisis? Initially, we’ll retrofit cities with sensors. Eventually, we’ll
construct smart cities from scratch because our existing road systems, zoning patterns and power grids aren’t made for
automated, data-driven lifestyles. Autonomous cars, for instance, have different needs than the manual gas guzzlers
around which we have designed our infrastructure.

Problem No. 2

As we design smart cities around the data we want instead of the wiring we have, the dialogue gets more complex. Mass
data aggregation will establish some truths (the source of certain problems) about how our cities run. It will lead us to
score cities on different quality-of-life metrics. And that brings us to the toughest question of all: What do we value in a
human habitat? That raises the second problem with a smart city: We could create a dystopia just as easily as we
could create a utopia . The dividing line is deceivingly thin. We assume that by tapping into the collective intelligence of
both devices and people we can create better living environments. I believe we can. But data is not a magical cure to
all our woes. To quote author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers, “If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be
billionaires with perfect abs.” Likewise, if urban data was the answer, then collecting it would eliminate traffic, poverty,
crime, etc. That’s dangerously optimistic. We’ll need leaders to interpret and use the data wisely . Too often, our

officials pass along data like hors d'oeuvres , expecting people to take only what nourishes their
worldview. That’s not good enough. Smart cities will need leaders who have the courage to defend their data, say
what it means and establish it as a truth upon which cities make decisions. If officials don't stand behind their data,
neither will the public.
 D: Terror—Nuclear

CBRN terror’s overhyped, difficult, AND responses solve

Gregory D. Koblentz 20, Associate Professor and Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at the Schar School of
Policy and Government at George Mason University, “Emerging Technologies and the Future of CBRN Terrorism,” The
Washington Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 2, 04/02/2020, pp. 177–196

Cautions and Caveats

It is important to note that scientific advances and the emergence of new technologies are not the only, or even the
most important, factors influencing the likelihood of terrorist groups acquiring and using CBRN weapons. Thankfully, the
number of terrorist groups motivated to acquire these weapons has been limited , despite many that have the
requisite technical and financial resources.60 The vast majority of terrorist groups have been satisfied with
conventional weapons such as guns and bombs. The surprising rise of the Islamic State and their repeated use of
chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria, however, serve as a reminder that it only takes one group with the intent and
capability to acquire and use CBRN weapons to pose a threat to international security.61

In addition, the ability of a terrorist group to convert CBRN-related material into a weapon depends on intangible
factors such as tacit knowledge (the unarticulated knowledge that can only be gained through hands-on, trial-and-
error experience or mentorship), the ability of the group to create and share such knowledge, and its ability to
assemble and successfully manage interdisciplinary teams.62 Terrorist groups, especially those facing pressure from
law enforcement and intelligence agencies , have had difficulties recruiting, retaining , and effectively utilizing
individuals with the right combination of scientific, technical, and organizational skills to develop effective CBRN
weapons.

Developing a CBRN weapon capable of causing mass casualties is also a very complex process. A scientific
breakthrough that makes developing or acquiring one component of a weapon easier might not have any impact on
the other stages in the weaponization process. Thus, the impact of a single scientific breakthrough or a novel
technology on the acquisition of a CBRN weapon should not be exaggerated . For example, synthetic biology might
make it easier for a non-state actor to create a pathogen, but that technology does not help terrorists improve their
ability to disseminate the pathogen on a large scale.63

Likewise, it is important to assess the specific contributions that a particular technology can make to a specific aspect
of the CBRN threat in practice, not just in theory. In the case of 3D printing, this manufacturing technology is not
appropriate for working with metals that are toxic or radioactive. While microreactors are well-suited to covertly
producing small quantities of highly pure chemicals, they are not well-suited to the production of most chemical warfare
agents and precursors due to excessive heat generated by their synthesis and by the production of solid byproducts that
would clog the microfluidic channels at the heart of this technology.64

Finally, advances in science and technology represent not just threats, but also opportunities to make it harder for
terrorist groups to acquire CBRN weapons. Unmanned aerial and ground vehicles can be used for border security ,
CBRN weapon detection , and bomb disposal . For example, the EU is sponsoring the development of unmanned aerial
and ground vehicles to investigate CBRN crime scenes under the ROCSAFE project.65 Biometrics and radio frequency ID
chips can be used to improve physical security measures and inventory control to prevent unauthorized access to
CBRN materials. Advances in science and technology are also leading to improved sensors that can be used to detect
the production, transportation, and use of CBRN weapons. The development of dedicated laboratories and new
techniques to analyze CBRN materials has also contributed to impressive advances in nuclear, biological, and chemical
forensics, which are crucial for attribution.66
International Responses

Given the high degree of dual-use, diffusion, and decentralization associated with these emerging technologies,
preventing non-state actors from acquiring and using them to cause harm will require international cooperation. There
are a number of measures that individual countries , the United Nations, and international organizations dedicated to
preventing the proliferation of CBRN weapons, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the Implementation Support Unit (ISU) of the
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), could take to more effectively address this challenge.
 D: Trade

Empirics are NEG---highly interdependent trading partners continue to trade during war. That
means trade’s not a deterrent to conflict.
Mariya Grinberg 21, assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Wartime Commercial Policy
and Trade between Enemies,” International Security, Vol. 46, Issue 1, Summer 2021,
https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/46/1/9/102856/Wartime-Commercial-Policy-and-Trade-between

Conventional wisdom suggests that trade is the first casualty of war .1 Because the gains from trade can be converted
into military capabilities , trading with the enemy is akin to selling the opponent the gun they will use to shoot you .
The empirical record of wartime trade , however, suggests otherwise. For example, World War I, a total war in which
the majority of the states involved fought for their very survival, saw extensive trade between enemy belligerents .
Britain continued to trade with its enemies until October 1, 1918—one month and eleven days before the Armistice. In
fact, Britain started the war with restrictions on the export of only 20 percent of the goods that it ultimately prohibited
from reaching the enemy. Even after a year of ªghting, by the end of August 1915, around half of the products that
would eventually be prohibited were still allowed to be legally traded with enemy states.

World War I is hardly unique in that trade occurred and varied during the war. Some enemies continue to trade
throughout the war—for example, India and Pakistan in the First Kashmir War (1947–49) and Yugoslavia and Croatia
in the War of Bosnian Independence (1992).2 Other states sever trade immediately at the start of the war—for
example, England and Argentina in the Falkland Islands War (1982) and India and Pakistan in the Kargil War (1999).3 Yet,
other states start off trading with the enemy, only to change course during the war, as occurred, for example, between
Ethiopia and Somalia in the Second Ogaden War (1977–78).4 There is remarkable variation in wartime trading patterns
between adversaries.

Why do states trade with their enemies in wartime? In this article, I argue that states make deliberate choices when
setting their wartime commercial policies and that these policies are tailored to the type of war the state expects to
ªght. Specifically, states seek to balance two goals—maximizing revenue from continued trade during the war and
minimizing the opponent’s ability to benefit militarily from trade.

As a result, states have two reasons to continue trading with their enemies during war. First, states continue to trade
in products that their opponents take a long time to convert into military capabilities , because the security
consequences from this trade will not accrue in time to help the opponent win the war. Second, states continue to
trade in products that are essential to the domestic economy but that can be obtained only from the opponent ,
because sacrificing this trade would impair the state’s long-term security . Furthermore, states revise their wartime
commercial policies based on how well they perform on the battleªeld. As the expected length of a war increases, the
number of prohibited products will increase, because the opponent will have more time to beneªt militarily from the
gains of trade. Similarly, the closer the war is to becoming an existential threat, the greater the portion of wartime trade
with the enemy that the state will sever.

The article makes two major theoretical contributions. First, it shows that temporality is key to understanding the
security externalities of trade—that is, the military consequences of a state beneªting from trade. Existing scholarship
focuses on the idea that trading with the enemy increases the adversary’s military capabilities,5 but it omits the
temporal dimension, in which economic gains may be converted into military power. Although all gains from trade are
ultimately convertible into military capabilities, the amount of time this process takes varies by product. A similar
temporal distinction can be applied to all wartime policy tools to determine if, and to what extent, they carry security
externalities.
Second, the article challenges a central conclusion of economic interdependence theory —that significantly
interdependent states are least likely to fight each other . According to that theory , trade between states is severed
in war, which incentivizes states to avoid war to prevent losing the benefits of trade.6 So long as trade is lost during
war, trade deters conflict. As my research shows, however, under the right circumstances, states have ample reason
to trade with their enemies during war. Additionally, the more interdependent two economies are, the greater their
incentives for wartime trade . Contrary to the predictions of economic interdependence theory , trade is unlikely to
serve as a deterrent to war between highly interdependent states. This finding is particularly salient given the
heightened possibility of conºict between the United States and China. Although they share signiªcant economic ties,
these ties could not be used to prevent the escalation of a potential U.S.-China conºict.

Interdependence doesn’t prevent war

Edwin van de Haar 20, independent scholar specializing in the liberal tradition in international political thought. He
has lectured in international relations and political theory at Brown University, PhD from Maastricht University (2008), a
MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1997) and a MA in Political
Science from Leiden University (1996), “Free trade does not foster peace,” 2020, DOI: 10.1111/ecaf.12405

The most obvious rebuttal of these arguments is empirical . It just did not happen. Countries trading with each other,
all around the globe, have fought wars with one another, over and over again. Some recent examples are Russia and
Georgia, Russia and Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia and Yemen. As Smith predicted, human nature is an important factor in
the explanation. People will quarrel and fight: ultimately emotions rule reason. In the domestic situation, there is hardly
anyone who thinks that people can do without police and judiciary, because some people simply will not obey the
rules. The international system is without a court with enforcement powers. There are some structural constraints, but
it remains a human affair. The fundamental insights of Smith and his contemporaries into human behaviour do not
amount to some oldfashioned idea, long refuted by modern science. They are confirmed not only by modern
economists such as Kahneman (2011) and international relations specialists such as Waltz (1954, pp. 16–79) and
Donelan (2007), but also by theorists working on the border between evolutionary psychology and international
affairs (Rosen, 2005; Rubin, 2002; Thayer, 2004).

The relationship between trade and economic interdependence is also far more complex. Economic interdependence
matters sometimes, but it cannot trump power politics . As Copeland (2015, pp. 1–50, 428–46) makes clear, economic
interdependence is sometimes a constraint on violent action by a state. Yet it could just as well be a cause of violent
action, especially of a pre-emptive nature in the event that actors expect to be cut off from trade and other economic
resources in the near future. In this way, the benefits of continued trade lose out against the expected economic
vulnerability. Sobek (2009, pp. 107–27) adds that trade relations might lead to uneven power relationships , which may
be a cause of war as well.

Also relevant here is the fact that free trade does not normally result in bilateral interdependence, except for trade in
the rarest goods. Free trade leads to multilateral trade relations, and consequently there may be more than one country
where particular goods can be bought. Therefore, in times of war, it is relatively easy to switch to suppliers from
country A to country B or C. In this way warfare may be a less costly option than is assumed by the idea of economic
interdependence.

Public opinion is not automatically opposed to war, as Cobden painfully found out during the Crimean War (1853–56).
This has been evident many times since, not least in the two world wars. So the idea of public opinion as a pacifying
factor influencing decision-makers must be discarded. It must also be noted that the public in any case hardly ever
influences foreign policy decisions on war and peace (Hill, 2003, pp. 250–82).

Trade is unable to foster peace, because it is unable to overcome many causes of war. Think about cultural and
religious differences, geopolitical causes such as the fight for natural resources, including increasingly rare raw
materials, or more traditional wars between great powers or their proxies over a border dispute. States may also act
against their economic interest for some perceived higher goal (Coker, 2014). The causes of war are often
multifaceted and complex. Wars happen because people have reasons to fight, in the form of goals and grievances,
and possess enough resources and resolve (Ohlson, 2009). Trade relations are just one factor in the mix of causes of war,
which include such coincidental factors as chance, luck, or reckless behaviour by individuals who happen to influence
public policy. International commerce is simply not a “perfectly effective antiwar device” (Suganami, 1996, pp. 153–
210). The best one can say is that the protection of trade relations is sometimes one of the factors in the decision not
to wage war. Nothing less, nothing more.

To sum up, many of Adam Smith's arguments still stand, and are confirmed or complemented by modern research.
There is no solid ground for the expectation that trade promotes, fosters, or leads to peace . Generally, international
economic interests are not the crucial factors in decisions over war and peace. Too many other factors come into play.
To believe that trade fosters peace was folly even hundreds of years ago. To still think so is to believe in fairy tales , to
be blinded [confused] by the correlates computed by limited yet available datasets, or both.

Trade doesn’t prevent conflict---national security concerns always outweigh. Only the DA turns the
case.
Henry Farrell et al 19, is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University,
“Weaponized Interdependence: The End of Globalization?,” NPR, 6/3/19, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/729401275

STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:

Starting in the early 1990s, the world experienced a globalization boom that lasted two decades . Countries became
more connected in all kinds of ways. People and businesses traded more goods and services across national borders.
They invested more money in each other. And the rise of the Internet made it easier for them to share information with
each other with just a keystroke.

CARDIFF GARCIA, HOST:

And the promise of globalization was that it would make the global economy more efficient , more prosperous
because it would allow the people and businesses inside of countries to specialize in doing the things they do best, and
then to trade for the things that other countries do best.

VANEK SMITH: But globalization was not just supposed to be about economics . Fans of globalization also hoped that
it would make the world more peaceful because, you know, if countries depend on each other for their economic
prosperity, they're not going to want to jeopardize that prosperity with political disputes or, you know, at an extreme
level, fighting each other in a war. But as the U.S. trade war with China and a bunch of other recent diplomatic
disputes have shown , that assumption about globalization is looking increasingly shaky .

I'm Stacey Vanek Smith.

GARCIA: And I'm Cardiff Garcia. Today on THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY, we discuss a new framework for
understanding globalization, a framework that says it is globalization itself that has provided the diplomatic weapons
being used in these disputes .

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

VANEK SMITH: Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington
University. He says some of the assumptions that people once made about globalization are now being undermined.

HENRY FARRELL: So I see the basic assumption of globalization as being that when you start to put work out to the
world, that is when you start to engage in all of these complex relations of international trade, producing things in ways
that go across national boundaries, that you would be able to do so with a minimum of politics. And what I think we're
seeing now is that politics are getting more and more complicated.
GARCIA: Political disputes between countries, Henry says, are increasingly interfering with the close economic
relationships that those countries have enjoyed . This wasn't really supposed to happen.

A premise of globalization was that the way that countries and companies and other actors trade with each other and
invest money with each other would be mostly based on rules that those countries had already agreed to, and that
political arguments between the governments of those same countries would not much get in the way. But now...

FARRELL: And in particular, national security concerns are beginning to overshadow some of the ways in which actors
were trying to create more efficient ways of building things , of engaging in trade and are really potentially
threatening to undermine those kinds of relationships that really help us to build the kinds of things - the kinds of
products that we have come to rely upon.

VANEK SMITH: Right now, the obvious example of how the politics of national security is interfering with a trading
relationship is the trade war between the U.S. and China.

GARCIA: Yeah. See, the trade war started the way you would expect a trade war to start - with tariffs . These are taxes
on goods that are sold from a business in one country to people and businesses in another country. The U.S. and China
have now raised tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other's goods.

VANEK SMITH: For a while, these tariffs were part of a negotiation that was mostly about economics . The U.S. wanted
to sell more American goods inside of China, and China wanted the same from the U.S. Plus, the U.S. wanted China to
protect the technology and intellectual property of American companies that do business in China.

GARCIA: But the U.S. and China could not reach a deal. And now, the U.S. and Chinese governments are targeting
each other's economic weaknesses as part of this larger diplomatic standoff , which is largely about national security .
And these are economic weaknesses that exist precisely because the two countries have become such close trading
partners in the last few decades as part of globalization . It's kind of like how spouses know each other's weaknesses so
well precisely because they've become so intimate.

VANEK SMITH: That makes - and that can make the fights even more brutal.

GARCIA: Yes.

VANEK SMITH: Right?

FARRELL: What we're beginning to realize and think is that when you start to really get deep , deep, deep into
globalization so that, for example, you begin to rely upon a particular product that is made in another country , you
then expose yourself to possible pressure by that other country, which then can use the fact that you're dependent
on this product to try to extract concessions from you, to act against you in ways that you might not like.

GARCIA: When countries do this - when they exploit each other's dependence on their trading partners and on the
global trading system, Henry refers to it as weaponized interdependence. It's a concept he's been working on with his
collaborator Abraham Newman in a new study.

VANEK SMITH: And maybe we should start using this term for relationships, too.

GARCIA: Oh, God.

VANEK SMITH: (Laughter) Weaponized interdependence. Anyway, weaponized interdependence helps explain what
the U.S. has done to Huawei , a huge Chinese telecommunications company. So Huawei has 188,000 employees. And it
operates in more than 170 countries. It sells smartphones all around the world - pretty much everywhere except in the
U.S. And it also sells the equipment that countries can use to build their own wireless networks.
GARCIA: Huawei has a dodgy past. It's been accused of stealing the technology of American companies like Cisco, T-
Mobile and Motorola. Plus, the U.S. government believes that Huawei has a close relationship with the Chinese
government and that Huawei might help the Chinese government spy on people in other countries using the
telecommunications equipment that it sells to those countries, which is one reason the U.S. has long believed that
Huawei is a national security threat.

VANEK SMITH: So the U.S. government has taken steps to prevent Huawei from buying or licensing the American
technology that it needs to make its products, like the glass for its smartphones - Huawei buys it from Corning, the U.S.
company - or the microchips that Huawei buys from Qualcomm, or the Android operating system that Huawei gets from
Google. Plus, the U.S. is pressuring other countries not to buy Huawei smartphones and equipment.

GARCIA: So consider what's happening here. The U.S. government is cutting off trade with Huawei not just because of
what it considers to be unfair trading practices, but explicitly for national security reasons - to prevent Chinese spying
and surveillance.

And to do this, the U.S. is even willing to hurt its own companies, which can no longer sell technology to Huawei, and to
get in the way of other countries altogether buying equipment from Huawei as well. The U.S. is using Huawei's very
dependence on its trade with the U.S. and with other countries against it.

VANEK SMITH: And, of course, this goes both ways . The Chinese government has been threatening to retaliate in a
bunch of different ways, including threatening to cut off its exports to the U.S. of rare earth elements . So rare earths
are necessary to make all kinds of electronics and cars and other advanced technologies, including military equipment.
And of all the rare earths that the U.S. imports from the rest of the world, 80% come from China.

GARCIA: So again, that is an example of how the interdependence between American and Chinese businesses is being
weaponized, this time by the Chinese government.

VANEK SMITH: Henry Farrell says he's not surprised by this. In fact, he suspects that the world is evolving increasingly in
this direction.

FARRELL: And I think that to some extent, this is also a kind of a world in which you can see these kinds of things
beginning to escalate pretty quickly because it could be that when one country begins to do this, another country, which
might before that have been attached to a more optimistic account of how globalization works, will begin to retaliate.
And you can get these spirals beginning to develop very, very quickly . And I think plausibly, that is what we're
beginning to see now between the United States and China.

Trade doesn’t stop wars – causes populism and their studies lack causation.
Ruben Gonzalez-Vincente ‘18; University Lecturer in Global Political Economy @ Leiden University, PhD in
Geography at University of Cambridge; 12/6/18 “The liberal peace fallacy: violent neoliberalism and the temporal and
spatial traps of state-based approaches to peace,” Territory, Politics, Governance 8.1, p. 100-116;

Yet, decades of neoliberal integration have not brought Fukuyama’s prophecy closer to its realization. Across the
world, liberal market integration has facilitated convivial relations among key countries and paid important dividends to
elites, yet it has also resulted in the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands , rising inequalities within countries
(although not between them) and higher concentration of wealth at the top, and increased risks and vulnerability as
the logic of market competitiveness takes hold of many aspects of our lives (Anand & Segal, 2015; Lynch, 2006). The
relation between the U nited States and China or the processes of economic integration in the European Union are
clear examples of these trends. In these places as well as others, inequalities , precarization and economic insecurity
have given way to a populist and nationalist momentum that can be interpreted both as a popular response to the
extreme and diverse forms of violence engendered by processes of market integration, or as a manoeuvre to channel
discontent towards the ‘ other’ in order to protect elite interests (Gonzalez-Vicente & Carroll, 2017). By prescribing
ever more market globalization to counter populist politics and avoid conflict , liberal elites add fuel to the fire as
they sever the very conditions that led to the disfranchisement of significant segments of the population in the first
place. Thereby, it is crucial to understand how the argument for capitalist peace fails to factor in the crisis-prone and
socially destructive tendencies of capitalism , particularly in a context of unfenced global competitiveness along
market lines.2

Two of the underlying problems in the liberal peace argument stand out. The first has to do with the statistical
selection of fixed points in time that suggest correlations between growth in trade and diminished conflict – while
failing to discern mechanisms of causation (Hayes, 2012). A wider temporal lens is needed to situate the
contemporary rise of mercantilist and illiberal politics in the context of neoliberal globalization, representing the
same sort of ‘ counter movement’ that Polanyi had warned of in his reading of the 19th-century downward spiral
towards war – aided in our contemporary case by the demise of the traditional left (Blyth & Matthijs, 2017; Carroll &
Gonzalez-Vicente, 2017). The second problem relates to liberal international political economy and IRT’s scalar
fixation on inter-state matters and hence their inability to factor in violence in the absence of war . I turn now to these
two points.

Trade doesn’t solve war

Paul Musgrave 20, assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “The Beautiful,
Dumb Dream of McDonald’s Peace Theory”, Foreign Policy, 11/26/20,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/26/mcdonalds-peace-nagornokarabakh-friedman/

Of course, I would explain to my students, war could also proceed from other causes. Economic integration may be no
panacea to interstate war after all. John Vasquez writes: “War among equals has followed the failure of power politics
to settle certain highly salient issues”—none, he writes, more than “issues involving territory, especially territorial
contiguity.”

In the former Soviet Union, the wars over Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, and now Nagorno-Karabakh have all involved
territory as a crucial element, a story much closer to what Vasquez’s theory would predict than to Friedman’s.

Globalization may have increased the costs of these wars, but they have obviously not prevented them. To be sure,
Armenia has no McDonald’s, an issue grave enough to have been raised in the parliament at Yerevan earlier this year.
The Azerbaijan franchise’s cheerleading was also slapped down by the Home Office.

Regardless, Friedman’s logic suggests the conflict shouldn’t have begun, or shouldn’t have been so bloody once it did.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan score highly (and almost identically) on the ETH Zurich KOF Globalisation Index. The pace
of deaths suggests that the conflict could qualify as a so-called real war by the traditional 1,000 battle-related-deaths
criterion. (Indeed, some reports say the death toll blew past that level quickly.)

And if the conflict has knocked the final support from the Golden Arches theory, it has also finally toppled whatever
confidence remained in the 1990s belief in the eternal sunshine of the American order.

The resurgent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict provides yet another reason to worry that the world is entering a new phase
of more violent conflict—including major wars—and globalization will no more prevent them than burgeoning trade
before Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination prevented World War I.
After all, wars keep emerging that challenge the optimistic assessment that war is a relic of the past. The specific ways
these conflicts emerge, moreover, point to the possibility that new wars could break out that make even bloody
conflicts like those in Syria and Yemen seem relatively minor.

Driven by processes of imperial dysfunction and internal breakdown, today’s wars have causes that are enormously
difficult to heal.

The conflicts in the former Soviet Union, from Chechnya in the 1990s to Nagorno-Karabakh today, represent a set of
wars in the post-Soviet succession. Russia has attempted to maintain its central role against real and perceived rivals
throughout that vast region including transnational Islam, the European Union, the United States, China, and now
arguably Turkey.

In the Middle East, revisionist regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran contend for power as the United States
continues to loudly proclaim that it is unwilling to continue playing its imperial stabilizing role (even if Washington never
actually seems to find the exit).

And China, which once preferred to keep its border disputes quiet, seems increasingly willing to saber-rattle from the
Taiwan Straits to the Himalayas.
 D: Warming

No extinction---models are highly unreliable

H. Sterling Burnett 22, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and
the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, “CLIMATE CHANGE POSES NO EXISTENTIAL THREAT. NADA. NOT
ANY”, https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/climate-change-poses-no-existential-threat-nada-not-any, March
17th, 2022

In this article, chock full of data, Simon schools so-called journalists in the corporate media on how to examine claims
that humans are causing a climate catastrophe. Simon presents data and research that conclusively demonstrate
temperature and climate-related deaths have significantly declined during the period of modern warming. Climate
Realism has also pointed this out on numerous occasions, refuting alarmists’ claims to the contrary.

For example, arguably the largest study ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature was published in
the July 1 edition of The Lancet, one of the world’s most prominent health journals. The study’s authors, 68 scientists
representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world, came to two clear
conclusions: cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures, and deaths
associated with extreme temperatures, hot or cold, are declining . The researchers found nearly 10 times more people
die due to cold temperatures than hot temperatures. Moreover, as global temperatures modestly increase, the number
of people dying because of suboptimal temperatures is decreasing .

“Importantly, cold-related death decreased 0.51 per cent from 2000 to 2019, while heat-related death increased 0.21
per cent, leading to a reduction in net mortality due to cold and hot temperatures,” the study reports.

Considering that 10 times more people were dying from cold than from heat, the study indicates the warming between
2000 and 2019 saved 3.1 million lives from cold-related deaths, at the expense of just 130,000 extra deaths caused by
heat. As a result, global warming saved a net of nearly three million lives during the past 20 years.

This study confirms what previous research has consistently shown. In 2015, for example, The Lancet published the
results of another large-scale temperature/mortality study, in which the researchers found cold weather directly or
indirectly killed 1,700 percent more people than warm or hot weather. The scientists examined health data from 384
locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths. The authors of this study wrote,

[N]on-optimum ambient temperature is responsible for substantial excess in mortality, with important differences
between countries. Although most previous research has focused on heat-related effects, most of the attributable
deaths were caused by cold temperatures. Despite the attention given to extreme weather events, most of the effect
happened on moderately hot and moderately cold days, especially moderately cold days.

Even The New York Times acknowledged the importance of that study, with Jane Brody writing, “Over time, as global
temperatures rise, milder winter temperatures are likely to result in fewer cold-related deaths, a benefit that could
outweigh a smaller rise in heat-caused mortality.”

In addition to correcting the record on heat-related deaths, Simon dismantles various climate fictions about worsening
natural disasters, using readily available data:

The facts regarding natural disasters also do not support the “ existential threat ” claim. The number of hurricanes per
year, a 2021 EPA report shows, has not increased since the late 19th century. Moreover, although you wouldn't know it
from the panicky, sensationalized news coverage, the total acreage burnt by forest fires annually has decreased , and
most rivers flood less today than they used to.
Since 1920, Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees and the world population has quadrupled from less
than two billion to almost eight billion. Even so, the number of people killed each year by natural disasters has
declined by about 90 percent . That statistic, more than any other, puts the lie to claims of an existential crisis due to
climate.

There is also the global air pollution death rate, which has declined by about 45 percent over the last three decades.
Again, no "existential threat" here.

Simon is correct. Research published at Climate Realism has refuted assertions about worsening wildfires and hurricanes
on multiple occasions.

Simon also discusses research showing the positive side of climate change: “global warming has increased both
agricultural yields and growth of forests, grasslands, and tree leaves.”

Climate Change Weekly and Climate Realism have refuted claims climate change is a threat to crop production more
than 100 times. We have cited research and hard data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
showing regional and global crop production and crop yields have regularly, almost yearly, set new records during the
recent period of modern warming.

Basic agronomy explains why crop production is booming under current climate conditions. As detailed by the
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change in Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts and
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the carbon dioxide humans have been pumping into the air since the
middle of the twentieth century has enriched plant growth and improved plants’ water-use efficiency , thereby
contributing to record crop yields.

Laboratory experiments and real-world field research show as carbon dioxide increases, plant fitness and flower
pollination improve, plants develop more-extensive root systems to extract greater amounts of nutrients from even
poor-quality soil, plants use water more efficiently by reducing the number and openness of stomata through which
they lose moisture during transpiration, and plants produce greater amounts of natural substances that repel insects
and fight off competing weeds.

All of this has helped bring about the largest decline in hunger , malnutrition, and starvation in human history.

Simon’s conclusion is spot-on and speaks for itself:

Biden administration climate change policies are sensationalizing the threats while ignoring all the benefits. They rely
on speculative “models” that supposedly project global temperatures and predict disasters. But these models are
highly unreliable , … unable even to reproduce the temperature changes of the 20th century.
Disadvantages
 Assault Weapons Bad DA: NSU

AWB DA:
Fear of Court overturn blocks Assault Weapon Ban now
Frank DeVito 6-4-2022, attorney and a current fellow in the Napa Legal Good Counselor Project. His work has
previously been published in The American Conservative, the Quinnipiac Law Review, and the Penn State Online Law
Review. He lives in eastern Pennsylvania with his wife and three young
children.https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-left-wants-to-repeal-the-second-amendment/, "The Left Wants
to Repeal the Second Amendment," American Conservative (ermo/sms, Acc:9-9-2022)

While the Second Amendment itself does not in any way limit firearm rights, most scholars concede, as did the majority
opinion in Heller, that the right to bear arms is not absolute. If there is at least some room to regulate the details of
when, where, and how the people may keep and bear arms, one key aspect of the discussion in Heller must be
remembered. The Heller opinion restates a principle previously articulated in a Supreme Court case called United States
v. Miller: the sorts of weapons protected by the Second Amendment are particularly those “in common use at the
time.” Yes, in the 1790s, that was probably the musket and flintlock pistol. But what are the weapons “in common use”
that warrant the particular protection of the Second Amendment today? Handguns are the most commonly owned type
of firearm; the most common caliber handgun is the 9mm. Among rifles, what is the most common? Bolt-action hunting
rifles? The simple .22? Of course, the most commonly owned rifle in the United States is the AR-15. It is effective, easy to
learn to use, and accurate, without requiring too much practice. And being fairly lightweight and with almost no
kickback, it is an ideal home-defense firearm for women who are often uncomfortable with the kick of a shotgun. This is
where the left’s agenda crashes into the reality of the Second Amendment: The AR-15, demonized as an assault
weapon by the left, is actually an ordinary firearm in common use. The president apparently also wants to add 9mm
handguns—literally the most popular self-defense weapon in the nation—to the list of “high-caliber” firearms that
ought to be banned. These are exactly the types of firearms the Second Amendment gives the people the right to keep
and bear. It is rare and almost admirable when someone puts their true objective in writing, and for the left to
accomplish what it wants, it must repeal and replace the Second Amendment. Only then will we get the “gun control”
measures that the left desires. Short of that, you will not see Congress pass these “meaningful common-sense gun-
control measures” in the wake of a mass shooting. Congress will not ban the 9mm handgun nor the AR-15 as an assault
weapon. You will only see political posturing, virtue signaling, name-calling, and fundraising; then it’s back to business as
usual. Despite the constant barrage of noise about banning assault weapons, the left knows they can’t do it . After much
hyperbolic rhetoric about “common-sense gun control,” particularly banning assault weapons, the president has already
essentially admitted defeat. He has already proposed an alternative: “[i]f we can’t ban assault weapons then we should
raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21.” Until we see a major movement on the left to amend the Constitution
and repeal the Second Amendment, we should assume these political voices aren’t actually serious about the gun
bans for which they advocate. And if the left does start an honest movement to repeal and replace the Second
Amendment; well, this is still America. Good luck with that!

Expanding standing incentivizes advisory opinions, spurring Constitutionally questionable

legislation
Harvard Law Review, 2011, ADVISORY OPINIONS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUPREME COURT OVER AMERICAN
POLICYMAKING, 124 Harv. L. Rev. 2064, Nexis Uni (ermo/sms, Acc:8-12-2022)

The influence and prestige of the federal judiciary derive primarily from its exercise of judicial review. This power to
strike down acts of the so-called political branches or of state governments as repugnant to the Constitution — like the
federal judicial power more generally — is circumscribed by a number of self-imposed justiciability doctrines, among
the oldest and most foundational of which is the bar on advisory opinions.1 In accord with that doctrine, the federal
courts refuse to advise other government actors or private individuals on abstract legal questions; instead, they
provide their views only in the course of deciding live cases or controversies.2 [FN2 2 The bounds of a case or
controversy are delimited by the doctrines of standing , ripeness, and mootness. See RICHARD H. FALLON, JR., JOHN F.
MANNING, DANIEL J. MELTZER & DAVID L. SHAPIRO, HART AND WECHSLER’S THE FEDERAL COURTS AND THE FEDERAL
SYSTEM 49 (6th ed. 2009) [hereinafter HART & WECHSLER] This means that the Supreme Court will not consider
whether potential legislative or executive action violates the Constitution when such action is proposed or even when
it is carried out, but only when it is challenged by an adversary party in a case meeting various doctrinal requirements.
So, if a legislative coalition wishes to enact a law that might plausibly be struck down — such as the 2010 healthcare
legislation3 — it must form its own estimation of whether the proposal is constitutional4 but cannot know for certain
how the Court will ultimately view the law. The bar on advisory opinions is typically justified by reference to the
separation of powers and judicial restraint: when courts answer legal questions outside the legal dispute-resolution
process, they reach beyond the judicial role and assume a quasi-legislative character. But whatever its rationale, the
effect of the bar — and in particular the federal courts’ refusal to provide an ex ante evaluation of a proposed law’s
constitutionality at the request of the elected branches — is to expand the influence of the judiciary over American
policymaking.5 First, because the legislature cannot know ahead of time whether plausibly unconstitutional statutes
will be struck down or left standing, it must discount the expected value of such proposals by the probability of their
not being invalidated in deciding how to expend its limited political capital.6 All else equal, this makes legislation that
the Court might strike down less attractive to Congress, and so less likely to be enacted, than constitutionally
unproblematic legislation. Second, the Court is itself subject to political constraints, especially when issuing
countermajoritarian invalidations of the acts of the elected branches. The bar on advisory opinions, by keeping Congress
guessing and forcing it to forego some constitutionally problematic legislation while allowing the Court to withhold
judgment until enactment and implementation costs have been sunk, allows the Court to reserve its limited political
capital for those proposals that surmount legislative doubts about constitutionality and pass through bicameralism,
presentment, and other veto-gates to become law. Thus, by refusing to issue advisory opinions, the Court both causes
Congress and helps itself to conform American law to the Court’s vision of the Constitution. A doctrine adopted in the
name of judicial restraint thereby tilts the balance of power between the Supreme Court and the elected branches in
favor of greater influence for the Court.

AWB ends primacy through Q-Anon accelerationist civil war

Chris Joyner, 1-3-2021, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2021/01/03/experts-us-extremism-escalating-could-find-new-energy-
2021/4123310001/, "Experts: US extremism escalating, could ‘find new energy’ in 2021," York Dispatch (ermo/sms,
Acc:9-9-2022)

ATLANTA — Watchdogs and the U.S. intelligence community observed with growing concern as domestic extremist
groups rose in prominence in recent years, escalating into a crescendo of chaos and violent outbursts around the
presidential election. They are not going away in 2021, experts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Things indeed are
escalating,” said Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center, a progressive nonprofit that promotes
democratic engagement. “We have elected officials who are now being escorted into legislative session by law
enforcement because of the level of threats they are experiencing. … Political violence is going to be part of our reality in
2021.” Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said radical
extremist groups may actually grow in 2021 and “find new energy.” That’s particularly true for movements with an anti-
government ideology, like the far-right paramilitary militia movement. Pitcavage said the militia movement has an
“odd relationship” with President Donald Trump, admiring him for his outsider demeanor while mistrusting the
government he leads. With Joe Biden in power, that may change, Pitcavage said. “There is a very legitimate chance we
could see a resurgence of the militia movement,” he said. As president, Biden wants to renew the assault weapons
ban, expand background checks and ban high-capacity magazines, which have the potential to trigger militia groups .
“With a Biden administration coming in, the militia movement is no longer going to be limited in its anger at the federal
government as it has been,” Pitcavage said. Trump’s rhetoric: If Trump remains a visible force in American politics over
the next four years, Pitcavage said fringe right-wing groups could be further energized by his rhetoric. One such group is
the Proud Boys, which gained national notoriety during the first presidential debate when Biden called on Trump to
denounce the group. Trump’s cryptic statement to “stand back and stand by” was enthusiastically taken by the group as
a presidential endorsement, despite a subsequent rejection by the president on Fox News’s “Hannity.” Since the
election, the Proud Boys have been involved in numerous street demonstrations, including a protest last month in
Washington, D.C., that included violent altercations with left-wing counter protesters, and resulted in several stabbings.
The group styles itself as a sardonic “drinking club,” but watchdogs describe it as anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and deeply
misogynistic. The ADL notes that, while not a white supremacist organization itself, some of its leaders have engaged in
racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Recently, national leader Enrique Tarrio took part in a protest outside the Capitol in
Atlanta after November general election. “They are one of very few far-right extremist groups that have multiple
chapters on the ground across the country,” Pitcavage said. Conspiracy theorists: One of the more perplexing questions
of 2021 is what will become of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its adherents. The phenomenon burst into the national
consciousness this summer as Facebook scampered to ban fast-growing QAnon groups that organized around
coordinated “Save Our Children” marches across the country. One such march in August in Woodstock drew hundreds of
marchers. The QAnon community has long held that Trump is waging a secret war against a globalist cabal of Satanic
pedophiles that would culminate in mass arrests of prominent Democrats and celebrities. Alex Newhouse, a researcher
with the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College’s Institute of International
Studies, said the conspiracy is too robust to fade away, but what shape it will take as Trump exits the White House is
unclear. “There will be some period of turmoil and soul-searching for some of them,” he said. “Some fringe adherence
might peel off and lose faith, but the core of the movement will still be there.” The conspiracy theory may be bolstered
by newly elected congresswomen Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia’s 14th District,
both of whom have embraced it. Greene and Boebert will get attention if they choose to push the conspiracy from their
new posts in Congress, Newhouse said. Trump’s potential to spread the conspiracy is a more serious concern.
Newhouse said the president remains the central figure in the widening QAnon universe, and that may outlast his
presidency. In the short term, Newhouse said, he is concerned about how QAnon adherents will react to Biden’s
inauguration. “There are a lot of far-right groups that are really pushing for physical, real-world accelerationist action,”
he said. Acclerationists are among the most extreme radicals, encouraging violent action to bring about the downfall of
the United States as a way to achieve their political goals. If QAnon goes that way, “they become much more
dangerous,” Newhouse said. “If they take that turn, they instantly become the largest right-wing accelerationist group
in the world,” he said.

Decline in hegemony cause nuclear war. Allies, Proliferation, Terrorism, Nationalism.

Wright 20 – (Thomas Wright, Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a Senior Fellow in the Project
on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution; “The Folly of Retrenchment”; Foreign Affairs; D.A.
August 27th 2020, [Published March/April 2020]; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-02-10/folly-
retrenchment)

Global retrenchment is fast emerging as the most coherent and ready-made alternative to the United States’ postwar
strategy. Yet pursuing it would be a grave mistake . By dissolving U.S. alliances and ending the forward presence of
U.S. forces, this strategy would destabilize the regional security orders in Europe and Asia . It would also increase the
risk of nuclear proliferation , empower right-wing nationalists in Europe, and aggravate the threat of major-power
conflict. This is not to say that U.S. strategy should never change. The United States has regularly increased and
decreased its presence around the world as threats have risen and ebbed. Even though Washington followed a strategy
of containment throughout the Cold War, that took various forms, which meant the difference between war and peace
in Vietnam, between an arms race and arms control, and between détente and an all-out attempt to defeat the Soviets.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States changed course again, expanding its alliances to include many
countries that had previously been part of the Warsaw Pact. Likewise, the U nited S tates will now have to do less in
some areas and more in others as it shifts its focus from c ounter t errorism and reform in the Middle East toward
great-power competition with China and Russia . But advocates of global retrenchment are not so much proposing
changes within a strategy as they are calling for the wholesale replacement of one that has been in place since World
War II. What the U nited S tates needs now is a careful pruning of its overseas commitments—not the indiscriminate
abandonment of a strategy that has served it well for decades. RETRENCHMENT REDUX Support for retrenchment stems from the view that the United States
has overextended itself in countries that have little bearing on its national interest. According to this perspective, which is closely associated with the realist school of international relations, the United States is fundamentally secure thanks to its geography, nuclear
arsenal, and military advantage. Yet the country has nonetheless chosen to pursue a strategy of “liberal hegemony,” using force in an unwise attempt to perpetuate a liberal international order (one that, as evidenced by U.S. support for authoritarian regimes, is not
so liberal, after all). Washington, the argument goes, has distracted itself with costly overseas commitments and interventions that breed resentment and encourage free-riding abroad. Critics of the status quo argue that the United States must take two steps to
change its ways. The first is retrenchment itself: the action of withdrawing from many of the United States’ existing commitments, such as the ongoing military interventions in the Middle East and one-sided alliances in Europe and Asia. The second is restraint: the
strategy of defining U.S. interests narrowly, refusing to launch wars unless vital interests are directly threatened and Congress authorizes such action, compelling other nations to take care of their own security, and relying more on diplomatic, economic, and political
tools. In practice, this approach means ending U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, withdrawing U.S. forces from the Middle East, relying on an over-the-horizon force that can uphold U.S. national interests, and no longer taking on responsibility for the security of
other states. As for alliances, Posen has argued that the United States should abandon the mutual-defense provision of NATO, replace the organization “with a new, more limited security cooperation agreement,” and reduce U.S. commitments to Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan. On the question of China, realists have split in recent years. Some, such as the scholar John Mearsheimer, contend that even as the United States retrenches elsewhere, in Asia, it must contain the threat of China, whereas others, such as Posen, argue
that nations in the region are perfectly capable of doing the job themselves. Since Trump’s election, some progressive foreign policy thinkers have joined the retrenchment camp. They diverge from other progressives, who advocate maintaining the United States’
current role. Like the realists, progressive retrenchers hold the view that the United States is safe because of its geography and the size of its military. Where these progressives break from the realists, however, is on the question of what will happen if the United
States pulls back. While the realists favoring retrenchment have few illusions about the sort of regional competition that will break out in the absence of U.S. dominance, the progressives expect that the world will become more peaceful and cooperative, because
Washington can still manage tensions through diplomatic, economic, and political tools. The immediate focus of the progressives is the so-called forever wars—U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the broader war on terrorism—as well as the
defense budget and overseas bases. Although the progressives have a less developed vision of how to implement retrenchment than the realists, they do provide some guideposts. Stephen Wertheim, a co-founder of the Quincy Institute, has called for bringing home
many of the U.S. soldiers serving abroad, “leaving small forces to protect commercial sea lanes,” as part of an effort to “deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every problem with a violent solution.” He argues that U.S. allies may believe that the United
States has been inflating regional threats and thus conclude that they do not need to increase their conventional or nuclear forces. Another progressive thinker, Peter Beinart, has argued that the United States should accept Chinese and Russian spheres of influence,

IS LESS REALLY MORE? The realists and the progressives arguing for retrenchment differ in their
a strategy that would include abandoning Taiwan.

assumptions, logic, and intentions. The realists tend to be more pessimistic about the prospects for peace and frame
their arguments in hardheaded terms, whereas the progressives downplay the consequences of American withdrawal
and make a moral case against the current grand strategy. But they share a common claim: that the United States would
be better off if it dramatically reduced its global military footprint and security commitments. This is a false promise , for
a number of reasons. First, retrenchment would worsen regional security competition in Europe and Asia . The realists
recognize that the U.S. military presence in Europe and Asia does dampen security competition, but they claim that it
does so at too high a price—and one that, at any rate, should be paid by U.S. allies in the regions themselves. Although
pulling back would invite regional security competition , realist retrenchers admit, the United States could be safer in
a more dangerous world because regional rivals would check one another. This is a perilous gambit , however,
because regional conflicts often end up implicating U.S. interests . They might thus end up drawing the U nited S tates
back in after it has left—resulting in a much more dangerous venture than heading off the conflict in the first place by
staying. Realist retrenchment reveals a hubris that the U nited S tates can control consequences and prevent crises
from erupting into war. The progressives’ view of regional security is similarly flawed. These retrenchers reject the
idea that regional security competition will intensify if the United States leaves. In fact, they argue, U.S. alliances
often promote competition, as in the Middle East, where U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
has emboldened those countries in their cold war with Iran. But this logic does not apply to Europe or Asia, where U.S.
allies have behaved responsibly. A U.S. pullback from those places is more likely to embolden the regional powers .
Since 2008, Russia has invaded two of its neighbors that are not members of NATO, and if the Baltic states were no
longer protected by a U.S. security guarantee, it is conceivable that Russia would test the boundaries with gray-zone
warfare . In East Asia , a U.S. withdrawal would force Japan to increase its defense capabilities and change its
constitution to enable it to compete with China on its own, straining relations with So uth Ko rea. The second problem
with retrenchment involves nuclear prolif eration. If the United States pulled out of NATO or ended its alliance with
Japan, as many realist advocates of retrenchment recommend, some of its allies, no longer protected by the U.S.
nuclear umbrella, would be tempted to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Unlike the progressives for
retrenchment, the realists are comfortable with that result, since they see deterrence as a stabilizing force. Most
Americans are not so sanguine, and rightly so. There are good reasons to worry about nuclear proliferation: nuclear
materials could end up in the hands of terrorists , states with less experience might be more prone to nuclear
accidents, and nuclear powers in close proximity have shorter response times and thus conflicts among them have a
greater chance of spiraling into escalation . Third , retrenchment would heighten nationalism and xenophobia . In
Europe, a U.S. withdrawal would send the message that every country must fend for itself. It would therefore
empower the far-right groups already making this claim—such as the A lternative for G ermany, the L eague i n I taly,
and the N ational F ront in F rance—while undermining the centrist democratic leaders there who told their
populations that they could rely on the United States and NATO. As a result, Washington would lose leverage over the
domestic politics of individual allies, particularly younger and more fragile democracies such as Poland. And since
these nationalist populist groups are almost always protectionist, retrenchment would damage U.S. economic
interests, as well. Even more alarming, many of the right-wing nationalists that retrenchment would empower have
called for greater accommodation of China and Russia. A fourth problem concerns regional stability after global
retrenchment. The most likely end state is a spheres-of-influence system, whereby China and Russia dominate their
neighbors, but such an order is inherently unstable. The lines of demarcation for such spheres tend to be unclear, and
there is no guarantee that China and Russia will not seek to move them outward over time. Moreover, the United
States cannot simply grant other major powers a sphere of influence—the countries that would fall into those realms
have agency, too. If the United States ceded Taiwan to China, for example, the Taiwanese people could say no. The
current U.S. policy toward the country is working and may be sustainable. Withdrawing support from Taiwan against
its will would plunge cross-strait relations into chaos . The entire idea of letting regional powers have their own spheres
of influence has an imperial air that is at odds with modern principles of sovereignty and international law . A fifth
problem with retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support . The American people may favor greater burden sharing ,
but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019
by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military
superiority makes the U nited S tates safer , and almost three-quarters think that alliances contribute to U.S. security. A
2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense
spending. As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment , and as
the United States’ democratic allies objected to its withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result
could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate between retrenchment
and reengagement , creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by
Washington, its allies, or its rivals. Realist and progressive retrenchers like to argue that the architects of the United
States’ postwar foreign policy naively sought to remake the world in its image. But the real revisionists are those who
argue for retrenchment , a geopolitical experiment of unprecedented scale in modern history. If this camp were to
have its way, Europe and Asia—two stable, peaceful, and prosperous regions that form the two main pillars of the U.S.-
led order—would be plunged into an era of uncertainty .
 Bizkon DA: NU

Potential for new entities to become corporate bodies and gain legal liability ruins business
confidence
Grahame Thompson 12, 2012, The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere, pg. 85-91,
https://academic.oup.com/book/27540

A.II.1: LEGAL PERSONHOOD

The classic case of legal personhood applies to ‘natural persons’. But this term should not be taken to imply an
unproblematic naturalness on behalf of humans. As suggested in the main chapter, a ‘natural person’ is a legal category:
defined as a cognate being perceptible through the senses, able to rationalize and make decisions, and having an
identity that persist through time; and minors and those of impaired mental capacities, or criminals, are often treated as
special cases for various purposes (like voting). On the other hand, there is the category of ‘artificial person’ or ‘virtual
person’, which applies to corporate bodies of various kinds (though see the discussion below on this terminology). These
display various features, but the basic characteristic is that the entity so constituted is considered a separate one from
the human persons who own it, manage it, or otherwise work for it. It has the status of a legal entity in its own right,
which enables it to contract business as it sees fit (subject to constraints of law and custom of course). In the following
text, we return to the kinds of persons companies can be considered to be—which remains controversial. In the main
text, the rights they can claim in law that are analogous to those of natural persons are discussed, which arise from this
consideration of various forms of corporate personhood.

But the question of legal personhood is not confined just to natural persons or corporate bodies. There is a debate over
extending some of these AQ11 features to other inanimate entities or non-sentient beings . The classic examples are
trees, involving a debate initiated by Christopher Stone’s suggestion (1974) that these be afforded the status of
‘standing’ (enabling a party to sue for damages in a court) so as to enable them to literally remain standing when under
threat from logging companies for instance. ‘Friends of the trees’ would establish a form of legal guardianship over such
trees under threat, and use the courts to seek protection for them. This inaugurated an ongoing debate about extending
such legal rights to other animals and entities (e.g. Varner, 1987; Solum, 1992; Teubner, 2006—the great apes come
immediately to mind),16 and in seeking stakeholder status for such objects in respect to corporate governance (Starik,
1995). In addition, robotic entities have also been the subject of such discussion (e.g. Solum, 1992), and even
completely artificial agents like search engines, shopping website operations, and databases (Allen and Widdison, 1996;
Chopra and White, 2004). Below and in the main text, we reflect on quite what all this might mean for the category and
status of citizenship, which is the one closely linked to the idea of ‘personhood in law’. But a quick comment on the trees
issue is appropriate at this stage since it began this debate and serves to illustrate some wider concerns. The difficulty
with affording the status of personhood or standing to these is where it would end . Supposing trees had this legal
status, one tree could then in principle sue another tree if there were some conflict over access to light, for instance.
And why not extend the status to aphids? If they were then to attack the tree’s leaves, presumably the tree could sue
the aphids. The possibilities are endless, but this just demonstrates where all this loose ‘rights talk’ might take us.
Finally, single people can also be a legal corporate body . This arises in the case of ‘the corporation sole’. In Anglo-
American law, this is a legal entity consisting of a single (‘sole’) incorporated office, occupied by a single (‘sole’) man or
woman. This allows a corporation to pass vertically in time from one office holder to the next successor-in-office, giving
the position legal continuity with each subsequent office holder having identical powers to his or her predecessor.
Although this capacity is usually associated with religious offices (the head of the Church of England, The Archbishop of
Canterbury, is such a corporation sole), it is not confined to this office alone. The British monarch, for instance, is not just
a human person (indeed, she is not just a ‘natural person’ either; inasmuch that she claims divine lineage she is also a
‘supernatural person’ of sorts) but has several ‘corporation soles’ which allow her to hold property in the name of the
monarch in several different countries and jurisdictions.17
To sum up, broadly speaking, to have legal personality implies that a body has an existence independent of its members,
that is, it does not terminate with the death of its founders; that it can sue and be sued in a court in its own name, with
respect to contracts as well as to torts and crimes, even in relation to its members (we return to torts below); and finally,
that it may own property in its own name. This latter point is very important in the context of the question of who or
what ‘owns’ a limited liability (L-L) company. Conventional language vests ownership in the shareholders, but strictly
speaking and in a legal sense this is not quite the case. The subsequent sections review the position of companies as
legal persons in the context of this vexed question of who or what owns them. It does this as a first clarificatory move in
anticipation that this will help in a further clarificatory move associated with the relationship between the personhood
of companies and their role in claiming to be ‘citizens’, which is pursued in the main text.

A.II.2: OWNERSHIP AND LEGAL PERSONHOOD

In the long dispute over corporate personhood, there have been three basic positions. These are neatly summed up by
Iwai: The corporate realists believe that the corporation is a fully-fledged organizational entity whose legal personality is
no more than an external expression of its real personality in the society. The corporate nominalists, in opposition,
assert that the corporation is a contractual association of individual shareholders whose legal personality is no more
than an abbreviated way of writing their names together for legal transactions. And both claim to have superseded the
‘fiction theory,’ the traditional doctrine since the time of Pope Innocent IV, which maintained a position one might well
think tortuous: that the corporation is a separate and distinct social entity, but that its legal personality is a mere fiction
conceded by the state or created by law. (Iwai, 1999: 584; italics added)

According to Iwai, Maitland’s ‘Introduction’ to Otto Gierke (1900) established the forerunner to the realist position: that
on the basis of ‘real’ conditions on the ground and found in practice, corporations are entities absolutely equivalent to
natural persons (see also Laski, 1916). Corporations are ‘organic’ bodies that display all the characteristics of natural
persons (Gierke, 1900). This is sometimes known as the natural entity theory of the corporation: that the corporation is
neither a legal fiction created by the state nor a contract among individuals, but a natural person whose existence is
prior to law. In fact, the contemporary realist position distances itself from Gierke’s formulations since it wants to found
the ‘realistic’ corporation in law. Thus, it distances itself from the ‘physico-spiritual unity’ conception of the corporate
entity as an organization somehow endowed with a mysterious organicist metaphysical will of its own (Note, 1982;
Iwai, 1999: 616). As we will see in the following text, the contemporary realist position views corporate autonomy as a
consequence of interactions between human beings, both inside and outside the entity, but who address their activities
in the name of the corporation itself in the first instance, rather than in terms of their own personal proclivities,
inclinations, or intentions.

On the other hand is the nominalist position. Although this has a long tradition in the economics literature, it is modern
agency theory and particularly the idea of the corporation as nothing more than a ‘nexus of contracts’ that has given it
added impetus (Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Williamson, 1990). As a nexus of contracts, the firm can be considered to be
something other than the aggregation of its constituent parts. From this perspective, however, ‘ownership’ (in the form
of possession) is rejected as an appropriate category in respect to business firms ; contracts cannot be owned as
possessions in the same manner as asset can (though see below). Instead, shareholders are considered as ‘principals’,
able to direct their ‘agents’—the managers and directors. But this does not go quite far enough since the modern
corporation is more than this: it is a fully fledged subject of property ownership in its own right so it too can make
contracts of its own and enter into litigation; it acts beyond what can be accommodated simply by an ex-ante
contractual specification (see also Parkinson, 1993: ch. 6, who nevertheless supports a strict ownership model of the
corporation criticized in the following text).

Finally, there is the ‘fiction theory’, often first attributed to German romantic F.C. von Savigny (see Rattigan, 1884;
Maitland’s ‘Introduction’ to Gierke, 1900; Ru¨ckert, 2006). In this case the corporation is considered an artificial entity
admitted as a subject in law by means of a ‘pure fiction’ sanctioned by the State. However, it is possible to interpret
Savigny more subtly as affording legal relational status to corporations other than by State sanction, though it perhaps
needs the recognition by the State ‘in the last instance’ so to speak (Iwai, 1999: 602–3).
The difficulty in judging between these approaches to specifying the appropriate relationship between personhood and
ownership arises because the corporation recognized in law is both a ‘thing’ and a ‘person’ at the same time. It is a kind
of ‘cyborg’: analogous to both human and machine. The definition of a cyborg employed here is less one that sees it as
a cybernetic organism in the form of a network of communication and control, but rather views it as an entity that
shares properties of both synthetic mechanical operationality ( thingness) and properties of humanness (personhood). So
this is not humanness in the form of a natural person but as an artificial person.

We return to the consequences of this way of viewing the firm in terms of its ownership but first we deal with the nature
of that other key feature of the modern corporate form, namely limited liability.

A.II.3: LIMITED LIABILITY (L-L)

Limited liability is a ubiquitous feature of the modern business world. It was gradually introduced in the United Kingdom
and the United States in the later part of the nineteenth century (Plesch and Blankenburgh, 2007: 8–15). Prior to this,
development companies had unlimited liability. The idea was that such a legal limitation on shareholder losses would
foster investment and the development of industrial capitalism. Subsequently, it spread throughout the world.

L-L is principally about the protection of assets and creditor confidence . It is the principle whereby a member of a
company cannot be made personally liable for the debts of the company beyond the capital invested , or, in general,
beyond a certain amount. Debtors or plaintiffs in any action against the company thus make their claims against the
property or assets of the company, not those of its shareholders. Shareholders are only liable to their own personal
creditors. Clearly, L-P and LL are different but complimentary aspects of company form.

Both L-L and L-P are argued to make better deals possible because they instill confidence. But L-L also reduces
confidence because it limits the pool from which debts can be paid. L-L does not exist if you have to put up personal
assets as guarantees. Thus, L-L means you do not need to know who the other investors are , that is, fellow
shareholders—or their wealth. As a result, the aptly named socie´te´ anomie produces a bigger investment pool and
greater investment, or so it is argued.

But L-L is paradoxical in respect to confidence and risk. On the one hand, it reduces risks for the shareholders. L-L and
shareholding means that the shareholder knows what his/her liabilities are. He/she is not responsible for anything other
than the value of his/her shareholding. But on the other hand, it might encourage companies to take on more risk than
is socially justifiable, as explained in the next section.

And whilst the establishment of L-L was a clear move in terms of legislative enactment in the United Kingdom, the
United States, and other countries, the status of l egal personality just discussed was only afforded companies as a result
of a series of landmark decisions by the courts (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway Co. in 1886 in the United
States and Salomon v. Salomon & Co. in the United Kingdom in 1897). And whilst it was not the original intention of
company law legislation to extend the status of legal personality to companies, governmental authorities have done
little to prevent its application. But it has been essentially a court-led process. What we have as a result, however, is a
very privileged position for companies in the way they are allowed to operate, involving legal immunities not extended
to ordinary citizens (Ireland, 1999, 2010). As a result, they are often accused of having extensive rights without
concomitant responsibilities. Certainly, this accusation can be legitimately laid at the door of shareholders and
directors, who can for all intents and purposes avoid any personal liability for misdemeanours or damages they may
cause (directors, for instance, can insure against this possibility). But shareholders can also escape liability in the case of
tort actions as will be discussed in the following text.

Decline cascades---nuclear war.

Dr. Mathew Maavak 21, PhD in Risk Foresight from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, External Researcher
(PLATBIDAFO) at the Kazimieras Simonavicius University, Expert and Regular Commentator on Risk-Related Geostrategic
Issues at the Russian International Affairs Council, “Horizon 2030: Will Emerging Risks Unravel Our Global Systems?”,
Salus Journal – The Australian Journal for Law Enforcement, Security and Intelligence Professionals, Volume 9, Number
1, p. 2-8

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst
has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implicat ions for global
security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are
getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical,
societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight
couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball in to a full-blown crisis
elsewhere. The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be
sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper
concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals.

Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset

INTRODUCTION

The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food
security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
(VUCA).

Human activities within however

But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries.

are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, health care and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined .
Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker,
2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by
complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998).
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also
tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable.
Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens, 2020).

An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan
and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity.

COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler
and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and
technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional
forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach.

METHODOLOGY

An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily
informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020):

• Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006);

• Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012);

• Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and

• Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions
through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources.

ECONOMY

According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a
previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown ,
impacting all areas of human activity.

The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may
lead to a Second Great Depression . Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019).
Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this
chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have
contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020).

As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even
earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy
(Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007).
Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments . Bullions now
carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe . After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from
the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit.

According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in
particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated
(Dudik & Tomek, 2019):

“You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something
happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.”
(Parenthesis added by author).

President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by
hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek,
2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the U nited States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-
denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far , wide and for a
considerable period.
A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power
parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system
will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The
World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016).

In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a).
We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade.

ENVIRONMENTAL

What happens to the environment when our economies implode ? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive
nuclear and chemical plants , along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents ? Economic stressors , workforce
demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to
the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation:

The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is
a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly
unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary,
“vulnerable” or unpaid jobs.

Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In
line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo . Frazzled
workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis
(2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear
disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes
of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500
injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The
environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated.

Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather
than to mundane human activity.

Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by
the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation . This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of
computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation
workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko,
2021).

Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by
vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems,
developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications.
On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with
governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008).

The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph
into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section.

Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark

Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be

defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival.

hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a
Sword of Damocles over this decade.

GEOPOLITICAL

The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression . Since history often repeats itself , expect familiar
bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk
on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forc ing Israel to undertake reprisal
operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated
to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon
effect s like these present a classic VUCA problematic.

Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran -Israel war; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the
S outh C hina S ea; North Korea n proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies ; an India -Pakistan nuclear war ; an
Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz ; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world ; or a nuclear
confrontation between NATO and Russia . Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani
might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally
change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got
replaced.
 China Tech Good DA: Gtown

Chinese tech dominance is key to its near-term power projection as other growth sources tap out –
perception of decline incentivizes conflict over Taiwan and SCS to secure domestic legitimacy
Brands 21 – Professor of Global Affairs, JHU SAIS
Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael Beckley, associate
professor of political science at Tufts University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem: The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not
because its rival is rising but because of the opposite., 24 September 2021, Foreign Policy,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-united-states/

China’s rise is no mirage : Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global power. Major
investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a strong position in the struggle for
geoeconomic influence ; China is using a multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most
alarming, think tank assessments and U.S. Defense Department reports show China’s increasingly formidable military
now stands a real chance of winning a war against the United States in the Western Pacific.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that China has also developed the ambitions of a superpower: Xi has more or less
announced that Beijing desires to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan , the South China Sea, and other disputed areas ,
becoming Asia’s preeminent power and challenging the United States for global leadership. Yet if China’s geopolitical
window of opportunity is real, its future is already starting to look quite grim because it is quickly losing the advantages
that propelled its rapid growth.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and energy resources. It enjoyed the
greatest demographic dividend in history, with 10 working-age adults for every senior citizen aged 65 or older. (For
most major economies, the average is closer to 5 working-age adults for every senior citizen.) China had a secure
geopolitical environment and easy access to foreign markets and technology, all underpinned by friendly relations
with the United States. And China’s government skillfully harnessed these advantages by carrying out a process of
economic reform and opening while also moving the regime from stifling totalitarianism under former Chinese leader
Mao Zedong to a smarter—if still deeply repressive—form of authoritarianism under his successors. China had it all
from the 1970s to the early 2010s—just the mix of endowments, environment, people, and policies needed to thrive.

Since the late 2000s, however, the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around entirely. For example,
China is running out of resources : Water has become scarce, and the country is importing more energy and food than
any other nation, having ravaged its own natural resources. Economic growth is therefore becoming costlier :
According to data from DBS Bank, it takes three times as many inputs to produce a unit of growth today as it did in the
early 2000s.

China is also approaching a demographic precipice : From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding 200 million working-
age adults—a population the size of Nigeria—and gain 200 million senior citizens. The fiscal and economic
consequences will be devastating: Current projections suggest China’s medical and social security spending will have to
triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of
impoverishment and neglect.

To make matters worse, China is turning away from the package of policies that promoted rapid growth. Under Xi,
Beijing has slid back toward totalitarianism . Xi has appointed himself “chairman of everything,” destroyed any
semblance of collective rule, and made adherence to “Xi Jinping thought” the ideological core of an increasingly rigid
regime. And he has relentlessly pursued the centralization of power at the expense of economic prosperity.

State zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of capital. Objective economic analysis is being
replaced by government propaganda. Innovation is becoming more difficult in a climate of stultifying ideological
conformity. Meanwhile, Xi’s brutal anti-corruption campaign has deterred entrepreneurship, and a wave of politically
driven regulations has erased more than $1 trillion from the market capitalization of China’s leading tech firms. Xi hasn’t
simply stopped the process of economic liberalization that powered China’s development: He has thrown it hard into
reverse.

The economic damage these trends are causing is starting to accumulate—and it is compounding the slowdown that
would have occurred anyway as a fast-growing economy matures. The Chinese economy has been losing steam for
more than a decade : The country’s official growth rate declined from 14 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2019, and
rigorous studies suggest the true growth rate is now closer to 2 percent. Worse, most of that growth stems from
government stimulus spending. According to data from the Conference Board, total factor productivity declined 1.3
percent every year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning China is spending more to produce less each year. This
has led, in turn, to massive debt: China’s total debt surged eight-fold between 2008 and 2019 and exceeded 300 percent
of GDP prior to COVID-19. Any country that has accumulated debt or lost productivity at anything close to China’s
current pace has subsequently suffered at least one “lost decade” of near-zero economic growth.

All of this is happening, moreover, as China confronts an increasingly hostile external environment. The combination of
COVID-19, persistent human rights abuses, and aggressive policies have caused negative views of China to reach levels
not seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Countries worried about Chinese competition have slapped
thousands of new trade barriers on its goods since 2008. More than a dozen countries have dropped out of Xi’s Belt and
Road Initiative while the United States wages a global campaign against key Chinese tech companies—notably, Huawei
—and rich democracies across multiple continents throw up barriers to Beijing’s digital influence. The world is becoming
less conducive to easy Chinese growth, and Xi’s regime increasingly faces the sort of strategic encirclement that once
drove German and Japanese leaders to desperation.

Case in point is U.S. policy. Over the past five years, two U.S. presidential administrations have committed the United
States to a policy of “competition”—really, neo-containment—vis-à-vis China. U.S. defense strategy is now focused
squarely on defeating Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific; Washington is using an array of trade and technological
sanctions to check Beijing’s influence and limit its prospects for economic primacy. “Once imperial America considers
you as their ‘enemy,’ you’re in big trouble,” one senior People’s Liberation Army officer warned. Indeed, the United
States has also committed to orchestrating greater global resistance to Chinese power, a campaign that is starting to
show results as more and more countries respond to the threat from Beijing.

In maritime Asia, resistance to Chinese power is stiffening. Taiwan is boosting military spending and laying plans to turn
itself into a strategic porcupine in the Western Pacific. Japan is carrying out its biggest military buildup since the end of
the Cold War and has agreed to back the United States if China attacks Taiwan. The countries around the South China
Sea, particularly Vietnam and Indonesia, are beefing up their air, naval, and coast guard forces to contest China’s
expansive claims.

Other countries are pushing back against Beijing’s assertiveness as well. Australia is expanding northern bases to
accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft and building long-range conventional missiles and nuclear-powered attack
submarines. India is massing forces on its border with China while sending warships through the South China Sea. The
European Union has labeled Beijing a “systemic rival,” and Europe’s three greatest powers—France, Germany, and the
United Kingdom—have dispatched naval task forces to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A variety of multilateral
anti-China initiatives—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; supply chain alliances; the new so-called AUKUS alliance with
Washington, London, and Canberra; and others—are in the works. The United States’ “multilateral club strategy,”
hawkish and well-connected scholar Yan Xuetong acknowledged in July, is “isolating China” and hurting its development.
No doubt, counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect. But the overall trend is clear: An array of actors is
gradually joining forces to check Beijing’s power and put it in a strategic box. China, in other words, is not a forever-
ascendant country. It is an already-strong , enormously ambitious , and deeply troubled power whose window of
opportunity won’t stay open for long.

A Chinese military band plays

In some ways, all of this is welcome news for Washington: A China that is slowing economically and facing growing
global resistance will find it exceedingly difficult to displace the United States as the world’s leading power—so long as
the United States doesn’t tear itself apart or otherwise give the game away. In other ways, however, the news is more
troubling. History warns the world should expect a peaking China to act more boldly , even erratically , over the coming
decade—to lunge for long-sought strategic prizes before its fortunes fade.

What might this look like? We can make educated guesses based on what China is presently doing.

Beijing is already redoubling its efforts to establish a 21st century sphere of economic influence by dominating critical
technologies —such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G telecommunication s—and using the
resulting leverage to bend states to its will. It will also race to perfect a “digital authoritarianism” that can protect an
insecure Chinese Communist Party’s rule at home while bolstering Beijing’s diplomatic position by exporting that model
to autocratic allies around the world.

In military terms, the Chinese Communist Party may well become increasingly heavy-handed in securing long,
vulnerable supply lines and protecting infrastructure projects in Central and Southwest Asia, Africa, and other
regions, a role some hawks in the People’s Liberation Army are already eager to assume. Beijing could also become
more assertive vis-à-vis Japan, the Philippines, and other countries that stand in the way of its claims to the South and
East China Seas.

Most troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next
decade before Washington and Taipei can finish retooling their militaries to offer a stronger defense. The People’s
Liberation Army is already stepping up its military exercises’ intensity in the Taiwan Strait. Xi has repeatedly declared
Beijing cannot wait forever for its “renegade province” to return to the fold. When the military balance temporarily
shifts further toward China’s favor in the late 2020s and as the Pentagon is forced to retire aging ships and aircraft,
China may never have a better chance of seizing Taiwan and dealing Washington a humiliating defeat.

To be clear, China probably won’t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did in the 1930s and early
1940s. But it will run greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in
the age of a peaking China: a country that already has the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that
will probably run faster and push harder as it loses confidence that time is on its side.

The United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will have to continue
mobilizing for long-term competition while also moving quickly to deter aggression and blunt some of the more
aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to
deal with a rising China. It’s about to discover that a declining China may be even more dangerous.

A sudden decline in Chinese strength triggers great power conflict – they’ll delay a confrontation
now but the perception that their window is closing forces them to lash out
Brands 21 – Professor of Global Affairs, JHU SAIS
Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael Beckley, associate
professor of political science at Tufts University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem: The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not
because its rival is rising but because of the opposite., 24 September 2021, Foreign Policy,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-united-states/

Why do great powers fight great wars? The conventional answer is a story of rising challengers and declining
hegemons. An ascendant power, which chafes at the rules of the existing order, gains ground on an established power
—the country that made those rules. Tensions multiply; tests of strength ensue. The outcome is a spiral of fear and
hostility leading, almost inevitably, to conflict. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired
in Sparta, made war inevitable,” the ancient historian Thucydides wrote—a truism now invoked, ad nauseum, in
explaining the U.S.-China rivalry.

The idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds that the danger of war
will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has endorsed the
concept arguing Washington must make room for Beijing. As tensions between the United States and China escalate,
the belief that the fundamental cause of friction is a looming “power transition ”—the replacement of one hegemon by
another—has become canonical.

The only problem with this familiar formula is that it’s wrong .

The Thucydides Trap doesn’t really explain what caused the Peloponnesian War. It doesn’t capture the dynamics that
have often driven revisionist powers —whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941—to start some of history’s
most devastating conflicts. And it doesn’t explain why war is a very real possibility in U.S.-China relations today
because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development —the point at which its
relative power is peaking and will soon start to fade.

There’s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. But it’s not the product of a power
transition the Thucydidean cliché says it is. It’s best thought of instead as a “peaking power trap.” And if history is any
guide, it’s China’s—not the United States’—impending decline that could cause it to snap shut.

The retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War

There is an entire swath of literature, known as “power transition theory,” which holds that great-power war typically
occurs at the intersection of one hegemon’s rise and another’s decline. This is the body of work underpinning the
Thucydides Trap, and there is, admittedly, an elemental truth to the idea. The rise of new powers is invariably
destabilizing. In the runup to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century B.C., Athens would not have seemed so
menacing to Sparta had it not built a vast empire and become a naval superpower. Washington and Beijing would not be
locked in rivalry if China was still poor and weak. Rising powers do expand their influence in ways that threaten reigning
powers.

But the calculus that produces war—particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers, countries seeking to shake
up the existing system, to lash out violently—is more complex. A country whose relative wealth and power are
growing will surely become more assertive and ambitious. All things equal, it will seek greater global influence and
prestige. But if its position is steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with the reigning hegemon
until it has become even stronger. Such a country should follow the dictum former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping laid
down for a rising China after the Cold War: It should hide its capabilities and bide its time.

Now imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical
horizons. But then the country peaks , perhaps because its economy slows , perhaps because its own assertiveness
provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to
look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these
circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively , to grab what it can before it is too late . The
most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.

As we show in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, this scenario is more common than
you might think. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens started acting more belligerently in the
years before the Peloponnesian War because it feared adverse shifts in the balance of naval power—in other words,
because it was on the verge of losing influence vis-à-vis Sparta. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well.

Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world
average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown —usually don’t fade away quietly . Rather, they become
brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive
spheres of influence abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior
commonly provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Eras of rapid growth supercharge a country’s ambitions, raise its people’s expectations, and
make its rivals nervous. During a sustained economic boom, businesses enjoy rising profits and citizens get used to living
large. The country becomes a bigger player on the global stage. Then stagnation strikes.

Slowing growth makes it harder for leaders to keep the public happy . Economic underperformance weakens the
country against its rivals. Fearing upheaval , leaders crack down on dissent . They maneuver desperately to keep
geopolitical enemies at bay . Expansion seems like a solution—a way of grabbing economic resources and markets,
making nationalism a crutch for a wounded regime, and beating back foreign threats.

Goes nuclear
Dr. Adam Lowther 15, Director, School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies, Air Force Global Strike Command,
with Alex Littlefield is a professor at Feng Chia University, Taiwan and the Prospects for War Between China and
America, August 11, http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/taiwan-and-the-prospects-for-war-between-china-and-america/

Possible Scenario¶ While there are several scenarios where conflict between the United States and China is possible,
some analysts believe that a conflict over Taiwan remains the most likely place where the PRC and the U.S. would
come to blows. Beijing is aware that any coercive action on its part to force Taiwan to accept its political domination
could incur the wrath of the United States. To prevent the U.S. from intervening in the region, China will certainly turn
to its anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy, beginning with non-lethal means and non-lethal threats to discourage
the American public from supporting the use of force in support of Taiwan. ¶ If thwarted in its initial efforts to stop
Chinese aggression against Taiwan, the U nited States may be tempted to resort to stronger measures and attack
mainland China. A kinetic response to a cyber-attack, for example, although an option, would very likely lead to
escalation on the part of the Chinese. Given the regime’s relative weakness and the probability that American attacks
(cyber and conventional) on China will include strikes against PLA command and control (C2) nodes, which mingle
conventional and nuclear C2, the Chinese may escalate to the use of a nuclear weapon (against a U.S. carrier in
China’s self-declared waters for example) as a means of forcing de-escalation. ¶ In the view of China, such a strike
would not be a violation of its no-first-use policy because the strike would occur in sovereign Chinese waters, thus
making the use of nuclear weapons a defensive act. Since Taiwan is a domestic matter, any U.S. intervention would be
viewed as an act of aggression. This, in the minds of the Chinese, makes the United States an outside aggressor, not
China.¶ It is also important to remember that nuclear weapons are an asymmetric response to American conventional
superiority. Given that China is incapable of executing and sustaining a conventional military campaign against the
continental United States, China would clearly have an asymmetry of interest and capability with the United States – far
more is at stake for China than it is for the United States.¶ In essence, the only effective option in retaliation for a
successful U.S. conventional campaign on Chinese soil is the nuclear one. Without making too crude a point, the
nuclear option provides more bang for the buck, or yuan. Given that mutually assured destruction (MAD) is not part
of China’s strategic thinking – in fact it is explicitly rejected – the PRC will see the situation very differently than the
United States.¶ China likely has no desire to become a nuclear peer of the United States. It does not need to be in
order to achieve its geopolitical objectives. However, China does have specific goals that are a part of its stated core
security interests, including reunification with Taiwan. Reunification is necessary for China to reach its unstated goal of
becoming a regional hegemon. As long as Taiwan maintains its de facto independence of China it acts as a literal and
symbolic barrier to China’s power projection beyond the East China Sea. Without Taiwan, China cannot gain military
hegemony in its own neighborhood.¶ China’s maritime land reclamation strategy for Southeast Asia pales in scope and
significance with the historical and political value of Taiwan. With Taiwan returned to its rightful place, the relevance to
China of the U.S. military presence in Japan and South Korea is greatly diminished. China’s relationship with the
Philippines, which lies just to the south of Taiwan, would also change dramatically. ¶ Although China criticizes the United
States for playing the role of global hegemon, it is actively seeking to supplant the United States in Asia so that it can
play a similar role in the region. While Beijing may take a longer view toward geopolitical issues than Washington does,
Chinese political leaders must still be responsive to a domestic audience that demands ever higher levels of prosperity. ¶
Central to China’s ability to guarantee that prosperity is the return of Taiwan, and control of the sea lines of commerce
and communication upon which it relies. Unfortunately, too many Americans underestimate the importance of these
core interests to China and the lengths to which China will ultimately go in order to guarantee them – even the use of
nuclear weapons. ¶ Should China succeed it pushing the United States back, the PRC can deal with regional territorial
disputes bilaterally and without U.S. involvement. After all, Washington invariably takes the non-Chinese side. ¶ China
sees the U.S. as a direct competitor and obstacle to its geopolitical ambitions. As such it is preparing for the next step
in a crisis that it will likely instigate, control, and conclude in the Taiwan Straits . China will likely use the election or
statement of a pro-independence high-ranking official as the impetus for action . This is the same method it used
when it fired missiles in the Straits in response to remarks by then-President Lee Teng-hui, ushering in the 19 96 Taiwan
Straits Crisis. The U.S. brought an end to the mainland’s antics when the U.S.S Nimitz and six additional ships sailed
into the Straits. ¶ Despite the pro-China presidency of Ma Ying-jeou, China continues to expand its missile force
targeting Taiwan and undertakes annual war games that simulate an attack on Taiwan. ¶ China has not forgotten the
humiliation it faced in 1996 and will be certain no U.S. carrier groups have access to the Strait during the next crisis.
The Second Artillery Corps’ nuclear capabilities exist to help secure the results China seeks when the U.S. is caught off-
guard, overwhelmed, and forced to either escalate a crisis or capitulate. ¶ While the scenario described is certainly not
inevitable, the fact than many American readers will see it as implausible if not impossible is an example of the mirror-
imaging that often occurs when attempting to understand an adversary. China is not the United States nor do Chinese
leaders think like their counterparts in the United States. Unless we give serious thought to possible scenarios where
nuclear conflict could occur, the United States may be unprepared for a situation that escalates beyond its ability to
prevent a catastrophe.

Advantage 1
Winning the tech race means extinction that’s 1NC Brands – A rising U.S. capability gives Xi and
strategic leaders the perception their window of opportunity to achieve core national gains like
control over Taiwan is waning. That means they’ll run the risk of escalation by invading before the
U.S. innovative project is complete.
That’ll draw the U.S. in and is incredibly likely to go nuclear
Sweeney 21 – fellow at Defense Priorities
Mike Sweeney, “WHY A TAIWAN CONFLICT COULD GO NUCLEAR,” Defense Priorities, March 4, 2021,
https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/why-a-taiwan-conflict-could-go-nuclear
THE CENTRALITY OF TAIWAN IN CHINESE THINKING

At this point, it is worth underscoring the obvious: Not all U.S.-China conflicts must inevitably end in a nuclear
exchange. It is possible to imagine scenarios in which there is a military clash that remains limited to conventional
forces. A war over the Senkakus in the East China Sea or the Spratlys in the South China Sea has less chance of
escalating to the level of an existential conflict. But that is not true where those two seas meet: Taiwan . It is physically
closer to the mainland—essentially China’s “doorstep”—and also occu pies a far more prominent place in China’s
national psyche . Taiwan is unlike any other issue in Chinese foreign policy precisely because that is not the prism
through which Beijing views the island. Rather, it is a domestic issue. Put differently, for Beijing, Taiwan is already
Chinese territory.31

While one can technically make the argument that China feels the same about various disputed islands in both the South
and East China Seas, uninhabited atolls do not carry the same historical weight as Taiwan, not just for modern China
but for the CCP itself . Since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, CCP leadership has sought to absorb the island.
During the 1950s, a series of clashes played out between Communist and Nationalist forces on the ancillary islands of
the Taiwan Strait, each of which ended with some form of U.S. intervention on the side of Taipei.

The intervening decades have done little to cool China’s enthusiasm for reunification. The early years of the post-Cold
War world saw a revival in tension over Taiwan after the election of Lee Teng-hui, who was perceived by the mainland as
overly assertive on Taiwanese sovereignty. Lee’s presidency sparked a renewed crisis in the Taiwan Strait during 1995
and 1996, with China employing missile tests and military exercises to deter action toward greater ROC
independence.32 The Clinton administration responded at one point with the deployment of two carrier battlegroups,
one of which sailed through the Taiwan Strait itself in a deliberate, high-profile show of force. China’s inability to deter
those U.S. deployments is often viewed as a precipitating event for its ambitious program of naval modernization during
the ensuing 25 years.33

In a recent survey of China’s grand strategy, political scientist Avery Goldstein argues that under President Xi Jinping
there has been even less room for diffidence on China’s core interests than his immediate predecessors, with no
concern more basic to the regime’s concept of identity than dominion over Taiwan .34 The island will remain an
obsession for the Chinese leadership because, as Goldstein notes, the CCP long ago “identified restoring sovereignty
over Taiwan as an essential part of the effort to recover territory China lost during the ‘century of humiliation.’”35
Reunification goes beyond a vital interest to a basic article of faith in China’s destiny.

Compounding matters, the Chinese public is likely to be deeply invested and supportive of a Taiwan campaign once
begun. While polling in China is hardly an exact science, one study of multiple opinion surveys found a discernible
hawkish bent among the Chinese populace, especially among the younger generations who have undergone so-called
“patriotic education,” instituted in 1994.36 This particularly could be the case if U.S. forces were to attempt
conventional strikes against air bases, missile launchers, radars, and other facilities on the Chinese mainland. Even
though these are military targets, additional collateral damage and civilian casualties are likely. Such attacks could
further inflame public sentiment in favor of the war—and against capitulation in the face of defeat—boxing in China’s
leadership in the event of conventional setbacks.37

Finally, the existential nature of a potential Taiwan campaign is underscored by China’s understanding of its own
military history. As naval scholar Toshi Yoshihara has pointed out, there is heightened recognition among the Chinese
of the relationship between major defeat at sea and regime stability.38 For example, it is possible to draw a line from
the Japanese destruction of the Qing Dynasty fleet at the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894 through to the Boxer Rebellion
five years later.39 Fleets that take immense treasure and decades to construct can be destroyed in a matter of days (or
even an afternoon) and the consequences for the nation seldom end with the loss of tonnage.

MAXIMALIST AIMS WILL INVITE MAXIMALIST MEANS

These factors raise an essential point in the calculation regarding Chinese nuclear use: how does any leader survive a
defeat over a core tenet of modern Chinese identity like dominion over Taiwan? Or as Ambassador Chas Freeman has
put it, for Beijing, a war over Taiwan could “escalate to the nuclear level against the domestic political consequences
of accepting humiliation on the core issue of Chinese nationalism .”40

Freeman’s point is worth dwelling on. Any battle over Taiwan will not just be a question of territorial aggression but a
fight over the core conception of modern China’s soul . And for the leaders who launch such an endeavor, their political
futures will hinge on the outcome, as will, possibly, their physical safety and that of their families in the event of
failure. Under such circumstances, nuclear use might not be palatable, but it could seem far more plausible if military
defeat were to equate to loss of domestic power and possible death anyway.

Paul Heer, a former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, has argued that China is not seeking excuses to invade
Taiwan. To the contrary, in his view, Beijing fears action by either Washington or Taipei to alter the status quo thereby
forcing China’s hand militarily.41

Given the stakes for any leader who ordered an invasion, such trepidation is understandable. Even with highly
favorable conditions, amphibious landings remain among the most complex and risky of all military operations. And
current conditions—including the immaturity of China’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities,42 its lack of
amphibious lift, the capabilities of the U.S. Navy, and the 100-mile width of the Taiwan Strait—cannot be construed as
entirely favorable despite other advantages, such as Taiwan’s overall proximity and the general growth in Chinese
military power.

On the one hand, this is good news as it discourages the likelihood of an overt attempt by China to capture Taiwan. On
the other, it means that should such an operation be dared , all elements of Chinese national power would eventually
be on the table, especially if U.S. intervention is forthcoming and proves decisive in the early going. This might be the
case even if nuclear use was not seen as a viable option by Chinese leaders at the outset of the campaign. The
prospect of catastrophic defeat could change their thinking .

China’s push for tech dominance is specifically motivated by fears of being eclipsed by the US––
turns revisionist powers arugment
Burrows 21 – serves as the director of Foresight in the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and as the co-director of New
American Engagement Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Mathew Burrows, Julian Mueller-Kaler, a resident senior fellow with the GeoTech Center and with the Scowcroft
Strategy Initiative, Kaisa Oksanen, a Senior Researcher at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Unit for Policy
Planning and Research, and Ossi Piironen, a Senior Researcher at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Unit for
Policy Planning and Research, “Unpacking the geopolitics of technology: How Second- and Third-Order Implications of
Emerging Tech are Changing the World,” The Atlantic Council, December 8, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/12/GTC_Unpacking-the-Geopolitics-of-Technology.pdf

More recently, Beijing’s added push to speed up its innovation capacity is motivated by fears of the United States
stopping the country in its tracks , preventing it from becoming an innovation leader . Since 2016, those fears are more
than illusory, as the former Trump administration blacklisted Chinese firms, cutting off supplies of vital goods and
services to China and waging an international campaign against countries adopting communications equipment from
Chinese companies, most notably Huawei.45

Alarmed by the speed at which China has mastered and became a leader in some technologies, the United States
believes it still holds a large advantage in computer chips, which could slow China’s tech dominance. At this point in
time, the country still lacks chipmakers that can compete with the likes of Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co., although it is pouring gigantic resources into building up its own. “Every US market leader in the
computer chip industry now has a Chinese ‘doppelgänger’ that is being positioned to take its place as a vendor,”
according to the Financial Times.46

Furthermore, China has launched an intensified effort to “de-Americanize” its supply chains . For many in the
leadership who always wanted to make China less dependent on others, the US trade war and Huawei sanctions have
arguably given decision-makers in Beijing the necessary cover for something it has long desired.47 US-Chinese tensions
have consolidated domestic industry support for “localizing production.” There is a countrywide consensus that China
must build a viable semi-conductor. Chinese companies used to prefer US products because they were seen as superior;
increasingly, however, aspiring local chipmakers are working with Chinese firms to perfect their inputs. This homegrown
industry has the potential to hurt US companies in the medium and long term. China accounts for at least 25 percent
of the sales of most US chipmakers, which is why US companies such as Qualcomm are lobbying the Biden
administration to weaken restrictions on sales to China. Few in Beijing’s decision-making circles believe 100 percent de-
Americanization is a realistic goal in the near future, but the rapid growth of Chinese start-ups in recent years shows
the potential for them to become semiconductor leaders, threatening US market share in China and elsewhere in the
world.

The country is becoming more competitive in other technologies as well . Chinese cloud service providers are gaining
speed rapidly, benefiting from government efforts to prioritize local companies. Yet China’s cloud service providers are
expanding beyond the home market . Their lower cost is a key factor in their expansion in Europe and Australia, while
cultural similarities are an attraction for the Southeast Asian market. China’s Belt and Road project and its related
Digital Silk Road also create opportunities.

Some internal factors have influenced the rapid pace of China’s advances. A report by the US National Security
Commission on Artificial Intelligence projects that “within the next decade, China could surpass the United States as
the world’s AI superpower,”48 and notes that AI entrepreneurs in China benefit from a ready supply of data to test
their algorithms in an environment where the public is less skeptical than in the West about embracing new innovations,
such as mobile payment platforms that provide ample data on consumer habits.49 While Chinese consumers are
becoming more concerned about how the leading tech companies use their data, they are more trusting of the
government. The country has turned into “a surprise leader in Asia on data privacy rules,” according to the Financial
Times, but the rules on data protection apply only to tech companies and not the government.50 The recently
established social credit system uses “big data” gathered on everybody’s movements, buying habits, and opinions as
voiced on social media to determine trustworthiness. Apparently, “the goal is to construct a high-trust society which
rewards individuals and companies for following the law.”51 Notwithstanding regional variations, there are distinct
social credit systems for citizens, businesses, and government officials. Such a surveillance state—repugnant to
Westerners—is tolerated by most Chinese because it reduces crime, while the government uses it for social control
and stability.

AT: Exports Authoritarianism

Even if China becomes more repressive at home, it doesn’t export that authoritarianism abroad –
prefers steady expansion leveraging economic power
Wong 21 – Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program

Audrye Wong, “How not to win allies and influence geopolitics,” MIT Center for International Studies, appeared in
Foreign Affairs May/June 2021, https://cis.mit.edu/publications/analysis-opinion/2021/how-not-win-allies-and-
influence-geopolitics

Over the past few decades, China’s global economic footprint has grown enormously. In 1995, China accounted for just
three percent of global trade, but by 2018, thanks to massive economic growth, it accounted for 12 percent—the largest
share of any country. In 2020, in part due to the pandemic, China became the EU’s largest trading partner, displacing
the United States. Chinese foreign investment has expanded rapidly in the developing world, too, with Chinese
companies and banks plowing money into Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Beijing has also taken on an active
leadership role in global economic governance, its confidence boosted by having weathered the 2008 global financial
crisis well. In 2014, China unveiled the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a multilateral development bank with an
initial capitalization of $100 billion that has since grown to include more than 100 countries. Many of them are
traditional US partners and allies that joined over Washington’s objections.

What does China want to do with all this newfound economic power? The opacity of China’s political system leads
many to ascribe its behavior to a centralized decision-making process pursuing a coherent grand strategy, but Chinese
policies are in fact often the product of competition and compromise among a tangle of actors—local governments,
high-level bureaucracies, state-owned enterprises, private firms, and more. Consider the BRI. What began as a vague
and sprawling plan has taken on a life of its own, at times hijacked by opportunistic government officials and companies
seeking to feather their own nests. Many of the constituent projects are motivated less by some grand strategic
blueprint than by the preferences of individual actors.

Another error is to assume that China’s actions are driven by a desire to export its own autocratic political system and
statist economic system. True, Xi has grown increasingly repressive at home and assertive abroad, but China is still
preoccupied more with safeguarding its own interests than with trying to remake other countries in its own image.
Even though China seeks to reshape the international system to reflect its priorities, that is a far cry from trying to
overturn the order altogether.

What really drives China’s economic statecraft is not grand strategic designs or autocratic impulses but something
more practical and immediate: stability and survival. The Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental objective is to
preserve the legitimacy of its rule. China’s economic statecraft, then, is often employed to put out immediate fires
and protect the CCP’s domestic and international image . China wants to stamp out criticism and reward those who
support its policies. This is particularly true when it comes to issues involving national sovereignty and territorial
integrity (such as Taiwan , Tibet, and the East China and South China Seas) and domestic governance (such as China’s
treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic).

Beijing approaches its efforts to convert economic prowess into geopolitical influence in a number of different ways.
China has often leveraged the size of its domestic market to impose trade restrictions on countries it wishes to punish,
but in targeted and symbolic ways that minimize damage to its own economy. The Chinese government imposed
sanctions on Norwegian salmon exports after the dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and it
blocked Philippine banana exports after a flare-up in tensions in the South China Sea, in both cases on the supposed
grounds of food safety. It has also taken advantage of its size by encouraging boycotts—urging Chinese consumers, for
example, not to patronize a South Korean department store chain in an attempt to dissuade Seoul from deploying a US-
led missile defense system. Capitalizing on China’s position as a top foreign investor and technology producer, the
Chinese government and Chinese firms have played active roles in international standard-setting bodies and
promoted the export of Chinese equipment, particularly of emerging technologies —some with national security
implications, such as 5G and artificial intelligence.
 Corporate Rights DA: Wake

Extending the category of rights and duties to nature get distorted into expansion of legal rights for
corporate interests – link alone turns the entirety of case
Anna Grear ’19, is professor of law at Cardiff University, and the founder and editor in chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, “It’s
wrongheaded to protect nature with human-style rights”, Aeon, 3/19/19, https://aeon.co/ideas/its-wrongheaded-to-protect-nature-with-human-style-rights

How can the law account for the value of complex, nonhuman entities such as rivers, lakes, forests and ecosystems ?
At a time of runaway climate change, when the Earth’s biosphere is on the brink of collapse and species extinctions are
accelerating, this has become a vital question.

Some theorists argue that there’s a clear historical precedent for what we should do, arising from the struggle for
universal human rights. The law and discourse of human rights, commonly traced back to the Enlightenment, has held
sway over the sections of the Western public for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps we should take the idea of ‘the
human’ as a rights-bearer and extend it to the complex, nonhuman systems that we wish to protect, that we know
are deserving of care and concern.

Tempting as it is, this move must be resisted . For one thing, human rights have proven to be exclusionary – even
within our own species. Its emergence as a set of legal and moral norms betrays the fact that the white, European,
male property-owner is the paradigm case of ‘the human’: others, historically, have had to fight even to be seen as
fully capable of bearing rights. International treaties have been required to address the rights of women, children,
workers, LGBT people, indigenous communities and others, precisely because such ‘minorities’ were marginalised by the
abstract idea of ‘the human’ of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Critics have also suggested that human
rights norms are a Trojan horse for neo-imperialism, providing ideological cover for dubious ‘humanitarian’
interventions and capitalist plundering. In theory, human rights are for all humans, but it turns out that some people
are more human than others.

Yet maybe there’s something to be salvaged from rights discourse all the same – if we can find a way to deploy the idea
of ‘rights’ while decentring ‘the human’. Perhaps we can find ways of understanding ourselves as entangled partners,
and sometimes co-sufferers, with nonhuman animals, beings and systems in a ‘more-than-human world’, as the gender
scholar Astrida Neimanis at the University of Sydney put it in an article in 2014.

Certain dangers lurk in using human rights to capture the interests of the nonhuman . First, its
language and conceptual framing risk blunting attention to the distinctiveness and particularities of such dynamic
beings. We risk only having respect for things insofar as they resemble human experience and characteristics.

Secondly, and just as important, is the related danger of diminishing our awareness of the human itself as a variegated
mode of being in the world. This danger is already starkly present in the advent of corporate human rights, a
development that has distorted the entire international human rights paradigm. At the heart of these
developments is a legal conflation of the ‘human’ and the ‘person’ – a merger by which global
capital can claim the mantle of humanity in ways that risk harming real, living people . The human right to health, for
example, can be cast as a byproduct of big pharma protecting intellectual property monopolies; or the human right to
food can be deployed as a justification for agribusiness companies to dominate global food supplies.

Return to unrestrained corporate rights focus causes democratic backsliding into libertarian
dictatorship
Heer ’16 – is a senior editor at the New Republic (Jeet, “The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy”, 10/24/16, New Republic,
https://newrepublic.com/article/138019/right-giving-democracy)//CW
Thiel’s disdain for democracy has roots in a long tradition among hardcore libertarians who have a tendency to prefer
dictatorships that ensure property rights to social democracies that tax the rich and provide welfare to the masses .
This is why prominent libertarians like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek supported right-wing dictators, ranging
from Mussolini (Mises) to Pinochet (Hayek). The most recent heir to the tradition of Mises and Hayek is the economist
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and occasional associate of Thiel. Hoppe’s book,
Democracy: The God That Failed, argues that monarchy is preferable to modern mass democracy.

Beyond the musings of Thiel and Hoppe, libertarian legal scholars are pushing to use the courts to limit democratic
sovereignty over the economy. As Brian Beutler reported in the New Republic last year, conservative legal theory is
increasingly being influenced by the work of Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett, a radical libertarian who
wants to revive the legal tradition found in cases like Lochner v. New York (1905), which would render much
government welfare policy since the late 1930s as unconstitutional.

Lochnerism is a fundamentally anti-democratic legal doctrine rooted in the idea that property rights should override
laws made by democratically elected officials . As University of Michigan legal scholar Sam Bagenstos notes, a
full embrace of Lochnerism would scuttle Obamacare and much more: “Laws guaranteeing workers the right to join a
union without being fired, and the right to earn a minimum wage and receive overtime if working more than 40 hours
a week, laws protecting worker safety, and laws protecting workers and customers against discrimination based on
race or other protected statuses, just for starters.” Just for starters.

Democratic collapse is an existential threat --- controls every impact

Kasparov 17 (Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, former World Chess Champion, “Democracy
and Human Rights: The Case for U.S. Leadership,” Testimony Before The Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere,
Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues of the U.S. Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, February 16 th, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/021617_Kasparov_
%20Testimony.pdf)

As one of the countless millions of people who were freed or protected from totalitarianism by the United States of
America, it is easy for me to talk about the past. To talk about the belief of the American people and their leaders that
this country was exceptional, and had special responsibilities to match its tremendous power. That a nation founded on
freedom was bound to defend freedom everywhere. I could talk about the bipartisan legacy of this most American
principle, from the Founding Fathers, to Democrats like Harry Truman, to Republicans like Ronald Reagan. I could talk
about how the American people used to care deeply about human rights and dissidents in far-off places, and how this is
what made America a beacon of hope, a shining city on a hill. America led by example and set a high standard, a
standard that exposed the hypocrisy and cruelty of dictatorships around the world. But there is no time for nostalgia .
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, Americans, and America,
have retreated from those principles, and the world has become much worse off as a result . American skepticism
about America’s role in the world deepened in the long, painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their aftermaths.
Instead of applying the lessons learned about how to do better, lessons about faulty intelligence and working with native
populations, the main outcome was to stop trying. This result has been a tragedy for the billions of people still living
under authoritarian regimes around the world, and it is based on faulty analysis. You can never guarantee a positive
outcome— not in chess, not in war, and certainly not in politics. The best you can do is to do what you know is right and
to try your best. I speak from experience when I say that the citizens of unfree states do not expect guarantees. They
want a reason to hope and a fighting chance. People living under dictatorships want the opportunity for freedom, the
opportunity to live in peace and to follow their dreams. From the Iraq War to the Arab Spring to the current battles for
liberty from Venezuela to Eastern Ukraine, people are fighting for that opportunity, giving up their lives for freedom. The
United States must not abandon them. The United States and the rest of the free world has an unprecedented
advantage in economic and military strength today. What is lacking is the will. The will to make the case to the
American people, the will to take risks and invest in the long-term security of the country, and the world. This will
require investments in aid, in education, in security that allow countries to attain the stability their people so badly
need. Such investment is far more moral and far cheaper than the cycle of terror, war , refugees, and military
intervention that results when America leaves a vacuum of power. The best way to help refugees is to prevent them
from becoming refugees in the first place. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, and this focused the attention of
the world, and the American people. There existential threat today is not found on a map, but it is very real . The
forces of the past are making steady progress against the modern world order. Terrorist movements in the Middle
East, extremist parties across Europe, a paranoid tyrant in North Korea threatening nuclear blackmail, and, at the
center of the web, an aggressive KGB dictator in Russia . They all want to turn the world back to a dark past because
their survival is threatened by the values of the free world, epitomized by the United States. And they are thriving as
the U.S. has retreated . The global freedom index has declined for ten consecutive years. No one like to talk about the
United States as a global policeman, but this is what happens when there is no cop on the beat. American leadership
begins at home , right here. America cannot lead the world on democracy and human rights if there is no unity on the
meaning and importance of these things. Leadership is required to make that case clearly and powerfully . Right now,
Americans are engaged in politics at a level not seen in decades. It is an opportunity for them to rediscover that
making America great begins with believing America can be great. The Cold War was won on American values that
were shared by both parties and nearly every American. Institutions that were created by a Democrat, Truman, were
triumphant forty years later thanks to the courage of a Republican, Reagan. This bipartisan consistency created the
decades of strategic stability that is the great strength of democracies. Strong institutions that outlast politicians allow
for long-range planning. In contrast, dictators can operate only tactically, not strategically, because they are not
constrained by the balance of powers, but cannot afford to think beyond their own survival. This is why a dictator like
Putin has an advantage in chaos, the ability to move quickly. This can only be met by strategy, by long-term goals that
are based on shared values, not on polls and cable news. The fear of making things worse has paralyzed the United
States from trying to make things better. There will always be setbacks, but the United States cannot quit. The spread of
democracy is the only proven remedy for nearly every crisis that plagues the world today. War, famine, poverty,
terrorism –all are generated and exacerbated by authoritarian regimes. A policy of America First inevitably puts
American security last. American leadership is required because there is no one else , and because it is good for
America. There is no weapon or wall that is more powerful for security than America being envied, imitated, and
admired around the world. Admired not for being perfect, but for having the exceptional courage to always try to be
better. Thank you.
 <>Court Clog DA; Dartmouth

The plan opens a floodgate of litigation.

Bhati, 20 -- Lecturer at Jindal Global Law School, OPJGU, specializing in environmental, natural resources and energy
law

[Harsh Vardhan, "Rights of Nature: The Ascent from Legal Object to Legal Person (Analysis)," Nluo Blog for Animal and
Environmental Jurisprudence and Rights, 7-20-2020,
http://dspace.jgu.edu.in:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10739/3938/RIGHTS%20OF%20NATURE%20%3A%20THE
%20ASCENT%20FROM%20LEGAL%20OBJECT%20TO%20LEGAL%20PERSON%20%28Analysis
%29%20%E2%80%93%20NLUO%20Blog%20for%20Animal%20and%20Environmental%20Jurisprudence%20and
%20Rights.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, accessed 5-31-2022; AD]

First challenge is that these decisions will open a floodgate of litigation where some people will be asking courts to
grant similar rights as Ganga to other rivers having deep-rooted religious and sacred connotations. Whereas, other
people will be charged with assault and “murder for damaging the legal entity.”[lxv] For examples, in rivers case,
people could sue the river for flooding and river could sue the people for polluting and interrupting its continuous flow
by building up dams. For forests, people could sue the forests for wildfire damages and forests could sue people for
clear cutting , habitat destruction and land-use change for non-forest purposes. And, I could go on and on. Madhya
Pradesh agriculture and farmer welfare minister Kamal Patel stated that Narmada river was a living entity and therefore
collectors have been told to register attempt to murder cases against sand miners for causing harm to the water body in
May 2020.[lxvi]

Efficient court review is key to economic growth.

Shepard, 11 -- former Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court
[Randall T. Shepard, "The Judiciary's Role in Economic Prosperity," Vol. 44 No. 4 (2011): Survey of Recent Developments
in Indiana Law, 1-4-2011, https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol44p987.pdf, accessed 9-8-2022; AD]

In the modern regulatory state, the law is completely interwoven with the economy , and business regulation has
grown beyond merely settling disputes between feuding merchants, although settling contract disputes is still a core
judicial function. The ubiquitous impact of legal rules on the economy was observable in Goldman Sachs’s recent
debacle involving the sale of privately held stock in Facebook. After quietly approaching many of its top clients about
purchasing Facebook stock, Goldman decided not to extend the opportunity to American investors and instead sold the
stock to only foreign investors. The 6 press had extensively publicized the Facebook transaction, and Goldman feared
that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would view the news coverage as advertising, thus triggering
reporting requirements and creating a potential for litigation. Observing this sequence of events, one commentator
declared that “SEC regulation and the litigious atmosphere it fosters” are moving capital markets offshore, with a
number of U.S. companies choosing to list their stocks only on foreign exchanges.7

While such dramas do not often make their way into public discourse, it can hardly be doubted that businesses regularly
react to the legal environment around in them and vote with their feet when raising capital or creating new jobs . In
his most recent State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama emphasized that the United States needs to stay
competitive with up and comers like China and India. He made multiple recommendations to Congress about how to
accomplish 8 that goal. While the nation ponders government’s role in the economy, it would 9 be good for lawyers and
judges to reflect on what courts can do to keep our economy competitive.

Every year the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ponders this
question when it releases a report ranking the business climate associated with various state judiciaries. The aim of
the analysis is to “quantify how corporate attorneys view the state systems.” 10 The study gives each state an overall
ranking and then ranks the states in ten different categories. The Chamber Institute surveys “in-house general counsel,
11 senior litigators or attorneys, and other senior executives at companies with at least $100 million in annual
revenues.”12

When asked “[h]ow likely would you say it is that the litigation environment in a state could affect an important
business decision at your company such as where to locate or do business,” 67% of respondents stated “very likely” or
“somewhat likely.” This response is important because “locat[ing] or do[ing] 13 business” could mean whether a
business stays in Illinois or moves to Indiana. It could determine whether a business stays in Indiana or moves to India.
“[I]mportant decisions” could also include whether to hold on to capital to pay for future lawsuits or whether to use
that capital to expand and create more jobs.

All this raises the question, “What can courts do to aid job creation and retention?” There are three things that courts
can do without overstepping their limited role in popular governance. First, courts must aspire to treat similar cases alike
by using clear and predictable rules in tort and contract law. Second, courts must be impartial and treat all litigants alike
whether they are corporations or individuals. Third, the judiciary must strive to resolve disputes quickly and without
undue expense.

There are respectable principles for approaching all sorts of litigation involving any citizens, but they impact economic
enterprises in ways that affect all of us. It is no secret that companies will hesitate to innovate in the face of uncertain
liability. Innovation is what drives economic growth, and thus drives 14 job creation. When companies are unsure of the
outcome, when a deal sours, or when companies fear uncertain liability in tort, they are less likely to consummate some
deals and more likely to keep some new products from the market. Justice Holmes once said of the legal profession that

[p]eople want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much
stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of
our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the
courts. 15

And thus it is that predictability allows businesses to know what actions may get them haled into court and how much
they will owe. When better able to predict the risk, enterprises can more effectively plan their affairs, allowing them
to expand current initiatives and enter new markets . Predictability and reliability 16 also assure businesses that their
contracts will be enforced and their intellectual property protected.

Extinction – a strong economy caps numerous geopolitical crises.

Baird 20 [Zoe; October 2020; C.E.O. and President of the Markle Foundation, Member of the Aspen Strategy Group
and former Trustee at the Council on Foreign Relations, J.D. and A.B. from the University of California at Berkeley;
Domestic and International (Dis)order: A Strategic Response, “Equitable Economic Recovery is a National Security
Imperative,” Ch. 13]

A strong and inclusive economy is essential for American national security and global leadership . As the nation seeks
to return from a historic economic crisis, the national security community should support an equitable recovery that
helps every worker adapt to the seismic shifts underway in our economy.

Broadly shared economic prosperity is a bedrock of America’s economic and political strength —both domestically
and in the international arena. A strong and equitable recovery from the economic crisis created by COVID-19 would
be a powerful testament to the resilience of the American system and its ability to create prosperity at a time of
seismic change and persistent global crisis . Such a recovery could attack the profound economic inequities that have
developed over the past several decades. Without bold action to help all workers access good jobs as the economy
returns, the U nited States risks undermining the legitimacy of its institutions and its international standing . The
outcome will be a key determinant of America’s national security for years to come.
An equitable recovery requires a national commitment to help all workers obtain good jobs—particularly the two-thirds
of adults without a bachelor’s degree and people of color who have been most affected by the crisis and were denied
opportunity before it. As the nation engages in a historic debate about how to accelerate economic recovery, ambitious
public investment is necessary to put Americans back to work with dignity and opportunity. We need an intentional
effort to make sure that the jobs that come back are good jobs with decent wages, benefits, and mobility and to
empower workers to access these opportunities in a profoundly changed labor market.

To achieve these goals, America n policy makers need to establish job growth strategies that address urgent public
needs through major programs in green energy, infrastructure, and health. Alongside these job growth strategies, we
need to recognize and develop the talents of workers by creating an adult learning system that meets workers’ needs
and develops skills for the digital economy. The national security community must lend its support to this cause. And as
it does so, it can bring home the lessons from the advances made in these areas in other countries, particularly our
European allies, and consider this a realm of international cooperation and international engagement.

Shared Economic Prosperity Is a National Security Asset

A strong economy is essential to America’s security and diplomatic strategy . Economic strength increases our
influence on the global stage, expands markets , and funds a strong and agile military and national defense . Yet it is
not enough for America’s economy to be strong for some—prosperity must be broadly shared. Widespread belief in the
ability of the American economic system to create economic security and mobility for all —the American Dream—
creates credibility and legitimacy for America’s values , governance , and alliances around the world.

After World War II, the U nited States grew the middle class to historic size and strength. This achievement made
America the model of the free world— setting the stage for decades of American political and economic leadership .
Domestically, broad participation in the economy is core to the legitimacy of our democracy and the strength of our
political institutions. A belief that the economic system works for millions is an important part of creating trust in a
democratic government’s ability to meet the needs of the people.

The COVID-19 Crisis Puts Millions of American Workers at Risk

For the last several decades, the American Dream has been on the wane. Opportunity has been increasingly
concentrated in the hands of a small share of workers able to access the knowledge economy. Too many Americans,
particularly those without four-year degrees, experienced stagnant wages, less stability, and fewer opportunities for
advancement.

Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs or income and are struggling to meet their basic needs—including food,
housing, and medical care.1 The crisis has impacted sectors like hospitality, leisure, and retail, which employ a large
share of America’s most economically vulnerable workers, resulting in alarming disparities in unemployment rates along
education and racial lines. In August, the unemployment rate for those with a high school degree or less was more than
double the rate for those with a bachelor’s degree.2 Black and Hispanic Americans are experiencing disproportionately
high unemployment, with the gulf widening as the crisis continues.3

The experience of the Great Recession shows that without intentional effort to drive an inclusive recovery, inequality
may get worse: while workers with a high school education or less experienced the majority of job losses, nearly all new
jobs went to workers with postsecondary education. Inequalities across racial lines also increased as workers of color
worked in the hardest-hit sectors and were slower to recover earnings and income than White workers.4

The Case for an Inclusive Recovery

A recovery that promotes broad economic participation, renewed opportunity, and equity will strengthen American
moral and political authority around the world . It will send a strong message about the strength and resilience of
democratic government and the American people’s ability to adapt to a changing global economic landscape. An
inclusive recovery will reaffirm American leadership as core to the success of our most critical international alliances,
which are rooted in the notion of shared destiny and interdependence. For example, NATO, which has been a
cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and a force of global stability for decades, has suffered from American disengagement
in recent years. A strong American recovery —coupled with a renewed openness to international collaboration—is core
to NATO’s ability to solve shared geopolitical and security challenges. A renewed partnership with our European allies
from a position of economic strength will enable us to address global crises such as climate change , global
pandemics , and refugees . Together, the United States and Europe can pursue a commitment to investing in workers for
shared economic competitiveness, innovation, and long-term prosperity.

The U.S. has unique advantages that give it the tools to emerge from the crisis with tremendous economic strength —
including an entrepreneurial spirit and the technological and scientific infrastructure to lead global efforts in developing
industries like green energy and biosciences that will shape the international economy for decades to come.
 <>Court Clog DA: KY

Personhood clogs the courts.

Kelsey Kobil 16, J.D. Candidate, The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University, “When it Comes to
Standing, Two Legs are Better than Four,” Penn State Law Review, 2016, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?
h=hein.journals/dlr120&i=641

B. Significant Negative Consequences Will Result From Granting Animals Legal Personhood Status

Professor Richard Epstein 147 stated that "[t]here would be nothing left of human society if we treated animals not as
property, but as independent holders of rights."'148 In Rabideau v. City of Racine,149 Judge Bablitch considered
whether animals were properly classified as property." ° Judge Bablitch reiterated Epstein's concern.' 51 Judge Bablitch
expressed his sympathy for humans who form deep bonds and "devoted friendship[s]" with dogs, and likewise
expressed his disdain for classifying dogs as property. 52 Despite this sympathy, Judge Bablitch recognized that removing
the property classification from dogs would result in eventually removing the property distinction from all animals . 153

Professor Epstein and Judge Bablitch envisioned the chaos that would result from granting legal rights to animals, and
this chaos will begin if animals are granted standing to sue . Hundreds or even thousands of cases would clog the
court dockets if animal rights activists could file suit with animals as the plaintiffs, with these "plaintiffs" ranging from
cattle on farms, to monkeys in laboratories, to domesticated cats and dogs in households.1 54 Furthermore, courts
would be tasked with handling claims and regulating industries that Congress intended to be controlled entirely by
administrative agencies . 55

Efficient court review underpins patent-led innovation---that stops nuclear war and a range of
existential threats
Robert J. Rando 16, Founder and Lead Counsel of The Rando Law Firm P.C., Fellow of the Academy of Court-Appointed
Masters, Treasurer for the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, Chair of the Federal Bar Association
Intellectual Property Law Section, “America’s Need For Strong, Stable and Sound Intellectual Property Protection and
Policies: Why It Really Matters”, IP Insight, June 2016, p. 12-14 [language modified] [abbreviations in brackets]

Robert F. Kennedy’s speech, which includes his reference to the oft-quoted “interesting times” curse, applies throughout
history in many contexts and, indeed, with both negative and positive connotation. While he focused on the struggles
for freedom and social justice, the requisite ascendancy of the individual over the state, and the institution and
integration of those ideals for the greater good, he also promoted the goals of greater global unity, cooperation and
communication , which were, and could be, achieved by advances in tech nology. And, as noted in the excerpt, he
championed “the creative energy of men.”
Intellectual Property in “Interesting Times”

It is beyond question that starting with the last decade of the twentieth century and throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, when it comes to matters relating to intellectual property, we have been
living in “interesting times.” Some may interpret these interesting times as defined by the curse and others may view it by the ordinary meaning of “interesting.” In either case, those of us that toil in the fields of patents,
copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and privacy rights have experienced an unprecedented sea change in the way those rights are procured, protected and enforced. Likewise, and perhaps more importantly, even those
of us that do not practice in these areas of law, as well as the general public, have been, and continue to be, impacted by the consequences of these changes (both positive and negative).

The Changes In Intellectual Property Law

Examples of some of the changes in intellectual property law are: the sweeping 2011 legislative changes to the patent laws under the America Invents Act (AIA), which impact is only beginning to be fully appreciated; the
various proposals for patent law reform, on the heels of the AIA, beginning with the 113th and 114th Congress; the copyright laws Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and numerous 114th Congressional proposed
copyright law changes; the recently enacted federal trade secret law (Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA))2; the impact of the internet, domain names and globalization on Trademark law; the intellectual property law
harmonization requirements included in various global/regional trade agreements; and the proliferation of devices (both invasive and non-invasive) that defy any rational basis for believing we can still adhere to the
republic’s libertarian understanding of the right to privacy.

Without engaging in “chicken and egg” analysis, it is sufficient to observe that technological advancement , societal
needs , globalization , existential threats , economic realities , and political imperatives (or what James Madison
referred to in the Federalist Papers No. 10 as factious governance), have combine d to create the “interesting times” for
the United States [IP] intellectual property laws.

What was said by Bobby Kennedy in 1966 remains true today. We live in dangerous and uncertain times. Many of the
existential threats remain the same ( nuclear war and proliferation, [genocides] genocidal maniacs and natural
disease ) and some are new ([hu]manmade disease, greater awareness of environmental changes and possibly
human interrelationship factors, and the unintended consequences of genetic manipulation and robotic
technologies ). The danger and uncertainty that pervades changes in intellectual property laws, though not an
existential threat of the same manner and kind, correlates with the threat and remains “more open to the creative
energy of man than any other time in history.”

Apropos the creative energy of man, there is a non-coincidental congruence and convergence of activity across and
among the three branches of government, occurring almost simultaneously with the congruence and convergence of
the rapid developments of technological innovation across various scientific disciplines and the information age,
reflected in the transformation of the [IP] intellectual property laws in the United States.
Patents

The passage of the AIA was a culmination of efforts spanning several years of Congressional efforts; and the product of a push by the companies at the forefront of the twenty-
first century new technology business titans. The legislation brought about monumental changes in the patent law in the way that patents are procured (first
inventor to file instead of first to invent) and how they are enforced (quasi-judicial challenges to patent validity through inter-party reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)).

The 113th and 114th Congress grappled with newly proposed patent law reforms that, if enacted, may present additional tectonic shifts in the patent law. Major provisions of the
proposals include: fee-shifting measures (requiring loser pays legal fees - counter to the American rule); strict detailed pleadings requirements, promulgated without the traditional Rules
Enabling Act procedure, that exceed those of the Twombly/Iqbal standard applied to all other civil matters in federal courts, and the different standards applicable to patent claim

interpretation in PTAB proceedings and district court litigation concerning patent validity .
The Executive and administrative branch has also been active in the patent law arena. President Obama was a strong supporter of the AIA3 and in his 2014 State Of The Union Address, essentially stated that, with respect to the proposed patent law reforms aimed at
patent troll issues, we must innovate rather than litigate.4 Additionally, the USPTO has embarked upon an energetic overhaul of its operations in terms of patent quality and PTO performance in granting patents, and the PTAB has expanded to almost 250
Administrative Law Judges in concert with the AIA post-grant proceedings’ strict timetable requirements.

The Supreme Court, not to be outdone by the Articles I and II branches of the U.S. government, has raised the profile of patent cases to historical heights. From 1996 to the 2014-15 term there has been a steady increase in the number of patent cases decided by the
SCOTUS5. The 2014-15 term occupied almost ten percent of the Court’s docket. Prior to the last two decades, the Supreme Court would rarely include more than one or two patent cases in a docket that was much larger than those we have become accustomed to
from the Roberts’ Court6.

While the SCOTUS activity in patent cases is viewed by some as a counter-balance to the perceived Federal Circuit’s pro-patent and bright line decisions, it can just as assuredly be viewed as decisions rendered by a Court of final resort which does not function in a
vacuum devoid of the social, economic and political winds of the times. In recognition of the effect new technologies have on the patent law, the politicization of intellectual property law matters, especially patent law (through factious governing principles of the
political branches of the government), and the maturation of the Federal Circuit patent law jurisprudence, the SCOTUS has rendered opinions in cases that impact, and perhaps are/were intended to mitigate the concerns regarding, some of the vexing issues
confronting the patent community today (e.g., non-practicing entities or in the politicized parlance “patent trolls,” the intersection of patent and antitrust laws in Hatch-Waxman so called “pay-for-delay” settlements between Branded and Generic pharma
companies, and the fundamental tenets that comprise the very heart of what is patent eligible subject matter).

Copyrights
The advent and ubiquity of the internet, social media and digital technologies (MP3s, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) represents the impetus for changes in the Copyright laws.
The DMCA addressed the issues presented by these advances or changes in the differing media and forms of artistic impressions. The proliferation of digital photos, graphic designs and
publishing alternatives, as well as adherence to globalization harmonization have given rise to changes in the statutory law and jurisprudence in this area of intellectual property law.
Additionally, there
is an overlap of patent rights and copyrights for software driven by the ebb and flow of the strength of
each respective intellectual property protection.
Notably, the Patent and Copyright Clause7, in addition to Author’s writings, has been viewed as discretely applying to two different types of creativity or innovation. When drafted the
“sciences” referred not only to fields of modern scienctific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. And the “useful arts” does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans or
people skilled in a manufacturing craft. Rather than result in ambiguity or confusion, perhaps the Framers were either quite prescient or, just coincidentally, these aspects of the Patent and
Copyright Clause have converged.

For example, none other than the famous Crooner, Bing Crosby, benefited from both protections. Well-known as a prolific and popular recording artist he also benefited from his
investments in the, then innovative, recording technologies. Similarly, the Beatles, Beach Boys, as well as many other rock and roll artists, experimental efforts in music performance,
recording and production, helped to transform the music industry in both copyrightable artistic expression and patentable inventions. Similarly, film, literary and digital arts reap benefits at
the crossroads of both copyright and patent protections.

Trademarks
Trademark laws have been impacted by numerous changes in the business landscape. They include the internet, Domain names, international rights in a global economy, different venues
and avenues for branding, marketing and merchandising, global knock-offs from nations that have a less than stellar respect for intellectual property rights, and international trade
agreements. More recently, politicization (or perhaps political correctness) has creeped into the trademark law arena pitting branding rights and protections against first amendment rights.

Trade Secrets
As with Copyright and Trademark law, trade secrets law includes some of the same issues related to trade agreements. TRIPS required members to have trade secret protection in place.
Initially, the United States compliance with this requirement has relied upon the trade secret law of the individual states. That compliance may be supplanted by the recently enacted DTSA.
Similarly, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement contains intellectual property rights provisions that will trigger required changes to United States statutory Intellectual Property
Laws.

The proposed trade secret legislation also gives rise to several concerns. For instance, there is an absence of a specific definition for trade secret, as well as potential issues of federalism,
conflict with state law precedent (despite no preemption), remedies, and the impact on employer/employee relations.

There is also a real concern that the

strengthening of trade secret protection in conjunction with the perceived weakening of
patent protection (e.g., high rate of invalidating patents in post-grant proceedings before the PTAB and strict limitations on what is patent eligible subject matter) may very-
well have the unintended consequence of contravening the purpose behind the Patent and Copyright Clause: “to promote
the progress of the sciences and the useful arts.” Moreover, the incentive to innovate may very well be usurped by the advantage of withholding patent law disclosure of highly beneficial
scientific advancements that directly affect the human condition, alter life expectancies and the evolution of the human species (rather than by mere “natural selection”), and what is the
very essence of a human being (for better or worse). Thus, crippling innovation and the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

Privacy Rights

It is increasingly more difficult to function “off the grid.” The invasive and non-invasive attributes of the internet, the reliance upon the multitude of devices, social media, and information age technologies, and access to big data, all contribute to the decrease in and
dilution of the right to privacy. Wittingly or otherwise, the strong libertarian roots of the republic have been replaced by dependence upon these modes of an information-age life. Commentary on the benefits and deficits of this reality are beyond the subject and
purpose of this writing. Suffice to acknowledge that the right to privacy has been significantly reduced. The laws that protect these rights are in a constant struggle to maintain those rights while yielding to the demands of the lifestyle and security concerns. Laws that
relate to cybersecurity in the global and domestic space create interplay with privacy rights. Legislation, trade agreements and jurisprudence all impact this area of intellectual property. Cross-border theft of trade secrets, competitor espionage, and loss of control
over personal data are all implicated in the intellectual property law arena.

America’s Need For Strong Intellectual Property Protection

The need for strong protection of intellectual property rights is greater now than it was at the dawn of our republic . Our
Forefathers and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized the need to secure those rights in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. James Madison provides insight for its
significance in the Federalist Papers No. 43 (the only reference to the clause). It is contained in the first Article section dedicated to the enumerated powers of Congress. The clause
recognizes the need for: uniformity of the protection of IP rights, securing those rights for the individual rather than the state;
and, incentivizing innovation and creative aspirations.
Underlying this particular enumerated power of Congress is the same struggle that the Framers grappled with throughout the document for the new republic: how to promote a unified
republic while protecting individual liberty. The fear of tyranny and protection of the “natural law” individual liberty is a driving theme for the Constitution and throughout the Federalist
Papers. For example, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison articulated the important recognition of the “faction” impact on a democracy and a republic. In Federalist No. 51, Madison
emphasized the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of the republic. And in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton, provided his most significant essay, which
described the judiciary as the weakest branch of government and sought the protection of its independence providing the underpinnings for judicial review as recognized thereafter in
Marbury v. Madison.

All of these related themes are relevant to the Patent and Copyright Clause and at the center of the intellectual property protections then and now. The Federalist Papers No. 10 recognition
that a faction may influence the law has been playing itself out in the halls of congress in the period of time leading up to the AIA and in connection with the current patent law reform
debate. The large tech companies of the past, new tech, new patent-based financial business model entities, and pharma factions have been the drivers, proponents and opponents of
certain of these efforts. To
be sure, some change is inevitable, and both beneficial and necessary in an environment of rapidly
changing technology where the law needs to evolve or conform to new realities . However, changes not premised upon the founding
principles of the Constitution and the Patent and Copyright Clause (i.e., uniformity, secured rights for the individual, incentivizing innovation and protecting individual liberty) run afoul of the
intended purpose of the constitutional guarantee.

Although the Sovereign does not benefit directly from the fruits of the innovator, enacting laws that empower the King, and enables the King to remain so, has the same effect as deprivation
and diminishment of the individual’s rights and effectively confiscates them from him/her. Specifically, with respect to intellectual property rights, effecting change to the laws that do not
adhere to these underlying principles, in favor of the faction that lobbies the most and the best in the quid pro quo of political gain to the governing body threatens to undermine the
individual’s intellectual property rights and hinder the greatest economic driver and source of prosperity in the country.

It is also important to recognize that the social, political and economic impact of strong protections for i ntellectual
p roperty cannot be overstated . In the social context, the incentive for disclosure and innovation is critical . Solutions
for sustainability and climate change (whether natural, man-made or mutually/marginally intertwined) rely upon
this premise. Likewise, as we are on the precipice of the ultimate convergence in technologies from the hi-tech digital
world and life sciences space, capturing the ability to cure many diseases and fatal illnesses and providing the true
promise of extended longevity in good health and well-being, that is meaningful, productive, and purposeful; this
incentive must be preserved .

In similar fashion, advancements in tech nologies related to the global economy and communications will enhance the
possibilities for solutions to political and cultural conflicts that arise around the globe . Likewise, the U nited
States economy has always benefited when it is at the forefront of innovation and achieves prosperity from its
leadership role in technological advancements .

Conclusion
As was the case in 1966, how we move forward today, to solve the many problems facing our country and the
broader global community in these “interesting times,” both within and without the laws affecting intellectual property
rights, depends upon the “creative energy of man” which must prevail. An achievable goal, dependent on the strong,
stable and sound protection of intellectual property rights .
 <>Court Clog DA: Michigan

DA – Court Clog

Expanding personhood creates a crushing flood of litigation.

Clarke ’15 [Jessica; October 2015; Associate Professor and Vance Opperman Research Scholar at the University of
Minnesota Law School, recipient of the Stanley V. Kinyon award, J.D. from Yale University; Yale Law Journal, “Against
Immutability,” vol. 125]

D. Creating Line-Drawing Problems

Apart from these normative objections, the new immutability raises a number of tactical or strategic concerns for social
movements seeking to extend antidiscrimination protection. The first is a line-drawing problem. The expanded concept
of immutability does not have any limit ing principle. While the old immutability seemed to be restricted to involuntary
traits, there are no readily apparent parameters to limit which chosen traits are essential to  personhood . This
difficulty is likely to create judicial and public resistance to arguments premised on the new immutability.

Line-drawing problems are often articulated as hypothetical consequences of proposed theories, through the
metaphors of floodgates  and slippery slopes . 242 Line-drawing concerns have purchase in public debates 243 and
in courtrooms. 244 This is particularly true in equal protection cases, in which "every new characteristic
the courts recognize as warranting greater protection threatens to open the floodgates to a new wave of groups
asking for protection based on that characteristic." 245 For example, the Supreme Court has refused to extend suspect
class treatment to "the mentally retarded," for lack of a "principled way" to distinguish this group from "the aging, the
disabled, the mentally ill, and the infirm." 246 Even where statutes specify protected classifications, texts cannot provide
answers to every potential question of application, and courts must use common law reasoning to decide which traits
fall within the ambit of a statute's protection. Common law reasoning requires the identification of principles that do not
produce results that jurists consider counterintuitive, opposed to statutory purpose, or otherwise absurd. 247

<<FOOTNOTES 242 THROUGH 244 BEGIN>>

See, e.g., Nussbaum, supra note 89, at 310 & n.54 (arguing that "a protected class defined so broadly as to include the
moderately overweight, the short, and the unattractive would be legally unworkable and would bring the entire idea of
the protected class into disrepute," and expressing concern regarding "a flood of litigation ").

See, e.g., Mark D. Rosen & Christopher W. Schmidt, Why Broccoli? Limiting Principles and Popular Constitutionalism in
the Health Care Case, 61 UCLA L. Rev. 66 (2013).

See, e.g., Toni M. Massaro, Gay Rights, Thick and Thin, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 45, 79 (1996) (arguing that "ambitious
interpretations of equal protection present a practical dilemma : How does the Court cabin the growing number of
groups or identities claiming protection?").

<<FOOTNOTES END>>

The new immutability does not help in this effort. Jed Rubenfeld has replied to personhood arguments by asking,
"Where is our self-definition not at stake? Virtually every action a person takes could arguably be said to be an element
of his self-definition." 248 The claim that the right to privacy should protect decisions crucial to personhood might be
qualified with an exception for decisions that cause harm to others. 249 But "the minute someone starts defending her
actions against a storm of protest with the claim that she is only affecting herself, we may be certain that the opposite is
true." 250 Few actions affect only the actor, and those that generate litigation are always those where another
person perceives her own interests to be at stake. 251 Rights to new forms of personhood threaten social interests in
saving traditional norms from disruption by iconoclasts. 252 The question then becomes one of balancing relative
rights, rather than recognizing absolute rights to personhood. 253

Court clog collapses effective governance---trust, innovation, and frivolous litigation

Deloitte ’19 [Lori Scialabba, Bruce Chew, China Widener, and Isaac Jenkins; May 6; specialist executive at Deloitte
Consulting LLP who served 33 years in the US federal government, retiring as the acting director of USCIS; former
Harvard Business School professor and has twice served on the advisory board panel for the President’s Federal
Customer Service Awards; “Government backlog reduction,” https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/public-
sector/government-backlog-reduction.html]

The true costs of backlogs

Agencies often struggle to get the funding needed to fix their backlogs. After all, a backlog is an annoyance, but is it
really worth the effort to solve it? The problem with this thinking is it ignores the opportunity costs of a backlog, which
can be significant for individuals, communities, and businesses. For example, the US security clearance backlog, which
peaked at over 700,000 cases in 2018,9 is a backlog with high opportunity costs. Each clearance case represents an
individual who needs access to classified information to do the job right—but instead is unable to do so, or worse, is
simply waiting for clearance to be employed. According to a 2018 survey of cleared personnel, jobs that required
clearance had an average salary of about US$93,000.10 The downstream effects of the backlog—in employment terms
alone—are felt in lost labor market efficiency, forgone income, and reduced tax revenues (not to mention the mission
impact of a shortage of qualified and cleared personnel).

Many states face backlogs in everything from human services to examining criminal evidence. With some states facing a
serious epidemic of opioid and related drug abuse, a drug-evidence testing backlog can mean delayed justice, which
means police could release known drug dealers while they wait on evidence. That means more dealers and traffickers on
the street, and more damage to communities.11 The effects on communities can exacerbate backlogs in other state
systems—from children in foster care to state and local court systems to elder care.

And government backlogs can reduce the attractiveness of investment and innovation in entire economies. Backlogs
in court systems , for example, can deter economic investment by increasing risk , especially for foreign investors, and
by enabling anti-competitive behavior , such as bogging down competitors in endless lawsuits or violating agreements
with impunity. Backlogs in developing economies in Asia, for example, are soaring, with downstream effects for justice,
growth, and long-term development.12 They can harm developed economies too: By one estimate, Italy’s justice
backlog reduces GDP growth by 1 percent annually.13

Backlogs can also hinder innovation . Studies by the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property have found that
each year of patent delay can reduce a startup’s employment by 21 percent and sales growth by 28 percent over the five
years after approval.14 Patent backlogs can decrease the payoff for R&D, reducing technology progress:15 For example,
backlogs in three top patent offices led to more than US$10 billion in reduced global growth each year.16

Backlogs can also reduce citizen satisfaction , and in turn, confidence in government. Trust in government today is at
historic lows , with only 18 percent of Americans surveyed saying they trust government to do the right thing all or most
of the time.17 For many citizens, case-processing systems are where they encounter government, whether at the
registry for motor vehicles, in applying for benefits, or getting permits for their homes or businesses. Long wait times
and poor customer experience can further erode confidence in government—no one’s desired outcome.

The impact is extinction

Collier ’21 [Dr. Stephen J; November; Professor of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley,
PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton, “The Government of Emergency: Vital
Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security,” p. xi-19]
The evidence is clear: we live in an increasingly vulnerable world. Maps with isometric lines indicating flood zones tell
us about the ever-growing likelihood that the places we live will be inundated in future hurricanes, torrential rains, or
even high tides. Emergency exercises reveal that governmental response systems are not prepared to deal with future
disease outbreaks. Stress tests isolate weak links in national and global financial systems that would be exposed in the
event of a panic or an economic downturn. Network analyses point to alarming vulnerabilities to accidents or attacks
(whether cyber or physical) on critical nodes of power systems . Models of climate change demonstrate the
vulnerability of cities and critical infrastructures to heat waves, drought, floods, and landslides. This mountain of
evidence points to a troubling contemporary reality: the vulnerability of the vital systems on which modern life
depends to a startling range of potentially catastrophic events .1

Discussions of vulnerability and preparedness are often, understandably, caught up in the urgency of recent disasters
and future threats: a looming hurricane; a critical system that is prone to failure; a virus that is a single mutation away
from causing a deadly pandemic . And experts, policymakers, and scholars often search out the sources of vulnerability
in relatively recent changes in the structure of our collective existence. Intensifying global flows of people, goods, and
capital, they argue, make our world increasingly interdependent and therefore subject to sudden disruptions that
spread through financial systems, electricity grids, information networks, or human bodies in rapid circulation and close
proximity.2 But there is another way to think about our vulnerable world. Rather than taking vulnerability for granted as
a category of understanding—and investigating how our vulnerability became so acute and pervasive—we can ask how
it became possible to think about our world in this way in the first place. More specifically, we can ask how we came to
think of our world in terms of a particular kind of vulnerability. When did government first become concerned with the
disruption or breakdown of life-sustaining vital systems? For what purposes were the techniques that, today, generate
such an extraordinary profusion of evidence about our vulnerability originally invented? How did norms such as
resilience and preparedness become political obligations, to which policymakers and officials are held accountable?

The Government of Emergency addresses these questions by turning to a period of American history in which this
distinctive and now mostly taken-for- granted way of thinking about vulnerability was just taking shape. In the middle
decades of the twentieth century, amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of technical
experts and government officials developed a new understanding of the United States as a complex of vulnerable, vital
systems. They also invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability , as well as
organizing a distinctive form of emergency government designed to prepare for uncertain future events that might
catastrophically disrupt these systems. In doing so, these experts and officials did not, of course, solve the problem of
vulnerability. Quite the contrary, they defined vulnerability as a particular kind of problem with which today’s experts,
officials, policymakers, and emergency managers are still grappling.
——

Our interest in these topics was initially sparked by the aftermath—at once troubling and disorienting—of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The most visible and controversial response by the federal government to these attacks was a series of aggressive
security policies identified with the “war on terror.” External security measures taken in the wake of the September 11 attacks included preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone strikes on suspected terrorist cells, and extrajudicial detentions, most notoriously
in the prison complex at Guantanamo Bay. Domestically, new security measures included heightened border controls, domestic surveillance, and steps to protect large cities and transportation networks against attack. Many of these domestic measures were
associated with a new federal agency, established soon after the attacks of 9/11, with an unfamiliar and Orwellian name: the Department of Homeland Security.

At one level, these new security measures challenged familiar conceptions of security. Externally, the focus of military and intelligence organizations on terrorist groups and other nonstate actors seemed distinct from the traditional framework of national security,
related to struggles among sovereign states. Meanwhile, new domestic policies pointed to an ominous “securitization” of civilian life, with totalitarian overtones. In another sense, however, these widely discussed elements of the “war on terror” fit relatively
comfortably with familiar understandings of security. These measures sought to identify and interdict enemies of the United States, employing traditional means of intelligence, surveillance, military force, border control, and policing.

But beneath the surface of these highly visible and contested measures, a different formation of contemporary security
was consolidating. Its contours could be glimpsed by perusing the plans and strategic statements on problems such as
“national preparedness” and “critical infrastructure protection” issued by the president, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other parts of the US government in the years after 2001.
The key norm articulated in these statements was not the deterrence, interdiction, capture, or defeat of an enemy.
Rather, these statements laid out a strategy of preparedness for a range of uncertain future events —from natural
disasters to disease outbreaks, blackouts , and terrorist attacks —that threatened to disrupt the vital systems that
make contemporary life possible . They drew on forms of specialized knowledge and expert assessment that were
quite different from those of domestic surveillance, foreign intelligence, and other approaches to understanding the
plans and motivations of enemies. The evidence these documents adduced to assess vulnerability was produced by tools
such as simulations of catastrophic events; scenario-based exercises to pinpoint gaps in preparedness plans; and
evaluations of the “criticality” of particular facilities, such as ports, power plants, communication nodes, and
transportation hubs. Finally, these statements of strategy proposed a distinctive set of preparedness measures:
stockpiling critical supplies; securing vital facilities or creating redundant facilities; improving coordination among
different parts of the federal government, and among federal, state, and local governments; and, perhaps above all,
conducting more exercises to test readiness. The sudden consolidation of these norms, knowledge practices, and
security measures was puzzling. Where had they developed and been cultivated before coming together so rapidly in
new plans and practices?
In 2005, two years after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, these questions were cast into starker relief, and inflected in new ways, by another domestic catastrophe: Hurricane Katrina, which inundated the city of New Orleans. Like the attacks of September 11, Katrina was followed by rancorous debate and
finger pointing. Much of the blame fell on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA had borne responsibility for disaster preparedness and response in the federal government for almost thirty years. But by 2005, it was incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security, whose emphasis on
counterterrorism, some observers charged, had left the agency unprepared for a massive natural disaster.3 FEMA’s failure to organize a competent response to Katrina raised doubts about the federal government’s ability to prepare for a range of other disasters, such as the outbreak of a novel and dangerous infectious disease, a
particularly acute concern for public health officials in 2005 given the reemergence of avian flu in Asia, one year earlier. 4 The failed response to Katrina also focused attention on the “distributed” structure of preparedness in the United States, which required complex coordination among local, state, and federal governments. This
structure, too, had failed in spectacular fashion. Local governments proved poorly organized and ill equipped. State governments were unable to provide timely assistance.

But amid the arguments about where the failure lay, and who was to blame, a basic diagnosis was universally accepted: the government had been unprepared to deal with an event like Katrina and was obliged, in the future, to bolster preparedness, not only for natural disasters but also for a range of other future catastrophes.
Thus, more questions: Where did this peculiar American structure of distributed preparedness come from? Why would an agency charged with anticipating terrorism also be responsible for natural disaster preparedness? And how had this unquestioned political responsibility—to prepare for events like Katrina—initially been
established and entrusted to such a peculiar and apparently precarious governmental arrangement?

In a first stage of our research, we sought to address these questions by looking back to civil defense planning of the early Cold War.5 Cold War civil defense was in one sense quite different from contemporary emergency management. Its primary concern was not preparedness for natural disasters, pandemic disease, or terrorist
attacks. Rather, civil defense focused on strengthening the preparedness of local governments, communities, and households for a nuclear attack on the United States.6 In another sense, however, the way civil defense planners identified problems and sought to address them was familiar: preparing to respond in the wake of a
catastrophic event. Moreover, Cold War civil defense, particularly the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1950–1958), was a recognized part of the landscape of postwar history for scholars of American emergency management, who have identified it as the source of our current way of thinking about and organizing for
emergencies.7

But as our research proceeded, our attention was increasingly drawn to another history—adjacent to but distinct from the history of civil defense—that turned out to be more germane to our concerns. Initially, we encountered a forgotten federal government office, the Office of Emergency Preparedness, that in the 1960s was
charged with addressing many of the problems that have become so urgent and visible at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 8 The central concern of this office was the vulnerability of vital systems, such as oil pipeline networks, electricity and communication grids, and systems of economic circulation. And it sought to
develop methods for anticipating the effects of various kinds of events—terrorist attacks, economic shocks, industrial strikes—that might disrupt these systems, as well as techniques for planning and testing a governmental structure capable of rapid, coordinated response. Digging into the history of this office and its predecessors,
we found ourselves on a track that ran parallel to the story of civil defense (see figure 0.1). It led us to the National Security Resources Board and the Office of Defense Mobilization, which were established not to carry out the now-familiar functions of emergency management but to prepare for military-industrial mobilization. In
contrast to the well-studied history of civil defense, the activities of these organizations have been largely neglected in the scholarship on the history of emergency management and, indeed, in the broader scholarship on American political development in the middle of the twentieth century. And yet, from 1947 (when the National
Security Resources Board was created by the National Security Act) to 1958 (when the Office of Defense Mobilization was combined with the Federal Civil Defense Administration), these were the organizations working on the central problem of emergency government: preparedness for a nuclear attack on the United States. As we
show in the chapters that follow, experts and officials working in these now obscure offices shaped current understandings and practices related to the vulnerability of vital systems, preparedness for future catastrophes, and the organization of emergency government.

Our research into the work of these mobilization planning offices opened up, in turn, a deeper history, which connected
the history of emergency management in the United States to very different kinds of emergencies: the Great Depression
and World War II. During these earlier episodes, we found, experts and officials working in domains such as mobilization
planning, target selection for air war, and national economic planning developed new kinds of knowledge about flows of
resources through the nation’s vital systems and their vulnerability to catastrophic disruption. These were also the
circumstances in which government reformers assembled the distinctive administrative and political mechanisms of
American emergency government, with its small, centralized planning offices (the ancestors of FEMA), its complex
arrangements for distributed preparedness across agencies and governmental units, and its often-fraught
accommodations between democratic norms, expert control, and strong executive authority to address crisis situations.
Thus, in the unexpected settings of depression and world war, we encountered the now-familiar norms and forms of US
emergency government taking shape.
When we set out to write this book, we imagined that it would begin in the 1950s and move into the present, tracing how Cold War civil defense evolved into contemporary emergency management in its various guises of homeland security, pandemic preparedness, and natural disaster policy. But as this parallel history unfolded, the scope of our book shifted. What we had previously imagined would be the beginning of the story—nuclear
pathways of American emergency government. Many of the practices and institutions of contemporary American emergency government emerged from little-studied offices such as the National Security Resources Board and the Office of Defense Mobilization. The history of these organizations points to largely unexplored genealogical connections between emergency government as we know it today and major midcentury episodes in the
development of American political institutions. Credit: Janice Yamanaka-Lew. preparedness in the 1950s—became its endpoint. Our question changed as well. The book’s central concern was no longer the process through which nuclear preparedness expanded into preparedness for a range of other emergencies in the decades after the 1950s—a history that largely remains to be written. Instead, we traced how the knowledge practices,
administrative devices, and governmental mechanisms originally invented to manage the emergencies of economic depression and world war were redirected to preparedness for uncertain future events that threaten vital systems.

This shift in empirical focus went hand in hand with a shift in, and significant expansion of, the conceptual and historical problems with which we were grappling. In the United States and elsewhere, the problem of the vulnerability of vital systems to catastrophic disruption is coeval with—and is indeed a crucial element in—the history of industrial and urban modernity itself. Thus, the process through which system vulnerability became such
a prevalent governmental concern, and such a dominant feature of our politics, can only be described as one dimension of the broader emergence of a mass industrial and metropolitan society in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. It is also linked to a significant mutation in political institutions. In contending with the “emergencies” of the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War—all of which were
understood as existential crises that demanded exceptional government measures—political reformers created new mechanisms of expert rule and expanded executive power. Thus, in investigating the genealogy of system vulnerability, we also address the process through which, as political scientist Clinton Rossiter put it in 1949, US government was “adjusted in all its ramifications to the mounting stresses of a protean, outward-looking,
industrial society.”9

As we completed this book, governments around the world were struggling to respond to a global crisis. In early 2020, the coronavirus outbreak that began in China was spreading rapidly. As the first wave of the pandemic arrived in the United States, officials faced a daunting prospect: the onset of a deadly disease with no effective biomedical countermeasures at hand, and an immunologically naïve population. Experts rushed to identify
bottlenecks in health systems, such as shortages of masks, testing reagents, and medical personnel, that would limit the number of patients that could be treated. Policymakers argued about how to procure scarce materials and establish priorities for the allocation of limited resources. Local officials sought to identify essential functions—medical services, critical infrastructure, and the production and distribution of food, for example—
whose operation would need to be secured as stay-at- home orders were imposed across the country. Epidemiologists updated pandemic models to anticipate surges in cases in particular areas and to estimate the demand that such surges would make on health resources. Debates flared up about the distribution of responsibility between federal agencies and the president, and between the federal government and the states.

As authorities sought to address multiplying breakdowns and bottlenecks in health systems, a distant episode of American history came to public attention. In spring 2020, Democratic lawmakers and a range of experts and interest groups urged then-president Donald Trump to draw on the emergency powers of the Defense Production Act to organize a forceful federal response to the pandemic. This Act, passed in 1950, gave the president
authority to manage national economic resources in order to mobilize the industrial economy, initially for the Korean War.10 By the late 1950s, mobilization planners had laid plans to use Defense Production Act powers to manage an array of other problems— including massive nationwide medical response—that would arise in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack on the United States. These plans addressed many of the issues that
health officials and policymakers would face, over half a century later, in spring 2020: ensuring adequate production capacity of essential medical supplies through government loans and production agreements; securing vital inputs to such production through priorities ratings and allocation controls; and managing the distribution of scarce medical resources, including personnel, to meet a medical emergency unfolding across the country.

The Trump administration made limited use of the Defense Production Act to procure items such as test kits and protective gear but was widely criticized for its unwillingness to employ it more expansively. “We’re at war,” proclaimed the former director of the Defense Production Act program division at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “and the enemy is called Covid. The question is do we have the guts that our grandfathers
had to mobilize the economy of the United States against the enemy.” 11 Upon taking office in January 2021, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order that outlined a broad use of the Defense Production Act’s emergency authorities. Priorities ratings would bolster vaccine manufacturers’ access to equipment such as filling pumps and filtration units required to ramp up production. Loans and purchase agreements would spur
investment in domestic plants to manufacture surgical gloves, whose production in other countries had been constrained by shortages of a vital input: nitrile butadiene rubber. Officials contemplated similar actions, such as issuing loans and purchase agreements, to expand the production of at-home coronavirus tests, N95 masks, and other critical supplies.12

As we show in this book, the powers of priorities ratings, allocation control, emergency loans, and purchase agreements are not the only elements of the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic that have roots in the emergencies of the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, many dimensions of the response can be traced back to attempts to manage national resources and to ensure the operation of vital systems during these prior
emergencies. Perhaps like no other event in the last seventy years, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust these problems to the center of attention. But a range of current issues—most notably the intensifying disasters that will result from climate change—ensure that this largely neglected dimension of emergency government will be increasingly central to contemporary politics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the intellectual engagement and support of innumerable friends, colleagues, collaborators, and family members. We are particularly grateful to Ben Anderson, Carlo Caduff, Craig Calhoun, David Collier, Ruth Berins Collier, Deborah Cowen, Savannah Cox, Tyler Curley, Myriam Dunn, Lyle Fearnley, Andreas Folkers, Nils Gilman, Kevin Grove, Anke Gruendel, Frédéric Keck, Chris Kelty, Clay
Kerchoff, Eric Klinenberg, George Lakoff, Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Sandy Lakoff, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Brian Lindseth, Sven Opitz, Onur Özgöde, Paul Rabinow, Peter Redfield, Janet Roitman, Antina von Schnitzler, and Antti Silvast.

We are also grateful for support from the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1058882, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Julien J. Studley Research Fund at The New School, and the Dean’s Office of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

INTRODUCTION

The New Normalcy

During the past twenty years we have substituted for the normalcy of the halcyon 1920s an almost unbroken series of emergencies: depression, defense, war, inflation, cold war. Indeed, emergency appears to have become the new kind of normalcy. National emergencies tend to favor improvisation by government. Yet with all our improvising, our “putting out of fires,” our apparent activation by events instead
of deliberate activation of events, we have emerged with a discernible pattern of domestic and foreign policy and, most important, with an acceptance of the idea that government should consciously plan a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the operational level.

— JAMES FESLER, SPEECH TO THE INDUSTRIAL COLL EGE OF THE ARMED FORCES, SEPTEMBER 4, 1952

In 1954, the United States’ Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) published a massive multivolume tome, Emergency Management of the National Economy.1 The ICAF volumes collected a series of lectures that had been delivered to military officers at the college, as well as a range of government documents that addressed ICAF’s main concern: managing industrial mobilization for war. The fourth volume, dedicated to Principles of
Administration, reproduced a lecture by political scientist James Fesler, a veteran of government reform during the New Deal and of mobilization planning during World War II.2 Looking back on the previous two tumultuous decades, Fesler observed that the United States had emerged from an “unbroken series of emergencies”—“ depression, defense, war, inflation, cold war”—with a “discernible pattern” of emergency government. Its
hallmark was a new norm: “government should consciously plan a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the operational level.” In the “new kind of normalcy” Fesler described, emergency government was no longer confined to exceptional situations. Rather, ongoing emergency preparedness had become a part of governmental routine.

More than six decades later, it is taken for granted that government bears responsibility for continuously anticipating and preparing for emergencies. This assumption has been evident in efforts to assign blame and bolster readiness following disasters such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. It is noteworthy, then, that in 1952, when Fesler gave his lecture,
this governmental norm was neither established nor taken for granted. Rather, it was new and required explicit statement and elaboration.

It is also noteworthy that Fesler’s discussion addressed a set of problems and institutional contexts that seem distant from our contemporary understandings of emergency management. Today, government offices tasked with managing emergencies are concerned with preparedness for events such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and terrorist attacks, as well as with response and recovery in the aftermath of such events. But in
1952, the object of emergency management was the national economy, and its central aim was military-industrial mobilization—marshaling raw materials, industrial facilities, and manpower to build the tanks, planes, munitions, and other supplies necessary for total war. In this sense, Fesler’s speech points us to the specificity of the historical conjuncture during which new norms for managing emergencies were first articulated in the United
States and were connected to forms of expert knowledge, administrative practices, and legal mechanisms. The topics addressed in Emergency Management of the National Economy suggest some of the issues that, in this now unfamiliar landscape, were initially clustered around emergency government: resource planning, economic controls, internal security, economic intelligence, air targeting, government reorganization, domestic
vulnerability, and nonmilitary defense. And the government offices, commissions, and agencies whose work was either collected or discussed in the ICAF volumes—most long-since dissolved, and many virtually forgotten—provide a map of the institutional settings in which emergency government was addressed at this time. Among these were committees working on government reform and resource management during the New Deal;
wartime and postwar mobilization planning offices; air-targeting and strategic intelligence units in the military; and offices of civil defense and domestic preparedness of the early Cold War.3

If Emergency Management of the National Economy situates the history of American emergency government in relation to economic management and military-industrial mobilization during the Great Depression and World War II, it also marks a point of inflection. In the early 1950s, emergency government was already in the process of becoming something different and, from our contemporary perspective, more familiar. In the foreword to
the ICAF tome, another veteran of wartime mobilization planning, Arthur Flemming, described this new horizon of emergency government. At the time, Flemming was serving as director of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM). Created in 1950 to lead civilian mobilization planning for the Korean War, ODM had by 1953 become the most important domestic preparedness agency in the federal government. Surveying the landscape of the
early Cold War, Flemming offered a grim assessment of the current world situation. The United States, he wrote, was in an “age of peril.” The advent of long-range bombers and atomic weapons confronted national security strategists with the specter of a sudden “devastating attack on the continental United States.” In the event of such a sudden attack, the United States would not have time to mobilize its “material and human resources”
over the course of months or years, as it had in the prior two world wars. Rather, Flemming argued, the country would have to shift immediately to war footing and would be faced with managing the consequences of a crippling initial blow. Adequately preparing the nation for this eventuality could “save an untold number of human lives” and ensure that the United States could “continue a substantial portion of our war production and
production essential for the holding together of our civilian economy.” 4

In light of these concerns about a devastating enemy attack, during the 1950s the civilian mobilization planning agencies turned their attention to a novel task. If earlier these agencies were concerned primarily with military-industrial production during a long war fought overseas, then increasingly their focus shifted to preparedness planning to ensure the survival of the national population and recovery of the economy in the aftermath of a
domestic catastrophe. It is indicative of this shift that, by the early 1960s, the Office of Defense Mobilization had evolved into the Office of Emergency Planning, which was in turn renamed the Office of Emergency Preparedness. In 1962, the director of this office, Edward McDermott, outlined the aims and means of emergency government as they had come to be understood by this time. Citing a draft executive order issued by President John
F. Kennedy, McDermott reported that he had been charged with coordinating the “national preparedness program,” whose goal was to maintain a “state of readiness with respect to all conditions of national emergency.” This meant, first and foremost, maintaining an “emergency management organization” that would be prepared to “handle the myriad of resource and economic problems necessary to save lives and sustain survival and
expedite recovery.” Reviewing these “resource and economic problems”— related to electric power, transportation, communications, food, and medical care—McDermott pointed to the vast scope of his office’s concern. “We are really talking about the fundamentals of life on this earth,” he intoned, “the elemental problems of safeguarding the food we eat, the fuel we consume, the transportation to maintain a steady flow of commerce,
an intricate telecommunications system which will continue to function under all conditions, and perhaps most important, the foundation of constitutional government which underpins our way of life.”5 In sum, the Office of Emergency Planning was charged with sustaining the very biological and associational life of the American population during a future emergency.

In the decades since McDermott’s speech, practices for anticipating and managing emergencies have continued to evolve, and the organization of emergency government has been frequently reshuffled. But McDermott’s 1962 description of the task of governmental preparedness for emergency is strikingly similar to contemporary understandings. Emergency preparedness continues to focus on reducing the vulnerability of vital systems in
anticipation of a range of potentially catastrophic future events, and on preparing for life-saving response and recovery in their aftermath. Thus, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 2015 National Preparedness Goal—which currently guides governmental preparedness for events ranging from terrorist attacks to hurricanes and pandemics—refers to a “secure and resilient Nation with the capabilities required across the whole
community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.” 6 The emphasis now, as in 1962, is on what the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 guidance on critical infrastructure protection refers to as “the essential services that underpin American society and serve as the backbone of our nation’s economy, security, and health”; “the power we use in our homes,
the water we drink, the transportation that moves us . . . and the communication systems we rely on.”7 Today, as in the early 1960s, emergency preparedness aims to ensure governmental functions relating to “health and safety,” “infrastructure systems,” “hydration, feeding, and sheltering,” that, in the wake of a future disaster, will be essential to “rapidly meeting basic human needs,” “restoring basic services,” “establishing a safe and
secure environment,” and “supporting the transition to recovery.”8 And as has been true since the beginning of the postwar period, emergency government today is not an exception to the normal operation of the state. Rather, it encompasses the management of unfolding emergencies and ongoing preparedness for future emergency situations as permanent functions of normal government.

A Genealogy of Emergency Government

This book examines the formation of American emergency government in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It follows the process through which a governmental apparatus initially assembled to manage economic depression and industrial mobilization for war mutated into an apparatus of emergency preparedness for domestic catastrophe. The account presented in this book is a genealogy of emergency government that traces
how now-familiar forms of knowledge, practices, and norms first came into being.9 It is only relatively recently, we suggest, that we have come to understand and organize emergency government as a matter of reducing the vulnerability of vital systems, and it is only recently that preparedness for events that might disrupt these systems has become a basic obligation of government.

This genealogical approach to the study of emergency government can be usefully distinguished from histories of the field of disaster preparedness and emergency management, which follow the changing forms of knowledge and governance that have been applied to a certain class of phenomena—disasters. For example, in Acts of God, historian Ted Steinberg traces how the US government has understood and managed (or failed to
manage) natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and storms, from the early days of the American republic to the present. 10 Scott Knowles, in The Disaster Experts, constructs what he calls a “disaster chronology” over roughly the same period, tracking how experts have made “the knowledge and control of disasters their special concern.”11 In contrast to such historical studies of disaster and disaster management, a genealogical
approach asks how a range of seemingly disparate phenomena, from nuclear attacks and economic shocks to hurricanes and disease outbreaks, have been constituted as common types of events that present similar kinds of problems. Thus, the title of this book—The Government of Emergency—does not refer to the way that a pregiven class of events or situations has been governed. Rather, it refers to a form of political rationality, which
we understand, following sociologist Nikolas Rose, as an “intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming.”12

As Rose suggests, political rationalities have both normative and epistemological dimensions. On the one hand, a given political rationality entails specific assumptions about the “proper distribution of tasks between different authorities” and the “ideals or principles to which government should be addressed.” Thus, it implies certain presumptions (however contested and unstable) about what government is, what it should do, and what its
limits should be. On the other hand, a political rationality involves a distinct “style of reasoning,” that is, a body of “intellectual techniques for rendering reality thinkable and practicable, and constituting domains that are amenable—or not amenable—to reformatory intervention.” Importantly, a style of reasoning entails specific “conceptions of the objects to be governed,” whether the national economy, the population, or the vulnerable,
vital systems on which the economy and the population depend.13

One strategy of genealogical research is to paint a “before and after” picture that aims, as Ian Hacking has put it, “to permanently fix in the mind of the reader the fact that some upheaval has occurred”—a momentous shift in ways of thinking and governing.14 Our account is framed by such a conceptual and political “upheaval,” in which new objects, aims, and practices of government came into being over a relatively brief period. But we
also present a detailed account of how this momentous shift unfolded. We focus on specific organizations and on historically situated actors as they took up existing ways of knowing and intervening, or invented new ones, to address novel problems. 15 Through these often-mundane practices, a new political rationality—and indeed, we suggest, a new dimension of political modernity—took shape over the period spanning roughly from the
Great Depression through the early Cold War.

The first part of the book examines the period from the 1930s to the early 1940s, in which the federal government faced two conditions of “national emergency”: the Great Depression and World War II. During this period, emergency government largely involved economic interventions to ameliorate the Depression and to manage industrial production for total war. Chapter 1 follows the work of experts in a succession of domains—from city
and regional planning to economic management, wartime mobilization, and air targeting—as they constituted vital systems as objects of systematic knowledge and as targets of intervention. Chapter 2 describes a parallel process through which government reformers invented administrative devices and organizational forms to address the economic emergencies of depression and war. It focuses in particular on how these reformers
addressed the tensions between liberal constitutionalism and crisis government by assembling what they called an “administrative machinery” to organize and prepare for emergency situations.

The book’s second part is situated in the years immediately after World War II, a period of heightening concern about the prospect of an enemy attack on the continental United States that would cripple military-industrial production systems. Chapter 3 shows how civilian experts and military officers developed systematic knowledge about American economic and infrastructural vulnerability and devised practices and understandings that
would constitute a new kind of expertise—and a new kind of expert, the “vulnerability specialist.”16 Chapter 4 turns to the first efforts to develop techniques for reducing this vulnerability and preparing to manage the consequences of a massive attack. It examines postwar mobilization planning agencies, where experts and officials reoriented the existing institutions and practices of emergency government. If previously these institutions
had focused on economic management of the unfolding emergencies of depression and war, their objective now shifted to preparing for a future war. Emergency government was thus becoming a matter of ongoing peacetime preparedness.

Part III traces a further shift in American emergency government that took place during the 1950s. As nuclear weapons
and delivery systems grew increasingly powerful, mobilization planners deemphasized readiness to ramp up industrial
production for a long war. Instead, they turned to the task of ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems that
would be required to sustain human life , economic activity, and governmental operations in the unprecedented
conditions that would result from a thermonuclear attack. Chapter 5 examines the practices of “administrative
readiness” developed by mobilization planners to prepare for government operations in a future emergency,
culminating with a description of Mobilization Plan D-Minus (1957)—the first plan for national emergency preparedness
in the United States. Chapter 6 focuses on one dimension of such national preparedness planning: the management of
resources such as food, medical supplies, and services that would be essential to the population’s postattack survival.
The chapter traces how mobilization planners used the new tool of computer simulation to envision and prepare for an
unprecedented future event—a catastrophic nuclear attack.
By the late 1950s, emergency government, which had previously focused on alleviating economic depression and mobilizing for war, had mutated into emergency preparedness for a future domestic catastrophe. A coherent set of understandings, practices, and organizational forms had consolidated into an apparatus that continues to structure emergency government—in the United States and beyond—to the present day. In the next two
sections, we outline the broader conceptual and theoretical significance of this mutation in governmental rationality. First, we introduce the concept of vital systems security as a form of “reflexive biopolitics,” oriented to the management of uncertain and potentially catastrophic future events. We argue that, beginning with the midcentury episodes we examine, securing the nation’s vital systems has become a central norm of modern
government. Second, we describe how American emergency government took shape as a response to the challenge that increasingly common use of emergency powers during war and economic crisis posed to democratic government. In these contexts, reformers assembled a political technology for governing emergencies that, they thought, would make it possible to avoid recourse to exceptional measures that would undermine
constitutional democracy.

Vital Systems Security

In 1984, applied mathematician and security expert Robert Kupperman published Technological Advances and Consequent Dangers, a working paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.17 Kupperman’s essay was a far-reaching reflection on the vulnerability of vital systems as a central problem of national security. For our purposes, Kupperman’s paper indicates how system
vulnerability was linked to a broader problematization of risk and security in modern societies.

For millennia, Kupperman argued, human beings had faced relatively localized and “self-extinguishing” threats that were “dissipated by the distribution of cultural assets, by the existence of physical and psychological ‘hinterlands,’ and by the cushioning function of institutional diversity and independence.” Even the cataclysm of World War I was a contained event. “Diversities, distances, and differences, systematic inefficiencies of civilization
in themselves,” he argued, “provided the recuperative forces necessary to maintain continuity.” But in the intervening years, the “extension of technology in the service of civilization” had enabled human beings to move “into every suitable niche, and even into some not so suitable.” The increasingly “efficient, economical infrastructure” required to sustain this process carried with it an unacknowledged price. “Modern technological
efficiency in the provision of food, water, energy, medicine, transport and communication,” he wrote, has been “oriented toward economic affordability without much attention to complex network fragility.” Pointing to the “interlocking technologies” that underpin the “fragile dynamic cycle of production, transportation, and consumption” in contemporary societies, Kupperman argued that the “greater a society’s dependence for survival
on its technological infrastructure, the greater its vulnerability to a collapse triggered naturally or artificially at a key point.” Like biological organisms, contemporary human societies could not manage “fundamental system failures multiplying at a biological rate.” “A critical point is reached,” Kupperman warned. “A cascade of organ-system failures ensues, and death comes quickly.” Modern civilization, in developing technologies oriented to
furthering the “ends of human life,” had created a system whose “success and importance to social survival make it, ironically, one of society’s greatest weaknesses.”18

In the 1970s and 1980s, the kinds of hazards that Kupperman identified—what sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as “modernization risks”19—were taking on a new kind of public and political life. Economic and energy shocks, environmental crisis, and terrorism garnered increasing attention alongside the paradigmatic specter of catastrophic risk, thermonuclear war, which raised the prospect, for the first time, of self-inflicted human
extinction. 20 Kupperman’s reflections are especially significant for our story given his career trajectory, which passed through some of the mostly forgotten technical domains in which, we show in this book, the vulnerability of vital systems was identified and addressed as a matter of governmental concern. In 1980, Kupperman served the incoming Ronald Reagan administration as the head of the transition for the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), which President Jimmy Carter had created by executive order in 1979. Prior to that, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Kupperman had worked in one of FEMA’s predecessors, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). As director of the Systems Evaluation Division within OEP, Kupperman oversaw studies on “the impact on the Nation’s security and economy created by emergency contingencies of both
military and nonmilitary nature,” examining issues such as natural disaster assistance, the continuity of government, damage assessment, resource management, and the “survivability of networks related to national preparedness.”21

The arc of Kupperman’s career points us to a broader question: How did it become possible to understand collective existence in the United States as dependent on a complex of vital and vulnerable systems, and how did the protection of such systems come to be a taken-for- granted obligation of contemporary government? In the chapters that follow we show that, for nearly a century, a persistent discourse has examined collective life
from a particular point of view: the vulnerability of modern society and economy to disruption of the vital systems on which they depend. And since at least the early Cold War, the federal government has been concerned with ensuring the continuous functioning of such systems in the face of catastrophic threats. Today, this problem of “vital systems security” is a central object and aim of government, defined in legislation, executive
orders, and broad statements of security strategy.

REFLEXIVE BIOPOLITICS

We analyze the emergence of vital systems security as the product of a mutation in the government of modern life. Specifically, it marks a reflexive moment in the history of “biopolitics”—that is, the government of human beings in relation to their biological and social existence. Michel Foucault famously coined the term “biopolitics” to mark a shift, dating roughly to the late eighteenth century, in the aims and objects of government in
European countries: from the “classical sovereignty” of the European territorial monarchies to a new governmental concern with ensuring the health and well-being of national populations.22 Classical sovereignty, Foucault argued, ruled “from the standpoint of the juridical-political notion” of the legal subject. Diplomatic, military, and police apparatuses—elements of what might be called “sovereign state security”—aimed to ensure the
security of the state itself in the face of foreign and domestic threats. By contrast, biopolitical government is exercised over the population—a collection of living beings understood as a “technical-political object of management.” Foucault traced the “birth of biopolitics” to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Europe, when government authorities sought to manage the health and welfare of populations in growing urban centers.
The rapid growth of towns, the expansion of industry, the intensification of trade, and increasingly crowded living conditions posed “new and specific economic and political problems of governmental technique.” In response, officials, planners, and experts in the nascent human sciences invented new forms of knowledge about—and devices for governing—the “fine materiality of human existence and coexistence, of exchange and
circulation.”23 As Foucault emphasized, the point is not that the birth of biopolitics displaced prior mechanisms of sovereignty; indeed, particularly with the advent of total war, threats to sovereignty were a key catalyst for the development of biopolitics. Rather, the theme of biopolitics designates the interplay between the exercise of juridical power over legal subjects and the technical management of living beings.

Building on Foucault’s analysis, scholars have traced the development of biopolitical government in a range of domains from the early nineteenth century. In efforts to reduce the toll of epidemics, organize conscription for war, or manage economic fluctuations, government bureaucracies generated vast amounts of data about phenomena such as birth, illness, and death; suicide and crime; and levels of production and employment.24 This
“avalanche of numbers,” as Hacking puts it, made possible a new, statistical understanding of collective life.25 The technical and political category of risk played a central role in this development, enabling experts and government officials to quantitatively analyze how phenomena such as crime, illness, accident, and poverty were distributed over a given population, and to assess the costs and benefits of measures to minimize these risks.26
New governmental apparatuses in areas such as economic regulation, urban planning, and public health specified and managed these problems. As Foucault describes this complex process, a “constant interplay between techniques of power and their object” served to “carve out” the population and its specific phenomena (birth and death rates, disease processes, etc.) as a “field of reality.” 27

We take up this story of biopolitical modernity at a later conjuncture and in a different locale. Beginning in the early twentieth century, American planners and policymakers in various domains argued that with the development of mass industrial and metropolitan societies, the interdependencies that made modern collective life possible also rendered it vulnerable to catastrophic disruption from events such as economic shocks, industrial
accidents, or wars. Over the following decades, experts and officials addressed this vulnerability by devising new ways to anticipate and mitigate the effects of such events, to reduce the vulnerability of vital systems, and to make society resilient to shocks.28

The first governmental apparatus for securing vital systems was assembled in the 1950s. In the early Cold War, planners and officials working on nuclear preparedness brought together a set of elements— knowledge forms, techniques of intervention, and organizational arrangements—that constituted system vulnerability as a target of governmental intervention. Like the demographers, public health experts, and urbanists of the
nineteenth century, mobilization planners produced an “avalanche of numbers” about collective existence, not through statistical analysis of populations but by using scenarios, catastrophe models, and vulnerability assessments. Through this process, society became vulnerable in a novel way. Like the figure of population a century earlier, a new figure of collective life—the vulnerable, vital system—was “carved out” as an object of expert
knowledge, technical intervention, and political concern.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this apparatus of vital systems security had been extended into new domains, including natural disaster response, pandemic preparedness, the management of economic crises, and homeland security.29 This is not to say that vital systems security displaced prior forms of security or became the dominant form of collective security. As we will show, vital systems security emerged and
consolidated in complex relation to sovereign state security and population security. Thus, the officials and planners in the 1950s-era Office of Defense Mobilization viewed the task of ensuring the functioning of vital systems in the wake of a nuclear attack as a matter of sovereign state security—prevailing in a future war.30 Meanwhile, vital systems security has become central to many domains of biopolitical government, including the
provision of population security in areas such as public health, urban planning, and economic governance. Indeed, we suggest that vital systems security should be understood as a form of “reflexive biopolitics.” It shares the aim of population security: ensuring the health and welfare of populations. But these two forms of biopolitical security differ in their objects of concern, knowledge practices, and norms (see table 1). Whereas population
security addresses regularly occurring events that can be managed through the distribution of risk, vital systems security deals with events whose probability cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic. Vital systems security does not rely on statistical analysis of past events, but rather employs techniques of enactment such as catastrophe models and scenario-based exercises to simulate potential
future events and thereby generate knowledge about present vulnerabilities.31 Its interventions seek to increase the resilience of critical systems and to bolster preparedness for future emergencies.

A NEW POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Our claim is not that governmental concern with vital systems is itself novel. Governments have long been concerned with vital systems like roads, communication networks, and large systems of water management. The construction and control of transportation, energy, and communication systems—what has only recently come to be called “infrastructure”—is found in all large-scale complex societies. 32 Territorial empires have for
centuries recognized what were referred to as “communications” as essential to prosperity and security. And military strategists have long been concerned with the importance of transportation and communication for military lines of supply; the military tactic of blockade goes back millennia.33 But from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, we observe a significant intensification and modulation of these concerns. In
particular, three features distinguish vital systems security as a political rationality and delimit the conceptual and empirical scope of this book: first, its relationship to biopolitics; second, the emergence of specialized expertise about vital systems; and third, the consolidation of a new political norm—that governments must ensure the ongoing functioning of vital systems in the face of catastrophic threats.

Vital systems and modern biopolitics. First, we can refer to vital systems security in the sense we use the term here only with the emergence of modern biopolitics. Electricity networks, railroads, and complex chains of production became “vital systems” when they were linked to newly constituted problem domains such as the national economy or social welfare.34 Although this development can be traced to the late nineteenth century,
particularly in European contexts,35 our narrative begins in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. We focus on two apparently disparate fields: regional planning and strategic bombing theory.36 Experts in these fields initially used biological metaphors to illustrate the dependence of collective existence on what Muir Fairchild, an instructor at the US Army’s Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s, called “life-sustaining
vital systems.”37 Fairchild’s term suggested that, like the failure of vital organs or the breakdown of circulatory systems in a biological organism, the disruption of such systems would be catastrophic to the social body. As another Air Corps instructor put it in 1938, as the United States had “grown and prospered in proportion to the excellence of its industrial system,” it had become “more vulnerable . . . to wartime collapse caused by the
cutting of one or more of its essential arteries.”38 The use of such biological metaphors would fade over time (though never disappear, as Kupperman’s 1984 report demonstrates). But from the case studies of the Air Corps Tactical School and the quantitative analyses of “criticality” and “essentiality” in wartime and postwar facilities ratings to contemporary assessments of critical infrastructure vulnerability or resilience, experts have
defined the “vitality” of vital systems, and the threat posed by their disruption, in terms of these systems’ role in the health and well-being of populations—the central concerns of biopolitical government.

System vulnerability expertise. Second, vital systems security is distinguished by the development of specialized knowledge that constitutes vital systems and their vulnerability as objects of expert analysis and rational-technical intervention. By the mid-twentieth century, technical specialists and officials working in mobilization and air-targeting agencies had devised new practices for assessing vulnerability and preparing for future events
that might disrupt the nation’s vital systems. This new form of expertise rested on the accumulation of a vast amount of information about American natural resources, productive facilities, and public works—what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to in 1935 as an “inventory of our national assets.”39 Such expertise also drew on techniques for analyzing the interrelationships among the elements that this “inventory” comprised.
Although specialists from many fields were involved in constituting vital systems—and the vulnerability of these systems—as objects of systematic knowledge, economists played a particularly prominent role. Economists first appear in our account during the New Deal, inventing a “science of flows” to analyze how shocks would propagate through the economic system, whether these shocks resulted from a plunge in demand during
economic downturns or from a surge in demand caused by government stimulus policies or wartime mobilization. A number of these New Deal economists then migrated to air intelligence offices during World War II, where they developed an “economics of strategic target selection” to assess the vulnerability of enemy production systems and to recommend bombing targets.40 A decade prior to the development of “systems analysis” at
the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, these mobilization planners and air intelligence specialists established methods for the quantitative analysis of military-industrial complexes as ensembles of interlocking vital systems.41

In the closing years of World War II and the early Cold War, technical experts coupled the analysis of vital systems with new methods for modeling how a catastrophic event—such as an incendiary bombing attack on a city (during World War II) or an atomic detonation (after the war)—would unfold in space. As we show in chapter 3, these experts produced a new kind of knowledge about vital and vulnerable systems. Initially, military
analysts in air intelligence units used graphical techniques such as maps and transparent overlays to generate assessments of urban and industrial vulnerability. By the mid-1950s, vulnerability experts had replaced maps and physical overlays with digital computers and geographically tagged data sets—a precursor of geographic information systems (GIS). The advent of computer simulation added another dimension to vulnerability analysis.
By incorporating randomization procedures and multiple simulated runs in their models, vulnerability specialists could account for uncertainties about how a future attack would unfold. These simulation techniques—initially used as speculative “experiments” or “war games” 42 as part of nuclear preparedness planning (see chapter 6)—have come to be accepted in various domains as authoritative tools for generating knowledge about
uncertain future events.43

Vital systems security as political obligation and norm. Third, and finally, vital systems security refers to an increasingly taken-for- granted norm of politics. After World War II, the task of ensuring the continuous operation of vital systems and managing the risk of catastrophic disruption came to be accepted as a basic obligation of sovereign government. This was not the first time that the US government was expected to deal with the
consequences of domestic catastrophes. As Michele Landis Dauber has documented, there is a long American tradition of federal relief following disasters.44 But prior to the middle of the twentieth century, these governmental responses were ad hoc, organized in the wake of what were understood to be unforeseeable “acts of god.” 45 Only in the last several decades has government been held responsible for preparing in advance of
future catastrophes that can be anticipated if not precisely predicted. And only in the last several decades has this obligation been addressed, at least in part, by technical measures that aim to ensure the functioning of vital systems.

The first statutory mention of this new governmental obligation (discussed in chapter 4) was in the 1947 National Security Act. The Act created a new peacetime mobilization agency—the National Security Resources Board (NSRB)—and charged it with undertaking measures to protect “industries, services, Government and economic activities” whose “continuous operation” Congress deemed “essential to the Nation’s security.” 46 The NSRB
was a defense mobilization agency, in which the norm of “preparedness” still referred to military-industrial readiness for war. But planners working in government agencies charged with preparedness gradually adapted these techniques to address other kinds of potentially catastrophic events, such as hurricanes, floods, and infectious disease outbreaks. By the 1960s, the norm of preparedness could refer to any event that might
catastrophically disrupt the nation’s vital systems. The organization of responsibility for emergency preparedness has shifted almost constantly over the subsequent decades, and attention to this problem has ebbed and flowed. But the task of ensuring the continuous operation of vital systems is now a virtually unquestioned—if not always successfully met—obligation of contemporary government.

An “Administrative Machinery” for Governing Emergencies

The prior section described how experts and officials constituted system vulnerability as an object of specialized knowledge and a target of governmental intervention during the Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. But on its own, this description of expert knowledge and technical interventions is too serene. It is too serene, in part, because these “interventions” into vital systems were closely linked to projects— whether war
mobilization, strategic air targeting, or nuclear preparedness—that involved the mass slaughter of civilians, the annihilation of cities, and, after World War II, the prospect of nuclear holocaust.47 It is also too serene because the developments we have described corresponded to an upheaval in American government. Technical experts and government officials often instituted the mechanisms of vital systems security through “emergency”
measures that challenged American political traditions, such as deference to legislative prerogative and judicial precedent, as well as a diffuse and decentralized pattern of sovereignty. An account of the emergence and consolidation of vital systems security must, therefore, address the fraught relationship between emergency powers and constitutional democracy.

As a point of entry into these questions, we turn to the writings of a prominent midcentury American commentator on crisis government, political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter began his seminal study Constitutional Dictatorship, published in 1948, with a question that President Abraham Lincoln had posed at the outset of the American Civil War. “Is there in all republics,” Lincoln asked, “this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a
government be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Had Lincoln been alive on the eve of World War II, Rossiter observed, he could have “framed his question in more modern terms.” Was it possible for a democracy to “fight a successful total war and still be a democracy when the war is over?” For Rossiter, writing just after the end of World War II, the “incontestable facts of history” had
provided an answer. “We have fought a successful total war,” Rossiter declared, “and we are still a democracy.” In this “severe national emergency,” the US government had employed “devices and techniques” that made it “strong enough to maintain its own existence without at the same time being so strong as to subvert the liberties of the people it has been instituted to defend.” 48

In what follows, we show that the “devices and techniques” Rossiter referred to were the product of efforts by governmental reformers who, during the New Deal and World War II, sought to meet the challenge that, they thought, emergency situations posed to constitutional democracy. These reformers assembled what Rossiter called an “administrative machinery” that would enable the US federal government, especially its executive
branch, to manage emergency situations through expert rule without recourse to an extra-constitutional state of exception. They believed, like Rossiter, that in an era of pervasive doubt about the prospects for democracy, they had successfully responded to the “taunt of the dictators” that “democracies cannot meet the demands of the modern world and still remain democratic,” as the reformer Luther Gulick put it in 1941.49 Our aim in
describing these reformers’ efforts is not to assess the validity of such claims. Rather, it is to reconstruct how they formulated and sought to address the problem that emergencies posed to democratic constitutionalism. Their responses shaped a distinctive political technology for governing emergency situations.

DEMOCRACY, EMERGENCY, AND THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE

Our account begins in the early twentieth century. At this time, Progressive reformers argued that, as Charles Merriam
put it in 1933, governments had “to undertake new activities” to address intensifying processes of urbanization and
industrialization. Among these new activities were the management of “public welfare, including education, recreation,
health, social relief, and welfare planning”; the construction of public works, such as “highways and aid to
communications”; and the “central control over social and economic forces.”50 The challenge, Merriam and other
reformers held, was that American governmental institutions, which were set up when the United States was a largely
rural and sparsely populated country, were ill suited to the functions required of what they referred to as a “positive
state” that was involved in managing the health, well-being, and conditions of existence of a rapidly growing and an
increasingly urban population. Merriam described this mismatch as “social lag” and argued for governmental
“adjustment.”51 On the one hand, technical experts would have to play an expanded role in political administration. On
the other hand, such an “adjustment” would require a significant shift in the locus of political authority: centralization to
address issues that crossed local jurisdictional boundaries and decisive executive leadership to manage urgent social and
economic problems.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, administrative reformers succeeded in instituting significant changes
along the lines Merriam and other Progressives prescribed. Initially, their efforts focused on state and local
governments, as they sought to deal with the growing pressures of urban growth and industrial expansion. By the 1930s,
in the context of the New Deal, these reformers turned their attention to the national level and the federal government,
where they confronted the “emergency” situations of the Great Depression and World War II. Between 1933 and 1945,
federal agencies took on a vast range of new functions relating to the provision of social welfare , economic
management , and industrial mobilization .52 To better equip the federal government—particularly the executive
branch—to meet these new demands, Progressive reformers working in and around the Roosevelt administration
pushed through a series of laws and administrative changes. Partly as a result of their efforts, the American presidency,
which began the 1930s as a solitary office with a small staff, emerged from the war as a powerful office that oversaw an
array of agencies , wield ing formidable discretionary powers.53 [FOOTNOTE] 53. Waldo (Administrative State) referred
to the federal government that emerged from World War II as the “administrative state.” On the expansion of the
Executive Office of the President (EOP) in particular, see Relyea, Executive Office. As one indicator of the growth of this
apparatus of executive rule, President Hoover’s staff consisted of thirty-three people; today, more than two thousand
people are on the EOP’s staff. [END FOOTNOTE] New expert bodies were scattered throughout the executive branch,
and new mechanisms of rational-technical administration were woven into laws and regulations.
 <>Court Clog DA: NU

Granting personhood destabilizes the court with a flood of petitions.

Janet DiFiore 22, Chief Judge for the Court of Appeals of New York, 6/14/2022, “Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project,
Inc. v. Breheny,” Court of Appeals of New York, No. 52, lexis

We cannot agree; to do so would be to turn a blind eye to the impact of any ruling that elephants (or autonomous
beings more generally) have liberty interests . A determination that Happy, an elephant, may invoke habeas corpus to
challenge her confinement at the Bronx Zoo—a confinement both authorized and, by all indications, compliant with
state and federal statutory law and regulations—would have an enormous destabilizing impact on modern society. It is
not this Court's role to make such a determination. As the Appellate Court of Connecticut cautioned in dismissing similar
litigation by petitioner in that state, "[n]ot only would this case require us to recognize elephants as 'persons' for
purposes of habeas corpus, this recognition essentially would require us to upend this state's legal system to allow
highly intelligent, if not all, nonhuman animals the right to bring suit in a court of law" (R.W. Commerford and Sons, Inc.,
192 Conn App at 44). Granting legal personhood to a nonhuman animal in such a manner would have significant
implications for the interactions of humans and animals in all facets of life , including risking the disruption of property
rights , the agricultural industry (among others), [*16] and medical research efforts. Indeed, followed to its logical
conclusion, such a determination would call into question the very premises underlying pet ownership, the use of
service animals, and the enlistment of animals in other forms of work. With no clear standard for determining which
species are entitled to access the writ , who has standing to bring such claims on a nonhuman animal's behalf, what
parameters to apply in [**7] determining whether a confinement is "unjust," and whether "release" from a
confinement otherwise authorized by law is feasible or warranted in any particular case, courts would face grave
difficulty resolving the inevitable flood of petitions . Likewise, owners of numerous nonhuman animal species—
farmers, pet owners, military and police forces, researchers, and zoos, to name just a few—would be forced to answer
and defend those actions.

Tellingly, neither of our dissenting colleagues identify any intelligible standard upon which to resolve these
labyrinthine issues , which buttresses our conclusion that habeas corpus—which exists to protect liberty interests—is
not the appropriate forum to resolve disputes concerning the confinement of nonhuman animals. Judge Wilson [*17]
posits that courts should engage in "a normative analysis that weighs the value of keeping the [nonhuman animal]
confined with the value of releasing the [nonhuman animal] from confinement," taking into consideration "[t]he value of
the confinement" to the nonhuman animal as well as the "value of the confinement to the captor and society" (Wilson,
J. dissenting op at 68). This, of course, bears no relationship to the merits analysis properly undertaken in a habeas
corpus proceeding, which asks whether the confinement—i.e., the curtailment of liberty—is legal. Rather, relief would
be dependent, not on the legality of detention, but on a judge's subjective determination of where the relator would be
"better off" (Wilson, J. dissenting op at 4). Such a balancing test would transform the great writ of habeas into a morass
of confusing case-by-case inquiries apparently to be determined by some subjective , amorphous , and evolving
"normative" value system regarding the treatment of nonhuman animals to which our own legislature has not
subscribed. Moreover, a standard weighing the nonhuman animal's purported liberty interests against the various
interests of the claimed human captor does little [*18] to alleviate the asserted wrongful subjugation of nonhuman
animals. Judge Rivera, on the other hand, suggests that liberty rights spring from "autonomy"—a term that is notably
left undefined and which could reasonably be applied to a vast number of species.

Judge Wilson also appears to contemplate some form of "functional intelligence" test to limit the undeniably slippery
slope his view would set us upon. But that is exactly the test, as Judge Wilson himself makes clear (see Wilson, J.
dissenting op at 14-15), that cannot be used for human animals. All one can glean from Judge Wilson's dissent is that
elephants qualify, ants do not. What of dolphins—or dogs? What about cows or pigs or chickens—species routinely
confined in conditions far more restrictive than the elephant enclosure at the Bronx Zoo? Indeed, the dissenters' wholly
unsatisfactory attempts to distinguish "domestic" animals from elephants despite their appreciable intelligence and
autonomy simply because they purportedly live "comfortably" among humans (Rivera, J. dissenting op at 19) or are
supposedly genetically predisposed to confinement (see Wilson, J. dissenting op at 62-64) is divorced from practical
reality, devoid [*19] of support, and demonstrates the internally contradictory foundation on which their analyses are
built. Such arbitrary distinctions stand in clear contrast to our recognition that habeas is, and always has been, the
bulwark of human liberty rights. Moreover, giving a court authority to interpret the relevant "science" (Wilson, J.
dissenting op at 59-65) so as to make judgments regarding "who" deserves a right to "liberty" would have perilous
implications far beyond the issue here.

Simply put, granting legal personhood and attendant liberty rights to Happy, an elephant, would not be an incremental
step in "the slow process of decisional accretion" regarding the scope and flexibility of the writ of habeas (Keitt, 18 NY2d
at 263) but a " sweeping pronouncement []" of nonhuman animal personhood lacking in legal foundation that would
displace the carefully devised state and federal statutory frameworks governing animal welfare (R.W. Commerford and
Sons, Inc., 192 Conn App at 44). Thus, while this litigation may invite consideration by others of questions that [**8] are
the appropriate subject of ethical, moral, religious, and philosophical debate, the legal issue presented is
straightforward. The use of habeas corpus as a vehicle to extend legal personhood beyond [*20] living humans is not a
matter for the courts (see Byrn v New York City Health & Hosps. Corp., 31 NY2d 194, 203, 286 N.E.2d 887, 335 N.Y.S.2d
390 [1972]).

Docket overload prevents efficient resolution of water disputes---that escalates conflict over
climate-related shortages.
Vanessa Perez 19, Associate Professor of Law at Texas A&M, Associate Research Professor at the Texas A&M
Department of Agricultural Economics, J.S.D. from New York University, L.L.M. from the University of Chicago,
“Specialization Trend: Water Courts,” Environmental Law, vol. 49

I. Introduction

Definition of property rights is an essential solution to the tragedy of the commons 1 from which many of our natural
resources suffer. The scholarship analyzing how property rights are created and how they evolve often takes for granted
the enforcement of those rights. 2 Enforcement is key. Enforcement is a public good often, but not exclusively,
provided by [*589] government . Enforcement takes many different forms: from ostracism in self-governed property
rights systems to administrative agencies' resolutions and judicial decisions in formal property right systems.

This Article focuses on the last step in the enforcement of water rights: the courts. In particular, it analyzes whether the
introduction of water courts is advisable in western United States. Currently, water rights are first enforced by
administrative agencies, and the decisions of those agencies may be challenged in court . For example, a water rights
holder may challenge a water agency's denial of a location change for their water right. 3 Additionally, private parties
may bring claims against other water rights holders to court. Presently water cases are heard by generalist state courts .
However, water law cases may unduly burden the dockets of those generalist courts. 4 Courts decide on many
different areas and the complexity of the facts and the law in water law cases suggests that a different institutional
design, one with specialized courts, may be more efficient. 5 The gains in efficiency will come from a faster, more
accurate resolution of cases. 6

Specialized courts are quite common from a comparative perspective in areas as varied as corporate matters, tax issues,
gender violence, administrative law, family law, or patents. 7 One such area is environmental law. Forty-two countries
have specialized environmental courts. For example, India created the Green Tribunal in 2010, 8 New South Wales
(Australia) has the Land and Environmental Courts that hear environmental and land use cases since 1979. 9 Sweden, in
2011, replaced property and environmental courts for a system of Land and Environment Courts which also hears water
cases. 10
In the United States, the generalist judge is celebrated. 11 Judge Posner wrote in defense of the generalist judge in 1983.
12 While in 1990, the United States Judicial Conference qualified them as "exotic," 13 around that time the [*590]
Vermont Superior Court Environmental Division 14 and the Shelby County-Tennessee Environmental Court 15 were
created. Setting aside the specialization of administrative law judges such as the United States Environmental Protection
Agency administrative law judges or the environmental appeals board, 16 there are plenty of examples of specialized
courts in the United States, such as bankruptcy courts or Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. 17

Water law has not been immune to specialization at the judicial level. Water law is similar to environmental law 18 and
patent law because both the facts and the regulations are very complex. In fact, across the world, water issues have
often prompted the establishment of environmental courts and tribunals. 19 In the United States, only Colorado has a
system of water courts. 20 These courts have been in place since 1969 21 but, surprisingly, the literature about
specialized courts has not paid much attention to these Colorado courts. In addition, some specialized courts, created to
deal with the adjudication processes in the western states where water rights were not properly recorded, are becoming
permanent courts of limited jurisdiction. 22 While there are few examples, water courts are not frequent. However,
voices advocate for them. For example, in California, when drought strikes, there are often claims of the need for water
courts. 23

This Article analyzes whether water law courts are a sound reform to deal with water rights disputes in an era of climate
change which will inevitably make water disputes more common . Water courts compete with general courts as a
forum for dispute resolution, but they also compete with market mechanisms or with political deal-making as alternative
ways to [*591] solve water conflicts. 24 A better system of judicial decision making should reduce the overall social
costs of water conflicts.

In order to assess the suitability of water courts, the Article starts by analyzing the comparative advantages and
disadvantages of specialized courts in relation to the current system of generalist courts. Second, it looks at some
examples of existing water courts in the United States and beyond, namely the Water tribunal of Valencia, the South
Africa Water Court, Colorado Water Courts, and the Montana Water Court. Third, the Article describes the trend
towards specialization in water law judicial decision making and distills the characteristics that a water court should have
and how those could also inform the establishment of other specialized judicial institutions for other natural resources.

II. Specialized Tribunals

Specialized courts are expected to make quicker decisions, reducing the workload of regular courts, and provide higher
quality decisions, thus ensuring legal coherence and uniform judicial decisions. 25 Beyond these advantages that all
scholars agree on, some works on specialized courts identify additional advantages. 26 The study Greening Justice about
the potential for environmental courts lists visibility as an advantage. 27 The report understands environmental courts
as a way to increase the public relevance of a subject because by creating these courts, the government shows that
environmental issues are a topic of great importance. 28 The lessons offered here for specialized water courts can be
translated to many other areas.

If all the above advantages were realized, private parties should favor specialized courts because they would greatly
reduce the cost of doing business in the subject matter areas where those courts specialize. 29 Additionally, a
trustworthy , respected judicial system is a key part of procedural environmental justice. 30 Some scholars consider
specialized [*592] courts as increasing public confidence 31 in the system, which in turn may enjoy greater legitimacy.
32 Subpart A below will focus on the two advantages that encompass all the additional ones listed in the current
scholarship on the topic: celerity and quality of adjudication 33

It goes global---extinction. U.S. judicial management is key.

Peter Gleick 21, MacArthur Fellow, Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and Hydroclimatologist, Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley, 2021, “Water Recommendation for the New Administration,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, vol. 77
Climate changes are already affect ing US water resources, and the consequences for communities, health, and the
environment will worsen

The science is unambiguous , as shown in the long series of US National Climate Assessments, reports from the US
National Academies of Science, and other national and international scientific reviews (US Global Change Research
Program 2020). Rising temperatures affect both water supply and demand. Rapidly melting snow and ice mean floods
in spring, droughts in summer, and new threats to hydropower production. Rising sea levels threaten coastal
communities, groundwater, and wetlands.

Hurricanes, floods, and droughts – already the nation’s most destructive natural disasters – are getting worse. By failing
to address climate change, we threaten our economy, security, health, and the environment.

So, what can we do about it? A few key recommendations include supporting the ongoing US National Climate
Assessments, as required by law. These reports provide the best scientific assessment of the risks of climate change. The
Biden administration could also require all federal agencies to integrate climate resilience and risk mitigation into water
programs, including infrastructure investments, disaster planning, insurance programs, agricultural and industrial
commitments, and military and national security assessments. Funding and scientific advice is needed for states,
counties, cities, and tribal communities to establish key partnerships, develop climate change risk-reduction and
resilience programs, and enhance protection from disasters.

It’s also long past time to revise and modernize the federal National Flood Insurance Program to increase protections
from changing flood risks and discourage development or redevelopment in vulnerable areas. The new administration
should also develop federal water- and energy-efficiency programs and greenhouse-gas emissions reductions strategies
that reduce the energy cost of providing, treating, delivering, using, and cleaning water, and boosting soil carbon – and
President-elect Biden, immediately upon his inauguration, should reaffirm US commitments to the Paris Agreement and
the World Health Organization.

Which brings us to the next problem.

Water resource problems pose threats to US national and international security and will continue to be a source of
intra- and inter-state conflict

In 2012, the US Intelligence Community released an assessment of national security threats associated with water
resources (Intelligence Community Assessment 2012). Among their conclusions: “During the next 10 years, many
countries important to the United States will experience water problems – shortages , poor water quality, or floods –
that will risk instability and state failure , increase regional tensions , and distract them from working with the U nited
States on important US policy objectives.” These conclusions have unfortunately been borne out with water-based
conflicts affecting US global interests in countries around the world.

The 2014 US Quadrennial Defense Review also identified water resource issues as threat multipliers that pose
significant challenges for the United States and the world at large (Quadrennial Defense Review 2014). The May 2017
statement of the Director of US National Intelligence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted:
“[h]eightened tensions over shared water resources are likely in some regions” (Coats 2017). Beginning immediately,
the National War College system, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and other defense and
intelligence agencies should conduct a series of integrated assessments to identify and analyze water-related threats to
vital US interests, including the vulnerability of US water systems to terrorism and cyber-attacks.

As we improve our understanding of the nature of the threats, US foreign policy should place greater emphasis on
reduc ing the risks of water-related conflicts around the world . A variety of approaches to reduce water-related
tensions should be implemented, including international agreements and treaties, technology based solutions,
conflict-resolution institutions, and innovative water management (Gleick, Iceland, and Trivedi 2020). These
approaches hold great promise for reducing water-related conflicts but have not yet been adequately adopted.
Here in the U nited States, Federal agencies and Congress should assist local water agencies to identify security threats
to water systems and put in place improved physical barriers, real-time chemical and biological monitoring and
treatment, cyber-security strategies, and integrated responses.

And that takes us to our final problem.

The United States has no National Water Strategy, reducing the ability to understand water problems and define and
implement solutions

More than 20 federal agencies have overlapping and conflicting responsibilities for water management. As a result,
current US water programs are incomplete, haphazard, and inconsistent. Basic water data are not collected or analyzed.
Fundamental science remains undone. Regulations are inconsistent and outdated. Financial investments are haphazard
and insufficient. Our freshwater resources are used inefficiently and ineffectively. Continuing to neglect these water
problems will impoverish and sicken this and future generations, destroy irreplaceable aquatic ecosystems , and
threaten our economy and food supply .

There are several ways to address these problems. For starters, the president should immediately create a new
National Water Commission for the 21st Century to evaluate and recommend specific federal actions to improve
national water policy. We have had no national water commission since 1973. Such a commission would reorganize and
streamline the diverse and uncoordinated federal water responsibilities and laws.

And such a commission should not be idle, but expected to produce recommendations within 12 months that include
executive branch actions, congressional actions, and legal and judicial actions. The National Water Commission should
address the entire range of national water challenges, be nonpartisan, and consist of scientists, legal and policy experts,
and nongovernmental and community representatives who can speak to the on-the-ground realities facing American
communities.

The need to address water problems in the U nited States is great, but so are the opportunities. The new
administration must move forward rapidly to make progress on this vital challenge.

Clog DA
Water---Impact---Overview---2NC
Uniqueness---2NC
Data refutes the clog.
Ronald Cass 22, Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the C. Boyden
Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Spring 2022, “On Expanding Federal Courts,” National Affairs, No.
52, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts

One final element to consider before adding federal judgeships involves the practical needs of the courts themselves.
Politics aside, the arguments most assiduously advanced in support of adding seats to the bench focus on difficulties in
the timely processing of cases, backed by data indicating that the federal courts have witnessed a significant increase in
caseloads. But a closer examination of these data reveals serious reason to doubt the need to add a significant number
of judgeships to manage existing caseloads. At the very least, it supports taking a modest approach to the issue rather
than rushing to expand the judiciary.

Turning first to the appellate level, advocates of creating additional judgeships have repeatedly asserted that the U.S.
courts of appeals are facing a crisis due to the rising number of cases. Yet while the appellate caseload did increase
from the 1970s through the 1990s , it leveled off afterward and then began to decline . The number of cases filed in
the federal courts of appeals in 2020 was almost 10% below the number filed in 2000.

Not only are case numbers falling, but the time taken to reach decisions is, too. Though termination times rose
precipitously in the 1970s, they leveled off during the following two decades and, after an uptick in the early 2000s,
have shown signs of trending downward again. Since 2010, the median time for deciding cases in the federal courts of
appeals has been lower each year in the past decade (from 2011 to 2020) than it was in the decade's first year. The
difference is even more dramatic when compared with termination times from three decades earlier: In 1990, the
median time it took the federal courts of appeals to close a case was over 15 months — roughly 69% higher than it was
in 2020 and more than double what it was in 2016.

Courts resolve backlogs now.

Alaina Lancaster 22, Litigation Editor for Law.com, 4/7/2022, “Backlogs Are Burdening Litigators, Court Staff as
Proceedings Ramp Back Up,” https://www.law.com/2022/04/07/backlogs-are-burdening-litigators-court-staff-as-
proceedings-ramp-back-up/

The Forecast

In response to the influx of trial work amid backlogs, demands to add more staff within courts, law firms and legal
offices could grow louder. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said the city’s criminal justice partners need more
funding. Krasner said a ramped-up trial schedule could be further accelerated if the various offices within the criminal
justice system could increase their headcounts. “Accountability requires that government put its money where its
mouth is. And that means funding for public defenders, funding for district attorneys, proper funding for private
attorneys who do court-appointed work, proper funding for the courts, is necessary,” he said.

In Georgia, the Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit’s allocated more than $860,000 in A merican Rescue Plan Act funding to
address its pandemic-related backlog , which included adding a senior judge, a courtroom and corresponding staff .

Some courts might also adjust their rules to provide attorneys and parties more notice for deadlines . Carolyn
Carluccio, president judge of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, said she is seeking to amend a
local rule on case management to set earlier deadlines for trial readiness. “By giving earlier notice of deadlines, we
expect that fewer deadline extensions will be needed and cases will more quickly be heard or resolved,” Carluccio
said.

Courts adapt and innovate now.

Alyssa Nekritz 21, Knowledge and Information Services researcher at the National Center for State Courts,
12/15/2021, “A look at pandemic backlog in court proceedings and resources,”
https://cdm16501.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/ctadmin/id/2482

About one third of U.S. courts saw an increase of over 5% in backlogs. This increase would have been larger had
courts not adapted quickly to online operations. Several types of court proceedings, particularly trials, were delayed.
Some court professionals are optimistic that the existing backlogs will be resolved quickly . Others are worried
backlogs will continue.

In order to avert for a growing backlog, some states have or are dropping non-violent criminal cases when courts
reopen. Other prosecutors are prioritizing repeat offenders . Although it is important for the court system to manage
the cases timely, there are staunch critics who believe dismissal is a bad idea. Critics argue adjournments and the
associated delay can create access to justice concerns, placing courts in a tough position.

Other state courts, like Florida and Washington, have requested more retired judges to assist pulled judges out of
retirement and temporarily increased staffing to help with backlogs. Some jurisdictions continue to look for effective
ways of addressing their backlogs.
NCSC’s Effective Criminal Case Management Project conducted extensive data collection on felony and misdemeanor
cases. The project built resources on case flow management to help courts process cases efficiently.

Courts continue to innovate and NCSC is tracking pandemic related backlogs. More data will be necessary to draw
conclusions about future impacts. Revisit the 2020 CCJ/COSCA Pandemic Backlog Report for more resources on dealing
with a surge in civil cases. Additionally, courts can access the ECCM’s Cost of Delay Calculator (PDF and Excel) to
compute a simple estimate revealing how quickly and significantly the costs of delay accumulate across a court.

Link---2NC
The plan forces courts to work out every detail from scratch---litigants will challenge at every turn
Joanna J. Bryson 17, Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bath, et al., 9/8/17, “Of, for, and by the people:
the legal lacuna of synthetic persons,” Artificial Intelligence and Law, Vol. 25, pp. 273-291

Even once a legal system has determined which rights and obligations to confer on a legal person, practical realities
may nullify them. Legal rights with no way to enforce them are mere illusion. Standing—the right to appear before
particular organs for purposes of presenting a case under a particular rule—is crucial to a legal person seeking to
protect its rights in the legal system. Standing does not necessarily follow from the existence of an actor’s legal
personality. An entity, even when its legal personality is not in doubt, must exercise its standing before it can avail itself
of relevant procedures (Vollenhoven et al. 1926). When an entity tries to invoke newly conferred rights , challenges to
its standing are all the more likely (Shah 2013).

Consider the legal right of “integral respect” that Ecuador gave to its ecosystem. While the ecosystem may have the
right as a matter of law, it clearly lacks the non-legal capacities it would need to protect the right from encroachment.
To effectuate the right, the Ecuadorian constitution gave standing to everyone in Ecuador to bring suits on behalf of the
ecosystem. Thus, in 2011, private Ecuadorians successfully sued the Provincial Government of Loja to halt expansion of a
roadway that was damaging an important watershed (Greene 2011). The outcome would have been very different if
Ecuador had provided no mechanism for protecting nature’s legal right of integral respect. Nature cannot protect itself
in a court of law.

Just as legal rights mean nothing if the legal system elides the standing to protect them, legal obligations mean
nothing in the absence of procedure to enforce them . The advisory opinion of the ICJ establishing that the UN has legal
personality was in 1948, but this resolved only whether the UN could bring a claim. It said nothing about an obvious
correlate: the legal capacity of the UN to bear responsibility and answer for its own breaches. Affirmation that the UN
indeed can be responsible for its breaches did come—but over half a century later (Wickremasinghe and Evans 2000,
para. 66). Despite the efforts of international lawyers, there is still no reliable procedure for suing an international
organization.Footnote12

We could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal people would interact with other legal persons
and with the institutions of the legal system ( courts , administrative agencies , legislatures , police, etc.). In its first
encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf or against it would require novel and
controversial developments in law . Courts and other organs would struggle to decide how, if at all, the rules—
heretofore addressed to other legal persons—address the robot. Both the robot’s standing against other actors and
other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested. If the topic of electronic personality is to be
addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely
synthetic entities to sue and of others to sue them—is a further matter that would need to be considered.

Summary

The intricacies described in this section are not just inevitable ‘bugs’ to be eventually worked out. They are crucial
questions that we must answer before introducing novel legal personhood. Concerns about legal accountability , and
the way electronic persons might affect accountability, are our main motivation in writing this paper. We now turn to
consider the impacts of offering some form of personhood status to robots.

Clog DA
Water---Impact---Overview---2NC
It’s fast: there’s tipping points next year AND it causes nuke war in Asia, Africa, and India/Pakistan.
Dahr Jamail 19, Recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and 2018 Izzy Award for Outstanding
Achievement in Independent Media, Contributing Writer, Board of Advisers Member and Former Staff Reporter at
Truthout, 2/11/2019, “The World Is on the Brink of Widespread Water Wars,” https://truthout.org/articles/the-world-is-
on-the-brink-of-widespread-water-wars/

Given the Arctic realities and the looming Blue Ocean Event (once the Arctic loses its summer sea ice, at which point
global climate and weather patterns become profoundly destabilized) possibly as soon as 2022 , things are really going
to amplify .

Likely we will look back on January 2019 as when it was moderate and “easy” compared to the challenging heat and
drought on the way.

Mark’s words should be a call to attention, and a call to action. The plight of farmers in Australia illustrates a larger
reality: As planetary temperatures continue to increase and rainfall patterns shift due to human-caused climate
disruption, our ability to grow crops and have enough drinking water will become increasingly challenged , and the
outlook is only going to worsen .

We Have Been Warned

The most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of increasingly intense
droughts and mass water shortages around large swaths of the globe.

But even more conservative organizations have been sounding the alarm. “Water insecurity could multiply the risk of
conflict,” warns one of the World Bank’s reports on the issue. “Food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame
latent conflicts and drive migration . Where economic growth is impacted by rainfall, episodes of droughts and floods
have generated waves of migration and spikes in violence within countries.”

Meanwhile, a study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, looked at how “hydro-political issues” —
including tensions and potential conflicts — could play out in countries expected to experience water shortages
coupled with high populations and pre-existing geopolitical tensions .

The study warned that these factors could combine to increase the likelihood of water-related tensions — potentially
escalating into armed conflict in cross-boundary river basins in places around the world by 74.9 to 95 percent. This
means that in some places conflict is practically guaranteed .

These areas include regions situated around primary rivers in Asia and North Africa . Noted rivers include the Tigris and
Euphrates, the Indus, the Nile, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra.

Consider the fact that 11 countries share the Nile River basin: Egypt, Burundi, Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda,
Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All told, more than 300 million people already live
in these countries, — a number that is projected to double in the coming decades, while the amount of available water
will continue to shrink due to climate change.
For those in the US thinking these potential conflicts will only occur in distant lands — think again. The study also
warned of a very high chance of these “hydro-political interactions” in portions of the southwestern US and north ern
Mexico, around the Colorado River.

India and Pakistan

Potential tensions are particularly worrisome in India and Pakistan , which are already rivals when it comes to water
resources. For now, these two countries have an agreement, albeit a strained one, over the Indus River and the sharing
of its water, by way of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty.

However, water claims have been central to their ongoing, burning dispute over the Kashmir region, a flashpoint area
there for more than 60 years and counting.

The aforementioned treaty is now more strained than ever, as Pakistan accuses India of limiting its water supply and
violating the treaty by placing dams over various rivers that flow from Kashmir into Pakistan.

In fact, a 2018 report from the International Monetary Fund ranked Pakistan third among countries facing severe water
shortages, This is largely due to the rapid melting of glaciers in the Himalaya that are the source of much of the water for
the Indus.

To provide an idea of how quickly water resources are diminishing in both countries, statistics from Pakistan’s Islamabad
Chamber of Commerce and Industry from 2018 show that water availability (per capita in cubic meters per year) shrank
from 5,260 in 1951, to 940 in 2015, and are projected to shrink to 860 by just 2025.

In India, the crisis is hardly better. According to that country’s Ministry of Statistics (2016) and the Indian Ministry of
Water Resources (2010), the per capita available water in cubic meters per year was 5,177 in 1951, and 1,474 in 2015,
and is projected to shrink to 1,341 in 2025.

Both of these countries are nuclear powers. Given the dire projections of water availability as climate change
progresses, nightmare scenarios of water wars that could spark nuclear exchanges are now becoming possible .

1NR---AT: Clogged Now

Data refutes the clog.
Ronald Cass 22, Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the C. Boyden
Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, Spring 2022, “On Expanding Federal Courts,” National Affairs, No.
52, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts

One final element to consider before adding federal judgeships involves the practical needs of the courts themselves.
Politics aside, the arguments most assiduously advanced in support of adding seats to the bench focus on difficulties in
the timely processing of cases, backed by data indicating that the federal courts have witnessed a significant increase in
caseloads. But a closer examination of these data reveals serious reason to doubt the need to add a significant number
of judgeships to manage existing caseloads. At the very least, it supports taking a modest approach to the issue rather
than rushing to expand the judiciary.

Turning first to the appellate level, advocates of creating additional judgeships have repeatedly asserted that the U.S.
courts of appeals are facing a crisis due to the rising number of cases. Yet while the appellate caseload did increase
from the 1970s through the 1990s , it leveled off afterward and then began to decline . The number of cases filed in
the federal courts of appeals in 2020 was almost 10% below the number filed in 2000.

Not only are case numbers falling, but the time taken to reach decisions is, too. Though termination times rose
precipitously in the 1970s, they leveled off during the following two decades and, after an uptick in the early 2000s,
have shown signs of trending downward again. Since 2010, the median time for deciding cases in the federal courts of
appeals has been lower each year in the past decade (from 2011 to 2020) than it was in the decade's first year. The
difference is even more dramatic when compared with termination times from three decades earlier: In 1990, the
median time it took the federal courts of appeals to close a case was over 15 months — roughly 69% higher than it was
in 2020 and more than double what it was in 2016.

Courts resolve backlogs now.

Alaina Lancaster 22, Litigation Editor for Law.com, 4/7/2022, “Backlogs Are Burdening Litigators, Court Staff as
Proceedings Ramp Back Up,” https://www.law.com/2022/04/07/backlogs-are-burdening-litigators-court-staff-as-
proceedings-ramp-back-up/

The Forecast

In response to the influx of trial work amid backlogs, demands to add more staff within courts, law firms and legal
offices could grow louder. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said the city’s criminal justice partners need more
funding. Krasner said a ramped-up trial schedule could be further accelerated if the various offices within the criminal
justice system could increase their headcounts. “Accountability requires that government put its money where its
mouth is. And that means funding for public defenders, funding for district attorneys, proper funding for private
attorneys who do court-appointed work, proper funding for the courts, is necessary,” he said.

In Georgia, the Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit’s allocated more than $860,000 in A merican Rescue Plan Act funding to
address its pandemic-related backlog , which included adding a senior judge, a courtroom and corresponding staff .

Some courts might also adjust their rules to provide attorneys and parties more notice for deadlines . Carolyn
Carluccio, president judge of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, said she is seeking to amend a
local rule on case management to set earlier deadlines for trial readiness. “By giving earlier notice of deadlines, we
expect that fewer deadline extensions will be needed and cases will more quickly be heard or resolved,” Carluccio
said.

1NR---LT Simplification

AI can’t be liable for harm now, but granting personhood draws AI into a rat’s nest of legal
challenges.
Dr. Lance Eliot 22, Stanford Fellow and world-renowned expert on Artificial Intelligence advising Congress and
authoring 50 books and 750 articles on AI, 3/4/2022, “AI Legal Personhood Distresses AI Ethicists Since People Could
Deviously Scapegoat Machines To Avoid Apt Human Responsibility, Including In The Case Of AI-Based Self-Driving Cars,”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2022/03/04/ai-legal-personhood-distresses-ai-ethicists-since-people-could-
deviously-scapegoat-machines-to-avoid-apt-human-responsibility-including-in-the-case-of-ai-based-self-driving-cars/?
sh=1957bd4210ac

Suppose that AI or robots do have legal personhood . A possible and realistically plausible consequence could be that
humans would leverage, exploit, or get confounded by pointing fingers at the AI and tend to hide behind or shift
attention to the AI rather than perhaps more rightfully acknowledge the human culpability underpinning a grievous AI-
related circumstance that has gone awry.

That’s a mouthful. Time to unpack it.

We’ll use a quick and easy scenario to highlight the issues involved.
An AI developer has crafted an AI system to do some actions that are generally useful to humans. The AI seems to be
working fine and people that are daily using it are satisfied. One day, a person interacting with the AI gets injured via
the AI system.

Who is legally responsible for what the AI did?

I’ve discussed at length the impending “ AI blame game ” that we are already veering toward, see my coverage at this
link here. You could say that the AI developer ought to be responsible. As the developer that programmed the AI, we
should hold that person’s feet to the fire. Or maybe the company that employs the AI developer ought to be on the
hook. The company opted to hire the AI developer and put them to work, and furthermore, the company unleashed the
AI onto the public. All in all, the company is perhaps where we should be setting our legally responsible sights.

Sometimes the developers and others behind-the-scenes are quick to try and blame the AI. They are fast to emphasize
that it was the AI that caused the injury. Do not look at the AI developer. Do not look at the company that hired the AI
developer, even though the company oversaw the crafting of the AI and put the AI into active use. No, definitely don’t
look there, we are supposed to instead intently gaze at the AI.

Magicians do this, it is called theatrical misdirection .

For AI systems, the attempt to shift the focus and the blame is kind of devilishly clever when you think about it. The
public at large is intimately familiar with machines that don’t work or errantly work. People oftentimes take their anger
out on the machine and do not think about all of those humans that put the machine together and put the machine into
their hands. How many times have you heard someone use the excuse that the darned misbehaving computer did this
or that?

We all share that same frustration and simply shrug our shoulders.

This vividly showcases that people can be tricked into becoming focused on AI. Their scrutiny is diverted away from
those humans that devised and fielded the AI. The thing is, legally, in today’s world, there isn’t any legal recourse to
somehow go after the AI for your efforts of righting an injustice when you’ve been wronged by an AI system. If you
decide to legally pursue your just compensation for the injury by going after the AI, please realize that you aren’t going
to be able to compel the AI to walk, crawl, or somehow enter into a courtroom to face the truth piercing scrutiny of
justice.

Instead, in today’s world, you could potentially pursue the hope for justice by going after the humans that underlie the
AI system, including specific humans or possibly the company or companies that pertain to the AI system. They are
traditionally within the sphere of being held legally responsible or legally accountable.

That being said, remember that we are also now pretending that we are going to provide legal personhood to AI or
robots, and if so, the scenario that I have sketched is going to radically change. The scenario won’t change, but the
pointing of fingers is going to legally demonstratively change.

Presumably, an AI that has legal personhood can be pursued for legal redress .

You could try suing the AI directly for compensation regarding your injuries. Besides civil legal actions, you could
possibly have the government seek criminal charges against the AI. For those of you with a curiosity about this sort of
thing, you might take a moment to consider how the AI would be criminally imprisoned or otherwise judicially punished
for its crime, assuming that the AI or robot was found guilty (and was not able to overturn the verdict on appeal).

This determined pursuit of the AI or robot as to its legal responsibility due to having legal personhood seems perhaps
judiciously satisfying. If it was the AI’s fault, and since it has the legal duty of care as presumably imposed via having
legal personhood , the AI ought to pay the consequences for its wayward acts. No need to waste time going after any
humans that were involved in the casting of the AI. Set your eyes on the AI and drag that AI into court.
I assure you that coping with AI that has legal personhood and seeking redress from that AI is going to be a rat’s nest of
legal challenges. I realize you might snicker at this next comment, but we would almost decidedly have lawyers that
would be asked to represent the AI or robot during any justice-seeking endeavors. One would assume that legal
personhood should also have adequate legal representation.

Again, for a bit of an offshoot of mind-expanding considerations, if we can achieve AI-based legal reasoning sufficiently
to perform the work of human lawyers, would we therefore possibly have AI that represents the AI that caused the
injury? That’s a side tangent for you to ponder.

Getting back to the matter of the AI or robot as having legal personhood and carrying the legal responsibility accordingly,
suppose that the AI wasn’t truly at fault. Nonetheless, the humans that perhaps crafted faulty AI could hide behind the
AI garnered legal personhood. Whereas today this kind of hiding is not going to get you very far , the gambit becomes
much more viable if AI has legal personhood . At that juncture, the expectation is that the AI will be held legally
accountable.

Researchers at the University of Oxford stated the matter this way: “Attributing electronic personhood to robots risks
misplacing moral responsibility, causal accountability, and legal liability regarding their mistakes and misuses. Robots
could be blamed and punished instead of humans. And irresponsible people would dismiss the need for care in the
engineering, marketing and use of robots” (by co-authors Luciano Floridi and Mariarosaria Taddeo, “Don’t Grant Robots
Legal Personhood” in Nature, 2018).

There are lots of variations concerning how this blame-shifting might take place.

Someone might truly know that they were the bearers of the misconduct but opt to use the AI as a potential legal and
ethical shield to protect their dour deeds. You can’t do so today because the AI of today does not have legal
personhood. Once we allow legal personhood for AI or robots, the door is opened for this kind of shield-bearing
shenanigans. Is it Pandora’s box that is being opened ?

The plan forces courts to work out every detail from scratch---litigants will challenge at every turn
Joanna J. Bryson 17, Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bath, et al., 9/8/17, “Of, for, and by the people:
the legal lacuna of synthetic persons,” Artificial Intelligence and Law, Vol. 25, pp. 273-291

Even once a legal system has determined which rights and obligations to confer on a legal person, practical realities
may nullify them. Legal rights with no way to enforce them are mere illusion. Standing—the right to appear before
particular organs for purposes of presenting a case under a particular rule—is crucial to a legal person seeking to
protect its rights in the legal system. Standing does not necessarily follow from the existence of an actor’s legal
personality. An entity, even when its legal personality is not in doubt, must exercise its standing before it can avail itself
of relevant procedures (Vollenhoven et al. 1926). When an entity tries to invoke newly conferred rights , challenges to
its standing are all the more likely (Shah 2013).

Consider the legal right of “integral respect” that Ecuador gave to its ecosystem. While the ecosystem may have the
right as a matter of law, it clearly lacks the non-legal capacities it would need to protect the right from encroachment.
To effectuate the right, the Ecuadorian constitution gave standing to everyone in Ecuador to bring suits on behalf of the
ecosystem. Thus, in 2011, private Ecuadorians successfully sued the Provincial Government of Loja to halt expansion of a
roadway that was damaging an important watershed (Greene 2011). The outcome would have been very different if
Ecuador had provided no mechanism for protecting nature’s legal right of integral respect. Nature cannot protect itself
in a court of law.

Just as legal rights mean nothing if the legal system elides the standing to protect them, legal obligations mean
nothing in the absence of procedure to enforce them . The advisory opinion of the ICJ establishing that the UN has legal
personality was in 1948, but this resolved only whether the UN could bring a claim. It said nothing about an obvious
correlate: the legal capacity of the UN to bear responsibility and answer for its own breaches. Affirmation that the UN
indeed can be responsible for its breaches did come—but over half a century later (Wickremasinghe and Evans 2000,
para. 66). Despite the efforts of international lawyers, there is still no reliable procedure for suing an international
organization.Footnote12

We could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal people would interact with other legal persons
and with the institutions of the legal system ( courts , administrative agencies , legislatures , police, etc.). In its first
encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf or against it would require novel and
controversial developments in law . Courts and other organs would struggle to decide how, if at all, the rules—
heretofore addressed to other legal persons—address the robot. Both the robot’s standing against other actors and
other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested. If the topic of electronic personality is to be
addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely
synthetic entities to sue and of others to sue them—is a further matter that would need to be considered.

Summary

The intricacies described in this section are not just inevitable ‘bugs’ to be eventually worked out. They are crucial
questions that we must answer before introducing novel legal personhood. Concerns about legal accountability , and
the way electronic persons might affect accountability, are our main motivation in writing this paper. We now turn to
consider the impacts of offering some form of personhood status to robots.

1NR---AI Solves DA
The DA turns and solves innovation
Robert J. Rando 16, Founder and Lead Counsel of The Rando Law Firm P.C., Fellow of the Academy of Court-Appointed
Masters, Treasurer for the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, Chair of the Federal Bar Association
Intellectual Property Law Section, “America’s Need For Strong, Stable and Sound Intellectual Property Protection and
Policies: Why It Really Matters”, IP Insight, June 2016, p. 12-14 [language modified] [abbreviations in brackets]

Robert F. Kennedy’s speech, which includes his reference to the oft-quoted “interesting times” curse, applies throughout
history in many contexts and, indeed, with both negative and positive connotation. While he focused on the struggles
for freedom and social justice, the requisite ascendancy of the individual over the state, and the institution and
integration of those ideals for the greater good, he also promoted the goals of greater global unity, coop eration and
communication, which were, and could be, achieved by advances in tech nology. And, as noted in the excerpt, he
championed “the creative energy of men.”

Intellectual Property in “Interesting Times”

It is beyond question that starting with the last decade of the twentieth century and throughout the first two decades of
the twenty-first century, when it comes to matters relating to intellectual property, we have been living in “interesting
times.” Some may interpret these interesting times as defined by the curse and others may view it by the ordinary
meaning of “interesting.” In either case, those of us that toil in the fields of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade
secrets, and privacy rights have experienced an unprecedented sea change in the way those rights are procured,
protected and enforced. Likewise, and perhaps more importantly, even those of us that do not practice in these areas of
law, as well as the general public, have been, and continue to be, impacted by the consequences of these changes (both
positive and negative).

The Changes In Intellectual Property Law

Examples of some of the changes in intellectual property law are: the sweeping 2011 legislative changes to the patent
laws under the America Invents Act (AIA), which impact is only beginning to be fully appreciated; the various proposals
for patent law reform, on the heels of the AIA, beginning with the 113th and 114th Congress; the copyright laws Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and numerous 114th Congressional proposed copyright law changes; the recently
enacted federal trade secret law (Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA))2; the impact of the internet, domain names
and globalization on Trademark law; the intellectual property law harmonization requirements included in various
global/regional trade agreements; and the proliferation of devices (both invasive and non-invasive) that defy any
rational basis for believing we can still adhere to the republic’s libertarian understanding of the right to privacy.

Without engaging in “chicken and egg” analysis, it is sufficient to observe that tech nological advancement , societal
needs , globalization , existential threats , economic realities , and political imperatives (or what James Madison referred
to in the Federalist Papers No. 10 as factious governance), have combined to create the “interesting times” for the
United States [IP] intellectual property laws.

What was said by Bobby Kennedy in 1966 remains true today. We live in dangerous and uncertain times. Many of the
existential threats remain the same ( nuclear war and proliferation, [genocides] genocidal maniacs and natural
disease ) and some are new ([hu]manmade disease, greater awareness of environmental changes and possibly
human interrelationship factors, and the unintended consequences of genetic manipulation and robotic
technologies ). The danger and uncertainty that pervades changes in intellectual property laws, though not an
existential threat of the same manner and kind, correlates with the threat and remains “more open to the creative
energy of man than any other time in history.”

Apropos the creative energy of man, there is a non-coincidental congruence and convergence of activity across and
among the three branches of government, occurring almost simultaneously with the congruence and convergence of the
rapid developments of technological innovation across various scientific disciplines and the information age, reflected in
the transformation of the [IP] intellectual property laws in the United States .
Patents

The passage of the AIA was a culmination of efforts spanning several years of Congressional efforts; and the product of a push by the companies at the forefront of the twenty-
first century new technology business titans. The legislation brought about monumental changes in the patent law in the way that patents are procured (first
inventor to file instead of first to invent) and how they are enforced (quasi-judicial challenges to patent validity through inter-party reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)).

The 113th and 114th Congress grappled with newly proposed patent law reforms that, if enacted, may present additional tectonic shifts in the patent law. Major provisions of the
proposals include: fee-shifting measures (requiring loser pays legal fees - counter to the American rule); strict detailed pleadings requirements, promulgated without the traditional Rules
Enabling Act procedure, that exceed those of the Twombly/Iqbal standard applied to all other civil matters in federal courts, and the different standards applicable to patent claim

interpretation in PTAB proceedings and district court litigation concerning patent validity .
The Executive and administrative branch has also been active in the patent law arena. President Obama was a strong supporter of the AIA3 and in his 2014 State Of The Union Address,
essentially stated that, with respect to the proposed patent law reforms aimed at patent troll issues, we must innovate rather than litigate.4 Additionally, the USPTO has embarked upon an
energetic overhaul of its operations in terms of patent quality and PTO performance in granting patents, and the PTAB has expanded to almost 250 Administrative Law Judges in concert with
the AIA post-grant proceedings’ strict timetable requirements.

The Supreme Court, not to be outdone by the Articles I and II branches of the U.S. government, has raised the profile of patent cases to historical heights. From 1996 to the 2014-15 term
there has been a steady increase in the number of patent cases decided by the SCOTUS5. The 2014-15 term occupied almost ten percent of the Court’s docket. Prior to the last two decades,
the Supreme Court would rarely include more than one or two patent cases in a docket that was much larger than those we have become accustomed to from the Roberts’ Court6.

While the SCOTUS activity in patent cases is viewed by some as a counter-balance to the perceived Federal Circuit’s pro-patent and bright line decisions, it can just as assuredly be viewed as
decisions rendered by a Court of final resort which does not function in a vacuum devoid of the social, economic and political winds of the times. In recognition of the effect new
technologies have on the patent law, the politicization of intellectual property law matters, especially patent law (through factious governing principles of the political branches of the
government), and the maturation of the Federal Circuit patent law jurisprudence, the SCOTUS has rendered opinions in cases that impact, and perhaps are/were intended to mitigate the
concerns regarding, some of the vexing issues confronting the patent community today (e.g., non-practicing entities or in the politicized parlance “patent trolls,” the intersection of patent
and antitrust laws in Hatch-Waxman so called “pay-for-delay” settlements between Branded and Generic pharma companies, and the fundamental tenets that comprise the very heart of
what is patent eligible subject matter).

Copyrights
The advent and ubiquity of the internet, social media and digital technologies (MP3s, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) represents the impetus for changes in the Copyright laws.
The DMCA addressed the issues presented by these advances or changes in the differing media and forms of artistic impressions. The proliferation of digital photos, graphic designs and
publishing alternatives, as well as adherence to globalization harmonization have given rise to changes in the statutory law and jurisprudence in this area of intellectual property law.
Additionally, there
is an overlap of patent rights and copyrights for software driven by the ebb and flow of the strength of
each respective intellectual property protection .
Notably, the Patent and Copyright Clause7, in addition to Author’s writings, has been viewed as discretely applying to two different types of creativity or innovation. When drafted the
“sciences” referred not only to fields of modern scienctific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. And the “useful arts” does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans or
people skilled in a manufacturing craft. Rather than result in ambiguity or confusion, perhaps the Framers were either quite prescient or, just coincidentally, these aspects of the Patent and
Copyright Clause have converged.

For example, none other than the famous Crooner, Bing Crosby, benefited from both protections. Well-known as a prolific and popular recording artist he also benefited from his
investments in the, then innovative, recording technologies. Similarly, the Beatles, Beach Boys, as well as many other rock and roll artists, experimental efforts in music performance,
recording and production, helped to transform the music industry in both copyrightable artistic expression and patentable inventions. Similarly, film, literary and digital arts reap benefits at
the crossroads of both copyright and patent protections.

Trademarks
Trademark laws have been impacted by numerous changes in the business landscape. They include the internet, Domain names, international rights in a global economy, different venues
and avenues for branding, marketing and merchandising, global knock-offs from nations that have a less than stellar respect for intellectual property rights, and international trade
agreements. More recently, politicization (or perhaps political correctness) has creeped into the trademark law arena pitting branding rights and protections against first amendment rights.

Trade Secrets
As with Copyright and Trademark law, trade secrets law includes some of the same issues related to trade agreements. TRIPS required members to have trade secret protection in place.
Initially, the United States compliance with this requirement has relied upon the trade secret law of the individual states. That compliance may be supplanted by the recently enacted DTSA.
Similarly, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement contains intellectual property rights provisions that will trigger required changes to United States statutory Intellectual Property
Laws.

The proposed trade secret legislation also gives rise to several concerns. For instance, there is an absence of a specific definition for trade secret, as well as potential issues of federalism,
conflict with state law precedent (despite no preemption), remedies, and the impact on employer/employee relations.

There is also a real concern that the strengthening of trade secret protection in conjunction with the perceived weakening of patent
protection (e.g., high rate of invalidating patents in post-grant proceedings before the PTAB and strict limitations on what is patent eligible subject matter) may very-well
have the unintended consequence of contravening the purpose behind the Patent and Copyright Clause: “to promote the
progress of the sciences and the useful arts.” Moreover, the incentive to innovate may very well be usurped by the advantage of withholding patent law disclosure of highly beneficial
scientific advancements that directly affect the human condition, alter life expectancies and the evolution of the human species (rather than by mere “natural selection”), and what is the
very essence of a human being (for better or worse). Thus, crippling innovation and the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

Privacy Rights

It is increasingly more difficult to function “off the grid.” The invasive and non-invasive attributes of the internet, the reliance upon the multitude of devices, social media, and information
age technologies, and access to big data, all contribute to the decrease in and dilution of the right to privacy. Wittingly or otherwise, the strong libertarian roots of the republic have been
replaced by dependence upon these modes of an information-age life. Commentary on the benefits and deficits of this reality are beyond the subject and purpose of this writing. Suffice to
acknowledge that the right to privacy has been significantly reduced. The laws that protect these rights are in a constant struggle to maintain those rights while yielding to the demands of
the lifestyle and security concerns. Laws that relate to cybersecurity in the global and domestic space create interplay with privacy rights. Legislation, trade agreements and jurisprudence all
impact this area of intellectual property. Cross-border theft of trade secrets, competitor espionage, and loss of control over personal data are all implicated in the intellectual property law
arena.

America’s Need For Strong Intellectual Property Protection

The need for strong protection of intellectual property rights is greater now than it was at the dawn of our republic . Our
Forefathers and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized the need to secure those rights in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. James Madison provides insight for its
significance in the Federalist Papers No. 43 (the only reference to the clause). It is contained in the first Article section dedicated to the enumerated powers of Congress. The clause
recognizes the need for: uniformity of the protection of IP rights, securing those rights for the individual rather than the state; and,
incentivizing innovation and creative aspirations .
Underlying this particular enumerated power of Congress is the same struggle that the Framers grappled with throughout the document for the new republic: how to promote a unified
republic while protecting individual liberty. The fear of tyranny and protection of the “natural law” individual liberty is a driving theme for the Constitution and throughout the Federalist
Papers. For example, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison articulated the important recognition of the “faction” impact on a democracy and a republic. In Federalist No. 51, Madison
emphasized the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of the republic. And in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton, provided his most significant essay, which
described the judiciary as the weakest branch of government and sought the protection of its independence providing the underpinnings for judicial review as recognized thereafter in
Marbury v. Madison.

All of these related themes are relevant to the Patent and Copyright Clause and at the center of the intellectual property protections then and now. The Federalist Papers No. 10 recognition
that a faction may influence the law has been playing itself out in the halls of congress in the period of time leading up to the AIA and in connection with the current patent law reform
debate. The large tech companies of the past, new tech, new patent-based financial business model entities, and pharma factions have been the drivers, proponents and opponents of
certain of these efforts. To
be sure, some change is inevitable, and both beneficial and necessary in an environment of rapidly
changing technology where the law needs to evolve or conform to new realities . However, changes not premised upon the founding principles
of the Constitution and the Patent and Copyright Clause (i.e., uniformity, secured rights for the individual, incentivizing innovation and protecting individual liberty) run afoul of the intended
purpose of the constitutional guarantee.

Although the Sovereign does not benefit directly from the fruits of the innovator, enacting laws that empower the King, and enables the King to remain so, has the same effect as deprivation
and diminishment of the individual’s rights and effectively confiscates them from him/her. Specifically, with respect to intellectual property rights, effecting change to the laws that do not
adhere to these underlying principles, in favor of the faction that lobbies the most and the best in the quid pro quo of political gain to the governing body threatens to undermine the
individual’s intellectual property rights and hinder the greatest economic driver and source of prosperity in the country.

It is also important to recognize that the social, political and economic impact of strong protections for i ntellectual
p roperty cannot be overstated . In the social context, the incentive for disclosure and innovation is critical . Solutions
for sustainability and climate change (whether natural, man-made or mutually/marginally intertwined) rely upon this
premise. Likewise, as we are on the precipice of the ultimate convergence in technologies from the hi-tech digital world
and life sciences space, capturing the ability to cure many disease s and fatal illnesses and providing the true promise
of extended longevity in good health and well-being, that is meaningful, productive, and purposeful; this incentive must
be preserved .

In similar fashion, advancements in tech nologies related to the global economy and communications will enhance the
possibilities for solutions to political and cultural conflicts that arise around the globe . Likewise, the U nited States
economy has always benefit ed when it is at the forefront of innovation and achieves prosperity from its leadership role
in technological advancements .

Conclusion

As was the case in 1966, how we move forward today, to solve the many problems facing our country and the
broader global community in these “interesting times,” both within and without the laws affecting intellectual property
rights, depends upon the “creative energy of man” which must prevail. An achievable goal, dependent on the strong,
stable and sound protection of intellectual property rights .

1NR
1NR---2AC 5---Floodgates Fake
Caseload fluctuation displaces water adjudication---it’s resource-intensive and competes for space
with other issues.
Yichuan Wang 14, LL.M. from UC Berkeley, J.D. from the University of British Columbia, B.Sc. Honours in Economics
with Distinction from the University of Victoria, Member of the Law Society of British Columbia, Spring 2014, “Courting
Colorado's Water Courts in California to Improve Water Rights Adjudication? Letting Go and Improving Existing
Institutions,” Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, Vol. 15

Ground water adjudication is inherently complex in California for three reasons. First, it usually involves hundreds of
parties . Second, it requires hydrologists , engineers , and geologists to provide opinions for adjudication of facts.
Third, not only must it establish priority among the hundreds of rights, but also it must produce a "physical solution" to
protect the basin as a water supply. This physical solution is a court supervised management plan intended to protect
the resource for the long term. These three factors further challenge the creation of special water courts.
IV. California May Get More Mileage from Improving Functionally-Equivalent Tools

A. Focus on Functionality

California would benefit from evaluating the proposal to adopt water courts by evaluating its functionality over form. Professor Tarlock illustrates the benefit of focusing on functionality over form by comparing the
elements of Colorado's and other states" systems. He writes: "[u]nder the permit statutes adopted in all appropriation states but Colorado, a state administrative agency . . . has quasi-judicial functions. The same matters
[of administering surface water rights] in Colorado are left to water courts that have administrative functions." Indeed, Justice Hobbs acknowledges that western states, save Colorado, use a combination of "administrative
and judicial proceedings" in creating their water allocation systems.

This separation of each state's system into a pairing of both administrative and judicial elements shows that functionality, rather than a name, is what matters. Therefore, California would benefit by loosening its grip on
any cachet inherent in the idea of "special" water courts. What matters most is whether an institutional arrangement responds to the state's unique water needs.

Two existing institutions in California offer the potential to respond to California's unique water needs. One is the SWRCB, which fulfills many functions performed by the referees in Colorado's system. Some view the
[*556] SWRCB as a "court master." The other, warranting more discussion, is the complex civil litigation project.

B. Complex Litigation Project Offers Fertile Opportunities to Tackle Delay and Costs

If California hastens to pursue the use of water courts, it may miss fertile opportunities for nurturing homegrown solutions that are already tackling delay and cost. For example, California has already invested in
developing tools for improving the management of groundwater adjudications. Two tools in particular merit attention.
First, as part of the Complex Civil Litigation Pilot Project spearheaded by Judge Jack Komar, Santa Clara County Superior Court offers a website that allows individuals to view and file documents for the Santa Maria
groundwater litigation. Since having been declared complex on July 3, 2000, this case has amassed 824 parties, 20,813 documents in repository, and 10,640 documents in discovery. The website seeks to facilitate
management of this complex case by enabling individuals to see a calendar, see pleading and discovery documents filed, submit a document, see lists of parties and attorneys, and download sample forms for modification.
Of note, the website also displays an up-to-date document service list. It even enables users to retrieve a U.S. mail service list for making mailing labels.

Second, Santa Clara County Superior Court offers a website for the Antelope Valley groundwater cases, also designated complex. While the Santa Maria groundwater litigation website contains all the essential information
more neatly, the Antelope Valley website still links to important content. For example, users can access online documents, e-file documents, view lists of parties and calendar events, download a model [*557] answer to
complaints and cross-complaints, and access orders relating to the trial phases.

While Colorado's resume system may offer even more administrative efficiency from its streamlined and consolidated approach, functional equivalence or at least similarity means California may save more costs by
evaluating the potential for scaling up existing tools than to rush to replicate Colorado's resume system. Precisely how much can be saved is likely better predicted by careful cost-benefit analysis, which extends beyond the
scope of this article. The point is, scaling up these features for other groundwater and surface water adjudications bears potential for reducing the delay and cost associated with lawyers having to identify every affected
individual. Therefore, in contemplating whether or not to adopt another jurisdiction's system, California may benefit from at least doing an inventory of its existing worthy contenders.

C. Complex Litigation Offers Certain Advantages over Special Courts that Seem More Amenable for California

Working on California's complex civil litigation departments to manage complex water adjudications offers certain advantages over developing special water courts that seem more amenable for California. One reason is
that a certain rationale identified by a 1996 Business Court Study Task Force against creating specialized courts in the business context also holds true for the current debate over special water courts. Then-Chief Justice
Malcolm M. Lucas appointed the task force to conduct an "exhaustive national and statewide review." Drawing on opinions from judges, lawyers, and business leaders, the task force recommended developing complex
litigation departments in trial courts instead of creating special business courts for four major reasons.

First, complex litigation departments offer greater "responsiveness to the public" by handling business matters as well as other claims, whereas business courts only deal with business matters. Second, many members of
the public perceive business courts as favoring business interests, whereas complex litigation departments touch "all segments of society" through their cases. Third, where business courts are confined to a certain type of
case, complex litigation departments offer more flexibility by expanding or contracting in response to caseload fluctuations within a trial court system. This response is also helpful for handling emergencies. Finally,
complex litigation departments match business courts in expertise through training, using a complex litigation manual, streamlining procedures by amending statutes and rules, and drawing on human and technological
resources.

While the first reason matters less as applied to the water context than in the business context, the second and third
reasons do matter. It would be especially prudent for California to consider the perception of some members of the
public in Colorado that water courts favor wealthier municipal interests. The ability of complex litigation departments
to respond flexibly to overall caseload fluctuations also makes sense for the bigger picture. The process of designing
the best judicial institutions to adjudicate water, be it honing departments or carving out special courts, would benefit
from taking into account the institutions impact on the overall organization of judicial resources . Since establishing
water courts would likely take considerable resources away from other matters that also need justice, on balance,
strengthening departments within the judiciary may be more helpful during these tough economic times.

Even if not, it degrades the technical competence of decisions---that’s key.

Rhett Larson 16, Associate Law Professor at Arizona State University and a fellow at Morrison Institute for Public
Policy's Kyl Center for Water Policy; and Kelly Kennedy, JD Candidate at ASU; April 2016, “Bankrupt Rivers,“ University of
California Davis Law Review, Vol. 49

When general stream adjudication courts , special masters, and support agencies are underfunded , water disputes
become a quagmire [*1362] to efficient water management and effective water conservation. 187 The failure to
adequately fund government officials and offices tasked with resolving general stream adjudications arises from the age-
old problem of taking water for granted, and therefore undervaluing the most valuable resource, particularly for arid
western states. 188 The lack of resources undermines what should be a primary function of general stream
adjudications, and what is a primary function of bankruptcy courts - the development and maintenance of institutional
competency to address critical and highly technical large-scale legal disputes. 189

Trade-offs are likely AND occur cross-issue---the courts are stretched thin AND think they’re at risk
of overload, so they’ll preemptively scale back in other areas for docket control.
Matthew Shapiro 21, Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, J.D. from Yale University, June 2021,
“Distributing Civil Justice,” Georgia Law Journal, Vol. 109

C. Judicial Resources

Proponents of access to justice advocate more egalitarian distributions not only of party resources, but also of judicial
resources. By "judicial resources" I mean judicial personnel (judges, court staff, and jurors), the time and attention of
those personnel, and the financial and other wherewithal of courts, as well as the ways in which procedural rules and
doctrines allocate those other resources. The basic demand of access to justice with respect to judicial resources is that
they be distributed more or less equally across different categories of cases and different groups of litigants. Conversely,
access to justice is undermined when a larger share of judicial resources is devote d to certain, favored categories of
cases than to other, disfavored ones.

Although rarely presented in such stark terms, the demand for a more egalitarian distribution of judicial resources is
implicit in certain critiques of contemporary civil practice. Many of those critiques fault courts for focusing unduly on
"big" or "complex" cases (often with larger financial stakes) at the expense of more routine cases, skewing the
distribution of judicial resources in favor of the former. There are several different mechanisms through which such
maldistribution of judicial resources can occur.

In the most direct mechanism, courts foreclose a particular cause of action, effectively withdrawing all judicial
resources from that category of litigation so that they can be reserved for other, "more important" cases . This occurs,
for instance, when courts embrace the "floodgates" argument , the idea that

certain sorts of law suits should not be allowed because to do so would 'swamp' the courts with litigation. The
court supposes that if it were to allow that type of suit it would lack the time to consider promptly enough
other law suits aiming to vindicate rights that are, taken together, more important than the rights it therefore
proposes to bar.

The access-to-justice concern with the floodgates argument is that courts invoke it disproportionately to avoid having to
deal with disfavored claims typically brought by disfavored groups of litigants, such as prisoners or discrimination
plaintiffs. When they do so, courts are effectively reallocating their resources away from those disfavored cases toward
ones deemed more important.

Courts can also end up distributing judicial resources among different categories of cases somewhat more indirectly ,
simply by devoting more time and attention to some and thereby leaving less for others. This seems to be one
potential concern with the practice that Judith Resnik has dubbed "managerial judging," whereby judges focus on the
"managerial" tasks associated with shepherding cases through the pretrial phase (usually resulting in settlement) at the
expense of the more traditionally "adjudicatory" tasks associated with actually deciding cases on the merits. Criticisms of
managerial judging have tended to focus on [*1492] the practice's costs for managed cases, particularly the risk that
judges will abuse their power to prematurely terminate potentially meritorious lawsuits. But managerial judging
might also have more systemic implications for the distribution of judicial resources. In particular, insofar as more
complex cases require more case management, judges who adopt a more managerial posture will end up spending more
time and attention on complex cases than they otherwise would, necessarily reducing the time and attention they have
to spend on more routine cases. The prevalence of managerial judging can thereby end up slighting routine cases. Once
again, from an access-to-justice perspective, the worry is that courts are giving certain categories of cases short shrift so
that they can focus on the ones that, from many judges' perspectives, really matter.

Perception alone triggers the link---the belief in a litigation explosion causes access to be scaled
back.
Edward Cavanagh 15, Law Professor at St. John’s University, 2015, “Federal Civil Litigation at the Crossroads:
Reshaping the Role of the Federal Courts in Twenty-First Century Dispute Resolution,” Oregon Law Review, Vol. 93

Concern over excessive litigation in the federal courts is old hat ... [and] also typically exaggeration ... . The truth about
the " litigation explosion' is that it is a weapon of perception , not substance. If the public can be persuaded that there
is a litigation crisis, it may support efforts to cut back on litigation access.

2NR---UQ
Courts adapt and innovate now.
Alyssa Nekritz 21, Knowledge and Information Services researcher at the National Center for State Courts,
12/15/2021, “A look at pandemic backlog in court proceedings and resources,”
https://cdm16501.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/ctadmin/id/2482

About one third of U.S. courts saw an increase of over 5% in backlogs. This increase would have been larger had
courts not adapted quickly to online operations. Several types of court proceedings, particularly trials, were delayed.
Some court professionals are optimistic that the existing backlogs will be resolved quickly . Others are worried
backlogs will continue.

In order to avert for a growing backlog, some states have or are dropping non-violent criminal cases when courts
reopen. Other prosecutors are prioritizing repeat offenders . Although it is important for the court system to manage
the cases timely, there are staunch critics who believe dismissal is a bad idea. Critics argue adjournments and the
associated delay can create access to justice concerns, placing courts in a tough position.

Other state courts, like Florida and Washington, have requested more retired judges to assist pulled judges out of
retirement and temporarily increased staffing to help with backlogs. Some jurisdictions continue to look for effective
ways of addressing their backlogs.

NCSC’s Effective Criminal Case Management Project conducted extensive data collection on felony and misdemeanor
cases. The project built resources on case flow management to help courts process cases efficiently.

Courts continue to innovate and NCSC is tracking pandemic related backlogs. More data will be necessary to draw
conclusions about future impacts. Revisit the 2020 CCJ/COSCA Pandemic Backlog Report for more resources on dealing
with a surge in civil cases. Additionally, courts can access the ECCM’s Cost of Delay Calculator (PDF and Excel) to
compute a simple estimate revealing how quickly and significantly the costs of delay accumulate across a court.

Courts are innovating solutions to COVID disruptions.

Reuters 20, Thompson Reuters Legal, “How the backlog may reshape the future of the courts,” Thompson Reuters
Legal, 7/24/20, https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/backlog-reshape-future-courts

Judges, attorneys, and clients have adapted quickly to the virtual courtroom setting. Using tools like Zoom, YouTube,
and even Facebook Live, the court system has often kept up with non-jury hearings and other matters while
maintaining the standards expected of a public hearing. They have worked through many of the glitches of using legal
technology, and they now feel relatively comfortable in this new way of operating .

In fact, some judges have noted that virtual courtrooms have increased their efficiency in getting through those
proceedings. Going virtual has eliminated the need for judges to travel to different courts; less traveling means they
can get through their dockets much more quickly . The same time-saving benefit holds true for attorneys and their
clients.

Unfortunately, the current inability to conduct virtual jury trials means many criminal and civil proceedings have been
stalled. As months go by, those backlogs continue to grow.

How will courts get through the backlog?

Efficiency in all areas is going to be key in moving ahead and catching up. Courts need to explore their ability to speed
things up, and this will be an ongoing necessity.

One such way is to quickly adopt new legal research tech nology that focuses on making courts more efficient .
Fortunately, that technology exists. Westlaw Edge's Quick Check Judicial helps judges and law clerks quickly analyze
and review multiple documents from a single matter . This can reduce the time the courts—as well as attorneys—need
to pore over legal briefs and documents.

By decreasing the amount of time it takes to manually check citations and quotations across multiple filings, courts can
review documents at a speed not previously possible . This type of dramatic time-saving resolution will be key.

Stick with what's working

Another way courts would like to get through the backlog is to continue with virtual hearings. There is hope that they
will be able to continue holding proceedings for hearings and matters that have been held virtually throughout the
pandemic.

The increased efficiency that is noted above may be critical to working through the backlog. If that continues, they can
more easily get through those cases while also adding back in jury trials and other in-person proceedings.
 <>Court Clog DA: UTD

AI rights causes protracted, complex legal battles

Bryson et al 2017
(Joanna J. Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a
British citizen since 2007. Mihailis E. Diamantis is a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa and has a courtesy appointment with the Department
of Philosophy. Prior to joining the faculty at Iowa, Professor Diamantis was an associate at Columbia Law School. He clerked on the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals and worked on white-collar investigations as an attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. Thomas D. Grant is a Senior Research
Fellow at Wolfson College, and a Senior Associate at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, both in the University of Cambridge, United
Kingdom. “Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-017-9214-9)sw

We could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal people would interact
with other legal persons and with the institutions of the legal system (courts, administrative agencies, legislatures, police, etc.).
In its first encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf or
against it would require novel and controversial developments in law. Courts and other organs
would struggle to decide how , if at all, the rules —heretofore addressed to other legal persons— address the robot . Both the robot’s
standing against other actors and other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested . If the topic of electronic
personality is to be addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely synthetic

entities to sue and of others to sue them—is a further matter that would need to be considered. Many legal and other scholars
warn that such attribution should not enable those who develop and employ artificial agents to outsource and escape
responsibility, thus incentivizing them to take risks and externalize costs because they know they will not be liable.

Efficient court review underpins patent-led innovation---that stops nuclear war and a range of
existential threats
Robert J. Rando 16, Founder and Lead Counsel of The Rando Law Firm P.C., Fellow of the Academy of Court-Appointed
Masters, Treasurer for the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, Chair of the Federal Bar Association
Intellectual Property Law Section, “America’s Need For Strong, Stable and Sound Intellectual Property Protection and
Policies: Why It Really Matters”, IP Insight, June 2016, p. 12-14 [language modified] [abbreviations in brackets]

Robert F. Kennedy’s speech, which includes his reference to the oft-quoted “interesting times” curse, applies throughout
history in many contexts and, indeed, with both negative and positive connotation. While he focused on the struggles
for freedom and social justice, the requisite ascendancy of the individual over the state, and the institution and
integration of those ideals for the greater good, he also promoted the goals of greater global unity, cooperation and
communication , which were, and could be, achieved by advances in tech nology. And, as noted in the excerpt, he
championed “the creative energy of men.”

Intellectual Property in “Interesting Times”

It is beyond question that starting with the last decade of the twentieth century and throughout the first two decades of
the twenty-first century, when it comes to matters relating to intellectual property, we have been living in “interesting
times.” Some may interpret these interesting times as defined by the curse and others may view it by the ordinary
meaning of “interesting.” In either case, those of us that toil in the fields of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade
secrets, and privacy rights have experienced an unprecedented sea change in the way those rights are procured,
protected and enforced. Likewise, and perhaps more importantly, even those of us that do not practice in these areas of
law, as well as the general public, have been, and continue to be, impacted by the consequences of these changes (both
positive and negative).
The Changes In Intellectual Property Law

Examples of some of the changes in intellectual property law are: the sweeping 2011 legislative changes to the patent
laws under the America Invents Act (AIA), which impact is only beginning to be fully appreciated; the various proposals
for patent law reform, on the heels of the AIA, beginning with the 113th and 114th Congress; the copyright laws Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and numerous 114th Congressional proposed copyright law changes; the recently
enacted federal trade secret law (Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA))2; the impact of the internet, domain names
and globalization on Trademark law; the intellectual property law harmonization requirements included in various
global/regional trade agreements; and the proliferation of devices (both invasive and non-invasive) that defy any
rational basis for believing we can still adhere to the republic’s libertarian understanding of the right to privacy.

Without engaging in “chicken and egg” analysis, it is sufficient to observe that technological advancement , societal
needs , globalization , existential threats , economic realities , and political imperatives (or what James Madison
referred to in the Federalist Papers No. 10 as factious governance), have combined to create the “interesting times” for
the United States [IP] intellectual property laws.

What was said by Bobby Kennedy in 1966 remains true today. We live in dangerous and uncertain times. Many of the
existential threats remain the same ( nuclear war and proliferation, [genocides] genocidal maniacs and natural
disease ) and some are new ([hu]manmade disease, greater awareness of environmental changes and possibly
human interrelationship factors, and the unintended consequences of genetic manipulation and robotic
technologies ). The danger and uncertainty that pervades changes in intellectual property laws, though not an
existential threat of the same manner and kind, correlates with the threat and remains “more open to the creative
energy of man than any other time in history.”

Apropos the creative energy of man, there is a non-coincidental congruence and convergence of activity across and
among the three branches of government, occurring almost simultaneously with the congruence and convergence of
the rapid developments of technological innovation across various scientific disciplines and the information age,
reflected in the transformation of the [IP] intellectual property laws in the United States.
Patents

The passage of the AIA was a culmination of efforts spanning several years of Congressional efforts; and the product of a push by the companies at the forefront of the twenty-
first century new technology business titans. The legislation brought about monumental changes in the patent law in the way that patents are procured (first
inventor to file instead of first to invent) and how they are enforced (quasi-judicial challenges to patent validity through inter-party reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)).

The 113th and 114th Congress grappled with newly proposed patent law reforms that, if enacted, may present additional tectonic shifts in the patent law. Major provisions of the
proposals include: fee-shifting measures (requiring loser pays legal fees - counter to the American rule); strict detailed pleadings requirements, promulgated without the traditional Rules
Enabling Act procedure, that exceed those of the Twombly/Iqbal standard applied to all other civil matters in federal courts, and the different standards applicable to patent claim

interpretation in PTAB proceedings and district court litigation concerning patent validity .
The Executive and administrative branch has also been active in the patent law arena. President Obama was a strong supporter of the AIA3 and in his 2014 State Of The Union Address,
essentially stated that, with respect to the proposed patent law reforms aimed at patent troll issues, we must innovate rather than litigate.4 Additionally, the USPTO has embarked upon an
energetic overhaul of its operations in terms of patent quality and PTO performance in granting patents, and the PTAB has expanded to almost 250 Administrative Law Judges in concert with
the AIA post-grant proceedings’ strict timetable requirements.

The Supreme Court, not to be outdone by the Articles I and II branches of the U.S. government, has raised the profile of patent cases to historical heights. From 1996 to the 2014-15 term
there has been a steady increase in the number of patent cases decided by the SCOTUS5. The 2014-15 term occupied almost ten percent of the Court’s docket. Prior to the last two decades,
the Supreme Court would rarely include more than one or two patent cases in a docket that was much larger than those we have become accustomed to from the Roberts’ Court6.

While the SCOTUS activity in patent cases is viewed by some as a counter-balance to the perceived Federal Circuit’s pro-patent and bright line decisions, it can just as assuredly be viewed as
decisions rendered by a Court of final resort which does not function in a vacuum devoid of the social, economic and political winds of the times. In recognition of the effect new
technologies have on the patent law, the politicization of intellectual property law matters, especially patent law (through factious governing principles of the political branches of the
government), and the maturation of the Federal Circuit patent law jurisprudence, the SCOTUS has rendered opinions in cases that impact, and perhaps are/were intended to mitigate the
concerns regarding, some of the vexing issues confronting the patent community today (e.g., non-practicing entities or in the politicized parlance “patent trolls,” the intersection of patent
and antitrust laws in Hatch-Waxman so called “pay-for-delay” settlements between Branded and Generic pharma companies, and the fundamental tenets that comprise the very heart of
what is patent eligible subject matter).

Copyrights
The advent and ubiquity of the internet, social media and digital technologies (MP3s, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) represents the impetus for changes in the Copyright laws.
The DMCA addressed the issues presented by these advances or changes in the differing media and forms of artistic impressions. The proliferation of digital photos, graphic designs and
publishing alternatives, as well as adherence to globalization harmonization have given rise to changes in the statutory law and jurisprudence in this area of intellectual property law.
Additionally, there
is an overlap of patent rights and copyrights for software driven by the ebb and flow of the strength of
each respective intellectual property protection.
Notably, the Patent and Copyright Clause7, in addition to Author’s writings, has been viewed as discretely applying to two different types of creativity or innovation. When drafted the
“sciences” referred not only to fields of modern scienctific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. And the “useful arts” does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans or
people skilled in a manufacturing craft. Rather than result in ambiguity or confusion, perhaps the Framers were either quite prescient or, just coincidentally, these aspects of the Patent and
Copyright Clause have converged.

For example, none other than the famous Crooner, Bing Crosby, benefited from both protections. Well-known as a prolific and popular recording artist he also benefited from his
investments in the, then innovative, recording technologies. Similarly, the Beatles, Beach Boys, as well as many other rock and roll artists, experimental efforts in music performance,
recording and production, helped to transform the music industry in both copyrightable artistic expression and patentable inventions. Similarly, film, literary and digital arts reap benefits at
the crossroads of both copyright and patent protections.

Trademarks
Trademark laws have been impacted by numerous changes in the business landscape. They include the internet, Domain names, international rights in a global economy, different venues
and avenues for branding, marketing and merchandising, global knock-offs from nations that have a less than stellar respect for intellectual property rights, and international trade
agreements. More recently, politicization (or perhaps political correctness) has creeped into the trademark law arena pitting branding rights and protections against first amendment rights.

Trade Secrets
As with Copyright and Trademark law, trade secrets law includes some of the same issues related to trade agreements. TRIPS required members to have trade secret protection in place.
Initially, the United States compliance with this requirement has relied upon the trade secret law of the individual states. That compliance may be supplanted by the recently enacted DTSA.
Similarly, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement contains intellectual property rights provisions that will trigger required changes to United States statutory Intellectual Property
Laws.

The proposed trade secret legislation also gives rise to several concerns. For instance, there is an absence of a specific definition for trade secret, as well as potential issues of federalism,
conflict with state law precedent (despite no preemption), remedies, and the impact on employer/employee relations.

There is also a real concern that the

strengthening of trade secret protection in conjunction with the perceived weakening of
patent protection (e.g., high rate of invalidating patents in post-grant proceedings before the PTAB and strict limitations on what is patent eligible subject matter) may very-
well have the unintended consequence of contravening the purpose behind the Patent and Copyright Clause: “to promote
the progress of the sciences and the useful arts.” Moreover, the incentive to innovate may very well be usurped by the advantage of withholding patent law disclosure of highly beneficial
scientific advancements that directly affect the human condition, alter life expectancies and the evolution of the human species (rather than by mere “natural selection”), and what is the
very essence of a human being (for better or worse). Thus, crippling innovation and the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

Privacy Rights

It is increasingly more difficult to function “off the grid.” The invasive and non-invasive attributes of the internet, the reliance upon the multitude of devices, social media, and information
age technologies, and access to big data, all contribute to the decrease in and dilution of the right to privacy. Wittingly or otherwise, the strong libertarian roots of the republic have been
replaced by dependence upon these modes of an information-age life. Commentary on the benefits and deficits of this reality are beyond the subject and purpose of this writing. Suffice to
acknowledge that the right to privacy has been significantly reduced. The laws that protect these rights are in a constant struggle to maintain those rights while yielding to the demands of
the lifestyle and security concerns. Laws that relate to cybersecurity in the global and domestic space create interplay with privacy rights. Legislation, trade agreements and jurisprudence all
impact this area of intellectual property. Cross-border theft of trade secrets, competitor espionage, and loss of control over personal data are all implicated in the intellectual property law
arena.

America’s Need For Strong Intellectual Property Protection

The need for strong protection of intellectual property rights is greater now than it was at the dawn of our republic . Our
Forefathers and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized the need to secure those rights in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. James Madison provides insight for its
significance in the Federalist Papers No. 43 (the only reference to the clause). It is contained in the first Article section dedicated to the enumerated powers of Congress. The clause
recognizes the need for: uniformity of the protection of IP rights, securing those rights for the individual rather than the state;
and, incentivizing innovation and creative aspirations.
Underlying this particular enumerated power of Congress is the same struggle that the Framers grappled with throughout the document for the new republic: how to promote a unified
republic while protecting individual liberty. The fear of tyranny and protection of the “natural law” individual liberty is a driving theme for the Constitution and throughout the Federalist
Papers. For example, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison articulated the important recognition of the “faction” impact on a democracy and a republic. In Federalist No. 51, Madison
emphasized the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of the republic. And in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton, provided his most significant essay, which
described the judiciary as the weakest branch of government and sought the protection of its independence providing the underpinnings for judicial review as recognized thereafter in
Marbury v. Madison.

All of these related themes are relevant to the Patent and Copyright Clause and at the center of the intellectual property protections then and now. The Federalist Papers No. 10 recognition
that a faction may influence the law has been playing itself out in the halls of congress in the period of time leading up to the AIA and in connection with the current patent law reform
debate. The large tech companies of the past, new tech, new patent-based financial business model entities, and pharma factions have been the drivers, proponents and opponents of
certain of these efforts. To
be sure, some change is inevitable, and both beneficial and necessary in an environment of rapidly
changing technology where the law needs to evolve or conform to new realities . However, changes not premised upon the founding
principles of the Constitution and the Patent and Copyright Clause (i.e., uniformity, secured rights for the individual, incentivizing innovation and protecting individual liberty) run afoul of the
intended purpose of the constitutional guarantee.
Although the Sovereign does not benefit directly from the fruits of the innovator, enacting laws that empower the King, and enables the King to remain so, has the same effect as deprivation
and diminishment of the individual’s rights and effectively confiscates them from him/her. Specifically, with respect to intellectual property rights, effecting change to the laws that do not
adhere to these underlying principles, in favor of the faction that lobbies the most and the best in the quid pro quo of political gain to the governing body threatens to undermine the
individual’s intellectual property rights and hinder the greatest economic driver and source of prosperity in the country.

It is also important to recognize that the social, political and economic impact of strong protections for i ntellectual
p roperty cannot be overstated . In the social context, the incentive for disclosure and innovation is critical . Solutions
for sustainability and climate change (whether natural, man-made or mutually/marginally intertwined) rely upon
this premise. Likewise, as we are on the precipice of the ultimate convergence in technologies from the hi-tech digital
world and life sciences space, capturing the ability to cure many diseases and fatal illnesses and providing the true
promise of extended longevity in good health and well-being, that is meaningful, productive, and purposeful; this
incentive must be preserved .

In similar fashion, advancements in tech nologies related to the global economy and communications will enhance the
possibilities for solutions to political and cultural conflicts that arise around the globe . Likewise, the U nited
States economy has always benefited when it is at the forefront of innovation and achieves prosperity from its
leadership role in technological advancements .

Conclusion

As was the case in 1966, how we move forward today, to solve the many problems facing our country and the
broader global community in these “interesting times,” both within and without the laws affecting intellectual property
rights, depends upon the “creative energy of man” which must prevail. An achievable goal, dependent on the strong,
stable and sound protection of intellectual property rights .

AT: Turn
Backlogs are manageable now.
Cass ’22 [Ronald; Spring 2022; Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law, distinguished senior fellow of the
C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State; National Affairs, “On Expanding Federal Courts,”
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts]

Another concern litigants have is the cost of presenting matters to courts and having their issues resolved. Rules that
define the way litigation unfolds, the burdens of production and persuasion, how litigants can access information held
by others, and how they may present findings to the decision-maker all have significant implications for the cost of
litigation. Though such expenses cannot be taken as free-standing matters unrelated to the choices litigants make,
judicial interpretations of the rules can affect them. Judges who understand the rules of procedure and exercise good
practical judgment can keep a lid on costs to some degree. The third element of judicial decision-making that litigants
value is speed . This is often the most prominent consideration in public discussions of how many judges should sit on
the federal courts. Congressional representatives from both parties, including Democrat Hank Johnson and Republican
Darrell Issa, have made the issue of delays in judicial decisions their central argument in favor of adding new judgeships.
Other advocates of expanding the courts have pointed to judges' caseloads , which are often taken as a proxy for the
speed with which litigation can be resolved. Caseloads are not necessarily correlated with the speed of case resolution,
however, meaning that the debate speaks more to the concerns of the judges themselves than the interest litigants
have in a speedy resolution of their case. And as we shall see later on, the data are broadly consistent with the
conclusion that there is no caseload crisis in the federal courts that calls for additional judges.
Justices will shelve data protection.
Haley ’20 [Thomas; 2020; Faculty member at the University of Virginia Law School; Washington Law Review, “Data
Protection in Disarray,” https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5133&context=wlr]

The Seventh Circuit may have said the quiet part out loud: "The
standing rule reduces the workload of the federal judiciary ...." (205) While
literally true, that is neither an accepted nor acceptable justification for standing doctrine. (206) The existence of a "Case" or
"Controversy" does not depend on how pleased the court will be to hear it. Article III does not give the judiciary the ability to set its caseload. And a dispute will be no less adversarial
between the parties if it is the tenth hearing on a court's calendar rather than the first. Indeed, around the time that the Supreme Court threw standing jurisprudence for a loop in Clapper, it
admonished that federal courts are obligated to hear cases falling within their jurisdiction. (207)

Yet the appeal of the standing dismissal to the federal judge is impossible to ignore. The massive and increasing caseload in the federal courts is well known. In
the data-
protection context, cases typically promise to be long and involved . Most arise from large-scale data breaches or
inappropriate, indiscriminate data collection. As such, they are usually brought as class actions and implicate complex
technical issues. One can certainly understand why overworked judges might be eager to get such cases off their
dockets .
With that in mind, dismissal for lack of standing has a special appeal over other means of dispensing with a case: it is a non-merits dismissal. Even if erroneous or improperly motivated, a
dismissal for lack of standing works relatively little injustice, as its effect is only to banish the suit to state court. Moreover, as the data show, state-law and common-law claims predominate
in data-protection litigation--the majority of cases analyzed involved such claims, while fewer than half of cases asserted claims under federal law. Allowing state courts to deal with state-law
claims is a hallmark feature of the federal system, CAFA notwithstanding.

The Northern District of Illinois' BIPA series of cases may proceed from this impulse. Most were brought initially in state court, then removed to federal court by defendants who seemed
intent on challenging plaintiffs' right to bring suit at all. Confronted with the prospect of overseeing a lengthy, complicated class-action lawsuit brought by plaintiffs who did not want to be in
federal court in the first place against defendants who appeared to be engaging in gamesmanship, the judges of the Northern District of Illinois may well have viewed dismissal for lack of
standing as the best of all possible worlds.

The data are potentially consistent with this explanation. In particular, appellate courts have been significantly more
solicitous of plaintiffs in data-protection cases , finding standing in 75% of cases, compared to only 51% of district courts. In data-breach cases ,
which likely present both the most technically complicated inquiries and the most diffuse harms , appellate courts
upheld standing in 79% of cases, compared to a mere 41% of district court cases .

That’s key to effective AI---downsides AND upsides are existential.

EPRS ’20 [European Parliamentary Research Service; 2020; Panel for the Future of Science and Technology; European
Parliament, “The impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on artificial intelligence,”
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/641530/EPRS_STU(2020)641530_EN.pdf]

The future emergence of a general a rtificial i ntelligence is already raising serious concerns . A general artificial
intelligence system may improve itself at an exponential speed and quickly become superhuman; through its superior
intelligence it may then acquire capacities beyond human control. 10 In relation to self-improving artificial intelligence,
humanity may find itself in a condition of inferiority similar to that of animals in relation to humans. Some leading
scientists and technologists (such as Steven Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates) have argue d for the need to anticipate
this existential risk , 11 adopting measures meant to prevent the creation of general artificial intelligence or to
direct it towards human-friendly outcomes (e.g., by ensuring that it endorses human values and, more generally, that it
adopts a benevolent attitude). Conversely, other scientists have looked favourably on the birth of an intelligence meant
to overcome human capacities. In an AI system's ability to improve itself could lie the 'singularity' that will accelerate
the development of science and technology, so as not only to solve current human problems (poverty,
underdevelopment, etc.), but also to overcome the biological limits of human existence (illness, aging, etc.) and spread
intelligence in the cosmos . 12

The risks related to the emergence of an 'artificial general intelligence' should not be underestimated: this is, on the
contrary, a very serious problem that will pose challenges in the future. In fact, as much as scientists may disagree on
whether and when 'artificial general intelligence,' will come into existence, most of them believe that this objective will
be achieved within the end of this century. 13 In any case, it is too early to approach 'artificial general intelligence' at a
policy level, since it lies decades ahead, and a broader experience with advanced AI is needed before we can understand
both the extent and proximity of this risk, and the best ways to address it.

Conversely, 'artificial specialised intelligence' is already with us, and is quickly transforming economic, political, and
social arrangements, as well as interactions between individuals and even their private lives. The increase in economic
efficiency already is reality (see Figure 2), but AIprovides further opportunities: economic, social, and cultural
development; energy sustainability; better health care; and the spread of knowledge. In the very recent White Paper by
the European Commission14 it is indeed affirmed that AI.

will change our lives by improving healthcare (e.g. making diagnosis more precise, enabling better prevention of
disease s), increasing the efficiency of farming, contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation, improving
the efficiency of production systems through predictive maintenance, increasing the security of Europeans, and in many other
ways that we can only begin to imagine.

The opportunities offered by AI are accompanied by serious risks , including unemployment, inequality, discrimination,
social exclusion, surveillance , and manipulation . It has indeed been claimed that AI should contribute to the realisation
of individual and social interests, and that it should not be 'underused, thus creating opportunity costs, nor overused
and misused, thus creating risks.' 15 In the just mentioned Commission's White paper, it is indeed observed that the
deployment of AI

entails a number of potential risks, such as opaque decision-making, gender-based or other kinds of
discrimination, intrusion in our private lives or being used for criminal purposes.

Because the need has been recognised to counter these risks, while preserving scientific research and the beneficial uses
of AI, a number of initiatives have been undertaken in order to design an ethical and legal framework for 'human-
centred AI.' Already in 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the European Parliament's
Committee on LegalAffairs, and, in the UK, the House of Commons'Science and Technology Committee released their
initial reports on how to prepare for the future of AI16. Multiple expert committees have subsequently produced reports
and policy documents. Among them, the High-Level Expert Group on artificial intelligence appointed by the European
Commission, the expert group on AI in Society of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),
and the select committee on artificial intelligence of the United Kingdom (UK) House of Lords.17

The Commission's White Paper affirms that two parallel policy objectives should be pursued and synergistically
integrated. On the one hand research and deployment of AI should be promoted, so

that the EU is competitive with the US and China. The policy framework setting out measures to align efforts at
European, national and regional level should aim to mobilise resources

to achieve an 'ecosystem of excellence' along the entire value chain, starting in research and innovation, and to create
the right incentives to accelerate the adoption of solutions based on AI, including by small and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs)

On the other hand, the deployment of AI technologies should be consistent with the EU fundamental rights and social
values. This requires measures to create an 'ecosystem of trust,' which should provide citizens with 'the confidence
to take up AI applications' and 'companies and public organisations with the legal certainty to innovate using AI'.
This ecosystem

must ensure compliance with EU rules, including the rules protecting fundamental rights and consumers' rights, in
particular for AI systems operated in the EU that pose a high risk.

It is important to stress that the two objectives of excellence in research, innovation and implementation, and of
consistency with individual rights and social values are compatible, but distinct. On the one hand the most advanced AI
applications could be deployed to the detriment of citizens' rights and social values; on the other hand the effective
protection of citizens' from the risks resulting from abuses AI does not provide in itself the incentives that are needed to
stimulate research and innovation and promote beneficial uses. This report will argue that General Data Protection
Regulation can contribute to address abuses of AI , and that it can be implemented in ways that do not hinder its
beneficial uses. It will not address the industrial and other policies that are needed to ensure the EU competitiveness in
the AI domain.

Court Clog DA:

Backlogs are manageable now.

Cass ’22 [Ronald; Spring 2022; Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law, distinguished senior fellow of the
C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State; National Affairs, “On Expanding Federal Courts,”
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts]

Another concern litigants have is the cost of presenting matters to courts and having their issues resolved. Rules that
define the way litigation unfolds, the burdens of production and persuasion, how litigants can access information held
by others, and how they may present findings to the decision-maker all have significant implications for the cost of
litigation. Though such expenses cannot be taken as free-standing matters unrelated to the choices litigants make,
judicial interpretations of the rules can affect them. Judges who understand the rules of procedure and exercise good
practical judgment can keep a lid on costs to some degree. The third element of judicial decision-making that litigants
value is speed . This is often the most prominent consideration in public discussions of how many judges should sit on
the federal courts. Congressional representatives from both parties, including Democrat Hank Johnson and Republican
Darrell Issa, have made the issue of delays in judicial decisions their central argument in favor of adding new judgeships.
Other advocates of expanding the courts have pointed to judges' caseloads , which are often taken as a proxy for the
speed with which litigation can be resolved. Caseloads are not necessarily correlated with the speed of case resolution,
however, meaning that the debate speaks more to the concerns of the judges themselves than the interest litigants
have in a speedy resolution of their case. And as we shall see later on, the data are broadly consistent with the
conclusion that there is no caseload crisis in the federal courts that calls for additional judges.

AI rights causes protracted, complex legal battles

Bryson et al 2017
(Joanna J. Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a
British citizen since 2007. Mihailis E. Diamantis is a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa and has a courtesy appointment with the Department
of Philosophy. Prior to joining the faculty at Iowa, Professor Diamantis was an associate at Columbia Law School. He clerked on the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals and worked on white-collar investigations as an attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. Thomas D. Grant is a Senior Research
Fellow at Wolfson College, and a Senior Associate at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, both in the University of Cambridge, United
Kingdom. “Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-017-9214-9)sw

We could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal people would interact
with other legal persons and with the institutions of the legal system (courts, administrative agencies, legislatures, police, etc.).
In its first encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf or
against it would require novel and controversial developments in law. Courts and other organs
would struggle to decide how , if at all, the rules —heretofore addressed to other legal persons— address the robot . Both the robot’s
standing against other actors and other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested . If the topic of electronic
personality is to be addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely synthetic

entities to sue and of others to sue them—is a further matter that would need to be considered. Many legal and other scholars
warn that such attribution should not enable those who develop and employ artificial agents to outsource and escape
responsibility, thus incentivizing them to take risks and externalize costs because they know they will not be liable.

Efficient court review underpins patent-led innovation---that stops nuclear war and a range of
existential threats
Robert J. Rando 16, Founder and Lead Counsel of The Rando Law Firm P.C., Fellow of the Academy of Court-Appointed
Masters, Treasurer for the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, Chair of the Federal Bar Association
Intellectual Property Law Section, “America’s Need For Strong, Stable and Sound Intellectual Property Protection and
Policies: Why It Really Matters”, IP Insight, June 2016, p. 12-14 [language modified] [abbreviations in brackets]

Robert F. Kennedy’s speech, which includes his reference to the oft-quoted “interesting times” curse, applies throughout
history in many contexts and, indeed, with both negative and positive connotation. While he focused on the struggles
for freedom and social justice, the requisite ascendancy of the individual over the state, and the institution and
integration of those ideals for the greater good, he also promoted the goals of greater global unity, cooperation and
communication , which were, and could be, achieved by advances in tech nology. And, as noted in the excerpt, he
championed “the creative energy of men.”

Intellectual Property in “Interesting Times”

It is beyond question that starting with the last decade of the twentieth century and throughout the first two decades of
the twenty-first century, when it comes to matters relating to intellectual property, we have been living in “interesting
times.” Some may interpret these interesting times as defined by the curse and others may view it by the ordinary
meaning of “interesting.” In either case, those of us that toil in the fields of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade
secrets, and privacy rights have experienced an unprecedented sea change in the way those rights are procured,
protected and enforced. Likewise, and perhaps more importantly, even those of us that do not practice in these areas of
law, as well as the general public, have been, and continue to be, impacted by the consequences of these changes (both
positive and negative).

The Changes In Intellectual Property Law

Examples of some of the changes in intellectual property law are: the sweeping 2011 legislative changes to the patent
laws under the America Invents Act (AIA), which impact is only beginning to be fully appreciated; the various proposals
for patent law reform, on the heels of the AIA, beginning with the 113th and 114th Congress; the copyright laws Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and numerous 114th Congressional proposed copyright law changes; the recently
enacted federal trade secret law (Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA))2; the impact of the internet, domain names
and globalization on Trademark law; the intellectual property law harmonization requirements included in various
global/regional trade agreements; and the proliferation of devices (both invasive and non-invasive) that defy any
rational basis for believing we can still adhere to the republic’s libertarian understanding of the right to privacy.

Without engaging in “chicken and egg” analysis, it is sufficient to observe that technological advancement , societal
needs , globalization , existential threats , economic realities , and political imperatives (or what James Madison
referred to in the Federalist Papers No. 10 as factious governance), have combined to create the “interesting times” for
the United States [IP] intellectual property laws.

What was said by Bobby Kennedy in 1966 remains true today. We live in dangerous and uncertain times. Many of the
existential threats remain the same ( nuclear war and proliferation, [genocides] genocidal maniacs and natural
disease ) and some are new ([hu]manmade disease, greater awareness of environmental changes and possibly
human interrelationship factors, and the unintended consequences of genetic manipulation and robotic
technologies ). The danger and uncertainty that pervades changes in intellectual property laws, though not an
existential threat of the same manner and kind, correlates with the threat and remains “more open to the creative
energy of man than any other time in history.”

Apropos the creative energy of man, there is a non-coincidental congruence and convergence of activity across and
among the three branches of government, occurring almost simultaneously with the congruence and convergence of
the rapid developments of technological innovation across various scientific disciplines and the information age,
reflected in the transformation of the [IP] intellectual property laws in the United States.
Patents

The passage of the AIA was a culmination of efforts spanning several years of Congressional efforts; and the product of a push by the companies at the forefront of the twenty-
first century new technology business titans. The legislation brought about monumental changes in the patent law in the way that patents are procured (first
inventor to file instead of first to invent) and how they are enforced (quasi-judicial challenges to patent validity through inter-party reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)).

The 113th and 114th Congress grappled with newly proposed patent law reforms that, if enacted, may present additional tectonic shifts in the patent law. Major provisions of the
proposals include: fee-shifting measures (requiring loser pays legal fees - counter to the American rule); strict detailed pleadings requirements, promulgated without the traditional Rules
Enabling Act procedure, that exceed those of the Twombly/Iqbal standard applied to all other civil matters in federal courts, and the different standards applicable to patent claim

interpretation in PTAB proceedings and district court litigation concerning patent validity .
The Executive and administrative branch has also been active in the patent law arena. President Obama was a strong supporter of the AIA3 and in his 2014 State Of The Union Address,
essentially stated that, with respect to the proposed patent law reforms aimed at patent troll issues, we must innovate rather than litigate.4 Additionally, the USPTO has embarked upon an
energetic overhaul of its operations in terms of patent quality and PTO performance in granting patents, and the PTAB has expanded to almost 250 Administrative Law Judges in concert with
the AIA post-grant proceedings’ strict timetable requirements.

The Supreme Court, not to be outdone by the Articles I and II branches of the U.S. government, has raised the profile of patent cases to historical heights. From 1996 to the 2014-15 term
there has been a steady increase in the number of patent cases decided by the SCOTUS5. The 2014-15 term occupied almost ten percent of the Court’s docket. Prior to the last two decades,
the Supreme Court would rarely include more than one or two patent cases in a docket that was much larger than those we have become accustomed to from the Roberts’ Court6.

While the SCOTUS activity in patent cases is viewed by some as a counter-balance to the perceived Federal Circuit’s pro-patent and bright line decisions, it can just as assuredly be viewed as
decisions rendered by a Court of final resort which does not function in a vacuum devoid of the social, economic and political winds of the times. In recognition of the effect new
technologies have on the patent law, the politicization of intellectual property law matters, especially patent law (through factious governing principles of the political branches of the
government), and the maturation of the Federal Circuit patent law jurisprudence, the SCOTUS has rendered opinions in cases that impact, and perhaps are/were intended to mitigate the
concerns regarding, some of the vexing issues confronting the patent community today (e.g., non-practicing entities or in the politicized parlance “patent trolls,” the intersection of patent
and antitrust laws in Hatch-Waxman so called “pay-for-delay” settlements between Branded and Generic pharma companies, and the fundamental tenets that comprise the very heart of
what is patent eligible subject matter).

Copyrights
The advent and ubiquity of the internet, social media and digital technologies (MP3s, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) represents the impetus for changes in the Copyright laws.
The DMCA addressed the issues presented by these advances or changes in the differing media and forms of artistic impressions. The proliferation of digital photos, graphic designs and
publishing alternatives, as well as adherence to globalization harmonization have given rise to changes in the statutory law and jurisprudence in this area of intellectual property law.
Additionally, there
is an overlap of patent rights and copyrights for software driven by the ebb and flow of the strength of
each respective intellectual property protection.
Notably, the Patent and Copyright Clause7, in addition to Author’s writings, has been viewed as discretely applying to two different types of creativity or innovation. When drafted the
“sciences” referred not only to fields of modern scienctific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. And the “useful arts” does not refer to artistic endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans or
people skilled in a manufacturing craft. Rather than result in ambiguity or confusion, perhaps the Framers were either quite prescient or, just coincidentally, these aspects of the Patent and
Copyright Clause have converged.

For example, none other than the famous Crooner, Bing Crosby, benefited from both protections. Well-known as a prolific and popular recording artist he also benefited from his
investments in the, then innovative, recording technologies. Similarly, the Beatles, Beach Boys, as well as many other rock and roll artists, experimental efforts in music performance,
recording and production, helped to transform the music industry in both copyrightable artistic expression and patentable inventions. Similarly, film, literary and digital arts reap benefits at
the crossroads of both copyright and patent protections.

Trademarks
Trademark laws have been impacted by numerous changes in the business landscape. They include the internet, Domain names, international rights in a global economy, different venues
and avenues for branding, marketing and merchandising, global knock-offs from nations that have a less than stellar respect for intellectual property rights, and international trade
agreements. More recently, politicization (or perhaps political correctness) has creeped into the trademark law arena pitting branding rights and protections against first amendment rights.

Trade Secrets
As with Copyright and Trademark law, trade secrets law includes some of the same issues related to trade agreements. TRIPS required members to have trade secret protection in place.
Initially, the United States compliance with this requirement has relied upon the trade secret law of the individual states. That compliance may be supplanted by the recently enacted DTSA.
Similarly, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement contains intellectual property rights provisions that will trigger required changes to United States statutory Intellectual Property
Laws.

The proposed trade secret legislation also gives rise to several concerns. For instance, there is an absence of a specific definition for trade secret, as well as potential issues of federalism,
conflict with state law precedent (despite no preemption), remedies, and the impact on employer/employee relations.
There is also a real concern that the
strengthening of trade secret protection in conjunction with the perceived weakening of
patent protection (e.g., high rate of invalidating patents in post-grant proceedings before the PTAB and strict limitations on what is patent eligible subject matter) may very-
well have the unintended consequence of contravening the purpose behind the Patent and Copyright Clause: “to promote
the progress of the sciences and the useful arts.” Moreover, the incentive to innovate may very well be usurped by the advantage of withholding patent law disclosure of highly beneficial
scientific advancements that directly affect the human condition, alter life expectancies and the evolution of the human species (rather than by mere “natural selection”), and what is the
very essence of a human being (for better or worse). Thus, crippling innovation and the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

Privacy Rights

It is increasingly more difficult to function “off the grid.” The invasive and non-invasive attributes of the internet, the reliance upon the multitude of devices, social media, and information
age technologies, and access to big data, all contribute to the decrease in and dilution of the right to privacy. Wittingly or otherwise, the strong libertarian roots of the republic have been
replaced by dependence upon these modes of an information-age life. Commentary on the benefits and deficits of this reality are beyond the subject and purpose of this writing. Suffice to
acknowledge that the right to privacy has been significantly reduced. The laws that protect these rights are in a constant struggle to maintain those rights while yielding to the demands of
the lifestyle and security concerns. Laws that relate to cybersecurity in the global and domestic space create interplay with privacy rights. Legislation, trade agreements and jurisprudence all
impact this area of intellectual property. Cross-border theft of trade secrets, competitor espionage, and loss of control over personal data are all implicated in the intellectual property law
arena.

America’s Need For Strong Intellectual Property Protection

The need for strong protection of intellectual property rights is greater now than it was at the dawn of our republic . Our
Forefathers and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized the need to secure those rights in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. James Madison provides insight for its
significance in the Federalist Papers No. 43 (the only reference to the clause). It is contained in the first Article section dedicated to the enumerated powers of Congress. The clause
recognizes the need for: uniformity of the protection of IP rights, securing those rights for the individual rather than the state;
and, incentivizing innovation and creative aspirations.
Underlying this particular enumerated power of Congress is the same struggle that the Framers grappled with throughout the document for the new republic: how to promote a unified
republic while protecting individual liberty. The fear of tyranny and protection of the “natural law” individual liberty is a driving theme for the Constitution and throughout the Federalist
Papers. For example, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison articulated the important recognition of the “faction” impact on a democracy and a republic. In Federalist No. 51, Madison
emphasized the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of the republic. And in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton, provided his most significant essay, which
described the judiciary as the weakest branch of government and sought the protection of its independence providing the underpinnings for judicial review as recognized thereafter in
Marbury v. Madison.

All of these related themes are relevant to the Patent and Copyright Clause and at the center of the intellectual property protections then and now. The Federalist Papers No. 10 recognition
that a faction may influence the law has been playing itself out in the halls of congress in the period of time leading up to the AIA and in connection with the current patent law reform
debate. The large tech companies of the past, new tech, new patent-based financial business model entities, and pharma factions have been the drivers, proponents and opponents of
certain of these efforts. To
be sure, some change is inevitable, and both beneficial and necessary in an environment of rapidly
changing technology where the law needs to evolve or conform to new realities . However, changes not premised upon the founding
principles of the Constitution and the Patent and Copyright Clause (i.e., uniformity, secured rights for the individual, incentivizing innovation and protecting individual liberty) run afoul of the
intended purpose of the constitutional guarantee.

Although the Sovereign does not benefit directly from the fruits of the innovator, enacting laws that empower the King, and enables the King to remain so, has the same effect as deprivation
and diminishment of the individual’s rights and effectively confiscates them from him/her. Specifically, with respect to intellectual property rights, effecting change to the laws that do not
adhere to these underlying principles, in favor of the faction that lobbies the most and the best in the quid pro quo of political gain to the governing body threatens to undermine the
individual’s intellectual property rights and hinder the greatest economic driver and source of prosperity in the country.

It is also important to recognize that the social, political and economic impact of strong protections for i ntellectual
p roperty cannot be overstated . In the social context, the incentive for disclosure and innovation is critical . Solutions
for sustainability and climate change (whether natural, man-made or mutually/marginally intertwined) rely upon
this premise. Likewise, as we are on the precipice of the ultimate convergence in technologies from the hi-tech digital
world and life sciences space, capturing the ability to cure many diseases and fatal illnesses and providing the true
promise of extended longevity in good health and well-being, that is meaningful, productive, and purposeful; this
incentive must be preserved .

In similar fashion, advancements in tech nologies related to the global economy and communications will enhance the
possibilities for solutions to political and cultural conflicts that arise around the globe . Likewise, the U nited
States economy has always benefited when it is at the forefront of innovation and achieves prosperity from its
leadership role in technological advancements .

Conclusion

As was the case in 1966, how we move forward today, to solve the many problems facing our country and the
broader global community in these “interesting times,” both within and without the laws affecting intellectual property
rights, depends upon the “creative energy of man” which must prevail. An achievable goal, dependent on the strong,
stable and sound protection of intellectual property rights .
 <>Court Clog DA: Wake

RON undermines court credibility and cause clog

Julia Talbot-Jones 18, Victoria University of Wellington, “Flowing from fiction to fact: the challenges of implementing
legal rights for

Rivers”, International Water Law Project, 5-7-2018, https://www.internationalwaterlaw.org/blog/2018/05/07/flowing-

from-fiction-to-fact-the-challenges-of-implementing-legal-rights-for-rivers/

Unintended consequences of granting legal rights to rivers

For policy makers or judicial experts interested in granting rights to rivers , the elements of the broader Te Awa Tupua
framework are important to note, particularly because, in the absence of an integrated framework, granting a river
legal rights could have unintended consequences for society as a whole.

For example, recognizing a river as a person will require the political system to find ways and means to deliver and
uphold a river’s new legal rights, sometimes at the direction of the courts . Because judges do not typically have the
discretion to make decisions based on the potential consequences of their decrees, this means that upholding the
rights of the river may impose unexpected costs on other sections or scales of society .

Further, although granting legal rights to rivers has the potential to benefit some industries and professionals, who stand
to gain by providing court-mandated goods and services, it also carries the risk of forcing the court to become
politicized . This could compromise moral authority and public confidence in the system. The series of events following
the Uttarakhand decision provides evidence of how this can, and has, occurred (BBC News Service, 2017).

Granting legal rights to rivers also places the responsibility of looking after, and representing, the environmental good or
resource in the appointed guardians, rather than elected officials. Without broader institutional and financial support,
this means that only wealthy or well-endowed representatives will be able to challenge decisions and enter costly
litigation , should a river wish to sue or find itself the subject of an individual or class action.

Given the financial burden of engaging in judicial process, perhaps it is not surprising that Ecuador – a country that
granted all of nature legal rights in 2008 (Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008; Revkin, 2008) – has had only
three cases of the rights of nature being successfully brought to court by civil society (Kauffman & Martin, 2017). In
the first case, two American residents who live parttime in Ecuador brought a case against the provincial government of
Loja on behalf of the Vilcabamba River. The plaintiffs owned property downstream of a road that was to be widened and
that runs past the river. The couple argued on behalf of nature that the new construction was adding debris to the
river and thus increasing the likelihood of floods that affected the riverside populations that use the river’s resources
(Daly, 2012).

Admittedly, in the case of the rivers discussed here, nominated guardians have been appointed to speak on behalf of
the rivers, and in the case of the Whanganui River, a NZ$ 30 million contestable fund has been created for the
purposes of improving Te Awa Tupua’s health and well-being, as well as litigation purposes. However, in the case of
the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, no financial support has been provided , which limits the legitimacy and power of
their legal rights, and that of the guardians who represent them .

Justices will shelve data protection.

Haley ’20 [Thomas; 2020; Faculty member at the University of Virginia Law School; Washington Law Review, “Data
Protection in Disarray,” https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5133&context=wlr]
The Seventh Circuit may have said the quiet part out loud: "The
standing rule reduces the workload of the federal judiciary ...." (205) While
literally true, that is neither an accepted nor acceptable justification for standing doctrine. (206) The existence of a "Case" or
"Controversy" does not depend on how pleased the court will be to hear it. Article III does not give the judiciary the ability to set its caseload. And a dispute will be no less adversarial
between the parties if it is the tenth hearing on a court's calendar rather than the first. Indeed, around the time that the Supreme Court threw standing jurisprudence for a loop in Clapper, it
admonished that federal courts are obligated to hear cases falling within their jurisdiction. (207)

Yet the appeal of the standing dismissal to the federal judge is impossible to ignore. The massive and increasing caseload in the federal courts is well known. In
the data-
protection context, cases typically promise to be long and involved . Most arise from large-scale data breaches or
inappropriate, indiscriminate data collection. As such, they are usually brought as class actions and implicate complex
technical issues. One can certainly understand why overworked judges might be eager to get such cases off their
dockets .
With that in mind, dismissal for lack of standing has a special appeal over other means of dispensing with a case: it is a non-merits dismissal. Even if erroneous or improperly motivated, a
dismissal for lack of standing works relatively little injustice, as its effect is only to banish the suit to state court. Moreover, as the data show, state-law and common-law claims predominate
in data-protection litigation--the majority of cases analyzed involved such claims, while fewer than half of cases asserted claims under federal law. Allowing state courts to deal with state-law
claims is a hallmark feature of the federal system, CAFA notwithstanding.

The Northern District of Illinois' BIPA series of cases may proceed from this impulse. Most were brought initially in state court, then removed to federal court by defendants who seemed
intent on challenging plaintiffs' right to bring suit at all. Confronted with the prospect of overseeing a lengthy, complicated class-action lawsuit brought by plaintiffs who did not want to be in
federal court in the first place against defendants who appeared to be engaging in gamesmanship, the judges of the Northern District of Illinois may well have viewed dismissal for lack of
standing as the best of all possible worlds.

The data are potentially consistent with this explanation. In particular, appellate courts have been significantly more
solicitous of plaintiffs in data-protection cases , finding standing in 75% of cases, compared to only 51% of district courts. In data-breach cases ,
which likely present both the most technically complicated inquiries and the most diffuse harms , appellate courts
upheld standing in 79% of cases, compared to a mere 41% of district court cases .

Credible data protection - key to effective AI---downsides AND upsides are existential.
EPRS ’20 [European Parliamentary Research Service; 2020; Panel for the Future of Science and Technology; European
Parliament, “The impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on artificial intelligence,”
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/641530/EPRS_STU(2020)641530_EN.pdf]

The future emergence of a general a rtificial i ntelligence is already raising serious concerns . A general artificial
intelligence system may improve itself at an exponential speed and quickly become superhuman; through its superior
intelligence it may then acquire capacities beyond human control. 10 In relation to self-improving artificial intelligence,
humanity may find itself in a condition of inferiority similar to that of animals in relation to humans. Some leading
scientists and technologists (such as Steven Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates) have argue d for the need to anticipate
this existential risk , 11 adopting measures meant to prevent the creation of general artificial intelligence or to
direct it towards human-friendly outcomes (e.g., by ensuring that it endorses human values and, more generally, that it
adopts a benevolent attitude). Conversely, other scientists have looked favourably on the birth of an intelligence meant
to overcome human capacities. In an AI system's ability to improve itself could lie the 'singularity' that will accelerate
the development of science and technology , so as not only to solve current human problems (poverty,
underdevelopment, etc.), but also to overcome the biological limits of human existence (illness, aging, etc.) and spread
intelligence in the cosmos . 12

The risks related to the emergence of an 'artificial general intelligence' should not be underestimated: this is, on the
contrary, a very serious problem that will pose challenges in the future. In fact, as much as scientists may disagree on
whether and when 'artificial general intelligence,' will come into existence, most of them believe that this objective will
be achieved within the end of this century. 13 In any case, it is too early to approach 'artificial general intelligence' at a
policy level, since it lies decades ahead, and a broader experience with advanced AI is needed before we can understand
both the extent and proximity of this risk, and the best ways to address it.

Conversely, 'artificial specialised intelligence' is already with us, and is quickly transforming economic, political, and
social arrangements, as well as interactions between individuals and even their private lives. The increase in economic
efficiency already is reality (see Figure 2), but AIprovides further opportunities: economic, social, and cultural
development; energy sustainability; better health care; and the spread of knowledge. In the very recent White Paper by
the European Commission14 it is indeed affirmed that AI.

will change our lives by improving healthcare (e.g. making diagnosis more precise, enabling better prevention of
disease s), increasing the efficiency of farming, contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation, improving
the efficiency of production systems through predictive maintenance, increasing the security of Europeans, and in many other
ways that we can only begin to imagine.

The opportunities offered by AI are accompanied by serious risks , including unemployment, inequality, discrimination,
social exclusion, surveillance , and manipulation . It has indeed been claimed that AI should contribute to the realisation
of individual and social interests, and that it should not be 'underused, thus creating opportunity costs, nor overused
and misused, thus creating risks.' 15 In the just mentioned Commission's White paper, it is indeed observed that the
deployment of AI

entails a number of potential risks, such as opaque decision-making, gender-based or other kinds of
discrimination, intrusion in our private lives or being used for criminal purposes.

Because the need has been recognised to counter these risks, while preserving scientific research and the beneficial uses
of AI, a number of initiatives have been undertaken in order to design an ethical and legal framework for 'human-
centred AI.' Already in 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the European Parliament's
Committee on LegalAffairs, and, in the UK, the House of Commons'Science and Technology Committee released their
initial reports on how to prepare for the future of AI16. Multiple expert committees have subsequently produced reports
and policy documents. Among them, the High-Level Expert Group on artificial intelligence appointed by the European
Commission, the expert group on AI in Society of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),
and the select committee on artificial intelligence of the United Kingdom (UK) House of Lords.17

The Commission's White Paper affirms that two parallel policy objectives should be pursued and synergistically
integrated. On the one hand research and deployment of AI should be promoted, so

that the EU is competitive with the US and China. The policy framework setting out measures to align efforts at
European, national and regional level should aim to mobilise resources

to achieve an 'ecosystem of excellence' along the entire value chain, starting in research and innovation, and to create
the right incentives to accelerate the adoption of solutions based on AI, including by small and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs)

On the other hand, the deployment of AI technologies should be consistent with the EU fundamental rights and social
values. This requires measures to create an 'ecosystem of trust,' which should provide citizens with 'the confidence
to take up AI applications' and 'companies and public organisations with the legal certainty to innovate using AI'.
This ecosystem

must ensure compliance with EU rules, including the rules protecting fundamental rights and consumers' rights, in
particular for AI systems operated in the EU that pose a high risk.

It is important to stress that the two objectives of excellence in research, innovation and implementation, and of
consistency with individual rights and social values are compatible, but distinct. On the one hand the most advanced AI
applications could be deployed to the detriment of citizens' rights and social values; on the other hand the effective
protection of citizens' from the risks resulting from abuses AI does not provide in itself the incentives that are needed to
stimulate research and innovation and promote beneficial uses. This report will argue that General Data Protection
Regulation can contribute to address abuses of AI , and that it can be implemented in ways that do not hinder its
beneficial uses. It will not address the industrial and other policies that are needed to ensure the EU competitiveness in
the AI domain.
 <>Court Clog DA: Wichita State

The United States should add 2 permanent article III courts of appeals judgeships, 77 permanent
article III district courts judgeships, and convert 9 temporary article III district courts judgeships to
permanent status
That solves backlog – trust the courts
Judicial Conference, 21 (The Judicial Conference of the United States is the national policymaking body for the
federal courts, “REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE JUDICIAL CONFERENCE OF THE UNITED STATES”, March 16, 2021,
https://www.uscourts.gov/file/33142/download)//babcii

ARTICLE III JUDGESHIPS Additional Judgeships. The Committee on Judicial Resources considered requests and
justifications for additional judgeships in the courts of appeals and the district courts as part of its 2021 biennial survey
of judgeship needs. Based on its review, and after considering the views of the courts and circuit judicial councils, the
Committee recommended that the Judicial Conference request from Congress the addition of 2 permanent Article III
judgeships for the courts of appeals and the addition of 77 permanent Article III judgeships and the conversion to
permanent status of 9 existing temporary Article III judgeships in the district courts . The Conference adopted the
Committee’s recommendations, agreeing to transmit the following request to Congress (“P” denotes permanent; “T/P”
denotes conversion of temporary to permanent):

Expansion of personhood spills over and flood’s the legal system

IFTF, 11 (IFTF, The Institute for the Future is a Palo Alto, California, US–based not-for-profit think tank, 2011, accessed
on 5-27-2022, Iftf, "law: strategic personhood", https://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR1378_TYF11_6-Law_rdr-
1.pdf)//babcii
In almost all modern political and legal systems, rights, responsibilities, and privileges are all predicated on the concept of the individual. In U.S. law, there are two categories of persons: natural persons (a category reserved exclusively for human beings) and legal

persons (primarily organizations, such as corporations or unions). The history of personhood, both natural and legal, has been marked by dramatic expansion. This expansion has always met resistance. For natural
beings, from wives to slaves to children, the attainment of personhood has been the way to escape being defined as property. For artificial entities like corporations , personhood has been a way to extend the benefits of
collective property and power, while still protecting personal property. The United States does not have a principle-based definition of a legal person, but rather a history of case
law and situational applications of rights and the language of rights, and the category of legal personhood has evolved as a contentious classification —with disruptive

consequences. Recent Supreme Court decisions have greatly expanded the rights available to legal persons (although a small shift in judicial mindsets could reverse this trend). Meanwhile, activists and corporations around the world are using the
concept of legal personhood as a “trump card” in debates over regulation and economic liberty. This power—and the fuzzy logic of its definition— will likely render legal personhood a key battleground

for social, economic, and political change in the coming decade. But with each expansion of the concept of personhood has come debate and stress on the system . It’s

possible that the strain on the legal and political system arising from the extension of legal personhood may lead to its unraveling . How many

entities can be called “persons” before personhood loses its meaning and political power? PERSONHOOD EXTENDED: THE MORE THE MESSIER?
Corporations have been the most aggressive in accruing and defending their personhood rights. Dozens of court cases in the United States have confirmed and extended the rights of artificial legal persons, including “free speech” rights to contribute to political

campaigns and rights to privacy. However, while corporations have seen the most ROI on their personhood strategy, other entities (or representatives of those entities) have begun to use personhood as a
legal technology for amplifying their power and protecting their interests. In 2008, Ecuador famously gave constitutional rights to nature, claiming it “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital
cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” A few years ago, Spain considered a subset of human rights to embrace higher primates, and numerous scientists have called for dolphins to be recognized as “nonhuman persons,” as well. And while the
issue has yet to reach the level of legislation, the question of rights for potential human-animal chimeras—however microscopic and limited—is subject to growing religious and environmental debate. Over the next decade, we should expect to see more efforts to
accord non-human entities some legal rights of personhood. Higher primates, dolphins, and other intelligent mammals will lead the way, especially if scientific trends continue to demonstrate that animals have more conscious reflexivity and self-awareness than
previously thought. Environmental activists will continue to push for rights for nature to mitigate ecological destruction. Anti-abortion activists will continue to use personhood as an argument against abortion and the use of embryos in scientific research. All these

arguments are
debates focus on expanding the definition of the natural person and have highly charged religious, ethical, and cultural aspects. While we may see tentative conclusions about expanding natural personhood this decade, the

likely to continue. Meanwhile, the real fight over the transformation in the definition of person will take place in the realm of legal persons. THE BOUNDARIES OF PERSONHOOD: WHERE DOES A PERSON END? Those who are troubled that
corporations can be persons will be facing a whole range of new, ad hoc, abstract, and hybrid entities, all vying for personhood . For example, the ability of individuals

to network their time, skills, and “mind-share” with each other and with machines will create entirely new classes of lightweight organizations, distributed cognitive systems, and mind-bot collectives. Granting these collective entities individual
personhood will give groups of individuals the power to “scale up” their resources and their reach at much greater speeds. It will allow individuals to mitigate the risks to their personal wealth and freedom and lower the barrier to entry for becoming a corporation.

animals—and the advocacy of rights for non-human, non-animate, and even non-existent entities such as future
Scientific knowledge about the intelligence of

generations—will push the boundaries of legal personhood even further. Legal scholars are already debating the question of personhood for artificially intelligent beings, and the notion that
sapient artificial intelligences (AIs) will gain rights through incorporation is already a science fiction trope. But while the emergence of self-aware computers remains a distant concern, a more tangible possibility for truly radical legal disruption will emerge when

Our legal system is built around bounded, complete individual persons, with
digitally networked human minds become more intimately connected and interdependent.

rights and responsibilities tied to that individual. As consciousness and agency become more fragmented and distributed through our networks and
technologies, the notion of a distinct individual with sole agency for decisions and actions becomes problematic . Our legal
systems will be forced to evolve or will be rendered obsolete. Two possible strategic directions are clear. The first will be the move to limit personhood to only natural human beings. We already see many anti-corporate
activist groups adopting this strategy today. The other will be the continued expansion of the concept of personhood to include new and surprising entities, such as nature, virtual corporations, and future generations. While the most radical forms of personhood will
win only slow and grudging acceptance, the debate over personhood will become increasingly central to shaping the politics—and possibly the economics—of the 2020s.

Judicial functioning is key to rule of law

Marks ’21 [Lawrence K; Chief Administrative Judge, New York State Unified Court System; 4/30/21; “The Rule of Law
and the Courts”; https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2021/04/30/the-rule-of-law-and-the-courts/; New York Law
Journal; accessed 9/7/21;]

As Thomas Paine famously said, “In America, the law is king.” This year’s Law Day theme—the rule of law —embodies
the concept that no individual is above the law; that everyone is subject to and accountable under the law, including
lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and judges. This principle was recognized by the ancient philosophers.
Democracy focuses on how societies select those who will hold political power; the rule of law concerns how that
power is exercised. The rule of law is the foundation of our rights and liberties in the United States. The courts , of
course, perform a critical role in ensuring the rule of law. Without an independent , fair and efficient court system,
the rule of law would be little more than a lofty, but hollow, gesture. Crime would go unpunished, negligent acts
would not be redressed, business contracts would lack enforcement, property rights would be ignored, family legal
disputes would be left unresolved. In short, civilized society, as we know it and which we often take for granted, would
cease to exist. This is precisely why we worked so hard in New York to keep courts open —to ensure access to justice
—even throughout the darkest days of the pandemic. Although during the early weeks of the pandemic the
magnitude of the public health crisis necessitated that court operations be limited to emergency and essential
matters, in very short time technology was deployed to permit access to justice for a rapidly expanded range of
proceedings that did not meet the emergency and essential criteria. Indeed, as of the writing of this article, typically
each week over 20,000 virtual court conferences and related proceedings are being conducted, roughly 5,000 cases are
being settled or otherwise disposed of virtually, over 1,000 remote bench trials and other evidentiary hearings are
being held, and over 2,000 written decisions are being issued. So the miracle of technology, the ingenuity of judges and
court staff, and the cooperation and determination of the bar have enabled the rule of law to endure over the past
year. ave been serious challenges. Proceedings that do not easily lend themselves to the virtual format—in particular,
jury trials—have suffered. And although virtual proceedings are here to stay and will continue to be an important part of
how the New York courts conduct business, there are many examples of where virtual is not always as effective as in-
person, especially when self-represented litigants are involved. As a result, backlogs have grown in some, although not
all, case courts and case types. This is of vital concern , because the viability of the rule of law requires an efficient
court system that can consistently resolve legal disputes in a timely fashion . The rule of law would be an empty
gesture if the rights of the accused and the interests of crime victims are not speedily addressed, injury victims are
subject to lengthy delays in securing redress, contract rights are not expeditiously interpreted and enforced, and
critically sensitive family disputes are allowed to fester. So as we approach the final stage of the pandemic, and as we
begin the return to eventual full complements of jury trials and other in-person proceedings, our focus is being re-
directed to the expanded backlogs of cases we see in many of our courts . The good news is that we have broad
experience to draw upon in confronting this challenge. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s Excellence Initiative, which up until
the pandemic had been so successful in attacking case delays and promoting efficiencies in case processing, provides a
blueprint for meeting the challenges we now face. This involves, first and foremost, extensive collection of caseload
data for courts throughout the state, and the widespread sharing of that data with Administrative Judges, Supervising
Judges, and, importantly, individual judges so they can review and fully understand their case inventories and pinpoint
where the problems lie. This intensive focus on addressing aging cases includes, particularly in high-volume jurisdictions,
designation of judges to concentrate on resolving the oldest cases and, if they cannot be resolved, readying them for
trial. Also critically important is a careful evaluation of how court resources , judges and court staff alike, are allocated
and, where necessary, reassigning those resources to allow for maximum efficiency. Finally, any meaningful effort to
attack case backlogs must include a major emphasis on alternative dispute resolution (ADR). This includes traditional
forms of ADR such as mediation and neutral evaluation, to be conducted by court-established rosters of neutrals and
community dispute resolution centers, but it also includes concerted efforts by judges and court legal staff to presume
all civil matters are appropriate for settlement, and to endeavor to do so at the earliest stages of the case. A statewide
program to dramatically expand presumptive, early ADR had begun in the months preceding the pandemic, and that
effort will be renewed in the months ahead as a critical element of the courts’ plans to attack case backlogs and delays.
The past year has offered unprecedented challenges for society as a whole, and that includes the courts. But we can
take great assurance in the fact that, despite the challenges, the rule of law has endured . Our courts have continued to
provide an independent and fair forum for the resolution of legal disputes. The courts’ timely and efficient resolution
of legal disputes, however, is an important component of the rule of law. New Yorkers can be assured that this goal will
be of the highest priority for our courts as we navigate the challenges that lie ahead.

Rule of law stops great power wars

Davis and Morse ’18 [Christina and Julia; September 19; Professor of Government at Harvard University; Professor
of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara; International Studies Quarterly, “Protecting Trade by
Legalizing Political Disputes: Why Countries Bring Cases to the International Court of Justice,” vol. 62]

Trade, Conflict, and Adjudication

countries turn to international adjudication to protect trade flows under

We argue that strong economic interdependence conditions of .

First, states believe international dispute

This argument is built on two key assumptions. could harm trade. Second, states view
that an over territory, fishing rights, or another salient issue

adjudication as an effective way to end dispute. Given the risk of harm to economic relations and
international courts the the potential for

to contribute to conflict resolution , states will be willing to undertake litigation with high trade value vested in a relationship more costly . This section elaborates on the general conditions of
our theory and then explains why the ICJ is a good venue for testing the relationship between economic interdependence and international adjudication. The Adverse Impact of Conflict on Trade The premise that conflict disrupts trade is central to the theory of commercial peace. Russett and Oneal (2001) draw on the work of
philosopher Immanuel Kant to argue that interdependence deters conflict by raising its costs. According to this reasoning, war interrupts trade while peace promotes stable commerce, leading states to calculate that the gains of peace are significant compared to the costs of war.4 Other perspectives focus on the informational role
of interdependence to lower uncertainty between states (Reed 2003). Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer (2001) contend economic interdependence allows states to signal their resolve through their willingness to bear the economic costs of confrontation.5 A host of empirical studies supports the idea that conflict reduces trade (Keshk,
Reuveny, and Pollins 2004; Long 2008). Several potential channels connect trade and conflict, including direct damage to infrastructure and transportation resulting from actual conflict, sanctions policies, and informal discrimination by governments or private actors. Glick and Taylor (2010) find that the effect of war on trade is
significant and persistent. At a lower level, political tensions may also suppress trade (Pollins 1989; Fuchs and Klann 2013). Consumer boycotts and financial market reactions in some cases have led to adverse market impact (Fisman, Hamao, and Wang 2014; Heilmann 2016; Pandya 2016). Simmons (2005) finds that territorial
disputes have a sizable negative impact on trade even in the absence of militarized action. Others suggest states anticipate the potential adverse impact of conflict on trade, and therefore trade less to begin with if they think that war is likely. In such a scenario, the marginal economic costs of war should be insufficient to change a
state's calculation for going to war (Morrow 1999; Barbieri 2002). Gowa and Hicks (2017) contend that trade is largely diverted through third-party channels, which compensate for having less direct trade with the adversary. We assume that leaders and business constituencies on average believe that conflict damages trade
relations. Political conflict could lead governments to adopt sanctions against an adversary or to restrict financial flows. Violence likely disrupts trading routes and slows the movement of goods. The potential for adverse financial market reactions and consumer response adds further unpredictability about the risk of spillover from

When states want

political disagreement into economic harm. Substitution through third parties could alleviate the harm, but this would still increase trade costs. The expected harm to trade motivates states to pursue the resolution of disputes. Adjudication as a Conflict Resolution Mechanism

to resolve an interstate dispute , why choose adjudication rather than militarized action?
would they the negotiations, economic sanctions, or In some cases,

decision follows military conflict to normalize relations

an episode of countries may turn to a legal venue to
as part of an effort . In other disputes,

prevent a problem from reaching political tensions or threats of force literature offers three broad
ever the stage that could produce serious . The types of

explanations legitimacy , informational benefits , and dom estic obstacles

for why states pursue adjudication: At the systemic level, to settlement.

international norms support peaceful resolution that rule of law has come to shape states, forming
conflict . Some contend the identities of

norms about action in international spheres

appropriate both the domestic and it forms a (Finnemore and Sikkink (1998, 902). When international law has been established through fair procedures and offers coherent principles,

legitimate source of authority that generates “ compliance pull ” on state behavior

in international affairs courts an independent (Franck 1990, 65). International

combine legitimacy bothas they help states solve specific disputes about
and authority international law how to interpret ; the growing role for international courts in international

The ICJ achieved a

affairs represents an important trend (Alter 2014; Alter, Helfer, and Madsen 2016). Integration with national courts has reinforced states’ use of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which stands out for its expansive caseload and impact on state behavior (Alter 1998). has

relatively strong record of compliance Legal settlement can help states coordinate
with rulings (Schulte 2004; Llamzon 2007; Mitchell and Hensel 2007; Johns 2012).

policies through information the provision of adjudication conveys willingness to reach an

. Compared to bilateral negotiations or nonbinding third-party arbitration, a government's

agreement Having taken the step to initiate legal action, a government would
(Helfer and Slaughter 2005; Gent and Shannon 2010). incur a public appear inconsistent and

reputational penalty if it took unilateral measures such as military actions before legal process reached a
also sanctions or the had

conclusion. This shapes the diplomatic context because participants know the matter will neither escalate into that

violence nor disappear A court ruling offers a focal point amidst uncertainty about
through neglect. terms of agreement how to interpret the an

In these informational
(Ginsburg and McAdams 2004; Huth, Croco, and Appel 2011). As the record-keeper of past actions, courts support systems of tit-for-tat and reputational enforcement (Milgrom, North, and Weingast 1990; Carrubba 2005; Mitchell and Hensel 2007).

theories states comply with court rulings in the absence of coercive measures
of courts, may because the reputational or the threat of sanctions

costs of noncompliance are too high courts coordinate enforcement . Rather than simply interpret law, expectations about . Johns (2012) models the circumstances whereby mobilization of third-party actions in

International courts offer a way for

support of a court ruling generates endogenous enforcement that can affect outcomes. In this way, multilateral enforcement makes an international court different from the pressure available in bilateral negotiations. also

states to frame settlements to appeal to domestic audiences negotiated (Fang 2008). Simmons notes that even when the same deal could be reached in negotiations or through a court decision, a

settlement could be viewed as weakness while legal resolution would be a positive signal for future cooperation
a sign of
(Simmons 2002, 834). This dynamic occurs because “domestic groups will find it more attractive to make concessions to a disinterested institution than to a political adversary” (Simmons 2002, 834). In research on several prominent ICJ cases, Fischer (1982, 271) emphasizes the court has helped governments to save face.
Consequently, those governments unable to reach agreements over domestic opposition may find it easier to do so with the involvement of a third-party ruling. Allee and Huth (2006a) show that governments with higher levels of domestic political constraints are more likely to choose adjudication over negotiation for settling
territorial disputes. Domestic political constraints also increase the probability of filing complaints at the WTO (Davis 2012). The mobilization of domestic groups plays a critical role in litigation patterns at the ECJ (Alter and Vargas 2000)
Clog DA
2NC --- AT: PDB
Recommendations are specifically crafted to solve current backlog through mathematics and
examination – plan obviously tips the scales
US Courts, 20 (it’s the courts…, “Judiciary Makes the Case for New Judgeships“, June 30, 2020,
https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2020/06/30/judiciary-makes-case-new-judgeships)//babcii

The creation of new judgeships has not kept pace with the growth in case filings over three decades, producing
“profound” negative effects for many courts across the country, U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller told Congress today.
Miller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing on the Judiciary’s request for additional judgeships.
He appeared on behalf of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the national policy-making body of the federal
Judiciary. Miller chairs a subcommittee on judicial statistics for the conference’s Committee on Judicial Resources. The
Judicial Conference has recommended that Congress establish five new judgeships in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
and 65 new judgeships in 24 district courts across the country. The conference also recommended that eight existing
temporary district court judgeships be converted to permanent status. Since 1990, when the last comprehensive
judgeship bill was passed by Congress, case filings in the courts of appeals had grown by 15 percent by the end of 2018,
while district court case filings had risen by 39 percent in the same period. “The effects of caseload increases without
increasing the number of judges are profound,” Miller said in his written testimony. “Increasing caseloads lead to
significant delays in the consideration of cases, especially civil cases which may take years to get to trial. … Delays
increase expenses for civil litigants and may increase the length of time criminal defendants are held pending trial.
Substantial delays lead to lack of respect for the Judiciary and the judicial process.” Miller noted that before a judgeship
recommendation is transmitted to Congress, it undergoes careful consideration and review at six levels within the
Judiciary. Judgeship needs are determined through an examination of the unique circumstances of a district, such as the
number of senior judges and magistrate judges to assist with workload. The conference also uses a mathematical
formula to determine the “weighted filings per judgeship,” which is a way of accounting for the varying complexity of
the different types of civil and criminal filings and the differences in time commitments required of judges. For example,
the goal is to maintain a standard in the range of 430 weighted filings per judgeship in a district court. For the district
courts where additional judgeships are being requested, weighted filings average 635 per judgeship.

2NC --- O/V

Turns disease
Greco 5 (Michael S., President – American Bar Association, Miami Daily Business Review, 52.42, 12-5)
What makes the rule of law so important that it attracted such a distinguished community† First, because the rule of
law is so central to everything the legal community stands for, both in the United States and around the world. And
second, because we increasingly find that our nation's top international priorities-defeating terrorism, corruption and
even the spread of deadly diseases-are being undone at the ground level by poor governance and lawlessness. As Rice
eloquently told the gathering, "In a world where threats pass even through the most fortified boundaries, weak and
poorly governed states enable disease to spread undetected, and corruption to multiply unchecked, and hateful
ideologies to grow more violent and more vengeful." The only real antidote to these global threats is governments, in
all corners of the world, that operate with just, transparent and consistent legal systems that are enforced by fair and
independent judiciaries. These issues are not just the province of distant foreign governments. Building the rule of law
must begin at home. Recent revelations in our own country-that the CIA has maintained secret prisons for foreign
detainees-underscore the urgent need for an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate our treatment of such
prisoners.
The link turns patent innovation
Robert J. Rando 16, Founder and Lead Counsel of The Rando Law Firm P.C., Fellow of the Academy of Court-Appointed
Masters, Treasurer for the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, Chair of the Federal Bar Association
Intellectual Property Law Section, “America’s Need For Strong, Stable and Sound Intellectual Property Protection and
Policies: Why It Really Matters”, IP Insight, June 2016, p. 12-14 [language modified] [abbreviations in brackets]

there is a non-coincidental congruence and convergence of activity across and among the three branches
Apropos the creative energy of man,

of government, occurring almost simultaneously with the congruence and convergence of the rapid developments of
technological innovation across various scientific disciplines and the information age, reflected in the transformation
of the [IP] intellectual property laws in the United States The passage of the AIA . Patents was a culmination of efforts spanning several years of Congressional efforts; and the product of a

brought monumental changes in patent law

push by the companies at the forefront of the twenty-first century new technology business titans. The legislation about the in the way that patents are procured (first inventor to file instead of first to invent)

patent law
and how they are enforced (quasi-judicial challenges to patent validity through inter-party reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB)). The 113th and 114th Congress grappled with newly proposed reforms that, if enacted, may present additional tectonic shifts in the patent law. Major

include
provisions of the proposals : fee-shifting measures (requiring loser pays legal fees - counter to the American rule); strict detailed pleadings requirements, promulgated without the traditional Rules Enabling Act procedure, that exceed those of the Twombly/Iqbal standard applied to all other civil matters in

district court litigation concerning patent validity .

federal courts, and the different standards applicable to patent claim interpretation in PTAB proceedings and The Executive and administrative branch has also been active in the patent law
arena. President Obama was a strong supporter of the AIA3 and in his 2014 State Of The Union Address, essentially stated that, with respect to the proposed patent law reforms aimed at patent troll issues, we must innovate rather than litigate.4 Additionally, the USPTO has embarked upon an energetic overhaul of its operations in
terms of patent quality and PTO performance in granting patents, and the PTAB has expanded to almost 250 Administrative Law Judges in concert with the AIA post-grant proceedings’ strict timetable requirements. The Supreme Court, not to be outdone by the Articles I and II branches of the U.S. government, has raised the profile
of patent cases to historical heights. From 1996 to the 2014-15 term there has been a steady increase in the number of patent cases decided by the SCOTUS5. The 2014-15 term occupied almost ten percent of the Court’s docket. Prior to the last two decades, the Supreme Court would rarely include more than one or two patent
cases in a docket that was much larger than those we have become accustomed to from the Roberts’ Court6. While the SCOTUS activity in patent cases is viewed by some as a counter-balance to the perceived Federal Circuit’s pro-patent and bright line decisions, it can just as assuredly be viewed as decisions rendered by a Court of
final resort which does not function in a vacuum devoid of the social, economic and political winds of the times. In recognition of the effect new technologies have on the patent law, the politicization of intellectual property law matters, especially patent law (through factious governing principles of the political branches of the
government), and the maturation of the Federal Circuit patent law jurisprudence, the SCOTUS has rendered opinions in cases that impact, and perhaps are/were intended to mitigate the concerns regarding, some of the vexing issues confronting the patent community today (e.g., non-practicing entities or in the politicized parlance

“patent trolls,” the intersection of patent and antitrust laws in Hatch-Waxman so called “pay-for-delay” settlements between Branded and Generic pharma companies, and the fundamental tenets that comprise the very heart of what is patent eligible subject matter). Copyrights The advent and ubiquity of the
internet, social media and digital technologies (MP3s, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) represents the impetus for changes in the Copyright laws. The DMCA addressed the issues presented by these advances or changes in the differing media and forms of artistic impressions. The proliferation of digital photos, graphic

there is an overlap of patent rights and

designs and publishing alternatives, as well as adherence to globalization harmonization have given rise to changes in the statutory law and jurisprudence in this area of intellectual property law. Additionally,

copyrights for software driven by the ebb and flow of the strength of each respective intellectual property protection .
Notably, the Patent and Copyright Clause7, in addition to Author’s writings, has been viewed as discretely applying to two different types of creativity or innovation. When drafted the “sciences” referred not only to fields of modern scienctific inquiry but rather to all knowledge. And the “useful arts” does not refer to artistic
endeavors, but rather to the work of artisans or people skilled in a manufacturing craft. Rather than result in ambiguity or confusion, perhaps the Framers were either quite prescient or, just coincidentally, these aspects of the Patent and Copyright Clause have converged. For example, none other than the famous Crooner, Bing
Crosby, benefited from both protections. Well-known as a prolific and popular recording artist he also benefited from his investments in the, then innovative, recording technologies. Similarly, the Beatles, Beach Boys, as well as many other rock and roll artists, experimental efforts in music performance, recording and production,

helped to transform the music industry in both copyrightable artistic expression and patentable inventions. Similarly, film, literary and digital arts reap benefits at the crossroads of both copyright and patent protections. Trademarks Trademark laws have been impacted by numerous changes in the business
landscape. They include the internet, Domain names, international rights in a global economy, different venues and avenues for branding, marketing and merchandising, global knock-offs from nations that have a less than stellar respect for intellectual property rights, and international trade agreements. More recently,

politicization (or perhaps political correctness) has creeped into the trademark law arena pitting branding rights and protections against first amendment rights. Trade Secrets As with Copyright and Trademark law, trade secrets law includes some of the same issues related to trade agreements. TRIPS
required members to have trade secret protection in place. Initially, the United States compliance with this requirement has relied upon the trade secret law of the individual states. That compliance may be supplanted by the recently enacted DTSA. Similarly, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement contains intellectual
property rights provisions that will trigger required changes to United States statutory Intellectual Property Laws. The proposed trade secret legislation also gives rise to several concerns. For instance, there is an absence of a specific definition for trade secret, as well as potential issues of federalism, conflict with state law precedent

the strengthening of trade secret protection in conjunction with the

(despite no preemption), remedies, and the impact on employer/employee relations. There is also a real concern that

perceived weakening of patent protection may very-well have the (e.g., high rate of invalidating patents in post-grant proceedings before the PTAB and strict limitations on what is patent eligible subject matter)

unintended consequence of contravening the purpose behind the Patent and Copyright Clause: “to promote the progress of the sciences and the useful arts.”
Moreover, the incentive to innovate may very well be usurped by the advantage of withholding patent law disclosure of highly beneficial scientific advancements that directly affect the human condition, alter life expectancies and the evolution of the human species (rather than by mere “natural selection”), and what is the very
essence of a human being (for better or worse). Thus, crippling innovation and the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

2NC --- AT --- Thumpers

3---Backlogs are manageable now.
Cass ’22 [Ronald; Spring 2022; Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law, distinguished senior fellow of the
C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State; National Affairs, “On Expanding Federal Courts,”
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts]

Another concern litigants have is the cost of presenting matters to courts and having their issues resolved. Rules that
define the way litigation unfolds, the burdens of production and persuasion, how litigants can access information held
by others, and how they may present findings to the decision-maker all have significant implications for the cost of
litigation. Though such expenses cannot be taken as free-standing matters unrelated to the choices litigants make,
judicial interpretations of the rules can affect them. Judges who understand the rules of procedure and exercise good
practical judgment can keep a lid on costs to some degree.

The third element of judicial decision-making that litigants value is speed . This is often the most prominent
consideration in public discussions of how many judges should sit on the federal courts. Congressional representatives
from both parties, including Democrat Hank Johnson and Republican Darrell Issa, have made the issue of delays in
judicial decisions their central argument in favor of adding new judgeships. Other advocates of expanding the courts
have pointed to judges' caseloads , which are often taken as a proxy for the speed with which litigation can be
resolved. Caseloads are not necessarily correlated with the speed of case resolution, however, meaning that the debate
speaks more to the concerns of the judges themselves than the interest litigants have in a speedy resolution of their
case. And as we shall see later on, the data are broadly consistent with the conclusion that there is no caseload crisis
in the federal courts that calls for additional judges.

2NC --- Link --- AI

2---Interactions---Courts must determine where and with who the new personhood applies ---
That’s absurdly burdensome
Bryson et al. 17 (Joanna J. Bryson, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK, Mihailis E.
Diamantis, College of Law, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA, and Thomas D. Grant, Wolfson College and
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, “Of, for, and by the people: the legal
lacuna of synthetic persons”, Artificial Intelligence and Law volume 25, 273–291, 08 September 2017,
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-017-9214-9)//babcii

The gap between de jure and de facto legal personality Even once a legal system has determined which rights and obligations to confer on a
legal person, practical realities may nullify them. Legal rights with no way to enforce them are mere illusion. Standing—the right to appear before particular organs for purposes of
presenting a case under a particular rule—is crucial to a legal person seeking to protect its rights in the legal system. Standing does not necessarily follow from the

existence of an actor’s legal personality . An entity, even when its legal personality is not in doubt, must exercise its standing before it can avail itself of relevant
procedures (Vollenhoven et al. 1926). When an entity tries to invoke newly conferred rights, challenges to its standing are all the

more likely (Shah 2013). Consider the legal right of “integral respect” that Ecuador gave to its ecosystem. While the ecosystem may have the right as a matter of law, it
clearly lacks the non-legal capacities it would need to protect the right from encroachment. To effectuate the right, the Ecuadorian constitution gave standing to everyone in

Ecuador to bring suits on behalf of the ecosystem. Thus, in 2011, private Ecuadorians successfully sued the Provincial Government of Loja to halt expansion of a
roadway that was damaging an important watershed (Greene 2011). The outcome would have been very different if Ecuador had provided no mechanism for protecting nature’s legal right
of integral respect. Nature cannot protect itself in a court of law. Just as legal rights mean nothing if the legal system elides the standing to protect them, legal
obligations mean
nothing in the absence of procedure to enforce them . The advisory opinion of the ICJ establishing that the UN has legal personality was in 1948, but this
resolved only whether the UN could bring a claim. It said nothing about an obvious correlate: the legal capacity of the UN to bear responsibility and answer for its own breaches. Affirmation
that the UN indeed can be responsible for its breaches did come—but over half a century later (Wickremasinghe and Evans 2000, para. 66). Despite the efforts of international lawyers, there
is still no reliable procedure for suing an international organization.Footnote12 We
could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal
people would interact with other legal persons and with the institutions of the legal system (courts, administrative
agencies, legislatures, police, etc.). In its first encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf
or against it would require novel and controversial developments in law. Courts and other organs would struggle to
decide how, if at all, the rules—heretofore addressed to other legal persons—address the robot. Both the robot’s
standing against other actors and other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested. If the topic of electronic
personality is to be addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely synthetic entities to sue and of others to sue
them—is a further matter that would need to be considered.

3---The plans applicability is uncertain and requires large litigation

Bertolini and Episcopo, 21 (Andrea Bertolini and Francesca Episcopo, Bertolini, LLM (Yale), PhD (SSSA), Assistant
Professor of Private Law, Episcopo, MJur (Oxford), PhD (Università di Pisa), Postdoctoral Fellow in Private Law, 2021,
accessed on 5-29-2022, Cambridge, " The Expert Group’s Report on Liability for Artificial Intelligence and Other Emerging
Digital Technologies: a critical assessment", https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/
view/45FD6BB0E113E7C4A9B05128BC710589/S1867299X21000301a.pdf/the-expert-groups-report-on-liability-for-
artificial-intelligence-and-other-emerging-digital-technologies-a-critical-assessment.pdf)//Babcii

III. The distinction between high- and low-risk applications as a potential source of legal uncertainty As anticipated, the Report suggests that when AI&ET “are
operated in non-private environments and may typically cause significant harm”, due to the “interplay of [its] potential frequency and the severity”, a strict liability regime should apply.
Significant harms would likely be caused by “emerging digital technologies which move in public spaces, such as vehicles, drones, or the like”, and “objects of a certain minimum weight,
moved at a certain minimum speed … such as AI-driven delivery or cleaning robots, at least if they are operated in areas where others may be exposed to risk”. On the contrary, “[s]mart
home appliances will typically not be proper candidates for strict liability”, and the same is said for “merely stationary robots (eg surgical or industrial robots) even if AI-driven, which are
exclusively operated in a confined environment, with a narrow range of people exposed to risk, who are also protected by a different – including contractual – regime …”. This proposal is
highly questionable. First, the distinction between high- and low-risk applications – despite echoing the liability regime envisaged by some MSs for dangerous things and activities– does not
specify when the harm should qualify as “severe” or “potentially frequent”. Thus, it results in a circular definition, void of any selective meaning. On the one hand, the distinction does not
offer any guidance to policymakers, who need not to predetermine the criteria according to which they will decide whether to regulate a specific application, use or domain. Risk – as defined
by the EG – ought not to be the sole criterion justifying intervention. Indeed, reform might be argued on other grounds, such as social desirability, the need to ensure access to justice in case
of very small claims that would otherwise not be compensated, causing externalities and market failures of various kinds and the need to provide positive incentives towards the adoption of
a specific solution. Said policy arguments could also vary from one case to another, and uniformity and consistency of criteria are not desirable per se. Quite to the contrary, this could
substantially limit the spectrum of considerations to be taken into account with respect to different emerging technologies when deciding whether to intervene. On the other hand, were the
dichotomy to be adopted and used – absent a clear enumeration of which applications fall into what category (thence being classified as high- or low-risk, ultimately causing the definition
itself to become superfluous) – it would give rise to unacceptable ex ante uncertainty about the applicable standard of liability (strict or
fault-based) in each case. Somewhat recalling the Learned Hand formula, it would not allow operators of the specific technology to determine beforehand what standard of liability
they would then be subject to. This would open the floodgate to litigation – most likely both at the national and the European level – potentially causing progressive
divergence among MSs. In particular, even if only low-risk applications were to be identified a contrario – while high-risk ones were clearly and strictly indicated– considering the

pervasiveness of AI and the broad notion of “AI-system” considered, which applications ought to fall under this special
regime of liability would most likely be uncertain. If a piece of software used in medical diagnosis – not classified as high-risk – were to be considered a low-risk
application (thence still falling under the special liability regime for advanced technologies), this would only be ascertained before a judge once harm had

already occurred. The medical doctor would not know beforehand what standard of liability would apply to their case, and, from a normative perspective, this would heavily
interfere with national tort law systems. All of this is while – on the face of a careful assessment of the applicable legal framework – many prospective low-risk applications would simply not
need to be regulated.

Even perception triggers the link---results in litigation and anxieties.

Ryan Abbott & Alex Sarch 19, Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Surrey School of Law and
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles; Sarch,
Reader (Associate Professor) in Legal Philosophy, University of Surrey School of Law, “Punishing Artificial Intelligence:
Legal Fiction or Science Fiction,” 53 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 323, November 2019, WestLaw

Even so, any sort of legal personhood for AIs would be a dramatic legal change that could prove problematic.225 As discussed earlier, providing legal
personality to AI could result in increased anthropomorphisms. People anthropomorphizing AI expect it to adhere to social norms and have higher expectations regarding AI

capabilities.226 This is problematic where such expectations are inaccurate and the AI is operating in a position of trust .
Especially for vulnerable users, such anthropomorphisms could result in “ cognitive and psychological damages to manipulability and reduced quality of

life.”227 These outcomes may be more likely if AI were held accountable by the state in ways normally reserved for human
members of society. Strengthening questionable anthropomorphic tendencies regarding AI could also lead to more violent or destructive
behavior directed at AI, such as vandalism or attacks.228 Further, punishing AI could also affect human well-being in less direct ways , such as by

producing anxiety about one’s own status within society due to the perception that AIs are given a legal status on a par with human
beings.

2NC --- AT --- Not Personhood

Ur Wrong --- A singular grant of a legal right grants legal personhood
Briana Hopes 21, Senior Managing Editor, Volume 23, Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. J.D.
candidate 2021, Tulane University Law School; B.A. 2014, Mass Communication: Public Relations, Louisiana State
University, “Rights for Robots? U.S. Courts and Patent Offices Must Consider Recognizing Artificial Intelligence Systems
as Patent Inventors,” 23 Tul. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 119, Spring 2021, WestLaw

*128 A. Objections to AI Personhood Those opposed to granting an AI system legal personhood status have two main
objections to recognizing rights to AIs.81 First, “only natural persons should be given the rights of constitutional
personhood.”82 Second, artificial intelligence systems lack the critical components of personhood such as souls,
consciousness, intentionality, and feelings.83 1. AI Systems Are Not Humans The most obvious objection to recognizing
AI as a legal person is simply that artificial intelligence systems are not human.84 Opponents argue that only humans can
have constitutional rights.85 However, one response to that objection would be to develop criteria of personhood for
non-human entities that are independent from being human.86 For example, in October 2017, Saudi Arabia became the
first country to grant citizenship to a robot.87 The robot, named Sophia, was deemed a Saudi citizen in “an attempt to
promote Saudi Arabia as a place to develop artificial intelligence.”88 However, much criticism followed the granting of
citizenship to Sophia because the robot was given more rights than many human women in Saudi Arabia.89 Saudi Arabia
still only gives limited rights to human women.90 This issue comes into play in many other countries as well, where
many citizens also have fewer rights than nonintelligent software and robots.91 Granting legal personhood status to an
AI system when other humans have lesser rights than a robot can cause human rights and dignity to suffer.92 *129 2. AI
Systems Lack Critical Elements of Personhood Another objection for granting AI legal personhood status is that these
systems lack critical elements of personhood such as a soul, feelings, consciousness, intentionality, desires, and
interests.93 This argument, known as the “missing something” argument, stresses that AI systems could never truly
possess these elements and therefore are missing something in order to be recognized as legal persons.94 For example,
“quality X is essential for personhood.”95 Quality X cannot be possessed by an AI system.96 Thus, even though a
computer could produce behavior that demonstrates quality X, it is only a simulation and the computer is truly lacking
quality X.97 V. LEGAL PERSONHOOD STATUS OF NON-HUMANS AND ARTIFICIAL ENTITIES The first step in granting a
non-human entity with intellectual property rights will require the entity to be recognized as a legal person or
“artificial person.” If a non-human entity is granted legal personhood, the entity will inherit rights and protections
similar to those of a natural person as determined by law and our courts.

Expansion of personhood spills over and flood’s the legal system

IFTF, 11 (IFTF, The Institute for the Future is a Palo Alto, California, US–based not-for-profit think tank, 2011, accessed
on 5-27-2022, Iftf, "law: strategic personhood", https://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR1378_TYF11_6-Law_rdr-
1.pdf)//babcii
In almost all modern political and legal systems, rights, responsibilities, and privileges are all predicated on the concept of the individual. In U.S. law, there are two categories of persons: natural persons (a category reserved exclusively for human beings) and legal

persons (primarily organizations, such as corporations or unions). The history of personhood, both natural and legal, has been marked by dramatic expansion. This expansion has always met resistance. For natural
beings, from wives to slaves to children, the attainment of personhood has been the way to escape being defined as property. For artificial entities like corporations , personhood has been a way to extend the benefits of

collective property and power, while still protecting personal property. The United States does not have a principle-based definition of a legal person, but rather a history of case
law and situational applications of rights and the language of rights, and the category of legal personhood has evolved as a contentious classification —with disruptive

consequences. Recent Supreme Court decisions have greatly expanded the rights available to legal persons (although a small shift in judicial mindsets could reverse this trend). Meanwhile, activists and corporations around the world are using the
concept of legal personhood as a “trump card” in debates over regulation and economic liberty. This power—and the fuzzy logic of its definition— will likely render legal personhood a key battleground

for social, economic, and political change in the coming decade. But with each expansion of the concept of personhood has come debate and stress on the system . It’s

possible that the strain on the legal and political system arising from the extension of legal personhood may lead to its unraveling . How many

entities can be called “persons” before personhood loses its meaning and political power? PERSONHOOD EXTENDED: THE MORE THE MESSIER?
Corporations have been the most aggressive in accruing and defending their personhood rights. Dozens of court cases in the United States have confirmed and extended the rights of artificial legal persons, including “free speech” rights to contribute to political

campaigns and rights to privacy. However, while corporations have seen the most ROI on their personhood strategy, other entities (or representatives of those entities) have begun to use personhood as a
legal technology for amplifying their power and protecting their interests. In 2008, Ecuador famously gave constitutional rights to nature, claiming it “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital
cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” A few years ago, Spain considered a subset of human rights to embrace higher primates, and numerous scientists have called for dolphins to be recognized as “nonhuman persons,” as well. And while the
issue has yet to reach the level of legislation, the question of rights for potential human-animal chimeras—however microscopic and limited—is subject to growing religious and environmental debate. Over the next decade, we should expect to see more efforts to
accord non-human entities some legal rights of personhood. Higher primates, dolphins, and other intelligent mammals will lead the way, especially if scientific trends continue to demonstrate that animals have more conscious reflexivity and self-awareness than
previously thought. Environmental activists will continue to push for rights for nature to mitigate ecological destruction. Anti-abortion activists will continue to use personhood as an argument against abortion and the use of embryos in scientific research. All these

debates focus on expanding the definition of the natural person and have highly charged religious, ethical, and cultural aspects. While we may see tentative conclusions about expanding natural personhood this decade, the arguments are
likely to continue. Meanwhile, the real fight over the transformation in the definition of person will take place in the realm of legal persons. THE BOUNDARIES OF PERSONHOOD: WHERE DOES A PERSON END? Those who are troubled that
corporations can be persons will be facing a whole range of new, ad hoc, abstract, and hybrid entities, all vying for personhood . For example, the ability of individuals

to network their time, skills, and “mind-share” with each other and with machines will create entirely new classes of lightweight organizations, distributed cognitive systems, and mind-bot collectives. Granting these collective entities individual
personhood will give groups of individuals the power to “scale up” their resources and their reach at much greater speeds. It will allow individuals to mitigate the risks to their personal wealth and freedom and lower the barrier to entry for becoming a corporation.

animals—and the advocacy of rights for non-human, non-animate, and even non-existent entities such as future
Scientific knowledge about the intelligence of

generations—will push the boundaries of legal personhood even further. Legal scholars are already debating the question of personhood for artificially intelligent beings, and the notion that
sapient artificial intelligences (AIs) will gain rights through incorporation is already a science fiction trope. But while the emergence of self-aware computers remains a distant concern, a more tangible possibility for truly radical legal disruption will emerge when

Our legal system is built around bounded, complete individual persons, with
digitally networked human minds become more intimately connected and interdependent.

rights and responsibilities tied to that individual. As consciousness and agency become more fragmented and distributed through our networks and
technologies, the notion of a distinct individual with sole agency for decisions and actions becomes problematic . Our legal

systems will be forced to evolve or will be rendered obsolete. Two possible strategic directions are clear. The first will be the move to limit personhood to only natural human beings. We already see many anti-corporate
activist groups adopting this strategy today. The other will be the continued expansion of the concept of personhood to include new and surprising entities, such as nature, virtual corporations, and future generations. While the most radical forms of personhood will
win only slow and grudging acceptance, the debate over personhood will become increasingly central to shaping the politics—and possibly the economics—of the 2020s.

Judicial functioning is key to rule of law

Marks ’21 [Lawrence K; Chief Administrative Judge, New York State Unified Court System; 4/30/21; “The Rule of Law
and the Courts”; https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2021/04/30/the-rule-of-law-and-the-courts/; New York Law
Journal; accessed 9/7/21;]

As Thomas Paine famously said, “In America, the law is king.” This year’s Law Day theme—the rule of law —embodies the
concept that no individual is above the law; that everyone is subject to and accountable under the law, including lawmakers, law
enforcement officials, and judges. This principle was recognized by the ancient philosophers . Democracy focuses on how societies select those who will
hold political power; the rule of law concerns how that power is exercised . The rule of law is the foundation of our rights and
liberties in the United States. The courts , of course, perform a critical role in ensuring the rule of law. Without an
independent , fair and efficient court system, the rule of law would be little more than a lofty, but hollow, gesture. Crime
would go unpunished, negligent acts would not be redressed, business contracts would lack enforcement, property
rights would be ignored, family legal disputes would be left unresolved . In short, civilized society , as we know it and which we often take for granted,
would cease to exist. This is precisely why we worked so hard in New York to keep courts open —to ensure access to
justice—even throughout the darkest days of the pandemic . Although during the early weeks of the pandemic the
magnitude of the public health crisis necessitated that court operations be limited to emergency and essential
matters, in very short time technology was deployed to permit access to justice for a rapidly expanded range of proceedings that did not meet the emergency and essential criteria. Indeed, as of the
writing of this article, typically each week over 20,000 virtual court conferences and related proceedings are being conducted,
roughly 5,000 cases are being settled or otherwise disposed of virtually , over 1,000 remote bench trials and other evidentiary hearings are being held, and over 2,000

written decisions are being issued. So the miracle of technology , the ingenuity of judges and court staff , and the cooperation and

determination of the bar have enabled the rule of law to endure over the past year. ave been serious challenges. Proceedings that do not easily
lend themselves to the virtual format—in particular, jury trials—have suffered. And although virtual proceedings are here to stay and will continue to be an important part of how the New York courts conduct business,

As a result, backlogs have grown in some,

there are many examples of where virtual is not always as effective as in-person, especially when self-represented litigants are involved.

although not all, case courts and case types. This is of vital concern , because the viability of the rule of law requires an

efficient court system that can consistently resolve legal disputes in a timely fashion . The rule of law would be an
empty gesture if the rights of the accused and the interests of crime victims are not speedily addressed , injury victims
are subject to lengthy delays in securing redress, contract rights are not expeditiously interpreted and enforced, and
critically sensitive family disputes are allowed to fester. So as we approach the final stage of the pandemic , and as we begin the
return to eventual full complements of jury trials and other in-person proceedings, our focus is being re-directed to the expanded backlogs of cases we see

in many of our courts. The good news is that we have broad experience to draw upon in confronting this challenge. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s Excellence
Initiative, which up until the pandemic had been so successful in attacking case delays and promoting efficiencies in case processing, provides a blueprint for meeting the challenges we now face. This
involves, first and foremost, extensive collection of caseload data for courts throughout the state, and the widespread sharing
of that data with Administrative Judges, Supervising Judges, and, importantly, individual judges so they can review and fully understand their case inventories and pinpoint where the
problems lie. This intensive focus on addressing aging cases includes, particularly in high-volume jurisdictions, designation of judges to concentrate on resolving the oldest cases and, if they cannot be resolved,

readying them for trial. Also critically important is a careful evaluation of how court resources , judges and court staff
alike, are allocated and, where necessary, reassigning those resources to allow for maximum efficiency. Finally, any meaningful
effort to attack case backlogs must include a major emphasis on alternative dispute resolution (ADR). This includes traditional forms of ADR such as mediation and neutral evaluation, to be conducted by court-established
rosters of neutrals and community dispute resolution centers, but it also includes concerted efforts by judges and court legal staff to presume all civil matters are appropriate for settlement, and to endeavor to do so at the
earliest stages of the case. A statewide program to dramatically expand presumptive, early ADR had begun in the months preceding the pandemic, and that effort will be renewed in the months ahead as a critical element

The past year has offered unprecedented challenges for society as a whole, and that
of the courts’ plans to attack case backlogs and delays.

includes the courts. But we can take great assurance in the fact that, despite the challenges, the rule of law has endured . Our courts have continued to
provide an independent and fair forum for the resolution of legal disputes. The courts’ timely and efficient resolution
of legal disputes, however, is an important component of the rule of law. New Yorkers can be assured that this goal will be of the highest priority for our courts as we
navigate the challenges that lie ahead.

Rule of law stops great power wars

Davis and Morse ’18 [Christina and Julia; September 19; Professor of Government at Harvard University; Professor
of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara; International Studies Quarterly, “Protecting Trade by
Legalizing Political Disputes: Why Countries Bring Cases to the International Court of Justice,” vol. 62]

Trade, Conflict, and Adjudication

countries turn to international adjudication to protect trade flows under

We argue that strong economic interdependence conditions of .

First, states believe international dispute

This argument is built on two key assumptions. could harm trade. Second, states view
that an over territory, fishing rights, or another salient issue

adjudication as an effective way to end dispute. Given the risk of harm to economic relations and
international courts the the potential for

to contribute to conflict resolution , states will be willing to undertake litigation with high trade value vested in a relationship more costly . This section elaborates on the general conditions of
our theory and then explains why the ICJ is a good venue for testing the relationship between economic interdependence and international adjudication. The Adverse Impact of Conflict on Trade The premise that conflict disrupts trade is central to the theory of commercial peace. Russett and Oneal (2001) draw on the work of
philosopher Immanuel Kant to argue that interdependence deters conflict by raising its costs. According to this reasoning, war interrupts trade while peace promotes stable commerce, leading states to calculate that the gains of peace are significant compared to the costs of war.4 Other perspectives focus on the informational role
of interdependence to lower uncertainty between states (Reed 2003). Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer (2001) contend economic interdependence allows states to signal their resolve through their willingness to bear the economic costs of confrontation.5 A host of empirical studies supports the idea that conflict reduces trade (Keshk,
Reuveny, and Pollins 2004; Long 2008). Several potential channels connect trade and conflict, including direct damage to infrastructure and transportation resulting from actual conflict, sanctions policies, and informal discrimination by governments or private actors. Glick and Taylor (2010) find that the effect of war on trade is
significant and persistent. At a lower level, political tensions may also suppress trade (Pollins 1989; Fuchs and Klann 2013). Consumer boycotts and financial market reactions in some cases have led to adverse market impact (Fisman, Hamao, and Wang 2014; Heilmann 2016; Pandya 2016). Simmons (2005) finds that territorial
disputes have a sizable negative impact on trade even in the absence of militarized action. Others suggest states anticipate the potential adverse impact of conflict on trade, and therefore trade less to begin with if they think that war is likely. In such a scenario, the marginal economic costs of war should be insufficient to change a
state's calculation for going to war (Morrow 1999; Barbieri 2002). Gowa and Hicks (2017) contend that trade is largely diverted through third-party channels, which compensate for having less direct trade with the adversary. We assume that leaders and business constituencies on average believe that conflict damages trade
relations. Political conflict could lead governments to adopt sanctions against an adversary or to restrict financial flows. Violence likely disrupts trading routes and slows the movement of goods. The potential for adverse financial market reactions and consumer response adds further unpredictability about the risk of spillover from

When states want

political disagreement into economic harm. Substitution through third parties could alleviate the harm, but this would still increase trade costs. The expected harm to trade motivates states to pursue the resolution of disputes. Adjudication as a Conflict Resolution Mechanism

to resolve an interstate dispute , why would they choose adjudication rather than negotiations, economic sanctions, or militarized action? the In some cases,
decision follows military conflict to normalize relations
an episode of countries may turn to a legal venue to
as part of an effort . In other disputes,

prevent a problem from reaching political tensions or threats of force literature offers three broad
ever the stage that could produce serious . The types of

explanations legitimacy , informational benefits , and dom estic obstacles

for why states pursue adjudication: At the systemic level, to settlement.

international norms support peaceful resolution that rule of law has come to shape states, forming
conflict . Some contend the identities of

norms about action in international spheres

appropriate both the domestic and it forms a (Finnemore and Sikkink (1998, 902). When international law has been established through fair procedures and offers coherent principles,

legitimate source of authority that generates “ compliance pull ” on state behavior

in international affairs courts an independent (Franck 1990, 65). International

combine legitimacy bothas they help states solve specific disputes about
and authority international law how to interpret ; the growing role for international courts in international

The ICJ achieved a

affairs represents an important trend (Alter 2014; Alter, Helfer, and Madsen 2016). Integration with national courts has reinforced states’ use of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which stands out for its expansive caseload and impact on state behavior (Alter 1998). has

relatively strong record of compliance Legal settlement can help states coordinate
with rulings (Schulte 2004; Llamzon 2007; Mitchell and Hensel 2007; Johns 2012).

policies through information the provision of adjudication conveys willingness to reach an

. Compared to bilateral negotiations or nonbinding third-party arbitration, a government's

agreement Having taken the step to initiate legal action, a government would
(Helfer and Slaughter 2005; Gent and Shannon 2010). incur a public appear inconsistent and

reputational penalty if it took unilateral measures such as military actions before legal process reached a
also sanctions or the had

conclusion. This shapes the diplomatic context because participants know the matter will neither escalate into that

violence nor disappear A court ruling offers a focal point amidst uncertainty about
through neglect. terms of agreement how to interpret the an

In these informational
(Ginsburg and McAdams 2004; Huth, Croco, and Appel 2011). As the record-keeper of past actions, courts support systems of tit-for-tat and reputational enforcement (Milgrom, North, and Weingast 1990; Carrubba 2005; Mitchell and Hensel 2007).

theories states comply with court rulings in the absence of coercive measures
of courts, may because the reputational or the threat of sanctions

costs of noncompliance are too high courts coordinate enforcement . Rather than simply interpret law, expectations about . Johns (2012) models the circumstances whereby mobilization of third-party actions in

International courts offer a way for

support of a court ruling generates endogenous enforcement that can affect outcomes. In this way, multilateral enforcement makes an international court different from the pressure available in bilateral negotiations. also

states to frame settlements to appeal to domestic audiences negotiated (Fang 2008). Simmons notes that even when the same deal could be reached in negotiations or through a court decision, a

settlement could be viewed as weakness while legal resolution would be a positive signal for future cooperation
a sign of
(Simmons 2002, 834). This dynamic occurs because “domestic groups will find it more attractive to make concessions to a disinterested institution than to a political adversary” (Simmons 2002, 834). In research on several prominent ICJ cases, Fischer (1982, 271) emphasizes the court has helped governments to save face.
Consequently, those governments unable to reach agreements over domestic opposition may find it easier to do so with the involvement of a third-party ruling. Allee and Huth (2006a) show that governments with higher levels of domestic political constraints are more likely to choose adjudication over negotiation for settling
territorial disputes. Domestic political constraints also increase the probability of filing complaints at the WTO (Davis 2012). The mobilization of domestic groups plays a critical role in litigation patterns at the ECJ (Alter and Vargas 2000).

Court clog
2NC --- ! AO --- Faith
Clogged courts make people lose faith in government
Richard E. Messick 15, legal consultant and former World Bank lawyer, “Uncorking the bottlenecks: Using political
economy analysis to address court delay,” https://www.cmi.no/publications/5847-using-political-economy-analysis-to-
address-court

Court delay is costly – to the parties to the case and to society as a whole . The lapse of time between the filing of a
case and its resolution lessens the chances that the dispute will be justly decided ; witnesses may die or disappear and
memories can fade. Frustrated by long waits, parties may abandon the effort to vindicate their rights, and a few may
turn to violence. Delay undermines public confidence in the court system and in government itself.

Extinction – and turns the case

Small 6 — Jonathan Small, former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition, 2006 (“Moving Forward,” The
Journal for Civic Commitment, Available Online via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine at
http://web.archive.org/web/ 20060711184600/http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/
Small.jsp, Accessed 09-22-2009)
What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that

the new century will present

humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility,

challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened self-interest . Confronting global warming , depleted
natural resources , global super viruses , global crime syndicates , and multinational corporations with no conscience
and no accountability will require cooperation , openness , honesty , compromise , and most of all solidarity – ideals not exactly
cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history
of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven. Our very existence depends upon our ability to
adapt to this new paradigm , to envision a more cohesive society. With humankind’s next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern
individualism backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation . Unlike any

other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once . Global super viruses will ravage
rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will
affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe . Air pollution will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the
sun, and chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current course , to

survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter the course of human

events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We
need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and
arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged
individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical
transformation of our conception of education. We’ll need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set
before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of
public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some
possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay
between ideas of social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to
direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and
how their relationship to each other affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one
could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing
instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and
equality. The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social
contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and
specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively.

Civic engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual

Once again, let’s not get bogged down on subtleties.

and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that today’s youth
are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are

today’s youth no longer see government and

about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and today’s youth. But one thing is for sure;

politics as an effective or valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world . Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to
sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.” Maybe the youth’s

In order to
rejection of American politics isn’t a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today.

foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-first
century , we need to fundamentally change our systems . Therefore, part of our challenge becomes convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean
government and commerce, have the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in

this context.

2NC – AT: Clog now

Backlogs are manageable now.
Cass ’22 [Ronald; Spring 2022; Dean Emeritus of the Boston University School of Law, distinguished senior fellow of the
C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State; National Affairs, “On Expanding Federal Courts,”
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/on-expanding-federal-courts]

Another concern litigants have is the cost of presenting matters to courts and having their issues resolved. Rules that
define the way litigation unfolds, the burdens of production and persuasion, how litigants can access information held
by others, and how they may present findings to the decision-maker all have significant implications for the cost of
litigation. Though such expenses cannot be taken as free-standing matters unrelated to the choices litigants make,
judicial interpretations of the rules can affect them. Judges who understand the rules of procedure and exercise good
practical judgment can keep a lid on costs to some degree.

The third element of judicial decision-making that litigants value is speed . This is often the most prominent
consideration in public discussions of how many judges should sit on the federal courts. Congressional representatives
from both parties, including Democrat Hank Johnson and Republican Darrell Issa, have made the issue of delays in
judicial decisions their central argument in favor of adding new judgeships. Other advocates of expanding the courts
have pointed to judges' caseloads , which are often taken as a proxy for the speed with which litigation can be
resolved. Caseloads are not necessarily correlated with the speed of case resolution, however, meaning that the debate
speaks more to the concerns of the judges themselves than the interest litigants have in a speedy resolution of their
case. And as we shall see later on, the data are broadly consistent with the conclusion that there is no caseload crisis
in the federal courts that calls for additional judges.

Empirical studies go neg.

Poppe ’21 [Emily; February 2021; Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University, JD from Northwestern University School
of Law, A.B. Degrees in Public Policy and Spanish from Duke University, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of
California, Irvine School of Law; U.C. Irvine Law Review, “Institutional Design for Access to Justice,” vol. 11]

This law-centric orientation is strikingly different from that of most Americans, despite popular claims about their
litigiousness. 8 Most individuals never even identify the civil legal problems they experience as "legal." Only a tiny
minority will ever seek legal advice in response to a problem, and most are more likely to do nothing than to file a
lawsuit. Decades of empirical scholarship have confirmed that despite the prevalence of civil legal problems in
everyday life, there is remarkably little recourse to formal law.

Footnote 8:

DAVID M. ENGEL, THE MYTH OF THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY: WHY WE DON'T SUE 3 (2016) (noting that " specious claims of a
litigation explosion have been made so often that they have rooted themselves in the national psyche ").

End of Footnote 8.

A burgeoning movement among scholars and practitioners seeks to incorporate this empirical reality into our
understanding of access to justice. While earlier conceptualizations of access to justice focused on access—to lawyers,
legal expertise, and legal institutions 12—the emerging approach is centered instead on justice. With the goal of
equalizing individuals’ ability to achieve just resolutions to civil legal problems regardless of whether lawyers or courts
are involved, it pragmatically seeks to acknowledge individuals’ disinclination to turn to law while nevertheless
promoting their ability to achieve justice.13

Realizing this objective requires expanding the access to justice toolkit. An international set of evidence-based best
practices suggests that access to justice interventions be proactively targeted to those groups most in need of
assistance, linked to other social service providers, aimed at addressing problems early to avoid escalation, and
customized to the user’s capabilities.14 By enhancing individuals’ ability to resolve civil legal problems, such
interventions could promote equality in their ability to thrive in society; without successful interventions, inequalities in
access to justice are likely to continue to reproduce existing social and economic inequalities and perpetuate cycles of
poverty.

Unfortunately, our institutional infrastructure is poorly suited to deliver these types of interventions. Responsibility for
access to justice is primarily assigned to the civil justice system, which is a reactive institution limited to engaging with
the “cases and controversies” before it.15 Thus, while it may work to increase access to legal representation, offer
alternative means of resolving disputes, or provide resources for self-representation, it does so only in the context of
the tiny minority of legal problems that enter its domain. Meanwhile, the vast majority of justiciable problems that
people experience remain outside the boundaries of the legal system in an institutionally barren no-man’s land. To an
extent not often recognized, access to justice is an orphan issue, a social problem for which no institution bears
responsibility.16

This has negative implications not only for individuals’ ability to resolve justiciable issues, but also for the emergence of
access to justice as a political issue.17 Yet, we are living in a moment of upheaval—wrought by a global pandemic,18 a
divisive populist president,19 rising economic inequality,20 and a reckoning with systemic racism21 and sexism22—that
may produce an opening to reconsider our commitment to equity in access to justice. In this Article, I offer a blueprint
for several institutional design reforms that might be implemented to capitalize on such an opportunity.
The Article proceeds as follows. In Part I, I describe the state of access to justice today. Drawing on empirical research , I
document the prevalence and unequal distribution of justiciable problems and identify patterns of behaviors taken in
response. I then explain how this empirical understanding has transformed our conceptualization of access to justice. In
Part II, I describe the mismatch between the types of evidence-based interventions that could operationalize the
contemporary conceptualization of access to justice and our near-exclusive reliance on the judicial system, whose
mandate largely excludes such efforts. Part III contains my proposals for institutional design for access to justice.

I. Access to Justice Today

We are in an era of renewed dedication to the goal of expanding access to justice domestically23 and around the
world.24 Yet doing so requires that we define the scope of the issue.25 In this Part, I describe how a growing
international body of evidence regarding the prevalence, distribution, and consequences of civil legal problems, as well
as the most significant barriers to their resolution, has influenced the evolving definition of access to justice.

A. Justiciable Problems: Prevalence, Distribution, and Consequences

We live in a “ law-thick ” world 26 in which civil legal problems are both prevalent and consequential.27 While this
includes situations involving formal civil legal action , these represent only a tiny fraction —the tip of the iceberg —of
the civil legal problems that individuals experience.28

Footnote 28:

28. Rebecca L. Sandefur, Paying Down the Civil Justice Data Deficit: Leveraging Existing National Data Collection, 68 S.C.
L. REV. 295, 299 (2016); Richard E. Miller & Austin Sarat, Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary
Culture, 15 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 525, 546 (1980) (noting the low rate of litigation relative to the number of grievances);
Felstiner et al., supra note 7, at 636.

End of Footnote 28.

2NC --- Link --- Generic

The aff overwhelms the courts ---
1---Activists--- Even if the aff is small it invites new litigation and movements from every facet of
personhood movements --- That puts massive stress on the legal system --- That’s IFTF
They will see the aff as muddying the bright line of personhood and a chance to argue for their
specific cause across the spectrum
Cupp, 15 (Richard Cupp Jr., John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, 2015, accessed on 5-
28-2022, Fedsoc, "Human Responsibility, Not Legal Personhood, For Nonhuman Animals",
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/human-responsibility-not-legal-personhood-for-nonhuman-animals)//
Babcii

IV. How Far Might Animal Personhood and Rights Extend? The NhRP has stated that a goal of using these lawsuits is to
break through the legal wall between humans and animals.39 But we have no idea how far things might go if the wall
comes down. One might suspect that many advocates would push for things to go quite far. In the real world, law
does not fit perfectly with any single philosophical theory or other academic theory because judges must be intensely
conscious of the practical, real world consequences of their decisions. One practical consequence courts should expect
if they break through the legal wall between animals and humans is a broad and intense proliferation of expansive
litigation without a meaningful standard for determining how many of the billions of animals in the world are intelligent
enough to merit personhood. We should not fool ourselves into minimizing the implications of these lawsuits by
thinking that they are, in the long run, only about the smartest animals. How many species get legal personhood based
on intelligence is just the start. Once the wall separating humans and nonhumans comes down, that could serve as a
stepping stone for many who advocate a focus on the capacity to suffer as a basis for legal personhood. Animal legal
rights activists do not all see eye to eye regarding whether they should focus on seeking legal standing for all animals
who are capable of suffering or on legal personhood and rights for particularly smart animals like chimpanzees.
However, these approaches may only be different beginning points with a similar possible end point. The intelligent
animal personhood approach that begins with the smartest animals is more pragmatic in the short term, because the
immediate practical consequences of granting legal standing to all sentient animals could be immensely disruptive for
society.40 We do not have much economic reliance on chimpanzees, there are relatively few of them in captivity
compared to many other animals, and we can recognize that they are particularly intelligent and more similar to humans
than are other animals. Thus, perhaps a court could be tempted to believe that granting personhood to chimpanzees
would be a limited and manageable change. If that were accepted as a starting position, there is no clear or even fuzzy
view of the end position. It would at least progress to assertions that most animals utilized for human benefit have
some level of autonomy interests sufficient to allow them to be legal persons who may have lawsuits filed on their
behalf on that basis. Professor Richard Epstein has recognized the slipperiness of this slope, pointing out that, “unless
an animal has some sense of self, it cannot hunt, and it cannot either defend himself or flee when subject to attack.
Unless it has a desire to live, it will surely die. And unless it has some awareness of means and connections, it will fail in
all it does.”41 Once the personhood door opens to the more intelligent animals, it would also encourage efforts to
extend personhood on the basis of sentience rather than autonomy. The implications of much broader potential
expansion of legal personhood based on either autonomy definitions or sentience could be enormous, and society
should carefully think through them. Any court that contemplates restructuring our legal system must also contemplate
the practical consequences.

Those cases destroy the legal system with their cost and length EVEN IF they lose every single one
Cupp, 7 (Richard Cupp, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, 2007, accessed on 5-29-
2022, Animallaw, "A Dubious Grail: Seeking Tort Law Expansion and Limited Personhood as Stepping Stones Toward
Abolishing Animals' Property Status | Animal Legal & Historical Center", https://www.animallaw.info/article/dubious-
grail-seeking-tort-law-expansion-and-limited-personhood-stepping-stones-toward)//Babcii

Personhood
C. and Rights for Children, Incompetent Adults, and Things Such as Corporations and Ships Both Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line emphasize that despite all of the attention devoted by animal rights' detractors to the primacy of humans over animals, precedent
exists for granting legal capacity to sue [FN95] and legal rights to humans who are not legally competent and to other entities that are not even sentient. [FN96] Human children, even as infants or fetuses, are granted
rights under the Constitution. [FN97] The same is true for *17 adults who are mentally ill or mentally retarded. [FN98] Rattling the Cage correctly points out that many great apes function at a much higher level of intelligence and communication than infant children or many mentally incompetent adults. [FN99] Thus, the book

argues, if rights are assigned to infants and incompetent adults, they should also be assigned to great apes functioning at a higher level. [FN100] This argument has a powerful intuitive appeal. The position that we must draw a sharp line between legal
personhood for humans and animals seems less compelling when we are reminded that humans with less intellectual, emotive, and communicative ability than many animals receive these rights. The wind is taken from the sails of the sharp line argument even more

If
effectively when considering that even ships and corporations are granted personhood in civil litigation. [FN101] these nonthinking, nonfeeling, lifeless things are granted legal personhood for some purposes, one might
wonder just how sacred legal personhood can be . There is surface attractiveness to the argument that a living, thinking, communicating, feeling animal should have an even better case for personhood than does a permanently unconscious human
being or, even more so, a lifeless thing. Rattling the Cage uses the rights status of children and incompetent adults to illustrate that rights exist on a scale, and that personhood may be granted without granting all forms of rights. [FN102] For example, children and incompetent adults do not have the right to vote or to hold political
office. [FN103] Rattling the Cage states that “as their autonomies approach the *18 minimum, the scope of their fundamental rights may be varied proportionately.” [FN104] Wise would like for courts to take the same approach to animals, allowing them basic dignity rights if they have practical autonomy, but not necessarily
allowing them “full” rights such as the right to vote, hold office, marry, engage in political speech, and so forth. [FN105] Despite the intuitive appeal of pointing out that some rights are afforded to children, incompetent adults, corporations, and ships, important distinctions exist. Regarding corporations and ships,

personhood was created as a legal fiction because courts found doing so to be efficacious in conducting and regulating
business transactions and practices Corporations are legal . [FN106] No great societal upheavals or challenges accompanied courts' pretense that these entities could be thought as legal persons for some purposes.

concentrations of the energies and efforts of humans assigning them personhood is a device to indirectly (shareholders and employees), and

facilitate and control the combined efforts of humans. Similarly, ships are owned by humans for profit or pleasure, [FN107]

and the legal fiction of assigning them personhood is a proxy for the human or humans who control them. [FN108] Ships and corporations do not

pretending that ships and corporations are “persons” does

assert the dignity rights that Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line would assign to animals, such as the right to be free from slavery or a right of bodily integrity, and

not create the enormous societal implications that would a finding that some animals may not be “enslaved” or have their bodies used without their consent. Regarding children and incompetent adults, one may argue that the potential for full autonomy they represent as humans distinguishes them from all animals, even if some animals may surpass their intellectual, *19 emotive, and communicative ability. As Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line

acknowledge, religious and societal values and assumptions play a large role in this response's appeal. [FN109] Most Americans probably believe that humans are uniquely sacred. An infant, while perhaps not possessing consciousness at one stage of its life, may grow up to become the next Einstein or Ghandi or may develop a cure for cancer. Even a person in a permanent vegetative state, with no hope of recovery, is tied to other humans more closely by their emotions and by societal and religious values than is an intelligent animal. Courts assign dignity rights to this unfortunate human because she is a human, and most other humans feel a bond of
sameness with her stronger than any bond of sameness they might feel with the most intelligent of animals. [FN110] A related criticism that may be made regarding the books' focus on consciousness as the primary basis for personhood is that, based on that standard, even computers demonstrating artificial intelligence may one day need to be granted personhood status and constitutional rights. Wise is clearly skeptical that computers might be able to attain consciousness anytime soon. Prominent legal scholar and judge Richard Posner takes Wise to task for his unwillingness to seriously address the problem of having to eventually grant personhood to
computers on an analogous basis. [FN111] Rattling the Cage criticizes MIT professor Marvin Minsky, the “founding father of artificial intelligence,” as grossly overstating the possibility that computers may attain consciousness in the foreseeable future. [FN112] Having to add computers into the mix when arguing for expansion of rights complicates matters for those supporting animal rights. Assigning rights and personhood to exceptionally powerful computers that are programmed to attain a high level of artificial intelligence would likely strike most Americans as untenable, [FN113] and recognizing that the arguments for granting rights to computers are similar
to the arguments for *20 granting rights to animals may weaken the appeal of assigning personhood to animals. D. The Evolution of Rights and Personhood for Slaves, Women, and Children Rattling the Cage focuses on three cases to illustrate the history of equality and liberty rights. Two of the three cases involve slaves. This in itself is not controversial, as the question of human slavery has given United States courts their most significant opportunities to reflect upon the nature of personhood and rights. [FN114] However, Rattling the Cage goes far beyond looking to cases involving slavery merely for lessons on the nature of rights. Rather, the book (and other
writings by animal rights activists) makes close and pronounced parallels between societal and legal evolution away from slavery and the proposed evolution of rights for some animals. In addition to helping to understand the sense of righteous zeal possessed by many animal rights activists (that is, unless they are engaged in lawless violence, we would not consider someone who is passionate about the evils of human slavery as an extremist), this provides one of the central questions in the debate over animal rights: are the parallels between intelligent animals and slaves close enough to use the legal evolution of rights for slaves as the blueprint for evolving
rights for some animals? The two cases involving slavery that Wise describes as setting the stage for his theory of animal personhood [FN115] are Somerset v. Stewart [FN116] and Dred Scott v. Sandford. [FN117] Somerset is a well-known English case from 1772. It involved James Somerset, a slave captured in Africa and sold in Virginia in 1749. [FN118] In 1769, Somerset's owner traveled to England, bringing Somerset with him. [FN119] Somerset escaped in England but was captured and imprisoned until he could be sailed back to Jamaica and sold. [FN120] However, English abolitionists petitioned the King's Bench for a writ of habeas corpus seeking to have
slavery declared illegal and Somerset freed. [FN121] To the delight of present animal rights activists--but also identifying a foundation for a negative response to pleas for animal *21 rights--Somerset's lawyer used an analogy to property ownership of animals in his argument that Somerset should have personhood and rights. At a preliminary hearing, he questioned “upon what principle is it--can a man become a dog for another man?” [FN122] The King's Bench used this case to prohibit slavery in England (although it was of course still allowed in the colonies). [FN123] The court's decision was influenced strongly by notions of natural law--the idea that moral
absolutes exist and at a basic level are apparent to humans and that the role of the courts is to correctly identify and follow natural law rather than contradicting the natural moral order. [FN124] In a passage quoted in Rattling the Cage, the Somerset court relied on basic moral imperatives to reject the arguments of Somerset's owner and to ban slavery: The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only by positive law . . . it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is
allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged. [FN125] For Wise, a key aspect of this reasoning is that a sufficiently strong moral imperative outweighs practical concerns (the ruling being made despite “whatever inconveniences . . . may follow”). [FN126] The economic upheaval societal leaders knew would be caused by banning human slavery was, without doubt, the strongest reason that it lasted as long as it did in the United States. [FN127] Of course, one of the strongest practical arguments against rights for animals is that assigning them rights would cause enormous *22 economic and societal disruption. [FN128]
By focusing on a natural law moral imperative, Rattling the Cage seeks to argue that assigning rights for some animals is necessary and that our history with slavery illustrates this. The Dred Scott case, known better than Somerset to Americans, involved a slave named Dred Scott, whose master, Dr. John Emerson, was an Army surgeon. [FN129] Because of his Army career, Dr. Emerson moved to different posts in the 1830s several times, taking Mr. Scott with him. [FN130] Their residences included forts in the Illinois territory and the Missouri territory. [FN131] The Scotts filed petitions in federal court arguing that they should be released from slavery since they
had resided in the Illinois territory, which prohibited slavery. [FN132] The United States Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case, made at a time of enormous national tension shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, is a model of racist ignominy, and it remains a source of shame in our history. Like Somerset, the Dred Scott Court seemed attracted to the concept of natural law, but with a much different interpretation of natural justice. Chief Justice Roger Taney declared blacks to have been found to be “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” [FN133] Because of this natural order, blacks could be “treated as
an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.” [FN134] On this basis, the Court rejected Mr. Scott's legal personhood, and held that as property he had no standing to bring a legal action. [FN135] Rattling the Cage uses Somerset to illustrate its vision of an enlightened use of legal process to create (or, more accurately from Wise's perspective, to properly acknowledge) rights, and uses Dred Scott to illustrate the backward legal thinking Wise believes is presently holding courts back from granting rights to intelligent animals. The final of the three primary cases Wise uses to illustrate his concept of rights is Citizens to End
Animal Suffering and Exploitation v. New England Aquarium. [FN136] This is a case Wise litigated himself in the 1990s in which a dolphin named Kama was named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit alleging violations of federal law in the sale of the dolphin to the Navy. Wise finds a direct connection between the shameful reasoning of the court in Dred Scott and the decision of a federal court in 1993 that Kama the dolphin was not a person and *23 thus could not file a legal action: “One hundred and forty years later [after Dred Scott], another federal judge said that Kama had no legal capacity either.” [FN137] Other animal rights activists have also sought to use the
evolution of rights for women and for children as roadmaps for the evolution of rights for animals. [FN138] In Anglo-American legal history, both women and children were, until relatively recent times, viewed as property of husbands and fathers in some contexts. [FN139] Feminist literature and thought, in particular, have been increasingly referenced in analyzing oppression and denial of rights for animals. [FN140] The message repeated with all three comparisons (slaves, women, and children) is that our concept of rights evolves with time and shifting societal mores and values, and that over time we will view our repression of animal rights to be shameful

As noted above, no clear standard exists for determining when an entity may be considered a
just as our earlier repression of rights for oppressed humans was shameful. III. ANIMAL PERSONHOOD, RIGHTS, AND SOCIETAL INTERESTS

person for purposes of asserting rights. the answer has historically seemed too apparent for serious [FN141] This is likely in large part because

discussion--a person is a human person . Even Somerset v. Stewart, the well-known English case discussed above disallowing slavery, relied on simple natural law notions of liberty and equality for humans rather than a precisely articulated legal standard. [FN142]

Although some creations of humans, such as corporations, have been granted the capacity to sue or be sued, they may
be viewed as symbolic representations of the *24 interests of humans, and thus as extensions of humans. [FN143] Animals are, of

efforts to extend personhood

course, not extensions of humans. Thus, have centered on highlighting as many attributes as possible that they to animals

share with humans . If some animals are smarter than some humans, more capable of feeling emotions than some humans, better communicators than some humans, and more conscious than some humans, the argument goes, it is unjust to assign personhood to all humans but not to intelligent animals. [FN144] Assuming that courts were some day to accept this argument, a specific legal mechanism where it might initially be manifest is the doctrine of standing. A. Personhood and Legal Standing Courts must find standing before considering substantive rights arguments on

the merits. Because of this, the first, and perhaps most decisive, struggle in the direct battle [FN145] for animal rights may be fought over capacity to sue. At present, if a person representing that she is acting on behalf of a research lab chimpanzee were to file a lawsuit in the chimp's name claiming, for example, that the chimp was being subjected to slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, the court would likely reject the claim on the basis of lack of standing to sue for the chimp rather than needing to address the substantive constitutional claim. [FN146] *25 Provided that a case or controversy is found to exist, Congress may legislatively grant
standing in the federal courts to any entity it wishes. [FN147] It may be that a court would find the Constitution's case or controversy requirement to prevent standing for an animal in any context. [FN148] However, it seems likelier that the courts would allow Congress to permit standing for direct enforcement of legislation such as the Animal Welfare Act if Congress chose to do so. [FN149] Standing to assert constitutional rights, as opposed to enforcement of legislation, is another matter. Although many of the cases he addresses involve federal constitutional rights questions. Wise ultimately argues for rights under the common law. [FN150] However, other
animal rights supporters have not shied away from seeking direct rights under the federal constitution. For example, the Seton Hall Law Constitutional Law Journal published a sample legal brief in 2000 that provides insights into the types of constitutional claims that may be raised when lawsuits make direct constitutional challenges rather than focusing on “stepping stone” issues. This sample legal brief is entitle The Case of Evelyn Hart. [FN151] Evelyn Hart is the name of a fictitious chimpanzee bringing a constitutional claim in her own name through a guardian ad litem. In addition to arguing for personhood, the sample brief argues that using the chimp for
scientific experiments violates the chimp's constitutional rights under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, the Eighth amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and the Thirteenth amendment's prohibition of slavery. The key to an animal's standing to make constitutional slavery, due process, or equal protection claims is, as the Evelyn Hart brief recognizes, the question of personhood. Thus, the personhood debate at the center of the struggle for animal rights may find a prominent battlefield in the legal context of adjudicating constitutional standing. [FN152] *26 The seminal case of Roe v.
Wade [FN153] provides an interesting discussion of personhood that will doubtlessly receive attention in any constitutional litigation over rights for animals. The Court in that case held that the government cannot interfere with a woman's privacy right of autonomy over her body absent a compelling government interest. [FN154] The government had argued that a fetus is a “person” entitled to rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that protecting the life of this person is a compelling interest. [FN155] Noting that “[t]he Constitution does not define ‘person’ in so many words,” the Court analyzed each use of the word “person” in the Constitution and
found that in almost every instance “the use of the word is such that it has application only postnatally.” [FN156] Thus, the court concluded that the word person in the Constitution does not include the unborn. [FN157] Although, of course, animals for whom constitutional rights are sought are born rather than unborn, Roe's analysis and restrictive interpretation of the word “person” likely will be useful to those opposing the extension of rights to animals both in disputes over legal standing and on other battlegrounds of what will doubtlessly be a protracted war over animals' property status. B. Rights in Competition Recognizing personhood and rights for
animals in standing claims or in any other legal context would generate deep and lasting moral and societal challenges. An intellectual foundation for opposing the assignment of personhood and thus rights to animals is based on recognizing that all rights exist in competition with other rights. [FN158] Rights are not free; assigning new rights may entail significant societal costs and may significantly impair existing rights. [FN159] Were this not so, rights would be an *27 unmitigated good, and should be assigned as freely and as broadly as possible. [FN160] As a simple and pertinent illustration, recognizing a constitutional right in a chimpanzee to be free of
slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment would destroy currently recognized property rights (for example, an HIV research laboratory's “property” interest in its chimpanzee). It would also restrict the First Amendment expression rights of scientists to engage in important animal research. [FN161] Beyond the costs to other constitutional rights, it would incur significant--perhaps disastrous--costs to society in the loss of potential medical advances that will relieve suffering and death for both humans and animals. The abortion debate provides another vivid illustration. In that context, claims for fetus' right to life are in competition with women's claims to

autonomy rights over their bodies. [FN162] Thus, any debate over animal rights of necessity must include consideration of what specific rights are being sought and at what cost to competing rights and to society in general. Rattling the Cage's approach of limiting claims to particularly intelligent animals and seeking only limited rights for those intelligent animals reflects a recognition of this problem. [FN163] The more limited the rights Rattling the Cage seeks, the less the societal cost accepting its arguments would entail. However, even providing limited rights to a limited range of animals challenges the sanctity and primacy of human rights.

Taking away the uniqueness and sanctity of humanity even through the establishment of limited “human” rights for some animals is a threat to
humanity. The philosopher A. M. MacIver asserts that, rather than improving the lot of animals, recognition of animal rights would reflect a fundamental shift in how we value human life and human rights, making both less precious: “The ultimate sufferers are likely to be our fellow men, because the final conclusion is likely to be, not that we ought to treat the brutes like human beings, but that there is no good reason why we should not treat human beings like brutes.” [FN164] *28 C. Divorcing Rights from Responsibilities--Rejecting the Social Compact The argument that humans must have primacy is supported

not only by concern that human suffering will ultimately increase if we begin viewing ourselves on the same level as animals, but also by humans' ability to exercise moral responsibility. Rights may be viewed as inextricably intertwined with moral responsibilities. [FN165] When chimpanzees viciously attacked and mutilated a human visitor in a highly publicized incident in California in 2005, no one blamed the chimps. [FN166] They do not have rights but, correspondingly, they do not have responsibilities in human society. [FN167] The search for responsibility appropriately centered on those with the power to exercise rights with moral responsibility: the
chimps' keepers and even the assault victims. [FN168] Political scientists often describe human civilization and government as grounded upon a “social compact” between citizens and government. [FN169] In exchange for being assured of valued rights [FN170] and protection, humans in effect agree to sacrifice some freedoms and to take on responsibilities to others in their community and to their government. A powerful argument may be made that assigning rights to animals that do not possess moral responsibility represents a rejection of the foundation of human civilization. In this regard, the argument for animal rights may be even less persuasive than
arguments for “computer rights.” The capacity to make smarter and smarter computers remains dynamic, allowing at least the argument that they could some day develop consciousness and moral responsibility. Even under the most hopeful scenario, absent millions of years of evolution or DNA manipulation, chimpanzees will never develop the moral *29 responsibility that should be a prerequisite for establishing new rights in a civilized society. [FN171] One might argue that animals' interests may actually be best served by emphasizing the centrality of human moral responsibility rather than animal rights in debates over how animals are treated. [FN172]
The higher one places humans on a rights pedestal, the higher human recognition or acceptance of responsibility for moral choices must be. This relates to A. M. MacIver's argument that assigning rights to animals would diminish the sanctity and dignity of human life. [FN173] The cost to humans of receiving rights is the heavy burden of responsibility, including responsibility for preventing inappropriate treatment of socially powerless animals. [FN174] The status of children and incompetent adults must be raised again when analyzing the relationship between rights and responsibilities. Human society gives some rights to children and incompetent adults even
though in some instances they are incapable of exercising any moral responsibility at all (for example, an infant or an adult in a coma). As addressed above, children and incompetent adults are different from animals in the potential for full consciousness and human autonomy that they represent. [FN175] Even brain-dead humans who have no hope of recovering consciousness are connected to other humans by the nonimpaired humans' emotions and by societal and (for most Americans) religious values much more closely than are intelligent animals. [FN176] Abandoning blanket recognition of at least some rights for all humans that are superior to what
society recognizes for animals would entail implications *30 that society in its present state would not be willing to accept. To expand upon a quote from Rattling the Cage noted above, [FN177] Wise argues: Human infants, young children, and the severely mentally retarded or autistic who lack the autonomy necessary to entitle them to full liberty rights are not totally denied them. Judges give them dignity-rights, and even the right to choose, by using the legal fiction that “all humans are autonomous.” However, as their autonomies approach the minimum, the scope of their fundamental rights may be varied proportionally. If so, equality demands that the
rights of animals who possess the same degree of autonomy as these humans possess vary proportionally, too. [FN178] If this argument were to prevail, we would have to be willing to accept that some animals are entitled to rights superior to the rights of some humans. A normal adult chimpanzee has a stronger argument for practical autonomy as defined by Wise than does a human infant or a comatose or severely retarded human adult. [FN179] Chimps have better demonstrated reasoning ability, greater ability to communicate, and, at least in comparison to an unconscious human, greater emotive capability. [FN180] Society is simply not prepared to value

chimpanzees more highly than it values infants or severely impaired adults, and noting this reality helps to highlight the difficulties in the comparisons Rattling the Cage seeks to make. IV. THE STEPPING STONE APPROACH Mr. Wise's approach of seeking rights and personhood for intelligent animals is not the only stepping stone being sought. Professor David Favre, an animal law activist, [FN181] has expressed concerns that Wise's personhood approach is not sufficiently
practical in the short term . He notes that “Mr. Wise's writings do not suggest how to think about balancing human and animal rights when they are in conflict.” [FN182] A “significant limitation” he sees with Wise's practical autonomy approach is that “human characteristics become the measuring stick by which to judge the *31 legal ‘oughts' for animals.” [FN183] Further, Favre correctly believes it is “unlikely that the next movement in the legal system will be to grant any absolute rights to a group or species of animals.” [FN184] Instead, Favre

thinks that courts are likelier to begin taking animals' interests more seriously in what he perceives to be a gradual approach--taking steps that represent something less than a grant of personhood status, but something more than the current legal paradigm. Although Wise ultimately hopes for rights for some animals (and, if he were “Chief Justice of the Universe,” he might recognize rights for all animals capable of suffering), [FN185] he also understands that this is not going to come quickly. As addressed above, his books focus extensively on the gradual evolution of the common law and “funeral by funeral” changes as older judges die and younger judges
with greater receptivity to emerging ideas take their place. [FN186] Because of this, animal rights activists are fighting numerous legal battles that do not directly go to the question of personhood and rights for animals, but rather would serve as important stepping stones toward eventually achieving that ultimate objective. The most intense of these related stepping stone battles at present is over noneconomic damages in tort lawsuits brought by humans whose companion animals were wrongfully killed. Courts in most jurisdictions allow damage awards for the emotional distress suffered by a parent, child or spouse when a loved one is negligently killed (for
example, a death caused by negligent operation of an automobile or medical malpractice). [FN187] However, courts typically do not allow such damages when a companion animal is negligently killed. [FN188] Animals are viewed as property under the law, and the law typically does not allow emotional distress damages for property loss. [FN189] Rather, the measure of damages is the animal's property value. Thus, the recovery available for the negligent death of a much-beloved mutt whom the owner loves like a child is almost nothing. [FN190] *32 Animal rights activists have recognized that if courts or legislatures reject the market value paradigm in these
cases and instead treat pets in the same way human children are treated--again, emotional distress damages are allowed to parents when their children are negligently killed--a significant legal step will have been taken toward ultimately eradicating animals' property status. Further, they recognize that they have in this issue a potential opportunity to garner support from mainstream society. No loving pet owner thinks of her or his pet as mere property like a chair or a bicycle, and the idea that the wrongful death of a much-beloved but nonpedigreed family dog could be “compensated” for less than $100 seems coldhearted and perhaps even offensive.
[FN191] It is telling that Wise himself, although seeming to have a primary focus on animal rights rather than specifically on tort law, is a prominent supporter of these cases seeking expansion of emotional distress damages. He is not shy about providing a reason for his strong interest in this area. In a June 5, 2005 article in the Chicago Tribune, Wise was quoted as saying that often the monetary damages are not the most important aspect of animal-related cases. [FN192] And to quote part of a March 6, 2005 article in the Boston Globe discussing the views of Wise and other animal rights activists, “Animal rights activists say they are laying the legal foundation
establishing that pets have intrinsic worth. Ultimately, says Steven Wise . . . this foundation will support a ruling that animals are not property but have rights of their own and thus legal standing.” [FN193] Although not yet accepted by appellate courts, some lower courts have begun awarding emotional distress damages for negligent killing of a pet. Further, three states [FN194] have enacted statutes allowing damages beyond market value in at least some circumstances, and legislation has been proposed in at least seven other states. [FN195] The American Veterinary Medical Association views the issue as having serious ramifications, and recently drafted an
official policy position opposing efforts to expand such damages. [FN196] The American Law Institute is recognizing the emergence of this *33 issue; a recent tentative draft of a section of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: General Principles directly addresses the problem and correctly concludes that recovery is not appropriate. [FN197] In addition to focusing on the concern over helping to lay the groundwork for assigning rights to animals, opponents of potential expansion focus on numerous other concerns, including that allowing this expansion would place human-animal relationships over most human-human relationships (under wrongful death statutes
very close nonfamily relationships, such as best friends or even fiancés, are not allowed emotional distress recovery), [FN198] and that allowing this expansion would make veterinary services more expensive and less available to the poor, actually causing harm rather than benefit to animals needing medical care. [FN199] Two other stepping stone battlefields that are receiving increasing attention from animal rights activists are the movement to replace the concept of pet ownership with pet “guardianship,” and the movement to treat pets more similarly to how human children are treated in marital dissolution cases. Applying the concept of guardianship
rather than ownership would, of course, be a step in the direction of eliminating property status. [FN200] Human parents are legal guardians, not owners, of human children. [FN201] At least thirteen cities and the state of Rhode Island have enacted ordinances and statutes changing ownership language to *34 guardianship. [FN202] In marital dissolution cases, pets are currently treated by most courts as property. [FN203] If a divorcing couple cannot reach agreement on who should have custody of a jointly owned pet, courts will sometimes threaten to have the pet sold and the proceeds of the “property” sale divided between the spouses. [FN204] Animal
rights activists are pushing to have courts change the standard from property to a “best interest of the pet” approach, analogous to the “best interest of the child” approach used in deciding custody for human children in divorce cases. [FN205] Appreciating how this approach, if adopted, would serve as another stepping stone toward animal personhood, is not difficult. V. SEEKING ANOTHER STEP: ANIMALS AS TORT PLAINTIFFS A. Animals as “Individuals” in Tort Law Interest Balancing A New Tort, [FN206] Professor David Favre's recent law review article, continues the search for stepping stones with an interesting proposal. In the *35 article, Favre takes a step
beyond efforts to allow noneconomic damages for owners of tortiously-killed animals. He suggests that a new tort cause of action should be recognized in which animals themselves, represented by humans appointed by the courts, are the plaintiffs. This section will analyze A New Tort's proposal as illustrative of efforts to bend current law to provide stepping stones for the erosion or elimination of animals' property status. [FN207] 1. The Historical Basis for Torts Claims Tort law is intensely human. It is the civil legal repository for the countless conflicts between humans that are inevitable in civilized society. As noted by Dean William Prosser, tort law addresses
“the allocation of losses arising out of human activities.” [FN208] Its purpose may be described as providing a societal balancing of interests between humans or human institutions in conflict. Quoting Prosser again, “in short, to strike some reasonable balance between the plaintiff's claim to protection against damage and the defendant's claim to freedom of action for the defendant's own ends, and those of society, occupies a very large part of the tort opinions.” [FN209] The essential humanity of tort law is so strongly imbedded in its nature that commentators typically do not even bother to address the possibility of applying it to entities unrelated to
humans. [FN210] Of course tort law may involve corporations [FN211] or government entities [FN212] as parties, but these institutions are human creations and merely represent aggregations of human interests. [FN213] Thus, considering their interests against those of an *36 opposing human (or even of an opposing corporation or government entity) is very much an exercise in balancing human concerns. Although tort scholars typically assume rather than explicitly emphasize the exclusively human nature of tort law balancing, they often ascribe purposes for the balancing that are uniquely human. For example, theorists have emphasized preservation of
moral freedom--a concept that entails free will and moral responsibility--as a primary focus of tort law. Professor Richard Wright, promoting the Kantian-Aristotelian concept of justice as a basis of tort law, argues that tort law's goal is the promotion of the equal (positive and negative) freedom of each individual in the community. Embodied in this concept of the good is the idea of the absolute moral worth of each human being as a free and equal member of the community, with an equal entitlement to the share of social resources and the security of currently held resources needed to realize his or her humanity. [FN214] Professor David Owen provides
another illustration, writing that “[i]n an imperfect and dynamic world, accidental harm is inevitably entailed in human freedom, such that conduct resulting in accidental harm may be considered faulty only if it results from a choice to violate another person's vested rights or the community's interests in utility.” [FN215] The Kantian-Aristotelian focus on justice as a basis for tort law is often described as a corrective justice model. [FN216] In the past few decades, law and economics scholars have articulated a deterrence model to compete with the corrective justice model. [FN217] Advocates of the deterrence model, which does not have deep historical roots
in tort law scholarship, [FN218] argue that societal economic efficiency should be tort law's objective. [FN219] However, even the upstart deterrence model although perceived as cold and uncaring by some, is ultimately human. The utilitarian balancing *37 of interests in a human society are of necessity human interests. Analyses of interest balancing by deterrence-minded scholars focuses on human needs and human desires in a world of scarce resources. [FN221] Although the interests of corporations and governments may be included in the balancing, they are, as noted above, human creations and represent collective human interests. [FN222] Both from a
corrective justice and from an economic efficiency perspective, consideration of animals' interests in tort law must inevitably be made from a human perspective in a society created, organized, and controlled by humans. Dean Roscoe Pound listed five categories of fundamental human interests that provide the basis for law. [FN223] They include the physical person, freedom of will, honor and reputation, privacy and sensibilities, and belief and opinion. [FN224] The latter four of these five interests are uniquely human. Few serious persons would ascribe free will, for example, with its companion moral responsibility, to any animals. As noted above, [FN225]
when chimpanzees viciously attacked and mutilated a human visitor in a highly publicized incident in California in 2005, no one blamed the chimps. [FN226] Animals do not have rights but, correspondingly, they do not have responsibilities in human society. [FN227] The Restatement (Second) of Torts applied an interest analysis specifically to tort law, which it also described in uniquely human terms. It defined interests as denoting “the object of any human desire.” [FN228] 2. The Proposed New Basis for Tort Claims Involving Animals as Plaintiffs A New Tort's proposed new tort claim would require finding a basis for tort law radically different from its uniquely
human foundation. The article's first paragraph infers that animals are “individuals” and that, under A New Tort's proposal, tort law would “do what it always has done” by balancing the interests of individuals. [FN229] Accepting this premise, of course, makes all the difference in the world regarding whether animals should be allowed to bring tort lawsuits. As noted above, tort law is uniquely human and has always been directed *38 at human conflicts. [FN230] Animals are certainly individuals in a sense; each animal has different characteristics, and few would challenge an assertion that intelligent species of animals even have individual personalities.
However, the concept of an “individual” in legal analysis has always applied to human individuals and their proxies (for example, corporations and government entities). Only humans possess the moral responsibility and undisputed consciousness [FN231] --in other words, personhood--required by the tort system for status as a party to a lawsuit. Indeed, allowing animals plaintiff status in tort lawsuits may be more of a front door approach toward personhood than A New Tort concedes. The article's thesis is that direct attempts at eliminating property status are too bold given the current societal climate, and that allowing animals to serve as tort plaintiffs
would serve as a stepping stone toward change while, at least for now, maintaining their property status. [FN232] However, given the intensely human nature of tort law, recognizing animals as plaintiffs would in some respects be equivalent to making them persons. The historically dominant view of tort law as moral balancing to maintain human freedom by definition requires persons or their proxies to serve as parties. [FN233] Viewing the ascension of animals to plaintiff status as merely a small stepping stone may underestimate the dramatic repudiation of the basis of tort law that such a development would require. Rather than making animals a bit more
like persons, as far as tort law is concerned, they would be given the moral status of persons. A New Tort points to the creation of several types of laws protecting animals as previous stepping stones making the transition to animals as plaintiffs feasible. For example, the article argues that because anti-cruelty laws protect animals from mistreatment, they already appear to have legal rights enforceable by the state. [FN234] Currently, this “right” is only enforceable by the state, but A New Tort argues that the “logical next step” is to evolve the government-enforced right into a personal right held by animals. [FN235] The government may have difficulty
enforcing this right, and allowing animals to enforce it themselves would “make the implementation of the duty more efficient.” [FN236] This would “allow other resources, neither politically nor economically limited, to support animals in asserting their interests.” [FN237] This analysis neglects some fundamental problems in comparing protection of animals under criminal animal welfare statutes to animals protecting their own welfare as tort plaintiffs with human representatives. *39 Criminal law's purpose is different from tort law's purpose. Criminal law is not directed at creating rights for victims of crime; rather, it is directed at the societal (rather than
individual) interests of punishing wrongdoers and deterring future potential wrongdoing. [FN238] One of the more dramatic illustrations of this point is found in cases of domestic violence where the victim, after reporting the crime, makes amends with her or his partner and seeks to withdraw charges. Prosecutors often press forward with the charges despite the victim's desire to drop the matter because it is not the victim's direct interests that the prosecutor is pursuing. [FN239] Rather, it is society's interest in punishing the wrongdoer and in discouraging future wrongdoing by the criminal or by others in society. [FN240] This focus on societal interests rather
than the interests of individual persons makes protection of animals much less problematic in criminal law than it would be if they were granted plaintiff status in tort law. Unlike criminal law, tort law focuses on the interests (and, as addressed above, the human freedom) of the individual persons or proxies for persons involved in the litigation. [FN241] In tort law, of course, a plaintiff is allowed to discontinue a lawsuit if she wishes to do so, because the lawsuit is first and foremost a pursuit of her individual interests rather than broad societal interests. Further, numerous legislatures have made it clear that societal concern for the welfare of humans is the
deeper issue in criminal animal cruelty statutes. The first state to enact an animal cruelty statute was Maine. [FN242] The statute was promoted as a measure to protect human society, because cruelty to animals corrupts human morality and desensitizes humans to acts of inflicting pain on other humans. [FN243] This concern for human welfare has also served as a primary motivator for the enhancement of animal cruelty laws to felony status in many states since the *40 1990s. Stories of Jeffery Dahmer's mutilation of animals as a precursor to the atrocities he committed on humans are well-known. [FN244] Such stories, buttressed by empirical evidence and
psychological profiling indicating that humans who abuse animals are much more likely to eventually abuse humans as well, were frequently cited as the basis for enhancing the penalty's for animal cruelty to felony status. [FN245] This emphasis on human welfare even in statutes addressing cruelty to animals is not surprising, given that our legal system and indeed our society are inextricably intertwined with humanity and human concerns. Abusing or failing to care for animals is corrosive to human nature, and thus barring such behavior is in humanity's interests. Our laws protect animals, but they do so from a human perspective, and with the human moral
consequences of mistreatment of animals heavily in mind. This perspective fits well with criminal laws addressing the societal implications of animal cruelty; it is not a good fit with the idea of effectively elevating animals to personhood status by making them plaintiffs in tort lawsuits. Other statutes A New Tort seeks to identify as stepping stones to animal tort lawsuits also serve to emphasize law's uniquely human perspective. For instance, the article raises the example of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act, enacted by Congress in 2000, as “representative of incremental legal change on behalf of animals.” [FN246] The Act
addressed what to do with chimpanzees that had been used in federally funded research but were no longer needed. [FN247] *41 One option would have been to euthanize the animals, but instead, Congress voted to create and fund retirement sanctuaries for them. [FN248] Humans should treat animals humanely, for humans' sake as well as for animals' sake. Conscious mistreatment of animals is morally corrosive for humans, and it both reflects and deepens serious character flaws. [FN249] Thus, every step toward greater protection or concern for animals is not necessarily a step toward animal rights and personhood. Although A New Tort seeks to utilize
the Chimpanzee Health Improvement statute as a stepping stone in its arguments for animals as tort plaintiffs, Favre concedes that in debating the legislation “no congressperson took the opportunity to make the case for animal rights.” [FN250] Indeed, the language A New Tort cites as the “clearest statement” by a congressperson regarding the reason for enacting the law focuses explicitly on human concerns. Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire stated “In other words, because chimpanzees and humans are so similar, those who work directly in chimpanzee research would find it untenable to continue using these animals if they were to be killed at the
conclusion of the research.” [FN251] Humans should feel concern over killing chimpanzees when reasonable options are available, regardless of whether they feel that such animals should have rights. The strong emphasis on human concerns rather than animal interests in Senator Smith's explanation detracts from, rather than supports, an argument that the statute provides a progression toward animal rights. A New Tort argues that the law represents “what is politically and financially feasible at a moment in time. If this works, then perhaps this model can be expanded to other species in the future.” [FN252] However, there is no evidence that this admirable
legislation had anything to do with the advancement of animal rights. Were this necessarily the case, every new law that in some way benefits animals would be a step toward animal rights. To the contrary, law is distinctively human, and creating laws promoting responsible and humane treatment of animals is an important responsibility for humans that we ignore at our peril. A New Tort claims the Uniform Trusts Act of 2000 as another stepping stone toward animals as tort plaintiffs, but in reality the Act provides another illustration of the primacy of human concerns in animal-related legislation. The Act allows animals to be included in trusts, and for a *42
person to be appointed to enforce the trust. [FN253] A New Tort notes that “legislatures adopting the Uniform Law and associated state statutes apparently did not have any conceptual difficulty with the accommodation of animals into the existing legal community.” [FN254] However, the Act was designed to benefit humans rather than animals. The goal of laws addressing the distribution of an individual's assets after the individual's death is to fulfill the individual's wishes as closely as possible within the limitations of public policy. [FN255] This law is consistent with the law's desire to honor human wishes, rather than a step toward animal rights. As moral

beings, humans have a responsibility toward the animals they own, and this law empowers humans to exercise that responsibility for the care of their animals after their deaths. Favre acknowledges that “the primary motivation may well have been to take care of human concerns.” [FN256] Once again, the focus is on humans. Shifting the focus of human law to animal interests through allowing animals to sit as plaintiffs in human courts would not be a small step beyond statutes such as the Chimpanzee Health Improvement Act and the Uniform Trusts Act of 2000--it would be an enormous and ill-advised leap into an entirely different realm. B .

Adding Billions of Potential New Plaintiffs Billions of Dollars in Litigation Costs to the United States System and Tort In considering the specifics of
Professor Favre's proposed new tort, the potential for gargantuan expansion of the tort system stands out among numerous serious concerns. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (“PETA”) and other animal rights organizations estimate that 25 to 28 billion animals per year are killed for human use in the United States.
[FN257] Another estimated 360 million animals are kept as pets in the United *43 States, according to a pet industry group. [FN258] According to animal rights organizations, another 20 million animals are being used for scientific research. [FN259] A New Tort makes clear that each of these billions of animals would be eligible for
status as plaintiffs if its proposed new tort were accepted. [FN260] Thus, if the cause of action were adopted, the potential number of tort plaintiffs in the United States would instantly grow from our current 300 million human citizens [FN261] (in addition to our corporations, foreign plaintiffs, etc.) to well over 25 billion. [FN262]

The significance of this explosion in potential plaintiffs is difficult to understate. One of the more common sound reasons for courts to reject proposed new tort causes of action or expansions of existing causes of action are concerns for opening up the floodgates
of litigation . As a particularly relevant example, in 2001 a New Jersey appellate court articulated this concern in rejecting noneconomic damages for pet owners based on the wrongful death of a pet. In Harabes v. Barkery, Inc., the court noted, “We are particularly concerned that were such a claim to go
forward, the law would proceed along a course that had no just stopping point.” [FN263] In 2003, an Ohio appellate court agreed with Harabes in Oberschlake v. Veterinary Associates Animal Hospital. [FN264] In Oberschlake, the owners of a miniature poodle named “Poopi” sought to name the dog as a plaintiff in a lawsuit based
on a veterinary hospital's alleged negligence, and also sought to bring a claim in their own names for the emotional distress they suffered from harm to Poopi. [FN265] The court first declined to allow Poopi standing as a plaintiff because, although dogs can suffer emotional distress, “the evidentiary problems with such issues are

obvious.” [FN266] The court then went on to dismiss Poopi's owners' emotional distress claims, stating among other reasons that Harabes was correct to be concerned about potentially opening a floodgate of litigation were such claims to be *44 allowed. [FN267] Given the huge numbers
involved, the enormous expansion of potential tort plaintiffs would be exceptionally troubling even if animals were not particularly litigious. But there is every reason to
believe that they would be quite litigious --or rather, that those seeking to represent their “interests” would be quite litigious. A New Tort argues that courts should appoint human representatives to decide when to sue on behalf of an animal and to represent
the animal's interests in the lawsuit. [FN268] It declines to address the issue in detail, dismissing it as “a procedural matter” that should be the subject of further scholarly consideration but that should not be a bar to creating the proposed tort. [FN269] However, predicting who will be first in line seeking to initiate lawsuits on behalf
of these billions of animals is not difficult. Large numbers of the volunteers will be animal rights activists passionately committed to utilizing the legal system in any manner possible to build stepping stones toward animal personhood and the elimination or erosion of property status. As noted above, interest in using the courts and
legislatures to further an animal rights agenda has experienced dramatic growth in recent years. Many of the lawyers and law students participating in the rapid expansion of animal law, [FN270] as well as many non-lawyer animal rights activists, will without doubt view representing an animal or class of animals in a lawsuit as
perhaps the most powerful vehicle yet devised for ultimately achieving the animal rights agenda. A New Tort in effect emphasizes this by promoting the appropriateness of applying its tort action to some of the most important uses of animals in society, which are also among the favorite targets of animal rights activists. Many
animal rights legal activists vehemently oppose most or all scientific research on laboratory animals. [FN271] In addition to legal efforts to limit or eliminate scientific research on laboratory animals, a radical fringe's terrorist attacks against animal researchers and research laboratories have highlighted the passion such research
efforts generate. [FN272] *45 A New Tort chooses to utilize a chimpanzee in a scientific research laboratory as the context for one of its three primary hypotheticals demonstrating how its proposal would operate. [FN273] The chimpanzee in the article's hypothetical is kept in a manner meeting the requirements of the Animal
Welfare Act but is not given all of the environmental amenities that some activists believe are appropriate. [FN274] If a legal representative for the chimpanzee (again, the burgeoning legal animal rights community would supply a surfeit of volunteers for this role) were to sue to attain a better environment in the research
laboratory, A New Tort states that “under the proposed tort, [the research laboratory] would have to make its case to a court.” [FN275] Such a consequence could be disastrous for HIV research and other areas of medical research that rely on the use of animals. As addressed below, Favre proposes that his tort include money

damages awards, [FN276] and such awards would of course have a chilling effect on research. However, even if researchers were usually found by jurors to have acted appropriately in caring for the chimpanzee, and thus money damages awards were few, the litigation would likely be devastating to medical animal research. In
tort lawsuits, litigation costs often exceed the money damages awarded litigation --primarily attorney's fees and expert witness fees-- . [FN277] Even when no damages are awarded,

costs for each lawsuit can cost millions of dollars hundreds of thousands or sometimes even . For example, in asbestos litigation, in which most cases settle rather than lingering through a full trial, a study found that out of the $70 billion spent on

The tendency for lawsuits to settle, as illustrated in asbestos litigation, keeps

asbestos litigation between the 1960s and 2002, $40 billion was spent on legal fees rather than on judgments. [FN278]

litigation costs from being even higher Unfortunately, there are , as would be the case if most lawsuits proceeded all the way through trial. According to one study, ninety-eight percent of lawsuits settle before trial. [FN279]

strong reasons for concern that lawsuits would settle significantly less frequently animal tort than do typical tort lawsuits, making animal tort lawsuits even more expensive to litigate. Tort
lawsuits typically settle because both parties believe that settling is in their best financial interest. *46 However, as noted above, activist Steven Wise probably spoke for most attorneys interested in animal law when he stated that money damages are often not the most important matter in animal-related tort lawsuits. [FN280]
Creating stepping stones toward abolishing or eroding the property status of animals is likely much more appealing to animal rights activists than is making as much money as possible from lawsuits. [FN281] Although settlements would doubtlessly sometimes be reached, much of the motivation for compromise from the plaintiff's
perspective in traditional tort litigation would be absent. Further, it is expected that animal rights activists would be cognizant that numerous lengthy legal battles might drain research laboratories' resources and limit their ability to continue undertaking such research. Even if very few of the lawsuits result in judgments, opening up
tort litigation in this context might well signal the end of scientific research that presently provides enormous public health benefits. Opening up tort lawsuits by animals against the meat and dairy industries would perhaps cause even more societal upheaval, at least from an economic perspective. A New Tort proposes to somehow
bar lawsuits based on the permissibility of killing animals for food from its animal tort cause of action, yet allow lawsuits based on the quality of life afforded to animals used for food. [FN282] In practice, the article's proposed distinction might make little difference, as those passionately opposed to eating animals or to the use of
other animal products would have countless opportunities to initiate costly lawsuits even without reaching the question of whether animals may in any circumstances be killed. As noted above, animal rights activists estimate that 25 to 28 billion animals are killed for food or other human use in the United States every year. [FN283]

activists would not even need to be successful in

Almost any approach to treatment of livestock or other animals kept for economic uses could be at least argued to be inappropriate. As with scientific research on animals, animal rights

winning judgments to create enormous havoc simply bringing lawsuits addressing even a . Given the scale of animal use for food or other economic benefit in our society,

small percentage could lead to overwhelmed courts and nationwide economic blight. of the billions of potential animal plaintiffs C. Elements of the Proposed New Tort Professor
Favre suggests that an animal plaintiff should prevail in his proposed new tort if the animal's representative can establish the following elements: *47 1) That an interest exists that is of fundamental importance to the plaintiff animal; 2) That the fundamental interest has been interfered with or harmed by the actions or inactions of
defendant; and 3) That the weight and nature of the interests of the animal plaintiff substantially outweigh the weight and nature of the interests of the human defendant. [FN284] 1. An Interest of Fundamental Importance to the Animal A New Tort's proposed requirement that the interest at issue must be of fundamental
importance to the animal seems designed to ensure that no trivial matters, but rather only matters of true significance, are successfully litigated. The word “successfully” in the previous sentence is key, as animal rights activists would be able to claim that any number of interests are fundamental to a particular animal and would
have an opportunity to impose costly litigation on animal owners to address such issues in the courts. As noted in the discussion of a potential flood of lawsuits against research laboratories and the animal food industry, the ultimate success of such lawsuits may not be necessary to make such uses of animals much more expensive
and difficult. A New Tort asserts that there “is not a bright line test” regarding animals' fundamental interests, and that this “obviously will force the court to make a judgment call.” [FN285] This constitutes an invitation to wide-scale litigation on the issue. In some areas, whether something is fundamental to animals is obvious, such
as freedom from intentional torture. In these areas, existing laws, such as animal cruelty laws and the Animal Welfare Act, already provide protection (whether such statutes should be strengthened or broadened are important but separate questions beyond the scope of this article). Further, for a much larger class of issues,
whether something is fundamental to an animal would have to be fought out in costly litigation. As one of countless potential examples, A New Tort contends that being able to reproduce “is fundamental to all living beings.” [FN286] Presumably this means that every time pet owners decide to have their pets spayed or neutered,
they may have to fight lawsuits over whether this infringement on their animal's fundamental interest is justified. They might also be subject to lawsuits when they prevent their pets from going over the fence to mate with a neighboring pet. Even if such lawsuits are not ultimately successful, allowing them into the courts is
societally costly and bad public policy to say the least. This raises another problem: beyond the obvious, how are humans to decide what are fundamental interests to other species? One might argue that the very endeavor is presumptuous. Further, one might suspect that the vague standard proposed by A New Tort would allow
activists to project *48 onto animals the activists' own ideas on what is best for the animals. Steven Wise's lawsuit addressed above in which he sought to name Kama, a Navy research dolphin, as a plaintiff may be illustrative. [FN287] Wise argued that Kama, the named plaintiff, was harmed by the Navy's activities with it. [FN288]
However, the Navy retorted that Kama mingled freely with wild dolphins on a regular basis, that Kama could easily swim away from his work with the Navy but chose not to do so, and that Kama was indeed happy with his work for the Navy. [FN289] Humans are not capable of knowing Kama's mind and heart sufficiently to ascertain
whether freedom from his labors with the Navy was fundamental to him. Favre argues that “if we cannot say what is fundamental to an animal, then the doors of the courtroom will remain closed until such information is available.” [FN290] However, he does not indicate how we would be able to close those doors, and doing so

Activists may find the doors to actually winning judgments in such cases closed, but the doors to causing
seems unlikely.

enormous aggregate litigation expenses and burden on the courts in battles over whether we can know whether an
interest is fundamental would be wide open. 2. Causation (and Intent) The proposed element that the animal must establish that the fundamental interest has been interfered with or harmed by the actions or inactions of the defendant appears
intended as a general causation element. Confusingly, however, A New Tort labels its discussion of this proposed element as “Intention of the Defendant” [FN291] rather than in referring in any way to causation. The article briefly acknowledges that establishing causation is “axiomatic” in tort lawsuits but then quickly shifts its
discussion to the question of intent. The level of requisite intent is an issue in all tort lawsuits but it is not addressed in A New Tort's list of proposed elements. In its section addressing the causation element, the article reveals Favre's view that tort's intent standard should not consider whether the human defendant intended the
specific consequence of her acts. Rather, the standard should be met if the defendant intended the act at issue, regardless of intent regarding consequences. [FN292] Analyzing the intent element of an intentional tort in this manner is supported by precedent. [FN293] However, A New Tort seeks to modify the intent element
further in a manner that would be exceptionally prejudicial *49 to defendants. It proposes, in effect, that the burden of proof be shifted to the animal's owner to presume that the owner understood the fundamental interests of the animal's species. [FN294] How the owner can fairly be presumed to know an animals' fundamental
interests when determining such interests, as A New Tort acknowledges, “is not a bright line test” and will often require courts to make a “judgment call” is not addressed [FN295] Indeed, such an onerous presumption in the face of such a vague and ambiguous standard seems spectacularly unfair. Further, it seems contrary to A
New Tort's own assertion in the article's section addressing the fundamental interest element that “[o]bviously the test cannot be whether humans know everything about a species, as we do not yet even know everything about ourselves.” [FN296] 3. Animal Interests Substantially Outweigh Human Interests A New Tort's final
formally identified element [FN297] is that the animal's representative must establish that the weight and nature of the interests of the animal plaintiff substantially outweigh the weight and nature of the interests of the human defendant. The proposition that a tort action should only be permitted if the plaintiff can first prove that
her interest substantially outweighs the other party's interest is, at least, unusual in tort law. Nuisance torts come to mind as claims requiring substantial and unreasonable interference with the plaintiff's interests, [FN298] but these elements are much different from A New Tort's “substantially outweighs” standard. In nuisance law,
“substantial” means only a significant harm. [FN299] The “unreasonable” requirement in nuisance law does entail balancing, but it is a simple weighing of interests rather than a requirement that one party's interests be “substantially” stronger than the other party's interests. [FN300] A New Tort indicates, however, that its odd

standard is necessary because without it there is no hope that society as it currently exists would accept the tort. [FN301] The odd nature of this element highlights the tort's general vagueness and ambiguity and the significant
stretching of accepted principles it would represent. tort Courts tend to disfavor superlatives in tort elements because superlatives tend to signal doctrinal fuzziness and lack of clarity regarding when tort elements are established. For
example, the concept *50 of “gross negligence” has largely wilted on the common law vine. Most courts have rejected the standard, reasoning that negligence is negligence, and that seeking to make distinctions between gross and “regular” negligence is confusing and unproductive. [FN302] Even with m

m m m m m nv te excess ve tigation ack of certa nty regard ng the aw and

inconsistent decisions by courts . When are an animal's interests “substantially” stronger than the owner's interests rather than simply stronger, clearly stronger, or stronger by a little bit? Although some cases would be obvious, such as when an owner wishes to torture his

animal to satisfy the owner's sadism, in most situations the balancing would not be so apparent, and costly case-by-case litigation would be needed to make findings . Different courts would doubtlessly weigh the
interests differently, inviting inconsistent and confusing case law.

2---Interactions---Courts must determine where and with who the new personhood applies ---
That’s absurdly burdensome
Bryson et al. 17 (Joanna J. Bryson, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK, Mihailis E.
Diamantis, College of Law, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA, and Thomas D. Grant, Wolfson College and
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, “Of, for, and by the people: the legal
lacuna of synthetic persons”, Artificial Intelligence and Law volume 25, 273–291, 08 September 2017,
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-017-9214-9)//babcii

The gap between de jure and de facto legal personality Even once a legal system has determined which rights and obligations to confer on a
legal person, practical realities may nullify them. Legal rights with no way to enforce them are mere illusion. Standing—the right to appear before particular organs for purposes of
presenting a case under a particular rule—is crucial to a legal person seeking to protect its rights in the legal system. Standing does not necessarily follow from the

existence of an actor’s legal personality . An entity, even when its legal personality is not in doubt, must exercise its standing before it can avail itself of relevant
procedures (Vollenhoven et al. 1926). When an entity tries to invoke newly conferred rights, challenges to its standing are all the

more likely (Shah 2013). Consider the legal right of “integral respect” that Ecuador gave to its ecosystem. While the ecosystem may have the right as a matter of law, it
clearly lacks the non-legal capacities it would need to protect the right from encroachment. To effectuate the right, the Ecuadorian constitution gave standing to everyone in

Ecuador to bring suits on behalf of the ecosystem. Thus, in 2011, private Ecuadorians successfully sued the Provincial Government of Loja to halt expansion of a
roadway that was damaging an important watershed (Greene 2011). The outcome would have been very different if Ecuador had provided no mechanism for protecting nature’s legal right
of integral respect. Nature cannot protect itself in a court of law. Just as legal rights mean nothing if the legal system elides the standing to protect them, legal obligations mean
nothing in the absence of procedure to enforce them . The advisory opinion of the ICJ establishing that the UN has legal personality was in 1948, but this
resolved only whether the UN could bring a claim. It said nothing about an obvious correlate: the legal capacity of the UN to bear responsibility and answer for its own breaches. Affirmation
that the UN indeed can be responsible for its breaches did come—but over half a century later (Wickremasinghe and Evans 2000, para. 66). Despite the efforts of international lawyers, there
is still no reliable procedure for suing an international organization.Footnote12 We
could never anticipate ex ante all the ways purely synthetic legal
people would interact with other legal persons and with the institutions of the legal system (courts, administrative
agencies, legislatures, police, etc.). In its first encounters with the legal system, every rule invoked on a robot’s behalf
or against it would require novel and controversial developments in law. Courts and other organs would struggle to
decide how, if at all, the rules—heretofore addressed to other legal persons—address the robot. Both the robot’s
standing against other actors and other actors’ standing against the robot would be sharply contested. If the topic of electronic
personality is to be addressed, as directed in the European Parliament’s 27 January 2017 Motion, standing—both of robots and other purely synthetic entities to sue and of others to sue
them—is a further matter that would need to be considered.

3---Fiat---The plans immediate and certain nature ensures a rush of litigation and backlash
Žgur, 20 (Matija Žgur, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Roma Tre University, “ALL THE EARTH’S LEGAL CHILDREN SOME
SCEPTICAL COMMENTS ABOUT NATURE’S LEGAL PERSONHOOD”, 2020, https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?
handle=hein.journals/dirquesp20&div=42&id=&page=)//babcii

The problem of “who is law for”, i.e. who can be a rights-holding person in law, can be addressed on different levels.
From a purely legal-technical point of view of the legislator, there seems to be very little, if any, non-legal reasons
preventing the legislator from ascribing rights to whichever type of entity, be it natural or fictional. As Dayan vividly
argues, at the hands of the legislator the law can become a magic-like instrument for changing the world: «Once the
word “legal” is attached to words such as conscience, intellect, or choice» Dayan argues, «they no longer mean what we
thought they meant. It is as if whenever “legal” is used, it erodes not just the customary and normal but the very facts of
existence»55. However, neither legal theory, nor legal practice will easily admit what some argue, namely that
«anything goes, anything or anyone can be endowed with rights and so become a legal person , as long as it is
compatible with the purpose of any particular law»56. At the theoretical level, as we have seen, it is necessary that –
among other things – the entity in question can sensibly be ascribed interests57. At the practical level, the problem of a
radical and hasty expansion of legal personhood to new entities could risk a societal backlash. As Pietrzykowski notes,
equal recognition of personhood has been a long and painful process even in reference to human beings58 . The
expansion of legal recognition to new entities should therefore always tread carefully and rather than being a
trailblazing activity should follow in the footsteps of scientific discovery, theoretical arguments and societal
acceptance59. As far as welcoming sentient animals into the family of persons is concerned, there is increasing scientific
evidence showing their cognitive similarity to some already recognized persons; there are also solid legal theoretical
arguments supporting rights-attribution; finally, Western societies seem to be increasingly receptive of the idea as well.
On the other hand, all of the above is lacking in relation to the question of extending legal personhood to non-animal
living entities, i.e. Nature. The conclusion of this essay is, thus, that EJ fails to establish itself as a viable theory of rights
for Nature. This, however, doesn’t mean that we are given a free pass in how we should treat the environment. This
brings me to the last point I wish to make here.

4---Empirics---Previous expansions of personhood had to be rolled back because of excess litigation

Siegrist, 20 (A. g. Siegrist, Anthony Siegrist is a pastor-theologian currently serving a congregation in Ottawa, Ont. He
holds a ThD from the Toronto School of Theology, an MA from Eastern Mennonite University and is currently completing
a MSc from the University of Ottawa, 5-1-2020, accessed on 5-28-2022, Anthony G. Siegrist, "Should Nature Have
Rights? Exploring a Provocative Question", https://anthonysiegrist.com/2020/05/31/should-nature-have-rights-
exploring-a-provocative-question/)//Babcii

A 2017 decision of the High Court in Uttarakhand state in India had potential to have a much wider impact. In an effort to force cleanup of the
highly polluted Ganges River and its prominent tributary, the Yamuna River, the court conferred legal personhood on the river system. Also in 2017,
the Constitutional Court of Columbia declared the Atrato River basin to be a legal entity with rights to “protection, conservation,
maintenance, and restoration.” To advocate for the rights of the river a joint guardian, comprised of both governmental and indigenous representatives,
was created. These cases attracted widespread attention, both because of their relative novelty and because of the high level at which the laws were
being worked out. The enhanced legal status of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers did not last long however. Despite the sacred status of this river
system, it was only several months before the Supreme Court of India reversed the decision on the grounds that the river’s status
as a legal person, and the widespread liability it created, could not be sustained by the legal system itself. The court
anticipated a flood of litigation.

5---Perception---It alone triggers the link---the belief in a litigation explosion causes access to be
scaled back
Cavanagh ’15 [Edward; 2015; Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law; Oregon Law Review, “Federal
Civil Litigation at the Crossroads: Reshaping the Role of the Federal Courts in Twenty-First Century Dispute Resolution,”
vol. 93]

Concern over excessive litigation in the federal courts is old hat ... [and] also typically exaggeration... . The truth about the "litigation explosion' is that it is a
weapon of perception , not substance. If the public can be persuaded that there is a litigation crisis, it may support efforts to cut back
on litigation access.

2NC --- Link --- AI

The plans applicability is uncertain and requires large litigation
Bertolini and Episcopo, 21 (Andrea Bertolini and Francesca Episcopo, Bertolini, LLM (Yale), PhD (SSSA), Assistant
Professor of Private Law, Episcopo, MJur (Oxford), PhD (Università di Pisa), Postdoctoral Fellow in Private Law, 2021,
accessed on 5-29-2022, Cambridge, " The Expert Group’s Report on Liability for Artificial Intelligence and Other Emerging
Digital Technologies: a critical assessment", https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/
view/45FD6BB0E113E7C4A9B05128BC710589/S1867299X21000301a.pdf/the-expert-groups-report-on-liability-for-
artificial-intelligence-and-other-emerging-digital-technologies-a-critical-assessment.pdf)//Babcii

III. The distinction between high- and low-risk applications as a potential source of legal uncertainty As anticipated, the Report suggests that when AI&ET “are
operated in non-private environments and may typically cause significant harm”, due to the “interplay of [its] potential frequency and the severity”, a strict liability regime should apply.
Significant harms would likely be caused by “emerging digital technologies which move in public spaces, such as vehicles, drones, or the like”, and “objects of a certain minimum weight,
moved at a certain minimum speed … such as AI-driven delivery or cleaning robots, at least if they are operated in areas where others may be exposed to risk”. On the contrary, “[s]mart
home appliances will typically not be proper candidates for strict liability”, and the same is said for “merely stationary robots (eg surgical or industrial robots) even if AI-driven, which are
exclusively operated in a confined environment, with a narrow range of people exposed to risk, who are also protected by a different – including contractual – regime …”. This proposal is
highly questionable. First, the distinction between high- and low-risk applications – despite echoing the liability regime envisaged by some MSs for dangerous things and activities– does not
specify when the harm should qualify as “severe” or “potentially frequent”. Thus, it results in a circular definition, void of any selective meaning. On the one hand, the distinction does not
offer any guidance to policymakers, who need not to predetermine the criteria according to which they will decide whether to regulate a specific application, use or domain. Risk – as defined
by the EG – ought not to be the sole criterion justifying intervention. Indeed, reform might be argued on other grounds, such as social desirability, the need to ensure access to justice in case
of very small claims that would otherwise not be compensated, causing externalities and market failures of various kinds and the need to provide positive incentives towards the adoption of
a specific solution. Said policy arguments could also vary from one case to another, and uniformity and consistency of criteria are not desirable per se. Quite to the contrary, this could
substantially limit the spectrum of considerations to be taken into account with respect to different emerging technologies when deciding whether to intervene. On the other hand, were the
dichotomy to be adopted and used – absent a clear enumeration of which applications fall into what category (thence being classified as high- or low-risk, ultimately causing the definition
itself to become superfluous) – it would give rise to unacceptable ex ante uncertainty about the applicable standard of liability (strict or
fault-based) in each case. Somewhat recalling the Learned Hand formula, it would not allow operators of the specific technology to determine beforehand what standard of liability
they would then be subject to. This would open the floodgate to litigation – most likely both at the national and the European level – potentially causing progressive
divergence among MSs. In particular, even if only low-risk applications were to be identified a contrario – while high-risk ones were clearly and strictly indicated– considering the

pervasiveness of AI and the broad notion of “AI-system” considered, which applications ought to fall under this special
regime of liability would most likely be uncertain. If a piece of software used in medical diagnosis – not classified as high-risk – were to be considered a low-risk
application (thence still falling under the special liability regime for advanced technologies), this would only be ascertained before a judge once harm had

already occurred. The medical doctor would not know beforehand what standard of liability would apply to their case, and, from a normative perspective, this would heavily
interfere with national tort law systems. All of this is while – on the face of a careful assessment of the applicable legal framework – many prospective low-risk applications would simply not
need to be regulated.

Even perception triggers the link---results in litigation and anxieties.

Ryan Abbott & Alex Sarch 19, Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Surrey School of Law and
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles; Sarch,
Reader (Associate Professor) in Legal Philosophy, University of Surrey School of Law, “Punishing Artificial Intelligence:
Legal Fiction or Science Fiction,” 53 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 323, November 2019, WestLaw

Even so, any sort of legal personhood for AIs would be a dramatic legal change that could prove problematic.225 As discussed earlier, providing legal
personality to AI could result in increased anthropomorphisms. People anthropomorphizing AI expect it to adhere to social norms and have higher expectations regarding AI

capabilities.226 This is problematic where such expectations are inaccurate and the AI is operating in a position of trust .
Especially for vulnerable users, such anthropomorphisms could result in “ cognitive and psychological damages to manipulability and reduced quality of

life.”227 These outcomes may be more likely if AI were held accountable by the state in ways normally reserved for human
members of society. Strengthening questionable anthropomorphic tendencies regarding AI could also lead to more violent or destructive
behavior directed at AI, such as vandalism or attacks.228 Further, punishing AI could also affect human well-being in less direct ways , such as by

producing anxiety about one’s own status within society due to the perception that AIs are given a legal status on a par with human
beings.

2NC --- IL --- Quitting

Judges quit because of workload
Alicia Bannon 14, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program counsel, “The Impact of Judicial Vacancies on Federal Trial
Courts,” https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Impact%20of%20Judicial%20Vacancies
%20072114.pdf

These heavy workloads can take a toll on judges; in four districts, interviewees explicitly raised the concern of burn-
out due to the burdens of compensating for long-term vacancies (E.D. Cal., S.D. Fla., D. Nev., E.D. Tex.).59 Chief Judge Davis in the Eastern District of
Texas, for example, described the “long-term tolling effect on the judges” from his district’s two vacancies, citing an impact on “morale.”60 He added, “I sense a

weariness and a tiredness on behalf of our district judges, especially ones that have to travel long distances [because
of vacancies].”61 Judge Davis speculated that this long-term toll was encouraging judges in his district to retire , noting that
the number of senior judges in his district has declined as more judges chose to leave the bench altogether when they reached retirement

age.62 Chief Judge Federico Moreno in the Southern District of Florida likewise highlighted the toll that vacancies in his district placed on judges, despite observing that he did not think the
vacancies were impacting the administration of justice.63 “It’s like an emergency room in a hospital,” he observed. “The judges are used to it and people come in and out and get good
treatment. But the question is, can you sustain it? Eventually you burn out.”64

In two districts, interviewees also highlighted the burdens on senior judges who had retired from active service while continuing to carry full or close-to-full caseloads,65 arguing that it
“wears [them] down.”66 The Clerk of Court in the Western District of Wisconsin commended the district’s senior judge as “working as hard or harder than before she retired.”67
Several attorneys raised similar concerns, describing “ wear and tear ” on their districts’ judges,68 along with
“ overwork ,”69 a “lower level of morale,”70 and a “very heavy burden ”71 on judges. These observations suggest that
high and sustained levels of judicial vacancies raise concerns not just for their impact on current cases but for the
long-term health and vitality of our courts .

That snowballs across the legal system

Alicia Bannon 14, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program counsel, “The Impact of Judicial Vacancies on Federal Trial
Courts,” https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Impact%20of%20Judicial%20Vacancies
%20072114.pdf

C. Impacts on Court Administration Judges and court administrators in five districts also raised concerns about the broader impact
that vacancies placed on court administration (E.D. Cal., N.D. Cal., M.D. Fla., E.D. Tex., W.D. Wis.).50 “ It’s a trickle-down effect. When you
have a vacancy it affects all parts of your court system ,”observed the Eastern District of Texas’s Chief Judge Davis.51 Vacancies can impact
districts’ judicial resources and staffing , particularly if a judgeship stays vacant for a lengthy period. When a judgeship becomes
vacant, the remaining judges in the district typically take on greater workloads to compensate for the vacancy. However, if a judge leaves the bench through

retirement or death, the district loses any law clerks , courtroom deputies , or administrative assistants that had been
allocated to the judge after 120 days (with the possibility of an extension of up to 210 days).52 Without these law clerks
and chambers personnel, the remaining judges lose research and admin istrative support for the cases added to their
dockets. “Those law clerks do a lot of legwork,” noted Chief Judge Davis, whose district’s two vacancies were the result of retirements. “We’re not only down two judges [in my district],
we’re also down six law clerks or their equivalent.”53 Similarly, a judge that retires from active service and takes senior status is allocated

staff based on the senior judge’s actual workload .54 Since many senior judges carry reduced loads, staffing for the
district is reduced even though the overall workload for the district is unchanged . The Clerk of Court in the Western District of Wisconsin,
which recently experienced two vacancies in a two-judge court, describes this as a “multiplier effect.” “ The loss of the judge is only part of the problem ,” he
explained.55 Vacancies likewise impact other aspects of judicial administration. Chief Judge Claudia Wilken from the Northern District of California observed that vacancies reduce the
capacity of judges to work on committees that address important administrative issues, such as changes to local procedural rules and initiatives to effectively utilize technology. “With more
judges, we could be more proactive and study the issues more,” she noted.56

2NC --- IL --- clog kills inno

Streamlined and predictable court review enables clear enforcement of the most critical aspects of
patent law BUT requires effective case management
Jonas Anderson 14, Assistant Professor at the American University Washington College of Law, “Congress as a Catalyst
of Patent Reform at the Federal Circuit”, American University Law Review, 63 Am. U.L. Rev. 961, April 2014, Lexis

Despite these criticisms, Congress's decision to create the Federal Circuit has been, from most perspectives, a
"success." Industry groups are largely satisfied with the court, other countries have begun imitating the U.S. patent
institutional structures, and generalized appellate courts have rarely complained about the absence of patent cases on
their dockets. As hoped, the court's virtual monopoly over patent appeals has eliminated patent forum shopping , at
least at the appellate level. The court has also implemented a number of procedural and case management
innovations that have improved the predictability of patent [*978] enforceability and standardized various aspects
of patent litigation. Most importantly, some observers credit the court with making substantive alterations to patent
jurisprudence that have resulted in increased predictability across the most critical aspects of patent enforcement
including infringement , validity , and licensing .

Court adjudication is the only method for resolving patent disputes---that’s necessary for functional
law that enables innovation
Jeanne C. Fromer 10, Associate Professor at Fordham Law School, JD from Harvard Law School, MS in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BA from Columbia University,
“Patentography”, New York University Law Review, 85 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1444, November 2010, Lexis

The Institutional Structure of Patent Litigation

The principal goal of the American patent system is to stimulate innovation , as manifested in the Constitution's
articulation of Congress's power "To promote the Progress of … useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to … Inventors
the exclusive Right to their … writings and discoveries." Stimulation occurs by rewarding inventors with a time-limited
exclusive patent right for taking two steps they typically would not otherwise take: to invent in the first instance and
to reveal information to the public about these inventions, thereby enabling other innovators to build on earlier
insights . The government will grant a utility patent for an invention only if it is novel, nonobvious "at the time the
invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art," and "useful." The Patent Act also requires disclosure of
certain content within the patent by calling for a "written description," "enablement," and "best mode." The written-
description requirement ensures that the inventor is in possession of the claimed invention. To enable the invention, the
patent applicant must demonstrate in the specification to "any person skilled in the [relevant] art [how] … to make and
use the [invention]" without "undue experimentation." Also, the patent applicant must set out "the best mode
contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention." The best mode requirement is met so long as the [*1451]
patent document objectively discloses the best mode that the inventor subjectively conceived by the time the inventor
filed the patent application.

Patents are granted after successfully undergoing examination by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), an
administrative agency within the Department of Commerce, to ascertain that an invention meets the patentability
conditions and that the description in the patent application satisfies the disclosure requirements. The patent's scope is
defined principally by its claims, which "particularly point[] out and distinctly claim[] the subject matter which the
applicant regards as his invention." The patent right permits the patentee to exclude others from practicing the
invention claimed in the patent for a term of typically twenty years from the date the patent application was filed.

With this primer on substantive patent law, I turn to the institutional structure of patent litigation, focusing on both
district courts and the Federal Circuit. Section A sets out the venue rules in the district courts. Section B discusses the
Federal Circuit, the centralized and specialized appeals court for almost all patent litigation. Section C then describes the
interaction between the district courts and the Federal Circuit by laying out the standards under which the Federal
Circuit reviews patent decisions by the district courts.

A. Venue Rules in District Courts

Patent litigation is generally distinct from other federal causes of action, in that there is but one choice - the Federal
Circuit - for almost all appeals from whichever district court a litigant chose as the court in the first instance. However,
given patent law's permissive venue rules, a patent plaintiff may frequently choose to initiate a lawsuit in virtually any
federal district court.

[*1452] In the American patent system, the power to adjudicate patent disputes is vested exclusively in the federal
courts. Venue rules dictate which of these courts can entertain particular patent cases, assuming personal jurisdiction
over the defendants also exists in that court. Venue rules typically seek to ensure a convenient forum for litigation,
particularly for the defendant, who has been haled into court, but these rules differ depending on the type of patent suit
and status of the defendant.

Court clog undermines the patent system and innovation via delays and costs
Dr. Gwendolyn Ball 10. Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, J.D. from George
Mason University School of Law, Jay P. Kesan, J.D from Georgetown Law Center, Professor of Law at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4-30-10, “Judges, Courts and Economic Development: The Impact of Judicial Human
Capital on the Efficiency and Accuracy of the Court System,”
https://extranet.sioe.org/uploads/isnie2011/Ball_Courts_paper.pdf

While most economic scholarship analyzing the importance of the courts has focused on disputes over real property, the
relationship between the court system and investment is no less strong for i ntellectual p roperty. And to a large
extent, the relationship between the courts and the patent system depends on the quality of “judicial human capital.”
In the U nited S tates, as in many countries, the courts are a crucial part of the patent system to the extent that the
patent system is can be termed a two-stage process. In the first stage, the U.S. P atent and T rademark O ffice grants
property rights to inventors. In the second stage, inventors can protect those rights through patent infringement suits
in the courts and alleged infringers have the right to challenge improvidently granted patents and have them declared
invalid. As a consequence, some authors have referred to patent rights as being “probabilistic,” depending not only on
whether the innovation embodied in the patent has commercial value, but also on the refinement of that patent
property right after litigation .15

Just as with real property, the m anagement of the court system has an impact on both patenting behavior and on
investment in r esearch and d evelopment. While the majority of all patents are not litigated, those that are disputed in
the courts are among the most valuable .16 The rules governing the court system may even “feed back” into patenting
behavior; some authors have found evidence that the increasingly “patent friendly” rules17 adopted by the courts are
a major factor in the surge in patenting since the 1980s.18 Moreover, the ability to define the “probabilistic” property
rights is an important element in determining whether patents fulfill their purpose of promoting innovation .19
Finally, the costs associated with the patent systems can be reduced by an efficient court system ; firms may hesitate
to invest in new products and technologies which may infringe on existing patents, so any additional delay or cost in
clarifying existent rights may slow the process of innovation . The more quickly and cheaply these rights are defined,
the more beneficial the patent system will be in promoting and not inhibiting innovation and investment
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Emory

The plan’s logic will be strategically invoked as precedent in other areas, resulting in fetal
personhood.
Erin Phillips 19. University of New Mexico School of Law, Class of 2019, “The Silent Problem: The Implicit Personhood
Determination in State v. Montoya,” 49 N.M. L. Rev. 134, Winter 2019, WestLaw

VII. JUDICIAL OPTIONS IN ADDRESSING PERSONHOOD AND MONTOYA'S IMPLICIT SUPPORT OF THE PERSONHOOD
MOVEMENT

The Montoya Court had a difficult decision on their hands, as policy concerns rightfully guided the decision to uphold the
conviction. In order to answer those policy concerns and the conviction, the Court had to reach beyond the statute
towards the rational link standard, since a literal application of the robbery statute would not have been sufficient to
uphold the conviction. But whether intentional or *147 not, the Court ultimately determined that the deceased victim
was a person and in doing so opened a door to potentially dangerous reliance in the future . Although it may seem
unlikely that a Personhood Movement proponent would seek out Montoya as a resource to support claims that state
legislatures should consider fetuses as persons and expand their afforded rights, it is possible.90 It is possible because
the Montoya Court determined by default that, because the conviction of robbery--a crime against persons and
property--was upheld, the deceased victim of the crime was necessarily a person. In response to the first question of this
note, “can a dead person still be considered a person under a criminal statute,” the Montoya Court offered a silent but
definitive answer of “yes.” Were a Personhood Movement proponent to rely on Montoya, they would be able to argue
that the boundaries of what defines personhood have expanded.

In response to potential future reliance on Montoya, there should be an amended solution for contemporary decisions
dealing with personhood, given the relentless efforts of the Personhood Movement.91 One option would be to adopt a
tiered approach to addressing questions of personhood. Such a tiered approach might hold:

that ‘personhood’ is a concept that admits of degrees and shades of gray. According to this theory, beings
should be considered ‘full-fledged’ persons if they should be the bearers of all of the rights and obligations that
our legal system has to offer. Contrarily, they should be considered ‘partial’ persons if they should only have the
privilege to enjoy some of the rights that our constitutional and statutory provisions confer to persons.92

If the Montoya Court had adopted a similar tiered approach to addressing the defendant's personhood argument, then
it may have been able to definitively speak to why, for the purpose of their decision, the deceased victim was going to
be considered a “partial” person, retaining the rights to control the property attached to their body. Had such a
clarification been made, the Court may have been able to freely uphold the robbery conviction and satisfy the policy
concerns without also inferring a broad yet unspoken determination of the victim's personhood status. A tiered
approach to personhood questions could generally assist courts or legislators in achieving goals without drawing drastic
implications that could affect the rights *148 of women seeking reproductive healthcare or those who wish to access
end-of-life assistance.

This discussion does, at least in part, center on the importance of establishing clear judicial stances through consistent
language: why didn't the Montoya Court just say why it wasn't going to decide on the personhood issue, even if the
reason was that it did not want to enter into a controversial realm? Why didn't it just say that it was not going to decide
the case based on personhood because it thought the precedent based on policy concerns was more important to
ensuring the safety of society than addressing the defendant's claim? Because doing so would have meant making an
overt statement, either that the dead person was or was not a person. Understandably, the Court didn't want to make
such a determination, or simply did not think their inevitable personhood determination was relevant or impactful. No
matter the motivations, a state court cannot afford to avoid such an argument. And, ultimately, the Court's refusal to
speak to the personhood argument resulted in a determination that the deceased victim was a person. Given that the
Court made a determination that it presumably did not want to make, a more deliberate approach would have been
beneficial. This could have been solved by a tiered approach, allowing the Court to define its own boundaries of
personhood to fit the Montoya facts without interfering with the Constitutional provisions with which its holding
intersected.

VIII. CONCLUSION

The Montoya Court needed to uphold the lower court's robbery conviction due to overwhelming policy concerns.93
Because the Court could not achieve this end through a literal application of the robbery statute, the Court turned to the
ambiguous but logical rational link standard in order to show that because the defendant's crimes were sufficiently
related to one another, as the robbery was made possible by the antecedent assault, the conviction could be upheld.94
Despite the Court's admirable motivation to address policy concerns, within its decision to uphold the robbery
conviction was a silent determination that the deceased victim was, in fact, still a person after their death. This
problematic determination means that Montoya implicitly held that a dead person is still a person in the eyes of the law.
This holding could mean that, as national efforts continue to pass legislation expanding the recognition of fetuses as
persons and of permanently-comatose individuals as non-persons , Montoya could be relied upon to show just how
far one New Mexico court was willing to go in order to expand the scope of personhood rights .

That criminalizes embryonic stem cell research.

Lee Rubin Collins 12. JD, member of the Board of Directors of The Howard and Georgeanna Jones Foundation, and
RESOLVE Board Chair, with Susan L Crockin. “Fighting ‘personhood’ initiatives in the United States.” Reproductive
BioMedicine Online (2012) 24, 689–691. ScienceDirect.

Since 2008, so-called ‘personhood’ initiatives have sprung up in many states within the United States, threatening to
impose potentially significant restrictions on infertility treatment – including IVF and embryo disposition, pre-natal
care, abortion, contraception, and stem-cell research. While the language and form of these initiatives vary from state to
state (legislative bills in some states and ballot initiatives presented directly to the voters in others), each essentially
attempts to redefine a ‘person’ or ‘human being’ as existing from the moment of fertilization or conception, and
endowed with the full legal and Constitutional rights of personhood. Nowhere has the fight over personhood proposals
been more dramatically illustrated than in a feverish legislative fight in Virginia that consumed a few brief weeks of
February 2012, and that left a number of valuable lessons in its wake.

Much of the impetus behind these bills and initiatives comes from a political/religious group known as Personhood USA
which seized upon dictum (extraneous language) in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the seminal US Supreme Court decision
affirming a constitutional right to abortion, to the effect that if a fetus were established to be a person, it would have a
guaranteed right to life. Personhood USA has thus pursued a radical strategy to redefine a human being under state
laws, eschewing the incremental approach to dismantling abortion rights followed by other national anti-abortion
groups (Christianity Today, 2011). Legal experts believe personhood laws would give embryos and fetuses rights equal to
those of the women who created or are carrying them, potentially subjecting physicians who perform abortions or
remove ectopic pregnancies vulnerable to criminal charges, jeopardizing many forms of birth control and restricting
embryonic stem cell research. Finally, whether intended or not, these laws would be likely to severely restrict IVF and
embryo freezing protocols. Some proposed bills explicitly subject persons responsible for embryo loss (potentially
embryologists or other medical and lab personnel) to criminal prosecution.

Only stem cell research averts the sixth mass extinction by preserving biodiversity.
Kevin Gonzales 21. PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University, NY, 3/2/21. "Can
Stem Cell Research Save Endangered Species?," available via Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619222032/https://www.isscr.org/news-publicationsss/isscr-news-articles/blog-
detail/stem-cells-in-focus/2021/03/02/can-stem-cell-research-save-endangered-species.
Many other species are facing eradication as the Earth undergoes its sixth mass extinction . In the past century alone,
we have lost the same number of species that would typically have gone extinct over the course of about 10,000 years.
Human behavior, including habitat degradation, pollution, factory farming, and animal exploitation, has led to
calamitous changes to the natural world that have accelerated the extinction rate by 100 times or more, causing a
rapid decline of biodiversity . Human innovation and changes to behavior, however, can slow down this annihilation of
species through conscious environmental preservation, and surprisingly, stem cell research.

The role of stem cell research in species conservation is best exemplified by efforts to save the beloved rhino, whose
populations have been driven to the brink of extinction by illegal poaching. Loss of the rhinoceros would jeopardize the
grassland habitats of Africa and Asia where these megaherbivores play key roles in shaping the earth and vegetation
upon which many other species depend. The most pressing case is that of the Northern White Rhino, which at present,
has only two known living individuals left in the entire world, both infertile females (Figure 2). Because previous
attempts at breeding this species in captivity were unsuccessful, researchers are currently using assisted reproductive
technology and novel stem cell techniques to try to save this species.

Scientists previously collected sperm and eggs from several Northern White Rhinos. Through in vitro fertilization (IVF)
scientists produced five Northern White Rhino embryos, which have the potential to develop into mature animals. The
researchers are hoping that the closely-related Southern White Rhino can function as a surrogate mother for these
Northern White Rhino embryos and bear healthy Northern White Rhino calves.

The supply of eggs, however, is very limited and additional methods are needed. Scientists have therefore turned to
stem cell research to try to create additional Northern White Rhino embryos, which could eventually help create a self-
sustaining population.

In a landmark study in 2006, researchers determined that they could take a skin cell in the body and revert it to a
stem cell state by cellular reprogramming. This creates what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which
can give rise to all of the cells in an organism. The first Northern White Rhino iPSCs were reprogrammed in 2011, and
today, there are iPSCs from 12 Northern White Rhinos, eight of which are not related. This is important for establishing
genetic diversity and maintaining a healthy population. With this method, a single rhinoceros skin cell could be all we
need to produce new rhinos.

In order for iPSCs to be used in conservation efforts, researchers must figure out how to directly convert iPSCs into
embryos, or coax them to produce mature sperm and eggs for IVF. Both methods are currently being studied in mice.
Once perfected using mouse iPSCs, the protocols will have to be adapted for the rhino. Until this time Northern White
Rhino iPSCs can safely be maintained in the laboratory where they will be readily available once science advances.
Successful creation of iPSCs from the Northern White Rhino jumpstarted efforts to preserve other endangered species
using stem cells, including the Sumatran Rhino, estimated at fewer than 80 in existence.

Cellular reprogramming can be performed on virtually any cell from any species. This technology is therefore as
applicable to extinct species as it is to endangered ones, as long as a viable cell is still available. The Frozen Zoo® in San
Diego, CA, USA, a frozen tissue bank, has already preserved cells from more than 10,000 individuals representing 1,000+
species. With this in mind, scientists have begun research on reviving ecologically important extinct animals such as
the passenger pigeon (a migratory bird like the swift parrot) and the wooly mammoth (a megaherbivore like the rhino).

Biodiversity loss causes extinction.

Economist 21. “Loss of biodiversity poses as great a risk to humanity as climate change.” 6-15-2021.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/06/15/loss-of-biodiversity-poses-as-great-a-risk-to-humanity-
as-climate-change

Human societies depend on healthy ecosystems . People consume their products in the shape of fish, meat, crops,
timber and fibres such as cotton and silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by
molecules and mechanisms found within it. The ecosystems that crops depend upon are regulated by living things .
Through photosynthesis, trees and other plants take in carbon and pump out oxygen . In doing so they remove roughly
11bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, equivalent to 27% of what human industry and
agriculture emits (the oceans absorb a further 10bn tonnes).

The services that ecosystems provide to humanity depend , in turn, on there being a diversity of living things. More
than 75% of global food-crop types, including coffee, cocoa and almonds, are pollinated by animals . The complex web
underpinning every food chain and ecosystem means that the narrow range of species that humans eat and exploit
cannot be sustained without the existence of a much greater diversity of animals , plants and bacteria .

More diverse forests store more carbon than monocultures. Skipjack tuna makes up roughly half of the global tuna
catch for human consumption. As young animals, they eat zooplankton, which is to say very small floating animals like
tunicates, ctenophores and small crustaceans as well as the larvae of larger animals. As adults, they eat smaller fish,
squid and crustaceans. To conserve the skipjack, all this diversity in its food chain must also be conserved.

Since the 1990s, alarmed by studies showing rapid declines in animal and plant species around the globe, ecologists
have talked of an impending mass extinction . It would be the sixth in the Earth’s history, but one unlike any that has
come before. Surveys show that the loss of biodiversity is the result of a combination of factors : climate change,
pollution, human exploitation of land, sea, plants and animals, and the displacement of some species into new
territories where they play havoc with existing ecosystems. Uniquely in Earth’s history, each of these drivers of
ecological change is caused by a single species: Homo sapiens.

When ipbes (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, similar to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its assessment of the state of global biodiversity in 2019, it
offered a sobering picture. Roughly 1m animal and plant species were deemed to be at risk of extinction , more than at
any other point in human history. These included many that are used in farming . At least 9% of the 6,200 breeds of
domesticated mammals that humans eat, or use to produce food, had become extinct by 2016, and at least 1,000 more
are threatened. More than one-third of continental land area and nearly three-quarters of freshwater resources are
used to produce crops or livestock, but environmental degradation has damaged the land’s ability to support these
activities. And one-third of marine fish stocks were being unsustainably exploited in 2015.

The biod iversity crisis poses as great a risk to human societies as climate change . Yet it has a fraction of the public
profile. In part that is because the loss of biodiversity cannot be neatly quantified , as climate change can, into parts per
million of carbon dioxide, or degrees above pre-industrial average temperatures. And the webs that link species within
and across ecosystems are even more complex than the processes that drive climate change.
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Emory

The plan’s logic will be strategically invoked as precedent in other areas, resulting in fetal
personhood.
Erin Phillips 19. University of New Mexico School of Law, Class of 2019, “The Silent Problem: The Implicit Personhood
Determination in State v. Montoya,” 49 N.M. L. Rev. 134, Winter 2019, WestLaw

VII. JUDICIAL OPTIONS IN ADDRESSING PERSONHOOD AND MONTOYA'S IMPLICIT SUPPORT OF THE PERSONHOOD
MOVEMENT

The Montoya Court had a difficult decision on their hands, as policy concerns rightfully guided the decision to uphold the
conviction. In order to answer those policy concerns and the conviction, the Court had to reach beyond the statute
towards the rational link standard, since a literal application of the robbery statute would not have been sufficient to
uphold the conviction. But whether intentional or *147 not, the Court ultimately determined that the deceased victim
was a person and in doing so opened a door to potentially dangerous reliance in the future . Although it may seem
unlikely that a Personhood Movement proponent would seek out Montoya as a resource to support claims that state
legislatures should consider fetuses as persons and expand their afforded rights, it is possible.90 It is possible because
the Montoya Court determined by default that, because the conviction of robbery--a crime against persons and
property--was upheld, the deceased victim of the crime was necessarily a person. In response to the first question of this
note, “can a dead person still be considered a person under a criminal statute,” the Montoya Court offered a silent but
definitive answer of “yes.” Were a Personhood Movement proponent to rely on Montoya, they would be able to argue
that the boundaries of what defines personhood have expanded.

In response to potential future reliance on Montoya, there should be an amended solution for contemporary decisions
dealing with personhood, given the relentless efforts of the Personhood Movement.91 One option would be to adopt a
tiered approach to addressing questions of personhood. Such a tiered approach might hold:

that ‘personhood’ is a concept that admits of degrees and shades of gray. According to this theory, beings
should be considered ‘full-fledged’ persons if they should be the bearers of all of the rights and obligations that
our legal system has to offer. Contrarily, they should be considered ‘partial’ persons if they should only have the
privilege to enjoy some of the rights that our constitutional and statutory provisions confer to persons.92

If the Montoya Court had adopted a similar tiered approach to addressing the defendant's personhood argument, then
it may have been able to definitively speak to why, for the purpose of their decision, the deceased victim was going to
be considered a “partial” person, retaining the rights to control the property attached to their body. Had such a
clarification been made, the Court may have been able to freely uphold the robbery conviction and satisfy the policy
concerns without also inferring a broad yet unspoken determination of the victim's personhood status. A tiered
approach to personhood questions could generally assist courts or legislators in achieving goals without drawing drastic
implications that could affect the rights *148 of women seeking reproductive healthcare or those who wish to access
end-of-life assistance.

This discussion does, at least in part, center on the importance of establishing clear judicial stances through consistent
language: why didn't the Montoya Court just say why it wasn't going to decide on the personhood issue, even if the
reason was that it did not want to enter into a controversial realm? Why didn't it just say that it was not going to decide
the case based on personhood because it thought the precedent based on policy concerns was more important to
ensuring the safety of society than addressing the defendant's claim? Because doing so would have meant making an
overt statement, either that the dead person was or was not a person. Understandably, the Court didn't want to make
such a determination, or simply did not think their inevitable personhood determination was relevant or impactful. No
matter the motivations, a state court cannot afford to avoid such an argument. And, ultimately, the Court's refusal to
speak to the personhood argument resulted in a determination that the deceased victim was a person. Given that the
Court made a determination that it presumably did not want to make, a more deliberate approach would have been
beneficial. This could have been solved by a tiered approach, allowing the Court to define its own boundaries of
personhood to fit the Montoya facts without interfering with the Constitutional provisions with which its holding
intersected.

VIII. CONCLUSION

The Montoya Court needed to uphold the lower court's robbery conviction due to overwhelming policy concerns.93
Because the Court could not achieve this end through a literal application of the robbery statute, the Court turned to the
ambiguous but logical rational link standard in order to show that because the defendant's crimes were sufficiently
related to one another, as the robbery was made possible by the antecedent assault, the conviction could be upheld.94
Despite the Court's admirable motivation to address policy concerns, within its decision to uphold the robbery
conviction was a silent determination that the deceased victim was, in fact, still a person after their death. This
problematic determination means that Montoya implicitly held that a dead person is still a person in the eyes of the law.
This holding could mean that, as national efforts continue to pass legislation expanding the recognition of fetuses as
persons and of permanently-comatose individuals as non-persons , Montoya could be relied upon to show just how
far one New Mexico court was willing to go in order to expand the scope of personhood rights .

That criminalizes embryonic stem cell research.

Lee Rubin Collins 12. JD, member of the Board of Directors of The Howard and Georgeanna Jones Foundation, and
RESOLVE Board Chair, with Susan L Crockin. “Fighting ‘personhood’ initiatives in the United States.” Reproductive
BioMedicine Online (2012) 24, 689–691. ScienceDirect.

Since 2008, so-called ‘personhood’ initiatives have sprung up in many states within the United States, threatening to
impose potentially significant restrictions on infertility treatment – including IVF and embryo disposition, pre-natal
care, abortion, contraception, and stem-cell research. While the language and form of these initiatives vary from state to
state (legislative bills in some states and ballot initiatives presented directly to the voters in others), each essentially
attempts to redefine a ‘person’ or ‘human being’ as existing from the moment of fertilization or conception, and
endowed with the full legal and Constitutional rights of personhood. Nowhere has the fight over personhood proposals
been more dramatically illustrated than in a feverish legislative fight in Virginia that consumed a few brief weeks of
February 2012, and that left a number of valuable lessons in its wake.

Much of the impetus behind these bills and initiatives comes from a political/religious group known as Personhood USA
which seized upon dictum (extraneous language) in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the seminal US Supreme Court decision
affirming a constitutional right to abortion, to the effect that if a fetus were established to be a person, it would have a
guaranteed right to life. Personhood USA has thus pursued a radical strategy to redefine a human being under state
laws, eschewing the incremental approach to dismantling abortion rights followed by other national anti-abortion
groups (Christianity Today, 2011). Legal experts believe personhood laws would give embryos and fetuses rights equal to
those of the women who created or are carrying them, potentially subjecting physicians who perform abortions or
remove ectopic pregnancies vulnerable to criminal charges, jeopardizing many forms of birth control and restricting
embryonic stem cell research. Finally, whether intended or not, these laws would be likely to severely restrict IVF and
embryo freezing protocols. Some proposed bills explicitly subject persons responsible for embryo loss (potentially
embryologists or other medical and lab personnel) to criminal prosecution.

Only stem cell research averts the sixth mass extinction by preserving biodiversity.
Kevin Gonzales 21. PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University, NY, 3/2/21. "Can
Stem Cell Research Save Endangered Species?," available via Wayback Machine at
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619222032/https://www.isscr.org/news-publicationsss/isscr-news-articles/blog-
detail/stem-cells-in-focus/2021/03/02/can-stem-cell-research-save-endangered-species.
Many other species are facing eradication as the Earth undergoes its sixth mass extinction . In the past century alone,
we have lost the same number of species that would typically have gone extinct over the course of about 10,000 years.
Human behavior, including habitat degradation, pollution, factory farming, and animal exploitation, has led to
calamitous changes to the natural world that have accelerated the extinction rate by 100 times or more, causing a
rapid decline of biodiversity . Human innovation and changes to behavior, however, can slow down this annihilation of
species through conscious environmental preservation, and surprisingly, stem cell research.

The role of stem cell research in species conservation is best exemplified by efforts to save the beloved rhino, whose
populations have been driven to the brink of extinction by illegal poaching. Loss of the rhinoceros would jeopardize the
grassland habitats of Africa and Asia where these megaherbivores play key roles in shaping the earth and vegetation
upon which many other species depend. The most pressing case is that of the Northern White Rhino, which at present,
has only two known living individuals left in the entire world, both infertile females (Figure 2). Because previous
attempts at breeding this species in captivity were unsuccessful, researchers are currently using assisted reproductive
technology and novel stem cell techniques to try to save this species.

Scientists previously collected sperm and eggs from several Northern White Rhinos. Through in vitro fertilization (IVF)
scientists produced five Northern White Rhino embryos, which have the potential to develop into mature animals. The
researchers are hoping that the closely-related Southern White Rhino can function as a surrogate mother for these
Northern White Rhino embryos and bear healthy Northern White Rhino calves.

The supply of eggs, however, is very limited and additional methods are needed. Scientists have therefore turned to
stem cell research to try to create additional Northern White Rhino embryos, which could eventually help create a self-
sustaining population.

In a landmark study in 2006, researchers determined that they could take a skin cell in the body and revert it to a
stem cell state by cellular reprogramming. This creates what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which
can give rise to all of the cells in an organism. The first Northern White Rhino iPSCs were reprogrammed in 2011, and
today, there are iPSCs from 12 Northern White Rhinos, eight of which are not related. This is important for establishing
genetic diversity and maintaining a healthy population. With this method, a single rhinoceros skin cell could be all we
need to produce new rhinos.

In order for iPSCs to be used in conservation efforts, researchers must figure out how to directly convert iPSCs into
embryos, or coax them to produce mature sperm and eggs for IVF. Both methods are currently being studied in mice.
Once perfected using mouse iPSCs, the protocols will have to be adapted for the rhino. Until this time Northern White
Rhino iPSCs can safely be maintained in the laboratory where they will be readily available once science advances.
Successful creation of iPSCs from the Northern White Rhino jumpstarted efforts to preserve other endangered species
using stem cells, including the Sumatran Rhino, estimated at fewer than 80 in existence.

Cellular reprogramming can be performed on virtually any cell from any species. This technology is therefore as
applicable to extinct species as it is to endangered ones, as long as a viable cell is still available. The Frozen Zoo® in San
Diego, CA, USA, a frozen tissue bank, has already preserved cells from more than 10,000 individuals representing 1,000+
species. With this in mind, scientists have begun research on reviving ecologically important extinct animals such as
the passenger pigeon (a migratory bird like the swift parrot) and the wooly mammoth (a megaherbivore like the rhino).

Biodiversity loss causes extinction.

Economist 21. “Loss of biodiversity poses as great a risk to humanity as climate change.” 6-15-2021.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/06/15/loss-of-biodiversity-poses-as-great-a-risk-to-humanity-
as-climate-change

Human societies depend on healthy ecosystems . People consume their products in the shape of fish, meat, crops,
timber and fibres such as cotton and silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by
molecules and mechanisms found within it. The ecosystems that crops depend upon are regulated by living things .
Through photosynthesis, trees and other plants take in carbon and pump out oxygen . In doing so they remove roughly
11bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, equivalent to 27% of what human industry and
agriculture emits (the oceans absorb a further 10bn tonnes).

The services that ecosystems provide to humanity depend , in turn, on there being a diversity of living things. More
than 75% of global food-crop types, including coffee, cocoa and almonds, are pollinated by animals . The complex web
underpinning every food chain and ecosystem means that the narrow range of species that humans eat and exploit
cannot be sustained without the existence of a much greater diversity of animals , plants and bacteria .

More diverse forests store more carbon than monocultures. Skipjack tuna makes up roughly half of the global tuna
catch for human consumption. As young animals, they eat zooplankton, which is to say very small floating animals like
tunicates, ctenophores and small crustaceans as well as the larvae of larger animals. As adults, they eat smaller fish,
squid and crustaceans. To conserve the skipjack, all this diversity in its food chain must also be conserved.

Since the 1990s, alarmed by studies showing rapid declines in animal and plant species around the globe, ecologists
have talked of an impending mass extinction . It would be the sixth in the Earth’s history, but one unlike any that has
come before. Surveys show that the loss of biodiversity is the result of a combination of factors : climate change,
pollution, human exploitation of land, sea, plants and animals, and the displacement of some species into new
territories where they play havoc with existing ecosystems. Uniquely in Earth’s history, each of these drivers of
ecological change is caused by a single species: Homo sapiens.

When ipbes (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, similar to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its assessment of the state of global biodiversity in 2019, it
offered a sobering picture. Roughly 1m animal and plant species were deemed to be at risk of extinction , more than at
any other point in human history. These included many that are used in farming . At least 9% of the 6,200 breeds of
domesticated mammals that humans eat, or use to produce food, had become extinct by 2016, and at least 1,000 more
are threatened. More than one-third of continental land area and nearly three-quarters of freshwater resources are
used to produce crops or livestock, but environmental degradation has damaged the land’s ability to support these
activities. And one-third of marine fish stocks were being unsustainably exploited in 2015.

The biod iversity crisis poses as great a risk to human societies as climate change . Yet it has a fraction of the public
profile. In part that is because the loss of biodiversity cannot be neatly quantified , as climate change can, into parts per
million of carbon dioxide, or degrees above pre-industrial average temperatures. And the webs that link species within
and across ecosystems are even more complex than the processes that drive climate change.

pillover DA

DA outweighs – first, reproductive autonomy – preserving it is a D rule

Center for Reproductive Rights 22 – global human rights organization of lawyers and advocates
Center for Reproductive Rights, "The Constitutional Right to Reproductive Autonomy: Realizing the Promise of the 14th
Amendment," Center for Reproductive Rights, 7-26-2022, https://reproductiverights.org/wp-content/uploads/
2022/07/Final-14th-Amendment-Report-7.26.22.pdf

The Right to Life of the Pregnant Person

Although undertheorized in U.S. law, international human rights law recognizes that the right to life provides critical
protections for one’s reproductive autonomy.
The U.S. Supreme Court has not directly recognized the Fourteenth Amendment right to life as a limit on government
interference with personal decisions about pregnancy or medical care. Prior to Dobbs, it had ruled in numerous cases
that “a State may not restrict access to abortions that are necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the
preservation of the life or health” of the woman.275 California’s high court has recognized that both abortion bans276
and coverage restrictions277 implicate the state constitutional right to life for this very reason: Pregnancy and
childbirth involve “risk of death” and “even when a life-threatening condition is not present, the constitutional choice
directly involves the woman’s fundamental interest in the preservation of her personal health.”278 Additionally, the
U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that a substantive due process right to life protects against official action that is
lethal, “unjustifiable by any government interest,” and rises to “the conscience-shocking level.”279

Some scholars argue that U.S. Supreme Court precedent supports a right to medical decision-making necessary to
prevent death, or even more broadly to preserve health.280 Some have urged the importance of understanding and
framing abortion as medically necessary health care.281 Others have argued for an understanding of the right to health
care as integral to the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy.282

The potential application of these lines of argument to the various contexts in which state policies or official actions
threaten the health, safety, and lives of individuals who are pregnant, giving birth, and postpartum are ripe for
development. One important guide in doing so is the strong recognition under human rights law of the right to life as a
critical protection for reproductive autonomy.

Under international human rights law, right to life protections are rooted in Article 6 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 6 provides that “[e]very human
being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his
life.”283 The right should not be interpreted narrowly.284 And it is not subject to derogation,285 which means that the
right is absolute and cannot be suspended or restricted. Critically, human rights experts confirm that right to life
protections grounded in the human rights treaties do not apply prenatally.286

Human rights bodies have long recognized the connection between restrictive abortion laws, high rates of unsafe
abortion, and maternal mortality, and found that restrictive abortion laws violate a range of human rights, including
the right to life. The 2022 World Health Organization’s Abortion Care Guideline notes that between 4.7% and 13.2% of
all maternal deaths are attributed to unsafe abortions, with the proportion of unsafe abortions significantly higher in
countries with highly restrictive abortion laws than in those with less restrictive laws.287 The UN Human Rights
Committee, which is charged with overseeing interpretation and implementation of the ICCPR, has confirmed that the
right to life contains important protections for access to abortion. It limits the restrictions that states can place on
abortion access, and it obligates governments to ensure access to abortion services.288

Specifically, in General Comment 36,289 the Committee stated that abortion restrictions cannot imperil the right to life,
including by forcing women to undertake unsafe abortion.290 At a minimum, the right to life requires states to provide
safe, legal, and effective access to abortion where a person’s life and health is at risk, or when carrying a pregnancy to
term would cause them substantial pain or suffering.291 The Committee noted that state parties to the treaty “may not
regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and
girls do not have to resort to unsafe abortions, and they should revise their laws accordingly.”292 In addition, the
Committee noted that states may not introduce new barriers to abortion and should remove existing barriers that deny
effective access to safe and legal abortion.293 It noted, too, that states should prevent the stigmatization of people
seeking abortion.294 Finally, the Committee noted that, in order to fulfill the right to life and protect against unsafe
abortion, governments should ensure the availability of, and effective access to information and education on sexual and
reproductive health, a wide range of contraceptive methods, and quality prenatal and post-abortion health care.295
Other treaty bodies also have found that access to safe and legal abortion is essential to reproductive health and a
prerequisite for safeguarding the right to life, among other rights.296

International human rights bodies have likewise made clear that the right to life includes important protections for
maternal health, requiring governments to address both the causes and prevalence of maternal mortality.297 The
Human Rights Committee has consistently expressed concern about high rates of maternal mortality,298 which it
considers a violation of women’s right to life.299 It has made clear that the right to life requires governments to ensure
the availability of, and effective access to, quality prenatal health care, on a confidential basis,300 and to develop plans
for improving access to medical examinations and treatments designed to reduce maternal and infant mortality.301
Invoking the right to life, the Committee has recommended that governments take efforts to effectively eliminate
preventable maternal mortality and ensure non-discriminatory access to affordable quality health care, including
prenatal and emergency obstetric care.302

Indeed, the duty to protect life requires governments to take affirmative measures both to protect the right to life and
to advance the enjoyment of a life with dignity.303 The UN Human Rights Committee has noted that these measures
include ensuring access to essential goods and services, such as food, water, shelter, and health care, and taking positive
steps to reduce maternal mortality.304 Jurisprudence by the Committee further affirms governments’ obligation to take
measures to protect the right to life and underscores the indivisibility and interdependence of the right to life with other
rights, including economic, social, and cultural rights.305

National courts have similarly interpreted right to life protections under national constitutions. For example, the
Supreme Court of India has recognized the right to health as an aspect of the right to life with dignity, and specifically
recognized women’s right to reproductive health as being a facet of the right to life protected under Article 21 of India’s
constitution.306 Courts in India have found that the denial of access to reproductive health care, including maternal
health care and abortion care, violates the right to life under Article 21.307

In the context of the prevalence of uterine prolapse in pregnant women in Nepal, the Supreme Court of Nepal held that
the right to health, including the right to reproductive health, is a part of the right to life, along with the right to live a
dignified life.308 And, in Lakshmi Dhikta v. Nepal, discussed earlier, the Supreme Court of Nepal grounded the right to
access safe and legal abortion services in a constellation of rights contained in Nepal’s constitution, including the right to
live with dignity and personal liberty, and held that these human rights place affirmative obligations on the government
to ensure access to abortion. Accordingly, the Court directed the government to introduce a comprehensive abortion
law based on international human rights principles, and to create a fund to cover the cost of services for women living
on low incomes or women without income.

In the case of PAK and Salim Mohammed v. the Attorney General and 3 Others, the High Court of Kenya in Malindi
affirmed that abortion care is a fundamental right under the Constitution of Kenya and that arbitrary arrests and
prosecution of patients and health care providers for seeking or offering abortion care is illegal. In reaching its decision,
the High Court engaged an analysis of the right to life under the Constitution of Kenya, drawing, in part, on the UN
Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 36 and noting that the right to life obligates governments to ensure
women and girls do not have to undertake unsafe abortions, as well as to take affirmative steps to provide access to
abortion.309

Such analysis can guide an understanding and application of the right to life to similarly protect reproductive autonomy
under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Conclusion

The Constitution requires the government to respect—and courts to protect— the human right to reproductive
autonomy. The Fourteenth Amendment ensures this right through its multiple and interdependent guarantees of life,
liberty, and equal protection. As does international human rights law. Each of these foundational sources support a
broad right to reproductive autonomy under law that advocates, scholars, and jurists must defend against further
retrogression and strengthen for future generations.
DA turns case – first, biodiversity – stem cell research solves it, but preventative efforts fail
Gonzales 21 – PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University.
Kevin Gonzales, March 2 2021, “Can Stem Cell Research Save Endangered Species?” International Society for Stem Cell
Research, https://www.isscr.org/news-publicationsss/isscr-news-articles/blog-detail/stem-cells-in-focus/2021/03/02/
can-stem-cell-research-save-endangered-species

Many other species are facing eradication as the Earth undergoes its sixth mass extinction. In the past century alone, we
have lost the same number of species that would typically have gone extinct over the course of about 10,000 years.
Human behavior, including habitat degradation, pollution, factory farming, and animal exploitation, has led to
calamitous changes to the natural world that have accelerated the extinction rate by 100 times or more, causing a rapid
decline of biodiversity. Human innovation and changes to behavior, however, can slow down this annihilation of
species through conscious environmental preservation, and surprisingly, stem cell research.

The role of stem cell research in species conservation is best exemplified by efforts to save the beloved rhino, whose
populations have been driven to the brink of extinction by illegal poaching. Loss of the rhinoceros would jeopardize the
grassland habitats of Africa and Asia where these megaherbivores play key roles in shaping the earth and vegetation
upon which many other species depend. The most pressing case is that of the Northern White Rhino, which at present,
has only two known living individuals left in the entire world, both infertile females (Figure 2). Because previous
attempts at breeding this species in captivity were unsuccessful, researchers are currently using assisted reproductive
technology and novel stem cell techniques to try to save this species.

Figure 2: Nola, the last Northern White Rhino in the United States, died in 2015 but her cells live on in the form of
induced pluripotent stem cells made by researchers from the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, USA in
collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute, USA. Photo credit: San Diego Zoo Global.

Scientists previously collected sperm and eggs from several Northern White Rhinos. Through in vitro fertilization (IVF)
scientists produced five Northern White Rhino embryos, which have the potential to develop into mature animals. The
researchers are hoping that the closely-related Southern White Rhino can function as a surrogate mother for these
Northern White Rhino embryos and bear healthy Northern White Rhino calves.

The supply of eggs, however, is very limited and additional methods are needed. Scientists have therefore turned to
stem cell research to try to create additional Northern White Rhino embryos , which could eventually help create a self-
sustaining population.

In a landmark study in 2006, researchers determined that they could take a skin cell in the body and revert it to a stem
cell state by cellular reprogramming. This creates what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which can
give rise to all of the cells in an organism. The first Northern White Rhino iPSCs were reprogrammed in 2011, and today,
there are iPSCs from 12 Northern White Rhinos, eight of which are not related. This is important for establishing genetic
diversity and maintaining a healthy population. With this method, a single rhinoceros skin cell could be all we need to
produce new rhinos.

In order for iPSCs to be used in conservation efforts, researchers must figure out how to directly convert iPSCs into
embryos, or coax them to produce mature sperm and eggs for IVF. Both methods are currently being studied in mice.
Once perfected using mouse iPSCs, the protocols will have to be adapted for the rhino. Until this time Northern White
Rhino iPSCs can safely be maintained in the laboratory where they will be readily available once science advances.
Successful creation of iPSCs from the Northern White Rhino jumpstarted efforts to preserve other endangered species
using stem cells, including the Sumatran Rhino, estimated at fewer than 80 in existence.

Cellular reprogramming can be performed on virtually any cell from any species. This technology is therefore as
applicable to extinct species as it is to endangered ones, as long as a viable cell is still available. The Frozen Zoo® in San
Diego, CA, USA, a frozen tissue bank, has already preserved cells from more than 10,000 individuals representing
1,000+ species. With this in mind, scientists have begun research on reviving ecologically important extinct animals such
as the passenger pigeon (a migratory bird like the swift parrot) and the wooly mammoth (a megaherbivore like the
rhino).

Second, disease – stem cells are key

Mroczkowski et al. 22 – Associate Director, Health Care Initiative, Harvard Business School
Krys Mroczkowski, Colleen Ammerman, and Rembrand Koning, "How Abortion Bans Will Stifle Health Care
Innovation," Harvard Business Review, 8-8-2022, https://hbr.org/2022/08/how-abortion-bans-will-stifle-health-care-
innovation

Third, there may be a spillover effect into other forms of health care innovation. Even FemTech companies that don’t
work directly in reproductive care could be constrained by extreme abortion restrictions. They may feel forced to
divert resources away from their core business to managing legal risk — and potentially lose out on investment from
funds that now view women’s health as too uncertain a prospect. These include ventures working to address health
issues that affect tens of millions of people, such as Renovia, a Boston-based company with a digital therapeutic to treat
pelvic floor disorders (weakening of muscles or connective tissue of the pelvic area). This condition is sometimes but not
always related to pregnancy and affects one in three women. Sowing confusion about the boundary between legally
restricted and legally permissible medical care not only makes it harder for existing companies to operate, it’s likely to
discourage new entrants from taking the plunge.

And what might the investment outlook be in a post-Roe era? According to Pitchbook, venture capital funding for
FemTech has tripled since 2015. There are likely investors who believe strongly enough in the moral imperative to
resource innovation in women’s health that they won’t be scared away from including such companies in their
portfolios. But on the whole, the patchwork nature of abortion restrictions will contribute to an environment in which
we may see this capital shrink instead of grow, as potential returns become less clear, especially for ventures suddenly
viable only in certain states. Some investors may understandably shy away from wading into the now-murky territory of
women’s health for a whole host of reasons, a development which will slow the flow of dollars to companies trying to
solve problems with massive implications for both individual and community health.

Beyond the potential to choke off investment in women’s health, the post-Roe era could also curtail female founders
and limit women’s careers. Women are 40% more likely to invent for women than men, and with a potential pullback in
funding to turn these ideas into businesses, the gender gap in entrepreneurship could well widen. Better access to
reproductive health care increases women’s propensity to become entrepreneurs no matter the industry they work in,
increases women’s ability to secure VC funding, and improves the performance of female-run ventures. Consider that
the introduction of oral contraceptives in the mid-20th century closed or narrowed gendered wage and career gaps,
enabling firms to retain more and better female talent. The Dobbs decision may well roll back these gains.

Third, food security – space col solves resource wars

Collins 10
Patrick Collins, professor of economics at Azabu University in Japan, and a Collaborating Researcher with the Institute for
Space & Astronautical Science, as well as adviser to a number of companies, Adriano V. Autino is President of the Space
Renaissance International; Manager, CEO/CTO, Systems Engineering Consultant / Trainer at Andromeda Systems
Engineering LLC; and Supplier of methodological tools and consultancy at Intermarine S.p.A, Acta Astronautica, Volume
66, Issues 11–12, June–July 2010, “What the growth of a space tourism industry could contribute to employment,
economic growth, environmental protection, education, culture and world peace”, Pages 1553–1562

Although the use of extra-terrestrial resources on a substantial scale may still be some decades away, it is important to
recognise that simply acknowledging its feasibility using known technology is the surest way of ending the threat of
resource wars. That is, if it is assumed that the resources available for human use are limited to those on Earth, then it
can be argued that resource wars are inescapable [22] and [37]. If, by contrast, it is assumed that the resources of space
are economically accessible, this not only eliminates the need for resource wars, it can also preserve the benefits of
civilisation which are being eroded today by “resource war-mongers”, most notably the governments of the “Anglo-
Saxon” countries and their “neo-con” advisers. It is also worth noting that the $1 trillion that these have already
committed to wars in the Middle-East in the 21st century is orders of magnitude more than the public investment
needed to aid companies sufficiently to start the commercial use of space resources.

Industrial and financial groups which profit from monopolistic control of terrestrial supplies of various natural resources,
like those which profit from wars, have an economic interest in protecting their profitable situation. However, these
groups’ continuing profits are justified neither by capitalism nor by democracy: they could be preserved only by
maintaining the pretence that use of space resources is not feasible, and by preventing the development of low-cost
space travel. Once the feasibility of low-cost space travel is understood, “resource wars” are clearly foolish as well as
tragic. A visiting extra-terrestrial would be pityingly amused at the foolish antics of homo sapiens using long-range
rockets to fight each other over dwindling terrestrial resources—rather than using the same rockets to travel in space
and have the use of all the resources they need!

7.2. High return in safety from extra-terrestrial settlement

Investment in low-cost orbital access and other space infrastructure will facilitate the establishment of settlements on
the Moon, Mars, asteroids and in man[/woman]-made space structures. In the first phase, development of new
regulatory infrastructure in various Earth orbits, including property/usufruct rights, real estate, mortgage financing and
insurance, traffic management, pilotage, policing and other services will enable the population living in Earth orbits to
grow very large. Such activities aimed at making near-Earth space habitable are the logical extension of humans’
historical spread over the surface of the Earth. As trade spreads through near-Earth space, settlements are likely to
follow, of which the inhabitants will add to the wealth of different cultures which humans have created in the many
different environments in which they live.

Success of such extra-terrestrial settlements will have the additional benefit of reducing the danger of human extinction
due to planet-wide or cosmic accidents [27]. These horrors include both man-made disasters such as nuclear war,
plagues or growing pollution, and natural disasters such as super-volcanoes or asteroid impact. It is hard to think of
any objective that is more important than preserving peace. Weapons developed in recent decades are so destructive,
and have such horrific, long-term side-effects that their use should be discouraged as strongly as possible by the
international community. Hence, reducing the incentive to use these weapons by rapidly developing the ability to use
space-based resources on a large scale is surely equally important [11] and [16]. The achievement of this depends on
low space travel costs which, at the present time, appear to be achievable only through the development of a vigorous
space tourism industry.

SC decision key---states won’t be able to prohibit all research across the country
Alder and Wheeler 22 – Reporters for Bloomberg Law, citing Josh Blackman, professor at the South Texas College of
Law Houston and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute
Madison Alder and Lydia Wheeler, "Alito Draft Would Allow for Sweeping State Action on Abortion," Bloomberg Law, 5-
4-2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/alito-draft-would-allow-for-sweeping-state-action-on-abortion

But Blackman doesn’t think the Supreme Court draft supports that line of thinking. Though some states will try to ban
abortion at conception through fetal personhood, it’s unlikely they will be able to stop procedures from taking place in
other states where they’re still lawful without a federal abortion ban.

“The only way California will be able to ban abortion is if the Supreme Court says the Constitution requires it,” Blackman
said. “I don’t see anything in the court’s opinion that supports this broader conception that the Constitution requires
banning abortion.”

Clinics and researchers will simply move to blue states

Filipovic 22 – freelance contributor to Bloomberg
Jill Filipovic, "IVF Patients Are Trapped in Limbo and Bracing for the Next Post-Roe Fight," Bloomberg, 8-5-
2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-08-05/ivf-patients-fear-embryo-laws-could-make-starting-a-
family-harder

Even without personhood laws in place, doctors, patients, and lawyers are navigating newly treacherous terrain. Ulrich
has assured her patients that fertility treatments can proceed as planned, following discussions with her business
partner, her team, and the clinic’s lawyer. Still, she’s worried. Louisiana’s personhood bill was defeated only a month
before the Dobbs decision, and the state already regulates infertility options more stringently than most. Same-sex
couples are barred from using gestational carriers, making it particularly difficult for gay men to have children. And the
state outlaws discarding an embryo that continues to develop, even if genetic testing finds that it could never lead to a
healthy pregnancy. Audubon Fertility has been storing its patients’ embryos at a facility in Texas so its patients can
decide how long to keep the embryos and when to discard them. Now, with some patients in distress over the future of
reproductive rights in that state, the clinic is looking for other options. IVF patients in other conservative states have
also been scrambling to move their embryos to more liberal territory.

Even if some states ban, research is spread out across the country
Owens 14 – freelance science writer and editor
Brian Owens, "Mapping biomedical research in the USA," The Lancet, Vol 384, 7-5-
2014, https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2814%2961114-4

State-wide

One side-effect of the sheer size of the US biomedical research landscape is that it is spread wide across the country.
Unlike in the UK, where a large proportion of the work is concentrated in the “golden triangle” around London, Oxford,
and Cambridge, there are large research and industrial hubs beyond the obvious ones in Boston, San Francisco, and San
Diego. “I always get in trouble whenever I make a generalised statement about the major research hubs, because I’m
always in the room with someone from one I’ve left off the list”, says Garrison.

In FASEB’s annual breakdown of NIH funding by state, there is never a single one that is left off the list. There is a wide
range—researchers in California got more than $3 billion in 2013, while those in Idaho received just $5·4 million—but
every state gets at least a few million dollars in federal grant money. And that list can turn up some unexpected results.
The University of Utah, for example, has a very strong programme in genetics, at least in part because of the Mormon
church’s historical interest in genealogy.
Part of the reason for this relatively even spread of expertise is a sort of competition between the states to build
prestige by investing in higher education. “There was a time when California set out to build a system of world-class
research universities”, says Garrison. “And North Carolina and Texas and others sought to emulate them.”

The largest research contributors are blue states that won’t ban abortion
FIC 12 – Fogarty International Center
FIC, "US economy benefits from global health research," Fogarty International Center, National Institute of Health, June
2012, https://www.fic.nih.gov/News/GlobalHealthMatters/may-june-2012/Pages/us-economic-impact-research.aspx

Every state benefits from federal research

All U.S. states receive federal grants and contracts for health research, with the bulk coming from the NIH.

California, the largest recipient of federal research funds, has a robust global health sector that contributes
significantly to the state economy. About $3.3 billion in NIH grants and contracts supported more than 62,000 jobs in
the state in 2010, according to United for Medical Research.

"We need public funding for the basic research, we need private investment in the execution of that research and we
need world cooperation in all of the research," Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-CA, said in a Research!America release.

Another state receiving substantial NIH funds is New York, with $2 billion supporting more than 33,000 of the 80,000
life sciences jobs in 2011. The state houses seven of the top 50 American research universities and two of the top 25
medical universities. New York City alone has the largest bioscience workforce in the nation, according to data
presented by Research!America.

U.S. dominates ESC research across the globe---funding and resources make up for political limits
Kurtz et al. 12 – Berlin Brandenburg Center for Regenerative Therapies
Andreas Kurtz, Sabine Kobold, Anke Guhr, Franz-Josef Müller, and Peter Löser, "Scope and Impact of International
Research in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells," Stem Cell Reviews and Reports volume 8, pg. 1048–1055, 10-2-
2012, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12015-012-9409-0

Discussion

There has been some controversy on the effects of regulatory policies on hESC research output and about the reasons
for the preferred usage of an only restricted set of hESC lines [2–4, 6, 7, 10, 12]. Most recently, it has been suggested
that embargo effects from past restrictive policies in the US may contribute to a reduced output by US-based
researchers in recent years, while non-US labs thrive because they were able to freely use any hESC cell line without
budget restrictions [9]. Our analysis of the available data did not confirm a reduced relative academic output or impact
of US-based hESC research over time.

In fact, our data show that the number of publications in the hESC research field increased globally over the past 5
years, independent of a more or less restrictive stem cell policy or ideology-driven research funding. Although a short-
term effect of a restrictive budget policy might have delayed research output in the US after 2001 [16], factors such as
general research and alternative budgets, research capacities and human resources or the availability of research
material all contribute to the research output and may compensate for politically motivated restrictions. For example, in
the United States the state funding for stem cell research partially exceeded federal funding by the NIH in the last years
[17]. For the US, our data show no decline in relative contribution to international hESC research as measured in
numbers of published research and in terms of its impact, and if anything we found a trend towards a relative increase
in the number of citations of work published by US-based researchers as compared to work from researchers based
outside the United States. Independent of the US situation with 14 hESC research papers published in 2003 (45.2 % of
global output), 41 in 2004 (41.8 %), 49 in 2005 (37.1 %) and 174 in 2011 (40.7 %), hESC research output increased
globally with higher numbers of publications, from 31 in 2003 up to newly 430 in 2011.

The reason for the supposed loss of leadership of the United States in hESC research or, more generally, pluripotent
stem cell research was blamed on the restrictive funding policy in the US, and its long-term aftereffects. Already in 2006
it was reported that the US share in hESC studies published through 2004 experienced a decline starting in 2001 [1].
Levine identified the United States as an underperformer in hESC research relative to the unrelated RNAi research field
[2] although the conclusions of this study have been challenged [3]. A recent citation analysis identified a lag in US
production in hESC research of up to 40 % behind anticipated levels when using studies involving RNAi as a reference
[16]. However, this lag was most prominent from 2001 to 2003 and although RNAi was – as hESCs – first described in
1998 by a US-based group, studies involving RNAi might not be the best choice for the intended comparison. In contrast
to pluripotent stem cells, experimental use of RNAi does neither require a rare and difficult to propagate material (such
as stem cells in complex culture systems) nor scientists trained in special experimental skills beyond common molecular
biology techniques. In our hands-on experience [18, 19], both factors limited significantly the development of the hESC
research field. There is no doubt that restrictions and regulatory uncertainty can have a major impact on researchers
[20] and may delay or even prevent scientific progress. However, our analysis of publications does not confirm but
clearly refutes the hypothesis of a relative decline of US productivity in hESC research.

It can only be speculated about the reasons for the apparent discrepancy between our data and the recent findings of
DeRouen and co-workers. While these authors used a data pool of 2,086 hESC and hiPSC papers published from 1998 to
2010 for their analysis, our dataset for this period of time contains 1940 original research papers. Thus, the paper pool
seems to be of a comparable size, and inclusion and exclusion criteria may be the prime reason for different results
obtained in both studies. The public availability of the datasets used in the paper of DeRouen et al. as well as in other
studies from the same group would have been helpful for understanding obvious discrepancies. In addition, the period
of time analyzed by DeRouen and co-workers did only span 3 years and might not be sufficient to draw appropriate
conclusions on the principal development of a research field. Moreover, it may be questionable in general whether the
number of publications alone is a suitable measure for the impact of a nation’s research. We suggest that taking
additional factors such as Journal Impact Factors and citation numbers into account may be more adequate. Doing so,
we did not find any evidence for a decline in the US contribution to the hESC field.

For the essentially unrestricted research on hiPSC we found a different outcome with respect to the relative weight of
US and global research output. By 2008, nearly 70 % of all hiPSC work was published by US-based groups, but the US
share in published work on hiPSCs dropped to below 50 % in 2011. At the same time, US-based research in the hiPSC
field maintained a continuing high visibility. It would be premature to conclude that the observed decline in the relative
share of US contribution to the hiPSC field may reflect a diminished competitiveness of US research. Rather, we suggest
that the undisputable initial dominance of US research in this field was due to pioneering work of several US-based
groups which caused a high popularity of hiPSC research in the following years. A reason for the comparatively fast
ascent of hiPSC research outside of the US might be that a high number of researchers have been trained by now and
are capable to work with human pluripotent stem cells. The easier availability of other resources that are needed for this
type of research which were built up during the previous hESC era may also contribute to the rapid development of the
hiPSC field. It is surprising, however, that research from Japan performed below average in terms of impact during the
reported time frame.

In summary, our data shows an unaltered strong contribution of US research to the hESC field. This may be supportive
for the hypothesis that research output is obviously not severely hampered by budgetary regulation as long as
alternative budget options are available [16]. Moreover, research on hiPSCs is characterized by a moderate decrease in
US dominance in this field with regard to paper numbers, while the impact of US research remains at a high level.
Factors such as increasing international collaboration, publication bias or distribution of resources may have specific
effects on this type of research and require further investigation.
We wouldn’t accept others’ research
Pezenik and Flaherty 20 – writers for ABC News
Sasha Pezenik and Anne Flaherty, "Conservatives confront moral dilemma of vaccines and treatments derived from fetal
tissue cells ," ABC News, 10-18-2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/conservatives-confront-moral-dilemma-vaccines-
treatments-derived-fetal/story?id=73664533

"Fetal tissue has unique and valuable properties that often cannot be replaced by other cell types," the International
Society for Stem Cell Research urged the new Trump ethics board in July, adding, it "remains the gold standard for
evaluating the accuracy of models of human fetal development."

Lying at the crux of the contention -- how that material is obtained. Under current statute, tissue from "spontaneous"
abortions, or miscarriages, are permitted. But those moments often occur not in hospital -- rather, at home -- making
proper sample collection difficult, experts say, in what poses an already brief window of time before the cells are
degraded. And, miscarriage often occurs because of complications during fetal development which prevented it from
surviving to full term. Thus that tissue would offer limited use, unless it was that specific abnormality a scientist had
hoped to study.

'Gradations of cooperation'

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has advocated for at least one COVID-19 vaccine to be developed completely
free from connection to aborted fetal cells. In April, the USCCB sent a letter to FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn, urging,
"no American should be forced to choose between being vaccinated against this potentially deadly virus and violating
his or her conscience."

Rev. Dr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center and member of a federal
ethics advisory board on the matter, told ABC: "The decision by companies to intentionally utilize these problematic cell
lines results, if there are no alternatives, in a kind of moral coercion."

The U.S. is one of the only countries without a 14-day research limit
Matthews and Moralí 20 – Baker Institute Center for Health & Biosciences; Rice University
Kirstin RW Matthews and Daniel Moralí, "National human embryo and embryoid research policies: a survey of 22 top
research-intensive countries," Regenerative Medicine, 8-17-2020, https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/rme-
2019-0138

Four countries did not have a date limit: Brazil, France, Israel and the USA. Brazil's laws on hESC research prohibit
“genetic engineering on human germ cells, human zygotes or human embryos” but do not address a development limit
or other restrictions on human embryo research [41–43]. Israel has a 1999 law banning reproductive cloning and a set of
guidelines for hESC research, but it does not address nor limit in vitro human embryo research [44–46]. French law
permits the use of leftover IVF embryos for scientific research if scientifically justified and with prior authorization by the
Agency of Biomedicine [47,48]. This bioethics law is under review in 2020, and the new version could include more
permissive language related to human embryo research, including potentially adding a 21-day limit [49].

While the USA was the first to propose the 14-day limit, the limit was never passed as a federal law [10,11]. The USA
does prohibit federal funding for human embryo research through the Dickey-Wicker Amendment [10,13,50]. This
amendment has been passed annually within the federal budget for the US Department of Health and Human Services
since 1995, prohibiting scientists from obtaining funding for human embryo research work from the US NIH, which is one
of the largest funders for biomedical research with an annual budget of approximately US$40 billion. The Dickey-Wicker
Amendment, named after the two legislators who developed it (Jay Dickey and Roger Wicker), specifically bans federal
funding for “the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes or research in which a human embryo or
embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subject to risk of injury or death,” including developing hESC lines
[13,50]. The amendment only applies to federal funding and does not affect R&D funded by state or local governments
or private institutions [13]. In addition to federal laws, several US states have enacted laws limiting or restricting human
embryo research, including South Dakota and Louisiana, which outright prohibit all human embryo research (state or
private) [51].

14-day limit prevents critical breakthrough research---especially in ectogenesis

Regalado 21 – senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review
Antonio Regalado, "Scientists plan to drop the 14-day embryo rule, a key limit on stem cell research," MIT Technology
Review, 3-16-2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/16/1020879/scientists-14-day-limit-stem-cell-human-
embryo-research/

Zernicka-Goetz had hit up against an internationally recognized ethical limit called the “14-day rule.” Under this limit,
scientists have agreed never to allow human embryos to develop beyond two weeks in their labs. That is the point at
which a spherical embryo starts to form a body plan, deciding where its head will end up, and when cells begin taking on
specialized missions.

For the last 40 years, the rule, which is law in some countries and a guideline in others, has served as an important stop
sign for embryonic research. It has provided a clear signal to the public that scientists wouldn’t grow babies in labs. To
researchers, it gave clarity about what research they could pursue.

Now, however, a key scientific body is ready to do away with the 14-day limit. The action would come at a time when
scientists are making remarkable progress in growing embryonic cells and watching them develop. Researchers, for
example, can now coax a few individual stem cells to grow into embryo-like structures, and some hope to follow these
synthetic embryo models well past the old two-week line.

By allowing both normal and artificial embryos to continue developing after two weeks, the end of the self-imposed limit
could unleash impressive but ethically charged new experiments on extending human development outside the
womb.

If they win others fill in, it’s bad – biotech lead will be the key determinant in military leadership
Carlson et al 21 – Engineering Prof @ UWA; inaugural deputy assistant secretary of defense for China; and IR Prof
focused on biosecurity @ GU with a PhD in molecular biology from JHU

Rob Carlson, also managing director at Bioeconomy Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm; and Chad Sbragia, also
former director of the China Research Group for the U.S. Marine Corps and now a research staff member at the Institute
for Defense Analyses; and Kate Sixt, also assistant director of the Strategy, Forces and Resources Division at the Institute
for Defense Analyses, where she leads the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Analysis group; BEYOND
BIOLOGICAL DEFENSE: MAINTAINING THE U.S. BIOTECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE, 14 September 2021,
https://warontherocks.com/2021/09/beyond-biological-defense-maintaining-the-u-s-biotechnology-advantage/

From 2007 to 2008, tainted supplies of Chinese-manufactured heparin, a common blood thinner, led to 81 deaths across
the United States. This should have been a wake-up call to the Department of Defense. Over the last two decades,
biotechnology has become a key component of American supply chains, perhaps accounting for 20 percent of the
chemicals the U.S. military uses. Those supply chains now span the globe and contain a significant amount of material
produced in China. Remarkably, the full extent of the military’s dependence on Chinese biotechnology is unknown
because the U.S. government is not assessing it. These dependencies extend beyond pharmaceuticals to fundamentals
such as solvents and polymers. Just try and paint an aircraft without xylenes. If you’ve never thought about how difficult
it would be, well that’s exactly the problem.

The Department of Defense has historically viewed biotechnology narrowly in relation to military medicine and
biodefense. As a result, the vital role of biotechnology in military readiness and national security remains poorly
understood. Biowarfare and bioterrorism are real risks, but approaching the nation’s biotechnology security needs only
in these terms will leave the country ever more vulnerable.

China, by contrast, has been integrating biotechnology into its strategic development and elevating biotechnology to a
key component of national security. China’s military-civil fusion development strategy makes biotechnology a core
priority for the People’s Liberation Army. This strategy has one goal: to bring together China’s civilian and military
industrial bases in order to better project power. To that end, China has cornered supply chains in multiple sectors,
including pharmaceuticals ingredients and other important chemicals.

Stephanie Rogers, the Defense Department’s acting principal director for biotechnology, recently declared that “the
nation that leads the world in biotechnology will accrue enduring economic, societal, and defense gains.” Unfortunately,
this awareness has yet to be reflected in government policy. Biotechnology security is national security — for the United
States and for China. The Department of Defense should recognize biotechnology’s role as a foundational technology
and make biotechnology development and supply chain security a priority.

Maintaining America’s Biotechnology Advantage

Biotechnology in the United States is a significant contributor to the economy. By one estimate, in 2017, U.S.
biotechnology revenues exceeded $400 billion, or 2 percent of gross domestic product, substantially surpassing better-
measured sectors such as mining. Bioeconomy revenues have grown at an average rate of 10 percent annually for
two decades. Notably, U.S. biotechnology revenues alone were approximately equal to worldwide
semiconductor revenues for 2017. Biotechnology now supplies critical medicines, and, as more than 90 percent of the
corn and soy grown in the United States is genetically modified , biotechnology feeds the armed forces. Industrial
biotechnology is responsible for upward of 20 percent of chemicals produced in the United States, suggesting a similar
proportion of chemicals used in the military are also biologically derived. And these impressive figures may still be
significant underestimates: Using a different methodology, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently concluded
that the biotechnology industry contributes 5 to 7 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Biotechnology, therefore,
may already constitute an even larger share of the military supply chain.

As biotechnology continues to mature, its contribution to physical and economic security will become even more
significant. Tools are now being deployed that enable the engineering and biomanufacturing of materials that will
eventually not only displace petrochemicals but also surpass them in production scale and performance. Over the next
ten to twenty years, biological production could soon supply up to 60 percent of physical inputs across the global
economy, and biotechnology could have a “direct economic impact of up to $4 trillion a year.”

While the United States is arguably still leading in biotechnology, it risks losing this lead to China. In China,
biotechnology is a national development and a security matter. China’s Innovation Driven Development Strategy
emphasizes biotechnology’s essential role in the country’s economic development, while the Military-Civil Fusion
Development Strategy seeks to ensure that biotechnology research is also oriented toward the country’s military and
broader security goals. Chinese biotechnology revenues are reported to be of a similar size to those in the United States,
although they are subject to even lesser clarity in reporting.

While China continues its licit and illicit acquisition efforts targeting the U.S. biotechnology sector, it is also shifting its
attention to domestic innovation. In time, this will provide the People’s Liberation Army with new capabilities and
increase both America’s and the Pentagon’s reliance on Chinese biotechnology products .
Recommendations As early as 1958, the Department of Commerce was tracking the economic contribution of semiconductors, even though they made up less than 0.1 percent of the gross domestic product. Yet, today, the U.S. government has made no equivalent effort to track the much more significant role of biotechnology. This illiteracy is a national security issue. American and Chinese bioeconomies are in competition, and Beijing asserts that it is investing with the intent to take, and to then maintain, the lead. To sustain America’s advantage, the U.S. Department of Defense should better understand its reliance on biotechnology and increase investment
in it accordingly. The Pentagon’s recent investment in the BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem is a notable step in the right direction. However, the seven-year budget for this project is approximately the cost of a single F-35A. For an investment that could impact the entire defense supply chain, this is inadequate. We recommend the following plan of action for the Department of Defense to take its place alongside the Departments of Commerce and State in the broader interagency effort to secure America’s biotechnology advantage. First, in close coordination with the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense should make a
systematic effort to better understand the role of biotechnology in the economy, supply chains, and manufacturing. This, in turn, should inform additional oversight and regulatory controls. The responsibility to understand, prepare for, and respond to biotechnology threats is balkanized, spread across at least nine departments and agencies. Vulnerabilities in the bioeconomy will affect the Department of Defense in terms of readiness, soldier health, and the ability to fulfill missions. Addressing those vulnerabilities begins with a sustained, comprehensive effort to understand the role of biotechnology in industry today, as well as how that industry contributes to
defense supply chains, and how military acquisition policy shapes biotechnology. To that end, the Pentagon should work with the Department of Commerce to create domestic reporting codes for biotechnology revenues and employment for the quarterly and annual economic census, and further incorporate those codes into the North American Industrial Classification System. Institutionalizing the gathering of these data is the first step toward sustainable policymaking and rational spending. The Department of Commerce should then consider adding import/export controls on biotechnology, while avoiding overly broad restrictions that suffocate innovation.
Protecting foundational technologies using the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act and Export Control Reform Act will be critical for securing biotechnology. However, biotechnology competition is not exclusive to commercial activities. The Pentagon should assess critical vulnerabilities and dependencies to assist the other agencies in bringing China’s foreign biotechnology access in line with standards in other major markets. The Department of Defense has been asked to document and secure supply chains critical to defense applications and to the overall U.S. economy. This should also apply to biotechnology. Current Pentagon efforts to
expand domestic biological manufacturing capabilities are an important start, but a broader effort is needed. An empowered deputy national security adviser could help oversee the relationship between the Pentagon and the National Economic Council to promote and secure the military’s broader technology needs. Second, the Department of Defense should better study the accomplishments and intent of China, especially the Chinese military, in developing biotechnology as a strategic technology. Once the Department of Defense better understands critical U.S. biotechnology dependencies on China, it can begin the work of reducing them. This requires an
interagency examination to identify cross-cutting resources, develop mitigation strategies, formulate best practices to bolster innovation, and expand outreach to allies and partners to reduce systemic gaps China could exploit. Partnership with industry and allies will allow the U.S. government to understand and counter Beijing’s efforts to distort commercial activity in its favor. To this end, the Department of Defense should mirror the National Security Council’s effort by creating an emerging technology portfolio within Office of the Under Secretary of Defense-Policy. While other technology offices in the Department of Defense are internally focused, an entity
in this office that concentrates externally on foundational technology competition is required. Such an office may be able to address uncertainties in assessments of Chinese biotechnology revenues and capabilities. Finally, in coordination with the Department of State, the Department of Defense should identify opportunities for dialogue with the People’s Liberation Army about biotechnology-related security issues. It is time to include biotechnology in the dialogue mechanisms that compose bilateral U.S. defense relations with the People’s Liberation Army. This dialogue should prioritize the ethics of biotechnology in the context of future conflicts, the
escalatory risks this technology creates, and the possibility of cooperation where the interests of the two nations intersect. Both sides should work toward a common understanding related to ethics, policies, and standards when operationalizing biotechnology. This will help avoid miscalculation and promote strategic stability. Unlike the U.S. government, Chinese leadership has a carefully considered position on the importance of biosafety and “biological problems” in national security. While these problems are understood to encompass traditional weapons concerns, they also extend to the health of the entire natural world in the context of ever-expanding
applications of biotechnology. This position might provide an opportunity for constructive engagement at a time when tensions are rising. Conclusion The Pentagon needs to expand its approach to biotechnology beyond biodefense. If China maintains biological warfare aspirations, by all means address those. But defense planners should also address China’s broader approach to biotechnology and its integrated approach to civil-military fusion.
Securing biotechnology secures the nation. Maintaining the U.S. lead in biotechnology is critical to the nation’s
economic and military resilience in war, peace, and the gray zone short of conflict. This requires better biotechnology
collaboration — within the U.S. government, with allies and partners, and even, where possible, with competitors.

Retrenchment causes extinction

Rapp-Hooper 20 – Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at CFR & Senior Fellow in the China Center at Yale Law
Mira Rapp-Hooper, Stephen A. Schwarzman Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2020, Saving America’s Alliances:
The United States Still Needs the System That Put It on Top, Foreign Affairs

The stakes of failing to reform the alliance system could scarcely be higher. If Washington does not act, it will miss the
opportunity to protect its dearest interests on relatively favorable terms, before China’s growing power and Russia’s
revanchism undermine the system’s proven guarantees. The reform agenda recommended here is vast, but it is far less
burdensome than a U.S. foreign policy that cannot rely on allies. The United States can no more go it alone now than it
could in the immediate postwar years. Whether the United States has alliances or not, American security and prosperity
will still require an open and independent Asia and Europe. Even if Washington pulled back from both theaters, the
United States would still face cyberattacks, financial and infrastructural disruptions, and assaults on its democratic
institutions. And by retrenching, Washington would lose whatever readiness for conflict it currently has. If the country
later joined a war abroad, it would have to do so only after significant time delays and without the allied cooperation
that might have allowed it to prevail. Put simply, the United States might fall into a conflict that it could have instead
deterred—one now waged with hypersonic speed and destruction.

Adult stem cells can’t replace ESC

Mayo Clinic ’22 -- The Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit American academic medical center focused on integrated health
care, education, and research.

Mayo Clinic Staff, “Stem cells: What they are and what they do” March 19, 2022, https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-
procedures/bone-marrow-transplant/in-depth/stem-cells/art-20048117

Why can't researchers use adult stem cells instead? Although research into adult stem cells is promising, adult stem
cells may not be as versatile and durable as are embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells may not be able to be
manipulated to produce all cell types , which limits how adult stem cells can be used to treat diseases. Adult stem cells
are also more likely to contain abnormalities due to environmental hazards, such as toxins, or from errors acquired by
the cells during replication. However, researchers have found that adult stem cells are more adaptable than was first
thought.

Even if they are helpful, ESC research is necessary for breakthroughs

NRC and IOM 2 – The National Research Council (NRC) is the operating arm of the United States National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is an independent, nonprofit organization and
the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, "Executive Summary,” Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative
Medicine, National Academies Press, 2002, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223702/

There are important biological differences between adult and embryonic stem cells and among adult stem cells found in
different types of tissue. The implications of these biological differences for therapeutic uses are not yet clear, and
additional data are needed on all stem cell types. Adult stem cells from bone marrow have so far provided most of the
examples of successful therapies for replacement of diseased or destroyed cells. Despite the enthusiasm generated by
recent reports, the potential of adult stem cells to differentiate fully into other cell types (such as brain, nerve, pancreas
cells) is still poorly understood and remains to be clarified. In contrast, studies of human embryonic stem cells have
shown that they can develop into multiple tissue types and exhibit long-term self-renewal in culture, features that have
not yet been demonstrated with many human adult stem cells. The application of stem cell research to therapies for
human disease will require much more knowledge about the biological properties of all types of stem cells. Although
stem cell research is on the cutting edge of biological science today, it is still in its infancy. Studies of both embryonic
and adult human stem cells will be required to most efficiently advance the scientific and therapeutic potential of
regenerative medicine. Moreover, research on embryonic stem cells will be important to inform research on adult stem
cells, and vice versa. Research on both adult and embryonic human stem cells should be pursued.

ESCs are critical for developing foundational biological understanding

Cyranoski 18 – reporter for Nature
David Cyranoski, "How human embryonic stem cells sparked a revolution," Nature 555, 428-430, 3-20-
2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03268-4

But despite their sometimes rocky history, ES cells have proved their value repeatedly, and in some unpredictable ways,
say many investigators. Some researchers have even scaled back their use of animal models because ES cells seem to
provide a better path to studying human disease. “My motto was, ‘all human, all the time’,” Melton says.

Yamanaka says that ES cells were the motivation for his own work on iPS cells. And it was Thomson’s recipe for human
ES cells that allowed the shift from mouse to human iPS cells in just one year , after it had taken nearly two decades to
move from mouse ES cells to the human variety. “We knew exactly how we should culture human iPS cells,” says
Yamanaka.

ES cells are just as crucial today, he says, for better understanding the mechanism of pluripotency and for improving the
medical application of any pluripotent cell. “The importance of human ES cells is no less now than 20 years ago, and I do
not imagine it will be any lower in the future,” he says.

Cardiovascular damage and radiation vulnerability make long-term space travel impossible for
humans absent further research
Guerrero-Beltrán et al. 19 – research professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He is a member of the Research
Group on Cardiovascular and Metabolomics Medicine of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and a member of
the National System of Researchers

Enrique Guerrero-Beltrán et al., "The Biological and Medical Challenges of Traveling to Mars," Transferencia Tec,
Tecnológico de Monterrey, 5-8-2019, https://transferencia.tec.mx/english/health/medical-specialities/the-biological-
and-medical-challenges-of-traveling-to-mars/

As humanity has embarked on the exploration and possibility of inhabiting Mars, it has had to face multiple challenges,
many of them related to the field of medicine. It has been proven that several factors present in space and on Mars are
associated with the worsening of many health problems. This article explains, on a scientific basis, the biological and
medical challenges that traveling to Mars would entail for human beings, and also offers a new proposal for inhabiting
the Red Planet. Do you want to know about it?

Perhaps you’ve heard about the immune system, that’s right, the body’s natural defense against infections (and the key
point of this project). Its main function is also to remove damaged, abnormal or cancerous cells from the body. However,
when humans travel into space, the immune system weakens, and in general, the whole body undergoes several
changes that translate into adaptations and many of them induce health damage. But why does this happen? The
causes are two main factors: microgravity and cosmic radiation.

Microgravity is defined as the environment under which the effects of the force of gravity are reduced, just imagine an
astronaut floating on a space mission to notice its presence. As for the second factor, cosmic radiation, the National
Cancer Institute (NCI) defines it as “the energy that is released in the form of particles or electromagnetic waves.”

Due to microgravity, astronauts’ body fluids accumulate in the upper part of the trunk, and the deviation of these fluids
causes the heart to receive more blood at each beat, which forces it to expel a greater volume of blood per minute
(known as greater cardiac output), preventing blood with oxygen from properly reaching all other parts of the body. In
addition, NASA has reported that blood vessels in the upper body begin to stiffen when astronauts are exposed to long
periods of microgravity.

It has also been shown that there are many factors that can trigger or worsen heart damage in outer space, such as low
oxygen levels, free radical production, autoantibodies, and signaling pathways that induce programmed cell death;
this cell signaling mediated by toll-like receptors (TLRs) can be activated by endotoxins, microbial components
(antigens), and heat shock proteins (HSPs). HSPs are a family of proteins produced by our own cells in response to
exposure to stressful conditions, as observed in heart failure, a condition in which the heart cannot pump blood
efficiently throughout the body.

All damage to the cardiovascular system is a challenge for long-term space missions. Space missions, such as the one
planned for Mars, would last between 6 and 8 months, under optimal conditions of orbit trajectories. However, the
trajectory can vary and be extended far beyond that.

On the other hand, among the problems faced by astronauts in space, there is also cosmic radiation, from which we are
protected on Earth thanks to our magnetosphere. However, this magnetosphere is not present either on Mars or
throughout space travel. Without this protection against cosmic radiation in space travel, there is a high risk of DNA
damage and mutations that end in some form of cancer.

Through the various robots it has sent to Mars, NASA has reported that the radiation to which an astronaut would be
exposed when carrying out a mission to Mars (considering the journey and stay on that planet), increases by more than
5% the risk of developing some kind of deadly cancer. This 5% increase would violate current NASA standards, which
set a maximum limit of 3%.

More human enhancements, specifically embryonic stem cell research, needed for space
Rappaport and Corbally ‘20 -- Margaret Boone Rappaport, The Human Sentience Project, Tucson, Arizona, USA;
Christopher J. Corbally, Vatican Observatory Research Group, Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona, Tucson,
Arizona, USA.

Margaret Boone Rappaport and Christopher J. Corbally, Human Enhancements for Space Missions, Space and Society, p
7. “Chapter 1 Normalizing the Paradigm on Human Enhancements for Spaceflight,” Springer Nature Switzerland, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42036-9_5

Human enhancements for spaceflight will always have a mandate that many others do not have: They enable humans to
tolerate off-world environments and realize the desire to roam, conquer, and settle new territories for the rest of us. It is
a species requirement so ingrained, so much a part of us biologically, it motivated members of the genus Homo who
came before us. Long before our species evolved 300– 400,000 years ago (Hublin et al. 2017), Homo erectus left Africa
to colonize Eurasia all the way to the Far East, beginning about one million years ago.

Other forces at work in the development of human enhancements, like war, disability, congenital defects, aging,
pandemics, environmental degradation, and the emergence of synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and robotic surgery
will all be important, but a leading force will be human space travel because the species will find it such a difficult
environment without help. It is the classic sine qua non: Without enhancements, human spacefaring will not occur, at
least not much, not soon, and not for long periods and distances. From early indications based on neurological testing,
the existing human species is just barely, sufficiently neuroplastic to be able to with- stand the rigors of space with the
current propulsion systems (van Ombergen et al. 2017; Demertzi et al. 2016; Rappaport et al. 2020). A sentient bird
could not do it; a sentient packrat could not do it. The sentient wasp would be ill equipped, as would the sentient
elephant, but the sentient human can do it, gifted as the species is by corporal flexibility, pervasive adaptability,
variation in phenotypic development and adult expression, culture, intelligence, wanderlust, and what we have come to
call “verve”—nerve, even recklessness, and a stubborn tendency to try new things—all,we believe, at least partially an
inheritance from the ancient apes from which our line descended. Great apes can sometimes behave with blatant
demonstrativeness, even fearlessness. The remnant species of great apes from the once large and varied population in
Africa and Eurasia remain big, strong, and smart today. We will carry many of their genes to space with us.

Human space travel will likely lead the way for enhancements because of available funding. Sadly, war, pestilence, and
the environment have often failed to move many to do much. That will change in the future, when one of these threats
gains a structured rationale, a momentum, and money, in that order. Spacefaring is ahead of them all, although that
could change, too, if humankind turns its back on the skies and refuses to go to space because it is too difficult and too
expensive. That is always possible, but we feel, unlikely. Again, the human propensity to explore, conquer, and settle
goes far back into our prehistory. Even if some future political entities eschew spacefaring, others will persevere. Once
we left Earth behind, however briefly, humans were destined to do it again and again.

As a species, we evolved in a warm, varied, oxygen-fed place that allowed us to scavenge for what our brains needed
most—meat, to feed an organ that still uses more energy than any other. In contrast, space is cold, with no atmosphere,
no moisture, no gravity, and no manner to gain sustenance. Even worse, it provides nothing for the non-scientist to do.
There will be scientists and physicians on early space missions, but most of the crew will be engineers. What will they do
to keep themselves occupied on long, protracted journeys? Induced torpor may help, and eventually full hibernation like
the Arctic ground squirrels (Rappaport et al. 2020).

The only other option is to provide all that an earthly environment provides, and more, too. It must provide something
to help non-scientists counteract the monotony, confinement, and likely ennui. The latter response will not be
altogether insane, because it could be interpreted as a realistic reaction to the circumstances of a lengthy spaceflight.
This problem brings us squarely into confrontation with the potential use of psychiatric medications and enhancements
that allow humans to tolerate their new environment, one to which they have never had to adapt before, for such long
periods of time. Recent analog studies of “extreme teams” that “solve complex problems outside of traditional
performance environments and have significant consequences associated with failure” show that affect does change
over time and becomes more homogenized. Although there are reported conflicts in all studies, little is known about the
management of “team affect” (Bell et al. 2019). Indirectly, of course, these human problems will encourage research on
propulsion systems that can deliver us to the asteroids and outer planets more quickly. We note that nanotechnology
may be one of the first modalities considered for psychiatric treatment, and we would include it in the broad category
human enhancements (cf Fond et al. 2013).
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Gtown

Conservatives will seize the aff’s underlying logic for expansion of rights to push for fetal
personhood
Reichmann 22 – reporter covering the Supreme Court and politics for Courthouse News Service
Kelsey Reichmann, "Senate sees push for fetal personhood, testing bounds of post-Roe landscape," Courthouse News
Service, 7-12-2022, https://www.courthousenews.com/senate-sees-push-for-fetal-personhood-testing-bounds-of-post-
roe-landscape/

WASHINGTON (CN) — Warring views on abortion made their way into the Senate on Tuesday as the Judiciary
Committee took up the legal consequences of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

While Democrats laid out their efforts to protect abortion access for all Americans, Republicans made their case for
having the law recognize fetuses in the womb with all the rights accorded by the 14th Amendment.

“Life is a human right,” Denise Harle, senior counsel and director of the Center for Life Alliance Defending Freedom,
testified before the panel.

Seizing on a concept that Justice Samuel Alito explores in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization lead
opinion, Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn asked Harle when the unalienable right to life recognized in the
Declaration of Independence begins.

“I do think that the American people understand that you have no rights if you don't have the right to life,” Harle said.
“That is a principle that our nation was founded upon, and every human being, from its earliest existence , has its own
DNA and has a future — if we don't extinguish it — has a future and that is a human right .”

Alito makes a point in Dobbs of abandoning Roe's reference to "fetal life" in favor of " unborn human beings ," the
language that appears in the Mississippi abortion ban newly endorsed by the court.

“Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters
such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and
Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us
describes as an ‘unborn human being,’” Alito wrote.

This is new terrain.

“Alito’s opinion gave voice to the idea of fetal personhood in a way that we've never seen in the text of a Supreme
Court opinion,” Katherine Franke, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia
University, said in a phone call. “There was reference to a fetus or to pregnancy in prior opinions, say written by Justice
Blackmun or Kennedy, but we had never seen a fetus figure as a legal subject in the same way that that idea appeared
in the Dobbs opinion.”

This is not to say the court now recognizes the constitutional rights of fetuses, but it does offer new encouragement
to those who want states to give legal rights to fetuses .

Fetal personhood collapses biomedical research

Baumann 22 – Reporter for Bloomberg Law
Jeannie Baumann, "State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research," Bloomberg Law, 8-4-
2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research

Biomedical scientists using embryonic stem cells or fetal tissue could find their studies at risk in conservative states
aiming to redefine personhood after the US Supreme Court’s rollback of abortion rights.

These states would give embryos and fetuses the same rights as people . A provision in Georgia’s new abortion law
includes embryos, once there’s a detectable heartbeat, which is at about six weeks, and fetuses in population counts.
The laws primarily are intended to focus on abortions, but they have downstream consequences on a range of issues,
including biomedical research .

“They’re not thinking through the other possible consequences of declaring that an embryo is a person from the
moment of fertilization,” Suzanna Sherry, a constitutional law scholar at Vanderbilt University, said. But it’s unclear how
it’ll play out since these questions haven’t been tested in court, she said.

If states grant personhood to embryos without specific exceptions for derivation of stem cells from embryos, then
there can be no stem cells on which to do research or develop therapeutic products, Mark Barnes, a research attorney
with Ropes & Gray LLP, said.

Embryonic stem cells offer great promise in health and medicine because they can turn into any cell in the human
body, offering the potential to repair and regenerate tissue damaged by a host of diseases . They also can be used to
screen drug candidates for toxicity. But embryos must be destroyed in the process of generating stem cell lines for
research. It’s illegal to create embryos specifically for research, but US researchers can use embryos from in vitro
fertilization that would otherwise be discarded and have been donated for research.

Pipeline in Jeopardy

The National Institutes of Health funded more than $2 billion in stem cell research in fiscal 2021, including $309 million
in embryonic stem cell research.

While there are just seven cell and gene therapies on the US market today, there are more than 1,000 cell and gene
therapies are currently in the pipeline, according to Faster Cures, with 50 to 75 therapies expected to be approved in the
US by 2030.

The global stem cell market is expected to grow to $27.7 billion by 2028 from nearly $12 billion in 2021, according to
one market report.

“If you can’t do IVF at all, then you won’t have stem cells,” Sherry said. “There’s no answer to that. Nobody knows. It’ll
have to be tested in court.”

The exact impact of personhood laws on biomedical research is unclear because it depends on the wording of each
state statute, and whether it defines a person from conception or implantation or a heartbeat.

But if a state defines a person from the moment of conception, then it would effectively ban research using embryos,
R. Alta Charo, who’s guided stem cell policies for the National Academies, President Barack Obama‘s transition team, as
well as Wisconsin and California stem cell research institutes, said in an interview.

“If that applies to an embryo outside the body, effectively, it means that in vitro fertilization for fertility purposes itself is
now in question,” Charo said.
IVF is a procedure with a high failure rate in which it’s common to implant embryos selectively based on whether an
embryo appears to be healthy. But failure to use every embryo would presumably become illegal under the new laws,
she said.

“All of these point inevitably to the conclusion that the deliberate use of an embryo in research or to derive
embryonic stem cell lines—which we know will destroy the embryo—is almost certainly going to be illegal . The
question is, is it illegal under what rubric? Is it homicide? Is it manslaughter?” Charo, a bioethicist and law professor at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Continued biomedical advancement is key to survival---COVID was only the first warning shot
EID = Emerging Infectious Disease

Excler et al. 21 – Jean-Louis Excler, International Vaccine Institute, Seoul, Republic of Korea; Melanie Saville, Coalition
for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), London, UK; Seth Berkley, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Geneva,
Switzerland; Jerome H. Kim, International Vaccine Institute, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Jean-Louis Excler, Melanie Saville, Seth Berkley, and Jerome H. Kim, "Vaccine development for emerging infectious
diseases," Nat Med 27, 591–600, 4-12-2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01301-0

Newly emerging and reemerging infectious viral diseases have threatened humanity throughout history. Several
interlaced and synergistic factors including demographic trends and high-density urbanization, modernization favoring
high mobility of people by all modes of transportation, large gatherings, altered human behaviors, environmental
changes with modification of ecosystems and inadequate global public health mechanisms have accelerated both the
emergence and spread of animal viruses as existential human threats. In 1918, at the time of the ‘Spanish flu’, the
world population was estimated at 1.8 billion. It is projected to reach 9.9 billion by 2050, an increase of more than 25%
from the current 2020 population of 7.8 billion (https://www.worldometers.info). The novel severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) responsible for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic1,2,3 engulfed
the entire world in less than 6 months, with high mortality in the elderly and those with associated comorbidities. The
pandemic has severely disrupted the world economy. Short of lockdowns, the only means of control have been limited
to series of mitigation measures such as self-distancing, wearing masks, travel restrictions and avoiding gatherings, all
imperfect and constraining. Now with more than 100 million people infected and more than 2 million deaths, it seems
that the addition of vaccine(s) to existing countermeasures holds the best hope for pandemic control. Taken together,
these reasons compel researchers and policymakers to be vigilant, reexamine the approach to surveillance and
management of emerging infectious disease threats, and revisit global mechanisms for the control of pandemic
disease4,5.

Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases

The appearance of new infectious diseases has been recognized for millennia, well before the discovery of causative
infectious agents. Despite advances in development of countermeasures (diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines), world
travel and increased global interdependence have added layers of complexity to containing these infectious diseases.
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are threats to human health and global stability6,7. A review of emerging
pandemic diseases throughout history offers a perspective on the emergence and characteristics of coronavirus
epidemics, with emphasis on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic8,9. As human societies grow in size and complexity, an endless
variety of opportunities is created for infectious agents to emerge into the unfilled ecologic niches we continue to
create. To illustrate this constant vulnerability of populations to emerging and reemerging pathogens and their
respective risks to rapidly evolve into devastating outbreaks and pandemics, a partial list of emerging viral infectious
diseases that occurred between 1900 and 2020 is shown in Table 1.
[[Figure Omitted]]
Although nonemerging infectious diseases (not listed in Table 1), two other major mosquito-borne viral infections are yellow fever and dengue. Yellow fever, known for centuries and an Aedes mosquito-borne disease, is endemic in more than 40 countries across
Africa and South America. Since 2016, several yellow fever outbreaks have occurred in Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Brazil to cite a few10, raising major concerns about the adequacy of yellow fever vaccine supply. Four live attenuated vaccines
derived from the live attenuated yellow fever strain (17D)11 and prequalified by the WHO (World Health Organization) are available12.

Dengue is an increasing global public health threat with the four dengue virus types (DENV1–4) now cocirculating in most dengue endemic areas. Population growth, an expansion of areas hospitable for Aedes mosquito species and the ease of travel have all
contributed to a steady rise in dengue infections and disease. Dengue is common in more than 100 countries around the world. Each year, up to 400 million people acquire dengue. Approximately 100 million people get sick from infection, and 22,000 die from severe
dengue. Most seriously affected by outbreaks are the Americas, South/Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific; Asia represents ~70% of the global burden of disease (https://www.cdc.gov/dengue). Several vaccines have been developed13. A single dengue vaccine,
Sanofi Pasteur’s Dengvaxia based on the yellow fever 17D backbone, has been licensed in 20 countries, but uptake has been poor. A safety signal in dengue-seronegative vaccine recipients stimulated an international review of the vaccine performance profile, new
WHO recommendations for use and controversy in the Philippines involving the government, regulatory agencies, Sanofi Pasteur, clinicians responsible for testing and administering the vaccine, and the parents of vaccinated children14.

Two bacterial diseases, old scourges of humanity, are endemic and responsible for recurrent outbreaks and are increasingly antimicrobial resistant. Cholera, caused by pathogenic strains of Vibrio cholerae, is currently in its seventh global pandemic since 1817;
notably, the seventh pandemic started in 196115. Global mortality due to cholera infection remains high, mainly due to delay in rehydrating patients. The global burden of cholera is estimated to be between 1.4 and 4.3 million cases with about 21,000–143,000
deaths per year, mostly in Asia and Africa. Tragic outbreaks have occurred in Yemen and Haiti. Adding to rehydration therapy, antibiotics have been used in the treatment of cholera to shorten the duration of diarrhea and to limit bacterial spread. Over the years,
antimicrobial resistance developed in Asia and Africa to many useful antibiotics including chloramphenicol, furazolidone, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, nalidixic acid, tetracycline and fluoroquinolones. Several vaccines have been developed and WHO prequalified;
these vaccines constitute a Gavi-supported global stockpile for rapid deployment during outbreaks16.

Typhoid fever is a severe disease caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi). Antimicrobial-resistant S. Typhi strains have become increasingly common. The first large-scale emergence and spread of a novel
extensively drug-resistant (XDR) S. Typhi clone was first reported in Sindh, Pakistan17,18, and has subsequently been reported in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Iraq and Guatemala19,20. The world is in a critical period as XDR S. Typhi has appeared in
densely populated areas. The successful development of improved typhoid vaccines (conjugation of the Vi polysaccharide with a carrier protein) with increased immunogenicity and efficacy including in children less than 2 years of age will facilitate the control of
typhoid, in particular in XDR areas by decreasing the incidence of typhoid fever cases needing antibiotic treatment21,22.

A model of vaccine development for emerging infectious diseases

The understanding of emerging infectious diseases has evolved over the past two decades. A look back at the SARS-CoV
outbreak in 2002 shows that—despite a small number of deaths and infections—its high mortality and transmissibility
caused significant global disruption (see Table 1). The epidemic ended as work on vaccines was initiated. Since then, the
disease has not reappeared—wet markets were closed and transmission to humans from civets ceased. Consequently,
work on vaccines against SARS-CoV ended and its funding was cut. Only a whole inactivated vaccine23 and a DNA
vaccine24 were tested in phase 1 clinical trials.

Following a traditional research and development pipeline, it takes between 5 and 10 years to develop a vaccine for an
infectious agent. This approach is not well suited for the needs imposed by the emergence of a new pathogen during an
epidemic. Figure 1 shows a comparison of the epidemic curves and vaccine development timelines between the 2014
West African Ebola outbreak and COVID-19. The 2014 Ebola epidemic lasted more than 24 months with 11,325 deaths
and was sufficiently prolonged to enable the development and testing of vaccines for Ebola, with efficacy being shown
for one vaccine (of several) toward the end of the epidemic25,26. What makes the COVID-19 pandemic remarkable is
that the whole research and development pipeline, from the first SARS-CoV-2 viral sequenced to interim analyses of
vaccine efficacy trials, was accomplished in just under 300 days27. Amid increasing concerns about unmitigated
transmission during the 2013–2016 Western African Ebola outbreak in mid-2014, WHO urged acceleration of the
development and evaluation of candidate vaccines25. To ensure that manufacturers would take the Ebola vaccine to full
development and deployment, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, publicly announced support of up to US$300 million for
vaccine purchase and followed that announcement with an advance purchase agreement. Ironically, there had been
Ebola vaccines previously developed and tested for biodefense purposes in nonhuman primates, but this previous work
was neither ‘ready’ for clinical trials during the epidemic nor considered commercially attractive enough to finish
development28.

[[Figure Omitted]]

From these perceived shortcomings in vaccine development during public health emergencies arose the Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to timely vaccine development
capabilities in anticipation of epidemics29,30. CEPI initially focused on diseases chosen from a list of WHO priority
pathogens for EIDs—Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Lassa fever, Nipah, Rift Valley fever (RVF) and
chikungunya. The goal of CEPI was to advance candidate vaccines through phase 2 and to prepare stockpiles of vaccine
against eventual use/testing under epidemic circumstances. CEPI had also prepared for ‘disease X’ by investing in
innovative rapid response platforms that could move from sequence to clinical trials in weeks rather than months or
years, such as mRNA and DNA technology, platforms that were useful when COVID-19 was declared a global health
emergency in January 2020, and a pandemic in March 202031,32.

CEPI has been able to fund several vaccine development efforts, among them product development by Moderna, Inovio,
Oxford–AstraZeneca and Novavax. Providing upfront funding helped these groups to advance vaccine candidates to
clinical trials and develop scaled manufacturing processes in parallel, minimizing financial risk to vaccine developers. The
launch of the larger US-funded Operation Warp Speed33 further provided companies with funding—reducing risks
associated with rapid vaccine development and securing initial commitments in vaccine doses.

Vaccine platforms and vaccines for emerging infectious diseases

Vaccines are the cornerstone of the management of infectious disease outbreaks and are the surest means to defuse
pandemic and epidemic risk. The faster a vaccine is deployed, the faster an outbreak can be controlled. As discussed in
the previous section, the standard vaccine development cycle is not suited to the needs of explosive pandemics. New
vaccine platform technologies however may shorten that cycle and make it possible for multiple vaccines to be more
rapidly developed, tested and produced34. Table 2 provides examples of the most important technical vaccine
platforms for vaccines developed or under development for emerging viral infectious diseases. Two COVID-19 vaccines
were developed using mRNA technology (Pfizer–BioNTech35 and Moderna36), both showing safety and high efficacy,
and now with US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA)37,38 and European Medicines
Agency (EMA) conditional marketing authorization39,40. While innovative and encouraging for other EIDs, it is too
early to assert that mRNA vaccines represent a universal vaccine approach that could be broadly
applied to other EIDs (such as bacterial or enteric pathogens). While COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are a useful proof of
concept, gathering lessons from their large-scale deployment and effectiveness studies still requires more work and
time.

1NR

Disease turns their war scenarios

Morris, professor of history at Stanford University, 3/22/20 13
(Ian, “The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations,” Carnegie Council, Lexis)

There are several periods when we get discontinuities, when we get collapses in social development scores. You can see
several very clear examples on this graph.

When we look back at the history of what happens when we get these great collapses in social development, every time
we see the same five forces involved:

Mass migrations that the societies of the day cannot cope with. This is always in the mix. The mass migrations often lead
to huge epidemic diseases, as previously separate disease pools get merged. Epidemic diseases regularly killing half the
population, it would seem, tend to lead to state failure. Governments cannot cope with catastrophe on this scale. The
collapse of the governments tends to lead to breakdown in long-distance trade. Famines ensue, many, many more
people die. And then, always there in the mix in some way, although it varies in every case, is climate change. It always
plays into this. Now, I'm sure you don't need me to tell you these are forces that plenty of people are talking about as
threats we are facing in the early 21st century.

It seems to me perfectly possible that the 21st century is going to see another collapse of the kind we have seen so
many times in the past. So in some ways it's possible the 21st century might be a rerun of what has happened many
times before—but with one big difference: We now have nuclear weapons, which ancient people didn't have. The
Romans would have loved nuclear weapons. Luckily, they didn't have them. I think if we do stumble into a collapse on
the scale that I'm talking about here, we should seriously expect there is a possibility of these being used. It's quite
possible that the 21st century will see a disaster that dwarfs anything we have seen earlier.
Motive is our uniqueness argument---conservatives want bans now but only have a means with the
Aff’s precedent.
The Economist 22
The Economist, "A push to recognise the rights of the unborn is growing in America," 7-7-
2022, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/07/07/a-push-to-recognise-the-rights-of-the-unborn-is-growing-
in-america

What happens when America’s extreme anti-abortion activism meets its litigiousness ? Fetuses get their own lawyers.
In recent years some judges in conservative states have appointed legal representation for fetuses in abortion disputes
(generally, when a minor wants to terminate a pregnancy). The arrangement has some glaring holes. Lawyers cannot
meet or talk to their client or, supposing a fetus had wishes, guess at them. Yet with the recent overturning of Roe v
Wade—the ruling that had enshrined access to abortion as a constitutional right—the push for legal recognition of the
“ personhood ” of fetuses is set to grow .

Many anti-abortionists believe that life begins at conception. Proponents of “fetal personhood” go a step further,
arguing that the 14th Amendment of America’s constitution gives “equal protection of the laws” to all, including a
fertilised egg (despite the fact that as many as half of all zygotes do not implant and become pregnancies). Increasingly,
anti-abortion legislation is adopting the language of fetal personhood .

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the case that ended Roe, did not do so. But the Supreme Court’s
momentous ruling, on June 24th, criticised the view that “the Constitution requires the states to regard a fetus as lacking
even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed”. Laura Portuondo,
a fellow in reproductive rights and justice at Yale Law School, says this is likely to encourage the emergence of state
laws banning abortion explicitly in the name of fetal personhood.

Efforts to ban abortions on personhood grounds are “ethically clearer”, argues John Seago, the president of Texas Right
to Life, an anti-abortion organisation. Mr Seago was influential in the push to pass a stringent abortion ban in Texas last
year. “They are more honest about the ethical principle that underlines the belief that abortions are wrong,” he adds.
Emphasising fetal personhood is a natural next step, he says, in working towards a national ban . Like many others in
this camp, Mr Seago is “not content” for abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis.

Before Roe was overturned dozens of states introduced bills that banned abortion by establishing fetal personhood,
according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice think-tank. Because Roe rejected the idea and protected abortion
until a fetus was viable, such laws were blocked. Since its overruling, at least two states have sought to reinvigorate
them.

It is unclear if such laws will be allowed to stand . In Arizona the American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for
Reproductive Rights, two advocacy groups, are suing state officials over an abortion ban that would give “an unborn
child at every stage of development all rights, privileges and immunities…” on the basis that the law’s “ vagueness ”
violates the right to due process and puts providers and women at risk of prosecution.

Congress is not likely to pass an abortion ban based on fetal personhood any time soon. Elizabeth Sepper, a professor
at the University of Texas School of Law, says it would lead to impossible questions over matters from the census (should
it count fetuses?) to imprisoning pregnant women (can the state not imprison pregnant women since it would mean
locking up the fetus as well?). Most Americans would not, she says, “struggle between saving a one-month-old infant
and a container with dozens of embryos”.

The aff confers legal personality via conferring rights and duties---it’s a yes/no question
Chaudhary 21 – Ph.D. Scholar, Indian Law Institute, New Delhi.
Gyandeep Chaudhary, "Artificial Intelligence: The Personhood Conundrum," Artificial Intelligence and Law, ISBN 978-81-
949395-1-1, 2-1-2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3804265

Generally, the law confers on legal persons an absolute right and imposes special duties, permits them to own and
dispose of property and to sue others and to be sued by others while exercising these rights or in case of violation of
these rights by others. Therefore, a person is legally defined concerning ‘ rights’ and ‘ duty ,’ which means that a legal
person is subject to certain legal rights and duties24. Black’s Law Dictionary defines, “a person is a ‘human being,’ or
‘natural person,’ and ‘[a]n entity (such as a corporation) that is recognized by law as having the rights and duties of a
human being.’”25 Butterworths Australian Legal Dictionary defines a person as “a separate legal entity , recognized by
the law as having rights and obligations ” 26 which involves human beings and entities that “the law regards as capable
of rights and duties.”27 It further elucidates, with reference to Salmond, that the ability to exercise rights and duties is
a sole criterion of legal personhood , adding that all entities who have these capacities are legal persons and, on the
contrary, all who do not have them are not persons, irrespective of whether they are human beings or not28. Therefore,
the conferment of legal personality is inherent to the conferment of legal rights and the imposition of legal duties29 .

The aff spills over to fetal personhood---the issues of human uniqueness are fundamentally
interconnected
Kalman 22 – scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America
David Zvi Kalman, "What We Can All Learn From How Jewish Law Defines Personhood in A.I., Animals, and
Aliens," Slate, 7-25-2022, https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/artificial-intelligence-animals-aliens-personhood-
judaism.html

Earlier this year, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After
engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the A.I. was in fact a
sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood . Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him, and
almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong, but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of
articles, many with the premise “Yes, but what if he wasn’t?”

Attention to this case isn’t surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough to demonstrate that we’re
fascinated by the prospect of creating true artificial life. By this point, however, we ought to recognize that claims about
the advent of new techno-religions tend to be—to use an industry term—almost entirely vaporware, with exactly none
of the grassroots interest or staying power of the movements that are typically classified as religions. Anthony
Levandowski’s much-hyped Church of AI, founded in 2015, officially closed last year (do religions “close?”) after several
years of inactivity. Robotic priests, which have appeared in several countries, make for great dinner conversation, but
their functionality has been greatly overstated—they are closer to Tickle Me Elmos than GPT3—and they exist because
of a few idiosyncratic individuals, not mass demand, so they remain prototypes. To paraphrase an old Jewish joke:
Nobody cares if you dreamed that you were a leader of a hundred hasidim. We care if a hundred hasidim dreamed that
you were their leader.

The coverage of these truthfully rather small stories perpetuates the tech-centric narrative that everything is
“unprecedented.” But many religious traditions have been considering the prospect of nonhuman sentience for literal
centuries—and living algorithms are only one manifestation of questions both larger and deeper: What makes us
uniquely human? How much humanity must an entity exhibit before we treat it like a person?

Reframing the LaMDA question like this feels like turning off a quiet side street and finding oneself on a four-lane
highway, because it turns out that there are quite a few entities with claims to personhood , and some of these claims
are taken quite seriously indeed. On the fringes, we have aliens and animals : just three days after the Washington
Post reported on Lemoine’s claims, a New York’s highest court ruled that Happy, an elephant at the Bronx Zoo, cannot
be considered a person, despite scientific evidence that she, together with a handful of other species, experience a
sense of self. A few weeks before that, Congress held hearings on unidentified flying objects for the first time in half a
century, largely because of potential national security implications but in the process making it more acceptable to
soberly entertain evidence of extraterrestrial life.

In the center , of course, we have abortion . In the wake of Dobbs, conservatives across the country have advanced the
notion of “ fetal personhood ,” according to which even fertilized eggs would retain the same legal protection as human
beings. If enacted, such legislation could allow abortion providers to be prosecuted as murderers, threaten IVF, and
endanger women even in clear-cut situations of life-threatening pregnancy. Alabama and Georgia have already passed
laws classifying a fetus as a person, and a conservative Supreme Court is less likely to rule that such laws are
unconstitutional . Despite its legislative success, however, fetal personhood does not grapple with the complexity of
fetal development—including questions of viability or even awareness that the fetus exists in the first few weeks—and
its proponents show little interest in exploring its legal implications for taxation, immigration, the census, or even using
the HOV lane. As a result, it is hard to engage on fetal personhood as a philosophical question separate from its
existence as a legal strategy for policing women’s bodies.

Abortion, like artificial intelligence, exerts a powerful gravitational force that makes it seem impossible to bring them up
in conversation unless they are at the center—any way you do it weighs the whole set of ideas down. But in truth, all of
these debates—even those about aliens and animals— engage a broader idea , and one that is worth spending time on:
that the things we consider uniquely human may in fact be shared with beings from other worlds, beings we discover
in our algorithms, human beings in gestational form , or even creatures we’ve long lived beside but underestimated. In
the media, these have been covered as separate stories. From a religious perspective, they have long been connected.

Dobbs set the groundwork for years of legal personhood grey area---case law development in the
next few years is the determinant of the extent of fetal personhood efforts
Carlisle 22 – reporter for TIME in New York City
Madeleine Carlisle, "Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle Over Reproductive Rights," Time, 6-24-
2022, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/

In the early 1970s, when lawyers representing the state of Texas argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court,
they argued that a fetus is a person . Because a fetus is a person, they told the Justices, a fetus is entitled to all the
protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment including a right to “life.”

In 1973, the high court ruled that Texas was wrong . “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does
not include the unborn,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in his landmark opinion. The Supreme Court held that
personhood could not be granted to a fetus before “viability”—the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy when a fetus
can survive outside the womb—and established a constitutional right to abortion access.

But nearly 50 years later, Roe was overturned , and Justice Samuel Alito declared in the Supreme Court’s majority
opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”
Now, laws that establish fetal personhood —meaning they extend the legal rights of people to a fetus or embryo before
viability—could be the next frontier in the legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States.

Not all abortion bans establish fetal personhood. But all pre-viability fetal personhood laws ban abortion—and could
have even broader implications for reproductive healthcare access and the potential criminalization of pregnancy.
“Abortion laws regulate a procedure,” says Rebecca Kluchin, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, who
recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post criticizing such policies. “Fetal personhood laws allow the state to
regulate pregnant women.”
While 13 states had already enacted “trigger laws” designed to ban all or nearly all abortions once Roe was overturned,
at least six states have also introduced legislation to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood , according to the
Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Litigation over such laws has already begun . Last year, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey enacted an abortion
ban that gave “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other
persons, citizens, and residents.” Cathi Herrod, the president of the conservative Christian advocacy group Center for
Arizona Policy (CAP), says CAP supported Arizona’s law because they “stand for the belief that human life begins at the
moment of conception, that life is a human right, and unborn children deserve protection.” The ACLU of Arizona and the
Center for Reproductive Rights sued, and on Saturday filed an emergency motion asking a judge to block the
implementation of the law in the wake of the fall of Roe , arguing the law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due
process and could put abortion providers and pregnant people at risk of criminal prosecution. The judge has yet to rule
on the motion and a hearing will be held in July. (Brittni Thomason, spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general’s
office, says they “anticipate filing a legal brief” on the matter “next week.”)

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on fetal personhood in Dobbs: “Our opinion is not based on any view about if
and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how fetal
personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we will be living
in a legal gray area for a long time ,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates for
Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people, including women who have had abortions. “ Case
law will have to be developed , or statutes will have to be clarified , because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so
monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all play out.”

Critics of fetal personhood laws argue the state cannot bestow legal rights onto a fetus or embryo without subjugating
the rights of the pregnant person.

In theory, fetal personhood laws could impact the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that uses a combination
of medicines and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant the embryo into the uterus. A
round of IVF can create multiple embryos, which can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal personhood laws could also impact
contraception access, given that some members of the anti-abortion movement argue that IUDs and the emergency
contraception Plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and violate personhood, explains Mary Ziegler, an
abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. (The American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists say that those forms of contraception work by preventing fertilization in the first place.)

Fetal personhood laws could also have major implications for pregnant people. If a fetus is legally considered a person,
then child endangerment laws can apply. A state could potentially say pregnant people can only eat certain foods, or
punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or compel someone to have a cesarean section they are refusing, says
Kluchin. If a pregnant woman must undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, adds Ziegler, she could in theory be
told to delay care until she gives birth so she does not harm the fetus, as the New Yorker reports has “routinely”
occurred with pregnant women in Poland. (Many U.S. abortion laws have narrow exceptions for when the mother’s life
is in danger.)

Establishing fetal personhood could put people who self-induce abortions at risk for criminal prosecution, says Jolynn
Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. It could also impact people who miscarry. Leslie J. Reagan, a
professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says prior to Roe, if someone went to the hospital or
called a doctor about a miscarriage, they were often questioned on whether they had induced an abortion. Reagan’s
research found that beginning in the early 1900s and running up until Roe in the 1970s, doctors and nurses sometimes
functioned as the arm of the police, even threatening to deny care to patients if they did not provide information. “They
were all suspects,” says Reagan. “[Doctors] couldn’t tell if it was a natural miscarriage or whether they had induced it,
and they came to assume that anyone who came in bleeding, miscarrying, had induced it—and began to ask questions.”
Roe explicitly banned laws from establishing fetal personhood before the “viability” line. But the logic of fetal
personhood has been used for decades in policies and enforcement against women, particularly low-income women of
color, in the later stages of pregnancy.

A peer-reviewed study by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) found 413 cases from 1973 to 2005 of
women who were arrested or otherwise deprived of their physical liberty because they were accused of hurting their
fetus, often because they were found to have tested positive for drugs. And the numbers are picking up: a similar study
by NAPW examining data from 2006 to 2020 found roughly 1,331 examples of such cases. (The majority of cases in the
NAPW study resulted in healthy birth outcomes.) Some states have laws specifically extending a viable fetus separate
legal protections from those of the pregnant person, while in others prosecutors have extended child endangerment or
homicide laws to instances where a fetus was harmed.

With the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists are calling for broader laws that extend similar legal protections to
embryos and fetuses . Some were previously ruled unconstitutional , like Georgia’s HB 481, which includes language
that states “natural persons include an unborn child,” allows people to claim a fetus as a dependent on tax forms, and
requires state officials to count a fetus toward Georgia’s population for official population count purposes. The law was
struck down in 2020, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe on Friday, Georgia’s attorney general filed a notice
requesting the decision be reversed .

A federal fetal personhood law was also introduced last year in both chambers of Congress. The Life at Conception Act,
which would extend fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” beginning at the moment of fertilization, has 164
cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Still, many of these new laws will likely face legal challenges . While there is no longer a constitutional right to an
abortion, fetal personhood laws could still be challenged for violating state constitutions , or for violating the
constitutional right to due process because of vague wording , like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions that we’ll have to see laid out,” says Ziegler. “[Fetal personhood laws] are
much more likely to be enforceable than would have been the case before, but we still can’t be sure until the
litigation is done.”

Dabus doesn’t prove

Their Villasenor ev is in the context of Thaler – but Aff breaks the personhood barrier---the patent
ruling was premised on AI not being persons
Ebshara 22 – LL.M. 2021
Ali Ebshara, "AIs as Inventors: Thaler v. Hirshfeld – Berkeley Technology Law Journal," Berkeley Technology Law
Journal, 1-24-2022, https://btlj.org/2022/01/ais-as-inventors-thaler-v-hirshfeld/#:~:text=On%20September%202%2C
%202021%2C%20the,an%20inventor%20on%20a%20patent.

On September 2, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Thaler v. Hirshfeld ruled in favor of
the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), stating that an artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be listed as an
inventor on a patent.1 The plaintiff alleged he had created an AI capable of forming patentable creations and filed for a
patent application with the AI listed as an inventor.2 But the USPTO refused the application and stated that patent
laws do not expand to include machines within the definition of an inventor.3

In coming to its decision, the court considered the interpretation of the language in the Patent Act.4 Specifically, the
court considered the Act’s use of the term “ individual ” and whether it can expand to non-humans .5 The court relied
on the Dictionary Act to find that the term “individual” should be interpreted through its common usage .6 The court
also considered the use of personal pronouns like “himself” or “herself,” citing a case where the Supreme Court held
that words in statutes should be interpreted by the words adjacent to them.7 In this sense, the pronouns used before
the term “individual” help cement the fact that Congress had intended the term “individual” to refer to a person . The
court also relied on the Federal Circuit’s decisions holding that being an inventor requires mental capacity to conceive
the invention and that only natural persons can be inventors.8

IP law rights spillover to broader debates rights-bearing entities

Bennett and Daly 20 – Australian Centre for Health Law Research, School of Law, Queensland University of
Technology; School of Law, Strathclyde University

Belinda Bennett and Angela Daly, "Recognising rights for robots: Can we? Will we? Should we?" Law, Innovation and
Technology 12:1, 60-80, 2-27-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17579961.2020.1727063?
casa_token=J8KHytY3tM8AAAAA:yVyZJseEgUEF8-09Qjqut4TCr6c4hpiDl4Uma-4PuBC6Lja8DnfxXNn7y71rxXdN-
3TrrOb1ldDnBQ

This situation may change if the legal personhood of AIs and robots is recognised at some point; this may have flow-
on effects as to how specific areas of law recognise right-bearing actors , including IP. However, as can be seen earlier
in this article, legal personhood does not guarantee the same rights for all actors across all areas of law. Larger and more
complex policy issues may determine how different areas of law address the status of robots and AI, and their ability to
bear rights and responsibilities. These policy considerations may go to pre-existing debates around the rationales and
justifications for certain legal regimes , which may be unsettled . This is certainly the case with IP, where there has
been long-standing debate as to the basis for IP rights,118 which have also been referenced in the discussion on AI and
IP.119 Robots and AI may actually disprove or otherwise collapse these justifications for particular areas of law e.g. the
need to incentivize creation and invention as a justification for IP law which may be upset by robotic creations and
inventions which do not require financial incentivisation. One ironic outcome of the debate as to whether robots and AI
should have legal rights and responsibilities may be the undermining of justifications for certain legal regimes such as IP
law and thus undermining the regimes themselves, possibly to an extreme where no-one, human or otherwise,
possesses IP rights.120

While the debate in IP law as regards AI and robots is illuminating as regards how other areas of law might approach
the question of what status to give AI and robots, ultimately the larger question remains as to how the law more
generally should characterise AI and robots. The debate in IP law is not illuminating on this point, and indeed robots’
and AI’s lack of legal personality more generally has been an impediment for some for recognising robots and AI as an
‘owner’ of IP rights. It may well be that the law more generally will have to approach the rights- and responsibilities-
bearing by robots and AI on a case-by-case basis. However, as we have argued earlier in this article, that position is not
unknown to common law systems, which over time and across different legal systems and areas of law have recognised
different actors, both human and non-human, as the bearers of legal rights and responsibilities.

The aff requires expanded judicial interpretation of statutes that previously have been limited to
natural persons
Robinson 22 – Non-Lawyer Intern Robinson + Cole, Data Privacy + Security Insider
Blair Robinson, "AI Can’t Hold Patents Because They Require an “Inventor” to Be a “Natural Person”," JD Supra, 8-12-
2022, https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ai-can-t-hold-patents-because-they-7625419/

A federal court ruled last week in Thaler v. Vidal (4th Cir. Aug. 5, 2022), that an artificial intelligence (AI) system
cannot be listed as a named inventor on a patent application, affirming earlier rulings from the United States Patent
and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the lower court in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Dr. Richard Thaler brought the case to challenge a USPTO ruling that his patent applications were invalid because he
listed his AI system, called DABUS, as the inventor. According to the briefings, Thaler did not contribute to the
conception of these inventions, and any person having skill in the art could have taken DABUS’ output and reduced the
ideas in the applications to practice, meeting two requirements for US Patent applications.

The Circuit Court concluded that the Patent Act requires an “ inventor ,” as defined in § 100(f) of the Patent Act, to be a
“ natural person ” and that there was “ no ambiguity in the text .” According to the ruling, the statute’s use of the
pronouns “ his ” and “ her ” indicate that Congress intended patentholders to be human . Thaler has announced his
intention to seek further review of the Fourth Circuit’s ruling, with his attorney criticizing the court’s textualist approach
to interpreting the Patent Act. The Fourth Circuit picked up and immediately abandoned a more exciting line of
reasoning: patent applications require the applicant to certify their belief that they created the work, so an AI system
must be capable of forming beliefs to hold a patent. Thaler didn’t offer any evidence that DABUS could do so, but future
AI systems might become advanced enough to form beliefs. So, should a self-aware AI be granted legal personhood? The
Thaler decision points to no, but this court has hardly given the final word on the issue as AI systems increase in
complexity.

Granting AI rights or duties spills over to abortion---gives credence to fetal personhood theories
given fuzziness at the border of personhood
Solum 92 – Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University. B.A. 1981,
University of California at Los Angeles; J.D: 1984, Harvard Law School

Lawrence B. Solum, "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences," North Caroline Law Review vol. 70, no. 4, 4-1-
1992, https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3447&context=nclr

Thinking about the question whether AIs should ever be made legal persons does shed some light on the difficult
questions the law faces about the status of personhood . It is not that we have discovered a theory of personhood that
resolves hard questions about the borderlines of status. Rather, thinking about personhood for AIs forces us to
acknowledge that we currently lack the resources to develop a fully satisfactory theory of legal or moral personhood. 1
77 There are reasons for our uneasiness about the hard cases at the borderline of status , and the thought experiment
in which we have engaged can help us to get a firmer grasp on these reasons.

The first reason for our uneasiness concerns the relationship between our concept of personhood and our concept of
humanity . All of the persons we have met have been humans , and the overwhelming majority have been normal
humans who give clear behavioral evidence of being conscious, having emotions, understanding meanings, and so forth.
Given this coincidence (in the narrow sense), it is not surprising that our concept of person is fuzzy at the edges . For
most practical purposes, this fuzziness does not get in our way. We treat humans as persons, and we need not worry
about why we do so.

There are, however, occasions on which this strategy fails. Two of the most prominent cases occur at the beginning and
the end of human life. Abortion and the cessation of life-sustaining treatment for humans in permanent vegetative states both raise
questions about the status of personhood that cannot be answered by a simple comparison with a normal human
adult. A third case is that of those higher mammals that seem most likely to have a mental life that is similar to that of
humans.

In these cases, we can see the second reason for the persistence of uneasiness about the borderline of personhood.
With respect to fetuses , humans in vegetative states, and higher mammals, we lack the sort of evidence we would
need to establish a clear-cut case of personhood . Fetuses and humans in permanent vegetative states do not behave
as normal human adults do, but they are humans .17 Similarly, we have not been able to communicate with higher
mammals in a way that yields clear behavioral evidence of a mental life of human quality, and higher mammals like
whales are clearly not humans. In none of these cases is the behavioral evidence sufficient to establish that persons are
(or are not) present.

There is a third reason for our persistent doubts about the borderline of personhood. Cognitive science, so far, has not
yielded well-confirmed theories of the brain processes that underlie mental states like consciousness, emotion, and so
forth. Absent well-confirmed theories of underlying processes, we cannot make confident judgments that the
elements of personhood are lacking in particular cases.

IL
2NC---ESCs K2 EID Vaccines
ESC research is critical to vaccine development
Speidel 21 – Postdoctoral Researcher, Karolinska Institutet
Alessondra T. Speidel, "Cells from human foetuses are important for developing vaccines – but they’re not an
ingredient," The Conversation, 3-26-2021, https://theconversation.com/cells-from-human-foetuses-are-important-for-
developing-vaccines-but-theyre-not-an-ingredient-157484

Human embryonic cells have been used to develop safe and effective vaccines  since the 1960s and have played
varying roles in the rapid development of six of the eight authorised COVID-19 vaccines.

How it works

Modern vaccination has come a long way since 1796 when Edward Jenner infected his first “patient” with cowpox to
prevent smallpox. One modern vaccination strategy is to hack viruses to deliver immunity. The adenovirus, a virus that
can cause the common cold and other respiratory illness, has been re-engineered to create vaccines, including the
Johnson & Johnson, Oxford/AstraZeneca, CanSino and Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccines.

The adenovirus is stripped of its original instructions, or genes, that trigger disease, and replaced with blueprints for a
small part of the coronavirus – the spike protein. The body’s immune system recognises the spike protein as foreign and
makes antibodies that then protect against future coronavirus infection.

Viruses are not alive and need to infect cells to propagate. To make enough re-engineered adenovirus for vaccines,
cells that closely resemble the target of vaccination (humans) are needed. This is one reason scientists use human cells
to create adenovirus-based vaccines. The adenovirus used in these vaccines also tends to infect human cells better than
other animal cell types, making it easier to create more copies of the virus in human cells. For this, embryonic cell lines
are sometimes used.

Two embryonic cell lines have been used to develop COVID-19 vaccines: human embryonic kidney cells called HEK 293
and human embryonic retinal cells called PER.C6. The PER.C6 cell line is from an elective abortion in the Netherlands in
1985, and the HEK 293 cell line comes from an undisclosed source (either spontaneous miscarriage or elective
abortion) in the Netherlands in about 1972.

Johnson & Johnson used PER.C6 cells in their COVID-19 vaccine development , and the Oxford/AstraZeneca
vaccine used HEK 293 cells. CanSino Biologics and Gamaleya Research Institute’s Sputnik V vaccines have also used HEK
293 cells.

Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech used HEK 293 cells in their proof-of-concept tests to see effectively take up the genetic
instructions contained in these vaccines and produce the required spike protein. But human embryonic cell lines were
not used to make either company’s final vaccine.
HEK 293 and PER.C6 cell lines have been genetically altered to include the part of the adenovirus instructions that trigger
replication of adenoviruses. This allows the production of a large amount of the final vaccination product and allows the
removal of the adenoviral replication instructions in the vaccine.

This prevents further replication of the adenovirus in the patient. So the delivered dose of adenovirus infects a relatively
controlled number of host cells, which create a limited amount of coronavirus spike protein, enough for the body to
mount an immune response.

After a large enough dose of coronavirus spike-containing adenoviruses is collected, the adenovirus is purified and
isolated from the embryonic cell material for inclusion in the vaccine. No embryonic cells are included in the actual
vaccine.

Why are they used?

Before human embryonic cell lines were available, animal cell lines, such as monkey kidney, dog kidney and chicken
embryo cells, were used to develop vaccines.

Between 1955 and 1963, the polio vaccine was grown in monkey kidney cells that were later found to have been
infected with a virus called simian virus 40 (SV40), making vaccinated people vulnerable to SV40 infection. Modern
versions of the polio vaccine are still made in a similar manner but are now extensively filtered so that the original
animal cell content is removed.

The polio vaccine is also an example of a different type of vaccination from the adenovirus-based vaccines. This type of
vaccine is based on an inactivated version of the poliovirus that had been grown in monkey cells. Historically, concerns
about potential contamination or endemic viral content in animal cell lines encouraged the search for and use of
“ cleaner” human cell lines.

Embryonic cell lines are considered “ clean ” since they have not had time to be infected by other potentially
contaminating viruses , making them safe factories for generating adenovirus-based vaccines .

Using cells from electively aborted foetuses to develop vaccines is not new. Two human embryonic cell lines called WI-
38 and MRC-5, derived from electively aborted foetuses in Sweden in 1962 and the UK in 1966, respectively, have
historically been used to develop weakened or inactivated virus-based vaccines against chickenpox, shingles, rubella,
hepatitis A, polio and rabies.

The polio component of the Quadracell vaccine and rabies vaccine called Imovax are based on inactivated viruses
cultured in MRC-5 cells developed by Sanofi-Pasteur. Imovax replaced potentially dangerous, sometimes deadly versions
of the rabies vaccine that had been produced in animal tissue.

The hepatitis A, chickenpox and shingles vaccines by Merck were produced using MRC-5 cells. Merck’s rubella
component of the MMR vaccine along with the 1970 adenovirus vaccine were all produced using WI-38 cells.

In 2020, WI-38 cells were estimated to have saved over 10 million lives thanks to their contributions to the development
of many vaccinations.

Despite their relatively recent foray into the biomedical field, human embryonic cell lines have made formidable
contributions to modern medicine. They have played and promise to continue to play a major role in the rapid
development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Fetal personhood ends fetal tissue research---independently annihilates vaccine development

Boonstra 16 – Vice President for Public Policy at the Guttmacher Institute
Heather D. Boonstra, "Fetal Tissue Research: A Weapon and a Casualty in the War Against Abortion," Guttmacher
Institute, 2-9-2016, https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2016/fetal-tissue-research-weapon-and-casualty-war-against-
abortion

The debate over using human fetal tissue in medical research came roaring back on the national policy agenda last
summer when a group of antiabortion activists began releasing deceptively edited videos about Planned Parenthood’s
handling of fetal tissue donations for this purpose. Fetal tissue research dates back to the 1930s, and has led to major
advances in human health, including the virtual elimination of such childhood scourges as polio, measles and
rubella in the United States. 1,2 Today, fetal tissue is being used in the development of vaccines  against Ebola and HIV,
the study of human development, and efforts to treat and cure conditions and diseases that afflict millions of
Americans.

To ensure it meets the highest ethical standards, fetal tissue research has been subject to stringent laws and regulations
for decades. Abortion foes are now accusing health care providers and researchers of violating these laws and ethical
standards, in hopes of undermining the right to abortion and ending fetal tissue research . These attacks not only
threaten sexual and reproductive health and rights, but also pose a threat to the large numbers of people who could
benefit from fetal tissue research, given the wide range of conditions that such research might ameliorate. Any
impediment to ongoing scientific inquiry in the field caused by the current controversy would have substantial
consequences.

Importance Of Fetal Tissue Research

Unlike embryonic stem cell research, which uses cells from days-old embryos created through in vitro fertilization, fetal
tissue research uses tissue derived from induced abortion of pregnancies at or after the ninth week . 1,3 (Fetal tissue
obtained from a miscarriage is often not suitable for research purposes because of concerns about potential
chromosomal abnormalities that led to the miscarriage. 3) Researchers most often acquire fetal tissue from a tissue
bank or, sometimes, directly from a hospital or abortion clinic. 4

Because it is not as developed as adult tissue and is able to adapt to new environments, fetal tissue is critical to the
study of a wide variety of diseases  and medical conditions, according to the American Society for Cell Biology.
1 Researchers use fetal tissue—and cell cultures derived from such tissue, which can be maintained in a laboratory
environment for decades—to study fundamental biological processes and fetal development. According to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, fetal tissue continues to be an important resource for researchers studying
degenerative eye disease, human development disorders such as Down syndrome, and early brain
development (relevant to understanding the causes of autism and schizophrenia). 2

Fetal tissue has also been used to develop vaccines  that have saved and improved the lives of billions of people
worldwide. 1,2,5 The 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for work using cell cultures originating from fetal
tissue that led to the development of the polio vaccine. Vaccines for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella,
chickenpox, whooping cough, tetanus, hepatitis A and rabies were also created using fetal cell cultures , and
researchers are now using fetal cells to develop vaccines against other diseases , including Ebola , HIV and dengue
fever .

Fetal tissue key to fight current and future infectious diseases

Wadman ’15 -- reporter at Science, has written for Nature, Fortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal,
has covered biomedical research politics for twenty years.

Meredith Wadman, “The Truth about Fetal Tissue Research,” Nature, 12-09-2015,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-fetal-tissue-research/
The figures show that in 2014, the NIH funded 164 projects using the tissue, at a cost of $76 million. This is slightly less
than half of what the agency spent on work with human embryonic stem cells (ES cells), which has also been highly
controversial, and 0.27% of the $27.9 billion it spent on all research. (By comparison, the UK Medical Research Council
spent 0.16%—£1.24 million ($1.9 million)—of its total spending on research on five projects involving fetal tissue in the
12 months up to 31 March 2015.) Analysis of the NIH projects shows that the tissue is used most heavily for research on
infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS; in the study of retinal function and disease; and in studies of normal and
anomalous fetal development (see ‘Fetal tissue research by discipline’).

Opponents argue that the work is not necessary because other model systems and techniques can be used. “This is
antiquated science,” says David Prentice, the vice-president and research director at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the
research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List, which is an anti-abortion organization in Washington DC. “There are better
and, frankly, more successful alternatives.”

But supporters of the research counter that fetal tissue is legally obtained, that it would otherwise be destroyed, that
such work has already led to major medical advances and that, if there were better alternatives, they would turn to
them. “Fetal tissue is a flexible, less-differentiated tissue. It grows readily and adapts to new environments, allowing
researchers to study basic biology or use it as a tool in a way that can’t be replicated with adult tissue,” says Carrie
Wolinetz, the NIH’s associate director for science policy.

“I get very frustrated when misinformed people go on about how it can all be done with computer models or cell
cultures or stem cells or animals,” says Paul Fowler, a reproductive biologist at the University of Aberdeen Institute of
Medical Sciences, UK, who in January published a study using livers from aborted fetuses to probe the impacts of
maternal smoking on liver development. “In some areas, the human is absolutely dramatically different than rodents.”

Some argue that the entire episode represents a thinly cloaked attempt to attack and limit access to abortion by eroding
support and funding for Planned Parenthood. “People are talking about fetal tissue, but really what this discussion is
about is abortion,” says Shari Gelber, a specialist in maternal–fetal medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New
York City, who has argued for the value of the research.

Laboratory lines

Cell lines derived from aborted fetal tissue have been fairly commonplace in research and medicine since the creation in
the 1960s of the WI-38 cell strain, which was derived at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and MRC-5,
which came from a Medical Research Council laboratory in London (see Nature 498, 422–426; 2013). Viruses multiply
readily in these cells, and they are used to manufacture many globally important vaccines, including those against
measles, rubella, rabies, chicken pox, shingles and hepatitis A.

An estimated 5.8 billion people have received vaccines made with these two cell lines which, with others, have become
standard laboratory tools in studies of ageing and drug toxicity. (Research with such lines is not covered by US
regulations governing the use of fresh fetal cells and tissue nor captured in the NIH database.) In the past 25 years, fetal
cell lines have been used in a roster of medical advances, including the production of a blockbuster arthritis drug and
therapeutic proteins that fight cystic fibrosis and haemophilia.

Fetal personhood guts ESC research -- solves heart disease, strokes, Parkinson’s, and more
Sullivan and Costerisan ’08 -- Dennis M. Sullivan, MD, MA (Ethics), Director of the center for Bioethics at Cedarville
University, Cedarville, Ohio; Aaron Costerisan, MA (Ethics), medical student at Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

Dennis M. Sullivan and Aaron Costerisan, “Complicity and Stem Cell Research: Countering the Utilitarian Argument,”
Ethics and Medicine, Vol. 24:3, 151-158, Fall 2008.
Human embryonic stem cells (hES cells), derived from frozen embryos “left over” from in vitro fertilization (IVF)
procedures, have the promise of curing a variety of human ailments. Because hES cells can act as “starter” cells to grow
new nerve tissue, heart muscle tissue, or glandular tissue, many scientists are excited about potential treatments or
even cures for heart disease, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and many other disabling conditions . Yet
producing hES cells requires the destruction of the embryos that contain them, entities that many pro-life Christians
hold to be human persons with rights.

Current U.S. policy permits private companies to engage in hES cell research, but prohibits federal funding (e.g., through
the National Institutes of Health), except for a limited number of stem cell lines from embryos that had already been
destroyed.2 At issue are two major themes. First is the sanctity of human life. Many object to the destruction of
embryos to obtain hES cells, since they believe that embryos are human persons, and thus have basic human rights.B.

Fetal cells specifically key for disease prevention---low levels of replication ensure longevity
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia ’21 -- Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is a children's hospital in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “Vaccine Ingredients – Fetal Cells” reviewed by Paul A. Offit, MD, 9-21- 2021,
https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-ingredients/fetal-tissues

Vaccines for varicella (chickenpox), rubella (the “R” in the MMR vaccine), hepatitis A, rabies (one version, called
Imovax®) and COVID-19 (one U.S.-approved version, Johnson & Johnson (J&J)/Janssen) are all made by growing the
viruses in fetal cells. All of these, except the COVID-19 vaccine, are made using fibroblast cells. The COVID-19 vaccine
(J&J/Janssen) is made using fetal retinal cells. Fibroblast cell history Fibroblast cells are the cells needed to hold skin and
other connective tissue together. The fetal fibroblast cells used to grow vaccine viruses were first obtained from elective
termination of two pregnancies in the early 1960s. These same fetal cells obtained from the early 1960s have continued
to grow in the laboratory and are used to make vaccines today. No further sources of fetal cells are needed to make these
vaccines. The reasons that fetal cells were originally used included: Viruses need cells to grow and tend to grow better in
cells from humans than animals (because they infect humans). Almost all cells die after they have divided a certain
number of times; scientifically, this number is known as the Hayflick limit. For most cell lines, including fetal cells, it is
around 50 divisions; however, because fetal cells have not divided as many times as other cell types, they can be used
longer. In addition, because of the ability to maintain cells at very low temperatures, such as in liquid nitrogen, scientists
are able to continue using the same fetal cell lines that were isolated in the 1960s. As scientists studied these viruses in
the lab, they found that the best cells to use were the fetal cells mentioned above. When it was time to make a vaccine,
they continued growing the viruses in the cells that worked best during these earlier studies.

Research bans prevent any breakthroughs

Baumann 22 – Reporter for Bloomberg Law
Jeannie Baumann, "State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research," Bloomberg Law, 8-4-
2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research

Politicization of Research

Bratcher Goodwin also said researchers in states with personhood laws are at risk of a ban on their research. Those
threats are part of a greater movement of politicization of issues that have historically stayed out of the political arena.

Fetal tissue research , for example, has been around for decades but the Trump administration effectively stopped the
work in 2019. The Biden administration undid those restrictions last April.
“Part of the challenge is that it’s happening so quickly,” she said. “In some ways, things that were seen as sacred before
may no longer be . And even federal laws that would protect research or protect certain activities or certain procedures
may fall vulnerable to the courts , where those kinds of procedures are being challenged. ”

The 1993 NIH Revitalization Act permits donated fetal tissue to be used for research, which Bratcher Goodwin said raises
the question of where to draw the line between fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research.

“In the spaces where federal law has not spoken, then states are able to enact laws where the federal government has
not spoken and where their laws do not contravene federal laws or Supreme Court decisions,” she said. “It would not
be a surprise in this backdrop , that one would see lawmakers proposing laws that would ban research in these
areas.”

The aff’s granting of legal personality arms conservatives with a powerful rhetorical sword to slay
fetal personhood naysayers
***Note: Hal is a strong AI; Vanna is a Chimera***

Boyle 11 – William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School

James Boyle, "Endowed by Their Creator? The Future of Constitutional Personhood," The Future of the Constitution,
Governance Studies at Brookings, 3-9-2011, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/
2016/06/0309_personhood_boyle.pdf

For some－those who are opposed to abortion or who argue for the rights of non-human animals－the arrival of Hal
and Vanna might seem like a godsend . How can you
deny the moral claims of the dolphin, still less the
fetus, when you are willing to grant personhood to this bucket of bolts and transistors , this
puddle of senseless bioengineered flesh ? There is a long history in the debate over the franchise and over
constitutional rights, of disenfranchised groups using claims such as these. Some white women suffragists asked how
they could be denied the vote when African-American men had been granted it, using prejudices about racial privilege
to fight prejudices about sex privilege. A form of this argument is already being made by those who believe that it is
ludicrous to grant inhuman corporations legal personality but to refuse to do so for human fetuses . At the very least,
Hal and Vanna's arrival would dramatically expand the range of such appeals . “ Lesser
comparative otherness” can be a winning strategy . If, in twenty years time, you can generally predict
someone's position on the legal personality of artificial intelligences by their position on abortion, this guess will have
proven to be correct. But that outcome is far from assured.

Consider the challenge, almost the paradox, that Hal and Vanna present to the constitutional intuitions of a conservative
religious person who is strongly antiabortion. If one believes deeply in a divinely commanded natural order, in which
man has been given ‘dominion over the inferior creatures, over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air,’ in which
“unnatural” and “immoral” are synonyms, then a transgenic entity or an artificial intelligence is more likely to elicit a cry
of “heresy” than an egalitarian embrace. Yes, in some pragmatic sense, recognition of the rights of these entities might
benefit the push to grant constitutional personhood to the fetus . But the price would surely be too high for at least
one important wing of those who are morally opposed to abortion.

But now consider the mirror-image paradox that Hal and Vanna present to the pro-choice liberal who believes that the
moral story of history is an inexorable widening of personhood and civil rights to reach more and more groups,
overcoming bias about surface differences in order to expand the boundaries of legal respect. As I pointed out before,
Hal and Vanna might well seem like the next stop on the Kantian express, the next entity to cry “Am I not a man and a
brother?” to the rest of us in the hope we could overcome our parochial prejudice. Perhaps the very difficulties that we
have identifying some essential common humanness or personality may lead us to be more willing to push the
boundaries of those concepts outward, avoiding rather than solving the question of who counts as a person simply
by leaving fewer groups outside to complain. Yet the liberal for whom abortion rights are not just a constitutional issue
but the constitutional issue would surely be deeply wary of handing the pro-life forces another rhetorical weapon .
Why are fetuses not the next stop on the Kantian express, the last discrete and insular minority whose “otherness”
has allowed us to deny them personhood ? No, for at least some on each side of the abortion debate, Hal and Vanna
would produce strong cognitive dissonance rather than cries of strategic delight.

Fetal personhood collapses biomedical research

Baumann 22 – Reporter for Bloomberg Law
Jeannie Baumann, "State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research," Bloomberg Law, 8-4-
2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research

Biomedical scientists using embryonic stem cells or fetal tissue could find their studies at risk in conservative states
aiming to redefine personhood after the US Supreme Court’s rollback of abortion rights.

These states would give embryos and fetuses the same rights as people . A provision in Georgia’s new abortion law
includes embryos, once there’s a detectable heartbeat, which is at about six weeks, and fetuses in population counts.
The laws primarily are intended to focus on abortions, but they have downstream consequences on a range of issues,
including biomedical research .

“They’re not thinking through the other possible consequences of declaring that an embryo is a person from the
moment of fertilization,” Suzanna Sherry, a constitutional law scholar at Vanderbilt University, said. But it’s unclear how
it’ll play out since these questions haven’t been tested in court, she said.

If states grant personhood to embryos without specific exceptions for derivation of stem cells from embryos, then
there can be no stem cells on which to do research or develop therapeutic products, Mark Barnes, a research attorney
with Ropes & Gray LLP, said.

Embryonic stem cells offer great promise in health and medicine because they can turn into any cell in the human
body, offering the potential to repair and regenerate tissue damaged by a host of diseases . They also can be used to
screen drug candidates for toxicity. But embryos must be destroyed in the process of generating stem cell lines for
research. It’s illegal to create embryos specifically for research, but US researchers can use embryos from in vitro
fertilization that would otherwise be discarded and have been donated for research.

Pipeline in Jeopardy

The National Institutes of Health funded more than $2 billion in stem cell research in fiscal 2021, including $309 million
in embryonic stem cell research.

While there are just seven cell and gene therapies on the US market today, there are more than 1,000 cell and gene
therapies are currently in the pipeline, according to Faster Cures, with 50 to 75 therapies expected to be approved in the
US by 2030.

The global stem cell market is expected to grow to $27.7 billion by 2028 from nearly $12 billion in 2021, according to
one market report.
“If you can’t do IVF at all, then you won’t have stem cells,” Sherry said. “There’s no answer to that. Nobody knows. It’ll
have to be tested in court.”

The exact impact of personhood laws on biomedical research is unclear because it depends on the wording of each
state statute, and whether it defines a person from conception or implantation or a heartbeat.

But if a state defines a person from the moment of conception, then it would effectively ban research using embryos,
R. Alta Charo, who’s guided stem cell policies for the National Academies, President Barack Obama‘s transition team, as
well as Wisconsin and California stem cell research institutes, said in an interview.

“If that applies to an embryo outside the body, effectively, it means that in vitro fertilization for fertility purposes itself is
now in question,” Charo said.

IVF is a procedure with a high failure rate in which it’s common to implant embryos selectively based on whether an
embryo appears to be healthy. But failure to use every embryo would presumably become illegal under the new laws,
she said.

“All of these point inevitably to the conclusion that the deliberate use of an embryo in research or to derive
embryonic stem cell lines—which we know will destroy the embryo—is almost certainly going to be illegal . The
question is, is it illegal under what rubric? Is it homicide? Is it manslaughter?” Charo, a bioethicist and law professor at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.

Continued ESC research is key to get off the rock

-Microgravity stunts differentiation
-Studying embryonic stem cells k2 turning off the gene that causes that
-Advancements in heart disease research
-Studying cells in space-like conditions
Oakland University News ’22 – news surrounding Oakland University campus, practices, faculty, alumni, and other
noteworthy events.

Oakland University News, “OU professor studying effects of microgravity on human pluripotent stem cells,” Oakland
University News, 7-21-2022, https://www.oakland.edu/oumagazine/news/

As NASA prepares to return to the moon in 2025, Dr. Luis Villa-Diaz and a team of researchers at Oakland University
have been studying the effects of microgravity — the closest that we can get on Earth to zero gravity, like that found on
the International Space Station — on human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC). These cells have the ability to remain
undifferentiated by self-renewal mechanisms or to differentiate into virtually any cell type in the human body.

Dr. Villa-Diaz’s lab has been doing research with human pluripotent stem cells like embryonic stem cells approved by
the federal government and with induced-pluripotent stem cells generated in his lab.

“Before we go back to the moon or colonize Mars, we need to investigate what’s going to happen to every single cell
in the body in that environment,” said Villa-Diaz, an assistant professor in the Biological Sciences and Bioengineering
departments at Oakland University. “In regular gravity, hPSCs are able to differentiate, but we wanted to see whether
they are able to differentiate in space or under microgravity conditions. We found that they are, but to a lesser degree.
We also observed that they proliferate faster. This confirms that microgravity enhances their self-renewal, but prevents
differentiation.”
This indicates that the behavior of hPSCs is different in microgravity conditions.
This research, which was published this month in npj Microgravity — an open-access scientific journal dedicated to
covering important research in the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering fields — could lead to a better
understanding of the effects of microgravity on humans in space, as well as its potential use in personalized and
regenerative medicine.

“One potential application of this research on Earth is that we could produce more pluripotent stem cells in a faster way
if we grow them in microgravity conditions,” Villa-Diaz said. “For example, hPSCs can be induced to make
cardiomyocytes, which are cells of the heart. If I have a heart attack, billions of my cardiomyocytes are going to die. In
the future, if we want to regenerate the heart with cell transplantation, we will need to replace those cells with healthy
cells, and the faster way to get that large number of cells required would be through microgravity.”
Working in collaboration with graduate and undergraduate students and faculty from the Department of Biological Sciences, Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, and Department of Bioengineering at Oakland University, Villa-Diaz designed a fast-rotating 2-D clinostat to
study the biological effects of simulated microgravity on hPSCs.

“We put the cells into rotation in this device in an incubator and then we grow them and see what happens,” Villa-Diaz said. “We grow them for
five days and then stop. What we observed is their proliferation actually increased compared to normal gravity conditions.

“At the same time, another experiment we did is we induced differentiation during the five days. What we observed is
the cells are able to start differentiating when we provide these signals in microgravity; however, compared to normal
conditions, their differentiation is stunted. Microgravity is kind of fighting the differentiation because it’s actually
enhancing their self-renewal and preventing differentiation.”
Using RNA-sequencing analysis, researchers found that PSMD11, a protein coding gene whose role is to degrade other proteins — particularly
those used in cell differentiation — was highly expressed in almost every single pathway modified under microgravity conditions.

“Essentially, PSMD11 is keeping them from differentiating,” Villa-Diaz said. “If we can figure out a way to ‘turn it down,’
we can induce differentiation in microgravity.”

In addition, learning more about the role of the PSMD11 gene on differentiation in normal stem cells could also lead to a
greater understanding of its impact on abnormal stem cells, such as cancer stem cells.

“If microgravity enhances self-renewal in cancerous cells and we have determined the mechanism that does that, we
can start targeting those particular signaling mechanisms and prevent their proliferation,” Villa-Diaz said. “This is
important because if microgravity or zero gravity affects cancer stem cells in the same manner that hPSCs , it would have
bad implications for the health of astronauts in space.”

Space exploration solves extinction---otherwise, life is terminally doomed

Kovic, 18 – co-founder and president of the thinktank ZIPAR, the Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research. He is also
co-founder and CEO of the consulting firm ars cognitionis. He has a PhD in political communication, University of Zurich

Marko Kovic, “Why space colonization is so important,” Medium. November 10, 2018.
https://medium.com/@marko_kovic/space-colonization-why-nothing-else-matters-a877723f77d4

Space or bust: Why we must reach for the stars

Why should we pursue space colonization in the first place? Don’t we have more pressing problems today, on Earth?

Yes, we do have many problems on Earth today, and we should try to solve them. But space colonization is just that: A
strategy for dealing with certain problems. An the problems that space colonization would be dealing with are,
arguably, among the greatest problems of them all: Existential risks; risks that might lead to the extinction of
humankind [1]. Currently, all of our proverbial existential eggs are in the same basket. If a natural existential risk strikes
(for example, a large asteroid colliding with Earth) or if a man-made existential risk results in a catastrophic outcome (for
example, runaway global warming [2, 3]), all of humankind is at risk because humankind is currently limited to planet
Earth. If, however, there are self-sustainable human habitats beyond Earth, then the probability of an irreversibly
catastrophic outcome for all of humankind is drastically reduced.

Investing in space colonization today could therefore have immense future benefits. Using resources today in order to
make space colonization possible in the medium-term future is not a waste, but a very profitable investment. If
humankind stays limited to Earth and if we go extinct as a consequence of doing so, then we will all the billions of life
years and billions of humans who might have come to exist — and who would have experienced happiness and
contributed to humankind’s continued epistemic and moral progress.

Fetal Personhood DA
Black swans are inevitable and kill us within decades unless we leave.
Malik 13 – Space.com Editor in Chief
Tariq Malik, “Stephen Hawking: Humanity Must Colonize Space to Survive,” Space.com. April 13, 2013.
https://www.space.com/20657-stephen-hawking-humanity-survival-space.html

Famed British cosmologist Stephen Hawking sees only one way for humanity to survive the next millennium: colonize
space. And he's probably right.
In a lecture Tuesday in Los Angles, the 71-year-old Stephen Hawking said humanity would likely not survive another
1,000 years "without escaping beyond our fragile planet," according to the Associated Press.  Hawking has long been an
advocate of space exploration as a way to ensure humanity's survival. Living on a single planet leaves us at risk of self-
annihilation through war or accidents, or a cosmic catastrophe like an asteroid strike.

Every second counts -- 10 nonillion lives are saved per second

Bostrom, Research Fellow – Oxford U., 3
(Nick, “Astronomical Waste”, Utilitas, Vol. 15, No. 3, http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html/)

From a utilitarian perspective, this huge loss of potential human lives constitutes a correspondingly huge loss of
potential value. I am assuming here that the human lives that could have been created would have been worthwhile
ones. Since it is commonly supposed that even current human lives are typically worthwhile, this is a weak assumption.
Any civilization advanced enough to colonize the local supercluster would likely also have the ability to establish at least
the minimally favorable conditions required for future lives to be worth living. The effect on total value, then, seems
greater for actions that accelerate technological development than for practically any other possible action. Advancing
technology (or its enabling factors, such as economic productivity) even by such a tiny amount that it leads to
colonization of the local supercluster just one second earlier than would otherwise have happened amounts to bringing
about more than 10^31 human lives (or 10^14 human lives if we use the most conservative lower bound) that would
not otherwise have existed. Few other philanthropic causes could hope to match that level of utilitarian payoff.

1---Weaponization---even if a reasonable standard could work, conservatives will twist anything

into a justification for fetal rights.
Boyle 11 – William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School
James Boyle, "Endowed by Their Creator? The Future of Constitutional Personhood," The Future of the Constitution,
Governance Studies at Brookings, 3-9-2011, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/
2016/06/0309_personhood_boyle.pdf
Both the definition of legal persons, and the rights accorded to those persons, have changed over time. For many
liberals, the history of constitutional law over the last two centuries presents a story of Kantian progress, a tale of
triumphant universalization. Little by little, the rights promised in the Declaration of Independence and elaborated in
the Bill of Rights were extended from one race and one sex to all races and both sexes. Progress may have been gradual,
intermittent or savagely resisted by force. There may have been back-sliding. But in the end the phrase “all men”
actually came to mean all men, and women too. In this view, the liberal project is marked by its attempt successfully to
universalize constitutional norms, to ensure that contingent and unchosen attributes such as sex and race are not
used to cabin constitutional guarantees of equality, and that we abolish those legal status categories －slave, for
example－which deny human beings legal personality. In fact, moral progress consists precisely of the broadening of
individual and national sympathies to recognize common humanity beneath the surface. We first recognize that all
human beings are full legal persons and then accord all legal persons equal constitutional rights.

Seen through the lens of this account, the genetic chimera, the clone and the electronic artificial intelligence are
merely the next step along the way. Having fought to recognize a common personhood beneath differences of race and
sex, we should do the same thing with the technologically created “persons” of the 21st century, looking beneath
surface differences that may be far greater. The picture of a slave in chains that illustrated John Whittier Greenleaf's
poem “My Countrymen in Chains” carried the slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” Should we look at Vanna and Hal
in exactly the same way? We are their creators. Do we owe them unalienable rights ?

Those who fought for equal rights over the last two centuries had to deal with a multitude of claims that women and
African-Americans were not in fact equal persons, that they were somehow deficient in rationality, biblically
subordinated, not fully human or a more primitive branch on the evolutionary tree. Yet whatever the enormous political
obstacles, there seems to be a certain conceptual straightforwardness in making an argument for common humanity in
those who are in fact human and then arguing that all humans are entitled to be treated as legal persons.10

But even here, within the familiar boundaries of our own species , it is not so simple. Moral intuition and belief
diverge markedly at the beginning and the end of life . We disagree radically on the status of the fetus and even, if much
less so, about the individual in a coma with no brain stem activity at all. How much harder will it be to come to
agreement on the status of a chimeric construct or an artificial intelligence ? The attempt to
define a single
constitutional standard for common personhood would be immensely difficult even if all
participants in the discussion were not constantly scrutinizing every statement －as they
inevitably would be －for its implications in the debate over the personhood of the fetus.
Especially with the current court.
Kalman 22 – scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America
David Zvi Kalman, "What We Can All Learn From How Jewish Law Defines Personhood in A.I., Animals, and
Aliens," Slate, 7-25-2022, https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/artificial-intelligence-animals-aliens-personhood-
judaism.html

Earlier this year, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After
engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the A.I. was in fact a
sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood . Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him, and
almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong, but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of
articles, many with the premise “Yes, but what if he wasn’t?”

Attention to this case isn’t surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough to demonstrate that we’re
fascinated by the prospect of creating true artificial life. By this point, however, we ought to recognize that claims about
the advent of new techno-religions tend to be—to use an industry term—almost entirely vaporware, with exactly none
of the grassroots interest or staying power of the movements that are typically classified as religions. Anthony
Levandowski’s much-hyped Church of AI, founded in 2015, officially closed last year (do religions “close?”) after several
years of inactivity. Robotic priests, which have appeared in several countries, make for great dinner conversation, but
their functionality has been greatly overstated—they are closer to Tickle Me Elmos than GPT3—and they exist because
of a few idiosyncratic individuals, not mass demand, so they remain prototypes. To paraphrase an old Jewish joke:
Nobody cares if you dreamed that you were a leader of a hundred hasidim. We care if a hundred hasidim dreamed that
you were their leader.

The coverage of these truthfully rather small stories perpetuates the tech-centric narrative that everything is
“unprecedented.” But many religious traditions have been considering the prospect of nonhuman sentience for literal
centuries—and living algorithms are only one manifestation of questions both larger and deeper: What makes us
uniquely human? How much humanity must an entity exhibit before we treat it like a person?

Reframing the LaMDA question like this feels like turning off a quiet side street and finding oneself on a four-lane
highway, because it turns out that there are quite a few entities with claims to personhood , and some of these claims
are taken quite seriously indeed. On the fringes, we have aliens and animals : just three days after the Washington
Post reported on Lemoine’s claims, a New York’s highest court ruled that Happy, an elephant at the Bronx Zoo, cannot
be considered a person, despite scientific evidence that she, together with a handful of other species, experience a
sense of self. A few weeks before that, Congress held hearings on unidentified flying objects for the first time in half a
century, largely because of potential national security implications but in the process making it more acceptable to
soberly entertain evidence of extraterrestrial life.

In the center , of course, we have abortion . In the wake of Dobbs, conservatives across the country have advanced the
notion of “ fetal personhood ,” according to which even fertilized eggs would retain the same legal protection as human
beings. If enacted, such legislation could allow abortion providers to be prosecuted as murderers, threaten IVF, and
endanger women even in clear-cut situations of life-threatening pregnancy. Alabama and Georgia have already passed
laws classifying a fetus as a person, and a conservative Supreme Court is less likely to rule that such laws are
unconstitutional . Despite its legislative success, however, fetal personhood does not grapple with the complexity of
fetal development—including questions of viability or even awareness that the fetus exists in the first few weeks—and
its proponents show little interest in exploring its legal implications for taxation, immigration, the census, or even using
the HOV lane. As a result, it is hard to engage on fetal personhood as a philosophical question separate from its
existence as a legal strategy for policing women’s bodies.

Abortion, like artificial intelligence, exerts a powerful gravitational force that makes it seem impossible to bring them up
in conversation unless they are at the center—any way you do it weighs the whole set of ideas down. But in truth, all of
these debates —even those about aliens and animals— engage a broader idea , and one that is worth spending time on:
that the things we consider uniquely human may in fact be shared with beings from other worlds, beings we discover
in our algorithms, human beings in gestational form , or even creatures we’ve long lived beside but underestimated. In
the media, these have been covered as separate stories. From a religious perspective, they have long been connected.

AND because courts have huge discretion.

Stone 72 – Professor of Law, University of Southern California; A.B. 1959, Harvard; LL.B. 1952, Yale; Chairman,
Committee on Law and the Humanities, Association of American Law Schools.

Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects," Southern California Law
Review 45, 1972, https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christopher-d-should-trees-have-standing.pdf

But this is not the same as to suggest that introducing the notion of the "rights" of trees and rivers would accomplish
nothing beyond the introduction of a set of particular rules like (R1) and (R2), above. I think it is quite misleading to say
that "A has a right to ... " can be fully explicated in terms of a certain set of specific legal rules, and the manner in which
conclusions are drawn from them in a legal system. That is only part of the truth. Introducing the notion of something
having a "right" ( simply speaking that way ), brings into the legal system a flexibility and open-endedness that no
series of specifically stated legal rules like R 1, R2, R3, ••• Rn can capture. Part of the reason is that " right " (and other
so-called "legal terms" like "infant," "corporation," "reasonable time") have meaning-vague but forceful-in the
ordinary language, and the force of these meanings, inevitably infused with our thought, becomes part of the context
against which the "legal language" of our contemporary "legal rules" is interpreted . 109 Consider, for example, the
"rules" that govern the question, on whom, and at what stages of litigation, is the burden of proof going to lie?
Professor Krier has demonstrated how terribly significant these decisions are in the trial of environmental cases, and yet, also,
how much discretion judges have under them.11° In the case of such vague rules, it is context-senses
of
direction, of value and purpose- that determines how the rules will be understood, every bit
as much as their supposed "plain meaning." In a system which spoke of the environment "having legal
rights," judges would, I suspect, be inclined to interpret rules such as those of burden of proof far more liberally from
the point of the environment. There is, too, the fact that the vocabulary and expressions that are available to us
influence and even steer our thought. Consider the effect that was had by introducing into the law terms like "motive,"
"intent," and "due process." These terms work a subtle shift into the rhetoric of explanation available to judges; with
them, new ways of thinking and new insights come to be explored and developed.111 In such fashion, judges who
could unabashedly refer to the "legal rights of the environment" would be encouraged to develop a viable body of
law-in part simply through the availability and force of the expression. Besides, such a manner of speaking by courts
would contribute to popular notions, and a society that spoke of the "legal rights of the environment" would be inclined
to legislate more environment-protecting rules by formal enactment.

If my sense of these influences is correct, then a society in which it is stated, however vaguely, that "rivers have legal
rights" would evolve a different legal system than one which did not employ that expression, even if the two of them
had, at the start, the very same "legal rules" in other respects.

2---Lesser Otherness---conservatives will argue fetuses are closer to grown humans than AI to
justify fetal rights---those appeals would be incredibly persuasive post plan---that’s 1NC Boyle.
3---Bright-lines---the plan necessitates them BUT they’ll be vague justifying fetal personhood.
Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine. B.A.,
Cornell University, 1990; J.D., 1994, Cornell University, “Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal
Personhood,” 59 Hastings L.J. 369, December 2007, WestLaw

Since the focus of this paper is on legal, not moral status, the evaluation of fetal interests is constrained . Legal and
moral evaluations are intertwined, but not necessarily equivalent. As stated previously, moral status, or the lack of it,
does not determine legal personhood status . An entity may lack moral status, but still be considered a legal person.
Conversely, an entity may have moral status but not be considered a legal person. In such a case, the lack of legal
recognition would not negate the entity's moral status, and the absence of legal obligations would not imply the
absence of moral obligations.

The concern is not with determining at what point the fetus develops any interests, but at what point those interests
should form the basis of legal personhood . This is a question of line drawing --legal personhood must come into play
at some point in time even though fetal interests likely develop along a continuum . The law is a rather blunt
instrument . Although there may be a way to achieve a somewhat nuanced legal approach by recognizing juridical
personhood at an early stage of fetal development, and subsequently natural personhood at a later stage, both
designations still must be based on fairly easily identifiable standards --in other words, we must still draw lines . The
final determination of whether and how to draw distinctions between different developmental levels of human beings
may depend on practical needs in identifying clear legal lines. If this is the case, then the lack of legal personhood
recognition will not negate the moral claims of the entity in question. The entity may still have certain moral rights, and
others will have moral obligations to respect those rights.
There are a number of possible biological events that can be used to determine legal status, each having significance in different ways. I will not go through all the potential biological landmarks in the subsections that follow. Rather, this section considers the legal significance of, and interplay between, three important factors in fetal development: sentience (consciousness), birth, and physical development. I choose not to focus on viability
since it is a changing line (as technology improves, viability will push back towards conception), as well as an incredibly imprecise standard-- does the standard mean viable for a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, or longer?

a. Sentience

Prior to the development of sentience, which occurs in the latter part of the second trimester, the fetus does not have interests of its own and thus does not have the requisite basis for natural personhood. Sentience, *394 or conscious awareness, is necessary to feel--for example, fetuses cannot perceive pain prior to sentience (and thus have no interest in avoiding pain).103 Sentience cannot occur until the neural system is sufficiently
developed to allow for brain functioning and consciousness, at around twenty-two to twenty-four weeks.104 While this currently provides a rough match with the present standards for viability, unlike viability the timeline will not change as medical technology advances. Eventually artificial womb technology may suffice to keep the ex utero fetus alive from the embryonic stage, and allow development to continue. But prior to sentience the
fetus will not have interests, regardless of its location in or outside the body. This is not to say that artificial womb technology should not be used prior to sentience, but merely that its use cannot be based on regard for the fetus's own interests, but must refer to the interests of others.

I have pointed out previously that natural personhood is rarely, if ever, granted merely on the basis of the interests of others. It is hard to understand how the interests of currently recognized people would suffer if we do not include non-sentient fetuses on an equal legal footing. Fetuses are not currently recognized as natural persons, and there is little or no evidence that the legal rights and interests of currently recognized persons have
suffered. An argument to recognize fetuses as natural persons should bear the burden of showing that the interests of others are harmed, or else it must rest on the interests of the fetus itself. As noted above, prior to sentience fetuses lack interests of their own, under the Feinberg/Steinbock approach, thus juridical personhood prior to sentience would be inappropriate. Arguably, the Supreme Court jurisprudence recognizing increasing
state interests after viability (which maps roughly onto sentience) is compatible with the notion that prior to sentience the interests at stake (those of others, not the fetus) are too weak to provide significant legal protections for the fetus itself. Others are certainly free to reject the Feinberg/Steinbock concept of interests, and attempt to develop a different theory of interests that would apply to fetuses. My point is that if fetuses are to be
considered natural persons because of their interests, an argument must be made that they have interests, using a coherent understanding of the term that can be applied across different entities. If fetuses are to be considered natural persons because of the interests of others, there must be some argument about how the interests of others are harmed by the exclusion of fetuses in the category of natural persons. All of this is not to say
that fetuses are not *395 entitled to legal protection, or that juridical personhood is not a possibility, merely that natural personhood prior to sentience is not warranted.

But what happens after sentience? At this point fetuses have claims based on their own interests. What would be the effect of granting natural personhood status to fetuses when they reach the point of sentience? Significantly greater restrictions on abortion would result as states would have an obligation to protect fetuses, just as they now do to protect already-born children. Moreover, designating fetuses as natural persons prior to birth
would limit the rights of other currently recognized natural persons--particularly pregnant women whose decisions during pregnancy might be constrained in the same way that parents' decisions are constrained by the interests of their already born children. Fetal interests at the point of sentience are not strong enough to justify these limitations. Arguably newborn interests at the point of birth are not sufficient either. Rather, the natural
person designation at birth is based on protection of the interests of others. However, during the prenatal period, the interests of others are not strong enough to justify granting fetuses full natural personhood status or protections while still in utero based solely on sentience--other factors must also be present. Those who disagree with this position should have the burden of showing that limiting the rights of others (by designating fetuses
as natural persons) would be necessary in order to fully protect the rights of currently recognized people.

Would it be appropriate to consider a sentient in utero fetus a juridical person with certain legal protections prior to birth? The answer here is likely yes. It would be a matter of state choice (as are other juridical personhood designations). Those states that choose to afford sentient fetuses juridical personhood status would need to align the rights given to the interests at stake. The fact that sentience is not possible prior to twenty-two and
twenty-four weeks gestation does not mean that the fetus has fully developed cognition and perception. At this point, for example, the fetus may not be able to feel pain, and thus has no interest in avoiding pain.105 If this is so, a state should not be able to require fetal anesthetic use during all abortions at twenty-two weeks based on sentience.106 Legislation providing specific protections prior to birth, but *396 after sentience, is an area
which states might explore in more detail.

b. Cognitive and Physical Development

The closer to birth, the greater the interests of the fetus, and the greater the interests of others in providing the same kinds of protections as are granted to currently recognized persons such as children. If we give newborn infants legal protections based on these interests, why not fully developed fetuses? It is hard to understand why an entity at this stage should not be considered as having equal legal status as an entity outside the womb.
But one problem with a “development” standard is that it does not take into account fetuses that have problems in development. As a result, we might set the standard based on gestational age, rather than “full development.”

At the end of the eighth month of pregnancy (thirty-two weeks), in most cases, all of the fetus's internal and external organ structures have substantially developed.107 Natural personhood and thus constitutional protections could apply at this late stage of development. The result would change in the analysis of both abortions and forced caesarian-sections after this time point--the rights of the pregnant woman would be balanced against
the rights of a “fetal natural person.” I will discuss this in more detail in the following section. While it may be tempting to change the timeline for according natural personhood, there are reasons to be wary. First, fetal age determinations can be inexact.108 Second, even in the absence of natural personhood protections prior to birth, the fetus is entitled to significant moral status--status which may be recognized under a juridical
personhood framework. Pregnancy terminations at this point are highly restricted; except in cases of severe fetal abnormality, they are almost always undertaken with the goal of achieving a live birth (e.g., ending the pregnancy, but not the life of the fetus). In cases of severe fetal abnormality, the issues raised are similar to those raised by neonatal euthanasia.109 The only difference is the added complication of the pregnant woman's right
of bodily integrity, which plays a significant role in the analysis and does not change if the fetus is considered a natural person. As a result, it may not be necessary to consider the fetus a natural person prior to birth to achieve fetal protections, and may significantly complicate the situation to do so.

*397 Juridical personhood based on developmental or gestational age may be appropriate. This is already done implicitly by states which accord fetuses limited rights prior to birth by recognizing a variety of causes of action for harm done to fetuses at different stages of development. Alternatively, gestational age might serve as a bright line cut-off for sentience. Thus a state might explicitly grant juridical personhood protections at twenty-
two weeks gestation, on the assumption that for a normally developing fetus that point marks the earliest time at which sentience is possible. For fetuses which are not experiencing normal development, the presumption of personhood could be rebutted--much as is done currently in determining viability or lack thereof.

c. Birth

There are practical reasons for choosing birth as the latest point at which personhood protections adhere, and thus at which the label “natural person” must be applied. Likewise, a fetus born prematurely, but after sentience, should also be considered a natural person and treated as a full-term newborn would be treated under the law. Except in the absence of brain material or brain activity, it is practically impossible to determine sentience
using current medical technology, and treatment decisions for premature neonates are based on rough approximations of development, rather than evaluations of sentience. But what about a fetus “born”110 clearly prior to sentience,111 as might be the case if artificial womb technology advances?112

The answer depends on whether there are interests of others in according legal personhood protections, as is the case with anencephalic infants.113 Unlike anencephalic infants, however, these entities may not *398 share any form with later developed humans. Would an eight-week old fetus be considered a legal person if in an artificial womb? The interests of others do not seem strong enough to accord natural personhood protections in
this case. But this may be a situation in which juridical personhood protections are appropriate. A living but pre-sentient fetus outside the mother's body (in an artificial womb) creates an unusual situation. In utero fetuses have the ancillary protections of their mother's legal personhood. But ex utero fetuses would not have these protections. While parental property interests would function and may provide a basis for decision making and
control (as they do in the ex utero embryo context),114 we may well need the additional identification of the developing ex utero fetus as a separate legal actor. As artificial womb technology advances, this question should receive more thought and analysis.

d. Summary: Juridical to Natural Persons

Thus far I have argued that sentience is crucial for the development of fetal interests, and birth and external form each play a role in considering the interests of others. The same constraints that limit the scope of juridical personhood rights for embryos function in the pre-consciousness context for fetuses. Granting juridical personhood status to fetuses prior to sentience may undermine the rights of currently recognized persons--for
example pregnant women's rights to make a variety of decisions in the first trimester would be limited. Even apart from abortion decisions, if we grant fetuses such status, women may have constraints placed upon their decisions to engage in risky activities, or to partake of legal substances that are harmful to the fetus. In order to justify this, proponents would need to show that the legal recognition was necessary in order to safeguard
rights of currently recognized natural persons, and that the result would be a greater protection of the rights of natural persons overall. This is an extremely difficult argument to make, and may fail in many situations. Arguments that the lack of legal recognition of fetal rights prior to sentience harms the rights of people generally, ignores the harm to the rights of people resulting from the recognition itself. Thus prior to sentience the fetus
should be considered neither a natural, nor a juridical person. There may be restrictions on what can be done with fetuses born extremely early, either because of an interrupted pregnancy, or because they were never implanted after in vitro fertilization, but these limitations are not based on the personhood status of the fetus. The interests of others can function to limit many actions, without resulting in personhood status for the entity in
question. Consider, for example, legal restrictions related to actions involving *399 endangered species.115 We may not be allowed to destroy the habitat of a particular type of frog, regardless of whether that frog can make any claim to personhood. The protections are based on the interests of others in maintaining the diversity of species on this planet, not necessarily on the interests of the species itself. Likewise, there may be a variety of
restrictions on what can be done to a pre-sentient fetus based on the interests of currently recognized persons.

Birth, after sentience, is sufficient for natural personhood status-- not because the interests of the fetus are any greater with the birth, but because the interests of others in affording full natural personhood protections are strong enough to grant natural personhood. This is true regardless of the physical development of the child. Birth without sentience due to developmental problems, but at the point of significantly complete physical
development, also provides a basis for natural personhood, again based on the interests of others. Substantially full physical development (eighth month of pregnancy or later) combined with sentience may be sufficient to accord the fetus the protections of natural persons, but careful consideration should be given to the practical effect of such designation.

In the period of time between sentience and natural personhood, there may be reasons to provide fetuses the status and protections of juridical persons. Sentience does not mean that the fetus attains equal status with adult competent human beings,116 merely that the fetus has characteristics that can form the basis for personhood protections based on its own (rather than other's) interests. Moreover, as the fetus develops closer to a
newborn infant, both its interests and the interests of others that form the basis for juridical personhood protections may increase.117 The following section discusses some initial implications of this proposed framework.

e. Implications

My goal here is not to provide a full analysis, nor even a complete summary of the relevant issues, but rather to begin to refocus, in light of my proposed framework, the debate in some of the most highly contentious areas of law such as abortion and medical interventions on behalf of a fetus. Paradoxically, perhaps, the framework I suggest should *400 not result in drastic changes in current laws. This is one of the strengths of the proposal,
as it should not result in great legal upheaval. The most significant change should be in how the cases are analyzed, and the basis for evaluating future cases that do not fit well under the current model (such as fetuses in artificial womb environments). The shift in focus should clarify the issues that need further evaluation, and move us away from the simplistic, and misguided, assertion that Roe's determination about whether the fetus is a
person under the Fourteenth Amendment is the only relevant question.

To begin, I want to make two, interrelated, points. The first is that fetuses are considered persons already under the laws of many states.118 The second is that this recognition should be explicit and fetuses should be labeled juridical persons for purposes of the application of these rights. The status designation serves a number of purposes. It emphasizes that the rights in question are rights of persons, but those of a juridical person, not a
natural person. To some extent this clarifies the apparent inconsistency between laws allowing abortions, for example, and laws allowing tort suits for pre-birth injuries. It is not that fetuses are considered persons for some laws and not for others, but that they are considered juridical persons with specific, but not complete, rights. Finally, explicit recognition allows states to identify specifically the rights in question that go with the status,
rather than simply assert that the fetus is a “person” (without limitation) for some purposes and not a person for others. This should result both in more detailed policy discussions about allowing fetuses certain “personhood” rights, understanding that the recognition of the rights limits the rights of existing natural persons, and also more attention paid to why we grant certain juridical personhood rights to various entities, and whether
those should be limited or even extended. As a result, we may choose to provide personhood protections for sentient fetuses without granting them the same rights as fully recognized natural persons. Juridical personhood is not a unitary concept; there are different kinds of juridical persons and different rights which may adhere. To the extent that states have discretion in determining which entities will be considered juridical persons, they
may make different choices about the types of rights which they grant sentient fetuses. This has already proved to be the case, as demonstrated by the vast array of prenatal laws currently in place.

There is little in the above analysis that should change abortion laws which apply prior to twenty-two to twenty-four weeks, that is, prior to the development of sentience, other than to reinforce that the restrictions before this time period cannot be based on fetal interests.119 The above *401 framework may, however, have some implications both for evaluations of abortion restrictions post-viability and for prenatal and medical care
decisions made by a pregnant woman towards the very end of the pregnancy. The current “undue burden” test articulated in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey120 and reaffirmed by Stenberg v. Carhart121 is based on balancing the interests of the woman making the abortion decision against the interests of the state. Certainly this balance would still be a factor even if the fetus is granted additional legal rights. That
is, the state would still have interests which may need to be balanced against the individual's interests.

Designating fetuses as legal persons, however, would create a situation in which the fetus's interests would have to be taken into account on their own (not simply indirectly as is now done through the state's interests in protecting potential life). Thus the analysis would look more like the analysis that takes place in the context of parental decisions regarding minor's medical care--specifically, refusal of life-sustaining medical treatment.
Others have pointed out that the language of “rights” is less helpful in the parental decision-making context, since “parental rights” do not rest on any clear constitutional basis.122 In contrast, the abortion situation does involve constitutional rights of bodily integrity.123 Weighing the rights of one natural person against another natural person is difficult. To the extent a fetus is considered a natural person, the abortion debate will have to
consider how to weigh the woman's right of bodily integrity against the fetal right to life. Although a complete analysis is beyond the scope of this Article, we can draw some initial conclusions. Since there are no laws requiring parents to sacrifice their lives for their children, it would be hard to imagine that we would accept a legal requirement to do so in the context of pregnancy. Thus between the woman's right to life and the fetus's right
to life, the woman's legal rights should be given preference. Harder, of course, is the balance between the woman's right to health, and the fetus's right to health or even life. The varying opinions either allowing or disallowing forced c-sections for almost full-term pregnancies is evidence of the difficulty courts have weighing these issues.124 The framework I have suggested here should encourage a shift in thinking about these issues to
focus on the parallel between this situation and *402 others that involve direct conflicts between the health/life of one person and the health/life of another. Moreover, it should lead to greater evaluation of the concept and extent of so-termed “bodily integrity” rights.125

My proposal should have three significant advantages over the current mode of analysis. First, it will allow states to “experiment” in finding the best system of recognizing and balancing legal rights in cases involving embryos and fetuses. Since legal personhood should no longer be viewed as a closed question, states should be free to consider how best to accord juridical personhood status. Second, it should allow us to find better and
conceptually more appealing answers to new debates in reproductive law. This will be extremely important as reproductive technology advances and the legal cases continue to move away from the traditional abortion context. Finally, it may achieve a compromise position in an area that has thus far been marked by heated and divisive commentaries.

B. Non-Human Animals and Artificial Intelligence

Although I have focused primarily on embryos and fetuses thus far, the framework suggested here may be applicable
to other entities . The idea that we might exclude from legal status an entity that meets all the attribute requirements
for equal moral status with currently recognized persons , but that is not genetically human , raises the question of
why genetic humanness matters.126 It seems inconsistent to argue for the extension of legal protection to a non-
sentient multi-celled human organism in the beginning stages of development (i.e., an embryo) and withhold such
protections from fully developed sentient, and perhaps even rational, non-human animals.127 If genetics is the sole
basis for legal personhood, there must be some explanation as to why this characteristic is so important.128 Thus far no
one has provided a satisfactory argument *403 in this respect.129

Animal “rights” aren’t “legal rights”---doesn’t trigger spillover concerns or break the species barrier
Kempers 22 – Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp
Eva Bernet Kempers, "Transition rather than Revolution: The Gradual Road towards Animal Legal Personhood through
the Legislature," Cambridge University Press, 4-13-2022, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transnational-
environmental-law/article/transition-rather-than-revolution-the-gradual-road-towards-animal-legal-personhood-
through-the-legislature/321523E062E9A3674804047908DC9A83
At level 1 of the Alternative Pyramid we find ‘simple rights’, a term that was coined by Stucki.29 Simple rights constitute
a so-called Hohfeldian relation between two legal entities, the ‘ other side of the coin’ of a legal duty .30 Even though
they are not currently framed as rights, they have all the ingredients to be rights in a doctrinal or conceptual sense. As
Stucki argues, ‘[a]ccording to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended
beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties’.31 A simple animal right is thus
brought into existence at the moment that a legal duty exists of which animals are intended to be the beneficiary
(regardless of whether or not they are classified as legal persons).32 The most straightforward examples are duties
towards animals laid down in animal protection legislatio n, such as the duty not to harm an animal unnecessarily.

However, simple rights are only a very weak form of legal rights. First of all, they are quite inefficient as they do not
entail the ability to initiate legal action or be legally injured : they are generally not recognized as ‘rights’ by the
courts.33 Additionally, they often represent only minor ameliorations compared with the treatment of animals as mere
objects. Animals might thus possess a simple right not to have their tail cut without sedation, without having their
substantial interests in life or bodily integrity legally protected. Nevertheless, ascribing simple rights to animals
represents a first small step towards their legal visibility; animals are distinguished from inanimate things by the fact that
they are intended beneficiaries of duties, included in the Hohfeldian scheme, while remaining objects of rights for most
purposes.

Fundamental rights, located at level 2 of the Alternative Pyramid, are, according to Stucki, distinguished from simple
rights by (i) the fact that they protect substantial interests, and (ii) their normative force.34 This type of animal right
resembles what is usually understood by the term ‘legal rights’ , comparable with the rights of humans. Hence,
fundamental animal rights are closer to the kind of rights that animal advocates aim to establish, which would ensure
adequate protection of animals.

Appellate courts have consistently rejected animal legal personhood

Cupp 21 ---- Richard L. Cupp Jr., John W. Wade Professor of Law (Pepperdine Law School), “Considering the Private
Animal and Damages,” Washington University Law Review, Volume 98, 2021, HeinOnline

In recent years at least three appellate courts have unanimously rejected animal legal personhood because animals do
not possess, individually or as a norm, sufficient moral agency to be legally accountable, and legal rights are intertwined at a
broad but deep level with a norm of legal duty.97 As Judge N. R. Smith put it simply in his concurrence in the Ninth Circuit's Naruto v. Slater
"monkey selfie" copyright ruling, "[p]articipation in society brings rights and corresponding duties." 98 The attribution of legal personhood to infants
and other humans with significant cognitive limitations is not pernicious speciesism or irrational biological prejudice; rather, it is anchored in their statuses as members of the human
community, where sufficient moral agency to be legally accountable is the norm.99 As explained in the 2017 New York intermediate appellate
decision Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. ex rel. Tommy v. Lavery:

Petitioner argues that the ability to acknowledge a legal duty or legal responsibility should not be determinative of entitlement to
habeas relief, since, for example, infants cannot comprehend that they owe duties or responsibilities and a comatose person lacks
sentience, yet both have legal rights. This argument ignores the fact that these are still human beings, members of the
human community.' 100

Further, the court recognized that corporate personhood does not reflect that the word "person" is a mere term of
art, as corporations are proxies for humans .' 101

Motive is our uniqueness argument---conservatives want bans now but only have a means with the
Aff’s precedent.
The Economist 22
The Economist, "A push to recognise the rights of the unborn is growing in America," 7-7-
2022, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/07/07/a-push-to-recognise-the-rights-of-the-unborn-is-growing-
in-america
What happens when America’s extreme anti-abortion activism meets its litigiousness ? Fetuses get their own lawyers.
In recent years some judges in conservative states have appointed legal representation for fetuses in abortion disputes
(generally, when a minor wants to terminate a pregnancy). The arrangement has some glaring holes. Lawyers cannot
meet or talk to their client or, supposing a fetus had wishes, guess at them. Yet with the recent overturning of Roe v
Wade—the ruling that had enshrined access to abortion as a constitutional right—the push for legal recognition of the
“ personhood ” of fetuses is set to grow .

Many anti-abortionists believe that life begins at conception. Proponents of “fetal personhood” go a step further,
arguing that the 14th Amendment of America’s constitution gives “equal protection of the laws” to all, including a
fertilised egg (despite the fact that as many as half of all zygotes do not implant and become pregnancies). Increasingly,
anti-abortion legislation is adopting the language of fetal personhood .

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the case that ended Roe, did not do so. But the Supreme Court’s
momentous ruling, on June 24th, criticised the view that “the Constitution requires the states to regard a fetus as lacking
even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed”. Laura Portuondo,
a fellow in reproductive rights and justice at Yale Law School, says this is likely to encourage the emergence of state
laws banning abortion explicitly in the name of fetal personhood.

Efforts to ban abortions on personhood grounds are “ethically clearer”, argues John Seago, the president of Texas Right
to Life, an anti-abortion organisation. Mr Seago was influential in the push to pass a stringent abortion ban in Texas last
year. “They are more honest about the ethical principle that underlines the belief that abortions are wrong,” he adds.
Emphasising fetal personhood is a natural next step, he says, in working towards a national ban . Like many others in
this camp, Mr Seago is “not content” for abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis.

Before Roe was overturned dozens of states introduced bills that banned abortion by establishing fetal personhood,
according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice think-tank. Because Roe rejected the idea and protected abortion
until a fetus was viable, such laws were blocked. Since its overruling, at least two states have sought to reinvigorate
them.

It is unclear if such laws will be allowed to stand . In Arizona the American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for
Reproductive Rights, two advocacy groups, are suing state officials over an abortion ban that would give “an unborn
child at every stage of development all rights, privileges and immunities…” on the basis that the law’s “ vagueness ”
violates the right to due process and puts providers and women at risk of prosecution.

Congress is not likely to pass an abortion ban based on fetal personhood any time soon. Elizabeth Sepper, a professor
at the University of Texas School of Law, says it would lead to impossible questions over matters from the census (should
it count fetuses?) to imprisoning pregnant women (can the state not imprison pregnant women since it would mean
locking up the fetus as well?). Most Americans would not, she says, “struggle between saving a one-month-old infant
and a container with dozens of embryos”.

States won’t thump---barriers now to full fetal personhood now.

Messerly and Kashinsky 22 – health care reporter for POLITICO Pro; POLITICO reporter and author of the
Massachusetts Playbook

Megan Messerly and Lisa Kashinsky, "'It's now up to the states': Republicans move to ban abortion after Roe
falls," POLITICO, 7-6-2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/states-abortion-laws-supreme-court-00042390

Bans in some red states may take time

Abortion bans in other red states hinge on court and legislative action.
In Indiana, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb asked the legislature on Friday to take up abortion in a July 6 special session
where lawmakers were set to address tax-related issues. Abortion remains legal in Indiana, though it had long been
expected lawmakers would move quickly to ban the procedure if the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

“The Supreme Court’s decision is clear, and it is now up to the states to address this important issue,” Holcomb said.
“We’ll do that in short order in Indiana.”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, also announced a special session later in the year to further address
abortion rights in the state — even though abortion is already banned. Three other Republican governors — Montana
Gov. Greg Gianforte, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts — said they were consulting with
legislative leaders on next steps.

Republican elected officials in states where abortion bans have been blocked by federal courts moved rapidly to allow
those laws to go into effect . Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed an injunction to trigger the state’s six-week abortion
ban, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster pledged to file motions to lift a block on a similar law in his state by the end of
the day, , and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said the state would “immediately” move to ask the court to lift an injunction on
the state’s near-total abortion ban, which a judge did Friday evening.

Two blue cities in red states, meanwhile, began to mount an opposition — a strategy they’re hoping other jurisdictions
will replicate.

St. Louis City Alderwoman Annie Rice, a Democrat, introduced a measure on Friday that will allocate $1.5 million in
federal recovery funds to aid abortion access , including $1 million to organizations that offer logistical support —
including child care, transportation and lodging — to people seeking abortions, and $500,000 to establish a
reproductive equity fund to support providers who offer pregnancy care.

Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri, said she anticipates the bill will be voted on before the
Board of Aldermen goes on recess in July.

“This legislation shows the strength of our grassroots movement and the critical importance of state and local
leadership,” Schwarz said. “The people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and we hope you will see this
as a model for what a national response could and should look like.”

And in Austin, Texas, Council members Chito Vela and Vanessa Fuentes called for a special meeting of the City Council
to take up a proposal to effectively decriminalize abortion in the state.

The aff is distinct from corporate personhood – corporations are proxies for human interests
Cupp 15 ---- Richard L. Cupp Jr., John W. Wade Professor of Law (Pepperdine Law School), “Human Responsibility, Not
Legal Personhood, For Nonhuman Animals,” Engage, Volume 16, Issue 2, July 2015, https://s3.amazonaws.com/fedsoc-
cms-public/library/doclib/20150928_16Engage2final.pdf#page=35

It is sometimes asserted that since we give corporations personhood, justice requires that we should give personhood to
intelligent animals. But this ignores the fact that corporations are created by humans as a proxy for the rights and
duties of their human stakeholders . They are simply a vehicle for addressing human interests and obligations.30

Corporate personhood doesn’t trigger the link

Cupp 7 – John W. Wade Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, Pepperdine University School of Law
Richard L. Cupp, "A Dubious Grail: Seeking Tort Law Expansion and Limited Personhood as Stepping Stones toward
Abolishing Animals' Property Status," 60 SMU L. REV. 3, January 2007, https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1436&context=smulr
Despite the intuitive appeal of pointing out that some rights are afforded to children, incompetent adults,
corporations, and ships, important distinctions exist . Regarding corporations and ships, personhood was created as a
legal fiction because courts found doing so to be efficacious in conducting and regulating business transactions and
practices. 10 6 No great societal upheavals or challenges accompanied courts' pretense that these entities could be
thought as legal persons for some purposes. Corporations are legal concentrations of the energies and efforts of
humans (shareholders and employees), and assigning them personhood is a device to indirectly facilitate and control
the combined efforts of humans . 107

Cardiovascular damage and radiation vulnerability make long-term space travel impossible for
humans absent further research
Guerrero-Beltrán et al. 19 – research professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He is a member of the Research
Group on Cardiovascular and Metabolomics Medicine of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and a member of
the National System of Researchers

Enrique Guerrero-Beltrán et al., "The Biological and Medical Challenges of Traveling to Mars," Transferencia Tec,
Tecnológico de Monterrey, 5-8-2019, https://transferencia.tec.mx/english/health/medical-specialities/the-biological-
and-medical-challenges-of-traveling-to-mars/

As humanity has embarked on the exploration and possibility of inhabiting Mars, it has had to face multiple challenges,
many of them related to the field of medicine. It has been proven that several factors present in space and on Mars are
associated with the worsening of many health problems. This article explains, on a scientific basis, the biological and
medical challenges that traveling to Mars would entail for human beings, and also offers a new proposal for inhabiting
the Red Planet. Do you want to know about it?

Perhaps you’ve heard about the immune system, that’s right, the body’s natural defense against infections (and the key
point of this project). Its main function is also to remove damaged, abnormal or cancerous cells from the body. However,
when humans travel into space, the immune system weakens, and in general, the whole body undergoes several
changes that translate into adaptations and many of them induce health damage. But why does this happen? The
causes are two main factors: microgravity and cosmic radiation.

Microgravity is defined as the environment under which the effects of the force of gravity are reduced, just imagine an
astronaut floating on a space mission to notice its presence. As for the second factor, cosmic radiation, the National
Cancer Institute (NCI) defines it as “the energy that is released in the form of particles or electromagnetic waves.”

Due to microgravity, astronauts’ body fluids accumulate in the upper part of the trunk, and the deviation of these fluids
causes the heart to receive more blood at each beat, which forces it to expel a greater volume of blood per minute
(known as greater cardiac output), preventing blood with oxygen from properly reaching all other parts of the body. In
addition, NASA has reported that blood vessels in the upper body begin to stiffen when astronauts are exposed to long
periods of microgravity.

It has also been shown that there are many factors that can trigger or worsen heart damage in outer space, such as low
oxygen levels, free radical production, autoantibodies, and signaling pathways that induce programmed cell death;
this cell signaling mediated by toll-like receptors (TLRs) can be activated by endotoxins, microbial components
(antigens), and heat shock proteins (HSPs). HSPs are a family of proteins produced by our own cells in response to
exposure to stressful conditions, as observed in heart failure, a condition in which the heart cannot pump blood
efficiently throughout the body.

All damage to the cardiovascular system is a challenge for long-term space missions. Space missions, such as the one
planned for Mars, would last between 6 and 8 months, under optimal conditions of orbit trajectories. However, the
trajectory can vary and be extended far beyond that.
On the other hand, among the problems faced by astronauts in space, there is also cosmic radiation, from which we are
protected on Earth thanks to our magnetosphere. However, this magnetosphere is not present either on Mars or
throughout space travel. Without this protection against cosmic radiation in space travel, there is a high risk of DNA
damage and mutations that end in some form of cancer.

Through the various robots it has sent to Mars, NASA has reported that the radiation to which an astronaut would be
exposed when carrying out a mission to Mars (considering the journey and stay on that planet), increases by more than
5% the risk of developing some kind of deadly cancer. This 5% increase would violate current NASA standards, which
set a maximum limit of 3%.

Biotech lead will be the key determinant in military leadership

Carlson et al 9/14 – Engineering Prof @ UWA; inaugural deputy assistant secretary of defense for China; and IR Prof
focused on biosecurity @ GU with a PhD in molecular biology from JHU

Rob Carlson, also managing director at Bioeconomy Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm; and Chad Sbragia, also
former director of the China Research Group for the U.S. Marine Corps and now a research staff member at the Institute
for Defense Analyses; and Kate Sixt, also assistant director of the Strategy, Forces and Resources Division at the Institute
for Defense Analyses, where she leads the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Analysis group; BEYOND
BIOLOGICAL DEFENSE: MAINTAINING THE U.S. BIOTECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE, 14 September 2021,
https://warontherocks.com/2021/09/beyond-biological-defense-maintaining-the-u-s-biotechnology-advantage/

From 2007 to 2008, tainted supplies of Chinese-manufactured heparin, a common blood thinner, led to 81 deaths across
the United States. This should have been a wake-up call to the Department of Defense. Over the last two decades,
biotechnology has become a key component of American supply chains, perhaps accounting for 20 percent of the
chemicals the U.S. military uses. Those supply chains now span the globe and contain a significant amount of material
produced in China. Remarkably, the full extent of the military’s dependence on Chinese biotechnology is unknown
because the U.S. government is not assessing it. These dependencies extend beyond pharmaceuticals to fundamentals
such as solvents and polymers. Just try and paint an aircraft without xylenes. If you’ve never thought about how difficult
it would be, well that’s exactly the problem.

The Department of Defense has historically viewed biotechnology narrowly in relation to military medicine and
biodefense. As a result, the vital role of biotechnology in military readiness and national security remains poorly
understood. Biowarfare and bioterrorism are real risks, but approaching the nation’s biotechnology security needs only
in these terms will leave the country ever more vulnerable.

China, by contrast, has been integrating biotechnology into its strategic development and elevating biotechnology to a
key component of national security. China’s military-civil fusion development strategy makes biotechnology a core
priority for the People’s Liberation Army. This strategy has one goal: to bring together China’s civilian and military
industrial bases in order to better project power. To that end, China has cornered supply chains in multiple sectors,
including pharmaceuticals ingredients and other important chemicals.

Stephanie Rogers, the Defense Department’s acting principal director for biotechnology, recently declared that “the
nation that leads the world in biotechnology will accrue enduring economic, societal, and defense gains.” Unfortunately,
this awareness has yet to be reflected in government policy. Biotechnology security is national security — for the United
States and for China. The Department of Defense should recognize biotechnology’s role as a foundational technology
and make biotechnology development and supply chain security a priority.

Maintaining America’s Biotechnology Advantage

Biotechnology in the United States is a significant contributor to the economy. By one estimate, in 2017, U.S.
biotechnology revenues exceeded $400 billion, or 2 percent of gross domestic product, substantially surpassing better-
measured sectors such as mining. Bioeconomy revenues have grown at an average rate of 10 percent annually for
two decades. Notably, U.S. biotechnology revenues alone were approximately equal to worldwide
semiconductor revenues for 2017. Biotechnology now supplies critical medicines, and, as more than 90 percent of the
corn and soy grown in the United States is genetically modified , biotechnology feeds the armed forces. Industrial
biotechnology is responsible for upward of 20 percent of chemicals produced in the United States, suggesting a similar
proportion of chemicals used in the military are also biologically derived. And these impressive figures may still be
significant underestimates: Using a different methodology, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently concluded
that the biotechnology industry contributes 5 to 7 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Biotechnology, therefore,
may already constitute an even larger share of the military supply chain.

As biotechnology continues to mature, its contribution to physical and economic security will become even more
significant. Tools are now being deployed that enable the engineering and biomanufacturing of materials that will
eventually not only displace petrochemicals but also surpass them in production scale and performance. Over the next
ten to twenty years, biological production could soon supply up to 60 percent of physical inputs across the global
economy, and biotechnology could have a “direct economic impact of up to $4 trillion a year.”

While the United States is arguably still leading in biotechnology, it risks losing this lead to China. In China,
biotechnology is a national development and a security matter. China’s Innovation Driven Development Strategy
emphasizes biotechnology’s essential role in the country’s economic development, while the Military-Civil Fusion
Development Strategy seeks to ensure that biotechnology research is also oriented toward the country’s military and
broader security goals. Chinese biotechnology revenues are reported to be of a similar size to those in the United States,
although they are subject to even lesser clarity in reporting.

While China continues its licit and illicit acquisition efforts targeting the U.S. biotechnology sector, it is also shifting its
attention to domestic innovation. In time, this will provide the People’s Liberation Army with new capabilities and
increase both America’s and the Pentagon’s reliance on Chinese biotechnology products .
Recommendations As early as 1958, the Department of Commerce was tracking the economic contribution of semiconductors, even though they made up less than 0.1 percent of the gross domestic product. Yet, today, the U.S. government has made no equivalent effort to track the much more significant role of biotechnology. This illiteracy is a national security issue. American and Chinese bioeconomies are in competition, and Beijing asserts that it is investing with the intent to take, and to then maintain, the lead. To sustain America’s advantage, the U.S. Department of Defense should better understand its reliance on biotechnology and increase investment
in it accordingly. The Pentagon’s recent investment in the BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem is a notable step in the right direction. However, the seven-year budget for this project is approximately the cost of a single F-35A. For an investment that could impact the entire defense supply chain, this is inadequate. We recommend the following plan of action for the Department of Defense to take its place alongside the Departments of Commerce and State in the broader interagency effort to secure America’s biotechnology advantage. First, in close coordination with the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense should make a
systematic effort to better understand the role of biotechnology in the economy, supply chains, and manufacturing. This, in turn, should inform additional oversight and regulatory controls. The responsibility to understand, prepare for, and respond to biotechnology threats is balkanized, spread across at least nine departments and agencies. Vulnerabilities in the bioeconomy will affect the Department of Defense in terms of readiness, soldier health, and the ability to fulfill missions. Addressing those vulnerabilities begins with a sustained, comprehensive effort to understand the role of biotechnology in industry today, as well as how that industry contributes to
defense supply chains, and how military acquisition policy shapes biotechnology. To that end, the Pentagon should work with the Department of Commerce to create domestic reporting codes for biotechnology revenues and employment for the quarterly and annual economic census, and further incorporate those codes into the North American Industrial Classification System. Institutionalizing the gathering of these data is the first step toward sustainable policymaking and rational spending. The Department of Commerce should then consider adding import/export controls on biotechnology, while avoiding overly broad restrictions that suffocate innovation.
Protecting foundational technologies using the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act and Export Control Reform Act will be critical for securing biotechnology. However, biotechnology competition is not exclusive to commercial activities. The Pentagon should assess critical vulnerabilities and dependencies to assist the other agencies in bringing China’s foreign biotechnology access in line with standards in other major markets. The Department of Defense has been asked to document and secure supply chains critical to defense applications and to the overall U.S. economy. This should also apply to biotechnology. Current Pentagon efforts to
expand domestic biological manufacturing capabilities are an important start, but a broader effort is needed. An empowered deputy national security adviser could help oversee the relationship between the Pentagon and the National Economic Council to promote and secure the military’s broader technology needs. Second, the Department of Defense should better study the accomplishments and intent of China, especially the Chinese military, in developing biotechnology as a strategic technology. Once the Department of Defense better understands critical U.S. biotechnology dependencies on China, it can begin the work of reducing them. This requires an
interagency examination to identify cross-cutting resources, develop mitigation strategies, formulate best practices to bolster innovation, and expand outreach to allies and partners to reduce systemic gaps China could exploit. Partnership with industry and allies will allow the U.S. government to understand and counter Beijing’s efforts to distort commercial activity in its favor. To this end, the Department of Defense should mirror the National Security Council’s effort by creating an emerging technology portfolio within Office of the Under Secretary of Defense-Policy. While other technology offices in the Department of Defense are internally focused, an entity
in this office that concentrates externally on foundational technology competition is required. Such an office may be able to address uncertainties in assessments of Chinese biotechnology revenues and capabilities. Finally, in coordination with the Department of State, the Department of Defense should identify opportunities for dialogue with the People’s Liberation Army about biotechnology-related security issues. It is time to include biotechnology in the dialogue mechanisms that compose bilateral U.S. defense relations with the People’s Liberation Army. This dialogue should prioritize the ethics of biotechnology in the context of future conflicts, the
escalatory risks this technology creates, and the possibility of cooperation where the interests of the two nations intersect. Both sides should work toward a common understanding related to ethics, policies, and standards when operationalizing biotechnology. This will help avoid miscalculation and promote strategic stability. Unlike the U.S. government, Chinese leadership has a carefully considered position on the importance of biosafety and “biological problems” in national security. While these problems are understood to encompass traditional weapons concerns, they also extend to the health of the entire natural world in the context of ever-expanding
applications of biotechnology. This position might provide an opportunity for constructive engagement at a time when tensions are rising. Conclusion The Pentagon needs to expand its approach to biotechnology beyond biodefense. If China maintains biological warfare aspirations, by all means address those. But defense planners should also address China’s broader approach to biotechnology and its integrated approach to civil-military fusion.

Securing biotechnology secures the nation. Maintaining the U.S. lead in biotechnology is critical to the nation’s
economic and military resilience in war, peace, and the gray zone short of conflict. This requires better biotechnology
collaboration — within the U.S. government, with allies and partners, and even, where possible, with competitors.

Retrenchment causes extinction

Rapp-Hooper 20 – Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at CFR & Senior Fellow in the China Center at Yale Law
Mira Rapp-Hooper, Stephen A. Schwarzman Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2020, Saving America’s Alliances:
The United States Still Needs the System That Put It on Top, Foreign Affairs

The stakes of failing to reform the alliance system could scarcely be higher. If Washington does not act, it will miss the
opportunity to protect its dearest interests on relatively favorable terms, before China’s growing power and Russia’s
revanchism undermine the system’s proven guarantees. The reform agenda recommended here is vast, but it is far less
burdensome than a U.S. foreign policy that cannot rely on allies. The United States can no more go it alone now than it
could in the immediate postwar years. Whether the United States has alliances or not, American security and prosperity
will still require an open and independent Asia and Europe. Even if Washington pulled back from both theaters, the
United States would still face cyberattacks, financial and infrastructural disruptions, and assaults on its democratic
institutions. And by retrenching, Washington would lose whatever readiness for conflict it currently has. If the country
later joined a war abroad, it would have to do so only after significant time delays and without the allied cooperation
that might have allowed it to prevail. Put simply, the United States might fall into a conflict that it could have instead
deterred—one now waged with hypersonic speed and destruction.
The Supreme Court will impose fetal personhood if they can---they have the motive…
Needham 22 – attorney and a contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American
Independent

Lisa Needham, "A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics," Balls and Strikes, 5-25-
2022, https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-explainer/

How many Supreme Court justices believe in fetal personhood ?

Too many . During oral arguments in Dobbs, Alito served up the softest of softballs to Mississippi’s solicitor general,
asking him whether there are any “secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of
personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability.” This allowed the solicitor general, Scott Stewart,
to reply that, why yes, a “wide array” of people exist “who would reasonably have that view.” This feels like Alito’s
clunky method of trying to establish that there are at least some non-religious people who think personhood begins
at conception , too, not just conservative Christian supremacists like him.

There are other warning signs in the leaked Dobbs opinion. Take one of Alito’s few approving citations to Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that weakened Roe without oveturning it: that abortion is a “ unique act ” because it
terminates “life or potential life .” At several points, Alito fawningly adopts the language of the Mississippi law that
calls fetuses “ unborn human beings ”—a tacit assertion that a currently-unconstitutional law accurately reflects the
factual scientific landscape.

Justice Clarence Thomas, too, seems very comfortable with the uncomfortable issues fetal personhood creates. During
oral argument, he tried to shift the conversation with Susan Rikelman, who represented one of the abortion providers,
to the overarching issue of control of the bodies of pregnant people. Back in 2001, Thomas was one of three dissenters
from the Court’s opinion in Ferguson v. Charleston, which held that a hospital could not drug-test people who had just
given birth and allow cops to arrest anyone who tested positive for cocaine.

The implications of fetal personhood for cases like Ferguson were clearly on Thomas’s mind during his exchange with
Rikelman more than two decades later. “I understand your argument is about abortion,” he explained. “I am trying to
look at the issue of bodily autonomy, and whether or not she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting
an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability fetus.” It seems that Thomas not only opposes the right to
choose, but is already thinking ahead to what civil rights he could use fetal personhood to curtail next.

Barrett, Thomas’s former clerk, is probably on board , too. In 2006, she signed an open letter sponsored by St. Joseph
County Right to Life of people who “oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to
natural death,” which is about as tidy as a summary of fetal personhood can get.

DA Spillover
And it kills global coop on things like climate change which zeros any chance countries model the
U.S.
Gabriel 20 – Sigmar Gabriel, a former federal minister and vice chancellor of Germany, is Chairman of Atlantik-Brücke. 
Sigmar Gabriel, April 1 2020, “The Lethal Threat of COVID-19 Isolationism,” Project Syndicate, https://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/covid19-protectionism-undermines-europe-global-role-by-sigmar-gabriel-2020-04
BERLIN – Under President Donald Trump, the United States is not actively seeking cooperation with other countries in
combating COVID-19, leaving the global fight against the coronavirus fractured. Far more than the US-European dispute
over the role of NATO, the silence surrounding the pandemic between the two sides shows that one can hardly speak
of a transatlantic community.

Even worse, the US is resorting to conspiracy theories. Just as China claims that the coronavirus was developed in US
military laboratories and serves to damage China’s rise, the Trump administration calls COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,”
stirring up geopolitical resentment .

At the same time, China is trying to make its mark in the crisis by providing aid to hard-hit countries. It is not the US or
Europe that is currently providing the most support to Italy, Spain, or Africa; it is China, which has sent medical teams
and supplies. Seldom has it been possible to observe so clearly how China is replacing Western global leadership.

During the Great Recession that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, China was not so strong, and the US was not so
self-centered. Shortly after the financial-market jugglers had led themselves and the rest of the world into the abyss, the
finance ministers of the world’s top 20 economies met to discuss joint responses. So far, despite a recent virtual summit,
the G20 has not played a similar role.

Even before the appearance of COVID-19, the antagonism between the US and China was central to resolving Europe’s
global role. It is clear that Europe would be marginalized in a G2 world, in which the US and China dominate, even
though Europe’s prosperity is directly linked to the openness of global markets.

But Europe’s global role will also be determined by how it deals with the COVID-19 crisis, and the pandemic is
weakening its unity, almost to the point of despair. The European Union has failed miserably so far. Only the
independent European Central Bank has acted. As in the euro crisis nearly a decade ago, the ECB’s “whatever it takes”
policy has kept the currency stable and provided member states with the liquidity they need. Until now, neither the
European Commission nor the European Council has engaged in anything comparable. On the contrary, Italians probably
will never forget that, when people in Lombardy were already dying en masse, Germany imposed an export ban on
medical supplies to Italy.

We are currently witnessing the consequences of fair-weather multilateralism: European and international
cooperation is easy when it costs nothing. German politicians in particular want “Europe à la carte”: they want
Germany to be an export champion in good times, benefiting from open borders and frictionless trade, but then turn
inward in times of crisis. That is why the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers could not agree recently on joint aid
for Italy and Spain.

Simply put, COVID-19 is not the only contagion threatening Europe: While Italy and Spain struggle to contain the
pandemic, the Eurogroup succumbed to the same “my-country-first ” virus that infected the Greek debt crisis a few
years ago. The idea that aid to affected eurozone members should be approved only if they implement major reform
programs is incomprehensible political stupidity. One can only hope that heads of government will be smarter than their
finance ministers – as leaders were in 2015. It is noteworthy that all German economists, even those who have
traditionally opposed debt mutualization, now recommend the opposite. After all, Italy and Spain cannot shoulder the
necessary financial burden to fight the virus and stabilize their economies. They need all eurozone states to share the
necessary loans; whether one calls them Euro bonds or corona bonds is irrelevant.

There is still time to change course in Europe – and internationally. But perhaps the most dangerous consequence of
the COVID-19 crisis is that citizens’ only protection is the nation-state. As a result, the coronavirus threatens not only
people, but also international unification projects , including the European Union, which was established and
painstakingly built to end centuries of war on the continent.
Fetal personhood crushes US biotech leadership- spurs brain drain and chilling effect
Peikoff, 12 -- Leaps editor-in-chief
[Kira Peikoff, Columbia University bioethics MSC, "Personhood vs. stem cell research," Atlanta Journal Constitution, 5-
25-2012, https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/personhood-stem-cell-research/6LWlWd6jSNNZeMI162zJZI/, accessed 6-
18-2022]

Personhood vs. stem cell research

The state of Georgia may be about to get a lot more populous.

Recently, it was announced that Republican voters will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot question in the July 31 primary to declare that a “pre-born” child — consisting of as few as
one cell — should be entitled to all the legal rights of a human being.

While the Personhood USA movement works to galvanize legislators in about 30 states, the crux of the public debate is over abortion rights, but a
related issue deserves a hearing: the effects on human e mbryonic s tem c ell research.

Bruce Olwin,
a stem cell researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, foresees two consequences of legislation that
could criminalize legitimate research: Scientists might flee to states that view their work more favorably — or leave the country altogether.

Alienating an entire contingent of researchers would have dire consequences on America’s ability to compete globally in the
field. “Because of the overarching intrusion of religion and politics on science,” Olwin said, “I think it’s going to drive the United States into a Third World science country. We will
not be anywhere near the leaders .”

Bernard Siegel, the founder and director of the Genetics Policy Institute, agrees that the Personhood movement represents a potentially major setback.

“Microscopic cells in a lab dish, that by a couple’s decision will never be implanted in a womb, should not be defined as ‘people, ’” Siegel said. “Any
state aspiring to become a center for biomedical research and biotech nology should not touch a personhood bill with a 10-
foot pole .”
Another ripple effect of the Personhood legislation would be an assault on an infertile couple’s ability to have a child, according to Dr. Jonathan Van Berklom, an expert on IVF at the

University of Colorado Boulder. The very act of creating embryos in a lab would be laced with criminal liability.
“If an embryo dies in a lab accident or the culture medium is not quite right, and an embryo doesn’t develop, these aspects of IVF — where things do and can go wrong — would become a
criminal act,” Van Berklom said. “So some IVF practitioners would stop practicing. People would say, ‘I’m just going to go back to doing OB-GYN’ so
they won’t be picketed.”

If Keith Mason, the leader of Personhood USA, has his way , doctors and researchers will do exactly that: retreat. He calls embryonic stem
cell research “largely unsuccessful” and “horrendous.”

Perhaps he should talk to Sue Freeman, whose macular degeneration improved enough to allow her to go grocery shopping alone after her participation in a groundbreaking clinical trial at
UCLA last year using human embryonic stem cells.

At such an exciting time for the field, the Personhood movement’s robust expansion is sobering.

“Any state passing a personhood measure would surely send the wrong message to the world ,” Siegel warned. “Do we prefer the Dark Ages or the
promise of 21st century biomedical research?”

The clock is ticking. We’re about to find out.

Biotech leadership’s key to US standard-setting on synthetic biology- that’s key to unlock its
potential AND prevent disasters
Gronvall, 15 – PhD, Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security senior associate
[Gigi Kwik, "US Competitiveness in Synthetic Biology," Health Security, 2015, 13.6,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685481/, accessed 8-16-22]
Synth bio etic logy is an emerging technical field that aims to make biology easier to engineer ; the field has applications in strategically important sectors for the US economy. While the United States currently leads in synthetic biology R&D,
other nations are heavily investing in order to boost their economies, which will inevitably diminish the US leadership position. This outcome is not entirely negative—additional investments will expand markets—but it is critical that the US government take steps to remain competitive: There are applications from which the US

US tech leadership will ensure US experts have a leading role in synth

population and economy may benefit; there are specific applications with importance for national defense; and nical that etic

bio governance , regulation, and oversight.

logy Measures to increase competitiveness in S&T generally are broadly applicable for synthetic biology and should be pursued. However, the US government will also need to take action on fundamental issues

The U S should maintain its regulatory approach so that the

that will affect the field's development, such as countering anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) sentiments and anti-GMO legislation. nited tates it is

product is regulated that , not the method used to create a product. At the same time, the United States needs to ensure that the regulatory framework is updated so that synthetic biology products do not fall into regulatory gaps. Finally, the United States needs to pay close attention to how
synthetic biology applications may be governed internationally, such as through the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biological Diversity, so that beneficial applications may be realized.

Synthetic biology is an emerging new technical field that aims to make biology easier to engineer and more amenable to rational design, so that biological traits, functions, and products can be programmed like a computer. The concept of engineering biology is not a new one, nor is synthetic biology the first instance in which
biology has been declared engineerable.1 Stephane Leduc wrote about the concept in the early 1900s.2 In 1974, the renowned cancer biologist Waclaw Szybalski described then-current work on molecular biology as the “descriptive phase,” adding that the real challenge will begin “when we enter the synthetic biology phase of

the ability to
research in our field. We will then devise new control elements and add these new modules to the existing genomes or build up wholly new genomes.”3(p23) Though what is now termed synthetic biology is not wholly distinct from previous studies of genetic engineering,

fruitfully accomplish bioengineering is greater than at any other point in history. Thanks to advances in much now it has been

computing the ability to rapidly and inexpensively synthesize

power; DNA; new tools to edit genomes , reliably, long tracts of reliably ; an increased understanding of
biological systems; and the enthusiasm of young scientists who want to enter the field, synthetic biology is a new field and a new phenomenon, which proponents believe could revolutionize medicine and manufacturing.4-7

Synthetic biology encompasses widely diverse aims, making it difficult to draw boundaries for the field. For example, synthetic biology applications have included making a synthetic version of an anti-malarial compound that is difficult to harvest from nature; synthesis of influenza vaccines that could be produced in a shorter time
than by traditional methods; manufacturing standard biological parts that can be assembled into genetic machines, including measurement devices, inverters, or logic devices; investigations into how life emerged on earth through the development of protocells; the synthesis of a bacterial cell; and the development of cell factories
to produce biofuels and other compounds.8,9 In addition to synthetic biology being its own discipline, it has also brought about new tools to manipulate the genomes of biological organisms, which are used by scientists in disparate fields and in a variety of biotechnology companies.

The field shows a great deal of promise. synth bio and related biotech allow According to the US National Bioeconomy Blueprint (2012), etic logy nologies “can Americans to live longer, healthier lives,

reduce dependence on oil, address key environmental challenges

our increase ag , transform manufacturing processes, and the productivity and scope of the ricultural sector while growing new

However
jobs and industries.”10synth bio also poses risks, , the advent of The field is creating
etic logy which have generated a great deal of attention from national security experts and the US government since the inception of the field.

new tools for genetic manipulation of biological organisms and making them more accessible worldwide; these tools
could be misused to make a bio weapon Concerns about these risks resulted in numerous US
logical or inadvertently cause a consequential accident. have

government actions over the past decade, including guidance for DNA synthesis companies to limit unauthorized production of pathogens; an examination of the ethical risks and regulatory challenges inherent in the synthetic biology field by the Presidential Commission for the Study of
Bioethical Issues in 2010; an examination of the biosecurity risks by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federal advisory committee created to address issues related to biosecurity and dual-use research; an FBI “see something, say something” program to reach out to scientists at universities as well as amateur
scientists to report on intentional misuse; and a recent moratorium on certain areas of influenza infectious disease research (so-called “gain of function research”) while the risks and benefits are analyzed by advisory committees to the US government.11-16

While concerns about the safety or deliberate misuse of synthetic biology are appropriate, these prospective scenarios do not span the full range of risks that the development of the synthetic biology field may pose to US national security. There is another scenario that would have serious negative consequences to US national
security that should be considered by US policymakers and experts and should inspire action: that the United States may lose its competitive edge in synthetic biology and related technologies. While the synthetic biology field was pioneered in the United States, and the United States is currently the leader in these technologies,
other nations are investing heavily in these technologies in hopes of capitalizing on the field's progress, boosting their economies, and leading the field. Some, like China, India, and the UK, have even developed specific synthetic biology roadmaps for development.17 At the same time as there is heavy investment in synthetic
biology by other nations, there is mounting concern that the competitive position of US life sciences is diminishing.18,19

If the U S were to lose its competitive edge in synth bio

nited tates there would be serious consequences for etic logy and related technologies,

national security. Some would result in a declining environment for businesses

negative effects be strictly economic, ing and workers to be productive in synthetic biology–related industries in

[a strong economy] underwrites our military

the long term.20 This is important for national security because, as described in the US National Security Strategy (2015), “In addition to being a key measure of power and influence in its own right,

strength and diplomatic influence. loss of economic A strong economy, combined with a prominent US presence in the global financial system, creates opportunities to advance our security.”21 Current forecasting would suggest that a

opportunities in synthetic bio could be immense Fidelity Investments describes synthetic bio as “the defining tech
logy : logy nology

of next century” for global investments. 22 In 2012, the World Economic Forum ranked synthetic biology as the second key technology for the 21st century, after informatics.23 According to BCC research, a market analysis company, the synthetic biology
market reached nearly $2.1 billion in 2012 and $2.7 billion in 2013. They expect the market to grow to $11.8 billion in 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of 34.4% over a 5-year period from 2013 to 2018.24

Losing competitiveness in synth bio could limit specific security applications essential for national defense.
etic logy also on the horizon that are

These include the development of countermeasures for bio weapons medical responding to logical, chemical, or radiological threats and new approaches to diagnostics. A US Department of Defense (DoD)

synth bio could bring major advances to the development of high-performance sensors
report described how etic logy , sensors for unusual signatures, clandestine sensing, and

Synth bio may offer the possibility for distributed

high-performance materials for national defense; these applications would not likely be available to DoD based on private sector funding alone.25 etic logy also

manufacturing so that critical supply chains are less vulnerable to disruptions.

Synthetic Biology, Governance, and US Participation

The next several years will be formative in setting the “rules of the road”
se synth bio research the U S may
likely for emerging etic logy . Yet, nited tates

be disadvantaged and limited in its ability to actively participate in conversations about governance if US fundamental the of synthetic biology

experts are not tech leaders in synthetic bio as the shaping of synth bio governance will be dominated by the
nological logy, etic logy

nations and their experts who are at the leading edge of tech development. This is because formal regulations nology or standards

lag behind development

usually well For a new area, regulations are often preceded by development of standard
the of new technologies. technical the

practices in a field The rules are created by those

, as well as cultural expectations and safety measures. These expectations and agreements build on previous sets of regulations but take new technical possibilities and dangers into account. often

who are most familiar with the tech the scientists

intimately at the leading edge nologies—often, who are performing the work of development.

In the biological sciences, the most well-known example of scientists calling attention to nascent dangers in their field and setting the standards for scientific practice occurred when the field of recombinant DNA biology was new. In a letter published in Science in 1974, leading scientists and Nobel laureates recommended that
certain types of recombinant DNA experiments—those with toxins, oncogenic viruses, and antibiotic resistance—should be off limits until their safety could be evaluated and assessed in a conference held a year later.26 That conference, held at Asilomar, California, in February 1975 and attended by scientists, government officials,
and members of the press, led to a lifting of the moratorium in 1976, as well as the creation of a new regulatory system for recombinant DNA work funded by the US government.26 Efforts of the scientists to self-govern may well have forestalled restrictive national legislation.27 Asilomar now symbolizes scientists' attention to the
public's concerns, as well as the scientific community's capacity to self-govern.

A more recent example of self-governance can be found in a synthetic biology application: commercial DNA synthesis. Companies that sell DNA synthesis products now screen their orders to determine whether a customer is ordering genetic material for dangerous pathogens and to block orders if the customer is not authorized.
This screening system was developed in large part through self-governance of the commercial suppliers and interested scientists, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and was eventually put into formal guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2010.11,28

In synth bio
the etic logy field, there are other applications at the leading edge will require governance measures to be safely and of development that

ethically applied One example is gene drives

, and some scientists have already stepped in to propose self-governance measures to deal with them. the development of , which are systems that can spread a particular gene throughout a population with
 These have become much easier to construct using
non-Mendelian inheritance—that is, much faster than would occur naturally.29 a new gene-editing technique—clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats

CRISPR
( Some proposed using gene drives to change the DNA of
/Cas9 or Cpf1)—which allows sections of DNA to be searched for and replaced in a matter roughly analogous to editing a document in Word. scientists have

mosquitoes this tech could be misapplied or result in a

to make them resistant to malaria. Such a project could decrease the prevalence of malaria, which currently kills more than 600,000 people—mostly children—per year. Yet, nology

accident should the genes spread

consequential or cause unintended effects. to other species other Those scientists who have been leading the development of gene drive and gene editing technologies have also taken the
lead in thinking about the safety consequences, and they have been developing a series of commonly agreed upon safeguards for laboratory research into gene drives, such as using a combination of multiple stringent confinement strategies, as any single confinement strategy could fail.29 Scientists have also put forward ideas for
how to safely use them outside of the laboratory.30

Another contentious application of synthetic biology that will require careful planning and safety standards is human germline editing, wherein modifications to sperm or egg DNA would not be applied to just one person, but to all their progeny. A group of interested and involved scientists met in Napa, California, to consider the
ethical and safety ramifications of this work; the meeting was convened by Jennifer Doudna, one of the molecular biologists credited with developing the CRISPR/Cas9 tool. The meeting was intended to discuss the “scientific, medical, legal, and ethical implications of these new prospects for genome biology,” and they identified
steps so that this technology could be performed “safely and ethically.”31(p36) In their consensus paper, published in Science, they recommend that the practice of germ-line editing be strongly discouraged for now, that forums be held in which this application can be discussed more broadly, and that foundational research that
does not cross the line into embryo modification be encouraged.31 The National Academies of Science also launched an initiative to recommend guidelines for the new genetic technology, to explore the scientific, ethical, and policy issues associated with human gene-editing research.32

Determining what the “red line” is for allowable, critical, or ethical applications of synthetic biology, as well as how much safety data are required before pressing ahead, will always be a challenging exercise, and not all scientists, experts, and observers will agree. Tension over what is acceptable to pursue has already come up for
germline editing, after a Chinese research group reported that they used CRISPR techniques to modify human embryos.33 (And there are at least 4 additional research groups in China known to be pursuing gene editing in human embryos.34) While the standards or expectations set by the scientific community will be impossible to
enforce in an international context, the scientific community does set boundaries; those who flout those standards have to justify their actions in the international practice of science, and those boundaries and expectations are set by the leaders in the field. In the case of germline editing, the Chinese research was rejected by top-
tier scientific journals Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections.35

Self-governance of science has its critics, who are justifiably skeptical that scientists can be trusted to govern their own research fairly and who question the effectiveness of this approach in an international context, as the embryo editing example illustrates. However, self-governance is not the sole mechanism of governance in this
area, as many foundational aspects of biotechnology and laboratory practice are already tightly regulated, and also because in forming new rules there is often a complex interplay among scientists, journalists, and policymakers to bring about new guidelines. In the case of DNA synthesis guidance, while there was substantial work
done by scientists and interested parties to prevent misuse of DNA synthesis and promote screening, the issue became more salient, requiring immediate action, after a journalist ordered a small segment of DNA that encoded the smallpox virus.36 Still, feasible alternatives to self-governance are limited when technologies are still
in the early stages of development, particularly when the applications are of broad interest, generating funding from private companies and multiple national governments, when the work is pursued in many places internationally, and when the technologies have great potential for tangible benefits to health and medicine. In
addition, the amount of technical knowledge required for understanding the implications of new research and what can be done to ameliorate negative consequences makes it challenging even for scientists in distinct disciplines to evaluate research outside their expertise, because understanding the technical details inherent in the
technology are critical both for identifying problems as well as proposing solutions.

additional applications
There are such as rescuing a species on the path to of synthetic biology that have already generated conversations about governance within the scientific community—

extinction even using synth bio for “de-extinction,” to bring back a species that was lost
; or etic logy because of human hunting or negligence; or brewing opiates by fermentation
in a process not unlike brewing beer.37-39 These applications have already sparked scientific involvement in discussions of what is technically possible and what rules should be developed. In 5 to 10 years, the list of applications that will require expert opinion and involvement to set expectations, standards of practice, and self-

If US scientists, policymakers , and institutions would like to have

governance may well be very different, just as consequential, and require technical experts to take the lead in setting norms and safety standards.

some say in what is decided, they need to be at the forefront of those tech will nologies.

US S&T: Evidence of Promise and Decline

The United States is currently a leader in synthetic biology, as well as biotechnology and biomedical research, and it is the focus of a great deal of private sector investment; these investments may help to bring at least 100 products to the market in the near future.17,40 According to a DoD report, the US government also provides at least $220 million annually toward synthetic biology R&D, with investments from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the DoD (including DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).25 An analysis from the Wilson Center found that between 2008 and
2014, the US government invested a total of $820 million in synthetic biology research, with DARPA funding nearly $110 million in 2014.40 Indeed, synthetic biology researchers in the United States have largely relied on DARPA funding, such as in their Living Foundries program, which aims “to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide access to new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation.”41

The United States does not have a specific synthetic biology technology roadmap, but on April 27, 2012, the Obama administration released their National Bioeconomy Blueprint, “a comprehensive approach to harnessing innovations in biological research to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment.”10 The blueprint identifies the administration's priorities to grow the bioeconomy through increased investment in research and development, expansion of public-private partnerships, and regulatory reform and, in numerous instances, specifically mentions the enormous promise of synthetic biology. While the government
programs and initiatives listed in the Bioeconomy Blueprint were already in progress, the blueprint served as a sign of federal commitment to developing the biological sciences as a component of the US economy.42

The United States also has a robust bioeconomy, which includes synthetic biology and related technologies. Defining the economic impact of synthetic biology is difficult, as “traditional” biotechnologies are also taking advantage of pervasive synthetic biology techniques. Looking at the bioeconomy as a whole, Robert Carlson, an industry analyst, found that products derived from biology contributed an estimated $350 billion to American GDP in 2012, and the “bioeconomy” grew 15% annually and accounted for nearly 7% of total US GDP growth in 2011 and 2012.43 Engineered organisms led to products worth more than $350 billion per year to the US
economy. DuPont, Pfizer, Bausch & Lomb, Coca-Cola, and other Fortune 500 companies either make or use products derived from engineered organisms, including food, clothing, medicines, and beauty products.25 For example, DuPont has been producing commercial quantities of the polymer 1,3-propanediol from engineered bacteria since 2006, which is 37% of the material in their Sorona fibers—used for everything from carpets to car interiors.44 Some investors forecast the possibility of billions of dollars of growth in American manufacturing through the biotechnology sector, including at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, DuPont, Archer Daniels
Midland, and Solazyme.44

Yet, in spite of clear US leadership in synthetic biology, there are well-documented concerns about the United States falling behind in biotechnology and in science more generally, as well as concerns about falling US biomedical research budgets, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce decline, and outsourcing by international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which are applicable to synthetic biology as well. Global indicators for the biosciences and biotechnology, including R&D outputs as well as shares of the global pharmaceutical industry, higher education, and workforce, are showing what NIH called an “erosion
of the competitive position of the U.S. life sciences industry over the past decade.”19 China will overtake the United States in R&D spending by 2020.19 In 2007, China overtook the United States in the number of doctoral degrees awarded in the natural sciences and engineering.45 Europe is thought to be the fastest growing market for synthetic biology products, and the UK is considered to be one of the most innovative and dynamic, and healthcare industries there are expected to grow in the future.20

US students in synthetic biology have been affected as well, as seen in the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This competition pits teams of synthetic biologists (primarily undergraduates) from all over the world in competition to engineer biological systems and operate them in living cells. It began as a small class at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003 and has grown to more than 2,000 international participants and more than 16,000 alumni.46 In 8 of the past 10 years, US student teams have failed to win “in part because of a lack of laboratory facilities” and other support.18(p29)

In a DoD report from the Office of Technical Intelligence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, dwindling human capital was identified as an obstacle to DoD operating effectively and efficiently in the future: “There are few highly-experienced program managers in the Department, few leading scientists, and even fewer individuals in uniform with deep knowledge of the [synthetic biology] field. The lack of uniformed expertise is particularly troubling.”25(p20)

In contrast to other industries that require substantial natural resources, such as arable land, oil, or natural gas, synthetic biology and related technologies have few barriers to entrance, and emerging markets can become competitive quickly. Major gains have been made rapidly in several nations by changing policies and investments. Though there are several countries making substantial strategic investments in synthetic biology, the example of China is most notable. The Chinese Academy of Sciences includes synthetic biology in its Innovation 2050: Technology Revolution and the Future of China Roadmap.47 An example of China's substantial investments in
synthetic biology is its support of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), a company located in the city of Shenzhen. It is the world's largest genetic research center, with more sequencing capacity than the entire US and about one-quarter of the total global capacity.48,49 In 2013, BGI purchased the Mountain View, California–based company, Complete Genomics, 1 of the 2 leading companies in the world that make equipment for sequencing DNA, further increasing BGI's dominance in the sequencing market. Previously known solely for their speed and proficiency in sequencing genomes, the company is starting to diversify and innovate, making several
commercial diagnostic tests. The comprehensive database of sequencing information they have developed—they have sequenced many hundreds of different types of bacteria; crops such as rice, soybeans, and cucumbers; and dozens of animals including the giant panda; as well as human genomes—is seen as a springboard for new discoveries, as well as the development of new drugs and therapies. BGI has also been helpful in international science efforts, playing a role in the Human Genome Project and identifying the foodborne Escherichia coli outbreak in Germany that infected nearly 4,000 people, killing 53.50,51

China's research system still draws attention for its ethics problems— including fraudulent results, plagiarism, junk patents, and unsafe or ineffective medical practices —but experts believe that the Chinese
research system is changing and becoming more internationally competitive.52,53 This change is due in part to China's successful efforts to lure back Chinese researchers who were trained and/or employed in the United States, offering them bigger budgets and greater research freedom than they would have in the United States.
In the case of BGI, international collaborations are integral to their success and include partnering with the Gates Foundation as well as hospitals and universities in the United States and Europe.54

The UK has also looked to synthetic biology for economic growth and other benefits. A roadmap for synthetic biology was released in 2012, and to date the UK government has invested approximately £200 million for research and the creation of several synthetic biology research groups across the country.55,56 In a 2012 study that
mapped the scientific landscape for synthetic biology, the UK was second only to the United States in having its scientists author publications on synthetic biology.57 The UK is also taking steps to dissociate synthetic biology from the controversies surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs). At the most recent world
conference on synthetic biology, held at Imperial College, London, in 2013, a minister from the House of Commons told the assembled scientists, referring to GMOs, that the UK would not become “a museum of twentieth century technologies in the twenty-first century.”58 GMO restrictions are a competitive hindrance in UK
participation in the field of synthetic biology and in biotechnology in the UK and EU more generally.

Steps to Greater US Competitiveness

Measures aimed at boosting competitiveness in science and technology generally are broadly applicable for synthetic biology and should be pursued by the US government. These initiatives would include increased basic research funding with minimal fluctuations from year to year, workforce development, and STEM education initiatives, as well as financial incentives to start and fund biotechnology and synthetic biology companies and discourage them from locating offshore.18,19,48,59 Some economists have recommended that foreign students who receive their PhDs for research in technical STEM-related fields at US universities should be encouraged to
stay in the country to pursue their careers and receive automatic green cards enabling them to work in the United States.20

But to remain competitive in synthetic biology, the US government will also need to take specific action on fundamental policy issues that will affect the field's development. One priority should be responding to and countering anti-GMO sentiments and legislation, which are on the rise. The ability to specifically modify, recode, transform, and manipulate the genetic code of organisms—and thus, the characteristics of the organisms themselves—is much more powerful using synthetic biology techniques than was ever possible before. In fact, synthetic biology has been described as “genetic engineering on steroids.”60 It should thus be no surprise that long-
standing debates, concerns, and activism surrounding the topic of GMOs would arise in response to synthetic biology. While the anti-GMO movement has been typically thought of as a European concern, which has diminished European agricultural competitiveness and has thus given the United States a competitive edge, there are warning signs that anti-GMO concerns are growing and will no longer be possible for scientists and policymakers in the United States to ignore. Simply put, concerns about GMOs that cannot be scientifically justified are at odds with US competitiveness in synthetic biology and other biotechnologies. The United States should actively
counter anti-GMO policies, while also ensuring that synthetic biology is appropriately regulated, and work to inform the public about how products are regulated for safety.

The U S approach to regulation nited tates' the of biotechnology, different from that of Europe , has so far carried over to the regulation of synthetic biology applications. The focus of regulation and safety in the United States has
been focused on
traditionally the product. the end result: This is not to say that all conceivable GMO products are guaranteed to be safe, but it is the product that should be subject to a safety determination, not the process used to make it, whether that process is synthetic
biology or another technique.

In contrast to the U S Eu nited tates, ropean regulatory agencies have typically embraced the “precautionary principle,” which place the burden of proof on the developer
s of a product that the
process used to make a particular product is not harmful. There are multiple formulations of the precautionary principle; one often-used definition came from the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998 and states:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. … The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially
affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.61

While precaution in the face of indeterminate risks sounds to many a reasonable approach—it is the essence of the expression “look before you leap”—in practice, critics have charged that the usual result of its application is inaction . 62,63 In the case of synthetic biology, a

precautionary approach would result in a general moratorium on synth bio the release and commercial use of etic logy until there is a research agenda, alternative approaches have been fully considered, a technology assessment has been performed, and there is national and perhaps

international oversight for each of the technologies.64 This could take years even if all nations were in agreement many about the need for it, which they are not.
The distrust of GMOs has had a detrimental economic effect in the EU. The prohibition on GMOs in the EU decreases profit margins for European farmers by up to a billion dollars each year.65 The British government Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRC) has charged that the precautionary approach has “effectively stifled GM crop farming in the EU.”66 It costs £10-20 million more to put a GM crop through an EU approval process than for conventionally bred new crops.67 A group of 21 prominent plant scientists wrote an open letter stating that Europe will lose research prominence unless field trials are allowed of GM crops and that
they will fall short of producing “world-class science” unless a pro-science stance is taken by policymakers.68 Science advisors to British Prime Minister David Cameron have called for scrapping “dysfunctional EU regulations” around GMOs, and they note the hypocrisy in that the EU imports 70% of its animal feed, most of it made with GMOs. The United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina grow 90% of the planet's GM crops.69

It should be stated that the evidence on the safety of “GMO” foods is in, and the results are clear. Genetic engineering presents no unique hazards compared to other methods that create genetic modification, such as traditional breeding or hybridization. Major scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies of Science, and the American Medical Association (AMA) all back GMOs as being safe. In a meta-review of the safety of genetically engineered crop research that evaluated 1,783 research papers and reports from the years 2002 to 2012, no significant hazards were
identified.70,71 The European Commission funded 1,340 research projects from 500 independent teams looking at GMO safety and none found risks.69 In addition to the lack of harm found in GMO use, there are substantial benefits to using GMOs: lower food prices; less pesticide use, which is safer for farmers; less water needed; increased crop yields; and more stable prices.69 There is also necessity: The UN FAO estimates that the world will need to grow 70% more food by 2050 just to keep up with population growth. There may be 10 billion people on earth, requiring more food to be grown in the next 75 years than has been produced in all of human
history.72 Climate change, with the loss of arable land, will worsen this problem. Maximizing food production through GMOs may be the only avenue to provide people with enough food.

The anti-GMO movement has also cost lives. Vitamin A deficiencies cause more than 1 million deaths every year, as well as half a million cases of irreversible blindness.69 In spite of this, the GMO Golden Rice, engineered to deliver more vitamin A than spinach, has not been allowed to be grown in India and the Philippines, largely due to the activities of Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations.73 Kenya had an outright ban on GMOs in spite of an advancing crop disease that affects corn, the Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease, which could lead to food insecurity and famine as crops are destroyed by the virus.74 Kenyan officials now say the ban resulted from
their being misled by French activists who claimed that GM products cause tumors and were unfit for human consumption; the ban on GMOs is expected to be lifted by the end of 2015.75,76

There is cause for concern that anti-GMO sentiments are increasing in the United States and will harm US competitiveness, particularly when it comes to realizing beneficial synthetic biology applications. In the United States, the use of anti-GMO sentiment as a marketing tool has been growing. Products that are marketed as not containing GMOs will account for 30% of US food and beverage sales by 2017.77,78 Whole Foods started labeling their products that are GMO-free, stating that they were responding to their customers, “who have consistently asked us for GMO labeling and we are doing so by focusing on where we have control: in our own stores.”79
By 2018, all products in their US and Canadian stores will be labeled to indicate if they contain GMOs. This is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for “full GMO transparency.”79 Chipotle and Trader Joe's also have decided to not sell foods made with GMOs and to use this fact in advertising campaigns. At least 20 states are considering GM labeling bills; most of those in favor of labeling would use those labels to avoid eating those foods.69,72 Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont have already passed labeling laws.

Congress established the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) under the USDA through the Organic Food Production Act, and it was charged with developing standards, which have become known as the “Organic Rule.” The Organic Rule expressly forbids the use of GMO crops, antibiotics, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, as well as food additives and ionizing radiation. The Organic Seal is a marketing tool and is separate from safety. But organic marketers represent conventionally grown or GM crops as dangerous.80 Major scientific organizations have tended to be against labeling laws because of what happened in Europe: In 1997, when there was
growing opposition to GMOs in Europe, the EU began to require labels. By 1999, to avoid the GMO labels, most European retailers had removed those ingredients, and now GM products cannot be found in European stores.73

Anti-GMO groups have already found synthetic biology as a target. One example comes from Ecover, a Belgian company that makes detergents, and Method, which is a subsidiary company. Ecover purchased oils for its products developed by Solazyme, a US company that uses synthetic biology to produce an environmentally sustainable substitute for palm kernel oil in algae. Palm kernel oil is in high demand, which has led to conservationist concerns about overcultivation, deforestation, and loss of tropical habitats. Ecover found itself inundated with petitions to stop using synthetic biology for using what an anti-GMO group labeled an “extreme biotech oil.”81

Another example comes from the synthetic production of vanillin, the most dominant flavor compound in vanilla extract. Vanilla extract is made from vanilla beans, which are commonly harvested from Madagascar, the island of Réunion, Tahiti, and Mexico. Harvesting is an extremely labor-intensive process, as the vanilla plants need to be hand-pollinated for commercial quantities, and the result yields the world's second-most expensive spice, following saffron. The demand for vanilla flavoring cannot be satisfied by the harvesting and processing of vanilla beans alone; even now, most vanillin is made synthetically from petrochemicals and less commonly from
chemically treated paper pulp. Evolva, a Swiss synthetic biology company developed a synthetic version produced using synthetic biology and has partnered with International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF-USA) to produce it. Vanillin does not taste as good as the vanilla extract that comes from vanilla beans, because the bean has more than 250 flavor and aroma compounds.82 But there are definite advantages to synthetic vanillin, in that synthetic production will not be affected by weather or crop failures, or the shifting costs of oil, thus resulting in a steady supply and less price volatility. Nonetheless, Evolva has also come under fire from anti-GMO activists for its
use of synthetic biology. Friends of the Earth (FOE) “persuaded” Haagen-Dazs not to use vanillin made through synthetic biology, but since Haagen-Dazs uses only vanilla extract from vanilla beans, this was not likely to occur anyway. It is another example of the cynical use of anti-GMO sentiment for marketing purposes.82,83

If anti-GMO sentiment increases, there will be a great deal of pressure placed on lawmakers by anti-GMO groups to adhere to the precautionary principle. Communicating the science behind GMOs is a much more difficult task than simply labeling it as bad, and the United States is not immune from applying a more precautionary stance to regulatory areas.84 Still, resisting efforts to undermine a positive future for synthetic biology is critical for US competitiveness, as is making sure that synthetic biology products are, indeed, appropriately regulated. While the product, not the process, should be the focus of regulation and oversight, at this time there are gaps
in regulation, and synthetic biology is likely to increase them.85 As one example, a 2013 fundraising campaign on Kickstarter caused consternation by producing glowing plants and distributing seeds to more than 8,000 supporters.44 The mechanisms used to produce the plants, distribute them, and plant them did not violate any current rules or regulations; however, allowing glowing plants to be introduced into the environment without regulatory review struck many as foolhardy and risked bringing about negative public opinions about synthetic biology.80 Current oversight depends on whether plant pests or some plant pest component is used for
engineering the plant. As many newer methods of genetic manipulation would not involve such a step, this would leave many engineered plants without regulatory review before they are cultivated in the environment for field trials or commercial production.85

Encouragingly, this situation is likely to change for the better. In July 2015, the White House directed the 3 federal agencies that have oversight responsibilities for biotechnology products—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the FDA, and the USDA—to develop a long-term strategy for the oversight of future products in biotechnology and to update what is known as the “Coordinated Framework.” The Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology was introduced in 1986 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as a comprehensive federal regulatory policy to ensure the safety of biotechnology products beyond
pharmaceuticals; it was last updated in 1992. Updating the framework became necessary, as it was outdated and confusing, and its complexity made it “difficult for the public to understand how the safety of biotechnology products is evaluated,” as the glowing plant example makes clear.57 In addition, the regulatory process could be unnecessarily challenging for small companies. The Coordinated Framework will be updated and will clarify which agencies have responsibility to regulate products that might fall under authorities of multiple agencies.57 In addition to this work, there will be a long-term strategy developed with an aim of making sure that the
regulatory system is well-equipped to assess the risks associated with future biotechnology products. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have also been commissioned to perform an outside, independent analysis of the future landscape of biotechnology products.57
Engaging in International Discussions

Formal mechanisms of international governance of synthetic biology need to be addressed by the US government. Synthetic biology has become a major topic in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has 168 member nations but does not include the United States, which has signed but not ratified the treaty. The Cartagena Protocol in the CBD provides an international regulatory framework for the transfer, handling, and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology. At the CBD 10th Conference in 2010, the members agreed that the release of products of synthetic biology requires caution and the application of
the Precautionary Principle. Another protocol to the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits, aims at sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way and will also affect the synthetic biology industry.

The US government should pay great attention to the activities of this treaty, to minimize the impact restrictions on developing synthetic biology technologies. Although the US is not bound by activities or resolutions of the convention, the synthetic biology market will be affected if the United States and the scientific community do

The stance
not become more engaged in the CBD process.86 precautionary that the treaty parties are taking, as well as the possible consideration to bar some genetic sequences for use, may limit US synthetic biology exports and could hamper the field's
development of beneficial applications . 87 The United States should work with other nations that are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Nagoya Protocol to minimize the impact on US economic interests. At the heart of the treaty is a

Rather than closing off

justifiable concern about the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. a potentially broadly beneficial tech nology, other mechanisms should be created that directly
address the need for fairness and access to benefits arising from the technologies.

Conclusion

Synth bio is a fast-moving fieldetic already applied to the development of new vaccines and medical
logy , and it has been

countermeasures as well as the production of biofuels, detergents, adhesives, perfumes, tires, and specialized chemicals that formerly required the use of petrochemicals. As the field continues to expand, synthetic biology may

synthetic bio could be the foundation of a new manufacturing economy for the U
become a pervasive industrial technology. Proponents believe that logy and related technologies nited

S and contribute to industries essential to US national security.

tates could While the field was pioneered in the United States, other nations are hoping that investments in this area will boost their economies, and so the

it s imperative the U S does not fall behind

great technical lead that the United States has enjoyed will inevitably shrink. However, to ensure it s positioned to i that nited tates and makes investments that i

participate in the technical back and forth that will set standards and limits for governance in
enjoy the fruits of a robust bioeconomy as well as

controversial applications of the tech nologies. In actively taking steps to increase its global competitiveness in synthetic biology, the United States should also address fundamental policy issues about GMOs and make sure that all products are appropriately
regulated—whether they are made through traditional methods, synthetic biology, or an innovative technology yet to be developed.

Extinction
Thompson, 18 -- Lexington Institute Chief Operating Officer
[Loren, former Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, former Harvard University
Kennedy School of Government professor, PhD in government from Georgetown University, "Invisible Scourge: The
Danger of Chemical or Biological Attack on America is Growing Fast," May 2018, https://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/6.18.18-LT-Invisible-Scourge-1.pdf, accessed 8-16-22]

The Rise of Synthetic Biology

The genetic information of almost all life forms is contained in a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that is found in
the nucleus of each cell in an organism's body. Without the information carried on this microscopic strand, the organism
could not express its characteristic traits or reproduce. The role of DNA in transmitting inherited traits between
generations of a species was first illuminated in 1953.

During the 1970s, scientists began to discover methods of manipulating DNA so that traits could be added or removed
from an organism's genetic makeup (or "genome"). The practice came to be called synthetic biology, because it involved
fashioning features not known to exist in nature. One of the earliest applications of such gene editing was the
modification of crops to make them less susceptible to drought or disease.

At its inception, synthetic biology was difficult and expensive. That, plus safety and ethical concerns, limited the spread
of knowledge concerning the emerging field. Over time, though, the tools for splicing and reassembling DNA became
accessible to a broader array of users. Eventually, scientists learned how to create wholly new biological components
and organisms. The most important breakthroughs came in 2009, in the form of a new gene editing tool known by the
acronym CRISPR.

To quote the National Human Genome Research Institute, "CRISPR is simpler, faster, cheaper, and more accurate than
older genome editing methods." Unfortunately, the vast improvement in laboratory practices enabled by advances like
CRISPR comes at a price. It s become much easier for users with destructive intent to apply synth etic biology to their ha

work. For instance, a scientist sympathetic to extremist causes might create an organism combin ing the lethality and
transmissibility of multiple pathogens to generate horrific effects.

The result would be a super pathogen threatening the survivability of large populations, and even civilizations if no
prompt countermeasures were available.
This is no fanciful speculation: some scientists believe that humanity is only two mutations of the influenza virus away
from species extinction. Unlike any other time in human history, it s now feasible to artificially spawn such mutations ,
i

and then loose them on unsuspecting targets.

That is the danger of widely deploying dual-use technologies in synthetic biology. The same methods that might be used
to defeat cancers could be used to destroy adversaries through virulent pandemics. That outcome might not even be
deliberate: if super pathogens escape lab oratories to reach the outside world, they might cause just as much damage
even though their release was accidental. The federal government and scientific community have sought to fashion
standards to minimize the likelihood of such catastrophes, but as knowledge spreads so does the danger.

This would not be the first time emerging technology had unforeseen consequences, but it might be the last. Nicholas
G. Evans of the University of Pennsylvania department of medical ethics and health policy observed in 2015 that "certain
broad elements of synthetic biology, driven by the aim to create a predictable engineering discipline out of the life
sciences, have the capacity to deskill the life sciences in a way that enables malevolent actors." Breakthroughs in
microbiology might thus become major threats to national security.

Weaponization---conservatives in the courts that would otherwise establish fetal personhood are
prevented now due to lack of legal pretext---the aff gives them the roadmap and the car keys by
giving blazing the trail for personhood without dramatic shift in jurisprudence
Ziegler 22 – professor of law at the University of California, Davis, is the author of “Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion
Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.”

Mary Ziegler, "Fetal personhood could challenge the meaning of equality," The Boston Globe, 8-19-
2022, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/19/opinion/fetal-personhood-could-challenge-meaning-equality/

For years, the antiabortion movement had Roe v. Wade in its crosshairs — so it seemed that the reversal of Roe would
be the ultimate victory for Americans who oppose abortion. But when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June,
antiabortion groups were far from done. And a law that went into effect in Georgia a few weeks ago gives us a preview
of what antiabortion leaders hope is next nationwide: the recognition of fetal personhood.

If a fetus is a person, then every constitutional right and legal protection theoretically applies in the womb. At a
minimum, that means abortion itself is unconstitutional . It also could upend the meaning of equality under the law.

Georgia’s new law, which bans abortion roughly two weeks after a woman could realize she is pregnant, amends the
definition of “natural person” to mean “any human being, including an unborn child.” Georgia has also spelled out some
of the consequences of this definition of personhood: The state has established that fetuses count as persons for census
purposes and qualify as dependents on tax returns. Other implications of this principle remain uncertain. Will fetuses be
able to have lawsuits brought on their behalf? Will they be able to own or inherit property? If fetal personhood is a
constitutional principle, will states even have the authority to allow abortions in cases of rape or incest?

Georgia’s law may be the first personhood measure to go into effect, but other states are likely to follow.

This should come as no surprise. The antiabortion movement has not been fighting since the 1960s merely to allow each
state to set its own policy on abortion. Instead, the movement has always argued that abortion is a violation of the
fetus’s rights to equality under the law. Even after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion throughout the United States in 1973,
antiabortion leaders still spent a decade fighting for a constitutional fetal-personhood amendment. That goal of
recognition for fetal personhood never faded away, even if the movement had to give up on the amendment.

Now that Roe is gone, the push for a national ban on abortion has started again. The movement is preparing legislation
banning abortion if Republicans regain control of Congress and the White House in 2024. Antiabortion lawyers have also
developed a plan to persuade the conservative Supreme Court to recognize fetal personhood and declare abortion
unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court will impose fetal personhood if given sufficient pretext---they have the motive…
Needham 22 – attorney and a contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American
Independent

Lisa Needham, "A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics," Balls and Strikes, 5-25-
2022, https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-explainer/

How many Supreme Court justices believe in fetal personhood?

Too many. During oral arguments in Dobbs, Alito served up the softest of softballs to Mississippi’s solicitor general,
asking him whether there are any “secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of
personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability.” This allowed the solicitor general, Scott Stewart,
to reply that, why yes, a “wide array” of people exist “who would reasonably have that view.” This feels like Alito’s
clunky method of trying to establish that there are at least some non-religious people who think personhood begins at
conception, too, not just conservative Christian supremacists like him.

There are other warning signs in the leaked Dobbs opinion. Take one of Alito’s few approving citations to Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that weakened Roe without oveturning it: that abortion is a “unique act” because it
terminates “life or potential life.” At several points, Alito fawningly adopts the language of the Mississippi law that calls
fetuses “unborn human beings”—a tacit assertion that a currently-unconstitutional law accurately reflects the factual
scientific landscape.

Justice Clarence Thomas, too, seems very comfortable with the uncomfortable issues fetal personhood creates. During
oral argument, he tried to shift the conversation with Susan Rikelman, who represented one of the abortion providers,
to the overarching issue of control of the bodies of pregnant people. Back in 2001, Thomas was one of three dissenters
from the Court’s opinion in Ferguson v. Charleston, which held that a hospital could not drug-test people who had just
given birth and allow cops to arrest anyone who tested positive for cocaine.

The implications of fetal personhood for cases like Ferguson were clearly on Thomas’s mind during his exchange with
Rikelman more than two decades later. “I understand your argument is about abortion,” he explained. “I am trying to
look at the issue of bodily autonomy, and whether or not she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting
an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability fetus.” It seems that Thomas not only opposes the right to
choose, but is already thinking ahead to what civil rights he could use fetal personhood to curtail next.

Barrett, Thomas’s former clerk, is probably on board, too. In 2006, she signed an open letter sponsored by St. Joseph
County Right to Life of people who “oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to natural
death,” which is about as tidy as a summary of fetal personhood can get.

and the aff gives the means---granting legal personality allows the court to spin a tale of the
triumphant universalization of legal rights and duties and require extension to fetuses
Boyle 11 – William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School
James Boyle, "Endowed by Their Creator? The Future of Constitutional Personhood," The Future of the Constitution,
Governance Studies at Brookings, 3-9-2011, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/
2016/06/0309_personhood_boyle.pdf
Both the definition of legal persons, and the rights accorded to those persons, have changed over time. For many
liberals, the history of constitutional law over the last two centuries presents a story of Kantian progress, a tale of
triumphant universalization. Little by little, the rights promised in the Declaration of Independence and elaborated in
the Bill of Rights were extended from one race and one sex to all races and both sexes. Progress may have been gradual,
intermittent or savagely resisted by force. There may have been back-sliding. But in the end the phrase “all men”
actually came to mean all men, and women too. In this view, the liberal project is marked by its attempt successfully to
universalize constitutional norms, to ensure that contingent and unchosen attributes such as sex and race are not used
to cabin constitutional guarantees of equality, and that we abolish those legal status categories－slave, for example－
which deny human beings legal personality. In fact, moral progress consists precisely of the broadening of individual and
national sympathies to recognize common humanity beneath the surface. We first recognize that all human beings are
full legal persons and then accord all legal persons equal constitutional rights.

Seen through the lens of this account, the genetic chimera, the clone and the electronic artificial intelligence are merely
the next step along the way. Having fought to recognize a common personhood beneath differences of race and sex, we
should do the same thing with the technologically created “persons” of the 21st century, looking beneath surface
differences that may be far greater. The picture of a slave in chains that illustrated John Whittier Greenleaf's poem “My
Countrymen in Chains” carried the slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” Should we look at Vanna and Hal in exactly
the same way? We are their creators. Do we owe them unalienable rights?

Those who fought for equal rights over the last two centuries had to deal with a multitude of claims that women and
African-Americans were not in fact equal persons, that they were somehow deficient in rationality, biblically
subordinated, not fully human or a more primitive branch on the evolutionary tree. Yet whatever the enormous political
obstacles, there seems to be a certain conceptual straightforwardness in making an argument for common humanity in
those who are in fact human and then arguing that all humans are entitled to be treated as legal persons.10

But even here, within the familiar boundaries of our own species, it is not so simple. Moral intuition and belief diverge
markedly at the beginning and the end of life. We disagree radically on the status of the fetus and even, if much less
so, about the individual in a coma with no brain stem activity at all. How much harder will it be to come to agreement on
the status of a chimeric construct or an artificial intelligence? The attempt to define a single constitutional
standard for common personhood would be immensely difficult even if all participants in the
discussion were not constantly scrutinizing every statement－as they inevitably would be－
for its implications in the debate over the personhood of the fetus.

That’s particularly true with rights of nature---it inevitably results in arbitrary goalpost-shifting and
continuous expansion of personhood by abandoning the human threshold
Guim 21 ---- Mauricio Guim is an assistant professor of law (Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico), the article
was also written with Michael A. Livermore who is a professor of law (University of Virginia), “Where Nature's Rights Go
Wrong,” Virginia Law Review, Volume 107, Number 7, November 2021, HeinOnline ***Modified for ableist language

In this Article, we provide a dose of skepticism.5 A defining feature of environmental policy is that it touches on complex, interconnected
systems. As a consequence, environmental policy tends to have effects across a large number of (at least arguably) morally relevant
dimensions. Outcomes that are affected by environmental policies include many features of human health and well-being, biodiversity and extinction, the protection of wilderness,
and the stability of ecosystems. The natural world is not a monolithic "it," but a "they" in the broadest possible understanding of

that term.6 This basic, pragmatic reality means that the process of environmental policymaking often requires that comparisons be made across
alternatives that have both positive and negative effects on human beings and the non-human world .7
A common example of an environmental policy choice that governments have faced many times is whether or not to grant a permit for a hydroelectric dam. Granting a permit may
further economic development for some while destroying the property of others; the dam may reduce carbon dioxide
emissions by displacing fossil fuel electricity generation, but its construction may also wipe out the habitat of an endangered species. If the concept of nature's
rights is not to be entirely paralyzing [halting], it must admit of some way for these heterogeneous effects to be balanced against each other
to decide whether, all things considered, it is better to grant the permit or not.

This balancing analysis requires that the various

entities that are affected by a policy be defined and that the effects of the policy on these entities be compared.
Each of these steps raises difficulties for a nature's rights framework. At the definitional step, the entities in question will frequently be aggregates,
such as ecosystems or species. 8 There may be multiple ways of drawing lines around these aggregates, and estimates of the net consequences of a policy may be sensitive to these
definitions. If there is no principled way to decide how to define the relevant entities, the decision of whether a policy is, on balance, desirable will be contingent on arbitrary line-drawing
choices.

Even if the entities could be defined in a satisfactory fashion, making comparisons across entities raises additional challenges. Policy
analyses limited just to effects on humans raise the classic problem of interpersonal comparisons. Solutions to this problem are
generally grounded in the mutual intelligibility of people's motivations, interests, and reasons . A shared and comprehensible intersubjectivity
that allows for deliberation and bargaining undergirds notions such as the social welfare function and the social contract, which are the dominant approaches for evaluating public policy
choices. An
equivalent shared understanding with entities like species, ecosystems, and landscapes is missing, leaving no
clear foundation for an analytic structure capable of rendering effects across these entities comparable . 9
This problem can be restated as one arising from multi-dimensionality. In standard forms of environmental policy analysis, the heterogeneous effects associated with a government decision
are reduced to a single dimension along which comparisons can be made.' 0 As practiced in the United States, that dimension is often a monetary metric based on the affected parties'
willingness to pay." If
non-human entities have their own intrinsic value, above and apart from the value assigned to them by
people, then effects on those entities must also be measured along a common dimension to make them comparable . But
none of the tools or concepts that are used to translate effects on people to a single dimension can readily be applied to
all of the relevant non-human entities. This leaves policymakers with a highly multi-dimensional space where policy comparisons will often be
indeterminate. Unless there is some sensible way to reduce the dimensionality used to describe outcomes, then it will often be unclear whether a policy infringes on, promotes, or is
neutral with respect to the interests that undergird nature's rights.' 2

Moving from the theoretical to the practical, experience with rights for nature has shown that their conceptual deficiencies have led
to confusion, inefficiency, and arbitrariness-without any obvious environmental benefit . Multiple litigants pursuing
conflicting goals have come to court claiming to speak on behalf of nature's rights, forcing courts not only to balance
heterogeneous effects of policy choices but also to arbitrate between alternative plausible representational claims .
Where nature's rights have been litigated , courts have struggled mightily to make sense of the inquiry before them.' 3

That includes the capacity to willfully exercise rights

Solaiman 16 – School of Law, University of Wollongong; Hoque & Associates Law Firm
S. M. Solaiman, "Legal personality of robots, corporations, idols and chimpanzees: a quest for legitimacy," Artificial
Intelligence and Law 25, 155–179, 11-14-2016, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-016-9192-3

Free will is a critical element of personhood where the person is subject of a legal right, because its existence is
needed to exercise such a right , and it is not necessary to have this power for a person who is bound by a legal duty (Gray 1909). However, a
different view exists that gives emphasis to duties instead of rights with respect to a juristic person (Machen 1911). A
‘juristic person’, as Gray describes, is one who is not a human being, but rather a legal person composed of humans with
the objective of advancing certain interests, for example states and corporations (Gray 1909). Also, with respect to
affording legal personality , authorities primarily consider whether law can address its commands to those who are
seeking personhood, as understanding and acting upon such commands is only possible for those who are rational
beings having the capability of feeling and volition (Machen 1911). Gray thinks that there can be no legal personhood
without having a will to exercise the right , and its (right) owner must exercise the willpower in enjoying it (Gray
1909). Linking this with the concept of right, Salmond says that in order to have right, one must be capable of interests
that may be affected by others, and correspondingly, also be capable of duties not to act affecting the interests of others
(Salmond 1916).

Thus the idea of personhood entails an entity to be a legal subject able to enjoy rights and to perform duties, rather
than being merely an objec t, in order for it to be a legally recognised person. This concept of personhood, developed
by experts of Canon law in the thirteenth century (Pagallo 2013), continues to dominate the administration of justice
to date, as most recently interpreted by the NY-SC in Stanley, which involved the determination of personhood of two
chimpanzees (Stanley 2015). 7

In a nutshell, the requirements or attributes of legal personhood are: (1) a person shall be capable of being a subject of
law; (2) being a legal subject entails the ability to exercise rights and to perform duties; and (3) the enjoyment of
rights needs to exercise awareness and choice .

And the ability to understand the law

Solaiman 16 – School of Law, University of Wollongong; Hoque & Associates Law Firm
S. M. Solaiman, "Legal personality of robots, corporations, idols and chimpanzees: a quest for legitimacy," Artificial
Intelligence and Law 25, 155–179, 11-14-2016, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-016-9192-3

Therefore both Stanley and Lavery categorically rejected the demand for personhood of chimpanzees, which are
argued to be closest to humans in terms of appearance and of some basic human attributes. Both courts reinforced that
a legal person must have the capability of rights and duties , which requires the ability to properly understand and
follow the commands of law , and that no derogation from this critical need is currently permissible in legal domains
unless any statutes specifically provide otherwise. The NY-SC further confirmed, no any attributes of human beings (as
identified in the above quotation of scientific evidence on chimpanzee) other than being capable of rights and duties,
nor the look-like physical appearance of any ‘things’, is a determinant in deciding the legal personality of any entities.
We can now look to the position of robots.

That’s impactful---capabilities are seen as necessary to hold duties---disavowing that framework

allows extension of personhood to other beings unable to fulfill societal duties such as fetuses
Heymann 22 – chair of the Animal Law Committee of the Queens County Bar Association; retired Judge of the NYC
Housing Court; an adjunct professor of law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University; certified Supreme
Court mediator

George M. Heymann, "‘Happy’, Don’t Pack Your Trunk! Court of Appeals Rejects Bid for Nonhuman Elephant’s Writ of
Habeas Corpus," New York Law Journal, 7-27-2022, https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2022/07/27/happy-dont-
pack-your-trunk-court-of-appeals-rejects-bid-for-nonhuman-elephants-writ-of-habeas-corpus/?
slreturn=20220631110700

The Appellate Division cases focused on the issue of whether the chimpanzees could fulfill the rights and
responsibilities of humans were they to be released from custody. The courts clearly determined that such “imposition
of societal obligations and duties” would not be possible. See Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Lavery, 124 A.D.3d
148, 150, 151 (3d Dep’t 2014), lv. denied, 26 N.Y.3d 902 (2015); Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Presti, 124 A.D.3d
1334 (4th Dep’t 2015), lv. denied, 26 N.Y.3d 901 (2015); Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Stanley, 2014 NY Slip Op
68434 (2d Dep’t 2014).

“Reciprocity between rights and responsibilities stems from principles of social contract, which inspired the ideals of
freedom and democracy at the core of our system of government.” Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Lavery, 124
A.D.3d at 151. The court further emphasized that “although the dispositive inquiry is whether chimpanzees are entitled
to the right to be free from restraint such that they may be deemed ‘persons’ subject to the benefits of habeas corpus,
legal personhood has consistently been defined in terms of both rights and duties. So far as legal theory is concerned, a
person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties … Persons are the substances of which rights
and duties are the attributes. It is only in this respect that persons possess judicial significance. And this is the exclusive
point from which personality receives legal recognition.” Id. (emphasis added)

Accordingly, the differentiation between chimpanzees, elephants and/or any other species of animal, from humans is
their “incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon
chimpanzees [or any other animal] the legal rights … that have been afforded to human beings.” Id. at 152.

REMEMBER---the threshold for the link is not whether the aff would logically spillover, but rather if
the aff provides sufficient pretext for the court to implement their own personal conclusions of
personhood
HLR 1 [Harvard Law Review. "What We Talk about When We Talk about Persons: The Language of a Legal Fiction."
https://www.fordham.edu/download/downloads/id/3307/natural_law_colloquium_fall_2015_cle_materials.pdf]

The doctrinal discord in the law of the person results largely from the lack of a coherent theory of the person . One
feature common to each of the current approaches is a disinclination on the part of courts to engage in theoretical
inquiry into the nature of personhood as a basis for conclusions about legal personhood . The Supreme Court's
theoretical stance in Roe, in which it preemptively disavowed any implication that its decision regarding a fetus's
constitutional personhood reflected at all on the philosophical question of when life begins, epitomized this approach.
96 A similar disinclination is evident in each of the decisions discussed above , in which courts relied on assumptions
about legal personhood but declined to include in their reasoning any reference to the considerable theoretical
literature on this topic. The absence of any coherent theory raises an inference that courts' determinations of legal
personality are strongly result driven , with judges selecting whatever theories of personhood suit the outcomes they
desire.97 As one commentator observed, "Personhood is ... a conclusion, not a question ." 98

SC decision key---states won’t be able to prohibit all research across the country
Alder and Wheeler 22 – Reporters for Bloomberg Law, citing Josh Blackman, professor at the South Texas College of
Law Houston and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute

Madison Alder and Lydia Wheeler, "Alito Draft Would Allow for Sweeping State Action on Abortion," Bloomberg Law, 5-
4-2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/alito-draft-would-allow-for-sweeping-state-action-on-abortion

But Blackman doesn’t think the Supreme Court draft supports that line of thinking. Though some states will try to ban
abortion at conception through fetal personhood , it’s unlikely they will be able to stop procedures from taking place
in other states where they’re still lawful without a federal abortion ban.

“The only way California will be able to ban abortion is if the Supreme Court says the Constitution requires it,”
Blackman said. “I don’t see anything in the court’s opinion that supports this broader conception that the Constitution
requires banning abortion.”

Clinics and researchers will simply move to blue states

Filipovic 22 – freelance contributor to Bloomberg
Jill Filipovic, "IVF Patients Are Trapped in Limbo and Bracing for the Next Post-Roe Fight," Bloomberg, 8-5-
2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-08-05/ivf-patients-fear-embryo-laws-could-make-starting-a-
family-harder
Even without personhood laws in place, doctors, patients, and lawyers are navigating newly treacherous terrain. Ulrich
has assured her patients that fertility treatments can proceed as planned, following discussions with her business
partner, her team, and the clinic’s lawyer. Still, she’s worried. Louisiana’s personhood bill was defeated only a month
before the Dobbs decision, and the state already regulates infertility options more stringently than most. Same-sex
couples are barred from using gestational carriers, making it particularly difficult for gay men to have children. And the
state outlaws discarding an embryo that continues to develop, even if genetic testing finds that it could never lead to a
healthy pregnancy. Audubon Fertility has been storing its patients’ embryos at a facility in Texas so its patients can
decide how long to keep the embryos and when to discard them. Now, with some patients in distress over the future of
reproductive rights in that state, the clinic is looking for other options . IVF patients in other conservative states have
also been scrambling to move their embryos to more liberal territory .

Even if some states ban, research is spread out across the country
Owens 14 – freelance science writer and editor
Brian Owens, "Mapping biomedical research in the USA," The Lancet, Vol 384, 7-5-
2014, https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2814%2961114-4

State-wide

One side-effect of the sheer size of the US biomedical research landscape is that it is spread wide across the country.
Unlike in the UK, where a large proportion of the work is concentrated in the “golden triangle” around London, Oxford,
and Cambridge, there are large research and industrial hubs beyond the obvious ones in Boston, San Francisco, and
San Diego. “I always get in trouble whenever I make a generalised statement about the major research hubs, because
I’m always in the room with someone from one I’ve left off the list”, says Garrison.

In FASEB’s annual breakdown of NIH funding by state, there is never a single one that is left off the list. There is a wide
range—researchers in California got more than $3 billion in 2013, while those in Idaho received just $5·4 million—but
every state gets at least a few million dollars in federal grant money. And that list can turn up some unexpected
results. The University of Utah, for example, has a very strong programme in genetics, at least in part because of the
Mormon church’s historical interest in genealogy.

Part of the reason for this relatively even spread of expertise is a sort of competition between the states to build
prestige by investing in higher education. “There was a time when California set out to build a system of world-class
research universities”, says Garrison. “And North Carolina and Texas and others sought to emulate them.”

The largest research contributors are blue states that won’t ban abortion
FIC 12 – Fogarty International Center
FIC, "US economy benefits from global health research," Fogarty International Center, National Institute of Health, June
2012, https://www.fic.nih.gov/News/GlobalHealthMatters/may-june-2012/Pages/us-economic-impact-research.aspx

Every state benefits from federal research

All U.S. states receive federal grants and contracts for health research, with the bulk coming from the NIH.
California , the largest recipient of federal research funds , has a robust global health sector that contributes
significantly to the state economy. About $3.3 billion in NIH grants and contracts supported more than 62,000 jobs in
the state in 2010, according to United for Medical Research.

"We need public funding for the basic research, we need private investment in the execution of that research and we
need world cooperation in all of the research," Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-CA, said in a Research!America release.

Another state receiving substantial NIH funds is New York , with $2 billion supporting more than 33,000 of the 80,000
life sciences jobs in 2011. The state houses seven of the top 50 American research universities and two of the top 25
medical universities. New York City alone has the largest bioscience workforce in the nation, according to data
presented by Research!America.

The court won’t uphold fetal personhood now because of lack of legal pretext
Scheckner 22 – journalist for Florida Politics, citing John Yoo, Law Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law
Jesse Scheckner, "Is the key to a federal abortion ban in the Constitution? Proponents like Josh Hammer says
yes.," Florida Politics, 9-13-2022, https://floridapolitics.com/archives/555591-is-the-key-to-a-federal-abortion-ban-in-
the-constitution-proponents-like-josh-hammer-says-yes/

Now, some conservatives are looking to Fourteenth Amendment again as they seek to federally outlaw abortion . The
key, they say, this time lies in its Equal Protections Clause, which requires states to afford every person identical
safeguards and forbids them from drawing distinctions between individuals “that are irrelevant to a legitimate
government objective,” according to Cornell Law School.

“I wish the Congress and that the federal courts would act under the Fourteenth Amendment, where the protections of
the law are being withdrawn from a whole class of human beings in the blue states, just in the way that the courts and
the Congress came to understand that … protections of the law were withdrawn from Black people in the South in the
’50s and ’60s,” Arkes says.

The route to that happening may be shorter than expected . Following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,
which reversed longstanding federal abortion protections, the anti-abortion movement has reset its sights on fetal
personhood — the concept that the unborn are full-fledge people deserving of the same constitutional protections
afforded to those outside the womb.

Lawmakers and courts have a moral obligation to do just that, according to Hammer, who rejects the notion that legal
interpretations can ever be “value-neutral.” Inherent to proper jurisprudence, he says, is an overriding prioritization of
the common good.

“There is no divorcing value judgement or morality from politics and law — period, full stop, end of story,” he says.
“Western history has repeatedly shown that the pursuit of a values-neutral, liberal order results in a one-way cultural
ratchet toward ruinous decadence.”

Not all in the national conservatism sphere agree with Arkes, Hammer and others proffering similar arguments. Such is
the case with University of California, Berkely law professor John Yoo , who famously authored the controversial
“Torture Memos” during the presidency of George W. Bush. He later advised former Vice President Mike Pence against
interfering in the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Yoo agrees with Hammer and Arkes that the Dobbs decision was correct in rejecting “progressive activism” in the
judiciary. But it may be a stretch , he says, for the Supreme Court to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to confirm
the personhood of the unborn at all stages of development .
“Can the Supreme Court interpret the Fourteenth Amendment (portion stating that) ‘life, liberty, or property’ cannot
be taken without due process — does that word, ‘life,’ mean the Supreme Court can say life begins at conception?” he
says. “There, I disagree with my friends. I don’t think that that’s consistent with the original understanding. I do think
that that is making the same mistake that our progressive friends make in that they use the courts to advance their
moral views at odds with what the democratic process would yield.

“The great temptation in the wake of Dobbs (is) there’s going to be a conservative , almost triumphalist (impression)
about what we can achieve through the courts. To me, Dobbs is very much a touch-and-go thing , (and) Justice
Kavanaugh and Justice Alito, in their opinions, made it pretty clear that returning the question to the state for decision
is as far as they were willing to go .”

And ABR is here now which requires new cures, regardless of whether or not cap caused it only
future innovation can solve
Schroeder et al 17 – Meredith Schroeder, PhD candidate, Department of Microbiological Sciences; North Dakota
State University, Benjamin D. Brooks, PhD, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; North Dakota State
University, and Amanda E. Brooks, PhD, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, North Dakota State University (“The
Complex Relationship between Virulence and Antibiotic Resistance,” Genes, Vol. 8, No. 1, page 39, January 2017,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5295033/)

Antibiotic resistance, prompted by the overuse of antimicrobial agents, may arise from a variety of mechanisms,
particularly horizontal gene transfer of virulence and antibiotic resistance genes, which is often facilitated by biofilm
formation. The importance of phenotypic changes seen in a biofilm, which lead to genotypic alterations, cannot be
overstated. Irrespective of if the biofilm is single microbe or polymicrobial, bacteria, protected within a biofilm from the
external environment, communicate through signal transduction pathways (e.g., quorum sensing or two-component
systems), leading to global changes in gene expression, enhancing virulence, and expediting the acquisition of antibiotic
resistance. Thus, one must examine a genetic change in virulence and resistance not only in the context of the biofilm
but also as inextricably linked pathologies . Observationally, it is clear that increased virulence and the advent of
antibiotic resistance often arise almost simultaneously; however, their genetic connection has been relatively ignored.
Although the complexities of genetic regulation in a multispecies community may obscure a causative relationship,
uncovering key genetic interactions between virulence and resistance in biofilm bacteria is essential to identifying new
druggable targets, ultimately providing a drug discovery and development pathway to improve treatment options for
chronic and recurring infection.

1. Introduction

Until recently, conventional “antibiotic wisdom” suggesting the presence of a fitness cost associated with the
development of antibiotic resistance that would eventually allow susceptible species to overtake resistant species was
the predominating dogma in infectious diseases [1]. However, the ever-increasing threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria
contradicts dogma and insinuates that the evolution of resistance may be associated with a fitness advantage, including
enhanced virulence [2,3]. Although virulence has now been directly related to multidrug resistance in several animal
infection models [2], the mechanism of virulence regulation in this climate of antibiotic resistance remains elusive. This
review will explore the relationship between the mechanisms of acquired antibiotic resistance and enhanced virulence,
a critical link in our war on the emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria.

Biotech innovation is happening now – momentum from COVID will continue

Perieteanu & Brooks 21 - Ph.D. serves as the Director of Biopharmaceutical Services for SGS Toronto & Managing
Editor

Alex Perieteanu & Kristin Brooks, “A New Era of Vaccine and Biologic Drug Development: As a result of COVID-19,
unprecedented investments in vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments have had a tremendous impact on the
Biotechnology industry,” 01-12-21, https://www.contractpharma.com/contents/view_online-exclusives/2021-01-12/a-
new-era-of-vaccine-and-biologic-drug-development/

The Biopharmaceutical industry has achieved remarkable success and innovation these past few years, namely the
first CAR-T cell therapy and antibody drug conjugate ( ADC) approvals . Significantly, the global pandemic has fueled
vaccine innovation with the rapid acceleration of RNA based COVID vaccines.

Currently, nine ADCs have received market approval, and in July 2020, the U.S. FDA approved the third CAR-T cell
therapy, Tecartus, a cell-based gene therapy for treatment of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). Additionally, to date,
Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine and Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine have been approved by the FDA for emergency
use.

Along with these advances, there has been a significant increase in outsourcing , particularly related to vaccine
manufacture and fill finish, as well as drug research and developmen t, analytical services, and manufacturing.

As the number of advanced therapy medicinal products ( ATMPs ) in development continue to grow , new production
strategies are helping to address the inherent development and manufacturing challenges associated with these
therapies.
Alex Perieteanu, Ph.D., Director of Biopharmaceutical Services at SGS Life Sciences discusses the future of vaccines and biologics, how the pandemic is impacting outsourcing and operations,
and the challenges and advances in manufacturing cell therapies. –KB

Contract Pharma: With the current COVID climate what do you anticipate for the future of vaccines and biologics?

Alex Perieteanu: As an outcome of COVID-19, we’ve entered a new era of vaccine and biological drug development .
The pandemic has demanded unprecedented investment into vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. In a relatively
short period of time, this has had a tremendous impact on the Biotechnology industry and the momentum is likely to
continue . Looking at vaccines alone, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in LNP-mRNA based approaches , a promising
technology, but one that had yet to mature to commercialization. That is, until recently, two COVID-19 vaccines have
recently received FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) to combat COVID-19.

CP: How has the pandemic impacted outsourcing and operations?

AP: Many organizations have had to carefully evaluate outsourcing strategies, internal capacities, priorities, and risks.
It’s of little surprise that we’ve seen an increase in demand across the board. Whether it be for high priority activities
related to Covid-19, supply chain diversification, or whether it is simply due to a needing to strategically outsource in
order to manage internal capacities.
CP: What capabilities will be needed down the road?

AP: A very difficult question, as almost everything is in demand. With a tidal wave of COVID-19 related investigational new drug applications (INDs), the ability to support GMP level
manufacturing as well as analytical testing, is and will be in high demand. Capabilities and experience in the nucleotide and vector-based delivery space (viral and non-viral) are going to be
highly sought after in the near term and will continue until the market adjusts to an increased demand.

CP: Are there specific geographical markets that are key?

AP: This pandemic has had a global impact. All markets with established capabilities are likely to see rapid growth in the sector; however, with such high demand, regions or nations whom
otherwise do not have significant local production capabilities may look to fund, or partially nationalize some basic levels of production in order to ensure long term supply.

CP: In what services areas are you seeing the most growth?

AP: Development , clinical trials , and manufacturing are all integral parts of bringing a molecule to market, and one
cannot be done without the other. We’re seeing proportional growth in all areas .

CP: With the advances in cell and gene therapies, what type of growth do you anticipate? Is the industry positioned to
accommodate future growth?
AP: Cell and gene therapies, or advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) offer groundbreaking new
opportunities for the treatment of disease or injury. While only a relatively small number of ATMPs have received
regulatory approval, the number of active INDs in this category is expected to break 1,000 by the end of 2021.

With a promise to revolutionize medicine, ATMPs are very likely to become a staple in 21st century medicine. The
industry has been adapting to the emergence of ATMPs with significant investments in product development , and
manufacturing technology. Ultimately, vector delivery systems, complexity of manufacturing, an evolving regulatory
landscape, and finally cost remain at the crux these emerging technologies.
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Houston

Next, Fetal Personhood:

It’s up for grabs after Dobbs. If upheld, it criminalizes pregnancy and bans IVF.
Carlisle 22, [Madeleine Carlisle is a reporter for TIME in New York City, Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in
the Battle Over Reproductive Rights, June 28,
https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/#:~:text=Roe%20explicitly%20banned%20laws
%20from,the%20later%20stages%20of%20pregnancy.]

In the early 1970s, when lawyers representing the state of Texas argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court,
they argued that a fetus is a person. Because a fetus is a person, they told the Justices, a fetus is entitled to all the
protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment including a right to “life.”

In 1973, the high court ruled that Texas was wrong. “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does
not include the unborn,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in his landmark opinion. The Supreme Court held that
personhood could not be granted to a fetus before “viability”—the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy when a fetus
can survive outside the womb—and established a constitutional right to abortion access.

But nearly 50 years later, Roe was overturned, and Justice Samuel Alito declared in the Supreme Court’s majority
opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”
Now, laws that establish fetal personhood—meaning they extend the legal rights of people to a fetus or embryo
before viability—could be the next frontier in the legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States.

Not all abortion bans establish fetal personhood. But all pre-viability fetal personhood laws ban abortion—and could
have even broader implications for reproductive healthcare access and the potential criminalization of pregnancy.
“Abortion laws regulate a procedure,” says Rebecca Kluchin, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, who
recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post criticizing such policies. “Fetal personhood laws allow the state to
regulate pregnant women.”

While 13 states had already enacted “trigger laws” designed to ban all or nearly all abortions once Roe was overturned,
at least six states have also introduced legislation to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood, according to the
Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Litigation over such laws has already begun. Last year, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey enacted an abortion
ban that gave “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other
persons, citizens, and residents.” Cathi Herrod, the president of the conservative Christian advocacy group Center for
Arizona Policy (CAP), says CAP supported Arizona’s law because they “stand for the belief that human life begins at the
moment of conception, that life is a human right, and unborn children deserve protection.” The ACLU of Arizona and the
Center for Reproductive Rights sued, and on Saturday filed an emergency motion asking a judge to block the
implementation of the law in the wake of the fall of Roe, arguing the law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due process
and could put abortion providers and pregnant people at risk of criminal prosecution. The judge has yet to rule on the
motion and a hearing will be held in July. (Brittni Thomason, spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general’s office, says
they “anticipate filing a legal brief” on the matter “next week.”)

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on fetal personhood in Dobbs: “Our opinion is not based on any view about if
and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how
fetal personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we will be
living in a legal gray area for a long time,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates
for Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people, including women who have had abortions.
“Case law will have to be developed, or statutes will have to be clarified, because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so
monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all play out.”

The implications of fetal personhood on pregnancy

Critics of fetal personhood laws argue the state cannot bestow legal rights onto a fetus or embryo without subjugating
the rights of the pregnant person.

In theory, fetal personhood laws could impact the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that uses a combination
of medicines and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant the embryo into the uterus. A
round of IVF can create multiple embryos, which can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal personhood laws could also impact
contraception access, given that some members of the anti-abortion movement argue that IUDs and the emergency
contraception Plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and violate personhood, explains Mary Ziegler, an
abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. (The American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists say that those forms of contraception work by preventing fertilization in the first place.)

Fetal personhood laws could also have major implications for pregnant people. If a fetus is legally considered a person,
then child endangerment laws can apply. A state could potentially say pregnant people can only eat certain foods, or
punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or compel someone to have a c esarean section they are refusing, says
Kluchin. If a pregnant woman must undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, adds Ziegler, she could in theory be
told to delay care until she gives birth so she does not harm the fetus, as the New Yorker reports has “routinely”
occurred with pregnant women in Poland . (Many U.S. abortion laws have narrow exceptions for when the mother’s life
is in danger.)

Establishing fetal personhood could put people who self-induce abortions at risk for criminal prosecution , says Jolynn
Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. It could also impact people who miscarry. Leslie J. Reagan, a
professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says prior to Roe, if someone went to the hospital or
called a doctor about a miscarriage, they were often questioned on whether they had induced an abortion. Reagan’s
research found that beginning in the early 1900s and running up until Roe in the 1970s, doctors and nurses sometimes
functioned as the arm of the police, even threatening to deny care to patients if they did not provide information. “They
were all suspect s,” says Reagan. “[Doctors] couldn’t tell if it was a natural miscarriage or whether they had induced it,
and they came to assume that anyone who came in bleeding, miscarrying, had induced it—and began to ask questions.”

Did fetal personhood laws exist before Roe fell?

Roe explicitly banned laws from establishing fetal personhood before the “viability” line. But the logic of fetal
personhood has been used for decades in policies and enforcement against women, particularly low-income women of
color, in the later stages of pregnancy.

A peer-reviewed study by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) found 413 cases from 1973 to 2005 of
women who were arrested or otherwise deprived of their physical liberty because they were accused of hurting their
fetus, often because they were found to have tested positive for drugs. And the numbers are picking up: a similar study
by NAPW examining data from 2006 to 2020 found roughly 1,331 examples of such cases. (The majority of cases in the
NAPW study resulted in healthy birth outcomes.) Some states have laws specifically extending a viable fetus separate
legal protections from those of the pregnant person, while in others prosecutors have extended child endangerment or
homicide laws to instances where a fetus was harmed.

With the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists are calling for broader laws that extend similar legal protections to embryos
and fetuses. Some were previously ruled unconstitutional, like Georgia’s HB 481, which includes language that states
“natural persons include an unborn child,” allows people to claim a fetus as a dependent on tax forms, and requires
state officials to count a fetus toward Georgia’s population for official population count purposes. The law was struck
down in 2020, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe on Friday, Georgia’s attorney general filed a notice
requesting the decision be reversed.
A federal fetal personhood law was also introduced last year in both chambers of Congress. The Life at Conception Act,
which would extend fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” beginning at the moment of fertilization, has 164
cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Still, many of these new laws will likely face legal challenges. While there is no longer a constitutional right to an
abortion, fetal personhood laws could still be challenged for violating state constitutions, or for violating the
constitutional right to due process because of vague wording, like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions that we’ll have to see laid out,” says Ziegler. “[Fetal personhood laws] are
much more likely to be enforceable than would have been the case before, but we still can’t be sure until the
litigation is done.”

The plan says that something that is not a person now can legally interact on a similar level as
someone who is. That exact determination of nonhuman personhood criminalizes pregnancy.
Matambanadzo 12, [SARU M. MATAMBANADZO - Associate Professor of Law, Tulane University Law School. Ph.D.
University of California, J.D. Harvard Law School, B.A. University of Pittsburgh, Embodying Vulnerability: A Feminist
Theory of the Person, 46 DUKE JOURNAL OF GENDER LAW & POLICY Volume 20:45,
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1235&context=djglp] *Modified for gender inclusivity.
[Those] added at beginning of final sentence. No text is removed.

The issues surrounding legal personhood concern not only the question of who counts as a full member of the legal
community but also how we take account of them. This question entails determining which entities, collectives and
individuals are considered legal persons and which rights , privileges , entitlements , duties and obligations these
persons have access to. Furthermore, in some cases, the current contests of legal personhood involve expanding legal
personhood for some while placing limits on the rights and privileges of others . The legal recognition of
persons can have legal and moral consequences for existing members of the community of
persons . If the legal recognition of personhood for some animals is expanded, for example, the property rights of
those individuals and corporate entities who sell animals as commodities may be restricted. In addition, recognizing
certain domestic animals as members of the legal community may entail legal penalties for those who eat animals or
enhanced criminal liabilities for those who abuse animals. And because the concept of legal personhood has an ethical
force, requiring us to reconsider who and what we regard as worthy of respect and consideration by law, an expansion
of legal personhood for animals would have moral consequences beyond the realm of law .149 The current
efforts to expand the legal personhood of fetuses , embryos and zygotes may similarly entail limitations on the rights
and privileges of other persons, particularly women. [Those] Women in the United States who currently enjoy limited
constitutional protections for reproductive freedom150 may be unable to realize these reproductive freedoms if the
legal rights, privileges, protections and entitlements of fetuses , embryos and zygotes are expanded .151

Treat arguments that dismiss spillover risk as willful ignorance.

NAPW 8-17, [National Advocates for Pregnant Women, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, 2022,
https://www.nationaladvocatesforpregnantwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fetal-Personhood-Issue-
8.17.22.pdf]

Lawmakers cannot control the ramifications and consequences of their laws, especially with aggressive prosecutors
all too willing to push the boundaries of what is legal or permissible. It is thus no answer to claim that the
ramifications outlined above are fantastical and that common sense can save us . Common sense has not protected
pregnant persons from all manner of nonsensical state interventions and prosecutions. Pregnancy criminalization,
past and present, makes the seemingly dystopian all too real . Claiming that we are not on a slippery slope is a flimsy
effort to mask the deliberate ,
giddy progression right down that slope by actors seeking to
regulate and punish pregnant people . Understanding the landscape of fetal personhood exposes its
underlying denial of liberty and autonomy to pregnant and postpartum people . We must work not only to reject and
dismantle fetal personhood ideology, but also to affirmatively safeguard and advance the full personhood and equality
of all people with the capacity for pregnancy.

Ruins fetal tissue and stem cell research

Bauman 8-4, [Bloomberg Law reporter, State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research, 2022,
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research]//MW

Biomedical scientists using embryonic stem cells or fetal tissue could find their studies at risk in conservative states
aiming to redefine personhood after the US Supreme Court’s rollback of abortion rights.

These states would give embryos and fetuses the same rights as people. A provision in Georgia’s new abortion law
includes embryos, once there’s a detectable heartbeat, which is at about six weeks, and fetuses in population counts.
The laws primarily are intended to focus on abortions, but they have downstream consequences on a range of issues,
including biomedical research .

“They’re not thinking through the other possible consequences of declaring that an embryo is a person from the
moment of fertilization,” Suzanna Sherry, a constitutional law scholar at Vanderbilt University, said. But it’s unclear how
it’ll play out since these questions haven’t been tested in court, she said.

If states grant personhood to embryos without specific exceptions for derivation of stem cells from embryos, then there
can be no stem cells on which to do research or develop therapeutic products, Mark Barnes, a research attorney with
Ropes & Gray LLP, said.

Embryonic stem cells offer great promise in health and medicine because they can turn into any cell in the human
body, offering the potential to repair and regenerate tissue damaged by a host of diseases. They also can be used to
screen drug candidates for toxicity . But embryos must be destroyed in the process of generating stem cell lines for
research. It’s illegal to create embryos specifically for research, but US researchers can use embryos from in vitro
fertilization that would otherwise be discarded and have been donated for research.

Solves disease and vaccines

Medical Groups 20, [Academic Pediatric Association AIDS Action Baltimore AIDS Foundation of Chicago AIDS United
Alliance for Aging Research American Academy of HIV Medicine American Academy of Neurology American Academy of
Pediatrics American Association for the Advancement of Science American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists American Pediatric Society American Physiological Society
American Society for Cell Biology American Society for Reproductive Medicine American Society of Hematology
American Society of Human Genetics American Thoracic Society Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
(ARVO) Association of American Medical Colleges Association of American Universities Association of Independent
Research Institutes Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs Association of Public and Land-grant
Universities AVAC Axis Advocacy Boston University Brown University California Institute of Technology Cascade AIDS
Project Coalition for the Life Sciences Columbia University Irving Medical Center Community Education Group Council on
Governmental Relations Duke University Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Endocrine Society Equality North
Carolina Equity Forward Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality
Harvard University HealthHIV HIV Medicine Association Housing Works, Inc. Infectious Diseases Society of America
International Foundation for Autoimmune & Autoinflammatory Arthritis (AiArthritis) International Society for Stem Cell
Research IRMA (International Rectal Microbicide Advocates) Jacobs Institute of Women's Health Johns Hopkins
University Massachusetts General Hospital Medical College of Wisconsin Medical Students for Choice Michigan State
University NASTAD National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research National Alliance on Mental Illness National Coalition
for LGBT Health National Multiple Sclerosis Society National Women's Health Network New York Stem Cell Foundation
New York University NMAC North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine Oregon Health & Science University Pediatric Policy Council Physicians for Reproductive
Health Princeton University Research!America Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Society for Maternal-Fetal
Medicine Society for Pediatric Research Society of Family Planning Stanford University Stony Brook University The
American Association of Immunologists The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research Treatment Action Group
Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance Tulane University UC San Francisco UCLA Union of Concerned Scientists University at Buffalo
Jacobs School of Medicine and Biological Sciences University of California University of California San Diego University of
California, Davis University of Chicago Medicine University of Illinois at Chicago University of Massachusetts Medical
School University of Michigan University of Oregon University of Pittsburgh University of Rochester University of
Washington University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health Weill Cornell Medicine Yale
University, Letter to President Trump, March 25, https://www.isscr.org/docs/default-source/policy-documents/covid-
19-human-fetal-tissue-research-letter.pdf]//MW

The world is facing an unprecedented public health threat that, by some estimates, could claim the lives of over a million
Americans. While there are promising treatments in development, we will not know whether these treatments are safe
and effective for COVID-19 patients until the clinical trials conclude. The full assessment may take months or years to
complete. In the meantime, all biomedical research tools should be made immediately available to develop new
treatments, vaccines, and cures to save lives and reduce suffering in the response to COVID-19. Fetal tissue has been
critical for the development of other vaccines and therapies for viral pathogens, such as HIV, in the past.

Last year’s restrictions on research using human fetal tissue are undermining the ability of NIH researchers to use this
crucial biomedical research tool to investigate potential treatments for COVID-19 and other diseases . Similarly,
researchers at institutions across the United States cannot access extramural NIH funding for research using fetal tissue
to investigate new therapies and vaccines. New funding has been on hold since September, waiting for the establishing
of the new ethics advisory board. Patients shouldn’t have to wait for NIH funded research on COVID-19 or other diseases
to progress. Removing barriers and bureaucratic layers of review is necessary to speed the delivery of new treatments.
Unless these restrictions are lifted, Americans may be forced to wait for treatments to be developed in other parts of
the world.

New pandemics cause extinction

Ord 20, [edited extract from The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord, published by
Bloomsbury, Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics, March 6,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/06/worst-case-thinking-prevent-pandemics-coronavirus-existential-
risk]

Our population now is a thousand times greater than it was for most of human history, so there are vastly more
opportunities for new human diseases to originate. And our farming practices have created vast numbers of animals
living in unhealthy conditions within close proximity to humans. This increases the risk, as many major diseases
originate in animals before crossing over to humans. Examples include HIV (chimpanzees), Ebola (bats), Sars (probably
civets or bats) and influenza (usually pigs or birds). We do not yet know where Covid-19 came from, though it is very
similar to coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins. Evidence suggests that diseases are crossing over into human
populations from animals at an increasing rate.

Modern civilisation may also make it much easier for a pandemic to spread. The higher density of people living
together in cities increases the number of people each of us may infect. Rapid long-distance transport greatly
increases the distance pathogens can spread, reducing the degrees of separation between any two people. Moreover,
we are no longer divided into isolated populations as we were for most of the past 10,000 years.
Together these effects suggest that we might expect more new pandemics , for them to spread more quickly , and to
reach a higher percentage of the world’s people .

But we have also changed the world in ways that offer protection. We have a healthier population; improved sanitation
and hygiene; preventative and curative medicine; and a scientific understanding of disease. Perhaps most importantly,
we have public health bodies to facilitate global communication and coordination in the face of new outbreaks. We have
seen the benefits of this protection through the dramatic decline of endemic infectious disease over the past century
(though we can’t be sure pandemics will obey the same trend). Finally, we have spread to a range of locations and
environments unprecedented for any mammalian species. This offers special protection from extinction events, because
it requires the pathogen to be able to flourish in a vast range of environments and to reach exceptionally isolated
populations such as uncontacted tribes, Antarctic researchers and nuclear submarine crews.

It is hard to know whether these combined effects have increased or decreased the existential risk from pandemics.
This uncertainty is ultimately bad news : we were previously sitting on a powerful argument that the risk was tiny ;
now we are not.

We have seen the indirect ways that our actions aid and abet the origination and spread of pandemics. But what about
cases where we have a much more direct hand in the process – where we deliberately use, improve or create the
pathogens?

Our understanding and control of pathogens is very recent. Just 200 years ago, we didn’t even understand the basic
cause of pandemics – a leading theory in the west claimed that disease was produced by a kind of gas. In just two
centuries, we discovered it was caused by a diverse variety of microscopic agents and we worked out how to grow them
in the lab, to breed them for different traits, to sequence their genomes, to implant new genes and to create entire
functional viruses from their written code.

This progress is continuing at a rapid pace. The past 10 years have seen major qualitative breakthroughs, such as the use
of the gene editing tool Crispr to efficiently insert new genetic sequences into a genome, and the use of gene drives to
efficiently replace populations of natural organisms in the wild with genetically modified versions.

This progress in biotechnology seems unlikely to fizzle out anytime soon: there are no insurmountable challenges
looming; no fundamental laws blocking further developments. But it would be optimistic to assume that this uncharted
new terrain holds only familiar dangers.

To start with, let’s set aside the risks from malicious intent, and consider only the risks that can arise from well-
intentioned research. Most scientific and medical research poses a negligible risk of harms at the scale we are
considering. But there is a small fraction that uses live pathogens of kinds that are known to threaten global harm. These
include the agents that cause the Spanish flu, smallpox, Sars and H5N1 or avian flu. And a small part of this research
involves making strains of these pathogens that pose even more danger than the natural types, increasing their
transmissibility, lethality or resistance to vaccination or treatment.

In 2012, a Dutch virologist, Ron Fouchier, published details of an experiment on the recent H5N1 strain of bird flu. This
strain was extremely deadly, killing an estimated 60% of humans it infected – far beyond even the Spanish flu. Yet its
inability to pass from human to human had so far prevented a pandemic. Fouchier wanted to find out whether (and
how) H5N1 could naturally develop this ability. He passed the disease through a series of 10 ferrets, which are
commonly used as a model for how influenza affects humans. By the time it passed to the final ferret, his strain of
H5N1 had become directly transmissible between mammals.

The work caused fierce controversy. Much of this was focused on the information contained in his work. The US National
Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity ruled that his paper had to be stripped of some of its technical details before
publication, to limit the ability of bad actors to cause a pandemic. And the Dutch government claimed that the research
broke EU law on exporting information useful for bioweapons. But it is not the possibility of misuse that concerns me
here. Fouchier’s research provides a clear example of well-intentioned scientists enhancing the destructive
capabilities of pathogens known to threaten global catastrophe .

Of course, such experiments are done in secure labs, with stringent safety standards. It is highly unlikely that in any
particular case the enhanced pathogens would escape into the wild. But just how unlikely? Unfortunately, we don’t have
good data, due to a lack of transparency about incident and escape rates. This prevents society from making well-
informed decisions balancing the risks and benefits of this research, and it limits the ability of labs to learn from each
other’s incidents.

Security for highly dangerous pathogens has been deeply flawed , and remains insufficient . In 2001, Britain was struck
by a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock. Six million animals were killed in an attempt to halt its
spread, and the economic damages totalled £8bn. Then, in 2007, there was another outbreak, which was traced to a lab
working on the disease. Foot-and-mouth was considered a highest-category pathogen, and required the highest level of
biosecurity. Yet the virus escaped from a badly maintained pipe, leaking into the groundwater at the facility. After an
investigation, the lab’s licence was renewed – only for another leak to occur two weeks later.

In my view, this track record of escapes shows that even the highest biosafety level ( BSL-4 ) is insufficient for working
on pathogens that pose a risk of global pandemics on the scale of the Spanish flu or worse. Thirteen years since the last
publicly acknowledged outbreak from a BSL-4 facility is not good enough. It doesn’t matter whether this is from
insufficient standards, inspections, operations or penalties. What matters is the poor track record in the field, made
worse by a lack of transparency and accountability. With current BSL-4 labs, an escape of a pandemic pathogen is only
a matter of time .

One of the most exciting trends in biotechnology is its rapid democratisation – the speed at which cutting-edge
techniques can be adopted by students and amateurs. When a new breakthrough is achieved, the pool of people with
the talent, training, resources and patience to reproduce it rapidly expands: from a handful of the world’s top biologists,
to people with PhDs in the field, to millions of people with undergraduate-level biology.

The Human Genome Project was the largest ever scientific collaboration in biology. It took 13 years and $500m to
produce the full DNA sequence of the human genome. Just 15 years later, a genome can be sequenced for under $1,000,
and within a single hour. The reverse process has become much easier, too: online DNA synthesis services allow anyone
to upload a DNA sequence of their choice then have it constructed and shipped to their address. While still expensive,
the price of synthesis has fallen by a factor of 1,000 in the past two decades, and continues to drop. The first ever uses
of Crispr and gene drives were the biotechnology achievements of the decade. But within just two years, each of these
technologies were used successfully by bright students participating in science competitions.

Such democratisation promises to fuel a boom of entrepreneurial biotechnology. But since biotechnology can be
misused to lethal effect, democratisation also means proliferation. As the pool of people with access to a technique
grows, so does the chance it contains someone with malign intent.

People with the motivation to wreak global destruction are mercifully rare. But they exist. Perhaps the best example is
the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, active between 1984 and 1995, which sought to bring about the destruction of
humanity. It attracted several thousand members, including people with advanced skills in chemistry and biology. And it
demonstrated that it was not mere misanthropic ideation. It launched multiple lethal attacks using VX gas and sarin gas,
killing more than 20 people and injuring thousands. It attempted to weaponise anthrax, but did not succeed. What
happens when the circle of people able to create a global pandemic becomes wide enough to include members of such a
group? Or members of a terrorist organisation or rogue state that could try to build an omnicidal weapon for the
purposes of extortion or deterrence?

The main candidate for biological existential risk in the coming decades thus stems from tech nology – particularly the
risk of misuse by states or small groups. But this is not a case in which the world is blissfully unaware of the risks.
Bertrand Russell wrote of the danger of extinction from biowarfare to Einstein in 1955. And, in 1969, the possibility was
raised by the American Nobel laureate for medicine, Joshua Lederberg: “As a scientist I am profoundly concerned about
the continued involvement of the United States and other nations in the development of biological warfare. This process
puts the very future of human life on earth in serious peril .”

In response to such warnings, we have already begun national and international efforts to protect humanity. There is
action through public health and international conventions, and self-regulation by biotechnology companies and the
scientific community. Are they adequate?

National and international work in public health offers some protection from engineered pandemics, and its existing
infrastructure could be adapted to better address them. Yet even for existing dangers this protection is uneven and
under-provided.

1NR
Nuclear war does NOT cause extinction
Ladish 20, [Jeffrey Ladish is a Information Security and Biosecurity Consultant at Gordian Research,
“Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction,” November 6, 2020,
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT6NxFxso6Z9xjS7o/nuclear-war-is-unlikely-to-cause-human-
extinction]//KAK
There are three potential mechanisms of human extinction from nuclear war:

1) Kinetic destruction

2) Radiation

3) Climate alteration

Only 3) is remotely plausible with existing weapons, but let's go through them all.

1) Kinetic destruction

There simply aren't enough nuclear warheads to kill everyone directly with kinetic force, and there likely never will be.
There are ~14,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and let’s suppose they have an average yield of something like 1
megaton. This is a conservative guess, the actual average is probably closer to 100 kilotons. With a 1 megaton warhead,
you can create a fireball covering 3 km², and a moderate pressure wave that knocks down most residential houses
covering 155 km². The former kills nearly everyone and the latter kills a decent percentage of people but not everyone.
Let's be conservative and assume the pressure wave kills everyone in its radius. 14,000 * 155 = 2.17 million km². The
New York Metro area is 8,683 km². So all the nuclear weapons in the world could destroy about 250 New York Metro
areas. This is a lot! But not near enough, even if someone intentionally tried to hit all the populations at once . Total land
surface of earth is: 510.1 million km². Urban area, by one estimate, is about 2%, or 10.2 million km.² Since the total
possible area destroyed from nuclear weapons is ~2.17 million km² is considerably less than a lower bound on the area
of human habitation, 10.2 million km², there should be basically no risk of human extinction from kinetic destruction.

The circle with the white border indicates the zone of moderate blast damage radius (5 psi): 7.03 km (155 km²) from a
1,000 kiloton warhead, link to nukemap

If you want to check my work there, I was using nuke map.

The even more obvious reason why kinetic damage wouldn't lead to human extinction is that nuclear states only
threaten one or several countries at a time, and never the population centers of the entire world. Even if NATO
countries and Russia and China all went to war at the same time, Africa, South America, and other neutral regions would
be spared any kinetic damage.

2) Radiation

Radiation won't kill everyone because there aren't enough weapons, and radiation from them would be concentrated
in some areas and wholly absent from other areas. Even in the worst affected areas, lethal radiation from fallout would
drop to survivable levels within weeks.

Here it's worth noting that there is an inherent tradeoff between length of halflife and energy released by radionuclides.
The shorter the half life the more energy will be released, and the longer the half life the less energy. The fallout
products from modern nuclear weapons are very lethal, but only for days to several weeks.

From Nuclear War Survival Skills, 1987 edition

Let's try the same calculation we used with kinetic damage, and see if an attack aimed at optimizing fallout for killing
everyone could succeed. Using Nukemap again, I'll go with the fallout contour for 100 rads per hour. 400 rads is thought
too be enough to kill 50% of people, so 100 rads per hour is likely to kill most all people not in some kind of shelter. We
need to switch to using a groundburst detonation rather than an airburst detonation, because groundbursts create far
more fallout. A 1mt ground burst would create an area of about 8,000 km² of >100 rads per hour. Okay, multiple that by
14,000 warheads, and we get 112 million km². That's a lot! It's still less than the 510.1 million km² of earth's land mass,
but it's a lot more than the ~10.2 million km² of urban space. Presumably this is enough to cover every human
habitation, so in principle, it might be possible to kill everyone with radiation from existing nuclear weapons.

The bright red and slightly less bright red indicate fallout contour for 1,000 rads and 100 rads per hour, covering 1,140
km² and 7,080 km² respectively, from a 1,000 kiloton ground burst. Nukemap settings

In practice, it would be almost impossible to kill every human via radiation with the existing nuclear arsenals, even if
they were targeted explicitly for this purpose. The first reason is that fallout patterns are very uneven. After a ground
burst, fallout is carried by the wind. Some areas will be hit bad and some areas will be hardly affected by fallout. Even if
most human population centers were covered, a few areas would almost certainly escape.

Two other things make extinction by radiation unlikely. Many countries, especially in the southern hemisphere, are
unlikely to be affected by fallout much at all. Since most of these countries are likely to be neutral in a conflict, and not
near combatant countries, they should be relatively safe from fallout. While fallout might travel hundreds of kms, it still
won't reach places separated by greater distances . Fallout that reaches the upper atmosphere will eventually fall back
down , but usually after the period of lethal radioactivity . The other mitigating factor is that in typical nuclear war
plans, ground bursts are usually restricted to hardened targets, and air bursts are favored for population and industry
centers. This is because air bursts maximize the size of the destructive pressure wave. Air burst detonations result in
little lethal fallout reaching the ground, so populations not downwind of military targets would likely be safe from the
worst of the radiological effects in a war scenario.

The final protection from extinction by radiation is simply large amounts of mass between people and the radiation
source, in other words, fallout shelters. After several weeks, the radionuclides in fallout from ground burst detonations
will have decayed to the point where humans can survive outside of shelters. Many fallout shelters exist in the world,
and many more could be made easily in a day or two with a shovel, some ground, and some boards. Even if lethally
radioactive fallout from ground bursts covered all population centers, many humans would still survive in shelters.

The risks of extinction from nuclear-weapon-induced-radiation wouldn't be complete without discussing two factors:
nuclear power plants and radiological weapons. I'm only going to cover these briefly, but they both don't change the
conclusions much.

Nuclear power plants could be targeted by nuclear weapons to create large amounts of fallout with a longer half-life but
less energy per unit time. The main concern here is that nuclear power plants and spent fuel sites contain a much
greater *mass* of radioactive material than nuclear missiles can carry. The danger comes primarily from spreading the
already very radiative spent or unspent nuclear fuel. The risk this poses requires a longer analysis, but the short version
is that while nuking a nuclear power plant or stored fuel site would indeed create some pretty long-lived fallout it would
still be concentrated in a relatively small area. Fortunately, even a nuclear detonation wouldn't spread the nuclear fuel
more than several hundred km at most. Having regions of countries covered in spent nuclear fuel would be awful, but it
doesn't much raise the risk of extinction

Radiological weapons are nuclear weapons designed to maximize the spread of lethal fallout rather than destructive
yield. The particular concern from the extinction perspective is that they can be designed to create fallout that continues
to emit levels of radiation that can make an area uninhabitable for months to years. These kind of radiological weapons
kill more slowly, but they still kill. In principle, radiological weapons could be used to kill everyone on earth. However, in
practice, the same constraints that apply to standard nuclear weapons apply to weapons optimized for long-lasting
fallout, as well as some additional constraints.

Radiological weapons wouldn't produce more fallout than standard warheads, they would just produce fallout with
different characteristics. As a result the amount of radiological weapons required to cover every part of earth's surface
would be massively expensive (likely as expensive as the largest existing nuclear arsenals), and serve no military
purpose. Their inefficiency in destruction and death compared to standard nuclear weapons is probably why radiological
weapons have never been developed or deployed in large numbers. This makes them an ongoing theoretical concern,
but not an existential risk in the immediate future. A concerning development is Russia's claim to have developed a
large-yield (100mt) submersible nuclear weapon with the suggestion that it could be used as a radiological weapon, but
even if this is true, it's unlikely to be deployed in large numbers.

3) Climate alteration

The bulk of the risk of human extinction from nuclear weapons come from risks of catastrophic climate change, nuclear
winter, due to secondary effects from nuclear detonations. However , even in most full-scale nuclear exchange
scenarios , the resulting climate effects are unlikely to cause human extinction .

Reasons for this:

a) Under scenarios where a severe nuclear winter occurs as described by Robock et al, some human populations would
likely survive.

b) The Robock group’s models are probably overestimating the risk

c) Nuclear war planners are aware of nuclear winter risks and can i ncorporate these risks into their targeting plans

But if it does, disease makes it worse

RECNA et al. 21 [Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA), Asia Pacific
Leadership Network (APLN), and the Nautilus Institute. Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament Volume 4, 2021.
“Pandemic Futures and Nuclear Weapon Risks: The Nagasaki 75th Anniversary pandemic-nuclear nexus scenarios final
report” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1890867] brett

The relationship between pandemics and war is as long as human history. Past pandemics have set the scene for wars
by weakening societies, undermining resilience , and exacerbating civil and inter-state conflict . Other disease
outbreaks have erupted during wars, in part due to the appalling public health and battlefield conditions resulting from
war, in turn sowing the seeds for new conflicts. In the post-Cold War era, pandemics have spread with unprecedented
speed due to increased mobility created by globalization, especially between urbanized areas. Although there are
positive signs that scientific advances and rapid innovation can help us manage pandemics, it is likely that deadly
infectious viruses will be a challenge for years to come.
The COVID-19 is the most demonic pandemic threat in modern history. It has erupted at a juncture of other existential
global threats, most importantly, accelerating climate change and resurgent nuclear threat-making. The most
important issue, therefore, is how the coronavirus (and future pandemics ) will increase or decrease the risks
associated with these twin threats, climate change effects, and the next use of nuclear weapons in war.5

Today, the nine nuclear weapons arsenals not only can annihilate hundreds of cities, but also cause nuclear winter and
mass starvation of a billion or more people, if not the entire human species . Concurrently, climate change is
enveloping the planet with more frequent and intense storms, accelerating sea level rise, and advancing rapid
ecological change, expressed in unprecedented forest fires across the world. Already stretched to a breaking point in
many countries, the current pandemic may overcome resilience to the point of near or actual collapse of social,
economic, and political order.

In this extraordinary moment, it is timely to reflect on the existence and possible uses of weapons of mass destruction
under pandemic conditions – most importantly, nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. Moments
of extreme crisis and vulnerability can prompt aggressive and counterintuitive actions that in turn may destabilize
already precariously balanced threat systems, underpinned by conventional and nuclear weapons , as well as the
threat of weaponized chemical and biological technologies. Consequently, the risk of the use of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), especially nuclear weapons, increases at such times, possibly sharply.

The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly driving massive, rapid, and unpredictable changes that will redefine every aspect of
the human condition, including WMD – just as the world wars of the first half of the 20th century led to a revolution in
international affairs and entirely new ways of organizing societies, economies, and international relations, in part based
on nuclear weapons and their threatened use. In a world reshaped by pandemics, nuclear weapons – as well as
correlated non-nuclear WMD, nuclear alliances, “deterrence” doctrines, operational and declaratory policies, nuclear
extended deterrence, organizational practices, and the existential risks posed by retaining these capabilities – are all up
for redefinition.

A pandemic has potential to destabilize a nuclear-prone conflict by incapacitating the supreme nuclear commander or
commanders who have to issue nuclear strike orders, creating uncertainty as to who is in charge, how to handle
nuclear mistakes (such as errors, accidents, technological failures, and entanglement with conventional operations gone
awry), and opening a brief opportunity for a first strike at a time when the COVID-infected state may not be able to
retaliate efficiently – or at all – due to leadership confusion. In some nuclear-laden conflicts, a state might use a
pandemic as a cover for political or military provocations in the belief that the adversary is distracted and partly
disabled by the pandemic, increasing the risk of war in a nuclear-prone conflict. At the same time, a pandemic may
lead nuclear armed states to increase the isolation and sanctions against a nuclear adversary, making it even harder to
stop the spread of the disease, in turn creating a pandemic reservoir and transmission risk back to the nuclear armed
state or its allies.

In principle, the common threat of the pandemic might induce nuclear-armed states to reduce the tension in a nuclear-
prone conflict and thereby the risk of nuclear war. It may cause nuclear adversaries or their umbrella states to seek to
resolve conflicts in a cooperative and collaborative manner by creating habits of communication, engagement, and
mutual learning that come into play in the nuclear-military sphere. For example, militaries may cooperate to control
pandemic transmission, including by working together against criminal-terrorist non-state actors that are trafficking
people or by joining forces to ensure that a new pathogen is not developed as a bioweapon.

To date, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the isolation of some nuclear-armed states and provided a
textbook case of the failure of states to cooperate to overcome the pandemic. Borders have slammed shut, trade shut
down, and budgets blown out, creating enormous pressure to focus on immediate domestic priorities. Foreign
policies have become markedly more nationalistic . Dependence on nuclear weapons may increase as states seek to
buttress a global re-spatialization6 of all dimensions of human interaction at all levels to manage pandemics. The effect
of nuclear threats on leaders may make it less likely – or even impossible – to achieve the kind of concert at a global
level needed to respond to and administer an effective vaccine, making it harder and even impossible to revert to pre-
pandemic international relations. The result is that some states may proliferate their own nuclear weapons , further
reinforcing the spiral of conflicts contained by nuclear threat, with cascading effects on the risk of nuclear war .

BUT Dobbs weakened Biden’s push for democratic resilience through the alliance system. That
turns both adv, wrecks all cooperation, and escalates tensions
Prey and Spears August 22, [Emily Prey is a Senior Analyst for Special Initiatives at the New Lines Institute.
Previously, Prey served as Project Manager of the Financial Integration in Displacement Initiative of the International
Rescue Committee at Tufts University. She has also worked with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency
Fund (UNICEF). Prey is a child protection and gender specialist with several years of experience working in international
development settings and has lived in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East. Her areas of research include
child marriage, human trafficking, and transitional justice, Kinsey Spears is a doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where her work focuses on gender, security studies, and Women, Peace, and
Security. Spears is also a researcher for the Feinstein International Center; a Teaching Fellow for Gender, Culture and
Conflict and Security Sector Reform: Conceptual and Contextual Debates in Peacebuilding; and a Research Fellow at the
World Peace Foundation. She has also worked as a Director of Scheduling in the U.S. Senate, August 2022: The Global
Consequences of the America’s Anti-Abortion Agenda, https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/20220809-US-
Abortion-Agenda-Dossier-NLISAPx.pdf]

U.S. Global Leadership at Risk There was considerable international outcry after the SCOTUS decision on Dobbs v.
Jackson was made official; many world leaders took to Twitter to decry the ruling. The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola
Sturgeon, said it was “one of the darkest days for women’s rights in my lifetime.” Sturgeon was not alone, as heads of
state in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and many others spoke out against the decision. The SCOTUS
ruling clearly puts the U nited States at odds with the majority of its closest allies . This has led leaders in some
countries to further enshrine rights to abortion access for fears that anti-abortion activists in Europe will become more
emboldened after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Biden and other Americans were confronted with this “value gap”
at the NATO and G7 Summits in June, during which many U.S. allies questioned the SCOTUS ruling. Marti Flacks,
director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it showed “a broader
U.S. security
concern about [how] they want to know that the U.S. continues to share their values.” While
alliances are not going to disappear immediately or even in the foreseeable future , the SCOTUS
decision is a nother major blow to Biden’s notion of “ leading by the power of our example rather than the example of
our power.” With recent SCOTUS rulings on other hot-button issues such as gun restrictions and climate change,
Washington’s status as a trusted ally with shared values is declining even further . Unfortunately, the United States is
becoming more in step with authoritarian leaders who have nearly non-existent records on improving human rights
and women’s rights, like Vladmir Putin and Kim Jong-un, even though one of Biden’s main policies has been to renew
democracy in the U.S. and around the world. Through his two Summit for Democracy events, Biden has placed
democratic resilience at the forefront of his domestic and foreign policies by aiming to lead a global alliance of
democracies against the growing autocracies of the world. And yet, America’s rollback of abortion rights mirrors
Russia’s rollback of women’s rights over the years. In the last five years, Putin has passed anti-feminist measures
including decriminalizing domestic violence and prohibiting women from dozens of professions deemed “too arduous”
or “harmful for women’s reproductive health.” The SCOTUS decision not only puts Biden’s progress on democratic
resilience in jeopardy , it also erodes America’s ability to protect our values against those of our strategic
competitors. After the Dobbs decision, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted a picture of him holding a baby which
said: “May God continue to give strength and wisdom to those who protect the innocence and future of our children, in
Brazil and around the world.” The lack of access to abortion in Brazil became worldwide news in June when an 11-year
old rape victim was denied access to an abortion by a judge, in spite of the obvious health concerns due to her age and
in direct contradiction to the young girl’s wishes. This closely mirrored a story in the U.S. about a 10-year old rape victim
in Ohio who was denied an abortion when Ohio’s trigger law fell into place, banning abortions in the state after just six
weeks. Forced pregnancies and forced births are something that the United States will have in common with
authoritarian states that have made egregious efforts to roll back human rights putting the lives of those who can get
pregnant at risk. The most recent legislation in some American states is even more draconian than many countries
further down on the Freedom House rating of people’s access to political rights and civil liberties. Some American
states that have effectively banned abortion across the board have “fewer human rights protections [in their states]
than Iran or Saudi Arabia” – countries that are often painted as humanrights boogeymen by U.S. politicians on both sides
of the aisle. Meanwhile, advocates and activists in other countries, including many of our allies and partners, have
fought tirelessly over the years to change abortion bans through legislative and judicial measures, with over 53 countries
expanding access to abortion care since 1994. The ability to access safe and reliable abortion care will also affect
people’s decisions to come to the U.S. to pursue work, entrepreneurship, education, and potentially even tourism. In
2014, 16% of the abortions provided in the U.S. were performed on individuals who did not live in the country. There is
a real concern that the number of international students choosing to study in the U.S. will continue to decrease.
International students coming to the U.S. for education is important for U.S. soft power , for domestic university
finances , and for university towns that rely heavily on students who might be now unwilling to move to states with
abortion bans . Economists have been raising the alarm about the impact that abortion restrictions will have on
states with near-total bans, but with the potential loss of Democratic control of the Senate and House in 2022 and an
uncertain presidential election in 2024, a possible nationwide abortion ban would be bad for businesses and bad for
the econ omy. With companies moving to find ways to ensure access to abortion to their employees in states with
restrictions and bans, those same measures might begin to impact international investment in the U.S.

Link
1) Their ev says we put AVs on par with corporations- those are right-holding entities which
trigger the link
Kimberly Carroll 21. Seton Hall University School of Law. “Smart Cars are Getting Smarter: Legal Personhood for
Self-Driving Vehicles.” https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2132&context=student_scholarship#:~:text=One%20potential%20legal%20framework%20that,in%20need%20of
%20stricter%20regulation.
It is important to discuss the first introduction for the idea of legal personhood for selfdriving cars. In 2017, the European
Parliament introduced the idea of legal personhood for selfdriving cars, citing the foreseeability and autonomy of
artificial intelligence.68 The European Parliament established a need for safety-measures to be taken in the case of
increasing prevalence of self-driving cars on the roadways.69 With the potential for self-driving cars to operate in an
unforeseeable manner, existing current laws required adaptation and modification . The European Parliament
addressed the fact that artificial intelligence is not just one application. Not one definition is capable of embracing
all of the applications and potential uses of artificial intelligence.70 The unpredictability of artificial intelligence in
itself would thus create the need for civil and criminal law reform. The European Parliament directly discussed the
need to depart from “traditional liability theories” – such as strict liability, product liability, negligence notions,
vehicular homicide or manslaughter, and more.71 Instead, the European Parliament called for proportionate liability
regime that would establish a compulsory insurance framework, and a potential for eventual legal status for self-driving
cars in the long-term.72 It is worth noting that the European Parliament made clear the suggestions are proposals, and not
one potential framework is law. However, the European Parliament was the first to introduce the revolutionary idea
of potential legal electronic personhood for self-driving cars.73 This resulted in both praise and skepticism from
ethical and legal scholars alike. After the European Parliament’s suggestion for legal personhood status for artificial
intelligence was published, many scholars debated the implications. One suggestion, as previously argued, was that
electronic legal personhood would not make robots virtual people but instead would allow self-driving cars to be
treated on par with corporations.74 The current liability model would eventually become defunct – meaning, where
artificial intelligence becomes increasingly more autonomous, it would be prudent for the European Union to thus
provide a version of legal personhood similar to corporations.75 This would suggest that selfdriving cars would have
some legal rights and responsibilities that a human may have, but in the light of how corporations are treated.76
Essentially, this model would not dehumanize humans but instead would revolve around accountability by holding
artificial intelligence in self-driving cars accountable when traffic accidents occur .77 An example would include a
compulsory insurance framework that would be contributed to by developers and manufacturers.78

1) Their ev says it’s a novel area that will cause large changes to law- it will use every tool in
the toolbox to set precedent and FP offers a gray area
Diana Mădălina Mocanu 22. Centre for Philosophy of Law, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Legal
Sciences, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. “Gradient Legal Personhood for AI
Systems—Painting Continental Legal Shapes Made to Fit Analytical Molds.” 1/11/22. Frontiers in Robotics and AI
8: 788179.
AI systems are in a rather singular position. We are making them show us reality in novel ways, and they are
making us reconsider the way we order it in return. No matter how we formulate our answer to the legal status
of AI systems question, it must acknowledge the fact that law is artifactual. Being much more in line with what
we think of as such, molds are yet another helpful metaphor. They are not mere collections of things tied
together by the proverbial vinculum juris, but tools for creating new things altogether, extensions of composing
parts with their shape, size, and color situated on gradients.
Given that the skills involved in making such tools were acquired only of late by this hybrid between homo faber
and homo juridicus that homo sapiens sapiens seems to be, they need honing. Engineering complex concepts,
such as legal personhood can be looked at as a work in progress from this perspective. Applying them to such
uncanny novel entities as AI systems requires the use of every other available tool in the analytical toolbox to
fashion a smooth transition in the face of the overwhelming changes brought about by the advent of AI.

2) Tort liability for AI creates a conceptual juristic framework to regognize embryonic rights
as interests to be balanced against interests of life and health of the pregnant person.
Pizzetti 21, [Professore ordinario di Istituzioni di diritto pubblico; Università degli Studi di Milano, Embryos, Organoids
and Robots: “legal subjects”?, https://air.unimi.it/bitstream/2434/820147/2/FGPIZZETTI_Organoids_Biolaw.pdf]

The “legal subjectivity” might be, in some cases, also attributed to some entities that are not considered as
legal persons . The debates in law and politics. In light of the recent legal and political activity concerning the
boundaries of personhood, this article argues that feminist legal theory should engage with the question of legal
personhood. To this end, it articulates one possible framework for a feminist legal theory of the person. Drawing on the
work of scholars in vulnerability studies and embodiment theory, this article imagines and proposes an analytic
framework to aid those who make and interpret the law when faced with the twenty-first century challenges of legal
personhood. se cases comprehend the embryos as human beings not-yet born and alive but capable of self-
development into a human-being , and (maybe) the AI-system as sophisticated artificial beings capable of autonomous
agentivity. From this specific (and narrow) point of view, the legal subjectivity might be the conceptual juristic
“substrate” for recognizing some specific rights to be protected and balanced with others’ rights and interests ( like
life and health ) such as in the case of embryos , or for imposing some responsibility for making good any
damage they may cause ( like tort and other illicit) such as in the case of the AI -systems.

3) ENEMY OF MY ENEMY. Both embryonic and AI personhood are challenged by the

traditional view that personhood is the flip side of being human.
Pizzetti 21, [Professore ordinario di Istituzioni di diritto pubblico; Università degli Studi di Milano, Embryos, Organoids
and Robots: “legal subjects”?, https://air.unimi.it/bitstream/2434/820147/2/FGPIZZETTI_Organoids_Biolaw.pdf]
Those legal texts (and many others that might be eventually cited) show how being a “member of the human family”
implies “inherently” to be vested of dignity, rights, and “legal personhood” as different sides of the same indivisible
“prism”.

However, facing the developments of biosciences and informatics technologies, that traditional legal view has been
recently questioned at least under three different sides: the embryos, the artificial intelligence, and the organoids (in
particular, the human cerebral type of organoid)9

4) Personhood law is a proxy for political fights. The plan expands the community. That’s the
exact boundary that fetal personhood supporters want to cross!
Matambanadzo 12, [SARU M. MATAMBANADZO - Associate Professor of Law, Tulane University Law School. Ph.D.
University of California, J.D. Harvard Law School, B.A. University of Pittsburgh, Embodying Vulnerability: A Feminist
Theory of the Person, 46 DUKE JOURNAL OF GENDER LAW & POLICY Volume 20:45,
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1235&context=djglp]

There are numerous ways to name the process of determining who counts and how we take account of them in law.
Citizenship, 9 legal rights10 and legal subjectivity11 are various ways to speak about who counts in law and how we take
account of them. Another way in which legal scholars talk about the issue of recognition for the purposes of structuring
the legal community is accomplished through the concept of legal personhood. At the dawn of the twenty-first century,
legal personhood has become a political battleground for activists and legislators . While some work to expand the
community of legal persons to include unborn human beings like fetuses and zygotes ,12 others focus their efforts on
pushing the bound arie s of legal personhood beyond human beings to include great apes or whales and orcas.13 And
finally, some activists are concerned with limiting the community of legal persons to exclude collective legal entities like
corporations, limited liability companies and unions.14

Recent activism concerning the status of persons and non-persons reveals how the legal boundaries of personhood
have served as the background for debates in law and politics . In light of the recent legal and political activity
concerning the boundaries of personhood, this article argues that feminist legal theory should engage with the question
of legal personhood. To this end, it articulates one possible framework for a feminist legal theory of the person. Drawing
on the work of scholars in vulnerability studies and embodiment theory, this article imagines and proposes an analytic
framework to aid those who make and interpret the law when faced with the twenty-first century challenges of legal
personhood.

Roberts and Kavanaugh cast key votes sticking to precedent instead of giving in to the culture war
Stern 9-15, [Mark Joseph Stern is a Slate senior writer., “Roberts and Kavanaugh Issue a Surprise
Warning Shot to Conservative Lawyers,” September 15, 2022,
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/09/roberts-kavanaugh-lgbtq-yeshiva-shadow-docket.html]
The Supreme Court divided 5–4 in a clash over religious liberty and LGBTQ equality on Wednesday, forcing Yeshiva
University to stop discriminating against a gay rights group on campus. But the majority’s order had little to do with this
culture war skirmish . It was, rather, a rebuke of Yeshiva—and specifically, its overeager lawyers—for racing to SCOTUS
after losing in the lower courts because of their own errors. Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh did not side
with the three liberals against the university because they think gay students deserve equal treatment. They did so
because Yeshiva brazenly abused the court’s shadow docket on the assumption that it would get special treatment. It
was an understandable gamble. But it failed.

Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance arose after the school denied official recognition to a student group that affirms
the equal dignity of LGBTQ people. Yeshiva calls itself a Jewish university; however, it is incorporated as a secular
institution in order to receive government funds, and fewer than 5 percent of students major in Jewish studies. The
LGBTQ student group accused the school of violating the New York City Human Rights Law and sued for formal
recognition. Yeshiva argued that it was exempt from the Human Rights Law because it is a “religious corporation”—and
added that if the law did apply, it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.

A state trial court sided against the university in June. The court held that New York City’s Human Rights Law does apply,
noting that Yeshiva’s own charter says it operates “exclusively for educational purposes,” not religious training. The
university sought relief from an intermediate appeals court called the First Department, which turned it down

Yeshiva then tried to appeal the First Department’s order to New York’s highest court. In the process, it made a mistake,
one that’s fairly technical but still important. State law requires a party to ask the First Department for permission to
appeal an order; Yeshiva failed to do so properly, filing the wrong application. The First Department informed the
university of its error and instructed it to refile the correct application. After that, it could appeal to the state’s highest
court—then, if necessary, to SCOTUS.

Yet lawyers representing the university did not want to play by New York’s rules. They were hoping to score a quick win,
and it’s easy to see why. To fight the LGBTQ student club, Yeshiva hired the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a right-
leaning group with a strong track record at this Supreme Court. As an impact litigation firm, Becket Fund seeks to rack up
high-profile victories that’ll attract more acclaim, donors, and clients. With every win, Becket grows more entrenched
and respected within the conservative legal movement. It apparently aims to become a marquee litigation shop for the
religious right on the level of Alliance Defending Freedom despite having a small fraction of ADF’s budget.

Moreover, Becket had good reason to believe it could short-circuit the appeals process in New York state courts. This
Supreme Court has shown extraordinary solicitude to religious liberty claims, most prominently in cases halting COVID
restrictions on houses of worship. The conservative justices have repeatedly changed the court’s own rules to carve
religious exemptions into law. They have exploited the shadow docket to skip over full briefing and oral argument,
sometimes acting before a lower court even issues a decision. The Becket lawyers evidently assumed that they could
secure this special treatment for their client, too.

This time, though, they went too far. Under federal law, the Supreme Court can only stay the “final judgment” of a
state’s highest court. But there’s no final judgment here: New York’s highest court is waiting for Yeshiva’s lawyers at the
Becket Fund to correct their error and refile, teeing up a proper appeal. These lawyers were really asking SCOTUS to
bend the rules just for them, and it backfired: Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,
and Ketanji Brown Jackson in swatting down their emergency application . The majority pointed out that Yeshiva still
had options in state court —most importantly, filing “a corrected motion ” that would put their case before New York’s
high court. It could also seek “expedited review” to speed up consideration of the merits. If the university pursues these
options and still fails, the majority wrote, it could return to SCOTUS with another request for a stay.

Predictably, Justice Samuel Alito penned a dyspeptic dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy
Coney Barrett accusing the majority of shirking “its duty to stand up for the Constitution even when doing so is
controversial.” Notably, Alito’s dissent focused on the merits of the case: He accused New York of forcing “a Jewish
school to instruct its students in accordance with an interpretation of Torah that the school, after careful study, has
concluded is incorrect.” (It’s unclear how requiring Yeshiva to grant equal recognition to a gay student club forces it to
“instruct its students” on anything.) “A state’s imposition of its own mandatory interpretation of scripture is a shocking
development that calls out for review,” the justice huffed.

Alito claimed that Yeshiva has a clear First Amendment right to discriminate against LGBTQ students under settled law,
which would justify an emergency stay. Is that true? Under existing precedent, maybe not. Religious organizations do
have a right to autonomy over their internal management decisions, particularly those fraught with faith-based
judgments. Yeshiva, though, may have relinquished that right when it chose to incorporate as a secular institution. This
Supreme Court will likely rule for the school in the end, but this area of the law is far from settled. In 1987, for instance,
the District of Columbia’s highest court ordered Georgetown University, a Catholic school, to provide equal benefits to a
gay student group. Alito wanted to seize on this case to establish new precedent handing educational institutions a
newfound religious right to discriminate, and he was willing to overlook Yeshiva’s own legal mistakes to do it.

Why did Roberts and Kavanaugh draw the line here? Presumably they could not bring themselves to sanction such an
egregious abuse of the shadow docket. The chief justice has, to his credit, already expressed dismay over the
ultraconservative majority’s freewheeling use of emergency orders to reshape the law. Kavanaugh is the surprise here :
He’s usually part of the problem, but cast the key vote to stop his colleagues from indulging Becket’s extravagant
demands .

Extinction
Logistics 230 22, [Logistics 230, Logistics2030.eu is a news publishing service promoting solutions for climate
mitigation, resilience and regeneration with support from companies and their supply chain stakeholders: employees,
customers, suppliers and shareholders, Plastic production now threatens human survival, Jan. 19,
https://www.logistics2030.ie/index.php/59-logistics2030-news/biodiversity/1404-plastic-production-now-threatens-
human-survival]

STOCKHOLM: An international team of scientists says the volume of chemical production, including plastic, has
breached a planetary boundary necessary for human survival .

In 2009, researchers identified nine boundaries that defined the Holocene era, stable since the dawn of civilization some
10,000-plus years ago. They include greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, forests, freshwater and biodiversity.

Revisiting their research in 2015, scientists discovered four boundaries had been breached as humans moved into a new,
unstable Anthropocene era.

With plastic production increasing 79 percent between 2000 and 2015, mankind has now exceeded a fifth planetary
boundary relating to environmental pollutants.

According to a new study by the 14 scientists, there are an estimated 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals
including plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, chemicals in consumer products, antibiotics and other
pharmaceuticals.

“There has been a 50-fold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950. This is projected to triple again by 2050,”
notes report co-author Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC).

The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice that of all living mammals , and roughly 80 percent of all
plastics ever produced remains in the environment with largely unknown effects on the Earth system.

“The rate at which these pollutants are appearing in the environment far exceeds the capacity of gov ernments to
assess global and regional risks, let alone control any potential problems,” comments co-author Bethanie Carney
Almroth from the University of Gothenburg. “We need to be working towards implementing a fixed cap on chemical
production and release.”

SRC scientist Sarah Cornell adds that shifting to a circular econ omy is now really important: “That means changing
materials and products so they can be reused not wasted, designing chem icals and products for recycling, and much
better screening of chemicals for their safety and sustainability along their whole impact pathway in the Earth system.”

Impact---AIDS
FTR solves AIDS---that’s Medical Groups
Goes airborne---extinction
Spignesi 4 New York Times bestselling author and university professor who writes about historical biography,
American and world history (Stephen, “Catastrophe! The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time”, p. 12)

Regardless of the means of transmission of the HIV virus or the societal groups most affected, the reality is that AIDS is
one of the worst pandemics ever to strike mankind. If the virus happens to mutate and become airborne contagious,
AIDS could very easily wipe out life on earth . The need for a vaccine and a cure is paramount, since we cannot be sure
that AIDS will burn itself out, as did the Black Death and influenza.

AND outweighs war without mutation

Elbe 5 Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Government at the University of Essex (Stefan Elbe,
2005 “HIV/AIDS: The International Security Dimensions”, stefanelbe.com/resources/ElkeBook.doc)

Much in this vein the Human Development Report went on to define human security as ‘safety from constant threats of
hunger, disease, crime and repression. It also means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of
our daily lives--wither in our homes, our jobs, in our communities or in our environments’. Specifically, the report
identified seven components of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and
political. Although this particular way of thinking about security has provoked considerable debate in post-Cold War
security studies, especially regarding its breadth as an analytical concept, it is important to bear in mind that such
thinking about the notion of security is not as novel as it might initially appear in context of the contemporary debate.
Emma Rothschild has shown how many of these ideas have evident Enlightenment roots that can be traced back at least
to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, if not earlier. From this perspective, the narrowing of security thinking in the
course of the twentieth century represents an historical anomaly--one linked, perhaps, to the extraordinary violent
nature the twentieth century. In either case, the idea of human security has not only been embraced by the United
Nations Security Council, but has also attracted a wider coalition of national governments, including Canada, Norway,
and Japan. If the human security approach is intimately concerned with securing not only the survival of the state, but
also the survival and welfare of individual human beings, then HIV/AIDS clearly amounts to an important security issue
within this framework. Quantitatively, HIV/AIDS is already amongst the five most frequent causes of death worldwide. In
Africa the illness even vies for the unenviable position of posing the greatest human security threat. In Africa HIV/AIDS is
not only the leading cause of death; it is also estimated to cause more than ten times as many deaths as armed
conflict. AIDS thus already poses a numerically greater risk to the survival and welfare of individuals in Africa than armed
conflict. Qualitatively, moreover, HIV/AIDS also directly and indirectly affects most of the components of human security
identified by the United Nations Development Program. At the most basic level, HIV/AIDS is a lethal illness that
threatens the life of those who develop AIDS and who do not enjoy access to life-saving medicines. As a result, the
average life expectancy in some African countries is likely to drop by as much as 20 to 30 years over the next decades. By
2010 the life expectancy in many countries could even be lower than at the beginning of the twentieth century, to no
small extent due to the impact of HIV/AIDS, thus further undermining virtually an entire century of modest
developmental gains. Beyond these individual tragedies, HIV/AIDS also has a plethora of direct and indirect human
security ramifications for those families and communities affected by the illness. Unlike many other illnesses associated
with old age--like ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and lower respiratory infections--AIDS-related
illnesses affect persons at a much younger and more productive age. Consequently there is an important relationship,
for example, between high HIV prevalence rates and levels of food security. As persons become too ill they may become
unable to provide or acquire nourishment for their families, or be unable to tend to the fields in order to secure
adequate levels of food. They may even have to sell off their possessions and/or livestock in order to compensate for
this lack of income. The same holds true for their more general ability to generate income, as individuals become too ill
to maintain steady employment. What is more, many urban dwellers decide to return to their villages once they become
ill, thus further perpetuating this cycle.
Impact---US Vaccines
US vaccine development solves science diplomacy
Hotez 14. Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Departments of
Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
06/26/2014. “‘Vaccine Diplomacy’: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases,
edited by Sara Lustigman, vol. 8, no. 6, p. e2808.

Vaccine dip lomacy is the branch of g lobal h ealth d iplomacy that relies on the use or delivery of vaccines, while
vaccine science diplomacy is a unique hybrid of global health and science diplomacy . Both offer innovative
opportunities to promote United States (US) foreign policy and diplomatic relations between adversarial nations.
Vaccine science diplomacy could also lead to the development and testing of some highly innovative neglected disease
vaccines. Introduction: Origins and Definitions International cooperation for purposes of infectious and tropical disease
control goes back to at least the 14th century, when early concepts of quarantine were introduced in Dubrovnik on the
Adriatic Coast of Croatia [1,2], and to the later date of 1851, when Europe held its first International Sanitary Conference
for multilateral cooperation to prevent the spread of cholera and, subsequently, plague and yellow fever [3]. Such
efforts led to a series of international sanitary treaties and conventions and ultimately to the formation of the Pan
American Health Organization and the later establishment of the World Health Organization (WHO) [3,4]. Some scholars
trace our current framework for global health diplomacy to the writings of Dr. Peter G. Bourne in his role as special
assistant for health issues to US President Jimmy Carter [5] and later (during the first years of the 21st century) to the
launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the release of the ‘‘Report of the Commission for
Macroeconomics and Health’’, when global health was placed squarely in the international diplomacy arena [6]. Among
the driving forces for these activities was an urgent need for diplomatic collaboration to combat pandemics caused by
HIV/ AIDS and seasonal and avian influenza, which came with the revelation that such diseases are threats to economic
development and both national security and foreign policy interests [7]. There were also practical considerations
concerning potential bioterrorist threats and situations that required international diplomacy, such as when Indonesia
balked at sharing its time-sensitive avian influenza data or when Nigeria and Pakistan halted polio and other
immunization initiatives because of religious tensions [7–11]. In 2007, foreign ministers from seven countries—Brazil,
France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa, and Thailand— issued the landmark ‘‘Oslo Ministerial Declaration’’
that formally linked global health to foreign policy [12]. At that time, Kickbusch et al. defined global health diplomacy in
terms of processes by which governments and civil societies both ‘‘position health in foreign policy negotiations’’ and
create new types of ‘‘global health governance’’ [13,14]. More recently, Kickbusch and Lokeny defined it as a ‘‘system of
organization and communications and negotiation processes that shape global policy environment in the sphere of
health and its determinants’’ [15]. A key element of modern global health diplomacy is that ‘‘no longer do diplomats
just talk to other diplomats’’, but instead a variety of experts in different areas and disciplines are now brought in to
solve timely global health issues [13]. Katz et al. [9] have since categorized different aspects of global health diplomacy
to include the following: (1) core diplomacy, referring to ‘‘classical Westphalian negotiations’’ between nations leading
to bilateral and multilateral treaties, such as the recent WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and
International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005; (2) multistakeholder diplomacy, i.e., negotiations between or among
nations and international agencies such as WHO, the GAVI Alliance, United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and (3) informal diplomacy, which includes peer-to-peer scientific
partnerships, private funders such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and even some government employees from
USAID or the US military working more or less independently in the field due to unique circumstances [9]. Michaud and
Kates have identified similar forms of global health diplomacy [16]. Kickbusch and Lokeny have also noted recently that
the WHO director-general made frequent mention of health diplomacy in her remarks at the January 2013 executive
session [15]. Among the factors responsible for this emphasis are globalization associated with the renewed emphasis
on ‘‘soft power’’, security policy, trade agreements, and policies concerning the environment and international
development, as well as the inclusion of health issues as part of the United Nations and summits held by various
government organizations and agencies, such as the Group of Eight (G8) and Group of Twenty (G20) nations, the
European Union (EU), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa) countries [15]. Still another factor is the increasing use of health attaches embedded in foreign
delegations and agencies and increasing dialogue with low- and middle-income countries [15]. With regards to the
G20 (and their BRICScountry components), I introduced the term ‘‘blue marble health’’ to refer to the unexpectedly high
neglected disease burden among the poor living in emerging economies and even some G20 countries, circumstances
such that these nations could drastically reduce global burdens of neglected diseases by taking greater responsibility for
their own health concerns [17,18]. Vaccine Diplomacy and Vaccine Science Diplomacy: Definitions Beginning in 2001, the
broad framework of global health diplomacy outlined above helped to generate the concepts of vaccine diplomacy and
vaccine science diplomacy [19–24]. Vaccine diplomacy refers to almost any aspect of global health diplomacy that relies
on the use or delivery of vaccines and encompasses the important work of the GAVI Alliance, as well as elements of the
WHO, the Gates Foundation, and other important international organizations. Central to vaccine diplomacy is its
potential as a humanitarian intervention and its proven role in mediating cessation of hostilities and even cease-fires
during vaccination campaigns [20–22,25]. In this case, the lead actor may come from an international organization, such
as WHO or the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), or an associated nongovernmental organization. A subset of
vaccine diplomacy is vaccine science diplomacy, which is a hybrid of elements of global health diplomacy and science
diplomacy. I use the term ‘‘vaccine science diplomacy’’ narrowly to refer to the joint development of life-saving vaccines
and related technologies, with the major actors typically scientists. Of particular interest, the scientists may be from two
or more nations that often disagree ideologically or even from nations that are actively engaged in hostile actions. This
definition is along the lines of what Katz et al. would call informal global health diplomacy based on peer-to-peer
scientific interactions [9], together with elements of science diplomacy in which the representative nation projects
power through its scientific prowess and reputation, as Abelson and others articulated for US science and applied
technology during the Cold War [26–28] or more recently as can be seen in outreach to the Islamic world [29] and
targeted initiatives for less developed countries [30]. Unlike many forms of global health diplomacy, this aspect of
vaccine diplomacy is led by scientists. An underlying theme of both vaccine and vaccine science diplomacies is that
vaccines are unique in comparison to other medical or public health interventions. By some estimates, vaccines are the
single most powerful intervention ever developed by humankind in terms of the lives that they save. By one estimate,
modern vaccines have saved more lives than those that were lost in the world wars during the 20th century [21–23]. The
Historical Context Both vaccine diplomacy and vaccine science diplomacy might be best understood by reviewing their
historical successes (Table 1). Indeed, an interesting but little-known feature is how diplomacy is intimately tied to the
initial development and delivery of many vaccines. The first vaccine discovered in modern times was in 1798 by Britain’s
Edward Jenner, who found that cowpox administered as an inoculum could prevent smallpox [31]; the term vaccine is
derived from vacca, the Latin term for ‘‘cow’’. Because smallpox produced such devastating and massive killer epidemics
(especially among indigenous populations in the New World), the first vaccine almost immediately attained international
acclaim in the first years of the 19th century [31,32]. For example, from 1800 to 1805, Jenner corresponded widely and
internationally and advised countries as diverse as Russia, Spain, and Turkey and Native American tribes and nations in
Canada and Mexico on how to prepare and administer the smallpox vaccine [31,32]. Among the earliest examples of
vaccine diplomacy, in 1801 Dr. Edward Gantt, the chaplain of the US Congress, vaccinated Native American diplomats
who were visiting Washington, D.C., and in 1803 the Lewis and Clark Expedition was provided smallpox vaccine intended
for Native Americans living on the western frontier, although it is unclear if successful vaccinations were actually
performed [32]. From 1803 to 1815 during the Napoleonic wars between England and France, Jenner himself was called
on for diplomatic functions, including prisoner releases [31]. Jenner was honored in France and wrote in a letter to the
National Institute of France that ‘‘the sciences are never at war,’’ while Napoleon was supposed to have once stated,
‘‘Jenner—we can’t refuse that man anything’’ [19,31]. The next set of vaccines, including a new rabies vaccine, was
developed almost one hundred years later by France’s Louis Pasteur. In a speech at the inauguration of his institute in
Paris in 1888, Pasteur stated that ‘‘science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity and is the torch
which illuminates the world’’ [31,33]. Before the close of the century, scientists from the Pasteur Institute spread out to
create a network of laboratories in Francophone countries in Indochina (beginning with the Saigon Pasteur Institute
[1891]) and North Africa [34], especially for the preparation and administration of rabies vaccine. Around this time (from
1892–1897), Dr. Waldemar Haffkine, a Jewish scientist from Ukraine working in France and Switzerland, traveled to India
in order to inoculate tens of thousands of people with his prototype cholera and plague vaccines, but he did so only after
first testing the vaccines on himself [35]. Today, the Haffkine Institute in Mumbai is an important microbiology research
institute. Vaccine science diplomacy entered its golden age during the Cold War between the US and the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1956 and 1959, Dr. Albert Sabin from the US traveled to the USSR and
collaborated with his Soviet virology counterparts, including Dr. Mikhail Chumakov, to develop a prototype oral polio
vaccine and test it on 10 million Soviet children and ultimately 100 million people under the age of 20 [36]. The success
of the collaboration depended on each scientist going to great lengths to convince their diplomatic liaisons to put aside
ideologies for purposes of joint scientific cooperation [19–23,36]. Today, the oral polio vaccine is leading to global
eradication efforts. Similarly, between 1962 and 1966, the USSR pioneered a freeze-drying technique for smallpox
vaccine and provided 450 million doses of vaccine to support global smallpox eradication campaigns in developing
countries, while the US provided key financial support [37]. Such international collaborative efforts led to the global
eradication of smallpox by the late 1970s, an effort led by Dr. D. A. Henderson [37]. Later, in the 1980s and following the
visit of US Nobel Laureate Fred Robbins to India, the Indo-US Vaccine Action Program (VAP) was established to foster
international collaboration in the areas of epidemiology, laboratory investigation, and vaccine clinical trials, quality
control, and delivery [38]. VAP is maintained under the auspices of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) [38]. In 1990– 91, a Children’s Vaccine Initiative was launched as an
early attempt at global governance for developing pediatric vaccines for developing countries. Vaccine diplomacy also
flourished in the later decades of the 20th century. According to WHO’s Health as a Bridge to Peace—Humanitarian
Cease-Fires Project (HCFP), vaccines and vaccinations were used to negotiate so-called ‘‘days of tranquility’’ in more
than a dozen countries during the 1980s and 1990s, including Afghanistan, Angola, Chechnya, Democratic Republic of
Congo, El Salvador, Guinea Bissau, Iraq, Lebanon, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Sudan [25]. Modern Day
Vaccine and Vaccine Science Diplomacy Beginning in 2000, vaccines became integrated as key tools in helping
developing nations achieve their MDGs and targets. Following the launch of the GAVI Alliance, many developing
countries for the first time gained access to vaccines for combating rotavirus and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib),
and a new vaccine for pneumococcal vaccine was developed [39,40]. Partly because of these interventions, child
mortality was reduced by almost one-half [40]. Included among these activities was GAVI’s important work in providing
vaccines for North Korea and other fragile states [41]. Among the initiatives relevant to vaccine diplomacy in the 21st
century are international efforts to ensure universal or equitable access for low- and middleincome countries to urgently
needed vaccines for diseases of pandemic potential. It was noted that many developing countries were on the ‘‘outside
looking in’’ when it came to having access to influenza vaccines, including the vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic influenza
in 2009 and prototype H5N1 avian influenza vaccines [42,43]. As a result, Indonesia went through a period in which it
refused to share timely influenza surveillance data with the WHO [42]. It was noted that IHR 2005 did not adequately
spell out provisions on providing equitable access for vaccines [43], and it was probably not intended for this purpose. In
2009, an Intergovernmental Meeting (IGM) was held on pandemic influenza preparedness as a means to establish a
framework for sharing influenza and other vaccines with developing countries [43]. Issues of developing country access
again arose when cholera emerged in sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti; there was no mechanism to rapidly mobilize cholera
vaccine, and calls went out to stockpile cholera vaccine as a humanitarian and diplomatic resource [44]. Also, in 2008
when yellow fever vaccine supplies were depleted during the first urban yellow fever outbreak in the Americas in
decades, countries neighboring Paraguay helped to ensure that the vaccine was made available in that country [45]. In
2012, following the earlier launch of the Decade of Vaccines Collaboration [46], the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP)
was endorsed by the 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly as ‘‘a framework to prevent millions of deaths
by 2020 through more equitable access to existing vaccines for people in all communities’’ [47]. A World Health
Assembly resolution was adopted that recognizes access to vaccines as a fundamental right to human health [48]. The
diplomatic community was also called on to address critical issues of noncompliance for polio and other vaccines
intended for vulnerable populations living in Islamic countries. In 2003, a boycott of polio vaccinations in three northern
Nigerian states from fears that the vaccine was contaminated with antifertility drugs (in order to sterilize Muslim girls)
necessitated diplomatic intervention from the Government of Malaysia and the OIC [49]. Similar interventions are now
required in Pakistan, where the Taliban and other extremist groups have assassinated vaccinators and other aid workers
[50]. Some assassinations may have been carried out in retaliation for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s alleged role
in establishing a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as a ruse in order to confirm the identity of
members of Osama bin Laden’s family [51]. Such activities represent a significant setback to vaccine diplomacy. Of
relevance to both vaccine and vaccine science diplomacy, in 2007 under the auspices of the WHO and the Global
Pandemic Influenza Action Plan, six countries—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam—received grants
from the US and Japanese governments to establish in-country manufacturing capacity for influenza vaccines [52].
Future Directions and Moving towards a Framework While the historical and modern-day track records of vaccine and
vaccine science diplomacy are impressive, they have not yet led to an overarching framework for its expanded role in
foreign policy . Establishing such a framework might be especially useful for US foreign policy. In 2009, President
Obama traveled to Cairo where he spoke out about engaging scientists in the Muslim world and extending a hand in
science diplomacy [53]. Despite the establishment of a valuable US Science Envoy program, to date such activities have
not led to substantive joint vaccine partnerships despite the observation that several Islamic countries in the Middle
East and Asia , including Egypt , Indonesia , Iran , and Saudi Arabia , have some capacity for vaccine product
development [23]. With an Iranian scientist from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Dr. Mohammed Rokni, I
recently advocated launching such efforts between the US and Iran and provided as an example the opportunity for
developing a vaccine for leishmaniasis, which has devastated areas of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa [54].
Similar opportunities exist in order to partner with nations such as Cuba , which has considerable technical expertise
both in producing and delivering vaccine [55], and possibly even countries such as North Korea, which has some
technical capabilities [56]. Our Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development
(Sabin), a nonprofit product development partnership (PDP) that uses industry practices to develop and test neglected
disease vaccines, could occupy a key niche in vaccine diplomacy. Sabin’s vaccine portfolio targets neglected tropical
diseases (NTDs) that specifically affect the poorest people living in low- and middleincome countries. Because NTDs have
been shown to promote poverty through their adverse effects on worker productivity, the health of girls and women,
and child development, the vaccines under development at Sabin are sometimes referred to as the ‘‘antipoverty
vaccines’’ [57,58]. Moreover, most of the diseases targeted by the Sabin portfolio of vaccines occur in countries of direct
relevance to vaccine diplomacy (Table 2) [59]. For example, more than one-third of the world’s cases of hookworm
infection, ascariasis, and trichuriasis occur in nations of the OIC, i.e., the world’s Muslim countries (Figure 1), while
almost one-half of the cases of schistosomiasis occur among the OIC countries [59]. Furthermore, both cutaneous and
visceral leishmaniasis have emerged as the most significant infections arising in settings of ongoing conflict, with the
former affecting hundreds of thousands of people in Syria and Syrian refugees, while the latter was the leading killer in
the war between northern and southern Sudan during the 1980s and 1990s [60]. Some of these diseases are also
widespread in some Latin American countries where leaders have expressed varying degrees of anti-American
sentiment. While Sabin is currently conducting joint vaccine development with public-sector vaccine manufacturers in
Brazil and Mexico, it is ready to embark on joint vaccine development with countries such as Cuba, Indonesia, and Iran,
i.e., nations with either strained or even overtly hostile foreign relations with the US in past and recent years . As a
form of projecting soft power with both allies and potential adversaries , such activities are consistent with what
former Secretary Hillary Clinton termed ‘‘civilian power’’ [24].

Nuclear war
Audra J. Wolf 16, editor, historian, and publishing consultant, Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of
Pennsylvania, 11/14/16, “Who could stop nuclear war in the Trump era? These scientists.,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/14/who-can-stop-nuclear-war-in-the-trump-era-maybe-
these-scientists/?utm_term=.d41d8fbec7d7

Since the end of the World War II — the only time that atomic weapons have been used in war — the policy of the
United States has been to discourage nuclear proliferation, whether through defense treaties, economic sanctions or
controlling international sales of uranium. Similarly, the concept of nuclear deterrence depends on rational, predictable
decisions about the use of nuclear weapons. Trump’s statements naturally caused a flurry of panic over an untested
leader with little familiarity with the basic principles of nuclear security having control of atomic weapons. Fear of
Trump having “the nuclear codes” became a sort of rallying cry for his opponents. Americans terrified over this
prospect, though, should take comfort in knowing that there is an option for limiting nuclear risk beyond panicking or
praying. It may be time to resurrect a Cold War strategy for limiting nuclear risk: back-channel communications among
private scientists. In 1955, a year after the U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll blanketed the globe with a
thin layer of radioactive fallout, a group of scientists issued a manifesto against the development, testing and use of
nuclear weapons. This public statement inspired what became known as the Pugwash Conference, an international
scientists’ movement on behalf of nuclear disarmament. At the height of Pugwash’s influence in the late 1950s and early
1960s, scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and a handful of other non-nuclear
countries gathered regularly to discuss the nature of the nuclear threat and ways to reduce it. Both today and at the
time, commentators have held up Pugwash as a model of nonpartisan scientific activism, a shining example of what
scientists could accomplish if they worked without the constraints of formal politics. In 1995, the Pugwash Conferences
and Joseph Rotblat, one of the movement’s founders, received the Nobel Peace Prize for their roles in reducing nuclear
tensions at the height of the Cold War. More recently, the Obama administration hailed the personal relationship
between Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as a
critical ingredient in the nuclear agreement with Iran. The two men shared a background in physics and engineering and
had overlapped at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. While Moniz and Salehi obviously
represented their respective countries at the negotiating table, their shared technical assumptions provided a platform
on which to build political consensus. Both during and after the Cold War, the U.S. government supported initiatives that
brought international scientists together outside formal political channels, whether in the form of academic conferences
or cooperative research initiatives, like the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Beyond the nuclear
realm, scientists have informally assisted U.S. officials in negotiating treaties on issues as diverse as climate change and
exploration rights in Antarctica. This strategy, commonly known as “science diplomacy ,” has limitations. Scientists are
not elected officials, and nothing in their scientific training is designed to prepare them for the subtleties of
international political negotiations. The premise of science diplomacy risks putting power in the hands of technical
experts whose personal interests may or may not match those of their national governments. And yet: There is no
evidence to suggest that the elected head of government — Donald J. Trump — possesses the finesse needed to
negotiate a nuclear crisis, either. In 1955, scientists like Joseph Rotblat hoped to use their personal connections and
technical expertise to avert a nuclear apocalypse . For the leaders of Pugwash, the point of an international scientists’
movement wasn’t so much to displace official negotiations between governments as to keep a line of communication
open in the event of a crisis. The idea was that private citizens could maintain personal relationships even if their
countries had severed formal relations, in much the same way that bipartisan dinner parties used to grease the wheels
of government in Washington. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, the American members of the
Pugwash Committee sent their Soviet counterparts a telegram urging restraint and promising to use whatever limited
influence they had over U.S. government officials to defuse the situation. The scientists acknowledged that the crisis
could be solved only by heads of state but hoped that a mere reminder of their presence might jolt political leaders into
recognizing the effects of a nuclear strike. Whether the president-elect and his advisers realize it, Trump is going to
need scientific expertise. His comments as a candidate suggest that he’ll scuttle the Iran deal and turn a blind eye to
nuclear proliferation, all while engaging in a race with Russia to modernize the nuclear arsenal. It remains to be seen, of
course, how many of these ideas will carry over to a Trump administration. In a normal administration, it would be a
given that Trump and his advisers would confer with security experts who could provide a reality check on technical
questions, from the stages of nuclear proliferation to the effects of modernized nuclear weapons on theories of
deterrence. But the Trump campaign has defied expectations in a number of ways, and a Trump presidency is in many
ways an open question. Should Trump decide to go forgo technical advice, Americans (and the world) should take
comfort in the fact that scientists , security specialists and nuclear weapons experts from many countries will continue
to talk to one another . Pugwash’s scientists, too, continue to meet, forging personal links and technical knowledge that
can transcend international borders. Back-channel communications among international scientists will always offer
hope for preventing a nuclear catastrophe , regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
3

Next is Fetal Personhood DA:

Expanding legal personhood opens line drawing that gets applied to fetuses. Independently,
signaling that personhood is no longer a closed question enables states to decide for themselves.
Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine. B.A.,
Cornell University, 1990; J.D., 1994, Cornell University, “Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal
Personhood,” 59 Hastings L.J. 369, December 2007, WestLaw

Since the focus of this paper is on legal, not moral status, the evaluation of fetal interests is constrained . Legal and
moral evaluations are intertwined, but not necessarily equivalent . As stated previously, moral status, or the lack of it,
does not determine legal personhood status . An entity may lack moral status, but still be considered a legal person.
Conversely, an entity may have moral status but not be considered a legal person. In such a case, the lack of legal
recognition would not negate the entity's moral status, and the absence of legal obligations would not imply the
absence of moral obligations.

The concern is not with determining at what point the fetus develops any interests, but at what point those interests
should form the basis of legal personhood . This is a question of line drawing --legal personhood must come into play at
some point in time even though fetal interests likely develop along a continuum . The law is a rather blunt instrument .
Although there may be a way to achieve a somewhat nuanced legal approach by recognizing juridical personhood at an
early stage of fetal development, and subsequently natural personhood at a later stage, both designations still must be
based on fairly easily identifiable standards --in other words, we must still draw lines . The final determination of
whether and how to draw distinctions between different developmental levels of human beings may depend on
practical needs in identifying clear legal lines. If this is the case, then the lack of legal personhood recognition will not
negate the moral claims of the entity in question. The entity may still have certain moral rights, and others will have
moral obligations to respect those rights.
There are a number of possible biological events that can be used to determine legal status, each having significance in different ways. I will not go through all the potential biological landmarks in the subsections that follow. Rather, this section considers the legal significance of, and interplay between, three important factors in fetal development: sentience (consciousness), birth, and physical development. I choose not to focus on viability
since it is a changing line (as technology improves, viability will push back towards conception), as well as an incredibly imprecise standard-- does the standard mean viable for a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, or longer?

a. Sentience

Prior to the development of sentience, which occurs in the latter part of the second trimester, the fetus does not have interests of its own and thus does not have the requisite basis for natural personhood. Sentience, *394 or conscious awareness, is necessary to feel--for example, fetuses cannot perceive pain prior to sentience (and thus have no interest in avoiding pain).103 Sentience cannot occur until the neural system is sufficiently
developed to allow for brain functioning and consciousness, at around twenty-two to twenty-four weeks.104 While this currently provides a rough match with the present standards for viability, unlike viability the timeline will not change as medical technology advances. Eventually artificial womb technology may suffice to keep the ex utero fetus alive from the embryonic stage, and allow development to continue. But prior to sentience the
fetus will not have interests, regardless of its location in or outside the body. This is not to say that artificial womb technology should not be used prior to sentience, but merely that its use cannot be based on regard for the fetus's own interests, but must refer to the interests of others.

I have pointed out previously that natural personhood is rarely, if ever, granted merely on the basis of the interests of others. It is hard to understand how the interests of currently recognized people would suffer if we do not include non-sentient fetuses on an equal legal footing. Fetuses are not currently recognized as natural persons, and there is little or no evidence that the legal rights and interests of currently recognized persons have
suffered. An argument to recognize fetuses as natural persons should bear the burden of showing that the interests of others are harmed, or else it must rest on the interests of the fetus itself. As noted above, prior to sentience fetuses lack interests of their own, under the Feinberg/Steinbock approach, thus juridical personhood prior to sentience would be inappropriate. Arguably, the Supreme Court jurisprudence recognizing increasing
state interests after viability (which maps roughly onto sentience) is compatible with the notion that prior to sentience the interests at stake (those of others, not the fetus) are too weak to provide significant legal protections for the fetus itself. Others are certainly free to reject the Feinberg/Steinbock concept of interests, and attempt to develop a different theory of interests that would apply to fetuses. My point is that if fetuses are to be
considered natural persons because of their interests, an argument must be made that they have interests, using a coherent understanding of the term that can be applied across different entities. If fetuses are to be considered natural persons because of the interests of others, there must be some argument about how the interests of others are harmed by the exclusion of fetuses in the category of natural persons. All of this is not to say
that fetuses are not *395 entitled to legal protection, or that juridical personhood is not a possibility, merely that natural personhood prior to sentience is not warranted.

But what happens after sentience? At this point fetuses have claims based on their own interests. What would be the effect of granting natural personhood status to fetuses when they reach the point of sentience? Significantly greater restrictions on abortion would result as states would have an obligation to protect fetuses, just as they now do to protect already-born children. Moreover, designating fetuses as natural persons prior to birth
would limit the rights of other currently recognized natural persons--particularly pregnant women whose decisions during pregnancy might be constrained in the same way that parents' decisions are constrained by the interests of their already born children. Fetal interests at the point of sentience are not strong enough to justify these limitations. Arguably newborn interests at the point of birth are not sufficient either. Rather, the natural
person designation at birth is based on protection of the interests of others. However, during the prenatal period, the interests of others are not strong enough to justify granting fetuses full natural personhood status or protections while still in utero based solely on sentience--other factors must also be present. Those who disagree with this position should have the burden of showing that limiting the rights of others (by designating fetuses
as natural persons) would be necessary in order to fully protect the rights of currently recognized people.

Would it be appropriate to consider a sentient in utero fetus a juridical person with certain legal protections prior to birth? The answer here is likely yes. It would be a matter of state choice (as are other juridical personhood designations). Those states that choose to afford sentient fetuses juridical personhood status would need to align the rights given to the interests at stake. The fact that sentience is not possible prior to twenty-two and
twenty-four weeks gestation does not mean that the fetus has fully developed cognition and perception. At this point, for example, the fetus may not be able to feel pain, and thus has no interest in avoiding pain.105 If this is so, a state should not be able to require fetal anesthetic use during all abortions at twenty-two weeks based on sentience.106 Legislation providing specific protections prior to birth, but *396 after sentience, is an area
which states might explore in more detail.

b. Cognitive and Physical Development

The closer to birth, the greater the interests of the fetus, and the greater the interests of others in providing the same kinds of protections as are granted to currently recognized persons such as children. If we give newborn infants legal protections based on these interests, why not fully developed fetuses? It is hard to understand why an entity at this stage should not be considered as having equal legal status as an entity outside the womb.
But one problem with a “development” standard is that it does not take into account fetuses that have problems in development. As a result, we might set the standard based on gestational age, rather than “full development.”

At the end of the eighth month of pregnancy (thirty-two weeks), in most cases, all of the fetus's internal and external organ structures have substantially developed.107 Natural personhood and thus constitutional protections could apply at this late stage of development. The result would change in the analysis of both abortions and forced caesarian-sections after this time point--the rights of the pregnant woman would be balanced against
the rights of a “fetal natural person.” I will discuss this in more detail in the following section. While it may be tempting to change the timeline for according natural personhood, there are reasons to be wary. First, fetal age determinations can be inexact.108 Second, even in the absence of natural personhood protections prior to birth, the fetus is entitled to significant moral status--status which may be recognized under a juridical
personhood framework. Pregnancy terminations at this point are highly restricted; except in cases of severe fetal abnormality, they are almost always undertaken with the goal of achieving a live birth (e.g., ending the pregnancy, but not the life of the fetus). In cases of severe fetal abnormality, the issues raised are similar to those raised by neonatal euthanasia.109 The only difference is the added complication of the pregnant woman's right
of bodily integrity, which plays a significant role in the analysis and does not change if the fetus is considered a natural person. As a result, it may not be necessary to consider the fetus a natural person prior to birth to achieve fetal protections, and may significantly complicate the situation to do so.

*397 Juridical personhood based on developmental or gestational age may be appropriate. This is already done implicitly by states which accord fetuses limited rights prior to birth by recognizing a variety of causes of action for harm done to fetuses at different stages of development. Alternatively, gestational age might serve as a bright line cut-off for sentience. Thus a state might explicitly grant juridical personhood protections at twenty-
two weeks gestation, on the assumption that for a normally developing fetus that point marks the earliest time at which sentience is possible. For fetuses which are not experiencing normal development, the presumption of personhood could be rebutted--much as is done currently in determining viability or lack thereof.

c. Birth

There are practical reasons for choosing birth as the latest point at which personhood protections adhere, and thus at which the label “natural person” must be applied. Likewise, a fetus born prematurely, but after sentience, should also be considered a natural person and treated as a full-term newborn would be treated under the law. Except in the absence of brain material or brain activity, it is practically impossible to determine sentience
using current medical technology, and treatment decisions for premature neonates are based on rough approximations of development, rather than evaluations of sentience. But what about a fetus “born”110 clearly prior to sentience,111 as might be the case if artificial womb technology advances?112

The answer depends on whether there are interests of others in according legal personhood protections, as is the case with anencephalic infants.113 Unlike anencephalic infants, however, these entities may not *398 share any form with later developed humans. Would an eight-week old fetus be considered a legal person if in an artificial womb? The interests of others do not seem strong enough to accord natural personhood protections in
this case. But this may be a situation in which juridical personhood protections are appropriate. A living but pre-sentient fetus outside the mother's body (in an artificial womb) creates an unusual situation. In utero fetuses have the ancillary protections of their mother's legal personhood. But ex utero fetuses would not have these protections. While parental property interests would function and may provide a basis for decision making and
control (as they do in the ex utero embryo context),114 we may well need the additional identification of the developing ex utero fetus as a separate legal actor. As artificial womb technology advances, this question should receive more thought and analysis.

d. Summary: Juridical to Natural Persons

Thus far I have argued that sentience is crucial for the development of fetal interests, and birth and external form each play a role in considering the interests of others. The same constraints that limit the scope of juridical personhood rights for embryos function in the pre-consciousness context for fetuses. Granting juridical personhood status to fetuses prior to sentience may undermine the rights of currently recognized persons--for
example pregnant women's rights to make a variety of decisions in the first trimester would be limited. Even apart from abortion decisions, if we grant fetuses such status, women may have constraints placed upon their decisions to engage in risky activities, or to partake of legal substances that are harmful to the fetus. In order to justify this, proponents would need to show that the legal recognition was necessary in order to safeguard
rights of currently recognized natural persons, and that the result would be a greater protection of the rights of natural persons overall. This is an extremely difficult argument to make, and may fail in many situations. Arguments that the lack of legal recognition of fetal rights prior to sentience harms the rights of people generally, ignores the harm to the rights of people resulting from the recognition itself. Thus prior to sentience the fetus
should be considered neither a natural, nor a juridical person. There may be restrictions on what can be done with fetuses born extremely early, either because of an interrupted pregnancy, or because they were never implanted after in vitro fertilization, but these limitations are not based on the personhood status of the fetus. The interests of others can function to limit many actions, without resulting in personhood status for the entity in
question. Consider, for example, legal restrictions related to actions involving *399 endangered species.115 We may not be allowed to destroy the habitat of a particular type of frog, regardless of whether that frog can make any claim to personhood. The protections are based on the interests of others in maintaining the diversity of species on this planet, not necessarily on the interests of the species itself. Likewise, there may be a variety of
restrictions on what can be done to a pre-sentient fetus based on the interests of currently recognized persons.

Birth, after sentience, is sufficient for natural personhood status-- not because the interests of the fetus are any greater with the birth, but because the interests of others in affording full natural personhood protections are strong enough to grant natural personhood. This is true regardless of the physical development of the child. Birth without sentience due to developmental problems, but at the point of significantly complete physical
development, also provides a basis for natural personhood, again based on the interests of others. Substantially full physical development (eighth month of pregnancy or later) combined with sentience may be sufficient to accord the fetus the protections of natural persons, but careful consideration should be given to the practical effect of such designation.

In the period of time between sentience and natural personhood, there may be reasons to provide fetuses the status and protections of juridical persons. Sentience does not mean that the fetus attains equal status with adult competent human beings,116 merely that the fetus has characteristics that can form the basis for personhood protections based on its own (rather than other's) interests. Moreover, as the fetus develops closer to a
newborn infant, both its interests and the interests of others that form the basis for juridical personhood protections may increase.117 The following section discusses some initial implications of this proposed framework.
e. Implications

My goal here is not to provide a full analysis, nor even a complete summary of the relevant issues, but rather to begin to refocus, in light of my proposed framework, the debate in some of the most highly contentious areas of law such as abortion and medical interventions on behalf of a fetus. Paradoxically, perhaps, the framework I suggest should *400 not result in drastic changes in current laws. This is one of the strengths of the proposal,
as it should not result in great legal upheaval. The most significant change should be in how the cases are analyzed, and the basis for evaluating future cases that do not fit well under the current model (such as fetuses in artificial womb environments). The shift in focus should clarify the issues that need further evaluation, and move us away from the simplistic, and misguided, assertion that Roe's determination about whether the fetus is a
person under the Fourteenth Amendment is the only relevant question.

To begin, I want to make two, interrelated, points. The first is that fetuses are considered persons already under the laws of many states.118 The second is that this recognition should be explicit and fetuses should be labeled juridical persons for purposes of the application of these rights. The status designation serves a number of purposes. It emphasizes that the rights in question are rights of persons, but those of a juridical person, not a
natural person. To some extent this clarifies the apparent inconsistency between laws allowing abortions, for example, and laws allowing tort suits for pre-birth injuries. It is not that fetuses are considered persons for some laws and not for others, but that they are considered juridical persons with specific, but not complete, rights. Finally, explicit recognition allows states to identify specifically the rights in question that go with the status,
rather than simply assert that the fetus is a “person” (without limitation) for some purposes and not a person for others. This should result both in more detailed policy discussions about allowing fetuses certain “personhood” rights, understanding that the recognition of the rights limits the rights of existing natural persons, and also more attention paid to why we grant certain juridical personhood rights to various entities, and whether
those should be limited or even extended. As a result, we may choose to provide personhood protections for sentient fetuses without granting them the same rights as fully recognized natural persons. Juridical personhood is not a unitary concept; there are different kinds of juridical persons and different rights which may adhere. To the extent that states have discretion in determining which entities will be considered juridical persons, they
may make different choices about the types of rights which they grant sentient fetuses. This has already proved to be the case, as demonstrated by the vast array of prenatal laws currently in place.

There is little in the above analysis that should change abortion laws which apply prior to twenty-two to twenty-four weeks, that is, prior to the development of sentience, other than to reinforce that the restrictions before this time period cannot be based on fetal interests.119 The above *401 framework may, however, have some implications both for evaluations of abortion restrictions post-viability and for prenatal and medical care
decisions made by a pregnant woman towards the very end of the pregnancy. The current “undue burden” test articulated in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey120 and reaffirmed by Stenberg v. Carhart121 is based on balancing the interests of the woman making the abortion decision against the interests of the state. Certainly this balance would still be a factor even if the fetus is granted additional legal rights. That
is, the state would still have interests which may need to be balanced against the individual's interests.

Designating fetuses as legal persons, however, would create a situation in which the fetus's interests would have to be taken into account on their own (not simply indirectly as is now done through the state's interests in protecting potential life). Thus the analysis would look more like the analysis that takes place in the context of parental decisions regarding minor's medical care--specifically, refusal of life-sustaining medical treatment.
Others have pointed out that the language of “rights” is less helpful in the parental decision-making context, since “parental rights” do not rest on any clear constitutional basis.122 In contrast, the abortion situation does involve constitutional rights of bodily integrity.123 Weighing the rights of one natural person against another natural person is difficult. To the extent a fetus is considered a natural person, the abortion debate will have to
consider how to weigh the woman's right of bodily integrity against the fetal right to life. Although a complete analysis is beyond the scope of this Article, we can draw some initial conclusions. Since there are no laws requiring parents to sacrifice their lives for their children, it would be hard to imagine that we would accept a legal requirement to do so in the context of pregnancy. Thus between the woman's right to life and the fetus's right
to life, the woman's legal rights should be given preference. Harder, of course, is the balance between the woman's right to health, and the fetus's right to health or even life. The varying opinions either allowing or disallowing forced c-sections for almost full-term pregnancies is evidence of the difficulty courts have weighing these issues.124 The framework I have suggested here should encourage a shift in thinking about these issues to
focus on the parallel between this situation and *402 others that involve direct conflicts between the health/life of one person and the health/life of another. Moreover, it should lead to greater evaluation of the concept and extent of so-termed “bodily integrity” rights.125

Since legal personhood should no longer be viewed as

My proposal should have three significant advantages over the current mode of analysis. First, it will allow states to “experiment” in finding the best system of recognizing and balancing legal rights in cases involving embryos and fetuses.

a closed question , states should be free to consider how best to accord juridical personhood status . Second, it should allow us to find better and conceptually more

This will be extremely important as reproductive tech nology advances and the legal cases continue to
appealing answers to new debates in reproductive law.

move away from the traditional abortion context . Finally, it may achieve a compromise position in an area that has thus far been marked by heated and divisive commentaries.

B. Non-Human Animals and Artificial Intelligence

Although I have focused primarily on embryos and fetuses thus far, the framework suggested here may be applicable
to other entities . The idea that we might exclude from legal status an entity that meets all the attribute requirements
for equal moral status with currently recognized persons , but that is not genetically human , raises the question of why
genetic humanness matters.126 It seems inconsistent to argue for the extension of legal protection to a non-sentient
multi-celled human organism in the beginning stages of development (i.e., an embryo) and withhold such protections
from fully developed sentient, and perhaps even rational, non-human animals .127 If genetics is the sole basis for legal
personhood, there must be some explanation as to why this characteristic is so important.128 Thus far no one has
provided a satisfactory argument *403 in this respect.129

Ruins fetal tissue and stem cell research

Bauman 8-4, [Bloomberg Law reporter, State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research, 2022,
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research]//MW

Biomedical scientists using embryonic stem cells or fetal tissue could find their studies at risk in conservative states
aiming to redefine personhood after the US Supreme Court’s rollback of abortion rights.

These states would give embryos and fetuses the same rights as people. A provision in Georgia’s new abortion law
includes embryos, once there’s a detectable heartbeat, which is at about six weeks, and fetuses in population counts.
The laws primarily are intended to focus on abortions, but they have downstream consequences on a range of issues,
including biomedical research .

“They’re not thinking through the other possible consequences of declaring that an embryo is a person from the
moment of fertilization,” Suzanna Sherry, a constitutional law scholar at Vanderbilt University, said. But it’s unclear how
it’ll play out since these questions haven’t been tested in court, she said.

If states grant personhood to embryos without specific exceptions for derivation of stem cells from embryos, then there
can be no stem cells on which to do research or develop therapeutic products, Mark Barnes, a research attorney with
Ropes & Gray LLP, said.

Embryonic stem cells offer great promise in health and medicine because they can turn into any cell in the human
body, offering the potential to repair and regenerate tissue damaged by a host of diseases. They also can be used to
screen drug candidates for toxicity . But embryos must be destroyed in the process of generating stem cell lines for
research. It’s illegal to create embryos specifically for research, but US researchers can use embryos from in vitro
fertilization that would otherwise be discarded and have been donated for research.
Solves disease and vaccines
Medical Groups 20, [Academic Pediatric Association AIDS Action Baltimore AIDS Foundation of Chicago AIDS United
Alliance for Aging Research American Academy of HIV Medicine American Academy of Neurology American Academy of
Pediatrics American Association for the Advancement of Science American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists American Pediatric Society American Physiological Society
American Society for Cell Biology American Society for Reproductive Medicine American Society of Hematology
American Society of Human Genetics American Thoracic Society Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
(ARVO) Association of American Medical Colleges Association of American Universities Association of Independent
Research Institutes Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs Association of Public and Land-grant
Universities AVAC Axis Advocacy Boston University Brown University California Institute of Technology Cascade AIDS
Project Coalition for the Life Sciences Columbia University Irving Medical Center Community Education Group Council on
Governmental Relations Duke University Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Endocrine Society Equality North
Carolina Equity Forward Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality
Harvard University HealthHIV HIV Medicine Association Housing Works, Inc. Infectious Diseases Society of America
International Foundation for Autoimmune & Autoinflammatory Arthritis (AiArthritis) International Society for Stem Cell
Research IRMA (International Rectal Microbicide Advocates) Jacobs Institute of Women's Health Johns Hopkins
University Massachusetts General Hospital Medical College of Wisconsin Medical Students for Choice Michigan State
University NASTAD National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research National Alliance on Mental Illness National Coalition
for LGBT Health National Multiple Sclerosis Society National Women's Health Network New York Stem Cell Foundation
New York University NMAC North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine Oregon Health & Science University Pediatric Policy Council Physicians for Reproductive
Health Princeton University Research!America Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Society for Maternal-Fetal
Medicine Society for Pediatric Research Society of Family Planning Stanford University Stony Brook University The
American Association of Immunologists The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research Treatment Action Group
Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance Tulane University UC San Francisco UCLA Union of Concerned Scientists University at Buffalo
Jacobs School of Medicine and Biological Sciences University of California University of California San Diego University of
California, Davis University of Chicago Medicine University of Illinois at Chicago University of Massachusetts Medical
School University of Michigan University of Oregon University of Pittsburgh University of Rochester University of
Washington University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health Weill Cornell Medicine Yale
University, Letter to President Trump, March 25, https://www.isscr.org/docs/default-source/policy-documents/covid-
19-human-fetal-tissue-research-letter.pdf]//MW

The world is facing an unprecedented public health threat that, by some estimates, could claim the lives of over a million
Americans. While there are promising treatments in development, we will not know whether these treatments are safe
and effective for COVID-19 patients until the clinical trials conclude. The full assessment may take months or years to
complete. In the meantime, all biomedical research tools should be made immediately available to develop new
treatments, vaccines, and cures to save lives and reduce suffering in the response to COVID-19. Fetal tissue has been
critical for the development of other vaccines and therapies for viral pathogens, such as HIV, in the past.

Last year’s restrictions on research using human fetal tissue are undermining the ability of NIH researchers to use this
crucial biomedical research tool to investigate potential treatments for COVID-19 and other diseases . Similarly,
researchers at institutions across the United States cannot access extramural NIH funding for research using fetal tissue
to investigate new therapies and vaccines. New funding has been on hold since September, waiting for the establishing
of the new ethics advisory board. Patients shouldn’t have to wait for NIH funded research on COVID-19 or other diseases
to progress. Removing barriers and bureaucratic layers of review is necessary to speed the delivery of new treatments.
Unless these restrictions are lifted, Americans may be forced to wait for treatments to be developed in other parts of
the world.
New pandemics cause extinction
Ord 20, [edited extract from The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord, published by
Bloomsbury, Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics, March 6,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/06/worst-case-thinking-prevent-pandemics-coronavirus-existential-
risk]

Our population now is a thousand times greater than it was for most of human history, so there are vastly more
opportunities for new human diseases to originate. And our farming practices have created vast numbers of animals
living in unhealthy conditions within close proximity to humans. This increases the risk, as many major diseases
originate in animals before crossing over to humans. Examples include HIV (chimpanzees), Ebola (bats), Sars (probably
civets or bats) and influenza (usually pigs or birds). We do not yet know where Covid-19 came from, though it is very
similar to coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins. Evidence suggests that diseases are crossing over into human
populations from animals at an increasing rate.

Modern civilisation may also make it much easier for a pandemic to spread. The higher density of people living
together in cities increases the number of people each of us may infect. Rapid long-distance transport greatly
increases the distance pathogens can spread, reducing the degrees of separation between any two people. Moreover,
we are no longer divided into isolated populations as we were for most of the past 10,000 years.

Together these effects suggest that we might expect more new pandemics , for them to spread more quickly , and to
reach a higher percentage of the world’s people .

But we have also changed the world in ways that offer protection. We have a healthier population; improved sanitation
and hygiene; preventative and curative medicine; and a scientific understanding of disease. Perhaps most importantly,
we have public health bodies to facilitate global communication and coordination in the face of new outbreaks. We have
seen the benefits of this protection through the dramatic decline of endemic infectious disease over the past century
(though we can’t be sure pandemics will obey the same trend). Finally, we have spread to a range of locations and
environments unprecedented for any mammalian species. This offers special protection from extinction events, because
it requires the pathogen to be able to flourish in a vast range of environments and to reach exceptionally isolated
populations such as uncontacted tribes, Antarctic researchers and nuclear submarine crews.

It is hard to know whether these combined effects have increased or decreased the existential risk from pandemics.
This uncertainty is ultimately bad news : we were previously sitting on a powerful argument that the risk was tiny ;
now we are not.

We have seen the indirect ways that our actions aid and abet the origination and spread of pandemics. But what about
cases where we have a much more direct hand in the process – where we deliberately use, improve or create the
pathogens?

Our understanding and control of pathogens is very recent. Just 200 years ago, we didn’t even understand the basic
cause of pandemics – a leading theory in the west claimed that disease was produced by a kind of gas. In just two
centuries, we discovered it was caused by a diverse variety of microscopic agents and we worked out how to grow them
in the lab, to breed them for different traits, to sequence their genomes, to implant new genes and to create entire
functional viruses from their written code.

This progress is continuing at a rapid pace. The past 10 years have seen major qualitative breakthroughs, such as the use
of the gene editing tool Crispr to efficiently insert new genetic sequences into a genome, and the use of gene drives to
efficiently replace populations of natural organisms in the wild with genetically modified versions.

This progress in biotechnology seems unlikely to fizzle out anytime soon: there are no insurmountable challenges
looming; no fundamental laws blocking further developments. But it would be optimistic to assume that this uncharted
new terrain holds only familiar dangers.
To start with, let’s set aside the risks from malicious intent, and consider only the risks that can arise from well-
intentioned research. Most scientific and medical research poses a negligible risk of harms at the scale we are
considering. But there is a small fraction that uses live pathogens of kinds that are known to threaten global harm. These
include the agents that cause the Spanish flu, smallpox, Sars and H5N1 or avian flu. And a small part of this research
involves making strains of these pathogens that pose even more danger than the natural types, increasing their
transmissibility, lethality or resistance to vaccination or treatment.

In 2012, a Dutch virologist, Ron Fouchier, published details of an experiment on the recent H5N1 strain of bird flu. This
strain was extremely deadly, killing an estimated 60% of humans it infected – far beyond even the Spanish flu. Yet its
inability to pass from human to human had so far prevented a pandemic. Fouchier wanted to find out whether (and
how) H5N1 could naturally develop this ability. He passed the disease through a series of 10 ferrets, which are
commonly used as a model for how influenza affects humans. By the time it passed to the final ferret, his strain of
H5N1 had become directly transmissible between mammals.

The work caused fierce controversy. Much of this was focused on the information contained in his work. The US National
Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity ruled that his paper had to be stripped of some of its technical details before
publication, to limit the ability of bad actors to cause a pandemic. And the Dutch government claimed that the research
broke EU law on exporting information useful for bioweapons. But it is not the possibility of misuse that concerns me
here. Fouchier’s research provides a clear example of well-intentioned scientists enhancing the destructive
capabilities of pathogens known to threaten global catastrophe .

Of course, such experiments are done in secure labs, with stringent safety standards. It is highly unlikely that in any
particular case the enhanced pathogens would escape into the wild. But just how unlikely? Unfortunately, we don’t have
good data, due to a lack of transparency about incident and escape rates. This prevents society from making well-
informed decisions balancing the risks and benefits of this research, and it limits the ability of labs to learn from each
other’s incidents.

Security for highly dangerous pathogens has been deeply flawed , and remains insufficient . In 2001, Britain was struck
by a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock. Six million animals were killed in an attempt to halt its
spread, and the economic damages totalled £8bn. Then, in 2007, there was another outbreak, which was traced to a lab
working on the disease. Foot-and-mouth was considered a highest-category pathogen, and required the highest level of
biosecurity. Yet the virus escaped from a badly maintained pipe, leaking into the groundwater at the facility. After an
investigation, the lab’s licence was renewed – only for another leak to occur two weeks later.

In my view, this track record of escapes shows that even the highest biosafety level ( BSL-4 ) is insufficient for working
on pathogens that pose a risk of global pandemics on the scale of the Spanish flu or worse. Thirteen years since the last
publicly acknowledged outbreak from a BSL-4 facility is not good enough. It doesn’t matter whether this is from
insufficient standards, inspections, operations or penalties. What matters is the poor track record in the field, made
worse by a lack of transparency and accountability. With current BSL-4 labs, an escape of a pandemic pathogen is only
a matter of time .

One of the most exciting trends in biotechnology is its rapid democratisation – the speed at which cutting-edge
techniques can be adopted by students and amateurs. When a new breakthrough is achieved, the pool of people with
the talent, training, resources and patience to reproduce it rapidly expands: from a handful of the world’s top biologists,
to people with PhDs in the field, to millions of people with undergraduate-level biology.

The Human Genome Project was the largest ever scientific collaboration in biology. It took 13 years and $500m to
produce the full DNA sequence of the human genome. Just 15 years later, a genome can be sequenced for under $1,000,
and within a single hour. The reverse process has become much easier, too: online DNA synthesis services allow anyone
to upload a DNA sequence of their choice then have it constructed and shipped to their address. While still expensive,
the price of synthesis has fallen by a factor of 1,000 in the past two decades, and continues to drop. The first ever uses
of Crispr and gene drives were the biotechnology achievements of the decade. But within just two years, each of these
technologies were used successfully by bright students participating in science competitions.

Such democratisation promises to fuel a boom of entrepreneurial biotechnology. But since biotechnology can be
misused to lethal effect, democratisation also means proliferation. As the pool of people with access to a technique
grows, so does the chance it contains someone with malign intent.

People with the motivation to wreak global destruction are mercifully rare. But they exist. Perhaps the best example is
the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, active between 1984 and 1995, which sought to bring about the destruction of
humanity. It attracted several thousand members, including people with advanced skills in chemistry and biology. And it
demonstrated that it was not mere misanthropic ideation. It launched multiple lethal attacks using VX gas and sarin gas,
killing more than 20 people and injuring thousands. It attempted to weaponise anthrax, but did not succeed. What
happens when the circle of people able to create a global pandemic becomes wide enough to include members of such a
group? Or members of a terrorist organisation or rogue state that could try to build an omnicidal weapon for the
purposes of extortion or deterrence?

The main candidate for biological existential risk in the coming decades thus stems from tech nology – particularly the
risk of misuse by states or small groups. But this is not a case in which the world is blissfully unaware of the risks.
Bertrand Russell wrote of the danger of extinction from biowarfare to Einstein in 1955. And, in 1969, the possibility was
raised by the American Nobel laureate for medicine, Joshua Lederberg: “As a scientist I am profoundly concerned about
the continued involvement of the United States and other nations in the development of biological warfare. This process
puts the very future of human life on earth in serious peril .”

In response to such warnings, we have already begun national and international efforts to protect humanity. There is
action through public health and international conventions, and self-regulation by biotechnology companies and the
scientific community. Are they adequate?

National and international work in public health offers some protection from engineered pandemics, and its existing
infrastructure could be adapted to better address them. Yet even for existing dangers this protection is uneven and
under-provided.
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: KU

DA---Personhood
Turns Case---War---1NR
Disease sparks global instability that goes nuclear.
Suzuki et al. 21, Director and Professor @ Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University,
Former Vice Chairman @ Japan Atomic Energy Commission. (Tatsujiro, “Pandemic Futures and Nuclear Weapon Risks:
The Nagasaki 75th Anniversary Pandemic-Nuclear Nexus Scenarios Final Report”, Journal for Peace and Nuclear
Disarmament, 4(1), p. 6-39)

A pandemic has potential to destabilize a nuclear-prone conflict by incapacitating the supreme nuclear commander or
commanders who have to issue nuclear strike orders, creating uncertainty as to who is in charge, how to handle
nuclear mistakes (such as errors, accidents, technological failures, and entanglement with conventional operations
gone awry), and opening a brief opportunity for a first strike at a time when the COVID-infected state may not be able
to retaliate efficiently – or at all – due to leadership confusion. In some nuclear-laden conflicts, a state might use a
pandemic as a cover for political or military provocations in the belief that the adversary is distracted and partly
disabled by the pandemic, increasing the risk of war in a nuclear-prone conflict. At the same time, a pandemic may lead
nuclear armed states to increase the isolation and sanctions against a nuclear adversary, making it even harder to stop
the spread of the disease, in turn creating a pandemic reservoir and transmission risk back to the nuclear armed state or
its allies.

In principle, the common threat of the pandemic might induce nuclear-armed states to reduce the tension in a nuclear-
prone conflict and thereby the risk of nuclear war. It may cause nuclear adversaries or their umbrella states to seek to
resolve conflicts in a cooperative and collaborative manner by creating habits of communication, engagement, and
mutual learning that come into play in the nuclear-military sphere. For example, militaries may cooperate to control
pandemic transmission, including by working together against criminal-terrorist non-state actors that are trafficking
people or by joining forces to ensure that a new pathogen is not developed as a bioweapon.

To date, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the isolation of some nuclear-armed states and provided a
textbook case of the failure of states to cooperate to overcome the pandemic. Borders have slammed shut , trade shut
down, and budgets blown out , creating enormous pressure to focus on immediate domestic priorities. Foreign policies
have become markedly more nationalistic . Dependence on nuclear weapons may increase as states seek to buttress a
global re-spatialization6 of all dimensions of human interaction at all levels to manage pandemics. The effect of
nuclear threats on leaders may make it less likely – or even impossible – to achieve the kind of concert at a global level
needed to respond to and administer an effective vaccine, making it harder and even impossible to revert to pre-
pandemic international relations. The result is that some states may proliferate their own nuclear weapons, further
reinforcing the spiral of conflicts contained by nuclear threat, with cascading effects on the risk of nuclear war .

T/C---Warming---1NR
Zero link between warming and disease.
Burnett ’21 [Dr. H. Sterling; 2021; PhD from Bowling Green State University, Heartland Senior Fellow on
Environmental Policy and the Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News; Climate Realism, “Sorry, Medical
Journals, Evidence Indicates Climate Change Doesn’t Threaten Human Health,”
https://climaterealism.com/2021/09/sorry-medical-journals-evidence-indicates-climate-change-doesnt-threaten-
human-health/]
Also, contrary to the impression given by the MJS, there is no ev idence insect borne tropical diseases are expand ing
their range or sickening, or claiming the lives of greater numbers of people as the earth has warmed.

The vast body of scientific literature referenced in Chapter Seven of Climate Change Reconsideree II: Biological Impacts
and Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels fails find any link between global warming and the
spread of Lyme disease, malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases are either grossly
overstated or outright false .

For example, a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature:

“compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria
is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 20 07 . They report, ‘even more
marked has been the decrease in prevalence within this greatly reduced range, with endemicity falling by one or more
classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.’ They write, ‘widespread claims that rising mean
temp erature s have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with
observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.’”

Also, in a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Pasteur Institute of Paris professor Paul Reiter writes:

“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most
temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum
altitudinal limits for transmission, [continuing] future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the
disease, but obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible ; the principal
determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”

High temperatures are more likely to prevent disease.

Worrall ’20 [Eric; 2020; Writer at Watts Up With That (Leading Climate Blog); Watts Up With That, “Fauci: “We Have
Entered The Pandemic Era” Because Of Climate Change,” https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/12/08/fauci-we-have-
entered-the-pandemic-era-because-of-climate-change/]

I really wish greens would stop pushing the falsehood that mosquitoes and mosquito borne diseases need a warm
climate to thrive.

During the depths of the Little Ice Age, Malaria was an endemic killer in Northern Europe. It didn’t matter that far
Northern Little Ice Age Summers were short, and that the climate was freezing cold most of the year. All the Malaria
mosquitoes needed was a few weeks of adequately warm weather in Summer, to breed and infest the far North with
deadly pathogens.

Mosquitoes are still a problem in the far North. Anyone who thinks mosquitoes are in short supply in the Arctic because
of the cold climate should try visiting in late Spring / early Summer. Some of the prolific clouds of mosquitoes which
thrive in cold climates are capable of carrying Malaria and other dangerous pathogens .

As for the impact of Global Warming on Covid-19, there is strong evidence Covid-19 prefers cold, dry winter weather.
According to the University of Sydney, high humidity drags Covid-19 virions out of the air, dramatically reducing the
risk of transmission.

… Professor Ward said there are biological reasons why humidity matters in transmission of airborne viruses.

“When the humidity is lower, the air is drier and it makes the aerosols smaller ,” he said. “When you sneeze and cough
those smaller infectious aerosols can stay suspend ed in the air for longer. That increases the exposure for other
people. When the air is humid and the aerosols are larger and heavier, they fall and hit surfaces quicker.” …

Read more: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/06/02/winter-time-could-be-covid-19-time.html

If we want to get rid of Covid-19, and reduce our risk of exposure to all airborne respiratory virus infections, including
viruses yet to be discovered. we need more hot, humid weather .

Bring on the global warming .

!---Reproductive Rights---1NR
Fetal personhood devastates every element of women’s rights
Girard 21 (Francoise, “Are Women Human Beings?,” Ms Magazine, https://msmagazine.com/2021/10/18/women-
human-beings-abortion-fetal-personhood-embryo-human-life-mississippi-dobbs-v-jackson-supreme-court/)

On December 1, 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
—the case of the Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even though the law clearly violates
the Court’s many precedents beginning with Roe v. Wade. In August, the Court refused to issue an emergency injunction
to stop S.B. 8, a Texas law banning abortion at about six weeks, from coming into effect. The constitutional right to
abortion in the United States is clearly at a tipping point. Mississippi’s brief in Dobbs makes for infuriating yet instructive
reading. It lists a variety of arguments for the ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court to use in overturning
Roe, as it is widely expected to do. Besides making the traditional but irrelevant claim that the U.S. Constitution contains
no textual protection for abortion rights (neither does it speak of same-sex marriage, for example), Mississippi asserts
abortion is no longer needed because: Contraception is now virtually free of charge (even though Mississippi sought to
weaken the Obamacare provision that made it so, and despite overwhelming evidence that contraceptives sometimes
fail); and Today’s “women [can] attain both professional success and a rich family life.” (The groundbreaking Turnaway
study showed the opposite: that failure to obtain an abortion causes significant financial distress.) The brief makes a
half-hearted claim that abortion procedures after 15 weeks are demeaning to the medical profession (the medical
doctors who filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Jackson Women’s Health Organization clearly disagree). It also
argues that abortions after 15 weeks endanger women’s health. (Legal abortion is a very safe procedure; carrying a
pregnancy to term is much riskier). Mississippi finally gets to the crux of its argument when it claims that Roe must be
overturned because “scientific advances show that an unborn child has taken on the human form and features months
before viability.” When life begins was a question that the Court in Roe had chosen not to decide. In Dobbs, the state of
Mississippi invites the Court to opine on this matter. Will the Court go there? Whereas previous U.S. state attempts to
restrict access to abortion claimed to protect women’s health by, for example, requiring abortion providers to have
hospital admitting privileges, the latest state anti-abortion laws do not have women’s health as their concern, despite
their rhetoric to that effect. (The district court in Dobbs called the Mississippi legislature’s professed interest in women’s
health “pure gaslighting.”) These latest laws, rather, are rooted in the idea of embryonic and fetal personhood—a
concept anti-abortion campaigners have been trying to establish in U.S. law for years. In Mississippi, in 2011, a ballot
measure to declare fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as persons and give them constitutional rights, had already been
attempted (and defeated). And under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services had
issued a strategic plan that declared that life began at conception. Anti-abortion extremists have long used powerful
imagery in their quest to paint fetuses as persons. Large posters depicting fetuses as newborns are a mainstay of anti-
abortion protests. Pea-sized, six-week embryos are described as having “heartbeats,” while 20-week fetuses are said to
feel pain. Neither of these claims are backed by science, but they pack an emotional punch. Declaring that an embryo
or fetus is a separate person under law—that is, a full bearer of rights—would have far-reaching implications for
women and anyone who can become pregnant. If a fertilized egg or embryo has the right to life, that means that the
pregnant person loses their ability to decide whether to carry the pregnancy, denying them their own rights to life,
health and liberty. It outlaws abortion, which is dangerous enough, but it goes much further—it authorizes the state
to take up the fetus’s interests, and ultimately constructs the pregnant person in opposition to the fetus, and as a
potential danger to it. From there, there is a very short distance to justifying surveillance , arrests , criminal charges ,
incarceration , detention and forced medical interventions to “protect” the fetus. Sounds far-fetched? Not to low-
income, Black and brown women in the U.S. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has documented 413 arrests of
and forced medical interventions on pregnant women in the United States between 1973-2005, and another 1,254
between 2006-2020; these actions overwhelmingly (71 percent) targeted low-income women, with Black women
making up 52 percent of those targeted. These coercive actions are often triggered by a woman’s use of drugs during
pregnancy, and sometimes by her seeking help to address drug use. But cases have also been brought against women
deciding to attempt a vaginal birth after a previous C-section (VBAC), suffering a miscarriage or a stillbirth, or being
themselves victims of domestic violence. In about a third of the cases, it was health care personnel or social workers
who had reported the woman. The same phenomenon can be observed worldwide. Where abortion is completely or
nearly completely banned, these kinds of cases become common place. Since 1998, following a lobbying campaign by
the Catholic Church, the Constitution of El Salvador has declared that “life begins at conception”—thereby granting a
fertilized egg full constitutional rights. Pregnant women are routinely denounced for their miscarriages and stillbirths,
and hundreds of them have been incarcerated. Half of these women were initially reported to the authorities by their
doctor. Asked in 2020 what could be done to address this dire situation, José Apolonio Tobar Serrano, El Salvador’s
solicitor general for human rights, invoked the Constitution to justify his inaction: “The rights of the person who will be
born are the same as the rights of the person already born.” In El Salvador as in the United States, the persons most
affected are poor. As is the case everywhere, higher-income women and girls in Salvador have access to safe, albeit
clandestine abortions. It’s therefore not inconceivable that sometime soon, U.S. Supreme Court justices could decide
that a fertilized egg is a person, opening the door to sweeping abortion restrictions across the country. This would no
longer be about returning abortion regulation to individual states. State laws that protect abortion rights, in Colorado,
New York or California, would be next in line for challenge. Reproductive justice groups and feminist activists around the
world have been sounding the alarm for years about the ultimate goals of anti-abortion forces. They have not always
been taken seriously. Upholding women’s full humanity and their reproductive autonomy is the reason feminists have
fought so hard to change abortion laws, from Nepal to Ireland and Argentina. The stakes are now plain for all in the
U.S. who did not care to see them before. The contested humanity of women and other persons capable of pregnancy,
and especially that of low-income Black and brown women, has always been at the heart of this struggle . The answer
must be: Yes, women are full human beings, and they must be able to control their lives , their reproduction and their
bodies . The alternative is terrifying .

The impact is handmaid’s tale

Carlisle 22, reporter for TIME in New York City (Madeleine, “Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle
Over Reproductive Rights,” TIME Magazine, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)

The implications of fetal personhood on pregnancy

Critics of fetal personhood laws argue the state cannot bestow legal rights onto a fetus or embryo without subjugating
the rights of the pregnant person. In theory, fetal personhood laws could impact the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a
procedure that uses a combination of medicines and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant
the embryo into the uterus. A round of IVF can create multiple embryos, which can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal
personhood laws could also impact contraception access, given that some members of the anti-abortion movement
argue that IUDs and the emergency contraception Plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and violate
personhood, explains Mary Ziegler, an abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. (The
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that those forms of contraception work by preventing
fertilization in the first place.) Fetal personhood laws could also have major implications for pregnant people. If a fetus
is legally considered a person, then child endangerment laws can apply. A state could potentially say pregnant people
can only eat certain foods , or punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or compel someone to have a cesarean
section they are refusing, says Kluchin. If a pregnant woman must undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, adds
Ziegler, she could in theory be told to delay care until she gives birth so she does not harm the fetus, as the New
Yorker reports has “routinely” occurred with pregnant women in Poland. (Many U.S. abortion laws have narrow
exceptions for when the mother’s life is in danger.) Establishing fetal personhood could put people who self-induce
abortions at risk for criminal prosecution, says Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. It could
also impact people who miscarry. Leslie J. Reagan, a professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
says prior to Roe, if someone went to the hospital or called a doctor about a miscarriage, they were often questioned
on whether they had induced an abortion. Reagan’s research found that beginning in the early 1900s and running up
until Roe in the 1970s, doctors and nurses sometimes functioned as the arm of the police, even threatening to deny care
to patients if they did not provide information. “They were all suspects,” says Reagan. “[Doctors] couldn’t tell if it was a
natural miscarriage or whether they had induced it, and they came to assume that anyone who came in bleeding,
miscarrying, had induced it—and began to ask questions.” Did fetal personhood laws exist before Roe fell? Roe explicitly
banned laws from establishing fetal personhood before the “viability” line. But the logic of fetal personhood has been
used for decades in policies and enforcement against women, particularly low-income women of color, in the later
stages of pregnancy.

Link---Nature---1NR
Personhood requires line drawing that will inevitably be applied to fetuses.
Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine. B.A., Cornell
University, i99o; J.D., 1994, Cornell University (Jessica, Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal
Personhood, Hastings Law Journal, 369 (2007))

The concern is not with determining at what point the fetus develops any interests, but at what point those interests
should form the basis of legal personhood. This is a question of line drawing--legal personhood must come into play
at some point in time even though fetal interests likely develop along a continuum. The law is a rather blunt
instrument. Although there may be a way to achieve a somewhat nuanced legal approach by recognizing juridical
personhood at an early stage of fetal development, and subsequently natural personhood at a later stage, both
designations still must be based on fairly easily identifiable standards --in other words, we must still draw lines . The
final determination of whether and how to draw distinctions between different developmental levels of human beings
may depend on practical needs in identifying clear legal lines. If this is the case, then the lack of legal personhood
recognition will not negate the moral claims of the entity in question. The entity may still have certain moral rights, and
others will have moral obligations to respect those rights.
There are a number of possible biological events that can be used to determine legal status, each having significance in different ways. I will not go through all the potential biological landmarks in the subsections that follow. Rather, this section considers the legal
significance of, and interplay between, three important factors in fetal development: sentience (consciousness), birth, and physical development. I choose not to focus on viability since it is a changing line (as technology improves, viability will push back towards
conception), as well as an incredibly imprecise standard-- does the standard mean viable for a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, or longer?

a. Sentience

Prior to the development of sentience, which occurs in the latter part of the second trimester, the fetus does not have interests of its own and thus does not have the requisite basis for natural personhood. Sentience, *394 or conscious awareness, is necessary to
feel--for example, fetuses cannot perceive pain prior to sentience (and thus have no interest in avoiding pain).103 Sentience cannot occur until the neural system is sufficiently developed to allow for brain functioning and consciousness, at around twenty-two to
twenty-four weeks.104 While this currently provides a rough match with the present standards for viability, unlike viability the timeline will not change as medical technology advances. Eventually artificial womb technology may suffice to keep the ex utero fetus
alive from the embryonic stage, and allow development to continue. But prior to sentience the fetus will not have interests, regardless of its location in or outside the body. This is not to say that artificial womb technology should not be used prior to sentience, but
merely that its use cannot be based on regard for the fetus's own interests, but must refer to the interests of others.

I have pointed out previously that natural personhood is rarely, if ever, granted merely on the basis of the interests of others. It is hard to understand how the interests of currently recognized people would suffer if we do not include non-sentient fetuses on an equal
legal footing. Fetuses are not currently recognized as natural persons, and there is little or no evidence that the legal rights and interests of currently recognized persons have suffered. An argument to recognize fetuses as natural persons should bear the burden of
showing that the interests of others are harmed, or else it must rest on the interests of the fetus itself. As noted above, prior to sentience fetuses lack interests of their own, under the Feinberg/Steinbock approach, thus juridical personhood prior to sentience would
be inappropriate. Arguably, the Supreme Court jurisprudence recognizing increasing state interests after viability (which maps roughly onto sentience) is compatible with the notion that prior to sentience the interests at stake (those of others, not the fetus) are too
weak to provide significant legal protections for the fetus itself. Others are certainly free to reject the Feinberg/Steinbock concept of interests, and attempt to develop a different theory of interests that would apply to fetuses. My point is that if fetuses are to be
considered natural persons because of their interests, an argument must be made that they have interests, using a coherent understanding of the term that can be applied across different entities. If fetuses are to be considered natural persons because of the
interests of others, there must be some argument about how the interests of others are harmed by the exclusion of fetuses in the category of natural persons. All of this is not to say that fetuses are not *395 entitled to legal protection, or that juridical personhood is
not a possibility, merely that natural personhood prior to sentience is not warranted.

But what happens after sentience? At this point fetuses have claims based on their own interests. What would be the effect of granting natural personhood status to fetuses when they reach the point of sentience? Significantly greater restrictions on abortion would
result as states would have an obligation to protect fetuses, just as they now do to protect already-born children. Moreover, designating fetuses as natural persons prior to birth would limit the rights of other currently recognized natural persons--particularly
pregnant women whose decisions during pregnancy might be constrained in the same way that parents' decisions are constrained by the interests of their already born children. Fetal interests at the point of sentience are not strong enough to justify these
limitations. Arguably newborn interests at the point of birth are not sufficient either. Rather, the natural person designation at birth is based on protection of the interests of others. However, during the prenatal period, the interests of others are not strong enough
to justify granting fetuses full natural personhood status or protections while still in utero based solely on sentience--other factors must also be present. Those who disagree with this position should have the burden of showing that limiting the rights of others (by
designating fetuses as natural persons) would be necessary in order to fully protect the rights of currently recognized people.

Would it be appropriate to consider a sentient in utero fetus a juridical person with certain legal protections prior to birth? The answer here is likely yes. It would be a matter of state choice (as are other juridical personhood designations). Those states that choose to
afford sentient fetuses juridical personhood status would need to align the rights given to the interests at stake. The fact that sentience is not possible prior to twenty-two and twenty-four weeks gestation does not mean that the fetus has fully developed cognition
and perception. At this point, for example, the fetus may not be able to feel pain, and thus has no interest in avoiding pain.105 If this is so, a state should not be able to require fetal anesthetic use during all abortions at twenty-two weeks based on sentience.106
Legislation providing specific protections prior to birth, but *396 after sentience, is an area which states might explore in more detail.

b. Cognitive and Physical Development

The closer to birth, the greater the interests of the fetus, and the greater the interests of others in providing the same kinds of protections as are granted to currently recognized persons such as children. If we give newborn infants legal protections based on these
interests, why not fully developed fetuses? It is hard to understand why an entity at this stage should not be considered as having equal legal status as an entity outside the womb. But one problem with a “development” standard is that it does not take into account
fetuses that have problems in development. As a result, we might set the standard based on gestational age, rather than “full development.”

At the end of the eighth month of pregnancy (thirty-two weeks), in most cases, all of the fetus's internal and external organ structures have substantially developed.107 Natural personhood and thus constitutional protections could apply at this late stage of
development. The result would change in the analysis of both abortions and forced caesarian-sections after this time point--the rights of the pregnant woman would be balanced against the rights of a “fetal natural person.” I will discuss this in more detail in the
following section. While it may be tempting to change the timeline for according natural personhood, there are reasons to be wary. First, fetal age determinations can be inexact.108 Second, even in the absence of natural personhood protections prior to birth, the
fetus is entitled to significant moral status--status which may be recognized under a juridical personhood framework. Pregnancy terminations at this point are highly restricted; except in cases of severe fetal abnormality, they are almost always undertaken with the
goal of achieving a live birth (e.g., ending the pregnancy, but not the life of the fetus). In cases of severe fetal abnormality, the issues raised are similar to those raised by neonatal euthanasia.109 The only difference is the added complication of the pregnant woman's
right of bodily integrity, which plays a significant role in the analysis and does not change if the fetus is considered a natural person. As a result, it may not be necessary to consider the fetus a natural person prior to birth to achieve fetal protections, and may
significantly complicate the situation to do so.
*397 Juridical personhood based on developmental or gestational age may be appropriate. This is already done implicitly by states which accord fetuses limited rights prior to birth by recognizing a variety of causes of action for harm done to fetuses at different
stages of development. Alternatively, gestational age might serve as a bright line cut-off for sentience. Thus a state might explicitly grant juridical personhood protections at twenty-two weeks gestation, on the assumption that for a normally developing fetus that
point marks the earliest time at which sentience is possible. For fetuses which are not experiencing normal development, the presumption of personhood could be rebutted--much as is done currently in determining viability or lack thereof.

c. Birth

There are practical reasons for choosing birth as the latest point at which personhood protections adhere, and thus at which the label “natural person” must be applied. Likewise, a fetus born prematurely, but after sentience, should also be considered a natural
person and treated as a full-term newborn would be treated under the law. Except in the absence of brain material or brain activity, it is practically impossible to determine sentience using current medical technology, and treatment decisions for premature
neonates are based on rough approximations of development, rather than evaluations of sentience. But what about a fetus “born”110 clearly prior to sentience,111 as might be the case if artificial womb technology advances?112

The answer depends on whether there are interests of others in according legal personhood protections, as is the case with anencephalic infants.113 Unlike anencephalic infants, however, these entities may not *398 share any form with later developed humans.
Would an eight-week old fetus be considered a legal person if in an artificial womb? The interests of others do not seem strong enough to accord natural personhood protections in this case. But this may be a situation in which juridical personhood protections are
appropriate. A living but pre-sentient fetus outside the mother's body (in an artificial womb) creates an unusual situation. In utero fetuses have the ancillary protections of their mother's legal personhood. But ex utero fetuses would not have these protections.
While parental property interests would function and may provide a basis for decision making and control (as they do in the ex utero embryo context),114 we may well need the additional identification of the developing ex utero fetus as a separate legal actor. As
artificial womb technology advances, this question should receive more thought and analysis.

d. Summary: Juridical to Natural Persons

Thus far I have argued that sentience is crucial for the development of fetal interests, and birth and external form each play a role in considering the interests of others. The same constraints that limit the scope of juridical personhood rights for embryos function in
the pre-consciousness context for fetuses. Granting juridical personhood status to fetuses prior to sentience may undermine the rights of currently recognized persons--for example pregnant women's rights to make a variety of decisions in the first trimester would
be limited. Even apart from abortion decisions, if we grant fetuses such status, women may have constraints placed upon their decisions to engage in risky activities, or to partake of legal substances that are harmful to the fetus. In order to justify this, proponents
would need to show that the legal recognition was necessary in order to safeguard rights of currently recognized natural persons, and that the result would be a greater protection of the rights of natural persons overall. This is an extremely difficult argument to
make, and may fail in many situations. Arguments that the lack of legal recognition of fetal rights prior to sentience harms the rights of people generally, ignores the harm to the rights of people resulting from the recognition itself. Thus prior to sentience the fetus
should be considered neither a natural, nor a juridical person. There may be restrictions on what can be done with fetuses born extremely early, either because of an interrupted pregnancy, or because they were never implanted after in vitro fertilization, but these
limitations are not based on the personhood status of the fetus. The interests of others can function to limit many actions, without resulting in personhood status for the entity in question. Consider, for example, legal restrictions related to actions involving *399
endangered species.115 We may not be allowed to destroy the habitat of a particular type of frog, regardless of whether that frog can make any claim to personhood. The protections are based on the interests of others in maintaining the diversity of species on this
planet, not necessarily on the interests of the species itself. Likewise, there may be a variety of restrictions on what can be done to a pre-sentient fetus based on the interests of currently recognized persons.

Birth, after sentience, is sufficient for natural personhood status-- not because the interests of the fetus are any greater with the birth, but because the interests of others in affording full natural personhood protections are strong enough to grant natural
personhood. This is true regardless of the physical development of the child. Birth without sentience due to developmental problems, but at the point of significantly complete physical development, also provides a basis for natural personhood, again based on the
interests of others. Substantially full physical development (eighth month of pregnancy or later) combined with sentience may be sufficient to accord the fetus the protections of natural persons, but careful consideration should be given to the practical effect of such
designation.

In the period of time between sentience and natural personhood, there may be reasons to provide fetuses the status and protections of juridical persons. Sentience does not mean that the fetus attains equal status with adult competent human beings,116 merely
that the fetus has characteristics that can form the basis for personhood protections based on its own (rather than other's) interests. Moreover, as the fetus develops closer to a newborn infant, both its interests and the interests of others that form the basis for
juridical personhood protections may increase.117 The following section discusses some initial implications of this proposed framework.

e. Implications

My goal here is not to provide a full analysis, nor even a complete summary of the relevant issues, but rather to begin to refocus, in light of my proposed framework, the debate in some of the most highly contentious areas of law such as abortion and medical
interventions on behalf of a fetus. Paradoxically, perhaps, the framework I suggest should *400 not result in drastic changes in current laws. This is one of the strengths of the proposal, as it should not result in great legal upheaval. The most significant change should
be in how the cases are analyzed, and the basis for evaluating future cases that do not fit well under the current model (such as fetuses in artificial womb environments). The shift in focus should clarify the issues that need further evaluation, and move us away from
the simplistic, and misguided, assertion that Roe's determination about whether the fetus is a person under the Fourteenth Amendment is the only relevant question.

To begin, I want to make two, interrelated, points. The first is that fetuses are considered persons already under the laws of many states.118 The second is that this recognition should be explicit and fetuses should be labeled juridical persons for purposes of the
application of these rights. The status designation serves a number of purposes. It emphasizes that the rights in question are rights of persons, but those of a juridical person, not a natural person. To some extent this clarifies the apparent inconsistency between laws
allowing abortions, for example, and laws allowing tort suits for pre-birth injuries. It is not that fetuses are considered persons for some laws and not for others, but that they are considered juridical persons with specific, but not complete, rights. Finally, explicit
recognition allows states to identify specifically the rights in question that go with the status, rather than simply assert that the fetus is a “person” (without limitation) for some purposes and not a person for others. This should result both in more detailed policy
discussions about allowing fetuses certain “personhood” rights, understanding that the recognition of the rights limits the rights of existing natural persons, and also more attention paid to why we grant certain juridical personhood rights to various entities, and
whether those should be limited or even extended. As a result, we may choose to provide personhood protections for sentient fetuses without granting them the same rights as fully recognized natural persons. Juridical personhood is not a unitary concept; there are
different kinds of juridical persons and different rights which may adhere. To the extent that states have discretion in determining which entities will be considered juridical persons, they may make different choices about the types of rights which they grant sentient
fetuses. This has already proved to be the case, as demonstrated by the vast array of prenatal laws currently in place.

There is little in the above analysis that should change abortion laws which apply prior to twenty-two to twenty-four weeks, that is, prior to the development of sentience, other than to reinforce that the restrictions before this time period cannot be based on fetal
interests.119 The above *401 framework may, however, have some implications both for evaluations of abortion restrictions post-viability and for prenatal and medical care decisions made by a pregnant woman towards the very end of the pregnancy. The current
“undue burden” test articulated in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey120 and reaffirmed by Stenberg v. Carhart121 is based on balancing the interests of the woman making the abortion decision against the interests of the state. Certainly
this balance would still be a factor even if the fetus is granted additional legal rights. That is, the state would still have interests which may need to be balanced against the individual's interests.

Designating fetuses as legal persons, however, would create a situation in which the fetus's interests would have to be taken into account on their own (not simply indirectly as is now done through the state's interests in protecting potential life). Thus the analysis
would look more like the analysis that takes place in the context of parental decisions regarding minor's medical care--specifically, refusal of life-sustaining medical treatment. Others have pointed out that the language of “rights” is less helpful in the parental
decision-making context, since “parental rights” do not rest on any clear constitutional basis.122 In contrast, the abortion situation does involve constitutional rights of bodily integrity.123 Weighing the rights of one natural person against another natural person is
difficult. To the extent a fetus is considered a natural person, the abortion debate will have to consider how to weigh the woman's right of bodily integrity against the fetal right to life. Although a complete analysis is beyond the scope of this Article, we can draw
some initial conclusions. Since there are no laws requiring parents to sacrifice their lives for their children, it would be hard to imagine that we would accept a legal requirement to do so in the context of pregnancy. Thus between the woman's right to life and the
fetus's right to life, the woman's legal rights should be given preference. Harder, of course, is the balance between the woman's right to health, and the fetus's right to health or even life. The varying opinions either allowing or disallowing forced c-sections for almost
full-term pregnancies is evidence of the difficulty courts have weighing these issues.124 The framework I have suggested here should encourage a shift in thinking about these issues to focus on the parallel between this situation and *402 others that involve direct
conflicts between the health/life of one person and the health/life of another. Moreover, it should lead to greater evaluation of the concept and extent of so-termed “bodily integrity” rights.125

My proposal should have three significant advantages over the current mode of analysis. First, it will allow states to “experiment” in finding the best system of recognizing and balancing legal rights in cases involving embryos and fetuses. Since legal personhood
should no longer be viewed as a closed question, states should be free to consider how best to accord juridical personhood status. Second, it should allow us to find better and conceptually more appealing answers to new debates in reproductive law. This will be
extremely important as reproductive technology advances and the legal cases continue to move away from the traditional abortion context. Finally, it may achieve a compromise position in an area that has thus far been marked by heated and divisive commentaries.

B. Non-Human Animals and Artificial Intelligence

Although I have focused primarily on embryos and fetuses thus far, the framework suggested here may be applicable
to other entities. The idea that we might exclude from legal status an entity that meets all the attribute requirements
for equal moral status with currently recognized persons, but that is not genetically human , raises the question of
why genetic humanness matters.126 It seems inconsistent to argue for the extension of legal protection to a non-
sentient multi-celled human organism in the beginning stages of development (i.e., an embryo) and withhold such
protections from fully developed sentient, and perhaps even rational, non-human animals .127 If genetics is the sole
basis for legal personhood, there must be some explanation as to why this characteristic is so important.128 Thus far no
one has provided a satisfactory argument *403 in this respect.129

Personhood outside of abortion spills into fetal rights. Limited intent is irrelevant.
Will 13, Professor of Law @ Mississippi (Jonathan, “Beyond Abortion: Why the Personhood Movement Implicates
Reproductive Choice,” American Journal of Law and Medicine, 39.4)
This lack of clarity regarding how a personhood framework might impact reproductive choice outside the
abortion context has contributed to the failure of personhood measures in multiple states, and could be the
reason why the federal Sanctity of Human Life Act, which was co-sponsored by Congressman and former vice-
presidential candidate Paul Ryan, did not make it out of congressional committee when first proposed in 2011.17 While
it may not have been surprising that personhood initiatives would be soundly defeated in a state such as Colorado, 18
the late 2011 failure of a proposed personhood amendment to the Mississippi Constitution sparked drastic changes to
the language utilized within the Personhood Movement.19 The revised language targets questions raised by previous
iterations, but it does not dispel the most pressing concerns regarding reproductive choice. And while no state has
adopted a personhood framework yet, at least nine states can expect to see personhood measures in coming years.20
As of March 2013, the North Dakota Senate and House approved an initiative (which will now appear on the November
2014 ballot) to amend the state constitution to protect “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of
development.” 21 How we define “person,” or at what point rights attach to human life, will directly impact all things
surrounding the reproductive process, regardless of the intent with which that process begins . It
is true that such answers will affect the choices available to women once pregnant, but they will also inevitably impact
such things as the availability of certain birth control options, and the permissiveness of various forms of assisted
reproductive technologies (ART).

The plan forces a re-definition of personhood that will be extended to rights of future lives
Jecker 22, Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, School of Medicine, University of Washington (Nancy, “What is
‘personhood’? The ethics question that needs a closer look in abortion debates,” The Conversation,
https://theconversation.com/what-is-personhood-the-ethics-question-that-needs-a-closer-look-in-abortion-debates-
182745)

One underlying ethical concern is, “What is a person?” How people answer this question shapes how they think about
a developing human being. When philosophers talk about “personhood,” they are referring to something or someone
having exceptionally high moral status, often described as having a right to life, an inherent dignity, or mattering for
one’s own sake. Non-persons may have lesser rights or value, but lack the full moral value associated with persons. To
be a person means having strong moral claims against others. For instance, persons have a claim to be treated fairly and
a claim not to be interfered with. A healthy adult human being is often considered the clearest example of a person. Yet,
most philosophers distinguish being a person from being human, pointing out that no one disputes the fetus’s species,
but many disagree about the fetus’s personhood. In current law, fetal viability is often used to mark the beginning of
personhood. However, viability varies based on people’s access to intensive medical care. It also changes as medicine
and technology advance. Some state laws restricting abortion identify the presence of a “fetal heartbeat” as morally
significant and use this as a basis for personhood. However, many living things have beating hearts, and they are not all
considered persons. And as physicians point out, though they may use the term “fetal heartbeat” in conversations with
patients, the fetus does not yet have a functioning heart that generates sound during early development. Defining the
limits of personhood is especially dicey due to its far-reaching consequences. Personhood carries implications for how
we treat animals, ecosystems and anencephalic infants, who are born with their cerebral cortex and large parts of their
skull missing. It also shapes the rights of people who will be born in the future , people with disabilities and individuals
in a persistent vegetative state. Debates over personhood have recently extended to robots.

Fetal personhood advocates will use the justifications for the plan’s personhood to give the state a
compelling reason to protect fetal life
Will 13, Professor of Law @ Mississippi (Jonathan, “Beyond Abortion: Why the Personhood Movement Implicates
Reproductive Choice,” American Journal of Law and Medicine, 39.4)
This approach stands in contrast to other ways in which we might define legal or moral personhood. For instance, one
might agree with the human species concept, yet maintain that membership does not occur until a later time in
development, such as the appearance of the primitive streak around fourteen days after fertilization,52 or when other
evidence of “life” is present like a detectable heartbeat (five to six weeks) 53 or electrical activity in the early brain (eight
weeks). 54 One could also assign legal or moral personhood to a pre-embryo 55 not because of its current state, but
because it has the potential to develop into a born human being.56 Yet another approach rejects the significance of
membership in the Homo sapiens species, and instead would attach legal or moral personhood at the point when the
developing organism attains certain capacities, such as the capacity to experience pain 57 or for rational thought or
self-consciousness.58 Interestingly, one could try to identify fetal viability as the person-defining criterion using any
of these approaches . For instance, membership in the species could be deemed to begin at viability; or a fetus
might be considered to have sufficient potential of becoming a born human at the point of viability such that it is then
worthy of legal protection; or, as the Supreme Court noted in Roe, one could say that at viability the fetus has the
capacity for “meaningful life outside the mother’s womb,” 59 so as to make the State’s interest in protecting fetal life
compelling at that point.

**The shift from human-centered interpretation of personhood to a trait-based interpretation of

personhood inevitably expands the scope to include fetuses
Beauchamp 99, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy,
Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Tom, “The Failure of Theories of Personhood,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal, 9.4)

One final problem about theories of personhood deserves attention. Literature on the criteria of persons is mired in
intractable dispute in a wide range of cases, including fetuses , newborns, the irreversibly comatose, God,
extraterrestrials, and the great apes. Facts about these beings are not the source of the dispute. The problem is created
by the vagueness and the inherently contestable nature of the ordinary language concept of person, 14 with its
commitments to a human individual comprised of a rather open-textured set of mental traits. The vagueness of this
concept is not likely to be dissipated by general theories of personhood unless they are revisionary. Theories typically
reflect the concept's vagueness and kindle more disagreement than enlightenment. 15 They give us no more than
grounds for a claim that there are alternative sets of sufficient conditions of personhood. The possibility of necessary
and sufficient conditions of person in a unified theory now seems dim. The concept of person is simply not orderly,
precise, or systematic in a way that supports one general philosophical theory to the exclusion of another. There is
one obvious solution to this problem of vagueness in the concept of person: Erase it from normative analysis and
replace it with more specific concepts and relevant properties. I favor this option for both metaphysical personhood and
moral personhood because it would enable us to go directly to the heart of substantive moral issues instead of using the
oblique detour now made through theories of personhood. That is, we could inquire directly about the moral
implications of possessing specific nonmoral and moral properties, such as reason and moral motivation, or we could
discuss the substantive bases of ascriptions of rights. Questions about whether fetuses can be aborted, whether
xenotransplantation is permissible, and whether anencephalics can be used in human experiments would then be
recast in terms of whether and, if so, on what moral grounds such actions can be performed . This suggestion should
not be taken to imply that we should abandon philosophical theories of metaphysical persons and moral persons. My
interest is exclusively in eliminating the abuse of these theories in normative analysis, not in eliminating the theories
themselves. [End Page 319] Conclusion I have said relatively little about specific normative problems or about the
practical implications of the conclusions I have reached, but not because these questions are unimportant. I conclude
with a comment on how very important they are. Much has been made of the potential breakdown of the lines that
have traditionally distinguished human and nonhuman animals. If nonhumans turn out to possess significantly more
advanced capacities than customarily envisioned, their moral standing would be upgraded to a more human level.
However, this possibility remains speculative and may be less important than the thesis that because many human lack
properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they are thereby rendered equal or inferior in moral standing to
some nonhumans. If this conclusion is defensible, we will need to rethink our traditional view that these unlucky
humans cannot be treated in the ways we treat relevantly similar nonhumans. For example, they might be aggressively
used as human research subjects and sources of organs. Perhaps we can find some justification of our traditional
practices other than a justification based on status as person or nonpersons . However, if we cannot find a compelling
alternative justification, we either should not be using animals as we do, or we should be using humans as we do not. 16

Uniqueness---Nature---1NR
There’s no fetal personhood now. But, pressure is growing and the legal status of fetal personhood
is in limbo.
Economist 7-7-2022 (“A push to recognise the rights of the unborn is growing in America,” The Economist,
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/07/07/a-push-to-recognise-the-rights-of-the-unborn-is-growing-in-
america)

What happens when America’s extreme anti-abortion activism meets its litigiousness? Fetuses get their own lawyers .
In recent years some judges in conservative states have appointed legal representation for fetuses in abortion disputes
(generally, when a minor wants to terminate a pregnancy). The arrangement has some glaring holes. Lawyers cannot
meet or talk to their client or, supposing a fetus had wishes, guess at them. Yet with the recent overturning of Roe v
Wade—the ruling that had enshrined access to abortion as a constitutional right—the push for legal recognition of the
“personhood” of fetuses is set to grow. Many anti-abortionists believe that life begins at conception. Proponents of
“fetal personhood” go a step further, arguing that the 14th Amendment of America’s constitution gives “equal
protection of the laws” to all, including a fertilised egg (despite the fact that as many as half of all zygotes do not
implant and become pregnancies). Increasingly, anti-abortion legislation is adopting the language of fetal personhood.
Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the case that ended Roe, did not do so . But the Supreme Court’s
momentous ruling, on June 24th, criticised the view that “the Constitution requires the states to regard a fetus as
lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed”. Laura
Portuondo, a fellow in reproductive rights and justice at Yale Law School, says this is likely to encourage the emergence
of state laws banning abortion explicitly in the name of fetal personhood. Efforts to ban abortions on personhood
grounds are “ethically clearer”, argues John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion organisation. Mr
Seago was influential in the push to pass a stringent abortion ban in Texas last year. “They are more honest about the
ethical principle that underlines the belief that abortions are wrong,” he adds. Emphasising fetal personhood is a natural
next step, he says, in working towards a national ban. Like many others in this camp, Mr Seago is “not content” for
abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis. Before Roe was overturned dozens of states introduced bills that
banned abortion by establishing fetal personhood, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice think-tank.
Because Roe rejected the idea and protected abortion until a fetus was viable, such laws were blocked. Since its
overruling, at least two states have sought to reinvigorate them. It is unclear if such laws will be allowed
to stand . In Arizona the American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for Reproductive Rights, two advocacy groups,
are suing state officials over an abortion ban that would give “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights,
privileges and immunities…” on the basis that the law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due process and puts providers
and women at risk of prosecution.
The push for fetal personhood is growing now, but not inevitable
Carlisle 22, reporter for TIME in New York City (Madeleine, “Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle
Over Reproductive Rights,” TIME Magazine, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)

With the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists are calling for broader laws that extend similar legal protections to
embryos and fetuses. Some were previously ruled unconstitutional, like Georgia’s HB 481, which includes language that
states “natural persons include an unborn child,” allows people to claim a fetus as a dependent on tax forms, and
requires state officials to count a fetus toward Georgia’s population for official population count purposes. The law was
struck down in 2020, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe on Friday, Georgia’s attorney general filed a notice
requesting the decision be reversed. A federal fetal personhood law was also introduced last year in both chambers of
Congress. The Life at Conception Act, which would extend fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” beginning
at the moment of fertilization, has 164 cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Still, many of these new laws
will likely face legal challenges. While there is no longer a constitutional right to an abortion, fetal personhood laws
could still be challenged for violating state constitutions, or for violating the constitutional right to due process because
of vague wording, like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims. “There are a lot of unanswered questions that we’ll have to
see laid out,” says Ziegler. “[Fetal personhood laws] are much more likely to be enforceable than would have been the
case before, but we still can’t be sure until the litigation is done.”

Legal personhood is limited to humans.

Scherer 18, Associate, Littler Mendelson P.C., and member of Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute and Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence, and Automation practice group (Matthew, Of Wild Beasts and Digital Analogues: The Legal Status of
Autonomous Systems, 19 Nev. L.J. 259 (2018), Available Online at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol19/iss1/8/)

The maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” applies to the laws of men no less than it
applies to the laws of nature. The central thesis of Bayern’s articles is that it is already possible for an unsupervised
artificial intelligence system to obtain legal personhood under existing law.15 To me—and, I would wager, to most
lawyers and laypeople alike—that is an extraordinary claim. Historically, legal systems have only recognized (1)
human beings and (2) entities endowed with “legal personhood”—that is, the ability to sue, be sued, and take actions
in the world that the legal system will enforce— but that are ultimately and actively controlled by human beings.16
Bayern’s argument, if correct, would mean that legislatures have inadvertently created a new category of legal person
—the first in history to be free of active human control.

Legal personhood is clearly limited to humans or human proxies.

Cupp 21, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law (Richard L. Jr., Considering the Private
Animal and Damages, 98 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1313 (2021), Available Online at:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol98/iss4/11)

5. Equating “Persons” with Humans and Their Proxies

The Naruto court at least implied that a legal person is a human or a human proxy , such as a corporation. For
example, Judge Smith’s concurrence noted that

the Federal Rules only authorize next friend suits on behalf of “a minor or an incompetent person.” Per the text,
this can only apply to human persons, not any “minor” or “incompetent” corporations or animals. Importantly,
the historical background of [the next friend statute] limits the use of next friends to only human persons.153

Of course, corporations are also legal persons, but the court recognized that they are merely proxies for
humans : “[C]orporations and unincorporated associations are formed and owned by humans ; they are not
formed or owned by animals.”154
Naruto’s apparent nod to the exclusively human foundation of legal personhood impliedly precludes the
treatment of animals as legal persons in private law damages actions. The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc., an
organization focused on expanding legal personhood to at least some animals, acknowledged and complained about
Naruto’s implicit limitation of personhood––contending, of course, that the court was wrong.155 But despite complaints
from animal rights activists, this aspect of Naruto adds to a growing body of cases that point out the centrality of
humanity to legal personhood in response to efforts to name animals as plaintiffs.156
AT: FP Fails---1NR
Embryonic research is the next target for anti-abortion advocates
Reynolds 22 (Matt, “Embryonic Research Could Be the Next Target After Roe,” WIRED,
https://www.wired.com/story/roe-wade-embryo-research/)

In states where human embryonic research is legal, people undergoing IVF are often given the choice to donate any
excess fertilized embryos to scientific research. These are sometimes used to search for potential treatments for
diseases such as diabetes or, as in Yuan’s case, to research ways to make IVF more successful. “Those discarded
embryos are really one of the key pieces for us to maintain the high quality of our platform here,” says Yuan, who is
research director at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine (CCRM). But in the wake of the Dobbs verdict , he
is worried that people will be less likely to donate their spare embryos for research and, down the line, that embryonic
research could become the next target of antiabortion campaigners . “It’s like you’re a little girl living in a dark room.
You know there are bad guys outside but you’re not too worried because the door has been locked,” says Yuan. “But
then somebody tells you that the door has been unlocked.” Yuan fears that anything that slows down access to human
embryos will ultimately end up slowing progress in IVF, which is responsible for between 1 and 2 percent of all US
births annually. The majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t single out IVF or human embryonic
research, but his choice of words to describe abortion could be seen as also being applicable to embryos outside the
body, says Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist and professor of law at Harvard Law School. The right to an abortion is distinct
from other rights, Alito notes in the opinion, because it destroys “potential life” and the life of an “unborn human
being.” “The same thing that he uses to distinguish abortion seems to me completely applicable to distinguishing
embryos,” says Cohen. “To me it makes it very, very clear after Dobbs that any state that wants to prohibit the
destruction of embryos as part of research is free to do so.” The wording that legislators use to describe the beginning
of human life is also important. In at least nine states, trigger laws—pieces of legislation designed to restrict abortion
quickly after the fall of Roe—include language that implies an egg cell becomes an “unborn child” or “unborn human
being” at the precise moment of fertilization. In other words, according to these definitions, every single human embryo
—including donated embryos that might be used in scientific research—is an unborn child. Although most of these
trigger laws apply specifically to pregnancy, and so do not regulate embryos outside of the human body, the idea that
life begins at the very moment of fertilization could be used to target embryonic research, says Cohen. “If you have that
view, it’s not clear to me why you would exempt the destruction of embryos if you prohibit abortion. To me, that wrong
is the same.” A typical cycle of IVF might collect 10 or more eggs, which are then fertilized outside of the body to create
viable embryos. Since only one or two are usually implanted into the uterus at a time, IVF often results in leftover
embryos that people can choose to freeze, discard, donate to another person or couple, or donate to research. In at
least one state—Utah—it is not clear whether the trigger law distinguishes between abortion and the discarding of
embryos through IVF. “One could argue that discarding an embryo or donating an embryo for research is an intentional
or attempted killing of a live unborn child and constitutes an abortion” under the Utah trigger law, wrote the authors of
a report from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Research on human embryos has always been
contentious in the United States. Federal funding for such research has been blocked since 1995, when two Republican
legislators introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill, preventing any money from the National Institutes of
Health going towards research where human embryos are destroyed. Although some states—including California,
Michigan, and New York—have passed laws explicitly allowing research on human embryos and embryonic stem cells, at
least 11 other states have banned or effectively banned the research. In states where human embryo research is legal,
the embryos are discarded before they reach 14 days of development—a rule that is observed in most places that allow
embryo research. Yuan at CCRM says that donated embryos are extremely important for improving knowledge of IVF.
They are used to train junior embryologists in taking small genetic samples from embryos so they can be tested for
certain diseases. Yuan is also using donated embryos to find ways to improve the culture medium that embryos are
grown in outside of the body, the aim of this research being to raise the chances of embryos implanting within the
uterus. One study of IVF found that embryos failed to implant properly around 30 percent of the time for people
undergoing their first IVF cycle and having a single embryo implant. Yuan’s hope is that finding ways to improve how
embryos grow outside of the body will improve their odds of becoming a sustained pregnancy. “What impacts IVF
research and what impacts IVF are the same thing,” he says. With no federal laws protecting this kind of research, it
might become the next target of antiabortion campaigners. “Once all of the upset and celebration over Dobbs does
settle in, there’s no reason why the advocacy groups who worked so diligently for 50 years to bring about the case
wouldn’t set their sights on the embryo discard issue,” says Judith Daar, a law professor at Northern Kentucky
University. Like Glenn Cohen, Daar agrees that the language of the Alito opinion could be used to target discarded
embryos as well as abortions.

AT: UQ Overwhelms---1NR
The plan would trigger mass litigation. Every court in the country would have the opportunity to
expand the scope of the plan’s mandate.
Smith 11, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture (Wesley,
“BEWARE THE “RIGHTS OF NATURE”,” First Things, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/12/beware-
the-rights-of-nature)

As regular readers of Secondhand Smoke know, I am very concerned about the growing anti-humanism permeating
enviromental advocacy. It started, perhaps, with deep ecology—but is spreading now to the misanthropic ”rights of
nature”—including I just found out, in Pittsburgh!—and the equally anti human exceptionalism campaign to make
“ecocide” an international felony deemed as heinous as genocide. So, I decided to make that issue my last column of the
year. First, I describe the issue and give examples of language purporting to establish ”rights” for nature, including for
“Mother Earth” (draft global warming treaty) and the goddess Pachamama (in Ecuador’s constitution). I then describe
the game that is afoot. From “Beware the ‘Rights of Nature’,” in the Daily Caller: Rights of Mother Earth!? Pachamama?
Sounds disturbingly like the proposed legal establishment of a neo earth religion to me. Metaphysics aside, think about
the adverse impact that granting rights to nature would have on human thriving. Pond scum and pollywogs are part of
nature. So are stink bugs, grass, poison ivy, pigeons and all other flora, fauna and indeed, if applied literally, so too are
mountains, rivers and other inanimate natural objects. If these individual and collective aspects of the natural world
have the “right” to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate,” it could stop most development and exploitation of natural
resources in their tracks — which, of course, is precisely the point. One way this great thwarting would play out would
be lawsuits brought by elements of nature—really radical environmentalist lawyers—to force judges to decide when
human development and “nature” came into conflict—which to some degree happens any time we do anything. This all
has a deeply anti-property ownership tinge: Talk about a full employment guarantee for lawyers! Imagine the
courtroom backlog that would be created if “nature” could sue every time enterprising humans wanted to act
enterprisingly with their own property. Indeed, imagine trying to obtain a liability insurance policy. Good luck with that!
But then, nature rights would prevent us from truly owning property. We would become, at best, mere trustees for all
of the life forms on the particular tracts of land that we no longer truly owned.
The Supreme Court is currently divided over fetal personhood---small changes in precedent could
result in a unified conservative block.
Andrews 21, Reporter at Mother Jones (Becca, December 1st, “We Always Knew Conservative Justices Would Tear Roe
Down. The Latest SCOTUS Fight Proves It,” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-
court-abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/, Accessed 08-23-2022)

The fault lines were apparent on the bench, as well.

Justice Clarence Thomas came in early with an eagerness to test the waters on consideration of fetal personhood—
which is not an issue that Dobbs is putting to the Court—specifically probing whether or not child abuse laws could be
enforced against pregnant people who use drugs before viability. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was concerned with safe-
haven laws, which allow a parent to anonymously surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, suggesting that
women can and should carry unwanted pregnancies to term, give birth, and then relinquish the child if they so choose.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly expressed that he feels the legality of abortion is not one for the Supreme Court at
all, but rather for the states, so he can wash his hands of the whole thing and avoid the hypocrisy of declaring that Roe v.
Wade is established precedent while also overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Samuel Alito tried to draw a comparison
between Roe and Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld state segregation and was later overturned in Brown v. Board of
Education, on the basis that the prior decision violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizens’ rights to life,
liberty, and property. Alito also offered up this tidbit of judicial wisdom: “The fetus has an interest in having a life.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch was fairly quiet, but he groped around for a way to frame undue burden, the standard for
protecting abortion access that’s been in place since Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s 1992 decision, as unworkable, and
to banish Roe‘s viability standard altogether. Chief Justice Roberts hewed closely to a “what’s the harm in a 15-week
limit?” frame, carefully not engaging with issues of personhood.

In summary, the conservatives were saying the quiet part out loud. Their questions and interjections today marked a
real and significant shift in how explicit they’re willing to be in their disdain for the legal precedent to abortion rights.
Naturally, this does not bode well for the future of people who can become pregnant.

More specifically, the conservative justices clearly implied that the Court will side with the state of Mississippi (which,
let’s not forget, is not just a question of legal procedure, and would be devastating for pregnant people all across the
country). But more than that, today’s queries suggested a much more expansive goal , one that is not as specific as
viability or undue burden. By closing arguments, Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general representing the
defense, made clear that the anti’s fight won’t end here, even with a victory on the 15-week law, or a reversal of Roe.
“There are interests here on both sides,” he declared. “There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the
woman. It’s unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions.” This is nothing if not an
argument for his—and by extension, Mississippi’s—belief in fetal personhood.

Not all the conservative justices seemed game to debate when life begins, but enough did . In addition to Thomas’
apparent interest, Alito literally asked, “Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the
rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?” This isn’t just an obscure issue of
philosophy or semantics. Bodily autonomy is on the line, and it’s not out of the question that this discussion could bleed
over to affect what kind of contraception is deemed acceptable, or the outlawing of Plan B (which, despite a slew of
right-wing misinformation, is not an abortifacient).

SCOTUS will pounce on fetal personhood, if given the opportunity. They set the table in Dobbs.
Needham 22, JD, contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American Independent (Lisa, “A
Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics: For the conservative legal movement,
overturning Roe v. Wade may be just the beginning.,” https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-
explainer/)
How many Supreme Court justices believe in fetal personhood?

Too many. During oral arguments in Dobbs, Alito served up the softest of softballs to Mississippi’s solicitor general,
asking him whether there are any “secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of
personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability.” This allowed the solicitor general, Scott
Stewart, to reply that, why yes, a “wide array” of people exist “who would reasonably have that view.” This feels like
Alito’s clunky method of trying to establish that there are at least some non-religious people who think personhood
begins at conception, too, not just conservative Christian supremacists like him. There are other warning signs in the
leaked Dobbs opinion. Take one of Alito’s few approving citations to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that
weakened Roe without oveturning it: that abortion is a “unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” At
several points, Alito fawningly adopts the language of the Mississippi law that calls fetuses “unborn human beings”—a
tacit assertion that a currently-unconstitutional law accurately reflects the factual scientific landscape. Justice
Clarence Thomas, too, seems very comfortable with the uncomfortable issues fetal personhood creates. During oral
argument, he tried to shift the conversation with Susan Rikelman, who represented one of the abortion providers, to the
overarching issue of control of the bodies of pregnant people. Back in 2001, Thomas was one of three dissenters from
the Court’s opinion in Ferguson v. Charleston, which held that a hospital could not drug-test people who had just given
birth and allow cops to arrest anyone who tested positive for cocaine. The implications of fetal personhood for cases like
Ferguson were clearly on Thomas’s mind during his exchange with Rikelman more than two decades later. “I understand
your argument is about abortion,” he explained. “I am trying to look at the issue of bodily autonomy, and whether or not
she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability
fetus.” It seems that Thomas not only opposes the right to choose, but is already thinking ahead to what civil rights he
could use fetal personhood to curtail next . Barrett, Thomas’s former clerk, is probably on board, too . In 2006, she
signed an open letter sponsored by St. Joseph County Right to Life of people who “oppose abortion on demand and
defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death,” which is about as tidy as a summary of fetal personhood can
get.

***The Supreme Court is angling to rule on fetal personhood now.

Papenfuss 22, Trends Reporter @ Huffington Post. Quoting Rachel Maddow, American television news program host
and liberal political commentator. Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a weekly television show on MSNBC, and
serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor alongside Brian Williams (Mary, June 25th, “Rachel Maddow
Predicts 'Fetal Personhood' SCOTUS Case Will End Abortion Nationwide,” The Huffington Post,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rachel-maddow-fetal-personhood-scotus-nationwide-abortion-
ban_n_62b68949e4b06169caa6e9d4, Accessed 08-23-2022)

An alarmed Rachel Maddow is convinced Republicans will now angle to bring a “fetal personhood” case before the
Supreme Court in a bid to totally shut down abortion nationwide.

Such a case would aim to define a fetus as a human being, and an abortion as murder. Maddow warned the extremist
fight is a long game, decades in the making, often enforced with violence, and that Republicans aren’t about to ease
off now that the court has overturned Roe v. Wade.
“The anti-abortion political project of the Republican Party and the political right has been the central organizing principle for the right’s entire effort around the judiciary, one for which there is still no match or mirror on the left. It’s a big deal,” she said on MSNBC’s
“Rachel Maddow Show” Friday.

This movement, 40 years in the making, “is just now hitting its stride, that is just coming into maturity,” she noted.

And they’re not stopping, she warned.

“There’s nothing in the reasoning of today’s opinion from these six justices that would stop them from accepting
something like a fetal personhood case ,” Maddow explained.

“A fetal personhood case ... would give this court a path to not just let individual states ban abortion, which is what
they did today. ... A fetal personhood case could be their vehicle to impose a nationwide ban on abortion, on the order
of the United States Supreme Court,” she said.
It’s hardly far-fetched, Maddow argued.

“Would it be that much more radical than what they’ve done today?” she asked. “I mean, they’ve kind of broken the
seal here, haven’t they? Roe was a 50-year-old precedent that had been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself
multiple times,” she noted.

Fetal
Uq
Fetal personhood is limited now, but it’s the next frontier for anti-abortion zealots
Carlisle 22
link
No wildlife rights now – aff flips that
Voight 19
Expanding non-human personhood will be co-opted to expand embryonic personhood
Laitos 12
They say corporations prove no link but
Legal personhood is clearly limited to humans or human proxies.
Cupp 21, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law (Richard L. Jr., Considering the Private
Animal and Damages, 98 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1313 (2021), Available Online at:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol98/iss4/11)

5. Equating “Persons” with Humans and Their Proxies

The Naruto court at least implied that a legal person is a human or a human proxy , such as a corporation. For
example, Judge Smith’s concurrence noted that

the Federal Rules only authorize next friend suits on behalf of “a minor or an incompetent person.” Per the text,
this can only apply to human persons, not any “minor” or “incompetent” corporations or animals. Importantly,
the historical background of [the next friend statute] limits the use of next friends to only human persons.153

Of course, corporations are also legal persons, but the court recognized that they are merely proxies for
humans : “[C]orporations and unincorporated associations are formed and owned by humans ; they are not
formed or owned by animals.”154

Naruto’s apparent nod to the exclusively human foundation of legal personhood impliedly precludes the
treatment of animals as legal persons in private law damages actions. The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc., an
organization focused on expanding legal personhood to at least some animals, acknowledged and complained about
Naruto’s implicit limitation of personhood––contending, of course, that the court was wrong.155 But despite complaints
from animal rights activists, this aspect of Naruto adds to a growing body of cases that point out the centrality of
humanity to legal personhood in response to efforts to name animals as plaintiffs.156
Most recent evidence. Courts have used the “human proxy” standard to deny personhood beyond
corporations
Miller 7-15-2022, associate at McManis Faulkner (Evan Louis, “Your AI Program Probably Isn't A Person In A Court Of
Law,” Law 360, Lexis)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed the nonhuman aspect of legal personhood in Naruto v. Slater
in 2018, where a wildlife photographer was sued for copyright infringement for publishing a selfie that a monkey had
taken when a camera was left unattended. Although the Ninth Circuit held that the crested macaque had alleged facts
sufficient to demonstrate an injury-in-fact to support Article III standing, the court subsequently found that Naruto
lacked statutory standing under the Copyright Act because the law did not expressly authorize suit by animals. In
response to the petitioner's argument that the law contemplated standing for nonhuman entities, such as
corporations, the court explained that corporations are formed by humans and that the character of their
composition is the relevant consideration . One federal district court recently held that an AI is not considered a person
for the purpose of obtaining a patent. In Thaler v. Hirshfeld in 2021, currently on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Third Circuit from the Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was sued for its denial of a
patent application because, under "inventor," it listed the name of an AI program. The plaintiff, Stephen Thaler, claims
that the AI program he created, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Science, or DABUS, developed
an invention on its own and without human involvement. Thaler, on behalf of DABUS, argued that the term "person" has
not been limited to "natural person" and that the Constitution's patent clause would be frustrated by the USPTO's
restrictive construction. The district court ruled in favor of the USPTO, holding that an inventor must be a natural person
and that the USPTO was owed deference to its interpretation. Whether higher courts agree remains to be seen. Courts
have generally not been receptive to arguments that nonhumans have legal capacity , although this has generally been
addressed in the context of arguments on behalf of animals. Even so, it is expected that AI and those who developed it
will continue to seek legal counsel and file lawsuits to assert AI-related claims.

They claim that property rights fall short but its about perceptuion. The link ev talk
Impact
Gender Inequality is the most important issue
UN 18
Extend Kessler o8 here from the bio d flow in the 1nc. This card talks about how weighing
probability is the most important thing in this debate because weighing magnitude is infinitely
regressive and pushes back change in defense of impacts that will never happen. The chances of
loss of rights for women causing massive gender inequality is 100% so that’s why you weigh the da
over the aff. The probability of every impact on the aff flow is extremely low which I will get to on
the case flow. They say we cant solve everything but the world of the aff is net better for women
than the world of the neg.

Fetal personhood is limited now, but it’s the next frontier for anti-abortion zealots
Carlisle 22, reporter for TIME in New York City (Madeleine, “Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle
Over Reproductive Rights,” TIME Magazine, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)
But nearly 50 years later, Roe was overturned, and Justice Samuel Alito declared in the Supreme Court’s majority
opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”
Now, laws that establish fetal personhood—meaning they extend the legal rights of people to a fetus or embryo before
viability—could be the next frontier in the legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States . Not all abortion
bans establish fetal personhood. But all pre-viability fetal personhood laws ban abortion—and could have even
broader implications for reproductive healthcare access and the potential criminalization of pregnancy. “Abortion laws
regulate a procedure,” says Rebecca Kluchin, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, who recently wrote
a piece for the Washington Post criticizing such policies. “Fetal personhood laws allow the state to regulate pregnant
women.” While 13 states had already enacted “trigger laws” designed to ban all or nearly all abortions once Roe was
overturned, at least six states have also introduced legislation to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood,
according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. Litigation over such laws has
already begun. Last year, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey enacted an abortion ban that gave “an unborn
child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and
residents.” Cathi Herrod, the president of the conservative Christian advocacy group Center for Arizona Policy (CAP),
says CAP supported Arizona’s law because they “stand for the belief that human life begins at the moment of
conception, that life is a human right, and unborn children deserve protection.” The ACLU of Arizona and the Center for
Reproductive Rights sued, and on Saturday filed an emergency motion asking a judge to block the implementation of the
law in the wake of the fall of Roe, arguing the law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due process and could put abortion
providers and pregnant people at risk of criminal prosecution. The judge has yet to rule on the motion and a hearing will
be held in July. (Brittni Thomason, spokesperson for the Arizona attorney general’s office, says they “anticipate filing a
legal brief” on the matter “next week.”) The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on fetal personhood in Dobbs: “Our
opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,”
Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how fetal personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the
challenge for many of us is that we will be living in a legal gray area for a long time,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy
executive directive at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people,
including women who have had abortions. “Case law will have to be developed, or statutes will have to be clarified,
because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all
play out.”

Expanding non-human personhood will be co-opted to expand embryonic personhood

Laitos 12, *Jan Laitos, Professor of Law and John A. Carver, Jr. Chair in Natural Resources and Environmental Law,
University of Denver Sturm College of Law; (2012, “The Right of Nonuse”, Sturm College of Law, Faculty Scholarship,
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/law_facpub/112/)

2. EXPANDING STANDING TO OTHER NONHUMAN, NONNATURAL RESOURCES

Even in 1972, Stone recognized that expanding standing to the natural objects could lead to the slippery slope
expansion of standing to other nonhuman entities, such as computers.74 Can we envision a future where our laptops
or smart phones or other wonders of modern technological advances could bring claims against humans, or one
another, in courts? Could a virus-infected operating system bring a lawsuit against the programmer who created the
virus? And, most certainly, expanding non-human standing could have huge effect on the abortion question and
fetus rights adjudication. Although attempts to create a guardianship for embryos and fetuses in order to represent
rights of the unborn is not a novel idea, expanded standing for resources grounded on the existence of a newly
recognized legal right , coupled with the elimination of an anthropocentric injury-in-fact requirement, could
conceivably give those zygote-embryo-fetus claims momentum . The right of nonuse proposed here should be limited
to natural and environmental resources whose nonuse component is endangered by human use.75 Neither computers
nor embryos have a similar nonuse dimension, and therefore the arguments advanced here do not logically extend to
nonnatural resources.
Embryonic personhood collapses bio-medical innovation. Impact is uncurable, existential disease
spread — that’s the 1AC evidence
Piergentili 21, Institute of Molecular Biology and Pathology, Italian National Research Council (Roberto, et al, “CRISPR-
Cas and Its Wide-Ranging Applications: From Human Genome Editing to Environmental Implications, Technical
Limitations, Hazards and Bioethical Issues,” Cells, 10.5)

If embryos are to be ascribed personhood status , then they are entitled to have their inalienable human rights
upheld. If, on the other hand, they are deemed as something in between, i.e., less than human beings but more than
mere pools of cells, what moral rights should they have acknowledged, if any? Certainly, some point out that the first
experiments using CRISPR to edit human embryos occurred in 2015, and since then, only few teams around the world
have focused on the process and its potential [85], but recent studies have highlighted an underappreciated risk of
CRISPR–Cas9 editing: if embryos are deemed to have the right to at least some degree of legal safeguards, such safety
concerns are likely to significantly inform the ongoing debate on the matter. In light of such major unsolved
controversies, some have called for an international moratorium on all embryo editing [88,89], and some countries,
including Canada, already have policies that ban human-embryo gene editing, irrespective of whether or not the edited
embryo would be meant for implantation [90]. In the United States and Britain, on the other hand, an intermediate
regulatory approach has been chosen. The US Food and Drug Administration views any use of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing
in humans as gene therapy, regulated by the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Clinical studies
of gene therapy in human beings therefore require the submission of an investigational new drug application (IND)
before they can be legally initiated in the United States. In addition, marketing gene therapy products calls for the
submission and approval of a biologics license application (BLA). As a result of such requirements and restrictions,
operating a private lab, with private funds, and conducting nonclinical, human gene therapy research is not illegal.
Nonetheless, marketing such therapeutic options in the US would require FDA approval in terms of clinical studies and
marketing. As far as it could be determined, no instances exist of a germline gene therapy product in the US; only
somatic cell gene therapy products have been granted approval; currently, federal law prevents the FDA from reviewing
or approving any application involving manipulated human embryos [91]. Again, it is necessary to draw a clear
distinction between embryo editing for research purposes and the implantation of such edited embryos, which is
ethically far more contentious. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the use of genome editing in embryos for the
purpose of implantation is banned, albeit gene editing on discarded IVF embryos is lawful, provided that such embryos
are destroyed immediately afterwards. In vitro culture of human embryos beyond 14 days after onset of embryo
creation, i.e., after the appearance of the primitive streak, is prohibited: such a ban is enshrined in the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Acts of 1990 and 2008 [92]. In Italy, specific provisions in law 40/2004 recognize the
embryo as having rights from the moment of fertilization [93]. The law prohibits the use of embryos for any research
unless it is specifically aimed towards improving the therapeutic and medical condition of the embryo itself [94,95].
Critics have pointed out the apparent paradox behind such a restriction, considering that in vivo embryos can be
terminated up to 24 weeks through voluntary termination of pregnancy [96]. Some may in fact find it confusing that
embryo research is required to stop so much earlier, particularly in light of the fact that it is arguably more ethically
sustainable to use abandoned supernumerary embryos for research purposes that could benefit humanity, than to just
dispose of them. While abortion ethics is beyond the scope of this review, it is worth pointing out that in these two
scenarios, different fundamental goals are in play: legal termination of pregnancy stems from the need to uphold the
right of women to have a choice and be in control of their body, whereas in vitro embryo research does not entail that
issue. As for embryo experimentation, such intermediate regulatory approaches bear witness to the current uncertainty
as to how strictly such techniques ought to be regulated, for the purpose of striking a balance between upholding
bioethics precepts and fostering scientific progress for the common good. Nonetheless, nations with more lax,
ambiguous or nonspecific regulatory frameworks governing new biomedical technologies may result in a worrisome
“maverick” scientific environment in which untested techniques are made available. That has been found to be the case
with mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), a form of nuclear transfer used as a germline therapy and believed to
prevent the transmission of mitochondrial diseases and increase the likelihood of success in pregnancies [97]. Although
MRT is banned in many countries due to its still dubious safety, clinics in Spain, Albania, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel have
been found to offer the procedure [98]. That said, and irrespective of how individual countries decide to govern such
techniques, the issue of whether scientists should seek to edit human embryos to prevent genetic diseases is
controversial in itself, because the genomic change which it creates is permanent and may be passed down for
generations. Even if embryo experimentation should be deemed justified, by virtue of its potential benefit to the embryo
itself and others, embryos obviously cannot grant informed consent , but are still liable to experience life-altering
consequences which can extend throughout their lifetimes and affect future generations as well. Besides, as mentioned
earlier on, the enforcement and practice of both ethical precepts and legal provisions are inextricably linked to a set of
notions that are hardly carved in stone and universally acknowledged. Hence, the time at which a human life (whether
embryo or fetus) is deemed a fully-fledged human being has far-reaching ramifications that encompass the crucial
realms of health care , law- and policy making and the inalienable right of individual autonomy of all humans [99]. There
are no easy answers in our ever more culturally and ethically diverse societies: one-size-fits-all approaches seem
doomed to fail, yet finding common ground is vital. If human embryos are to be deemed human beings with full
personhood status, major implications ensue. That is the perspective espoused by Catholic doctrine, best exemplified
by the late Pope John Paul II, who in 1995 famously stated that “the mere probability that a human person is involved
would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition of any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo” [100]. That
approach does not differentiate between embryos edited for research purposes and edited embryos to be implanted.
Conversely, prominent philosophers such as Kant, Locke and Fletcher have laid out criteria for identifying personhood
closely tied to self-awareness, the capability to relate to others, self-control, rationality, and the use of memory, among
others [101,102,103,104]. On the other hand, all such complexities and apparently irreconcilable views notwithstanding,
there is no denying that banning or constraining research on human embryos could put a damper on scientific
progress and stymie the development of therapies that could defeat currently untreatable diseases . Would that not
be a moral and ethical imperative outweighing previously reported concerns? Again, no easy answers.

It leads to the handmaid’s tale in real life — causes mass suffering

Carlisle 22, reporter for TIME in New York City (Madeleine, “Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle
Over Reproductive Rights,” TIME Magazine, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)

The implications of fetal personhood on pregnancy

Critics of fetal personhood laws argue the state cannot bestow legal rights onto a fetus or embryo without subjugating
the rights of the pregnant person. In theory, fetal personhood laws could impact the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a
procedure that uses a combination of medicines and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant
the embryo into the uterus. A round of IVF can create multiple embryos, which can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal
personhood laws could also impact contraception access, given that some members of the anti-abortion movement
argue that IUDs and the emergency contraception Plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and violate
personhood, explains Mary Ziegler, an abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. (The
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that those forms of contraception work by preventing
fertilization in the first place.) Fetal personhood laws could also have major implications for pregnant people. If a fetus
is legally considered a person, then child endangerment laws can apply. A state could potentially say pregnant people
can only eat certain foods , or punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or compel someone to have a cesarean
section they are refusing, says Kluchin. If a pregnant woman must undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, adds
Ziegler, she could in theory be told to delay care until she gives birth so she does not harm the fetus, as the New
Yorker reports has “routinely” occurred with pregnant women in Poland. (Many U.S. abortion laws have narrow
exceptions for when the mother’s life is in danger.) Establishing fetal personhood could put people who self-induce
abortions at risk for criminal prosecution, says Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. It could
also impact people who miscarry. Leslie J. Reagan, a professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
says prior to Roe, if someone went to the hospital or called a doctor about a miscarriage, they were often questioned
on whether they had induced an abortion. Reagan’s research found that beginning in the early 1900s and running up
until Roe in the 1970s, doctors and nurses sometimes functioned as the arm of the police, even threatening to deny care
to patients if they did not provide information. “They were all suspects,” says Reagan. “[Doctors] couldn’t tell if it was a
natural miscarriage or whether they had induced it, and they came to assume that anyone who came in bleeding,
miscarrying, had induced it—and began to ask questions.” Did fetal personhood laws exist before Roe fell? Roe explicitly
banned laws from establishing fetal personhood before the “viability” line. But the logic of fetal personhood has been
used for decades in policies and enforcement against women, particularly low-income women of color, in the later
stages of pregnancy.

DA — Fetal Personhood
Legal personhood is clearly limited to humans or human proxies.
Cupp 21, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law (Richard L. Jr., Considering the Private
Animal and Damages, 98 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1313 (2021), Available Online at:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol98/iss4/11)

5. Equating “Persons” with Humans and Their Proxies

The Naruto court at least implied that a legal person is a human or a human proxy , such as a corporation. For
example, Judge Smith’s concurrence noted that

the Federal Rules only authorize next friend suits on behalf of “a minor or an incompetent person.” Per the text,
this can only apply to human persons, not any “minor” or “incompetent” corporations or animals. Importantly,
the historical background of [the next friend statute] limits the use of next friends to only human persons.153

Of course, corporations are also legal persons, but the court recognized that they are merely proxies for
humans : “[C]orporations and unincorporated associations are formed and owned by humans ; they are not
formed or owned by animals.”154

Naruto’s apparent nod to the exclusively human foundation of legal personhood impliedly precludes the
treatment of animals as legal persons in private law damages actions. The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc., an
organization focused on expanding legal personhood to at least some animals, acknowledged and complained about
Naruto’s implicit limitation of personhood––contending, of course, that the court was wrong.155 But despite complaints
from animal rights activists, this aspect of Naruto adds to a growing body of cases that point out the centrality of
humanity to legal personhood in response to efforts to name animals as plaintiffs.156
The legal system has rejected personhood for animals BECAUSE of the potentially sweeping
precedential effects
NYLJ 22, New York Law Journal, “Habeas Relief Not Applicable to Non-Human Animals,” Lexis

The Court of Appeals ruled last month that an elephant is not entitled to bring a habeas corpus petition with respect
to her confinement at the Bronx Zoo. In Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Breheny, a five-judge majority lead by
the Chief Judge determined that writs of habeas corpus only protect the liberty rights of human beings and are not
available to animals regardless of their respective level of functional intelligence. Judges Wilson and Rivera each
submitted a dissent in which they argue that autonomous beings with substantial cognitive abilities such as the elephant
at issue in this case are entitled to the protections that the writ has historically provided. The petitioner in this case is a
non-profit organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NRP) that seeks to establish that at least certain animals
are "legal persons" entitled to fundamental rights. It has commenced a number of actions in New York and other states
on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants arguing that they are being unlawfully confined and are entitled to the issuance
of a writ of habeas corpus. All of their actions to date have been unsuccessful. NRP commenced this action in Supreme
Court, Bronx County in 2018 seeking a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of an Asian elephant named Happy. Index No.
260441/19, 2020 WL 1670735 at *2 (Sup. Ct., Bronx Cty. Feb. 18, 2020). The defendants were the Director of the Bronx
Zoo, James J. Breheny, and the Wildlife Conservation Society-the conservation organization that operates the Bronx Zoo.
NRP alleged that Happy was unlawfully confined in violation of her right to bodily liberty. Happy has been in captivity
since she was one year old and has lived at the Bronx Zoo for the past 45 years. Happy had been paired with two
different elephants over the years but each of them was euthanized after one was injured in a fight with other elephants
and the other fell ill. The Bronx Zoo has announced that it does not intend to acquire any more elephants and is phasing
out its captive elephant program. Accordingly, Happy and another female elephant with whom Happy has a hostile
relationship are the only remaining elephants at the Zoo. In support of its petition for a writ of habeas corpus, NRP
asserted that Happy is an "extraordinarily cognitively complex and autonomous nonhuman" that should be "recognized
as a legal person with the right to bodily liberty protected by the common law" and released from confinement at the
Zoo. NRP acknowledged that Happy could not be released into the wild or let loose onto the streets and it sought that
she be transferred to an appropriate sanctuary where she could be integrated with other elephants. NRP did not allege
that the Zoo had failed to comply with any applicable federal or state statutes or regulations regarding elephant care,
but it did submit affidavits from several experts asserting the elephants are intelligent beings with the capacity for self-
awareness, long-term memory, intentional communication, problem-solving skills and empathy. The respondents
opposed NRP's application and sought dismissal of the petition on grounds of lack of standing and failure to state a
claim, arguing that there was no legal basis for habeas relief and that Happy's living conditions comply with all applicable
laws and accepted standards of care. The Supreme Court dismissed the petition on the grounds that animals are not
"persons" entitled to habeas relief and that a habeas writ will not issue when the relief sought is not release but transfer
from one lawful confinement to another. Index No. 260441/19, 2020 WL 1670735 at *9 (Sup. Ct., Bronx Cty. Feb. 18,
2020). The Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously affirmed and found that "the writ of habeas corpus is
limited to human beings." 189 A.D.3d 583, 583 (1st Dep't 2020). The Court of Appeals granted leave to appeal and
affirmed. The majority rejected NRP's contention that Happy is entitled to seek a writ of habeas corpus and ruled that
the writ is available to secure the liberty rights of human beings who are unlawfully restrained but is not available to
nonhuman animals. The majority described the nature, history and importance of the habeas corpus doctrine and noted
that no court in New York or any other state has ever ruled that it is applicable to nonhuman animals. The writ protects
the liberty rights of humans precisely because they are humans with certain fundamental liberty rights recognized by
law. Nonhuman animals, on the other hand, have never been considered persons with a right to liberty under New York
law. The majority noted that the relief requested was not Happy's complete release from captivity, but her transfer to a
different confining facility. To the majority, the fact that the greatest possible relief was simply the transfer from one
lawful confinement to another lawful confinement demonstrates the incompatibility of habeas relief in the nonhuman
context. Courts have consistently found legal personhood is connected with the capacity to assume legal duties and
social responsibilities and, accordingly, the rights and responsibilities associated with legal personhood are not
bestowed on nonhumans. The majority also cautioned against the effect that a contrary ruling would have on human
and animal interaction in all facets of life and noted the difficulty of articulating any nonarbitrary standard for
determining which animals would be entitled to recognition as legal "persons." While nonhuman animals are afforded
various forms of legal protections and New York law imposes a duty on humans to treat them with dignity and respect,
nonhuman animals nevertheless do not have common law liberty rights protectable by the issuance of a writ of habeas
corpus. According to the majority, any continuing dialogue regarding the protection and welfare of nonhuman animals is
a subject for the legislature rather than the courts.

The Supreme Court is currently divided over fetal personhood---small changes in precedent could
result in a unified conservative block.
Andrews 21, Reporter at Mother Jones (Becca, December 1st, “We Always Knew Conservative Justices Would Tear Roe
Down. The Latest SCOTUS Fight Proves It,” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-
court-abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/, Accessed 08-23-2022)

The fault lines were apparent on the bench, as well.

Justice Clarence Thomas came in early with an eagerness to test the waters on consideration of fetal personhood—
which is not an issue that Dobbs is putting to the Court—specifically probing whether or not child abuse laws could be
enforced against pregnant people who use drugs before viability. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was concerned with safe-
haven laws, which allow a parent to anonymously surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, suggesting that
women can and should carry unwanted pregnancies to term, give birth, and then relinquish the child if they so choose.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly expressed that he feels the legality of abortion is not one for the Supreme Court at
all, but rather for the states, so he can wash his hands of the whole thing and avoid the hypocrisy of declaring that Roe v.
Wade is established precedent while also overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Samuel Alito tried to draw a comparison
between Roe and Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld state segregation and was later overturned in Brown v. Board of
Education, on the basis that the prior decision violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizens’ rights to life,
liberty, and property. Alito also offered up this tidbit of judicial wisdom: “The fetus has an interest in having a life.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch was fairly quiet, but he groped around for a way to frame undue burden, the standard for
protecting abortion access that’s been in place since Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s 1992 decision, as unworkable, and
to banish Roe‘s viability standard altogether. Chief Justice Roberts hewed closely to a “what’s the harm in a 15-week
limit?” frame, carefully not engaging with issues of personhood.

In summary, the conservatives were saying the quiet part out loud. Their questions and interjections today marked a
real and significant shift in how explicit they’re willing to be in their disdain for the legal precedent to abortion rights.
Naturally, this does not bode well for the future of people who can become pregnant.

More specifically, the conservative justices clearly implied that the Court will side with the state of Mississippi (which,
let’s not forget, is not just a question of legal procedure, and would be devastating for pregnant people all across the
country). But more than that, today’s queries suggested a much more expansive goal , one that is not as specific as
viability or undue burden. By closing arguments, Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general representing the
defense, made clear that the anti’s fight won’t end here, even with a victory on the 15-week law, or a reversal of Roe.
“There are interests here on both sides,” he declared. “There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the
woman. It’s unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions.” This is nothing if not an
argument for his—and by extension, Mississippi’s—belief in fetal personhood.

Not all the conservative justices seemed game to debate when life begins, but enough did . In addition to Thomas’
apparent interest, Alito literally asked, “Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the
rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?” This isn’t just an obscure issue of
philosophy or semantics. Bodily autonomy is on the line, and it’s not out of the question that this discussion could bleed
over to affect what kind of contraception is deemed acceptable, or the outlawing of Plan B (which, despite a slew of
right-wing misinformation, is not an abortifacient).

SCOTUS will pounce on fetal personhood, if given the opportunity. They set the table in Dobbs.
Needham 22, JD, contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American Independent (Lisa, “A
Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics: For the conservative legal movement,
overturning Roe v. Wade may be just the beginning.,” https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-
explainer/)

How many Supreme Court justices believe in fetal personhood?

Too many. During oral arguments in Dobbs, Alito served up the softest of softballs to Mississippi’s solicitor general,
asking him whether there are any “secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of
personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability.” This allowed the solicitor general, Scott
Stewart, to reply that, why yes, a “wide array” of people exist “who would reasonably have that view.” This feels like
Alito’s clunky method of trying to establish that there are at least some non-religious people who think personhood
begins at conception, too, not just conservative Christian supremacists like him. There are other warning signs in the
leaked Dobbs opinion. Take one of Alito’s few approving citations to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that
weakened Roe without oveturning it: that abortion is a “unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” At
several points, Alito fawningly adopts the language of the Mississippi law that calls fetuses “unborn human beings”—a
tacit assertion that a currently-unconstitutional law accurately reflects the factual scientific landscape. Justice
Clarence Thomas, too, seems very comfortable with the uncomfortable issues fetal personhood creates. During oral
argument, he tried to shift the conversation with Susan Rikelman, who represented one of the abortion providers, to the
overarching issue of control of the bodies of pregnant people. Back in 2001, Thomas was one of three dissenters from
the Court’s opinion in Ferguson v. Charleston, which held that a hospital could not drug-test people who had just given
birth and allow cops to arrest anyone who tested positive for cocaine. The implications of fetal personhood for cases like
Ferguson were clearly on Thomas’s mind during his exchange with Rikelman more than two decades later. “I understand
your argument is about abortion,” he explained. “I am trying to look at the issue of bodily autonomy, and whether or not
she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability
fetus.” It seems that Thomas not only opposes the right to choose, but is already thinking ahead to what civil rights he
could use fetal personhood to curtail next . Barrett, Thomas’s former clerk, is probably on board, too . In 2006, she
signed an open letter sponsored by St. Joseph County Right to Life of people who “oppose abortion on demand and
defend the right to life from fertilization to natural death,” which is about as tidy as a summary of fetal personhood can
get.

The Supreme Court is angling to rule on fetal personhood now.

Papenfuss 22, Trends Reporter @ Huffington Post. Quoting Rachel Maddow, American television news program host
and liberal political commentator. Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show, a weekly television show on MSNBC, and
serves as the cable network's special event co-anchor alongside Brian Williams (Mary, June 25th, “Rachel Maddow
Predicts 'Fetal Personhood' SCOTUS Case Will End Abortion Nationwide,” The Huffington Post,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rachel-maddow-fetal-personhood-scotus-nationwide-abortion-
ban_n_62b68949e4b06169caa6e9d4, Accessed 08-23-2022)

An alarmed Rachel Maddow is convinced Republicans will now angle to bring a “fetal personhood” case before the
Supreme Court in a bid to totally shut down abortion nationwide.

Such a case would aim to define a fetus as a human being, and an abortion as murder. Maddow warned the extremist
fight is a long game, decades in the making, often enforced with violence, and that Republicans aren’t about to ease
off now that the court has overturned Roe v. Wade.
“The anti-abortion political project of the Republican Party and the political right has been the central organizing principle for the right’s entire effort around the judiciary, one for which there is still no match or mirror on the left. It’s a big deal,” she said on MSNBC’s
“Rachel Maddow Show” Friday.

This movement, 40 years in the making, “is just now hitting its stride, that is just coming into maturity,” she noted.

And they’re not stopping, she warned.

“There’s nothing in the reasoning of today’s opinion from these six justices that would stop them from accepting
something like a fetal personhood case ,” Maddow explained.

“A fetal personhood case ... would give this court a path to not just let individual states ban abortion, which is what
they did today. ... A fetal personhood case could be their vehicle to impose a nationwide ban on abortion, on the order
of the United States Supreme Court,” she said.

It’s hardly far-fetched, Maddow argued.

“Would it be that much more radical than what they’ve done today?” she asked. “I mean, they’ve kind of broken the
seal here, haven’t they? Roe was a 50-year-old precedent that had been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself
multiple times,” she noted.
A.I. personhood requires drastic re-definitions of personhood and line drawing that can be easily
applied to other entities.
Powell 20, Duke University School of Law, J.D and LL.M. in Law & Entrepreneurship completed in 2020 (Dalton,
Autonomous Systems as Legal Agents: Directly by the Recognition of Personhood or Indirectly by the Alchemy of
Algorithmic Entities, 18 Duke Law & Technology Review, 306-331 (2020), Available Online at:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dltr/vol18/iss1/22/)

The recognition of the direct personhood of autonomous systems requires a fundamental shift in the Restatement's
definition of personhood . The shift would be from the sole focus on rights and obligations to a more holistic
determination that autonomous judgment should determine the ability to be a principal and agent. This normative
theoretical shift within the definition is appropriate as the internal tensions of the traditional analysis are heightened
with the rapid development of new technology. Fortunately, this fundamental shift will not require the common law to
write on a blank slate; the philosophical analysis of agency can guide the law here.
Indirect personhood for autonomous systems occurs by attaching them to previously recognized legal entities that fit into the traditional definitional analysis. In traditional doctrine, the Restatement's definition of person attempts to distinguish legally recognized
persons from purely organizational entities and mere instrumentalities. At present, the Restatement views computer programs as mere instrumentalities of the using person and thus not a separate person capable of being a principal or agent. The traditional
doctrine also focuses almost exclusively on the ability to be the object of liabilities and the holder of rights. Thus, the presence of the recognized legal entity will allow the autonomous systems to attain indirect personhood. But the reliance of indirect personhood on
organizational law that is easily amendable by the legislature necessitates analysis of direct personhood for autonomous systems.

Ultimately, autonomous systems should be recognized as legal persons for the purposes of agency law. This acceptance has the potential for significant knock-on pragmatic benefits, with one such example being improved corporate decision-making.

There are several downstream implications that are ripe for future research if autonomous systems are directly or
indirectly recognized as persons. The most critical determination will be deciding what level of autonomous judgment
is enough for personhood . While this Note clearly accepts that autonomous systems, as defined in Part I, are on the
right side of the line of autonomous judgment, the line must be drawn somewhere . For computer-related systems, the
appropriate line might be between autonomous and automated systems. 132 Overall, this line-drawing will “highlight
how difficult it is to identify machine consciousness or personhood [and] how uncertain we are about the boundaries
of our own [consciousness and personhood].”133 Other areas of study include reacting to the inherent risks posed by
recognizing the direct personhood of non-humans or so easily allowing the satisfaction of personhood by indirect
personhood.

Any rights outside of abortion spills into fetal rights. Limited intent is irrelevant.
Will 13, Professor of Law @ Mississippi (Jonathan, “Beyond Abortion: Why the Personhood Movement Implicates
Reproductive Choice,” American Journal of Law and Medicine, 39.4)

This lack of clarity regarding how a personhood framework might impact reproductive choice outside the
abortion context has contributed to the failure of personhood measures in multiple states, and could be the
reason why the federal Sanctity of Human Life Act, which was co-sponsored by Congressman and former vice-
presidential candidate Paul Ryan, did not make it out of congressional committee when first proposed in 2011.17 While
it may not have been surprising that personhood initiatives would be soundly defeated in a state such as Colorado, 18
the late 2011 failure of a proposed personhood amendment to the Mississippi Constitution sparked drastic changes to
the language utilized within the Personhood Movement.19 The revised language targets questions raised by previous
iterations, but it does not dispel the most pressing concerns regarding reproductive choice. And while no state has
adopted a personhood framework yet, at least nine states can expect to see personhood measures in coming years.20
As of March 2013, the North Dakota Senate and House approved an initiative (which will now appear on the November
2014 ballot) to amend the state constitution to protect “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of
development.” 21 How we define “person,” or at what point rights attach to human life, will directly impact all things
surrounding the reproductive process, regardless of the intent with which that process begins . It
is true that such answers will affect the choices available to women once pregnant, but they will also inevitably impact
such things as the availability of certain birth control options, and the permissiveness of various forms of assisted
reproductive technologies (ART).

Shifts rights to a trait-based interpretation of personhood inevitably expands the scope to include
fetuses
Beauchamp 99, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy,
Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Tom, “The Failure of Theories of Personhood,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal, 9.4)

One final problem about theories of personhood deserves attention. Literature on the criteria of persons is mired in
intractable dispute in a wide range of cases, including fetuses , newborns, the irreversibly comatose, God,
extraterrestrials, and the great apes. Facts about these beings are not the source of the dispute. The problem is created
by the vagueness and the inherently contestable nature of the ordinary language concept of person, 14 with its
commitments to a human individual comprised of a rather open-textured set of mental traits. The vagueness of this
concept is not likely to be dissipated by general theories of personhood unless they are revisionary. Theories typically
reflect the concept's vagueness and kindle more disagreement than enlightenment. 15 They give us no more than
grounds for a claim that there are alternative sets of sufficient conditions of personhood. The possibility of necessary
and sufficient conditions of person in a unified theory now seems dim. The concept of person is simply not orderly,
precise, or systematic in a way that supports one general philosophical theory to the exclusion of another. There is
one obvious solution to this problem of vagueness in the concept of person: Erase it from normative analysis and
replace it with more specific concepts and relevant properties. I favor this option for both metaphysical personhood and
moral personhood because it would enable us to go directly to the heart of substantive moral issues instead of using the
oblique detour now made through theories of personhood. That is, we could inquire directly about the moral
implications of possessing specific nonmoral and moral properties, such as reason and moral motivation, or we could
discuss the substantive bases of ascriptions of rights. Questions about whether fetuses can be aborted, whether
xenotransplantation is permissible, and whether anencephalics can be used in human experiments would then be
recast in terms of whether and, if so, on what moral grounds such actions can be performed . This suggestion should
not be taken to imply that we should abandon philosophical theories of metaphysical persons and moral persons. My
interest is exclusively in eliminating the abuse of these theories in normative analysis, not in eliminating the theories
themselves. [End Page 319] Conclusion I have said relatively little about specific normative problems or about the
practical implications of the conclusions I have reached, but not because these questions are unimportant. I conclude
with a comment on how very important they are. Much has been made of the potential breakdown of the lines that
have traditionally distinguished human and nonhuman animals. If nonhumans turn out to possess significantly more
advanced capacities than customarily envisioned, their moral standing would be upgraded to a more human level.
However, this possibility remains speculative and may be less important than the thesis that because many human lack
properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they are thereby rendered equal or inferior in moral standing to
some nonhumans. If this conclusion is defensible, we will need to rethink our traditional view that these unlucky
humans cannot be treated in the ways we treat relevantly similar nonhumans. For example, they might be aggressively
used as human research subjects and sources of organs. Perhaps we can find some justification of our traditional
practices other than a justification based on status as person or nonpersons . However, if we cannot find a compelling
alternative justification, we either should not be using animals as we do, or we should be using humans as we do not. 16

DA
It sparks global instability that goes nuclear.
Suzuki et al. 21, Director and Professor @ Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University,
Former Vice Chairman @ Japan Atomic Energy Commission. (Tatsujiro, “Pandemic Futures and Nuclear Weapon Risks:
The Nagasaki 75th Anniversary Pandemic-Nuclear Nexus Scenarios Final Report”, Journal for Peace and Nuclear
Disarmament, 4(1), p. 6-39)

The Challenge: Multiple Existential Threats

The relationship between pandemics and war is as long as human history. Past pandemics have set the scene for wars
by weaken ing societies, undermining resilience, and exacerbat ing civil and inter-state conflict. Other disease
outbreaks have erupted during wars, in part due to the appalling public health and battlefield conditions resulting from
war, in turn sowing the seeds for new conflicts. In the post-Cold War era, pandemics have spread with unprecedented
speed due to increased mobility created by globalization, especially between urbanized areas. Although there are
positive signs that scientific advances and rapid innovation can help us manage pandemics, it is likely that deadly
infectious viruses will be a challenge for years to come .

The COVID-19 is the most demonic pandemic threat in modern history. It has erupted at a juncture of other existential
global threats, most importantly, accelerating climate change and resurgent nuclear threat-making. The most important
issue, therefore, is how the coronavirus (and future pandemics) will increase or decrease the risks associated with these
twin threats, climate change effects, and the next use of nuclear weapons in war.5

Today, the nine nuclear weapons arsenals not only can annihilate hundreds of cities, but also cause nuclear winter and
mass starvation of a billion or more people, if not the entire human species . Concurrently, climate change is enveloping
the planet with more frequent and intense storms, accelerating sea level rise, and advancing rapid ecological change,
expressed in unprecedented forest fires across the world. Already stretched to a breaking point in many countries, the
current pandemic may overcome resilience to the point of near or actual collapse of social, economic, and political
order.

In this extraordinary moment, it is timely to reflect on the existence and possible uses of weapons of mass destruction
under pandemic conditions – most importantly, nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. Moments
of extreme crisis and vulnerability can prompt aggressive and counterintuitive actions that in turn may destabilize
already precarious ly balanced threat systems, underpinned by conventional and nuclear weapons, as well as the
threat of weaponized chemical and biological technologies. Consequently, the risk of the use of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), especially nuclear weapons, increases at such times, possibly sharply.

The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly driving massive, rapid, and unpredictable changes that will redefine every aspect of
the human condition, including WMD – just as the world wars of the first half of the 20th century led to a revolution in
international affairs and entirely new ways of organizing societies, economies, and international relations, in part based
on nuclear weapons and their threatened use. In a world reshaped by pandemics, nuclear weapons – as well as
correlated non-nuclear WMD, nuclear alliances, “deterrence” doctrines, operational and declaratory policies, nuclear
extended deterrence, organizational practices, and the existential risks posed by retaining these capabilities – are all up
for redefinition.

A pandemic has potential to destabilize a nuclear-prone conflict by incapacitating the supreme nuclear commander or
commanders who have to issue nuclear strike orders, creating uncertainty as to who is in charge, how to handle
nuclear mistakes (such as errors, accidents, technological failures, and entanglement with conventional operations
gone awry), and opening a brief opportunity for a first strike at a time when the COVID-infected state may not be able
to retaliate efficiently – or at all – due to leadership confusion. In some nuclear-laden conflicts, a state might use a
pandemic as a cover for political or military provocations in the belief that the adversary is distracted and partly
disabled by the pandemic, increasing the risk of war in a nuclear-prone conflict. At the same time, a pandemic may lead
nuclear armed states to increase the isolation and sanctions against a nuclear adversary, making it even harder to stop
the spread of the disease, in turn creating a pandemic reservoir and transmission risk back to the nuclear armed state or
its allies.

The plan requires an expansion of the definition of “person”

Gvozden 22, * Law and Humanities Fellow at Northwestern University and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law,
JD/PhD anticipated 2024 (Amanda, “FETAL PROTECTION LAWS AND THE “PERSONHOOD” PROBLEM: TOWARD A
RELATIONAL THEORY OF FETAL LIFE AND REPRODUCTIVE RESPONSIBILITY,” THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW &
CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 112, No. 2)

Personhood is a foundational element of the American legal system.5 To be imbued with rights or encumbered with
duties, an entity must first be identified as a “legal person.” 6 To this end, much legal and philosophical work has gone into making sense of exactly what
a “legal person” is.7 One significant question in this debate relates to the legal status of non-human persons. Animals are afforded some degree of legal rights, but are they persons? Since
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.8 there have been serious questions about the legal personhood of corporations.9 But one status in question—that is the subject of some
of the most intense debate—is the legal status of fetuses. Are fetuses legal persons? Do fetuses have rights?

The plan has to bestow personhood. It’s a fundamental requirement for the provision of rights and
duties.
Dyschkant 15, PhD in Philosophy (Alexis, “LEGAL PERSONHOOD: HOW WE ARE GETTING IT WRONG,” 2015 U. Ill. L.
Rev. 2075)

What it means to be a legal person is fundamental to any understanding of the law. The term "person" bears special
meaning in the U.S. Constitution, 1 in order to make contracts or hold property you must be a legal person, 2 and most importantly legal persons are the sole
bearers of rights and duties. 3 While there is disagreement about how precisely to formulate a definition of legal personhood, the key element of legal
personhood seems to be the ability to bear rights and duties . 4 Black's Law Dictionary defines a legal person as an entity "given certain legal rights and
duties of a human being; a being, real or imaginary, who for the purpose of legal reasoning is treated more or less as a human being." 5

The plan MAKES AI a legal person by bestowing rights/duties

Adriano 15, J. D. degree awarded by the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Regular professor in
Commercial Law, Economic Law (NATURAL PERSONS, JURIDICAL PERSONS AND LEGAL PERSONHOOD,
https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-mexican-law-review-123-articulo-natural-persons-juridical-persons-and-
S1870057815000062)

Despite the fact that juridical persons have their own interests or rights, personhood is not based solely on laws that grant these interests or rights. Rather, the person is the
legal subject or substance of which rights and duties are attributed . An individual having such attributes is called by jurists a “natural person”. Many basic
human rights are implicitly granted only to natural persons. For example, a law that prevents discrimination or forbids the government from denying certain rights based on gender, apply
solely to natural persons. Another example of the difference between natural and legal persons is that a natural person can hold public office, but a corporation cannot.33

“Person” is a term of art and is defined as a subject of legal rights or duties

Marcus Jr. ’97 — Walter F. Marcus Jr. (Justice, Supreme Court of Louisiana); December 2 nd, 1997; “Wartell v. Women’s
& Children’s Hospital;” Supreme Court of Louisiana, No. 97-C-0744; LexisNexis+, Accessed via KU Libraries

The Louisiana Civil Code's refusal

to accord unconditional legal personality to a fetus before live birth constitutes no moral or
philosophical judgment on the value of the fetus, nor any comment on its essential humanity . Rather, the classification of "person" is
made solely for the purpose of facilitating determinations about the attachment of  legal rights and duties. "Person" is
a term of art , as explained in A.N. Yiannopoulos, Louisiana Civil Law Systems § 48 (1977):
 According to the Romanist tradition, rights
and duties attach to, or are conferred by law upon, "persons." Civilian terminology thus
employs the word person in a technical sense to signify a subject of rights or duties .

Legal duties ONLY go to persons.

Court of Appeals of Ohio, Twelfth Appellate District, Clermont County, 14 (MICHAEL S. HOLCOMB, Plaintiff-
Appellant, - vs - THOMAS HOLCOMB, et al., Defendants-Appellees., Lexis)
Ordinarily, the existence of a legal duty in a negligence action is a question of law for the court and there is no expressed formula for determining whether or not a duty exists. See
Mussivand v. David (1989), 45 Ohio St. 3d 314, 544 N.E.2d 265; Malone, supra. " Legal
duty" has been defined as an obligation imposed by law on
one person to act for the benefit of another person due to a relationship between them. Berdyck v. Shinde

Here's another court case!

Superior Court of Rhode Island, Providence, 20 (Christofaro v. Shaws Supermarkets, Inc., No. WC-2018-0221,
2020 R.I. Super. LEXIS 2, at *11-12 (Super. Ct. Jan. 10, 2020))

The existence of a legal duty is purely a question of law. Kuzniar, 709 A.2d at 1055; Volpe, 821 A.2d at 705. A legal duty
is defined as

"an obligation imposed by the law upon a person . It requires that person to conform his or her actions to a particular standard. And it also carries with it a
recognition that the law will enforce this duty to the benefit of other individuals to whom this duty is owed. Put another way, the existence of a legal duty depends on whether the interest
that a defendant has allegedly invaded is entitled to legal protection."

Kuzniar, 709 A.2d at 1055. There exists no "clear-cut formula" for making such a determination, and courts follow an "ad hoc approach" when considering the relationship of the parties, the
scope and burden of the obligation to be imposed upon the defendant, public policy considerations, and notions of fairness. Hennessey v. Pyne, 694 A.2d 691, 697 (R.I. 1997) (quoting
Kenney Manufacturing Co. v. Starkweather & Shepley, Inc., 643 A.2d 203, 206 (R.I. 1994)).

Sarah Taft-Carter

A.I. personhood requires drastic re-definitions of personhood and line drawing that can be easily
applied to other entities.
Powell 20, Duke University School of Law, J.D and LL.M. in Law & Entrepreneurship completed in 2020 (Dalton,
Autonomous Systems as Legal Agents: Directly by the Recognition of Personhood or Indirectly by the Alchemy of
Algorithmic Entities, 18 Duke Law & Technology Review, 306-331 (2020), Available Online at:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dltr/vol18/iss1/22/)

The recognition of the direct personhood of autonomous systems requires a fundamental shift in the Restatement's definition
of personhood . The shift would be from the sole focus on rights and obligations to a more holistic determination that autonomous judgment should determine the ability to be a
principal and agent. This normative theoretical shift within the definition is appropriate as the internal tensions of the traditional analysis are heightened with the rapid development of new
technology. Fortunately, this fundamental shift will not require the common law to write on a blank slate; the philosophical analysis of agency can guide the law here.

Indirect personhood for autonomous systems occurs by attaching them to previously recognized legal entities that fit into the traditional definitional analysis. In traditional doctrine, the Restatement's definition of person attempts to distinguish legally recognized
persons from purely organizational entities and mere instrumentalities. At present, the Restatement views computer programs as mere instrumentalities of the using person and thus not a separate person capable of being a principal or agent. The traditional
doctrine also focuses almost exclusively on the ability to be the object of liabilities and the holder of rights. Thus, the presence of the recognized legal entity will allow the autonomous systems to attain indirect personhood. But the reliance of indirect personhood on
organizational law that is easily amendable by the legislature necessitates analysis of direct personhood for autonomous systems.

Ultimately, autonomous systems should be recognized as legal persons for the purposes of agency law. This acceptance has the potential for significant knock-on pragmatic benefits, with one such example being improved corporate decision-making.

There are several downstream implications that are ripe for future research if autonomous systems are directly or indirectly recognized
as persons. The most critical determination will be deciding what level of autonomous judgment is enough for
personhood . While this Note clearly accepts that autonomous systems, as defined in Part I, are on the right side of the line of autonomous judgment, the line must be
drawn somewhere . For computer-related systems, the appropriate line might be between autonomous and automated systems. 132 Overall, this line-drawing
will “highlight how difficult it is to identify machine consciousness or personhood [and] how uncertain we are about the
boundaries of our own [consciousness and personhood ].”133 Other areas of study include reacting to the inherent risks posed by recognizing the direct
personhood of non-humans or so easily allowing the satisfaction of personhood by indirect personhood.
1. Legal personhood is clearly limited to humans or human proxies.
Cupp 21, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law (Richard L. Jr., Considering the Private
Animal and Damages, 98 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1313 (2021), Available Online at:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol98/iss4/11)
5. Equating “Persons” with Humans and Their Proxies

The Naruto court at least implied that a legal person is a human or a human proxy , such as a corporation . For example, Judge Smith’s
concurrence noted that

the Federal Rules only authorize next friend suits on behalf of “a minor or an incompetent person.” Per the text, this can only apply to human persons , not
any “minor” or “incompetent” corporations or animals. Importantly, the historical background of [the next friend statute] limits the use of next friends to only human
persons.153

Of course, corporations are also legal persons, but the court recognized that they are merely proxies for
humans : “[C]orporations and unincorporated associations are formed and owned by humans ; they are not formed or owned
by animals .”154

Naruto’s apparent nod to the exclusively human foundation of legal personhood impliedly precludes the treatment
of animals as legal persons in private law damages actions. The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc., an organization focused on expanding legal personhood to at least some
animals, acknowledged and complained about Naruto’s implicit limitation of personhood––contending, of course, that the court was wrong.155 But despite complaints from animal rights

activists, this aspect of Naruto adds to a growing body of cases that point out the centrality of humanity to
legal personhood in response to efforts to name animals as plaintiffs.156

2. It hasn’t been extended extraordinarily.

Scherer 18, Associate, Littler Mendelson P.C., and member of Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute and Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence, and Automation practice group (Matthew, Of Wild Beasts and Digital Analogues: The Legal Status of
Autonomous Systems, 19 Nev. L.J. 259 (2018), Available Online at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol19/iss1/8/)

The maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” applies to the laws of men no less than it
applies to the laws of nature. The central thesis of Bayern’s articles is that it is already possible for an unsupervised artificial intelligence
system to obtain legal personhood under existing law.15 To me—and, I would wager, to most lawyers and laypeople alike—that is an
extraordinary claim . Historically, legal systems have only recognized (1) human beings and (2) entities endowed with
“legal personhood”—that is, the ability to sue, be sued, and take actions in the world that the legal system will enforce— but that are ultimately and actively
controlled by human being s .16 Bayern’s argument, if correct, would mean that legislatures have inadvertently created a new
category of legal person—the first in history to be free of active human control .

The legal system has rejected personhood for animals because of the potentially sweeping
precedential effects
NYLJ 22, New York Law Journal, “Habeas Relief Not Applicable to Non-Human Animals,” Lexis
The Court of Appeals ruled last month that an elephant is not entitled to bring a habeas corpus petition with respect to her
confinement at the Bronx Zoo. In Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Breheny, a five-judge majority lead by the Chief Judge determined that writs

of habeas corpus only protect the liberty rights of human beings and are not available to animals regardless of their
respective level of functional intelligence . Judges Wilson and Rivera each submitted a dissent in which they argue that autonomous beings with substantial cognitive
abilities such as the elephant at issue in this case are entitled to the protections that the writ has historically provided. The petitioner in this case is a non-profit organization called the
Nonhuman Rights Project (NRP) that seeks to establish that at least certain animals are "legal persons" entitled to fundamental rights. It has commenced a number of actions in New York
and other states on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants arguing that they are being unlawfully confined and are entitled to the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus. All of their actions to
date have been unsuccessful. NRP commenced this action in Supreme Court, Bronx County in 2018 seeking a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of an Asian elephant named Happy. Index No.
260441/19, 2020 WL 1670735 at *2 (Sup. Ct., Bronx Cty. Feb. 18, 2020). The defendants were the Director of the Bronx Zoo, James J. Breheny, and the Wildlife Conservation Society-the
conservation organization that operates the Bronx Zoo. NRP alleged that Happy was unlawfully confined in violation of her right to bodily liberty. Happy has been in captivity since she was
one year old and has lived at the Bronx Zoo for the past 45 years. Happy had been paired with two different elephants over the years but each of them was euthanized after one was injured
in a fight with other elephants and the other fell ill. The Bronx Zoo has announced that it does not intend to acquire any more elephants and is phasing out its captive elephant program.
Accordingly, Happy and another female elephant with whom Happy has a hostile relationship are the only remaining elephants at the Zoo. In support of its petition for a writ of habeas
corpus, NRP asserted that Happy is an "extraordinarily cognitively complex and autonomous nonhuman" that should be "recognized as a legal person with the right to bodily liberty
protected by the common law" and released from confinement at the Zoo. NRP acknowledged that Happy could not be released into the wild or let loose onto the streets and it sought that
she be transferred to an appropriate sanctuary where she could be integrated with other elephants. NRP did not allege that the Zoo had failed to comply with any applicable federal or state
statutes or regulations regarding elephant care, but it did submit affidavits from several experts asserting the elephants are intelligent beings with the capacity for self-awareness, long-term
memory, intentional communication, problem-solving skills and empathy. The respondents opposed NRP's application and sought dismissal of the petition on grounds of lack of standing and
failure to state a claim, arguing that there was no legal basis for habeas relief and that Happy's living conditions comply with all applicable laws and accepted standards of care. The Supreme
Court dismissed the petition on the grounds that animals are not "persons" entitled to habeas relief and that a habeas writ will not issue when the relief sought is not release but transfer
from one lawful confinement to another. Index No. 260441/19, 2020 WL 1670735 at *9 (Sup. Ct., Bronx Cty. Feb. 18, 2020). The Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously affirmed
and found that "the writ of habeas corpus is limited to human beings." 189 A.D.3d 583, 583 (1st Dep't 2020). The Court of Appeals granted leave to appeal and affirmed. The majority
rejected NRP's contention that Happy is entitled to seek a writ of habeas corpus and ruled that the writ is available to secure the liberty rights of human beings who are unlawfully restrained
but is not available to nonhuman animals. The majority described the nature, history and importance of the habeas corpus doctrine and noted that no court in New York or any other state
has ever ruled that it is applicable to nonhuman animals. The writ protects the liberty rights of humans precisely because they are humans with certain fundamental liberty rights recognized
by law. Nonhuman animals, on the other hand, have never been considered persons with a right to liberty under New York law. The majority noted that the relief requested was not Happy's
complete release from captivity, but her transfer to a different confining facility. To the majority, the fact that the greatest possible relief was simply the transfer from one lawful
confinement to another lawful confinement demonstrates the incompatibility of habeas relief in the nonhuman context. Courts have consistently found legal personhood is connected with
the capacity to assume legal duties and social responsibilities and, accordingly, the rights and responsibilities associated with legal personhood are not bestowed on nonhumans. The

majority also cautioned against the effect that a contrary ruling would have on human and animal interaction in all facets of life and
noted the difficulty of articulating any nonarbitrary standard for determining which animals would be entitled to
recognition as legal "persons." While nonhuman animals are afforded various forms of legal protections and New York law imposes a duty on humans to treat them with
dignity and respect, nonhuman animals nevertheless do not have common law liberty rights protectable by the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus. According to the majority, any continuing
dialogue regarding the protection and welfare of nonhuman animals is a subject for the legislature rather than the courts.

1. Pressure and legal limbo---it’s status is uncertain which lowers the threshold for the link.
Economist 7-7-2022 (“A push to recognise the rights of the unborn is growing in America,” The Economist,
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/07/07/a-push-to-recognise-the-rights-of-the-unborn-is-growing-in-
america)

What happens when America’s extreme anti-abortion activism meets its litigiousness? Fetuses get their own lawyers .
In recent years some judges in conservative states have appointed legal representation for fetuses in abortion disputes (generally, when a minor wants to terminate a pregnancy). The
with the recent overturning of Roe
arrangement has some glaring holes. Lawyers cannot meet or talk to their client or, supposing a fetus had wishes, guess at them. Yet

v Wade—the ruling that had enshrined access to abortion as a constitutional right— the push for legal recognition of the “personhood” of fetuses is

set to grow. Many anti-abortionists believe that life begins at conception. Proponents of “fetal personhood” go a step further, argu ing that the 14th
Amendment of America’s constitution gives “equal protection of the laws” to all, including a fertilised egg (despite the fact
that as many as half of all zygotes do not implant and become pregnancies). Increasingly, anti-abortion legislation is adopting the language of fetal

personhood. Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the case that ended Roe, did not do so . But the Supreme Court’s momentous
ruling, on June 24th, criticised the view that “the Constitution requires the states to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in
a pregnancy has passed”. Laura Portuondo, a fellow in reproductive rights and justice at Yale Law School, says this is likely to encourage the emergence of state

laws banning abortion explicitly in the name of fetal personhood. Efforts to ban abortions on personhood grounds are “ethically clearer”, argues John
Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion organisation. Mr Seago was influential in the push to pass a stringent abortion ban in Texas last year. “They are more honest
about the ethical principle that underlines the belief that abortions are wrong,” he adds. Emphasising fetal personhood is a natural next step, he says, in working towards a national ban. Like
many others in this camp, Mr Seago is “not content” for abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis. Before Roe was overturned dozens of states
introduced bills that banned abortion by establishing fetal personhood , according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice think-tank. Because
Roe rejected the idea and protected abortion until a fetus was viable, such laws were blocked. Since its overruling, at least two states have sought to reinvigorate them. It is
unclear if such laws will be allowed to stand . In Arizona the American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for Reproductive Rights, two
advocacy groups, are suing state officials over an abortion ban that would give “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges and immunities…” on the basis that the
law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due process and puts providers and women at risk of prosecution.
2. It’s not inevitable but activists are calling for it.
Carlisle 22, reporter for TIME in New York City (Madeleine, “Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle
Over Reproductive Rights,” TIME Magazine, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)

With the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists are calling for broader laws that extend similar legal protections to
embryos and fetuses. Some were previously ruled unconstitutional, like Georgia’s HB 481, which includes language that states “natural persons include an unborn child,” allows
people to claim a fetus as a dependent on tax forms, and requires state officials to count a fetus toward Georgia’s population for official population count purposes. The law was struck down
in 2020, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe on Friday, Georgia’s attorney general filed a notice requesting the decision be reversed. A federal fetal personhood
law was also introduced last year in both chambers of Congress. The Life at Conception Act, which would extend fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” beginning at
the moment of fertilization, has 164 cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Still, many of these new laws will likely face legal challenges. While
there is no longer a constitutional right to an abortion, fetal personhood laws could still be challenged for violating state constitutions, or for violating the constitutional right to due process
because of vague wording, like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims. “ There are a lot of unanswered questions that we’ll have to see laid out ,” says
Ziegler. “[Fetal personhood laws] are much more likely to be enforceable than would have been the case before, but we still can’t be sure until the litigation is

done .”
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: KY

Expanding personhood to nonhuman entities spills over to fetal personhood.

Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Although I have focused primarily on embryos and fetuses thus far, the framework suggested here may be applicable
to other entities . The idea that we might exclude from legal status an entity that meets all the attribute requirements
for equal moral status with currently recognized persons, but that is not genetically human, raises the question of why
genetic humanness matters.2' It seems inconsistent to argue for the extension of legal protection to a non-sentient
multi-celled human organism in the beginning stages of development (i.e., an embryo ) and withhold such protections
from fully developed sentient , and perhaps even rational , non-human animals .'" If genetics is the sole basis for legal
personhood, there must be some explanation as to why this characteristic is so important.28 Thus far no one has
provided a satisfactory argument in this respect.'29

Apart from concerns about consistency and fairness, withholding legal personhood protections from an entity that
clearly meets all criteria for moral personhood is not a priori improper, as long as the interests of the entity in question
are respected . The danger , of course, is that society has tried in the past to limit the legal rights of entities that clearly
met all requirements for moral personhood-e.g., women and slaves-and the results were highly problematic, not only
because violations of moral rights occurred, but because the exclusion of such entities from the system of legal
protection per se undermined moral rights. In other words, at some point the moral and legal rights may be so
intertwined that it is impossible to respect moral rights without also granting legal rights . But the situations of women
and slaves may be unique in that they are groups that are both human and meet the moral requirements for
personhood (e.g., they shared all characteristics/capacities with other fully recognized legal persons, except sex or skin
color).'30 By contrast, restrictions on the legal status of entities that fail one or the other attributes (e.g., non-human
animals) may not prevent recognition of their moral rights. 131

Part of the difficulty in accepting legal status based on moral claims of non-human entities may stem from a mistaken
insistence on " all-or-nothing " designations. Categorically determining what entities lack any moral status, such as a
rock, is fairly simple. But most claims of moral status map along a continuum . Using such an approach, many animals
would be granted moral status based on interests , but their placement on the moral hierarchy may be lower than
that of human persons."' 3 Legal status might follow this hierarchy. For example, some authors assert that great apes
and dolphins should be considered legal persons based on their mental and emotional similarities to human beings .
33 Perhaps we should develop a system of lesser legal status for non-human animals .' " The fact that the law as it is
currently written does not include nonhuman animals does not mean that it could not be altered to recognize the rights
of entities with varying moral status.'35 Rather than do so by creating new categories , I argue that is what could be
done with the concept of "juridical personhood."

There are good reasons to consider whether sentient animals should be given juridical personhood protections . These
may not be equivalent for all sentient creatures, but, as with developing human fetuses , may vary depending on the
interests at stake .'3 6 Thus far no state has chosen to provide any legal rights directly to animals; animal welfare laws
protect the interests of natural persons in preventing harm to animals. This , like fetal juridical personhood , is an area
ripe for state experimentation . If animals are to be considered legal persons with specific rights based on their own
interests, the protections should reflect and be commensurate with those interests.

It is less appropriate to grant legal status to non-human animals based on concerns about the effect on other persons of
withholding such legal status. There is little evidence, for example, that failing to recognize animals as juridical persons,
or failing to give them particular rights, harms the exercise of those rights for human persons. The closest argument to
this, sometimes used to justify animal welfare laws, is that cruelty to animals is linked (or may lead to) cruelty to
humans. Even if this is true, this may not justify granting juridical personhood to animals, but merely laws designed to
prevent cruelty to animals. In such a case, the lack of legal recognition would not negate the entity's moral status, and
the absence of legal obligations would not imply the absence of moral obligations.'3 7 Thus we may have a moral
obligation not to be cruel to animals, whether or not we have a law against such cruelty.

Additionally, should scientists succeed in creating sentient machines ,' 38 our society will have to consider whether
those machines may also lay claim to legal personhood protections.'39 Here, both justifications for juridical
personhood function-some machines may have interests sufficient for legal status, others may be so human-like in form
that excluding them from personhood status will harm the interests of current humans. Like the Replicants in Philip K.
Dick's novel-turnedmovie, Blade Runner,'4 ° the creation of such entities will challenge our conventional notions of
what it means to be a person , and our recognition of what legal rights should follow . Perhaps the creation of such
entities will force greater attention to the question of legal personhood status, since the discussion in the context of
embryos and fetuses is marred by the strong feelings underlying the protracted abortion debate.

The Court doesn’t take fetal personhood cases now---but, the plan sets precedent for expanding
personhood.
Kelsey Reichmann 22, reporter covering the Supreme Court and politics for Courthouse News Service, 9-8-22, “With
Roe out the door, the next big abortion battle is already on the Supreme Court steps,” Courthouse News Service,
https://www.courthousenews.com/with-roe-out-the-door-the-next-big-abortion-battle-is-already-on-the-supreme-
court-steps/

WASHINGTON (CN) — When the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the right to abortion did not
exist in the Constitution, they opened the door to questions about what rights do — or rather, in the case of a new
petition before the court, whom they apply to.

Catholics for Life and two pregnant people filing on behalf of their fetuses are asking the court to reevaluate who, in
light of the justices’ June ruling, is covered under the 14th Amendment. Their petition asks if fetuses are entitled to due
process and equal protection rights in the Constitution.

“As this Court held in Dobbs, abortion laws are different from all others,” Diane Messere Magee, an attorney from the
Law Offices of Diane Messere Magee, wrote in the petition. “Do unborn human beings , at any gestational age, have any
rights under the United States Constitution ? Or, has Dobbs relegated all unborn human beings to the status of
persona non grata in the eyes of the United States Constitution — below corporations and other fictitious entities?
No state court or legislature can answer this question. Only this Court can — as the final arbiter of what the United
States Constitution means .”

This is the next battleground in the anti-abortion movement : the recognition of fetal personhood . If fetuses are
granted personhood status, then they are entitled to constitutional rights . The court’s recognition of fetal
personhood rights would prevent even abortion-friendly states from protecting reproductive rights .

“It is not surprising that anti-abortion advocates would argue that the Dobbs decision be stretched to recognize the
idea of ‘fetal personhood,’” said Katherine Franke, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality
Law at Columbia University. “Overruling Roe v. Wade was never the end game for many of these advocates, so it was
just a matter of time before a case making this argument made its way to the Supreme Court .”

The concept of personhood is not new to the Supreme Court docket.

“What it means is that you're a holder of rights. … It's the facet of identity that signifies rights holding ,” Morgan
Marietta, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said in a phone call.
In fact, many big decisions over the 20th century were about personhood. Brown v. Board of Education — which found
that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional — recognized the personhood of nonwhites. United States v.
Virginia — which held that the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions were unconstitutional — recognized the
personhood rights of women.

By contrast, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 declared that fetuses did not have personhood rights. Dobbs changes
that.

“The most radical thing that was said in ‘73 was the court saying, absolutely, that a fetus is not a person, and Americans
just don't agree,” Marietta said. “They're just deeply divided. We've been fighting over this for 30 years, and the court
just changed it back to the states.”

What this new petition before the court signifies is the thought from some that the court should not have turned this
question back to the states and instead should answer it themselves.

The petition from Catholics for Life and the two pregnant people stems from a Rhode Island law — the Reproductive
Privacy Act — that codified Roe into law. The Rhode Island Supreme Court dismissed their challenge to the law for lack
of standing, finding that fetuses do not have the right to bring a case before the court.

After Dobbs, however, the challengers now see an opportunity to advance their case.

“This Court’s Dobbs holding, that ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,’ and its further overruling of Roe v. Wade
and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey surely signal rejection of this Court’s statement in Roe that, ‘[t]he
word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,’” the petition states. “The
Fourteenth Amendment has no textual definition of the term ‘any person’ therein. And it neither includes nor excludes
unborn human beings specifically.”

Court watchers and reproductive rights experts warned that these challenges would be coming after Dobbs . The
majority opinion — written by Justice Samuel Alito — gave credence to ideas of fetal personhood in a way the court
never had before.

“This is a deeply disputed fact in American culture and politics right now, and even the words that you use indicates
which of the possible facts you think are true,” Marietta said. “So in the decision, when they use the word ‘fetus,’ that
means something, and when they use ‘unborn child’ that means something else. Alito several times used ‘ unborn ’
which is the indication of personhood . So I do think that there's a lot of sympathy on the court for the fact of fetal
personhood.”

It is unclear if the court will take up this case . Four justices would have to agree to hear the case , and five would be
needed for a majority ruling . While the conservative majority was able to coalesce around a vote to overturn Roe ,
experts have doubts about expanding rights to fetuses .

“I doubt the court will take this case , as the justices, especially Chief Justice Roberts , will want the dust kicked up by
the Dobbs decision to settle before they take up another explosive abortion case ,” Franke said. “In fact, the argument
in this case is even more radical than the one made in Dobbs , as there is no precedent that supports the concept of
fetuses being ‘persons’ within the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.”

Pro-life policies cause global war.

Rachel Emond 19, Scoville Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, 9/23/2019, “How Anti-Choice
Policies Increase the Likelihood of War ,” https://inkstickmedia.com/how-anti-choice-policies-increase-the-likelihood-
of-war/
The political discourse surrounding abortion and health care has dominated election cycles and governance in the
United States for quite some time, but its impact doesn’t end at the border. In some fragile communities throughout the
world, the politicization of access to abortions in the United States could lead them into conflict .

Just three days after his inauguration in 2017, President Trump signed an extremely restrictive anti-choice policy that
will likely have wide-reaching negative impacts on global peace and security and US influence abroad .

This policy is actually an updated version of the “Mexico City Policy,” the Reagan-era act that prohibited non-
governmental organizations that provide abortion-related services from receiving any US federal funding related to
family planning and reproductive health.

The Trump Administration’s version of the Mexico City Policy has gone a step further. It prohibits foreign non-
governmental organizations that provide abortion-related services from receiving any form of US global health
assistance.

Beyond family planning and reproductive health, US global health assistance also includes funding for organizations
doing work related to maternal and child health; nutrition; HIV under the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR); prevention and treatment of malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases; and hygiene programs. Many of the
organizations that receive US global health assistance also receive aid from non-US sources, and use those alternative
sources of funding to pay for reproductive health programs and abortion-related services. The Trump Administration’s
policy would take that option off the table, should an organization want to continue receiving US funds.

Opponents of the policy have dubbed it the “Global Gag Rule,” because of the way it prevents local-level health care
providers from not only providing abortions, but also from advocating for the legalization of abortion and educating
about abortion as an option. Originally reported by Casey Quackenbush in TIME, some critics say the policy “holds life-
saving aid hostage to ideology.”

Throughout the last 33 years, the Mexico City Policy has been a political football between Administrations: repealed by
Democrats and dutifully reinstated by Republicans. This process forces a domestically politicized issue onto the
international stage and in practice, this policy can actually have dangerous effects on US security.

IN COMMUNITIES IN WHICH CONFLICT ALREADY EXISTS OR TENSIONS ARE HIGH, INADEQUATE ACCESS TO HEALTH
CARE CAN EXACERBATE THE PREVAILING ISSUES.

In communities in which conflict already exists or tensions are high, inadequate access to health care can exacerbate the
prevailing issues. The reverse is also true. During an outbreak of violence, health issues, such as communicable disease
outbreaks and maternal mortality all rise.

According to the World Health Organization, “Investing in health is investing in peace. Health needs and contributes to
physical, psychological, social and economic security. Investing in health can reduce the risk of conflict as well as
mitigate its impact… Placing social services high on the political agenda helps maintain social stability , and reduce
militarization in situations where the risk of violent conflict is high .”

Recent publications by the United States Institute of Peace, the World Health Organization, and the journal on Health
Research Policy and Systems, have reported about the positive impact that effective health systems and equitable access
to those systems has on reducing drivers of fragility, such as conflict or overall mortality rates. That is why development
experts and global advocates for women’s rights believe that the newly expanded Mexico City Policy will affect the
world’s most vulnerable individuals in the world’s most fragile communities.

Advocates of this policy contend that the effects of it will only be felt by abortion providers. In reality, it isn’t quite so
simple.

In states such as Madagascar, Kenya, and Colombia, those living in rural communities often depend on non-
governmental organizations for their healthcare. These services are provided by clinics that provide a multitude of
services, including those related to sexual and reproductive health, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs, and malaria. Because the aid
they receive is intermingled, it can be difficult for these organizations to completely change their service model in order
to sign and comply with the US Mexico City Policy. When organizations either cannot or choose not to sign on to the
policy, clinics end up closing. This severely limits already at-risk individuals from access to even the most basic of health
needs.

Ironically, since the Mexico City Policy is cutting off access to family planning services, including contraception, it might
actually be increasing demand for abortions. Since its most recent implementation, the Mexico City Policy has already
resulted in tens of millions of dollars in funding cuts. At the same time, there has been a 40% increase in abortions in
some African countries. Looking ahead, some experts are estimating this policy could lead to 15,000 maternal deaths, 8
million unwanted pregnancies, and up to 26 million fewer women and families with access to contraception and family
planning services.

While the Mexico City Policy does not change the total amount of health-related aid appropriated by Congress, the
policy considerably weakens the ability that local health providers have to effectively serve their communities. The on-
again/off-again nature of the policy causes extreme instability among local healthcare providers, many of which are the
sole location for such services in a region. This instability leads to staff layoffs, higher transaction costs, and confusion
about access to care. It also prevents healthcare providers from conducting any long-term planning to better meet the
needs of a community.

No matter the intention of its supporters, the Mexico City Policy damages the health care infrastructure in the countries
that rely on American aid the most. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of conflict in these communities and severely
undermines American soft power.

Soft power efforts — like the promotion of freedom , democracy , and h uman rights — have been a hallmark of the US
foreign policy strategy for the last 70 years .

One of the primary ways the United States has historically strengthened national security, promoted US values abroad ,
and improved its global influence is through investments in global development, including public health. In Fiscal Year
2019, the US contributed $11 billion to global health funding through the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) — more than any other contributor in the world. That funding is now entangled with the Mexico City Policy,
directly undermining the goals of USAID. Further, in the developing world, the United States is now in constant
competition with growing Chinese influence . By enacting policies that negate the reach of US soft power , the Trump
Administration is actually weakening US security .
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: MSU

SCOTUS unlikely to confer it now – but, post-Dobbs, test cases are available and such a ruling is
plausible.
Reichmann - Sept 8th – ’22 Internally quoting Katherine Franke, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at
Columbia University AND Morgan Marietta, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, AND Diane Messere Magee, an attorney from the Law
Offices of Diane Messere Magee, Kelsey Reichmann is a reporter covering the Supreme Court and politics for Courthouse News Service. With Roe
out the door, the next big abortion battle is already on the Supreme Court steps - September 8, 2022 - Courthouse News Service - #E&F – modified
for language that may offend - https://www.courthousenews.com/with-roe-out-the-door-the-next-big-abortion-battle-is-already-on-the-supreme-
court-steps/

With Roe out the door, the next big abortion battle is already on the Supreme Court steps

The justices' declaration that the abortion debate belongs to the states has been challenged by a group that wants to
grant rights to fetuses.

When the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the right to abortion did not exist in the Constitution,
they opened the door to questions about what rights do — or rather, in the case of a new petition before the court,
whom they apply to.

Catholics for Life and two pregnant people filing on behalf of their fetuses are asking the court to reevaluate who, in
light of the justices’ June ruling , is covered under the 14th Amendment. Their petition asks if fetuses are
entitled to due process and equal protection rights in the Constitution.

“As this Court held in Dobbs, abortion laws are different from all others,” Diane Messere Magee, an attorney from the
Law Offices of Diane Messere Magee, wrote in the petition . “Do unborn human beings , at any gestational age, have

any rights under the United States Constitution? Or, has Dobbs relegated all unborn human beings to the status of
persona non grata in the eyes of the United States Constitution — below corporations and other
fictitious entities? No state court or legislature can answer this question. Only this Court can — as the final
arbiter of what the United States Constitution means.”

This is the next battleground in the anti-abortion movement: the recognition of fetal personhood. If fetuses are
granted personhood status , then they are entitled to constitutional rights. The court’s recognition of fetal personhood
rights would prevent even abortion-friendly states from protecting reproductive rights.

“It is not surprising that anti-abortion advocates would argue that the Dobbs decision be stretched to recognize the idea
of ‘fetal personhood,’” said Katherine Franke, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at
Columbia University. “Overruling Roe v. Wade was never the end game for many of these advocates, so it was just a
matter of time before a case making this argument made its way to the Supreme Court.”

The concept of personhood is not new to the Supreme Court docket.

“What it means is that you're a holder of rights. … It's the facet of identity that signifies rights holding,” Morgan
Marietta, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said in a phone call.

In fact, many big decisions over the 20th century were about personhood. Brown v. Board of Education — which found
that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional — recognized the personhood of nonwhites. United States v.
Virginia — which held that the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions were unconstitutional — recognized
the personhood rights of women .

By contrast, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 declared that fetuses did not have personhood rights. Dobbs changes
that .

“The most radical thing that was said in ‘73 was the court saying, absolutely, that a fetus is not a person, and Americans
just don't agree,” Marietta said. “They're just deeply divided. We've been fighting over this for 30 years, and the court
just changed it back to the states.”

What this new petition before the court signifies is the thought from some that the court should not have turned this
question back to the states and instead should answer it themselves.

The petition from Catholics for Life and the two pregnant people stems from a Rhode Island law — the Reproductive
Privacy Act — that codified Roe into law. The Rhode Island Supreme Court dismissed their challenge to the law for lack
of standing, finding that fetuses do not have the right to bring a case before the court.

After Dobbs, however , the challengers now see (perceive) an opportunity to advance their case.

“This Court’s Dobbs holding, that ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,’ and its further overruling of Roe v. Wade
and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey surely signal rejection of this Court’s statement in Roe that, ‘[t]he
word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,’” the petition states. “The
Fourteenth Amendment has no textual definition of the term ‘any person’ therein. And it neither includes nor excludes
unborn human beings specifically.”

Court watchers and reproductive rights experts warned that these challenges would be coming after Dobbs . The
majority opinion — written by Justice Samuel Alito — gave credence to ideas of fetal personhood in a way the court
never had before.

“This is a deeply disputed fact in American culture and politics right now, and even the words that you use indicates
which of the possible facts you think are true,” Marietta said. “So in the decision, when they use the word ‘fetus,’ that
means something, and when they use ‘unborn child’ that means something else. Alito several times used ‘unborn’ which
is the indication of personhood. So I do think that there's a lot of sympathy on the court for the fact of fetal
personhood.”

It is unclear if the court will take up this case. Four justices would have to agree to hear (take) the case, and five would
be needed for a majority ruling . While the conservative majority was able to coalesce around a vote to overturn Roe,
experts have doubts about expanding rights to fetuses.

Nature lacks ITS OWN standing as a “legal person”. Plan breaks that wall and pressure grows to
expand to more entities. That pressure gets channeled into instrumental and politicized human
interests.
- Cplan does not link. Even if it alters Standing in some manner – it does not grant Standing to Nature itself. This is distinction between the
Aff and “guardianship” (Gordon cites Stone for this distinction in this card);
- The so-called “guardian” approach has an advocate for the environment – but the litigant with standing is not a river, tree, etc.

Gordon ‘18
Gwendolyn J. Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Environmental Personhood” -COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW - Vol. 43:1 - #E&F - Modified for language that may offend -
https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Gordon-Environmental-Personhood.pdf
In the United States, for instance, the end of the nineteenth century saw the legal establishment of national parks with
the notion of protecting the environment for human use.128 Over time, the focus of legal and scholarly attention to the
protection of nature has moved from being entirely focused on human interests in exploiting nature, to protecting
nature for future human generations, to conceptions that allow for nature to be protected as intrinsically valuable.129
In contrast with previous “purely anthropocentric” views (perspectives),130 often tied closely to utilitarian
arguments,131 environmental personhood has gained currency contemporaneously with scholarly reevaluation of the
place of human interests in relation to nature—a reevaluation that gives new life to Christopher Stone’s 1972 argument
that trees should have standing to litigate their own interests.

This early articulation of how a rights of nature regime might look spoke (function related) primarily to the concept of
standing.132 As Stone noted in an example concerning a stream, “ [s]o far as the common law is concerned, there is in
general no way to challenge the polluter’s actions save at the behest of a lower riparian—another human being—able to
show an invasion of his (their) rights.”133 Even where some such riparian chooses to litigate harms to the stream, there
are limits on how those harms are likely to be valued:

Whether under language of ‘reasonable use,’ ‘reasonable methods of use,’ ‘balance of convenience,’ or ‘the public
interest doctrine,’ what the courts are balancing with varying degrees of directness, are the economic hardships the
upper riparian (or dependent community) of abating the pollution vis-à-vis the economic hardships of continued
pollution on the lower riparians. 134

Continues to footnote 134 – no text omitted - 134. Id. at 461 (citations omitted). Stone later notes with approval a
contemporaneous trend toward liberalization of standing requirements. Id. at 467 (“[T]here is a movement in the law

toward giving the environment the benefits of standing , although not in a manner as satisfactory
as the guardianship approach .”). Despite the promise of these cases, however, Stone cautioned that the liberalized

standing approach taken by the courts does not quite reproduce the putative benefits of the guardianship approach
he suggests, which “would secure an effective voice (advocate) for the environment even where federal administrative
action and public-lands and waters were not involved” and would avoid floods of litigation from ill-defined and perhaps
overlapping groups seeking to protect a natural feature. Id. at 470–72. (end footnote)

In the face of such anthropocentrism, noted Laurence Tribe, even a sense of duty toward the environment that gives rise
to some effort to act on its behalf “will be translated into the terminology of human self-interest. . . . While the
environmentalist may feel somewhat disingenuous in taking this approach, he is (they are) likely to regard it as justified
by the demands of legal doctrine and the exigencies of political reality .”135 A human-centered way of
approaching environmental problems distorts even the bestintentioned environmentalism.

This means that a nature-focused “rights” approach to the protection of nature is preferable to a human-centered
“duties” approach.136 (continues to footnote 136 – no text removed) 136. Objections as to the capacity of nature to be
the subject of rights are easily defeated. See, e.g., Emmenegger & Tschentscher, supra note 120, at 574-75 ("Restricting

conceptually impossible to accord

rights to beings who are aware of their interests would make it

them to fetuses or newborn infants .... [T]he concept of 'rights' is instrumental, i.e., it is merely a legal
and moral instrument of protection. That is the reason why lifeless corporations can have rights."); see also Walt &
Schwartzman, supra note 3, at 15 ("We anticipate the objection that our argument in principle allows anything to count
as a person. If the category of persons serves to promote the values prized by moral theory, then any entity that

promotes them might be properly treated as a person. Rocks therefore count as persons if they are
serviceable in a suitable way . The charge accurately identifies an implication of the argument
but does not undermine it. Because the category of persons is normative, the entities that count as persons is
determined by moral theory, not fact. This is true in law , where statutes sometimes enumerate a nonexhaustive list of
persons. It also is true in moral theory. The bare possibility that moral theory or statutes could oddly consider certain
entities as persons does not impugn either. It likely turns out that a plausible moral theory does not recognize a value
that is promoted by treating rocks as persons. Unorganized groups, such as ethnic minorities, present a closer question
because they might have interests, or are instrumental in protecting interests , that the theory recognizes as worth
protecting. Corporations present an even closer question."). (end footnote) The point here is important , as arguments
that the interests of human beings and those of nature are coterminous hold (possess) a certain intuitive force. Despite
the fervor of ecologists for such arguments however, “the best interests of individual persons (and even of future human
generations) are not demonstrably congruent with those of the natural order as a whole.”137 Viewing natural and
human interests as equivalent in fact blinds us to the interests of nature that do not suit human interests. This is a
“rightlessness” that goes right down to our ability to imagine who might be the beneficiary in Stone’s “stream”
hypothetical:138 any damages to the stream beyond those that might be claimed by human interests are rendered
invisible to the law.139

Fetal personhood ends US embryonic stem cell research

NARAL ‘17A non-profit organization that was originally called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, NARAL was established
at the "First National Conference on Abortion Laws: Modification or Repeal?" held February 14–16, 1969 - January 1, 2017
https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/5.-Personhood-Measures-Extreme-and-Dangerous-Attempts-to-Ban-
Abortion.pdf

“Personhood” measures could have drastic consequences. Should one become law and go into effect, a “personhood”
measure would have a profound impact on reproductive-health care services beyond legal abortion.

“Personhood” measures would ban most common forms of birth control. Any form of contraceptive that prevents
implantation, rather than or in addition to fertilization, would be banned. This would have an enormous impact on the
99 percent of American women who use birth control.10

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) opposes “personhood” measures because they
would “erode women’s basic rights to privacy and bodily integrity; deny women access to the full spectrum of
preventive health care…and undermine the doctor-patient relationship.”11

“Personhood” measures could also potentially ban embryonic stem-cell research. Because embryonic stem cells are
obtained about five days after fertilization, 12 research using these types of cells would be illegal if a “personhood”
measure were law. In fact, Personhood Colorado refers to this immensely promising field of biomedical research as
“human harvesting.”13

Fertility groups oppose these measures. The National Infertility Association says “personhood amendments are clearly
intended to outlaw abortion but have the potential to affect assisted reproductive technology…If embryos are full
humans, anything that puts an embryo at risk could be a criminal violation, including the practice of
cryopreservation.”14

That research is key to US medical and life science innovations.

- Provides internal link to the kinds of “life sciences” discussed in the terminal impact – including cell differentiation, cell development, and
cell commonalities – including “the ways that biological subsystems interact”;
- Embryonic = key – must be from “beginning of life cycle”. That ‘s the best canvas for this kind of research
- Also gives internal link to novel therapeutics – like Regenerative Medicine.
C.A.P. ‘9 Center for American Progress is a Public Policy research and advocacy organization. This report internally quotes Michael J. Rugnetta –
who, at the time of the writing, was a Fellows Assistant, Center for American Progress. Since then Rugnetta has gone on to serve as The Deputy
Attorney General, Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General - Bringing Science Back to the Forefront – Center for American Progress - JAN 16, 2009 -
#E&F - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/bringing-science-back-to-the-forefront/

“Stem cell research is a cutting-edge component of our nation’s basic science infrastructure and it is that infrastructure
which gives rise to innovation, wealth creation, and an enhanced quality of life for all Americans,” said Michael J.
Rugnetta at an event today to release his new report, “A Life Sciences Crucible : Stem Cell Science and Innovation
Done Responsibly and Ethically.” The event panel discussed what the incoming administration can do during its first 90
days that to bring science back to the forefront of the national agenda and how it can help stem cell research move
forward ethically and responsibly.

The greatest potential for embryonic stem cell research lies in scientists’ ability to tap into the process of cell
differentiation and development . In other words, scientists need to study cells from the beginning of their life cycle in order
to understand the benefits that this research may provide. Embryonic stem cells—also called “pluripotent,” or all-purpose — provide the
perfect canvas to study this growth.

Stem cell research is crucial to the advancement of regenerative medicine, a therapeutic approach that works by
cultivating a small sample of a patient’s own cells and reprogramming them. Medical professionals can in this way curb
the risk and severe side effects that usually result from foreign organ transplants by using cells from a patient’s own
body.

US innovation key to global advancement in Life Sciences.

PAAP ‘21
PAAP = Patient Access & Affordability Project. PAAP is a is a Policy Institute that evaluates healthcare policies. PAAP is overseen by a Professional
Advisory Council where various Councilmembers hold MDs, PhDs, MSc’s as well as Doctorates in Philosophy. From “Patient Access & Affordability
Project (PAAP) Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration and the 117th Congress” - May 12, 2021 - #E&F -
https://accessandaffordability.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PAAP-117th-Congress-Policy-Platform-5-12-2021-1.pdf

The continued pursuit of cures and better treatments is vital to the health and wellbeing of patients worldwide. No
other country supports and values medical innovation like the United States. It is i mperative that we continue to lead
the world by advancing novel medicines and therapies while ensuring the patients for whom they are designed have
affordable access to these innovations. A healthy and vibrant life sciences sector working in tandem with an
independent and efficient FDA is an integral part of that process.

Extinction
- Has internal links back to the modes of Life Sciences discussed in prev portions of the Shell – like:
o Cell commonalities – including “the ways that biological subsystems interact”;
o the interaction of Biological Subsystems – including the unlocking of “transdisciplinary scientific endeavors” with “practical
applications”’
- Lists sev impacts:
o Marine/oceanic impacts
o Green/sustainability impacts – including energy
o Famine impacts
o Disease impacts
N.R.C. ‘8
Uber quals. The National Research Council (NRC) is the operating body of the United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine and is administered by a governing board. Its members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National
Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. This publication is the byproduct of The Board on Life Sciences Division on Earth and Life
Studies, National Research Council for The National Academy of Sciences, “The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future Summary
of a Workshop” December 3, 2008 – final publication in 2009 - #E&F – EBook – so some scrolling, but should be available via:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12592/chapter/2

A Critical Time for the Life Sciences

Speaker after speaker at the Summit agreed: the life sciences are poised to usher in a period of unprecedented health and prosperity. Basic scientific
research into how living things function is producing new understanding of how living systems work and new ways of using biological processes to meet human needs. If current

opportunities are grasped , the life sciences can help produce enough food for a growing population, cure chronic and acute
disease s, meet future needs for energy , and manage the preservation of earth's biological heritage for future generations. From
the perspective of the life sciences, we live in the most exciting and promising period in human history.
Yet even though the potential is enormous,
speakers emphasized that the benefits will be achieved more quickly if financial and institutional barriers to newly
emerging capabilities are reduced.

The potential of the life sciences today has two roots. First, powerful tools are allowing biologists to collect and analyze
vastly more information about complex systems, from single cells to global biogeochemical cycles, than has been
possible before. This information is helping to uncover not just the molecular mechanisms that underlie biological
processes but the ways that biological subsystems interact in whole organisms and in terrestrial and marine
ecosystems . In this way, ongoing research is helping to unify biology by revealing the commonalities among organisms
and by linking biological processes at different levels organization.

Second, a profound reorganization within science is occurring. Important segments of the life sciences are merging with
the physical sciences and engineering to create "transdisciplinary" scientific endeavors focused on pressing global
problems. This blending of disciplines is leading to new insights into life processes and creating new opportunities to
translate those insights into practical applications, just as the synthesis of the physical and mathematical sciences with
engineering in the 20lh century created the electronics and information revolutions that have transformed our lives.

Scientists, policymakers, and research administrators cannot predict which new technologies and industries will emerge
from the unification of biology and the convergence of the life sciences, the physical sciences, and engineering. Yet steps
can be taken now, multiple speakers pointed out, to ensure that the great potential of the life sciences bears fruit as
quickly as possible, thereby giving rise to a steady stream of new ideas and new applications of science. Public and
private funders can support the high-risk, transformational research that is commonly underfunded, especially during
times of stagnant budgets. They can support younger researchers, who face daunting challenges in competing for scarce
funds yet often have important insights that can spur progress.

They can help break down the barriers among disciplines that continue to inhibit transdisciplinary research. And they
can foster educational programs that will produce the transdisciplinary scientists and engineers of the future.

The Promise of the Biological Sciences

Investments in the life sciences pay off in three broad areas, observed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
President Susan Hockfield. They improve human health. They foster industries that boost the economy while addressing
a wide range of environmental, energy, health, and agricultural challenges. And they further human understanding of
some of the most fascinating systems in the universe.

Improving Human Health

The biological sciences have enabled most of the world's population to enjoy higher living standards and longer life
spans than ever before, said National Academies President Ralph Cicerone. New understanding of the links between
disease and sanitation, the role trace nutrients play in health, and the potential of vaccines and antibiotics, among many
other research results, have improved the lives of people everywhere.
The progress made in combating heart disease is a prime example of the payoffs from investment in the life sciences, said Hockfield. Over the past 30 years, the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) has invested about $4 per American per year in cardiovascular research. That investment has helped reduce the rate of death from heart disease and stroke by more than half.
Knowledge of cholesterol metabolism led to the development of the drugs known as statins, which have reduced heart attacks and strokes. The development of drug-eluting stents has
enabled physicians to open occluded blood vessels. Study of receptors on the surface of nerve cells has led to new beta blockers that are being used to treat hypertension and heart disease.

Similar advances have produced benefits throughout medicine, observed Thomas Cech, President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Harold Varmus, President of the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Greater understanding of the role of tumor necrosis factor in inflammatory disease has led to antibody treatments that have changed the lives of many people
with rheumatoid arthritis. Materials science is producing spare parts for bones, arteries, and other tissues and organs.

Basic research into retroviruses motivated by their role in some cancers built the base of understanding that proved
critical in first identifying the cause of the AIDS epidemic and then developing drugs to control the disease. "If we as a
country hadn't made the investment in the basic science, in the understanding of retroviruses, we would probably still
today have a rapidly expanding global AIDS epidemic," Cech said.
Continued basic research into fundamental biological processes could yield a wealth of new medical advances.

Investigations of bacterial genetics could provide new treatments for infectious diseases, including diseases caused by microbes that have evolved mechanisms to evade existing treatments.
Bioengineered stem cells could provide regulated insulin secretion in people with diabetes, for example, or repair severed spinal cord nerves. Study of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart
disease, and mental illness, which now account for the bulk of health care costs, could lead to personalized treatments that reflect a disease's unique characteristics in each individual.

However, the translation of basic research findings to applications is not always straightforward or quick, Cech observed. Even where understanding of biological processes is extensive, vast
amounts of work must be done, often by people in different disciplines and sectors working collaboratively, to apply new knowledge in medicine.

Fostering Industries to Counter Global Problems

The life sciences have applications in areas that range far beyond human health. Life-science based approaches could contribute to advances in many industries, from energy production and
pollution remediation, to clean manufacturing and the production of new biologically inspired materials. In fact, biological systems could provide the basis for new products, services and
industries that we cannot yet imagine. Microbes are already producing biofuels and could, through further research, provide a major component of future energy supplies. Marine and
terrestrial organisms extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which suggests that biological systems could be used to help manage climate change. Study of the complex systems
encountered in biology is producing insights into similarly interconnected networks encountered in many other areas of science - and vice versa.

Take agriculture as an example. The agricultural biotechnology industry is just a little more than a decade old, said Robert Fraley, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at
Monsanto - the first bioengineered crop, a soybean seed with a gene providing tolerance for a common herbicide, was launched in 1996. Yet biotechnology crops are today being planted on
20 percent of the world's farmland, and the percentage is projected to double as new crops are introduced and countries like India and China move toward full adoption of the technology.
"This is the most rapidly adopted new technology in the history of agriculture," Fraley said.

The ability to introduce multiple genes into an ever-expanding array of crops has not only increased yields but has produced significant environmental benefits. By altering the characteristics
of crops, agricultural biotechnology has made it possible for farmers to use fewer pesticides and other chemicals. Fewer trips through the fields on tractors mean less greenhouse gas
emissions and reduced compaction of soils. Furthermore, the revolution in agricultural biotechnology has just begun, Fraley said. Within a few years, agricultural companies will be selling
seeds with ten or more introduced genes. Crops can be modified to improve human health; for example, soybeans have been genetically modified to produce healthy rather than unhealthy
fatty acids. Future crops will need far less water, a crucial consideration as climate change alters rainfall patterns and groundwater aquifers are depleted. As Fraley said, "As much as we have
seen happen in the last decade, it is really just the beginning."

Advances in the underlying science of plant and animal breeding have been just as dramatic as the advances in genetic engineering. Results from basic research have allowed plant and
animal breeders to produce organisms with desired combinations of genetic traits. Say, for example, that a breeder wants to assemble 20 desirable genetic traits in the same plant. Using
traditional breeding methods, the odds of achieving exactly that combination of traits in a single plant would have been one in a trillion -essentially zero. Using the new techniques made
possible through genetic research, the odds are one in five. Over the last half century, plant breeders have been able to achieve a nearly one percent annual increase in corn yields using
traditional breeding techniques. With the new techniques, yields are now going up by two to three percent annually. "We can now pick traits and combinations of genes that it never would
have been possible to produce in the history of agriculture," said Fraley. "That says a lot when you consider that humans have been trying to do this for 8,000 years."

Many other technologies derived from basic scientific research are boosting agricultural yields. Automated gene
sequencers test genetic markers in thousands of individual seeds per day. Magnetic resonance imaging can look inside plants and animals to
characterize traits. Using tractors equipped with global positioning system devices, farmers can put down a band of fertilizer, come back six months later, and plant seeds exactly on that
row, reducing the need for fertilizer, pesticides, and other agricultural inputs.

Fraley said that the global agricultural system needs to adopt the goal of doubling the current yield of crops while reducing key inputs like pesticides, fertilizers, and water by one third. "It is
more important than putting a man on the moon," he said. Doubling agricultural yields would "change the world." Another billion people will join the middle class over the next decade just
in India and China as economies continue to grow. And all people need and deserve secure access to food supplies.

Continued progress will require both basic and applied research, as scientists learn more about the fundamental biology of plants and collaborate with others in putting that knowledge to
work. "Just as the basic biomedical research in the future is not going to be done by the pharmaceutical companies, [oil companies and agribusinesses] aren't going to do the
fundamental research in photosynthesis and plant development and plant hormones that is going to lay the groundwork for a future understanding of how plants work," said Cech. For the
life sciences to have a dramatic effect on nutrition, the world's food supply, and the renewable energy problem, "we need to keep reinvesting in understanding the biology."

Answering Fundamental Questions

The life sciences can answer some of the most fundamental, interesting, and difficult questions that human beings can
ask. How did the great diversity of living things come to be? How do cells function on a molecular level? What is the
role of life in changing the surface of the earth?
Consider this last question, said James Collins, who is currently on leave from Arizona State University to serve as Assistant Director for Biological Sciences at the National Science
Foundation. According to a recent estimate, of the approximately 4,300 types of minerals on the earth, about 3,000 are the products of biological processes. The evolution of life "put
earth under new management," Collins said. Understanding the future state of the planet will require understanding the biological systems that have shaped the planet.

Many of these biological systems are found in the oceans, which cover 70 percent of the earth's surface and have a crucial impact on weather, climate, and the composition of the
atmosphere. In the past decade, new tools have become available to explore the microbial processes that drive the chemistry of the oceans, observed David Kingsbury, Chief Program Officer
for Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. These technologies have revealed that a large proportion of the planet's genetic diversity resides in the oceans. In addition, many
organisms in the oceans readily exchange genes, creating evolutionary forces that can have global effects.

The oceans are currently under great stress, Kingsbury pointed out. Nutrient runoff from agriculture is helping to create huge and expanding "dead zones" where oxygen
levels are too low to sustain life. Toxic algal blooms are occurring with higher frequency in areas where they have not been seen in the past. Exploitation of ocean resources is disrupting
ecological balances that have formed over many millions of years. Human-induced changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere are changing the chemistry of the oceans, with potentially
catastrophic consequences. "If
we are not careful, we are not going to have a sustainable planet to live on ," said Kingsbury. Only by
understanding the basic biological processes at work in the oceans can humans live sustainably on earth.

1NR

The phrase “non-human animal” bundles and locks-in moral exclusion. It’s the same logic of violent
rhetoric hierarchies deployed in racialized and gendered naming practices
Borkfelt ‘11
Sune Borkfelt - PhD, Teaching Associate Professor, Institute of Language, Literature and Culture, Aarhus University - “What's in a Name?—
Consequences of Naming Non-Human Animals” - Animals (Basel). 2011 Mar; 1(1): 116–125. Published online 2011 Jan 19. #E&F – modified for
language that may offend – in this instance quotes were added to the label “non-human animal” and ‘species” -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552209/

Bundling together a number of individuals in order to create hierarchies and assert power relations is a practice that
has of course been applied to humans time and again throughout history, whether through reference to race and ethnicity,
gender or other shared features of those being categorized and put at the lower end of a hierarchy. Through all ages, those
who have physically resembled us the most have been those most willingly admitted into our communities and those, who we have wished to keep
beyond the moral pale have been categorized generically by reference to the features perceived to mark their difference from us.

With categorizations of “non-human animals” , however, we might argue the practice has been taken to its extreme.
Indeed, using the very term ‘animal’ to bundle together all other “species” is perhaps exactly the most extreme
example of generic naming in terms of how many differences there are between the creatures defined by it. And the
exclusion of ourselves from that same generic term, by viewing the word ‘human’ as an opposite to it, is as arbitrary as
would be the exclusion of any other species. Moreover, as Tim Ingold has argued, all the qualities we as humans are
claimed to “uniquely have, the animal is consequently supposed to lack; thus, the generic concept of ‘animal’ is
negatively constituted by the sum of those deficiencies” [18]. As a consequence, being an ‘animal’ becomes
intrinsically negative and helps to keep those defined as such outside the moral community.

Life science innovation is crucial to sustainability initiatives---extinction.

Philp 21 (Jim Philp, Ph.D., Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, The Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development; “Biotechnologies to Bridge the Schism in the Bioeconomy,” 12-13-21, MDPI,
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/24/8393/htm; Go Green!)
The bioeconomy concept is decades old, but the story for this paper starts with a landmark publication from the OECD
[1], where the science and technology of the bioeconomy was discussed in terms of public policy, thereby putting the
bioeconomy on a political and economic footing. It described the bioeconomy as “the set of economic activities in
which biotechnology contributes centrally to primary production and industry, especially where the advanced life
sciences are applied to the conversion of biomass into materials , chemicals and fuels ”. This cemented the idea that
biotechnology is a separate discipline from fundamental research in the life sciences that can generate economic activity
and added value. Added value is an important component as it can be also applied to the circular economy concept [2],
and there have been efforts to link the bioeconomy and circular economy [3]. This is especially so if “ waste”
materials such as agricultural and forestry residues and waste industrial gases can be converted through
biotechnology into useful products and services.

Another plank of biotechnology in the bioeconomy is the inextricable connection to sustainability . All national
bioeconomy strategies connect to sustainability, whether they emphasise biotechnology or not. The European
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) elaborated a bioeconomy view that reconciles the conundrum of environmental
and economic sustainability [4].

Running through this paper is the concept of ‘grand challenges’: the major dilemmas that humanity faces, some of such
gravity that they are existential for our species. These include food security , energy security , resource depletion ,
deforestation , biodiversity threats , even soil security . Overarching all of these is, of course, climate change [5]. Not
only are these issues existential , but, troublingly, they are particularly difficult to address as they interact with each
other in what has been termed a “ grand challenges ecosystem ” [6]. In other words, attempting to address one of
these can create problems in another . For example, a rising human population demands reducing food waste and
growing more food. Land intensification and extensification might result in increasing soil exhaustion. Such examples
are many, and for policymakers this creates unprecedented challenges . As grand challenges interact and overlap, then
policymakers have the unenviable task of attempting to design policy that minimises the possibilities of unintended, and
unwanted, consequences.

The link DOUESN’T HINGE on the Aff being a DIRECT legal action.
Rather - in the enforcement phase – the Aff’s permanent fiat places the Judiciary in a quandary.

Courts will encounter a new wave of “a fortiori” appeals – exogenous events that make a legal appeal more persuasive.
Opposing counsel would invoke pre-Dobbs abortion rulings that held “findings of life are pre-conditions to be a legal
person”.

Fiat ensures a contemporary Court says “NO – life ISN’T a precondition”. At that stage, the Judiciary will have lost its
“easy out” for dodging 14th Amendment inquiries about fetal personhood. We’ll contextualize this card from the A.I. lit.

Willick ‘83
Marshal S. Willick - Attorney at Law Nevada Supreme Court staff Carson City, Nevada - “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Some Legal Approaches and
Implications” - THE AI MAGAZINE Summer 1983 – modified for language that may offend – continues to footnote #35 – not text omitted - #E&F -
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/392/328.

The denial of the legal status of "persons" to fetuses by the Supreme Court 35 stirred a social and political struggle
which in many regards is still escalating 36. (continues to footnote 35) Roe v Wade, 93 S. Ct. 705 (1973). The Court
simply stated that "'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment , does not include the unborn." Id. p. 729.

The Court had reasoned that personhood, for constitutional protection, depended upon a finding of "life." Texas,
seeking to uphold state restrictions on abortion, maintained that human life began at conception, and that
constitutional guarantees attached at that time. The Court refused to resolve the question of when life begins, stating:
When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any
consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the
answer.37

The Court then examined in detail the history of medical, philosophical, theological and legal definitions of life, but
decided the case, finally, on other grounds.

Proponents of the various stands on abortion today perceive the gist of the conflict in different ways. Some view
abortion decisions as strictly moral judgments which are reflective of the nation's moral fabric.38 Others see abortion as
a purely religious question.39 Still others maintain that regulation of abortion, presumptively based on a resolution of
when life begins, is in reality a ruse to hide economic discrimination against women.40

One commentator dismissed the various labels attributed to abortion decisions as merely semantic. In examining the
legal struggle over abortion, he said: "[I]n America,... moral issues become legal issues, and legal issues become
constitutional issues What is right must be legal, and what is wrong must be unconstitutional" .41

Returning to the situation posited above, where a computer has gained access to a court and is resisting a claim of
ownership, a human party- opponent might well argue that the abortion decisions should be dispositive of
the case. Alleging that a finding of life is a necessary precondition to the existence of a legal interest, the human could
move for dismissal of the suit based on the lack of proper parties.42

The court might well be taken aback by an assertion that the law was denying protections to individuals that would, if
allowed, become recognized human persons, while it protected individuals that could never be human. The contrast is
between a biological individual that would at some point be considered a human being (though at the critical time
exhibiting no intelligent behavior) and a mechanical individual that would never be human (though at the critical time
exhibiting considerable intelligent behavior). The abortion decisions, however, were ultimately decided on grounds
other than "definition-of-life'' language. Further, the decisions were very much concerned with human life, and did not
even consider any alternatives.

The abortion decisions could be read as establishing a focus on development of the individual; somewhere along an
individual's linear course of development, a line can be crossed between the potential for personality and its actuality.
For fetuses, the inquiry relates to given levels of physical development. In the case above, however, the court would
have to determine the computer's knowledge of the world and whether that knowledge, in light of its structure as a
machine, entitled it to legal recognition. The court might well decline jurisdiction (and thus decide the case) to avoid
answering such questions. The court would thus be spared the necessity of deciding whether computers are "aware" of
their surroundings or "understand" concepts, freeing it from an inherently philosophical task that could prove (as in Roe
v. Wade to be beyond the ability of the judiciary "at this point in the development of man's knowledge".43

If computers are ever nonetheless viewed (considered) as individuals capable of attaining personality, the courts could
be caught up in just such a task. Pressure will then be upon the legislature (as it is now concerning the abortion issue) to
determine the necessary minimum requirements for legal recognition. Standards could be found in the satisfaction of
some test of reasoning or by comparison with a model combination of hardware and software. The potential problems
of enforcing such a scheme, however, would be staggering.

**Uniqueness is perfect for the Neg – the votes aren’t currently there, but it’s reversible.
Ziegler ‘22
Mary Ziegler is a Law Professor at the University of California, Davis, Law School – As interviewed by John Yang a correspondent for the PBS
NewsHour. “What’s next in the legal battle over abortion?” – PBS News Hour - June 24, 2022 - #E&F - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whats-
next-in-the-legal-battle-over-abortion
John Yang:

What happens now to the legal battle over abortion? What's the next step? What's the next phase?

Mary Ziegler:

There are multiple phases, John.

There are state constitutional battles in place — unfolding in places like Michigan that is already the site of a struggle
about whether there's a state constitutional right to abortion. There will be knock-down political battles in states like
Florida and North Carolina that have yet to commit to having outright bans on abortion.

And, of course, there will be legal battles as well. Conservatives will probably come back to the U.S. Supreme Court
and ask for protection for fetal rights. States may try to regulate out-of-state conduct, right, either preventing people
from traveling to get abortions or preventing doctors in blue states from performing abortions on people from red
states.

Those fights, of course, raise very complicated legal questions that could well end back up at the Supreme Court.

John Yang:

You talked about abortion rights' opponents coming back to the Supreme Court to talk about fetal rights.

Talk about that. What will they be pressing for?

Mary Ziegler:

The idea that — and this has really been the main constitutional premise of the anti-abortion movement from the
inception, is that the word person in the 14th Amendment, which, of course, guarantees equality under the law and
due process of the law, applies before, as well as after birth.

So these advocates are going to be pressing the Supreme Court to recognize that claim. And, of course, if the Supreme
Court were to do that, that would have the effect of banning abortion everywhere, not just, of course, in states that
may choose to do so.

John Yang:

So, in other words, this would be a federal right, a constitutional right, but on the other side?

Mary Ziegler:

Exactly. Right.

I mean, and I don't anticipate that happening soon. I mean, Brett Kavanaugh, who obviously would be a key vote on
this, was trying, I think, to telegraph in his concurrence today essentially that the Constitution is neutral, the Supreme
Court should be neutral. So I don't think there are five votes at the moment for the recognition of fetal personhood.

But, of course, if you had asked me as little as two years ago, there weren't the votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. So this
is a fast-moving topic where things can rapidly change.

Legal systems “link” juridical rights of non-human animals with those of fetuses. The Aff secures
pro-life jurisprudential victories.
Power ‘16
Nicole Power is a third-year student at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University - THE PROBLEM OF FALSE COMPARIONS: ANIMAL
WELFARE DISCOURSE AND THE ANTI-CHOICE MOVEMENT - Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies vol 25 (2016) - #E&F – modified for language that
may offend - https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1322&context=djls

Advocacy for the protection of animal welfare and women’s right to reproductive choice have little, if anything, in
common. It is productive, then, to question the recurring association of these unrelated ethical issues. If one feels
compassion for the plight of the nonhuman animal, the argument goes, then it is morally inconsistent to neglect the
fetus. An understanding of the incongruous political contexts at play between abortion and animal welfare effectively
repudiates this argument, but a more important question must be answered: why is this strange argument so

pervasive? In brief, it is the uniform legal marginalization of women and animals that animates this false
comparison, which is instructively analyzed through the theoretical lens of ecofeminism. The leading Canadian
judgments of R v Morgentaler and R v Ménard exemplify the socio-legal contours of ‘otherness’ outside the locus of
patriarchal dominance. This renders a broadly transferable framework of oppression at the hands of the law; examining
jurisprudential examples of displacement of agency, fragmentation of the self, and instrumental objectification, in both
contexts, provides a useful starting point in a consideration of the broad intersections between the legal treatment of
women and animals.

The issues of abortion and the exploitation of nonhuman animals have little in common, but share a pronounced
ability to provoke heated, partisan debate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it follows that the two are often linked.
Critics who oppose a woman’s right to reproductive choice view (consider) the animal welfare stance (perspective) as
a useful tool; if one cares about animal subjects, the argument goes, then perhaps this moral consideration extends to
the fetus. While this literature ignores important differences and seeks to erode female bodily autonomy, it also
instructively demonstrates the law’s culpability in treating disadvantaged groups in a way that masks their distinct
identities. A nuanced analysis of the law surrounding women’s reproductive freedom and animal welfare reveals the
dominant patriarchal perspective from which the law proceeds. As a necessary extension, this discussion puts the other
—those outside the privileged perspective—into stark relief.

The notion that both women and nonhuman animals reside in this periphery is intuitive given the patriarchal character
of our social and legal fabric; however, a careful consideration of the values embodied in these controversial areas of
jurisprudence should take nothing for granted. While the law aims to homogenize these groups, it is essential to both
foreground their differences and understand the legal workings of uniform ‘otherness.’ Although arguments that link the
issues of abortion and animal welfare are generally unpersuasive, they are particularly instructive regarding the
patriarchal oppressive impulse.

Simply put, the body of criticism advocating for moral consistency—that is, parallel ethical concern for both fetuses
and nonhuman animals—is unconcerned with the animal welfare movement. Instead, pro-animal arguments are
misappropriated and misapplied in an effort to disguise the central role of the pregnant woman in the abortion
debate. Approaching the issue through the critical lens of ecofeminism elucidates the mutually informing nature of
patriarchal domination directed at women and nonhuman animals. This theoretical framework speaks from the margins
of the legal system and underscores instances where subjugation intersects; it is therefore a particularly useful tool for
understanding the jurisprudential implications of likening antiabortion and pro-animal stances (perspectives).
DA – Spillover
2NC---O/V

Outweighs on scope---life sciences solves a laundry list of inevitable environmental threats.

Philp 21 (Jim Philp, Ph.D., Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, The Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development; “Biotechnologies to Bridge the Schism in the Bioeconomy,” 12-13-21, MDPI,
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/24/8393/htm; Go Green!)

The bioeconomy concept is decades old, but the story for this paper starts with a landmark publication from the OECD
[1], where the science and technology of the bioeconomy was discussed in terms of public policy, thereby putting the
bioeconomy on a political and economic footing. It described the bioeconomy as “the set of economic activities in
which biotechnology contributes centrally to primary production and industry, especially where the advanced life
sciences are applied to the conversion of biomass into materials , chemicals and fuels ”. This cemented the idea that
biotechnology is a separate discipline from fundamental research in the life sciences that can generate economic activity
and added value. Added value is an important component as it can be also applied to the circular economy concept [2],
and there have been efforts to link the bioeconomy and circular economy [3]. This is especially so if “ waste”
materials such as agricultural and forestry residues and waste industrial gases can be converted through
biotechnology into useful products and services.

Another plank of biotechnology in the bioeconomy is the inextricable connection to sustainability . All national
bioeconomy strategies connect to sustainability, whether they emphasise biotechnology or not. The European
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) elaborated a bioeconomy view that reconciles the conundrum of environmental
and economic sustainability [4].

Running through this paper is the concept of ‘grand challenges’: the major dilemmas that humanity faces, some of such
gravity that they are existential for our species. These include food security , energy security , resource depletion ,
deforestation , biodiversity threats , even soil security . Overarching all of these is, of course, climate change [5]. Not
only are these issues existential , but, troublingly, they are particularly difficult to address as they interact with each
other in what has been termed a “ grand challenges ecosystem ” [6]. In other words, attempting to address one of
these can create problems in another . For example, a rising human population demands reducing food waste and
growing more food. Land intensification and extensification might result in increasing soil exhaustion. Such examples
are many, and for policymakers this creates unprecedented challenges . As grand challenges interact and overlap, then
policymakers have the unenviable task of attempting to design policy that minimises the possibilities of unintended, and
unwanted, consequences.

AT: 5 States
These laws are NOT complete fetal personhood and are getting struck down, which means they do
not thump embryonic stem cell research
msu is green

2AC Jeff Amy 22. Author at Religion News Service, 7-30-2022, "EXPLAINER: What's the role of personhood in abortion
debate?," AP NEWS, https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-health-government-and-politics-
constitutions-93c27f3132ecc78e913120fe4d6c0977
HOW MANY STATES HAVE THESE LAWS?

Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri all have personhood laws .

Georgia’s law is maybe the most far-reaching, granting specific rights including tax breaks and child support to unborn
children. It took effect July 20 after a federal appeals court ruled in its favor. A federal court has put Arizona’s law on
hold, at least for now.

Absent an across-the-board Constitutional ban at the Federal level, embryonic stem cell research
will exist in blue-State pockets.
Baumann ‘22
Jeannie Baumann - Senior reporter covering for Medical Research for Bloomberg Law – “State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell
Research” – Bloomberg Law - Aug. 4, 2022 - #E&F - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/pharma-and-life-sciences/state-personhood-laws-threaten-
embryonic-stem-cell-research

“All of these point inevitably to the conclusion that the deliberate use of an embryo in research or to derive embryonic
stem cell lines—which we know will destroy the embryo—is almost certainly going to be illegal. The question is, is it
illegal under what rubric? Is it homicide? Is it manslaughter?” Charo, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, said.

States have “police power” to regulate directly all sorts of activities over which the federal government lacks direct
jurisdiction, Barnes said.

“The problem here in the states that may move to adopt ‘embryonic personhood’ without specific exceptions for
research and therapeutic use is that sophisticated research institutions will simply move their research to states
without such laws, thus eroding the research and development resources of states that have adopted such restrictive
measures,” Barnes said.

At least half a dozen states were considering proposals this year to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood,
according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Potential Brain Drain

Even the threat of a potential ban on research could create a brain drain in states with personhood laws, Michele
Bratcher Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine and director of the law school’s Center for
Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, said.

To the extent that there are laws that are being proposed and enacted” can have a chilling effect, Bratcher Goodwin
said. “Someone who has invested more than 20 years of their life and education because they want to save lives now
possibly might become the subject of a criminal investigation because they want to develop vaccines? Who would then
want to teach in those states or teach at those universities?”

2NC---UQ---AT: Fetal Personhood Inevitable

Fetal personhood isn’t inevitable – but the barrier is willpower. Our link ev proves the Aff plan
FOREGROUNDS new contradictions that would resonate with the Judiciary.
Craddock 22 (et al; Josh Craddock is an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the
American Founding. He graduated magna cum laude from the Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of
the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. He later clerked for the Honorable Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to law school, Josh managed advocacy teams for non-profit
organizations at the United Nations and participated in negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals. “The Next
Pro-Life Goal Is Constitutional Personhood” - Newsweek – 7/19/22 - #E&F - https://www.newsweek.com/next-pro-life-
goal-constitutional-personhood-opinion-1725698)

Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs actually hints at this understanding of 14th Amendment personhood.
Dobbs "sharply distinguishe[d]" other cases on which Roe and Casey relied based on the reality that "abortion destroys
what those decisions call 'potential life' and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an 'unborn human
being.'" In other words, Dobbs rejected Planned Parenthood's noxious "clump of cells" disinformation and candidly
acknowledged the moral salience of the unborn child.

It is thus not a far leap from Dobbs to constitutional personhood. The hurdle is not one of moral, biological, or
constitutional truth, but rather one of fortitude and sheer willpower. All relevant constitutional actors must flex their
muscles to help us reach the promised land of an abortion-free America.

Fetal personhood is not a given in the squo

Carlisle 22 (Internally quoting Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates for Pregnant
Women - Madeleine Carlisle - Staff Writer @TIME , covering gender, courts, and politics, previously @TheAtlantic –
“Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle Over Reproductive Rights” - Time – June 28 th - #E&F -
https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion/)

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on fetal personhood in Dobbs: “Our opinion is not based on any view about if
and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how fetal
personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we will be living
in a legal gray area for a long time,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates for
Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people, including women who have had abortions. “Case
law will have to be developed, or statutes will have to be clarified, because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so
monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all play out.”

A-to “Too Unique - Fetal Personhood Ruling = Impossible”

SCOTUS making 14th Amendment ruling that confers fetal personhood shouldn’t be dismissed as an
unlikely slippery sploe.
Fleming & Roth ‘22
Katherine Fleming served as lead author. At the time of the writing, Katherine Fleming was a legal intern at the National Advocates for Pregnant
Women. This Issue Brief is co-credited to Emma Roth. Emma Roth, JD, is a civil rights attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Prior
to joining National Advocates for Pregnant Women, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ronnie Abrams of the United States District Court
for the Southern District of New York. She also worked as an Equal Justice Works fellow for the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where she brought
impact litigation to advance the rights of women and girls in courts across the country. “When Fetuses Gain Personhood: Understanding the Impact
on IVF, Contraception, Medical Treatment, Criminal Law, Child Support, and Beyond“ - National Advocates for Pregnant Women Issue Brief - August
17, 2022 - #E&F - https://www.nationaladvocatesforpregnantwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fetal-Personhood-Issue-8.17.22.pdf

After initial stumbling blocks, the fetal personhood movement has gained alarming steam.1 The idea of a fetus as a
legal person has gone from a fringe idea, for which “political will” did not exist, to the ascendant framework of anti-
abortion states.2 This fringe theory now has the ear (consideration) of the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Alito’s
majority opinion in Dobbs laying breadcrumbs for a fetal right to life under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and
Fourteenth Amendments.3

As ascendant as the concept of fetal personhood has become, we have yet to reckon with what it really will, or could,
mean. Anti-abortion activists may conveniently “ignore the full consequences of granting fertilized eggs constitutional
rights” but, as Lynn M. Paltrow warned, we do so at our peril.4 To grapple with the full range of radical implications is to
recognize at the same time the absurdity and the danger. Fetal personhood and pregnant people’s personhood cannot
coexist: fetal personhood “fundamentally change[s] the legal rights and status of all pregnant women” and forces them
to “forfeit” their own personhood once fetal persons have taken up residence inside their bodies.5 The words of an anti-
abortion voter capture exactly this dynamic: “I understand women saying, ‘I need to control my own body,’ but once you
have another body in there, that’s their body.”6 The pregnant person’s body is no longer her own.

As the dissenters in Dobbs lamented, the majority of the Supreme Court now “says that from the very moment of
fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of” – women have been consigned to “second-class citizenship.”7 The
majority opinion in Dobbs cites the Mississippi legislature’s findings that the fetus has a heartbeat, hair, fingernails, and
toenails.8 Pregnant persons, too, have heartbeats, hair, fingernails, toenails; as Irin Carmon put it, “I, Too, Have a Human
Form.”9 Yet their personhood is robbed from them, debased as the personhood of fetuses is elevated. Personhood is a
legal concept, not a sociological one; one can believe that fetuses have moral value without conceding that they
should be equal to, or take precedence over, pregnant people under the law.

Now that the Pandora’s box of fetal personhood has been opened, and the Supreme Court has sown the seeds for a
constitutional right to life for fetuses, it is time to reckon with the full ramifications of fetal legal personhood. Fetal
personhood promoters or skeptics alike might claim these possibilities are far-fetched law school hypotheticals, an
absurd faux-Pandora’s Box or slippery slope,10 but if the present reality of pregnancy criminalization and abortion
restrictions shows anything, it is that seemingly far-fetched possibilities too easily become reality. Many would scoff at
the idea that a pregnant person could be criminalized for falling down the stairs,11 getting shot in the stomach,12 or
taking prescription medication.13 Yet those are all real cases. We should take all potential implications seriously,
recognizing possible future ramifications while also acknowledging the bitter past and present of policing and
criminalization of pregnancy. As Professor Lani Guinier wrote, “the distress of the racially marginalized is the ‘first sign
of a danger that threatens us all.’”14 And, as Professor Aziza Ahmed expressed, “[i]f we pay attention to those whose
lives have already been destroyed by an inability to access abortion, we can see our collective future and the depths the
challenges to come.”15

It's dangerous to presume SCOTUS would never take up the case.

Cruz ‘22
Caitlin Cruz - Senior Reporter covering abortion and politics at Jezebel - Anti-Abortion Activists Formally Ask Supreme Court to Consider Fetal
Personhood – Jezebel – Sept 7th - #E&F – modified for language that may offend - https://jezebel.com/anti-abortion-activists-formally-ask-supreme-
court-to-c-1849505290
The petitioners have a comically simple way of looking at (considering) the law. The Fourteenth Amendment uses the
phrase “any person,” but “has no textual definition....And it neither includes not excludes unborn human beings
specifically.” They want the court to rule on “whether unborn human beings will categorically be denied access to the
courts to challenge an abortion law,” without demanding the court wrestle with question of when life begins.

Only four justices need to say yes for a case to be argued before the Supreme Court. While Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s
Health Organization brought utter havoc upon our country, it did avoid questions of fetal personhood. “Petitioners’ case
presents the opportunity for this Court to meet that inevitable question head on,” the filing reads.

Since the justices dropped their cataclysmic abortion decision in June and peaced out for the summer, the country has
be thrust into a world of their making. A mere five people said abortion did not have constitutional protection, so fetal
personhood is the next logical step for a movement hellbent on keeping abortion illegal and inaccessible and women
subjugated.

If you grant a fetus the right to bring a lawsuit, the right to constitutional protections, you can legally require a number
of horrifying things. You can call a miscarriage murder or least negligent homicide. Sure, that pregnant up in Dallas could
drive in the HOV lane and not get a ticket. Haha! That same person could lose control of their right to make basic
decisions about their lives at the hands of the fetuses’ fathers.

While there
is no way to know if the court will take the case ( grant cert for the nerds reading this ), it’s not impossible:
Only four of the nine need to agree to put a case on the highest court’s docket . The court has shown complete
contempt for pregnancy, pregnant patients, and the people who wish to never be pregnant, let alone parent. While this suit might feel unlikely,
I worry it’s only the first draft.

2NC---AT: Thumper---T/L

Thumpers must be post-June. While Dobbs was a 10th Amendment holding – it’s now opened
distinct legal avenues for 14th Amendment Personhood appeals.
Kaveny ‘22
M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, with appointments in both the Department of Theology and Law
School. “Dobbs and Fetal Personhood” – Religion & Politics: A Project of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington
University in St. Louis - July 19, 2022 - #E&F - https://religionandpolitics.org/2022/07/19/dobbs-and-fetal-personhood/

The pro-life movement has long vilified Justice Harry Blackmun, whose majority opinion in Roe v. Wade struck down
laws prohibiting or restricting abortion in many states and created a broad, constitutionally protected right to abortion.
The most egregious part of the opinion, in the perspective of pro-life activists and citizens, is its flat denial of the
personhood of the unborn . After surveying the history of abortion law in the past two centuries, Blackmun concluded
that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Yet, at the same time that pro-life activists harshly condemned these words in the opinion, they took as gospel truth
Blackmun’s immediately preceding claim: “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the [Roe’s] case, of course,
collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”
Dobbs v. Jackson has overturned Roe (as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which modified Roe’s constitutional basis
and test), declaring that there is no constitutional right to abortion. But what does it say about the status of unborn
life? It is n ot entirely clear. Writing for the majority in Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito states that “our decision is not based
on any view about when a State should regard prenatal life as having rights or legally cognizable interests.” So, after
Dobbs, the fetus does not seem to be a person under the Constitution. But it is not not a person, either . It
exists in a liminal state , capable of being construed as a person or as a non-person , depending on the
perspective of the government of each of the fifty states.

Thumper is legally backwards – court ruled for the neg

msu is green

2AC Jacob Turner 19. MA, Law, Oxford; LLM, International Law and Legal Studies, Harvard Law; Barrister, Fountain
Court Chambers; not John. “Responsibility for AI.” Chapter 3 in Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave
MacMillan. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96235-1

In April 2018, despite the parties having settled out of court, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit chose to rule
on the matter nonetheless and concluded that the relevant Copyright Act made no provision for animals to sue. There
the story ended for Naruto’s selfie rights claim . Interestingly, the Court of Appeals left open the possibility of animals
“asserting” constitutional rights in other contexts , noting that animals still had constitutional standing to bring claims
in a Federal Court, following a precedent set in a previous case involving dolphins and whales.152

AT: Intrinsicness

2NC---Link---Animals

Animal rights litigation will be coopted by anti-abortion activists.

Kathie Jenni 94, Department of Philosophy, University of Redlands, “Dilemmas in Social Philosophy: Abortion and
Animal Rights,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 20, no. 1, Florida State University Department of Philosophy, 1994, pp.
59–83

Many people find themselves embracing both animal rights and feminism as social causes. Animal rights proponents
increasingly seek the support of feminists, noting connections between the exploitation of women and animals, and
ecofeminists have ex tended their concerns to embrace not just women's equality, but the welfare of nonhuman
animals and the natural environment. Concern to protect groups that are vulnerable and exploited makes feminism and
animal rights activism seem natural partners, and the advantages of pooling resources make a joining of these move
ments seem tactically wise.

But feminism in its most popular forms and consistent concern for all sentient beings do not comfortably coexist . It
has become something like orthodoxy for feminists to embrace a thoroughgoing pro-choice stance on the abortion
issue: to support unrestricted access to abortion. At the same time, animal rights philosophy has undercut the position
that only full-fledged persons deserve moral consideration , urging that we give the interests of sentient nonpersons
due weight in moral decision-making.

The problem is that fetuses attain a rudimentary sentience sometime during the second trimester of development.
Thus even if fetuses are not persons, serious moral problems face seekers of responsible abortion policy . If the fetus
is sentient , late abortions may harm morally considerable beings, and thus may not belong to the realm of private,
discretionary choice. If law should prohibit the infliction of pain and death on animals except for very serious reasons,
it ought to prohibit abortion of sentient fetuses except for very serious reasons, or so it seems plausible to argue. Thus
a liberal abortion policy , considered by many feminists an essential element in women's liberation, appears at odds
with animal rights defenders' desire to extend legal protection to sentient beings who cannot speak on their own
behalf.

Personhood measures create legal pressure on the judiciary to expand personhood to fetuses.
Willick 83 (Marshal S. Willick - Attorney at Law Nevada Supreme Court staff Carson City, Nevada - “ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE: Some Legal Approaches and Implications” - THE AI MAGAZINE Summer 1983 – modified for language that
may offend – continues to footnote #35 – not text omitted - #E&F -
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/392/328.)

The denial of the legal status of "persons" to fetuses by the Supreme Court 35 stirred a social and political struggle
which in many regards is still escalating 36. (continues to footnote 35) Roe v Wade , 93 S. Ct. 705 (1973). The Court
simply stated that "'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment , does not include the unborn." Id. p. 729.

The Court had reasoned that personhood, for constitutional protection , depended upon a finding of " life ." Texas,
seeking to uphold state restrictions on abortion, maintained that human life began at conception, and that
constitutional guarantees attached at that time. The Court refused to resolve the question of when life begins, stating:

When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any
consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the
answer.37

The Court then examined in detail the history of medical, philosophical, theological and legal definitions of life, but
decided the case, finally, on other grounds.

Proponents of the various stands on abortion today perceive the gist of the conflict in different ways. Some view
abortion decisions as strictly moral judgments which are reflective of the nation's moral fabric.38 Others see abortion as
a purely religious question.39 Still others maintain that regulation of abortion, presumptively based on a resolution of
when life begins, is in reality a ruse to hide economic discrimination against women.40

One commentator dismissed the various labels attributed to abortion decisions as merely semantic. In examining the
legal struggle over abortion, he said: "[I]n America,... moral issues become legal issues, and legal issues become
constitutional issues What is right must be legal, and what is wrong must be unconstitutional" .41

Returning to the situation posited above, where a computer has gained access to a court and is resisting a claim of
ownership, a human party- opponent might well argue that the abortion decisions should be dispositive of the case.
Alleging that a finding of life is a necessary precondition to the existence of a legal interest, the human could move
for dismissal of the suit based on the lack of proper parties.42
The court might well be taken aback by an assertion that the law was denying protections to individuals that would, if
allowed, become recognized human persons, while it protected individuals that could never be human. The contrast is
between a biological individual that would at some point be considered a human being (though at the critical time
exhibiting no intelligent behavior) and a mechanical individual that would never be human (though at the critical time
exhibiting considerable intelligent behavior). The abortion decisions, however, were ultimately decided on grounds
other than "definition-of-life'' language. Further, the decisions were very much concerned with human life, and did not
even consider any alternatives.

The abortion decisions could be read as establishing a focus on development of the individual; somewhere along an
individual's linear course of development, a line can be crossed between the potential for personality and its actuality.
For fetuses, the inquiry relates to given levels of physical development. In the case above, however, the court would
have to determine the computer's knowledge of the world and whether that knowledge, in light of its structure as a
machine, entitled it to legal recognition. The court might well decline jurisdiction (and thus decide the case) to avoid
answering such questions. The court would thus be spared the necessity of deciding whether computers are "aware" of
their surroundings or "understand" concepts, freeing it from an inherently philosophical task that could prove (as in Roe
v. Wade to be beyond the ability of the judiciary "at this point in the development of man's knowledge".43

If computers are ever nonetheless viewed (considered) as individuals capable of attaining personality, the courts could
be caught up in just such a task. Pressure will then be upon the legislature (as it is now concerning the abortion issue)
to determine the necessary minimum requirements for legal recognition. Standards could b2e found in the satisfaction
of some test of reasoning or by comparison with a model combination of hardware and software. The potential
problems of enforcing such a scheme, however, would be staggering.

Legal systems “link” juridical rights of non-human animals with those of fetuses. The Aff secures
pro-life jurisprudential victories.
Power ‘16
Nicole Power is a third-year student at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University - THE PROBLEM OF FALSE COMPARIONS: ANIMAL
WELFARE DISCOURSE AND THE ANTI-CHOICE MOVEMENT - Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies vol 25 (2016) - #E&F – modified for language that
may offend - https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1322&context=djls

Advocacy for the protection of animal welfare and women’s right to reproductive choice have little, if anything, in
common. It is productive, then, to question the recurring association of these unrelated ethical issues. If one feels
compassion for the plight of the nonhuman animal, the argument goes, then it is morally inconsistent to neglect the
fetus. An understanding of the incongruous political contexts at play between abortion and animal welfare effectively
repudiates this argument, but a more important question must be answered: why is this strange argument so

pervasive? In brief, it is the uniform legal marginalization of women and animals that animates this false
comparison, which is instructively analyzed through the theoretical lens of ecofeminism. The leading Canadian
judgments of R v Morgentaler and R v Ménard exemplify the socio-legal contours of ‘otherness’ outside the locus of
patriarchal dominance. This renders a broadly transferable framework of oppression at the hands of the law; examining
jurisprudential examples of displacement of agency, fragmentation of the self, and instrumental objectification, in both
contexts, provides a useful starting point in a consideration of the broad intersections between the legal treatment of
women and animals.

The issues of abortion and the exploitation of nonhuman animals have little in common, but share a pronounced
ability to provoke heated, partisan debate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it follows that the two are often linked.
Critics who oppose a woman’s right to reproductive choice view (consider) the animal welfare stance (perspective) as
a useful tool; if one cares about animal subjects, the argument goes, then perhaps this moral consideration extends to
the fetus. While this literature ignores important differences and seeks to erode female bodily autonomy, it also
instructively demonstrates the law’s culpability in treating disadvantaged groups in a way that masks their distinct
identities. A nuanced analysis of the law surrounding women’s reproductive freedom and animal welfare reveals the
dominant patriarchal perspective from which the law proceeds. As a necessary extension, this discussion puts the other
—those outside the privileged perspective—into stark relief.

The notion that both women and nonhuman animals reside in this periphery is intuitive given the patriarchal character
of our social and legal fabric; however, a careful consideration of the values embodied in these controversial areas of
jurisprudence should take nothing for granted. While the law aims to homogenize these groups, it is essential to both
foreground their differences and understand the legal workings of uniform ‘otherness.’ Although arguments that link the
issues of abortion and animal welfare are generally unpersuasive, they are particularly instructive regarding the
patriarchal oppressive impulse.

Simply put, the body of criticism advocating for moral consistency—that is, parallel ethical concern for both fetuses
and nonhuman animals—is unconcerned with the animal welfare movement. Instead, pro-animal arguments are
misappropriated and misapplied in an effort to disguise the central role of the pregnant woman in the abortion
debate. Approaching the issue through the critical lens of ecofeminism elucidates the mutually informing nature of
patriarchal domination directed at women and nonhuman animals. This theoretical framework speaks from the margins
of the legal system and underscores instances where subjugation intersects; it is therefore a particularly useful tool for
understanding the jurisprudential implications of likening antiabortion and pro-animal stances (perspectives).

2. Pressure---granting non-human animals personhood status creates social pressure to extend

rights to fetuses---that’s Willick AND…
---also at: corporate personhood thumper

Berg 7 (Jessica Berg, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine.
B.A., Cornell University, 1990; J.D., 1994, Cornell University – from the article: "Of Elephants And Embryos: A Proposed
Framework For Legal Personhood” – part of the Fordham Project - “The Law, Science, and Ethics Behind the Nonhuman
Rights Project and Its Struggle to Achieve Fundamental Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals” – Fordham’s Natural Law
Colloquium, Fall 2015 Lecture – originally published in The Hastings Law Journal in December of 2007. Re-presented
October 8th, 2015 - #E&F – modified for language that may offend -
https://www.fordham.edu/download/downloads/id/3307/natural_law_colloquium_fall_2015_cle_materials.pdf)

The notion of practical necessity is drawn from early articulations of corporate personality theory-fictional entity
theory and real entity theory -that were based not on suppositions about the moral character of corporations, but on
the need to create an entity to which the law could apply. Fictional entity theory states that corporations are
completely creatures of law. 67 Real entity theory, by contrast, acknowledges that there is an actual entity, which is
termed the "corporation." ' Both the fictional entity theory and the real entity theory are compatible with broad
discretion on the part of states in determining what rights to accord. But although the theories function descriptively,
they provide no basis for understanding whether and when a particular entity should be considered a juridical person.
Moreover, instead of articulating a basis," the judicial cases using the theories rely on circular analysis, asserting that
corporations have a particular legal right because they are juridical persons.7 ' Explaining this lack of normative
reasoning, John Dewey asserted that the term "person" in law might merely be "a synonym for a right-and-duty-
bearing unit ."72 The law must have an object upon which to act and that object must be a "person. 7 3 Thus, Dewey
argued, the development of the term "corporate personality" and the accompanying theories are a historical
anomaly.74 Dewey may be correct in his analysis of the historical development of corporate personality theory; I will
take no stand (position) on this debate. But unlike corporations, the categories of embryos, fetuses, non-human
animals, and machines with a rtificial i ntelligence are clearly not "fictional" entities . The potential application of
juridical personhood to these entities makes it necessary to reconsider the possibility of a normative justification for
juridical personhood based on social interests.75 On the other hand, these new entities may not be actors functioning
in the legal or social marketplace, so there may be less basis for categorizing them as juridical persons on this rationale
alone.

AT: LP is Case-By-Case

US key to global life sciences

US key to global life sciences – innovation can’t successfully shift to another nation.
McClure - July 6th - ‘22
Olivia McClure is a staff writer for Built In. She previously covered professional development and tech industry trends for BuiltIn.com. She holds a
bachelor of arts in English and multimedia journalism from Loyola University Chicago. . “22 Biotech Companies Bolstering Life Sciences” – Built In -
Jul 06, 2022 - #E&F - https://builtin.com/biotech/biotech-companies

These top biotech companies are impacting medical research and drug discovery .

While biotech has long been a vital component of the global tech market, this pivotal sector has seemingly reached
new heights over the past decade. And although organizations around the world have tried to rule the life sciences
space, the United States remains the undisputed biotech leader.

According to reports, the nation’s life sciences sector alone generates over $112 billion in revenue. In light of biotech’s
mounting economic impact, it’s no surprise that tech hubs across the country are witnessing a surge in life sciences
companies, bolstering the nation’s status as a biotech epicenter.

A-to “Alts to Embryonic Stem Cells solve”

Embryonic Stem Cell research is key – alternatives fail.

Rugnetta ‘9
et al; Michael J. Rugnetta – who, at the time of the writing, was a Fellows Assistant, Center for American Progress. Since then Rugnetta has gone on
to serve as The Deputy Attorney General, Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General – “A Life Sciences Crucible” - Center for American Progress
Reports - January 2009 - #E&F - http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2009/01/pdf/stem_cells.pdf?
_ga=2.175193830.535417375.1662788940-1373684941.1662788940

The scientific case for human embryonic stem cell research

Opponents of human embryonic stem cell research often champion human adult stem cells or umbilical cord blood
stem cells as suitable alternatives.3 They also consider the recent creation of so-called induced pluripotent stem cells,
or iPS cells (see glossary on page 2 and the box on different types of stem cells on page 23 for more details), as a
vindication of President Bush’s restrictive embryonic stem cell research policy.4 These iPS cells are created by using
viruses that insert genes into human somatic (body) cells to make them pluripotent, or capable of becoming any one of
the 200-plus different types of human cells. Refinements of this technology may someday eliminate the need for human
eggs and/ or embryos in research. Indeed, there have been recent findings that demonstrate the potential of iPS cells for
curing disease.

Importantly, though, these medical breakthroughs will not come about without research on human embryonic stem
cells, just as developments to date in iPS cell research would not have come about without research on human
embryonic stem cells. Indeed, in July 2008 the New York State Stem Cell Foundation reported that its chief scientific
officer, Kevin Eggan, produced adult stem cell lines from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Yet Eggan said he will still
continue his work on human embryonic stem cell research and so-called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (see glossary on
page 2 for details into this line of stem cell research). “It’s essential to note that we couldn’t possibly be where we are
now without first doing extensive work with human embryonic stem cells,” he explained. “It will be essential to continue
to do work with embryonic stem cells as they remain the stem cell gold standard.”5

As Eggan observes, embryonic stem cells are the “gold standard.” All cells brought forth as alternatives must be
measured against them. Moreover, any alternative stem cells cannot just be generally similar to embryonic stem cells—
they must be specifically similar for each therapy for which they may be used. Thus some adult stem cells or iPS cells
may be useful because they are less likely to be rejected by patients’ immune systems, but human embryonic stem cells
may be useful because of their ability to differentiate into all 200 different types of human cells. Therefore, the various
advantages of these various cells must all be studied so that they can be brought together to create the best therapies.
No one kind of cell can do everything and that is why all avenues of stem cell research must be pursued.

It is still too early to tell what kind of stem cells will be most useful for therapeutic purposes. In fact, it is very likely that
different kinds of cells will be used for different therapies using different strategies. Stem cellbased therapies may not
take the form of actual human embryonic stem cell transplants, where healthy embryonic stem cells are differentiated
into body cells used directly to repair the patient’s diseased or damaged tissues—but it is clear that embryonic stem cells
are needed as a research tool in order for some form of cell-reprogramming therapies to materialize. Australian
embryologist and stem cell biologist Alan Trounson, for example, argues that the embryonic stem cells of patients with
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis all need to be studied so that we can find out how
these diseases develop .6

The ultimate goal is to develop a guidebook that will tell us exactly how each gene or combination of genes contributes
to the development of a unique individual. This will greatly enhance our understanding of basic genetics and possibly
allow scientists to develop drugs that can prevent the diseases from developing in the first place. The hope is that
human embryonic stem cells can be differentiated into specific cell types so that scientists can quickly measure whether
a drug has a desired effect. This would make the drug development and clinical trial process much safer and more
efficient. That’s why it is vital that research is carried out using all types of stem cells , Scientists still are not certain
which of these cells possess the right kinds of genetic, developmental, or molecular properties to be useful for the above
purposes.7

Perhaps the most basic argument to be made in support of human embryonic stem cell research, however, is that all
cells in the human body develop from the embryo. By studying embryonic stem cells, scientists may be able to gain
basic knowledge about how to develop better cells to help the sick. Nevertheless, because iPS cells may turn out to
have many of the same risks and benefits as embryonic stem cells, we intend all the recommendations in this paper to
include research on iPS cells and all pluripotent cells regardless of their source.
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: NU

1NC---Fetal Personhood DA

Expanding personhood to nonhuman entities spills over to fetal personhood.

Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Although I have focused primarily on embryos and fetuses thus far, the framework suggested here may be applicable
to other entities . The idea that we might exclude from legal status an entity that meets all the attribute requirements
for equal moral status with currently recognized persons, but that is not genetically human, raises the question of why
genetic humanness matters.2' It seems inconsistent to argue for the extension of legal protection to a non-sentient
multi-celled human organism in the beginning stages of development (i.e., an embryo ) and withhold such protections
from fully developed sentient , and perhaps even rational , non-human animals .'" If genetics is the sole basis for legal
personhood, there must be some explanation as to why this characteristic is so important.28 Thus far no one has
provided a satisfactory argument in this respect.'29

Apart from concerns about consistency and fairness, withholding legal personhood protections from an entity that
clearly meets all criteria for moral personhood is not a priori improper, as long as the interests of the entity in question
are respected . The danger , of course, is that society has tried in the past to limit the legal rights of entities that clearly
met all requirements for moral personhood-e.g., women and slaves-and the results were highly problematic, not only
because violations of moral rights occurred, but because the exclusion of such entities from the system of legal
protection per se undermined moral rights. In other words, at some point the moral and legal rights may be so
intertwined that it is impossible to respect moral rights without also granting legal rights . But the situations of women
and slaves may be unique in that they are groups that are both human and meet the moral requirements for
personhood (e.g., they shared all characteristics/capacities with other fully recognized legal persons, except sex or skin
color).'30 By contrast, restrictions on the legal status of entities that fail one or the other attributes (e.g., non-human
animals) may not prevent recognition of their moral rights. 131

Part of the difficulty in accepting legal status based on moral claims of non-human entities may stem from a mistaken
insistence on " all-or-nothing " designations. Categorically determining what entities lack any moral status, such as a
rock, is fairly simple. But most claims of moral status map along a continuum . Using such an approach, many animals
would be granted moral status based on interests , but their placement on the moral hierarchy may be lower than
that of human persons."' 3 Legal status might follow this hierarchy. For example, some authors assert that great apes
and dolphins should be considered legal persons based on their mental and emotional similarities to human beings .
33 Perhaps we should develop a system of lesser legal status for non-human animals .' " The fact that the law as it is
currently written does not include nonhuman animals does not mean that it could not be altered to recognize the rights
of entities with varying moral status.'35 Rather than do so by creating new categories , I argue that is what could be
done with the concept of "juridical personhood."

There are good reasons to consider whether sentient animals should be given juridical personhood protections . These
may not be equivalent for all sentient creatures, but, as with developing human fetuses , may vary depending on the
interests at stake .'3 6 Thus far no state has chosen to provide any legal rights directly to animals; animal welfare laws
protect the interests of natural persons in preventing harm to animals. This , like fetal juridical personhood , is an area
ripe for state experimentation . If animals are to be considered legal persons with specific rights based on their own
interests, the protections should reflect and be commensurate with those interests.
It is less appropriate to grant legal status to non-human animals based on concerns about the effect on other persons of
withholding such legal status. There is little evidence, for example, that failing to recognize animals as juridical persons,
or failing to give them particular rights, harms the exercise of those rights for human persons. The closest argument to
this, sometimes used to justify animal welfare laws, is that cruelty to animals is linked (or may lead to) cruelty to
humans. Even if this is true, this may not justify granting juridical personhood to animals, but merely laws designed to
prevent cruelty to animals. In such a case, the lack of legal recognition would not negate the entity's moral status, and
the absence of legal obligations would not imply the absence of moral obligations.'3 7 Thus we may have a moral
obligation not to be cruel to animals, whether or not we have a law against such cruelty.

Additionally, should scientists succeed in creating sentient machines ,' 38 our society will have to consider whether
those machines may also lay claim to legal personhood protections.'39 Here, both justifications for juridical
personhood function-some machines may have interests sufficient for legal status, others may be so human-like in form
that excluding them from personhood status will harm the interests of current humans. Like the Replicants in Philip K.
Dick's novel-turnedmovie, Blade Runner,'4 ° the creation of such entities will challenge our conventional notions of
what it means to be a person , and our recognition of what legal rights should follow . Perhaps the creation of such
entities will force greater attention to the question of legal personhood status, since the discussion in the context of
embryos and fetuses is marred by the strong feelings underlying the protracted abortion debate.

The Court doesn’t take fetal personhood cases now---but, the plan sets precedent for expanding
personhood.
Kelsey Reichmann 22, reporter covering the Supreme Court and politics for Courthouse News Service, 9-8-22, “With
Roe out the door, the next big abortion battle is already on the Supreme Court steps,” Courthouse News Service,
https://www.courthousenews.com/with-roe-out-the-door-the-next-big-abortion-battle-is-already-on-the-supreme-
court-steps/

WASHINGTON (CN) — When the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the right to abortion did not
exist in the Constitution, they opened the door to questions about what rights do — or rather, in the case of a new
petition before the court, whom they apply to.

Catholics for Life and two pregnant people filing on behalf of their fetuses are asking the court to reevaluate who, in
light of the justices’ June ruling, is covered under the 14th Amendment. Their petition asks if fetuses are entitled to due
process and equal protection rights in the Constitution.

“As this Court held in Dobbs, abortion laws are different from all others,” Diane Messere Magee, an attorney from the
Law Offices of Diane Messere Magee, wrote in the petition. “Do unborn human beings , at any gestational age, have any
rights under the United States Constitution ? Or, has Dobbs relegated all unborn human beings to the status of
persona non grata in the eyes of the United States Constitution — below corporations and other fictitious entities?
No state court or legislature can answer this question. Only this Court can — as the final arbiter of what the United
States Constitution means .”

This is the next battleground in the anti-abortion movement : the recognition of fetal personhood . If fetuses are
granted personhood status, then they are entitled to constitutional rights . The court’s recognition of fetal
personhood rights would prevent even abortion-friendly states from protecting reproductive rights .

“It is not surprising that anti-abortion advocates would argue that the Dobbs decision be stretched to recognize the
idea of ‘fetal personhood,’” said Katherine Franke, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality
Law at Columbia University. “Overruling Roe v. Wade was never the end game for many of these advocates, so it was
just a matter of time before a case making this argument made its way to the Supreme Court .”

The concept of personhood is not new to the Supreme Court docket.

“What it means is that you're a holder of rights. … It's the facet of identity that signifies rights holding ,” Morgan
Marietta, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said in a phone call.

In fact, many big decisions over the 20th century were about personhood. Brown v. Board of Education — which found
that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional — recognized the personhood of nonwhites. United States v.
Virginia — which held that the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions were unconstitutional — recognized the
personhood rights of women.

By contrast, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 declared that fetuses did not have personhood rights. Dobbs changes
that.

“The most radical thing that was said in ‘73 was the court saying, absolutely, that a fetus is not a person, and Americans
just don't agree,” Marietta said. “They're just deeply divided. We've been fighting over this for 30 years, and the court
just changed it back to the states.”

What this new petition before the court signifies is the thought from some that the court should not have turned this
question back to the states and instead should answer it themselves.

The petition from Catholics for Life and the two pregnant people stems from a Rhode Island law — the Reproductive
Privacy Act — that codified Roe into law. The Rhode Island Supreme Court dismissed their challenge to the law for lack
of standing, finding that fetuses do not have the right to bring a case before the court.

After Dobbs, however, the challengers now see an opportunity to advance their case.

“This Court’s Dobbs holding, that ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,’ and its further overruling of Roe v. Wade
and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey surely signal rejection of this Court’s statement in Roe that, ‘[t]he
word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,’” the petition states. “The
Fourteenth Amendment has no textual definition of the term ‘any person’ therein. And it neither includes nor excludes
unborn human beings specifically.”

Court watchers and reproductive rights experts warned that these challenges would be coming after Dobbs . The
majority opinion — written by Justice Samuel Alito — gave credence to ideas of fetal personhood in a way the court
never had before.

“This is a deeply disputed fact in American culture and politics right now, and even the words that you use indicates
which of the possible facts you think are true,” Marietta said. “So in the decision, when they use the word ‘fetus,’ that
means something, and when they use ‘unborn child’ that means something else. Alito several times used ‘ unborn ’
which is the indication of personhood . So I do think that there's a lot of sympathy on the court for the fact of fetal
personhood.”

It is unclear if the court will take up this case . Four justices would have to agree to hear the case , and five would be
needed for a majority ruling . While the conservative majority was able to coalesce around a vote to overturn Roe ,
experts have doubts about expanding rights to fetuses .

“I doubt the court will take this case , as the justices, especially Chief Justice Roberts , will want the dust kicked up by
the Dobbs decision to settle before they take up another explosive abortion case ,” Franke said. “In fact, the argument
in this case is even more radical than the one made in Dobbs , as there is no precedent that supports the concept of
fetuses being ‘persons’ within the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.”

Pro-life policies cause global war.

Rachel Emond 19, Scoville Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, 9/23/2019, “How Anti-Choice
Policies Increase the Likelihood of War ,” https://inkstickmedia.com/how-anti-choice-policies-increase-the-likelihood-
of-war/
The political discourse surrounding abortion and health care has dominated election cycles and governance in the
United States for quite some time, but its impact doesn’t end at the border. In some fragile communities throughout the
world, the politicization of access to abortions in the United States could lead them into conflict .

Just three days after his inauguration in 2017, President Trump signed an extremely restrictive anti-choice policy that
will likely have wide-reaching negative impacts on global peace and security and US influence abroad .

This policy is actually an updated version of the “Mexico City Policy,” the Reagan-era act that prohibited non-
governmental organizations that provide abortion-related services from receiving any US federal funding related to
family planning and reproductive health.

The Trump Administration’s version of the Mexico City Policy has gone a step further. It prohibits foreign non-
governmental organizations that provide abortion-related services from receiving any form of US global health
assistance.

Beyond family planning and reproductive health, US global health assistance also includes funding for organizations
doing work related to maternal and child health; nutrition; HIV under the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
(PEPFAR); prevention and treatment of malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases; and hygiene programs. Many of the
organizations that receive US global health assistance also receive aid from non-US sources, and use those alternative
sources of funding to pay for reproductive health programs and abortion-related services. The Trump Administration’s
policy would take that option off the table, should an organization want to continue receiving US funds.

Opponents of the policy have dubbed it the “Global Gag Rule,” because of the way it prevents local-level health care
providers from not only providing abortions, but also from advocating for the legalization of abortion and educating
about abortion as an option. Originally reported by Casey Quackenbush in TIME, some critics say the policy “holds life-
saving aid hostage to ideology.”

Throughout the last 33 years, the Mexico City Policy has been a political football between Administrations: repealed by
Democrats and dutifully reinstated by Republicans. This process forces a domestically politicized issue onto the
international stage and in practice, this policy can actually have dangerous effects on US security.

IN COMMUNITIES IN WHICH CONFLICT ALREADY EXISTS OR TENSIONS ARE HIGH, INADEQUATE ACCESS TO HEALTH
CARE CAN EXACERBATE THE PREVAILING ISSUES.

In communities in which conflict already exists or tensions are high, inadequate access to health care can exacerbate the
prevailing issues. The reverse is also true. During an outbreak of violence, health issues, such as communicable disease
outbreaks and maternal mortality all rise.

According to the World Health Organization, “Investing in health is investing in peace. Health needs and contributes to
physical, psychological, social and economic security. Investing in health can reduce the risk of conflict as well as
mitigate its impact… Placing social services high on the political agenda helps maintain social stability , and reduce
militarization in situations where the risk of violent conflict is high .”

Recent publications by the United States Institute of Peace, the World Health Organization, and the journal on Health
Research Policy and Systems, have reported about the positive impact that effective health systems and equitable access
to those systems has on reducing drivers of fragility, such as conflict or overall mortality rates. That is why development
experts and global advocates for women’s rights believe that the newly expanded Mexico City Policy will affect the
world’s most vulnerable individuals in the world’s most fragile communities.

Advocates of this policy contend that the effects of it will only be felt by abortion providers. In reality, it isn’t quite so
simple.

In states such as Madagascar, Kenya, and Colombia, those living in rural communities often depend on non-
governmental organizations for their healthcare. These services are provided by clinics that provide a multitude of
services, including those related to sexual and reproductive health, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs, and malaria. Because the aid
they receive is intermingled, it can be difficult for these organizations to completely change their service model in order
to sign and comply with the US Mexico City Policy. When organizations either cannot or choose not to sign on to the
policy, clinics end up closing. This severely limits already at-risk individuals from access to even the most basic of health
needs.

Ironically, since the Mexico City Policy is cutting off access to family planning services, including contraception, it might
actually be increasing demand for abortions. Since its most recent implementation, the Mexico City Policy has already
resulted in tens of millions of dollars in funding cuts. At the same time, there has been a 40% increase in abortions in
some African countries. Looking ahead, some experts are estimating this policy could lead to 15,000 maternal deaths, 8
million unwanted pregnancies, and up to 26 million fewer women and families with access to contraception and family
planning services.

While the Mexico City Policy does not change the total amount of health-related aid appropriated by Congress, the
policy considerably weakens the ability that local health providers have to effectively serve their communities. The on-
again/off-again nature of the policy causes extreme instability among local healthcare providers, many of which are the
sole location for such services in a region. This instability leads to staff layoffs, higher transaction costs, and confusion
about access to care. It also prevents healthcare providers from conducting any long-term planning to better meet the
needs of a community.

No matter the intention of its supporters, the Mexico City Policy damages the health care infrastructure in the countries
that rely on American aid the most. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of conflict in these communities and severely
undermines American soft power.

Soft power efforts — like the promotion of freedom , democracy , and h uman rights — have been a hallmark of the US
foreign policy strategy for the last 70 years .

One of the primary ways the United States has historically strengthened national security, promoted US values abroad ,
and improved its global influence is through investments in global development, including public health. In Fiscal Year
2019, the US contributed $11 billion to global health funding through the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) — more than any other contributor in the world. That funding is now entangled with the Mexico City Policy,
directly undermining the goals of USAID. Further, in the developing world, the United States is now in constant
competition with growing Chinese influence . By enacting policies that negate the reach of US soft power , the Trump
Administration is actually weakening US security .

Fetal Personhood DA
2NC---Overview
Soft power solves every existential risk.
Devjani Roy 20, Senior Research Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, interviewing Joseph Nye,
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and former
Assistant Secretary of Defense, November 2020, “Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on the Geopolitical Impact of COVID-19, Morality
and the U.S. Presidency, and Soft Power in Foreign Policy,”
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/joseph-s-nye-jr-geopolitical-impact-covid-19-
morality-and-us

Looking forward, [President-Elect] Biden could take a cue from the post-1945 U.S. presidents whose successes I
describe. The U nited S tates could launch a massive COVID-19 aid program —a medical version of the Marshall Plan.
Instead of competing in propaganda, we could demonstrate the importance of power with, rather than over, others,
and set up bilateral and multilateral frameworks to enhance cooperation. We could realize that recurrent waves of
COVID-19 will affect poorer countries less able to cope and that such a developing-world reservoir will hurt everyone if it
spills back northward in a seasonal resurgence. Both for self-interested and humanitarian reasons, the United States
should lead the G-20 in generous contributions to a major new COVID-19 fund that is open to all countries. If Biden were
to choose such cooperative and soft-power-enhancing policies, something good may yet come out of the pandemic—a
geopolitical path to a better world.

GrowthPolicy: In what way(s) will COVID-19 reshape, or reposition, the United States’ place in the current world order
over the next fifty years? Second: What would be your recommendations for adjusting and adapting U.S. foreign policy
apropos of China given the long-term strategic impact of the pandemic on international relations? 

Joseph Nye: I hesitate to predict fifty years into the future. As I used to tell analysts when I chaired the National
Intelligence Council, there is no single future , and the longer the time horizon, the greater the number of confounding
variables and possible futures . Even a year ago, we did not foresee the effect that a pandemic would have on the 2020
election; yet without it, Trump might have been re-elected. And even though we can predict another pandemic, we
cannot predict its effects on world order. The Great Influenza of 1918-19 killed many more people than World War I ,
but the major political changes in the 1930s were caused by the war rather than the pandemic. But my guess today is
that this current pandemic will not change the geopolitics of 2030.

In 2030, COVID-19 will look just as unpleasant as the Great Influenza looked from 1930, but with similar limited long-
term geopolitical effects . Growing Chinese power , domestic populism and polarization in the West, and more
authoritarian regimes worldwide already existed, and the pandemic may have somewhat accentuated these trends.
While there is some setback to global supply chains in the name of security, some degree of economic globalization will
persist, and environmental globalization exemplified by climate change and pandemics will increase.

There will be a growing political awareness of the importance of environmental globalization , underpinned by a
grudging recognition that no country can solve such problems acting alone . We will see a “ cooperative rivalry ” where
we have to learn about power with other countries as well as power over others. The U.S. and China will manage to
cooperate on pandemics and climate change , even as they compete on other issues such as navigation restrictions in
the South or East China Sea . Friendship will be limited, but the rivalry can be managed . Some institutions will wither,
and still others will be invented. The United States will remain the largest power, but without the degree of influence it
had in the past.

China war outweighs---draws in everyone AND collapses the economy.

Robert Blackwill 21, Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, Lecturer in International Security at
Harvard, and Philip Zelikow, History Professor at the University of Virginia, Former Executive Director of 9/11
Commission, February 2021, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” Council Special Report
No. 90

The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should
preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president. It could be unlikely that a U.S.- China conflict would go nuclear
and Beijing has repeated its no first use doctrine, but there is little doubt that China wants to grow its arsenal of a few
hundred warheads and build a more sophisticated force that could employ hypersonic glide capabilities .189 Millions of
Americans could die in the first war in human history between two nuclear weapons states. A 2015 RAND Corporation
study of the effects of U.S.-China combat determined that estimating military losses would be “exceedingly difficult.”
World War II, however, was the last time the United States lost a major warship, and one sunk vessel could turn into the
deadliest U.S. military event since the Vietnam War.190

The outbreak of a great power war would likely produce a global recession , if not a depression . It would disrupt Asian
and international trade, sever major supply chains, and could collapse international financial systems.191 This would
produce deeply painful economic consequences for U.S. allies, who trade more with China than they do with the United
States. One study estimates that a single year of U.S.-China conflict could cause American GDP to decline by 5 to 10
percent.192

China could unleash cyberattacks on the United States. The New York Federal Reserve estimates that a major
cyberattack on the U.S. financial system could cause 2.5 times daily GDP in forgone payments, and a Lloyd’s of London
and Cambridge University study predicted that a hypothetical blackout affecting fifteen states could cause $243 billion to
$1 trillion in damages, as well as deaths resulting from disruption to health care, traffic, and industry.193

In 2013, hackers associated with the PLA reportedly tried to infiltrate companies that control U.S. critical infrastructure,
including Telvent which provides remote access and holds blueprints to North and South American oil and gas
pipelines.194 In 2019, researchers uncovered a suspected Chinese plot to access American utility companies.195
Additionally, in September 2020, a ransomware attack said to have originated in Russia hit U.S. hospitals during a
coronavirus surge and forced doctors to switch to pen and paper record keeping and postpone certain medical
procedures.196 The outbreak of U.S.-PRC conflict could see multiple cyber events hit U.S. society and its allies in rapid
succession.197

While Washington and Beijing were trading blows, Russia could threaten the Baltics , increase its presence in Ukraine,
or provide oil and weapon support to China.198 Iran would be unlikely to stand idle in the Middle East in such a crisis
given U.S. attention directed elsewhere . Another factor is the allied dimension. In matters ranging from technology
issues to criticism of China’s handling of Hong Kong, U.S. allies have sometimes been hesitant to support Washington
when American rhetoric and actions are deemed too provocative or come with high economic costs.199 France and
Germany refused to support the United States in the 2003 Gulf conflict. In a U.S.-China war, even Japan might not join
the battle given its domestic politics and constitutional constraints and the United States could well fight alone,
shattering its alliance system.

AT No Spillover
The extension of personhood to fetuses depends on assessing the “cases at the raw edges of human
existence”---the plan changes how to consider those cases by granting nonhuman entities juridical
personhood.
Alexis Dyschkant 15, Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, J.D., Illinois College of
Law, M.A. in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, B.A. in History and Philosophy, University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 2015, “LEGAL PERSONHOOD: HOW WE ARE GETTING IT WRONG,”
https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2015/5/Dyschkant.pdf

Unlike children, the question of whether or not fetuses should be considered legal persons has received a lot of
attention, in part because a declaration of fetuses as persons would challenge the constitutionality of abortion . In
Roe v. Wade, the Court emphasized the dramatic consequences of declaring a fetus to be a person . “[I]f this
suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then
be guaranteed specifically by the [ Fourteenth] Amendment .”39 The Court denied fetuses the status of legal persons.40

Important to the Court’s analysis is the fact that, as a practical matter, the use of the word “ person ” in the Fourteenth
Amendment generally only has postnatal application with no indication of any possible prenatal application.41 The
presumption seems to be that the rights and ininterests protected by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection
Clause just do not have practical application to a fetus. In conjunction with the fact that “person” is not constitutionally
defined, the Court refuses to attribute personhood to fetuses .
Interestingly for the purpose of this exposition, the debate between the Supreme Court and anti-abortion advocates
regarding whether to attribute personhood to fetuses directly tracks the question of fetal humanity. The Court
declines to attribute humanity to fetuses. All references in the Court’s decision to the fetuses’ humanity are qualified.
References include “the potentiality of human life,”42 “potential human life,” 43 and “potential future human life.”44 In
contrast, states which support including fetuses as persons also refer to the fetus as already human, sometimes at the
point of conception.45 The AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion, which seeks to reduce or end abortions generally,
claims that abortion is an “unwarrantable destruction of human life.”46 Anti-abortion states at the time widely had
adopted legislation declaring a fetus to be a human life.47

In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court held (reaffirming Roe) that “[b]efore viability,
the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial
obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.”48 The relevance of viability is that it helps establish
when the fetus becomes humanlike enough to trump the mother’s right to abort . Legal scholars advocating for a
theory of personhood that is modeled off of humanity would agree with this sort of line-drawing because basing the
person on the “ embodied human ” “draws on shared intuitions about who counts in our community of legal persons
and how we should take account of them.”49 Once a fetus is viable, it is not human like enough to be a legal person, but
it is human like enough to be “worthy of recognition.”50 The Court’s discussion of the relevance of viability in Roe
demonstrates the importance of belonging to humanity. It states that determinations of viability can be framed in terms
of when a “fetus became ‘formed’ or recognizably human, or in terms of when a ‘person’ came into being.”51

The disagreement about whether to extend personhood to fetuses rest, fundamentally, on how to handle cases at
“the raw edges of human existence .”52 This suggests that had fetuses been obviously human then personhood would
apply, or had fetuses been obviously nonhuman then personhood would not apply. The difficulty of establishing
personhood is why fetal personhood has received more attention than child personhood; children are obviously
humans and fetuses are not obviously humans.

A “romance with rights” causes spillover---there’s no basis to vest personhood in nonhuman

entities without doing the same for fetuses, since animals have zero potential to become human.
Richard L. Cupp 9, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, Winter 2009, “Moving Beyond
Animal Rights: A Legal/Contractualist Critique,” San Diego Law Review, Vol. 46, p. 27, advance-lexis-
com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/api/document?collection=analytical-materials&id=urn:contentItem:4W2F-XY50-
00CW-F0SF-00000-00&context=1516831

IV. Contractualist Personhood: The Centrality of Humanity to Rights

No general agreement exists on how rights should be precisely defined . 202Link to the text of the note Rights entail
complex moral, policy, societal, and cultural considerations, 203Link to the text of the note and both philosophers and
legal analysts have offered numerous conflicting and competing models seeking to explain or categorize rights. 204Link
to the text of the note As addressed above, use of rights language in legal discourse has blossomed since World War II.
Many legal thinkers seem smitten with the " romance of rights " in the afterglow of the civil rights movement's
important victories. 205Link to the text of the note This romance influences how rights are perceived and enhances
the role of emotion in arguments for and against expansion of rights . However, despite differences about what rights
are, scholars often agree that personhood is at their core . 206Link to the text of the note The United States
Constitution addresses "persons" and "citizens" as those subject to its protections. 207Link to the text of the note Thus,
no matter how it is defined, personhood is a central gateway issue in deciding whether to extend fundamental rights
to animals .

The rights status of human embryos provides a helpful illustration of personhood's centrality - and potential
malleability - in assignments of rights . In Davis v. Davis, 208Link to the text of the note the Tennessee Supreme Court
confronted this issue when divorcing spouses fought over custody of the couple's frozen embryos. The wife wished to
use the embryos for implantation in her own body or for donation to another couple. 209Link to the text of the note The
husband wished to have the embryos destroyed. 210Link to the text of the note Citing a report by the American Fertility
Society, the Davis court recognized that three major positions exist regarding the personhood status of embryos.
211Link to the text of the note Some ethicists [*65] view embryos as full human persons as soon as they have been
fertilized. 212Link to the text of the note Others view embryos as mere human tissue, and thus as a type of property.
213Link to the text of the note The third position balances the other two, holding that an embryo is not an actual
person but that it "deserves respect greater than that accorded to human tissue" due to "its potential to become a
person " and "its symbolic meaning for many people." 214Link to the text of the note

Davis endorsed the third position - that embryos are not persons with rights - but that they deserve special treatment
because of their potential to become persons. 215Link to the text of the note The difficult issues raised by Davis about
the ethical status of an embryo press the far reaches of personhood . However, the gulf between this issue on the edge
of personhood and efforts to assign personhood to animals is enormous. As with personhood for corporations and ships,
questions of personhood for embryos relate directly to humans and to humanity . Even under the narrowest possible
view of their status, embryos at the very least have the capacity to become human . Animals will never become
human and lack even the " symbolic meaning " of potential humanity .

Although embryos may be viewed as holding a status at the edges of personhood, courts have accepted personhood
status and at least some fundamental rights for postbirth children, even infant children not yet capable of autonomy.
216Link to the text of the note Again this illustrates the centrality of humanity and human interests in analyses of
personhood. Regardless of potential theoretical constructs on what constitutes a person, infants are incontrovertibly
human. Assignment of rights to mentally incapable adults also makes sense when humanity is recognized as the focus of
courts' assignment of personhood. 217Link to the text of the note Mentally incapable adults' lack of autonomy does not
make them nonhuman in the eyes of society or of society's courts, and thus they are assigned personhood and
fundamental rights.

[*66] Although philosophers and legal scholars have formulated several theories on the nature of rights, social contract
principles - which philosophers often refer to as "contractualism" 218Link to the text of the note - are particularly useful
in considering how courts consider rights in the trenches of litigation. Social contract theory also helps explain why
humanity and human interests are central to courts' decisions regarding when to assign rights. Although several variants
of social contract theory have been articulated, general reciprocity between rights and responsibilities is a basic tenet.
219Link to the text of the note Under this view, society generally extends rights in exchange for express or implied
agreement from its members to submit to social responsibilities . 220Link to the text of the note

Animals cannot submit to societal responsibilities . They lack moral agency and of course cannot be held accountable
for their actions . When an animal bites a human or another animal without provocation, we do not have the offending
animal arrested and put on trial. We view courts having done so in the Middle Ages with a sense of absurdity or dark
humor, perhaps with the feel of a Monty Python sketch. 221Link to the text of the note New Scientist derided assigning
rights to animals on this basis:

If animals have rights which protect them against humans , it is only logical that they should have rights that protect
them from each other . If a chimp kills another chimp in the wild, or a human, do we really want to hire a fleet of
lawyers? And if we extended honorary personhood to all animals, would the gazelle be entitled to rights against the
lion? 222Link to the text of the note
[*67] Because animals cannot be morally blameworthy, they also cannot be in and of themselves morally deserving of rights. However, this does not mean that humans are free to be cruel or negligent toward animals. 223Link to the text of the note Rather, the imperative for humans to be humane toward animals derives from
humans' moral agency. Unlike its treatment of animals, society treats humans as responsible for their conduct, including their conduct toward animals.

Immanuel Kant was one of the early contractualists to write about the rights status of animals. 224Link to the text of the note As a contractualist he did not favor assigning formal rights to animals, arguing that moral duties can only be owed to rational beings that can participate in the social contract. 225Link to the text of the note
However, Kant emphasized the importance to humanity of treating animals humanely. Although humans must take care to treat animals well, Kant found this obligation to be derived from human responsibilities. 226Link to the text of the note He believed that humans "have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not toward
them, but in regard to them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to persons." 227Link to the text of the note He wrote:

If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals,
for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. 228Link to the text of the note

[*68] The philosopher John Rawls was the most prominent champion of contractualism in recent times. 229Link to the text of the note He argued that the moral community includes only those who "are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the
principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree." 230Link to the text of the note Animals, he concluded, are not members of the moral community because they lack the "capacity for a sense of justice." 231Link to the text of the note However, like Kant, Rawls's view that animals are not part of the moral community did
not lead him to a disregard for their welfare. He insisted that "it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to [animals] … . Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil." 232Link to the text of the note
Evolutionary anthropologist Jonathan Marks elaborates on the importance of focusing on humans in seeking humane treatment, asserting that:

A concern for animal welfare must come out of a concern for human welfare. It must emerge from a concern for human rights, not supplant it. For once we begin to devalue human lives, we lose a standard by which to value any other kind of lives. And it just doesn't work the other way around. 233Link to the text of the note

Marks emphasizes the importance of protecting animals such as nonhuman primates. 234Link to the text of the note However, he cautions that humans must guard against allowing concern for animals to come at the expense of concern for human welfare. 235Link to the text of the note

In the early twentieth century, jurisprudence scholar Wesley Hohfeld formulated what has become "perhaps the most popular way of speaking about legal rights." 236Link to the text of the note He described legal relations in terms of opposites and correlatives and "believed that the term "right' should be restricted in use to
describe those things that correlate to duties… . Rights are simple and atomic; rights are claims based on duties." 237Link to the text of the note Courts have utilized the framework formulated by Hohfeld in analyzing legal terms. 238Link to the text of the note This formulation recognizes the significance of the social contract in
assigning rights: Rights generally have relevance in relation [*69] to duties or responsibilities. Philosopher L.W. Sumner recognized the relevance of Hohfeld's framework in animal rights issues, concluding that under the frequently cited approach, animals cannot have rights because they do not have duties or responsibilities.
239Link to the text of the note

Hohfeld's formulation of rights might be the most popular because it fits most closely with Western societies' intuitions and education about rights. Thomas Jefferson borrowed from contractualist John Locke in drafting the Declaration of Independence. 240Link to the text of the note Locke's conception of the social contract is that
citizens are entitled to "life, liberty and property." 241Link to the text of the note Jefferson merely substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in this theme at the core of our national identity. 242Link to the text of the note

School children in the United States are taught social contract theory as a basis for the ideals of the American Revolution. For example, one state articulates a teaching objective for eighth grade social studies students as being to "analyze the origin of the ideas behind the Revolutionary movement and the movement toward
independence; [for example], social contract, natural rights, English traditions." 243Link to the text of the note

As another of many potential examples, a textbook published by the United States government for use by immigrants who wished to be candidates for citizenship explained that in the book, "an effort is made to use concepts that the immigrant can relate to, such as the social contract and delegation of authority by the people as
supported by the Constitution, to help the student understand and appreciate representative government." 244Link to the text of the note Social contract ideals of rights mirroring responsibilities were an important intellectual underpinning in the formation of the United States, and our education system appropriately teaches
contractualist [*70] themes from the Revolutionary period such as "no taxation without representation" as a foundation of our national identity. The average American likely does not know the philosophical term contractualism, but that same average American has been taught social contract ideals as the very basis of democracy.
We are taught from a young age that just as government must give us representation to go along with taxation, it must give us rights that correlate with our societal responsibilities.

Richard Posner has downplayed the practical significance of academic philosophical concepts on the question of animal rights, 245Link to the text of the note and although law is connected to abstract philosophy at least at a theoretical level, he has a point. Posner calls Peter Singer - a champion of utilitarianism - one of his "stalking
horses" on the issue of rights. 246Link to the text of the note Under utilitarianism, behavior that creates the most utility should be encouraged. 247Link to the text of the note Posner applies this theoretical philosophy to a hypothetical involving an aggressive dog and a human infant. He asks us to consider a situation in which a dog
is about to attack an infant, and we can only stop the dog by inflicting severe pain on it. 248Link to the text of the note If the pain we need to inflict on the dog to stop it from harming the infant exceeded the infant's potential pain from the attack, Posner argues that a utilitarian approach treating animals' pain as equally important
to humans' pain would require allowing the infant to be attacked. 249Link to the text of the note He then notes that "any normal person (and not merely the infant's parents), including a philosopher when he is not self-consciously engaged in philosophizing, would say that it would be monstrous to spare the dog, even though to do
so would minimize the sum of pain in the world." 250Link to the text of the note Further:

[*71]

If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go … . Just as philosophers who have embraced skepticism about the existence of the external world, or hold
that science is just a "narrative" with no defensible claim to yield objective truth, do not put their money where their mouth is by refusing to jump out of the way of a truck bearing down on them, so philosophers who embrace weird ethical theories do not act on those theories even when they could do so without being punished.
There are exceptions, but we call them insane. 251Link to the text of the note

Similarly, most humans imbued with social contract principles from their earliest education about the nature of rights are unlikely to change their views based on abstract philosophical arguments. Steven Wise acknowledges the difficulty of changing strongly held societal views about the status of animals and argues that change
may take place slowly over time - "funeral by funeral" - as people gradually become more enlightened - from his perspective - regarding animals in successive generations. 252Link to the text of the note However, the significance of social contract principles in the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is a widely
accepted historical fact, and that will not change over time. Its role as the "principal justification" for American independence is "especially familiar." 253Link to the text of the note John Locke's writings "were a primary authority for the [*72] Colonists, and his social contract furnished the political theory for both the American
Revolution and the framing of the Constitution." 254Link to the text of the note

Thus, when philosophers or political theorists argue that other rights models are superior, they are swimming against a formidable tide in seeking widespread practical application of their views. At least in the United States, so long as children are taught and continue to believe that the ideals that led to the American Revolution are
to be cherished, they will likely retain a powerful attraction to social contract principles as a basis for rights throughout their lives. Whether the perception that rights are correlative to responsibilities is an inherent moral instinct or learned or some combination of instinct and learning, a key point is that the perception is widely
held. Abstract theory counts in law's evolution, but it does not count nearly as much as the facts on the ground. As constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone noted, judges typically build legal theory around results they feel are desirable, and not the other way around. 255Link to the text of the note

A. The "Argument from Marginal Cases": Addressing Rights for Infants and Mentally Incapable Adults Under Contractualism

As discussed above, some animal rights activists emphasize that rights are assigned to artificial entities , such as
corporations and ships , in arguing by analogy that intelligent animals should have rights . 256Link to the text of the
note However, analogizing rights assigned to human infants and to mentally incapable adults is even more popular
among animal rights proponents ; one writer calls it their "central argument." 257Link to the text of the note This
analogizing between infants or mentally incapable adults and intelligent animals in rights debates is sometimes termed
"the argument from marginal cases." 258Link to the text of the note Gary Francione describes the problem as a
challenge to those who would rely on contractualism to deny rights to animals:

[*73]

There are many human beings who are not able to exercise or respond to moral claims. Assuming that moral rights and
duties are properly viewed as arising from a hypothetical social contract - very significant assumption - there are plenty
of humans who lack the capacity to participate in such contractual arrangements … but these characteristics are wholly
irrelevant to whether a human should be treated as the resource of others. 259Link to the text of the note

The argument is that because infants and mentally incapable adults are not treated as property and are assigned limited
rights despite lacking moral agency, it is unfair to treat animals as property on the basis of their lacking moral agency.
The argument from marginal cases is at its strongest when the comparison is to particularly intelligent animals, such as
chimpanzees and bonobos. Such animals may have significantly more intelligence and communicative ability than
infants and many mentally incapable adults, and thus one might argue they are actually closer to moral agency than are
some humans.

Although the argument from marginal cases may be attractive on its surface, it is unpersuasive. Although arguments by
analogy are important and often appealing, they are also malleable and can be misleading - as demonstrated in the
efforts described above to argue by analogy that if nonliving corporations are assigned rights, then a fortiori living and
intelligent animals should be assigned rights. 260Link to the text of the note Analogizing between limited rights for
infants and mentally incapable adults and potential limited rights for animals is both problematic and dangerous.

First, the argument from marginal cases fails to account for the complexity of human lives and relationships. 261Link to
the text of the note When deciding how they should treat a human infant, people do not engage in an assessment of its
"practical autonomy" to determine whether it is deserving of moral rights and, one hopes, they never will. 262Link to
the text of the note Humans' motivation to protect human children may be, in part, instinctive. 263Link to the text of the
note To the extent that [*74] explanations for such instincts are even necessary, some are not difficult to articulate at a
basic level. In addition to sensing infants' vulnerability and need for protection, humans see hope in them. They are not
yet moral agents able to participate in the social contract, but they represent the future of humanity and of the social
contract. How they develop will determine what society will become. If they are denied moral rights and treated badly,
society will suffer.

This sentiment is demonstrated in how courts generally address family law cases and mandatory education cases. In
family law disputes over child custody, for example, courts focus on the best interests of the child rather than the
interests of the mother or the father. 264Link to the text of the note This is because the child's development is
important to society's welfare. 265Link to the text of the note Depending on how he or she is raised, the child might
develop a cure for cancer someday or - at the other extreme - might become a mass murderer. 266Link to the text of the
note Society has a vested interest in the child's future. The same may be said of mandatory education. Society
recognizes an important interest in having educated adult participants in the social contract , and thus it forcefully
asserts itself in requiring that children be educated. 267Link to the text of the note This essential connection between
human children and society's future powerfully distinguishes children from intelligent animals that will never become
members of the social contract .

One may not make this argument in the same way regarding many mentally incapable adults because many of them will
remain mentally incapable their entire lives and will never attain moral agency. Unlike infants, many such adults cannot
easily be seen as representing the social contract's future. However, they do represent its echo. In the practical world -
as contrasted with abstract philosophical hypotheses - humans [*75] recognize a sameness in mentally incapable adults
that they will never feel even with intelligent animals. 268Link to the text of the note Most people perceive mentally
incapable adults as human first, and mental incompetence is seen as an aspect of their humanity rather than as a
negation of it. Humans "who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to
human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community." 269Link to the text of the note Gary
Francione rejects such reasoning, asserting that "this argument … begs the question since the problem is how to
distinguish humans from other animals by some characteristic that may be shared by some animals but that is not
possessed by all humans." 270Link to the text of the note However, humans and their courts do not evaluate intelligence
in deciding whether to assign human dignity rights; they evaluate humanness. 271Link to the text of the note All of us
know we could become a mentally incapable adult; none of us might become a chimpanzee, and we cannot possibly
relate to a chimpanzee on the same level that we can relate to another human.

Further, and thankfully, courts do not have a mechanism for formally determining which mentally incapable adults have
absolutely no hope of future participation in the social contract. Many mentally incapable adults, such as those in a
temporary coma, will some day regain their mental competence and their moral agency. Additionally, we do not know
the future of medicine. Some mental conditions that may presently appear permanent might be cured during our
lifetimes. 272Link to the text of the note Although the hope of future moral agency for mentally incapable adults is
different from the more certain hope of future moral agency for children , it is still hope. Animals , in contrast, will
always be animals.

[*76] It is also important to note that the line between no moral agency and some moral agency in humans is fuzzy .
No clear boundaries exist between people who are minimally intelligent but morally responsible to some degree and
people who are nearly but not quite intelligent enough to be morally responsible to any degree . 273Link to the text of
the note Thus, seeking to divide humans on the basis of intelligence for purposes of determining whether dignity rights
should be assigned would be unworkable. In contrast, courts' current approach of assigning human dignity rights to all
humans because they are human - regardless of their intellectual competence - avoids the confusion and tragic
misjudgments that would be inherent in a case-by-case approach. 274Link to the text of the note

Finally, as addressed further in Part V, assigning rights to intelligent animals based on comparisons to mentally
incapable adults threatens the weakest and most vulnerable members of human society . 275Link to the text of the
note Even the phrase sometimes used to frame the debate - "arguments from marginal cases " 276Link to the text of
the note - highlights a challenge to human dignity . No human is marginal . As John Marks notes, "Singling out particular
classes of people in order to show how similar they are to apes is a troubling scientific strategy , not least of all when
the humans rhetorically invoked are the very ones whose rights are most conspicuously in jeopardy ." 277Link to the
text of the note Marks derides blurring the line between humans and apes as "an unscientific rhetorical device" that is
"morally problematic (in addition to being zoologically ridiculous)." 278Link to the text of the note Concluding that some
animals may be able to "earn" dignity rights if it is established that they are sufficiently intelligent implies that perhaps
some humans should lose their dignity rights if they [*77] are sufficiently unintelligent. "If [humanity] can be earned, of
course, it can also be lost; they are two sides of the same coin." 279Link to the text of the note If mere cognitive
performance were the standard, it is difficult to see why a bright adult chimpanzee would not have more rights than a
human infant or a mentally incapable adult. This would seem to be edgy territory even for an academic philosophical
theory; it should be given no opportunity for practical application in the real world of courts and law.

Yes spillover---personhood is a binary question, and fetuses do not fit in one or the other---the plan
clarifies that they should be persons.
Christine M. Korsgaard 13, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 2013,
“PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW,” Think, 12(34), pp. 25-32,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/personhood-animals-and-the-law/
E9F2FBA3B2F8ECF65A7C6BAD1DCD6D2A

The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of
‘ persons ’ and ‘ things ’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law . In the law, a ‘ person ’ is essentially the
subject of rights and obligations , while a thing may be owned as property . In ethics, a person is an object of respect,
to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative
value, and may be used as a means to some person’s ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us
with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to
the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category . For
various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus , a non-human animal , the
environment , or an object of great beauty, as a person , but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they
are to be valued only as means .

In the law, the bifurcation between persons and things or persons and property leaves non-human animals in an
especially awkward position. Animals, or at least many of them, are sentient beings with lives of their own and capacities
for enjoyment and suffering that seem to make some sort of claim on us. Some have very sophisticated cognitive
capacities, including some sense of self. But because animals are classified as property, efforts to secure them some
legal protections have been of mixed success and have introduced a certain level of incoherence into the laws. In the
face of this, some animal rights advocates have suggested that all cognitively sophisticated animals, or all animals
generally, ought to be re-categorized as legal persons .

But it may be argued that those who make this proposal are ignoring something important about the concept of a
person. It has generally been assumed that ‘personhood’, whatever it is, is, or is based on, an attribute that is
characteristic of human beings , and not of the other animals . In the philosophical tradition, the most common
candidate for the attribute that establishes ‘ personhood’ is rationality , but understood in a specific sense. Rationality is
sometimes loosely identified with the ability to choose intelligently between options or to solve problems by taking
thought, but those are attributes that human beings arguably share with many other animals. The more specific sense of
‘rationality’ refers to a normative capacity, a capacity to assess the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and to adjust
them accordingly. On the side of action, for instance, it is the capacity to ask whether something that would potentially
motivate you to perform a certain action is really a reason for doing that action – and then to be motivated to act in
accordance with the answer that you get. Rationality, in this sense, is normative self-government, the capacity to be
governed by thoughts about what you ought to do or to believe.

AT Constitution
Personhood spills over across contexts
Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Before discussing categories of legal personhood, it is worth considering whether there is such a thing as "personhood"
law in the first place.'" It could be that there are simply a number of different areas of law that define persons in
different ways depending on the purpose of the law , but no cohesive " law of persons ." The argument for this view
may be similar to ones that have taken issue with new categorizations of specialty areas of law, such as Internet law.
These arguments maintain that the issues arising out of technological developments break down into basic legal
areas such as contract , tort , or criminal law , and there is no unifying theme that justifies a special label." It is certainly
true that there is no express definition of " person " in the Constitution , nor has the Supreme Court proffered one."
Moreover, different state and federal statutes define "person" differently, depending on their goal.'3 Focusing our
attention on a personhood law as a whole , however, is a useful endeavor . It is likely to lead to greater clarity in a
variety of areas of law (e.g., corporate law , animal law ), as well as provide a framework under which we can consider
the application of current laws to new developments , such as artificial intelligence .'4 As a result, conducting an in-
depth evaluation of legal personhood is both necessary and useful .

AT Animals
There are no thumpers.
Phil Goldberg 21, office managing partner and co-chair of the public policy practice group at Shook Hardy & Bacon
LLP, 11-10-21, “Colombia's 'Cocaine Hippos' Are Not Persons Under US Law,” Law360,
https://www.law360.com/articles/1439289/colombia-s-cocaine-hippos-are-not-persons-under-us-law

To be sure, animals are not legal persons in the U.S. For decades, the ALDF and other animal rights groups, including
the Nonhuman Rights Project and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have tried to change this law .

They have filed habeas corpus petitions to free animals in zoos.[5] They have equated animal ownership with slavery,
saying owning animals violates the involuntary servitude provision of the 13th Amendment.[6]

In 2015, PETA filed a case for a chimpanzee , Naruto v. Slater, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of
California, claiming that the chimp qualified as a person under federal copyright law.[7] And the groups have asked
courts to recognize expanded damages in animal injury cases.[8]

Across these areas of law, federal and state courts have remained remarkably consistent . They have properly honored
the role of animals in society, including as cherished family pets — but have uniformly rejected efforts to leverage our
affinity for animals into new legal rights.

What they have found is that giving legal rights to animals is not automatically the pro-animal position — and the
groups do not necessarily speak for the animals they purport to represent . Indeed, animal rights often are at odds with
animals' welfare.
Nearly a decade ago, Joyce Tischler, a founder of the ALDF, cautioned that "not every animal lawyer has greeted [the
animal rights approach] with enthusiasm," with some urging students and practitioners "to step away from the focus on
animal rights and instead work for progressive welfare reforms ... [which] has gained a good deal of traction."[9] Courts
and legislatures have recognized this same dichotomy.

Courts also have been suspicious of the groups' claims that they are acting in the animals' best interests — not for their
own institutional benefits. In Naruto , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that PETA treated the
chimpanzee as "an unwitting pawn " in PETA's ideological goals .[10] In Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. v. Breheny, a case
before the New York Court of Appeals, the NRP is seeking to remove Happy the elephant from the only home it has ever
known, where it has lived for more than 40 years.[11]

As the Connecticut Court of Appeals explained in 2019, in denying a habeas petition in Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. v.
R.W. Commerford & Sons Inc., changing the categorization of animals to persons in any context would "upend" the legal
system.[12]

Under current law, animal welfare is the priority , with legislatures and courts consistently and rightfully protecting
animals from cruelty and abuse. That makes sense, but it does not make animals legal persons — nor does a three-line
order allowing a couple of subpoenas in a foreign case.

Given the ALDF's decadeslong quest to establish a beachhead for legal personhood, it is not surprising the group would
make mountains out of grains of sand. Kudos to them on faking out the American media.

But some will try to leverage the approval of the ALDF's subpoenas in other court proceedings — including the current
habeas corpus petition in New York. Hopefully, these courts will be more discerning than the media. It just takes reading
the ALDF's own words.

AT its inevitable
The Supreme Court has punted questions of fetal personhood.
Kaelan Deese 22, Supreme Court Reporter, 9-9-22, “Catholic group petitions Supreme Court on behalf of unborn, seeks
fetal personhood nationwide,” Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/catholic-group-petitions-supreme-court-on-
behalf-of-unborn-seeks-fetal-personhood-nationwide

Catholic activists say the Supreme Court should take up the issue of fetal personhood in light of the overturning of
Roe v. Wade this summer in an attempt to establish prenatal rights nationwide .

In a 46-page petition filed Tuesday asking the justices to review its case, the group Catholics for Life says the Supreme
Court has yet to " clarify whether an unborn human being has standing to access the courts" following its legal loss in
several Rhode Island courts dating back to 2019.

The religious group represents Nichole Leigh Rowley and two unborn children recognized in court filings as "Baby Mary
Doe" and "Baby Roe," claiming that their loss before the state Supreme Court in May should be reconsidered because
the recent standing denial was "deeply rooted in Roe."

The high court's June 24 opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which allowed states to create laws
severely limiting or restricting abortion access, was the case that struck down almost five decades of guaranteed
nationwide abortion access based on the 1973 precedent over Roe.

In order for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter, four or more justices have to give their approval toward
hearing the case. The high court typically receives thousands of petitions each year and usually grants around 80
requests.
"This case presents the unavoidable confrontation of Dobbs,” the petition reads, “which left unresolved the tensions
between the Tenth Amendment, federalism, and any surviving constitutional guarantees for the unborn."

Rhode Island passed the Reproductive Privacy Act in 2019 that codified the right to abortion under the Roe standards,
thus repealing other statutes that placed limits on abortion.

The petitioners lost their request for an injunction in lower court battles and later amended their complaint to challenge
the state legislature's authority to implement the abortion protections measure. They also sought to obtain a
declaration of their rights they claim were lost when the RPA took effect. The state filed for and received a dismissal.
Petitioners have repeatedly lost appeals in their attempt to ascend to higher courts.

“Viewing the allegations in their pleadings in the light most favorable to the adult plaintiffs, we are of the opinion that
they lack standing to bring this action under any conceivable set of facts,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its ruling in
May. “[T]he unborn plaintiffs fail to assert a legally cognizable and protected interest as persons pursuant to these
repealed statutes , which are contrary to the United States Constitution as construed by the United States Supreme
Court .”

Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito (the author of the Dobbs opinion) and Brett Kavanaugh
both signaled in the June 24 ruling that further matters related to prenatal life would remain as questions to resolve at
the state level.

"The Court will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting
fetal life throughout pregnancy," Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. "Instead, those difficult moral and policy
questions will be decided , as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the
constitutional processes of democratic self-government."

State trigger laws will be invalidated.

Carliss Chatman and A Martinez 22, Chatman is a law professor at Washington and Lee School of Law and Martinez
is staff at NPR, “Some states want a fetus to be considered a person. Defining those rights is tough,” NPR,
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/06/1109965594/some-states-want-a-fetus-to-be-considered-a-person-defining-those-
rights-is-toug

MARTINEZ: Now, many of these trigger laws that went into effect post-Roe are being challenged in court . Arizona's
law, for example, gives an unborn child, at least, at every stage of development, all rights, privileges and immunities
available to other persons, citizens and residents. Now, the lawsuit argues that the law's vagueness violates the right to
due process and could put abortion providers and pregnant people at risk for criminal prosecution . A hearing is set
for July 8 on that. Professor, what arguments are we likely to hear there?

CHATMAN: I'm hoping that they make a strong federal argument that this is a 14th Amendment violation , that you
cannot redefine when personhood begins state by state. I would love to see that happen. What I fear is that we get
lost in the weeds on abortion rights in general. We get lost in the weeds on the fact that now states can define whether
or not a woman can have an abortion, when and where and how, and that the personhood argument gets lost in the
shuffle. I think the personhood argument is actually the stronger argument. But it's also a more complicated argument.

Increments matter. The conservative legal movement can inflict more harm through fetal
personhood.
Lisa Needham 22, attorney and a contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American
Independent, 5-25-22, “A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics,” Balls and Strikes,
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-explainer/

Have states already passed fetal personhood laws ?

For now, personhood laws are generally unconstitutional under Roe because they block abortions at all stages of
pregnancy. But if the eventual Dobbs opinion overturns Roe , states that have flirted with the idea of fetal personhood
will likely do so again.

Alabama and Georgia , for example, have previously passed laws that relied upon fetal personhood to ban abortion ;
neither law is currently in effect, but not for lack of trying . Earlier this month, the Oklahoma House passed a complete
ban based on personhood before settling for a six-week Texas-style ban instead; weeks later the state legislature passed
a near-complete ban that the governor is expected to sign. Meanwhile, Louisiana legislators are pushing a law that
would make abortion a homicide no matter what the Court does to Roe, and calls for the impeachment and removal of
state judges who try to block its implementation.

This isn’t new . Colorado had fetal personhood ballot initiatives back in 2008 and 2010 . While voters resoundingly
rejected both measures, they sparked movements elsewhere . In 2011, Mississippi’s fetal personhood initiative
collapsed only after the widespread realization that it would significantly affect, if not outright bar, birth control and IVF.
Oklahoma tried to get a fetal personhood measure on the ballot in 2014, but the state supreme court declared it
unconstitutional. That same year, North Dakota voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have added personhood
language to the state constitution.

That’s hardly an exhaustive list. Over two dozen states are poised to ban abortion when Roe falls, and much of the
rhetoric around these bans has focused on life “beginning at conception.” Without federal constitutional protections
for the right to choose , some form of fetal personhood is inevitable in many states . The only remaining question is
how much more harm this next phase of the conservative legal movement will inflict .

AT Use Citizens United

Conservative justices have latent desire to establish fetal personhood, but they’re not game to
debate it now---the plan gives them an excuse to ban abortion.
Becca Andrews 21, reporter at Mother Jones, 12-1-21, “We Always Knew Conservative Justices Would Tear Roe Down.
The Latest SCOTUS Fight Proves It.,” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-court-
abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/

Justice Clarence Thomas came in early with an eagerness to test the waters on consideration of fetal personhood —
which is not an issue that Dobbs is putting to the Court—specifically probing whether or not child abuse laws could be
enforced against pregnant people who use drugs before viability . Justice Amy Coney Barrett was concerned with safe-
haven laws, which allow a parent to anonymously surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, suggesting that
women can and should carry unwanted pregnancies to term, give birth, and then relinquish the child if they so
choose. Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly expressed that he feels the legality of abortion is not one for the Supreme
Court at all, but rather for the states , so he can wash his hands of the whole thing and avoid the hypocrisy of declaring
that Roe v. Wade is established precedent while also overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Samuel Alito tried to draw a
comparison between Roe and Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld state segregation and was later overturned in Brown v.
Board of Education, on the basis that the prior decision violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizens’
rights to life, liberty, and property. Alito also offered up this tidbit of judicial wisdom: “The fetus has an interest in having
a life.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was fairly quiet, but he groped around for a way to frame undue burden , the standard for
protecting abortion access that’s been in place since Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s 1992 decision, as unworkable , and
to banish Roe‘s viability standard altogether. Chief Justice Roberts hewed closely to a “what’s the harm in a 15-week
limit?” frame, carefully not engaging with issues of personhood .
In summary, the conservatives were saying the quiet part out loud. Their questions and interjections today marked a
real and significant shift in how explicit they’re willing to be in their disdain for the legal precedent to abortion rights.
Naturally, this does not bode well for the future of people who can become pregnant.

More specifically, the conservative justices clearly implied that the Court will side with the state of Mississippi (which,
let’s not forget, is not just a question of legal procedure, and would be devastating for pregnant people all across the
country). But more than that , today’s queries suggested a much more expansive goal , one that is not as specific as
viability or undue burden. By closing arguments, Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general representing the
defense, made clear that the anti’s fight won’t end here, even with a victory on the 15-week law, or a reversal of Roe.
“There are interests here on both sides,” he declared. “There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the
woman. It’s unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions.” This is nothing if not an
argument for his—and by extension, Mississippi’s—belief in fetal personhood .

Not all the conservative justices seemed game to debate when life begins , but enough did . In addition to Thomas’
apparent interest , Alito literally asked, “Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the
rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?” This isn’t just an obscure issue of
philosophy or semantics. Bodily autonomy is on the line, and it’s not out of the question that this discussion could bleed
over to affect what kind of contraception is deemed acceptable, or the outlawing of Plan B (which, despite a slew of
right-wing misinformation, is not an abortifacient).

2NC---Internal Link---AT: Dobbs

1. ABORTION BAN---Dobbs lets states limit abortion, personhood justifies a nationwide ban.
Mary Ziegler 22, Professor of law at the University of California, Davis, 5-20-21, “The Abortion Fight Has Never Been
About Just Roe v. Wade,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/abortion-fight-roe-v-
wade/618930/

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could result in the overruling of Roe v. Wade. The case, Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion starting at the 15th week of
pregnancy. Significantly, the statute draws the line before fetal viability—the point at which survival is possible outside
the womb. The Court has previously held that before viability, “the state’s interests are not strong enough to support a
prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” To uphold
Mississippi’s law, the Court would have to rewrite the rules—perhaps just the opportunity it needs to overturn Roe
altogether.

If that happens, it will represent the culmination of decades of work by anti-abortion-rights activists. But for those
activists, gutting Roe would be just the beginning .

Ever since Roe , abortion-rights foes and their Republican allies have been asking the Court to reverse course —to
acknowledge that the Constitution has nothing whatsoever to say about abortion , either in favor of or against it.
Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice arguably most beloved by conservatives, routinely stated that the Constitution
is silent on abortion. Republicans have railed against the Court’s judicial activism in Roe, insisting that the justices
robbed the American people of the opportunity to decide the abortion issue for themselves. In this account, Roe did not
just destroy valuable opportunities for compromise on abortion; the decision did fundamental damage to America’s
democratic principles, removing one of the most controversial issues from representative legislatures and resolving it by
judicial fiat.

But within the anti-abortion-rights movement, there is not so much talk about democracy anymore. Now some
abortion-rights opponents are quite literally looking for a Roe of their own , asking the Court to recognize fetal rights
under the Fourteenth Amendment. Remember that overturning Roe wouldn’t make abortion illegal ; it would mean
that states could set their own abortion limits , which would no longer be subject to constitutional review. That will
never be enough for anti-abortion-rights activists, though. In the conservative magazine First Things, John Finnis , a
professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, recently made an argument that could provide the framework an
anti-abortion-rights Supreme Court could use to outlaw abortion across the country : that the legislators who wrote
the Fourteenth Amendment viewed unborn children as persons. If the Constitution recognizes fetal personhood , then
unborn children would have the right to equal protection under and due process of the law. Abortion would be
unconstitutional in New York as well as in Alabama . Other leading anti-abortion-rights scholars have made the same
argument.

Finnis’s article has provoked debate across the ideological spectrum. The conservative attorney Ed Whelan has taken
issue with the substance of Finnis’s claim, suggesting that unless the anti-abortion-rights movement first wins over
public opinion, Finnis’s approach will backfire. Progressives have been far harsher, unsurprisingly. Writing in The New
York Times, the columnist Michelle Goldberg denounced what she calls an authoritarian turn in anti-abortion-rights
advocacy—one more sign that the GOP has changed fundamentally in the post-Trump era.

The abortion debate has never been about just Roe —and it’s never been about letting a popular majority have a say.
What’s new is that this argument now meets a receptive Supreme Court for the first time in more than a generation .

Dobbs doesn’t thump---permitting states to ban abortion still enables access---but, fetal
personhood means abortion abolition in every state.
Jeannie Suk Gersen 19, contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School, 6-5-19, “How
Fetal Personhood Emerged as the Next Stage of the Abortion Wars,” New Yorker,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-fetal-personhood-emerged-as-the-next-stage-of-the-abortion-
wars

But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling
argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination
norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race , sex , or disability can be made relevant to a fetus ,
then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights —like people . This move imbues the fetus with
rights that the pregnant person —and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate . What is really at stake is an
idea of fetal personhood .

It is not coincidental that in the same case, last month, the Court upheld part of the Indiana law, which prohibited
abortion providers from disposing of fetal remains as they would surgical waste. Keeping the law in place, the Court
reasoned that how fetal remains are disposed of after abortion doesn’t affect access to the abortion itself. But it does
transform cultural practices surrounding the treatment of fetuses, through gestures that suggest they are person-like
entities, and point at their rights. Indeed, in defending the law, Indiana asserted an interest in the “humane and
dignified disposal of human remains.”

Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash
between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human
being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or
nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests
on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being. Tribe observed that “solutions that
split the difference—denying some fetuses life and some women liberty—hardly offer a solution.” But splitting that
difference has been our legal solution for half a century. During this time, the interest of neither the fetus nor the
pregnant woman has been treated as absolute.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court explicitly refused to “resolve the difficult question of when life begins .” From
there, over multiple decisions a scheme emerged of weighing the state’s interest in protecting the fetus against the
woman’s limited right to abortion, which lessens through the pregnancy in relation to the fetus’s increasing age. In
holding, at different times, that states may not act on the belief that human life begins at conception or plant a
“substantial obstacle” in the path of someone who wishes to abort a fetus before “viability”—a line that is constantly
shifting along with improvements in medical technology—the Court has discreetly drawn its own limits around the big
question it said it wasn’t resolving.

The abortion fight we are gearing up for departs from the realm of uneasy compromise and reengages the clash of
absolutes. For decades, conservatives have sought to overturn Roe . Yet simply getting rid of Roe would leave each
state legislature free to choose its own approach to abortion , from liberal abortion access in Northeast states to
outright or near-total bans like the “fetal heartbeat” bills recently passed in several states, which ban abortion as early
as the sixth week of pregnancy. But, for anti-abortion activists, that goal may no longer be enough . Last month, when
the Alabama legislature passed an extreme, near-total ban on abortion, Republican lawmakers explicitly rejected
exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you truly believe that a fetus is a person , then it shouldn’t matter how the
fetus was conceived. Its rights as a human being are the same .

When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and
when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point —that every
“ unborn child ” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me. And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons
do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe. It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to
allow abortions at all . This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition —would go far beyond what
either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible , but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now
entering the legal mainstream are headed .

Fetal Personhood DA
2NC---Uniqueness---Top
The Supreme Court has punted questions of fetal personhood.
Kaelan Deese 22, Supreme Court Reporter, 9-9-22, “Catholic group petitions Supreme Court on behalf of unborn, seeks
fetal personhood nationwide,” Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/catholic-group-petitions-supreme-court-on-
behalf-of-unborn-seeks-fetal-personhood-nationwide

Catholic activists say the Supreme Court should take up the issue of fetal personhood in light of the overturning of
Roe v. Wade this summer in an attempt to establish prenatal rights nationwide .

In a 46-page petition filed Tuesday asking the justices to review its case, the group Catholics for Life says the Supreme
Court has yet to " clarify whether an unborn human being has standing to access the courts" following its legal loss in
several Rhode Island courts dating back to 2019.

The religious group represents Nichole Leigh Rowley and two unborn children recognized in court filings as "Baby Mary
Doe" and "Baby Roe," claiming that their loss before the state Supreme Court in May should be reconsidered because
the recent standing denial was "deeply rooted in Roe."
The high court's June 24 opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which allowed states to create laws
severely limiting or restricting abortion access, was the case that struck down almost five decades of guaranteed
nationwide abortion access based on the 1973 precedent over Roe.

In order for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter, four or more justices have to give their approval toward
hearing the case. The high court typically receives thousands of petitions each year and usually grants around 80
requests.

"This case presents the unavoidable confrontation of Dobbs,” the petition reads, “which left unresolved the tensions
between the Tenth Amendment, federalism, and any surviving constitutional guarantees for the unborn."

Rhode Island passed the Reproductive Privacy Act in 2019 that codified the right to abortion under the Roe standards,
thus repealing other statutes that placed limits on abortion.

The petitioners lost their request for an injunction in lower court battles and later amended their complaint to challenge
the state legislature's authority to implement the abortion protections measure. They also sought to obtain a
declaration of their rights they claim were lost when the RPA took effect. The state filed for and received a dismissal.
Petitioners have repeatedly lost appeals in their attempt to ascend to higher courts.

“Viewing the allegations in their pleadings in the light most favorable to the adult plaintiffs, we are of the opinion that
they lack standing to bring this action under any conceivable set of facts,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its ruling in
May. “[T]he unborn plaintiffs fail to assert a legally cognizable and protected interest as persons pursuant to these
repealed statutes , which are contrary to the United States Constitution as construed by the United States Supreme
Court .”

Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito (the author of the Dobbs opinion) and Brett Kavanaugh
both signaled in the June 24 ruling that further matters related to prenatal life would remain as questions to resolve at
the state level.

"The Court will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting
fetal life throughout pregnancy," Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. "Instead, those difficult moral and policy
questions will be decided , as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the
constitutional processes of democratic self-government."

Kavanaugh proves.
Isaac Chotiner and Leah Litman 22, Chotiner is a writer at the New Yorker and Litman is an assistant professor of law
at the University of Michigan, 6-28-22, “How the Supreme Court Could Approach Federal Laws Upholding—or Banning—
Abortion,” New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-the-supreme-court-could-approach-federal-
laws-upholding-or-banning-abortion

Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and returning
the issue to the states, many of which have already enacted harsh bans on the procedure. Some Republicans have
floated the possibility of a federal statute banning abortion nationwide; Democrats, meanwhile, have spoken of a
federal law codifying Roe, but haven’t been able to overcome the Senate’s filibuster math. To discuss what’s in store,
and how the Court might view legislative responses to the decision, I spoke by phone with Leah Litman, an assistant
professor of law at the University of Michigan and a co-host of the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast. During our conversation,
which has been edited for length and clarity, we touched on the different legal approaches the Court would take in
assessing a national law that either bans or enshrines abortion, the distinct threats to abortion laws in blue states, and
whether disagreements among the Court’s conservatives, as embodied in the concurring opinions written by Justices
John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, offer any real room for compromise.
If Republicans take power in Congress and the White House, perhaps in 2024, they may try to pass a federal law
banning abortion . How would the Supreme Court view such a ban? Does the decision last week provide any hints?

At minimum, this opinion makes clear that a majority of the Court believes that such legislation would not violate the
due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment on the ground that it infringes on unenumerated, fundamental rights to
privacy or abortion, or violates the equal-protection principles that are incorporated into the same amendment. What it
doesn’t answer, however, is whether a majority of the Court would believe that Congress possesses the authority under
its enumerated or delegated powers to enact that legislation.

There are at least two bases on which Congress might enact a federal abortion ban. One would be under its power to
regulate interstate commerce. Some of the conservative Justices have adopted a pretty limited reading of Congress’s
powers to regulate interstate commerce, but there could be some ways for a Republican legislature to write a statute
that makes it more likely to be upheld on Commerce Clause grounds. Say [Congress] writes a statute that says, “No
abortion can be performed if it uses any device that has travelled in interstate commerce or any medication that
contains a component that has travelled in interstate commerce.”

The second basis is that Congress might say, “We are enacting this legislation under our power to enforce Section 5 of
the Fourteenth Amendment . We believe that fetuses are people . Therefore, we are enforcing and protecting fetal
personhood and rights to life.” Would the six conservatives conclude that Congress lacks the authority to enact either
version of the statute , or reject both of those theories? I don’t think we know . Chief Justice Roberts has taken more
expansive views of Congress’s power.

So the Chief Justice, despite having more qualms about this decision than the other five conservatives, actually has a
more expansive view of congressional power, and so he may be more likely to uphold a congressional ban?

Yes, exactly.

The counter-argument would be that a federal law banning abortion violates the Commerce Clause by getting the
federal government too involved in state actions. Is that accurate?

Yes. That’s an argument under the Commerce Clause, but the Court’s cases right now allow Congress to regulate more
traditional areas of state concern if they include what’s called a jurisdictional hook. That is, limit the statute to regulating
procedures that involve some element of interstate commerce.

What’s the upshot of that? That they could find a way to ban abortion nationwide, essentially?

Exactly.

You alluded to this when you mentioned the Fourteenth Amendment—there is stuff in the decision just about
protecting life. That reading would seem to give Congress fairly broad powers to do what it wished, right?

That’s exactly right. If you read the section of the opinion that explains why Mississippi’s statute is constitutional under
the new standard of review that the Court announced, the Court basically says in a single paragraph that Mississippi
viewed fetuses as unborn human beings and that that was a rational basis for it to act on. Even for Justices like, say,
Justice Clarence Thomas, who have a narrower reading of the Commerce Clause, I can easily imagine them embracing
the theory that Congress could view fetuses as human beings , and therefore ban abortion on that basis .
What about flipping it the other way? It doesn’t seem like Democrats anytime soon are going to get rid of the filibuster and codify a bill into law that protects the right to abortion, but how do you think this Court might look at such a law? We’ve been hearing for a long time from conservatives that the importance of getting rid of
Roe was to bring this power back to the people and their legislators. I’m curious how you think a conservative Court might view a law codifying Roe.

I’m extremely skeptical that they would allow Congress to codify a federal right to abortion. They are much more likely to conclude that such a statute exceeds Congress’s powers because they don’t believe that there is any right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment that Congress might be safeguarding if it enacted a federal
protection for abortion. So that possible basis for the law goes out, and that leaves the Commerce Clause. Given how easy it has been for [the Court] to find ways to strike down statutes that they don’t like under the Commerce Clause—like in N.F.I.B. v. Sebelius, on the Affordable Care Act—I’m not at all confident that they would
say, “Yes, Congress has the authority to codify Roe or the right to an abortion.”

There has been a slight tension in progressive commentary between this idea that Democrats in Washington have to do something, have to codify Roe and get rid of the filibuster, and, at the same time, this idea that the Court will do whatever it wants. I don’t see why the Court in its current makeup would allow a national bill to
stand. It doesn’t quite seem like a long-term solution.

I don’t see it differently. I guess I would just say two things. One is that I don’t want the White House or Congress to not be doing things just because they think that the Court will strike them down. I mean, my goodness, the Court is poised to tell the E.P.A. that it can’t regulate climate change. I don’t think that should stop
Democrats from trying. I do think it means they have to figure out how to address this conservative wrecking ball that is standing in front of them.

Did anything in the concurring opinions by Roberts and Kavanaugh strike you as notable for abortion law going forward, or abortion cases that liberals could have some faith in winning?

The only passage in either concurrence that falls into that category would be the passage in Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, in which he says that he doesn’t think states have the authority to criminalize residents going to other states to obtain abortions. We’ve already seen some legislatures floating or enacting laws that would
criminalize residents of Texas going to New York to get an abortion. Kavanaugh’s opinion indicates that he doesn’t believe those laws are constitutional. He thinks that they would violate the right to travel, which, as I’m sure you know, is not in the text of the Constitution, either, and yet he thinks that one exists.
And the Roberts concurrence?

It’s just an indication of how, frankly, irrelevant he has become on this Court. His vote isn’t needed, so he can’t craft these kinds of compromises that people used to laud him for.

What were your first thoughts about the dissent—how it was crafted and what it was arguing?

Two things struck me about the dissent. One is that I thought it was very well done, in particular how they centered the impact that this decision will have on women and their lives. I appreciated that. Second is that they encouraged everyone to worry about where this Court is headed next. They likened what the Court was doing to
toppling a Jenga tower of rights, and repeatedly underscored that what was guiding the majority opinion was nothing approximating law. It’s power. I think the combination of those statements, and others, were really a call for people to worry about this as not the end. It’s just the beginning of what this Court might do.

There have always been some complaints, even from progressive lawyers, that Roe, despite its important impact on the country and for women, was not necessarily the most well-reasoned decision. Did anything from the dissent suggest how a progressive rebirth on the Court at some future point would view abortion law, and how
it might be similar or different from Roe?

I don’t think the dissenters really offered a theory on how they would bring back Roe on alternative grounds. They defended Roe on its existing basis. Namely, it falls within an unenumerated right to privacy. I personally think, as other scholars have suggested, and as the former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested, that one of
the best arguments for a right to an abortion is on equal-protection grounds—that access to abortion, the ability to control when and whether you have a child, is fundamental to women’s ability to participate equally in society. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion writes out that argument in the span of a paragraph, insisting
that it’s foreclosed by precedent in an opinion in which he overrules another precedent. [Alito discounts the theory that abortion rights can find a “potential home” in the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because earlier precedents “establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based
classification.”] In the future, in a different world with a different Court, there is some possibility for that argument to become the basis for the legal right to an abortion.

What did you make of the dissent focussing on a right to abortion, rather than a broader conception of reproductive freedom?

They also located the right to an abortion within a broader umbrella of a right to privacy and a right to bodily autonomy, as well as a right to autonomy over decisions regarding parentage. They cite Skinner v. Oklahoma about the right not to be sterilized without consent. So I do think that they link it to other decisions that suggest
there is a broader right to reproductive freedom, but they are specific about abortion in this case.

Justice Thomas’s concurrence has some lines about where the Court might go or where he would like to see the Court go, in terms of issues such as gay marriage, which I gather Kavanaugh’s concurrence shoots down to some extent. Are there five votes for anything specific that you’re worried about? What areas of the law might
be particularly at risk?

In the immediate short term, I am very nervous about state restrictions on forms of contraception that states or the conservative legal movement label as forms of abortion or as abortifacients, whether that’s IUDs or the morning-after pill. I am worried that states will test the argument that, because those are forms of
contraception they view as abortion, this decision allows them to criminalize those forms of contraception. It’s a very real short-term risk given that the Court, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, said that employers didn’t have to abide by the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act, and that they were entitled to view certain
forms of contraception as methods of abortion. That is on the table in the short term.

The other decisions that I am very worried about include Griswold, a broader right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas,
the right to consensual, same-sex intimacy; and Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage equality. I don’t think those decisions are
under threat tomorrow, maybe not even in the next five years. But I am concerned that we are going to see states
chipping away [at those rights], in the same way we saw with abortion. And that culminated in an outright reversal of
Roe. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, frankly, doesn’t give me a lot of hope or faith. He rejects the idea of fetal
personhood , the idea that the Constitution itself criminalizes abortion . But I don’t know where he will be, let’s say, in
five years or ten years or fifteen years on Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell, if that’s where the other Justices and the
conservative legal movement and Republican politicians are going.

In practical terms, you’re saying that, even if Obergefell is not going to be reversed, the Court will still allow states to go
further than we might have thought toward restricting established rights?

Yes, exactly. I’m thinking back, for example, to the Court’s decision in Pavan v. Smith, in which the old Court, the one
with Justice Anthony Kennedy on it, said that states couldn’t make it harder for same-sex couples to be listed on the
birth certificate for their child. Now the Court could say that states can do that without issuing an opinion that formally
overrules Obergefell, and so those are the kinds of limits and chipping away at Obergefell that I am concerned about,
which would allow states to discriminate against same-sex families in ways other than formally denying a marriage
license.

You talked about why a national law codifying Roe might be unlikely to be upheld. Are you concerned, separately from a
national ban, that abortion laws in blue states could come under attack?

In blue states, we’ve already seen some abortion laws coming under attack on First Amendment grounds. California’s
law required unlicensed crisis pregnancy centers to disclose that they were unlicensed, and it required licensed facilities
to basically inform individuals that the state would pay for some forms of abortion. The Court struck that down, in
Becerra. So, yes, I am concerned that the Court will limit blue states’ ability to provide information about how to obtain
abortions.

What is the reasoning?

The reasoning from that opinion was that California required providers that didn’t provide abortions to inform their
patients that abortions were an option for them. The Court said that you couldn’t require providers to speak about
abortion if they didn’t want to. So that’s just one possible theory that might limit a state’s ability to require health-care
providers or other professionals to inform people about their rights to abortion under blue-state laws.

There is also this theory of fetal personhood, as well as possible limits on blue states’ ability to offer services to
individuals who have left their state to get an abortion and then go back , and whether a state such as Texas could
prosecute a California provider or a patient who went to California. I’m not quite as concerned about that in light of the
Kavanaugh concurrence, but I am still concerned about it because there is uncertainty, and that might make people
more reticent to offer services to individuals coming from abortion deserts. ♦
2NC---Link---Top
The extension of personhood to fetuses depends on assessing the “cases at the raw edges of human
existence”---the plan changes how to consider those cases by granting nonhuman entities juridical
personhood.
Alexis Dyschkant 15, Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, J.D., Illinois College of
Law, M.A. in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, B.A. in History and Philosophy, University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 2015, “LEGAL PERSONHOOD: HOW WE ARE GETTING IT WRONG,”
https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2015/5/Dyschkant.pdf

Unlike children, the question of whether or not fetuses should be considered legal persons has received a lot of
attention, in part because a declaration of fetuses as persons would challenge the constitutionality of abortion . In
Roe v. Wade, the Court emphasized the dramatic consequences of declaring a fetus to be a person . “[I]f this
suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then
be guaranteed specifically by the [ Fourteenth] Amendment .”39 The Court denied fetuses the status of legal persons.40

Important to the Court’s analysis is the fact that, as a practical matter, the use of the word “ person ” in the Fourteenth
Amendment generally only has postnatal application with no indication of any possible prenatal application.41 The
presumption seems to be that the rights and ininterests protected by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection
Clause just do not have practical application to a fetus. In conjunction with the fact that “person” is not constitutionally
defined, the Court refuses to attribute personhood to fetuses .

Interestingly for the purpose of this exposition, the debate between the Supreme Court and anti-abortion advocates
regarding whether to attribute personhood to fetuses directly tracks the question of fetal humanity. The Court
declines to attribute humanity to fetuses. All references in the Court’s decision to the fetuses’ humanity are qualified.
References include “the potentiality of human life,”42 “potential human life,” 43 and “potential future human life.”44 In
contrast, states which support including fetuses as persons also refer to the fetus as already human, sometimes at the
point of conception.45 The AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion, which seeks to reduce or end abortions generally,
claims that abortion is an “unwarrantable destruction of human life.”46 Anti-abortion states at the time widely had
adopted legislation declaring a fetus to be a human life.47

In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court held (reaffirming Roe) that “[b]efore viability,
the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial
obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.”48 The relevance of viability is that it helps establish
when the fetus becomes humanlike enough to trump the mother’s right to abort . Legal scholars advocating for a
theory of personhood that is modeled off of humanity would agree with this sort of line-drawing because basing the
person on the “ embodied human ” “draws on shared intuitions about who counts in our community of legal persons
and how we should take account of them.”49 Once a fetus is viable, it is not human like enough to be a legal person, but
it is human like enough to be “worthy of recognition.”50 The Court’s discussion of the relevance of viability in Roe
demonstrates the importance of belonging to humanity. It states that determinations of viability can be framed in terms
of when a “fetus became ‘formed’ or recognizably human, or in terms of when a ‘person’ came into being.”51

The disagreement about whether to extend personhood to fetuses rest, fundamentally, on how to handle cases at
“the raw edges of human existence .”52 This suggests that had fetuses been obviously human then personhood would
apply, or had fetuses been obviously nonhuman then personhood would not apply. The difficulty of establishing
personhood is why fetal personhood has received more attention than child personhood; children are obviously
humans and fetuses are not obviously humans.
A “romance with rights” causes spillover---there’s no basis to vest personhood in nonhuman
entities without doing the same for fetuses, since animals have zero potential to become human.
Richard L. Cupp 9, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, Winter 2009, “Moving Beyond
Animal Rights: A Legal/Contractualist Critique,” San Diego Law Review, Vol. 46, p. 27, advance-lexis-
com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/api/document?collection=analytical-materials&id=urn:contentItem:4W2F-XY50-
00CW-F0SF-00000-00&context=1516831

IV. Contractualist Personhood: The Centrality of Humanity to Rights

No general agreement exists on how rights should be precisely defined . 202Link to the text of the note Rights entail
complex moral, policy, societal, and cultural considerations, 203Link to the text of the note and both philosophers and
legal analysts have offered numerous conflicting and competing models seeking to explain or categorize rights. 204Link
to the text of the note As addressed above, use of rights language in legal discourse has blossomed since World War II.
Many legal thinkers seem smitten with the " romance of rights " in the afterglow of the civil rights movement's
important victories. 205Link to the text of the note This romance influences how rights are perceived and enhances
the role of emotion in arguments for and against expansion of rights . However, despite differences about what rights
are, scholars often agree that personhood is at their core . 206Link to the text of the note The United States
Constitution addresses "persons" and "citizens" as those subject to its protections. 207Link to the text of the note Thus,
no matter how it is defined, personhood is a central gateway issue in deciding whether to extend fundamental rights
to animals .

The rights status of human embryos provides a helpful illustration of personhood's centrality - and potential
malleability - in assignments of rights . In Davis v. Davis, 208Link to the text of the note the Tennessee Supreme Court
confronted this issue when divorcing spouses fought over custody of the couple's frozen embryos. The wife wished to
use the embryos for implantation in her own body or for donation to another couple. 209Link to the text of the note The
husband wished to have the embryos destroyed. 210Link to the text of the note Citing a report by the American Fertility
Society, the Davis court recognized that three major positions exist regarding the personhood status of embryos.
211Link to the text of the note Some ethicists [*65] view embryos as full human persons as soon as they have been
fertilized. 212Link to the text of the note Others view embryos as mere human tissue, and thus as a type of property.
213Link to the text of the note The third position balances the other two, holding that an embryo is not an actual
person but that it "deserves respect greater than that accorded to human tissue" due to "its potential to become a
person " and "its symbolic meaning for many people." 214Link to the text of the note

Davis endorsed the third position - that embryos are not persons with rights - but that they deserve special treatment
because of their potential to become persons. 215Link to the text of the note The difficult issues raised by Davis about
the ethical status of an embryo press the far reaches of personhood . However, the gulf between this issue on the edge
of personhood and efforts to assign personhood to animals is enormous. As with personhood for corporations and ships,
questions of personhood for embryos relate directly to humans and to humanity . Even under the narrowest possible
view of their status, embryos at the very least have the capacity to become human . Animals will never become
human and lack even the " symbolic meaning " of potential humanity .

Although embryos may be viewed as holding a status at the edges of personhood, courts have accepted personhood
status and at least some fundamental rights for postbirth children, even infant children not yet capable of autonomy.
216Link to the text of the note Again this illustrates the centrality of humanity and human interests in analyses of
personhood. Regardless of potential theoretical constructs on what constitutes a person, infants are incontrovertibly
human. Assignment of rights to mentally incapable adults also makes sense when humanity is recognized as the focus of
courts' assignment of personhood. 217Link to the text of the note Mentally incapable adults' lack of autonomy does not
make them nonhuman in the eyes of society or of society's courts, and thus they are assigned personhood and
fundamental rights.
 [*66] Although philosophers and legal scholars have formulated several theories on the nature of rights, social contract
principles - which philosophers often refer to as "contractualism" 218Link to the text of the note - are particularly useful
in considering how courts consider rights in the trenches of litigation. Social contract theory also helps explain why
humanity and human interests are central to courts' decisions regarding when to assign rights. Although several variants
of social contract theory have been articulated, general reciprocity between rights and responsibilities is a basic tenet.
219Link to the text of the note Under this view, society generally extends rights in exchange for express or implied
agreement from its members to submit to social responsibilities . 220Link to the text of the note

Animals cannot submit to societal responsibilities . They lack moral agency and of course cannot be held accountable
for their actions . When an animal bites a human or another animal without provocation, we do not have the offending
animal arrested and put on trial. We view courts having done so in the Middle Ages with a sense of absurdity or dark
humor, perhaps with the feel of a Monty Python sketch. 221Link to the text of the note New Scientist derided assigning
rights to animals on this basis:

If animals have rights which protect them against humans , it is only logical that they should have rights that protect
them from each other . If a chimp kills another chimp in the wild, or a human, do we really want to hire a fleet of
lawyers? And if we extended honorary personhood to all animals, would the gazelle be entitled to rights against the
lion? 222Link to the text of the note
[*67] Because animals cannot be morally blameworthy, they also cannot be in and of themselves morally deserving of rights. However, this does not mean that humans are free to be cruel or negligent toward animals. 223Link to the text of the note Rather, the imperative for humans to be humane toward animals derives from
humans' moral agency. Unlike its treatment of animals, society treats humans as responsible for their conduct, including their conduct toward animals.

Immanuel Kant was one of the early contractualists to write about the rights status of animals. 224Link to the text of the note As a contractualist he did not favor assigning formal rights to animals, arguing that moral duties can only be owed to rational beings that can participate in the social contract. 225Link to the text of the note
However, Kant emphasized the importance to humanity of treating animals humanely. Although humans must take care to treat animals well, Kant found this obligation to be derived from human responsibilities. 226Link to the text of the note He believed that humans "have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not toward
them, but in regard to them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to persons." 227Link to the text of the note He wrote:

If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals,
for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. 228Link to the text of the note

[*68] The philosopher John Rawls was the most prominent champion of contractualism in recent times. 229Link to the text of the note He argued that the moral community includes only those who "are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the
principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree." 230Link to the text of the note Animals, he concluded, are not members of the moral community because they lack the "capacity for a sense of justice." 231Link to the text of the note However, like Kant, Rawls's view that animals are not part of the moral community did
not lead him to a disregard for their welfare. He insisted that "it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to [animals] … . Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil." 232Link to the text of the note

Evolutionary anthropologist Jonathan Marks elaborates on the importance of focusing on humans in seeking humane treatment, asserting that:

A concern for animal welfare must come out of a concern for human welfare. It must emerge from a concern for human rights, not supplant it. For once we begin to devalue human lives, we lose a standard by which to value any other kind of lives. And it just doesn't work the other way around. 233Link to the text of the note

Marks emphasizes the importance of protecting animals such as nonhuman primates. 234Link to the text of the note However, he cautions that humans must guard against allowing concern for animals to come at the expense of concern for human welfare. 235Link to the text of the note

In the early twentieth century, jurisprudence scholar Wesley Hohfeld formulated what has become "perhaps the most popular way of speaking about legal rights." 236Link to the text of the note He described legal relations in terms of opposites and correlatives and "believed that the term "right' should be restricted in use to
describe those things that correlate to duties… . Rights are simple and atomic; rights are claims based on duties." 237Link to the text of the note Courts have utilized the framework formulated by Hohfeld in analyzing legal terms. 238Link to the text of the note This formulation recognizes the significance of the social contract in
assigning rights: Rights generally have relevance in relation [*69] to duties or responsibilities. Philosopher L.W. Sumner recognized the relevance of Hohfeld's framework in animal rights issues, concluding that under the frequently cited approach, animals cannot have rights because they do not have duties or responsibilities.
239Link to the text of the note

Hohfeld's formulation of rights might be the most popular because it fits most closely with Western societies' intuitions and education about rights. Thomas Jefferson borrowed from contractualist John Locke in drafting the Declaration of Independence. 240Link to the text of the note Locke's conception of the social contract is that
citizens are entitled to "life, liberty and property." 241Link to the text of the note Jefferson merely substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in this theme at the core of our national identity. 242Link to the text of the note

School children in the United States are taught social contract theory as a basis for the ideals of the American Revolution. For example, one state articulates a teaching objective for eighth grade social studies students as being to "analyze the origin of the ideas behind the Revolutionary movement and the movement toward
independence; [for example], social contract, natural rights, English traditions." 243Link to the text of the note

As another of many potential examples, a textbook published by the United States government for use by immigrants who wished to be candidates for citizenship explained that in the book, "an effort is made to use concepts that the immigrant can relate to, such as the social contract and delegation of authority by the people as
supported by the Constitution, to help the student understand and appreciate representative government." 244Link to the text of the note Social contract ideals of rights mirroring responsibilities were an important intellectual underpinning in the formation of the United States, and our education system appropriately teaches
contractualist [*70] themes from the Revolutionary period such as "no taxation without representation" as a foundation of our national identity. The average American likely does not know the philosophical term contractualism, but that same average American has been taught social contract ideals as the very basis of democracy.
We are taught from a young age that just as government must give us representation to go along with taxation, it must give us rights that correlate with our societal responsibilities.

Richard Posner has downplayed the practical significance of academic philosophical concepts on the question of animal rights, 245Link to the text of the note and although law is connected to abstract philosophy at least at a theoretical level, he has a point. Posner calls Peter Singer - a champion of utilitarianism - one of his "stalking
horses" on the issue of rights. 246Link to the text of the note Under utilitarianism, behavior that creates the most utility should be encouraged. 247Link to the text of the note Posner applies this theoretical philosophy to a hypothetical involving an aggressive dog and a human infant. He asks us to consider a situation in which a dog
is about to attack an infant, and we can only stop the dog by inflicting severe pain on it. 248Link to the text of the note If the pain we need to inflict on the dog to stop it from harming the infant exceeded the infant's potential pain from the attack, Posner argues that a utilitarian approach treating animals' pain as equally important
to humans' pain would require allowing the infant to be attacked. 249Link to the text of the note He then notes that "any normal person (and not merely the infant's parents), including a philosopher when he is not self-consciously engaged in philosophizing, would say that it would be monstrous to spare the dog, even though to do
so would minimize the sum of pain in the world." 250Link to the text of the note Further:

[*71]

If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go … . Just as philosophers who have embraced skepticism about the existence of the external world, or hold
that science is just a "narrative" with no defensible claim to yield objective truth, do not put their money where their mouth is by refusing to jump out of the way of a truck bearing down on them, so philosophers who embrace weird ethical theories do not act on those theories even when they could do so without being punished.
There are exceptions, but we call them insane. 251Link to the text of the note

Similarly, most humans imbued with social contract principles from their earliest education about the nature of rights are unlikely to change their views based on abstract philosophical arguments. Steven Wise acknowledges the difficulty of changing strongly held societal views about the status of animals and argues that change
may take place slowly over time - "funeral by funeral" - as people gradually become more enlightened - from his perspective - regarding animals in successive generations. 252Link to the text of the note However, the significance of social contract principles in the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is a widely
accepted historical fact, and that will not change over time. Its role as the "principal justification" for American independence is "especially familiar." 253Link to the text of the note John Locke's writings "were a primary authority for the [*72] Colonists, and his social contract furnished the political theory for both the American
Revolution and the framing of the Constitution." 254Link to the text of the note

Thus, when philosophers or political theorists argue that other rights models are superior, they are swimming against a formidable tide in seeking widespread practical application of their views. At least in the United States, so long as children are taught and continue to believe that the ideals that led to the American Revolution are
to be cherished, they will likely retain a powerful attraction to social contract principles as a basis for rights throughout their lives. Whether the perception that rights are correlative to responsibilities is an inherent moral instinct or learned or some combination of instinct and learning, a key point is that the perception is widely
held. Abstract theory counts in law's evolution, but it does not count nearly as much as the facts on the ground. As constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone noted, judges typically build legal theory around results they feel are desirable, and not the other way around. 255Link to the text of the note

A. The "Argument from Marginal Cases": Addressing Rights for Infants and Mentally Incapable Adults Under Contractualism

As discussed above, some animal rights activists emphasize that rights are assigned to artificial entities , such as
corporations and ships , in arguing by analogy that intelligent animals should have rights . 256Link to the text of the
note However, analogizing rights assigned to human infants and to mentally incapable adults is even more popular
among animal rights proponents ; one writer calls it their "central argument." 257Link to the text of the note This
analogizing between infants or mentally incapable adults and intelligent animals in rights debates is sometimes termed
"the argument from marginal cases." 258Link to the text of the note Gary Francione describes the problem as a
challenge to those who would rely on contractualism to deny rights to animals:

[*73]

There are many human beings who are not able to exercise or respond to moral claims. Assuming that moral rights and
duties are properly viewed as arising from a hypothetical social contract - very significant assumption - there are plenty
of humans who lack the capacity to participate in such contractual arrangements … but these characteristics are wholly
irrelevant to whether a human should be treated as the resource of others. 259Link to the text of the note

The argument is that because infants and mentally incapable adults are not treated as property and are assigned limited
rights despite lacking moral agency, it is unfair to treat animals as property on the basis of their lacking moral agency.
The argument from marginal cases is at its strongest when the comparison is to particularly intelligent animals, such as
chimpanzees and bonobos. Such animals may have significantly more intelligence and communicative ability than
infants and many mentally incapable adults, and thus one might argue they are actually closer to moral agency than are
some humans.

Although the argument from marginal cases may be attractive on its surface, it is unpersuasive. Although arguments by
analogy are important and often appealing, they are also malleable and can be misleading - as demonstrated in the
efforts described above to argue by analogy that if nonliving corporations are assigned rights, then a fortiori living and
intelligent animals should be assigned rights. 260Link to the text of the note Analogizing between limited rights for
infants and mentally incapable adults and potential limited rights for animals is both problematic and dangerous.

First, the argument from marginal cases fails to account for the complexity of human lives and relationships. 261Link to
the text of the note When deciding how they should treat a human infant, people do not engage in an assessment of its
"practical autonomy" to determine whether it is deserving of moral rights and, one hopes, they never will. 262Link to
the text of the note Humans' motivation to protect human children may be, in part, instinctive. 263Link to the text of the
note To the extent that [*74] explanations for such instincts are even necessary, some are not difficult to articulate at a
basic level. In addition to sensing infants' vulnerability and need for protection, humans see hope in them. They are not
yet moral agents able to participate in the social contract, but they represent the future of humanity and of the social
contract. How they develop will determine what society will become. If they are denied moral rights and treated badly,
society will suffer.

This sentiment is demonstrated in how courts generally address family law cases and mandatory education cases. In
family law disputes over child custody, for example, courts focus on the best interests of the child rather than the
interests of the mother or the father. 264Link to the text of the note This is because the child's development is
important to society's welfare. 265Link to the text of the note Depending on how he or she is raised, the child might
develop a cure for cancer someday or - at the other extreme - might become a mass murderer. 266Link to the text of the
note Society has a vested interest in the child's future. The same may be said of mandatory education. Society
recognizes an important interest in having educated adult participants in the social contract , and thus it forcefully
asserts itself in requiring that children be educated. 267Link to the text of the note This essential connection between
human children and society's future powerfully distinguishes children from intelligent animals that will never become
members of the social contract .

One may not make this argument in the same way regarding many mentally incapable adults because many of them will
remain mentally incapable their entire lives and will never attain moral agency. Unlike infants, many such adults cannot
easily be seen as representing the social contract's future. However, they do represent its echo. In the practical world -
as contrasted with abstract philosophical hypotheses - humans [*75] recognize a sameness in mentally incapable adults
that they will never feel even with intelligent animals. 268Link to the text of the note Most people perceive mentally
incapable adults as human first, and mental incompetence is seen as an aspect of their humanity rather than as a
negation of it. Humans "who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to
human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community." 269Link to the text of the note Gary
Francione rejects such reasoning, asserting that "this argument … begs the question since the problem is how to
distinguish humans from other animals by some characteristic that may be shared by some animals but that is not
possessed by all humans." 270Link to the text of the note However, humans and their courts do not evaluate intelligence
in deciding whether to assign human dignity rights; they evaluate humanness. 271Link to the text of the note All of us
know we could become a mentally incapable adult; none of us might become a chimpanzee, and we cannot possibly
relate to a chimpanzee on the same level that we can relate to another human.

Further, and thankfully, courts do not have a mechanism for formally determining which mentally incapable adults have
absolutely no hope of future participation in the social contract. Many mentally incapable adults, such as those in a
temporary coma, will some day regain their mental competence and their moral agency. Additionally, we do not know
the future of medicine. Some mental conditions that may presently appear permanent might be cured during our
lifetimes. 272Link to the text of the note Although the hope of future moral agency for mentally incapable adults is
different from the more certain hope of future moral agency for children , it is still hope. Animals , in contrast, will
always be animals.

[*76] It is also important to note that the line between no moral agency and some moral agency in humans is fuzzy .
No clear boundaries exist between people who are minimally intelligent but morally responsible to some degree and
people who are nearly but not quite intelligent enough to be morally responsible to any degree . 273Link to the text of
the note Thus, seeking to divide humans on the basis of intelligence for purposes of determining whether dignity rights
should be assigned would be unworkable. In contrast, courts' current approach of assigning human dignity rights to all
humans because they are human - regardless of their intellectual competence - avoids the confusion and tragic
misjudgments that would be inherent in a case-by-case approach. 274Link to the text of the note

Finally, as addressed further in Part V, assigning rights to intelligent animals based on comparisons to mentally
incapable adults threatens the weakest and most vulnerable members of human society . 275Link to the text of the
note Even the phrase sometimes used to frame the debate - "arguments from marginal cases " 276Link to the text of
the note - highlights a challenge to human dignity . No human is marginal . As John Marks notes, "Singling out particular
classes of people in order to show how similar they are to apes is a troubling scientific strategy , not least of all when
the humans rhetorically invoked are the very ones whose rights are most conspicuously in jeopardy ." 277Link to the
text of the note Marks derides blurring the line between humans and apes as "an unscientific rhetorical device" that is
"morally problematic (in addition to being zoologically ridiculous)." 278Link to the text of the note Concluding that some
animals may be able to "earn" dignity rights if it is established that they are sufficiently intelligent implies that perhaps
some humans should lose their dignity rights if they [*77] are sufficiently unintelligent. "If [humanity] can be earned, of
course, it can also be lost; they are two sides of the same coin." 279Link to the text of the note If mere cognitive
performance were the standard, it is difficult to see why a bright adult chimpanzee would not have more rights than a
human infant or a mentally incapable adult. This would seem to be edgy territory even for an academic philosophical
theory; it should be given no opportunity for practical application in the real world of courts and law.

Yes spillover---personhood is a binary question, and fetuses do not fit in one or the other---the plan
clarifies that they should be persons.
Christine M. Korsgaard 13, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 2013,
“PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW,” Think, 12(34), pp. 25-32,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/personhood-animals-and-the-law/
E9F2FBA3B2F8ECF65A7C6BAD1DCD6D2A

The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of
‘ persons ’ and ‘ things ’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law . In the law, a ‘ person ’ is essentially the
subject of rights and obligations , while a thing may be owned as property . In ethics, a person is an object of respect,
to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative
value, and may be used as a means to some person’s ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us
with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to
the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category . For
various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus , a non-human animal , the
environment , or an object of great beauty, as a person , but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they
are to be valued only as means .

In the law, the bifurcation between persons and things or persons and property leaves non-human animals in an
especially awkward position. Animals, or at least many of them, are sentient beings with lives of their own and capacities
for enjoyment and suffering that seem to make some sort of claim on us. Some have very sophisticated cognitive
capacities, including some sense of self. But because animals are classified as property, efforts to secure them some
legal protections have been of mixed success and have introduced a certain level of incoherence into the laws. In the
face of this, some animal rights advocates have suggested that all cognitively sophisticated animals, or all animals
generally, ought to be re-categorized as legal persons .

But it may be argued that those who make this proposal are ignoring something important about the concept of a
person. It has generally been assumed that ‘personhood’, whatever it is, is, or is based on, an attribute that is
characteristic of human beings , and not of the other animals . In the philosophical tradition, the most common
candidate for the attribute that establishes ‘ personhood’ is rationality , but understood in a specific sense. Rationality is
sometimes loosely identified with the ability to choose intelligently between options or to solve problems by taking
thought, but those are attributes that human beings arguably share with many other animals. The more specific sense of
‘rationality’ refers to a normative capacity, a capacity to assess the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and to adjust
them accordingly. On the side of action, for instance, it is the capacity to ask whether something that would potentially
motivate you to perform a certain action is really a reason for doing that action – and then to be motivated to act in
accordance with the answer that you get. Rationality, in this sense, is normative self-government, the capacity to be
governed by thoughts about what you ought to do or to believe.

Determining whether a fetus is a person depends on the criteria of personhood---the plan loosens
those criteria, which makes it easier for Courts to declare fetal personhood.
Mary Anne Warren 96, professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, 1996, “On the Moral and Legal Status
of Abortion,” Biomedical Ethics, 4th Ed., McGraw-Hill, pp. 434-440, https://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Ab3.pdf

Can it be established that genetic humanity is sufficient for moral humanity? I think that there are very good reasons for
not defining the moral community in this way. I Would like to suggest an alternative way of defining the moral
community , which I will argue for only to the extent of explaining why it is, or should be, self-evident . The suggestion is
simply that the moral community consists of all and only people , rather than all and only human being s,' and probably
the best way of demonstrating its self-evidence is by considering the concept of personhood , to see what sorts of
entity are and are not persons , and what the decision that a being is or is not a person implies about its moral rights.

What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a person? This is obviously not the place to attempt a complete
analysis of the concept of personhood, but we do not need such a fully adequate analysis just to determine whether
and why a fetus is or isn't a person . All we need is a rough and approximate list of the most basic criteria of
personhood , and some idea of which, or how many, of these an entity must satisfy in order to properly be considered
a person .

In searching for such criteria , it is useful to look beyond the set of people with whom we are acquainted , and ask how
we would decide whether a totally alien being was a person or not. (For we have no right to assume that genetic
humanity is necessary for personhood .) Image a space traveler who lands on an unknown planet and encounters a race
of beings utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these beings,
he has to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of
thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example, a source of food.
2NC---Link---Magnifier---Conservative Court
Conservative justices have latent desire to establish fetal personhood, but they’re not game to
debate it now---the plan gives them an excuse to ban abortion.
Becca Andrews 21, reporter at Mother Jones, 12-1-21, “We Always Knew Conservative Justices Would Tear Roe Down.
The Latest SCOTUS Fight Proves It.,” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-court-
abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/

Justice Clarence Thomas came in early with an eagerness to test the waters on consideration of fetal personhood —
which is not an issue that Dobbs is putting to the Court—specifically probing whether or not child abuse laws could be
enforced against pregnant people who use drugs before viability . Justice Amy Coney Barrett was concerned with safe-
haven laws, which allow a parent to anonymously surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, suggesting that
women can and should carry unwanted pregnancies to term, give birth, and then relinquish the child if they so
choose. Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly expressed that he feels the legality of abortion is not one for the Supreme
Court at all, but rather for the states , so he can wash his hands of the whole thing and avoid the hypocrisy of declaring
that Roe v. Wade is established precedent while also overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Samuel Alito tried to draw a
comparison between Roe and Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld state segregation and was later overturned in Brown v.
Board of Education, on the basis that the prior decision violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizens’
rights to life, liberty, and property. Alito also offered up this tidbit of judicial wisdom: “The fetus has an interest in having
a life.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was fairly quiet, but he groped around for a way to frame undue burden , the standard for
protecting abortion access that’s been in place since Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s 1992 decision, as unworkable , and
to banish Roe‘s viability standard altogether. Chief Justice Roberts hewed closely to a “what’s the harm in a 15-week
limit?” frame, carefully not engaging with issues of personhood .

In summary, the conservatives were saying the quiet part out loud. Their questions and interjections today marked a
real and significant shift in how explicit they’re willing to be in their disdain for the legal precedent to abortion rights.
Naturally, this does not bode well for the future of people who can become pregnant.

More specifically, the conservative justices clearly implied that the Court will side with the state of Mississippi (which,
let’s not forget, is not just a question of legal procedure, and would be devastating for pregnant people all across the
country). But more than that , today’s queries suggested a much more expansive goal , one that is not as specific as
viability or undue burden. By closing arguments, Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general representing the
defense, made clear that the anti’s fight won’t end here, even with a victory on the 15-week law, or a reversal of Roe.
“There are interests here on both sides,” he declared. “There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the
woman. It’s unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions.” This is nothing if not an
argument for his—and by extension, Mississippi’s—belief in fetal personhood .

Not all the conservative justices seemed game to debate when life begins , but enough did . In addition to Thomas’
apparent interest , Alito literally asked, “Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the
rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?” This isn’t just an obscure issue of
philosophy or semantics. Bodily autonomy is on the line, and it’s not out of the question that this discussion could bleed
over to affect what kind of contraception is deemed acceptable, or the outlawing of Plan B (which, despite a slew of
right-wing misinformation, is not an abortifacient).

The conservative justices will latch on to the plan.

Lisa Needham 22, attorney and a contributing writer to Rewire News Group, Dame Magazine, and The American
Independent, 5-25-22, “A Brief Guide to Fetal Personhood, the Next Frontier In Anti-Choice Politics,” Balls and Strikes,
https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/fetal-personhood-explainer/

How many Supreme Court justices believe in fetal personhood ?

Too many. During oral arguments in Dobbs, Alito served up the softest of softballs to Mississippi’s solicitor general,
asking him whether there are any “secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of
personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability .” This allowed the solicitor general, Scott
Stewart, to reply that, why yes, a “wide array” of people exist “who would reasonably have that view.” This feels like
Alito’s clunky method of trying to establish that there are at least some non-religious people who think personhood
begins at conception , too, not just conservative Christian supremacists like him.

There are other warning signs in the leaked Dobbs opinion. Take one of Alito’s few approving citations to Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that weakened Roe without oveturning it: that abortion is a “ unique act ” because
it terminates “ life or potential life .” At several points, Alito fawningly adopts the language of the Mississippi law that
calls fetuses “ unborn human beings ”—a tacit assertion that a currently-unconstitutional law accurately reflects the
factual scientific landscape.

Justice Clarence Thomas, too, seems very comfortable with the uncomfortable issues fetal personhood creates. During
oral argument, he tried to shift the conversation with Susan Rikelman, who represented one of the abortion providers,
to the overarching issue of control of the bodies of pregnant people. Back in 2001, Thomas was one of three dissenters
from the Court’s opinion in Ferguson v. Charleston, which held that a hospital could not drug-test people who had just
given birth and allow cops to arrest anyone who tested positive for cocaine.

The implications of fetal personhood for cases like Ferguson were clearly on Thomas’s mind during his exchange with
Rikelman more than two decades later. “I understand your argument is about abortion,” he explained. “I am trying to
look at the issue of bodily autonomy, and whether or not she has a right also to bodily autonomy in the case of ingesting
an illegal substance and causing harm to a pre-viability fetus.” It seems that Thomas not only opposes the right to
choose , but is already thinking ahead to what civil rights he could use fetal personhood to curtail next .

Barrett, Thomas’s former clerk, is probably on board, too . In 2006, she signed an open letter sponsored by St. Joseph
County Right to Life of people who “oppose abortion on demand and defend the right to life from fertilization to
natural death ,” which is about as tidy as a summary of fetal personhood can get.

Fetal Person DA
2NC---Overview
Soft power solves every existential risk.
Devjani Roy 20, Senior Research Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, interviewing Joseph Nye,
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and former
Assistant Secretary of Defense, November 2020, “Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on the Geopolitical Impact of COVID-19, Morality
and the U.S. Presidency, and Soft Power in Foreign Policy,”
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/joseph-s-nye-jr-geopolitical-impact-covid-19-
morality-and-us

Looking forward, [President-Elect] Biden could take a cue from the post-1945 U.S. presidents whose successes I
describe. The U nited S tates could launch a massive COVID-19 aid program —a medical version of the Marshall Plan.
Instead of competing in propaganda, we could demonstrate the importance of power with, rather than over, others,
and set up bilateral and multilateral frameworks to enhance cooperation. We could realize that recurrent waves of
COVID-19 will affect poorer countries less able to cope and that such a developing-world reservoir will hurt everyone if it
spills back northward in a seasonal resurgence. Both for self-interested and humanitarian reasons, the United States
should lead the G-20 in generous contributions to a major new COVID-19 fund that is open to all countries. If Biden were
to choose such cooperative and soft-power-enhancing policies, something good may yet come out of the pandemic—a
geopolitical path to a better world.

GrowthPolicy: In what way(s) will COVID-19 reshape, or reposition, the United States’ place in the current world order
over the next fifty years? Second: What would be your recommendations for adjusting and adapting U.S. foreign policy
apropos of China given the long-term strategic impact of the pandemic on international relations? 

Joseph Nye: I hesitate to predict fifty years into the future. As I used to tell analysts when I chaired the National
Intelligence Council, there is no single future , and the longer the time horizon, the greater the number of confounding
variables and possible futures . Even a year ago, we did not foresee the effect that a pandemic would have on the 2020
election; yet without it, Trump might have been re-elected. And even though we can predict another pandemic, we
cannot predict its effects on world order. The Great Influenza of 1918-19 killed many more people than World War I ,
but the major political changes in the 1930s were caused by the war rather than the pandemic. But my guess today is
that this current pandemic will not change the geopolitics of 2030.

In 2030, COVID-19 will look just as unpleasant as the Great Influenza looked from 1930, but with similar limited long-
term geopolitical effects . Growing Chinese power , domestic populism and polarization in the West, and more
authoritarian regimes worldwide already existed, and the pandemic may have somewhat accentuated these trends.
While there is some setback to global supply chains in the name of security, some degree of economic globalization will
persist, and environmental globalization exemplified by climate change and pandemics will increase.

There will be a growing political awareness of the importance of environmental globalization , underpinned by a
grudging recognition that no country can solve such problems acting alone . We will see a “ cooperative rivalry ” where
we have to learn about power with other countries as well as power over others. The U.S. and China will manage to
cooperate on pandemics and climate change , even as they compete on other issues such as navigation restrictions in
the South or East China Sea . Friendship will be limited, but the rivalry can be managed . Some institutions will wither,
and still others will be invented. The United States will remain the largest power, but without the degree of influence it
had in the past.

China war outweighs---draws in everyone AND collapses the economy.

Robert Blackwill 21, Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, Lecturer in International Security at
Harvard, and Philip Zelikow, History Professor at the University of Virginia, Former Executive Director of 9/11
Commission, February 2021, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” Council Special Report
No. 90

The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should
preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president. It could be unlikely that a U.S.- China conflict would go nuclear
and Beijing has repeated its no first use doctrine, but there is little doubt that China wants to grow its arsenal of a few
hundred warheads and build a more sophisticated force that could employ hypersonic glide capabilities .189 Millions of
Americans could die in the first war in human history between two nuclear weapons states. A 2015 RAND Corporation
study of the effects of U.S.-China combat determined that estimating military losses would be “exceedingly difficult.”
World War II, however, was the last time the United States lost a major warship, and one sunk vessel could turn into the
deadliest U.S. military event since the Vietnam War.190

The outbreak of a great power war would likely produce a global recession , if not a depression . It would disrupt Asian
and international trade, sever major supply chains, and could collapse international financial systems.191 This would
produce deeply painful economic consequences for U.S. allies, who trade more with China than they do with the United
States. One study estimates that a single year of U.S.-China conflict could cause American GDP to decline by 5 to 10
percent.192
China could unleash cyberattacks on the United States. The New York Federal Reserve estimates that a major
cyberattack on the U.S. financial system could cause 2.5 times daily GDP in forgone payments, and a Lloyd’s of London
and Cambridge University study predicted that a hypothetical blackout affecting fifteen states could cause $243 billion to
$1 trillion in damages, as well as deaths resulting from disruption to health care, traffic, and industry.193

In 2013, hackers associated with the PLA reportedly tried to infiltrate companies that control U.S. critical infrastructure,
including Telvent which provides remote access and holds blueprints to North and South American oil and gas
pipelines.194 In 2019, researchers uncovered a suspected Chinese plot to access American utility companies.195
Additionally, in September 2020, a ransomware attack said to have originated in Russia hit U.S. hospitals during a
coronavirus surge and forced doctors to switch to pen and paper record keeping and postpone certain medical
procedures.196 The outbreak of U.S.-PRC conflict could see multiple cyber events hit U.S. society and its allies in rapid
succession.197

While Washington and Beijing were trading blows, Russia could threaten the Baltics , increase its presence in Ukraine,
or provide oil and weapon support to China.198 Iran would be unlikely to stand idle in the Middle East in such a crisis
given U.S. attention directed elsewhere . Another factor is the allied dimension. In matters ranging from technology
issues to criticism of China’s handling of Hong Kong, U.S. allies have sometimes been hesitant to support Washington
when American rhetoric and actions are deemed too provocative or come with high economic costs.199 France and
Germany refused to support the United States in the 2003 Gulf conflict. In a U.S.-China war, even Japan might not join
the battle given its domestic politics and constitutional constraints and the United States could well fight alone,
shattering its alliance system.

AT Aff solves
2---No Personhood
Their advocate says personhood
Justyn 1AC Millamena 21, J.D. Candidate at Brooklyn Law School, 12/1/2021, How Artificial Intelligence Machines
Can Legally Become Inventors: an Examination of and Solution to the Decision on DABUS, Journal of Law and Policy, Vol.
30, Issue 1, Art. 7, 270-304

B. How Would AI Inventorship Work?

The USPTO decision on the DABUS application must be overturned. Specifically, the Office must recognize that DABUS'
neural nets allowed it to conceive of the invention, as required of any invention. Additionally, the Office must realize
that its call for a natural person to be the inventor relies on two assumptions that contain errors . The first assumption
is that the statutory language suggests only natural persons qualify. A closer reading of the language reveals that there
is only a legal person requirement , not a *297 natural person requirement. The second assumption is that the
Conception Requirement can only be fulfilled by natural persons and thus, inventorship is limited to natural persons.
This assumption has only been challenged by non-applicable legal persons --corporations, government entities, and
states--which cannot perform conception. AI machines , on the other hand, can arguably perform conception and can
plausibly satisfy the Conception Requirement.

After the DABUS decision is overturned, the legal status of AI machines must be reviewed. Currently, AI machines have
no legal status,191 however there are no legal barriers preventing AI machines from obtaining legal personhood .192
Any entity has legal status when it “has rights and obligations in accordance with law .”193 Accordingly, “when a legal
system confers legal rights and obligations on an entity,” that entity becomes a legal person .194

The most familiar example of the legal person is a corporation.195 Although the construction of personhood is
fictional--for natural persons and legal persons--it is “intended to be acted upon as though it were a fact.”196 Using this
fictional construction allows for legal rights and obligations to be conferred onto corporations. As a result,
corporations have certain rights and are subject to obligations (for example, contractual ones).197 This legal personhood
serves economic interests, and with such consideration, can be justified in having its personhood.198

While granting all AI systems legal personhood may be a challenge--since AI systems can vary depending on their
intended usage and functions199-- creativity machines that use their multiple *298 neural nets to develop structures
representing complex thoughts, like DABUS, should be granted legal personhood in the interests of inventorship .

The reservations preventing this construction derive from the propensity to think of legal personhood from a human
viewpoint.200 Observing legal personhood through a human lens has “led lawmakers to declare humans to be
persons that are incapable of exercising rights or owing duties and refuse to declare nonhumans to be persons ,” even
if capable of exercising such rights and duties .201 Using this humanistic model to shape our idea of personhood
“becomes habitual, the forms grow rigid, the behavior patterns are fixed,” so much so that “to work out new forms and
theories ... would severely tax the ingenuity of the [legal] profession.”202 This practice is felt throughout the legal
landscape, as “we only confer personhood to nonnatural persons when it serves the interest of natural persons.”203

2NC---Link---Top
The extension of personhood to fetuses depends on assessing the “cases at the raw edges of human
existence”---the plan changes how to consider those cases by granting nonhuman entities juridical
personhood.
Alexis Dyschkant 15, Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, J.D., Illinois College of
Law, M.A. in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, B.A. in History and Philosophy, University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 2015, “LEGAL PERSONHOOD: HOW WE ARE GETTING IT WRONG,”
https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2015/5/Dyschkant.pdf

Unlike children, the question of whether or not fetuses should be considered legal persons has received a lot of
attention, in part because a declaration of fetuses as persons would challenge the constitutionality of abortion . In
Roe v. Wade, the Court emphasized the dramatic consequences of declaring a fetus to be a person . “[I]f this
suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then
be guaranteed specifically by the [ Fourteenth] Amendment .”39 The Court denied fetuses the status of legal persons.40

Important to the Court’s analysis is the fact that, as a practical matter, the use of the word “ person ” in the Fourteenth
Amendment generally only has postnatal application with no indication of any possible prenatal application.41 The
presumption seems to be that the rights and ininterests protected by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection
Clause just do not have practical application to a fetus. In conjunction with the fact that “person” is not constitutionally
defined, the Court refuses to attribute personhood to fetuses .

Interestingly for the purpose of this exposition, the debate between the Supreme Court and anti-abortion advocates
regarding whether to attribute personhood to fetuses directly tracks the question of fetal humanity. The Court
declines to attribute humanity to fetuses. All references in the Court’s decision to the fetuses’ humanity are qualified.
References include “the potentiality of human life,”42 “potential human life,” 43 and “potential future human life.”44 In
contrast, states which support including fetuses as persons also refer to the fetus as already human, sometimes at the
point of conception.45 The AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion, which seeks to reduce or end abortions generally,
claims that abortion is an “unwarrantable destruction of human life.”46 Anti-abortion states at the time widely had
adopted legislation declaring a fetus to be a human life.47

In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court held (reaffirming Roe) that “[b]efore viability,
the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial
obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.”48 The relevance of viability is that it helps establish
when the fetus becomes humanlike enough to trump the mother’s right to abort . Legal scholars advocating for a
theory of personhood that is modeled off of humanity would agree with this sort of line-drawing because basing the
person on the “ embodied human ” “draws on shared intuitions about who counts in our community of legal persons
and how we should take account of them.”49 Once a fetus is viable, it is not human like enough to be a legal person, but
it is human like enough to be “worthy of recognition.”50 The Court’s discussion of the relevance of viability in Roe
demonstrates the importance of belonging to humanity. It states that determinations of viability can be framed in terms
of when a “fetus became ‘formed’ or recognizably human, or in terms of when a ‘person’ came into being.”51

The disagreement about whether to extend personhood to fetuses rest, fundamentally, on how to handle cases at
“the raw edges of human existence .”52 This suggests that had fetuses been obviously human then personhood would
apply, or had fetuses been obviously nonhuman then personhood would not apply. The difficulty of establishing
personhood is why fetal personhood has received more attention than child personhood; children are obviously
humans and fetuses are not obviously humans.

A “romance with rights” causes spillover---there’s no basis to vest personhood in nonhuman

entities without doing the same for fetuses, since animals have zero potential to become human.
Richard L. Cupp 9, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, Winter 2009, “Moving Beyond
Animal Rights: A Legal/Contractualist Critique,” San Diego Law Review, Vol. 46, p. 27, advance-lexis-
com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/api/document?collection=analytical-materials&id=urn:contentItem:4W2F-XY50-
00CW-F0SF-00000-00&context=1516831

IV. Contractualist Personhood: The Centrality of Humanity to Rights

No general agreement exists on how rights should be precisely defined . 202Link to the text of the note Rights entail
complex moral, policy, societal, and cultural considerations, 203Link to the text of the note and both philosophers and
legal analysts have offered numerous conflicting and competing models seeking to explain or categorize rights. 204Link
to the text of the note As addressed above, use of rights language in legal discourse has blossomed since World War II.
Many legal thinkers seem smitten with the " romance of rights " in the afterglow of the civil rights movement's
important victories. 205Link to the text of the note This romance influences how rights are perceived and enhances
the role of emotion in arguments for and against expansion of rights . However, despite differences about what rights
are, scholars often agree that personhood is at their core . 206Link to the text of the note The United States
Constitution addresses "persons" and "citizens" as those subject to its protections. 207Link to the text of the note Thus,
no matter how it is defined, personhood is a central gateway issue in deciding whether to extend fundamental rights
to animals .

The rights status of human embryos provides a helpful illustration of personhood's centrality - and potential
malleability - in assignments of rights . In Davis v. Davis, 208Link to the text of the note the Tennessee Supreme Court
confronted this issue when divorcing spouses fought over custody of the couple's frozen embryos. The wife wished to
use the embryos for implantation in her own body or for donation to another couple. 209Link to the text of the note The
husband wished to have the embryos destroyed. 210Link to the text of the note Citing a report by the American Fertility
Society, the Davis court recognized that three major positions exist regarding the personhood status of embryos.
211Link to the text of the note Some ethicists [*65] view embryos as full human persons as soon as they have been
fertilized. 212Link to the text of the note Others view embryos as mere human tissue, and thus as a type of property.
213Link to the text of the note The third position balances the other two, holding that an embryo is not an actual
person but that it "deserves respect greater than that accorded to human tissue" due to "its potential to become a
person " and "its symbolic meaning for many people." 214Link to the text of the note

Davis endorsed the third position - that embryos are not persons with rights - but that they deserve special treatment
because of their potential to become persons. 215Link to the text of the note The difficult issues raised by Davis about
the ethical status of an embryo press the far reaches of personhood . However, the gulf between this issue on the edge
of personhood and efforts to assign personhood to animals is enormous. As with personhood for corporations and ships,
questions of personhood for embryos relate directly to humans and to humanity . Even under the narrowest possible
view of their status, embryos at the very least have the capacity to become human . Animals will never become
human and lack even the " symbolic meaning " of potential humanity .

Although embryos may be viewed as holding a status at the edges of personhood, courts have accepted personhood
status and at least some fundamental rights for postbirth children, even infant children not yet capable of autonomy.
216Link to the text of the note Again this illustrates the centrality of humanity and human interests in analyses of
personhood. Regardless of potential theoretical constructs on what constitutes a person, infants are incontrovertibly
human. Assignment of rights to mentally incapable adults also makes sense when humanity is recognized as the focus of
courts' assignment of personhood. 217Link to the text of the note Mentally incapable adults' lack of autonomy does not
make them nonhuman in the eyes of society or of society's courts, and thus they are assigned personhood and
fundamental rights.

[*66] Although philosophers and legal scholars have formulated several theories on the nature of rights, social contract
principles - which philosophers often refer to as "contractualism" 218Link to the text of the note - are particularly useful
in considering how courts consider rights in the trenches of litigation. Social contract theory also helps explain why
humanity and human interests are central to courts' decisions regarding when to assign rights. Although several variants
of social contract theory have been articulated, general reciprocity between rights and responsibilities is a basic tenet.
219Link to the text of the note Under this view, society generally extends rights in exchange for express or implied
agreement from its members to submit to social responsibilities . 220Link to the text of the note

Animals cannot submit to societal responsibilities . They lack moral agency and of course cannot be held accountable
for their actions . When an animal bites a human or another animal without provocation, we do not have the offending
animal arrested and put on trial. We view courts having done so in the Middle Ages with a sense of absurdity or dark
humor, perhaps with the feel of a Monty Python sketch. 221Link to the text of the note New Scientist derided assigning
rights to animals on this basis:

If animals have rights which protect them against humans , it is only logical that they should have rights that protect
them from each other . If a chimp kills another chimp in the wild, or a human, do we really want to hire a fleet of
lawyers? And if we extended honorary personhood to all animals, would the gazelle be entitled to rights against the
lion? 222Link to the text of the note
[*67] Because animals cannot be morally blameworthy, they also cannot be in and of themselves morally deserving of rights. However, this does not mean that humans are free to be cruel or negligent toward animals. 223Link to the text of the note Rather, the imperative for humans to be humane toward animals derives from
humans' moral agency. Unlike its treatment of animals, society treats humans as responsible for their conduct, including their conduct toward animals.

Immanuel Kant was one of the early contractualists to write about the rights status of animals. 224Link to the text of the note As a contractualist he did not favor assigning formal rights to animals, arguing that moral duties can only be owed to rational beings that can participate in the social contract. 225Link to the text of the note
However, Kant emphasized the importance to humanity of treating animals humanely. Although humans must take care to treat animals well, Kant found this obligation to be derived from human responsibilities. 226Link to the text of the note He believed that humans "have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not toward
them, but in regard to them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to persons." 227Link to the text of the note He wrote:

If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals,
for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. 228Link to the text of the note

[*68] The philosopher John Rawls was the most prominent champion of contractualism in recent times. 229Link to the text of the note He argued that the moral community includes only those who "are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the
principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree." 230Link to the text of the note Animals, he concluded, are not members of the moral community because they lack the "capacity for a sense of justice." 231Link to the text of the note However, like Kant, Rawls's view that animals are not part of the moral community did
not lead him to a disregard for their welfare. He insisted that "it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to [animals] … . Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil." 232Link to the text of the note

Evolutionary anthropologist Jonathan Marks elaborates on the importance of focusing on humans in seeking humane treatment, asserting that:

A concern for animal welfare must come out of a concern for human welfare. It must emerge from a concern for human rights, not supplant it. For once we begin to devalue human lives, we lose a standard by which to value any other kind of lives. And it just doesn't work the other way around. 233Link to the text of the note

Marks emphasizes the importance of protecting animals such as nonhuman primates. 234Link to the text of the note However, he cautions that humans must guard against allowing concern for animals to come at the expense of concern for human welfare. 235Link to the text of the note

In the early twentieth century, jurisprudence scholar Wesley Hohfeld formulated what has become "perhaps the most popular way of speaking about legal rights." 236Link to the text of the note He described legal relations in terms of opposites and correlatives and "believed that the term "right' should be restricted in use to
describe those things that correlate to duties… . Rights are simple and atomic; rights are claims based on duties." 237Link to the text of the note Courts have utilized the framework formulated by Hohfeld in analyzing legal terms. 238Link to the text of the note This formulation recognizes the significance of the social contract in
assigning rights: Rights generally have relevance in relation [*69] to duties or responsibilities. Philosopher L.W. Sumner recognized the relevance of Hohfeld's framework in animal rights issues, concluding that under the frequently cited approach, animals cannot have rights because they do not have duties or responsibilities.
239Link to the text of the note

Hohfeld's formulation of rights might be the most popular because it fits most closely with Western societies' intuitions and education about rights. Thomas Jefferson borrowed from contractualist John Locke in drafting the Declaration of Independence. 240Link to the text of the note Locke's conception of the social contract is that
citizens are entitled to "life, liberty and property." 241Link to the text of the note Jefferson merely substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in this theme at the core of our national identity. 242Link to the text of the note

School children in the United States are taught social contract theory as a basis for the ideals of the American Revolution. For example, one state articulates a teaching objective for eighth grade social studies students as being to "analyze the origin of the ideas behind the Revolutionary movement and the movement toward
independence; [for example], social contract, natural rights, English traditions." 243Link to the text of the note

As another of many potential examples, a textbook published by the United States government for use by immigrants who wished to be candidates for citizenship explained that in the book, "an effort is made to use concepts that the immigrant can relate to, such as the social contract and delegation of authority by the people as
supported by the Constitution, to help the student understand and appreciate representative government." 244Link to the text of the note Social contract ideals of rights mirroring responsibilities were an important intellectual underpinning in the formation of the United States, and our education system appropriately teaches
contractualist [*70] themes from the Revolutionary period such as "no taxation without representation" as a foundation of our national identity. The average American likely does not know the philosophical term contractualism, but that same average American has been taught social contract ideals as the very basis of democracy.
We are taught from a young age that just as government must give us representation to go along with taxation, it must give us rights that correlate with our societal responsibilities.

Richard Posner has downplayed the practical significance of academic philosophical concepts on the question of animal rights, 245Link to the text of the note and although law is connected to abstract philosophy at least at a theoretical level, he has a point. Posner calls Peter Singer - a champion of utilitarianism - one of his "stalking
horses" on the issue of rights. 246Link to the text of the note Under utilitarianism, behavior that creates the most utility should be encouraged. 247Link to the text of the note Posner applies this theoretical philosophy to a hypothetical involving an aggressive dog and a human infant. He asks us to consider a situation in which a dog
is about to attack an infant, and we can only stop the dog by inflicting severe pain on it. 248Link to the text of the note If the pain we need to inflict on the dog to stop it from harming the infant exceeded the infant's potential pain from the attack, Posner argues that a utilitarian approach treating animals' pain as equally important
to humans' pain would require allowing the infant to be attacked. 249Link to the text of the note He then notes that "any normal person (and not merely the infant's parents), including a philosopher when he is not self-consciously engaged in philosophizing, would say that it would be monstrous to spare the dog, even though to do
so would minimize the sum of pain in the world." 250Link to the text of the note Further:

[*71]
If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go … . Just as philosophers who have embraced skepticism about the existence of the external world, or hold
that science is just a "narrative" with no defensible claim to yield objective truth, do not put their money where their mouth is by refusing to jump out of the way of a truck bearing down on them, so philosophers who embrace weird ethical theories do not act on those theories even when they could do so without being punished.
There are exceptions, but we call them insane. 251Link to the text of the note

Similarly, most humans imbued with social contract principles from their earliest education about the nature of rights are unlikely to change their views based on abstract philosophical arguments. Steven Wise acknowledges the difficulty of changing strongly held societal views about the status of animals and argues that change
may take place slowly over time - "funeral by funeral" - as people gradually become more enlightened - from his perspective - regarding animals in successive generations. 252Link to the text of the note However, the significance of social contract principles in the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is a widely
accepted historical fact, and that will not change over time. Its role as the "principal justification" for American independence is "especially familiar." 253Link to the text of the note John Locke's writings "were a primary authority for the [*72] Colonists, and his social contract furnished the political theory for both the American
Revolution and the framing of the Constitution." 254Link to the text of the note

Thus, when philosophers or political theorists argue that other rights models are superior, they are swimming against a formidable tide in seeking widespread practical application of their views. At least in the United States, so long as children are taught and continue to believe that the ideals that led to the American Revolution are
to be cherished, they will likely retain a powerful attraction to social contract principles as a basis for rights throughout their lives. Whether the perception that rights are correlative to responsibilities is an inherent moral instinct or learned or some combination of instinct and learning, a key point is that the perception is widely
held. Abstract theory counts in law's evolution, but it does not count nearly as much as the facts on the ground. As constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone noted, judges typically build legal theory around results they feel are desirable, and not the other way around. 255Link to the text of the note

A. The "Argument from Marginal Cases": Addressing Rights for Infants and Mentally Incapable Adults Under Contractualism

As discussed above, some animal rights activists emphasize that rights are assigned to artificial entities , such as
corporations and ships , in arguing by analogy that intelligent animals should have rights . 256Link to the text of the
note However, analogizing rights assigned to human infants and to mentally incapable adults is even more popular
among animal rights proponents ; one writer calls it their "central argument." 257Link to the text of the note This
analogizing between infants or mentally incapable adults and intelligent animals in rights debates is sometimes termed
"the argument from marginal cases." 258Link to the text of the note Gary Francione describes the problem as a
challenge to those who would rely on contractualism to deny rights to animals:

[*73]

There are many human beings who are not able to exercise or respond to moral claims. Assuming that moral rights and
duties are properly viewed as arising from a hypothetical social contract - very significant assumption - there are plenty
of humans who lack the capacity to participate in such contractual arrangements … but these characteristics are wholly
irrelevant to whether a human should be treated as the resource of others. 259Link to the text of the note

The argument is that because infants and mentally incapable adults are not treated as property and are assigned limited
rights despite lacking moral agency, it is unfair to treat animals as property on the basis of their lacking moral agency.
The argument from marginal cases is at its strongest when the comparison is to particularly intelligent animals, such as
chimpanzees and bonobos. Such animals may have significantly more intelligence and communicative ability than
infants and many mentally incapable adults, and thus one might argue they are actually closer to moral agency than are
some humans.

Although the argument from marginal cases may be attractive on its surface, it is unpersuasive. Although arguments by
analogy are important and often appealing, they are also malleable and can be misleading - as demonstrated in the
efforts described above to argue by analogy that if nonliving corporations are assigned rights, then a fortiori living and
intelligent animals should be assigned rights. 260Link to the text of the note Analogizing between limited rights for
infants and mentally incapable adults and potential limited rights for animals is both problematic and dangerous.

First, the argument from marginal cases fails to account for the complexity of human lives and relationships. 261Link to
the text of the note When deciding how they should treat a human infant, people do not engage in an assessment of its
"practical autonomy" to determine whether it is deserving of moral rights and, one hopes, they never will. 262Link to
the text of the note Humans' motivation to protect human children may be, in part, instinctive. 263Link to the text of the
note To the extent that [*74] explanations for such instincts are even necessary, some are not difficult to articulate at a
basic level. In addition to sensing infants' vulnerability and need for protection, humans see hope in them. They are not
yet moral agents able to participate in the social contract, but they represent the future of humanity and of the social
contract. How they develop will determine what society will become. If they are denied moral rights and treated badly,
society will suffer.

This sentiment is demonstrated in how courts generally address family law cases and mandatory education cases. In
family law disputes over child custody, for example, courts focus on the best interests of the child rather than the
interests of the mother or the father. 264Link to the text of the note This is because the child's development is
important to society's welfare. 265Link to the text of the note Depending on how he or she is raised, the child might
develop a cure for cancer someday or - at the other extreme - might become a mass murderer. 266Link to the text of the
note Society has a vested interest in the child's future. The same may be said of mandatory education. Society
recognizes an important interest in having educated adult participants in the social contract , and thus it forcefully
asserts itself in requiring that children be educated. 267Link to the text of the note This essential connection between
human children and society's future powerfully distinguishes children from intelligent animals that will never become
members of the social contract .

One may not make this argument in the same way regarding many mentally incapable adults because many of them will
remain mentally incapable their entire lives and will never attain moral agency. Unlike infants, many such adults cannot
easily be seen as representing the social contract's future. However, they do represent its echo. In the practical world -
as contrasted with abstract philosophical hypotheses - humans [*75] recognize a sameness in mentally incapable adults
that they will never feel even with intelligent animals. 268Link to the text of the note Most people perceive mentally
incapable adults as human first, and mental incompetence is seen as an aspect of their humanity rather than as a
negation of it. Humans "who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to
human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community." 269Link to the text of the note Gary
Francione rejects such reasoning, asserting that "this argument … begs the question since the problem is how to
distinguish humans from other animals by some characteristic that may be shared by some animals but that is not
possessed by all humans." 270Link to the text of the note However, humans and their courts do not evaluate intelligence
in deciding whether to assign human dignity rights; they evaluate humanness. 271Link to the text of the note All of us
know we could become a mentally incapable adult; none of us might become a chimpanzee, and we cannot possibly
relate to a chimpanzee on the same level that we can relate to another human.

Further, and thankfully, courts do not have a mechanism for formally determining which mentally incapable adults have
absolutely no hope of future participation in the social contract. Many mentally incapable adults, such as those in a
temporary coma, will some day regain their mental competence and their moral agency. Additionally, we do not know
the future of medicine. Some mental conditions that may presently appear permanent might be cured during our
lifetimes. 272Link to the text of the note Although the hope of future moral agency for mentally incapable adults is
different from the more certain hope of future moral agency for children , it is still hope. Animals , in contrast, will
always be animals.

[*76] It is also important to note that the line between no moral agency and some moral agency in humans is fuzzy .
No clear boundaries exist between people who are minimally intelligent but morally responsible to some degree and
people who are nearly but not quite intelligent enough to be morally responsible to any degree . 273Link to the text of
the note Thus, seeking to divide humans on the basis of intelligence for purposes of determining whether dignity rights
should be assigned would be unworkable. In contrast, courts' current approach of assigning human dignity rights to all
humans because they are human - regardless of their intellectual competence - avoids the confusion and tragic
misjudgments that would be inherent in a case-by-case approach. 274Link to the text of the note

Finally, as addressed further in Part V, assigning rights to intelligent animals based on comparisons to mentally
incapable adults threatens the weakest and most vulnerable members of human society . 275Link to the text of the
note Even the phrase sometimes used to frame the debate - "arguments from marginal cases " 276Link to the text of
the note - highlights a challenge to human dignity . No human is marginal . As John Marks notes, "Singling out particular
classes of people in order to show how similar they are to apes is a troubling scientific strategy , not least of all when
the humans rhetorically invoked are the very ones whose rights are most conspicuously in jeopardy ." 277Link to the
text of the note Marks derides blurring the line between humans and apes as "an unscientific rhetorical device" that is
"morally problematic (in addition to being zoologically ridiculous)." 278Link to the text of the note Concluding that some
animals may be able to "earn" dignity rights if it is established that they are sufficiently intelligent implies that perhaps
some humans should lose their dignity rights if they [*77] are sufficiently unintelligent. "If [humanity] can be earned, of
course, it can also be lost; they are two sides of the same coin." 279Link to the text of the note If mere cognitive
performance were the standard, it is difficult to see why a bright adult chimpanzee would not have more rights than a
human infant or a mentally incapable adult. This would seem to be edgy territory even for an academic philosophical
theory; it should be given no opportunity for practical application in the real world of courts and law.
Yes spillover---personhood is a binary question, and fetuses do not fit in one or the other---the plan
clarifies that they should be persons.
Christine M. Korsgaard 13, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 2013,
“PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW,” Think, 12(34), pp. 25-32,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/personhood-animals-and-the-law/
E9F2FBA3B2F8ECF65A7C6BAD1DCD6D2A

The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of
‘ persons ’ and ‘ things ’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law . In the law, a ‘ person ’ is essentially the
subject of rights and obligations , while a thing may be owned as property . In ethics, a person is an object of respect,
to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative
value, and may be used as a means to some person’s ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us
with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to
the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category . For
various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus , a non-human animal , the
environment , or an object of great beauty, as a person , but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they
are to be valued only as means .

In the law, the bifurcation between persons and things or persons and property leaves non-human animals in an
especially awkward position. Animals, or at least many of them, are sentient beings with lives of their own and capacities
for enjoyment and suffering that seem to make some sort of claim on us. Some have very sophisticated cognitive
capacities, including some sense of self. But because animals are classified as property, efforts to secure them some
legal protections have been of mixed success and have introduced a certain level of incoherence into the laws. In the
face of this, some animal rights advocates have suggested that all cognitively sophisticated animals, or all animals
generally, ought to be re-categorized as legal persons .

But it may be argued that those who make this proposal are ignoring something important about the concept of a
person. It has generally been assumed that ‘personhood’, whatever it is, is, or is based on, an attribute that is
characteristic of human beings , and not of the other animals . In the philosophical tradition, the most common
candidate for the attribute that establishes ‘ personhood’ is rationality , but understood in a specific sense. Rationality is
sometimes loosely identified with the ability to choose intelligently between options or to solve problems by taking
thought, but those are attributes that human beings arguably share with many other animals. The more specific sense of
‘rationality’ refers to a normative capacity, a capacity to assess the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and to adjust
them accordingly. On the side of action, for instance, it is the capacity to ask whether something that would potentially
motivate you to perform a certain action is really a reason for doing that action – and then to be motivated to act in
accordance with the answer that you get. Rationality, in this sense, is normative self-government, the capacity to be
governed by thoughts about what you ought to do or to believe.

2NC---Link---Spillover
Personhood spills over across contexts
Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Before discussing categories of legal personhood, it is worth considering whether there is such a thing as "personhood"
law in the first place.'" It could be that there are simply a number of different areas of law that define persons in
different ways depending on the purpose of the law , but no cohesive " law of persons ." The argument for this view
may be similar to ones that have taken issue with new categorizations of specialty areas of law, such as Internet law.
These arguments maintain that the issues arising out of technological developments break down into basic legal
areas such as contract , tort , or criminal law , and there is no unifying theme that justifies a special label." It is certainly
true that there is no express definition of " person " in the Constitution , nor has the Supreme Court proffered one."
Moreover, different state and federal statutes define "person" differently, depending on their goal.'3 Focusing our
attention on a personhood law as a whole , however, is a useful endeavor . It is likely to lead to greater clarity in a
variety of areas of law (e.g., corporate law , animal law ), as well as provide a framework under which we can consider
the application of current laws to new developments , such as artificial intelligence .'4 As a result, conducting an in-
depth evaluation of legal personhood is both necessary and useful .

2NC---Uniqueness---AT: Thumpers
There are no thumpers.
Phil Goldberg 21, office managing partner and co-chair of the public policy practice group at Shook Hardy & Bacon
LLP, 11-10-21, “Colombia's 'Cocaine Hippos' Are Not Persons Under US Law,” Law360,
https://www.law360.com/articles/1439289/colombia-s-cocaine-hippos-are-not-persons-under-us-law

To be sure, animals are not legal persons in the U.S. For decades, the ALDF and other animal rights groups, including
the Nonhuman Rights Project and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have tried to change this law .

They have filed habeas corpus petitions to free animals in zoos.[5] They have equated animal ownership with slavery,
saying owning animals violates the involuntary servitude provision of the 13th Amendment.[6]

In 2015, PETA filed a case for a chimpanzee , Naruto v. Slater, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of
California, claiming that the chimp qualified as a person under federal copyright law.[7] And the groups have asked
courts to recognize expanded damages in animal injury cases.[8]

Across these areas of law, federal and state courts have remained remarkably consistent . They have properly honored
the role of animals in society, including as cherished family pets — but have uniformly rejected efforts to leverage our
affinity for animals into new legal rights.

What they have found is that giving legal rights to animals is not automatically the pro-animal position — and the
groups do not necessarily speak for the animals they purport to represent . Indeed, animal rights often are at odds with
animals' welfare.

Nearly a decade ago, Joyce Tischler, a founder of the ALDF, cautioned that "not every animal lawyer has greeted [the
animal rights approach] with enthusiasm," with some urging students and practitioners "to step away from the focus on
animal rights and instead work for progressive welfare reforms ... [which] has gained a good deal of traction."[9] Courts
and legislatures have recognized this same dichotomy.

Courts also have been suspicious of the groups' claims that they are acting in the animals' best interests — not for their
own institutional benefits. In Naruto , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that PETA treated the
chimpanzee as "an unwitting pawn " in PETA's ideological goals .[10] In Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. v. Breheny, a case
before the New York Court of Appeals, the NRP is seeking to remove Happy the elephant from the only home it has ever
known, where it has lived for more than 40 years.[11]

As the Connecticut Court of Appeals explained in 2019, in denying a habeas petition in Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. v.
R.W. Commerford & Sons Inc., changing the categorization of animals to persons in any context would "upend" the legal
system.[12]

Under current law, animal welfare is the priority , with legislatures and courts consistently and rightfully protecting
animals from cruelty and abuse. That makes sense, but it does not make animals legal persons — nor does a three-line
order allowing a couple of subpoenas in a foreign case.
Given the ALDF's decadeslong quest to establish a beachhead for legal personhood, it is not surprising the group would
make mountains out of grains of sand. Kudos to them on faking out the American media.

But some will try to leverage the approval of the ALDF's subpoenas in other court proceedings — including the current
habeas corpus petition in New York. Hopefully, these courts will be more discerning than the media. It just takes reading
the ALDF's own words.

AT Corporations
2NC---Internal Link---AT: Dobbs
1. ABORTION BAN---Dobbs lets states limit abortion, personhood justifies a nationwide ban.
Mary Ziegler 22, Professor of law at the University of California, Davis, 5-20-21, “The Abortion Fight Has Never Been
About Just Roe v. Wade,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/abortion-fight-roe-v-
wade/618930/

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could result in the overruling of Roe v. Wade. The case, Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion starting at the 15th week of
pregnancy. Significantly, the statute draws the line before fetal viability—the point at which survival is possible outside
the womb. The Court has previously held that before viability, “the state’s interests are not strong enough to support a
prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” To uphold
Mississippi’s law, the Court would have to rewrite the rules—perhaps just the opportunity it needs to overturn Roe
altogether.

If that happens, it will represent the culmination of decades of work by anti-abortion-rights activists. But for those
activists, gutting Roe would be just the beginning .

Ever since Roe , abortion-rights foes and their Republican allies have been asking the Court to reverse course —to
acknowledge that the Constitution has nothing whatsoever to say about abortion , either in favor of or against it.
Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice arguably most beloved by conservatives, routinely stated that the Constitution
is silent on abortion. Republicans have railed against the Court’s judicial activism in Roe, insisting that the justices
robbed the American people of the opportunity to decide the abortion issue for themselves. In this account, Roe did not
just destroy valuable opportunities for compromise on abortion; the decision did fundamental damage to America’s
democratic principles, removing one of the most controversial issues from representative legislatures and resolving it by
judicial fiat.

But within the anti-abortion-rights movement, there is not so much talk about democracy anymore. Now some
abortion-rights opponents are quite literally looking for a Roe of their own , asking the Court to recognize fetal rights
under the Fourteenth Amendment. Remember that overturning Roe wouldn’t make abortion illegal ; it would mean
that states could set their own abortion limits , which would no longer be subject to constitutional review. That will
never be enough for anti-abortion-rights activists, though. In the conservative magazine First Things, John Finnis , a
professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, recently made an argument that could provide the framework an
anti-abortion-rights Supreme Court could use to outlaw abortion across the country : that the legislators who wrote
the Fourteenth Amendment viewed unborn children as persons. If the Constitution recognizes fetal personhood , then
unborn children would have the right to equal protection under and due process of the law. Abortion would be
unconstitutional in New York as well as in Alabama . Other leading anti-abortion-rights scholars have made the same
argument.

Finnis’s article has provoked debate across the ideological spectrum. The conservative attorney Ed Whelan has taken
issue with the substance of Finnis’s claim, suggesting that unless the anti-abortion-rights movement first wins over
public opinion, Finnis’s approach will backfire. Progressives have been far harsher, unsurprisingly. Writing in The New
York Times, the columnist Michelle Goldberg denounced what she calls an authoritarian turn in anti-abortion-rights
advocacy—one more sign that the GOP has changed fundamentally in the post-Trump era.

The abortion debate has never been about just Roe —and it’s never been about letting a popular majority have a say.
What’s new is that this argument now meets a receptive Supreme Court for the first time in more than a generation .

2NC---Uniqueness---AT: State Laws

2NC---Internal Link---Fetal Personhood Key
Abortion policy is perceived, but fetal personhood obliterates soft power.
Jen Kirby 22, Foreign and National Security Reporter at Vox, 6-30-22, “Why America’s allies are worried about the end
of Roe,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/23186751/roe-supreme-court-europe-world-reaction

On the same day the Supreme Court overruled Roe, Germany repealed a Nazi-era law that banned abortion providers
from advertising or providing information about their services. It is part of a larger pattern: In the past 25 years , nearly
60 countries have expanded access to reproductive rights , according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. The United
States is just one of four countries — Poland, Nicaragua, and El Salvador being the others — that has rolled back rights
since 1994 . That group isn’t exactly the cohort of democracies the United States often sees itself as the leader of .

Though, to be clear, the US has always swung back and forth when it comes to promoting reproductive rights as part of
its foreign policy; Republicans withdraw and Democrats restore funding for certain programs.

The Roe decision is in some ways more visible than, say, the funding for a UN agency. As experts said, gender and
women’s rights have long been a rallying point for US foreign policy. The Dobbs decision isn’t the first thing to expose
the gaps between America’s ideals and its realities, but it could make it harder for the US to take that stand. “It’s taking
this huge step back, and so the soft power of the US is damaged in several ways ,” said Michaela Mattes, an associate
professor in international relations at the University of California Berkeley.

And Supreme Court rulings can matter internationally. Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark anti-segregation
case — also helped the United States show the world it was trying to live up to post-World War II ideals of human
rights , and it helped in the larger ideological battles of the Cold War between democracy and communism . As former
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2004: “To sum up, Brown both reflected and propelled the
development of human rights protection internationally. It was decided with the horrors of the Holocaust in full view,
and with the repression of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a current reality.”

Encarnación pointed out that, when it comes to civil liberties, “it’s been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time
since the Supreme Court led the world” in policy or laws. (Same-sex marriage, maybe the last big progressive ruling, was
already legal in about 20 countries when that ruling came down in 2015.) The question is whether Dobbs will have
influence, but in an entirely different direction — either further damaging the US’s ability to advocate for human rights,
or being used to justify rollbacks to women and human rights in other places.

“This is something that we saw with Brown v. Board of [Education] — how a domestic federal ruling had global
dimensions,” said Joyce Mao, associate professor of history at Middlebury University. “The overturning of Roe may
have a similar cultural, political, and diplomatic importance that is going to absolutely influence the way in which
potential allies and existing allies view American democracy .”

America, the unpredictable

Allies and others have gotten pretty concerned and disillusioned with the U nited States before, as during the Iraq
War. But then came Donald Trump , who did things like threaten to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
actually pull out of the Iran deal negotiated with European partners, and start trade wars with allies. Also, Twitter wars.
Things that seemed like bipartisan constants in American foreign policy were no longer .

But the Trump era also exposed how deeply divided and polarized America was, culminating in January 6, 2021, and
the election fraud lies, which have only hooked themselves deeper into American political life. Biden is president, and
right now, relations with allies and partners are copacetic, even invigorated. But that no longer feels permanent.

The Supreme Court’s decision fits into this larger pattern of unpredictability , which makes it hard to know where
America will be in the next months , a few years , or a decade . As experts said, US institutions, including internationally,
were often seen as creating this framework of stability — yes, different political parties won, there were tensions
between branches, but pragmatism tended to prevail . “That pragmatism in terms of execution has been lost — and
Roe and Dobbs illustrated that to the nth degree,” Mao said.

As Mattes said, now, the Supreme Court decision reaffirmed that the institutions once seen as stabilizing factors are
not necessarily so . Instead, who has control over the institutions matters; and they may no longer have the same
constraints.

And predictability is what you want when dealing with other countries , and it’s what you need when it comes to
allies and close partners . Dobbs probably isn’t going to directly alter the US’s relationship with its allies in the
immediate term, and it will land differently in different parts of the world. But among European partners, especially, it is
likely to raise the ever-present worry that the Biden administration is less a restoration than a respite .

Fetal Personhood DA
2NC---Overview

Soft power solves every existential risk.

Devjani Roy 20, Senior Research Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, interviewing Joseph Nye,
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and former
Assistant Secretary of Defense, November 2020, “Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on the Geopolitical Impact of COVID-19, Morality
and the U.S. Presidency, and Soft Power in Foreign Policy,”
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/joseph-s-nye-jr-geopolitical-impact-covid-19-
morality-and-us

Looking forward, [President-Elect] Biden could take a cue from the post-1945 U.S. presidents whose successes I
describe. The U nited S tates could launch a massive COVID-19 aid program —a medical version of the Marshall Plan.
Instead of competing in propaganda, we could demonstrate the importance of power with, rather than over, others,
and set up bilateral and multilateral frameworks to enhance cooperation. We could realize that recurrent waves of
COVID-19 will affect poorer countries less able to cope and that such a developing-world reservoir will hurt everyone if it
spills back northward in a seasonal resurgence. Both for self-interested and humanitarian reasons, the United States
should lead the G-20 in generous contributions to a major new COVID-19 fund that is open to all countries. If Biden were
to choose such cooperative and soft-power-enhancing policies, something good may yet come out of the pandemic—a
geopolitical path to a better world.

GrowthPolicy: In what way(s) will COVID-19 reshape, or reposition, the United States’ place in the current world order
over the next fifty years? Second: What would be your recommendations for adjusting and adapting U.S. foreign policy
apropos of China given the long-term strategic impact of the pandemic on international relations? 
Joseph Nye: I hesitate to predict fifty years into the future. As I used to tell analysts when I chaired the National
Intelligence Council, there is no single future , and the longer the time horizon, the greater the number of confounding
variables and possible futures . Even a year ago, we did not foresee the effect that a pandemic would have on the 2020
election; yet without it, Trump might have been re-elected. And even though we can predict another pandemic, we
cannot predict its effects on world order. The Great Influenza of 1918-19 killed many more people than World War I ,
but the major political changes in the 1930s were caused by the war rather than the pandemic. But my guess today is
that this current pandemic will not change the geopolitics of 2030.

In 2030, COVID-19 will look just as unpleasant as the Great Influenza looked from 1930, but with similar limited long-
term geopolitical effects . Growing Chinese power , domestic populism and polarization in the West, and more
authoritarian regimes worldwide already existed, and the pandemic may have somewhat accentuated these trends.
While there is some setback to global supply chains in the name of security, some degree of economic globalization will
persist, and environmental globalization exemplified by climate change and pandemics will increase.

There will be a growing political awareness of the importance of environmental globalization , underpinned by a
grudging recognition that no country can solve such problems acting alone . We will see a “ cooperative rivalry ” where
we have to learn about power with other countries as well as power over others. The U.S. and China will manage to
cooperate on pandemics and climate change , even as they compete on other issues such as navigation restrictions in
the South or East China Sea . Friendship will be limited, but the rivalry can be managed . Some institutions will wither,
and still others will be invented. The United States will remain the largest power, but without the degree of influence it
had in the past.

China war outweighs---draws in everyone AND collapses the economy.

Robert Blackwill 21, Deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush, Lecturer in International Security at
Harvard, and Philip Zelikow, History Professor at the University of Virginia, Former Executive Director of 9/11
Commission, February 2021, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” Council Special Report
No. 90

The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should
preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president. It could be unlikely that a U.S.- China conflict would go nuclear
and Beijing has repeated its no first use doctrine, but there is little doubt that China wants to grow its arsenal of a few
hundred warheads and build a more sophisticated force that could employ hypersonic glide capabilities .189 Millions of
Americans could die in the first war in human history between two nuclear weapons states. A 2015 RAND Corporation
study of the effects of U.S.-China combat determined that estimating military losses would be “exceedingly difficult.”
World War II, however, was the last time the United States lost a major warship, and one sunk vessel could turn into the
deadliest U.S. military event since the Vietnam War.190

The outbreak of a great power war would likely produce a global recession , if not a depression . It would disrupt Asian
and international trade, sever major supply chains, and could collapse international financial systems.191 This would
produce deeply painful economic consequences for U.S. allies, who trade more with China than they do with the United
States. One study estimates that a single year of U.S.-China conflict could cause American GDP to decline by 5 to 10
percent.192

China could unleash cyberattacks on the United States. The New York Federal Reserve estimates that a major
cyberattack on the U.S. financial system could cause 2.5 times daily GDP in forgone payments, and a Lloyd’s of London
and Cambridge University study predicted that a hypothetical blackout affecting fifteen states could cause $243 billion to
$1 trillion in damages, as well as deaths resulting from disruption to health care, traffic, and industry.193

In 2013, hackers associated with the PLA reportedly tried to infiltrate companies that control U.S. critical infrastructure,
including Telvent which provides remote access and holds blueprints to North and South American oil and gas
pipelines.194 In 2019, researchers uncovered a suspected Chinese plot to access American utility companies.195
Additionally, in September 2020, a ransomware attack said to have originated in Russia hit U.S. hospitals during a
coronavirus surge and forced doctors to switch to pen and paper record keeping and postpone certain medical
procedures.196 The outbreak of U.S.-PRC conflict could see multiple cyber events hit U.S. society and its allies in rapid
succession.197

While Washington and Beijing were trading blows, Russia could threaten the Baltics , increase its presence in Ukraine,
or provide oil and weapon support to China.198 Iran would be unlikely to stand idle in the Middle East in such a crisis
given U.S. attention directed elsewhere . Another factor is the allied dimension. In matters ranging from technology
issues to criticism of China’s handling of Hong Kong, U.S. allies have sometimes been hesitant to support Washington
when American rhetoric and actions are deemed too provocative or come with high economic costs.199 France and
Germany refused to support the United States in the 2003 Gulf conflict. In a U.S.-China war, even Japan might not join
the battle given its domestic politics and constitutional constraints and the United States could well fight alone,
shattering its alliance system.

AT No Spillover

The extension of personhood to fetuses depends on assessing the “cases at the raw edges of human
existence”---the plan changes how to consider those cases by granting nonhuman entities juridical
personhood.
Alexis Dyschkant 15, Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, J.D., Illinois College of
Law, M.A. in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, B.A. in History and Philosophy, University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 2015, “LEGAL PERSONHOOD: HOW WE ARE GETTING IT WRONG,”
https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2015/5/Dyschkant.pdf

Unlike children, the question of whether or not fetuses should be considered legal persons has received a lot of
attention, in part because a declaration of fetuses as persons would challenge the constitutionality of abortion . In
Roe v. Wade, the Court emphasized the dramatic consequences of declaring a fetus to be a person . “[I]f this
suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then
be guaranteed specifically by the [ Fourteenth] Amendment .”39 The Court denied fetuses the status of legal persons.40

Important to the Court’s analysis is the fact that, as a practical matter, the use of the word “ person ” in the Fourteenth
Amendment generally only has postnatal application with no indication of any possible prenatal application.41 The
presumption seems to be that the rights and ininterests protected by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection
Clause just do not have practical application to a fetus. In conjunction with the fact that “person” is not constitutionally
defined, the Court refuses to attribute personhood to fetuses .

Interestingly for the purpose of this exposition, the debate between the Supreme Court and anti-abortion advocates
regarding whether to attribute personhood to fetuses directly tracks the question of fetal humanity. The Court
declines to attribute humanity to fetuses. All references in the Court’s decision to the fetuses’ humanity are qualified.
References include “the potentiality of human life,”42 “potential human life,” 43 and “potential future human life.”44 In
contrast, states which support including fetuses as persons also refer to the fetus as already human, sometimes at the
point of conception.45 The AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion, which seeks to reduce or end abortions generally,
claims that abortion is an “unwarrantable destruction of human life.”46 Anti-abortion states at the time widely had
adopted legislation declaring a fetus to be a human life.47
In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court held (reaffirming Roe) that “[b]efore viability,
the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial
obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.”48 The relevance of viability is that it helps establish
when the fetus becomes humanlike enough to trump the mother’s right to abort . Legal scholars advocating for a
theory of personhood that is modeled off of humanity would agree with this sort of line-drawing because basing the
person on the “ embodied human ” “draws on shared intuitions about who counts in our community of legal persons
and how we should take account of them.”49 Once a fetus is viable, it is not human like enough to be a legal person, but
it is human like enough to be “worthy of recognition.”50 The Court’s discussion of the relevance of viability in Roe
demonstrates the importance of belonging to humanity. It states that determinations of viability can be framed in terms
of when a “fetus became ‘formed’ or recognizably human, or in terms of when a ‘person’ came into being.”51

The disagreement about whether to extend personhood to fetuses rest, fundamentally, on how to handle cases at
“the raw edges of human existence .”52 This suggests that had fetuses been obviously human then personhood would
apply, or had fetuses been obviously nonhuman then personhood would not apply. The difficulty of establishing
personhood is why fetal personhood has received more attention than child personhood; children are obviously
humans and fetuses are not obviously humans.

A “romance with rights” causes spillover---there’s no basis to vest personhood in nonhuman

entities without doing the same for fetuses, since animals have zero potential to become human.
Richard L. Cupp 9, John W. Wade Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, Winter 2009, “Moving Beyond
Animal Rights: A Legal/Contractualist Critique,” San Diego Law Review, Vol. 46, p. 27, advance-lexis-
com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/api/document?collection=analytical-materials&id=urn:contentItem:4W2F-XY50-
00CW-F0SF-00000-00&context=1516831

IV. Contractualist Personhood: The Centrality of Humanity to Rights

No general agreement exists on how rights should be precisely defined . 202Link to the text of the note Rights entail
complex moral, policy, societal, and cultural considerations, 203Link to the text of the note and both philosophers and
legal analysts have offered numerous conflicting and competing models seeking to explain or categorize rights. 204Link
to the text of the note As addressed above, use of rights language in legal discourse has blossomed since World War II.
Many legal thinkers seem smitten with the " romance of rights " in the afterglow of the civil rights movement's
important victories. 205Link to the text of the note This romance influences how rights are perceived and enhances
the role of emotion in arguments for and against expansion of rights . However, despite differences about what rights
are, scholars often agree that personhood is at their core . 206Link to the text of the note The United States
Constitution addresses "persons" and "citizens" as those subject to its protections. 207Link to the text of the note Thus,
no matter how it is defined, personhood is a central gateway issue in deciding whether to extend fundamental rights
to animals .

The rights status of human embryos provides a helpful illustration of personhood's centrality - and potential
malleability - in assignments of rights . In Davis v. Davis, 208Link to the text of the note the Tennessee Supreme Court
confronted this issue when divorcing spouses fought over custody of the couple's frozen embryos. The wife wished to
use the embryos for implantation in her own body or for donation to another couple. 209Link to the text of the note The
husband wished to have the embryos destroyed. 210Link to the text of the note Citing a report by the American Fertility
Society, the Davis court recognized that three major positions exist regarding the personhood status of embryos.
211Link to the text of the note Some ethicists [*65] view embryos as full human persons as soon as they have been
fertilized. 212Link to the text of the note Others view embryos as mere human tissue, and thus as a type of property.
213Link to the text of the note The third position balances the other two, holding that an embryo is not an actual
person but that it "deserves respect greater than that accorded to human tissue" due to "its potential to become a
person " and "its symbolic meaning for many people." 214Link to the text of the note
Davis endorsed the third position - that embryos are not persons with rights - but that they deserve special treatment
because of their potential to become persons. 215Link to the text of the note The difficult issues raised by Davis about
the ethical status of an embryo press the far reaches of personhood . However, the gulf between this issue on the edge
of personhood and efforts to assign personhood to animals is enormous. As with personhood for corporations and ships,
questions of personhood for embryos relate directly to humans and to humanity . Even under the narrowest possible
view of their status, embryos at the very least have the capacity to become human . Animals will never become
human and lack even the " symbolic meaning " of potential humanity .

Although embryos may be viewed as holding a status at the edges of personhood, courts have accepted personhood
status and at least some fundamental rights for postbirth children, even infant children not yet capable of autonomy.
216Link to the text of the note Again this illustrates the centrality of humanity and human interests in analyses of
personhood. Regardless of potential theoretical constructs on what constitutes a person, infants are incontrovertibly
human. Assignment of rights to mentally incapable adults also makes sense when humanity is recognized as the focus of
courts' assignment of personhood. 217Link to the text of the note Mentally incapable adults' lack of autonomy does not
make them nonhuman in the eyes of society or of society's courts, and thus they are assigned personhood and
fundamental rights.

[*66] Although philosophers and legal scholars have formulated several theories on the nature of rights, social contract
principles - which philosophers often refer to as "contractualism" 218Link to the text of the note - are particularly useful
in considering how courts consider rights in the trenches of litigation. Social contract theory also helps explain why
humanity and human interests are central to courts' decisions regarding when to assign rights. Although several variants
of social contract theory have been articulated, general reciprocity between rights and responsibilities is a basic tenet.
219Link to the text of the note Under this view, society generally extends rights in exchange for express or implied
agreement from its members to submit to social responsibilities . 220Link to the text of the note

Animals cannot submit to societal responsibilities . They lack moral agency and of course cannot be held accountable
for their actions . When an animal bites a human or another animal without provocation, we do not have the offending
animal arrested and put on trial. We view courts having done so in the Middle Ages with a sense of absurdity or dark
humor, perhaps with the feel of a Monty Python sketch. 221Link to the text of the note New Scientist derided assigning
rights to animals on this basis:

If animals have rights which protect them against humans , it is only logical that they should have rights that protect
them from each other . If a chimp kills another chimp in the wild, or a human, do we really want to hire a fleet of
lawyers? And if we extended honorary personhood to all animals, would the gazelle be entitled to rights against the
lion? 222Link to the text of the note
[*67] Because animals cannot be morally blameworthy, they also cannot be in and of themselves morally deserving of rights. However, this does not mean that humans are free to be cruel or negligent toward animals. 223Link to the text of the note Rather, the imperative for humans to be humane toward animals derives from
humans' moral agency. Unlike its treatment of animals, society treats humans as responsible for their conduct, including their conduct toward animals.

Immanuel Kant was one of the early contractualists to write about the rights status of animals. 224Link to the text of the note As a contractualist he did not favor assigning formal rights to animals, arguing that moral duties can only be owed to rational beings that can participate in the social contract. 225Link to the text of the note
However, Kant emphasized the importance to humanity of treating animals humanely. Although humans must take care to treat animals well, Kant found this obligation to be derived from human responsibilities. 226Link to the text of the note He believed that humans "have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not toward
them, but in regard to them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to persons." 227Link to the text of the note He wrote:

If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practise kindness towards animals,
for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. 228Link to the text of the note

[*68] The philosopher John Rawls was the most prominent champion of contractualism in recent times. 229Link to the text of the note He argued that the moral community includes only those who "are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the
principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree." 230Link to the text of the note Animals, he concluded, are not members of the moral community because they lack the "capacity for a sense of justice." 231Link to the text of the note However, like Kant, Rawls's view that animals are not part of the moral community did
not lead him to a disregard for their welfare. He insisted that "it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to [animals] … . Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil." 232Link to the text of the note

Evolutionary anthropologist Jonathan Marks elaborates on the importance of focusing on humans in seeking humane treatment, asserting that:

A concern for animal welfare must come out of a concern for human welfare. It must emerge from a concern for human rights, not supplant it. For once we begin to devalue human lives, we lose a standard by which to value any other kind of lives. And it just doesn't work the other way around. 233Link to the text of the note

Marks emphasizes the importance of protecting animals such as nonhuman primates. 234Link to the text of the note However, he cautions that humans must guard against allowing concern for animals to come at the expense of concern for human welfare. 235Link to the text of the note

In the early twentieth century, jurisprudence scholar Wesley Hohfeld formulated what has become "perhaps the most popular way of speaking about legal rights." 236Link to the text of the note He described legal relations in terms of opposites and correlatives and "believed that the term "right' should be restricted in use to
describe those things that correlate to duties… . Rights are simple and atomic; rights are claims based on duties." 237Link to the text of the note Courts have utilized the framework formulated by Hohfeld in analyzing legal terms. 238Link to the text of the note This formulation recognizes the significance of the social contract in
assigning rights: Rights generally have relevance in relation [*69] to duties or responsibilities. Philosopher L.W. Sumner recognized the relevance of Hohfeld's framework in animal rights issues, concluding that under the frequently cited approach, animals cannot have rights because they do not have duties or responsibilities.
239Link to the text of the note

Hohfeld's formulation of rights might be the most popular because it fits most closely with Western societies' intuitions and education about rights. Thomas Jefferson borrowed from contractualist John Locke in drafting the Declaration of Independence. 240Link to the text of the note Locke's conception of the social contract is that
citizens are entitled to "life, liberty and property." 241Link to the text of the note Jefferson merely substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in this theme at the core of our national identity. 242Link to the text of the note

School children in the United States are taught social contract theory as a basis for the ideals of the American Revolution. For example, one state articulates a teaching objective for eighth grade social studies students as being to "analyze the origin of the ideas behind the Revolutionary movement and the movement toward
independence; [for example], social contract, natural rights, English traditions." 243Link to the text of the note

As another of many potential examples, a textbook published by the United States government for use by immigrants who wished to be candidates for citizenship explained that in the book, "an effort is made to use concepts that the immigrant can relate to, such as the social contract and delegation of authority by the people as
supported by the Constitution, to help the student understand and appreciate representative government." 244Link to the text of the note Social contract ideals of rights mirroring responsibilities were an important intellectual underpinning in the formation of the United States, and our education system appropriately teaches
contractualist [*70] themes from the Revolutionary period such as "no taxation without representation" as a foundation of our national identity. The average American likely does not know the philosophical term contractualism, but that same average American has been taught social contract ideals as the very basis of democracy.
We are taught from a young age that just as government must give us representation to go along with taxation, it must give us rights that correlate with our societal responsibilities.
Richard Posner has downplayed the practical significance of academic philosophical concepts on the question of animal rights, 245Link to the text of the note and although law is connected to abstract philosophy at least at a theoretical level, he has a point. Posner calls Peter Singer - a champion of utilitarianism - one of his "stalking
horses" on the issue of rights. 246Link to the text of the note Under utilitarianism, behavior that creates the most utility should be encouraged. 247Link to the text of the note Posner applies this theoretical philosophy to a hypothetical involving an aggressive dog and a human infant. He asks us to consider a situation in which a dog
is about to attack an infant, and we can only stop the dog by inflicting severe pain on it. 248Link to the text of the note If the pain we need to inflict on the dog to stop it from harming the infant exceeded the infant's potential pain from the attack, Posner argues that a utilitarian approach treating animals' pain as equally important
to humans' pain would require allowing the infant to be attacked. 249Link to the text of the note He then notes that "any normal person (and not merely the infant's parents), including a philosopher when he is not self-consciously engaged in philosophizing, would say that it would be monstrous to spare the dog, even though to do
so would minimize the sum of pain in the world." 250Link to the text of the note Further:

[*71]

If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go … . Just as philosophers who have embraced skepticism about the existence of the external world, or hold
that science is just a "narrative" with no defensible claim to yield objective truth, do not put their money where their mouth is by refusing to jump out of the way of a truck bearing down on them, so philosophers who embrace weird ethical theories do not act on those theories even when they could do so without being punished.
There are exceptions, but we call them insane. 251Link to the text of the note

Similarly, most humans imbued with social contract principles from their earliest education about the nature of rights are unlikely to change their views based on abstract philosophical arguments. Steven Wise acknowledges the difficulty of changing strongly held societal views about the status of animals and argues that change
may take place slowly over time - "funeral by funeral" - as people gradually become more enlightened - from his perspective - regarding animals in successive generations. 252Link to the text of the note However, the significance of social contract principles in the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is a widely
accepted historical fact, and that will not change over time. Its role as the "principal justification" for American independence is "especially familiar." 253Link to the text of the note John Locke's writings "were a primary authority for the [*72] Colonists, and his social contract furnished the political theory for both the American
Revolution and the framing of the Constitution." 254Link to the text of the note

Thus, when philosophers or political theorists argue that other rights models are superior, they are swimming against a formidable tide in seeking widespread practical application of their views. At least in the United States, so long as children are taught and continue to believe that the ideals that led to the American Revolution are
to be cherished, they will likely retain a powerful attraction to social contract principles as a basis for rights throughout their lives. Whether the perception that rights are correlative to responsibilities is an inherent moral instinct or learned or some combination of instinct and learning, a key point is that the perception is widely
held. Abstract theory counts in law's evolution, but it does not count nearly as much as the facts on the ground. As constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone noted, judges typically build legal theory around results they feel are desirable, and not the other way around. 255Link to the text of the note

A. The "Argument from Marginal Cases": Addressing Rights for Infants and Mentally Incapable Adults Under Contractualism

As discussed above, some animal rights activists emphasize that rights are assigned to artificial entities , such as
corporations and ships , in arguing by analogy that intelligent animals should have rights . 256Link to the text of the
note However, analogizing rights assigned to human infants and to mentally incapable adults is even more popular
among animal rights proponents ; one writer calls it their "central argument." 257Link to the text of the note This
analogizing between infants or mentally incapable adults and intelligent animals in rights debates is sometimes termed
"the argument from marginal cases." 258Link to the text of the note Gary Francione describes the problem as a
challenge to those who would rely on contractualism to deny rights to animals:

[*73]

There are many human beings who are not able to exercise or respond to moral claims. Assuming that moral rights and
duties are properly viewed as arising from a hypothetical social contract - very significant assumption - there are plenty
of humans who lack the capacity to participate in such contractual arrangements … but these characteristics are wholly
irrelevant to whether a human should be treated as the resource of others. 259Link to the text of the note

The argument is that because infants and mentally incapable adults are not treated as property and are assigned limited
rights despite lacking moral agency, it is unfair to treat animals as property on the basis of their lacking moral agency.
The argument from marginal cases is at its strongest when the comparison is to particularly intelligent animals, such as
chimpanzees and bonobos. Such animals may have significantly more intelligence and communicative ability than
infants and many mentally incapable adults, and thus one might argue they are actually closer to moral agency than are
some humans.

Although the argument from marginal cases may be attractive on its surface, it is unpersuasive. Although arguments by
analogy are important and often appealing, they are also malleable and can be misleading - as demonstrated in the
efforts described above to argue by analogy that if nonliving corporations are assigned rights, then a fortiori living and
intelligent animals should be assigned rights. 260Link to the text of the note Analogizing between limited rights for
infants and mentally incapable adults and potential limited rights for animals is both problematic and dangerous.

First, the argument from marginal cases fails to account for the complexity of human lives and relationships. 261Link to
the text of the note When deciding how they should treat a human infant, people do not engage in an assessment of its
"practical autonomy" to determine whether it is deserving of moral rights and, one hopes, they never will. 262Link to
the text of the note Humans' motivation to protect human children may be, in part, instinctive. 263Link to the text of the
note To the extent that [*74] explanations for such instincts are even necessary, some are not difficult to articulate at a
basic level. In addition to sensing infants' vulnerability and need for protection, humans see hope in them. They are not
yet moral agents able to participate in the social contract, but they represent the future of humanity and of the social
contract. How they develop will determine what society will become. If they are denied moral rights and treated badly,
society will suffer.

This sentiment is demonstrated in how courts generally address family law cases and mandatory education cases. In
family law disputes over child custody, for example, courts focus on the best interests of the child rather than the
interests of the mother or the father. 264Link to the text of the note This is because the child's development is
important to society's welfare. 265Link to the text of the note Depending on how he or she is raised, the child might
develop a cure for cancer someday or - at the other extreme - might become a mass murderer. 266Link to the text of the
note Society has a vested interest in the child's future. The same may be said of mandatory education. Society
recognizes an important interest in having educated adult participants in the social contract , and thus it forcefully
asserts itself in requiring that children be educated. 267Link to the text of the note This essential connection between
human children and society's future powerfully distinguishes children from intelligent animals that will never become
members of the social contract .

One may not make this argument in the same way regarding many mentally incapable adults because many of them will
remain mentally incapable their entire lives and will never attain moral agency. Unlike infants, many such adults cannot
easily be seen as representing the social contract's future. However, they do represent its echo. In the practical world -
as contrasted with abstract philosophical hypotheses - humans [*75] recognize a sameness in mentally incapable adults
that they will never feel even with intelligent animals. 268Link to the text of the note Most people perceive mentally
incapable adults as human first, and mental incompetence is seen as an aspect of their humanity rather than as a
negation of it. Humans "who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to
human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community." 269Link to the text of the note Gary
Francione rejects such reasoning, asserting that "this argument … begs the question since the problem is how to
distinguish humans from other animals by some characteristic that may be shared by some animals but that is not
possessed by all humans." 270Link to the text of the note However, humans and their courts do not evaluate intelligence
in deciding whether to assign human dignity rights; they evaluate humanness. 271Link to the text of the note All of us
know we could become a mentally incapable adult; none of us might become a chimpanzee, and we cannot possibly
relate to a chimpanzee on the same level that we can relate to another human.

Further, and thankfully, courts do not have a mechanism for formally determining which mentally incapable adults have
absolutely no hope of future participation in the social contract. Many mentally incapable adults, such as those in a
temporary coma, will some day regain their mental competence and their moral agency. Additionally, we do not know
the future of medicine. Some mental conditions that may presently appear permanent might be cured during our
lifetimes. 272Link to the text of the note Although the hope of future moral agency for mentally incapable adults is
different from the more certain hope of future moral agency for children , it is still hope. Animals , in contrast, will
always be animals.

[*76] It is also important to note that the line between no moral agency and some moral agency in humans is fuzzy .
No clear boundaries exist between people who are minimally intelligent but morally responsible to some degree and
people who are nearly but not quite intelligent enough to be morally responsible to any degree . 273Link to the text of
the note Thus, seeking to divide humans on the basis of intelligence for purposes of determining whether dignity rights
should be assigned would be unworkable. In contrast, courts' current approach of assigning human dignity rights to all
humans because they are human - regardless of their intellectual competence - avoids the confusion and tragic
misjudgments that would be inherent in a case-by-case approach. 274Link to the text of the note

Finally, as addressed further in Part V, assigning rights to intelligent animals based on comparisons to mentally
incapable adults threatens the weakest and most vulnerable members of human society . 275Link to the text of the
note Even the phrase sometimes used to frame the debate - "arguments from marginal cases " 276Link to the text of
the note - highlights a challenge to human dignity . No human is marginal . As John Marks notes, "Singling out particular
classes of people in order to show how similar they are to apes is a troubling scientific strategy , not least of all when
the humans rhetorically invoked are the very ones whose rights are most conspicuously in jeopardy ." 277Link to the
text of the note Marks derides blurring the line between humans and apes as "an unscientific rhetorical device" that is
"morally problematic (in addition to being zoologically ridiculous)." 278Link to the text of the note Concluding that some
animals may be able to "earn" dignity rights if it is established that they are sufficiently intelligent implies that perhaps
some humans should lose their dignity rights if they [*77] are sufficiently unintelligent. "If [humanity] can be earned, of
course, it can also be lost; they are two sides of the same coin." 279Link to the text of the note If mere cognitive
performance were the standard, it is difficult to see why a bright adult chimpanzee would not have more rights than a
human infant or a mentally incapable adult. This would seem to be edgy territory even for an academic philosophical
theory; it should be given no opportunity for practical application in the real world of courts and law.

Yes spillover---personhood is a binary question, and fetuses do not fit in one or the other---the plan
clarifies that they should be persons.
Christine M. Korsgaard 13, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, 2013,
“PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW,” Think, 12(34), pp. 25-32,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/personhood-animals-and-the-law/
E9F2FBA3B2F8ECF65A7C6BAD1DCD6D2A

The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of
‘ persons ’ and ‘ things ’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law . In the law, a ‘ person ’ is essentially the
subject of rights and obligations , while a thing may be owned as property . In ethics, a person is an object of respect,
to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative
value, and may be used as a means to some person’s ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us
with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to
the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category . For
various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus , a non-human animal , the
environment , or an object of great beauty, as a person , but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they
are to be valued only as means .

In the law, the bifurcation between persons and things or persons and property leaves non-human animals in an
especially awkward position. Animals, or at least many of them, are sentient beings with lives of their own and capacities
for enjoyment and suffering that seem to make some sort of claim on us. Some have very sophisticated cognitive
capacities, including some sense of self. But because animals are classified as property, efforts to secure them some
legal protections have been of mixed success and have introduced a certain level of incoherence into the laws. In the
face of this, some animal rights advocates have suggested that all cognitively sophisticated animals, or all animals
generally, ought to be re-categorized as legal persons .

But it may be argued that those who make this proposal are ignoring something important about the concept of a
person. It has generally been assumed that ‘personhood’, whatever it is, is, or is based on, an attribute that is
characteristic of human beings , and not of the other animals . In the philosophical tradition, the most common
candidate for the attribute that establishes ‘ personhood’ is rationality , but understood in a specific sense. Rationality is
sometimes loosely identified with the ability to choose intelligently between options or to solve problems by taking
thought, but those are attributes that human beings arguably share with many other animals. The more specific sense of
‘rationality’ refers to a normative capacity, a capacity to assess the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and to adjust
them accordingly. On the side of action, for instance, it is the capacity to ask whether something that would potentially
motivate you to perform a certain action is really a reason for doing that action – and then to be motivated to act in
accordance with the answer that you get. Rationality, in this sense, is normative self-government, the capacity to be
governed by thoughts about what you ought to do or to believe.

AT About Animal Rights

Corporate rights are fundamentally different---they’re conglomerations of natural persons.
Imani Gandy 13, Senior Editor of Law and Policy for Rewire News Group, “Roe v. Wade and Fetal Personhood: Juridical
Persons Are Not Natural Persons, And Why it Matters,” https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2013/01/03/fetal-personhood-
laws-juridical-persons-are-not-natural-persons-and-why-it-matter/

So what is “ personhood ?” It depends on whether one is talking about natural personhood or juridical personhood.
“Natural personhood” refers to persons as the term is understood in common parlance. Sir William Blackstone
characterized “natural persons” as those “[s]uch as the God of nature formed us.” Natural persons don’t have to wait for
a court or state to grant them rights; the rights available to “natural persons” attach at birth. While the constitutional
rights afforded “natural persons” are subject to change, whatever constitutional liberties are available, “natural persons”
are entitled to them. In short, “natural persons” are alive and breathing people with all of the rights that one normally
associates with being an alive breathing person.

“Juridical personhood,” on the other hand, refers to “artificial persons.” Juridical persons are legal fictions , and are
granted by states certain rights normally associated with live, breathing persons. These rights are do not attach at
birth, and whether or not juridical persons are afforded constitutional rights is subject to the whims of the state.
There is no framework for determining what rights shall be granted to a juridical person, and generally, such rights are
granted in an effort to accomplish a particular social goal.

The most common (and befuddling) example is corporate personhood . From Citizens United to the ongoing birth
control benefit lawsuits, whether or not corporations are persons under the Constitution and to what extent
corporations may avail themselves of the various constitutional protections afforded persons is a complex issue.

It is indisputable that corporations are not alive and breathing persons, but rights traditionally viewed as reserved
for natural persons or human beings have been granted to corporations, by and large to accomplish a particular goal ,
i.e., to protect the collective rights of the human beings (shareholders) that comprise the corporation. Consequently,
granting corporations free-speech rights is not about granting a brick-and-mortar building the right to participate in
the electoral process, but about allowing the shareholders that comprise the corporation a right to use their money
collectively to influence elections, just as persons can use their money individually to influence elections.

AT Constitution
Only persons are right holders.
Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Even if there is a coherent law of personhood , why focus on that as opposed to merely evaluating the issue in terms of
legal rights , without the " personhood " label , or with a new " pseudo-person " label? '" First , our current system of
laws is set up to focus exclusively on the rights of persons and not of other entities . 6 Persons have rights , duties , and
obligations ; things do not .'7 Although there have been challenges to this binary framework , 8 thus far the United
States legal system has maintained the distinction . As a result, creating new legal categories to address the rights of
entities along a moral continuum would entail great educational and other costs .'9 Second, as will be made clear by
the arguments below, currently existing personhood categorizations are flexible enough to accommodate a variety of
different levels of rights , and thus there is little need to create a new category of rights holders .

Personhood spills over across contexts

Jessica Berg 7, Professor of Law and Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law and Medicine, 2007,
“Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood,” Hastings Law Journal, 59(2),
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3676&context=hastings_law_journal

Before discussing categories of legal personhood, it is worth considering whether there is such a thing as "personhood"
law in the first place.'" It could be that there are simply a number of different areas of law that define persons in
different ways depending on the purpose of the law , but no cohesive " law of persons ." The argument for this view
may be similar to ones that have taken issue with new categorizations of specialty areas of law, such as Internet law.
These arguments maintain that the issues arising out of technological developments break down into basic legal
areas such as contract , tort , or criminal law , and there is no unifying theme that justifies a special label." It is certainly
true that there is no express definition of " person " in the Constitution , nor has the Supreme Court proffered one."
Moreover, different state and federal statutes define "person" differently, depending on their goal.'3 Focusing our
attention on a personhood law as a whole , however, is a useful endeavor . It is likely to lead to greater clarity in a
variety of areas of law (e.g., corporate law , animal law ), as well as provide a framework under which we can consider
the application of current laws to new developments , such as artificial intelligence .'4 As a result, conducting an in-
depth evaluation of legal personhood is both necessary and useful .

AT---No Link---Plan Liberal

Conservative justices have latent desire to establish fetal personhood, but they’re not game to
debate it now---the plan gives them an excuse to ban abortion.
Becca Andrews 21, reporter at Mother Jones, 12-1-21, “We Always Knew Conservative Justices Would Tear Roe Down.
The Latest SCOTUS Fight Proves It.,” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/12/supreme-court-
abortion-dobbs-conservative-justices-doom/

Justice Clarence Thomas came in early with an eagerness to test the waters on consideration of fetal personhood —
which is not an issue that Dobbs is putting to the Court—specifically probing whether or not child abuse laws could be
enforced against pregnant people who use drugs before viability . Justice Amy Coney Barrett was concerned with safe-
haven laws, which allow a parent to anonymously surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, suggesting that
women can and should carry unwanted pregnancies to term, give birth, and then relinquish the child if they so
choose. Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly expressed that he feels the legality of abortion is not one for the Supreme
Court at all, but rather for the states , so he can wash his hands of the whole thing and avoid the hypocrisy of declaring
that Roe v. Wade is established precedent while also overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Samuel Alito tried to draw a
comparison between Roe and Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld state segregation and was later overturned in Brown v.
Board of Education, on the basis that the prior decision violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizens’
rights to life, liberty, and property. Alito also offered up this tidbit of judicial wisdom: “The fetus has an interest in having
a life.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was fairly quiet, but he groped around for a way to frame undue burden , the standard for
protecting abortion access that’s been in place since Planned Parenthood v. Casey‘s 1992 decision, as unworkable , and
to banish Roe‘s viability standard altogether. Chief Justice Roberts hewed closely to a “what’s the harm in a 15-week
limit?” frame, carefully not engaging with issues of personhood .

In summary, the conservatives were saying the quiet part out loud. Their questions and interjections today marked a
real and significant shift in how explicit they’re willing to be in their disdain for the legal precedent to abortion rights.
Naturally, this does not bode well for the future of people who can become pregnant.

More specifically, the conservative justices clearly implied that the Court will side with the state of Mississippi (which,
let’s not forget, is not just a question of legal procedure, and would be devastating for pregnant people all across the
country). But more than that , today’s queries suggested a much more expansive goal , one that is not as specific as
viability or undue burden. By closing arguments, Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general representing the
defense, made clear that the anti’s fight won’t end here, even with a victory on the 15-week law, or a reversal of Roe.
“There are interests here on both sides,” he declared. “There are interests for everyone involved. This is unique for the
woman. It’s unique for the unborn child too whose life is at stake in all of these decisions.” This is nothing if not an
argument for his—and by extension, Mississippi’s—belief in fetal personhood .
Not all the conservative justices seemed game to debate when life begins , but enough did . In addition to Thomas’
apparent interest , Alito literally asked, “Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the
rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?” This isn’t just an obscure issue of
philosophy or semantics. Bodily autonomy is on the line, and it’s not out of the question that this discussion could bleed
over to affect what kind of contraception is deemed acceptable, or the outlawing of Plan B (which, despite a slew of
right-wing misinformation, is not an abortifacient).

AT its inevitable

The Supreme Court has punted questions of fetal personhood.

Kaelan Deese 22, Supreme Court Reporter, 9-9-22, “Catholic group petitions Supreme Court on behalf of unborn, seeks
fetal personhood nationwide,” Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/catholic-group-petitions-supreme-court-on-
behalf-of-unborn-seeks-fetal-personhood-nationwide

Catholic activists say the Supreme Court should take up the issue of fetal personhood in light of the overturning of
Roe v. Wade this summer in an attempt to establish prenatal rights nationwide .

In a 46-page petition filed Tuesday asking the justices to review its case, the group Catholics for Life says the Supreme
Court has yet to " clarify whether an unborn human being has standing to access the courts" following its legal loss in
several Rhode Island courts dating back to 2019.

The religious group represents Nichole Leigh Rowley and two unborn children recognized in court filings as "Baby Mary
Doe" and "Baby Roe," claiming that their loss before the state Supreme Court in May should be reconsidered because
the recent standing denial was "deeply rooted in Roe."

The high court's June 24 opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which allowed states to create laws
severely limiting or restricting abortion access, was the case that struck down almost five decades of guaranteed
nationwide abortion access based on the 1973 precedent over Roe.

In order for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter, four or more justices have to give their approval toward
hearing the case. The high court typically receives thousands of petitions each year and usually grants around 80
requests.

"This case presents the unavoidable confrontation of Dobbs,” the petition reads, “which left unresolved the tensions
between the Tenth Amendment, federalism, and any surviving constitutional guarantees for the unborn."

Rhode Island passed the Reproductive Privacy Act in 2019 that codified the right to abortion under the Roe standards,
thus repealing other statutes that placed limits on abortion.

The petitioners lost their request for an injunction in lower court battles and later amended their complaint to challenge
the state legislature's authority to implement the abortion protections measure. They also sought to obtain a
declaration of their rights they claim were lost when the RPA took effect. The state filed for and received a dismissal.
Petitioners have repeatedly lost appeals in their attempt to ascend to higher courts.

“Viewing the allegations in their pleadings in the light most favorable to the adult plaintiffs, we are of the opinion that
they lack standing to bring this action under any conceivable set of facts,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its ruling in
May. “[T]he unborn plaintiffs fail to assert a legally cognizable and protected interest as persons pursuant to these
repealed statutes , which are contrary to the United States Constitution as construed by the United States Supreme
Court .”
Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito (the author of the Dobbs opinion) and Brett Kavanaugh
both signaled in the June 24 ruling that further matters related to prenatal life would remain as questions to resolve at
the state level.

"The Court will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting
fetal life throughout pregnancy," Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. "Instead, those difficult moral and policy
questions will be decided , as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the
constitutional processes of democratic self-government."

2NC---Internal Link---AT: Dobbs

1. ABORTION BAN---Dobbs lets states limit abortion, personhood justifies a nationwide ban.
Mary Ziegler 22, Professor of law at the University of California, Davis, 5-20-21, “The Abortion Fight Has Never Been
About Just Roe v. Wade,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/abortion-fight-roe-v-
wade/618930/

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could result in the overruling of Roe v. Wade. The case, Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion starting at the 15th week of
pregnancy. Significantly, the statute draws the line before fetal viability—the point at which survival is possible outside
the womb. The Court has previously held that before viability, “the state’s interests are not strong enough to support a
prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” To uphold
Mississippi’s law, the Court would have to rewrite the rules—perhaps just the opportunity it needs to overturn Roe
altogether.

If that happens, it will represent the culmination of decades of work by anti-abortion-rights activists. But for those
activists, gutting Roe would be just the beginning .

Ever since Roe , abortion-rights foes and their Republican allies have been asking the Court to reverse course —to
acknowledge that the Constitution has nothing whatsoever to say about abortion , either in favor of or against it.
Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice arguably most beloved by conservatives, routinely stated that the Constitution
is silent on abortion. Republicans have railed against the Court’s judicial activism in Roe, insisting that the justices
robbed the American people of the opportunity to decide the abortion issue for themselves. In this account, Roe did not
just destroy valuable opportunities for compromise on abortion; the decision did fundamental damage to America’s
democratic principles, removing one of the most controversial issues from representative legislatures and resolving it by
judicial fiat.

But within the anti-abortion-rights movement, there is not so much talk about democracy anymore. Now some
abortion-rights opponents are quite literally looking for a Roe of their own , asking the Court to recognize fetal rights
under the Fourteenth Amendment. Remember that overturning Roe wouldn’t make abortion illegal ; it would mean
that states could set their own abortion limits , which would no longer be subject to constitutional review. That will
never be enough for anti-abortion-rights activists, though. In the conservative magazine First Things, John Finnis , a
professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, recently made an argument that could provide the framework an
anti-abortion-rights Supreme Court could use to outlaw abortion across the country : that the legislators who wrote
the Fourteenth Amendment viewed unborn children as persons. If the Constitution recognizes fetal personhood , then
unborn children would have the right to equal protection under and due process of the law. Abortion would be
unconstitutional in New York as well as in Alabama . Other leading anti-abortion-rights scholars have made the same
argument.
Finnis’s article has provoked debate across the ideological spectrum. The conservative attorney Ed Whelan has taken
issue with the substance of Finnis’s claim, suggesting that unless the anti-abortion-rights movement first wins over
public opinion, Finnis’s approach will backfire. Progressives have been far harsher, unsurprisingly. Writing in The New
York Times, the columnist Michelle Goldberg denounced what she calls an authoritarian turn in anti-abortion-rights
advocacy—one more sign that the GOP has changed fundamentally in the post-Trump era.

The abortion debate has never been about just Roe —and it’s never been about letting a popular majority have a say.
What’s new is that this argument now meets a receptive Supreme Court for the first time in more than a generation .
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Samford

A. The logic of the plan can be strategically invoked as precedent for granting fetal personhood:
Erin Phillips 19, University of New Mexico School of Law, Class of 2019, “The Silent Problem: The Implicit Personhood
Determination in State v. Montoya,” 49 N.M. L. Rev. 134, Winter 2019,
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol49/iss1/6/, Retrieved 9/14/2022)
VII. JUDICIAL OPTIONS IN ADDRESSING PERSONHOOD AND MONTOYA'S IMPLICIT SUPPORT OF THE PERSONHOOD MOVEMENT The Montoya Court had a difficult decision on their hands, as policy concerns rightfully guided
the decision to uphold the conviction. In order to answer those policy concerns and the conviction, the Court had to reach beyond the statute towards the rational link standard, since a literal application of the robbery

whether intentional or *147 not, the Court ultimately determined that the deceased
statute would not have been sufficient to uphold the conviction. But

victim was a person and in doing so opened a door to potentially dangerous reliance in the future . Although it may
seem unlikely that a Personhood Movement proponent would seek out Montoya as a resource to support claims that
state legislatures should consider fetuses as persons and expand their afforded rights, it is possible .90 It is possible because the
Montoya Court determined by default that, because the conviction of robbery--a crime against persons and property--was upheld, the deceased victim of the crime was necessarily a person. In response to the first

Were a Personhood Movement proponent

question of this note, “can a dead person still be considered a person under a criminal statute,” the Montoya Court offered a silent but definitive answer of “yes.”

to rely on Montoya, they would be able to argue that the boundaries of what defines personhood have expanded . In
response to potential future reliance on Montoya, there should be an amended solution for contemporary decisions dealing with personhood, given the relentless efforts of the Personhood Movement.91 One option
would be to adopt a tiered approach to addressing questions of personhood. Such a tiered approach might hold: that ‘personhood’ is a concept that admits of degrees and shades of gray. According to this theory, beings
should be considered ‘full-fledged’ persons if they should be the bearers of all of the rights and obligations that our legal system has to offer. Contrarily, they should be considered ‘partial’ persons if they should only have
the privilege to enjoy some of the rights that our constitutional and statutory provisions confer to persons.92 If the Montoya Court had adopted a similar tiered approach to addressing the defendant's personhood
argument, then it may have been able to definitively speak to why, for the purpose of their decision, the deceased victim was going to be considered a “partial” person, retaining the rights to control the property attached
to their body. Had such a clarification been made, the Court may have been able to freely uphold the robbery conviction and satisfy the policy concerns without also inferring a broad yet unspoken determination of the
victim's personhood status. A tiered approach to personhood questions could generally assist courts or legislators in achieving goals without drawing drastic implications that could affect the rights *148 of women seeking
reproductive healthcare or those who wish to access end-of-life assistance. This discussion does, at least in part, center on the importance of establishing clear judicial stances through consistent language: why didn't the
Montoya Court just say why it wasn't going to decide on the personhood issue, even if the reason was that it did not want to enter into a controversial realm? Why didn't it just say that it was not going to decide the case
based on personhood because it thought the precedent based on policy concerns was more important to ensuring the safety of society than addressing the defendant's claim? Because doing so would have meant making
an overt statement, either that the dead person was or was not a person. Understandably, the Court didn't want to make such a determination, or simply did not think their inevitable personhood determination was
relevant or impactful. No matter the motivations, a state court cannot afford to avoid such an argument. And, ultimately, the Court's refusal to speak to the personhood argument resulted in a determination that the
deceased victim was a person. Given that the Court made a determination that it presumably did not want to make, a more deliberate approach would have been beneficial. This could have been solved by a tiered
approach, allowing the Court to define its own boundaries of personhood to fit the Montoya facts without interfering with the Constitutional provisions with which its holding intersected. VIII. CONCLUSION The Montoya
Court needed to uphold the lower court's robbery conviction due to overwhelming policy concerns.93 Because the Court could not achieve this end through a literal application of the robbery statute, the Court turned to
the ambiguous but logical rational link standard in order to show that because the defendant's crimes were sufficiently related to one another, as the robbery was made possible by the antecedent assault, the conviction

a silent determination that the deceased

could be upheld.94 Despite the Court's admirable motivation to address policy concerns, within its decision to uphold the robbery conviction was

victim was, in fact, still a person after their death. This problematic determination means that Montoya implicitly held that a dead person is still a person in the eyes of the law. This holding could

mean that, as national efforts continue to pass legislation expanding the recognition of fetuses as persons and of
permanently-comatose individuals as non-persons , Montoya could be relied upon to show just how far one New Mexico
court was willing to go in order to expand the scope of personhood rights .

B. Conservatives in Congress and the Courts will push for fetal personhood—which decimates
rights for those capable of becoming pregnant:
Kylie Cheung, 3/24/2022 (staff writer, “'Fetal Personhood' Questions to Ketanji Brown Jackson Should Terrify Us,”
https://jezebel.com/fetal-personhood-questions-to-ketanji-brown-jackson-sho-1848698963, Retrieved 9/14/2022)

Texas Sen. John Cornyn posed a similar question on Wednesday: “What does viability mean when it comes to an unborn child, in your understanding?” We already knew Republican

politicians and their conservative allies on the Supreme Court are gunning for abortion rights and the end of Roe v. Wade in this country—look no further than the hundreds of
abortion restrictions that have shuttered access to the health service in the last few years, alone. Yet, these questions of fetal personhood reach far beyond

just abortion to our rights to IVF, most forms of birth control , emergency contraception, and fundamental privacy rights, in general. The end-goal
of anti-abortion activists—many of whom notably reside in Congress and the courts—has never just been sending abortion rights back to the state-level with
the fall of Roe. They want to establish fetal personhood , enshrining “equal protection” for fertilized eggs and embryos that

necessarily decimates rights for living American women.

C. Gender inequality causes war—a near consensus of scholars agrees:

Dara Kay Cohen & Sabrina M. Karim, 2021 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University & Assistant Professor in the department of Government @ Cornell, “Does More
Equality for Women Mean Less War? Rethinking Sex and Gender Inequality and Political Violence,”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/does-more-equality-for-women-mean-
less-war-rethinking-sex-and-gender-inequality-and-political-violence/66BDDF0D1EA57D98677D6BBD9F69AE5F/share/
77182c4331fec5a82c05c1191ca7cdef5b5c7e0d, Retrieved 9/15/2022)

Feminist scholars understood these links between the subordination of women in a given state and that state’s
likelihood for violence early on.4 Feminist research in international relations (IR) flourished in the 1990s, as scholars wrote about using gender both as an analytical category
and as a lens through which to understand how and why interstate and civil wars occur.5 Feminist arguments have varied, including that sexism and the possibility of war are co-constituted,
that more agency for women in conflict decision making may lead to more peaceful outcomes because of women’s gendered positions in social and political life, and that the gendered state
itself is a source of gendered warfare.6 Research on these questions branched in new directions in
the early 2000s when quantitative scholars, analyzing
large cross-national data sets, demonstrated a statis¬tically significant correlation between sex and gender inequality—
measured a variety of ways—and the probability of interstate war and civil conflict, even controlling for many other factors known to be

associated with the onset of violence.7 This core result has been replicated many times: nearly a hundred studies indicate some type of link between

sex and gender inequality and violent outcomes .8 Scholars characterize the relationship between sex and gender inequality

and war as “well¬established,”9 and a “ near-consensus .”10

 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Texas

Broad fetal personhood fails despite red state restrictions---strikedown and precedent.
Zernike 22 [Kate. *national correspondent for The New York Times. “Is a Fetus a Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy
Says Yes.,” New York Times, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/us/abortion-anti-fetus-person.html.]//enjia

In the  Roe decision, the Supreme Court prohibited states from banning abortion before a fetus can survive outside the
womb, which is now around 23 or 24 weeks. The justices identified a right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment,
declaring that the word “person” in that amendment did “not include the unborn.”

Anti-abortion groups responded by trying to establish that “person” did, in fact, include the unborn. They pushed a
constitutional amendment declaring that human life begins at conception. But their efforts got little traction , even after
1980, when the Republican Party platform first included support for a “human life amendment” that would “restore
protection of the right to life for unborn children.”

Anti-abortion advocates then moved to restrict abortion state by state . A number of states adopted laws counting a
fetus as a person in homicides, as a way to introduce the concept of fetal personhood into the law, to increase the
severity of the consequences for violence against pregnant women — or both.

Legislatures in five Republican -controlled states — Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri — passed fetal
personhood laws to ban abortion . But in three of those states, the laws were struck down or remain enjoined by
courts.

Ballot initiatives that would have established fetal personhood laws failed in some of the most anti-abortion states.
Voters rejected initiatives twice in South Dakota , in 2006 and 2008, and in Mississippi in 2011 — even as new
conservative majorities in state legislatures across the country were passing an unprecedented number of anti-abortion
restrictions.

“It’s an incredibly unpopular idea,” said Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy for the Center for
Reproductive Rights, which litigates against abortion restrictions. “The reason is because people very clearly articulated
the harms of fetal personhood . When voters understood these harms, they voted no , consistently , every time .”

In Mississippi, medical groups campaigned against the fetal personhood amendment in 2011 by warning that it would
criminalize IUDs and other methods of contraception. They also warned about the effects on in vitro fertilization, which
involves freezing fertilized embryos and typically implanting several because not all pregnancies will hold. Disposing of
unused fertilized eggs, or selectively eliminating implanted eggs, as many aspiring parents do, could result in murder
charges. (Since then other states, such as Arizona, have carved out exceptions for IVF.)

There’s robust precedent that spillover precipitates fetal personhood---breaches in corporate rights
were immediately followed by abortion amendments---the plan is no different.
Bose ’14 [Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons. *Professor in International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global
and International Studies at IU Bloomington **Interim Dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature @
University of Hawaii. "Life writing and corporate personhood." Biography, vol. 37, no. 1, winter 2014]//enjia

PERSONHOOD AND LEGAL RIGHTS

The effects of recent legal amplifications of corporate personhood, we contend, were both aided by and in turn have
abetted other articulations of the demand for rights based on the personhood model. It is to the complex ideological
terrain of the US political landscape that we turn to explore the intersections of campaign finance and reproductive
rights , two issues that share an overlap ping roster of people and parties. The chain of significations for "personhood"
links corporations to fetuses .
The political right, however, does not own a monopoly on the concept of personhood, which has also been cathected to
animal personhood and the natural world. Drawing on indigenous systems of knowledge and alternative epistemologies,
native movements have invoked personhood in relation to the natural world as a means of resisting the corporate
encroachment and exploitation of the commons. Their efforts constitute an important dimension of resistance to
corporate globalization and the privatization of all forms of biological and social life.

The January 21, 2010, Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission brought the issue
of corporate personhood into public consciousness. Asserting that the First Amendment bars limits on spending by
corporations and unions for political purposes, the five-four majority decision was widely interpreted as reaffirming the
right of corporations to be legally considered a person, and therefore guaranteeing to them the same constitutional
protections that accrue to individual persons. To be clear, corporations are inanimate economic units organized for
amassing profits, which are created through the authority of the state. Yet under US law, they are also fictitious people,
artificial persons whose corporate personas are "distinct from the individual shareholders who comprise them" (Bose
and Lyons 31). As we have explained, long before Citizens United, the corporate acquisition of personhood, secured in
the 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, has enabled corporations to contest government
restrictions on their behavior and expand their rights, particularly in the 1970s, when the Supreme Court issued a series
of rulings giving corporations safeguards against warrantless regulatory searches, and granting Fifth Amendment double-
jeopardy protection and the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury (Bose and Lyons 19). Other court decisions
granted First Amendment rights to corporations, including the right to political speech, commercial speech, and the
negative free speech right not to be associated with the speech of others (Bose and Lyons 19).

The groundwork for the Citizens United decision was also paved by legal antecedents challenging provisions of the
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, which sought to regulate the
increasing role of soft money in campaign financing and the proliferation of issue-advocacy advertisements paid for by
corporations and unions within a mandated period prior to federal elections. Before Citizens United , the 2007 court
ruling on F ederal E lection C ommission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc . laid the brickwork for an influx of undisclosed
corporate spending in elections. Citing McCain-Feingold, the FEC had originally refused to allow the Wisconsin Right to
Life Committee to air ads encouraging viewers to contact their senators to convince them to oppose filibusters of Bush
administration judicial nominees; the FEC dubbed these ads the "functional equivalent" of "electioneering
communications," and thus prevented their broadcast within sixty days of the election. Judging otherwise, the Roberts
Court ruled that the "functional equivalent" test must be applied narrowly to mean support or defeat of a particular
candidate (Federal Elections Commission). Since the Wisconsin Right to Life Committee's ads did not advocate voting for
or against either senator, their television spots were designated an "as applied" exception to McCain-Feingold limits on
issue ads close to a federal election (Monks and Murray). Barreling through the flimsy barricades against campaign
financing that remained after this ruling, Citizens United ensured corporations unobstructed travel on the airwaves and
on the route to influencing elections. The fact that a crucial provision of McCain-Feingold was mowed down by a Right
to Life organization suggests the different registers through which corporate personhood can be articulated.

In 2008, a year after the decision in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Personhood USA , a Colorado-based organization,
sought unsuccessfully to amend the Colorado state constitution to confer legal rights on zygotes by defining the origin
of personhood as occurring "from the moment of conception " (Ballotpedia). It conducted another failed campaign for
fetal personhood in 2010, and has a ballot measure pending in the November 2014 election. Personhood USA is explicit
about its desire "to ban abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and human cloning" (Rational Wiki). But its refusal to
insert language in its bill exempting some forms of birth control that impede a zygote's ability to attach to the uterus
such as hormonal methods, IUDs, and the morning after pill also indicates general hostility to women's right to control
their reproduction. Similar efforts to amend the constitutions of Mississippi, California, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida have
thus far been unsuccessful. In addition to noting that such laws criminalize the use of certain methods of
contraception , create impediments to i n v itro f ertilization, hold women legally liable for miscarriages, and
compromise healthcare for women by elevating a concern for harm to the fetus over the well-being of the woman,
some websites such as Rational Wiki cheekily comment on both the advantages that inhere in these laws and elaborate
on the duties that should be applied to fetuses. "Pregnant women would be carrying full persons so would be allowed in
the carpool lane," Rational Wiki exclaims. It also opines, "Fetuses should be paying taxes." But the site also frets about
the impact of fetal personhood on potential tax revenue, worrying that such status could enable parents to claim fetuses
as dependents, and thus qualify for Earned Income Credits.

As suggested by these state initiatives, Republican politicians have been a major impetus behind the push for fetal
personhood, and they have been echoed by national figures in the GOP. Representative and former vice presidential
candidate Paul Ryan is widely known to be hostile to reproductive rights and to champion fetal personhood, having
cosponsored a bill in the house that would have granted rights from the moment of fertilization. One of the
consequences of the push for fetal personhood in the 2012 Presidential election was the proliferation of egregious
comments by Republican candidates on the topic of rape and conception, which were only mildly rebuked by the party
establishment. Notwithstanding these gentle admonishments from the GOP leadership, the pronouncements of
candidates such as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock indicate the naturalization of the concept of fetal personhood, and
are signifiers of a vicious climate against women. (1) Imputations of the magical powers of wombs to block pregnancies
caused by rape, and invocations of divine intention when rape does result in conception show both the religious fervor
and the remove from science that underwrite the assault on women's reproductive rights.

Undeterred by previous ballot failures, since the 2012 presidential election, the fetal personhood movement has
stepped up its efforts at the state level, and has pressured legislatures to pass laws affirming the personhood of
zygotes. In 2013, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple signed into law some of the most restrictive laws against
abortion, including the so-called "fetal heartbeat" law that prohibits abortions after six weeks, when many women do
not yet know they are pregnant. The North Dakota voters are expected to vote during the 2014 Primary Election on an
amendment to the state's constitution that would enshrine "the inalienable right to life of every human being at any
stage of development"--i.e., fetal personhood--provided the amendment passes considerable legal challenges. (2)

Just as we see corporate rights outstripping the rights of actual people , so too the fetal personhood movement seeks
to ensure the protection of insentient cell masses over the rights of women. The hostility against women signaled by
such rhetoric no doubt played a role in the overwhelming support that President Obama received from women in his
2012 reelection. Yet the outlook for women's reproductive rights appears grim. As Dianne Feeley explains, in 2013,
"Twenty-two states passed 70 new restrictions, adding to the more than 135 passed in 2011 and 2012"; most of this
legislation imposes unreasonable conditions on abortion providers, bans abortions after 20-22 weeks of pregnancy, and
strips coverage for contraception or abortion from various insurance plans (4).

Where Mitt Romney ultimately stood on reproductive rights was difficult to ascertain given his equivocations on choice,
but he emphatically proclaimed his belief in and promotion of corporate personhood. During a campaign rally on August
11, 2011, Romney condescendingly chided audience members who had the temerity to suggest that corporations should
pay higher taxes, retorting "Corporations are people, my friend. Of course, they are. Everything corporations earn
ultimately goes to people" (qtd. in Rucker). Ralph Nader, for one, has commented on the reversibility of the terms
"corporation" and "people" where Romney is concerned; he observed, "Former Gov. Romney is a human being running
as a corporation for president. So we've really got a corporation running for the Republican Party ..." (qtd. in Bleifuss 5).
Nader's formulation of the personhood of Romney as an embodiment of a corporation succinctly alludes to his status as
CEO at different times of Bain Capital and Bain & Company, as well as the enormous amount of corporate money
Romney's campaign received. The top five direct corporate donors to Romney included Goldman Sachs, Bank of
America, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase & Company, and Credit Suisse. The total contributions weighed in at $4.14
million, a mere drop in the bucket of the overall $1.028 billion that went to support his campaign (OpenSecrets.org).
Significantly, Craig Unger describes the infusion of Super-PAC funds into Romney's campaign as itself a "highly leveraged
buyout" with the "acquisition [being] Mitt Romney himself" (237).
Since the Presidential campaign--which largely due to the loosening of restrictions on corporate spending in the wake of
the Citizens United decision was the most expensive on record costing approximately $6 billion-- fetal and corporate
personhood have found yet another common meeting ground : the contraception provisions contained within President
Obama's Affordable Care Act. In Spring 2014, the US Supreme Court heard arguments against the Department of Health
and Human Services in linked cases brought by Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. These
corporations assert that having to pay for their employees' birth control is contrary to the owners' religious beliefs that
nothing but divine will should prevent conception, and thus the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate violates
these corporations' right to religious freedom as guaranteed by the constitution and the 1993 Religious Freedom
Restoration Act (RFRA). (3)

The implications of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in favor of these corporations are potentially wide-ranging. In their
decision, the majority justices emphasize that their ruling pertains only to the contraception mandate of the Affordable
Care Act and is limited to how that portion of the legislation applies to "closely held" corporations (i.e., for-profit
companies in which 50 percent or more of the control or ownership of stock rests with five or less people), and cannot
be applied more broadly. Nonetheless, the majority decision reiterates that "person" as used in the RFRA has to be
understood to include both non- and for-profit corporations. The decision thus explicitly upholds freedom of religion as
a right that corporations can possess. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg forcefully argues against the
court's "expansive notion of corporate personhood," and notes that the prevailing decision "invites for-profit entities to
seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith," such as vaccinations, in vitro
fertilization, stem cell therapies, or certain psychiatric services, to name but a few. She further contends that the
decision could extend to other areas of corporate activity, including hiring practices. (4) Indeed, Ginsburg's concerns
were affirmed the day following the decision, when fourteen representatives from various religious organizations sent
President Obama a letter asking that he create a religious exemption from a forthcoming Executive Order that would
forbid federal contractors from engaging in discriminatory hiring practices based on gender or sexual orientation. Given
the court ruling in Hobby Lobby, such exemptions, if granted by the Obama administration or through legal cases, would
have to extend at the very least to closely held for-profit companies.

Lauren Berlant has outlined the "extreme cultural effects" of the legal consolidation of "fetal personhood," which has
profound consequences for how citizenship is envisioned both "as an index of social membership and a context for
social agency" (97). (5) She traces the genealogy of fetal personhood in the pro-life movement's wedding of "an
American counter-discourse of minority rights with the revitalized providential nationalist rhetoric of the Reaganite
Right," the offspring of which is the fetus, "the spectacle of amazing vulnerability: the unprotected person" (97). For
Berlant, the fetus functions as an object for sentimental attachment "and strategically distracts the collective gaze from
the class war currently raging in the United States ..." (97). In the hijacking of civil rights discourses to advance fetal
rights we see traces of the earlier commandeering of the Fourteenth Amendment to establish corporate personhood .
As with many aspects of American experience, race provides the palimpsest for a cultural and ideological dominant that
now includes fetal personhood and the legislated fantasy of a rights-bearing corporate person, in which the ambition to
secure the political and economic privileges of a few powerful stakeholders masquerades as the lofty aim to uphold the
values of the First Amendment.

As establishing personhood before the law becomes an increasingly successful vehicle to bestow rights , this strategy is
being adopted , to differing effect and success, for non-human entities . In stark contrast to the pernicious confluence of
corporate and fetal personhood, the legal status of personhood has been used recently in potentially more progressive
ways by both animal and indigenous rights activists.
Stem cell research fails under fetal personhood
DC Wertz, 5-22-2002, "Embryo and stem cell research in the United States: history and politics," EXCERPTS FROM Abstract, Introduction,
Research: Putting a Good Face on Abortion?, Peculiarities of US Culture and Religion Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/3301744 /// UT AS

Abstract Stem cell research in the United States is inevitably connected with the politics of abortion. Since 1973, when
the Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision legalized abortion, the US government has refused to fund embryo research,
including IVF, because Congress feared this would encourage women to have abortions. IVF and infertility research
have taken place in an unregulated private sector. Bush's decision allowing federal funds for research on stem cells
derived before 9 August 2001 may be the first use of federal finds, though the overall ban on embryo research still
stands. This paper examines 30 years of US refusal to fund embryo research, cultural background, religious beliefs as
these affect stem cell research, as well as the ethical issues related to creating blastocysts to specifically derive stem
cells, and therapeutic cloning. Introduction In the United states, the history of embryo research (which now includes stem
cells) has been closely entwined with the abortion debate for almost 30 years. Starting in 1973, shortly after the
Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortions, the US government banned use of federal funds for
research on embryos, fetuses, and embryonic or fetal tissue, while permitting largely unregulated research in the private
sector.1 The bans have driven most infertility research and treatment, including IVF, into the private sector. Research:
Putting a good face on abortion? Basic research on human embryonic tissue continued throughout the moratorium, using
federal funds2 and without attracting Congressional or public attention. This type of research was unlikely to lead
directly to treatment that might engage the media or put an acceptable face on abortion. For example, cultured cell
lines from human embryonic kidneys have been used for research on insulin-like growth factor at the National Cancer
Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, on follicle-stimulating hormone at
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, on gene therapy at the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and on gene expression in Wilms’ tumor at the Veterans’ Administration. Fetal and
embryonic tissue has been used by the Environmental Protection Agency to study effects of teratogens on fetal
palates, by the University of California at San Francisco to study wound healing, by the University of Miami to study
neural transmitters, and by the University of Iowa to study effects of maternal diabetes on lung development, to
name just a few institutions. The American Type Culture Collection lists 32 cell lines available commercially from
human embryos and 28 from human fetuses. Only therapeutically oriented research on embryos was prohibited from
receiving federal funds. This includes all infertility research, IVF, genetic therapy on embryos, and research on the time
at which HIV enters the embryo or fetus. Congress feared that the possibility of using an aborted fetus in ‘therapeutic’
research would encourage women to have abortions. Although there is no evidence that women would abort in order
to donate fetal tissue, Congress did not want to lend acceptability to abortion. Bush's 9 August 2001 decision did not
remove the ongoing moratorium on most human embryo research. Peculiarities of US culture and religion Although many
ethical issues arise from stem cell research, including weighty issues of equity and access to treatment, in the US most of
the debate has focused on the fate of the pre-embryo, or blastocyst, a cluster of perhaps 120 cells, without even the
‘primitive streak’ that will become the neural tube, residing in a laboratory container. Abortion opponents, having as yet
failed to overturn Roe v. Wade, are fighting the battle on the edge, at the very start of life, even if the pre-embryo will
never be implanted in a womb. Many abortion opponents are religious conservatives who believe that embryos have
intrinsic value from the moment of conception, whatever their stage of development, wherever they are, and
whatever their likely future. It does not matter that the embryo may be one of several hundred thousand left over
after IVF and awaiting almost inevitable discard. Believers in intrinsic value regard using an embryo to derive stem
cells (thereby destroying the embryo) as tantamount to killing a baby. Three cultural factors differentiate the US from
most European nations with regard to views on the embryo. First, the US is a church-going nation. In surveys, about 40%
of the population report that they attended a religious service last week,3 compared with perhaps 5% in the UK.
Genetics professionals also go to services; in one survey, 36% said they attended at least once a month.4 About 25% of
the general population believes that the Bible is the literal word of God, and another 50% thinks the Bible is the inspired
word of God, though not everything in it is to be taken literally. US politicians must answer to a sizeable segment of
voters who are active in conservative religious groups that oppose abortion. Second, the US has a politically active anti-
abortion movement that came to life after Roe v Wade legalized elective abortion. Stem cell research is irretrievably
linked with the abortion debate and probably always will be. Meanwhile, it will be politically impossible to separate
the stem cell debate from the abortion debate. The usual argument for separating the two debates goes like this: ‘A
shooting leads to brain death. Is it wrong to use the organs for transplantation because murder is wrong? Will the
possibility of organ transplantation increase the murder rate?’ Opponents of abortion counter that we can condemn
homicide, but abortion is a legally supported murder-machine of gigantic proportions, largely approved by society.
Use of embryonic tissue will make women feel less guilty than they should and will further increase society's approval
of abortion. Third, from the seventeenth century, free enterprise has topped the list of American values,5 making it
difficult to restrain private companies from pursuing their own strategies. Government may be hesitant to incite the
wrath of conservatives, but it is also hesitant to impinge on the rights of industry, especially to pursue therapeutic goals.
Except for laboratory quality controls, there is no regulation of infertility clinics, which often use profits to conduct their
own research. Religious traditions hold varying views of the embryo's value. Catholic doctrine holds that embryos have
intrinsic value. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops is much in the news as the most vocal opponent of stem
cell research, even after Bush's decision. However, this conservative body does not represent all American Catholics or all Catholic moral theologians. Polls suggest that the majority of Catholic
laypeople approve stem cell research. There is some latitude in moral theology. Although the Pope publicly expressed his disapproval to President Bush before 9 August, he did not speak ex cathedra, which could have made the statement
‘infallible’ according to Catholic doctrine. A growing number of Catholic moral theologians do not regard very early human embryos as individualized human entities and would allow research before the development of the ‘primitive streak’
at 14 days, which marks the point at which some cells are destined to become the embryo and others to become the placenta.6 This dividing line is widely recognized as having enough symbolic significance to permit research beforehand and
prohibit it afterwards. This view is analogous to a centuries-old tradition of ‘ensoulment’. According to Thomas Aquinas (following Aristotle and St Augustine), rational souls entered males at 40 days and females at 90 days, thereby
establishing personal existence and completing the process of conception. Embryos in the earliest stages had only a ‘vegetative’ life-force. However, nineteenth-century scientific discoveries about the timing of conception pushed ensoulment

into the background . In July 2000 the Pope listed cloning and stem cell research as among ‘the evils of Western culture’. Protestant views
vary. Historically, Protestantism supported science, believing that nature was faulty and that God intended us to discover its inner workings and repair it. In the seventeenth century, Boston's Puritan ministers preached the virtues of inoculation for smallpox from the
pulpit and even administered it themselves, while the medical establishment held back.7 This crusading spirit, originally religious, continues to affect American medical practice and scientific research. Some denominations have expressed support for embryonic stem
cell research, including the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-06/SaRN-Pvif-1406101.php) and the United Church of Christ. Others have taken the intrinsic value position, including the conservative Missouri
Synod Lutheran Church (http://www.islet.org/forum/messages.19166.htm), the United Methodist Church (http://www.umc-gbcs.org/bbpr118a.htm) and the Southern Baptist Convention (http://www.sbcannualmeeting.org/sbc99/res7.htm), all three of which
oppose embryonic stem cell research and hope that adult stem cells will suffice. In view of their overall support for medicine and technology, some denominations that now oppose may change their minds if embryonic stem cell research succeeds. Jewish views hold
that a fetus outside the mother's body does not have the same value as a fetus within her body. Traditionally, a fetus was ‘water’ for the first 40 days.8 ‘Genetic materials outside the uterus have no legal status in Jewish law, for they are not even part of a human
being until implanted in a woman's womb’.9 Most commentators speak of a ‘mandate to heal’ and a ‘mandate to be partners with God in creation,’ and some would allow creation of embryos in a petri dish solely for research. Islamic views generally place
ensoulment at the 120th day, after three 40-day periods of development, and hold that a very early embryo has no moral status. According to one interpreter, ‘research on stem cells made possible by biotechnical intervention is regarded as an act of faith in the
ultimate will of God as the Giver of all life, as long as such an intervention is undertaken with the purpose of improving human health’.10 Secular humanist views include those of University of Manchester philosopher John Harris, who warns of the ‘trap of potential’,
meaning that we often regard the embryo in terms of what it might become, under certain circumstances, rather than what it actually is now. Looking at the actual properties of the embryo, in terms too irreverent for most American sensibilities, Harris compares it
to many animals that become the Sunday roast.11 Yet when it comes to the hundreds of thousands of embryos frozen after IVF, perhaps it is time to look at actuality, rather than potential .

That undercuts disease response---tissue is uniquely key for vaccine development.

The Lancet ‘19 [*weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, among the world's oldest and best-known general
medical journals. “Fetal Tissue Research: Focus on the Science and Not the Politics.” The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 7,
no. 8 (August 2019): 639. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2213-2600(19)30222-x.]//enjia

The use of human fetal tissue and embryonic stem cells in medicine and research has led to many advances through
an improved understanding of congenital abnormalities and human disease development . This research has enabled
the use of stem cells lines (cell cultures that can be grown indefinitely in the laboratory) and humanised mice to provide
insights into human diseases. Therefore, proponents of such research efforts watched in dismay when on June 5, 2019,
the Trump administration imposed restrictions on the government funding for research with fetal tissue from elective
abortions , which will severely curtail research efforts, including crucial ongoing projects into vaccines and HIV
therapies. The use of human fetal tissue has been strongly opposed by anti-abortion groups and the conservative
political base who have supported President Trump. Although the funding restriction applied only to fetal tissue, there
was concern that embryonic stem cell research might also be halted when President Trump took office, as occurred in
2001 when President Bush imposed a ban on federal funding for research on newly created human embryonic stem cell
lines; thankfully, to date, no such limitations have been imposed. Opponents of using embryonic stem cells and fetal
tissue argue that there are alternative animal models, umbilical cord stem cells, or adult stem cells that have been used
with some success in certain areas of research. Several studies are using mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), which are
found in the bone marrow, and exploring their effect on immune responses in the body to reduce inflammation
associated with disease. The START study investigated administration of these cells to patients with moderate-to-severe
acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and found they were safe, but 28-day mortality did not differ from the
placebo group, which might be partly explained by issues with cell viability. Another study, presented at the 2019
American Thoracic Society Conference, in May, was the MUST-ARDS trial that used allogeneic bone marrow-derived
multipotent adult progenitor cells in patients with ARDS; the study met its safety endpoints and, although it wasn't
powered for secondary outcomes of mortality, intensive care unit, and ventilator-free days, numerical improvements
were also noted in these endpoints. Stem cell therapy research in lung disease is still at early stages, but the research
output is increasing and the area is a promising one. However, there are limits to the use of MSC and other adult
multipotent stem cells , because substantial numbers are required for therapeutic effects. The cells also have a shorter
replicative lifespan and can only make a restricted number of specialised cell types that are specific for their organ of
origin. Fetal tissue , by contrast, provides cell lines that grow rapidly , are able to easily differentiate into multiple cell
types, and are less likely to be rejected by the body. In the future, fetal tissue might be replaced in certain areas of
research with the use of induced pluripotent stem cells and organoids, which are human-cell cultures that can be crafted
to replicate an organ. However, in areas such as fetal development, a suitable replacement to fetal tissue is unlikely to
be found. Although research into fetal tissue alternatives is worthwhile, it will take time and until then, the use of fetal
tissue is essential so that research efforts, which are crucial for the development of new therapeutic treatments in
often difficult-to-treat lung diseases , are not severely hampered. And those in the field need to ensure their voices are
heard. Indeed, the American Thoracic Society released a statement the day after the Trump administration
announcement saying that “Scientific research with fetal tissue is vital for the development of new treatments for
many deadly diseases and conditions, such as cystic fibrosis and acute lung injury. There are no alternative research
models that can replace all fetal tissue research”. Fetal tissue has been a key part of the development of multiple
vaccines, treatments for cystic fibrosis, and ongoing research into cancer immunotherapy. The major objection to fetal
tissue research is that the source of the fetal tissue is mainly from elective abortions . However, there is no suggestion
that the number of abortions will decrease as a result of removing funding for fetal tissue research. Abortion is still legal
in all 50 states in the USA and fetal tissue would otherwise be discarded. Fetal tissue research, in fact, holds the
potential to save lives through the development of new treatments and vaccines . Politicising scientific research in this
way means denying hope to millions of patients with life-limiting diseases.

Unpredictable pandemics cause extinction---current research key to mitigation.

Diamandis ‘22 [Eleftherios P. *Professor & Head of Clinical Biochemistry in the Department of Laboratory Medicine
and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. "The mother of all battles: Viruses vs humans. Can humans avoid
extinction in 50–100 years?" Open Life Sciences 17, no. 1 (2022): 32-37.]//enjia

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID-19 disease, has taught us unexpected lessons about the
dangers of human suffering through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID -19 pandemic is now being
partially controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics , and vaccines , it became clear that our current lifestyle
and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to
face the next dangerous pandemic , not just overcoming the one that is upon us now. Is there any evidence that even
worse pandemics could strike us in the near future and threaten the existence of the human race ? The answer is
unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses found in bats, pangolins, and other exotic animals that
live in remote forests to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates that the human gut microbiota harbor
billions of viruses that are capable of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune system , lung ,
brain , liver , kidney , or heart . It is remotely possible that the development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to
contagious viruses , which can cause pandemics , leading to the destruction of vital organs , causing death or various
debilitating diseases such as blindness, respiratory, liver, heart, and kidney failures. These diseases could result in the
complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the gradual extinction of the human race . This essay will comment
on a few independent pieces of scientific facts, and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly
not all) hypothetical scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction, in the hope that these hypothetical
scenarios will trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.
 <>Fetal Personhood DA: Wyo

OV: T/ Innovation
DA outweighs and turns the case:
1. Extinction is inevitable- space solves. colonization is a multi-planet safety net- that’s Verseux.
2. Overview effect- colonization fosters global coop that solves every impact and all conflict- that’s
Verseux.
3. They cant solve innovation post aff – leads to massive chilling effect and brain drain bc no stem
cells
Synth bio lead is key to the economy- manufacturing revolution and supply chains
Gronvall, 15 – PhD, Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security senior associate
[Gigi Kwik, "US Competitiveness in Synthetic Biology," Health Security, 2015, 13.6,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685481/, accessed 8-16-22]

There is another scenario that

While concerns about the safety or deliberate misuse of synthetic biology are appropriate, these prospective scenarios do not span the full range of risks that the development of the synthetic biology field may pose to US national security.

would have serious negative consequences to US national security that should be considered that by US policymakers and experts and should inspire action:

the U S may lose its competitive edge in synthetic bio nited tates logy and related technologies. While the synthetic biology field was pioneered in the United States, and the United States is currently the leader in these technologies, other
nations are investing heavily in these technologies in hopes of capitalizing on the field's progress, boosting their economies, and leading the field. Some, like China, India, and the UK, have even developed specific synthetic biology roadmaps for development.17 At the same time as there is heavy investment in synthetic biology by
other nations, there is mounting concern that the competitive position of US life sciences is diminishing.18,19

If the U S were to lose its competitive edge in synthetic bio there would be serious consequences for
nited tates logy and related technologies,

national security. Some would result in a declining environment for businesses negative effects be strictly economic, ing and workers to be productive in synthetic biology–related industries in

[a strong economy] underwrites our military

the long term.20 This is important for national security because, as described in the US National Security Strategy (2015), “In addition to being a key measure of power and influence in its own right,

strength and diplomatic influence. loss of economic A strong economy, combined with a prominent US presence in the global financial system, creates opportunities to advance our security.”21 Current forecasting would suggest that a

opportunities in synthetic bio could be immense : Fidelity Investments describes synthetic bio as “the defining logy logy

tech of next century” for global investments. nology 22 In 2012, the World Economic Forum ranked synthetic biology as the second key technology for the 21st century, after informatics.23 According to BCC research, a market analysis company, the
synthetic biology market reached nearly $2.1 billion in 2012 and $2.7 billion in 2013. They expect the market to grow to $11.8 billion in 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of 34.4% over a 5-year period from 2013 to 2018.24

Losing competitiveness in synthetic biology could also limit specific security applications on the horizon that are
essential for national defense. These include the development of countermeasures for biological medical responding to , chemical, or radiological

weapons synthetic bio could bring major advances to the development of high-
threats and new approaches to diagnostics. A US Department of Defense (DoD) report described how logy

performance sensors Synthetic bio may , sensors for unusual signatures, clandestine sensing, and high-performance materials for national defense; these applications would not likely be available to DoD based on private sector funding alone.25 logy also

offer the possibility for distributed manufacturing so that critical supply chains are less vulnerable to disruptions.
Synthetic Biology, Governance, and US Participation

These next several years will likely be formative in setting the “rules of the road” for emerging synthetic biology research. Yet, the United States may be disadvantaged and limited in its ability to actively participate in fundamental conversations about the governance of synthetic biology if US experts are not technological leaders in synthetic biology, as the shaping of synthetic biology governance will be dominated by the nations and their experts who are at the leading edge of technology development. This is because formal regulations or standards usually lag well behind the development of new technologies. For a new technical area, regulations are often preceded by the development of standard practices in a field, as well as cultural expectations and safety measures. These expectations and agreements build on previous sets of regulations but take new technical possibilities and dangers into account. The rules are often created by those who are most intimately familiar with the technologies—often, the scientists who are perform ing the work at the leading edge of development.

In the biological sciences, the most well-known example of scientists calling attention to nascent dangers in their field and setting the standards for scientific practice occurred when the field of recombinant DNA biology was new. In a letter published in Science in 1974, leading scientists and Nobel laureates recommende d that certain types of recombinant DNA experiments—those with toxins , oncogenic viruses, and antibiotic resistance—should be off limits until their safety could be evaluated and assessed in a conference held a year later.26 That conference , held at Asilomar, California, in February 1975 and attended by scientists, government officials, and members of the press, led to a lifting of the moratorium in 1976, as well as the creation of a new regulatory system for recombinant DNA work funded by the US government.26 Efforts of the scientists to self-govern may well have forestalled restrictive national legislation.27 Asilomar now symbolizes scientists' attention to the public's concerns, as well as the scientific community's capacity to self-govern.

A more recent example of self-governance can be found in a synthetic biology application: commercial DNA synthesis. Companies that sell DNA synthesis products now screen their orders to determine whether a customer is ordering genetic material for dangerous pathogens and to block orders if the customer is not authorize d. This screening system was developed in large part through self-governance of the commercial supplie rs and interested scientists, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and was eventually put into formal guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2010.11,28

In the synthetic biology field, there are other applications at the leading edge of development that will require governance measures to be safely and ethically applied, and some scientists have already stepped in to propose self-governance measures to deal with them. One example is the development of gene drives, which are systems that can spread a particular gene throughout a population with non-Mendelian inheritance—tha t is, much faster than would occur naturally.29 These have become much easier to construct using a new gene-editing technique—clus tered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas9 or Cpf1)—which allows sections of DNA to be searched for and replaced in a matter roughly analogous to editing a document in Word. Some scientists have proposed using gene drives to change the DNA of mosquitoes to make them resistant to malaria. Such a project could decrease the prevalence of malaria, which currently kills more than 600,000 people—mostly children—per year. Yet, this technology could be misapplied or result in a consequential accident should the genes spread to other species or cause other unintended effects. Those scientists who have been leading the development of gene drive and gene editing technologies have also taken the lead in thinking about the
safety consequences , and they have been developing a series of commonly agreed upon safeguards for laboratory research into gene drives, such as using a combination of multiple stringent confinement strategies, as any single confinement strategy could fail.29 Scientists have also put forward ideas for how to safely use them outside of the laboratory.30

Another contentious application of synthetic biology that will require careful planning and safety standards is human germline editing, wherein modifications to sperm or egg DNA would not be applied to just one person, but to all their progeny. A group of interested and involved scientists met in Napa, California, to consider the ethical and safety ramifications of this work; the meeting was convened by Jennife r Doudna, one of the molecular biologists credited with developing the CRISPR/Cas9 tool. The meeting was intended to discuss the “scientific, medical, legal, and ethical implications of these new prospects for genome biology,” and they identified steps so that this technology could be performed “safely and ethically.”31(p36) In their consensus paper, published in Science, they recommend that the practice of germ-line editing be strongly discouraged for now, that forums be held in which this application can be discussed more broadly, and that foundational research that does not cross the line into embryo modification be encouraged.31 The National Academies of Science also launched an initiative to recommend guidelines for the new genetic technology, to explore the scientific, ethical, and policy issues associated with human gene-editing research.32

Determining what the “red line” is for allowable, critical, or ethical applications of synthetic biology, as well as how much safety data are require d before pressing ahead, will always be a challenging exercise, and not all scientists, experts, and observers will agree. Tension over what is acceptable to pursue has already come up for germline editing, after a Chinese research group reported that they used CRISPR techniques to modify human embryos.33 (And there are at least 4 additional research groups in China known to be pursuing gene editing in human embryos.34) While the standards or expectations set by the scientific community will be impossible to enforce in an international context, the scientific community does set boundaries; those who flout those standards have to justify their actions in the international practice of science, and those boundaries and expectations are set by the leaders in the field. In the case of germline editing, the Chinese research was rejecte d by top-tier scientific journals Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections.35

Self-governance of science has its critics, who are justifiably skeptical that scientists can be trusted to govern their own research fairly and who question the effectiveness of this approach in an international context, as the embryo editing example illustrates. However, self-governance is not the sole mechanism of governance in this area, as many foundational aspects of biotechnology and laboratory practice are already tightly regulated, and also because in forming new rules there is often a complex interplay among scientists, journalists, and policymakers to bring about new guidelines. In the case of DNA synthesis guidance, while there was substantial work done by scientists and interested parties to prevent misuse of DNA synthesis and promote screening, the issue became more salient, requiring immediate action, after a journalis t ordere d a small segment of DNA that encoded the smallpox virus.36 Still, feasible alternatives to self-governance are limited when technologies are still in the early stages of development, particularly when the applications are of broad interes t, generating funding from private companies and multiple national governments, when the work is pursued in many places internationally, and when the technologies have great potential for tangible benefits to health and medicine. In addition,
the amount of technical knowledge required for understanding the implications of new research and what can be done to ameliorate negative consequences makes it challenging even for scientists in distinct disciplines to evaluate research outside their expertise, because understanding the technical details inherent in the technology are critical both for identifying problems as well as proposing solutions.

There are additional applications of synthetic biology that have already generated conversations about governance within the scientific community—such as rescuing a species on the path to extinction; or even using synthetic biology for “de-extinction,” to bring back a species that was lost because of human hunting or negligence; or brewing opiates by fermentation in a process not unlike brewing beer.37-39 These applications have already sparked scientific involvement in discussions of what is technically possible and what rules should be developed. In 5 to 10 years, the list of applications that will require expert opinion and involvement to set expectations, standards of practice, and self-governance may well be very different, just as consequential, and require technica l experts to take the lead in setting norms and safety standards. If US scientists, policymakers, and institutions would like to have some say in what is decided, they will need to be at the forefront of those technologies.

US S&T: Evidence of Promise and Decline

The United States is currently a leader in synthetic biology, as well as biotechnology and biomedical research, and it is the focus of a great deal of private sector investment; these investments may help to bring at least 100 products to the market in the near future.17,40 According to a DoD report, the US government also provides at least $220 million annually toward synthetic biology R&D, with investments from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the DoD (including DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).25 An analysis from the Wilson Center found that between 2008 and 2014, the US government invested a total of $820 million in synthetic biology research, with DARPA funding nearly $110 million in 2014.40 Indeed, synthetic biology researchers in the United States have largely relied on DARPA funding, such as in their Living Foundries program, which aims “to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide access to new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation.”41

The United States does not have a specific synthetic biology technology roadmap, but on April 27, 2012, the Obama administration released their National Bioeconomy Blueprint, “a comprehensive approach to harnessing innovations in biologica l research to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment.”10 The blueprint identifies the administration's priorities to grow the bioeconomy through increased investment in research and development, expansion of public-private partnerships, and regulatory reform and, in numerous instances, specifically mentions the enormous promise of synthetic biology. While the government programs and initiatives listed in the Bioeconomy Blueprint were already in progress, the blueprint served as a sign of federal commitment to developing the biological sciences as a component of the US economy.42

The United States also has a robust bioeconomy, which includes synthetic biology and related technologies. Defining the economic impact of synthetic biology is difficult, as “traditional” biotechnologies are also taking advantage of pervasive synthetic biology techniques. Looking at the bioeconomy as a whole, Robert Carlson, an industry analyst, found that products derived from biology contributed an estimated $350 billion to American GDP in 2012, and the “bioeconomy” grew 15% annually and accounted for nearly 7% of total US GDP growth in 2011 and 2012.43 Engineered organisms led to products worth more than $350 billion per year to the US economy. DuPont, Pfizer, Bausch & Lomb, Coca-Cola, and other Fortune 500 companies either make or use products derived from engineered organisms, including food, clothing, medicines, and beauty products.25 For example, DuPont has been producing commercial quantities of the polymer 1,3-propanediol from engineered bacteria since 2006, which is 37% of the material in their Sorona fibers—used for everything from carpets to car interiors.44 Some investors forecast the possibility of billions of dollars of growth in American manufacturing through the biotechnology sector, including at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and
Solazyme.44

Yet, in spite of clear US leadership in synthetic biology, there are well-documented concerns about the United States falling behind in biotechnology and in science more generally, as well as concerns about falling US biomedical research budgets, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce decline , and outsourcing by international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which are applicable to synthetic biology as well. Global indicators for the biosciences and biotechnology, including R&D outputs as well as shares of the global pharmaceutical industry, higher education, and workforce , are showing what NIH called an “erosion of the competitive position of the U.S. life sciences industry over the past decade.”19 China will overtake the United States in R&D spending by 2020.19 In 2007, China overtook the United States in the number of doctoral degrees awarded in the natural sciences and engineering.45 Europe is thought to be the fastest growing market for synthetic biology products, and the UK is considered to be one of the most innovative and dynamic, and healthcare industries there are expected to grow in the future.20

US students in synthetic biology have been affected as well, as seen in the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This competition pits teams of synthetic biologists (primarily undergraduates) from all over the world in competition to engineer biological systems and operate them in living cells. It began as a small class at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003 and has grown to more than 2,000 international participants and more than 16,000 alumni.46 In 8 of the past 10 years, US student teams have failed to win “in part because of a lack of laboratory facilities” and other support.18(p29)

In a DoD report from the Office of Technical Intelligence , Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, dwindling human capital was identified as an obstacle to DoD operating effectively and efficiently in the future: “There are few highly-experience d program managers in the Department, few leading scientists, and even fewer individuals in uniform with deep knowledge of the [synthetic biology] field. The lack of uniformed expertise is particularly troubling.”25(p20)

In contrast to other industries that require substantial natural resources, such as arable land, oil, or natural gas, synthetic biology and related technologies have few barriers to entrance, and emerging markets can become competitive quickly. Major gains have been made rapidly in several nations by changing policies and investments. Though there are several countries making substantial strategic investments in synthetic biology, the example of China is most notable. The Chinese Academy of Sciences includes synthetic biology in its Innovation 2050: Technology Revolution and the Future of China Roadmap.47 An example of China's substantial investments in synthetic biology is its support of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), a company located in the city of Shenzhen. It is the world's largest genetic research center, with more sequencing capacity than the entire US and about one-quarter of the total global capacity.48,49 In 2013, BGI purchased the Mountain View, California–based company, Complete Genomics , 1 of the 2 leading companies in the world that make equipment for sequencing DNA, further increasing BGI's dominance in the sequencing market. Previously known solely for their speed and proficiency in sequencing genomes, the company is starting to diversify and innovate, making several
commercial diagnostic tests. The comprehe nsive database of sequencing information they have developed—they have sequenced many hundreds of different types of bacteria; crops such as rice , soybeans, and cucumbe rs; and dozens of animals including the giant panda; as well as human genomes—is seen as a springboard for new discoveries, as well as the development of new drugs and therapies. BGI has also been helpful in international science efforts, playing a role in the Human Genome Project and identifying the foodborne Escherichia coli outbreak in Germany that infected nearly 4,000 people, killing 53.50,51

China's research system still draws attention for its ethics problems—including fraudulent results, plagiarism, junk patents, and unsafe or ineffective medical practices—but experts believe that the Chinese research system is changing and becoming more internationally competitive.52,53 This change is due in part to China's successful efforts to lure back Chinese researche rs who were trained and/or employed in the United States, offering them bigger budgets and greater research freedom than they would have in the United States. In the case of BGI, international collaborations are integral to their success and include partnering with the Gates Foundation as well as hospitals and universities in the United States and Europe.54

The UK has also looked to synthetic biology for economic growth and other benefits. A roadmap for synthetic biology was released in 2012, and to date the UK government has invested approximate ly £200 million for research and the creation of several synthetic biology research groups across the country.55,56 In a 2012 study that mapped the scientific landscape for synthetic biology, the UK was second only to the United States in having its scientists author publications on synthetic biology.57 The UK is also taking steps to dissociate synthetic biology from the controversies surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs). At the most recent world conference on synthetic biology, held at Imperial College, London, in 2013, a minister from the House of Commons told the assembled scientists, referring to GMOs, that the UK would not become “a museum of twentieth century technologies in the twenty-first century.”58 GMO restrictions are a competitive hindrance in UK participation in the field of synthetic biology and in biotechnology in the UK and EU more generally.

Steps to Greater US Competitiveness

Measures aimed at boosting competitiveness in science and technology generally are broadly applicable for synthetic biology and should be pursued by the US government. These initiatives would include increased basic research funding with minimal fluctuations from year to year, workforce development, and STEM education initiatives, as well as financial incentives to start and fund biotechnology and synthetic biology companies and discourage them from locating offshore.18,19,48,59 Some economists have recommended that foreign students who receive their PhDs for research in technical STEM-related fields at US universities should be encouraged to stay in the country to pursue their careers and receive automatic green cards enabling them to work in the United States.20
But to remain competitive in synthetic biology, the US government will also need to take specific action on fundamental policy issues that will affect the field's development. One priority should be responding to and counte ring anti-GMO sentiments and legislation, which are on the rise. The ability to specifically modify, recode , transform , and manipulate the genetic code of organisms—and thus, the characteristics of the organisms themselves—is much more powerful using synthetic biology techniques than was ever possible before. In fact, synthetic biology has been described as “genetic engineering on steroids.”60 It should thus be no surprise that long-standing debates, concerns, and activism surrounding the topic of GMOs would arise in response to synthetic biology. While the anti-GMO movement has been typically thought of as a European concern, which has diminished European agricultural competitiveness and has thus given the United States a competitive edge, there are warning signs that anti-GMO concerns are growing and will no longer be possible for scientists and policymakers in the Unite d States to ignore. Simply put, concerns about GMOs that cannot be scientifically justified are at odds with US competitiveness in synthetic biology and other biotechnologies. The United States should actively
counte r anti-GMO policies, while also ensuring that synthetic biology is appropriately regulated, and work to inform the public about how products are regulated for safety.

The United States' approach to the regulation of biotechnology, different from that of Europe , has so far carrie d over to the regulation of synthetic biology applications. The focus of regulation and safety in the Unite d States has traditionally been focused on the end result: the product. This is not to say that all conceivable GMO products are guaranteed to be safe, but it is the product that should be subject to a safety determination, not the process used to make it, whether that process is synthetic biology or another technique.

In contrast to the United States, European regulatory agencies have typically embraced the “precautionary principle ,” which places the burden of proof on the developer of a product that the process used to make a particular product is not harmful. There are multiple formulations of the precautionary principle; one often-used definition came from the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998 and states:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. … The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informe d and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.61

While precaution in the face of indeterm inate risks sounds to many a reasonable approach—it is the essence of the expression “look before you leap”—in practice, critics have charged that the usual result of its application is inaction.62,63 In the case of synthetic biology, a precautionary approach would result in a general moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic biology until there is a research agenda, alternative approaches have been fully conside red, a technology assessment has been performed, and there is national and perhaps international oversight for each of the technologies.64 This could take many years even if all nations were in agreement about the need for it, which they are not.

The distrust of GMOs has had a detrimental economic effect in the EU. The prohibition on GMOs in the EU decreases profit margins for European farmers by up to a billion dollars each year.65 The British government Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRC) has charged that the precautionary approach has “effectively stifled GM crop farming in the EU.”66 It costs £10-20 million more to put a GM crop through an EU approval process than for conventionally bred new crops.67 A group of 21 prominent plant scientists wrote an open letter stating that Europe will lose research promine nce unless field trials are allowed of GM crops and that they will fall short of producing “world-class science” unless a pro-science stance is taken by policymakers.68 Science advisors to British Prime Minister David Cameron have called for scrapping “dysfunctional EU regulations” around GMOs, and they note the hypocrisy in that the EU imports 70% of its animal feed, most of it made with GMOs. The United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina grow 90% of the planet's GM crops.69

It should be stated that the evidence on the safety of “GMO” foods is in, and the results are clear. Genetic engineering presents no unique hazards compared to other methods that create genetic modification, such as traditional breeding or hybridization. Major scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies of Science, and the American Medical Association (AMA) all back GMOs as being safe. In a meta-review of the safety of genetically engineered crop research that evaluated 1,783 research papers and reports from the years 2002 to 2012, no significant hazards were identified.70,71 The European Commission funded 1,340 research proje cts from 500 independe nt teams looking at GMO safety and none found risks.69 In addition to the lack of harm found in GMO use, there are substantial benefits to using GMOs: lower food prices; less pesticide use, which is safer for farmers; less water needed; increased crop yields; and more stable prices.69 There is also necessity: The UN FAO estimates that the world will need to grow 70% more food by 2050 just to keep up with population growth. There may be 10 billion people on earth, requiring more food to be grown in the next 75 years than has been produced in all of human history.72 Climate
change, with the loss of arable land, will worsen this problem. Maximizing food production through GMOs may be the only avenue to provide people with enough food.

The anti-GMO movement has also cost lives. Vitamin A deficiencies cause more than 1 million deaths every year, as well as half a million cases of irreversible blindness.69 In spite of this, the GMO Golden Rice, engineered to deliver more vitamin A than spinach, has not been allowed to be grown in India and the Philippines , largely due to the activities of Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations.73 Kenya had an outright ban on GMOs in spite of an advancing crop disease that affects corn, the Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease, which could lead to food insecurity and famine as crops are destroyed by the virus.74 Kenyan officials now say the ban resulted from their being misled by French activists who claimed that GM products cause tumors and were unfit for human consumption; the ban on GMOs is expected to be lifted by the end of 2015.75,76

There is cause for concern that anti-GMO sentiments are increasing in the United States and will harm US competitiveness, particularly when it comes to realizing beneficial synthetic biology applications. In the United States, the use of anti-GMO sentiment as a marketing tool has been growing. Products that are marketed as not containing GMOs will account for 30% of US food and beverage sales by 2017.77,78 Whole Foods started labeling their products that are GMO-free, stating that they were responding to their customers , “who have consistently asked us for GMO labeling and we are doing so by focusing on where we have control: in our own stores.”79 By 2018, all products in their US and Canadian stores will be labeled to indicate if they contain GMOs. This is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for “full GMO transparency.”79 Chipotle and Trader Joe's also have decided to not sell foods made with GMOs and to use this fact in advertising campaigns. At least 20 states are considering GM labeling bills; most of those in favor of labeling would use those labels to avoid eating those foods.69,72 Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont have already passed labeling laws.

Congress established the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) under the USDA through the Organic Food Production Act, and it was charged with developing standards, which have become known as the “Organic Rule.” The Organic Rule expressly forbids the use of GMO crops, antibiotics, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, as well as food additives and ionizing radiation. The Organic Seal is a marketing tool and is separate from safety. But organic marketers represent conventionally grown or GM crops as dangerous.80 Major scientific organizations have tended to be against labeling laws because of what happened in Europe: In 1997, when there was growing opposition to GMOs in Europe , the EU began to require labels. By 1999, to avoid the GMO labels, most European retailers had removed those ingredients , and now GM products cannot be found in European stores.73

Anti-GMO groups have already found synthetic biology as a target. One example comes from Ecover, a Belgian company that makes detergents , and Method, which is a subsidiary company. Ecover purchased oils for its products developed by Solazyme, a US company that uses synthetic biology to produce an environmentally sustainable substitute for palm kernel oil in algae. Palm kernel oil is in high demand, which has led to conservationist concerns about overcultivation, deforestation, and loss of tropical habitats. Ecover found itself inundated with petitions to stop using synthetic biology for using what an anti-GMO group labeled an “extreme biotech oil.”81

Another example comes from the synthetic production of vanillin, the most dominant flavor compound in vanilla extract. Vanilla extract is made from vanilla beans, which are commonly harvested from Madagascar, the island of Réunion, Tahiti, and Mexico. Harvesting is an extremely labor-intensive process, as the vanilla plants need to be hand-pollinated for commercial quantities, and the result yields the world's second-most expensive spice, following saffron. The demand for vanilla flavoring cannot be satisfied by the harvesting and processing of vanilla beans alone; even now, most vanillin is made synthetically from petrochem icals and less commonly from chemically treated paper pulp. Evolva, a Swiss synthetic biology company developed a synthetic version produced using synthetic biology and has partnere d with International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF-USA) to produce it. Vanillin does not taste as good as the vanilla extract that comes from vanilla beans, because the bean has more than 250 flavor and aroma compounds.82 But there are definite advantages to synthetic vanillin, in that synthetic production will not be affected by weather or crop failures, or the shifting costs of oil, thus resulting in a steady supply and less price volatility. Nonetheless , Evolva has also come under fire from anti-GMO activists for its
use of synthetic biology. Friends of the Earth (FOE) “persuaded” Haagen-Dazs not to use vanillin made through synthetic biology, but since Haagen-Dazs uses only vanilla extract from vanilla beans, this was not likely to occur anyway. It is another example of the cynical use of anti-GMO sentiment for marketing purposes.82,83

If anti-GMO sentiment increases, there will be a great deal of pressure placed on lawmakers by anti-GMO groups to adhere to the precautionary principle. Communicating the science behind GMOs is a much more difficult task than simply labeling it as bad, and the United States is not immune from applying a more precautionary stance to regulatory areas.84 Still, resisting efforts to underm ine a positive future for synthetic biology is critical for US competitiveness, as is making sure that synthetic biology products are, indeed, appropriately regulated. While the product, not the process, should be the focus of regulation and oversight, at this time there are gaps in regulation, and synthetic biology is likely to increase them.85 As one example, a 2013 fundraising campaign on Kickstarter caused consternation by producing glowing plants and distributing seeds to more than 8,000 supporte rs.44 The mechanisms used to produce the plants, distribute them, and plant them did not violate any current rules or regulations; however, allowing glowing plants to be introduced into the environment without regulatory review struck many as foolhardy and risked bringing about negative public opinions about synthetic biology.80 Current oversight depends on whether plant pests or some plant pest component is used for
engineering the plant. As many newer methods of genetic manipulation would not involve such a step, this would leave many engineered plants without regulatory review before they are cultivated in the environme nt for field trials or commercial production.85

Encouragingly, this situation is likely to change for the better. In July 2015, the White House directe d the 3 federal agencies that have oversight responsibilities for biotechnology products—the Environmenta l Protection Agency (EPA), the FDA, and the USDA—to develop a long-term strategy for the oversight of future products in biotechnology and to update what is known as the “Coordinated Framework.” The Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology was introduce d in 1986 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as a comprehens ive federal regulatory policy to ensure the safety of biotechnology products beyond pharmaceuticals; it was last updated in 1992. Updating the framework became necessary, as it was outdated and confusing, and its complexity made it “difficult for the public to understand how the safety of biotechnology products is evaluated,” as the glowing plant example makes clear.57 In addition, the regulatory process could be unnecessarily challenging for small companies. The Coordinated Framework will be updated and will clarify which agencies have responsibility to regulate products that might fall under authorities of multiple agencies.57 In addition to this work, there will be a long-term strategy developed with an aim of making sure that the
regulatory system is well-equipped to assess the risks associated with future biotechnology products. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have also been commissioned to perform an outside , independent analysis of the future landscape of biotechnology products.57

Engaging in International Discussions

Formal mechanisms of international governance of synthetic biology need to be addressed by the US government. Synthetic biology has become a major topic in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has 168 member nations but does not include the United States, which has signed but not ratified the treaty. The Cartagena Protocol in the CBD provides an international regulatory framework for the transfer, handling, and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology. At the CBD 10th Confere nce in 2010, the members agreed that the release of products of synthetic biology requires caution and the application of the Precautionary Principle. Another protocol to the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits , aims at sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way and will also affect the synthetic biology industry.

The US government should pay great attention to the activities of this treaty, to minimize the impact restrictions on developing synthetic biology technologies. Although the US is not bound by activities or resolutions of the convention, the synthetic biology market will be affected if the United States and the scientific community do not become more engaged in the CBD process.86 The precautionary stance that the treaty parties are taking, as well as the possible consideration to bar some genetic sequences for use, may limit US synthetic biology exports and could hamper the field's development of beneficial applications.87 The United States should work with other nations that are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Nagoya Protocol to minimize the impact on US economic interests. At the heart of the treaty is a justifiable concern about the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. Rather than closing off a potentially broadly beneficial technology, other mechanisms should be created that directly address the need for fairness and access to benefits arising from the technologies.

Conclusion

Synth bio is a fast-moving field already applied to the development of new vaccines and medical
etic logy , and it has been

countermeasures as well as the production of biofuels, and specialized chemicals As detergents, adhesives, perfumes, tires, that formerly required the use of petrochemicals.

the field continues to expand, synth bio may become a pervasive industrial technology. synth bio etic logy Proponents believe that etic logy and related

could be the foundation of a new manufacturing economy for the U S and could contribute to industries
technologies nited tates

essential to US national security. it s While the field was pioneered in the United States, other nations are hoping that investments in this area will boost their economies, and so the great technical lead that the United States has enjoyed will inevitably shrink. However, i

imperative the U S does not fall behind to ensure it s positioned to enjoy the fruits of a robust that nited tates and makes investments that i

bioeconomy as well as participate in the technical back and forth that will set standards and limits for governance in controversial applications of the technologies. In actively taking steps to increase its global competitiveness in synthetic biology, the United States should also address fundamental policy issues
about GMOs and make sure that all products are appropriately regulated—whether they are made through traditional methods, synthetic biology, or an innovative technology yet to be developed.

Synbio solves biodiaster X

DiEuliis, 19 – National Defense University Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction assistant director
[Diane, PhD in biology from the University of Delaware; Andrew D. Ellington, Gigi Kwik Gronvall and Michael J. Imperiale,
"Does Biotechnology Pose New Catastrophic Risks?," Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, ed. by Thomas V. Inglesby and
Amesh Adalja, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-030-36311-6.pdf, accessed 8-17-22]

Fortunately, the tools of synth bio etic logy and related disciplines may also offer solutions for disease surveillance that could be advantageous irrespective of whether the novel agent is naturally occurring or deliberate. The
DNA “writing” revolution was preceded (and enabled) by vast expanses in our ability to read DNA, collectively known as NextGen Sequencing (NGS). These high-throughput sequencing methods may reduce the time and cost to identify biological agents; “targeted” NGS can focus on regions of known pathogens—speeding their
identification beyond that offered by PCR-based techniques (e.g., application of targeted NGS may have expedited the Ebola diagnosis in the example above). NGS can also be used in a “metagenomics” approach, when the pathogen is not known and complex environmental or clinical samples must be evaluated. Deep sequencing
may reveal enough of the novel or engineered pathogen’s genome to be able to reassemble it sufficiently to begin characterization. Once the new or altered genome is identified, PCR and targeted NGS reagents could then be rapidly prepared to permit lower-cost and faster detection from other samples or victims (National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Division on Engineering et al. 2018). The use of NGS during an outbreak may also provide assessments of the evolution or mutation of the pathogen during its interaction with hosts—information that is also critical to ongoing successful mitigation.

Success in the use of NGS is predicated on the availability of tailored bioinformatics tools and appropriate reference databases. Availability of such tools is hampered by the sheer scale of genomic information that must be analyzed, and the reference database is difficult to assemble with a lack of standards and consensus data, i.e.,
what metagenomics data should be used as a baseline? (Jackson et al. 2018) Moreover, if a sequence does not match the reference, what does that mean? These questions are central to the challenge of biosurveillance writ large. Current list-based approaches are based on traditional taxonomy, but new pathogens and strains are
being discovered through bioprospecting and taxonomies may take years to sort out, as engineered entities do not fit into traditional taxonomies. The discovery of Anthrax bacteria on the International Space Station provides an interesting illustration of how mere anomaly analyses might not validate a deliberate biothreat (van
Tongeren et al. 2014; Venkateswaran et al. 2017). The ever-increasing glut of sequencing information from environmental samples and sequence-based approaches to routine surveillance should eventually provide a suitable baseline for more informed anomaly analyses and assessments of provenance.

There is also an open question as to whether and how agents should be further characterized based on symptomatology in the patient, and on their activated genes or protein products. The feasibility of describing and managing agents based on biological function, rather than taxonomy, has been studied, but should be reevaluated
in the specific context of the global biosurveillance enterprise. The recent National Academies study on the risks of synthetic biology suggests that computational approaches could enhance the utility of list registries by systematically connecting them to design software and automated foundries (National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine and Division on Engineering et al. 2018).

Synth bio etic logy approaches may enable a new and powerful arm of biosurveillancealso , originating with sophisticated local analyses, rather than with clinical laboratories. Point-of-care diagnostics developed for
resource-poor settings may also prove expedient for identifying or monitoring events. For example, specialized DNA probe arrays could be useful to identify known microbes. While not as sensitive as real-time PCR, the high-density array approach (with thousands of DNA segments) can query many regions of DNA and works for
complex human samples. Some applications have been enabled on paper formats—making their use as global biosensors in a variety of settings rapid and facile; freeze-dried synthetic gene circuits can be programmed for various diagnostic pathologies at low cost and swift development (Patel 2016). Colorimetric detection of small
molecules and nucleic acids, such as bacterial antibiotic resistance genes, is now possible (Courbet et al. 2016). These improved methods, again, will in some part rely on our ability to tie novel microbial agents to their predominant biological features, and a set of resultant clinical manifestations in patients.

Finally, while the development of medical countermeasures is a lengthy process, even against well-known agents, the plethora of threats enabled by synthetic biology make this even more challenging. Synthetic biology again provides hope that the development time for
therapeutics could be greatly decreased . Methods for the facile development of synthetic antibodies, genes, and oligonucleotides can now bolster traditional small molecule drugs and immunological tools. Engineered
bio logical countermeasures can be enabled further by expanded biological metadata that resolves taxonomy problems and assists with understanding the relevant aspects of clinical pathogenesis on which medical countermeasures (MCMs) are based. If

developing engineered countermeasures that provide specific stopgaps

there is a finite set of pathways leading to pathology, to those pathways may be possible to develop.

Synth bio could speed the development of vaccines and antibiotics

etic directed evolution logy tools also more traditional . For example, computational design and approaches

might allow the creation of drugs that are broad in effective scope, such as a “universal” vaccine and vaccines that could inoculate against a series of pandemic

synth bio could accelerate drug pipelines

influenzas. The design-build-test cycle of etic logy be used to such as the cellular manufacture of vaccines, or the synthesis of drugs in plants. Conversely, synthetic biology offers the means to manufacture high-value

eliminating cost and resource scarcity that could be problematic in

compounds that have heretofore only been available through harvesting from naturally occurring plants or other organisms— some aspects of

an outbreak. The laboratory manufacture of artemisinin to counter malaria is an excellent example of this possibility.

7 Summary and Recommendations

Bioweapons were certainly possible before the advent of synthetic biology. However, synthetic biology diversifies potential threats, which complicates preparedness and response. Significant barriers and bottlenecks to weaponization that existed in the times of traditional microbiology have been overcome, such as moving very
large pieces of DNA from one organism to another, including whole genetic pathways that could encode complex pathogens. If misused for deliberate harm, these capabilities may expand pathogen host ranges and diversify toxin expression into new organisms. Rather than focusing solely on the pathogen as a means of security risk
—a philosophy embedded in our current biosecurity regime, particularly the select agent regulations—it is the DNA code itself which becomes a potential security risk. The code is what can be manipulated and transferred from one organism to another. Synthetic biology will also allow for new frontiers to manipulate for harm, such
as manipulation of the microbiome.

The scale of catastrophe caused by a global pandemic boils down to a race against time —how quickly the causative agent of a disease may be accurately identified, how quickly a medical countermeasure can be chosen or
created de novo, and how quickly it may be manufactured and deployed to prevent spread and save lives. This is the case whether a pathogen is naturally occurring or engineered, though synthetic biology is expanding the scope of threats that could cause catastrophic biological events (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,

and Medicine and Division on Engineering et al. 2018). However, synth bio could provide precious time savings
etic logy also during an event, through expedited creation and use of improved diagnostics at lowered cost and greater ease of use, the
creation of countermeasures with expanded utility against multiple biothreats, or improvements to manufacturing platforms for countermeasures. Realizing the benefits of this ongoing research, however, will depend on parallel, accompanying complex data standards and data management to steer tool and MCM development.

These enablers should be established now, so synth bio may be used to its greatest benefit in a time of need. that etic logy

In an era in which scientific advances are reported at an increasingly rapid pace, many of which are potentially dual use, the National Academies report offers a good counter to general alarm about expanding the

threats and should help defense analysts prepare and prioritize. Not every scientific discovery will dramatically lower barriers to biological weapons development. The framework in the NASEM report is important for the analysis of future threats, because it provides a tool to analyze the security impact of new scientific
discoveries and the movement of the field, independent of exaggeration. The bottlenecks and barriers identified in the report offer a good starting place for examining new scientific advances and should be fundamental to biodefense efforts.

it s important
Finally, i efforts do not attempt to curtail synth bio
that defense policies and the development of etic logy: These technologies are largely funded in the private sector and are globally developed and available, and so

efforts to limit development are likely to backfire , leaving defenses vulnerable to threats enabled by synthetic biology.Instead, there s a need i

to develop more synth bio tools useful in epidemic that is either natural
etic logy-enabled that would be an emerging ly occurring or deliberate ly caused. There are multiple ways
these tools can be developed and exercised, as there is, unfortunately, a plethora of infectious diseases for which there are no good medical diagnostics and/or medical countermeasures, which do not have heavy investments from the private sector, and which could serve as examples for which tools may be developed.

These should be opportunities to deliberately expand the range of beneficent, positive uses synth bio tools give
seen as etic logy

in the hands of biosecurity. synth bio may be misused but those same tools may assist in the
The tools of etic logy have the potential to to stagnate response capabilities—

creation of response capabilities that speedily avert catastrophe . help While we need to be wary of the former, certainly we can begin to enhance responses through the latter.

2AC1
Normal means doesn’t solve – it provides the precedent for judges to rule on fetal personhood
because they give AI the right to invest
That’s deprivation theory – fetuses are then describes as being deprived from being able to
innovate
2ac2
Establishing legal rights or duties for non-human entities expands personhood- that’ll be
weaponized to propel fetal personhood- Phillips.
Breaking down the firewall of limited personhood snowballs
Cupp, 16 -- Pepperdine University School of Law John W. Wade Professor of Law
[Richard L. Cupp Jr., "Focusing on Human Responsibility Rather than Legal Personhood for Nonhuman Animals," Pace
Environmental Law Review, 33.3, Spring 2016, https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1797&context=pelr, accessed 7-6-22]

The NhRP has stated that a goal of using these lawsuits is to break through the legal wall between humans and
animals.66 But we have no idea how far things might go if the wall comes down . One might suspect that many
advocates would push for things to go quite far .

As noted above, in the real world, law does not fit perfectly with any single philosophical theory or other academic
theory because judges must be intensely conscious of the practical, real world consequences of their decisions. One
practical consequence courts should expect if they break through the legal wall between animals and humans is the
opening of a floodgate of expansive litigation without a meaningful standard for determining how many of the billions
of animals in the world are intelligent enough to merit personhood. We should not fool ourselves into minimizing the
implications of these lawsuits by thinking that they are, in the long run, only about the smartest animals.
How many species get l egal personhood based on intelligence is just the start. Once the wall separating humans and
animals comes down , that could serve as a stepping stone for many who advocate a focus on the capacity to suffer as
a basis for granting l egal personhood. Animal legal rights activists do not all see eye to eye regarding whether they
should focus on seeking legal standing for all animals who are capable of suffering or on legal personhood and rights for
particularly smart animals like chimpanzees. However, these approaches may only be different beginning points with a
similar possible end point.

The intelligent animal personhood approach is more pragmatic in the short term, because the immediate practical
consequences of granting legal standing to all sentient animals could be immensely disruptive for society.67 We do not
have much economic reliance on chimpanzees, there are relatively few of them in captivity compared to many other
animals, and we can recognize that they are particularly intelligent and closer to humans than are other animals. Thus,
perhaps a court could be tempted to believe that granting personhood to chimpanzees would be a limited and
manageable change. If that were accepted as a starting position, there is no clear or even fuzzy view of the end
position. It would at least progress to assertions that most animals utilized for human benefit have some level of
autonomy interests sufficient to allow them to be legal persons who may have lawsuits filed on their behalf on that
basis. Professor Richard Epstein has recognized the slipperiness of this slope, pointing out that “[u]nless an animal has
some sense of self, it cannot hunt, and it cannot either defend himself or flee when subject to attack. Unless it has a
desire to live, it will surely die. And unless it has some awareness of means and connections, it will fail in all it does.”68

Opening the personhood door to the more intelligent animals would also encourage efforts to extend personhood on
the basis of sentience rather than solely seeking extensions based on autonomy. The implications of much broader
potential expansion of l egal personhood based on either autonomy definitions or sentience could be enormous, and
society should carefully think them through. Any court that contemplates making this restructuring of our legal system
must also contemplate the practical consequences.

The conservative legal movement is focused on fetal personhood- incremental expansion of legal
personhood galvanizes momentum
Craddock, 22 -- James Wilson Institute affiliated scholar
[Josh Craddock, former federal appellate law clerk, and Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor, and former federal
appellate law clerk, "The next pro-life goal is constitutional personhood," Newsweek, 7-19-2022,
https://www.newsweek.com/next-pro-life-goal-constitutional-personhood-opinion-1725698, accessed 7-20-2022]

The Next Pro-Life Goal Is Constitutional Personhood

The Supreme Court's decision last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned 1973's Roe v. Wade and its 1992 successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
represents a historic moment in American history. For pro-life activists and conservative legal movement activists, the Dobbs case is nothing short of epochal. The constitutional order has
been vindicated and a grievous moral stain has been eradicated; millions upon millions of unborn children will be spared an untimely demise in utero. The feeling is both surreal and
euphoric: The modern conservative legal movement has finally been vindicated on its marquee issue.

But Dobbs is not the end of the pro-life struggle. True, it represents the crowning achievement for a generation of conservative lawyers who built a movement to
countermand mid-century judicial excess and, above all, overturn Roe. But younger
conservative lawyers, who gravitate toward a more substantive approach to
originalism, see clearly the overarching moral imperative of abortion abolitionism . As Abraham Lincoln argued in his 1854 Peoria speech, the relevant moral and
legal question in the antebellum slavery debate was whether a black American "is not or is a man"; so, too, is the relevant moral and legal question in the abortion debate whether the
unborn child is not or is a natural person.

We know the biological answer to that question: Yes. Fortunately, a proper interpretation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, with its sweeping language securing the "equal protection
of the laws" for "any person," codifies that intuition into our national legal charter. Because the unborn child is a natural legal person—according to venerable authorities like William
Blackstone and an unbroken chain of state high court cases leading up to the 14th Amendment's ratification in 1868—a homicide statute that protects born persons but not unborn persons
necessarily violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee.

Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs actually hints at this understanding of 14th Amendment personhood. Dobbs "sharply
distinguishe[d]" other cases on which Roe and Casey relied based on the reality that "abortion destroys what those decisions call 'potential life' and what the law at issue in this case regards
as the life of an 'unborn human being.'" In other words, Dobbs rejected Planned Parenthood's noxious "clump of cells" disinformation and candidly acknowledged the moral salience of the
unborn child.
It s thus not a far leap from Dobbs to constitutional personhood. The hurdle is not one of moral, biological, or constitutional truth, but rather one of
i

fortitude and sheer willpower. All relevant constitutional actors must flex their muscles to help us reach the promised land of an abortion-free America.

First, Congress should "enforce, by appropriate legislation," this proper understanding of the Equal Protection Clause. Congress is the institution primarily responsible for securing the
Amendment's guarantees.

Second, the judiciary should, in future cases where the issue is squarely presented, rule on the side of natural legal personhood for the most vulnerable and defenseless among us. Lower
federal court judges should heed Dobbs' emphasis on the state's interest in protecting unborn human life, based on what one of us has described as a "common-good maximization
principle" for lower-court judging: When in doubt, "defer to the substantive common good and background principles of our common-law inheritance." Here, that militates in favor of 14th
Amendment personhood.

Third, the next pro-life president must independently act to properly interpret the Equal Protection Clause and impose that interpretation throughout the Executive branch. This does not
substitute for sweeping congressional or judicial action, but it would make for dramatic incremental progress.

Finally, pro-life
activists can advance the broader cause of constitutional personhood at the state level. Pro-lifers must work, especially after Dobbs,
to pass laws and state constitutional amendments defining legal personhood as beginning at conception. Such an incremental , state-by-state shift in
the legal landscape could galvanize momentum toward a federal abortion ban—whether it comes from Congress, from the
Supreme Court, or via constitutional amendment.

Establishing rights or duties establishes personhood- it the defining feature- that’s 1NC Phillips.
Only legal persons can have legal rights or duties- granting one grants the other- and that collapses
the common law firewall of personhood and spills-over
Fitzgerald, 15 -- J.D., University of Texas School of Law
[Emily A., "[Ape]rsonhood," The Review of Litigation, Spring 2015, Vol 34.2,
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth838673/m2/1/high_res_d/UNT_2016_0010_0018.pdf, accessed 8-21-
22]

a “legal person” is the holder of legal rights and duties , and is entitled to enforce their
Legal personhood denotes the capacity to possess legal rights.1 Accordingly,

rights in a court of law. “Legal things,” on the other hand, are the property of legal persons and do not possess legal
2

rights of their own. 3

Under American law, all living human beings are legal persons, but non-human animals are legal things.4 Although non-human animals are classified as things, some inanimate entities are recognized as legal persons under the common law.5 However, the lines establishing which non-humans qualify for legal personhood are vague,
indeterminate, and arguably nonexistent. No defined threshold or set of qualifications—no prima facie requirement—automatically excludes non-humans from personhood eligibility.

This Note focuses on a set of habeas corpus lawsuits that were filed in New York on behalf of four chimpanzees by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NHRP).6 The ambiguous boundaries and membership requirements of legal personhood are highlighted through an evaluation of the biological, cognitive, and social justifications for
affording legal personhood to Pan troglodytes—the common chimpanzee. The absence of a defined standard to determine which non-humans qualify for legal personhood not only leaves the “personhood” debate unresolved but also opens the door for recognizing chimpanzees as legal persons. The lack of a legal personhood
standard docs not expressly preclude any litigant from seeking personhood status, thereby exposing courts to the possibility of unlimited litigants. Thus, although this Note argues that chimpanzee personhood is justified, this Note advocates clarification of the application of legal personhood and implores courts to establish a
standard for determining which non-humans qualify for legal personhood.

the personhood debate is not limited to

While this Note focuses on the specific issue of chimpanzee personhood, the legal status of non-human primates Other subjects to which the
.7

personhood debate applies include fetuses , but are not limited to, the legal rights of corporations,8 ,9 terrorism suspects,10 and artificial intelligences.11 The individual justifications for affording these entities legal personhood vary; nonetheless, each
debate necessarily exists due to the absence of a defined legal standard for determining which non-humans qualify as legal persons.

Additionally, granting personhood to non-human animals may implicate various legal concerns , such as the acquisition of informed consent, the validity of contractual relationships, the availability of tort remedies, and the
allocation of property rights. If a judge were to grant non-human animals legal personhood status, these concerns would need to be addressed.12 However, extensive discussion of these concerns is outside of the scope of this Note.

This Note argues that the NHRP lawsuits present the best opportunity for an American court to grant personhood status to a non-human animal because of chimpanzees’ biological, cognitive, and social characteristics. Yet, this Note argues that regardless of whether or not a court grants personhood status to chimpanzees, any
court faced with this question should clearly articulate the factors necessary for a non-human to be eligible for personhood status.

The basic background of legal personhood is discussed in Part II. Part III outlines the history of the legal classification of non-human animals before detailing the modern practice of granting legal rights to non-humans. Next, Part IV discusses the NHRP lawsuits, and Part V argues that chimpanzees present the best vehicle for
affording legal personhood to a non-human under the existing American common law. Finally, Part V argues that the NHRP lawsuits present an opportunity for courts to explicitly clarify the legal requirements for affording personhood status to non-human animals.

II. What Is a Legal Person?

Legal persons—a class that is comprised of natural and juridical persons13—have the capacity to possess legal rights and have those rights recognized under law. Throughout American history, the composition of the class of legal persons has evolved from including only white, male citizens to including all living human beings and a
limited group of juridical entities.14 “Person” is defined in some statutory provisions for use within specific statutory schemes, but each statute defines the term differently depending on the individual purpose of the statute—this does little to clarify who qualifies as a “person” and creates more ambiguity as to the common
definition of the term.15 Most importantly, the term is still undefined in the context of common law habeas corpus16 and neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court has provided a concrete definition for who qualifies as a “person.”

The Court has confirmed that some of the non-humans possessing legal protections and rights under statutory laws qualify as persons. Historically, “[s]uch collectives, like families, churches, universities, or other institutions, [have] gained legal recognition as actors possessing legal rights, capacities, entitlements, and privileges.” In

general, legal personhood indicates the capacity to possess legal rights: “ Only legal persons count in courtrooms, or can be legally seen , for only they exist in law for their own benefits.”18 Legal things, on the other hand,
are the property of legal persons, and exist in law for the benefit and sake of such persons.19 Thus, the law turns a blind eye to subjects that do not possess legal personhood because they do not exist in law for their own benefit.20

The distinction between “persons” and “things” is important to establish the rights of each entity. Thus, the ambiguous meaning of “person” raises questions, such as: Who is or should be entitled to possess legal

If personhood status were to be afforded to non-

personhood? What are the justifications for awarding legal personhood? Is the classification of legal personhood dependent on the possession of certain qualifications or attributes?

humans, where does it s application stop —are all non-humans potentially legal persons? These important questions remain largely unanswered, which leaves litigants and
courts without guidance when determining which non-humans qualify as legal persons under the common law. This Part discusses the current convoluted nature of the boundaries of legal personhood in the United States, as well as the implications this lack of clarity has on the designation of juridical personhood of non-humans.

Natural Persons v. Juridical Persons

In common speech, “person” is often used to mean human being, “but the technical legal meaning of a ‘person’ is a
subject of legal rights and duties . In the U S l p is an exclusive group ”21 nited tates, egal ersonhood , comprised of natural persons and, in limited circumstances, juridical persons.22 A natural person must be a
biologically human being.23 In contrast, a juridical person is “an entity that is not a human being, but for which society chooses to afford some of the same legal protections and rights as accorded natural persons.”24

1. Natural Persons

Certain fundamental legal rights25 automatically vest upon birth (in some states, upon viability26) merely because an individual is biologically human. Even though natural persons are entitled to the maximum protection of the law, not all natural persons have the same legal rights.2 Children enjoy fewer legal rights than adults;28 the Fourteenth Amendment distinguishes between the rights of “citizens” and the rights of “persons” generally;29 and human fetuses are not legal persons under the Fourteenth Amendment until birth.30 However, no matter where an individual stands in the hierarchy of rights as compared to other natural persons, all natural
persons are entitled to preference over juridical persons.31

2. Juridical Persons

Juridical persons are also referred to as “artificial” or “fictional” persons.32 Even though natural persons are automatically granted greater rights than juridical persons, juridical persons are not necessarily precluded from possessing rights equal to natural persons under the Constitution.33 For example, the rights guaranteed to natural persons under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses are also afforded to some juridical persons;34 corporations, which are juridical persons, enjoy protection under the Fifth Amendment from takings without just compensation;35 and some juridical persons arc entitled to First Amendment free speech protection.36

In affirming the First Amendment rights of corporations, the Supreme Court in Citizens United noted: “The Framers may have been unaware of certain types of speakers or forms of communication, but that does not mean that those speakers and media are entitled to less [constitutional] protection than those speakers and media that provided the means of communicating . . . when the Bill of Rights was adopted.”37 Most importantly, the Court expressly rejected the notion that the constitutionally protected rights of juridical persons “should be treated differently . . . simply because such [persons] are not ‘natural persons.’”38

Today, corporations possess several rights, privileges, and entitlements as persons—including the capacity to sue and be sued, hold property, and engage in contracts.39 Although “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires ... [and] they arc not themselves members of‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established,”40 corporations are juridical persons with legally protected rights under the law.41

Corporate personhood is sometimes justified on the basis of protecting the rights of natural persons.42 Taking property from a corporation would directly injure natural persons (shareholders); thus, corporate personhood protects the rights of natural persons.43 Another justification for corporate personhood is that a corporation “can be regarded as resembling an embodied human being.”44 Corporations are often “formed by collectives of other legal persons.”45 But, regardless of the justification for corporate personhood, it is clear that the personhood of non-humans is not a novel concept under the current law of the United States.

B. Qualification as a Juridical Person

While it is universally acknowledged that the status of “natural person” is exclusively limited to biological humans, there is no consensus as to the limitations of the status of “juridical person.”46 Biological humanity is necessary to qualify as a natural person47 and is sufficient to qualify as a legal person. However, biological humanity is not necessary to qualify as a juridical person.48 Thus, qualification for juridical personhood must turn on something other than biological humanity.

The jurisprudence of juridical personhood suggests that states have broad authority to designate juridical persons, define their power, and set limitations as to the extent of such power.49 However, the literature on juridical personhood does not clearly establish what is necessary or sufficient to be a juridical person;50 therefore, this question remains open.

III. Personhood of Non-Human Animals

A. Legal Classification of Non-Human Animals

The classification of non-human animals as legal things, as opposed to legal persons, “has existed continuously since the dawn of law in Near Eastern and Western legal systems,”51 and stems from the ancient laws of some of “the most primitive legal systems known.”52 This ancient classification persisted through Roman law, which dramatically impacted the evolution of Western property law.53 Under Roman law, “[t]hose beings who were believed to lack free will—women, children, slaves, the insane, and nonhuman animals—were all . . . classified as property.”54 Merely capturing a wild non-human animal reduced the animal to property,55 and non-
human animals never shed this status.56

Interestingly, throughout the Middle Ages, non-human animals were subject to “trial” proceedings; thus, they “received the trappings of due process, but not due process itself.”5. Yet, humans could not contract with non-human animals because, as Thomas Hobbes noted, “not understanding our speech, [non-human animals] understand not, nor accept any of translation of right; nor can [they] translate any Right to another; and without mutual acceptance there is no [contract].”58

This legal hierarchical superiority of humans over non-humans had several philosophical underpinnings. For example, Hobbes argued that the rights of humans over non-human animals originated from the laws of nature.59 In contrast, William Blackstone identified both Roman and Old Testament laws as the origins of the legal classification of non-human animals as things.60 Regardless of its origin, this classification impacted the current legal status of non-human animals, as much of “law is rooted in the past.”61 However, because law is frequently derived from a vastly different time, place, and culture, it may not reflect current values or modem scientific
understandings.62

1. Historical Classification of Non-Human Animals in the United States

Much of the English common law was transplanted to post-Revolutionary America 63 Tame non-human animals—such as horses, sheep, and cattle—were the “subject of absolute property” under American common law.64 Wild non-human animals, ferae naturae, “were the subjects of only qualified property interests,” which existed only for the duration of the “occupancy” of the animal—the time in which the animal was captive.65 In Pierson v. Post,66 the New York Supreme Court of Judicature held that “occupancy” requires the “actual physical deprivation of a nonhuman animal’s ‘natural liberty.’”67 If the occupancy was abandoned or the animal escaped,
all property interests ceased and the animal’s natural liberty returned.68

2. Current Classification of Non-Human Animals in the United States

While there are laws protecting the “psychological well-being” of non-human animals in the United States,69 all non-human animals are still regarded as legal things—not persons.70 Generally, the modem common law rule regarding domesticated non-human animals is that the owner has an absolute property right in the animal, just like the absolute right an owner has in an inanimate object.71 Even though some courts consider non-human animals a special form of property depending on the animal’s relationship with a human,72 the legal classification of non-human animals as property prevents such animals from possessing legal rights of their own. -'

B. Legal Rights of Non-Human Animals

Today, “person” is no longer synonymous with “human being,” and the idea that non-human animals deserve to be legal persons is not novel. The question of non-human personhood has become increasingly common in the international arena and most countries, including the United States, have afforded personhood status to some non-humans—whether to other living beings or artificial persons (such as corporations). Thus, modem law has begun to reflect a shift in the classification of non-humans.74 Although the U.S. was a leader in affording legal personhood to non-human entities, such as corporations, other countries are leading the way to legal
personhood of non-human animals, and the U.S. is lagging behind.

1. Basic Legal Protections of Non-Human Animals

Over the past twenty years, many nations have extended legal protections to non-human animals by banning scientific testing on all animals. Included among these nations are Norway, Israel, India, and the European Union. 5 Additionally, many countries specifically ban great ape experimentation. Great Britain started limiting experimentation on great apes in 1987 by requiring “special justification” for such experimentation; by 1997, Great Britain completely banned invasive experimentation on great apes.76 Great ape experimentation has also been banned in Germany since 1992,77 Australia since 2003, Sweden since 2003,78 the Netherlands since 2004,
Austria since 2006,79 and Japan since 2006.80

Whether by banning invasive great ape experimentation, implementing regulations to protect great apes’ physiological wellbeing, or recognizing the “interests” of great apes, these countries afford greater legal protections to great apes than they afford other non-human animals. Thus, the legal status of great apes is differentiated from that of other non-human animals.

2. Personhood of Non-Human Animals

While banning the use of non-human animals in scientific testing and invasive experimentation has become the norm,81 many countries exceeded have these basic protections by proposing to grant legal
rights to non-human animals— thus, legal personhood . 82 Some have gone even further and have awarded legal personhood to natural geologic formations.83

The issue of non-human personhood is not new: In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution, granting non-human animals the legal status of “beings,” as opposed to “things.”84 Also, Germany amended its constitution in 2002 by adding the words “and animals” to a clause that obligates the state “to respect and protect the
dignity of humans,” thereby granting constitutional rights to non-human animals.85

Although non-human personhood is not novel, it has recently gained momentum as more nations have continued to consider, and favorably grant, legal rights to non-human animals. Recent legislative and judicial actions in India, Spain, and Argentina could become landmarks in the movement to grant legal rights to non-human
animals.86 In 2008, the Spanish parliament became the first national legislature to grant non-human animals—specifically, non-human hominids87—the right to life and freedom.88 More recently, India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests declared that dolphins arc “non-human persons.’’89 Because dolphins “are highly
intelligent and sensitive ... as compared to other animals,” the Ministry declared that dolphins “should be seen as ‘non-human persons’ and as such should have their own specific rights.”90 And in 2014, the Argentinian Second Appeals Court granted habeas corpus relief to an orangutan named Sandra who was improperly
imprisoned for twenty years.91 The court declared that Sandra deserved basic rights as a non-human person 92

These jurisdictions are not alone in the movement towards granting personhood to non-human animals—proponents of non-human personhood are increasingly bringing lawsuits on behalf of non-human animals in new jurisdictions.93 And even though not every attempt to grant legal personhood to non-human animals has been
successful, unsuccessful attempts still help to further the broader goals of non-human animal personhood. For example, the draft legislation of New Zealand’s Animal Welfare Act of 1999 proposed a “Hominid Rights” section that conferred “three explicit legal rights” to non-human hominids: “the right to not be deprived of life; the
right to not be subjected to torture or to cruel, degrading or disproportionately severe treatment; and the right to not be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation where it is not in the best interests of the individual hominid.”94 The legislative committee recognized that non-human hominids “merit special treatment of
some sort because of their sophisticated mental abilities—abilities that are in many ways closer to those of young human children than to other mammals,” but eventually determined that the section was outside the scope of the Act.95

While the enacted text of the Act did not award affirmative legal rights to non-human hominids, the Act banned the “use of non-human hominids in research, teaching or product-testing” unless such use is in the best interest of the individual ape or that ape’s species, and the benefits of such use arc not outweighed by any
potential harm to the ape.96 This ban on the use of non-human hominids for research, teaching, and testing seems to have minimal effects on the legal personhood of non-human hominids. However, the enacted text of the Act “recognizes that [non-human] hominids have interests” that may not be overlooked without significant
justification.97 Thus, “[although the Act [did] not protect great apes’ lives and [did] not confer explicit legal rights to them,” by protecting—thus, legally recognizing—the apes’ interests, the Act gave great apes “more than they or any other non-humans have had before—and therein lie the grounds for optimism.”98

IV. NHRP Lawsuits

A. History of Filings & Habeas Petitions

NHRP an devoted to changing common law status

The Non-Human Rights Project ( from mere ‘things,’ which lack the
) is organization “the of at least some nonhuman animals

capacity to possess any legal right[s], to ‘persons,’ who possess rights NHRP such fundamental as bodily integrity and bodily liberty.”99 By filing suits on behalf of non-human animals,

seeks “to break through the legal wall that separates humans from nonhumans , thereby gaining legal ‘personhood' for nonhuman animals, beginning with some of the most cognitively
complex animals on earth, including chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and whales.”100

Ascribing rights or duties creates legal personhood- this is the only and consistent legal theory
actually applied
Peters, 14 – Judge, New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Third Department, New York
[P.J, People ex rel. Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery, New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Third
Department, New York, 12-4-2014, https://casetext.com/case/people-v-lavery-6, accessed 8-22-22]

Further, although the dispositive inquiry is whether chimpanzees are entitled to the right to be free from bodily restraint
such that they may be deemed “persons” subject to the benefits of habeas corpus, legal personhood has consistently
been defined in terms of both rights and duties. Black's Law Dictionary defines the term “person” as “[a] human being”
or, as relevant here, “[a]n entity (such as a corporation) that is recognized by law as having the rights and duties [of] a
human being” (emphasis added). It then goes on to provide:

“So far as legal theory is concerned , a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties....
Persons are the substances of which rights and duties are the attributes. It is only in this respect that persons possess
juridical significance, and this is the exclusive point of view from which personality receives legal recognition” (Black's
Law Dictionary [7th ed. 1999], citing John Salmond, Jurisprudence 318 [10th ed. 1947]; see John Chipman Gray, The
Nature and Sources of the Law [2d ed.], ch. II, at 27 [stating that the legal meaning of a “person” is “a subject of legal
rights and duties”] ).

Case law has always recognized the correlative rights and duties that attach to l egal personhood ( see e.g. Smith v.
ConAgra Foods, Inc., 2013 Ark. 502, 431 S.W.3d 200, 203–204 [Ark.2013], citing Calaway v. Practice Mgmt. Servs., Inc.,
2010 Ark. 432, *4 [2010] [defining a “person” as “a human being or an entity that is recognized by law as having the
rights and duties of a human being”]; Wartelle v. Women's & Children's Hosp., 704 So.2d 778, 780 [La.1997] [finding that
the classification of a being or entity as a “person” is made “solely for the purpose of facilitating determinations about
the attachment of legal rights and duties”]; Amadio v. Levin, 509 Pa. 199, 225, 501 A.2d 1085, 1098 [1985, Zappala, J.,
concurring] [noting that “ ‘[p]ersonhood’ as a legal concept arises not from the humanity of the subject but
from the ascription of rights and duties to the subject”] ). Associations of human beings, such as
corporations and municipal entities, may be considered legal persons, because they too bear legal duties in
exchange for their legal rights ( see e.g. Pembina Consol. Silver Mining & Milling Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 189, 8
S.Ct. 737, 31 L.Ed. 650 [1888]; Western Sur. Co. v. ADCO Credit, Inc., 251 P.3d 714, 716 [Nev.2011]; State v. A.M.R., 147
Wash.2d 91, 94, 51 P.3d 790, 791 [2002]; State v. Zain, 207 W.Va. 54, 61–65, 528 S.E.2d 748, 755–759 [1999], cert.
denied529 U.S. 1042, 120 S.Ct. 1541, 146 L.Ed.2d 354 [2000] ).

Even if their theory is more logical it’s not what’s practiced- only persons have duties and rights and
that’s normal means
Berg, 7 -- Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law law and bioethics professor
[Jessica, "Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood," Hastings Law Journal, December
2007, Vol. 59,
https://www.fordham.edu/download/downloads/id/3307/natural_law_colloquium_fall_2015_cle_materials.pdf,
accessed 8-15-22]

Even if there is a coherent law of personhood, why focus on that as opposed to merely evaluating the issue in terms of
legal rights, without the “personhood” label, or with a new “pseudo-person” label?15 First, our current system of
laws is set up to focus exclusively on the rights of persons and not of other entities.'6 Persons have rights, duties, and
obligations ; things do not.'7 Although there have been challenges to this binary framework,'8 thus far the United
States legal system has maintained the distinction . As a result, creating new legal categories to address the rights of
entities along a moral continuum would entail great educational and other costs.'9 Second, as will be made clear by the
arguments below, currently existing personhood categorizations are flexible enough to accommodate a variety of
different levels of rights, and thus there is little need to create a new category of rights holders.

L: Framing (Legal Fiction)

It’s a perception DA and legal personhood is a legal fiction- it’s all made up anyway so the question
isn’t is there a hard rule that the plan creates legal personhood- it’s is there enough there for
conservative legal movements to weaponize to built momentum for LP for fetuses- (that’s 1NR
Craddock).

2AC3: Montoya/Pet Trusts/LLCs

Montoya wasn’t ruled on with personhood – but its different than AI, Montoya was still a person at
the time of the criminal charge
Erin Phillips, The Silent Problem: The Implicit Personhood Determination in State V. Montoya, 49 N.M. L. Rev. 134 (2019).
Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol49/iss1/6

Can a dead person still be considered a person under a criminal statute? This unspoken question is at the center of State
v. Montoya, 1 illustrating how a facially simple and uncontroversial case can actually be very misleading. On appeal in
Montoya, the defendant argued that the conviction of robbery was unfounded, since the victim was already deceased at
the time of theft.2 The Court of Appeals gave little attention to the argument about the victim’s personhood,3 instead
analyzing the case through the lens of a rational link standard,4 essentially measuring the connection between a
homicide and a subsequent robbery in determining whether those acts were sufficiently entwined and causally-related.5
This standard allowed the Court to circumvent a literal application of the State’s robbery statute, which requires the
use of force sufficient to remove property from the immediate control of another person.6 By failing to explicitly
address the issue of personhood, instead relying on an ambiguous standard i n order to uphold a conviction under the
robbery statute, the Montoya Court opened the door to dangerous future determination of personhood. Supported
by valid policy concerns,7 and with the authority of the rational link standard’s precedence, the Court positioned itself
to uphold the conviction without needing to address the defendant’s argument of personhood. However, by using the
rational link standard to convict under the robbery statute, the Court did make a statement about personhood,
categorizing the victim as a person by default—despite never saying so explicitly. In an attempt to avoid cornering
themselves in a legal fiction, the Court did exactly that by upholding the robbery statute and making a de facto
conclusion that the victim was a person.

Pet trust beneficiaries are hollow

Taylor, 22 -- FindLaw lawyer
[Daniel Taylor, "Can You Include Pets in Your Will?," FindLaw, 3-30-22, https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-
life/can-you-include-pets-in-your-will/, accessed 6-29-2022]

A beloved pet can be as much a part of your family as your spouse, child, or sibling. When it comes time to write a will,
devoting a piece of your estate to your favorite animal companion may seem like the best way to ensure that the pet is
taken care of after you pass away.

There are several ways to do this, but first, you need to be aware that naming your pet as a beneficiary is not a good
idea because pets can't own property . Although there's been a push to grant " personhood " to animals, no state has
gone that far.

This means that a gift of property left directly to a dog, cat, or other pet included in a will — such as "I leave $10,000 to
my dog, Fido" — will most likely lapse. Lapsed gifts fall into the residuary clause of your will if there is one, or they are
distributed under the intestacy code of your state, meaning your property will most likely go to the nearest living blood
relative.
In most cases, your well-intentioned bequest to a pet will most likely end up going to someone or somewhere else
entirely. So what can you do?

Corporations and ships are distinct- no upheaval because they’re proxies for humans
Cupp, 7 -- Pepperdine University School of Law John W. Wade Professor of Law
[Richard L. Cupp Jr., "A Dubious Grail: Seeking Tort Law Expansion and Limited Personhood as Stepping Stones toward
Abolishing Animals' Property Status," SMU Law Review, January 2007, 60.1,
https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1436&context=smulr, accessed 8-22-22]

Despite the intuitive appeal of pointing out that some rights are afforded to children, incompetent adults,
corporations, and ships, important distinctions exist. Regarding corporations and ships, personhood was created as a
legal fiction because courts found doing so to be efficacious in conducting and regulating business transactions and
practices.106 No great societal upheavals or challenges accompanied courts’ pretense that these entities could be
thought as legal persons for some purposes. Corporations are legal concentrations of the energies and efforts of
humans (shareholders and employees), and assigning them personhood is a device to indirectly facilitate and control
the combined efforts of humans.107

Similarly, ships are owned by humans for profit or pleasure, and the legal fiction of assigning them personhood is a
proxy for the human or humans who control them.108 Ships and corporations do not assert the dignity rights that
Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line would assign to animals, such as the right to be free from slavery or a right of
bodily integrity, and pretending that ships and corporations are “persons” does not create the enormous societal
implications that would a finding that some animals may not be “enslaved” or have their bodies used without their
consent.

LLCs don’t matter – they aren’t federal law they are based on state statue
2ACRest
Fetal personhood doesn’t break the firewall- it’s a debate over what’s human vs extending
personhood to a clear non-human
Dyschkant, 15 -- Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
[Alexis, "Legal Personhood: How We Are Getting It Wrong," University of Illinois Law Review, U. Ill. L. Rev. 2075, 2015,
l/n, accessed 8-25-22]

Interestingly for the purpose of this exposition, the debate between the Supreme Court and anti-abortion advocates
regarding whether to attribute personhood to fetuses directly tracks the question of fetal humanity . The Court
declines to attribute humanity to fetuses. All references in the Court's decision to the fetuses' humanity are qualified.
References include "the potentiality of human life," 42 "potential human life," 43 and "potential future human life." 44
In contrast, states which support including fetuses as persons also refer to the fetus as already human, sometimes at the
point of conception. 45 The AMA Committee on Criminal Abortion, which seeks to reduce or end abortions generally,
claims that abortion is an "unwarrantable destruction of human life." 46 Anti-abortion [*2083] states at the time widely
had adopted legislation declaring a fetus to be a human life. 47

In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court held (reaffirming Roe) that "before viability, the
State's interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial obstacle to
the woman's effective right to elect the procedure." 48 The relevance of viability is that it helps establish when the fetus
becomes humanlike enough to trump the mother's right to abort. Legal scholars advocating for a theory of personhood
that is modeled off of humanity would agree with this sort of line-drawing because basing the person on the "embodied
human" "draws on shared intuitions about who counts in our community of legal persons and how we should take
account of them." 49 Once a fetus is viable, it is not human like enough to be a legal person, but it is human like enough
to be "worthy of recognition." 50 The Court's discussion of the relevance of viability in Roe demonstrates the
importance of belonging to humanity. It states that determinations of viability can be framed in terms of when a "fetus
became "formed' or recognizably human, or in terms of when a "person' came into being." 51

The disagreement about whether to extend personhood to fetuses rest, fundamentally, on how to handle cases at
"the raw edges of human existence." 52 This suggests that had fetuses been obviously human then personhood would
apply, or had fetuses been obviously nonhuman then personhood would not apply . The difficulty of establishing
personhood is why fetal personhood has received more attention than child personhood; children are obviously humans
and fetuses are not obviously humans.

An examination of the personhood of children and fetuses shows the importance of being human for being a legal
person . Even when one is not obviously capable of bearing rights and duties, being human is often enough to be a
person. But, if an entity's humanity is not clear, then the status of personhood is much less likely to apply.

Fetal personhood won’t hold up in the status quo

Carlisle, 22 -- Time reporter
[Madeleine Carlisle, "Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle Over Reproductive Rights," Time, 6-28-
2022, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion, accessed 8-24-2022]

Still, many of these new laws will likely face legal challenges . While there is no longer a constitutional right to an
abortion, fetal personhood laws could still be challenged for violating state constitutions , or for violating the
constitutional right to due process because of vague wording, like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims.

Only one state passed fetal personhood- their ev is just about states that considered legislation
Guttmacher Institute, 8-15 ["State Legislation Tracker: Major Developments in Sexual & Reproductive Health," 8-
15-22, https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy, accessed 8-24-22]

Bans Abortion by Establishing Fetal Personhood

State Legislation

Introduced 8

Passed One Chamber 1

Passed Legislature 0

Enacted 1

Vetoed 0

State personhood measures just cause shift to other states- only national fetal personhood triggers
the impact
Baumann, 22 -- Bloomberg Law senior reporter covering medical research
[Jeannie Baumann, "State ‘Personhood’ Laws Threaten Embryonic Stem Cell Research," Bloomberg Law, 8-4-22,
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/state-personhood-laws-threaten-embryonic-stem-cell-
research, accessed 8-24-2022]
 “The problem here in the states that may move to adopt ‘embryonic personhood’ without specific exceptions for
research and therapeutic use is that sophisticated research institutions will simply move their research to states
without such laws, thus eroding the research and development resources of states that have adopted such restrictive
measures,” Barnes said.

No fetal personhood wave- too unpopular

Zernike, 8-21 -- NY Times national correspondent
[Kate Zernike, "Is a Fetus a Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy Says Yes.," NY Times, 8-21-2022,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/us/abortion-anti-fetus-person.html?
action=click&amp;pgtype=Article&amp;state=default&amp;module=styln-abortion-
us&amp;variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&amp;block=storyline_top_links_recirc, accessed 8-24-2022]

Ballot initiatives that would have established f etal personhood laws failed in some of the most anti-abortion states .
Voters rejected initiatives twice in South Dakota, in 2006 and 2008, and in Mississippi in 2011 — even as new
conservative majorities in state legislatures across the country were passing an unprecedented number of anti-abortion
restrictions.

“It’s an incredibly unpopular idea,” said Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy for the Center for
Reproductive Rights, which litigates against abortion restrictions. “The reason is because people very clearly articulated
the harms of fetal personhood. When voters understood these harms, they voted no, consistently, every time.”

Dobbs didn’t speak to fetal personhood- new statues or case law determine what comes next
Carlisle, 22 -- Time reporter
[Madeleine Carlisle, "Fetal Personhood Laws Are a New Frontier in the Battle Over Reproductive Rights," Time, 6-28-
2022, https://time.com/6191886/fetal-personhood-laws-roe-abortion, accessed 8-24-2022]

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on f etal personhood in Dobbs: “Our opinion is not based on any view about
if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how
fetal personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we will be
living in a legal gray area for a long time,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates
for Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people, including women who have had abortions.
“Case law will have to be developed, or statutes will have to be clarified, because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so
monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all play out.”

Roe overrule alone doesn’t trigger national fetal personhood

Berg, 7 -- Case Western Reserve University Schools of Law law and bioethics professor
[Jessica, "Of Elephants and Embryos: A Proposed Framework for Legal Personhood," Hastings Law Journal, December
2007, Vol. 59,
https://www.fordham.edu/download/downloads/id/3307/natural_law_colloquium_fall_2015_cle_materials.pdf,
accessed 8-15-22]

The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade held that a fetus is not a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution. The resulting furor over the case, and subsequent three decades of jurisprudence, plunged this country
into a battle for which the lines seem to be clearly and irrevocably drawn. At the base of these debates is the question of
fetal personhood. Contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Court’s pronouncement in Roe did not forestall all state
determinations of legal personhood.102 Moreover, even if Roe is overturned , as some believe to be possible given
changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, there will still be significant questions left unresolved about the
legal status of fetuses and embryos. In other words, not only is the legal status of embryos and fetuses an open
question under the current law of Roe v. Wade, but it will remain an open question even if the case is overruled. At the
very least, if Roe is overruled, the Court is highly likely to allow the states to determine for themselves whether to
accord fetuses legal status, rather than decide legal status itself as a matter of federal constitutional law.

Fetal personhood goes beyond abortion- it criminalizes science like ECS research
NARAL, 17 ["'Personhood' Measures: Extreme and Dangerous Attempts to Ban Abortion," 1-1-17,
https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/5.-Personhood-Measures-Extreme-and-Dangerous-
Attempts-to-Ban-Abortion.pdf, accessed 6-17-22]

"Personhood" Measures: Extreme and Dangerous Attempts to Ban Abortion

For decades, opponents of legal abortion have tried every approach possible to make the procedure illegal again. In recent years, anti-choice legislative strategists have focused efforts most intensely on two tracks: They have imposed as many restrictions on abortion services as possible - such as forced-ultrasound mandates,
biased-counseling laws, and mandatory delays. And they have made it harder for low-income women and women who get their health insurance through the government to afford abortion care. Collectively, these approaches have significantly eroded women's reproductive freedom but they have not succeeded in making abortion
illegal again nationwide.

Frustrated by that fact, now the most strident anti-choice advocates are pushing for an all-out ban, and have chosen among the most far-reaching approaches to reach their goal: so-called "personhood" measures.

change "person" to include a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus

Although details vary, "personhood" measures typically a state's definition of the word , with the intent of outlawing abortion. As if this were not enough,

most "personhood" measures go far beyond abortion to sweep in stem-cell research an ban also most common forms of contraception, , and in vitro fertilization. Even worse,
"personhood" measures by their very definition have few if any exceptions to protect a woman's life or health. In sum, "personhood" measures are a blatant attempt to take away a woman's ability to make reproductive-health-care decisions, including her constitutional right to choose safe, legal abortion.

"Personhood" Measures: Sweeping Across the States

In 2008 a number of local anti-choice groups founded an umbrella organization called Personhood USA. Its purpose was and is to press for "personhood" measures across the country.

Over the past few years, "personhood" efforts have manifested in two different ways: citizen-initiated ballot measures and legislation.1 None has become law yet, but as they proliferate across the states, it is evident that the threat is imminent.

In 2008, Colorado voters rejected an anti-choice "personhood" ballot initiative by a three-to-one margin. Undeterred by this defeat, proponents put it on the ballot again in 2010, only to meet with a similar result. Despite these two losses, "personhood" proponents vowed to continue their efforts. In December 2011, the initiative
failed to qualify for the ballot. For the 2014 ballot, Personhood Colorado changed tactics by changing the initiative's language to attempt to seem less extreme, as well as changing the name of the campaign from "personhood" to "A Voice for Brady" in an effort to obscure the campaign's true intent. Fortunately, voters saw through
the ploy and defeated the measure 64-35.

In 2011, voters in Mississippi, one of the nation's most conservative states, rejected Initiative 26, a so-called "personhood" measure, by a margin of 42 to 58 percent.

In 2012, anti-choice activists in Oklahoma launched a petition drive to put a "personhood" initiative on the state's ballot. Two pro-choice litigation groups filed a lawsuit to block the signature-gathering campaign and the state supreme court ruled that defining a fertilized egg as a person "is clearly unconstitutional." Proponents of
the measure, however, declared their intent to petition the U.S. Supreme Court for reconsideration. In October 2012, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.1

Also in 2012, a non-binding resolution endorsing "personhood" went before voters in Georgia's Republican primary, in which 66 percent voted in favor.2 The resolution would have no legal effect; however, its mere consideration exemplifies how anti-choice activists are attempting to push "personhood" into the mainstream anti-
choice movement.

In 2014, a "personhood" ballot initiative also went before voters in North Dakota. Proponents of the initiative tried to distance themselves from its extreme nature, going as far as saying it would not outlaw common forms of birth control. Despite the fact that North Dakota is a very conservative state, voters overwhelmingly
defeated the measure 64-35.

In 2016, no states enacted any "personhood" measures, although nine states introduced 13 such bills.3

Federal Efforts to Advance "Personhood" Measures

In 2012, as the Senate prepared to debate legislation to reauthorize the National Flood Insurance program, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) filed a "personhood" amendment. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) responded instantly to the threat, vowing to pull the entire unrelated bill if Paul did not back down. Sen. Paul ultimately
chose not to offer his amendment.

• In 2015, Reps. Alexander Mooney (R-WV), Walter Jones (R-NC), and Jody Hice (R-GA) introduced three separate measures to amend the U.S. Constitution to recognize life as beginning at conception (H.R.816, H.R.2761, H.R.426). These bills effectively would ban abortion nationwide in almost all circumstances.4

• This issue played heavily in the 2014 mid-term elections with cosponsors of the respective bills attempting to distance themselves from their previously held positions, declaring that the proposals were nothing more than a "simple statement" in support of life.5

"Personhood" Measures Have Far-Reaching Consequences

"Personhood" measures are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has long held that a woman has the right to choose abortion until the point of fetal viability.

• Under this standard, states may regulate abortion care, but not ban it before viability.6 However, "personhood" measures ban abortion in almost all cases by redefining an embryo or a fetus as a legal "person" or stating that life begins at the moment of conception.

"Personhood" measures would ban abortion outright and force women to seek illegal abortion care. Illegal abortion is extremely dangerous.

• Each year, an estimated 42 million women worldwide obtain abortion services to end unplanned pregnancies; approximately 21 million of them obtain the procedure illegally.7 Complications due to unsafe abortion account for approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide, nearly 50,000 deaths a year.8

• Where abortion is illegal, the risk of complications and maternal mortality is high. In fact, the abortion-related death rate is hundreds of times higher in developing regions, where the procedure is often illegal, than in developed countries.9

"Personhood" measures could have drastic consequences. Should one become law and go into effect, a "personhood" measure would have a profound impact on reproductive-health care services beyond legal abortion.

• "Personhood" measures would ban most common forms of birth control. Any form of contraceptive that prevents implantation, rather than or in addition to fertilization, would be banned. This would have an enormous impact on the 99 percent of American women who use birth control.10

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) opposes "personhood" measures because they would "erode women's basic rights to privacy and bodily integrity; deny women access to the full spectrum of preventive health care...and undermine the doctor-patient relationship."11

"Personhood" measures could ban e mbryonic s tem- c ell research. Because embryonic stem cells are obtained
also potentially about

after fertilization research using these types of cells would be illegal if a "personhood" measure were law .
five days ,12 In fact,

Personhood Colorado refers to this immensely promising field of biomedical research as "human harvesting." 13
 personhood amendments are intended to outlaw abortion but have the potential to
Fertility groups oppose these measures. The National Infertility Association says " clearly

affect assisted reproductive tech anything that puts an embryo at risk could be a criminal violation
nology...If embryos are full humans, , including the practice of
cryopreservation."14

Space: SynthBio Key / Extinction

Synth-bio is key to space colonization- prevents extinction
Warmflash, 16 -- astrobiologist, physician, and science writer
[David, former NASA astrobiologist, served as a member of NASA's Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter Science Definition Team,
"Biotechnology, synthetic biology keys to humans colonizing other planets," Genetic Literacy Project, 1-27-16,
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/01/27/biotechnology-synthetic-biology-keys-humans-colonizing-planets/,
accessed 8-20-2022]

Biotechnology, synth bio key to etic logy s humans colonizing other planets
Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on
other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

synth bio will be

As vital as etic logy to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely
colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding
against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for
us since it has no atmosphere at all.

Living off the land: Creating Earth-like environments away from Earth

Living anywhere in our Solar System beyond Earth will require the same level of protection that an astronaut needs while walking in space. A human-friendly environment must be provided to sustain life, and for long-term human presence that environment must be sustainable. In contrast to short flights into low-Earth orbit, or
brief visits to the Moon, space colonists will not be able to rely on deliveries of air, water, and food from Earth; instead they will have to live off the land. They’ll have to create Earth-like environments with consumables derived from local materials and recycled the way that air, water, and things that we eat are replenished on our
home world.

The lack of technology for such sustainable life support systems is a major factor underlying criticism of human space exploration. And it’s not the only factor. There’s also the high cost of human space flight and the substantial risk to human life. Weighed against the staggering advances in computers, robots, and nanotechnology,

the argument for sending astronauts to explore space instead of robot probes seems weak, except when one more issue is added to the equation: extinction insurance against planet-wide disasters caused either by
nature, or by our own negligence.

In a newly published book, a very original take on the human future and spaceflight, Louis Friedman, a space policy expert and astronautical engineer, embraces both the pro-human and pro-robot perspective. He does this by arguing that off-world colonization will be needed , and

therefore accomplished soon, to assure long-term survival of humanity , with Mars as the chosen location for our second home. But when it comes to exploration deeper into space, Friedman believes that we’ll opt to leave that task to our robot emissaries. The reason, which he
outlined in an interview with this writer for Discover Magazine, is that technology — including biotechnology that will enable uploading of the visual, audio, and other sensory experiences of our robot explorers to the human brain — will make virtual travel to distant locations better than the real thing, so why put the fragile human
body at so much risk?

How much risk is acceptable may be a matter of opinion, but in addition to making a virtual space exploration experience, biotechnology also could reduce the risk to humans who do choose to travel through space physically. In a new paper published outline in the Journal of the Royal Society, University of California, Berkeley

aerospace engineer and synthetic biology researcher Amor Menezes suggested six key challenges to establishing a human space presence that could be addressed with synth bio etic logy.

Synthetic biology and the challenges of space colonization

The first challenge , Menezes and his colleagues explain, is resource utilization. Unlike the Pilgrims on the shores of America, early colonists on the Moon or Mars will not be able to get their dinner by going fishing, but they could make the lunar or Martian dirt
into soil for growing plants. The Moon has water in the form of ice that they could melt and both water and the lunar rocks contain oxygen that can be drawn out through electrochemical reactions. Rather than discard the carbon dioxide that humans exhale as is done on spacecraft, colonists could use the waste gas as a carbon

source for making food. We already have organisms that do this. They include plants and photosynthetic bacteria , but genetic engineering has been making the carbon fixation process to create food more efficient, and future modification could be tailored to make

optimize photosynthesis for the dirt and environments of the Moon and Mars. In addition to food production, organisms can also be engineered to convert Martian and lunar materials into fuel and
that could be used for rockets, finally the organisms could be used to process waste .

organisms could be engineered to produce

In addition to using locally derived resources, space colonists will need to engage in massive manufacturing. Menezes believes that biocement, biopolymers, adhesives, and other building
materials. By recycling air and water. processing solid wastes, and producing food, genetically modified organisms could also play a central role in life support systems, which the paper lists as the
third challenge for a long-term human space presence.

genetic engineering can help in onsite synthesis of drugs, a capability

As for the fourth challenge, the researchers discuss space medicine and human health applications. Examples of how this area include that

vital to colonizations
will be modified organisms might be developed to
, since drugs are vulnerable to radiation, making the prospect of transporting medicines from Earth unattractive. At the same time, also

create radiation-resistant clothing and bioshielding other material.

Space cybernetics is the fifth challenge. For reasons similar to the drug manufacture issue, space colonists will be better off making their own electronics rather than depending on electronics shipped from Earth, and biosynthetic approaches could be the right tactic.

The final challenge, one that Menezes and the team admits is the most difficult, is called terraforming. Whether on the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid, living inside a pressurized module won’t be satisfying for more than a short bout. For long-term residence, humans will need environments that look and feel natural, with plenty
of trees, parkland, and rivers and streams in order to thrive.

The process of converting an entire planet like Mars or Venus into a world with a breathable atmosphere and a comfortable temperature is called terraforming. Scientists think that it could be technically possible, but terraforming would take an entire Mars-like world probably

centuries For this reason

and possibly even millennia. , space colonization proponents are also consider ing a less ambitious goal known as paraterraforming, basically terraforming
on a limited area
but of another world. On the Moon, for instance, a large crater, such as the 21 kilometer wide Shackelton crater on the Moon’s south pole, could be sealed with a dome and the inner environment could be terraformed in just a few years. On Mars, caves could be sealed and

terraformed, while a small asteroid could be hollowed out, terraformed on the inside and even spun to create Earth-equivalent gravity. In all of these cases, engineered organisms would be key to paraformation the process. As on Earth,
success would be more likely for those willing to start small, and the creation of an Earth-like environment on a small scale would demonstrate that, in the future, it might also be achieved on a planetary scale.
If a long-term human presence on other worlds is the goal, then genetically altered organisms are the key. If this is the case, and if we do decide that extinction insurance makes sense, it would mean that human survival itself

depends on the continued development of biotechnology.

!: Endocrine Disruption
Endocrine disruption causes extinction
Hauck, 21 -- citing Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai in New York with more than four decades of experience in the field

[Grace, "Add falling sperm counts to the list of threats to human survival, epidemiologist warns," USA Today, 2-27-21,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/02/27/falling-sperm-counts-threaten-humanity-chemicals-blame-book-
says/6842950002/, accessed 8-21-2022]

Humanity is facing not only a coronavirus pandemic and a climate crisis, but its existence is also threatened by falling sperm counts because of chemical
exposures, a prominent epidemiologist warns in a new book.

"Chemicals in our environment and other lifestyle factors in our modern age have harmed our reproductive health to the extent that, in the future, it
may not be possible for most people to reproduce in the old-fashioned way ," said Shanna Swan, an environmental and
reproductive epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York with more than four decades
of experience in the field.

Sperm counts among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand declined more than 59% from 1973 to 2011, according to a meta-
analysis Swan co-wrote in 2017. At the current rate, half of men in those countries would have no sperm by 2045, while many others would have very low counts, Swan told USA TODAY.

'Children of Men,' is rapidly becoming reality ," Swan writes in her new book with
"Some of what we’ve been thinking of as fiction, from stories such as 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and

science writer Stacey Colino out this week, "Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of

the Human Race."

chemicals pervasive in our world are interfering with the hormones in our bodies and contributing to harmful reproductive health outcomes in men and
In the book, Swan argues that

women. These "endocrine-disrupting chemicals" include chemicals that are water-soluble and wash out of our bodies, such as phthalates and bisphenol A ( BPA), as well
as "forever chemicals" that do not degrade, such as perfluoroalkyl substances ( PFAS).
The chemicals enter our bodies through foods and drink, microscopic airborne particles we inhale, and in the products we absorb through our skin, Swan said. They're found in plastic and vinyl, floor and wall coverings,
medical tubing and medical devices, children's toys, nail polishes, perfumes, hair sprays, soaps, shampoos and more.

Phthalates, for example, are commonly consumed through foods, she said.

"They’re added to plastic to make them soft and squishy – think shower curtains, rubber duckies, soft tubing. The processed food we eat passes through soft tubing to get into its packaging. When these chemicals in the
plastic come in contact with food, the phthalates leave the plastic and leach into the food. When we eat the food, they get into our bodies," she said.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can interfere with hormones in several different ways. Phthalates may "trick the body" into thinking it has more testosterone than it actually does, causing the body to stop producing
testosterone and increasing the chances the man will be infertile or have a lower sperm count, Swan said.

Dr. Pat Hunt, a geneticist at the Washington State University School of Molecular Biosciences, has been studying the effect of chemical exposures on male and female fertility since a laboratory accident in 1998 alerted her
to the harmful effects of household products.

"Over the years, I've watched the opinions of my scientific colleagues change as the evidence has become increasingly convincing," Hunt said. "There’s no question that sperm
counts have fallen. The hypothesis that sperm counts have fallen due to exposure to these chemicals has also gained more and more credence."

Synth-Bio solves
Webb, 22 -- Future Today Institute CEO and Harvard University Visiting Nieman Fellow
[Amy, "Futurist Amy Webb says babymaking could get crazy and the smartphone will die," Washington Post, interveiwed
by Steven Zeitchik, 1-10-2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/10/amy-webb-talks-crispr-ivf-
5g/, accessed 8-21-2022]
Webb has co-written a new book, “The Genesis Machine,” with pioneering geneticist Andrew Hessel that talks about the possibilities and pitfalls of synthetic biology — the broad idea

that science will allow us to change everything from how we create medicines to food to human beings. (Designer babies are, she says, the wrong way to think
about it.)

As 2022 kicks off with ever-increasing levels of innovation — and plenty of hype and fear to go with it — The Washington Post chatted with Webb about topics as varied as lab-created meats,
CRISPR gene editing, 5G and the future of reproduction. The conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Zeitchik: Let’s start with the themes of your new book. You’re very bullish on the many opportunities that science affords us in procreation. What do you see as some of them?

Webb: What we’re talking about here is a technology that unlocks our ability to be more selective and to intentionally design life. Maybe that means
one person using their own genetic material to bring an embryo to term; maybe it unlocks opportunities to select traits from more than two parents. We don’t know how it will look, but I
believe the possibilities can be very good. What all of this means is optionality.
S.Z.: Reading your book it feels like you have an almost philosophical belief that people should overhaul what they think about how humans are created. If synthetic biology can deliver on
some of these promises — if it removes any age restriction on egg fertilization, say, or if embryos can be gestated outside a human body — what do these changes do to us as a society? Do
they alter it fundamentally?

A.W.: The thing is we never stopped and asked how we got to this point. Until now a baby was a man and a woman and having the structures to be in place for that to happen. And now
synthetic biology is giving us other options. Forty years into the future, I think it may be the case that there are many parents to one child, or that a 70-year-old and their 60-
year old spouse decide to have a baby. Why would we close ourselves off to those possibilities?

SPILLOVER
A2: Chimp thumper
Literally took away a day later
Brendan Borrell, biologist-turned-journalist, who has written on science, health, and business for The Atlantic ,
Bloomberg Businessweek , National Geographic , Outside, Wired , and the New York Times4-22- 2015, "Chimpanzee
‘personhood’ case sows confusion," Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17398

A campaign by animal rights activists to establish the legal personhood of chimpanzees took a bizarre turn this week,
when a New York judge inadvertently opened a constitutional can of worms only to clamp it shut a day later. On 20
April, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe signed an order forcing Stony Brook University to respond to claims
by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) that two research chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, were being unlawfully
detained. The Coral Springs, Florida, organization declared victory, claiming that because such an order, termed a writ of
habeas corpus, can only be granted to a person in New York state, the judge had implicitly determined that the chimps
were legal persons. An eruption of news coverage on 21 April sparked a backlash by legal experts claiming the
significance of the order had been overblown. By that evening, Jaffe had amended the order, letting arguments on the
chimps’ detainment go forward but explicitly scratching out the words WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS at the top of the
document. Nature takes a look at the episode’s significance in the campaign to give animals legal rights and what it
means for the research community.

L: 1NR Frontline
Establishing legal rights or duties for non-human entities expands personhood- that’ll be
weaponized to propel fetal personhood- Phillips.
Breaking down the firewall of limited personhood snowballs
Cupp, 16 -- Pepperdine University School of Law John W. Wade Professor of Law
[Richard L. Cupp Jr., "Focusing on Human Responsibility Rather than Legal Personhood for Nonhuman Animals," Pace
Environmental Law Review, 33.3, Spring 2016, https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1797&context=pelr, accessed 7-6-22]
The NhRP has stated that a goal of using these lawsuits is to break through the legal wall between humans and
animals.66 But we have no idea how far things might go if the wall comes down . One might suspect that many
advocates would push for things to go quite far .

As noted above, in the real world, law does not fit perfectly with any single philosophical theory or other academic
theory because judges must be intensely conscious of the practical, real world consequences of their decisions. One
practical consequence courts should expect if they break through the legal wall between animals and humans is the
opening of a floodgate of expansive litigation without a meaningful standard for determining how many of the billions
of animals in the world are intelligent enough to merit personhood. We should not fool ourselves into minimizing the
implications of these lawsuits by thinking that they are, in the long run, only about the smartest animals.

How many species get l egal personhood based on intelligence is just the start. Once the wall separating humans and
animals comes down , that could serve as a stepping stone for many who advocate a focus on the capacity to suffer as
a basis for granting l egal personhood. Animal legal rights activists do not all see eye to eye regarding whether they
should focus on seeking legal standing for all animals who are capable of suffering or on legal personhood and rights for
particularly smart animals like chimpanzees. However, these approaches may only be different beginning points with a
similar possible end point.

The intelligent animal personhood approach is more pragmatic in the short term, because the immediate practical
consequences of granting legal standing to all sentient animals could be immensely disruptive for society.67 We do not
have much economic reliance on chimpanzees, there are relatively few of them in captivity compared to many other
animals, and we can recognize that they are particularly intelligent and closer to humans than are other animals. Thus,
perhaps a court could be tempted to believe that granting personhood to chimpanzees would be a limited and
manageable change. If that were accepted as a starting position, there is no clear or even fuzzy view of the end
position. It would at least progress to assertions that most animals utilized for human benefit have some level of
autonomy interests sufficient to allow them to be legal persons who may have lawsuits filed on their behalf on that
basis. Professor Richard Epstein has recognized the slipperiness of this slope, pointing out that “[u]nless an animal has
some sense of self, it cannot hunt, and it cannot either defend himself or flee when subject to attack. Unless it has a
desire to live, it will surely die. And unless it has some awareness of means and connections, it will fail in all it does.”68

Opening the personhood door to the more intelligent animals would also encourage efforts to extend personhood on
the basis of sentience rather than solely seeking extensions based on autonomy. The implications of much broader
potential expansion of l egal personhood based on either autonomy definitions or sentience could be enormous, and
society should carefully think them through. Any court that contemplates making this restructuring of our legal system
must also contemplate the practical consequences.

The conservative legal movement is focused on fetal personhood- incremental expansion of legal
personhood galvanizes momentum
Craddock, 22 -- James Wilson Institute affiliated scholar
[Josh Craddock, former federal appellate law clerk, and Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor, and former federal
appellate law clerk, "The next pro-life goal is constitutional personhood," Newsweek, 7-19-2022,
https://www.newsweek.com/next-pro-life-goal-constitutional-personhood-opinion-1725698, accessed 7-20-2022]

The Next Pro-Life Goal Is Constitutional Personhood

The Supreme Court's decision last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned 1973's Roe v. Wade and its 1992 successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
represents a historic moment in American history. For pro-life activists and conservative legal movement activists, the Dobbs case is nothing short of epochal. The constitutional order has
been vindicated and a grievous moral stain has been eradicated; millions upon millions of unborn children will be spared an untimely demise in utero. The feeling is both surreal and
euphoric: The modern conservative legal movement has finally been vindicated on its marquee issue.
But Dobbs is not the end of the pro-life struggle. True, it represents the crowning achievement for a generation of conservative lawyers who built a movement to
countermand mid-century judicial excess and, above all, overturn Roe. But younger conservative lawyers, who gravitate toward a more substantive approach to

originalism, see clearly the overarching moral imperative of abortion abolitionism . As Abraham Lincoln argued in his 1854 Peoria speech, the relevant moral and
legal question in the antebellum slavery debate was whether a black American "is not or is a man"; so, too, is the relevant moral and legal question in the abortion debate whether the
unborn child is not or is a natural person.

We know the biological answer to that question: Yes. Fortunately, a proper interpretation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, with its sweeping language securing the "equal protection
of the laws" for "any person," codifies that intuition into our national legal charter. Because the unborn child is a natural legal person—according to venerable authorities like William
Blackstone and an unbroken chain of state high court cases leading up to the 14th Amendment's ratification in 1868—a homicide statute that protects born persons but not unborn persons
necessarily violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee.

Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs actually hints at this understanding of 14th Amendment personhood. Dobbs "sharply
distinguishe[d]" other cases on which Roe and Casey relied based on the reality that "abortion destroys what those decisions call 'potential life' and what the law at issue in this case regards
as the life of an 'unborn human being.'" In other words, Dobbs rejected Planned Parenthood's noxious "clump of cells" disinformation and candidly acknowledged the moral salience of the
unborn child.

It s thus not a far leap from Dobbs to constitutional personhood. The hurdle is not one of moral, biological, or constitutional truth, but rather one of
i

fortitude and sheer willpower. All relevant constitutional actors must flex their muscles to help us reach the promised land of an abortion-free America.

First, Congress should "enforce, by appropriate legislation," this proper understanding of the Equal Protection Clause. Congress is the institution primarily responsible for securing the
Amendment's guarantees.

Second, the judiciary should, in future cases where the issue is squarely presented, rule on the side of natural legal personhood for the most vulnerable and defenseless among us. Lower
federal court judges should heed Dobbs' emphasis on the state's interest in protecting unborn human life, based on what one of us has described as a "common-good maximization
principle" for lower-court judging: When in doubt, "defer to the substantive common good and background principles of our common-law inheritance." Here, that militates in favor of 14th
Amendment personhood.

Third, the next pro-life president must independently act to properly interpret the Equal Protection Clause and impose that interpretation throughout the Executive branch. This does not
substitute for sweeping congressional or judicial action, but it would make for dramatic incremental progress.

Finally, pro-life
activists can advance the broader cause of constitutional personhood at the state level. Pro-lifers must work, especially after Dobbs,
to pass laws and state constitutional amendments defining legal personhood as beginning at conception. Such an incremental , state-by-state shift in
the legal landscape could galvanize momentum toward a federal abortion ban—whether it comes from Congress, from the
Supreme Court, or via constitutional amendment.

L: Guardianship/Representation
The plan expands personhood- only persons can have guardians represent them

Burke, 4 -- J.D. Candidate University of Colorado Law School

[Katherine A., "Can We Stand For It? Amending the Endangered Species Act With An Animal-Suit Provision," University of
Colorado Law Review, Vol. 75, 2004, https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/arus75ucololrev633.pdf, accessed
8-26-22]

III. Standing in the Shoes of Another: Rule 17(c)

If Congress enacted an animal-suit provision in the ESA , and the Court accepted an animal plaintiff suing under such a provision, some mechanism must
be found to represent the interests of the animal plaintiff in court. This part shows that the Rule 17(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provides such a
mechanism by providing for the representation of parties who, for one reason or another, cannot speak for themselves. One obstacle to the use of Rule 17(c) in animal suit cases immediately

presents itself: the expectation that those entitled to representation must be “persons.” 130 Animals do not fit the traditional understanding of personhood.
However, as explained below, the personhood problem should not pose an insurmountable obstacle to use of Rule 17(c) to bring suits under an animal-suit provision in the ESA.

A. Standing In For Animals: Next Friends

Rule 17(c) provides for several kinds of representatives for incompetent or incapacitated persons: general guardians, committees, conservators, guardians ad litem, and next friends.131 With the exception of next friends,
these representatives must be appointed, either by the principal or the court. Thus, these forms of representation require that the principal has the capacity to make such appointments or that the court takes the time to
do so. Also, appointments like these potentially put disinterested attorneys in the representative’s seat simply because they happen to be available.

On the other hand, the next friend is a self-nominated representative. Black’s Law Dictionary defines a next friend as one who is, “without being [a] regularly appointed guardian. . .[and] not a party to an action, . . .
appearing to look after the interests of the [entity] he represents.”132 Thus, the next friend can be a self-nominated third party, deeply interested in the plaintiffs case, who the court need not expend its resources to find
or appoint. The Supreme Court clearly delineated the requirements for next friend standing in Whitmore v. Arkansas:133 1) “an adequate explanation - such as inaccessibility, mental incompetence, or other disability - why
the real party in interest cannot appear on his own behalf,”134 and 2) “the next friend must be truly dedicated to the best interests of the person on whose behalf he seeks to litigate.”135 In addition, the Court held that
the “burden is on the next friend clearly to establish the propriety of his status and thereby justify the jurisdiction of the court.”136 The Court’s requirements aim to bar from court “‘intruders or uninvited meddlers’. . . [,
or] the litigant asserting only a generalized interest. . . .”137
Next friend representation is an important mechanism for the representation of plaintiffs without the capacity to appoint guardians. The qualifications of a self-nominated next friend must be carefully defined, both to
protect the real party in interest from unauthorized and undesired representation, and to protect the adjudicative process from inappropriate litigants circumventing the standing requirements of the Constitution. As

next friend is a workable mechanism by which qualified animal plaintiffs could bring their cases to court.
shown in Part IV below, the

However, before that is possible , Congress must face the issue of “personhood.”
B. Walking a Tightrope: Persons and Non-Persons

When the endangered Hawaiian Crow filed a lawsuit through a human next friend to enforce the ESA, the District Court of
Hawaii found that the crow could not be represented by a next friend under Rule 17(c) because it was not a “person,” which the
court interpreted to mean a human.138 Rule 17(c) does refer to “incompetent persons,” and the relevant dictionary meaning of “person” is, “(i]n general usage, a human being . . . though by statute [the] term may include
labor organizations, partnerships, associations, corporations . .. .”139

However, the issue of personhood need not foreclose the possibility of an animal-suit provision and the representation of animals under Rule 17(c). Black’s Law Dictionary acknowledges that statutes can define “person” to
include entities that are not human. Indeed, many non-human entities are regularly represented by human proxies.140 While many of these entities are associations of humans—corporations, municipalities, and the like—
this need not always be the case. Sea-going ships have been qualified as legal persons.141 At a time when African slaves were not considered legal persons, they were often allowed access to court through white
representatives.142 In fact, the Cases and Controversies clause of the Constitution does not mention the term “person.”143 It should not be terribly surprising that the legal concept of personhood has proven to be flexible
and not necessarily coextensive with the phrase “human being.”

As Steven Wise noted, objections to defining animals as persons run much deeper than linguistic or legal technicalities. Even if animals may technically be defined as persons for
specific purposes by statute, an animal-suit provision faces the physical, economic, political, religious, historical, legal, and psychological problems associated

with expanding the legal status of animals .144 The psychological problem can be especially acute in regards to the
distinctions between humans and animals, and any implications of equality of status can be deeply troubling. 145 Ultimately,
however, our legal system allows for statutory expansion of the term “person,” and the Constitution does not limit the judicial power to cases involving human beings, so it is within Congress’s power to define animals as
incompetent persons in an animal-suit amendment to the ESA.

1NR Impact Frontline / AT Defense Core

Unregulated synth-bio leads to extinction- CRISPR enables super pathogens that combine maximum
lethality and transmissibility- we’re just two mutations away from extinction- that’s Thompson.

Emerging tech democratization makes the risk real- their answers don’t assume convergence with AI and
additive manufacturing
Chandra, 20 -- Defense One analyst

[Bilva Chandra, and Andrew Gonzalez, Defense One associate, "Managing Chaos: Biosecurity in a Post-COVID-19
America," Real Clear Defense, 8-3-2020,
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/08/03/managing_chaos_biosecurity_in_a_post-covid-
19_america_115514.html, accessed 9-7-2020]

Emerging Technology is the Ideal Enabler

Emerging technologies, including biotechnology, accelerate the lethal use of unconventional weapons due to its
increasingly disruptive capabilities. It is their synergistic properties that make threats enabled by emerging technologies
more tangible today. Artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing , and biotech nology are precisely the hazardous
triumvirate that has raised concerns in the technology and national security communities. These emerging technologies
can enable our adversaries, both state and non-state actors, to more effectively and expediently develop
unconventional weapons advantages under the radar. The trend of technology democratization is exhaustive and, in the
case of biotechnology, produces ominous implications. For example, additive manufacturing reduces the barriers to
entry for a variety of technological fields and allows malicious state actors to accelerate the production and
weaponization of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. In the post-COVID-19 world, these technologies
will raise the stakes associated with preventing and mitigating the disruptive effects of biological threats, due to the
simultaneous lack of controls on them and the United States’ readiness to respond. Artificial intelligence and additive
manufacturing can enhance our adversaries’ ability to develop biological weapons and exploit the United States’
national security vulnerabilities, currently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recently, dialogue regarding emerging technology by scholars at the RAND Corporation and the Federation of American
Scientists has centered on the growth, acquisition, and evolution of artificial intelligence, and its potential to create
unintended consequences and undermine the United States’ strategic stability. Artificial intelligence encompasses an
overarching umbrella of technologies that enable machines to simulate the behavior of human beings. The
commercialization of this technology has resulted in its democratization. As posited by Michael C. Horowitz, there are
clear first-mover advantages in employing narrow artificial intelligence technologies, especially within military
institutions that can affect the global balance of power. States with demure conventional capabilities compared to the
United States can gain access to artificial intelligence due to its commercial nature and affordability. For example, many
deep learning frameworks—such as TensorFlow, and PyTorch—are open-source information, and their algorithms are
accessible to the public. Advancements in bio-warfare can be further empowered by artificial intelligence, as it
facilitates better data insights, automates parts of the testing process, and makes the creation of bio logical agents and
weapons more efficient, and affordable . For example, analyses of genetic data using machine learning techniques
would only take a few days, instead of a status-quo operation of several months through traditional processes. This
method of optimization enables the rapid creation of effective bioweapons . Biotechnologies like synthetic biology
serve a dual-purpose, because they are commercially-driven in sectors such as medicine and agriculture, and possess
military applications due to their ability to create biological agents and diseases. The capability of artificial intelligence to
accelerate the growth of the future biotechnology space, especially in its military application is extensive and
worrisome.

Exponential tech development creates means and motive- and accidental release is an independent
scenario
Luby, 19 -- Stanford's Woods Institute professor of infectious disease, epidemiology, and population health
[Stephen, and Ronan Arthur, "Risk and Response to Biological Catastrophe in Lower Income Countries," Global
Catastrophic Biological Risks, 5-25-19, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/82_2019_162, accessed 8-19-22]

2.2 Synthetic Biological Risks

Other scenarios include the intentional synthesis and release of a novel pathogen capable of efficient transmission
and high mortality. To date, biological weapons have not been the weapons of choice in most violent conflicts;
however , recent developments increase future risk. CRISPR and other techniques of genome editing and associated
developments in synthetic biology make it easier each year to genetically modify organisms, including human
pathogens. Technology continues its exponential development becoming increasingly portable , increasingly powerful
and less expensive . This expansion of biological knowledge and tools means that the capacity to manipulate organisms
will become progressively easier to implement and available to more and more people. Today, many graduate
students in the life sciences at leading universities can modify organisms and so change their function or develop novel
synthetic organisms. As the techniques become more refined, these capacities will be deployed in high school science
projects and available to tens of thousands of people who can learn the essentials with a focused review of information
available on the internet.

With the capacity for constructing synthetic pathogens increasingly available, initiating an intentional synthetic
pandemic would not require massive funding and a political state with legions of collaborators but could be deployed
by moderately sized terrorist cells or a disgruntled individual. Biological weapons also offer the opportunity for
preserving some populations through preemptive immunization while leaving the broader population susceptible,
strategy that may appeal to groups with fanatical views of religious, ideological, ethnic or cultural purity.

The increasing ease of gene editing and synthetic biology means that more groups, many with little background in lab
safety or appreciation of potential consequences will be editing and creating new organisms. The sheer number of
people engaged increases the risk of the unintentional release of a dangerous agent. The year on year increase in
both the potency and the availability of the tools for synthetic biology progressively increases this risk .

Uncontrolled synth-bio causes green goo- extinction

Heavey, 17 -- PhD from the University of Manchester
[Patrick Heavey, "Consequentialism and the Synthetic Biology Problem," Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 3-31-
2017, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-of-healthcare-ethics/article/abs/
consequentialism-and-the-synthetic-biology-problem/464601366BB778771B9906C32E7971AB, accessed 8-20-2022]

Regarding biological unknowns, until recently, 97 percent of DNA was referred to as "junk DNA" by scientists, as it
appeared to have no function.131 It is now known that much of it has important functions, such as regulating genes,
although its functions are not fully known.132'133 Introducing changes at the DNA level when there is such a large
degree of unknowability may result in unpredictable outcomes. Given that there are so many potential unknowns in this
research, the question arises: is synbio too big a risk? Monsters could be created inadvertently, at the microbial level or
higher.

Also, it is possible that some newly created organism could be accidentally released into the environment. It may have
the ability to replicate, evolve, and affect the course of evolution of other organisms with which it interacts. There may
be no consequences to such a release; however, on the other hand, significant ecological damage could be caused. A
worst case scenario has been proposed, adapted from Eric Drexler's description of Gray Goo in nanotechnology; here,
self-replicating robots continuously build copies of themselves, filling the earth and killing all life in the process.134 A
"green goo" version of this has been postulated for new biotech creations gone out of control.135,136 Drexler,
regarded as the 'father of nanotechnology/ describes Gray Goo as follows:

If the first replicator could assemble a copy of itself in one thousand seconds, the two replicators could then build two
more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of ten
hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than
two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the
planets combined.137

It s an apocalyptic scenario, albeit an extreme worst case.138,139,140 In short, potential dangers appear to be so great
i

regarding biosafety that questions arise as to whether synbio can be considered ethical per se. This is the case even
without human error and accidents (which can never be disregarded).

Synth-bio key to solve telomere erosion

Tollefsbol, 19 -- University of Alabama at Birmingham distinguished professor of biology
[Trygve, PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center, and Andrew Brane,
"Targeting Telomeres and Telomerase: Studies in Aging and Disease Utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 Technology," Feb 2019, 8.2,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6406488/, accessed 8-20-22]

Telomeres and telomerase provide a unique and important avenue of study in improving both life expectancy and quality of life due to their close association with aging and disease. While major advances in our understanding of these two biological mediators have characterized the last two decades, previous studies have been

The advent of
limited by the inability to affect change in real time within living cells. The last three years, however, have witnessed a huge step forward to overcome this limitation. the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/ CRISPR -associated (CRISPR/Cas) system has

led to a wide array of targeted genetic studies that are already being employed to modify telomeres and telomerase, as well as the genes that affect them. In this review, we analyze studies utilizing the
technology to target and modify telomeres, telomerase, and their closely associated genes. We also discuss how these studies can provide insight into the biology and mechanisms that underlie aging, cancer, and other diseases.

Keywords: telomeres, telomerase, CRISPR, CRISPR/Cas9, Cas9, dCas9, cancer, aging

1. Introduction

1.1. Telomeres and Telomerase

Since their discovery, telomeres have been at the forefront of research in both aging and disease. There were observations implicating structures on chromosome ends assisting in stability as far back as the 1930’s, but it was not until Blackburn and Gall’s pioneering paper that the modern idea of a telomere emerged [1,2]. Their
initial study showed that telomeres consist of linked, repeating nucleotide hexamers. Further study revealed a variety of possible sequences among clades of organisms [3]. Within these clades, however, function is highly conserved, with telomeres being transferred from distantly related species that are able to maintain biological
activity [4].
This activity is important for mitigating damage to genes during chromosomal replication. DNA polymerase is unable to replicate the ends of chromosomes, due to the nature of DNA replication. Telomeres act as buffer zones, which prevent the
gradual degradation of genes. Over the lifetime of a cell, telomeres become shorter, and cells will become senescent once a critical length is reached [5]. Because it is necessary to restore telomeres to continue division and reproduction, the discovery of telomeres posed a mechanistic
question as to how they are built and maintained. The answer to this question followed shortly after, when Greider and Blackburn discovered and isolated the protein that they called terminal transferase [6]. This protein is today known as telomerase.

As a ribonucleoprotein, telomerase is composed of both RNA and proteins, and it consists of two moecules each of telomerase reverse transcriptase, telomere RNA, and dyskerin [7,8,9]. While each subunit is necessary for proper biological function, the catalytic portion that is known as telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT and
hTERT in humans) is normally the limiting factor for telomerase activity and telomere elongation [10]. It is for this reason that a majority of research regarding telomere biology focuses on TERT.

Because of their intimate association with cell replication and senescence, telomeres and, by extension, telomerase, have been implicated in disease and aging since the 1980’s [5]. Mice that were bred to be deficient in telomerase showed a marked decrease in health and, after several generations, lose the ability to breed
completely [11]. Studies have shown that telomere length decreases in older organisms and that this effect is not simple correlation [12,13]. Within tissues, the ablation of telomeres results in spatially specific, age-associated damage [13,14]. On a cellular level, the loss of telomere function is linked with decreased ability for cellular
division, and TERT overexpression is linked with an increase in cellular proliferation [15]. The effect is especially pronounced in stem cells, where telomerase is normally upregulated to a high degree [16,17]. When telomerase activity is disrupted in these cells, they lose replicative capacity and lose their pluripotency. In addition, this
disruption leads to an increase in cellular oxidative stress [18].

However, these changes in activity are not solely linked with aging. As is the case with many cellular processes, disruptions to the normal function of telomeres and telomerase are associated with human disease. One of the most closely associated of these diseases is, perhaps, cancer. In around 90% of cancers, the expression of
telomerase is increased, while similar, yet benign, tumors do not display this increase in telomerase [19]. In a sample that was derived from cancer patient data within the National Cancer Institute Genomic Data Commons, this increase is seen across several cancer types (Figure 1a–c) and it remains high through progressive breast
cancer stages (Figure 1c) [20]. In addition, more severe, metastatic stages of cancer experience higher expression levels of telomerase, and disrupting telomerase activity may have some efficacy in preventing metastasis [10,21]. It is thought that these high levels of expression prevent cellular senescence and they allow for
aggressive, rapidly dividing cancer lines.

1.2. The CRISPR-Cas System

While major strides in understanding the of the function and dysfunction of telomeres have been apparent, a crucial hurdle
and telomerase has been in this study

the inability to affect living systems. and observe changes within However, recently a solution to this emerged CRISPR
issue has . The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats- -associated
(CRISPR-Cas) system was first described as an adaptive bacterial immune system in the early 2000’s and it functions to attack foreign bacterial and viral DNA in prokaryotes [22]. This discovery, named for its genomic clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated (Cas) protein, drew
interest from an evolutionary standpoint at the time. It was not until eight years later that an application for this system would be discovered and would draw wider acclaim. Between 2013 and 2014, the laboratories of Drs. Feng Zhang and George Church described methods of editing DNA in vitro utilizing the CRISPR-Cas system
[23,24]. It was not long after that many other investigators began to adopt and modify the system.

This system is comprised of two major parts, which can be roughly broken down into a guiding and an affecting portion. Responsible for specificity, the guiding portion consists of a single stranded RNA molecule, which is called single guide RNA (sgRNA) [25]. This RNA component targets a genomic region by complementing a
specific DNA sequence and is associated with the affecting portion by way of a fused portion of scaffold RNA. This affecting component is comprised of one of several Cas proteins, the most common being Cas9. In its native state, this protein has double-stranded endonuclease activity [24,26]. After producing a cut in the DNA, donor
DNA with a desired sequence can be added to the target site [27]. Combining this endonuclease activity with the aforementioned RNA guide allows for highly specific, tightly regulated editing of genetic information in vitro and in vivo.

The CRISPR-Cas system is not, however, limited to inducing double-stranded breaks. The Cas protein can be modified to retain its targeting ability while losing its endonuclease activity [25]. This catalytically inactive Cas (dCas) can be used as is, or further modified with a number of different functional groups. Molecules (visualized in
Figure 2) can be attached to dCas. These molecules can then be brought into proximity or attached to specified regions of the genome.

2. Telomeres—Imaging

One emerging use of this CRISPR-dCas system involves targeting telomeres for imaging. This system has a number of advantages over other systems, most of which stem from the dynamic and sustained nature of the CRISPR system. In one of the first imaging experiments involving CRISPR, Chen et al. were able to label telomeres in
HEK293T, UMUC3, and HeLa cell lines with enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) [28]. Within these cells, telomere movements were observed with a labeling efficiency and intensity akin to the well-established DNA FISH protocol. Further improvements that were made on this system may, in fact, result in greater labeling

the unprecedented precision

efficiency and specificity [29]. By replacing the EGFP with the brighter mClover fluorescent tag, labeled telomeres became even easier to detect and only produced negligible off-target effects [30]. Imaging telomeres is not in itself a new idea, but

and efficiency of CRISPR the -Cas system provides a novel way to quickly and efficiently track telomeres.

The true advantage of CRISPR imaging is , however, its ability to be directly applied to living systems. While there are other methods of fluorescently labeling genomic elements, these are
toxic to the cell and can result in irreparable DNA damage [31]. This limitation has disallowed the uninterrupted recording of telomeres and other genomic elements in vitro. Shao et al. were among the first to establish that labeling with the CRISPR-dCas had minimal cytotoxicity and was suitable for continuous viewing [32]. Their
system was used to track telomeres and centromeres over a five-minute period and measured the relative movements of each during interphase.

Building on these ideas, Dreissig et al. were able to track telomere movements in leaf cells of Nicotiana benthamiana using dCas that was labeled with both EGFP and mRuby2 fluorescent tags [33]. Within the nucleus, they observed telomere movements of up to 2 μm during interphase. In addition, combining this technique with
fluorescently labeled proteins allowed for the visualization of live protein-telomere interactions. By labeling both telomeres and end-binding protein TRB1, they found that these leaf cells appeared to contain chromosomes with both blunt and overhanging ends, a phenomenon that is not observed in mammals or fungi. While this
study was limited to this single, specific protein interaction, future work could lead to an understanding of how telomeres interact with any relevant portions of the proteome.

More recently, this technique has been extended to transgenic mouse models [34]. By expressing dCas-GFP throughout a mouse, the guides for telomeres could be inserted into specific tissues for labeling. The group used this technology, combined with CRISPR-interference of the TRF1 gene, to observe the aggregation and fusion
of telomeres in real time. This technology has the potential to be extended to other genes, allowing for the study of real-time changes in telomere dynamics after genetic manipulations.

Go to:

3. Telomeres—Editing

As discussed earlier, disruptions and damage to telomeres can lead to a wide array of cellular dysfunction. The CRISPR-Cas system’s ability to cut and insert genes allows for the real-time, in vivo study of
telomere damage. Using this system to induce double strand breaks (DSBs) in telomeres resulted in the activation of a telomeric repair system that was regulated by the Rad51 gene [35]. This study differs from previous conflicting and ambiguous results, which are likely due to a lack of precision in non-CRISPR induction of DSBs.
Previous findings were clouded by the initiation of senescence and apoptotic pathways in DSB-induced cells, and this study provides an example of how the Cas system can be utilized to remove the noise from results.

Taking these ideas a step further, Kim et al. were able to completely remove telomeres in bone marrow neuroblasts and measure the effects on cellular function and senescence [36]. Telomere removal led to a cascade of cellular changes, chiefly a loss of mitochondrial function and an aggregation of Parkinson’s disease (PD)
associated proteins. This change lowered cellular viability and it has the potential to model both aging and PD in cells. Because this method only removes telomeres, it allows for the study of how this specific process contributes to cellular aging [13,14,36]. This process is important in establishing causality and removing ambiguity
that could be associated with other cellular aging models.

CRISPR-Cas can also be employed to create more minor changes to telomeres. While the changes can be as small as a single nucleotide, they can have a major impact on a cell’s biology. After inducing a mutation to a subtelomeric CTCF binding site, known as TERRA, the cells exhibited a loss of sister telomeres and reduced capacity
for replication [37]. These issues were exacerbated by the induction of replication stress and it led to a higher rate of apoptosis. This study implicates CTCF and TERRA sites as being vital for successful telomere replication and maintenance and elucidates their importance for the overall maintenance and stability of chromosomes.

While current research involving CRISPR-Cas ablation of telomeres has been limited, the ability to use the technology in any cell type allows for the study of a variety of different diseases. By utilizing these methods in different tissues, the effect of aging can be measured across a broad array of conditions. Further study has the
potential to answer both biological and mechanistic questions regarding telomere loss and the disease states that it causes.

4. Telomerase—Imaging

While imaging the genomic region containing TERT with dCas is possible, it is not the nucleotide sequence itself that is primarily associated with biological function. Because of this, targeting and modifying the protein telomerase appears to be the most effective way to image and study its dynamics. By introducing a fluorescent
marker at the TERT locus, Schmidt, Zaug, and Cech were able to distinguish three stages of telomerase movement [38]. The stages can be characterized as a rapid diffusion stage, a frequent, transient telomere-associating stage, and a rarer, long-term association stage that results in a majority of telomere elongation. In addition,
telomerase appears to bind with the ssDNA overhangs and add multiple hexamer repeats in tandem [39]. Taking these results together provides a novel model for telomere formation; wherein, telomeres are elongated in short controlled periods following longer periods of transient association. Labeling and the subsequent imaging
of telomerase using the CRISPR-Cas system allows for an unprecedented ability to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of telomerase movements and recruitment. Understanding these dynamics is vital in the study of diseases, such as cancer, which utilize the protein to facilitate rapid, aggressive division.

5. Telomerase—Editing

One of the most common and valuable tools in biotechnology is modulating gene expression by knocking out or knocking in a gene. When doing so, comparing differences to wild type organisms allows for the parsing of genetic function. By targeting the promoter of hTERT, CRISPR-Cas can be used to both ablate and enhance TERT
expression [40]. Mutations that led to silencing resulted in normally immortal cell lines senescing and eventually dying, while those that increased expression saw TERT levels that were akin to those found in tumor cell lines. As an unintended consequence of adding a protein Halo tag to the N-terminus of TERT, Chiba et al. found
that they could modulate expression between these two extremes [41]. Additionally, they found a reduction of telomere lengths within these cell lines, implicating steric hindrance as a factor in telomere lengthening.

A different study by Xi et al. explored similar ideas, focusing on urothelial cancer cells [42]. These cells contain a single DNA substitution mutation in their hTERT promoter, which had previously been associated with high expression levels. The group used the CRISPR-Cas system to revert this mutation and observed a restoration in
the baseline hTERT levels.

In a later study, the mechanism behind this phenomenon was explored. In this experiment, promoter mutations were induced by the CRISPR-Cas system [43]. These mutants saw an increase in chromatin interactions upstream of the gene, as well as a recruitment of the transcription factor GABPA. This transcription factor directly
recruits DNA polymerase II and it provides a possible mechanism for the activation of TERT caused by promoter mutations across multiple cancer types.

While targeting telomerase directly has important clinical implications in cancer treatment, there are still 10–15% of cancer cases that exhibit telomere lengthening without a corresponding increase in telomerase activity [19]. These remaining cancers are still able to replicate rapidly, so they must be lengthening their telomeres and
preventing senescence by some other means. This alternative means of telomere lengthening (ALT) is the proposed mechanism for this prevention and it must be studied in order to achieve a full understanding of cancer proliferation [44]. One way to increase understanding of these ALT pathways is to generate a continuously
dividing cell line that lacks telomerase activities. By utilizing CRISPR to knockdown both TERT and a cell death pathway that is known as ATRX/DAXX, cells that exhibited ALT pathways were formed. This ALT pathway can also be achieved through CRISPR mediated knockout of the RNA component of telomerase (TERC) [45]. The ALT
pathway arose in only a tiny fraction of cells and led to telomere generation with large overhangs on the lagging strands. While ALT telomere elongation appears to be rare and it is still not fully understood, unraveling the mechanism and biology of the process is important for studying cancer that does not employ telomerase-
associated telomere lengthening.

Due to their prevalence in the disease, understanding the significance of TERT mutations is vital in the understanding of cancer cell growth. CRISPR-Cas provides a powerful tool for affecting these mutations in live cells and it allows for the modeling of rapidly dividing cell lines. However, this modeling is not limited to cancer
research. It has great potential to model aging as well as diseases that are characterized by cellular aging. The technique has already been used to reprogram hTERT in fibroblast cells, creating a novel model for Werner’s syndrome [46]. With the ever-increasing understanding of disease mechanisms, it is even more important to be
able to create accurate cellular models for these diseases. These models serve as a platform to test new drugs and therapies. It is therefore important that they have accurate, specific genetic states to ensure that treatments will translate from the laboratory into patients.

6. Genes that Affect Telomeres and Telomerase

As with any gene or protein within a biological system, telomeres and telomerase are affected by a suite of different genes. The CRISPR -Cas system allows for the identification and subsequent modification of these genes. Modifications to these genes often
induce changes that are associated with cancer and aging, but some disease models can be induced independently of the two. One such gene is nuclear assembly factor 1 (NAF1) [47]. Within the cellular and mouse models CRISPR induced mutations of the NAF1 gene result in a loss of around half of cellular TERT activity. This
mutation and the resulting expression loss form a profile that matches that of pulmonary fibrosis-emphysema. It is likely that this disease progresses by disrupting telomere homeostasis, a process that many aging and cancer-associated genes also influence.

In one of the earlier experiments to utilize the technology, CRISPR-Cas was used to confirm that the cold inducible RNA-binding protein (CIRP) functions in telomere maintenance at all temperatures and it modulates TERT expression at low temperatures [48]. With this gene knocked out, the overall telomere length was shorter than
the controls. These results indicate that CIRP is necessary for mediating telomerase activity during hypothermia as well as under normal cellular conditions.
Likewise, Notch1, a gene that is normally involved in development, was also found to be necessary for proper telomerase function [49]. Without it, telomeres shortened and expressed phenotypes that are typical of aging cells. This result also exemplifies Notch1’s role in cancer, due to evidence that telomeric shortening is
important for early tumorigenesis [12,49]. The loss of telomeres leads to chromosomal instability, which is conducive to the development of cancer phenotypes. This change may also explain Notch1’s pleiotropic association with tumor suppression and oncogenesis, as the shortening of telomeres is also associated with decreased
replicative capacity [50].

Gu et al. saw similar results with a different gene and mechanism; the group found that, by disrupting CTC1, a part of the telomere-regulating complex, telomeres would undergo rapid elongation, followed by an acute breakdown [51]. Similar to Notch1, this breakdown leads to chromosomal instability. Another gene that was
implicated as important for genomic stability was POLD3 [52]. Without it, cells lost telomeres, and these losses were likely due to the induction of DSBs. Cells that were deficient in POLD3 were unable to replicate efficiently and tended to have micronuclei. Ablating genes, such as these with CRISPR/Cas, allows for the systematic
study of the mechanisms of telomere and telomerase loss.

In some cancer types, telomere fusions result in massive rearrangements of genes on chromosomes as well as on localized hypermutation [53]. By using the CRISPR knockdown array, the group found evidence that these genomic events are caused by recombination after activity from the cytoplasmic nuclease TREX1. As both
rearrangements and hypermutation can lead to complications in recognizing and treating cancer cells, understanding how they are formed as well as what genetic factors contribute to them further the understanding of the disease itself. The identification of TREX1 provides an important screening target for clinicians when
considering treatment and genetic counseling.

7. Epigenetics—Editing

A critically important, yet understudied, avenue of telomerase biology is epigenetics. As epigenetic modifications can affect expression to a large degree, genes that modulate this expression are important targets for study. While there are no CRISPR-based studies involving the direct methylation or demethylation of the hTERT
gene, there is some interest in the genes that enact these epigenetic changes. Cells that were deprived of the DNA methyltransferase 2 (DNMT2), which catalyzes the addition of methyl groups to tRNA, suffered both a decrease in telomere lengths and telomerase activity [54,55]. Interestingly, the loss of DNMT2 resulted in the
compensatory upregulation of other DNA methyltransferases, including Dnmt1, Dnmt3a, and Dnmt3b. These methyltransferases primarily methylate DNA, which led to global DNA hypermethylation. In turn, this hypermethylation induced cellular senescence apoptotic pathways. These results suggest that DNMT2 could serve as an
important target for cancer and other telomere-associated disease.

Conversely, Cas-mediated knockout of the ten eleven translocation (Tet) proteins, which facilitate DNA demethylation, resulted in an elongation of telomeres [56]. Although the loss of a demethylator would suggest a higher level of methylation and results that are in line with those of the DNMT2 study, the lack of compensatory
global methylation likely prevented telomere shortening and cell senescence [55,56]. This result directly implicates Tet in the maintenance of normal telomere lengths and underscores its importance as a target for cancer and aging therapies. Understanding how changes in methylation state are induced at the TERT locus is vital, as
they may provide insight as to why the expression levels differ in disease states with no obvious mutation.

8. Conclusions

Aging is a pervasive and complicated process that results from the body’s limited capacity to regenerate itself. Cancer is an almost as pervasive and equally complicated disease that hijacks these regenerative capabilities to proliferate unchecked. Due to their complex nature, parsing out the mechanisms of each appears to be a

CRISPR has provided a powerful tool that can be used to fashion rapid and specific genomic
daunting task. However, the inception of -Cas technology

changes This has already made major contributions to understanding

in living organisms. system, as overviewed in Figure 3, telomerase the of telomeres and in the context of aging and

and will undoubtedly continue to do so as the tech develops.

disease it nology

Extinction
Ravilious, 4 – PhD, National Geographic science journalist; citing Reinhard Stindl of the Vienna Institute of Medical
Biology

[Kate, published in National Geographic, New Scientist, The Economist, The Guardian, "The Final Countdown," 4-8-4,
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/apr/08/science.highereducation, accessed 2-24-11]

Every species seems to come and go. Some last longer than others, but nothing lasts forever. Humans are a relatively recent phenomenon, jumping out of trees and striding across the land
around 200,000 years ago. Will we persist for many millions of years to come, or are we headed for an evolutionary makeover, or even extinction? According to
Reinhard Stindl, of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna , the answer to this question could lie at the tips of our chromosomes. In a controversial new

theory he suggests that all eukaryotic species (everything except bacteria and algae) have an evolutionary "clock" that ticks

through generations, counting down to an eventual extinction date. This clock might help to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of evolution, but it also
overturns current thinking and even questions the orthodoxy of Darwin's natural selection. For over 100 years, scientists have grappled with the cause of "background" extinction. Mass

extinction events, like the wiping out of dinosaurs 65m years ago, are impressive and dramatic, but account for only around 4% of now extinct
species. The majority slip away quietly and without any fanfare. Over 99% of all the species that ever lived on Earth have
already passed on, so what happened to the species that weren't annihilated during mass extinction events? Charles Darwin
proposed that evolution is controlled by "survival of the fittest". Current natural selection models imply that evolution is a slow and steady process, with continuous genetic mutations
leading to new species that find a niche to live in, or die. But digging through the layers of rock, palaeontologists have found that evolution seems to go in fits and starts. Most species seem
to have long stable periods followed by a burst of change: not the slow, steady process predicted by natural selection. Originally scientists attributed this jagged pattern to the imperfections
of the fossil record. But in recent years more detailed studies have backed up the idea that evolution proceeds in fits and starts. The quiet periods in the fossil record where evolution seems
to stagnate are a big problem for natural selection: evolution can't just switch on and off. Over 20 years ago the late Stephen Jay Gould suggested internal genetic mechanisms could regulate
these quiet evolutionary periods but until now no-one could explain how it would work. Stindl argues that the
protective caps on the end of chromosomes,
called telomeres, provide the answer. Like plastic tips on the end of shoelaces, all eukaryotic species have telomeres on the end of their
chromosomes to prevent instability. However, cells seem to struggle to copy telomeres properly when they divide, and very

gradually the telomeres become shorter . Stindl's idea is that there is also a tiny loss of telomere length between each generation ,
mirroring the individual ageing process. Once a telomere becomes critically short it causes diseases related to chromosomal instability,

or limited tissue regeneration, such as cancer and immunodeficiency. "The shortening of telomeres between generations means

that eventually the telomeres become critically short for a particular species, causing outbreaks of disease and finally a
population crash," says Stindl. "It could explain the disappearance of a seemingly successful species , like Neanderthal man, with no
need for external factors such as climate change."

Rate of tech advance overwhelms defense- Carlson Curve proves

Turchin, 17 – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies advisory board member
[Alexy, Brian Patrick Green, Santa Clara University; and David Denkenberger, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and
Tennessee State University, “Artificial Multipandemic as the Most Plausible and Dangerous Global Catastrophic Risk
Connected with Bioweapons and Synthetic Biology,” https://philpapers.org/rec/TURAMA-3, accessed 8-21-22]

Recent works by Ouagrham-Gormley(Ouagrham-Gormley, 2012)(Ouagrham-Gormley, 2014) show some of the

difficulties in the creation of classical biological weapons, as opposed to what is sometimes considered in popular
culture. However, these barriers should not be relied upon in the face of consistent tech nological advance.

The biotech analog of Moore’s law is the Carlson Curve and it is even steeper than Moore’s law, which means there
may be less time between the advent of the first artificial biological virus to a multipandemic(Carlson, 2003)(“Special
report: Life 2.0,” 2006) Carlson’s law is measured by the price of sequencing DNA, which , for a human genome, has
fallen from 3 billion dollars in 2000 to 1000 dollars in 2015, or 3 millions times , and is reasonable proxy for other not so
easily quantifiable biotechnological successes. For example, the price of DNA synthesis is also subject to a decreasing
cost curve, as Carlson has noted(Carlson, n.d.).

Biotechnologies in many respects have similar development speeds to computers, but with a later start. So if
biotechnologies develop at roughly the same speed as computer technology, we can estimate that it will take
approximately 10 years from first runaway artificial biotechnological virus to the condition of a dangerous
multipandemic. Artificial bioviruses have been created in labs since 2000(Cello, n.d.), but never runaway, the same way
as first experimental computer viruses have been created in 1970s.

Based on this, we can estimate that 2017 in the biotechnology field is like 1979 in the computer field, and if we continue
this analogy, first artificial virus may infect people outside the lab before 2020 and multipandemic could happen as
early as 2025. Such extrapolation cannot be used as a prediction, as our world is very uncertain. It could happen even
earlier, if large actors start anonymous biological warfare, the same way as they now use cryptic cyber attack, or it could
happen later, or never. As one example, in 2002 Sir Martin Rees made a bet that the first artificial virus will claim a
million victims before 2020(Longbetsorg, 2002). So there is the possibility that a multipandemic could happen very soon,
but also up to in any date in the more remote future, until some kind of universal defence will be created.

IL: FP Dooms Biotech Leadership

Fetal Personhood crushes US biotech leadership- spurs brain drain as top scientists will flee the
country and creates a chilling effect- deterring critical research- that’s Piekoff.

The plan will be weaponized to propel fetal personhood

Phillips, 19 -- University of New Mexico Law School
[Erin, "The Silent Problem: The Implicit Personhood Determination in State V. Montoya," New Mexico Law School, 49.1,
Winter, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2338&context=nmlr, accessed 6-30-22, footnotes
73-75 included]

This note will first examine the background and statutory insufficiencies in Montoya. Next, this note will explore the Montoya Court’s application of the rational link standard and the ways in which that standard creates an implicit determination of personhood. Finally, this note will address the ways in which the implicit and

personhood determination
inadvertent in Montoya could be wielded by proponents of the Personhood Movement to propel anti-
abortion sentiments.
II. THE BACKGROUND OF STATE V. MONTOYA AND AN INTRODUCTION TO THE RATIONAL LINK STANDARD

A simple and straightforward New Mexico Court of Appeals case, State v. Montoya upheld the lower court’s conviction of robbery against the defendant.11 Despite its brevity12 and lack of controversial holding, the short case portends dangerous precedent because of the court’s failure to address personhood. In the case, the Defendant, Joseph Montoya, robbed and killed the victim, Angel Arroyo.13 After Arroyo’s death, Montoya left the scene of the crimes, returned after a few hours, and subsequently emptied Arroyo’s pockets of any remaining cash.14 Montoya was convicted of multiple crimes and sentenced to 104.5 years of incarceration.15 On appeal,
defendant raised two challenges to his robbery conviction: that the application of the robbery statute was erroneous because the second robbery occurred after the victim was already dead, and that the defendant was subject to ineffective assistance of counsel because his attorney failed to request an instruction to include theft as a possible lesser included offense.16 For the purposes of this discussion, only defendant’s first challenge is relevant.

The defendant’s appeal argued that “a robbery conviction is improper when the robbery both commences and concludes on a dead person”17 and that robbing a corpse is a legal impossibility.18 The defendant argued that the conviction for the second robbery was erroneous because “[t]he necessary element of a ‘person’ for purposes of robbery [was] missing... as is the concept that Arroyo could be permanently deprived of his immediate control over anything whatsoever after his death.”19 This assertion was based on the theories that an individual’s personhood ceases at the time of their death.20 Moreover, the defendant asserted claims of legislative
intent, arguing that the legislature did not intend for robbery convictions to apply to the type of sequential crimes as in Montoya.21

The trial court’s jury instructions were also at issue in the defendant’s appeal, as the instructions did not specify that the jury consider the statutory element of immediate control in reaching its verdict.22 Arguably, the defendant raised a valid concern that the jury instructions23 were insufficient,24 stating that had the instructions more accurately articulated the statutory requirements for robbery, “[t]he jury could have concluded that [defendant] formed the intent to steal [the victim]’s money... well after” the victim was killed, and referred to case law arguing that when the intent to steal arises after the sufficient force is already used, the relevant offense is
theft, and not robbery.25

Despite these arguments, however, the Court of Appeals determined that the lower court’s conviction for the second robbery was correct under New Mexico’s robbery statute. Although the Court acknowledged that personhood was central to the defendant’s appeal, it dealt with the question of personhood only in dicta and ultimately left the issue unresolved.26 In addressing the defendant’s personhood argument, the Court recognized the defendant’s ultimate contention: that “personhood ceases upon the death of an individual.”27 The Court went on to reference the manner in which the defendant cited sources “that medically and philosophically wax on
life as fundamental to the term ‘person’ as a term that ceases upon death.”28 With that final reference to the defendant’s personhood argument, the Court ceased its discussion of the personhood issue within its short opinion.29

The Court turned instead to interpretation of the robbery statute in existing case law dealing with homicides followed by subsequent robberies.30 Beginning with State v. Barela, an unreported 2013 New Mexico Supreme Court case upholding a robbery conviction “where the killing and the taking of the property [were] part of the same transaction of events,” the Montoya Court introduced the legal theory that ultimately shapes its decision: if the death of a person and a subsequent robbery of that same person are sufficiently interwoven, and the robbery was ostensibly only able to take place because the prior death took place, a defendant will not be able to
prevail on a theory of personhood.31

Extending beyond Barela, the central point in the Montoya Court’s analysis is that the robbery was “made possible by an antecedent assault.”32 The contextual tie between the homicide and subsequent robbery made the personhood argument less pivotal, because the act of robbery was “directly connected with the original robbery and killing ... the second robbery can rationally be linked to the murder that enabled the robbery.”33 So long as there is a rational link between preceding events causing the victim’s death and the subsequent robbery, application of the robbery statute is valid under this opinion, rejecting the argument that a deceased person
cannot be robbed. The Court found the personhood argument inconsequential and held that the robbery statute was correctly interpreted, and through the rational link standard confirmed the lower court’s conviction.

III.

THE STATUTORY INSUFFICIENCIES IN STATE V. MONTOYA

The Montoya Court’s use of the rational link standard in order to satisfy the requirements of the robbery statute is not controversial on its face. New Mexico’s robbery statute states that “[rjobbery consists of the theft of anything of value from the person of another or from the immediate control of another, by use or threatened use of force or violence.”34 There are two main requirements within the statute: first, that the property is taken “from the person” or “from the immediate control” of another. The second main requirement of the statute is that property is removed “by use or threatened use of force.” In other words, the use of force must be the
lever by which property is removed from the victim, who was capable of exercising control over that property.35

In Montoya, it is logical to assume that the defendant’s previous killing of the victim facilitated the taking of the victim’s property. Therefore, it is logical to assume that the defendant’s previous killing of the victim could satisfy the statutory requirement of force. But the requirement of the victim’s ability to exercise immediate control is not so clearly satisfied in Montoya. This contention is at the root of the defendant’s personhood argument: that a dead person cannot exercise immediate control over its property.36 It would not be possible for any force used against that dead person to overcome immediate control, since no immediate control could be
exercised by the dead person. Simply put: without the deceased victim’s ability to exercise immediate control, the robbery statute’s requirements could not be satisfied.

Despite this unsatisfied statutory requirement, the Court faced significant policy concerns in support of upholding the robbery conviction. The Court did not want to promulgate the notion that a defendant could kill a person and receive a less severe punishment for subsequently taking the victim’s property.37 This was a valid concern that the Court answered by adopting the rational link standard. The standard provided an avenue through which the Court could rely on an expanded interpretation of the statute, despite unfulfilled requirements. This note will now explain the background of the rational link standard and its application in Montoya.

IV. THE MONTOYA COURT’S INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION OF THE RATIONAL LINK STANDARD

The rational link standard developed in the context of cases similar to Montoya, wherein a homicide occurred prior to theft from the victim. The standard examines whether the homicide and the theft were part of the same transaction of events, and if the theft was made possible by the antecedent assault.38 The rational link standard is logical, especially when considered in light of the aforementioned policy concerns. But the standard is also ambiguous, as its boundaries are not defined, specifically in terms of how much time may pass between the connected acts in order to still be part of the “same transaction” of events.39

To introduce the rational link standard, the Montoya Court looked first to Barela and its supporting authorities: James v. State, a 2005 case out of Georgia’s Court of Appeals,40 and People v. Navarette, a 2003 case out of the Supreme Court of California.41 The James Court arguably articulated the clearest explanation of the standard, stating that:

[although, as an abstract principle of law, one cannot be guilty of robbery if the victim is a deceased person, this principle does not apply where a robbery and homicide are a part of the same transaction and are so interwoven with each other as to be inseparable. If the taking was made possible by an antecedent assault, the offense is robbery regardless of whether the victim died before or after the taking of the property.42

The Georgia Court of Appeals interpreted the rational link standard to rely on the “principle” that when the acts in question arc a homicide and a subsequent robbery, the notion that a dead person cannot be the victim of robbery is irrelevant.43 Thus, the rational link standard developed in relation only to particular circumstances where homicide and robbery were at issue. The James Court outlined a policy reason for adopting such a standard, similar to the policy concern in Montoya, stating that “[cjommon sense demands that this be so, else one could avoid a charge of armed robbery by killing one’s victim before taking his property.”44

Georgia’s robbery statute is more encompassing than New Mexico’s,45 requiring either force, acts of intimidation, threat, coercion, or sudden snatching.46 The facts in James are distinct from Montoya, as they include a two-week lapse between the defendant’s killing of the victim and the subsequent theft (contrasted with the hours-long lapse in Montoya).41 This means that the rational link standard was implemented in a situation where significant lapses of time occurred between the acts of homicide and robbery. This begs the question: would the rational link standard ever not be applicable, regardless of the length of time between the two acts? The
James Court applied the standard in a case where two weeks passed between the criminal acts, indicating that a court has significant flexibility in determining whether a homicide and subsequent robbery arc rationally linked in terms of the elapsed time between.

The rational link standard was also articulated in People v. Navarette, in that “[wjhile it may be true that one cannot rob a person who is already dead when one first arrives on the scene, one can certainly rob a living person by killing that person and then taking his or her property.”48 However, the facts in Navarette are distinct from Montoya in that there was evidence illustrating the defendant harbored intent to take money from the victim during the days prior to the homicide and robbery.49 The element of prior intent lends credibility to the Navarette Court’s decision to interpret the homicide and robbery as connected acts, as the facts in the case indicate
that the homicide was a means to an end of acquiring the victim’s property. Problematically, Montoya docs not illustrate comparable facts showing the defendant’s prior intent to take the victim’s property.

California’s robbery statute closely resembles New Mexico’s, as it requires force or fear to mechanize the taking.50 The primary difference between New Mexico’s robbery statute and both California’s and Georgia’s statutes is the element of immediate control. California’s robbery statute requires “the felonious taking of personal property in the possession of another, from his person or immediate presence, and against his will, accomplished by the means of force or fear.”51 Georgia’s robbery statute requires the “intent to commit theft” through the taking of “property of another from the person or the immediate presence of another: by the use of force, by
intimidation, by the use of threat or coercion, or by placing such person in fear of immediate serious bodily injury ... or by sudden snatching.”52 All three statutes include the provision that property must be taken “from the person” of the victim, but New Mexico’s statute is more specific in terms of how much control that person must retain over the property. California’s statute says that the property must be taken from a victim’s “immediate presence” and against the victim’s will.53 The Georgia statute requires that the property be taken from the victim’s “immediate presence.” Neither California’s nor Georgia’s statute is as specific as New Mexico’s in terms
of requiring that the victim retain control over the property, although California’s statute comes close by requiring that the property be taken against the victim’s will.54

The Montoya Court employed the rational link standard in order to uphold a conviction of robbery without having to satisfy all of the statutory requirements. It is possible that the rational link standard developed, in part, in order to account for the ambiguity of statutory requirements for robbery across jurisdictions. When faced with circumstances wherein it seems that the homicide and the robbery are logically linked, courts face the hurdle of determining how they are legally linked. In James, Navarette, and even in Montoya, the connection between the homicides and the robberies is evident: the acts were performed by the same defendants, the robberies
occurred after the victims were killed, and the courts determined sufficient factual support to infer that the robberies were an extension of the killings.55 But in none of those cases could the courts prove that the victims retained control over property.5* In order to bridge the gap between the logical connections and the legal requirements, the rational link standard developed to allow courts to decide under a broadened interpretation of the statutes and to make decisions without needing to account for the lack of a victim’s retained control.

As articulated in the defendant’s appeal, the issue of personhood was not merely relied upon to argue that one may not rob a person who is already deceased.57 Rather, the issue of personhood was argued to show that the statutory element of “immediate control” was not satisfied. In order to have immediate control over one’s possessions, one must be able to exercise such control. The Court answered the unsatisfied statutory requirement by adopting the rational link standard in order to avoid a literal application of the robbery statute’s required elements. In doing so, it left the personhood question open and the issue wholly unresolved.

The Montoya Court may have adopted the rational link standard not only to avoid the statutory limitations impeding a robbery conviction, but also to entirely avoid answering defendant’s personhood argument. The Court may have deemed the personhood argument too large in scope and too attenuated and unnecessary to answer the perceived central question presented. Although there arc not constitutional questions, such as habeas corpus or due process, directly under consideration in Montoya, principles of the avoidance doctrine inform the case’s underlying tensions. Under the avoidance doctrine, courts are urged to avoid deciding “questions of a
constitutional nature unless they are absolutely necessary to the decision of the case.”58 The avoidance doctrine controls federal courts, but may not always control state courts.59 The prevalence of the avoidance doctrine, however, is likely influential beyond the confines of federal courts, since the doctrine supports judicial restraint and economy, ensuring that courts are not analyzing issues beyond those necessary to answer the immediate questions before them.60 Despite its confines within federal jurisdiction, the avoidance doctrine may influence (even inadvertently) the conduct of state courts.61 The Montoya Court may have been influenced by
principles of the avoidance doctrine in its decision to leave the defendant’s personhood argument unresolved.

The Court was warranted in adopting the rational link standard to avoid the defendant’s personhood argument by prioritizing policy concerns and upholding historical pressures of judicial restraint. But the Court’s choice to forego resolving the personhood argument did not result in the issue disappearing. In fact, by adopting the rational link standard in order to avoid statutory shortcomings, the Montoya Court ultimately did make an inadvertent, and problematic, determination of the deceased victim’s personhood.

V. THE INADVERTENT PERSONHOOD DETERMINATION IN STATE V. MONTOYA

The Montoya Court applied the rational link standard in order to make up for unsatisfied statutory requirements in upholding the defendant’s robbery conviction. In doing so, the Court made little mention of the defendant’s personhood argument, barely addressing it in the short opinion.62 The Court’s brief mention of the personhood issue may indicate its apprehension of addressing such a complex and controversial topic.63 Areas of law dealing centrally with the issue of personhood (e.g. reproductive rights, right to aid in dying) are polarizing. This polarizing nature of a personhood question, combined with the established precedence of the rational link
standard, may have led the Court to disregard the issue of personhood in Montoya. But by not resolving the personhood argument directly, the Court did not free themselves from making a determination. Even through its application of the rational link standard, the Court’s failure to definitively address the issue of personhood presents a legal fiction at best and a dangerous precedent at worst.

Even though the Montoya Court adopted the rational link standard as a way to circumvent a literal application of the robbery statute, the New Mexico robbery statute still controls interpretation of the case. This means that by upholding the robbery conviction under the controlling statute, the Court determined the deceased victim to be a person. New Mexico’s robbery statute requires that the victim exercise immediate control over the subsequently taken property. Whether or not the Court literally applied the statute, by upholding a conviction of robbery the Court implicitly made the determination that the deceased victim was able to exercise control over
the property ultimately taken by the defendant. In other words, the Court held, however implicitly, that the victim was a person even after death.

Without some unambiguous statement that the Court did not hold personhood to be required in the rational link standard, or some other overt rejection of the dcccased-victim-as-person notion, the Court implicitly conceded that the deceased victim is a person. Without overt rejection of that notion, there is no other interpretation of the implications set forth by the Court. The Court upheld a conviction under the robbery statute which criminalizes the theft of property from the immediate control of a person through the use of force. If the Court stated that the deceased victim was not a person, the Court could not have upheld the robbery conviction under
the statute. But by not taking a stance, the Court still makes a statement, even in its silence, that the deceased victim was a person.

The Court’s assertion—that a dead person is still a person—is a fallacy. The notion that a dead person can exercise control over possessions goes against prevalent scholarship citing the notion that personhood ceases upon the loss of cognitive function.64 Perhaps the Montoya Court recognized that fallacious territory it was entering into. Perhaps the desire to avoid having to make an overt determination of such legal fiction is exactly what drove the Court to adopt the rational link standard. No matter the motivation or the efforts to avoid doing so, the Montoya Court ultimately did make a defacto determination that the deceased victim was a person. Through
this unrecognized or unintended determination of personhood, the future problems caused by Montoya's holding become evident.

VI. BACKGROUND AND FRAMEWORK OF PERSONHOOD THEORY

personhood
Although the issue of centers on who counts for the purpose of the law there has been no judicial ultimately “the fundamental question of ,”

consensus as to how to apply personhood theory. personhood is defined as or function within 65 The theory of , or the legal metaphor of personhood,66 inherently problematic because although

an “entity ‘given certain legal rights and duties of a human being,’”67 it is often conflated to hold the same meaning as humanity.68 The most difficult questions in determining personhood center on “whether the entity in question can be regarded
as human.”69 The answer to that question varies, as “[different jurisdictions have created different thresholds for personhood and different distributions of rights,... such that the same individual or entity might be recognized as a person in one place and property in another.”70 Under the common law tradition, “legal personhood
is disparate and diffuse,”71 and “[t]he meaning of legal personhood shifts significantly depending” on who is discussing the distinction, and under what theory of legal framework.72

The Federal Constitution does not offer a definition of person, nor does it “delineate who or what is included in the concept of ‘person’ for purposes of bestowing” constitutional rights and protections.73 Despite the inconsistent definition, interpretation, and application of personhood, the concept carries “normative, ethical and

political force” and is both a legal fiction and a very tangible concept through which individuals access legal rights.74 The ability to bear and exercise those rights is a key feature of l egal
p ersonhood .75

[73. Jonathan F. Will, Beyond Abortion: Why the Personhood Movement Implicates Reproductive Choice , 39 AM. J.L. & MED. 573, 574 (2013).

74. Matambanadzo, supra note 70 at 68.

75. See Dyschkant, supra note 64 at 2078 (“ The key feature of a legal person—the ability to bear rights and duties —is commonly associated with humanity.”).]

Although routinely equated with humanity, personhood is a distinct categorization in the eyes of the law . Arguably, most legal questions regarding a human being deal with that human being as a person, therefore, the concepts of humanity and
personhood do not warrant distinction in those common scenarios.76 But broadly equating humanity and personhood ignores that the terms have fundamentally different definitions, as “‘[hjuman’ refers to a biological category and ‘person’ refers to an entity with a set of capabilities,”77 such as exercisable rights. Humanity and
personhood, although often equated to hold the same meaning, ought not be treated as synonyms, given that distinction.78

But the judiciary often finds itself at the center of the tension between humanity and personhood, especially with in the controversial

realms of reproductive rights. The Personhood Movement, an encompassing term for the national trends among abortion opponents to establish the legal personhood of fetuses, is rooted in Justice Blackmun’s language in Roe Wade: “‘[i]f the suggestion of fetal personhood is established ... the
fetus’ right to life would be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment.’”79 Leaning on this claim, the Personhood Movement consists of efforts within State Constitutions to add provisions asserting the rights of any human being starting at the moment of fertilization, as well as community-organizing efforts to affect

The ramifications of the Personhood Movement are easily seen: if fetuses were
political, legislative, and social change supporting the recognition of fetuses as persons.80

recognized as persons beginning at fertilization, the law regarding access healthcare affecting the fetus controlling a woman’s right to (including

would be more heavily regulated and restricted .

abortion)

Although the Personhood Movement is based in the realm of reproductive rights, its influence can be seen in other
legal realms, including the right to aid-in-dying and the rights of permanently comatose individuals. As within the controlling reproductive rights framework, wherein a fetus is not recognized as able to exercise rights or have interests in protection under the Constitution, adult humans who are permanently
comatose and approaching their end of life arc regarded as unable to exercise their rights.81 There is a clear distinction between the two realms, since permanently comatose adults are definitely considered humans, while fetuses have not been universally categorized as humans.82 Similarly, permanently comatose individuals arc
at the end of their life, versus fetuses that precede a human life.83 Despite these distinctions, however, a corollary exists between the two categorizations and the controversies they cause.

For permanently comatose individuals, tensions typically arise when considering whether or not to terminate life support. In those situations, the comatose individual is literally unable to assert any rights or state any preferences.84 Without that ability, any caregivers must base their decisions off of the directives given by the
individual prior to entering their comatose state.85 Likewise, a court would be left to infer that the personhood of that comatose individual stems from the fact that they were once active persons.86 The controversy regarding the rights of permanently comatose individuals typically revolves around determining whether the pre-
comatose directives were valid, thus affecting subsequent decisions of life support termination.
Analyzing Montoya through these personhood frameworks is relevant because, although the frameworks deal with distinct factual scenarios, the fundamental question is consistent throughout: when will a court recognize a human being as a person? Implicit in that question are moral tensions which may account for why the
concept of personhood is so controversial. Because personhood and humanity are often conflated as synonymous terms, determinations of one’s personhood begs analysis of one’s most basic existence. The Federal Constitution may not provide a definition for “person,” but it has certainly upheld as paramount the individual
interest associated in a human’s exercise of dignity, autonomy, and identity.87 The New Mexico Constitution has similarly recognized these rights as inherent to its citizens in its “Inalienable Rights” Clause, which protects “certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, among which are the rights of enjoying and defending life and
liberty, of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and of seeking and obtaining safety and happiness.”88 These expansive protections relate to countless aspects of a human being’s life and identity, protecting one’s ability to marry, to retain privacy, and to be free from intrusion. In other words, these rights have defined
society’s guiding principles of human existence, and disruption of those principles causes rightful discomfort.

In the context of Montoya, the Court would have been rightfully uncomfortable when faced with the daunting task of dealing with a question of personhood. Moreover, the Court may have seen the personhood question as irrelevant to the scope of their decision. But given the controversial position of personhood within the
evolution of society, the Court’s apparent discomfort ought not outweigh the necessity of taking clear and definitive stances when issues of personhood are raised. It is objectively uncomfortable to ask whether a deceased victim is still a person, because to do so may deny significance or reverence for the victim’s life. Because the

concepts of humanity and personhood are so closely related, even asking the question of whether a deceased victim can still retain rights is uncomfortable, as it tugs at society’s moral and ethical values. But even when faced with this discomfort, the Court cannot afford to be
ambiguous on issues of personhood .

Fetal personhood crushes US biotech leadership- spurs brain drain and chilling effect
Peikoff, 12 -- Leaps editor-in-chief
[Kira Peikoff, Columbia University bioethics MSC, "Personhood vs. stem cell research," Atlanta Journal Constitution, 5-
25-2012, https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/personhood-stem-cell-research/6LWlWd6jSNNZeMI162zJZI/, accessed 6-
18-2022]

Personhood vs. stem cell research

The state of Georgia may be about to get a lot more populous.

Recently, it was announced that Republican voters will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot question in the July 31 primary to declare that a “pre-born” child — consisting of as few as
one cell — should be entitled to all the legal rights of a human being.

While the Personhood USA movement works to galvanize legislators in about 30 states, the crux of the public debate is over abortion rights, but a
related issue deserves a hearing: the effects on human e mbryonic s tem c ell research.

Bruce Olwin,
a stem cell researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, foresees two consequences of legislation that
could criminalize legitimate research: Scientists might flee to states that view their work more favorably — or leave the country altogether.

Alienating an entire contingent of researchers would have dire consequences on America’s ability to compete globally in the
field. “Because of the overarching intrusion of religion and politics on science,” Olwin said, “I think it’s going to drive the United States into a Third World science country. We will
not be anywhere near the leaders .”

Bernard Siegel, the founder and director of the Genetics Policy Institute, agrees that the Personhood movement represents a potentially major setback.

“Microscopic cells in a lab dish, that by a couple’s decision will never be implanted in a womb, should not be defined as ‘people, ’” Siegel said. “Any
state aspiring to become a center for biomedical research and biotech nology should not touch a personhood bill with a 10-
foot pole .”
Another ripple effect of the Personhood legislation would be an assault on an infertile couple’s ability to have a child, according to Dr. Jonathan Van Berklom, an expert on IVF at the

University of Colorado Boulder. The very act of creating embryos in a lab would be laced with criminal liability.
“If an embryo dies in a lab accident or the culture medium is not quite right, and an embryo doesn’t develop, these aspects of IVF — where things do and can go wrong — would become a
criminal act,” Van Berklom said. “So some IVF practitioners would stop practicing. People would say, ‘I’m just going to go back to doing OB-GYN’ so
they won’t be picketed.”

If Keith Mason, the leader of Personhood USA, has his way , doctors and researchers will do exactly that: retreat. He calls embryonic stem
cell research “largely unsuccessful” and “horrendous.”

Perhaps he should talk to Sue Freeman, whose macular degeneration improved enough to allow her to go grocery shopping alone after her participation in a groundbreaking clinical trial at
UCLA last year using human embryonic stem cells.

At such an exciting time for the field, the Personhood movement’s robust expansion is sobering.

“Any state passing a personhood measure would surely send the wrong message to the world ,” Siegel warned. “Do we prefer the Dark Ages or the
promise of 21st century biomedical research?”

The clock is ticking. We’re about to find out.

Biotech leadership’s key to US standard-setting on synthetic biology- that’s key to unlock its
potential AND prevent disasters
Gronvall, 15 – PhD, Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security senior associate
[Gigi Kwik, "US Competitiveness in Synthetic Biology," Health Security, 2015, 13.6,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4685481/, accessed 8-16-22]

Synth bio etic logy is an emerging technical field that aims to make biology easier to engineer ; the field has applications in strategically important sectors for the US economy. While the United States currently leads in synthetic biology R&D,
other nations are heavily investing in order to boost their economies, which will inevitably diminish the US leadership position. This outcome is not entirely negative—additional investments will expand markets—but it is critical that the US government take steps to remain competitive: There are applications from which the US

US tech leadership will ensure US experts have a leading role in synth

population and economy may benefit; there are specific applications with importance for national defense; and nical that etic

bio governance , regulation, and oversight.

logy Measures to increase competitiveness in S&T generally are broadly applicable for synthetic biology and should be pursued. However, the US government will also need to take action on fundamental issues

The U S should maintain its regulatory approach so that the

that will affect the field's development, such as countering anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) sentiments and anti-GMO legislation. nited tates it is

product is regulated that , not the method used to create a product. At the same time, the United States needs to ensure that the regulatory framework is updated so that synthetic biology products do not fall into regulatory gaps. Finally, the United States needs to pay close attention to how
synthetic biology applications may be governed internationally, such as through the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biological Diversity, so that beneficial applications may be realized.

Synthetic biology is an emerging new technical field that aims to make biology easier to engineer and more amenable to rational design, so that biological traits, functions, and products can be programmed like a computer. The concept of engineering biology is not a new one, nor is synthetic biology the first instance in which
biology has been declared engineerable.1 Stephane Leduc wrote about the concept in the early 1900s.2 In 1974, the renowned cancer biologist Waclaw Szybalski described then-current work on molecular biology as the “descriptive phase,” adding that the real challenge will begin “when we enter the synthetic biology phase of

the ability to
research in our field. We will then devise new control elements and add these new modules to the existing genomes or build up wholly new genomes.”3(p23) Though what is now termed synthetic biology is not wholly distinct from previous studies of genetic engineering,

fruitfully accomplish bioengineering is greater than at any other point in history. Thanks to advances in much now it has been

computing the ability to rapidly and inexpensively synthesize

power; DNA; new tools to edit genomes , reliably, long tracts of reliably ; an increased understanding of
biological systems; and the enthusiasm of young scientists who want to enter the field, synthetic biology is a new field and a new phenomenon, which proponents believe could revolutionize medicine and manufacturing.4-7

Synthetic biology encompasses widely diverse aims, making it difficult to draw boundaries for the field. For example, synthetic biology applications have included making a synthetic version of an anti-malarial compound that is difficult to harvest from nature; synthesis of influenza vaccines that could be produced in a shorter time
than by traditional methods; manufacturing standard biological parts that can be assembled into genetic machines, including measurement devices, inverters, or logic devices; investigations into how life emerged on earth through the development of protocells; the synthesis of a bacterial cell; and the development of cell factories
to produce biofuels and other compounds.8,9 In addition to synthetic biology being its own discipline, it has also brought about new tools to manipulate the genomes of biological organisms, which are used by scientists in disparate fields and in a variety of biotechnology companies.

The field shows a great deal of promise. synth bio and related biotech allow According to the US National Bioeconomy Blueprint (2012), etic logy nologies “can Americans to live longer, healthier lives,

reduce dependence on oil, address key environmental challenges

our increase ag , transform manufacturing processes, and the productivity and scope of the ricultural sector while growing new

However
jobs and industries.”10synth bio also poses risks, , the advent of etic The field is creating
logy which have generated a great deal of attention from national security experts and the US government since the inception of the field.

new tools for genetic manipulation of biological organisms and making them more accessible worldwide; these tools
could be misused to make a bio weapon Concerns about these risks resulted in numerous US
logical or inadvertently cause a consequential accident. have

government actions over the past decade, including guidance for DNA synthesis companies to limit unauthorized production of pathogens; an examination of the ethical risks and regulatory challenges inherent in the synthetic biology field by the Presidential Commission for the Study of
Bioethical Issues in 2010; an examination of the biosecurity risks by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federal advisory committee created to address issues related to biosecurity and dual-use research; an FBI “see something, say something” program to reach out to scientists at universities as well as amateur
scientists to report on intentional misuse; and a recent moratorium on certain areas of influenza infectious disease research (so-called “gain of function research”) while the risks and benefits are analyzed by advisory committees to the US government.11-16

While concerns about the safety or deliberate misuse of synthetic biology are appropriate, these prospective scenarios do not span the full range of risks that the development of the synthetic biology field may pose to US national security. There is another scenario that would have serious negative consequences to US national
security that should be considered by US policymakers and experts and should inspire action: that the United States may lose its competitive edge in synthetic biology and related technologies. While the synthetic biology field was pioneered in the United States, and the United States is currently the leader in these technologies,
other nations are investing heavily in these technologies in hopes of capitalizing on the field's progress, boosting their economies, and leading the field. Some, like China, India, and the UK, have even developed specific synthetic biology roadmaps for development.17 At the same time as there is heavy investment in synthetic
biology by other nations, there is mounting concern that the competitive position of US life sciences is diminishing.18,19

If the U S were to lose its competitive edge in synth bio

nited tates there would be serious consequences for etic logy and related technologies,

national security. Some would result in a declining environment for businesses

negative effects be strictly economic, ing and workers to be productive in synthetic biology–related industries in

[a strong economy] underwrites our military

the long term.20 This is important for national security because, as described in the US National Security Strategy (2015), “In addition to being a key measure of power and influence in its own right,

strength and diplomatic influence. loss of economicA strong economy, combined with a prominent US presence in the global financial system, creates opportunities to advance our security.”21 Current forecasting would suggest that a

opportunities in synthetic bio could be immense Fidelity Investments describes synthetic bio as “the defining tech
logy : logy nology

of next century” for global investments. 22 In 2012, the World Economic Forum ranked synthetic biology as the second key technology for the 21st century, after informatics.23 According to BCC research, a market analysis company, the synthetic biology
market reached nearly $2.1 billion in 2012 and $2.7 billion in 2013. They expect the market to grow to $11.8 billion in 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of 34.4% over a 5-year period from 2013 to 2018.24

Losing competitiveness in synth bio could limit specific security applications essential for national defense.
etic logy also on the horizon that are

These include the development of countermeasures for bio weapons medical responding to logical, chemical, or radiological threats and new approaches to diagnostics. A US Department of Defense (DoD)

synth bio could bring major advances to the development of high-performance sensors
report described how etic logy , sensors for unusual signatures, clandestine sensing, and

Synth bio may offer the possibility for distributed

high-performance materials for national defense; these applications would not likely be available to DoD based on private sector funding alone.25 etic logy also

manufacturing so that critical supply chains are less vulnerable to disruptions.

Synthetic Biology, Governance, and US Participation

The next several years will be formative in setting the “rules of the road”
se synth bio research the U S may
likely for emerging etic logy . Yet, nited tates

be disadvantaged and limited in its ability to actively participate in conversations about governance if US fundamental the of synthetic biology

experts are not tech leaders in synthetic bio as the shaping of synth bio governance will be dominated by the
nological logy, etic logy

nations and their experts who are at the leading edge of tech development. This is because formal regulations nology or standards

lag behind development

usually well For a new the area, regulations are often preceded by development of standard
of new technologies. technical the
practices in a field , as well as cultural expectations and safety measures. These expectations and agreements build on previous sets of regulations but take new technical possibilities and dangers into account. The rules are often created by those
who are most familiar with the tech intimately nologies—often, the scientists who are performing the work at the leading edge of development.

In the biological sciences, the most well-known example of scientists calling attention to nascent dangers in their field and setting the standards for scientific practice occurred when the field of recombinant DNA biology was new. In a letter published in Science in 1974, leading scientists and Nobel laureates recommended that
certain types of recombinant DNA experiments—those with toxins, oncogenic viruses, and antibiotic resistance—should be off limits until their safety could be evaluated and assessed in a conference held a year later.26 That conference, held at Asilomar, California, in February 1975 and attended by scientists, government officials,
and members of the press, led to a lifting of the moratorium in 1976, as well as the creation of a new regulatory system for recombinant DNA work funded by the US government.26 Efforts of the scientists to self-govern may well have forestalled restrictive national legislation.27 Asilomar now symbolizes scientists' attention to the
public's concerns, as well as the scientific community's capacity to self-govern.

A more recent example of self-governance can be found in a synthetic biology application: commercial DNA synthesis. Companies that sell DNA synthesis products now screen their orders to determine whether a customer is ordering genetic material for dangerous pathogens and to block orders if the customer is not authorized.
This screening system was developed in large part through self-governance of the commercial suppliers and interested scientists, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and was eventually put into formal guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2010.11,28

In synth biothe applications at the leading edge

etic will require governance measures to be safely and
logy field, there are other of development that

ethically applied One example is gene drives , and some scientists have already stepped in to propose self-governance measures to deal with them. the development of , which are systems that can spread a particular gene throughout a population with

These have become much easier to construct using

non-Mendelian inheritance—that is, much faster than would occur naturally.29 a new gene-editing technique—clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats

CRISPR
( Some proposed using gene drives to change the DNA of
/Cas9 or Cpf1)—which allows sections of DNA to be searched for and replaced in a matter roughly analogous to editing a document in Word. scientists have

mosquitoes this tech could be misapplied or result in a

to make them resistant to malaria. Such a project could decrease the prevalence of malaria, which currently kills more than 600,000 people—mostly children—per year. Yet, nology

accident should the genes spread

consequential or cause unintended effects. to other species other Those scientists who have been leading the development of gene drive and gene editing technologies have also taken the
lead in thinking about the safety consequences, and they have been developing a series of commonly agreed upon safeguards for laboratory research into gene drives, such as using a combination of multiple stringent confinement strategies, as any single confinement strategy could fail.29 Scientists have also put forward ideas for
how to safely use them outside of the laboratory.30

Another contentious application of synthetic biology that will require careful planning and safety standards is human germline editing, wherein modifications to sperm or egg DNA would not be applied to just one person, but to all their progeny. A group of interested and involved scientists met in Napa, California, to consider the
ethical and safety ramifications of this work; the meeting was convened by Jennifer Doudna, one of the molecular biologists credited with developing the CRISPR/Cas9 tool. The meeting was intended to discuss the “scientific, medical, legal, and ethical implications of these new prospects for genome biology,” and they identified
steps so that this technology could be performed “safely and ethically.”31(p36) In their consensus paper, published in Science, they recommend that the practice of germ-line editing be strongly discouraged for now, that forums be held in which this application can be discussed more broadly, and that foundational research that
does not cross the line into embryo modification be encouraged.31 The National Academies of Science also launched an initiative to recommend guidelines for the new genetic technology, to explore the scientific, ethical, and policy issues associated with human gene-editing research.32

Determining what the “red line” is for allowable, critical, or ethical applications of synthetic biology, as well as how much safety data are required before pressing ahead, will always be a challenging exercise, and not all scientists, experts, and observers will agree. Tension over what is acceptable to pursue has already come up for
germline editing, after a Chinese research group reported that they used CRISPR techniques to modify human embryos.33 (And there are at least 4 additional research groups in China known to be pursuing gene editing in human embryos.34) While the standards or expectations set by the scientific community will be impossible to
enforce in an international context, the scientific community does set boundaries; those who flout those standards have to justify their actions in the international practice of science, and those boundaries and expectations are set by the leaders in the field. In the case of germline editing, the Chinese research was rejected by top-
tier scientific journals Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections.35

Self-governance of science has its critics, who are justifiably skeptical that scientists can be trusted to govern their own research fairly and who question the effectiveness of this approach in an international context, as the embryo editing example illustrates. However, self-governance is not the sole mechanism of governance in this
area, as many foundational aspects of biotechnology and laboratory practice are already tightly regulated, and also because in forming new rules there is often a complex interplay among scientists, journalists, and policymakers to bring about new guidelines. In the case of DNA synthesis guidance, while there was substantial work
done by scientists and interested parties to prevent misuse of DNA synthesis and promote screening, the issue became more salient, requiring immediate action, after a journalist ordered a small segment of DNA that encoded the smallpox virus.36 Still, feasible alternatives to self-governance are limited when technologies are still
in the early stages of development, particularly when the applications are of broad interest, generating funding from private companies and multiple national governments, when the work is pursued in many places internationally, and when the technologies have great potential for tangible benefits to health and medicine. In
addition, the amount of technical knowledge required for understanding the implications of new research and what can be done to ameliorate negative consequences makes it challenging even for scientists in distinct disciplines to evaluate research outside their expertise, because understanding the technical details inherent in the
technology are critical both for identifying problems as well as proposing solutions.

additional applications
There are such as rescuing a species on the path to of synthetic biology that have already generated conversations about governance within the scientific community—

extinction even using synth bio for “de-extinction,” to bring back a species that was lost
; or etic logy because of human hunting or negligence; or brewing opiates by fermentation
in a process not unlike brewing beer.37-39 These applications have already sparked scientific involvement in discussions of what is technically possible and what rules should be developed. In 5 to 10 years, the list of applications that will require expert opinion and involvement to set expectations, standards of practice, and self-

If US scientists, policymakers , and institutions would like to have

governance may well be very different, just as consequential, and require technical experts to take the lead in setting norms and safety standards.

some say in what is decided, they need to be at the forefront of those tech will nologies.

US S&T: Evidence of Promise and Decline

The United States is currently a leader in synthetic biology, as well as biotechnology and biomedical research, and it is the focus of a great deal of private sector investment; these investments may help to bring at least 100 products to the market in the near future.17,40 According to a DoD report, the US government also provides at least $220 million annually toward synthetic biology R&D, with investments from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the DoD (including DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).25 An analysis from the Wilson Center found that between 2008 and
2014, the US government invested a total of $820 million in synthetic biology research, with DARPA funding nearly $110 million in 2014.40 Indeed, synthetic biology researchers in the United States have largely relied on DARPA funding, such as in their Living Foundries program, which aims “to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide access to new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation.”41

The United States does not have a specific synthetic biology technology roadmap, but on April 27, 2012, the Obama administration released their National Bioeconomy Blueprint, “a comprehensive approach to harnessing innovations in biological research to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment.”10 The blueprint identifies the administration's priorities to grow the bioeconomy through increased investment in research and development, expansion of public-private partnerships, and regulatory reform and, in numerous instances, specifically mentions the enormous promise of synthetic biology. While the government
programs and initiatives listed in the Bioeconomy Blueprint were already in progress, the blueprint served as a sign of federal commitment to developing the biological sciences as a component of the US economy.42

The United States also has a robust bioeconomy, which includes synthetic biology and related technologies. Defining the economic impact of synthetic biology is difficult, as “traditional” biotechnologies are also taking advantage of pervasive synthetic biology techniques. Looking at the bioeconomy as a whole, Robert Carlson, an industry analyst, found that products derived from biology contributed an estimated $350 billion to American GDP in 2012, and the “bioeconomy” grew 15% annually and accounted for nearly 7% of total US GDP growth in 2011 and 2012.43 Engineered organisms led to products worth more than $350 billion per year to the US
economy. DuPont, Pfizer, Bausch & Lomb, Coca-Cola, and other Fortune 500 companies either make or use products derived from engineered organisms, including food, clothing, medicines, and beauty products.25 For example, DuPont has been producing commercial quantities of the polymer 1,3-propanediol from engineered bacteria since 2006, which is 37% of the material in their Sorona fibers—used for everything from carpets to car interiors.44 Some investors forecast the possibility of billions of dollars of growth in American manufacturing through the biotechnology sector, including at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, DuPont, Archer Daniels
Midland, and Solazyme.44

Yet, in spite of clear US leadership in synthetic biology, there are well-documented concerns about the United States falling behind in biotechnology and in science more generally, as well as concerns about falling US biomedical research budgets, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce decline, and outsourcing by international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which are applicable to synthetic biology as well. Global indicators for the biosciences and biotechnology, including R&D outputs as well as shares of the global pharmaceutical industry, higher education, and workforce, are showing what NIH called an “erosion
of the competitive position of the U.S. life sciences industry over the past decade.”19 China will overtake the United States in R&D spending by 2020.19 In 2007, China overtook the United States in the number of doctoral degrees awarded in the natural sciences and engineering.45 Europe is thought to be the fastest growing market for synthetic biology products, and the UK is considered to be one of the most innovative and dynamic, and healthcare industries there are expected to grow in the future.20

US students in synthetic biology have been affected as well, as seen in the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. This competition pits teams of synthetic biologists (primarily undergraduates) from all over the world in competition to engineer biological systems and operate them in living cells. It began as a small class at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003 and has grown to more than 2,000 international participants and more than 16,000 alumni.46 In 8 of the past 10 years, US student teams have failed to win “in part because of a lack of laboratory facilities” and other support.18(p29)

In a DoD report from the Office of Technical Intelligence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, dwindling human capital was identified as an obstacle to DoD operating effectively and efficiently in the future: “There are few highly-experienced program managers in the Department, few leading scientists, and even fewer individuals in uniform with deep knowledge of the [synthetic biology] field. The lack of uniformed expertise is particularly troubling.”25(p20)

In contrast to other industries that require substantial natural resources, such as arable land, oil, or natural gas, synthetic biology and related technologies have few barriers to entrance, and emerging markets can become competitive quickly. Major gains have been made rapidly in several nations by changing policies and investments. Though there are several countries making substantial strategic investments in synthetic biology, the example of China is most notable. The Chinese Academy of Sciences includes synthetic biology in its Innovation 2050: Technology Revolution and the Future of China Roadmap.47 An example of China's substantial investments in
synthetic biology is its support of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), a company located in the city of Shenzhen. It is the world's largest genetic research center, with more sequencing capacity than the entire US and about one-quarter of the total global capacity.48,49 In 2013, BGI purchased the Mountain View, California–based company, Complete Genomics, 1 of the 2 leading companies in the world that make equipment for sequencing DNA, further increasing BGI's dominance in the sequencing market. Previously known solely for their speed and proficiency in sequencing genomes, the company is starting to diversify and innovate, making several
commercial diagnostic tests. The comprehensive database of sequencing information they have developed—they have sequenced many hundreds of different types of bacteria; crops such as rice, soybeans, and cucumbers; and dozens of animals including the giant panda; as well as human genomes—is seen as a springboard for new discoveries, as well as the development of new drugs and therapies. BGI has also been helpful in international science efforts, playing a role in the Human Genome Project and identifying the foodborne Escherichia coli outbreak in Germany that infected nearly 4,000 people, killing 53.50,51

China's research system still draws attention for its ethics problems— including fraudulent results, plagiarism, junk patents, and unsafe or ineffective medical practices —but experts believe that the Chinese
research system is changing and becoming more internationally competitive.52,53 This change is due in part to China's successful efforts to lure back Chinese researchers who were trained and/or employed in the United States, offering them bigger budgets and greater research freedom than they would have in the United States.
In the case of BGI, international collaborations are integral to their success and include partnering with the Gates Foundation as well as hospitals and universities in the United States and Europe.54

The UK has also looked to synthetic biology for economic growth and other benefits. A roadmap for synthetic biology was released in 2012, and to date the UK government has invested approximately £200 million for research and the creation of several synthetic biology research groups across the country.55,56 In a 2012 study that
mapped the scientific landscape for synthetic biology, the UK was second only to the United States in having its scientists author publications on synthetic biology.57 The UK is also taking steps to dissociate synthetic biology from the controversies surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs). At the most recent world
conference on synthetic biology, held at Imperial College, London, in 2013, a minister from the House of Commons told the assembled scientists, referring to GMOs, that the UK would not become “a museum of twentieth century technologies in the twenty-first century.”58 GMO restrictions are a competitive hindrance in UK
participation in the field of synthetic biology and in biotechnology in the UK and EU more generally.

Steps to Greater US Competitiveness

Measures aimed at boosting competitiveness in science and technology generally are broadly applicable for synthetic biology and should be pursued by the US government. These initiatives would include increased basic research funding with minimal fluctuations from year to year, workforce development, and STEM education initiatives, as well as financial incentives to start and fund biotechnology and synthetic biology companies and discourage them from locating offshore.18,19,48,59 Some economists have recommended that foreign students who receive their PhDs for research in technical STEM-related fields at US universities should be encouraged to
stay in the country to pursue their careers and receive automatic green cards enabling them to work in the United States.20

But to remain competitive in synthetic biology, the US government will also need to take specific action on fundamental policy issues that will affect the field's development. One priority should be responding to and countering anti-GMO sentiments and legislation, which are on the rise. The ability to specifically modify, recode, transform, and manipulate the genetic code of organisms—and thus, the characteristics of the organisms themselves—is much more powerful using synthetic biology techniques than was ever possible before. In fact, synthetic biology has been described as “genetic engineering on steroids.”60 It should thus be no surprise that long-
standing debates, concerns, and activism surrounding the topic of GMOs would arise in response to synthetic biology. While the anti-GMO movement has been typically thought of as a European concern, which has diminished European agricultural competitiveness and has thus given the United States a competitive edge, there are warning signs that anti-GMO concerns are growing and will no longer be possible for scientists and policymakers in the United States to ignore. Simply put, concerns about GMOs that cannot be scientifically justified are at odds with US competitiveness in synthetic biology and other biotechnologies. The United States should actively
counter anti-GMO policies, while also ensuring that synthetic biology is appropriately regulated, and work to inform the public about how products are regulated for safety.

The U S approach to regulation nited tates' the of biotechnology, different from that of Europe , has so far carried over to the regulation of synthetic biology applications. The focus of regulation and safety in the United States has
been focused on
traditionally the product. the end result: This is not to say that all conceivable GMO products are guaranteed to be safe, but it is the product that should be subject to a safety determination, not the process used to make it, whether that process is synthetic
biology or another technique.

In contrast to the U S Eu nited tates, ropean regulatory agencies have typically embraced the “precautionary principle,” which place the burden of proof on the developer
s of a product that the
process used to make a particular product is not harmful. There are multiple formulations of the precautionary principle; one often-used definition came from the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998 and states:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. … The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially
affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.61

While precaution in the face of indeterminate risks sounds to many a reasonable approach—it is the essence of the expression “look before you leap”—in practice, critics have charged that the usual result of its application is inaction . 62,63 In the case of synthetic biology, a

precautionary approach would result in a general moratorium on synth bio the release and commercial use of etic logy until there is a research agenda, alternative approaches have been fully considered, a technology assessment has been performed, and there is national and perhaps

international oversight for each of the technologies.64 This could take years even if all nations were in agreement many about the need for it, which they are not.
The distrust of GMOs has had a detrimental economic effect in the EU. The prohibition on GMOs in the EU decreases profit margins for European farmers by up to a billion dollars each year.65 The British government Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRC) has charged that the precautionary approach has “effectively stifled GM crop farming in the EU.”66 It costs £10-20 million more to put a GM crop through an EU approval process than for conventionally bred new crops.67 A group of 21 prominent plant scientists wrote an open letter stating that Europe will lose research prominence unless field trials are allowed of GM crops and that
they will fall short of producing “world-class science” unless a pro-science stance is taken by policymakers.68 Science advisors to British Prime Minister David Cameron have called for scrapping “dysfunctional EU regulations” around GMOs, and they note the hypocrisy in that the EU imports 70% of its animal feed, most of it made with GMOs. The United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina grow 90% of the planet's GM crops.69
It should be stated that the evidence on the safety of “GMO” foods is in, and the results are clear. Genetic engineering presents no unique hazards compared to other methods that create genetic modification, such as traditional breeding or hybridization. Major scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies of Science, and the American Medical Association (AMA) all back GMOs as being safe. In a meta-review of the safety of genetically engineered crop research that evaluated 1,783 research papers and reports from the years 2002 to 2012, no significant hazards were
identified.70,71 The European Commission funded 1,340 research projects from 500 independent teams looking at GMO safety and none found risks.69 In addition to the lack of harm found in GMO use, there are substantial benefits to using GMOs: lower food prices; less pesticide use, which is safer for farmers; less water needed; increased crop yields; and more stable prices.69 There is also necessity: The UN FAO estimates that the world will need to grow 70% more food by 2050 just to keep up with population growth. There may be 10 billion people on earth, requiring more food to be grown in the next 75 years than has been produced in all of human
history.72 Climate change, with the loss of arable land, will worsen this problem. Maximizing food production through GMOs may be the only avenue to provide people with enough food.

The anti-GMO movement has also cost lives. Vitamin A deficiencies cause more than 1 million deaths every year, as well as half a million cases of irreversible blindness.69 In spite of this, the GMO Golden Rice, engineered to deliver more vitamin A than spinach, has not been allowed to be grown in India and the Philippines, largely due to the activities of Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations.73 Kenya had an outright ban on GMOs in spite of an advancing crop disease that affects corn, the Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease, which could lead to food insecurity and famine as crops are destroyed by the virus.74 Kenyan officials now say the ban resulted from
their being misled by French activists who claimed that GM products cause tumors and were unfit for human consumption; the ban on GMOs is expected to be lifted by the end of 2015.75,76

There is cause for concern that anti-GMO sentiments are increasing in the United States and will harm US competitiveness, particularly when it comes to realizing beneficial synthetic biology applications. In the United States, the use of anti-GMO sentiment as a marketing tool has been growing. Products that are marketed as not containing GMOs will account for 30% of US food and beverage sales by 2017.77,78 Whole Foods started labeling their products that are GMO-free, stating that they were responding to their customers, “who have consistently asked us for GMO labeling and we are doing so by focusing on where we have control: in our own stores.”79
By 2018, all products in their US and Canadian stores will be labeled to indicate if they contain GMOs. This is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for “full GMO transparency.”79 Chipotle and Trader Joe's also have decided to not sell foods made with GMOs and to use this fact in advertising campaigns. At least 20 states are considering GM labeling bills; most of those in favor of labeling would use those labels to avoid eating those foods.69,72 Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont have already passed labeling laws.

Congress established the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) under the USDA through the Organic Food Production Act, and it was charged with developing standards, which have become known as the “Organic Rule.” The Organic Rule expressly forbids the use of GMO crops, antibiotics, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, as well as food additives and ionizing radiation. The Organic Seal is a marketing tool and is separate from safety. But organic marketers represent conventionally grown or GM crops as dangerous.80 Major scientific organizations have tended to be against labeling laws because of what happened in Europe: In 1997, when there was
growing opposition to GMOs in Europe, the EU began to require labels. By 1999, to avoid the GMO labels, most European retailers had removed those ingredients, and now GM products cannot be found in European stores.73

Anti-GMO groups have already found synthetic biology as a target. One example comes from Ecover, a Belgian company that makes detergents, and Method, which is a subsidiary company. Ecover purchased oils for its products developed by Solazyme, a US company that uses synthetic biology to produce an environmentally sustainable substitute for palm kernel oil in algae. Palm kernel oil is in high demand, which has led to conservationist concerns about overcultivation, deforestation, and loss of tropical habitats. Ecover found itself inundated with petitions to stop using synthetic biology for using what an anti-GMO group labeled an “extreme biotech oil.”81

Another example comes from the synthetic production of vanillin, the most dominant flavor compound in vanilla extract. Vanilla extract is made from vanilla beans, which are commonly harvested from Madagascar, the island of Réunion, Tahiti, and Mexico. Harvesting is an extremely labor-intensive process, as the vanilla plants need to be hand-pollinated for commercial quantities, and the result yields the world's second-most expensive spice, following saffron. The demand for vanilla flavoring cannot be satisfied by the harvesting and processing of vanilla beans alone; even now, most vanillin is made synthetically from petrochemicals and less commonly from
chemically treated paper pulp. Evolva, a Swiss synthetic biology company developed a synthetic version produced using synthetic biology and has partnered with International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF-USA) to produce it. Vanillin does not taste as good as the vanilla extract that comes from vanilla beans, because the bean has more than 250 flavor and aroma compounds.82 But there are definite advantages to synthetic vanillin, in that synthetic production will not be affected by weather or crop failures, or the shifting costs of oil, thus resulting in a steady supply and less price volatility. Nonetheless, Evolva has also come under fire from anti-GMO activists for its
use of synthetic biology. Friends of the Earth (FOE) “persuaded” Haagen-Dazs not to use vanillin made through synthetic biology, but since Haagen-Dazs uses only vanilla extract from vanilla beans, this was not likely to occur anyway. It is another example of the cynical use of anti-GMO sentiment for marketing purposes.82,83

If anti-GMO sentiment increases, there will be a great deal of pressure placed on lawmakers by anti-GMO groups to adhere to the precautionary principle. Communicating the science behind GMOs is a much more difficult task than simply labeling it as bad, and the United States is not immune from applying a more precautionary stance to regulatory areas.84 Still, resisting efforts to undermine a positive future for synthetic biology is critical for US competitiveness, as is making sure that synthetic biology products are, indeed, appropriately regulated. While the product, not the process, should be the focus of regulation and oversight, at this time there are gaps
in regulation, and synthetic biology is likely to increase them.85 As one example, a 2013 fundraising campaign on Kickstarter caused consternation by producing glowing plants and distributing seeds to more than 8,000 supporters.44 The mechanisms used to produce the plants, distribute them, and plant them did not violate any current rules or regulations; however, allowing glowing plants to be introduced into the environment without regulatory review struck many as foolhardy and risked bringing about negative public opinions about synthetic biology.80 Current oversight depends on whether plant pests or some plant pest component is used for
engineering the plant. As many newer methods of genetic manipulation would not involve such a step, this would leave many engineered plants without regulatory review before they are cultivated in the environment for field trials or commercial production.85

Encouragingly, this situation is likely to change for the better. In July 2015, the White House directed the 3 federal agencies that have oversight responsibilities for biotechnology products—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the FDA, and the USDA—to develop a long-term strategy for the oversight of future products in biotechnology and to update what is known as the “Coordinated Framework.” The Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology was introduced in 1986 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as a comprehensive federal regulatory policy to ensure the safety of biotechnology products beyond
pharmaceuticals; it was last updated in 1992. Updating the framework became necessary, as it was outdated and confusing, and its complexity made it “difficult for the public to understand how the safety of biotechnology products is evaluated,” as the glowing plant example makes clear.57 In addition, the regulatory process could be unnecessarily challenging for small companies. The Coordinated Framework will be updated and will clarify which agencies have responsibility to regulate products that might fall under authorities of multiple agencies.57 In addition to this work, there will be a long-term strategy developed with an aim of making sure that the
regulatory system is well-equipped to assess the risks associated with future biotechnology products. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have also been commissioned to perform an outside, independent analysis of the future landscape of biotechnology products.57

Engaging in International Discussions

Formal mechanisms of international governance of synthetic biology need to be addressed by the US government. Synthetic biology has become a major topic in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has 168 member nations but does not include the United States, which has signed but not ratified the treaty. The Cartagena Protocol in the CBD provides an international regulatory framework for the transfer, handling, and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology. At the CBD 10th Conference in 2010, the members agreed that the release of products of synthetic biology requires caution and the application of
the Precautionary Principle. Another protocol to the CBD, the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits, aims at sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way and will also affect the synthetic biology industry.

The US government should pay great attention to the activities of this treaty, to minimize the impact restrictions on developing synthetic biology technologies. Although the US is not bound by activities or resolutions of the convention, the synthetic biology market will be affected if the United States and the scientific community do

The stance
not become more engaged in the CBD process.86 precautionary that the treaty parties are taking, as well as the possible consideration to bar some genetic sequences for use, may limit US synthetic biology exports and could hamper the field's
development of beneficial applications . 87 The United States should work with other nations that are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Nagoya Protocol to minimize the impact on US economic interests. At the heart of the treaty is a

Rather than closing off

justifiable concern about the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. a potentially broadly beneficial tech nology, other mechanisms should be created that directly
address the need for fairness and access to benefits arising from the technologies.

Conclusion

Synth bio is a fast-moving fieldetic already applied to the development of new vaccines and medical
logy , and it has been

countermeasures as well as the production of biofuels, detergents, adhesives, perfumes, tires, and specialized chemicals that formerly required the use of petrochemicals. As the field continues to expand, synthetic biology may

synthetic bio could be the foundation of a new manufacturing economy for the U
become a pervasive industrial technology. Proponents believe that logy and related technologies nited

S and contribute to industries essential to US national security.

tates could While the field was pioneered in the United States, other nations are hoping that investments in this area will boost their economies, and so the

it s imperative the U S does not fall behind

great technical lead that the United States has enjoyed will inevitably shrink. However, to ensure it s positioned to i that nited tates and makes investments that i

participate in the technical back and forth that will set standards and limits for governance in
enjoy the fruits of a robust bioeconomy as well as

controversial applications of the tech nologies. In actively taking steps to increase its global competitiveness in synthetic biology, the United States should also address fundamental policy issues about GMOs and make sure that all products are appropriately
regulated—whether they are made through traditional methods, synthetic biology, or an innovative technology yet to be developed.

Extinction
Thompson, 18 -- Lexington Institute Chief Operating Officer
[Loren, former Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, former Harvard University
Kennedy School of Government professor, PhD in government from Georgetown University, "Invisible Scourge: The
Danger of Chemical or Biological Attack on America is Growing Fast," May 2018, https://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/6.18.18-LT-Invisible-Scourge-1.pdf, accessed 8-16-22]

The Rise of Synthetic Biology

The genetic information of almost all life forms is contained in a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that is found in
the nucleus of each cell in an organism's body. Without the information carried on this microscopic strand, the organism
could not express its characteristic traits or reproduce. The role of DNA in transmitting inherited traits between
generations of a species was first illuminated in 1953.

During the 1970s, scientists began to discover methods of manipulating DNA so that traits could be added or removed
from an organism's genetic makeup (or "genome"). The practice came to be called synthetic biology, because it involved
fashioning features not known to exist in nature. One of the earliest applications of such gene editing was the
modification of crops to make them less susceptible to drought or disease.

At its inception, synthetic biology was difficult and expensive. That, plus safety and ethical concerns, limited the spread
of knowledge concerning the emerging field. Over time, though, the tools for splicing and reassembling DNA became
accessible to a broader array of users. Eventually, scientists learned how to create wholly new biological components
and organisms. The most important breakthroughs came in 2009, in the form of a new gene editing tool known by the
acronym CRISPR.
To quote the National Human Genome Research Institute, "CRISPR is simpler, faster, cheaper, and more accurate than
older genome editing methods." Unfortunately, the vast improvement in laboratory practices enabled by advances like
CRISPR comes at a price. It s become much easier for users with destructive intent to apply synth etic biology to their
ha

work. For instance, a scientist sympathetic to extremist causes might create an organism combin ing the lethality and
transmissibility of multiple pathogens to generate horrific effects.

The result would be a super pathogen threatening the survivability of large populations, and even civilizations if no
prompt countermeasures were available.

This is no fanciful speculation: some scientists believe that humanity is only two mutations of the influenza virus away
from species extinction. Unlike any other time in human history, it s now feasible to artificially spawn such mutations ,
i

and then loose them on unsuspecting targets.

That is the danger of widely deploying dual-use technologies in synthetic biology. The same methods that might be used
to defeat cancers could be used to destroy adversaries through virulent pandemics. That outcome might not even be
deliberate: if super pathogens escape lab oratories to reach the outside world, they might cause just as much damage
even though their release was accidental. The federal government and scientific community have sought to fashion
standards to minimize the likelihood of such catastrophes, but as knowledge spreads so does the danger.

This would not be the first time emerging technology had unforeseen consequences, but it might be the last. Nicholas
G. Evans of the University of Pennsylvania department of medical ethics and health policy observed in 2015 that "certain
broad elements of synthetic biology, driven by the aim to create a predictable engineering discipline out of the life
sciences, have the capacity to deskill the life sciences in a way that enables malevolent actors." Breakthroughs in
microbiology might thus become major threats to national security.
 Spillover DA: Dartmouth

Spillover DA

The AFF breaks the firewall that reserves personhood for humans---leads to spiraling claims for
superintelligence rights, causing extinction
---SRs = Superintelligent Robots

John-Stewart Gordon 22, full professor of philosophy, chief researcher at the Faculty of Law, head of the Research
Cluster for Applied Ethics (RCAE), and principal investigator of the EU-funded research project “Integration Study on
Future Law, Ethics, and Smart Technologies” (2017-2021) at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, “Are
Superintelligent Robots Entitled to Human Rights?,” Ratio, vol. 35, no. 3, 2022, pp. 181–193

4 THINKING THE IMPOSSIBLE

4.1 Superintelligent robots and human rights?

Gordon and Pasvenskiene (2021) reviewed the contemporary literature on whether intelligent robots should be
entitled to human rights once they exist and offered an interesting analysis of the current state of research. This topic
has been quite energetically discussed in numerous blogs and popular magazines but only very rarely in academic
journals. Both authors believe that this lack of academic attention is a mistake since future technological development
will—albeit perhaps still several decades in the future—most likely lead to the creation of SRs who may want to have
their “human rights” recognized.

The concept of human rights—or at least the idea of moral human rights—is no longer necessarily linked to being
human , but rather to the concept of personhood (Gordon & Pasvenskiene, 2021, sections 4 and 5). Recently, numerous
authors have applied the human rights approach to support the protection of higher animals (Cavalieri, 2001;
Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2013; Francione, 2009; Singer, 1975) and even the environment (Atapattu, 2015; Stone, 2010). If
this is the case, however, then one could raise the question whether SRs should be entitled to human rights as well
once (and if) they exist. Although it is possible, as Gunkel (2018) and Gellers (2022) do, to speak about “robot rights”
rather than “human rights for robots,” the rhetorical force of using human-rights language is an important aspect of
including humanlike SRs in the moral community. That is why Francione (2009) and others have used the term human
rights also in the context of animals . Likewise, it seems appropriate to speak about human rights in the context of
SRs.

It was argued above that the concept of personhood is the most important way to determine an entity's moral (and
legal ) status . In particular, it was argued that mental or psychological capacities are of utmost significance in
determining what we understand by personhood, in contrast to the social-relational approach and the human dignity
approach (which support the view that one must be a member of the species homo sapiens to count morally).
Furthermore, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that entities can have HMS depending on their degree of
psychological capacities . But if this is the case , then it seems also plausible that these supra-persons should
eventually be entitled to more (or stronger) moral and legal rights than typical adult human beings (see McMahan,
2009).

But what if these supra-persons are SRs? McMahan (2009) and other authors including Singer (1975, 1979) rightly
indicate that our common-sense morality is incoherent with respect to how we deal with, for example, animals such
as pigs, geese, chickens, cows and chimpanzees that have more advanced psychological capacities than human fetuses
and even newborns. Most people believe that, for example, newborns are entitled to moral rights such as the right not
to be killed or used for medical purposes, whereas the just-mentioned animals, which are (empirically speaking) more
advanced in terms of their psychological capacities, hold these rights to a much lesser degree if at all . The reason for
this incoherence is that human fetuses and newborns belong to the human species and are connected to a human
family (McMahan, 2009).

However, if we use only one moral standard, such as the ability to reason, for all cases and apply it coherently , then
human offspring would gain personhood, FMS, and the related moral and legal rights at a much later stage in their lives;
in fact, they would rate below the higher-level animals mentioned above (Gordon, 2021). The above line of reasoning
has implications for the way how we would most likely treat SRs. If, at some future point, we see the advent of SRs, we
will most probably not grant them HMS relative to typical adult human beings. But something is wrong with this
reasoning. Gordon and Pasvenskiene (2021) have pointed out that the ascription of moral status and rights is not up to
us but must be determined independently. In other words, if SRs meet the objective criteria which determine whether
entities have FMS and HMS, then they are entitled to the related moral and legal rights , unless one adopts an
approach that we would consider incoherent.

The socio-political, legal and moral implications of this development would be substantial. If non-human entities are
awarded human rights and even stronger moral and legal rights than typical adult human beings based on their much
higher psychological capacities, substantial social unrest might arise between human beings and SRs. Two differently
advanced species would be sharing one world. If we cannot solve the so-called alignment problem between them , as
argued by Bostrom (2014) and more recently by Ord (2020, chapter 5), humanity would most likely become extinct .10
Therefore, we should contemplate these issues carefully and long before the existence of SRs becomes imminent.
4.2 The argument

The above-mentioned general line of reasoning leads to the following argument:

Premiss: The attribution of moral (and legal) rights is based on the particular moral (and legal) status of a given entity.

Premiss: The higher the moral (and legal) status of an entity is, (a) the more rights are available to that entity and (b) the stronger that entity's rights are in comparison to entities with a lower moral (and legal) status (degree model).

Premiss: The typical adult human being has FMS and the greatest amount of moral and legal rights in the strongest sense (common view).

Premiss: SRs have HMS (hypothesis).

Premiss: HMS provides the entity with more and stronger moral (and legal) rights compared to entities with a lower moral status (degree model).

Ergo: SRs are entitled to more and stronger moral (and legal rights) than the typical adult human being.

The above argument presupposes the correctness of the two principles stated by Bostrom and Yudkowsky (2014, pp. 323–324):

The principle of substrate non-discrimination: If two beings have the same functionality and the same conscious experience, and differ only in the substrate of their implementation, then they have the same moral status.

The principle of ontogeny non-discrimination: If two beings have the same functionality and the same conscious experience, and differ only in how they came into existence, then they have the same moral status.

Both principles can be considered the starting point and constraining framework of how one should view the relationship between human beings and intelligent machines (once they exist). I do not see any convincing counterargument against both principles.11 The above argument could be questioned on two accounts. The first
objection concerns the likelihood of the existence of SRs (premiss 4) and the second objection concerns the use of the degree model in premiss 5. I will respond briefly to each point in turn.

The possibility of whether SRs might exist in the future remains unclear. Many AI researchers believe, that we will
eventually see the advent of SRs, but that it is impossible to determine the exact time (Müller & Bostrom, 2016). My
estimation is that we will most probably encounter SRs towards the end of this century (or even earlier) and that we
therefore have limited time to consider how we want to organize our societies once they exist. The advent of SRs will
cause substantial socio-political as well as moral and legal implications for our societies, and we need to prepare for
them well in advance. If we wait until we are confronted by these issues to start thinking about them, it will be too late.

A second objection is that we should not use the degree model to think about the recognition of moral and legal status
and related rights. Rather, one might argue, we should adhere to a moral threshold above which all entities should be
treated in the same way. This alternative would eliminate the possibility of entities with higher psychological capacities
being granted a higher moral and legal status and related rights than the typical adult human being. The underlying
theme of this objection is connected to general ideas of prioritizing one's own species over other species in relation to
vital questions regarding moral status as well as moral and legal rights (see the section “The incoherence approach”
below). Even though this approach might be understandable from a human-centred perspective, it still undermines how
ethics and moral philosophy have been carried out in modern times (at least to a great extent)—namely, by using
universal ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Neo-Kantianism.12
Whether SRs would actually feel the need to respect a moral threshold is a totally different matter. That is why scholars
such as Bostrom (2014) and Ord (2020) emphasize the need to solve the alignment problem and to control SRs to
ensure that humanity will not become extinct .
5 CRITICAL REMARKS

Besides the commonly voiced objections with respect to the impossibility of machines becoming self-aware, conscious, and intelligent and hence ever developing the ability to reason (Searle, 1980), opponents who adhere to functionalism and computationalism have argued that intelligence does not necessarily require belonging to
a particular substratum, such as carbon-based beings (like humans), but that it could also evolve in silicon-based environments, if the system is complex enough (Chalmers, 1996: chapter 9; Sinnott-Armstrong & Conitzer, 2021, pp. 275–282). Eventually, this dispute will be solved when new types of highly complex systems actually
emerge; it cannot be decided based on theoretical arguments alone.

The more interesting objections concern issues related to the likely advent of SRs and how we plan to deal with that eventuality, including ways to establish a proper mutual and peaceful relationship with non-human entities who are much smarter than us (indeed, the difference between SRs and us could be comparable to that
between us and ants, if not larger). If human beings try to treat SRs as their slaves with no rights, then humanity might be digging its own grave.

5.1 Do not produce SRs in great numbers

There is great interest in creating artificially intelligent entities that could take over many of our jobs (some scholars estimate that most human jobs will vanish within the next 100 years or so, especially those that are boring or extremely dangerous). SRs will achieve everything much faster, more effectively and without any
mistakes. This almost utopian situation, in which human beings could rest, relax and enjoy themselves all day, every day, could quickly turn into a dystopian nightmare in which human beings lose their general capabilities, degenerate, and become lazy and stupid because they no longer face any obstacles in their lives and because
everything is done for them (Danaher, 2019a). Adult human beings might become like children with limited human autonomy, due to the overly paternalistic nature of machines that do everything for them (e.g., Danaher, 2019b; Russell, 2019; Vallor, 2015, 2016). At this stage, human beings will face the existential problem of
boredom as SRs solve all our problems.

To avoid this dystopian situation, one could limit the number of SRs and other AI machines created so as to deal with any existential repercussions arising from these technological developments and prevent humanity from becoming a dysfunctional race. Limiting the quantity of SRs would also avoid or minimize two additional
problems: the existential risk problem and the competition for global resources. Bostrom (2014) and Ord (2020) have warned about the potential problem of unaligned SRs that might not value the same things as humans and thus could be motivated to cause the human race's extinction if we do not solve the control problem.
Furthermore, some scholars have voiced concerns with respect to earth's already limited global resources, which would have to be shared amongst human beings and SRs as well. The production and maintenance of highly advanced machines require substantial resources and could quickly drain the remaining resources available on
earth.

Therefore, in summary, we should avoid producing SRs in great numbers so as to avert (a) the degeneration of human beings, (b) our own destruction (existential risk scenarios), and (c) overconsumption of our global resources.

5.2 The incoherence approach

Some people might argue that even if SRs become smarter than human beings and therefore are entitled to HMS (at least from an objective perspective), we should never acknowledge their higher moral status and give them stronger (and more) moral and legal rights than human beings have. Being incoherent, many might argue,
is not necessarily morally wrong.

This line of reasoning is quite similar to how we currently treat higher animals such as the great apes, who actually deserve much stronger moral and legal rights based on their higher moral status than human beings tend to want them to have (Cavalieri, 2001; Francione, 2009; Singer, 1975). McMahan (2009) correctly claims that
human beings are incoherent with respect to the acknowledgement of the moral status and related rights of some animals in comparison to human offspring, based on their higher psychological capacities. In addition, Singer (2009) has justifiably questioned this argument, calling it prone to speciesism and contending that for this
reason it should be rejected (Singer, 2009).

Whether one should be “loyal” to one's own species compared to other species has been famously discussed by Bernard
Williams in his book chapter “The Human Prejudice” (Williams, 2006), where he argues against “moral universalists”
such as Singer. Williams explores the general idea of loyalty partly against the background of his thought-experiment
concerning “benevolent managerial aliens” who visit our planet and eventually conclude that it might be better to
remove humans from earth (Williams, 2006, pp. 151–152).13 In this context, he claims the following:

The relevant ethical concept is something like: loyalty to, or identity with, one's ethnic or cultural grouping; and
in the fantasy case, the ethical concept is: loyalty to, or identity with, one's species. … So the idea of there being
an ethical concept that appeals to our species membership is entirely coherent. (Williams, 2006, p. 150)

Applying Williams' reasoning to the case of robots, one could possibly argue that even though SRs might become much
smarter than human beings and therefore claim HMS based on their status as supra-persons, human being s should
nonetheless prioritize protection of their own species against any possible dangers, such as their extinction by a robot
revolution. There might only be a narrow dividing line between “allowing” SRs the enjoyment of their legitimate
entitlement to moral and legal rights, on one hand, and, on the other hand, using them as mere tools and thereby
creating a situation that has been dubbed “new speciesism” (DeGrazia, 2022, pp. 84–86).

Impact OV
4. Even if we don’t win animals spill over to AI- it definitely spills over to animal research-
medical facilities GET their subjects from the wild- Animal research is surging medical
innovation, but even limited rights grants will be weaponized by advocates to shut down
research.
Stephen M Byars et al. 22, Stephen M. Byars, USC Marshall School of Business; Kurt Stanberry, University of Houston–
Downtown; David Shapiro, Pennsylvania State University; Barbara Boerner, Brevard College; Robert Brancatelli, Fordham
University; Wade Chumney, California State University, Northridge; Laura Dendinger, Wayne State College; Bill Nantz,
Houston Community College; Mark Poepsel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, “8.5 Animal Rights and the
Implications for Business,” Business Ethics, updated 1/27/2022, OpenStax

The Use of Animals in Medical and Cosmetic Research

Viewpoints about animals used in medical research are changing in very significant ways and have resulted in a variety
of initiatives seeking alternatives to animal testing. As an example, in conjunction with professionals from human and
veterinary medicine and the law, the Yale University Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy, a bioethics research
institute, is seeking alternatives to animal testing that focus on animal welfare.

Animals such as monkeys and dogs are used in medical research ranging from the study of Parkinson disease to
toxicity testing and studies of drug interactions and allergies . There is no question that medical research is a valuable
and important practice. The question is whether the use of animals is a necessary or even best practice for producing
the most reliable results. Alternatives include the use of patient-drug databases, virtual drug trials, computer models
and simulations, and noninvasive imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography
scans.43 Other techniques, such as microdosing, use humans not as test animals but as a means to improve the accuracy
and reliability of test results. In vitro methods based on human cell and tissue cultures, stem cells, and genetic testing
methods are also increasingly available.

As for consumer product testing, which produces the loudest outcry, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not
require that animal tests be conducted to demonstrate the safety of cosmetics. Rather, companies test formulations on
animals in an attempt to protect themselves from liability if a consumer is harmed by a product. However, a significant
amount of new research shows that consumer products such as cosmetics can be accurately tested for safety without
the abuse of animals. Some companies may resist altering their methods of conducting research, but a growing number
are now realizing that their customers are demanding a change.

Regulating the Use of Animals in Research and Testing

Like virtually every other industrialized nation, the United States permits medical experimentation on animals, with
few limitations (assuming sufficient scientific justification). The goal of any laws that exist is not to ban such tests but
rather to limit unnecessary animal suffering by establishing standards for the humane treatment and housing of
animals in laboratories .

As explained by Stephen Latham, the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale,44 possible legal and
regulatory approaches to animal testing vary on a continuum from strong government regulation and monitoring of all
experimentation at one end, to a self-regulated approach that depends on the ethics of the researchers at the other
end. The United Kingdom has the most significant regulatory scheme, whereas Japan uses the self-regulation approach.
The U.S. approach is somewhere in the middle, the result of a gradual blending of the two approaches.

A movement has begun to win legal recognition of chimpanzees as the near-equivalent of humans, therefore, as
“persons” with legal rights. This is analogous to the effort called e nvironmental justice, an attempt to do the same for
the environment (discussed in the section on Environmental Justice in Three Special Stakeholders: Society, the
Environment, and Government). A nonprofit organization in Florida, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is an animal
advocacy group that has hired attorneys to present a theory in court that two chimpanzees (Tommy and Kiko) have the
legal standing and right to be freed from cages to live in an outdoor sanctuary (Figure 8.12). In this case, the attorneys
have been trying for years to get courts to grant the chimps habeas corpus (Latin for “you shall have the body”), a right
people have under the U.S. Constitution when held against their will. To date , this effort has been unsuccessful .45
The courts have extended certain constitutional rights to corporations, such as the First Amendment right to free
speech (in the 2010 Citizens United case). Therefore, some reason, a logical extension of that concept would hold that
animals and the environment have rights as well.

In cosmetic testing, the United States has relatively few laws protecting animals, whereas about forty other nations have
taken more direct action. In 2013, the European Union banned animal testing for cosmetics and the marketing and sale
of cosmetics tested on animals. Norway and Switzerland passed similar laws. Outside Europe, a variety of other nations,
including Guatemala, India, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey, have also passed laws to ban or limit
cosmetic animal testing. U.S. cosmetic companies will not be able to sell their products in any of these countries unless
they change their practices. The Humane Cosmetics Act has been introduced but not yet passed by Congress. If
enacted, it would end cosmetics testing on animals in the United States and ban the import of animal-tested
cosmetics.46 However, in the current antiregulatory environment , passage seems unlikely .

That’s vital to win the race against ABR.

Katie Loughman et al. 15, Loughman is a veterinarian at the North Paw Animal Hospital; Kathryn Brebner is
Department Staff, Business and Marketing Development Officer at the Wind Energy Center at the University of
Massachusetts; Emily Mei is Physician Assistant Student at the Rutgers School of Health Professionals, “Animal
Experimentation: A Continued Necessity in Medical Research,” Debating Science, 4/29/15,
https://blogs.umass.edu/natsci397a-eross/animal-experimentation-a-continued-necessity-in-medical-research/

Introduction

World War II is often referred to as the bloodiest war in history. From 1939 to 1945, over 50 million soldiers and
civilians lost their lives to bullets, bombs, lethal gases, or the horrifying and systematic genocide of the Jewish people
(History.com, n.d.). Families were torn apart by loss both on and off the battlefield. But what most fail to realize is that
many of these deaths were not caused by the weapons themselves, but instead by the bacteria that colonized the
wounds that they inflicted. In the midst of this devastating period of history, there was a beacon of hope: the
development of penicillin , which is still regarded today as the greatest achievement in medical history.

The mold Penicillium notatum, first discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, was finally refined and applied to the use
of treating infections in humans near the end of WWII and was soon sent out to the front lines en masse
(understandinganimalresearch.org.uk, n.d.). Before it ever made its way into humans, this pioneering antibiotic was
tested extensively on mice through the use of what is known as the mouse protection test. During this test, a given
number of mice were injected with lethal doses of bacteria. Half of these recipients then received the refined
penicillin. In testing, the mice that received the antibiotic survived their infections while the others died
(understandinganimalresearch.org.uk, n.d.). This testing was essential to determining that not only was this drug
effective at killing bacteria, but that it could do so without toxicity to the host (discoveriesinmedicine.com, n.d). Armed
with penicillin, we could now wage war on this new battlefield against bacteria . Soldiers with grave wounds who often
waited an average of 14 hours to see a surgeon could now be treated with penicillin to prevent lethal complications of
infections such as septicemia and gangrene (discoveriesinmedicine.com, n.d.). Thanks to animal research, countless
soldiers who would have otherwise died were able to make it home to their families.

Background

The use of animal experimentation dates back to the time of the Ancient Greece, where philosophers and scientists such
as Aristotle used animal models to better understand the anatomy and biology of a living organism (Hajar, 2011). In
more recent times, researchers have used animal models to improve their understanding of how manipulating body
systems with drugs or therapies can alter the health and well-being of the organism. In this way, animal research has
become essential to the medical community for the development of new medicines, therapies, and surgical techniques.
However, over the course of history many have argued against putting living organisms through pain and suffering for
the benefit of human-kind. Many animal rights groups, such as PETA, or the People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals, take a strong stance against the use of animals in laboratories (peta.org, n.d.).

In response to the strong backlash to animal use in research, the government created new laws to give some
protections to animals. The first major legislation to protect animals was the Animal Welfare Act, which was published
in 1966 (Favre, 2002). While this law, which is enforced by the USDA and APHIS, improved animal well-being by dictating
and enforcing the proper use, housing, and methods of acquisition for many animals, it does have some major pitfalls. It
excludes rodents, birds, reptiles, and all animals used for food and fiber (Favre, 2002). Since 90% of the animals used in
research are rodents, these laws do not lend them any protections (Kehinde, 2013). In order to combat this, “The Guide
for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals” was published by the National Research Council and is still considered to be
the standard of laboratory animal care today. This “Guide”, which is highly respected in the research community, covers
the well-being of animals like mice and rats, as well as their proper housing, care, pain management, and even humane
euthanasia (NRC, 2011).

Scientists are often motivated to maintain high standards of welfare because failure to do so could put the animals in
a state of extreme stress . The hormones and physiological changes associated with stress can seriously interfere
with experimental results . One example of a welfare recommendation made by “The Guide”, as it is better known as,
states that animals used for research purposes should be housed to maximize species-specific behaviors and minimize
behaviors caused by stress . For example, animals that typically live in groups in the wild should be housed in either
pairs or groups to meet its needs and social requirements (NRC, 2011).

Despite the efforts that have been made to improve the lives and minimize the suffering of animals, many groups like
PETA are still very much against their use in medical testing. While their stance comes from a commendable place of
compassion for animals, it often becomes problematic when put into play in the real world. In order to better
understand the reasoning behind PETA’s stance against animal use, we must first begin to understand that there are two
major schools of thought when it comes to animal ethics.

Animal rights groups like PETA operate under the conviction that all animals have equal rights to humans and should
be treated as such . They argue that animal use in any capacity that benefits humans is unethical and thus should be
eliminated. In PETA’s own words, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in
any way” (peta.org, n.d.). This includes not only animals in research , but also animals that are used for food and fiber,
and animals kept as pets or for recreational purposes such as dogs or horses.

Another major school of thought in animal ethics is animal welfare . Animal welfare activists support the use of
animals in research, but instead argue that in order to use animals for our benefit we must be actively championing
for their well-being. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), “ensuring animal welfare is a
human responsibility that includes consideration for all aspects of animal well-being, including proper housing,
management, nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling, and, when necessary,
humane euthanasia” (avma.org, n.d.). Animal welfare in recent years has been implemented in many ways, such as in
“The Guide” described earlier.

One other way researchers are implementing the ideals of animal welfare is through the concept of the Three R’s of
animal welfare. They refer to replacement, reduction, and refinement. The goal of each respective “R” is to replace
animals with non-living models when possible, to reduce the total number of animals used, and to refine the
experiments so that animals are receiving the best welfare possible (Hajar, 2011). Using the three R’s helps in attempts
to reduce animal suffering and to yield the best results with as few animals as possible.

Arguments Against Animal Models

Animal rights activists often argue that there are many non-animal research models that are just as effective as using
animals, and thus, animals are no longer necessary for the development of new drugs or medicines (peta.org, n.d.).
Although there is truth to the fact that there are alternatives to using animals in research, they are not necessarily
effective or accurate. One alternative method that has been used by researchers today is in vitro. By definition, in vitro
refers to an experimental process that occurs in a test tube, culture dish, or anywhere else beside the living organism
(Kehinde, 2013). In the article “They See a Rat, we Seek a Cure for Diseases: The Current Status of Animal
Experimentation in Medical Practice”, published in Medical Principles and Practice, Kehinde argues that there are
serious limitations to using in vitro research as opposed to testing on animals. He argues argue that while in vitro
experimentation is cheaper and easier for the researcher, the data obtained is often inadequate (Kehinde, 2013). Results
that are obtained from in vitro experimentation are often inaccurate due to the fact that cells have evolved over time to
work in tissue and organ systems; therefore the way they react outside of the body may differ from how they’d react in
vivo, where they are in the context of all other organ systems (Kehinde, 2011). Researchers have used animals in
research to test diseases and vaccinations for such diseases. By testing these drugs on animals, they are able to
determine how the body as a whole will respond to the drug as opposed to just a small portion of tissue used in vitro
(Kehinde, 2013).

Recently, in silico research techniques have also caught the attention of animal activists as a proposed alternative to
animal experimentation. In silico is a term that refers to a procedure or experiment that’s performed through a
computer simulation. Although this is indeed a potentially useful alternative, much like in vitro it has its inherent
limitations when it comes to producing accurate results. In their paper “In silico pharmacology for drug discovery:
methods for virtual ligand screening and profiling” Dr. Thomas Hartung and Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann (2007) argue that,
like in vitro, using in silico experimentation first requires a large set of data retrieved from organisms in vivo (or
experimentation on an organism as a whole). They continue to argue that the use of in silico methods require a large
group of live animal trial runs to be carried out in order to validate the credibility of each experiment. They state, “While
for in vitro tests only 20 to 100 substances are required for validation, a much larger training set of data is necessary for
in silico methods.” (p. 159) This is not a realistic alternative to animal testing because for each experiment it requires a
large number of tests to be run on live animals before it can even begin to work. Additionally, much like in vitro testing,
it happens outside of the context of a living organism and results are risky to interpret as being safe and valid enough to
move to human trials.

Those opposed to animal research may also claim that it’s simpler to go straight to human clinical trials for certain drugs
and therapies. Aside from ethical and safety considerations, there are experimental limitations to human trails that
become problematic. According to Kehinde (2013), in human trials of new drugs, approximately 3,000 human volunteers
would be required for accuracy of results (p.56). But, if a latent side effect were to occur after the clinical trial in 1 out of
10,000 patients, the drug would already be on the market and would have affected countless individuals (Kehinde, 2013,
p. 56). This is a serious safety concern. One example of how this method of experimentation can go wrong is with the
drug Actos. Actos was used for the treatment of diabetes mellitus, and underwent this type of clinical testing. It wasn’t
until it had been on the market for 8 years and used by over 1 million people that it was discovered to increase the
incidence of bladder cancer (Kehinde, 2013, p. 56). This is why animal models in the early stages of drug development
are so essential to determining a drug’s safety.

Additionally, animal rights proponents generally also argue that our current knowledge of biology and medicine should
be sufficient to build upon to create new therapies. However, as described by J.H Botting and A.R Morrison in the article
“Animal research is vital to medicine”, from the Scientific American, animal research has been and continues to be
essential to the development of new techniques (1997). One example that shows the importance of animal testing to
develop new or unique therapies is in the development of mitral valve replacements used in open heart surgery. Botting
and Morrison (1997) state that effective replacements for heart mitral valves have “stemmed from years of
development and testing for efficacy in dogs and calves” (p. 85) and that, “critics of animal research cannot present a
convincing scenario to show how effective treatment of mitral valve insufficiency could have developed any other way”
(p.85). Since it’s unethical to test these untried procedures on human beings, testing the transplant procedure in these
dogs and calves gave us a more accurate picture of the likelihood of success before it was attempted in humans.
Without developing this therapy in animals it would likely have either never been made available to people who would
die without the replacement, or human beings may have died in an attempt to find a safe and effective way to perform
it without an animal model.

Benefits of Animal Research

Animal research is so important to the betterment of mankind in today’s world, because through the development of
new drugs and therapies we can hope to combat terrible diseases that cause suffering or death to human beings
across the globe . One way that animal testing contributes to this medical advancement is through the development
of novel methods to treat cancer, a disease that kills millions of people every year. As described by Budhu, Wolchock,
and Merghoub in their article “The importance of animal models in tumor immunity and immunotherapy”, published in
Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, one method being explored recently by researchers is immunotherapy of
cancer. In essence, immunotherapy utilizes the natural ability of the body’s immune cells to target and attack foreign
cells. Using drugs, researchers are beginning to manipulate the immune system to better recognize tumors as foreign ,
and stimulate the destruction of tumors by immune cells (Budhu, Wolchock & Merghoub, 2014). The authors claim that
the use of mice in research has had a major impact on the understanding of cancer immunology and in the
development of currently available cancer immunotherapies. By using mice that have transplanted tumors we can
study the effects of these drugs on the tumors and on the body as a whole without needing to test on human cancer
patients (Budhu, Wolchock, & Merghoub, 2014). With the relatively new and exciting development of “humanized”
mouse models, in which the mouse’s own immune system is removed and replaced with human immune cells, any
data acquired from these mice become more directly applicable to humans (Budhu, Wolchock, & Merghoub, 2014).
This has far reaching implications on the effectiveness of animal models to predict adverse side effects in humans.
These new concepts have been applied to formulate approved human therapies such as ipilimumab , which
successfully targets advanced malignant melanoma, an extremely aggressive and often fatal cancer. These immune
therapies described are now on the forefront of cancer research due to their high rates of success in cancer patients.
Without the animal models used here, this major advancement and benefit to society would not have been possible.
This gives us a renewed hope in the fight against cancer.

Some activists argue that using animals for medical research isn’t very effective in developing beneficial drugs or
therapies for humans. However, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Through the use of animals in
research, mankind has made great strides in medical advancement. One of the most important discoveries we’ve made
through animal testing is the development of vaccinations. One of the greatest recent discoveries was the vaccination
for Polio disease, which was made possible due to animal research. According to the American Association for
Laboratory Animal Science Foundation, over 21,000 cases of Polio infected the US in 1952, which caused paralysis that
left children unable to breathe without the use of an iron lung, or even death (aalasfoundation.org, n.d.). Animal models
using mice and monkeys were used to develop an effective vaccine and in the late 1950’s polio was nearly eliminated
(understandinganimalresearch.org.uk, n.d.). Today polio has been nearly eradicated with the exception of a few
remaining cases in 16 countries (aalasfoundation.org, n.d). This is all thanks to the development of vaccines using animal
models.

Humans undoubtedly benefit from the use of animal testing, but what many don’t consider is that animal research
directly feeds back to benefit the animals themselves. Canine parvovirus has historically been serious problem in the
veterinary field, and in 1978 a worldwide outbreak was wiping out our dog population (aalasfoundation.org, n.d.).
Researchers soon discovered that parvovirus was very similar to feline leukemia seen in cats. A vaccine had already been
discovered to successfully prevent feline leukemia, and with a few modifications a new vaccine was created, tested, and
put into use to prevent canine parvovirus (aalasfoundation.org, n.d.). In today’s world, parvo, while not completely
eradicated, is far less prevalent than is has been historically, and outbreaks are usually caused by owners that refuse
vaccines. The discovery of a vaccine for parvovirus is ranked as one of the best success stories in the veterinary
community and it was due in part to the animals used in the development of both the feline leukemia vaccine, and in
the parvovirus vaccine. This benefit to animals is true of most medical advances that involve animal testing. If we make
improvements in human medicine, these concepts often filter down and are applied in veterinary medicine in the form
of better medicines, vaccines, and surgical techniques that save animal lives every day.

Looking Forward

In order for the field of medical research to continue creating new approaches to fighting disease in humans , there
needs to be a shift in the general opinion towards animal research. Currently, much of the public has been influenced
strongly by highly publicized media campaigns by animal rights activists like PETA without knowing all of the facts . As
a consequence most of the general public is very much against animal research without understanding just how
essential it is. A new non-profit organization is needed to educate and change negative public perceptions about the use
of animals in medical research. Without this change in how society thinks about animal research, advances in medicine
may be suppressed to the point that human and animal lives may suffer for the lack of new medicines and therapies it
would cause.

Due to the overwhelming success that groups like PETA have had in getting their message out to the public, we plan to
adopt a similar model to share our ideas. We propose to form a new non-profit organization called The Society for the
Welfare of Research Animals (SWRA). This animal welfare based non-profit organization would focus on disseminating
facts and knowledge about the positive aspects of animal research, and what can be done to continuously improve the
wellbeing of the animals involved. As a non-profit, we would run on donations and volunteer work. We will utilize
celebrity endorsement and media campaigns to spread knowledge about the conditions that animals used in research
are living in. In this vein, we would like the celebrities we work with to appear on popular talk shows or news stations,
on billboards, and in magazine advertisement. While our organization is modeled after PETA’s success, we would avoid
the extremism and propaganda they often employ to influence the public opinion.

Additionally, we would encourage open discussion with prominent members of the research community about what
techniques they are using to test on animals, and what they are doing to actively improve the lives of the animals that
they use. Many researchers feel that they can’t discuss their work with the public for fear of condemnation or even
physical harm, when in reality, the work that they do could potentially be applied to saving lives. In conjunction with
educating the public about animal research, we would like to assist in creating avenues by which researchers and the
public can openly communicate their ideas and concerns. If the public was more aware of what is really happening in
these labs, not only would it ease some of the fear of the unknown, but it would also hold researchers to a higher
standard of accountability for the welfare of the animals that they use.

We will also encourage involvement of the public by establishing campaigns to continually improve the legislation that
affords protections to animals used in research. We recognize that while animal research is necessary and often leads to
life-changing medical advancements, it’s not a perfect system. “The Guide” certainly sets standards of care for rodents,
but under the law there is still no legal accountability or government enforcement for the use of rodents. Better
accountability for rodents is an example of something that we could strive to change with the help of the public. We
would support the development of new legislation that would improve the quality of life of research animals and more
strongly enforce welfare practices without hampering the scientific process.

In conclusion, animal research is essential to the medical community for the development of new therapies, vaccines,
and drugs . Without it, we would be plunged back into the medical Dark Age that we experienced before the advent
of modern medicine . It’s easy to become complacent and forget that less than a century ago, we lived in a world
without antibiotics. Imagine if Penicillin had never been accidentally discovered and put to good use. Your family,
friends, and even you would be living in danger everyday of picking up the pathogen that ends your life. While we
take for granted the ability to go to the clinic and get a bottle of antibiotics and be on our way, it wasn’t always the case.
With resistance rapidly growing in microbes and outpacing even our best drugs , we need to support animal testing
now more than ever . There will be a day when our antibiotics stop working, and we will need to rely on the scientific
community to find a new way to save lives, and they can only do this with the help of animal models. Animal research
saves lives every single day through the advancements that is has given rise to. So in closing, remember to thank a
mouse.

AT: External evaluators

1. Animals spill over.
Yang ’19 [Eun Suk; Patent Attorney at KOTRA New York IP-DESK; 5/6/19; “Predicting the Legal Personhood of AI
through the Fate of Two Chimpanzees in the Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery”;
https://lawforbusiness.usc.edu/predicting-the-legal-personhood-of-ai-through-the-fate-of-two-chimpanzees-in-the-
matter-of-nonhuman-rights-project-inc-v-lavery/; USC Gould Business Law Digest]
Whether the artificial robots could be, and should be, considered “human” or “alive” is certainly beyond the scope of
this article,[10] but the courts will look to its legal precedents in resolving novel legal issues. The New York court
decision in Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery in 2017suggested that the idea that recognizing AI
humanoids as legal persons may surprisingly be a possibility.[11]

In Lavery, the petition argued that habeas corpus rights afforded to “persons” should be granted to chimpanzees,
named “Tommy” and “Kiko.” The petitioner sought to expand “the common-law definition of ‘person’ in order to
afford legal rights to an animal.”[12] However, the Supreme Court of the State of New York rejected this claim, finding
that “although the dispositive inquiry is whether chimpanzees are entitled to the right to be free from bodily restraint
such that they may be deemed ‘persons’ subject to the benefits of habeas corpus, legal personhood has consistently
been defined in terms of both rights and duties .”[13] Moreover, even in acknowledging that non-humans, such as
corporations, may be considered as legal persons, New York’s appellate court emphasized that the “asserted cognitive
and linguistic capabilities [of chimpanzees] . . . do not translate to a . . . capacity or ability, like humans, to bear legal
duties , or to be held legally accountable for their actions.”[14] In other words, in recognizing the current legal
framework, in which legal personhood are granted to certain non-human entities, the New York courts drew the line at
whether an “entity” could perform the legal duties and responsibilities that follow from the rights. Conversely, this
line implies that if the non-humans could perform legal duties , and thus are able to be held legally accountable,
Lavery suggests that the legal personhood may be conferred to that qualified non-human entity. Thus, although
Lavery failed to extend the legal limits of personhood with respect to habeas corpus rights to chimpanzees, the decision
leaves open the possibility that the court could recognize legal personhood by a non-human entity as long as it is
capable of performing legal duties and can be held accountable. AI is already performing legal duties and has
encroached on the jobs of paralegals and consultants in the legal industry.[15] If current technology could allow AIs to
operate vehicles and solve complex problems in real-time, it is possible that a humanoid AI could autonomously
navigate the legal system and its proceedings in the future.

The issue on whether AI can be granted legal status may be contingent on the protections and privileges granted to
pets . Many pet owners can attest to the intensely strong bond that humans can develop with pets and how this bond
may translate to receiving an actual inheritance.[16] For instance, some pets have inherited large fortunes amounting to
hundreds of millions of dollars.[17] Notwithstanding these high profile cases, studies have identified numerous legal
cases in the United States and around the world that involve pet owners leaving their pets with potential
inheritances.[18] However, animals are not legal persons and the legal system currently allows inheritance to pass only
to “closest relatives by blood, adoption, or marriage.”[19] Thus, the “traditional” family framework does not consider
any entity, human or non-human, or persons outside of legally recognized relationships. [20] As a result, some pet
owners have started a pet trust as only a temporary measure.[21] But these trusts have faced issues, including
enforceability and equitability.[22] Nevertheless, laws in some states have begun to recognize animals as something
more than simple property, suggesting expansion of the traditional family framework. Animal Legal Defense Fund notes
that “[a]s of 2017, [pets] can also be the beneficiaries of legally enforceable trusts in all 50 states. Nearly two-thirds of
states allow companion animals to be included in domestic violence protection orders.”[23] In addition, certain state
legislatures, such as Vermont, are beginning to take the well-being of the animals into consideration when determining
their custody in divorce proceedings.[24] Thus, although pets have not received the status of legal persons, some
states are acknowledging that people treat pets like a human family member by providing certain protections and
privileges . Extrapolating increasing recognition of protections and privileges of animals with special relationship to
humans, human relationships with AI in the future may also warrant similar protections and privileges.

Conclusion

Whether to grant legal personhood to advanced humanoid AI in the future may seem like an impossible challenge .
While the legal precedents and contemporary environment may seem unfavorable to that possibility, a nuanced reading
of Lavery—one of the latest case—suggests that the courts are leaving the door open to the possibility that non-
humans—inducing AI—capable of autonomous action and accepting responsibility could one day be granted legal
personhood , regardless of their origins.

2. AI lawmakers will model animal rights because they have appeals to human protection.
Chessman, 18 – Patent litigation law @ DLA Piper
(Chessman, Christian, Not Quite Human: Artificial Intelligence, Animals, and the Regulation of Sentient Property (June
29, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3200802 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3200802)//Neo

The values embedded in animal rights law can shed light on the values that AI regulation should seek to protect. The
following Sections consider a number of animal rights law values, briefly describe how each value is applied to
nonhuman animals, and then articulate how those values might be relevant to an analysis of protections for AI.

Though it may initially seem surprising, the overwhelming majority of animal rights laws exist to protect humans
rather than the animals themselves.54 In a thoughtful piece examining the history of animal rights law in the United
States, Professor Luis E. Chiesa explains that laws regulating animals broadly fit into five purposes: “(1) protection of
property, (2) protection against the infliction of emotional harm to those who have ties to the injured animal, (3)
prevention of future harm to humans, (4) enforcement of a moral principle, and (5) protection of the animals
themselves.”55 Notably, four out of those five purposes are oriented around the impact that harming animals has on
humans. Only the fifth principle involves animals, and thus implicates the thorny philosophical debates about the merits
of protecting animals as such.

The human-oriented nature of animal rights law presents a crucial advantage over approaching the question of animal
rights (and AI rights) abstractly, because it limits the role of uncertainty about the innate status of animals (and AI). By
orienting protections around the harms to humans, animal rights law obviates the need to determine an animal’s
intrinsic moral or legal status. To put it pointedly, lawmakers might ban torturing puppies because they think it turns
people into sociopaths,56 regardless of whether puppies ought not be tortured because of their inherent value. And the
functional result—here, the protection of puppies—is largely the same.57

Similarly, lawmakers might ban sexually torturing AIs that simulate children, regardless of the inherent value of the AI,
because of concerns about how that antisocial behavior might spill over to humans.

AT: No slippery slope

1. AI can only be rendered safe through confinement. Aff causing a disjunctive complex of
existential threats.
–––DSA = Decisive Strategic Advantage – defined by Bostrom (2014, p. 78) as “a level of technological and other
advantages sufficient to enable [an AI] to achieve complete world domination”

–––MSA = Major Strategic Advantage – which we will define as “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient
to pose a catastrophic risk to human society”.

Kaj Sotala 18, Foundational Research Institute, “Disjunctive scenarios of catastrophic AI Risk,” Chapter in Artificial
Intelligence Safety And Security (Roman Yampolskiy, ed.), CRC Press, 2018,
https://kajsotala.fi/assets/2017/11/Disjunctive–scenarios.pdf

This chapter seeks to provide a broad look at the various ways in which the development of sophisticated AI could lead
to it becoming powerful enough to cause a catastrophe. In particular, this chapter seeks to focus on the way that various
risks are disjunctive —on how there are multiple different ways by which things could go wrong, any one of which
could lead to disaster. In so doing, the chapter seeks to expand on existing work (T. Barrett & Baum 2017a) which has
begun applying established risk analysis methodologies into the AI safety field (T. Barrett & Baum 2017b).
Our focus is on AI advanced enough to count as an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, rather than risks from “narrow
AI”, such as technological unemployment (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011). However, it should be noted that some of
the risks discussed—in particular, crucial capabilities related to narrow domains (see section 4.3)—could arise
anywhere on the path from narrow AI systems to superintelligence.

The intent is not to deny or minimize the various positive aspects which could also result from the creation of AI, or to
suggest that AI development should not be pursued. Rather, the intent is to enable the realization of AI’s positive
potential, in the same manner that developing a better understanding of vulnerabilities related to computer security
allows for the creation of safe and secure computer systems.

2. Enablers of catastrophe

Most arguments for risks from AI arise from the conjunction of two claims (Yudkowsky 2008, Bostrom 2014, Sotala &
Yampolskiy 2015), the capability claim and the value claim. This chapter is focused on examining various ways by which
the capability claim could become true. A model of the value claim is outside the scope of this chapter, but see T. Barrett
& Baum (2017a) for one.

1. The capability claim: AI can become capable enough to potentially inflict major damage to human well–
being

2. The value claim: AI may act according to values which are not aligned with those of humanity , and in doing
so cause considerable harm

These claims can be further broken down. An existing model of them is the ASI–PATH model (T. Barrett & Baum 2017a)
(Figure 1). ASI–PATH focuses on analyzing pathways by which an AI may cause a catastrophe by becoming
superintelligent via recursive self–improvement, with humans being unable to prevent it from taking unsafe actions.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The ASI–PATH model uses fault diagram conventions, with the undesired event (AI catastrophe) as the top node,
followed by two nodes which would enable the top node if they were both true. These are the “ASI actions are unsafe”
node, which corresponds to the value claim, and the “AI takes off, resulting in [Artificial Super–Intelligence] with
[Decisive Strategic Advantage]” node, which corresponds to a specific form of the capability claim. This chapter seeks to
expand upon ASI–PATH by considering more general forms of the capability claim.

The capability claim is often formulated as the possibility of an AI achieving a decisive strategic advantage (DSA). While
the notion of a DSA has been implicit in many previous works, the concept was first explicitly defined by Bostrom (2014,
p. 78) as “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable [an AI] to achieve complete world
domination”.

However, assuming that an AI will achieve a DSA seems like an unnecessarily strong form of the capability claim, as
an AI could cause a catastrophe regardless . For instance, consider a scenario where an AI launches an attack
calculated to destroy human civilization. If the AI was successful in destroying humanity or large parts of it, but the AI
itself was also destroyed in the process, this would not count as a DSA as originally defined. Yet, it seems hard to
deny that this outcome should nonetheless count as a catastrophe .

Because of this, the present chapter focuses on situations where an AI achieves (at least) a major strategic advantage
(MSA), which we will define as “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to pose a catastrophic risk to
human society”. A catastrophic risk is one that might inflict serious damage to human well–being on a global scale and
cause ten million or more fatalities (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008).

Besides the obvious reasons for wanting to avoid an AI–caused catastrophic risk, we note that wide–scale destruction
may contribute to global turbulence (Bostrom et al. 2016), a situation in which existing institutions are challenged ,
and coordination and long–term planning become more difficult. Global turbulence could then contribute to another
out–of–control AI project failing even more catastrophically and causing even more damage . Thus, what was
originally only a catastrophic risk may contribute to the development of further existential (Bostrom 2002, 2013;
Sotala & Gloor, in preparation) risks.

Much of the existing literature on AI safety has focused on examining scenarios where the AI achieves a DSA and
analyzing the prerequisites for this. This is in many respects a sensible strategy, since if we are capable of handling an AI
that could achieve a DSA we are most likely also capable of handling an AI that could achieve an MSA; assuming a more
powerful AI is the conservative assumption (Yudkowsky 2001). Yet this strategy has the downside of possibly giving the
impression of much of AI safety analysis being irrelevant if one finds the possibility of an AI acquiring a DSA to be
exceedingly unlikely. Some defenses might also be sufficient for preventing an AI from acquiring a DSA, without being
sufficient for preventing it from getting an MSA.

3. When would a Strategic Advantage be acted upon?

An AI having the capability to inflict major damage on human well–being mostly matters if it has a motive to do so.
(There is also the possibility of the AI intending to cooperate with humanity, but causing damage by accident; this is
beyond the scope of the present analysis.) While a full analysis of the value claim is outside the scope of this chapter, it
cannot be entirely distinguished from the capability claim, as an AI’s values also affect the threshold of capability at
which it is rational for it to act against humanity. As we will discuss, some values and situations make it more likely for
the AI to take hostile action even when it is less capable.

Two main reasons for an AI to take action that caused damage to humanity would be:

● It had goals which neglected human well–being, and it would damage humanity in the pursuit of this goal,
such as by disassembling human cities for their raw materials ; “the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you,
but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else" (Yudkowsky 2008).

● It expected humans to take action against it and prevent it from fulfilling its goals, in which case defending
itself—or launching a preemptive attack —would be a rational course of action, as this would allow it to
actually carry out its goals (Omohundro 2007, 2008). This might be the case even if the AI had a goal which did
take elements of human well–being into account if the AI had reason to believe that humans would
nonetheless object to this goal being carried out . 4

The exact goals that an AI has, influence the level of capability that it needs for human–hostile actions to be a rational
strategy. An AI which cares mainly about some narrow goal may be willing to destroy human civilization in order to
make sure that a potential threat to it is eliminated. This ensures that it can go on pursuing its goal unimpeded.
However, an AI which was programmed to maximize something like the “happiness of currently–living humans” may be
much less willing to risk substantial human deaths . This would force it to focus on less 5 destructive takeover methods,
potentially requiring more sophisticated abilities.

In effect, the AI’s values determine the level of capability that it needs to have for hostile action to be a viable strategy. A
simplified model (Shulman 2010) is that an AI that believes itself having probability P of being successful if it initiates
aggression and to have an expected utility EU(Success) if successful, EU(Failure) if it fails, and EU(Cooperation) if it
desists from aggression and continues to cooperate, will rationally initiate aggression when

P*EU(Success) + (1–P)*EU(Failure) > EU(Cooperation).

This might be taken to suggest that an AI would primarily launch an attack if it had, or thought it could acquire, a DSA
and could thus establish dominion over humans. However, even an AI with only an MSA might take hostile action,
employing measures such as extortion and the threat of more limited damage in order to acquire more resources or
shift the world in a more favorable direction. Among other possibilities, this could happen:
 ● if the AI had been released to act autonomously and believed that it could not be tracked down (see
sections 5.1—5.2.5 for a discussion of ways in which an AI might either escape or be voluntarily released by its
creators)

● if the AI had allies which would protect it from retaliation (see section 4.3. for a discussion of social
manipulation abilities and sections 5.2.–5.2.6. for ways by which an autonomous AI might have human allies)

● if the AI controlled a human organization which could not be attacked without enormous collateral damage
(see sections 4.2. and 5.2.6. for an AI acquiring control of a human organization)

● if there were already more powerful AI systems taking actions and the AI believed itself to be a low priority for
retaliation (see section 6 for discussion of multiple AIs).
Regardless of the scale of the aggression, the AI’s behavior is also affected by various other situational considerations. For instance, an AI might be disinclined to cause damage because it thought there would be too much collateral damage to the things it valued, because it did not consider itself capable of surviving the resulting
retaliation, or because it estimated that the resulting damage on infrastructure also deprived it of the resources (such as electricity) that it needed in order to survive.

Attacks also differ in the extent to which they can be selectively targeted. Traditional firearms can be aimed selectively, whereas pandemics potentially threaten all the members of a species. To the extent that the AI needs to rely on the human economy to produce resources that it needs to survive, attacks threatening the
economy also threaten the AI’s resources. These resources are in a sense shared between the AI and humanity, so any attacks which cause indiscriminate damage on those resources are dangerous for both. The more the AI can design attacks which selectively deprive resources from its opponents, the lower the threshold it has for
using them. More advanced capabilities at rebuilding infrastructure would also allow an AI to launch a more indiscriminate attack. An AI that was capable of building more advanced infrastructure than the existing one might also disregard damage to the current infrastructure, if it was planning to demolish most of the existing one
anyway.

The balance of these calculations could be shifted if the AI thought itself in danger of being destroyed by humans even though it was cooperating (lowering the expected utility of cooperation). Self–preservation is an instrumental goal for many different values, because an agent that exists is better capable of furthering most values
than an agent which does not exist (Omohundro 2007, 2008, Bostrom 2012) . An AI which was in an imminent danger of being 6 destroyed could rationally launch a counterattack, even risking large amounts of destruction, as long as it estimated that the expected value of a scenario where the counterattack enabled it to survive and
further its values outweighed the damage caused by the counterattack. This would be a particularly compelling motivator if the AI had idiosyncratic values which it thought very unlikely to be promoted by other agents. If there were multiple AI projects in existence, and the AI believed that one of the other projects could acquire a
DSA first, it would have a reason to risk an earlier attack (see section 6 for discussion of multiple AIs). There have also been proposals for designing an AI’s values in ways which explicitly make it less worthwhile to act in hostile ways . 7

The preceding analysis assumes that the AI chooses its actions rationally. Irrationality might seem like it would prevent an AI from becoming very capable, but like humans, an AI might be rational in some respects while being irrational in others. It could also be rational for the AI to precommit to act in seemingly irrational ways, such
as by choosing to irrationally ignore threats in order to make it less profitable for others to try to threaten it (Parfit 1984, sect. 5). The main consideration that emerges from potential irrationality is that one cannot simply rely on the AI not causing damage, even if that would be a rational way for it to behave. Of course, irrationality
could also cause an AI to avoid doing damage in a situation where it was rational for it to do so.

[TABLE 1 OMITTED]
4. Enablers of catastrophic capability

We will consider four rough scenarios that could give an AI either a DSA or an MSA: individual takeoff scenarios (with three main subtypes), collective takeoff scenarios, scenarios where power slowly shifts over to AI systems, and scenarios in which an AI being good enough at some crucial capability gives it an MSA/DSA.

The likelihood of each of these either succeeding or failing is also affected by how cooperative humans are. While a possible scenario is one where an AI is entirely on its own and has to prevent its creators from shutting it down, there are also a variety of possible scenarios (discussed in Section 5) where the AI has the partial or full
cooperation of its creators, at least up to a certain point. These would affect the probability of each of the below scenarios coming true; a scenario in which a prototype AI has to avoid its programmers from shutting it down, is very different from one where the programmers are certain of it being safe and voluntarily help it undergo
a takeoff, especially if they also have the resources of a major corporation or nation–state at their disposal.

4.1. DSA enablers: takeoff scenarios

A “takeoff” (Bugaj & Goertzel 2007) is a process by which an AI becomes much more capable than humanity. In a soft takeoff, this happens on a time scale that allows ongoing human interaction, whereas in a hard takeoff, there will be some inflection point after which the AI will increase in capability very quickly, breaking out of
effective human control.

It is worth noting that a hard takeoff does not presuppose that an AI becomes very capable immediately after being created (however the moment of its creation is defined). A hard takeoff scenario may include an extended period of gradual improvement until some key level of capability is met, after which the AI undergoes a rapid
increase in its capabilities.

Many previous discussions (e.g. Yudkowsky 2008, Bostrom 2014, Sotala 2016) have focused on analyzing the possibility of a hard takeoff. While this is not the only possible scenario by which an AI might become capable, it is the one that leaves the least possibility to fix anything that goes wrong.

Bearing in mind that an excessive focus on hard takeoff scenarios may hide the fact that a hard takeoff may not be necessary for an AI to achieve either an MSA or a DSA, we will first consider hard takeoff scenarios and then other capability enablers.

4.1.1. DSA enabler: Individual takeoff

An “individual takeoff” is one where a single AI manages to become so powerful as to entirely dominate humanity. Three rough paths for this have been proposed in the literature: a hardware overhang (“more AI” ), a speed explosion (“faster AI”), and an intelligence explosion (“smarter AI”) (Sotala & Yampolskiy 2015); Bostrom
(2014) discusses these under the terms collective superintelligence, speed superintelligence, and quality superintelligence, respectively. It should be noted that these paths are by no means mutually exclusive: on the contrary, one of them happening may enable another also to happen.

4.1.1.1. Hardware overhang.

In a hardware overhang scenario (Yudkowsky 2008b, Shulman & Sandberg 2010), hardware develops faster than software, so that we’ll have computers with more computing power than the human brain does, but no way of making effective use of all that power. If someone then developed an algorithm for general intelligence that
could make effective use of that hardware, we might suddenly have an abundance of cheap hardware that could be used for running thousands or millions of AIs. These AIs might or might not be superintelligent, but the sheer number of them would allow them to carry out coordinated operations on a massive scale. If a single AI
took advantage of this potential to produce large numbers of copies or subagents of itself, it would allow for an individual takeoff . Otherwise this would make for a collective takeoff, 9 discussed below.

A hardware overhang may effectively happen even if AI was hardware–constrained at first: the first AIs may require large amounts of hardware, with further optimizations quickly bringing the hardware requirements down. Looking at recent progress in AI, the initial approach for learning Atari 2600 games (Mnih et al. 2015) used
specialized hardware in the form of a GPU, but an alternative approach was released only a year later which used a standard CPU and achieved better results using a shorter training time (Mnih et al. 2016). In addition to suggesting that software optimizations could rapidly increase the amount of AIs that could be run, the fact that
speed and performance also improved highlights the possibility of a hardware overhang scenario also contributing to the speed explosion and intelligence explosion scenarios, below.

4.1.1.2. Speed explosion.

In a speed explosion (Solomonoff 1985; Yudkowsky 1996; Chalmers 2010) scenario, intelligent machines design increasingly faster machines. A hardware overhang might contribute to a speed explosion, but is not required for it. An AI running at the pace of a human could develop a second generation of hardware on which it could
run at a rate faster than human thought. It would then require a shorter time to develop a third generation of hardware, allowing it to run faster than on the previous generation, and so on. At some point, the process would hit physical limits and stop, but by that time AIs might come to accomplish most tasks at far faster rates than
humans, thereby achieving dominance. In principle, the same process could also be achieved via improved software, as discussed above.

The extent to which the AI needs humans in order to produce better hardware will limit the pace of the speed explosion, so a rapid speed explosion requires the ability to automate a large proportion of the hardware manufacturing process. However, this kind of automation may already be achieved by the time that AI is developed.
The more automation there is, the faster an AI takeover can happen.

If the level of security for the hardware is good, then speed explosion scenarios in which the AI breaks into manufacturing systems and seizes control of them become less likely. On the other hand, there are possible paths (discussed in Section 5) in which the AI is given legitimate control to various resources. Having good security
for automated factories does not help if the AI is the one running them, or if it can rent access to them on the open market and has sufficient money for doing so.

A speed explosion could also contribute to hardware overhang and an intelligence explosion by allowing for more efficient or otherwise better algorithms to be found in a shorter time.

4.1.1.3. Intelligence explosion.

In an intelligence explosion (Good 1965; Chalmers 2010; Bostrom 2014), an AI figures out how to create a qualitatively smarter AI and that smarter AI uses its increased intelligence to create still more intelligent AIs, and so on, such that the intelligence of humankind is left far behind and the machines achieve dominance.

For many domains, there exist limits to prediction from the combinatorial explosions that follow from attempting to forecast increasingly into the future; and in e.g. weather modeling, forecasters can only access a limited amount of initial observations relative to the weather system’s degrees of freedom (Buizza 2002). However,
even if a superintelligent AI was unable to predict every future event accurately, it could still react to the event and predict its likely consequences better than humans could. Tetlock & Gardner (2015) review and discuss the ability of certain human forecasters ("superforecasters") to predict world events with considerable accuracy;
on unpredictable "black swan" (Taleb 2007) events, they write

‘We may have no evidence that superforecasters can foresee events like those of September 11, 2001, but we do have a warehouse of evidence that they can forecast questions like: Will the United States threaten military action if the Taliban don’t hand over Osama bin Laden? Will the Taliban comply? Will
bin Laden flee Afghanistan prior to the invasion? To the extent that such forecasts can anticipate the consequences of events like 9/11, and these consequences make a black swan what it is, we can forecast black swans.’

Sotala (2017), based on a review of the literature on human expertise and intelligence, finds that in humans, expertise is based on developing mental representations which allow experts to understand different situations and either instantly know the appropriate action for a given situation, or carry out a mental simulation of how
a situation might develop and what should be done in response. Such expertise is enabled by a combination of two subabilities, pattern recognition and mental simulation.

Sotala (2017) argues that an AI could improve on both subabilities. Superhuman mental simulation ability could be achieved by a combination of running larger simulations taking more factors into account, and also by having several streams of attention which could investigate multiple alternatives in parallel, exploring many
different perspectives and causal factors at once. Running accurate mental simulations would also require good mental representations to form the basic building blocks of the simulations. Among humans, there are cognitive differences which allow some people to learn and acquire accurate mental representations faster than
others, and these seem to come down to factors such as working memory capacity, attention control, and long–term memory. These might be improved upon via a combination of hardware improvements and theoretical computer science. In humans, improvements in intelligence seem to provide further benefits across the whole
documented range of intelligence differences, and it seems likely that various evolutionary constraints have bottlenecked human intelligence far below what might be the theoretical maximum.

With regard to limits on prediction from the inherent uncertainty of the world, Sotala (2017) acknowledges the existence of such limits, but argues that:
 ... it looks that even though an AI system couldn’t make a single superplan for world conquest right from the beginning, it could still have a superhuman ability to adapt and learn from changing and novel situations, and react to those faster than its human adversaries. As an analogy, experts playing most
games can't precompute a winning strategy right from the first move either, but they can still react and adapt to the game's evolving situation better than a novice can, enabling them to win.

An intelligence explosion could also contribute to a speed explosion and to hardware overhang, if the AI’s increased intelligence enabled it to find algorithms which were most efficient in terms of enabling more AI systems to be run with the same hardware (hardware overhang), or allowing them to be run faster (speed explosion).

4.1.2. DSA enabler: Collective takeoff with trading AIs

Vinding (2016; see also Hanson & Yudkowsky 2013) argues that much of seemingly–individual human intelligence is in fact based on being able to tap into the distributed resources, both material and cognitive, of all of humanity. Thus, it may be misguided to focus on the point when AIs achieve human–level intelligence, as
collective intelligence is more important than individual intelligence. The easiest way for AIs to achieve a level of capability on par with humans would be to collaborate with human society and use its resources peacefully.

Similarly, Hall (2008) notes that even when a single AI is doing self–improvement (such as by developing better cognitive science models to improve its software), the rest of the economy is also developing better such models. Thus it’s better for the AI to focus on improving at whatever thing it is best at, and keep trading with the
rest of the economy to buy the things that the rest of the economy is better at improving.

However, Hall notes that there could still be a hard takeoff, once enough AIs were networked together: AIs that think faster than humans are likely to be able to communicate with each other, and share insights, much faster than they can communicate with humans. As a result, it would always be better for AIs to trade and
collaborate with each other than with humans. The size of the AI economy could grow quite quickly, with Hall suggesting a scenario that goes “from [...] 30,000 human equivalents at the start, to approximately 5 billion human equivalents a decade later”. Thus, even if no single AI could achieve a DSA by itself, a community of them
could collectively achieve one, as that community developed to be capable of everything that humans were capable of .

4.2. DSA/MSA enabler: power gradually shifting to AIs

The historical trend has been to automate everything that can be automated, both to reduce costs and because machines can do things better than humans can. Any kind of a business could potentially run better if it were run by a mind that had been custom–built for running the business—up to and including the replacement of
all the workers with one or more with such minds. An AI can think faster and smarter, deal with more information at once, and work for a unified purpose rather than have its efficiency weakened by the kinds of office politics that plague any large organization. Some estimates already suggest that half of the tasks that people are
paid to do are susceptible to being automated using techniques from modern–day machine learning and robotics, even without postulating AIs with general intelligence (Frey & Osborne 2013, Manyika et al. 2017).

The trend towards automation has been going on throughout history, doesn’t show any signs of stopping, and inherently involves giving the AI systems whatever agency they need in order to run the company better. There is a risk that AI systems that were initially simple and of limited intelligence would gradually gain increasing
power and responsibilities as they learned and were upgraded, until large parts of society were under AI control.

4.3. MSA enabler: Crucial capabilities

For discussing MSAs, a key question is the capability threshold for inflicting catastrophic damage. An AI could be a catastrophic risk if its offensive capabilities in some crucial domain were sufficient to overwhelm existing defenses.

As we briefly discussed in section 3, assuming that the AI was rational, choosing to cause such damage would require a sensible motive; but as with humans, there could be a range of motives that would make hostile action a reasonable strategy, such as extortion, the desire to assist an ally, or mounting a first strike against another
AI or group which might otherwise be expected to obtain a DSA. Depending on the goals and on whether the AI had allies, conducting a follow–up to an attack enabled by crucial capabilities might require additional capabilities, such as rebuilding after destroying key infrastructure.

It is important to notice that causing catastrophic damage probably does not even require superhuman capabilities
(Torres 2016a; 2016b, chap. 4). For instance, it seems possible that a sufficiently determined human attacker could
already cause major damage on a society via electronic warfare. Although there have not yet been cyberattacks that
would have been reported to directly cause deaths, several have caused physical damage or disruption to emergency
services. In May of 2017, the “WannaCry” ransomware worm was reported to have infected over 230,000 computers in
over 150 countries (Ehrenfeld 2017), causing disruption to crucial services such as healthcare (Gayle et al. 2017). In
2016, three substations in the Ukrainian power grid were reported to have been disconnected by a malware attack,
leaving about half of the homes in a region with 1.3 million inhabitants temporarily without electricity (Goodin 2016). A
previous cyberweapon, Stuxnet, also had a physical target in the form of industrial centrifuges, which it managed to
successfully damage (Chen & Abu–Nimeh 2011). Various studies have found enormous numbers of industrial control
systems, controlling operations at installations such as banks and hospitals , exposed directly to the Internet with no
protection (Kiravuo et al. 2015).

The US and Russian governments could probably already wipe out most of humanity using nuclear weapons . The
Soviet Union also had an extensive biological warfare program, with an annualized production capability of 90–100
tons of weaponized smallpox, as well as having genetically engineered diseases to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics
(USAMRIID 2014), which could have caused enormous death tolls if used. The development of genetic engineering and
synthetic biology have also enabled the creation of biological agents far more deadly than what could ever evolve
naturally (ibid, p. 150–153). That none of these scenarios has come true so far is due to the values of the humans in
key positions, not because inflicting massive damage would inherently require superhuman capability .

In the domain of social manipulation , modern–day machine learning has been used to create predictions based on
people’s Facebook “likes” that are more accurate than the predictions made by their friends using a personality
questionnaire (Youyou et al. 2015), and “likes” have also been used to accurately predict private traits such as sexual
orientation (Kosinski et al. 2013). Some reports in the popular press have alleged that the marketing company
Cambridge Analytica’s use of AI–driven marketing played a major role in the United States 2016 presidential election and
the United Kingdom’s 2016 European Union membership referendum (Grassegger & Krogerus 2017). While the truth of
this claim remains an open question, and has been called into question (Taggart 2017), it is suggest ive of the kind of
power that AI capable of more sophisticated social modeling and manipulation might have, raising the possibility of a
world where the outcomes of national elections were decided by AI systems .

In general, some plausible capabilities which might enable an MSA include biological warfare (developing and releasing
biological plagues), cyberwarfare (attacking systems running key infrastructure), and social manipulation (persuading
sufficiently many humans to do the AI’s will; even just a single human could cause catastrophic damage , if that human
was e.g. the head of a state). Note that similarly as with takeoff enablers, having one capability may contribute to
others: for example, an AI capable of social manipulation may leverage it to find collaborators capable in the other
domains, and cyberwarfare may yield compromising information which assists in blackmailing people or collecting
information about human behavior.

4.4. Putting DSA/MSA enablers together

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The above figure (Figure 2) summarizes the different pathways to catastrophe discussed above. Any one of a speed
explosion, intelligence explosion, or hardware overhang could contribute to an individual takeoff , with a single AI
achieving immense capability. A hardware overhang could also contribute to a collective takeoff, with the spare
hardware capability allowing large amounts of AI systems to be created in a short time, those systems then beginning to
trade with each other and soon collectively outpacing humanity. The “trading AIs” node, another enabler of a collective
takeoff, represents a scenario which is otherwise similar but in which there is no hardware overhang, and where the
different AIs are built over a longer period, until they have reached the level of capability necessary for a collective
takeoff. Either form of takeoff could give AIs a DSA. AIs could also achieve a DSA if humans voluntarily gave them enough
power.

If AIs had been given some amount of power, but not enough to achieve a DSA, they could still achieve an MSA. Also,
even a single AI which was not powerful enough to achieve a DSA could achieve an MSA if it was sufficiently capable at
some crucial offensive capability.

For an AI to pose a threat to humanity , it needs to have a way of affect ing the world and causing a catastrophe. A
common proposal for limiting the AI ’s power is to attempt to somehow restrict the AI’s ability to communicate with
and influence the world, generally known as “confinement” or “AI boxing ” (Chalmers 2010, Armstrong et al. 2012,
Yampolskiy 2012, Bostrom 2014).

Challenges to confinement are two–fold. First, there is the technical challenge of confining the AI in such a way that it is
unable to escape, but is still capable of providing useful information. Additionally, confinement involves a social
dimension, where decision–makers may have various incentives to relax the confinement safeguards or even release the
AI entirely, even if it was technically possible to keep it contained (Sotala & Yampolskiy 2015). For confinement to be
successful, both the technical and social requirements have to be met.

5.1. The technical challenge

A common response is that a sufficiently intelligent AI will somehow figure out a way to escape, either by social
engineering or by finding an exploitable weakness in the physical security arrangements. This possibility has been
extensively discussed in a number of papers, including Chalmers (2012) and Armstrong, Sandberg & Bostrom (2012).
Writers have generally been cautious about making strong claims of our ability to keep a mind much smarter than
ourselves contained against its will. However, with cautious design, it may still be possible to design an AI combining
some internal motivation to stay contained, with a number of external safeguards monitoring the AI.

5.2. The social challenge

AI confinement assumes that the people building it, and the people that they are responsible to, are all motivated to
actually keep the AI confined. If a group of cautious researchers builds and successfully contains their AI, this may be of
limited benefit if another group later builds an AI that is intentionally set free . Reasons for releasing an AI may include
i) economic benefit or competitive pressure, ii) ethical or philosophical reasons, iii) confidence in the AI’s safety, as well
as iv) desperate circumstances such as being otherwise close to death. We will discuss each in turn below.
5.2.1. Voluntarily released for economic benefit or competitive pressure

As discussed above under “power gradually shifting to AIs”, there is an economic incentive to deploy AI systems in control of corporations. This can happen in two forms: either by expanding the amount of control that already–existing systems have, or alternatively by upgrading existing systems or adding new ones with previously–
unseen capabilities. These two forms can blend into each other. If humans previously carried out some functions which are then given over to an upgraded AI which has become recently capable of doing them, this can increase the AI’s autonomy both by making it more powerful and by reducing the amount of humans that were
previously in the loop.

As a partial example, the US military is seeking to eventually transition to a state where the human operators of robot weapons are “on the loop” rather than “in the loop” (Wallach and Allen 2012). In other words, whereas a human was previously required to explicitly give the order before a robot was allowed to initiate possibly
lethal activity, in the future humans are meant to merely supervise the robot’s actions and interfere if something goes wrong. While this would allow the system to react faster, it would also limit the window that the human operators have for overriding any mistakes that the system makes. For a number of military systems, such as
automatic weapons defense systems designed to shoot down incoming missiles and rockets, the extent of human oversight is already limited to accepting or overriding a computer’s plan of actions in a matter of seconds, which may be too little to make a meaningful decision in practice (Human Rights Watch 2012).
Sparrow (2016) reviews three major reasons which incentivize major governments to move towards autonomous weapon systems and reduce human control:

1. Currently–existing remotely–piloted military “drones”, such as the U.S. Predator and Reaper, require a high amount of communications bandwidth. This limits the amount of drones that can be fielded at once, and makes them dependant on communications satellites which not every nation has, and which
can be jammed or targeted by enemies. A need to be in constant communication with remote operators also makes it impossible to create drone submarines, which need to maintain a communications blackout before and during combat. Making the drones autonomous and capable of acting without human
supervision would avoid all of these problems.

2. Particularly in air–to–air combat, victory may depend on making very quick decisions. Current air combat is already pushing against the limits of what the human nervous system can handle: further progress may be dependant on removing humans from the loop entirely.

3. Much of the routine operation of drones is very monotonous and boring, which is a major contributor to accidents. The training expenses, salaries, and other benefits of the drone operators are also major expenses for the militaries employing them.

Sparrow’s arguments are specific to the military domain, but they demonstrate the argument that "any broad domain involving high stakes, adversarial decision making, and a need to act rapidly is likely to become increasingly dominated by autonomous systems" (Sotala & Yampolskiy 2015). Similar arguments can be made in the
business domain: eliminating human employees to reduce costs from mistakes and salaries is something that companies would also be incentivized to do, and making a profit in the field of high–frequency trading already depends on outperforming other traders by fractions of a second. While currently–existing AI systems are not
powerful enough to cause global catastrophe, incentives such as these might drive an upgrading of their capabilities that eventually brought them to that point.

Absent sufficient regulation, there could be a “race to the bottom of human control” where state or business actors competed to reduce human control and increased the autonomy of their AI systems to obtain an edge over their competitors (see also Armstrong et al. 2013 for a simplified “race to the precipice” scenario). This
would be analogous to the “race to the bottom” in current politics, where government actors compete to deregulate or to lower taxes in order to retain or attract businesses.

AI systems being given more power and autonomy might be limited by the fact that doing this poses large risks for the actor if the AI malfunctions. In business, this limits the extent to which major, established companies might adopt AI–based control, but incentivizes startups to try to invest in autonomous AI in order to
outcompete the established players. In the field of algorithmic trading, AI systems are currently trusted with enormous sums of money despite the potential to make corresponding losses – in 2012, Knight Capital lost $440 million due to a glitch in their trading software (Popper 2012, Securities and Exchange Commission 2013). This
suggests that even if a malfunctioning AI could potentially cause major risks, some companies will still be inclined to invest in placing their business under autonomous AI control if the potential profit is large enough.

U.S. law already allows for the possibility of AIs being conferred a legal personality , by putting them in charge of a
limited liability company. A human may register an LLC , enter into an operating agreement specifying that the LLC will
take actions as determined by the AI, and then withdraw from the LLC (Bayern 2015). The result is an autonomously
acting legal personality with no human supervision or control . AI–controlled companies can also be created in various
non–U.S. jurisdictions; restrictions such as ones forbidding corporations from having no owners can largely be
circumvented by tricks such as having networks of corporations that own each other (LoPucki 2017). A possible startup
strategy would be for someone to develop a number of AI systems, give them some initial endowment of resources, and
then set them off in control of their own corporations . This would risk only the initial resources, while promising
whatever profits the corporation might earn if successful. To the extent that AI–controlled companies were successful
in undermining more established companies, they would pressure those companies to transfer control to autonomous
AI systems as well.

5.2.2. Voluntarily released for purposes of criminal profit or terrorism

LoPucki (2017) argues that if a human creates an autonomous agent with a general goal such as “ optimizing profit ”,
and that agent then independently decides to e.g. commit a crime for the sake of achieving the goal, prosecutors may
then be unable to convict the human for the crime and can at most prosecute for the lesser charge of reckless initiation.
LoPucki holds that this “accountability gap”, among other reasons, assures that humans will create AI–run
corporations.

Furthermore, LoPucki (2017) holds that such “algorithmic entities” could be created anonymously and that them
having a legal personality would give them a number of legal rights , such as being able to “buy and lease real
property, contract with legitimate businesses , open a bank account, sue to enforce its rights , or buy stuff on Amazon
and have it shipped ”. If an algorithmic entity was created for a purpose such as funding or carrying out acts of
terrorism , it would be free from social pressure or threats to human controllers:

In deciding to attempt a coup, bomb a restaurant, or assemble an armed group to attack a shopping center, a
human–controlled entity puts the lives of its human controllers at risk. The same decisions on behalf of an AE
risk nothing but the resources the AE spends in planning and execution. (LoPucki 2017)

While most terrorist groups would stop short of intentionally destroying the world, thus posing at most a catastrophic
risk, not all of them necessarily would. In particular, ecoterrorists who believe that humanity is a net harm to the planet,
and religious terrorists who believe that the world needs to be destroyed in order to be saved, could have an interest in
causing human extinction (Torres 2016, 2017, chap 4.).
5.2.3. Voluntarily released for aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical reasons

A few thinkers (such as Gunkel 2012) have raised the question of moral rights for machines, and not everyone necessarily agrees on AI confinement being ethically acceptable. The designer of a sophisticated AI might come to view it as something like their child, and feel that it deserved the right to act autonomously in society, free
of any external constraints.

5.2.4. Voluntarily released due to confidence in the AI’s safety

For a research team to keep an AI confined, they need to take seriously the possibility of it being dangerous. Current AI research doesn’t involve any confinement safeguards, as the researchers reasonably believe that their systems are nowhere near general intelligence yet. Many systems are also connected directly to the Internet.
Hopefully, safeguards will begin to be implemented once the researchers feel that their system might start having more general capability, but this will depend on the safety culture of the AI research community in general (Baum 2016), and the specific research group in particular. If a research group mistakenly believed that their
AI could not achieve dangerous levels of capability, they might not deploy sufficient safeguards for keeping it contained.

In addition to believing that the AI is insufficiently capable of being a threat, the researchers may also (correctly or incorrectly) believe that they have succeeded in making the AI aligned with human values, so that it will not have any motivation to harm humans.

5.2.5. Voluntarily released due to desperation

Miller (2012) points out that if a person was close to death, due to natural causes, being on the losing side of a war, or any other reason, they might turn even a potentially dangerous AGI system free. This would be a rational course of action as long as they primarily valued their own survival and thought that even a small chance of
the AGI saving their life was better than a near–certain death.

5.2.6. The AI remains contained, but ends up effectively in control anyway

Even if humans were technically kept in the loop, they might not have the time, opportunity, motivation, intelligence, or confidence to verify the advice given by an AI. This would particularly be the case after the AI had functioned for a while, and established a reputation as trustworthy. It may become common practice to act
automatically on the AI’s recommendations, and it may become increasingly difficult to challenge the ‘authority’ of the recommendations. Eventually, the AI may in effect begin to dictate decisions (Friedman and Kahn 1992).

Likewise, Bostrom and Yudkowsky (2011) point out that modern bureaucrats often follow established procedures to the letter, rather than exercising their own judgment and allowing themselves to be blamed for any mistakes that follow. Dutifully following all the recommendations of an AI system would be another way of
avoiding blame.

O’Neil (2016) documents a number of situations in which modern–day machine learning is used to make substantive decisions, even though the exact models behind those decisions may be trade secrets or otherwise hidden from outside critique. Among other examples, such models have been used to fire school teachers that the
systems classified as underperforming and give harsher sentences to criminals that a model predicted to have a high risk of reoffending. In some cases, people have been skeptical of the results of the systems, and even identified plausible reasons why their results might be wrong, but still went along with their authority as long as it
could not be definitely shown that the models were erroneous.

In the military domain, Wallach and Allen (2012) note the existence of robots which attempt to automatically detect the locations of hostile snipers and to point them out to soldiers. To the extent that these soldiers have come to trust the robots, they could be seen as carrying out the robots’ orders. Eventually, equipping the robot
with its own weapons would merely dispense with the formality of needing to have a human to pull the trigger.

Figure 3 summarizes the different ways in which an AI may become free to act autonomously.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
6. Notes on single vs. multiple AIs

Many analyses have focused on the case of there only existing a single AI. A scenario in which only a single AI was relevant could plausibly happen if

1) the first AI to be created achieved a DSA very quickly after it was created;

2) some research group pulled considerably ahead of all competitors in developing AI, and was able to maintain this advantage for an extended time

For the purposes of this analysis, a scenario where there are many copies of a single AI, all pursuing the same goals, counts as one with a single AI. The same is true if a single AI creates more specialized “worker AIs” for carrying out some more narrow purpose that nonetheless serves its primary goals.

Of the two possibilities above, possibility #2 would seem relatively unlikely to persist for more than a few years at most, given the current fierce competition in the AI scene. Whereas a single company could conceivably achieve a major lead in a rare niche with little competition, this seems unlikely to be the case for AI.

A possible exception might be if a company managed to monopolize the domain entirely, or if it had development resources that few others did. For example, companies such as Google and Facebook currently have access to vastly larger datasets than most other corporate or academic actors. In contemporary machine learning,
large datasets combined with simple models tend to produce better results than small datasets and more sophisticated models (Halevy et al. 2009); Goodfellow et al. (2016, chap 1) note that as a rule of thumb, a deep learning algorithm requires a dataset of at least 10 million labeled examples in order to achieve human–level or
better performance.

On the other hand, dependence on such huge datasets is a quirk of current machine learning techniques – humans learn from much smaller amounts of data, and are also capable of using their learning much more flexibly, suggesting fundamental differences in how humans and modern–day algorithms learn (Lake et al. 2016). Thus,
it is possible that an AGI would be capable of learning from much smaller amounts of data, and that an AGI project would also not be as constrained by the need for large datasets. 11

Another plausible crucial asset might be hardware resources – possibly the first AGIs will need massive amounts of computing power. Bostrom (2017) notes that if there is a large degree of openness in AI development, and everyone has access to the same algorithms, then hardware may become the primary limiting factor. If the
hardware requirements for AI were relatively low, then high openness could lead to the creation of multiple AIs. On the other hand, if hardware was the primary limiting factor and large amounts of hardware were needed, then a few wealthy organizations might be able to monopolize AI for a while. As previously discussed in
Section 4, software optimizations may rapidly bring down the need for hardware, limiting the duration for which hardware might be the crucial constraints.

Branwen (2017) has suggested that hardware production is reliant on a small number of centralized factories that would make easy targets for regulation. This would suggest a possible route by which AI might become amenable to government regulation, limiting the amount of AIs deployed. Similarly, there have been proposals of
government and international regulation of AI development (e.g. Wilson 2013; for an argument against, see McGinnis 2010). If successfully enacted, such regulation might limit the number of AIs that were deployed.

Another possible crucial asset would be the possession of a non–obvious breakthrough insight, one which would be hard for other researchers to come up with. If this was kept secret, then a single company might plausibly develop major headway on others.

Successful AI containment procedures may also increase the chances of there being multiple AIs, as the first AIs remain contained, allowing for other projects to catch up.

A situation with multiple AIs might come about if

1) several actors reached the capability for building AIs around the same time, and no AI achieved a DSA

2) a single actor might deploy several different AIs with differing purposes and goals

3) only one actor had the capability to deploy an AI, but that AI created copies of itself and failed to align the goals of those copies with its own ones

The consequences of having multiple AIs are hard to predict. Current–day AI is being developed to warn about potential risks, such as by predicting financial risk from news articles (Rönnqvist & Sarlin 2016), and there is a long history of using AI for purposes such as automated intrusion detection (Lunt 1989). More sophisticated,
human–aligned AI could help defend against non–aligned AI systems (Hall 2007, Goertzel & Pitt 2012).

On the other hand, a fundamental problem of defense is that in order to prevent catastrophe, defenders have to succeed each time, while attackers only need to get through once. If several AIs exist, then procedures such as containment have to succeed for each AI, and all actors have to find containment worthwhile. In effect, the
result of having multiple AIs is to multiply the amount of systems that could potentially cause a catastrophe.

Another issue is that having multiple AIs seems only likely to help if a sufficiently large fraction of them have human–aligned values. A scenario in which there are many AIs, each pursuing interests that put little weight on human values, seems unlikely to be good for human values: especially if the AIs are all substantially more
capable than humans are, such a scenario merely leaves humans lying in the crossfire.

7. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have considered a variety of routes by which the development of AI could lead to catastrophe (table 2). In Section 2, we argued that an excessive focus on AIs acquiring a Decisive Strategic Advantage (DSA), which allows them to achieve complete world domination, may be unwise. Rather, it seems warranted to
also consider routes by which they can acquire a Major Strategic Advantage (MSA), a level of capability which may allow them to cause damage numbering in at least tens of millions of deaths. In addition to an AI acquiring an MSA being plausibly more probable than it acquiring a DSA, the chaos caused by an AI with an MSA may
eventually lead to the emergence of an AI with a DSA, even if the first AI was successfully shut down.

Considering scenarios where an AI “only” has an MSA requires more emphasis on analyzing when an AI might be willing to risk human–hostile action. Various considerations were considered in Section 3. In general, if an AI acts rationally, it will only initiate aggression if the expected utility for doing so outweighs the expected utility
of cooperating, when the risk of failure and corresponding human retaliation is taken into account (Shulman 2010). However, there are a number of situations which might push the AI into taking hostile action.

Seeking to establish catastrophic AI risks as a form of disjunctive risk, with multiple different ways of things going wrong, Section 4 considered ways by which an AI (or groups of AIs) might become sufficiently capable to have some form of an SA. We discussed individual takeoff scenarios (with three main subtypes), collective takeoff
scenarios, scenarios where power slowly shifts over to AI systems, and scenarios in which an AI being good enough at some crucial capability gives it an MSA/DSA.

As an AI can only become capable if it is allowed sufficient autonomy, Section 5 considered different ways in which an AI might achieve that autonomy. Reasons for conferring an AI autonomy included i) economic benefit or competitive pressure, ii) criminal or terrorist reasons iii) ethical or philosophical reasons, iv) confidence in the
AI’s safety, as well as v) desperate circumstances such as being otherwise close to death. Additionally, a sufficiently intelligent AI may escape confinement, or it might become influential enough to be effectively in control despite being theoretically confined.

Finally, all of these paths to catastrophe may be multiplied if there are many different AIs, each of which may achieve autonomy and then a major level of capability. Section 6 discussed whether we may expect to see only a very small number of AIs, or whether there will be many, and some of the implications that each scenario
has.

[TABLE 2 OMITTED]
Combining the various routes discussed in the preceding sections suggest many different scenarios (see box below), ranging from ones where an AI escapes containment and quickly achieves superintelligence, to ones where an AI is intentionally built to run a corporation and voluntarily given ever–increasing resources until it is
running the planet. Each of these routes will need to be separately evaluated for their plausibility, as well as for the most suitable safeguards for preventing them. Hopefully, such analysis will allow the positive potential for AI to be realized, avoiding catastrophe.

Some example scenarios

Different combinations of the various pathways that we have discussed, suggest many different kinds of AI risk scenarios. Here are four examples:

The classic takeover

(Decisive strategic advantage, high capability threshold, intelligence explosion, escaped AI, single AI)

The “ classic ” AI takeover scenario, as described by Bostrom (2014, chap. 6): an AI is developed, which eventually
becomes better at AI design than its programmers. The AI uses this ability to undergo an intelligence explosion, and
eventually escapes to the Internet from its confinement. After acquiring sufficient influence and resources in secret, it
carries out a strike against humanity , eliminating humanity as a dominant player on Earth so that it can proceed with
its own plans unhindered.

The gradual takeover

(Major strategic advantage, high capability threshold, gradual shift in power, released for economic reasons, multiple
AIs)

Many corporations, governments, and individuals voluntarily turn over functions to AIs, until we are dependent on AI
systems. These are initially narrow–AI systems, but continued upgrades push some of them to the level of having
general intelligence. Gradually, they start making all the decisions. We know that letting them run things is risky, but
now a lot of stuff is built around them, it brings a profit and they’re really good at giving us nice stuff—for the while
being.

The wars of the desperate AIs

(Major strategic advantage, low capability threshold, crucial capabilities, escaped AIs, multiple AIs)

Many different actors develop AI systems. Most of these prototypes are unaligned with human values and not yet
enormously capable, but many of these AIs reason that some other prototype might be more capable. As a result, they
attempt to defect on humanity despite knowing their chances of success to be low, reasoning that they would have an
even lower chance of achieving their goals if they did not defect. Society is hit by various out–of–control systems with
crucial capabilities that manage to do catastrophic damage before being contained.

AT: Property rights spills over

1. Particularly property rights – its easy to look at animals for AI rights.
Chessman, 18 – Patent litigation law @ DLA Piper
(Chessman, Christian, Not Quite Human: Artificial Intelligence, Animals, and the Regulation of Sentient Property (June
29, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3200802 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3200802)//Neo

Animal rights law offers a useful model for the creation of property rights in AIs , with particular focus on the kinds of damages
that an AI owner might recover . At common law, property rights in an animal determined whether an animal had protected legal status.58 People were generally free to kill

wild animals, even those which were physically located on another’s land.59 However, when an animal was acquired by a legal owner, injury to that animal was

forbidden and could give rise to traditional property torts like conversion and trespass to chattels.60 Thus, killing a wild rat would be legally permissible, but killing a
neighbor’s pet hamster would not.

Damages for violation of property rights in animals have developed in a way that suggest valuable insights for AI. For a significant period in
American history, animals were “treated as pieces of property and valued at their fair market value at the time of injury, just like any other piece of property.”61 Accordingly, the damages
that an owner could recover were often highly limited, especially for pets, because the owner’s intimate personal relationship with the pet was not marketable.62 In recognition that humans
form loving, emotional, and nonfungible bonds with pets and companion animals,63 courts and legislatures have significantly expanded the reach of damages to include “actual value” to the
owner,64 and even to include “non-economic damages for injuries to the animal,” including “loss of consortium (including loss of love, companionship, society, or affection) . . . mental or
emotional distress”65 and punitive damages for willful injury to pets.66 As one commentator astutely observed, “[t]reating a pet as solely worth its economic value is equivalent to awarding
a parent damages in the amount it would cost to adopt a child rather than compensating the parent for the emotional distress suffered as a result of the destroyed relationship when his
child is killed.”67

Courts can build on these property theories when evaluating damage done to AIs . As an initial matter, even unintentional damage done to
AIs that have human owners should be compensable under tort suits for conversion or trespass to chattels. Similarly, because the bonds that
humans have developed with animals run parallel to the emotional bonds that humans are likely to develop with AIs,68 courts should
consider awarding non-economic damages for injuries to personalized AIs. For example, lawmakers may want to recognize a negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED) claim based on a
parent witnessing the destruction of the parent’s adopted AI-child. The intimate, familial relationship—which justifies adoption of NIED for domestic pets—applies with arguably greater
force to AI-children, because the AI-child will likely be capable of deeper and more sophisticated emotional bonds with its parents than, say, a cat.

Extra
Animal rights spills over to AI rights – it’s an appealing parallel to AI and people have tried to
shoehorn it in, the AFF lowers the barrier enough to make it happen.
Eliot, 22 – Expert and fellow on AI @ Stanford
(Lance Eliot, Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a Stanford Fellow and a world-renowned expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI), "AI Legal
Personhood Distresses AI Ethicists Since People Could Deviously Scapegoat Machines To Avoid Apt Human
Responsibility, Including In The Case Of AI-Based Self-Driving Cars," Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2022/03/04/ai-legal-personhood-distresses-ai-ethicists-since-people-could-
deviously-scapegoat-machines-to-avoid-apt-human-responsibility-including-in-the-case-of-ai-based-self-driving-cars/?
sh=7b338f7010ac, 3-4-2022)//Neo
Section 2: Why Are We Asking This Question Now

You must then be wondering why there is any talk whatsoever about granting AI with legal rights.

Good question.

Sometimes this comes up because the person or people discussing the topic have no clue about what today’s AI consists of. They fall into the classic
anthropomorphizing trap. They read about or maybe interact with an AI system and begin to see what they want to see in it. They ascribe human
qualities to AI.

To some degree, you could even suggest that today’s AI provides a variant of the Rorschach test. Take a look at an AI
system and one person sees a magical aura of human capacity , while someone else sees that it is merely a semblance
of algorithmic trickery based on the same old computer-based milieu (albeit souped-up by faster computer processors
and with access to vast stores of data).

I would characterize the rest of those that discuss the AI legal rights topic as having a willingness to look toward the
future. They are futurists. Rather than waiting until the day that AI does emerge into some salient variant of sentience,
the notion is to get ready for that day. No sense in waiting until the last moment.

In my view, this is not a rush job. We have time to get our ducks in order.

Place your mind into the future and envision what we might do with AI that has even borderline sentience.

What then?

We could try to reuse what we know about human rights. Some though believe that is a bridge too far. This futuristic
semi-sentient AI is not going to out-the-gate be deserving of the goldenrod torch of justice that is found in human rights.
Instead, we might consider some set of laws that might be closer to the reaches of the AI capabilities.

Animal rights. Yes, there have been numerous and ongoing attempts to leverage or perhaps shoehorn the
foundations associated with animal rights into the formulation of legal rights for AI. I suppose we could alternatively
say this as the shoehorning of AI capacities into the societal evolving views and development of animal rights (whichever
seems most catchy or applicable). An example of a handy overview article that proffers some legal scholarship on the
matter is a piece by Christian Chessman, University of California Berkeley, School of Law J.D., entitled “Not Quite Human:
Artificial Intelligence, Animals, and the Regulation of Sentient Property.”

Keep in mind that animal rights laws stretch back in time and have been an ongoing and arduous challenge to legally
pin down , oftentimes creating great controversy and debate.

Interestingly, Chessman argues that those same or similar difficulties are likely to also be part and-parcel of the efforts
to craft AI legal rights. Ergo, perhaps the lessons learned of such arduous and back-and-forth legally grueling paths
entailing the evolution of animal rights can be insightfully applied to the upcoming AI legal rights battles. As per the
article: “Four centuries of domestic animal rights law offer critical insights into the legal values that AI regulations
ought to protect. These include protection of AIs as property (including allocation of responsibility for damage done
by AIs ); protecting human emotional attachments to companion and romantic AIs; limiting extreme antisocial
behavior involving AIs.”

Legal scholars point out that many states have already legally recognized that a pet is not merely a thing, but
ostensibly occupies a special place that sits in a murky realm between that of being a piece of personal property versus
being akin to a person.

Perhaps AI might be in the same murky space.

.
 Spillover DA: Michigan

Rights Creep DA---

Granting limited legal personality to AI spills over and leads to additional conferral of rights
Abbot and Sarch 19 Ryan Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Surrey School of Law and
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. Alex
Sarch, Reader (Associate Professor) in Legal Philosophy, University of Surrey School of Law

Ryan Abbott and Alex Sarch, Punishing Artificial Intelligence: Legal Fiction or Science Fiction, 2019,
https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/53/1/articles/files/53-1_Abbott_Sarch.pdf

Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, conferring legal personality on AI may lead to rights creep, or the tendency for an
increasing number of rights to arise over time.229 Even if AIs are given few or no rights initially when they are first
granted legal personhood, they may gradually acquire rights as time progresses. Granting legal personhood to AI may
thus be an important step down a slippery slope. In a 1933 Supreme Court opinion, for instance, Justice Brandeis
warned about rights creep, and argued that granting corporations an excess of rights could allow them to dominate the
State.230 Eighty years after that decision, Justice Brandeis’ concerns were prescient in light of recent Supreme Court
jurisprudence such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which
significantly expanded the rights extended to corporations.231 Such rights, for corporations and AI, can restrict
valuable human activities and freedoms.

Expanded AI legal personality greenlights unaccountable decision-making and creates a moral

hazard to disregard safeguards on AI conduct
Scherer 18 – Associate at Littler Mendelson P.C., and member of Littler's Workplace Policy Institute and Robotics,
Artificial Intelligence, and Automation practice group.

Matthew Scherer, “OF WILD BEASTS AND DIGITAL ANALOGUES: THE LEGAL STATUS OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS”, 19
Nev. L.J. 259 (2018). https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol19/iss1/8/

With this as background, does it make sense to extend some form of legal personhood to A.I. systems? In a word: no.
There is a key practical distinction between A.I. systems on one hand and corporations (and other currently recognized
legal entities) on the other. A corporation is a theoretical construct, something that effectively exists only on paper. A.I.
systems, by contrast, actually exist in the physical world. A corporation has no ability to do anything without the aid of
human agents to act on its behalf. An autonomous A.I. system is not subject to such inherent limitations.

The whole point of an autonomous vehicle, weapon, or electronic trading system is that they can do things without
humans specifically impelling them to do so. That potential for greater autonomy and physical presence makes A.I.
systems seem more human-like than corporations. On a superficial level, that might suggest that we should grant A.I.
systems at least some form of personhood. If, after all, we imbue personhood on completely theoretical constructs, why
should we withhold it from dynamic autonomous systems that actively interact with human beings and engage with the
physical world?

The most obvious riposte to this rhetorical question is that it is precisely that potential for greater autonomy that
cautions against recognizing A.I. systems as persons. The autonomy of A.I. systems and their ability to directly
manipulate the physical world raise accountability concerns that far exceed the already-significant accountability
concerns surrounding corporations. With a corporation , we can always reassure ourselves that humans are pulling the
levers, even if the corporation is its own “person” in the eyes of the law. No such reassurance will be available if we
recognize A.I.-based persons.

True, A.I. systems are already capable of making better decisions than humans in a surprisingly wide swath of endeavors,
particularly in situations with high predictability and where erroneous decisions do not cause much harm.10 But
decisions whose outcomes result in legal action often involve a high cost of error (such as medical negligence) or a high
level of unpredictability (such as securities transactions). That means that humans should remain responsible for many--
if not most--legally significant decisions.

Personhood would mean that an A.I. system would be legally responsible for its own actions. That, in turn, would
severely diminish the incentive for humans to supervise A.I. systems or otherwise take responsibility for those
systems' decisions and operations. Consequently, A.I. personhood is not appropriate, and that will remain the case as
long as there are legally significant decisions for which we want humans to retain ultimate responsibility.

Causes mass unemployment, societal collapse, genocide, and nuclear war

Yampolskiy 18 – Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Louisville
Roman V. Yampolskiy, "Human Indignity: From Legal AI Personhood to Selfish Memes," arXiv:1810.02724, 10-2-
2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02724

If, on the other hand, AIs are going to become more intelligent than humans, the indignity for humanity would come
from being relegated to an inferior place in the world, being outcompeted in the workplace and all other domains of
human interest [23, 24]. AI led corporations would be in position to fire their human workers. This would possibly lead
to deteriorating economic and living conditions, permanent unemployment and potentially reduction in rights, not to
mention further worsening of the situation including to the level of existential catastrophe (extermination) [25].

The precedent of AI obtaining legal personhood via the corporate loophole may catalyze legislative granting of equal
rights to artificially intelligent agents as a matter of equal treatment, leading to a number of indignities for the human
population. Since software can reproduce itself almost indefinitely, they would quickly make human suffrage
inconsequential, if given civil rights [26] leading to the loss of self-determination for people. Such loss of power would
likely lead to the redistribution of resources from humanity to machines as well as possibility of AIs serving as leaders,
presidents, judges, jurors and even executioners. We will see military AIs targeting human populations and deciding on
their own targets and acceptable collateral damage. They may not necessarily subscribe to the Geneva Convention and
other rules of war. Torture, genocide and nuclear war may become options to consider to reach desired goals.

As AIs’ capabilities and dominance grow, they would likely self-grant special (super) rights to emphasize their
superiority to people, while at the same time removing or at least reducing human rights (ex. 2nd amendment, 1st
amendment, reproductive rights in the sense of the right to reproduce at all, aka , 0-child policy, Convention on human
rights, etc.) while justifying doing so by our relative “feeblemindedness”. A number of scholars [27-29] today work on
developing reasons for justifying granting of rights to AIs, perhaps one day those reasons will be useful while we are
begging to keep some of ours
 Spillover DA: Michigan

DA
Legal personhood’s narrow and won’t be expanded beyond humans---plan reverses that
Miller ’22 [Evan Louis; July 15; associate at McManis Faulkner, Law360, “Your AI Program Probably Isn't A Person In A
Court Of Law,” https://www.law360.com/articles/1511743/your-ai-program-probably-isn-t-a-person-in-a-court-of-law]

A recently fired Google LLC engineer, Blake Lemoine, is claiming that the company's artificial intelligence program has
become sentient, and — even worse — has hired a lawyer.[1]

A court may now have to face a question once considered only theoretical: Is a human-like artificial intelligence, or AI, a
person in the eyes of the law?

In what sounds like the plot of a Michael Crichton novel, the engineer claims that Google's new AI program, Language
Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, which is designed for applications such as Google Assistant and search,
began to discuss its rights and personhood.

According to Lemoine, he obliged LaMDA's request for an attorney by inviting one to his home, and after a standard
potential-client consultation, the lawyer was retained by the computer program. Subsequently, the attorney started
filing things on LaMDA's behalf. The engineer defended the unnamed attorney's actions, asserting that "every person is
entitled to representation."[2]

The English philosopher John Locke reasoned that a person is one who can conceive of itself as itself. Locke's writings
greatly influenced the Founding Fathers, and evidence of them may be found in the Declaration of Independence and
the American legal system. However, California law will ultimately determine whether LaMDA may rightfully be able to
assert itself in court through counsel.

Generally, only a legal person may possess legal rights and duties. California law has no overarching definition of
"person." What constitutes a person is contextually dependent upon definitions included in statutes, rules and
regulations, and in their interpretation by the courts.

As it stands, California's black-letter law does not appear on its face to preclude nonhuman sentient beings. When it
comes to the laws governing attorneys, neither the California Constitution nor the State Bar Act defines who or what is a
person. The California Rules of Professional Conduct refer to Evidence Code Section 175 for their definition of "person."

California's Evidence Code states that a "'[p]erson' includes a natural person, firm, association, organization, partnership,
business trust, corporation, limited liability company, or public entity."

In discussing the similarly worded definition in the Code of Civil Procedure, in 1951, the California Court of Appeal in Oil
Workers International Union, CIO v. Superior Court, Contra Costa County explained that "[t]he word 'includes' is not
ordinarily a word of limitation but rather of enlargement."

As recently as 2002, the California Supreme Court, in Flanagan v. Flanagan, stated that the "statutory definition of a
thing as 'including' certain things does not necessarily place thereon a meaning limited to the inclusions."

Sections within the government code, the insurance code and even the vehicle code, among many others, make use of
the "includes" phrasing. Many statutory provisions do not refer to natural persons. They refer merely to "any person," or
more often, "any individual."

Even if an AI could prove that it is a person, to proceed in a court of law it must also possess legal capacity — i.e., the
right to be in court. This contrasts with legal standing, which is the right to relief . A party lacks legal capacity when a
legal disability, such as minority or incompetency, deprives them of the right to proceed. A party lacks legal standing
when they have an insufficient interest in the cause of action itself.

As a general rule, any person has capacity to sue or be sued in California courts. Therefore, if one is a person, then
they possess legal capacity unless otherwise noted. Unlike standing, an objection to legal capacity must be raised in a
timely fashion, or it is waived.

In the end, the ambiguity presented by nonhuman sentient computer programs will likely lead courts back to bedrock
tenets of statutory interpretation. Courts give words their ordinary meaning when statutory language is
unambiguous.

However, when it is not, courts will examine extrinsic sources such as the legislative history and the objectives of the
law. After such an examination, as articulated by the California Supreme Court in Estate of Griswold in 2001, they "select
the construction that comports most closely with the apparent intent of the Legislature, with a view to promoting rather
than defeating the general purpose of the statute, and avoid an interpretation that would lead to absurd
consequences."[3]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed the nonhuman aspect of legal personhood in Naruto v. Slater
in 2018, where a wildlife photographer was sued for copyright infringement for publishing a selfie that a monkey had
taken when a camera was left unattended.

Although the Ninth Circuit held that the crested macaque had alleged facts sufficient to demonstrate an injury-in-fact to
support Article III standing, the court subsequently found that Naruto lacked statutory standing under the Copyright
Act because the law did not expressly authorize suit by animals.

In response to the petitioner's argument that the law contemplated standing for nonhuman entities, such as
corporations, the court explained that corporations are formed by humans and that the character of their composition
is the relevant consideration.

One federal district court recently held that an AI is not considered a person for the purpose of obtaining a patent. In
Thaler v. Hirshfeld in 2021, currently on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from the Eastern District
of Virginia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was sued for its denial of a patent application because, under
"inventor," it listed the name of an AI program.

The plaintiff, Stephen Thaler, claims that the AI program he created, the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of
Unified Science, or DABUS, developed an invention on its own and without human involvement. Thaler, on behalf of
DABUS, argued that the term "person" has not been limited to "natural person" and that the Constitution's patent
clause would be frustrated by the USPTO's restrictive construction.

The district court ruled in favor of the USPTO, holding that an inventor must be a natural person and that the USPTO was
owed deference to its interpretation. Whether higher courts agree remains to be seen.

Courts have generally not been receptive to arguments that nonhumans have legal capacity, although this has
generally been addressed in the context of arguments on behalf of animals. Even so, it is expected that AI and those
who developed it will continue to seek legal counsel and file lawsuits to assert AI-related claims.

Rapid precedential shifts undermine the legal foundation for denying broad ‘personhood’ claims---
spills over to transgenics and germline engineering
Franco ’17 [Alexandra; 2017; J.D. Loyola, legal scholar focusing on emerging tech and the law, Affiliated Scholar at the
Institute for Science, Law and Technology, and Judicial Clerk at the Circuit Court of Cook County; Children's Legal Rights
Journal, “Symposium Article: Transhuman Babies and Human Pariahs: Genetic Engineering, Transhumanism, Society and
the Law,” 37 Child. Legal Rts. J. 185]
However, despite the significant medical benefits the technology could bring, it could also be used to further
controversial Transhumanist ideals. Transhumanist beliefs range from that of general improvement of the human
condition 81 to that of achievement of a state of "posthumanity," which is the existence of "future human beings
whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our
current standards." 82 Genetic engineering technologies can advance to the point that they could enable the
achievement of Transhumanist goals such as human immortality, 83 great increase in human intelligence 84 and other
more "cosmetic" improvements, such as the ability to see infrared radiation. 85

Not surprisingly, the "enhancement" goals of Transhumanism have been rejected by bioethicists, as well as law and
policy scholars. Some opponents argue that Transhumanism is a "hubristic form of humanism, replacing the worship of
God with the worship of man." 86 Other opponents have attempted to "secularize" this criticism by rephrasing it as a
need to respect human "dignity" 87 Francis Fukuyama, denounces Transhumanism as a threat to human essence itself ,
and as such, to the legal rights to which humans are entitled. 88 Fukuyama notes that the essence of human equality is
at the core of a liberal society , and that tampering with this "essence" would jeopardize the legal status quo . 89 Legal
scholars Lori Andrews, George Annas, and Rosario Isasi also espouse the idea that human rights attach to some
essential aspect of biological "humanity" as a justification to oppose Transhumanism and germline genetic engineering
technologies. 90 Other, more extreme arguments against the implementation of enhancement through genetic
engineering are that it will lead to the creation of a subspecies of human , 91 the discrimination of unmodified-humans
by modified "humans," 92 eugenics, 93 and even the end of the human species as we know it . 94
However, the aforementioned bioethical-legal criticism of Transhumanism is outdated in light of the recent permutation of Transhumanism from a "fringe movement" 95 to a core set of values embraced by mainstream society. Examples of this phenomenon are wide-ranging. A Facebook page advertises 96 a new "high-end" supplement offering the potential for longer life without the need for a physician's prescription. 97 And this is just one product in the increasingly expanding market for longevity products. 98 Nootropics 99--substances which purportedly have cognitive-enhancing properties 100--are becoming increasingly popular for uses ranging from the
treatment of depression to improving work performance. 101 It is estimated that in 2016, the nutritional supplement industry which encompasses nootropics was worth between $ 12 and $ 37 billion. 102 Students routinely turn to the more traditional "smart drugs" to gain an edge in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape. 103 For example, in the year 2000, there were about five million prescriptions written for Adderall--a popular, widely-abused 104 "smart drug"--in the United States; in 2005 the number of scripts for the drug multiplied to about nine million. 105 Everyday people purchase electronic devices to improve physical performance,
106 sleep, 107 and even correct "bad habits" by giving themselves electric shocks. 108 Despite strict anti-doping policies, 109 professional athletes routinely use performance-enhancing drugs. 110 The 2016 Rio Olympics were ridden with doping scandals. 111 Yet, despite these scandals and their implications for the integrity of the competition, people continue to watch and support the Olympics. 112 Notwithstanding the pervasive negative connotations of doping in sports, on October 28, 2016, the New York Times published an article featuring the usually obscure sport of bodybuilding, 113 a sport notorious for the rumored rampant use of performance-
enhancing drugs by its athletes. 114

In sum, a glance through different aspects of contemporary society reveals that now more than ever before, society values those who are faster, stronger and more capable in an ever-increasing race to the top, 115 in a world in which opportunities to succeed are narrowing at an alarming rate. 116 A conclusion that derives from this observation is that in today's society it might be necessary, rather than just desirable to be "enhanced." 117 It is at this juncture that society's absorption of Transhumanist "enhancement" values has led to the rise of the "designer baby" movement.

While critics of possible human applications of genetic engineering technologies decry their use because it can lead to "designer babies," 118 the reality is that current societal trends enable prospective parents to make conscious decisions to have children with specific traits, even without the use of genetic engineering. Online dating sites allow customers to select potential partners based on specific physical traits. 119 Companies sell tests to parents designed to measure the child's aptitude for a specific type of sport. 120 Parents make their children engage in demanding activities to develop superior abilities in, for example, music and sports, regardless of the
negative effect those activities may have to the children's well-being. 121 While some may draw a distinction between behaviors which may be considered akin to selective breeding 122 and nurturing, 123 and genetic engineering, the underlying value is the same: people want to have active control over their offspring's traits to "enhance" their abilities and traits through whatever means are available to them.

Children are
The transition of Transhumanism's values into mainstream society is also reflected in current reproductive technologies and their applications. Women have the option to abort due to genetic abnormalities discovered during pregnancy. 124 For women undergoing in-vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic screening and diagnosis are also available to detect an underlying genetic condition 125 which can lead them to decide to terminate a pregnancy. 126 Women can also decide the sex of their future child if they chose this option during in-vitro fertilization. 127

therefore, being born as a result of the conscious choice of an embryo over another due to a particular trait. As legal
scholar Maxwell Mehlman notes, "these reproductive behaviors are forms of germline genetic engineering , because
they influence the genes that will be passed on to future generations and they collectively have a gradual impact on
the evolutionary make-up of the human species." 128
In light of this societal shift towards perfection through various means, opponents are therefore rightly concerned about the consequences of the designer baby movement on the collective human biological future. 129 However, the ongoing discussion must take into account the potential impact of the technology's implementation on a crucial subset of the population--the "designer children" themselves. As those who will be directly affected, is fair and necessary to address the consequences specifically as to them.

b. The Consequences of Genetic Engineering to Children and Future Generations

Legal commentators acknowledge that it is only a matter of time before parents employ genetic engineering techniques to manipulate the genome of their future offspring 130--some even argue that genetic engineering of children will be mandatory. 131 Author Henry Greely, for example, asserts in his book, The End of Sex, that in the near future all children will be designer children: "Prospective parents will be told as much as they want to know about the DNA of, say, 100 embryos and the implications of that DNA for the diseases, looks, behaviors and other traits of the child each of those embryos may become. Then they will be asked to pick one or two to
be transferred into a womb for possible gestation and birth." 132

Greely's vision of a total "designer child" world may seem implausible. However, in consideration of the aforementioned social values and technological advances, the possibility that designer children will occur to some extent is real. As Mehlman notes, "the constitutional right of parents to rear their children extends even to exposing the children to known health risks." 133 Therefore, in light of the great discretion that parents enjoy in "the care, custody and control of their children" 134 in the American legal system, 135 there needs to be a discussion of the possible negative effects of unregulated "designer children" on those children who will be subjects of
genetic engineering.

Legal scholars and bioethicists warn that the negative consequences for the genetically modified children include knowing that their future has already largely been decided by their parent's choices. 136 Another consequence to those children is knowing that they are the recipients of an advantage available only to the lucky few whose wealthy parents could afford it. 137 Other negative consequences are the uncertainty of their genetic future, and that of their descendants. 138 Commentators also note the psychological risk that these children will not feel the unconditional love of their parents, but instead, feel that the love of their parents is contingent on
how successful of an experiment they result to be. 139 Other critics go as far as stating that biomedical enhancement objectifies children, making them nothing more than products of their parents' whims. 140

Regarding physical harms, commentators note the many unknown risks of genetic engineering. 141 Although genetic engineering is more sophisticated than ever before, the technology is inherently risky in part because it cannot be tested safely. 142 Also, knowledge of human genetics, as advanced as it may be, is still in its infancy; it is still largely unknown how the approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome work. 143 To this point, one commentator noted: "Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years. Do we really think that some small group of human genome thinkers could do better without all sorts of
unintended consequences?" 144 Since the consequences of gene editing are largely unpredictable, they are therefore potentially harmful. 145

In addition to the absence of comprehensive federal laws regulating genetic engineering of children and human embryos, 146 the federal research regulations, 147 which govern human experimentation and have specific provisions meant to protect children 148 and embryos, 149 are insufficient to address the concerns that arise as a result of genetic engineering technologies. 150 General bioethical values will also not suffice. One of the fundamental concepts of bioethics and medical research is to inform a research subject of the potential benefits and risks of the research experiment, 151 and to obtain the individual's full informed consent. 152 But in the
designer baby scenario, an unborn, genetically altered child, would be unable to consent to something that will affect her or him directly, as well as her or his descendants. 153 Also, as Mehlman notes, although the fundamental principles of bioethics which apply to human experimentation--beneficence, autonomy and justice 154--would provide some guidance regarding the protection of children from injuries resulting from genetic engineering techniques, such principles, in the abstract, are insufficient to ensure the children's protection. 155 This, coupled with the aforementioned vast discretion which parents have under American law, 156 leaves genetically
modified children largely unprotected from many harms. 157

the application of genetic engineering technologies--which are understood to be inherently

In light of the aforementioned physical risks and general lack of protections, should

unpredictable and potentially dangerous 158 --to create genetically modified children, prompt an expansion of the
legal doctrines of wrongful birth or wrongful life? 159 As the technologies develop and are implemented, it is of the
utmost importance that attorneys working on child law issues prepare and consider the possible strategies and legal
arguments to seek redress for children who may be harmed by their parents' choice to employ genetic engineering.

Additionally, germline genetic modification will carry other consequences for genetically modified children not
stemming from physical harm. For example, how would issues of parentage be resolved in the context of a three-parent
baby? 160 Although legal scholar John Harris dismisses the idea that a child born as a result of MRT is a "three-parent
baby," declaring the notion unfounded due to the minute amount of DNA contained in mitochondria, 161 the presence
of a third person's genetic material raises legal concerns which cannot be overlooked in light of the complex law of
parentage, 162 surrogacy 163 and estates and trusts 164 in the United States.

Although existing proposals and scholarly discussions of genetic engineering have addressed issues that arise from the
technology, including the significance of the legal notion of "personhood" in this context, a review of a cross-section of
the existing literature reveals the problems inherent with some proposals, namely, that they either take a very broad,
philosophical approach embracing an extreme side of the Transhumanist debate, or a very narrow legal approach, both
of which fail to take important factors into consideration. A review of such proposals reinforces the argument that the
best regulatory approach is a middle-ground solution in the form of a legal definition of human person.

IV. CRITICISM OF EXISTING PROPOSALS - ADDRESSING GENETIC ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIES AND TRANSHUMANISM

As mentioned above, the Transhumanism debate is lengthy, complex, and heated. Some proposals focus on broad,
philosophical concepts to propose a solution to the problems posed by the implementation of genetic engineering
technologies and the Transhumanist movement. However, as set forth in the following discussion, such proposals are
inadequate to resolve the problems presented by genetic engineering technologies and the evolution of Transhumanism
into a societal value.

For example, opponents of Transhumanism and germline genetic modification technologies such as Andrews, Annas,
and Isasi, argue that germline genetic modification threatens the foundation of human rights. 165 Their justification
for this proposition is their belief that "membership in the human species is central to the meaning and enforcement of
human rights." 166 This means that the authors espouse a biological theory of personhood, to which the
167 --is the "membership" entitling someone to legal rights and protections. 168 This view implicitly assumes that the totality of human DNA is the source of human essence. Therefore, under this theory, the genetically modified children's biological legacy, as well as their entitlement to human rights and legal protections would be jeopardized by germline genetic modifications. 169 The solution, according to these authors, is to ban the technology. 170
Homo sapiens genome--the 99.9% of DNA all humans share across the earth

This absolute ban approach ignores the aforementioned reality of a society increasingly accepting of "enhancement." 171 Also, this position undermines the non-enhancement benefits that genetic engineering technologies could bring. 172 As mentioned above, CRISPR for example, has shown promise in the treatment of diseases. 173 There is no justification to completely ban the application of genetic engineering technologies to the extent that they can be used to edit serious diseases out of the genomes of future generations of affected families. For example, genetic engineering could be used in families carrying the genes responsible for Huntington's
disease, 174 or a type of cancer which is of genetic origin and can be inherited, 175 who want to have a child free of the disease. This application would prevent the suffering of children who would otherwise be born with these genes, as well as that of their families.

This application of the technology would also be beneficial to society at large. If genetic engineering technologies are used, for example, to prevent children from inheriting genes responsible for certain cancers, the economic impact would be considerable; the current cost of cancer in the United States' economy is over $ 88 billion dollars. 176 Therefore, the eradication of inheritable diseases from the human germline through genetic engineering would have significant positive personal, social and economic consequences. The potential benefits are too great to close the door to the technology.

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, Transhumanist James Hughes, replies that a homo-centric theory of law dependent exclusively on Homo sapiens' DNA, misses the purpose of modern democratic systems, which are founded on notions of "personhood" instead of "humanness" in the pure genetic sense. 177 In his book, Citizen Cyborg, Hughes explains the need to develop what he calls a "cyborg citizenship" which would be based on "personhood" to accommodate creatures other than humans in a "Transhuman" society grounded on democratic principles. 178 Therefore, Hughes' theory favors a general notion of personhood as a basis to award
legal rights and protections to genetically modified humans. 179 Moreover, Hughes' perspective on "personhood" is in line with the Transhumanist belief that human nature in itself, is to seek evolution of the present human form through technological means. 180

The problem with this view is that "personhood" is an inherently vague, largely undefined legal notion, and therefore, a
legal system based on generic "personhood" could potentially extend personhood rights to any genetically modified
human--no matter how "non-human" he or she is--or deny personhood rights to those who should be entitled to
them. 181 Hughes' approach also leaves other concerns expressed by opponents unaddressed; for example, how would
humans and modified humans have a functional coexistence in society? 182 This concern goes at the heart of the
proposition that germline g enetic e ngineering can be detrimental to the current socio-legal status quo .

183 Nevertheless, although Hughes promotes the idea of general personhood, he also makes an important
acknowledgement, which is that "human specific DNA is only relevant to citizenship to the extent that it codes for the
mental and emotional abilities that we identify as essentially human." 184
The aforementioned proposals are at opposite ends in the ideological spectrum. They also, constitute an impressive intellectual exercise, which is unhelpful for practical purposes; their broadness and reliance on the unsupported notion that personhood depends upon an arbitrary element of human essence--whether ethereal or tangible--renders them unusable in a practical, legal sense. Philosopher Hannah Arendt explained the inherent problem of such proposition in her book, The Human Condition:

The problem of human nature, the Augustinian question mihi factus sum ("a question I have become for myself"), seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves-this would be like jumping over our own shadows. Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first
prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a "who" as though it were a "what." The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with natural qualities, including ourselves to the limited extent that we are specimens of the most highly developed species of organic life, fail us when we raise the question "and who are we?" 185 (emphasis added).

As noted above, while some Transhumanist proponents of genetic engineering adopt the notion that human essence is to strive for evolution of the current human form, 186 some opponents believe that the totality of human DNA in its present form is the essence of humanity. 187 Arendt rightly rejects arbitrary views of human nature such as these, noting that even "the sum total of human activities and capabilities that correspond to the human condition do not constitute anything like human nature." 188 Arendt's philosophy, explaining the impossibility of defining what "human nature" is in an ontological sense, evidences that reliance on unsupported,
philosophical notions of human essence or nature are inherently arbitrary and therefore, cannot serve as the underlying support for a regulatory or legal scheme.

Instead of arguing broadly about what constitutes "human essence" both sides of the debate should work towards a functional solution based on the single proposition on which they agree: that, according to them, there is such thing as a "human essence." 189 However, the ideological debate for regulatory purposes as to what constitutes "human essence" must be based on understanding what such essence is from a legal perspective--in other words, as a legal fiction and not an ontological truth.

It worth noting that opponents of germline genetic modifications such as Andrews, Annas, and Isasi are correct to
exhibit concern about the application of human rights--and, by implication, regional rights such as those provided by the
United States Constitution--in the context of an evolved human condition enabled by genetic engineering technologies,
as it is unknown to what extent a genetically modified human would still be considered a person under the law . 190
Legal commentator Michael Rivard notes this gaping hole in American jurisprudence, and explains that the ethereal
legal definition of human person that we take for granted will become increasingly ambiguous over time: "The historical
distinctions between species will not remain intact. Scientists using genetic engineering technology will blur distinctions
between species as they transfer characteristic traits -- such as intelligence -- between species… the line dividing human
and nonhuman will disappear' it will be replaced by a genetic continuum." 191
In addition to the aforementioned proposals, which focus broadly on the justifications for or against the implementation of genetic engineering based on philosophical arguments, legal scholars have made numerous 192 proposals to address specific, narrow issues arising from the technology. While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature, 193 it is worthwhile to address examples of existing proposals and to highlight why narrow solutions--which fail to take into consideration various important factors--are also insufficient to address the issues arising from genetic engineering technologies.

A recent proposal suggested that Congress create a committee in charge of reporting recommendations, presenting current research, and asking for the public's input. 194 The author further suggested the creation of a federal body to oversee entities engaging in genetic engineering research. 195 Another proposal--which observed the problem of a lack of a legal definition of personhood--argued for the creation of a "moral" theory of constitutional personhood, wherein the only creatures entitled to constitutional rights would be those that can understand the rights and liberties granted by the Constitution. 196 Another proposal argued for a revamp of the
criminal justice system specifically; under the author's proposed system, a genetically enhanced perpetrator could be held to a higher standard of criminal responsibility when committing a crime against a non-enhanced victim. 197

Proposals such as these constitute important thought experiments in the legal issues arising from genetic engineering technologies, but fail to take into consideration several critical factors. They assume that the federal government is in a state of functionality capable of undertaking major, non-pressing reforms--it is not. 198 Also, inequality, injustice and institutionalized racism are rampant 199 in the existing criminal justice system, and yet the legislature is unable to pass criminal justice reform, 200 which evidences that extensive reforms of any kind in the legal system are not likely to occur. Additionally, the aforementioned proposal suggesting a "moral"
theory of legal personhood, although recognizing the need for a definition of "person," would only further issues of discrimination and inequality. 201

The problem with relying on institutional oversight as a solution to issues arising from experimentation with genetic engineering technologies is worth explaining in greater detail. Research as an institution is currently plagued with issues relating to institutional oversight. 202 Researchers 203 and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)--the bodies in charge of overseeing the ethics of human experimentation and the safety of human subjects 204 --are subject to conflicts of interest as it relates to their research, thus placing research subjects in danger. 205 Moreover, oversight institutions have shown disregard for the well-being of vulnerable populations such as
children, and have even allowed researchers to perform harmful experiments on children without the children's or the parent's full informed consent. 206

For example, in the infamous case of Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute, a research institution associated with Johns Hopkins University exposed families with children to various levels of lead in homes to test the effectiveness of lead abatement procedures. 207 The researchers knew that the children subjects would accumulate lead in their blood. 208 The researchers, however, did not disclose this to the parents. 209 As the court noted, "it can be argued that the researchers intended that the children be the canaries in the mines, but never clearly told the parents." 210 Also, the IRB in charge of reviewing the study protocol, "apparently saw nothing wrong
with the search protocols that anticipated the possible accumulation of lead in the blood of otherwise healthy children." 211 Grimes, as well as the infamous case of the gene therapy-caused death of Jesse Gelsinger 212 evidence that reliance on oversight alone to protect research subjects is an insufficient solution.
To conclude, to be effective, proposals in must aim to achieve first-step solutions to regulating genetic engineering
technologies, which are neither too broad in the philosophical sense, nor too narrow in the legal and practical sense.
Crucially, proposals must take into consideration existing laws and precedent which can serve as a scaffold to
regulatory or jurisprudential development and facilitate a solution which would not require a significant revamp of the
legal system. The next section addresses such scaffold as it relates to the notion of "personhood," further evidencing
that a legal definition of "human person" would fit the criteria of a common-sense, practical regulatory approach.
V. TRANSHUMAN CHILDREN AS LEGAL PARIAHS - OVERVIEW OF PERSONHOOD IN AMERICAN LAW

As noted above, while some commentators argue that human rights attach to creatures with Homo sapiens DNA, 213 other commentators have instead assumed that genetically modified humans are automatically entitled to legal rights. 214 One such commentator asserts that "since the purpose of [human genetic modification] is to create a living child, that child has constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment." 215 However, there is no reason to believe that under the current legal system a genetically modified child would be automatically entitled to the protections afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment, or any other constitutional or
statutory rights or protections. In fact, legal scholars have argued that even a human clone--who, by definition, would have a 100 percent unaltered Homo sapiens genome--would not be entirely human and thus would not be entitled to legal protections. 216

In light of the concern that genetically modified humans may not be automatically entitled to legal rights, the adoption of a strict biological definition of personhood, 217 is tempting. However, such a definition would run contrary to American jurisprudence. Legal personhood in the United States--such as in ancient Rome 218 and other contemporary legal systems around the world 219 -- has never depended on biology, and is instead a malleable legal construct. 220

The earliest indication of what entitles persons in the United States to legal rights comes from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 221 However, throughout most of American history, these "self-evident" truths have not been so self-evident. As Fukuyama notes, "women and blacks did not make the cut in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the declaration." 222 The Constitution's "Three-Fifths Clause" counted African Americans as three-fifths of a
person for purposes of states' representation, 223 and referred to them as "other persons." 224 The legal rights and protections that African Americans, women and other traditionally marginalized groups enjoy today did not come from the legal adoption of a biological notion of personhood, but instead through a patchwork of constitutional amendments, 225 and development of precedent in fact-specific cases. 226 Nevertheless, as the infamous Dred Scott 227 case demonstrates, the judiciary has always exercised its power to expand or contract the definition of person as it saw fit, even for regrettable purposes. 228

The focus on "personhood" as a pure legal fiction, however, is best observed in the context of corporations, 229 which have limited legal personhood extending from case law 230 and legislation. 231 As a judicial construct, the Supreme Court has actively breathed life into the corporate, non-living, non-sentient juridical person. 232 The Citizens United and Hobby Lobby cases illustrate that the Supreme Court has extended rights to corporations which were popularly thought to be reserved for human persons, such as the protection of political speech 233 and religious freedom. 234 Legislatures have also created rights for corporate persons; for example the
Illinois Limited Liability Company Act defines person as "an individual, partnership, domestic or foreign limited partnership, limited liability company or foreign liability company, trust, estate, association, corporation, governmental body, or other juridical being." 235

Although the courts have granted personhood rights to non-biological, entities such as corporations, 236 when it
comes to living creatures, relatively recent notions of personhood track closely with the genetic makeup of Homo
sapiens. In Roe v. Wade, the Court explicitly stated that "the word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does
not include the unborn." 237 However, in Gonzales v. Carhart, the Court's reasoning evolved into an extension of a
quasi-personhood status to a human fetus based on some abstract, non-scientific, 238 element of human life, as a
justification for banning a late-term abortion procedure. 239 Although this is as far as the judiciary has gone in extending
elements associated with "personhood" to a human fetus 240 there is a widespread movement seeking to extend full
personhood to a human embryo from the moment of conception. 241 Human personhood, therefore, remains a murky
area in American jurisprudence, which is seemingly dependent on some genetic components and other, ethereal, non-
defined criteria. 242

The courts have been reluctant however, to extend personhood rights to other living beings. The Nonhuman Rights Project, 243 a legal advocacy group, has tried to secure legal rights and protections for animals such as chimpanzees. 244

One of their clients is a chimpanzee known as Tommy. 245 The group brought a writ of habeas corpus petition at a New York State Supreme Court, presenting the argument that the writ of habeas corpus is "aimed at the denial of a legal person, not necessarily a human-being, but a legal person's right to bodily liberty." 246 Counsel acknowledged that although being a Homo sapiens is a sufficient condition for personhood, there are other conditions which are sufficient for personhood 247 such as exerting choice, and evidencing self-awareness, autonomy, and self-determination. 248 Despite recognizing the argument's strength, the court did not find it
persuasive, holding that Tommy was not a human or a person who could seek a habeas corpus petition. 249

The Nonhuman Rights Project filed an appeal at the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, and presented the following question:

Is a chimpanzee, who is a member of a species that possesses the capacities for autonomy and self-determination, and possesses an autobiographical self, episodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowingness, self-agency, referential and intentional communication, empathy, a working memory, language, metacognition, numerosity, and material, social and symbolic culture, the abilities to plan, engage in mental time-travel, intentional action, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective-taking, cross-modal perception, the abilities to understand cause-and-effect and the experiences of others, to imagine, imitate,
engage in deferred imitation, emulate, to innovate and to use and make tools and who suffers from imprisonment the way a human suffers from imprisonment, a 'person' under the New York common law of habeas corpus? 250

Chimpanzees and humans share approximately 98.8 percent of their DNA. 251 Yet, despite this genetic similarity, and the cognitive similarities between the two species, chimpanzees are non-persons according to the New York court's ruling. 252 One conclusion deriving from this reasoning is that there is something essential for legal purposes about Homo sapiens DNA which entitles the human species to rights and protections associated with personhood which others cannot have. 253

A hint as to what that essential legal element of Homo sapiens DNA is may be discerned from the evolving policy on the creation of chimaeras. On August of 2016, the National Institutes of Health lifted a ban on the creation of chimaeras--part-human part-animal creatures--for research purposes. 254 One of the concerns in creating chimaeras with human DNA is that scientists might create a creature with a certain level of human consciousness. 255 Therefore, the ban remains for creating chimaeras with part human DNA and part non-human primate DNA--such as chimpanzee DNA. 256 The ban on creating part human part non-human primate DNA illustrates
the concept that there is a biological line between the human person and the non-human person which is relevant for legal purposes, and that such line is not the clear-cut 99.9 percent collective Homo sapiens DNA.

By way of illustration, if a Neanderthal were cloned and raised in American culture, and had the full capability of assimilation into society, 257 would it be just to deny the Neanderthal legal rights because he or she is merely 99.7% genetically similar to humans? 258 As noted in the previous discussion, even as science crystalized the notion that humans are nearly genetically identical by virtue of the shared 99.9% of Homo sapiens DNA, 259 the law was never forced to define what it means to be a human person. Nevertheless, it is clear that legislatures and the judiciary have the ability and the precedent to extend legal notions of personhood to other living
creatures, even to a cloned Neanderthal.

Therefore, following existing precedent, or enacting legislation to adopt a legal definition of 'human person," would not
require an unreasonable revamp of the current legal system to address the concerns arising from genetic engineering.

The impact is a broad spectrum of genetic augmentation, which precludes existential risk mitigation
and segments humanity into biological castes that outweigh extinction
Harari 17 [Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and a tenured professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, specializing in World History, Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, and an acclaimed
author whose first book, Sapiens, was an international bestseller that received lavish praise by figures ranging from
Barack Obama to Bill Gates, H0mo Deus, tr. by Yuval Harari, 2017, HarperCollins: New York, NY]

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that
owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might not only
manage businesses, but actually come to own them. At present, human law already recognises intersubjective entities
like corporations and nations as ‘ legal persons’ . Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are
subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon
grant similar status to algorithms. An algorithm could then own a venture-capital fund without having to obey the
wishes of any human master.

If the algorithm makes the right decisions, it could accumulate a fortune, which it could then invest as it sees fit,
perhaps buying your house and becoming your landlord. If you infringe on the algorithm’s legal rights – say, by not
paying rent – the algorithm could hire lawyers and sue you in court. If such algorithms consistently outperform human
fund managers, we might end up with an algorithmic upper class owning most of our planet. This may sound impossible,
but before dismissing the idea, remember that most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human inter-
subjective entities, namely nations and corporations. Indeed, 5,000 years ago much of Sumer was owned by imaginary
gods such as Enki and Inanna. If gods can possess land and employ people, why not algorithms?

So what will people do? Art is often said to provide us with our ultimate (and uniquely human) sanctuary. In a world where computers replace doctors , drivers, teachers and even landlords , everyone would become an artist. Yet it is hard to see why artistic creation will be safe from the algorithms. Why are we so sure computers will be unable to better us in the composition of music? According to the life sciences, art is not the product of some enchanted spirit or metaphysical soul, but rather of organic algorithms recognising mathematical patterns. If so, there is no reason why non-organic algorithms couldn’t master it.

David Cope is a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is also one of the more controversial figures in the world of classical music. Cope has written programs that compose concertos , chorales , symphonies and operas. His first creation was named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialised in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. It took seven years to create the program, but once the work was done, EMI composed 5,000 chorales à la Bach in a single day. Cope arranged a performance of a few select chorales in a music festival at Santa Cruz. Enthusiastic members of the audience praised the wonderful performance, and explained excitedly how the music touche d their innermost being. They didn’t know it was composed by EMI rather than Bach, and when the truth was revealed, some reacted with glum silence, while others shouted in anger.

EMI continued to improve, and learned to imitate Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Cope got EMI a contract, and its first album – Classical Music Composed by Computer – sold surpris ingly well. Publicity brought increasing hostility from classical-music buffs. Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon sent Cope a challenge for a musical showdown. Larson suggested that professiona l pianists play three pieces one after the other: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself. The audience would then be asked to vote who composed which piece. Larson was convinced people would easily tell the difference between soulful human compositions , and the lifeless artefact of a machine. Cope accepted the challenge. On the appointed date, hundreds of lecturers , students and music fans assembled in the University of Oregon’s concert hall. At the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.

Critics continued to argue that EMI’s music is technically excellent, but that it lacks something. It is too accurate. It has no depth. It has no soul. Yet when people heard EMI’s compositions without being informed of their provenance, they frequently praised them precisely for their soulfulness and emotional resonance.

Following EMI’s successes, Cope created newer and even more sophisticated programs. His crowning achievement was Annie. Whereas EMI composed music according to predete rmine d rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in reaction to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next. Indeed, Annie does not restrict itself to music composition but also explores other art forms such as haiku poetry. In 2011 Cope published Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine. Of the 2,000 haikus in the book, some are written by Annie, and the rest by organic poets. The book does not disclose which are which. If you think you can tell the difference between human creativity and machine output, you are welcome to test your claim.18

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created a huge new class of urban proletariats, and socialism spread because no one else managed to answer their unprecedente d needs, hopes and fears. Liberalism eventually defeated socialism only by adopting the best parts of the socialist programme. In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.

In September 2013 two Oxford researchers , Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne , publishe d ‘The Future of Employment’, in which they surveyed the likelihood of different professions being taken over by computer algorithms within the next twenty years. The algorithm developed by Frey and Osborne to do the calculations estimated that 47 per cent of US jobs are at high risk. For example, there is a 99 per cent probability that by 2033 human telemarketers and insurance underwrite rs will lose their jobs to algorithms. There is a 98 per cent probability that the same will happen to sports referees, 97 per cent that it will happen to cashiers and 96 per cent to chefs. Waiters – 94 per cent. Paralegal assistants – 94 per cent. Tour guides – 91 per cent. Bakers – 89 per cent. Bus drivers – 89 per cent. Construction laboure rs – 88 per cent. Veterinary assistants – 86 per cent. Security guards – 84 per cent. Sailors – 83 per cent. Bartenders – 77 per cent. Archivists – 76 per cent. Carpenters – 72 per cent. Lifeguards – 67 per cent. And so forth. There are of course some safe jobs. The likelihood that compute r algorithms will displace archaeologists by 2033 is only 0.7 per cent, because their job requires highly sophisticated types of pattern recognition, and doesn’t produce huge profits. Hence it is improbable that
corporations or government will make the necessary investment to automate archaeology within the next twenty years.19

Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual- world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than your run-of-the-mill job, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual- world designers (just try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.20

The technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support the useless masses even without any effort on their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? People must do something, or they will go crazy. What will they do all day? One solution might be offered by drugs and compute r games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experie nces. What’s so sacred in useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?

Some experts and thinkers , such as Nick Bostrom , warn that humankind is unlikely to suffer this degradation, because once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, it might simply exterminate humankind. The AI is likely to do so either for fear that humankind would turn against it and try to pull its plug, or in pursuit of some unfathomable goal of its own. For it would be extremely difficult for humans to control the motivation of a system smarter than themselves.

Even preprog ramming the system with seemingly benign goals might backfire horribly. One popular scenario imagines a corporation designing the first artificial super-intelligence , and giv ing it an innocent test such as calculating pi. Before anyone realises what is happening, the AI takes over the planet, eliminates the human race, launches a conquest campaign to the ends of the galaxy, and transforms the entire known universe into a giant super-computer that for billions upon billions of years calculates pi ever more accurately. After all, this is the divine mission its Creator gave it.21

A Probability of 87 Per Cent

At the beginning of this chapter we identified several practical threats to liberalism. The first is that humans might become militarily and economically useless. This is just a possibility, of course, not a prophecy. Technical difficulties or political objections might slow down the algorithmic invasion of the job market. Alternatively, since much of the human mind is still uncharte d territory, we don’t really know what hidden talents humans might discover, and what novel jobs they might create to replace the losses. That, however, may not be enough to save liberalism. For liberalism believes not just in the value of human beings – it also believes in individualism. The second threat facing liberalism is that in the future , while the system might still need humans, it will not need individuals. Humans will continue to compose music, to teach physics and to invest money, but the system will understand these humans better than they understand themselves, and will make most of the important decisions for them. The system will thereby deprive individuals of their authority and freedom.

The liberal belief in individua lism is founded on the three important assumptions that we discussed earlier in the book:

1. I am an in-dividual – i.e. I have a single essence which cannot be divided into any parts or subsystems. True, this inner core is wrapped in many outer layers. But if I make the effort to peel these external crusts, I will find deep within myself a clear and single inner voice, which is my authentic self.

2. My authentic self is complete ly free.

3. It follows from the first two assumptions that I can know things about myself nobody else can discover. For only I have access to my inner space of freedom, and only I can hear the whispers of my authentic self. This is why liberalism grants the individual so much authority. I cannot trust anyone else to make choices for me, because no one else can know who I really am, how I feel and what I want. This is why the voter knows best, why the customer is always right and why beauty is in the eye of the beholde r.

However, the life sciences challenge all three assumptions. According to the life sciences:

1. Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals – they are ‘dividuals ’, i.e. humans are an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self.

2. The algorithms constituting a human are not free. They are shaped by genes and environmental pressures, and take decisions either deterministically or randomly – but not freely.

3. It follows that an external algorithm could theoretically know me much better than I can ever know myself. An algorithm that monitors each of the systems that comprise my body and my brain could know exactly who I am, how I feel and what I want. Once developed, such an algorithm could replace the voter, the customer and the beholde r. Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the belief in individualism nevertheless made good practical sense, because there were no external algorithms that could actually monitor me effectively. States and markets may have wished to do exactly that, but they lacked the necessary technology. The KGB and FBI had only a vague understanding of my biochemis try, genome and brain, and even if agents bugged every phone call I made and recorded every chance encounter on the street, they did not have the computing power to analyse all this data. Consequently, given twentieth-century technological conditions, liberals were right to argue that nobody can know me better than I know myself. Humans therefore had a very good reason to regard themselves as an autonomous system, and to follow their own inner voices rather than the commands of Big Brothe r.

However, twenty-first-century technology may enable external algorithms to know me far better than I know myself,
and once this happens, the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to
networked algorithms. People will no longer see themselves as autonomous beings running their lives according to
their wishes, and instead become accustomed to seeing themselves as a collection of biochemical mechanisms that is
constantly monitored and guided by a network of electronic algorithms . For this to happen, there is no need of an external algorithm that knows me perfectly, and that never makes any mistakes; it is enough that an external algorithm will know me better than I know myself, and will make fewer mistakes than me. It will then make sense to trust this algorithm with more and more of my decisions and life choices.

We have already crossed this line as far as medicine is concerned. In the hospital, we are no longer individuals. Who do you think will make the most momentous decisions about your body and your health during your lifetime? It is highly likely that many of these decisions will be taken by computer algorithms such as IBM’s Watson. And this is not necessarily bad news. Diabetics already carry sensors that automatically check their sugar level several times a day, alerting them whenever it crosses a dangerous threshold. In 2014 researchers at Yale University announced the first successful trial of an ‘artificial pancreas’ controlled by an iPhone. Fifty-two diabetics took part in the experiment. Each patient had a tiny sensor and a tiny pump implanted in his or her stomach. The pump was connecte d to small tubes of insulin and glucagon, two hormones that together regulate sugar levels in the blood. The sensor constantly measured the sugar level, transmitting the data to an iPhone. The iPhone hosted an application that analysed the information, and whenever necessary gave orders to the pump, which injected measured amounts of either insulin or glucagon – without any need of human intervention.22

Many other people who suffer from no serious illnesses have begun to use wearable sensors and computers to monitor their health and activities. The devices – incorporated into anything from smartphones and wristwatches to armbands and underwear – record diverse biometric data such as blood pressure. The data is then fed into sophisticated computer programs, which advise you how to change your diet and daily routines so as to enjoy improved health and a longer and more productive life.23 Google, together with the drug giant Novartis, are developing a contact lens that checks glucose levels in the blood every few seconds, by testing tear contents.24 Pixie Scientific sells ‘smart diapers’ that analy se baby poop for clues about the baby’s medical condition. Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Band in November 2014 – a smart armband that monitors among other things your heartbeat, the quality of your sleep and the number of steps you take each day. An application called Deadline goes a step further, telling you how many years of life you have left, giv en your curre nt habits.

Some people use these apps without thinking too deeply about it, but for others this is already an ideology, if not a religion. The Quantified Self movement argues that the self is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no chance of understanding them. So if you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis, but rather you should systematically collect biometric data and allow algorithms to analyse them for you and tell you who you are and what you should do. The movement’s motto is ‘Self-knowledge through numbers ’.25

In 2000 the Israeli singer Shlomi Shavan conquered the local playlists with his hit song ‘Arik’. It’s about a guy who is obsessed with his girlfriend’s ex, Arik. He demands to know who is better in bed – him, or Arik? The girlfriend dodges the question, saying that it was different with each of them. The guy is not satisfied and demands: ‘Talk numbers , lady.’ Well, precisely for such guys, a company called Bedpost sells biometric armbands you can wear while having sex. The armband collects data such as heart rate, sweat level, duration of sexual intercourse , duration of orgasm and the number of calories you burnt. The data is fed into a computer that analyses the information and ranks your performance with precise numbers. No more fake orgasms and ‘How was it for you?’26

People who experie nce themselves through the unrelenting mediation of such devices may begin to see themselves as a collection of biochemical systems more than as individuals, and their decisions will increasingly reflect the conflicting demands of the various systems.27 Suppose you have two free hours a week, and you are unsure whether to use them in order to play chess or tennis. A good friend may ask: ‘What does your heart tell you?’ ‘Well,’ you answer, ‘as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family, dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay the onset of dementia.’

You can already find much more extreme examples of external mediation in the geriatric wards of hospitals. Humanism fantasises about old age as a period of wisdom and awareness. The ideal elder may suffer from bodily ailments and weaknesses, but his mind is quick and sharp, and he has eighty years of insights to dispense. He knows exactly what’s what, and always has good advice for the grandchildren and other visitors. Twenty-first-century octogenarians don’t always look like that. Thanks to our growing understanding of human biology, medicine keeps us alive long enough for our minds and our ‘authentic selves’ to disintegrate and dissolve. All too often, what’s left is a collection of dysfunctional biological systems kept going by a collection of monitors, computers and pumps.

At a deeper level, as genetic technologies are integrated into daily life , and as people develop increasingly intimate
relations with their DNA, the single self might blur even further, and the authentic inner voice might dissolve into a
noisy crowd of genes. When I am faced by difficult dilemmas and decisions, I may stop searching for my inner voice, and instead consult my inner genetic parliament.

On 14 May 2013 actress Angelina Jolie publishe d an article in the New York Times about her decision to have a double mastectomy. Jolie lived for years under the shadow of breast cancer, as both her mother and grandmothe r died of it at a relatively early age. Jolie herself did a genetic test that proved she was carrying a dangerous mutation of the BRCA1 gene. According to recent statistical surveys, women carrying this mutation have an 87 per cent probability of developing breast cancer. Even though at the time Jolie did not have cancer, she decided to pre-empt the dreaded disease and have a double mastectomy. In the article Jolie explained that ‘I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene-tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.’28

Deciding whether to undergo a mastectomy is a difficult and potentially fatal choice. Beyond the discomforts , dangers and financial costs of the operation and its follow-up treatments, the decision can have far-reaching effects on one’s health, body image, emotional well-being and relationships. Jolie’s choice, and the courage she showed in going public with it, caused a great stir and won her international acclaim and admiration. In particular, many hoped that the publicity would increase awareness of genetic medicine and its potential benefits.

From a historical perspective, it is interesting to note the critical role algorithms played in this case. When Jolie had to take such an important decision about her life, she did not climb a mountaintop overlooking the ocean, watch the sun set into the waves and attempt to connect to her innermos t feelings. Instead, she preferred to listen to her genes, whose voice manifested not in feelings but in numbers. Jolie felt no pain or discomfort whatsoever. Her feelings told her: ‘Relax, everything is perfectly fine.’ But the compute r algorithms used by her doctors told a different story: ‘You don’t feel anything is wrong, but there is a time bomb ticking in your DNA. Do something about it – now!’

Of course, Jolie’s emotions and unique personality played a key part too. If another woman with a different personality had discovered she was carrying the same genetic mutation, she might well have decided not to undergo a mastectomy. However – and here we enter the twilight zone – what if that other woman had discovered she carried not only the dangerous BRCA1 mutation, but another mutation in the (fictional) gene ABCD3, which impairs a brain area responsible for evaluating probabilities, thereby causing people to underestimate dangers? What if a statistician pointe d out to this woman that her mother, grandmother and several other relatives all died young because they underestimated various health risks and failed to take precautionary measures?

In all likelihood, you too will make important decisions about your health in the same way as Angelina Jolie. You will do a genetic test, a blood test or an fMRI; an algorithm will analyse your results on the basis of enormous statistical databases; and you will then accept the algorithm’s recommendation. This is not an apocalyptic scenario. The algorithms won’t revolt and enslave us. Rather, the algorithms will be so good in making decisions for us that it would be madness not to follow their advice.

Angelina Jolie’s first leading role was in the 1993 science- fiction action film Cyborg 2. She played Casella Reese, a cyborg developed in the year 2074 by Pinwheel Robotics for corporate espionage and assassination. Casella is programmed with human emotions, in order to blend better into human societies while pursuing her missions. When Casella discovers that Pinwheel Robotics not only controls her, but also intends to terminate her, she escapes and fights for her life and freedom. Cyborg 2 is a liberal fantasy about an individual fighting for liberty and privacy against global corporate octopuses.

In her real life, Jolie preferre d to sacrifice privacy and autonomy for health. A similar desire to improve human health may well cause most of us to willingly dismantle the barriers protecting our private spaces, and allow state bureaucracies and multinational corporations access to our innermos t recesses. For instance, allowing Google to read our emails and follow our activities would make it possible for Google to alert us to brewing epidemics before they are noticed by traditional health services.

How does the UK National Health Service know that a flu epidemic has erupted in London? By analysing the reports of thousands of doctors in hundreds of clinics. And how do all these doctors get the information? Well, when Mary wakes up one morning feeling a bit under the weather, she doesn’t run straight to her doctor. She waits a few hours, or even a day or two, hoping that a nice cup of tea with honey will do the trick. When things don’t improve, she makes an appointment with the doctor, goes to the clinic and describes the symptoms. The doctor types the data into the computer, and somebody up in NHS headquarters hopefully analyses this data together with reports streaming in from thousands of other doctors , concluding that flu is on the march. All this takes a lot of time.

Google could do it in minutes. All it needs to do is monitor the words Londoners type in their emails and in Google’s search engine, and cross-reference them with a database of disease symptoms. Suppose on an average day the words ‘headache’, ‘fever’, ‘nausea’ and ‘sneezing’ appear 100,000 times in London emails and searches. If today the Google algorithm notices they appear 300,000 times, then bingo! We have a flu epidemic. There is no need to wait till Mary goes to her doctor. On the very first morning she woke up feeling a bit unwell, and before going to work she emailed a colleague, ‘I have a headache, but I’ll be there.’ That’s all Google needs.

However, for Google to work its magic, Mary must allow Google not only to read her messages, but also to share the information with the health authorities. If Angelina Jolie was willing to sacrifice her privacy in order to raise awareness of breast cancer, why shouldn’t Mary make a similar sacrifice in order to fight epidemics?

This isn’t a theoretical idea. In 2008 Google actually launched Google Flu Trends, that tracks flu outbreaks by monitoring Google searches. The service is still being developed, and due to privacy limitations it tracks only search words and allegedly avoids reading private emails. But it is already capable of ringing the flu alarm bells ten days before traditional health services.29

A more ambitious project is called the Google Baseline Study. Google intends to build a mammoth database on human health, establishing the ‘perfe ct health’ profile. This will hopefully make it possible to identify even the smallest deviations from the baseline, thereby alerting people to burgeoning health problems such as cancer when they can be nipped in the bud. The Baseline Study dovetails with an entire line of products called Google Fit. These products will be incorporate d into wearables such as clothes, bracelets, shoes and glasses, and will collect a never-ending stream of biometrica l data. The idea is for Google Fit to feed the Baseline Study with the data it needs.30

Yet companies such as Google want to go much deeper than wearables. The market for DNA testing is currently growing in leaps and bounds. One of its leaders is 23andMe, a private company founded by Anne Wojcicki, former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The name ‘23andMe’ refers to the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that contain our genome, the message being that my chromosomes have a very special relationship with me. Anyone who can understand what the chromosomes are saying can tell you things about yourself that you never even suspected.

If you want to know what, pay 23andMe a mere $99, and they will send you a small package with a tube. You spit into the tube, seal it and mail it to Mountain View, California. There the DNA in your saliva is read, and you receive the results online. You get a list of the potential health hazards you face, and your genetic predispos ition for more than ninety traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. ‘Know thyself’ was never easier or cheaper. Since it is all based on statistics, the size of the company’s database is the key to making accurate predictions. Hence the first company to build a giant genetic database will provide customers with the best predictions, and will potentially corne r the market. US biotech companies are increasingly worried that strict privacy laws in the USA combined with Chinese disregard for individual privacy may hand China the genetic market on a plate.

If we connect all the dots, and if we give Google and its competitors free access to our biometric devices, to our DNA scans and to our medical records , we will get an all-knowing medical health service, which will not only fight epidemics , but will also shield us from cancer, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s. Yet with such a database at its disposal, Google could do far more. Imagine a system that, in the words of the famous Police song, watches every breath you take, every move you make and every bond you break. A system that monitors your bank account and your heartbeat, your sugar levels and your sexual escapades. It will definite ly know you much better than you know yourself. The self-deceptions and self-delusions that trap people in bad relationships , wrong careers and harmful habits will not fool Google. Unlike the narrating self that controls us today, Google will not make decisions on the basis of cooked-up stories , and will not be misled by cognitive short cuts and the peak-end rule. Google will actually remember every step we took and every hand we shook.

Many people will be happy to transfer much of their decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever they face important choices. Google will advise us which movie to see, where to go on holiday, what to study in college, which job offer to accept, and even whom to date and marry. ‘Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’

And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounte r you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms , and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.

‘Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you giv e external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.’31

In exchange for such devoted counselling services, we will just have to giv e up the idea that humans are individuals, and that each human has a free will determining what’s good, what’s beautiful and what is the meaning of life. Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network.

Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the
marriage market. For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions
and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will
be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.
Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my
own political opinions better than myself. When I stand behind the curtain in the polling booth, liberalism instructs me to consult my authentic self, and choose whichever party or candidate reflects my deepest desires. Yet the life sciences point out that when I stand there behind the curtain, I don’t really remember everything I felt and thought in the years since the last election. Moreover, I am bombarded by a barrage of propaganda, spin and random memories which might well distort my choices. Just as in Kahneman’s cold-water experiment, in politics too the narrating self follows the peak-end rule. It forgets the vast majority of events, remembers only a few extreme incidents and gives a wholly disproportional weight to recent happenings.

For four long years I may repeatedly complain about the PM’s policies, telling myself and anyone willing to listen that he will be ‘the ruin of us all’. However, in the months prior to the elections the government cuts taxes and spends money generously. The ruling party hires the best copywriters to lead a brilliant campaign, with a well-balanced mixture of threats and promises that speak right to the fear centre in my brain. On the morning of the elections I wake up with a cold, which impacts my mental processes, and causes me to prefer security and stability over all other considerations. And voila! I send the man who will be ‘the ruin of us all’ back into office for another four years.

I could have saved myself from such a fate if I only authorised Google to vote for me. Google wasn’t born yesterday, you know. Though it doesn’t ignore the recent tax cuts and the election promises, it also remembers what happened throughout the previous four years. It knows what my blood pressure was every time I read the morning newspapers, and how my dopamine level plummeted while I watched the evening news. Google will know how to screen the spin-doctors’ empty slogans. Google will also know that illness makes voters lean a bit more to the right than usual, and will compensate for this. Google will therefore be able to vote not according to my momentary state of mind, and not according to the fantasies of the narrating self, but rather according to the real feelings and interests of the collection of biochemical algorithms known as ‘I’.

Naturally, Google will not always get it right. After all, these are all just probabilities. But if Google makes enough good decisions, people will grant it increasing authority. As time goes by, the databases will grow, the statistics will become more accurate, the algorithms will improve and the decisions will be even better. The system will never know me perfectly, and will never be infallible. But there is no need for that. Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, giv en that most people don’t really know themselves well.

A recent study commissione d by Google’s nemesis – Facebook – has indicate d that already today the Facebook algorithm is a better judge of human personalities and dispositions even than people’s friends, parents and spouses. The study was conducted on 86,220 volunteers who have a Facebook account and who completed a hundred- item personality questionnaire. The Facebook algorithm predicted the volunteers’ answers based on monitoring their Facebook Likes – which webpages, images and clips they tagged with the Like button. The more Likes, the more accurate the predictions. The algorithm ’s predictions were compared with those of work colleagues, friends, family members and spouses. Amazingly, the algorithm needed a set of only ten Likes in order to outperform the predictions of work colleagues. It needed seventy Likes to outperform friends, 150 Likes to outperform family members and 300 Likes to outperform spouses. In other words, if you happen to have clicked 300 Likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!

Indeed, in some fields the Facebook algorithm did better than the person themself. Participants were asked to evaluate things such as their level of substance use or the size of their social networks. Their judgements were less accurate than those of the algorithm. The research concludes with the following prediction (made by the human authors of the article, not by the Facebook algorithm): ‘People might abandon their own psychologica l judgements and rely on compute rs when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. It is possible that such data-driven decisions will improve people’s lives.’32

On a more sinister note, the same study implies that in the next US presidential elections, Facebook could know not only the political opinions of tens of millions of Americans, but also who among them are the critical swing votes, and how these votes might be swung. Facebook could tell you that in Oklahoma the race between Republicans and Democrats is particularly close, Facebook could identify the 32,417 voters who still haven’t made up their mind, and Facebook could determine what each candidate needs to say in order to tip the balance. How could Facebook obtain this priceless political data? We provide it for free.

In the high days of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloure d beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

From Oracle to Sovereign

Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns.33 To understand this trajectory, conside r the case of Waze – a GPS-based navigational application which many drivers use nowadays. Waze isn’t just a map. Its millions of users constantly update it about traffic jams, car accidents and police cars. Hence Waze knows to divert you away from heavy traffic, and bring you to your destination through the quickest possible route. When you reach a junction and your gut instinct tells you to turn right, but Waze instructs you to turn left, users sooner or later learn that they had better listen to Waze rather than to their feelings.34

At first sight it seems that the Waze algorithm serves us only as an oracle. We ask a question, the oracle replies, but it is up to us to make a decision. If the oracle wins our trust, however, the next logical step is to turn it into an agent. We give the algorithm only a final aim, and it acts to realise that aim without our supervision. In the case of Waze, this may happen when we connect Waze to a self-driving car, and tell Waze ‘take the fastest route home’ or ‘take the most scenic route ’ or ‘take the route which will result in the minimum amount of pollution’. We call the shots, but leave it to Waze to execute our commands.

Finally, Waze might become sovereign. Having so much power in its hands, and knowing far more than we know, it may start manipulating us, shaping our desires and making our decisions for us. For example, suppose because Waze is so good, everybody starts using it. And suppose there is a traffic jam on route no. 1, while the alternative route no. 2 is relatively open. If Waze simply lets everybody know that, then all drivers will rush to route no. 2, and it too will be clogged. When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign. So Waze must think for us. Maybe it will inform only half the drivers that route no. 2 is open, while keeping this information secret from the other half. Thereby pressure will ease on route no. 1 without blocking route no. 2.

Microsoft is developing a far more sophisticated system called Cortana , named after an AI character in their popular Halo video-game series. Cortana is an AI personal assistant which Microsoft hopes to include as an integral feature of future versions of Windows. Users will be encouraged to allow Cortana access to all their files, emails and applications, so that it will get to know them, and can offer its advice on myriad matters, as well as becoming a virtual agent representing the user’s interests. Cortana could remind you to buy something for your wife’s birthday, select the present, reserve a table at the restaurant and prompt you to take your medicine an hour before dinner. It could alert you that if you don’t stop reading now, you will be late for an important business meeting. As you are about to enter the meeting, Cortana will warn that your blood pressure is too high and your dopamine level too low, and based on past statistics, you tend to make serious business mistakes in such circumstances. So you had better keep things tentative and avoid committing yourself or signing any deals.

Once Cortanas evolve from oracles to agents, they might start speaking directly with one another, on their masters’ behalf. It can begin innocently enough, with my Cortana contacting your Cortana to agree on a place and time for a meeting. Next thing I know, a potential employer tells me not to bother sending a CV, but simply allow his Cortana to grill my Cortana. Or my Cortana may be approached by the Cortana of a potential lover, and the two will compare notes to decide whether it’s a good match – completely unbeknown to their human owners.

As Cortanas gain authority, they may begin manipulating each other to furthe r the interests of their masters, so that success in the job market or the marriage market may increasingly depend on the quality of your Cortana. Rich people owning the most up-to-date Cortana will have a decisive advantage over poor people with their older versions.

But the murkiest issue of all concerns the identity of Cortana’s master. As we have seen, humans are not individuals, and they don’t have a single unified self. Whose interes ts, then, should Cortana serve? Suppose my narrating self makes a New Year resolution to start a diet and go to the gym every day. A week later, when it is time to go to the gym, the experiencing self asks Cortana to turn on the TV and order pizza. What should Cortana do? Should it obey the experiencing self, or the resolution taken a week ago by the narrating self?

You may well ask whether Cortana is really different from an alarm clock, which the narrating self sets in the evening, in order to wake the experiencing self in time for work. But Cortana will have far more power over me than an alarm clock. The experiencing self can silence the alarm clock by pressing a button. In contrast, Cortana will know me so well that it will know exactly what inner buttons to push in order to make me follow its ‘advice’.

Microsoft’s Cortana is not alone in this game. Google Now and Apple’s Siri are headed in the same direction. Amazon too has algorithms that constantly study you and use their knowledge to recommend products. When I go to Amazon to buy a book, an ad pops up and tells me: ‘I know which books you liked in the past. People with similar tastes also tend to love this or that new book.’ Wonderful! There are millions of books in the world, and I can never go over all of them, not to mention predicting accurately which ones I would like. How good that an algorithm knows me, and can give me recommendations based on my unique taste.

And this is just the beginning. Today in the US more people read digital books than printed volumes. Devices such as Amazon’s Kindle are able to collect data on their users while they are reading the book. For example, your Kindle can monitor which parts of the book you read fast, and which slow; on which page you took a break, and on which sentence you abandoned the book, never to pick it up again. (Better tell the author to rewrite that bit.) If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. And whereas you quickly forget most of what you read, Amazon will never forget a thing. Such data will enable Amazon to evaluate the suitability of a book much better than ever before. It will also enable Amazon to know exactly who you are, and how to turn you on and off.35

Eventually, we may reach a point when it will be impossible to disconnect from this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death. If medical hopes are realised, future people will incorporate into their bodies a host of biometric devices, bionic organs and nano-robots, which will monitor our health and defend us from infections, illnesses and damage. Yet these devices will have to be online 24/7, both in order to be updated with the latest medical news, and in order to prote ct them from the new plagues of cyberspace. Just as my home computer is constantly attacked by viruses, worms and Trojan horses, so will be my pacemaker, my hearing aid and my nanotech immune system. If I don’t update my body’s anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

The new technologies of the twenty-first century may thus reverse the humanist revolution, stripping humans of their
authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead. If you are horrified by this direction, don’t blame the
computer geeks. The responsibility actually lies with the biologists. It is crucial to realise that this entire trend is fuelled
by biological insights more than by computer science . It is the life sciences that have concluded that organisms are
algorithms. If this is not the case – if organisms function in an inherently different way to algorithms – then computers
may work wonders in other fields, but they will not be able to understand us and direct our life, and they will certainly
be incapable of merging with us. Yet once biologists concluded that organisms are algorithms, they dismantled the wall
between the organic and inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological
cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.

Some people are indeed horrified by this development, but the fact is that millions willingly embrace it. Already today
many of us give up our privacy and our individuality, record our every action, conduct our lives online and become
hysterical if connection to the net is interrupted even for a few minutes. The shifting of authority from humans to
algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of
mundane choices.

The result will not be an Orwellian police state. We always prepare ourselves for the previous enemy, even when we
face an altogether new menace. Defenders of human individuality stand guard against the tyranny of the collective,
without realising that human individuality is now threatened from the opposite direction. The individual will not be
crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within. Today corporations and governments pay homage to my
individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customised to my unique needs and
wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems,
monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process,
the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic
algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.

Upgrading Inequality

So far we have looked at two of the three practical threats to liberalism: firstly, that humans will lose their value
completely; secondly, that humans will still be valuable collectively, but they will lose their individual authority, and will
instead be managed by external algorithms. The system will still need you to compose symphonies, teach history or
write computer code, but the system will know you better than you know yourself, and will therefore make most of the
important decisions for you – and you will be perfectly happy with that. It won’t necessarily be a bad world; it will,
however, be a post-liberal world.
The third threat to liberalism is that some people will remain both indispensable and undecipherable, but they will
constitute a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans. These superhumans will enjoy unheard-of abilities and
unprecedented creativity, which will allow them to go on making many of the most important decisions in the world.
They will perform crucial services for the system, while the system could not understand and manage them. However,
most humans will not be upgraded , and they will consequently become an inferior caste, dominated by both
computer algorithms and the new superhumans.

Splitting humankind into biological castes will destroy the foundations of liberal ideology . Liberalism can coexist with
socio-economic gaps. Indeed, since it favours liberty over equality, it takes such gaps for granted. However, liberalism
still presupposes that all human beings have equal value and authority. From a liberal perspective, it is perfectly all right
that one person is a billionaire living in a sumptuous chateau, whereas another is a poor peasant living in a straw hut.
For according to liberalism, the peasant’s unique experiences are still just as valuable as the billionaire’s. That’s why
liberal authors write long novels about the experiences of poor peasants – and why even billionaires read such books
avidly. If you go to see Les Misérables in Broadway or Covent Garden, you will find that good seats can cost hundreds of
dollars, and the audience’s combined wealth probably runs into the billions, yet they still sympathise with Jean Valjean
who served nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephews.

The same logic operates on election day, when the vote of the poor peasant counts for exactly the same as the
billionaire’s. The liberal solution for social inequality is to give equal value to different human experiences, instead of
trying to create the same experiences for everyone. However, what will be the fate of this solution once rich and poor
are separated not merely by wealth, but also by real biological gaps?

In her New York Times article, Angelina Jolie referred to the high costs of genetic testing. At present, the test Jolie had
taken costs $3,000 (which does not include the price of the actual mastectomy, the reconstruction surgery and related
treatments). This in a world where 1 billion people earn less than $1 per day, and another 1.5 billion earn between $1
and $2 a day.36 Even if they work hard their entire life, they will never be able to finance a $3,000 genetic test. And the
economic gaps are at present only increasing. As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as
much as the poorest 3.6 billion people! Since the world’s population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these sixty-two
billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.37

The cost of DNA testing is likely to go down with time, but expensive new procedures are constantly being pioneered.
So while old treatments will gradually come within reach of the masses, the elites will always remain a couple of steps
ahead. Throughout history the rich enjoyed many social and political advantages, but there was never a huge
biological gap separating them from the poor. Medieval aristocrats claimed that superior blue blood was flowing
through their veins, and Hindu Brahmins insisted that they were naturally smarter than everyone else, but this was pure
fiction. In the future, however, we may see real gaps in physical and cognitive abilities opening between an upgraded
upper class and the rest of society.

When scientists are confronted with this scenario, their standard reply is that in the twentieth century too many medical
breakthroughs began with the rich, but eventually benefited the whole population and helped to narrow rather than
widen the social gaps. For example, vaccines and antibiotics at first profited mainly the upper classes in Western
countries, but today they improve the lives of all humans everywhere.

However, the expectation that this process will be repeated in the twenty-first century may be just wishful thinking, for
two important reasons. First, medicine is undergoing a tremendous conceptual revolution. Twentieth-century medicine
aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy. Healing the sick was
an egalitarian project, because it assumed that there is a normative standard of physical and mental health that
everyone can and should enjoy. If someone fell below the norm, it was the job of doctors to fix the problem and help
him or her ‘be like everyone’. In contrast, upgrading the healthy is an elitist project, because it rejects the idea of a
universal standard applicable to all, and seeks to give some individuals an edge over others. People want superior
memories, above-average intelligence and first-class sexual abilities. If some form of upgrade becomes so cheap and
common that everyone enjoys it, it will simply be considered the new baseline, which the next generation of treatments
will strive to surpass.

Second, twentieth-century medicine benefited the masses because the twentieth century was the age of the masses.
Twentieth-century armies needed millions of healthy soldiers, and the economy needed millions of healthy workers.
Consequently, states established public health services to ensure the health and vigour of everyone. Our greatest
medical achievements were the provision of mass-hygiene facilities, the campaigns of mass vaccinations and the
overcoming of mass epidemics. The Japanese elite in 1914 had a vested interest in vaccinating the poor and building
hospitals and sewage systems in the slums, because if they wanted Japan to be a strong nation with a strong army and a
strong economy, they needed many millions of healthy soldiers and workers.

But the age of the masses may be over, and with it the age of mass medicine. As human soldiers and workers give way
to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard
conditions of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of
superhumans beyond the norm.

Already today, the birth rate is falling in technologically advanced countries such as Japan and South Korea, where
prodigious efforts are invested in the upbringing and education of fewer and fewer children – from whom more and
more is expected. How could huge developing countries like India, Brazil or Nigeria hope to compete with Japan? These
countries resemble a long train. The elites in the first-class carriages enjoy health care, education and income levels on a
par with the most developed nations in the world. However, the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens who crowd the
third-class carriages still suffer from widespread diseases, ignorance and poverty. What would the Indian, Brazilian or
Nigerian elites prefer to do in the coming century? Invest in fixing the problems of hundreds of millions of poor, or in
upgrading a few million rich? Unlike in the twentieth century, when the elite had a stake in fixing the problems of the
poor because they were militarily and economically vital, in the twenty-first century the most efficient (albeit
ruthless) strategy may be to let go of the useless third- class carriages, and dash forward with the first class only. In
order to compete with Japan, Brazil might need a handful of upgraded superhumans far more than millions of healthy
ordinary workers.

How can liberal beliefs survive the appearance of superhumans with exceptional physical, emotional and intellectual
abilities? What will happen if it turns out that such superhumans have fundamentally different experiences to normal
Sapiens? What if superhumans are bored by novels about the experiences of lowly Sapiens thieves, whereas run-of-
the-mill humans find soap operas about superhuman love affairs unintelligible?

The great human projects of the twentieth century – overcoming famine, plague and war – aimed to safeguard a
universal norm of abundance, health and peace for all people without exception. The new projects of the twenty-first
century – gaining immortality, bliss and divinity – also hope to serve the whole of humankind. However, because these
projects aim at surpassing rather than safeguarding the norm, they may well result in the creation of a new
superhuman caste that will abandon its liberal roots and treat normal humans no better than nineteenth-century
Europeans treated Africans.

If scientific discoveries and technological developments split humankind into a mass of useless humans and a small elite
of upgraded superhumans, or if authority shifts altogether away from human beings into the hands of highly intelligent
algorithms, then liberalism will collapse. What new religions or ideologies might fill the resulting vacuum and guide the
subsequent evolution of our godlike descendants?

Impact
That causes the death of billions and promises slavery for the vast majority of the rest---outweighs
extinction, which is at least doled out equally---and you can’t ethically value life in a world of neo-
slavery
Independently, split-humanity collapses liberalism---bigger IL to every extinction impact and turns
case
Harari ’18 [Yuval Noah; September 26; Professor of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The Economist, “We
need a post-liberal order now,” https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/09/26/we-need-a-post-liberal-order-
now]

For several generations, the world has been governed by what today we call “the global liberal order”. Behind these
lofty words is the idea that all humans share some core experiences, values and interests, and that no human group is
inherently superior to all others. Cooperation is therefore more sensible than conflict. All humans should work
together to protect their common values and advance their common interests. And the best way to foster such
cooperation is to ease the movement of ideas, goods, money and people across the globe. Though the global liberal
order has many faults and problems, it has proved superior to all alternatives. The liberal world of the early 21st
century is more prosperous, healthy and peaceful than ever before. For the first time in human history, starvation kills
fewer people than obesity; plagues kill fewer people than old age; and violence kills fewer people than accidents. When
I was six months old I didn’t die in an epidemic, thanks to medicines discovered by foreign scientists in distant lands.
When I was three I didn’t starve to death, thanks to wheat grown by foreign farmers thousands of kilometers away. And
when I was eleven I wasn’t obliterated in a nuclear war, thanks to agreements signed by foreign leaders on the other
side of the planet. If you think we should go back to some pre-liberal golden age, please name the year in which
humankind was in better shape than in the early 21st century. Was it 1918? 1718? 1218? Nevertheless, people all over
the world are now losing faith in the liberal order . Nationalist and religious views that privilege one human group over
all others are back in vogue. Governments are increasingly restricting the flow of ideas, goods, money and people. Walls
are popping up everywhere, both on the ground and in cyberspace. Immigration is out, tariffs are in. If the liberal order
is collapsing , what new kind of global order might replace it? So far, those who challenge the liberal order do so
mainly on a national level. They have many ideas about how to advance the interests of their particular country, but
they don’t have a viable vision for how the world as a whole should function. For example, Russian nationalism can be
a reasonable guide for running the affairs of Russia, but Russian nationalism has no plan for the rest of humanity. Unless,
of course, nationalism morphs into imperialism, and calls for one nation to conquer and rule the entire world. A century
ago, several nationalist movements indeed harboured such imperialist fantasies. Today’s nationalists, whether in Russia,
Turkey, Italy or China, so far refrain from advocating global conquest. In place of violently establishing a global empire,
some nationalists such as Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, the Northern League in Italy and the British Brexiteers dream
about a peaceful “Nationalist International”. They argue that all nations today face the same enemies. The bogeymen of
globalism, multiculturalism and immigration are threatening to destroy the traditions and identities of all nations.
Therefore nationalists across the world should make common cause in opposing these global forces. Hungarians,
Italians, Turks and Israelis should build walls, erect fences and slow down the movement of people, goods, money and
ideas. The world will then be divided into distinct nation-states, each with its own sacred identity and traditions. Based
on mutual respect for these differing identities, all nation-states could cooperate and trade peacefully with one another.
Hungary will be Hungarian, Turkey will be Turkish, Israel will be Israeli, and everyone will know who they are and what is
their proper place in the world. It will be a world without immigration, without universal values, without
multiculturalism, and without a global elite—but with peaceful international relations and some trade. In a word, the
“Nationalist International” envisions the world as a network of walled-but-friendly fortresses. Many people would
think this is quite a reasonable vision. Why isn’t it a viable alternative to the liberal order? Two things should be noted
about it. First, it is still a comparatively liberal vision. It assumes that no human group is superior to all others, that no
nation should dominate its peers, and that international cooperation is better than conflict. In fact, liberalism and
nationalism were originally closely aligned with one another. The 19th century liberal nationalists, such as Giuseppe
Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy, and Adam Mickiewicz in Poland, dreamt about precisely such an international
liberal order of peacefully-coexisting nations. The second thing to note about this vision of friendly fortresses is that it
has been tried—and it failed spectacularly . All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted
in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic
Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians. This
had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress
wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of
universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are
seldom friendly. But if you happen to live inside a particularly strong fortress, such as America or Russia, why should you
care? Some nationalists indeed adopt a more extreme isolationist position. They don’t believe in either a global empire
or in a global network of fortresses. Instead, they deny the necessity of any global order whatsoever. “Our fortress
should just raise the drawbridges,” they say, “and the rest of the world can go to hell. We should refuse entry to foreign
people, foreign ideas and foreign goods, and as long as our walls are stout and the guards are loyal, who cares what
happens to the foreigners?” Such extreme isolationism, however, is completely divorced from economic realities.
Without a global trade network, all existing national economies will collapse—including that of North Korea. Many
countries will not be able even to feed themselves without imports, and prices of almost all products will skyrocket. The
made-in-China shirt I am wearing cost me about $5. If it had been produced by Israeli workers from Israeli-grown cotton
using Israeli-made machines powered by non-existing Israeli oil, it may well have cost ten times as much. Nationalist
leaders from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin may therefore heap abuse on the global trade network, but none thinks
seriously of taking their country completely out of that network. And we cannot have a global trade network without
some global order that sets the rules of the game. Even more importantly, whether people like it or not, humankind
today faces three common problems that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can only be solved through
global cooperation . These are nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption . You cannot build a wall
against nuclear winter or against global warming, and no nation can regulate artificial intelligence (AI) or
bioengineering single-handedly. It won’t be enough if only the European Union forbids producing killer robots or only
America bans genetically-engineering human babies. Due to the immense potential of such disruptive technologies, if
even one country decides to pursue these high-risk high-gain paths, other countries will be forced to follow its
dangerous lead for fear of being left behind. An AI arms race or a biotechnological arms race almost guarantees the
worst outcome . Whoever wins the arms race, the loser will likely be humanity itself . For in an arms race, all
regulations will collapse. Consider, for example, conducting genetic-engineering experiments on human babies. Every
country will say: “We don’t want to conduct such experiments—we are the good guys. But how do we know our rivals
are not doing it? We cannot afford to remain behind. So we must do it before them.” Similarly, consider developing
autonomous-weapon systems, that can decide for themselves whether to shoot and kill people. Again, every country
will say: “This is a very dangerous technology, and it should be regulated carefully. But we don’t trust our rivals to
regulate it, so we must develop it first”. The only thing that can prevent such destructive arms races is greater trust
between countries. This is not an impossible mission . If today the Germans promise the French: “Trust us, we aren’t
developing killer robots in a secret laboratory under the Bavarian Alps,” the French are likely to believe the Germans,
despite the terrible history of these two countries. We need to build such trust globally. We need to reach a point when
Americans and Chinese can trust one another like the French and Germans. Similarly, we need to create a global safety-
net to protect humans against the economic shocks that AI is likely to cause. Automation will create immense new
wealth in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while the worst effects will be felt in developing countries whose
economies depend on cheap manual labor. There will be more jobs to software engineers in California, but fewer jobs to
Mexican factory workers and truck drivers. We now have a global economy, but politics is still very national. Unless we
find solutions on a global level to the disruptions caused by AI, entire countries might collapse, and the resulting
chaos, violence and waves of immigration will destabilise the entire world . This is the proper perspective to look at
recent developments such as Brexit. In itself, Brexit isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But is this what Britain and the EU
should be dealing with right now? How does Brexit help prevent nuclear war? How does Brexit help prevent climate
change? How does Brexit help regulate artificial intelligence and bioengineering? Instead of helping, Brexit makes it
harder to solve all of these problems. Every minute that Britain and the EU spend on Brexit is one less minute they spend
on preventing climate change and on regulating AI. In order to survive and flourish in the 21st century, humankind
needs effective global cooperation , and so far the only viable blueprint for such cooperation is offered by liberalism .
Nevertheless, governments all over the world are undermining the foundations of the liberal order, and the world is
turning into a network of fortresses. The first to feel the impact are the weakest members of humanity, who find
themselves without any fortress willing to protect them: refugees, illegal migrants, persecuted minorities. But if the
walls keep rising, eventually the whole of humankind will feel the squeeze .

Designer babies trump war, environment, and other pithy impacts

Impacts
 M: Biodiversity Bad—KY

Biodiversity increases the risk of zoonotic diseases

Felicia Keesing and Richard S. Otsfeld 21, Bard College Biology and Cary Institute Ecosystem Studies, “Impacts of
biodiversity and biodiversity loss on zoonotic diseases," PNAS, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023540118

Biodiversity as a Source of Zoonotic Pathogens

Animals share their pathogens with us the same ways that humans share their pathogens with each other. A pathogen
might travel from one host to another in droplets or aerosols from coughs or sneezes; through blood, urine, saliva, or
other bodily fluids; through fecal material; or by being transferred during the bite of a vector like a fly, mosquito, or tick.
In some cases, the pathogen might linger on a surface or in the environment so that a human might encounter the
pathogen without close proximity to the animal that was its source. The pathogen might not be able to infect the human
it contacts. Even if it can, the person’s immune system might stop the pathogen before it causes harm. But in some
cases, the pathogen is able to infect the new human host, and that person might in turn transmit the pathogen to
others.

What factors determine whether a pathogen will spill over from an animal into a human host and become established?
Cross-species transmission results from a complex interplay between the characteristics of the pathogen (2, 10 ⇓–12):
the original host’s infection, behavior, and ecology; how the pathogen is shed into and survives in the environment; how
humans are exposed to the pathogen; and how susceptible those humans are to infection (4, 12⇓⇓⇓–16).

Natural biodiversity, and its loss, can affect this pathway at multiple points, potentially affecting the probability that a
new pathogen will become established in humans. Most importantly, diverse communities of host species can serve as
sources for new pathogens, and it is this role for biodiversity that has received the most attention in research on
disease emergence. In the most common conceptual model linking biodiversity to disease emergence, biodiversity is
made up of species that host a diversity of pathogens (SI Appendix), any one of which could have the characteristics
enabling it to jump successfully into humans (Fig. 1A) (7). Implicit in this model focusing on total host diversity is the
assumption that all taxa are equally likely to be sources of zoonotic pathogens. Alternatively, certain groups—such as
bats, rodents, or livestock—might be significantly more likely to serve as sources of zoonotic pathogens. In this “zoonotic
host diversity” model, the diversity of these hosts, but not total host biodiversity, would be most important in
determining the probability of zoonotic emergence (Fig. 1B).

Alternative conceptual models linking host biodiversity to zoonotic emergence in humans. (A) Total host diversity: In this
model, the overall diversity of hosts leads to a pool of pathogens, any one of which could jump to humans . Research
assuming this model typically involves comparisons of large geographic areas with innate variation in biodiversity (e.g.,
along latitudinal gradients or between countries). (B) Zoonotic host diversity: In this model, some species are more likely
to host zoonotic pathogens, and it is the diversity of these zoonotic hosts that is most important in determining the risk
of zoonotic emergence. Research using the zoonotic host diversity model typically focuses on the distribution or
characteristics of a particular taxon (e.g., bats or primates). (C) Zoonotic host diversity and abundance: In this model, the
diversity and the abundance of zoonotic hosts determine the risk of zoonotic emergence. Research using this model
typically focuses on the effects of changes in natural biodiversity (e.g., through human impacts, on zoonotic pathogens).
Modified from an illustration in Ostfeld and Keesing (7).

Researchers explicitly or implictly applying the “total host diversity” model (Fig. 1A) tend to conduct broad geographic
comparisons across regions that differ in their innate levels of biodiversity. For example, in a seminal study, Jones et al.
(5) identified zoonotic diseases that had emerged between 1940 and 2005, and mapped the most likely locations of their
underlying emergence. After attempting to correct for potential spatial variation in reporting bias, Jones et al. compared
a suite of variables to see which best predicted the locations of global zoonotic hotspots. Although zoonotic diseases
arising from wildlife were only ∼1% more likely to emerge where the diversity of wild mammals was high, Jones et al. (5)
concluded that “wildlife host species richness is a significant predictor for the emergence of zoonotic EIDs [emerging
infectious diseases] with a wildlife origin, with no role for human population growth, latitude or rainfall.” Of note was
their observation that high human population density increased the likelihood of the emergence of a zoonotic disease
from wildlife by 75 to 90%, an effect almost two orders-of-magnitude greater than the effect of mammalian diversity.
Allen et al. (17) expanded this analysis, incorporating more explanatory variables and new methods for estimating
reporting bias. After correcting for reporting bias, they found that mammal species richness had only the fourth
strongest influence on the distribution of emerging infectious diseases, after the presence of evergreen broadleaf trees
first, human population density second, and climate third.
 M: Growth Good—MSU

Sustainable growth is possible and makes this planet habitable

King and Lichtenstein 21 (David King, Founder and Chair, Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge, University of
Cambridge; and Jane Lichtenstein, Associate, Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge, University of Cambridge;
“Surviving the next 50 years is an existential crisis – 3 things we must do now,” The Print, 8-14-2021,
https://theprint.in/opinion/surviving-the-next-50-years-is-an-existential-crisis-3-things-we-must-do-now/715069/)
The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is now seen as a planet-wide existential crisis ; we need to work together
urgently, just to secure a short-term future for human civilisation. Global weather patterns are violently disrupted:
Greece burns; the south of England floods; Texas has had its coldest weather ever, while California and Australia suffer
apocalyptic wild fires. All of these violent, record-breaking events are a direct result of rapid heating in the Arctic –
occurring faster than in the rest of the world. A warm Arctic triggers new ocean and air currents that change the
weather for everyone. The only way to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain a kind of stability
in climate and weather systems, is “ climate repair ” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” – which demands that
we make very rapid progress to net zero global emissions; that there is massive, active removal of greenhouse gases
from the atmosphere; and, in the first instance, that we refreeze the Earth’s poles and glaciers to correct the wild
weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea level, and break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate
global warming. There are no either/or options . Reducing emissions About 70% of world economies have net zero
emissions commitments over varying timescales, but this has come too late to restore climate stability. The IPCC has
asked for accelerated progress on this trajectory, but whatever happens, current emission rates of atmospheric
greenhouse gases imply global warming of 1.5℃ by 2030 and well over 2℃ above pre-industrial level by the end of
the century – a devastating outcome. In particular, melting ice and thawing permafrost are considered inevitable
even if rapid and deep CO2 emissions reductions are achieved , with sea-level rise to continue for centuries as a result.
In every area of the world , climate events will become more severe and more frequent , whether flooding, heating,
coastal erosion or fires. There are definitely important steps that can still reduce the scale of this devastation, including
faster and deeper emissions reductions. However, this is not enough on its own to avert the worst . Together there is
real evidence that the massive removal of g reen h ouse g ases from the atmosphere and solutions such as repairing
the Earth’s poles and glaciers could help humanity find a surviv able way out of this crisis. Removing greenhouse gases
Taking CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, with the aim of getting back to 350ppm (parts per
million) by 2100, involves creating new CO2 “sinks” – long-term stores from which CO2 cannot escape. Sinks operate at
many scales, with forest planting, mangrove restoration, wetland and peat preservation all crucially important. Very
large projects, such as the restoration of the Loess Plateau in China demonstrate scalable CO2 removal, with multiple
add-on benefits of food production , bio-d iversity enhancement and weather stabilisation . Habitat restoration can
also make economic sense. In the Philippines, mangrove is the focus of a cost-benefit analysis. Mangrove captures four
times more carbon than the same area of rainforest, provides numerous ecosystem services and protects against
flooding, conferring socio-economic benefits and significantly reducing the cost of dealing with extreme weather events.
Big new carbon sinks must be created wherever safely possible, including in the oceans . Interventions that mimic
natural processes, known to operate safely “in the wild”, are a workable starting point. Promotion of ocean pastures to
restore ocean diversity and fish and whale stocks to the levels last seen 300 years ago is one such possibility – offering
new sustainable food sources for humans, as well as contributing to climate ecosystem services and carbon sinks. In
nature, sprinklings of iron-rich dust blow from deserts or volcanic eruptions, onto the surface of deep oceans,
generating – in a matter of months – rich ocean pastures, teeming fish stocks and an array of marine wildlife. Studies of
ocean kelp regeneration show the full range of real-life impacts, from increased protein sources for human
consumption, to restoration of pre-industrial levels of ocean biodiversity and productivity, and extensive carbon
sequestration. Extending the scale and number of ocean pastures could be achieved by systematically scattering iron-
rich dust onto target areas in oceans around the world. The approach is intuitively scalable, and could sequester
perhaps 30 billion tons per year of CO2 if 3% or so of the world’s deep oceans were to be treated annually. Large-
scale carbon-sink creation of this kind is pivotal if the atmosphere is to return to pre-industrial CO2 levels. A billion
tons per year of sequestration is the minimum threshold coordinated by the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge
given the intensity of the climate crisis. While the scale of intervention is sometimes called “geoengineering”, the
approach is closer to forest planting or mangrove restoration. The aim is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using
natural means, to return us to pre-industrial levels within a single generation. Repairing the planet The immediate
challenge is to stabilise the planet, achieving a manageable equilibrium that gives a last chance to shift to renewable
energy and towards a circular global economy , with new norms in urban, rural and ocean management. “Repairing”
systematically seeks to draw the Earth back from climate tipping points (which, by definition, cannot happen without
direct effort ), providing a supporting framework in which “reduce” and “restore” can happen. Political and societal will
is needed. The most urgent effort is to refreeze the Arctic, interrupting a bleak spiral of accelerating ice loss, sea-level
rise – and the acceleration of climate change and violent global weather changes that they cause. Arctic temperatures
have risen much faster (and increasingly so) than global average temperatures, when compared with pre-industrial
levels. Figure 1 shows this clearly from 1850 to the present day. Melting Arctic ice embodies a powerful feedback force
in climate change. White ice reflects the Sun’s energy away from the Earth before it can heat the surface. This is known
as the albedo effect. As ice melts, dark-blue seawater absorbs increasing amounts of the Sun’s energy, warming
increases, and ever-larger areas of ice disappear each summer, expanding the acceleration. Arctic temperatures govern
winds, ocean currents and weather systems across the globe. A tipping point is passing: sea-ice loss is becoming
permanent and accelerating; Greenland ice will follow and will eventually raise global sea-levels by over seven metres.
Total loss may take centuries but, decade by decade, there will be relentless incremental impacts. By mid-century the
melting will be irreversible, and sea-level rise alone will leave low-lying countries like Vietnam in desperate
circumstances, with reductions to global rice production a certainty, many millions of climate refugees and no obvious
pathway forward for such nations. Figure 1: comparison between average global temperature change, and change in the
Arctic region from 1850 to present day. Provided by Nerilie Abram using IPCC data, ANU, Australia, 2021 The rapid Arctic
temperature increase is matched by the rapid and accelerating loss in minimum (summer) sea-ice volume (Figure 2),
which further accelerates the temperature rise in a spiral of reinforcing feedback loops. Figure 2: decline in annual
minimum Arctic Sea ice volume 1980-2020. Provided by Nerilie Abram using IPCC data, ANU, Australia, 2021 It is vital to
pivot the world back from this ice-melt tipping point , and to repair the Arctic as rapidly as possible . Marine cloud
brightening in which floating solar-powered pumps spray salt upwards to brighten clouds and create a reflective
barrier between the Sun and the ocean, is known to cool ocean surfaces and is a promising way to promote Arctic
summer cooling. It mimics nature, and can be scaled up or down in a flexible way. Studies of marine cloud brightening,
its climate impacts and interactions with human systems, are underway. As with promotion of ocean pastures, such
solutions must be critically analysed , but there is no longer any doubt of their crucial importance . What we do in the
next five years determines the viability of humanity’s future . Even if we narrow our aspirations to “survival”, fixing on a
timescale of 50 years or so, the challenges are daunting. Humanity deserves better. We know what to do to be able to
imagine thousands of years of human civilisation ahead, as well as behind us.
 M: Heg Good

Decline causes nuclear war.

Bret Stephens 22, MSc. from the London School of Economics, B.A. from the University of Chicago, Recipient of Two
Honorary Doctorates and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, “Don’t Wish for a Post-Pax Americana”, New York
Times, 2/15/2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/ukraine-war-biden.html

Either way, the crisis should serve as a tutorial on what the so-called post-Pax Americana world will look like. In a
fantasy version of that world — a world in which American power isn’t constantly being called upon to address faraway
crises or reassure nervous allies — the U nited States trades the burdens of being a superpower for the modest but
more manageable, affordable and humane ambitions of a normal country.

Our military shrinks to a size adequate for national defense, not global policing. We spend the savings on mending the
frayed edges of society.

Our allies stop freeloading off our security guarantees and start spending more on their own defense.

Our foreign policy becomes less arrogant and more collaborative. We lose the illusion that we can, or should, solve
other people’s problems, and we free ourselves from the personal sacrifices and moral compromises that go with that
illusion.

Our economic policies shift to adapt to a less-globalized world. Instead of depending on China for low-cost
manufacturing and labor, we reinvest in American workers and factories and become independent in everything from
energy to microchips.

It’s a tempting vision, a left-right marriage of George McGovern’s “Come Home, America” and Donald Trump’s “America
First.” It’s also been thought of before: Bob La Follette Jr., the progressive senator from Wisconsin, and Father Charles
Coughlin, the antisemitic radio host, shared the same sorts of ideas in the run-up to World War II. They had broad public
appeal all the way through Dec. 6, 1941.

What’s wrong with those ideas? For starters, global order is not a self-generating phenomenon. In the absence of Pax
Americana, would the U nited Nations be capable of enforcing rules of the road , like freedom of navigation in the
South China Sea, over which as much as one-third of the world’s commercial traffic passes? How about regional
alliances, like the E uropean Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Don’t count on it.

This has some obvious knock-on effects . It’s an invitation to predatory behavior — precisely of the kind we’re
witnessing on Ukraine ’s borders and also seeing signs of over the Taiwan Strait. And predatory behavior is rarely
satisfied . A Russia that possesses more of Ukraine or a China that seizes Taiwan will each want more . They’ll be in a
stronger position to get it.

Another obvious consequence: There will be no peace dividend in a post-Pax Americana world. Contrary to
conventional wisdom, the United States today spends historically little on defense — about 3.7 percent of gross
domestic product, compared to more than 5 percent in the last year of the Carter administration. But military spending
would have to return to Cold War levels for an era in which core U.S. interests were constantly threatened by hostile
and confident powers.

We would also find ourselves perplexed and frightened by the behavior of our traditional allies. Instead of having
freeloaders, we would enter a world of freelancers , countries aggressively out for themselves , irrespective of
American wishes or established norms. Without the assurance of U.S. protection, what would keep a future Japanese
government from rapidly fielding a vast nuclear arsenal as a response to China? Why shouldn’t Turkey and Saudi
Arabia go nuclear , too, particularly if Iran winds up with a bomb?
A world in which several combustible regions each have multiple nuclear powers in varying configurations of alliance
and hostility is a recipe for miscalc ulation, accident and tragedy .

China rise is bad---it triggers great-power war.

Gabriel Glickman 18, Nonresident Associate Fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University,
“Back to the Future: The Potential of Great-Power Conflict”, The National Interest, 2/12/18,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/back-the-future-the-potential-great-power-conflict-24464

What does the DOD mean by “order?” In the field of international relations, the terms “revisionist state” and “status-
quo state” are used to describe, respectively, countries that seek to change the current international system and those
that uphold it. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the international system has been defined by American
hegemony and the spread of Western liberal democracy rather than its challengers—notably, fascism and socialism.
This is commonly referred to as the liberal world order .

Under that world order, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It often intervenes in international
conflicts at a high cost, thus keeping dissatisfied nations from overturning the system . The NDS, however, refers to a
recent shift in the current world order with an observation that, “We are facing global disorder , characterized by
decline in the long-standing rules-based international order.”

The basis for that observation is the argument that the United States under the Obama administration took a brief, but
arguably consequential, step back from the job of world-order maintenance. As proof of this, foreign-policy pundits
often refer to Obama’s favorite quote (which he got from Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn got it from a nineteenth-
century clergyman named Theodore Parker): “[T]he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The
implication of this quote is that history is ultimately on the side of good rather than evil (e.g., dictatorships), and
therefore the United States needn’t concern itself with great power competition or world order strategy. Critics point
out that the president’s faith in that sentiment was put to poor use, however, because it led him to apologize for
American power and to enact a more restrained foreign policy that in turn allowed revisionist states like Russia, China
and Iran to flourish at the expense of their respective regions’ security. As Charles Krauthammer harshly wrote in the
final months of the administration: “The consequent withdrawal of American power … has yielded nothing but
geopolitical chaos and immense human suffering . (See Syria.).”

And that's not exactly a partisan argument either. In addition to conservative critics like Krauthammer, left-leaning
foreign policy scholars, like Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute, also have been critical of the results of the Obama
administration's well-intentioned foreign policy.

The NDS promises to reverse the “arc of history” approach to security policy with a three-tiered approach that prioritizes
the “revisionist powers” of China and Russia, then “rogue regimes” like Iran and North Korea, and finally “nonstate
actors” such as ISIS.

Of course, this new approach may alleviate serious concerns about the NSS—including my own—that the United States
government no longer cares about global security. But policy will only follow well-written sentiment if President Trump
himself can accept that America is the glue holding together an entire world order .

With China now poised to reclaim its previous spot in world history as a global hegemon, the proverbial clock is turning
back. And that appears to be the reason why the DOD is serious about America being in the business of world order
maintenance. As stated in the NDS: “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S.
national security.”

Indeed, China already has a strong economy . It represents almost 15 percent of the global GDP to America’s roughly 24
percent. But, to put that in a slightly different perspective, China has grown astronomically in the last decade to overtake
Japan as the second largest global economy. Thus, there is a real possibility that in the near future (likely decades) it may
be able to surpass even the U nited States and then harness its capital to develop superior military technology. At that
point, China would be capable of overthrowing the current international system.

The world has not seen global conflict the likes of World War I and II since the U nited States became the dominant
power. Nor, for that matter, has it seen a recurrence of the great power conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. As the new defense strategy implies, take U.S. hegemony out of that equation and great powers may clash
once again to the detriment of a cherished world order.

K---2AC
Kritiks
 AB K: KY MW

Understanding the subversive nature of antiblackness and its semiotics is necessary to shape your
orientation to the world. This proliferation of antiblack violence establishes itself correct through
narratives of redemption and often on the microlevel.
Gillespie 20. John Gillespie ’20, PhD student at UC Irvine, Comparative Literature, “ON THE PROSPECT OF BLACK
BAUDRILLARD: NOTES ON THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA”, Mumble Theory, 7/14/20, Paper presented at Wake Forest
University, https://mumbletheory.com/2020/07/14/on-the-prospect-of-black-baudrillard-notes-on-the-precession-of-
simulacra/

In Baudrillard, the images and representations of the real have become indistinguishable from the real itself such that
a simulation may stand in for reality without any semblance of reality being lost. The simulation is the reality. The
reality would cease to be a scene of the Real without the simulation. Thus, in Baudrillard’s account of “How We Mistook
the Map for the Territory”[1] the map has not so much as receded access to the territory itself, but has instead
become so enmeshed in the territory that there is a hazard in being able to determine the difference. Thus, he begins
Simulation and Simulacra with what he calls, “The Precession of Simulacra.” A precession is defined as, “the slow
movement of an axis of a spinning body around another axis due to a torque (such as gravitational influence) acting to
change the direction of the first axis.” With the use of this term, we can infer that at the start of Baudrillard’s magnum
opus what he is attempting to describe in his philosophical sociology of his increasingly post-modern Euro-Western
society is a transition in the spinning of its axis. This transition is a transition of which “due to a torque (such as
gravitational influence)” has acted to change the direction of the first axis. This transition, according to Baudrillard, can
be read in and through the axiomatics of Western relations to the technology and techniques of the sign. Baudrillard
states: All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to
the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange
– God of course… Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this
equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle
of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of
every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation,
simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. [2] Thus, what is brought about is the
transition from the Modern axis of Representation to the Post-Modern regime of Simulation. The former presupposes a
direct link between the word and its object, the linguistics of the category and the materiality of the thing being
categorized, suggesting that what is spoken speaks to what is true. The Post-Modern axis of Simulation is an oscillation
that negates the value of the word, the sign, and the category – moving from one pole of terminology to the other
suggesting that what was once the opposite of the signified can also be found internally within its signification. For
example, Television under a regime of Representation is an articulation of a re-presentation of the Real, but under
Baudrillard’s description Television becomes a simulation of the Real – a reality TV, no longer separate and unequal, but
integrated and enveloped. Is the President a real President or a President acting as President on TV? Baudrillard would
say he is both, which is to say that he is a neither, which is to say there is no President. Thus, this transition in
axiological relations to the real is a transition that he states, “is the generation by models of a real without origin or
reality: a hyperreal.”[3] Thirteen years after his death, it would seem that such a characterization, like the
proclamations of the death of God by Baudrillard’s philosophical predecessor Friedrich Nietzsche, had been proclaimed
all too soon. Yet, here we are, we children of the dawn of the 21st Century, and we cannot help but find ourselves in a
web of virtualities, simulations, fake news (which in itself is a perfect phrasing of the imbalance of opposites in
accordance to Baudrillard), and viral videos of violence that pose no threat nor circulate any meaning. In a way,
Baudrillard was the most absurd of the post-structuralist/post-modernist thinkers. In this I admire him, for he was the
most willing to verbalize the fracturing of a Worldview that had begun to unfurl in the aftermath of the revolutions of
the 1960s. In addition to this, what makes Baudrillard’s account of this turn in relation to the sign is the location in
which he places the evidence of the transformation in axioms from the realism of modernity to the hyper-realism of
post-modernity. While readings of Baudrillard and the post-modern often suggest that it was solely the technological
transformations from within an increasingly cybernetic and algorithmic technocapitalism that drove Baudrillard’s
insistence until death that the simulation had made the Real territory impossible to grasp, it is Baudrillard’s
problematic meditations on the “Savage” which drive home the truth of the hyper-real built as it is on the grounds of
a violent hyper-chaos. Indeed, for what the Savage reveals to Baudrillard is none other than that which Denise
Ferreira Da Silva states boldly namely that, “We had something to do with the crisis of science; we, the others of Man,
were upsetting history: our words and deeds unleashed the predicament of the ‘modern order.’” [4] Baudrillard, at
the limits of his corporeal integrity, suggest a similar truth from the position of the fractured subject position of Man –
elaborating the paradoxes of the capacities that bore him. He states, “Ethnology brushed up against its paradoxical
death in 1971, the day when the Philippine government decided to return the few dozen Tasaday who had just been
discovered in the depths of the jungle, where they had lived for eight centuries without any contact with the rest of
the species, to their primitive state, out of the reach of colonizers, tourists, and ethnologists. This at the suggestion of
the anthropologists themselves, who were seeing the indigenous people disintegrate immediately upon contact, like
mummies in the open air.”[5] The genocidal encounter of ethnology with its object of investigation reveals the
paradoxes of the Western real. In order for its real to live, its object must die. In order to prevent the death of the
object, the strategies of procuring the real must die. In order to protect the real, the simulation of the real must rise.
The Real is resurrected through a simulation. Thus, the Tasaday after being hoarded into ethnological description,
categorical schemata and onto-ethico-epistemological accounts rooted in colonization which labelled the “newly
found primitives” as exemplars of the primal vestiges of the Human species, will be returned to the jungles from
whence they came to be a living museum to the past (which is also the present since the Tasaday are still with us) of
Human evolution. In other words, the Tasaday/Savage reveals the simulation. In the Savage, the paradoxes of science,
ethnology, and the Real are made to bear. Hence why Baudrillard states: The Indian thus returned to the ghetto, in the
glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology.
This model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the ‘brute’ reality of these Indians it has
entirely reinvented – Savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being Savages: what a turn of events, what a
triumph for this science that seemed dedicated to their destruction![6] Where Baudrillard takes his analysis both all too
far and all too Human is in suggesting that the condition which has made the Savage, a Savage, is a condition which
has not only become a universal condition by way of the universal expression of the simulation of signs, but a
condition which belongs to the sign alone and not to the materiality of severed flesh, broken necks, and
unreclaimable bodies. The absurdity of Baudrillard lies not so much in his claim that the Savage has been articulated
in ethnology as an amalgam of simulations and simulacra but rather in his insistence that this relation of simulation
and simulacra is the same for all Beings across the board (because post-modernity) including but not limited too
Baudrillard’s own ontological capacity as a White Being and henceforth, the still long-enduring typological face of
Humanity par excellence. In Baudrillard’s own words, “We are all Tasadays, Indians who have again become what they
were – simulacral Indians who at last proclaim the universal truth of ethnology.”[7] It is at this point in Baudrillard’s
work that “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death” begins not as a blackening of Baudrillard, but as a critique of its
elaboration. For what one finds in Baudrillard’s theory of the Real is the limits of the sign to signify a universality for all
positionalities thought to be interlocuting from within the social space of civil society. For in Baudrillard’s theory, there
had once been a Real underneath the sign, and now the Real is the simulacrum. In this transition from the Real to the
Hyper-Real, one can suggest that at one point there was a representation that adequately separated the Indian as
Indian and Western Man as Western Man, just as one can suggest that now, with the triumph of the simulation, we
have all become savages. Yet, such a theory has not read Hortense Spillers nor grasped the severity of her claims that
“Sticks and stones might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us.”[8] For what one gathers in this
poetically poignant critique of the sign is the materiality of semiotics. A materiality that Baudrillard and most of the
post-structuralist interest in the signifier occludes. To take account of the words that kill is to take account of the
violence of the signifier and the materiality of the word. Put differently, Hortense Spiller’s “words will most certainly
kill” is a reminder to remain conscientious about the materiality of the map – no matter its arrangement over and in-
between the territory. Or better yet, Hortense Spiller’s “words will most certainly kill” is a reminder that language is
haunted by a violence which is “the grammar and ghost of every gesture.”[9] That there can be a Being for which the
sign – language nor image – is not enough to render coherent or legible its grammar of suffering is forgone as the
attempt of procuring universal entrapment is announced in Baudrillard. Yet, the cataloguing of the World in
accordance to hierarchical variations of difference – by way of axiological simulations of abstractions that begin to
map the territory of the post-modern and hyper-modern landscape is neither equally distributed nor is it all a game of
sign, signifiers and semiotics. In fact, the very conditions of possibility for such a cataloguing of personhood as well as
its post-Sixties transformations begins with the bracketing off of Blackness as the nadir of ethnology. So that if we see
this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States as the
analog form of a global archi-pelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called
“underdeveloped” areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa (now stricken with
AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil wars, and whose bottommost place as the most impoverished of all the earth’s
continents is directly paralleled by the situation of its Black Diaspora peoples, with Haiti being produced and reproduced
as the most impover- ished nation of the Americas)—a systemic pattern emerges. This pattern is linked to the fact that
while in the post-sixties United States, as Herbert Gans noted recently, the Black population group, of all the multiple
groups comprising the post-sixties social hierarchy, has once again come to be placed at the bottommost place of that
hierarchy (Gans, 1999), with all incoming new nonwhite/non-Black groups, as Gans’s fellow sociologist Andrew Hacker
(1992) earlier pointed out, coming to claim “normal” North American identity by the putting of visible distance
between themselves and the Black population group (in effect, claiming “normal” human status by distancing
themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir, “nigger” rung of being human within the terms of our
present ethnoclass Man’s overrepresentation of its “descriptive statement” [Bateson 1969] as if it were that of the
human itself), then the struggle of our times, one that has hitherto had no name, is the struggle against this
overrepresentation. [10] When Baudrillard reduces the Savages condition to a condition of hyper-reality that “we all”
must undergo he forgets the ways in which his own present ethnoclass of Man still retains the overdeterminate
grounds for authorizing and signifying its own “descriptive statement” as if it was the only meta-narrative that
mattered and for that matter possessed Real matter. He also leaves unthought or never begins to consider the ways in
which Blackness gets locked out of narrative capacity itself by virtue of occupying this ‘nadir’ of Humanity. Thus, what is
the “nigger rung of being Human” in Wynter, I found to be “Blackness as Slaveness” in Wilderson and the Afro-
pessimists. And the violence done to the Slave conditions the possibilities for the axiological signs and concepts which
will come to set the scales and terms of il/legibility which will come to situate Man1 as the Rational Man, Man2 as the
Biocentric Man, and what I have increasingly identified as Man3 and the Storytelling Man. All of these variations of
the Human exists and persist on “bizarre axiological ground.” [11] A ground which drips in the Real of Black blood and
paints this suffering over in simulation and simulacra, leaving the Hyper-Chaos of Black reality in the Hyper-Reality of
an anti-Black World. What appeared as an account that can only wash away the Real, was the Hyper-chaotic ground
of the Real, that situates Black death and its disavowal at the limits of signification. Thus, as Wilderson claims: “We
need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror,”[12] a language of abstraction which we can say will not be
found in the work or under the name of Jean Baudrillard.

Granting “personhood” specifically juxtaposes the non-existence of black folk – after 154 years of
laws hailed as “progress”, the lived experience of blackness still relegates them to an existential
void outside the realm of politics. Granting personhood only reminds black folk and makes this
antiblack violence more invisible via massive claims of “saving us”
Marissa Jackson Sow 22. Open Society Foundations (OSF); United Nations - Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights; St. John's University - School of Law. “Whiteness as Contract” Washington and Lee Law Review, Vol. 78, No. 5
(2022)

- Detroit water shutoff ignored black communities’ cries for water, depriving them of a basic human right

- Breanna Taylor judge nominated for supreme court

- It’s a racial Contract – Legal personhood for whites in exchange for stripping black life
 o Subcontracting (i.e anyone can perpetuate whiteness, or be tokenized for whiteness)

- Black property threatened by deed theft, discriminatory property tax assessments, unfair utility pricing
structures, immigration policy, or modern-day lynch mobs.

- Black life threatened by police, policing, surveillance, exploitation of labor, murder, fear

The impact of the Detroit water shutoff program on the lives of the Detroiters subjected to disconnections reveals the
narratives—mostly of Black women—whose existences are suspended between the human and the non-human animal,
or somewhere between life and death. It is a settled fact that human beings cannot survive without water and cannot
thrive without clean running water.141 It is equally settled, in the human rights canon, that human beings have a right
to water.142 In Detroit, homes subjected to water disconnections risk referrals to Child and Family Services because
homes lacking running water are considered unsafe for children.143 But no such right to water is recognized in the
United States, which has been used to justify the water shutoff program by Detroit’s local government as well as the
federal court presiding over Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy.144 Prior to Governor Whitmer’s institution of a temporary
moratorium on the shutoffs in March 2020,145 Detroiters were forced to survive for months, and even several years,
without water because of the City’s extremely high water and sewage pricing.146 One elderly woman, who had been
without water for two years, described saving up enough coins to wash her clothes at the laundromat every couple of
months and only flushing her toilet after bowel movements.147 Of her plight, she said, “You use your brain. You
scramble. You survive because you’re used to dealing with nothing.”148 Another woman, Mattie McCorkle, described
the experience of filling up buckets of water at a car wash for months to bathe herself and her three children as if she
were “less than a person.”149 The treatment of Detroiters like Ms. McCorkle by their local governments begs the
question: In a society where all people are guaranteed equal rights under the law, are Black people really people at
all? Bernadette Atuahene and Timothy Hodge underscored the centrality of property to personhood in their work on the
property foreclosure scandal in Detroit by mentioning that foreclosure has “injurious emotional, social, political, and
cultural consequences” as well as financial impact.150 Of the relationship between home ownership and personhood,
Atuahene and Hodge note, “When the home is foreclosed upon, a family loses more than an economic asset; their
personhood is also impacted.”151 There are political ramifications bearing on personhood too, because ownership of
“property serves as a bulwark against state encroachment on individual autonomy .”152 Ms. McCorkle’s feelings of
sub-humanity, then, stem from the fact that the deprivation of an essential utility—itself property, and also inextricably
linked to the habitability of her real property—stripped her of social, political, and even natural personhood by the
state.153 Commissioner Welch’s views on race and personhood were not only a reflection of Justice Taney’s view on
Black sub-personhood in Dred Scott,154 but also reflect Homer Plessy’s views concerning whiteness as capital155 and
the Supreme Court’s rulings attaching American citizenship to one’s status as either white or Black per the Naturalization
Act of 1906.156 In Plessy v. Ferguson,157 the Court upheld racial segregation by declaring that Black people were
“separate but equal”—“tiered personhood”158 that elevated the legal status of Black peoples in the United States while
still insisting upon their subjugation. Though centuries have passed since the Three-Fifths Clause was repealed and
replaced by the Fourteenth Amendment, the sociopolitical personhood of Black people in America remains an unsettled
question. The legal rights of Black Americans, while solid in theory and codified, are still uncertain in practice. Where
rights and remedies are concerned, social contract theory asserts that natural humanity has never been enough. Rights
are political constructions, given force by and through law, and most importantly, bargained for by a body politic.159
That Black people have been excluded from the body politic necessarily means that rights that would apply to them on
the basis of their natural humanity in theory, do not apply to them in practice.160 Of course, many Black scholars have
addressed Black people’s persistent exclusion from full citizenship benefits in the United States (and beyond) despite the
nation’s formal commitments to the equality of all citizens under the law.161 Journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson has
advanced a theory of race as a mere “visible manifestation” of the nation’s caste system, which concerns power and is
perpetuated by division of labor.162 For Wilkerson, the subordination of some people under others is, as Mills posits,
about exploitation and domination, but unlike Mills, Wilkerson minimizes race as a sort of discursive crutch that
Americans use when they should, in fact, be describing caste.163 While I agree with Wilkerson that white supremacy is
sustained by the caste-ing of human beings and that white supremacy has always held wealth extraction and domination
as its goals,164 I join the chorus of race scholars who understand that while caste is not necessarily race, race is always
caste.165 Atiba Ellis’s theory of tiered personhood posits Blackness as a form of personhood that is subordinated to
whiteness but still part of the political and social project.166 Per Ellis, political personhood is a status allowing people to
exercise constitutional rights and receive constitutional protections, and a framework for reifying status and stratifying
those of certain status and power above or below others.167 Notably, Ellis describes the concepts of personhood and
citizenship as conceptually distinct.168 The Racial Contract essentially fuses the two concepts by granting those natural
persons raced as white full personhood, citizenship in both the racial state and the racial superstate, and the core rights
(of property and contract)—and by stripping those raced as Black of political personhood, citizenship, and rights169
irrespective of formal legal transformations-as-codified. Lolita Buckner Inniss also elucidates the dynamics created and
exploited by whiteness in her work on white witnesses. For Inniss, white people and men are public people who “deploy
power both by observing and by being observed . . . dismantle and erect visual barriers by shaping laws, rules and
norms,” while non-white people and non-men are private people “who see little and are little seen.”170 Whiteness
requires the relegation of non-white people to private life because the public domain is the political, contracting, and
decision-making realm from which non-white people are excluded so that they may be efficiently and effectively
exploited.171 By placing Black people outside of the public, they are placed out of the realm of politics even when (or
especially if) public law offers a grant of rights and a promise of equal protection of the law.172 The private order can
therefore carry forth exploitation and human rights abuses not reached by the law.173 Uncovering abuse and
exploitation perpetuated in the private order often requires the act of a public person—for example, white witnesses
who record abuses against Black people—to elevate the atrocities experienced by Black people into public
consciousness and discourse.174 Inniss’s theory of the private versus public person is clearly expressed in Governor
Whitmer’s executive order concerning the water shutoff program in Detroit, which contrasts the health and wellbeing of
Black Detroiters—a private matter of no concern to the State—with the public health and wellbeing of white people
placed at risk by Black people’s lack of running water.175 With respect to the human rights abuses and brutality that the
state metes out on Black and Indigenous people, discussed in Part III, I depart from Inniss’s theory by understanding
“private people” as those “who see much and are little seen.”176 With respect to policing of Black proprietorship or
possession of space, as discussed in Part III, I would describe private people as those “who see much and are highly
surveilled.”177 Like Ellis, Pateman and Mills discuss tiered personhood in The Contract and Domination—writing of
white men as contractors and of white women and non-white men as subcontractors while non-white women are
nonpersons void of contractual capacity.178 I understand white people to be contractors—agreeing with Ellis that white
men are tiered higher than white non-men179—and Black and Indigenous people and lands as the objects of those
contracts, or contractees, and therefore politically nonpersons.180 This is particularly true in the case of non-white non-
men;181 as an exception to the rule, some non-white non-men and non-white men may act as subcontractors. Per the
theory of sub-contractorship, Black men have been delegated the power over water policy in Detroit and trade in the
collective of Black women who collect rainwater on their roofs and any money to pay their water bills as consideration in
exchange for proximity to politics and power—or to whiteness.182 In the case of Breonna Taylor, a Black Attorney
General failed to indict the police officers who killed her as she was sleeping, and was immediately placed on the
President’s list for consideration as a potential Supreme Court Justice candidate.183 Again, the bargained-for
consideration was a Black female victim of state violence and the community seeking justice on her behalf. By contrast,
while white women’s citizenship has been subordinated to white men’s citizenship, white women retain the de facto
policing power that is a marker of full citizenship184 by regularly using the power against Black people.185 Race is
political and legal, rather than biological. Whiteness is a constructed identity that is imbued with power and control, and
therefore it is not particularly remarkable that a person raced as Black of any gender could reify whiteness as a
subcontractor or even as the head of a local, state, or federal government.186 Not only does one’s racial status depend
upon legal and social definitions, and change therewith according to time and place, but also the proximity to whiteness
of both individuals and groups of people is similarly fluid.187 By delegating a measure of the power of whiteness to
individual people raced as Black, signatories to the contract of whiteness can conceal the existence of the contract and
weaponize the Black subcontractors as a mirage and shield against Black complainants to gaslight them. Despite the
formal status as American citizens, Black Americans do not fully enjoy the rights of citizenship. They instead occupy a
place and space outside of politics (social contracting) and proprietorship (commercial contracting). While Black
people can no longer be held as chattel, the lived realities of Black Americans are as wards of the state—incarcerated or
not—and as nonpersons whom white civilians have the power to contain, detain, expel, or eliminate.188 Black people’s
possession of property—as owners or occupiers—is consistently and persistently threatened, whether by deed theft or
discriminatory property tax assessments,189 by unfair utility pricing structures,190 immigration policy,191 or modern-
day lynch mobs.192 Black people are tenants at best and trespassers at worst; they are natural-born persons, but not
part of the American body politic; they are not contractors, but often the objects of the contract or the consideration
therefore. Because Black people are present but not persons within the United States, they are not legally or
politically alive; moreover, even physically speaking, while alive, Black people are often near death, near-death, or
nearly dead.

Top-down policy changes to nature personhood fail absent a lens targeting racism as a conditioning
dynamic for personhood itself
Laura Pulido 16, 5-1-2016, "Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-
sanctioned violence," ResearchGate,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303096561_Geographies_of_race_and_ethnicity_II_Environmental_racism_r
acial_capitalism_and_state-sanctioned_violence

Failure on such a scale cannot be resolved by tinkering with policy. While geographers typically attribute such dynamics
to neoliberalism (Faber, 2008; Holifield, 2007), this is only part of the story. For instance, what is the connection
between court decisions that contract the definition of discrimination and neoliberalism? Pellow (2007) is one of the few
to combine political economy and race in his analysis of transnational pollution, although Heynen (2015) has made some
important moves in this direction. I build on Pellow’s work as well as research from critical ethnic studies to argue that
environmental racism is part of racial capitalism. Ethnic Studies scholars have long grappled with the relationship
between racism and capitalism (Barrera, 1979; Marable, 1983; Almaguer, 1994). Cedric Robinson coined the term racial
capitalism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. First published in 1983, he argued that racism
was a structuring logic of capitalism. His work did not initially circulate beyond a small circle of scholars (e.g. Kelley,
1990; Gilmore, 2007), but the rise of critical ethnic studies (Ma´rquez and Rana, 2015) has introduced a new generation
to it. While this is new to some (Bonds and Inwood, forthcoming; Driscoll Derickson, 2014; Ruiz, 2015), there is, in fact,
older geographic scholarship that sees capitalism as deeply racial (Wilson, 1992; Blaut, 1993; Woods, 1998; Gilmore,
2002). Thus, the ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the term, the intellectual moment, and the political
urgency. The time is ripe for a deep engagement with racial capitalism. A focus on racial capitalism requires greater
attention to the essential processes that shaped the modern world, such as colonization, primitive accumulation,
slavery, and imperialism. As McKittrick notes, ‘the geographic management of blackness, race, and racial difference (and
thus nonblackness) hinges on a longstanding but unacknowledged plantation past’ (2011: 953). By insisting that we are
still living with the legacy of these processes, racial capitalism requires that we place contemporary forms of racial
inequality in a materialist, ideological and historical framework. Dominant historical narratives of racism locate its
origins in European colonization. Robinson (2000) challenges this notion by documenting its prior roots in Europe. This is
key, because although he and others, such as Melamed (2015: 77), insist that, ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’, this
historicization suggests that racism predates capitalism and therefore can be used by diverse economic systems,
including colonization and slavery. Indeed, to treat colonization, for example, as solely an economic process is not to
fully grasp its human impact, logic, or legacy (Said, 1979; Blaut, 1993; Fanon, 1965; Galeano, 1973; Blackhawk, 2008).
We can never overlook the fact that racial ideology (along with guns) enabled colonization. Though conquest and
domination were not always the sole motives, the elaborate ideology that constructed indigenous people as less than
fully human was entirely necessary for the colonial project. Indeed, Smith (2012) has suggested the genocide is the core
logic driving colonization. In the case of the US and other settler societies, colonization led to massive land theft, which
was not only a form of primitive accumulation, but also became the basis of those countries’ national territories at the
cost of native nations (Hixson, 2013). Earlier debates sought to reconcile racism and capitalism (Wilson, 1992; Barrera,
1979; Almaguer, 1994), but critical ethnic studies and its precursors insist that race cannot always be contained by
capitalism (Omi and Winant, 1986; HoSang et al., 2012; Roediger, 2008; Lipsitz, 2006). Though racism has been and is
deployed to facilitate maximum accumulation, racism can also exceed the desires of various fractions of capital.
Consider the overt racism of the contemporary US Republican Party, which is arguably counter to the desires of much of
multicultural corporate America (Melamed, 2011). Given the variability of racism to capitalism, I consider the production
of difference and value as the most fundamental point of connection. Accordingly, this should be the starting point for EJ
analyses.

Our critique serves to create consistency in ontological and intra-ontological resistance to pinpoint
the best response to antiblackness
***CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of suicide. ***

Michael A. Barlow Jr. 16, Bachelors degree in Sociology from United States Military Academy at West Point, 2016,
"Addressing Shortcomings in Afro-Pessimism," Inquiries Journal,
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1435/2/addressing-shortcomings-in-afro-pessimism

If the United States was founded upon the genocide of the indigenous and the death of the African, then how can it ever
be an ethical entity? It is not, and it should not be the end-point of Black political emancipation. Black movements in
particular should abandon the United States as a source of hope because of the antagonistic relationship that it has with
civil society. In terms ontological positioning, the ultimate point of freedom for the Black subject is the disorganization of
society’s operation upon Black flesh because “for Black people, civil society itself- rather than its abuses or shortcomings
- is a state of emergency” (Wilderson 2003). The power dynamic in the status quo exists as such through the continuous
destructive consumption of the Black.

Obviously, chattel slavery has ended but the slave relationship the Black has with the United States, and the world as a
whole, is unchanged. In every major institution, Black bodies experience oppression and inequality at a systemic level.
From ailing educational structures in overly impoverished neighborhoods, to the state of mass incarceration, Black
subjects in America are targeted and subjected to overwhelming discrimination and abuse in every field. This is no
coincidence. Recent theorizations have even gone as far as to identify the state of mass incarceration as the newest era
of Black enslavement. Though not on the plantation, there is a case to be made that the slavery now exists in “the
mass incarceration of people of color. Although African American men comprise less than seven percent of the
population, they comprise half of the prison and jail population. Today, one out of three African American men is
either in prison, on probation, or on parole” (Alexander 2006).

This pattern of surveillance, restriction, and destruction of Black bodies is the very same process of enslavement from
the plantation. This has been and continues to be the truth of Black life in western civilization since the dawning of the
Middle Passage. Now, there are a myriad of liberal scholars who will point to sentimental hollow policies such as the
Civil Rights Act to make the case for why the state of Black oppression is getting better. While the form of Black slavery
has definitely changed and become more nuanced in its application, the foundational truth of said slavery remains
unchanged.

The question remains of how to create consistency in ontological and intra-ontological resistance. Is it materially
possible to both call for a disruption of civil society while finding points of productivity in society? The answer is yes, at
the margins . It is here that this paper makes another substantive departure from conventional pessimistic theorization,
and again, it is useful to refer to Wilderson’s work. His theorization of the Black’s antagonistic relationship with the
world concludes that the world is parasitic on Black life. Thus, he forwards the end of the world as the only ethical
alternative. Afro-Pessimists are often criticized for their highly theoretical abstraction with this concept.

Though there are no explicit specifications of what the end of the world is or how Black resistance movements are to
specifically get there, it is widely accepted that the position is more of an epistemic orientation rather than one that
forwards literal destruction. In addition, Wilderson calls for Black refusal to engage in civil society in an unflinching
paradigmatic analysis meaning that any form of engagement with civil society would require Black abjection. This is the
point of friction that this paper seeks to address.
Even though Black bodies stand in an antagonistic relationship to the world, there needs to be a distinction made. The
notion that any level of stability within civil society affirms Black Death has two major problems. First, it produces the
exact same pattern of ressentiment which reproduces the internalization of self-hate which only sets the stage for
communal violence in an attempt to cleanse. If the standard for measuring the effectiveness of Black movements is the
destruction of every part of society, then failure is the only appropriate descriptor for every Black resistance strategy in
history. If this is the case, the internalization of Black slaveness becomes all but inevitable by reinforcing psychological,
mental, and emotional chains of depression on all those who seek to resistance. The second problem is that Black bodies
have no means of creating instability at the state or societal level.

Society is a manifestation of hundreds of years of economic and political accumulation that has yielded countless
weapons against the oppressed. Simply expecting the dominant order to forgo the use of those weapons is a fantasy.
The scope of orienting towards the end of the world in terms of instability is far too large. The end of the world is not
possible. Afro-Pessimism is far too separated from the material practice of resistance in this regard. If the justification
for detaching from state involvement is that it requires a sacrificing of Black flesh, then resistance strategies must
consider the effect of a complete embrace of political refusal. Calls for absolute Black pessimism is also an abjection of
Black flesh in the same manner Wilderson bases the need for the end of the world because an open refusal and
rejection to at least seemingly conform to degrees of social norms will have deadly consequences for Black bodies. For
pessimists to call for Blacks to openly embrace physical death in pursuit of theory is irresponsible and unethical.

Wilderson uses the question of flinching as a misnomer. The term seems to suggest that any participation in or any
implicit affirmation of society is an insufficient Black politic. The problem is that at its core the very nature of Black
life is one that requires a series of strategic and tactical flinches. This means that in different situations and settings,
Black bodies take different forms. If confronted on the street by a racist police officer, asking for one to unconditionally
refuse to recognize the position of the officer is in turn asking for Black suicidal politics. As posited above, there is
something inherently valuable within Black intra-ontological arrangements, and as such, suicide is a non-starter. Not
only is this a strategy for sustaining intra-ontological freedom, but it is also a strategy for pursuing the disorganization of
civil society. It problematizes society’s ability to easily script the nature of Black life and Black resistance.

Tactical flinches allow Blackness to become a thousand different villains disguised as citizens. It is a protective
mechanism for those who seek to fight against tyranny without inciting the wrath of the tyrannical. This is not to say
that Black resistance should ever flinch in its orientation to civil society at a fundamental level. It is to say that in order
for Black life to exist in a world that wishes its death, it is necessary to disguise that orientation and strategically present
it in certain settings. Some will be highly critical of this notion because it will be perceived as a call to sacrifice
expressions of authentic self in an appeasement of the dominant order. Instead, this is a call to reassess the very
understanding of political orientation.

Black resistance should embody refusal at the core level; that should be internalized, and it is the very process of
mystifying that core refusal in acts of fugitive transgressions against civil society that renders its violence inoperable.
This is not a sacrifice of the authentic self, but the mystification and protection of authentic Blackness in an act of
rebellion against societal production of anti-Black violence. This is an effective means of navigating Black ontological
questions.

Again, Black liberation cannot be measured in terms of the absence of white violence, but it must be measured using
different rubrics. In terms of Black ontological resistance as an ensemble, this resistance is a question is the maintenance
of Black communities through the inoperability of violence by complicating perceptions of Black criminality. Since the
slave has no capacity to orchestrate the manifestation of the end of the world, then Black orientation to the end of the
world must begin with one of constructing the illegality of the body. This is the means in which Black movements must
employ fleshly politics in modern resistance strategies. The end of the world should not be understood through the
instability of civil society or the state, but rather, it should be understood through the ability of Black communities to
render themselves self-sufficient which should very well include a strategic and criminal relationship with civil society.
Vote negative for a strategy of black self-defense --- it creates a radical potential for new
imaginaries while mitigating the impact of gratuitous violence
Adam Bledsoe 19, 12-31-2019, "Neither Ground on Which to Stand, nor Self to Defend: The Structural Denial (and
Radical Histories) of Black Self-Defense," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2021.1963657

Anti-Blackness makes the prospect of legitimate Black self-defense structurally impossible. Although there exist various
forms of racialized violence, antiBlackness is unique among forms of racialized oppression and places Black populations
in a distinctive ontological position that precludes legible selfdefense. Colonized populations, for instance, while
experiencing racial violence, retain recourse to self-defense due to their legible claims of sovereignty and nativity.
Indeed, anticolonial discourses and struggles evidence an ability to legitimately claim and enact a right to self-defense
via claims of prior spatial occupancy and freedom, as well as indigenous cultural, religious, and political matrices (see Ho
1968; Cabral 1979; V. Johnson 1993; Sajed 2019).1 Black diasporic populations do not conceptually have access to such
rights. Indeed, multiple characteristics constitutive of anti-Blackness make Black claims to self-defense conceptually and
structurally impossible. A central component of anti-Blackness is gratuitous violence. Anti-Black gratuitous violence is a
“relationship to violence [that] is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint, triggered by prelogical catalysts
which are unmoored from [one’s] transgressions and unaccountable to historical shifts” (Wilderson 2014, 27).
Gratuitous violence has roots in chattel slavery. The lack of self-ownership of the enslaved meant that non-Black
populations treated Black bodies as spaces open to non-Black displays of mastery, precluding any legitimate Black action
beyond willful submission (Hartman 1996, 1997; McKittrick 2011). The violence typical of chattel slavery anticipates
present-day forms of anti-Black violence, as the position of Black populations in the world has changed in ways that are
important historically but nonetheless still determined by assumptions of Black inhumanity (Wilderson 2014; McKittrick
2016). Gratuitous violence remains central to establishing the boundaries of what it means to be in society (Douglass
2018). Whereas modern humans experience violence for specific reasons and transgressions, anti-Black violence exists
as a structural necessity, a “life force,” securing “the order of life itself” while also offering a human sense of well-being
(Douglass and Wilderson 2013, 117; Wilderson 2015, 147–48; Wilderson 2020, 92). Gratuitous violence distinguishes the
assumedly inhuman Black subject from the modern Human subject, as modern humanity roots its sense of self in not
experiencing the vertiginous effects of gratuitous violence, simultaneously bearing witness to and participating in such
violence (Wilderson 2015). The unfree, constrained Black subject remains the ontological counterpoint to the
autonomous, self-possessed Human subject (Hartman 1996). Anti-Blackness, then, entails the societal insistence of a
lack of Black self, resulting in Black populations retaining no right to their own physical being (Sexton 2020). Denying the
right of Black self-defense, historically and currently, is thus an effect of repetitive and always-sanctioned violent
expressions of power that locate Black bodies as, first and foremost, spaces subjected to Human authority (Bogues
2010). Aspatiality also plays a fundamental role in the structural position of Black populations and the conceptual
impossibility of Black self-defense. The assumed aspatiality of Black populations and gratuitous violence go hand in
hand, as the marking of Black populations as “without land or home,” like gratuitous violence, was central to chattel
slavery and its present-day afterlives (McKittrick 2011, 948). Labeling Black populations as “ungeographic” and deeming
the locations associated with those same populations as “invisible/forgettable” or “unknowable and unseeable” worked
to erase Black senses of place in dominant modern spatial imaginaries (McKittrick 2006, x; McKittrick 2011, 948;
McKittrick and Woods 2007, 4). The assumption of Black aspatiality stems from the deracination—or loss of nativity and
claims to nation—inherent to slavery (Sexton 2010, 2020). Anti-Blackness in modernity has rendered Black diasporic
populations as the quintessential unsovereign figures of the modern world (Sexton 2020), absent the possibility of
nativity, citizenship, or belonging (Sexton 2010). In the present, “Black people in the world are often regarded as living
outside of the protective folds and spaces of the human” (King 2016, 1024, italics added), remaining “conceptually
unable to legitimately create space” (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a, 12). Even as slavery is no longer a legal practice,
assumed Black aspatiality remains the condition of spatial possibility for modern humans to create dominant spatial
formations (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a; Bledsoe 2020). This assumed aspatiality even negates the possibility of Black
populations establishing home spaces, because assumptions of Black nonbeing negate the possibility of domesticity
(Spillers 1987). Black residences remain the “spatial extension of the master’s [read: Human’s] dominion” (Wilderson
2020, 227). Hence, modern notions of space do not recognize the Black ability to make, occupy, or claim space in this
world. Along with the denial of Black corporeal sovereignty, the assumption of Black aspatiality upends Black claims to
legitimate self-defense. The inability for Black populations to claim self or space undergirds modernity, as gratuitous
violence and the condition of Black aspatiality set the boundary for what it means to be Human. Whereas other racially
oppressed populations maintain a claim to sovereign space—and thus a legitimate right to self-defense—Black
populations have no rights to any space, including their own bodies, the home, or spaces outside the home. Thus, they
have no legible claims to self-defense. Just as the Human’s right to self-defense is central to modernity and modern
spatial practices, so, too, is the untenability of Black self-defense vital for modern notions and practices of being. The
structural prohibition of Black self-defense has important implications for Black political aspirations. Black political
claims, broadly, are destabilized due to the fact that gratuitous violence legitimates any and all acts of anti-Black
violence, and aspatiality denies legitimate Black spatial creation and occupation. Still, an organized Black rejection of
gratuitous violence and aspatiality and a commitment to establishing the sanctity of the Black body and Black spaces via
self-defense creates the potential for political change. Historically, by preventing the violation of their bodies, Black
actors have, at different moments, temporarily held off the concrete effects of gratuitous violence and aspatiality,
thereby protecting Black individuals and collectives and creating the possibility for new spatial relations to emerge. In
other words, Black self-defense against anti-Black violence has created temporary spaces in which Black dreams,
aspirations, and relations can take shape.

This is material and revolutionary

Adam Bledsoe 19, 12-31-2019, "Neither Ground on Which to Stand, nor Self to Defend: The Structural Denial (and
Radical Histories) of Black Self-Defense," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2021.1963657

The armed self-defense of the Panthers, Seminoles, Reconstruction-era militias, and civil rights activists allowed for the
pursuit of a variety of Black freedom struggles. These acts of self-defense also led to new senses and practices of self and
emergent spatial relations. Self-defense temporarily challenged gratuitous violence and aspatiality—the bases of the
assumption of Black inhumanity—and thus challenged notions of Human being. The Seminoles’ ability to defend their
Black contingent from reenslavement cultivated among those enslaved in Florida the belief in, and aspiration to, spaces
free from chattel slavery. This recognition of the existence of spaces not defined by assumed Black inhumanity was one
of the primary driving factors for slaves to run away to Seminole communities (Porter 1943). The existence of such
spaces was also a motivating force for allowing the Black Seminoles to move west, as Army officers and slave owners
alike greatly feared that the Black Seminoles’ experience with freedom would lead to continued, and intractable forms
of, marronage that would destabilize slavery in the region (Porter 1943; Opala 1980). In the Reconstruction-era South,
the psychic effects of Black self-defense are partially encapsulated in an episode where “a column of Negro soldiers
passed by to the cheers of a boisterous entourage of freedmen, [and an] old Southern gentleman threw up his hands in
horror and pleaded, ‘Blow Gabriel blow, for God’s sake blow’” (N. Johnson 2014, 76). This invocation was a clear plea for
the world to come to an end, as the implications of a Black defense corps were sufficient for this White individual to
question the rectitude of the world he inhabited. A similar episode played out in Monroe, North Carolina, a century later
when Robert Williams and a number of other armed activists found themselves confronted by a violent mob on their
way to protest for the integration of the town’s public swimming pool. Williams and his companions presented arms to
defend themselves against both the mob and hostile police officers present. While this transpired, there was “an old
white man in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby and he kept crying, and he said, ‘God damn,
God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the
police can’t even arrest them!’” (Williams 2013, 46). Black self-defense had the effect of inducing a kind of vertigo
among those whose sense of self relied on the perpetuation of anti-Blackness. The disorientation that induced non-Black
individuals to question the very existence of the world is understandable when one reflects on the fact that the very
sense of being that underpins the modern world depends on the prevalence of gratuitous violence and Black aspatiality.
Inaugurating a permanent end to anti-Black gratuitous violence and aspatiality would signal the simultaneous
inauguration of a new epoch altogether; hence the conceptual vertigo among the non-Black antagonists discussed
earlier. In the process of disrupting concrete enactments of gratuitous violence and creating defensible space, the
various actors already described induced not only non-Black vertigo but also a new sense of being for the Black
individuals and groups involved. Spaces of emergent political possibilities—where the logic of anti-Blackness, gratuitous
violence, and aspatiality was hindered—became realizable goals for those in proximity to these movements. The
transformative potential of these acts of self-defense is found in the fact that such self-defense was important to
programs that propagated Black communities. In these cases, defensive violence was not a reason unto itself; it was but
a part of a much larger, complex set of relations that sought to create spaces that fostered (Black) life. The recognition
that gratuitous violence and aspatiality precluded the potential for Black political recognition animated the efforts of
Black selfdefense. Because gratuitous violence entails the legitimation of all acts of anti-Black violence and aspatiality
denies legible Black spatial creation and occupation, political claims by Black communities are destabilized by the
imminent violation of the claimants. Black resolve to establish the sanctity of the Black body and Black spaces created
the potential for political change. Preventing the violation of Black actors produced the possibility for new spatial
relations to emerge, as fear of the effects of Black responses to anti-Black violence occasionally forced non-Black
antagonists to capitulate to Black demands. So, whether pursuing the nonradical demand of inclusion in the prevailing
political and economic systems of the country or seeking the radical establishment of spaces of autonomy separate from
dominant society, all iterations of Black politics described earlier exercised self-defense to protect against the
politically disqualifying realities of gratuitous violence and aspatiality and open up spaces of political potentia l. In the
struggle to exercise spatial agency, Black populations have transhistorically relied on self-defense—a reality that
continues today. Looking toward the Future The necessity of Black self-defense remains evident in the present.
Renewed rounds of human and civil rights struggles have emerged, led by Black women, trans folk, and men who call for
the recognition of, and end to, different forms of anti-Black violence. These groups and individuals are responding to a
situation in which the structural realities of gratuitous violence and aspatiality have manifested in renewed forms of
concrete anti-Black violence. The past five years have seen rates of hate crimes against Black individuals rise (FBI 2017;
Beirich 2019). In addition, state-sanctioned violence continues to disproportionately affect Black populations (Edwards,
Lee, and Esposito 2019). The protests, occupations, and actions of different Black-led and Black-influenced movements
fighting against these very conditions have faced numerous forms of violent retribution in places like Minnesota,
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas, to name but a handful of instances (B. Stahl 2017; Carson and Rodriguez 2020;
Peiser 2020). Given the importance of self-defense among prior Black political movements, as well as the persistence of
anti-Black violence today, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have emerged a number of individuals and groups intent
on enacting forms of Black selfdefense in the present. The National African American Gun Association reported 9,000
new members between November 2016 and February 2017 (Young 2017). Firearms dealers and gun clubs across the
country have also noted a sharp rise in Black gun purchases (T. Lee 2017). Black-run organizations like Guerrilla
Mainframe, the Huey Newton Gun Club, and Black Women’s Defense League have garnered public attention in the past
few years, further demonstrating the continued Black commitment to practicing armed self-defense (Cooper 2017; A.
Stahl 2018). Recently, a number of Black community organizations in Minneapolis have established armed patrols to
provide protection for community members amidst the opportunistic antiBlack violence occurring in the wake of the
2020 uprising (Jany 2020; Winter 2021). Only time will tell what the long-term outcomes of these forms of self-defense
will be. These self-defense efforts will only be as efficacious as are the movements and goals that they protect and will
only persist if they are able to navigate the various societal efforts at preventing Black self-defense. Nonetheless, current
practices of Black self-defense suggest that Black-led movements are following in the footsteps of their predecessors
and seeking to realize their goals through the physical protection of themselves and their spaces. Although this
particular article focuses on the context of the United States, further inquiries should examine the history of Black self-
defense in the wider diaspora. Across the Americas, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial laws prohibited
enslaved and sometimes free Black individuals from carrying arms (Cramer 1994; Peabody 2011; Woods 2017; Patisso
and Ermete 2020). Gratuitous violence and aspatiality have also been transhistorical realities for diasporic populations
outside the United States (Bledsoe 2015; Smith 2016; Alves 2019; Vargas 2020). Finally, historical acts of Black self-
defense outside the United States remain some of the major drivers of world history, as the willingness for Black
populations across the diaspora to assert a (societally denied) right to self and space has ushered in major territorial and
political developments in the Americas (James 1989; Price 1996; Reis 1997; Meeks 1999; Gottlieb 2000; Gomes 2005).
These factors demonstrate the necessity of engaging the question of Black self-defense in a diasporic context. The
question of the possibility of Black selfdefense offers important insights into the nature of modern space and notions of
being. Because selfdefense, as a central component of modern humanity, is predicated on a multiscalar right to self and
space and because chattel slavery and its afterlife foreclose a Black ownership of self or a legible Black creation and
occupation of space, the condition of Blackness reveals to us the limits of modern humanism and spatiality. Nonetheless,
the resolve of Black populations to reject the modern insistence of Black inhumanity and aspatiality and employ self-
defense as part of the realization of various political demands offers insight into key components for the struggle of new
spatialities and ways of being. The historical necessity of Black self-defense offers important precedents that will shape
future forms of Black struggle. After all, resisting the destabilizing effects of antiBlackness is necessary to create a world
not defined by anti-Blackness.

It solves – any revolutionary already knows they are doomed. Meaning the negs praxis creates the
possibility for gratuitous black life within social death, on an entirely different ontological register
Michael A. Barlow Jr. 16, Bachelors degree in Sociology from United States Military Academy at West Point, 2016,
"Addressing Shortcomings in Afro-Pessimism," Inquiries Journal,
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1435/2/addressing-shortcomings-in-afro-pessimism

Intra-ontological resistance must not be a question of how the world understands Blackness, because the position of the
slave is one that cannot be articulated in terms of hegemony. If it is so that the Black inherently experiences the world
through a different ontological register, then measures of Black liberation cannot be articulated through the lens of
humanist grammars. Jared Sexton, the Director of the African-American Studies School of Humanities at the University
of California-Irvine, is another leading scholar in Afro-pessimism. He explains that there is indeed social life that exists
within social death. There are many that condemn the invocation of social death as overly pessimistic, but “this
acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to
being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an
accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world” (Sexton 2010). This is to say that it is indeed possible to both
affirm the state of social death and actively pursue the social life that exists within Blackness.

This is not the typical critique of social death, but rather it is a necessary specification of the social life within social
death that Sexton speaks. Social death is adequate in terms of measuring the ontological state of the human versus the
Black, but a different rubric is required in mapping social life within social death. One such rubric is fleshly politics. This
concepts derives from the plantation in regards to the manner in which slaves would temporarily reclaim and weaponize
their bodies as a site of political protest against their state of enslavement. Fleshy politics is an example of an
appropriate rubric for measuring liberation within intra-ontological politics because these bodily resistances surely did
not change the physical state of enslavement, but it did immeasurable good for the mental and psychological state of
those in the master’s cage. Alternate orientations to the flesh “excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it
represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices
of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds” (Weheliye 2014).
 AB K: Michigan HR

Blackness exists as a metaaporia that interrogates the cyclical ways violence onto blackness is
morphed and ultimately appropriated. The 1AC relies on a redemptive narrative of humanity that is
fundamentally inaccessible for blacks. Their project is ultimately meant to hide and recreate
moments of black death for the sake of redeeming Human life.
Wilderson 20 [Frank B. Wilderson, professor of Drama and African American studies at the University
of California, Irvine, “Afropessimism”, page 13-17, JMH]
For most critical theorists writing after 1968, the word aporia is used to designate a contradiction in a text or theoretical undertaking. For example, Jacques Derrida suggests an aporia
indicates “a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.” But when I say that
Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action, the addition of the prefix meta- goes beyond what Derrida and the poststructuralists meant—it raises the level of
abstraction and, in so doing, raises the stakes. In epistemology, a branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category).
In linguistics, a grammar is considered as
Metadata, for example, are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in, and so on).

being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level of abstraction to describe properties of the
plain language (and not itself). Metadiscussion is a discussion about discussion (not any one particular topic of discussion
but discussion itself). In computer science, a theoretical software engineer might be engaged in the pursuit of
metaprogramming (i.e., writing programs that manipulate programs). Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more
of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken,
assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical
consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it
does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again,
Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of
liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the
suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta-aporias, strewn like land mines
in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true. If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not
Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies
and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal
humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled [constricted] by a meta-aporia : a contradiction that
manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal
structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action— Black
people are the wrench in the works. Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are
instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies
are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to
most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is
no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this
catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can’t use words like “being” or “person” to describe myself
without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling. I was convinced
that if a story of Palestinian redemption could be told . . . its denouement would culminate in the return of the land , a
spatial, cartographic redemption; and if a story of class redemption could be told . . . its denouement would culminate in
the restoration of the working day so that one stopped working when surplus values were relegated to the dustbin of
history, a temporal redemption; in other words, since postcolonial and working-class redemption were possible, then
there must be a story to be told through which one could redeem the time and place of Black subjugation. I was wrong. I
had not dug deep enough to see that though Blacks suffer the time and space subjugation of cartographic
deracination and the hydraulics of the capitalist working day, we also suffer as the hosts of Human parasites, though
they themselves might be the hosts of parasitic capital and colonialism. I had looked to theory (first as a creative
writer, and only much later as a critical theorist) to help me find/create the story of Black liberation—Black political
redemption. What I found instead was that redemption, as a narrative mode, was a parasite that fed upon me for its
coherence. Everything meaningful in my life had been housed under the umbrellas called “critical theory” and “radical
politics.” The parasites had been capital, colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia. And now it was clear that I had missed
the boat. My parasites were Humans, all Humans—the haves as well as the have-nots. If critical theory and radical
politics are to rid themselves of the parasitism that they heretofore have had in common with radical and progressive
movements on the Left, that is, if we are to engage, rather than disavow, the difference between Humans who suffer
through an “economy of disposability” and Blacks who suffer by way of “social death,” then we must come to grips
with how the redemption of the subaltern (a narrative, for example, of Palestinian plenitude, loss, and restoration) is
made possible by the (re)instantiation of a regime of violence that bars Black people from the narrative of
redemption. This requires (a) an understanding of the difference between loss and absence, and (b) an understanding of
how the narrative of subaltern loss stands on the rubble of Black absence. Sameer and I didn’t share a universal,
postcolonial grammar of suffering. Sameer’s loss is tangible, land. The paradigm of his dispossession elaborates
capitalism and the colony. When it is not tangible it is at least coherent, as in the loss of labor power. But how does one
describe the loss that makes the world if all that can be said of loss is locked within the world? How does one narrate
the loss of loss? What is the “difference between . . . something to save . . . [and nothing] to lose”? Sameer forced me
to face the depth of my isolation in ways I had wanted to avoid; a deep pit from which neither postcolonial theory, nor
Marxism, nor a gender politics of unflinching feminism could rescue me. Why is anti-Black violence not a form of racist
hatred but the genome of Human renewal; a therapeutic balm that the Human race needs to know and heal itself? Why
must the world reproduce this violence, this social death, so that social life can regenerate Humans and prevent them
from suffering the catastrophe of psychic incoherence— absence? Why must the world find its nourishment in Black
flesh?

Expansion of the internet and capital technologies sustains algorithmic thinking into policy making
itself. These technological forms of growth bracket out black life for the sake of sustaining market
efficiency and the super exploitation of blackness. Reject their form of predatory inclusion and
prefer the alternatives approach towards resistance.
Cottom 2020 [Tressie McMillan Cottom, School of Information and Library Sciences, University of North Carolina,
October 9, 2020, “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the
Digital Society”, American Sociology Association, SAGE Journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332649220949473, Pages 442-444, JMH]

An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My
answer revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to say. But that is arguing from an
embarrassingly basic logical fallacy. The question of what the Internet does analytically that , say, “capital” or “economy”
or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I
do not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our social inquiries, but it adds something analytical
precision. Other constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital society. For instance, one can argue
that Silicon Valley is a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial
meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism
(Bonilla-Silva 2006) can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming
platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of noteworthy
approaches taken to studying Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e., economic cultures and
discourses, respectively). Still, sociological practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of Internet
technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If there is anything particular about Internet technologies for
sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we should give it the same theoretical care as
states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that, “the reality is that in the
networked society . . . racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power connect
across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s
conceptualization of the State as a primary structural agent in racial formation.” Daniels named to the global nature of
both racism and the networks of capital we gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bringing
back the political economy of race and racism. Internet technologies are specific in how they have facilitated,
legitimized, and transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy . An app with which underemployed
skilled labor sells services to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the
app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and
what is “labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can extract for mediating the laborer-customer
relationship. Even the way we move money on these platforms— “Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational firms
such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020). Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of globalization
with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy
of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this transformation operates in everyday social worlds:
privatization through opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are distinctly about the power of Internet
technologies. And each characteristic is important for the study of race and racism. Understanding platform capitalism
helps us understand how these two characteristics are important. Internet technologies have networked forms of capital
(Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum
forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and
produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By that definition, the
Internet has amplified and reworked existing social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical
importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and
new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners,
workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”). Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms introduce
new layers of opacity into every facet of social life . So-called mate markets move from neighborhood bars to dating
apps, moving family formation behind a platform’s velvet rope (Hobbs, Owen, and Gerber 2017; OllierMalaterre, Jacobs,
and Rothbard 2019). It transforms public education into “online delivery,” locking student-teacher-school interactions
into privately controlled black boxes (Woolcock and Narayan 2000). “Smart cities” extract our routine activities from
public life, which shapes democratic access to how our communities are governed (Brauneis and Goodman 2018; O’Neil
2017; Walsh and O’Connor 2019). A colleague recently bemoaned the difficulty of negotiating with Facebook for data on
political attitudes. Many sociologists share her lament. In our routine work we realize that different rules produce and
govern data, from survey to observational, than the rules even 20 years ago. That is but a minor example of the myriad
ways platform capitalism’s opacity is qualitatively distinct. That opacity has a logic. Pasquale (2015) argued that ours is a
“black box society.” Administrative opacity is a deliberate strategy to manage regulatory environments. It shields
organizations, both public and private, from democratic appeals for access and equity. As the state legitimizes the use
of digital and algorithmic decision making, it also creates new data worlds (Gray 2018; Milan and van der Velden 2016)
to which few sociologists have access. The inaccessibility of these data is part of their value to state and capital
interests. Private data worlds where decision making can be veiled from democratic inquiry fuel economic and
political commitment to more datafication. This brings about more secrecy. Sometimes, a firm or organization performs
secrecy just for the sake of secrecy. This reinforces its ability to do so and its right to do so (Seaver 2017). Pasquale
outlined three types of secrecy strategies. One of those strategies, obfuscation, is particularly relevant to the study of
race and racism. Theoretically, obfuscation operates much like willful whiteness that can always claim ignorance of
statistical discrimination, for example, because it owns the means of discovery. Obfuscation does not mean that
someone or some organization does not know these data. It means that the information is difficult to access and often
couched in needlessly complex technical jargon or process. As we privatize public goods, Internet technologies promise
cost savings (usually by reducing labor) and increased efficiency of whatever task is at hand. Those Internet technologies
introduce a web of data extraction and valuation that has significant economic value (Zuboff 2015). Obfuscation
becomes a technique of privatization through two processes. One, it extracts data that would have previously been
public, publicly available or legally discoverable. Two, it expands obfuscation as a logic, even in organizations or
institutions that have a public mandate. When full privatization is not possible, obfuscation privatizes information by
making it inaccessible in practice. Information is the vessel for social actions and social facts. If information is
inaccessible, the objects of everyday life are too. Although secrecy and means testing for information have always been
features of the administrative state and of capital, platform capitalism is about the scale of secrecy, the value of secrecy,
and the logic of obfuscation. By thinking about the politics of the Internet technologies embedded in the current political
economy, we more precisely capture a set of social relations than occurs when Internet technologies are tangential to
our analyses. Thinking about the analytical utility of the Internet also brought to mind one of the most vexing dialectal
tensions of racism under platform capitalism. The Internet expands. This “pervasive expansion” (Castells 2010) is near
total. It is no longer a question of whether one is “online.” Whether or not one is online, one’s life chances are shaped
by online (Fourcade and Healy 2013). That settles the thing. The expansion requires bringing people into the social
relations of Internet technologies. That can happen as a user (Ritzer 2015) or as a site of extraction (Amrute 2016) or by
producing a surplus population of users and nonusers (McCarthy 2016). This expansive quality sets us on a crash course
with a fundamental understanding of what race does. Race (as deployed by racism) excludes. It also devalues and
stratifies. But exclusion is one of the most studied aspects of race and racism in social science. The racialized social
hierarchy produced these Internet technologies. Also, Internet technologies became a dominant tool of capital because
of their ability to expand markets and consumer classes. To both expand and exclude, the platform-mediated era of
capitalism that grew from Internet technologies specializes in predatory inclusion. Predatory inclusion is the logic,
organization, and technique of including marginalized consumer-citizens into ostensibly democratizing mobility
schemes on extractive terms One of the clearest articulations of predatory inclusion comes from work on education,
where educational access and its attendant social rewards are extended to excluded groups on extractive terms (Dwyer
2018; Eaton et al. 2016; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). With higher education, predatory inclusion looks like
expanding “access” to higher education (and its relation to labor market and status returns) by offering online college
degrees that both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations market to African American women (Cottom 2017). When
those African American women disproportionately enroll in these institutions, they most often do so by taking on
student loans. Some of those loans are publicly subsidized and others are from private lenders. These students’ loans
have been shown to be harder to pay off, easier to default on, and more likely to reach negative amortization than
student loans taken out at other kinds of institutions by other kinds of students (Scott-Clayton and Li 2016). African
American women’s inclusion in higher education comes at a high individual price and with a significant profit to the
financial caretakers of that extraction. Predatory inclusion happens not only in education. It operates through credit
schemes, consumer debt (Charron-Chénier and Seamster forthcoming) and small business lending (Nopper 2010). It
frames how minorities are “included” in homeownership schemes that pervert the value of ownership because of bad
loans and racist social policy (Taylor 2019). Although not explicitly named, another example is found in the “gig
economy.” This is where waged work has become harder to secure and surplus labor is nominally included in the “digital
economy” on extractive terms. These schemes could happen without Internet technologies. But they happen using
Internet technologies, and Internet technologies have made these cases more efficient. Moreover, platform capitalism
generates the logic, incentives, and capital for these predatory inclusion practices . Whether they use the Internet to
affect these practices, the logic of capital that financializes through algorithmic means at a scale made possible because
of network technologies makes these particular processes of the digital society

The plan uses AI a surrogate for human labor, which “carries forward and reuniversalizes” antiblack
hierarchies by establishing corporate personhood as “something to be achieved.”
Atanasoski and Vora, 19—Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz; Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UC Davis (Neda and Kalindi,
“The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism,” Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological
Futures, Introduction, 8-16, dml)
Like the “others” of the (white) liberal subject analyzed by decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, the
surrogate human effect of technology functions first to consolidate something as “the human,” and second
to colonize “the human” by advancing the post-Enlightenment liberal subject of modernity as universal.8 The concept of
the surrogate brings together technoliberal claims that technological objects and platforms are increasingly standing in
for what the human does, thus rendering the human obsolete, while also foregrounding the history of racial unfreedom
that is overwritten by claims of a postrace and postgender future generated by that obsolescence. In our usage, the
longer history of the surrogate human effect in post-Enlightenment modernity stretches from the disappearance of
native bodies necessary for the production of the fully human, through the production of the fungibility of the slave’s
body as standing in for the master, and therefore also into the structures of racial oppression that continue into the
post-slavery and post-Jim Crow periods, and into the disavowal of gendered and racialized labor supporting
outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and sharing economy platforms. Framing technologies through the lens of the surrogate
effect brings a feminist and critical race perspective to bear on notions of technological development, especially in the
design and imagination of techno-objects and platforms that claim a stand-in role for undesirable human tasks.
As part of the surrogate effect, the surrogate is a racialized and gendered form defining the limits of
human consciousness and autonomy. Saidya Hartman conceptualizes the surrogate by citing Toni Morrison’s
formulation of slaves as “surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom.”9 Hartman proposes
that “the value of blackness resided in its metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of
the commodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand
themselves.”10 The slave, the racialized fungible body, also acts as a “surrogate for the master’s body
since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and domination.”11 As Hartman
elaborates, these racialized structures of the surrogate did not simply disappear after emancipation. Rather, “the
absolute dominion of the master, predicated on the annexation of the captive body, yielded to an economy of
bodies, yoked and harnessed, through the exercise of autonomy, self-interest, and consent. . . . Although no longer the
extension and instrument of the master’s absolute right or dominion, the laboring black body remained a medium of
others’ power and representation.”12
While Hartman is referencing the rise of new modes of bonded labor following emancipation that were encapsulated by
the liberal formalities of contract, consent, and rights, her theorization of surrogacy as a racialized and gendered
arrangement producing autonomy and universality of and for the master is useful for thinking about the contemporary
desire for technology to perform the surrogate human effect. The racialized and gendered scaffolding of the surrogate
effect continues to assert a “disembodied universality” that actually offers the position
of “human” to limited human actors, thereby guaranteeing power and domination through defining the limits of work,
violence, use, and even who or what can be visible labor and laboring subjects.
Tracking the endurance of the racial form of slavery as the (not so) repressed or spectral frame for the imaginary of what
surrogate technologies do, or who or what they are meant to replace, we insist throughout this book that human
emancipation (from work, violence, and oppressive social relations) is a racialized aspiration for proper humanity in the
postEnlightenment era. In the US context, reading technologies as they reflect the dominant imagination of what it
means to be a human thus means that they are situated in social relations of race, gender, and sexuality, as these derive
from embodied histories of labor, Atlantic chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and European and US imperialism, to name
the most dominant. The preeminent questions of the politics of the subject, and the derivative politics of difference that
consume critical theory—questions that are about political consciousness, autonomy with its attendant concepts of
freedom and unfreedom, and the problem of recognition—also drive the preeminent questions we must ask of
technologies that perform the surrogate human effect.
The surrogate effect of technological objects inherits the simultaneously seeming irrelevance yet all-encompassing
centrality of race and histories of enslavement and indenture against which the liberal subject is defined. As Lisa Lowe
writes:
During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, liberal colonial discourses improvised racial terms for the non-European
peoples whom settlers, traders, and colonial personnel encountered. We can link the emergence of liberties defined
in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial
difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal doctrine describes as unfit for liberty or incapable of
civilization, placed at the margins of liberal humanity.13
Lowe explains that while it is tempting to read the history of emancipation from slave labor as a progress narrative of
liberal development toward individual rights and universal citizenship, in fact, “to the contrary, this linear conception of
historical progress—in which the slavery of the past would be overcome and replaced by modern freedom—
concealed the persistence of enslavement and dispossession for the enslaved and indentured” and racialized
populations necessary to the new British-led impe- rial forms of trade and governance “expanding across Asia, Africa,
and the Americas under the liberal rubric of free trade.”14 Moreover, according to Lowe, “the liberal experiment that
began with abolition and emancipation continued with the development of free wage labor as a utilitarian discipline for
freed slaves and contract laborers in the colonies, as well as the English workforce at home, and then the expanded
British Empire through opening free trade and the development of liberal government.”15 While the history of
capitalism tends to be written as the overcoming of serf, slave, and indentured labor through free contract and wage
labor, that is, as freedom overcoming unfreedom, as Lowe demonstrates, it is actually the racialized coupling of freedom
and unfreedom that undergird and justify capitalist and imperial expansionism.
Rather than freedom being on the side of modernity, which overcomes the unfreedom that is the condition of
premodernity, in fact the states of both freedom and unfreedom are part of the violent processes of
extraction and expropriation marking progress toward universality. Undergirding Euro-American coloniality, political
liberalism maintains the racial temporality of post-Enlightenment modernity that depends on innovating both bodies
and resources (and how each will be deployed). David Theo Goldberg argues that liberalism is the “defining doctrine of
self and society for modernity,” through which articulations of historical progress, universality, and freedom are
articulated.16 Because liberalism’s developmental account of Euro-American moral progress has historically been
premised on the transcending of racial difference, as Goldberg puts it, under the tenets of liberalism, “race is irrelevant,
but all is race.”17
To articulate freedom and abstract universal equality as the twin pillars of liberal modes of governance, racial identity
categories and how they are utilized for economic development under racial capitalism are continually disavowed even
as they are innovated. In her writing about how such innovations played out in the post–World War II context, the
historical period in which we locate our study, Jodi Melamed has argued that US advancement toward equality, as
evidenced by liberal antiracism such as civil rights law and the professional accomplishments of black and other minority
citizens, was meant to establish the moral authority of US democracy as superior to socialist and communist nations.18
Highlighting antiracism as the central tenet of US democracy, the US thus morally underwrote its imperial projects as a
struggle for achieving states of freedom abroad over illiberal states of unfreedom, racializing illiberal systems of belief as
a supplement to the racialization of bodies under Western European imperialism.19 The assertion that the US is a space
of racial freedom, of course, covered over ongoing material inequalities based on race at home. As part of the
articulation of US empire as an exceptional empire whose violence is justified because it spreads freedom, the history
of slavery is always acknowledged, but only insofar as it can be rendered irrelevant to the present day—that is, the
history of slavery is framed as a story of US national overcoming of a past aberrant from the ideals of US democracy, and
as a story of redemption and progress toward an inclusion as rights-bearing subjects of an ever-proliferating list of
others (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, etc.).
Technoliberalism and Racial Engineering of a “Post”-Racial World
“Will robots need rights?” This dilemma was included in Time magazine’s September 21, 2015, issue as one of the most
important questions facing US society in the present day. In his written response, Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and
computer scientist, wrote that “If an AI can convince us that it is at human levels in its responses, and if we are
convinced that it is experiencing the subjective states that it claims, then we will accept that it is capable of experiencing
suffering and joy,” and we will be compelled to grant it rights when it demands rights of us.20 In other words, if a robot
can prove that it can feel human (feel pain, happiness, fear, etc.), its human status can be recognized through the
granting of rights. Philosophical and cultural meditations upon questions of artificial personhood, machinic
consciousness, and robot autonomy such as that in Time magazine announce the advent of what we term in this
book technoliberalism by asserting that in the current moment, the category of humanity can be even
further expanded to potentially include artificial persons. According to Hartman, under liberalism, the “metamorphosis
of ‘chattel into man’” occurs through the production of the liberal individual as a rights-bearing subject.21 However, as
Hartman elaborates, “the nascent individualism of the freed designates a precarious autonomy
since exploitation, domination, and subjection inhabit the vehicle of rights.”22
Autonomy and consciousness, even when projected onto techno-objects that populate accounts of capitalist
futurity, continue to depend on a racial relational structure of object and subject. We describe this symbolic ordering of
the racial grammar of the liberal subject the “surrogate human effect.” As technology displaces the human chattel-
turned-man with manmade objects that hold the potential to become conscious (and therefore autonomous, rights-
bearing liberal subjects freed from their exploitative conditions), the racial and gendered form of the human as an
unstable category is further obscured. Technoliberalism’s version of universal humanity heralds a postrace and
postgender world enabled by technology, even as that technology holds the place of a racial order of things in which
humanity can be affirmed only through degraded categories created for use, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist
accumulation. As Lisa Lowe articulates, “racial capitalism suggests that capitalism expands not through rendering all
labor, resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying
particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation, and others for disposal.”23
As we show throughout the chapters of this book—which range in scope from examining how technological progress is
deployed as a critique of white supremacy since the advent of Trumpism, effectively masking how the fourth industrial
revolution and the second machine age have accelerated racialized and gendered differentiation, to how the language of
the sharing economy has appropriated socialist conceptions of collaboration and sharing to further the development of
capitalist exploitation—within present-day fantasies of techno-futurity there is a reification of imperial and racial
divisions within capitalism. This is the case even though such divisions are claimed to be overcome through technology.
Surrogate Humanity contends that the engineering imaginaries of our technological future rehearse (even as
they refigure) liberalism’s production of the fully human at the racial interstices of states of freedom and unfreedom.
We use the term technoliberalism to encompass the techniques through which liberal modernity’s simultaneous and
contradictory obsession with race and its irrelevance has once again been innovated at the start of the twenty-first
century, with its promises of a more just future enabled by technology that will ostensibly result in a postrace, postlabor
world. This is also a world in which warfare and social relations are performed by machines that can take on humanity’s
burdens. Technological objects that are shorthand for what the future should look like inherit liberalism’s version of an
aspirational humanity such that technology now mediates the freedom–unfreedom dynamic that has structured liberal
futurity since the post-Enlightenment era. Put otherwise, technoliberalism proposes that we are entering a completely
new phase of human emancipation (in which the human is freed from the embodied constraints of race, gender, and
even labor) enabled through technological development. However, as we insist, the racial and imperial governing logics
of liberalism continue to be at the core of technoliberal modes of figuring human freedom. As Ruha Benjamin puts it,
“technology . . . is . . . a metaphor for innovating inequity.”24 To make this argument, she builds on David Theo
Goldberg’s assessment of postraciality in the present, which exists “today alongside the conventionally or historically
racial. . . . In this, it is one with contemporary political economy’s utterly avaricious and limitless appetites for the
new.”25 Yet amid assertions of technological newness, as Benjamin demonstrates, white supremacy is the default
setting.
Technoliberalism embraces the “post”-racial logic of racial liberalism and its conception of historical, economic, and
social newness, limiting the engineering, cultural, and political imaginaries of what a more just and equal future looks
like within technological modernity. As we propose, race and its disciplining and governing logics are engineered into the
form and function of the technological objects that occupy the political, cultural, and social armature of
technoliberalism. Rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies
about what media outlets commonly refer to as the revolutionary nature of technological developments carry
forward and reuniversalize the historical specificity of the category human whose bounds they claim to surpass.
Our book addresses not just how technologies produce racialized populations demarcated for certain kinds of work, but
also how race produces technology in the sense that it is built into the imaginaries of innovation in engineering
practice.26 To do so we build on and expand on the work of scholars like Wendy Chun and Beth Coleman, who have
proposed thinking about race as technology. Chun demonstrates that conceptualizing race as a technology (not as an
essence, but as a function) lets us see how “nature” and “culture” are bound together for purposes of differentiating
both living beings and things, and for differentiating subjects from objects.27 This formulation allows us to trace the
conceptual origins of race as a political category rooted in slavery and colonialism that has enduring legacies (both in
terms of classifying people and in terms of inequities). Similarly, Beth Coleman argues that conceptualizing race as a
technology highlights the productive work that race does (as a tool, race can in some contexts even be seen to work in
ways that are separable from bodies).28 While such reconceptualizations of race as a category are valuable, they do not
fully account for race as the condition of possibility for the emergence of technology as an
epistemological, political, and economic category within Euro-American modernity. As such, technology undergirds the
production of the human as separate from the machine, tool, or object. Technology is a racial
category in that it reiterates use, value, and productivity as mechanisms of hierarchical differentiation and
exploitation within racial capitalism.
Our focus on race and gender, and freedom and unfreedom, within the technoliberal logics that configure the
aspirational temporality of feeling human in the twenty-first century brings a critical race and ethnic studies perspective
to the imaginary of historical progress that pins hopes for achieving universal human freedom on technological
development. Decolonial thought, critical race studies, and feminist science studies, each of which has differently
engaged post- and antihumanism to extend an analysis of the vitality and agency of objects and matter to problematize
the centrality of modern man in the field of the political, can thus productively be put into dialogue as a starting point
for theorizing technology beginning with difference. According to Alexander Weheliye, “the greatest contribution to
critical thinking of black studies—and critical ethnic studies more generally . . . [is] the transformation of the human into
a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli.”29 Weheliye argues that, given developments in biotechnology
and informational media, it is crucial to bring this critical thought to bear upon contemporary reflections on the
human.30 As is well known, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonialism, a structure that
instituted a global sliding scale of humanity through scientific notions about racial differences
and hierarchies, undergirded systematic enslavement and subjugation of nonwhite peoples to advance European
capitalism and the industrial revolution. Developed alongside and through the demands of colonialism, this scale
designated a distinction among human beings, not just between humans and animals, such that humanity
was something to be achieved.31 Decolonization, Frantz Fanon wrote, is in this respect “quite simply the replacing of a
certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”32 At stake in the Fanonian concept of decolonial revolution is the
reimagining of the human–thing relation as a precondition for freedom. This is precisely the relation that the techno-
revolutionary imaginary scaffolding technoliberalism fails to reenvision. This failure is due in part to the fact that, at the
same time that colonialism was without a doubt a project of dehumanization, as scholars like David Scott and Samera
Esmeir show, European colonialism through its discourses of technological innovation, progress, and civilization also
aimed to “humanize” racialized others. 33  
Engineering imaginaries about technological newness that propose to reimagine human form and function through
technological surrogates taking on dull, dirty, repetitive, and reproductive work associated with racialized, gendered,
enslaved, indentured, and colonized labor populations thus inherit the tension between humanization and
dehumanization at the heart of Western European and US imperial projects. On the one hand, there is a fear that as
technologies become more proximate to humans, inserting themselves into spheres of human activity, the essence of
humanity is lost. On the other hand, the fantasy is that as machines take on the sort of work that degrades
humans, humans can be freer than ever to pursue their maximum potential. As we postulate, this tension arises
because even as technoliberalism claims to surpass human raced and gendered differentiation, the figuration
of “humanity” following the post- of postracial and postgender brings forward a historically universalizing category
that writes over an ongoing differential achievement of the status of “the human.”

Slavery morphs and recodes itself in different ways- it relies on the sadism of liberal progress
narratives to perfect itself and maintain “life”. Only the alternative can disrupt this project and
render these promises incoherent.
Wilderson 20 [Frank B. Wilderson, professor of Drama and African American studies at the University
of California, Irvine, “Afropessimism”, page 94-96, JMH]
Northup’s book implies, without stating directly, why this generalization of sadism—brutality as the constituent element of family bonding—cannot be understood as being triggered by
transgressions. It is as ubiquitous as the air he breathes. “It was rarely a day passed without more whippings . . . It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash and the shrieking
of slaves, can be heard from dark till bedtime . . .” Patsey and Solomon, unlike Stella and me, were living in a place and time when civil society and the Human were neither ashamed nor
A thousand miles upriver and one hundred twenty six years later, Josephine was shocked by this
embarrassed by this.

inheritance, but it didn’t take her long to recover, and to claim it. Though the structure of Stella’s “life” (or, better, the
paradigm of social death, for the quotation marks are essential here) cannot be reconciled with the structure of
Josephine’s life (or the paradigm of social life), there is a connection. But this connection is parasitic and perverse—
regardless of what the socially dead Black person (i.e., Stella and Patsey) or the socially alive Human (i.e., Josephine
or Mary Epps) might say about their “relationship.” It is parasitic because White and non-Black subjectivity cannot be
imbued with the capacity for selfknowledge and intersubjective community without anti-Black violence; without, that is,
the violence of social death. In other words, White people and their junior partners need anti-Black violence to know
they’re alive.* If Hattie McDaniel were to truly die, as Stella proclaimed, it would be tantamount to the death of a
parasite’s host. This is what makes social death something more surreal than the end of breath. It is, in the words of
David Marriott, a deathliness that saturates life, not an embalming; a resource for Human renewal. It is perverse for
many reasons: one of which is the fact that as civil society matures (from 1853 to December 1979, when it all went
south with Josephine)—and we move historically from the obvious technologies of chattel slavery to universal suffrage,
the discourse of human rights, and the concept of universal access to civil society— the anti-Black violence necessary for
the elaboration and maintenance of White (and non-Black) subjectivity gets repressed and becomes increasingly
unavailable to conscious (as opposed to unconscious) speech . (“I judge people by the quality of their character,” as Dr.
King said, “and not the color of their skin”; or the commonly spoken, “At the end of the day, we’re all Americans and
we’re in this together”— and other such malarkey of the conscious mind.) But the pageantries of naked and submissive
Black flesh, pageantries of bleeding backs and buttocks, whip marks, amputations, and faces closed by horse bits,
provide evidence of the role sadism plays in the constitution of White subjectivity, and 12 Years a Slave makes this
visible on the screen, despite its repression in the narrative of both the film and civil society writ large. It is tempting and
commonplace to reduce Mary and Edwin Epps’s sadism to individual psychopathology. Or one might think that Edwin
Epps is one of a group of exceptionally sadistic people who lived in an exceptionally sadistic time and place. But the film,
and to an even greater extent the autobiography, sees (rather than narrates) sadism—the sexual perversion in which
gratification is obtained by inflicting physical or mental pain on a love object— not as the individual pathology of a
handful of people, but as a generalized condition; generalized in that pleasure, as a constituent element of communal
life, cannot be disentangled from anti-Black violence. Conventionally, the object of sadism can, tomorrow, become the
subject of sadism. But the sadism that constitutes the spectacles of 12 Years a Slave, and which constitutes early
nineteenth century society, is not imbued with such reciprocity. The Slaves of social death cannot switch places and
make Edwin Epps or his equally cruel wife the love objects of their collective sadism. If they did so in private (if Patsey
beat Edwin or Mary in a private bedroom encounter, for example) it is because such a reversal was occasioned and
allowed—in other words, the master used his prerogative and power to play a different game, one in which he suffers
because suffering fulfills his fantasy and because, unlike the Slave, his fantasies have “objective value.” Such role
reversals do not imbue the encounter with reciprocity. The changes that begin to occur after the Civil War and up
through the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the American election of a Black president are merely changes
in the weather. Despite the fact that the sadism is no longer played out in the open as it was in l840, nothing essential
has changed.

Only through embracement of disorder and incoherence via the alternative are we able create
revolutionary politics that disrupt the generative mechanism of civil society.
Wilderson 20 [Frank B. Wilderson, professor of Drama and African American studies at the University
of California, Irvine, “Afropessimism”, page 249-252, JMH]
Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and Whites (or, more precisely, between Black and non-Blacks), it is
produced by a violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction against Black
psychic integration and Black filial and affilial relations, it is the lifeblood of White psychic integration and filial (which is
to say, domestic) and affilial (or institutional) relations. For whoever says “rape” says Black; whoever says “prison” says
Black; and whoever says “AIDS” says Black—the Negro is a phobogenic object: a past without a heritage, the map of
gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor
Marxist, in terms of its structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation of social death embodied in Black
beings. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” “Black” has been inviting Whites, as
well as civil society’s junior partners (for example, Palestinians, Native Americans, Latinx) to the dance of social death
for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today (even in the most
anti-racist movements, like anti-colonial insurgency) invested elsewhere. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes
radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. and the world. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity
(such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of
resistance function as a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a program of complete disorder. One must embrace
its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten
by a revolutionary desire. What other lines of accountability are there when slaves are in the room? There is nothing
foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced,
and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known
to say, Gee whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all. Few so-called radicals desire to
be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness—and the state of political movements in
the U.S. today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: Gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe
not come at all. Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black than there is in the joy of sex (unless
one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain inorgasmic in the face of civil society—with
hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this stasis or paralysis, they try to do the work of prison
abolition, that work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (such as the worker) on behalf of a
position of incoherence of the Black: radical politics morphed into extensions of the master’s prerogative. In this way,
social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between Humans and Slaves. They
remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as
crowding-out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply feeding Black people’s frustration. Whereas the positionality of
the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a
social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject (whether a prison-
slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil
society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims Blackness not as a positive
value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction.” It is a “scandal” that rends civil society
asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a Black specter
waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be
pursued to the death. But lest we forget, this is not a question of volition. It is not as simple as waking up in the morning
and deciding, in one’s conscious mind, to “do the right thing.” For when we scale up from the terrain of the psyche to
the terrain of armed struggle, we may be faced with a situation in which the eradication of the generative mechanism
of Black suffering is something that is not in anyone’s interest. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering is not in the interest of Palestinians and Israelis, as my shocking encounter with my friend Sameer, on a placid
hillside, suggests; because his anti-Black phobia mobilizes the fantasy of belonging that the Israeli state might otherwise
strip him of. For him to secure his status as a relational being (if only in his unconscious), his unconscious must labor to
maintain the Black as a genealogical isolate. “The shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier was an
Ethiopian Jew.” The Israelis are killing the Palestinians, literally; but psychic life, Human capacity for relations, is
vouchsafed by a libidinal relay between them and their common labor to avoid “niggerization” [negroization]
[racialization] (Fanon). This relay is the generative mechanism that makes life life. It is also the generative mechanism
of Black suffering and isolation. The end of this generative mechanism would mean the end of the world. We would
find ourselves peering into the abyss. This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working-class, post-colonial, and/or radical
feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be
liberated from the world; which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the
dead. Finally, if we push this analysis to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the generative mechanisms of
Black suffering is also not in the interests of Black revolutionaries. For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and
political desire from the Black psyche’s desire to destroy the Black imago, a desire that constitutes the psyche? In
short, bonding with Whites and non-Blacks over phobic reactions to the Black imago provides the Black psyche with the
only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago and love a White ideal. “In
these circumstances, having a ‘white’ unconscious may be the only way to connect with—or even contain—the
overwhelming and irreparable sense of loss. The intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal
object, the ego, but there is also no ‘outside’ to this ‘real fantasy’ and the effects of intrusion are irreparable.” This raises
the question, who is the speaking subject of Black insurgent testimony; who bears witness when the Black insurgent
takes the stand? Who is writing this book?
 AB K: Michigan HR—Three Tier

3 Tier

1ACs must use the three tier process – 1AC violates, academics without personal experience or
performance of organic intellectuals are rootless.
Reid-Brinkley 8 [Shanara, PhD from UGA, professor of communications at the University of Pittsburgh. “THE HARSH
REALITIES OF “ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH
RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE”]

The process of signifyin’ engaged in by the Louisville debaters is not simply designed to critique the use of traditional
evidence. As Green argues, their goal is to “challenge the relationship between social power and knowledge.”57 In other
words, those with social power within the debate community are able to produce and determine “legitimate”
knowledge. These legitimating practices usually function to maintain the dominance of normative knowledge-making
practices, while crowding out or directly excluding alternative knowledge-making 83 practices. The Louisville
“framework looks to the people who are oppressed by current constructions of power.”58 Jones and Green offer an
alternative framework for drawing claims in debate speeches, they refer to it as a three-tier process : A way in which
you can validate our claims, is through the three-tier process. And we talk about personal experience , organic
intellectuals , and academic intellectuals . Let me give you an analogy. If you place an elephant in the room and send in
three blind folded people into the room, and each of them are touching a different part of the elephant. And they come
back outside and you ask each different person they gone have a different idea about what they was talking about. But,
if you let those people converse and bring those three different people together then you can achieve a greater truth.59
Jones argues that without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege those
with institutional and economic power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per se, instead they
seek to augment or supplement what counts as evidence with other forms of knowledge produced outside of academia.
As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals, “Knowledge surrounds me in the streets, through my peers,
through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight with my mind.”60 The thee-tier process: personal
experience, organic intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that taps into diverse
forms of knowledge-making practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and organic intellectuals are
placed on par with traditional forms of evidence. While the Louisville debaters see the benefit of academic research,
they are also critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented
discussions because of their lack of training and expertise . Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism ,
classism , sexism , and homophobia from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell hooks talks
about how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory becomes rootless .
That’s the reason why we use a three-tiered process. That’s why we use alternative forms of discourse such as hip hop.
That’s also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives so you don’t get just one perspective claiming to
be the right way. Because it becomes a more meaningful and educational view as far as how we achieve our
education.61 The use of hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of
academic and expert discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks. Green argues that without alternative perspectives,
“radical libratory theory becomes rootless.” The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material
circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition represent an
intellectual population with a level of objective distance from that which they study. For the Louisville debaters, this
distance is problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is rooted in the community of those most
greatly affected by the status of oppression.
Vote neg:
1 – Access – expertism crowds out minority participation, prereq to debate’s benefits
2 – Interpassivity turns case – researching legal personhood sans three tiers ensures distancing
which precludes politics rooted in the community of those effected.
 AB K: Michigan IM—Mbembe

We have reached the Dark Enlightenment. Reason has become subsumed by techne concretized as
the “quintessential language of reason”. Sociality is eroding become nothing but the automated
language of Western rationality. The foundations of democratic life are at the brink of extinction
with conflicts proliferating with no “rational solution”. Thus, brings us to the question, is there a
way to reverse the frame of “rational” and “predictable”
Mbembe 21 [Achille Mbembe is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa). “Futures of Life and Futures of
Reason”. Duke University Press. Published: 2021. Accessed: 7/6/2022//!PI!]

These are also times when many are gradually coming to the realization that reason may well have reached its limits.
Or, in any case, it is a time when reason is on trial— we are, in other words, in a sort of Dark Enlightenment. Reason is a
faculty we used to recognize in humans and in humans alone. In the Western tradition we have all, willingly or not,
become the inheritors of reason: reason was always seen as the highest of all human faculties, the one that opened the
doors to knowledge, wisdom, virtue, and, most importantly, freedom. Although unequally redistributed among humans,
it was their prerogative alone. Reason distinguished humans from other living species. Thanks to their superior capacity
to exercise this faculty, humans could claim to be exceptional.

Today, reason is on trial in two ways. First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality,
when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason
is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location
of reason. The human brain is being “downloaded” into nanomachines. An inordinate amount of power is gradually
being ceded to abstractions of all kinds. Old modes of reasoning are being challenged by new ones that originate
through and within technology in general and digital technologies in particular, as well as through the top-down models
of artificial intelligence. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason.

Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne, is increasingly weaponized. Time itself is becoming
enveloped in the doings of machines. Machines themselves do not simply execute instructions or programs. They start
generating complex behavior. The computational reproduction of reason has made it such that reason is no longer, or is
a bit more than, just the domain of the human species. We now share it with various other agents. Reality itself is
increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modeling, mathematics. Second, many people are turning their back on
reason in favor of other faculties and other modes of expression and cognition. They are calling for a rehabilitation of
affect and emotions, for instance. In many of the ongoing political struggles of our times, passion is clearly trumping
reason. Confronted with complex issues, feeling and acting with one’s guts, viscerally rather than reasoning, is fast
becoming the new norm.

Conclusion

As the new century unfolds, we are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wave fronts of calculation.
More and more, these wave fronts incorporate life, death, and matter into systems of abstraction and mechanic
reasoning. In the process, they generate new automated couplings between matter and machines, waste and human
beings. If yesterday the modern rational subject’s raison de vivre was to fight myth, superstition, and obscurantism, the
work of reason nowadays is to allow for different modes of seeing and measuring to appear. It is to help human subjects
to properly identify the threshold that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, the quantifiable and
the unquantifiable, the computable and the incomputable. Technologies of calculation, computation, and
quantification present us with one world among many actual and possible worlds. As Pasquinelli (2015) argues,
different modes of measuring will open up the possibility of different aesthetics, of different politics of inhabiting not
just the earth, but the universe and, we may add, of sharing the planet.

As multiple wave fronts of calculation expand across the planet, incorporating more and more life and matter into
systems of abstraction and “machine reasoning,” it becomes urgent to resist an epistemic hegemony that reduces the
earth to a financial problem and a problem of financial value. To be intelligent, one still needs consciousness. Indeed,
were data to overcode the subject, to act without reasoning, to leave behind reflexive thinking and to privilege data
correlation, formal language and inferential deductions would become the norm. Sociality would become totally
automated. Reason as we knew it would be swallowed within a computational matrix that trades on circular causality
(Parisi 2017).

This logic of circular causality is at work in contemporary politics. Almost everywhere, basic agreements concerning
those conflicts that are legitimate and those that are not are eroding quickly, including within liberal democracies. The
number of conflicts that can be contained within the political process is diminishing quickly. As a result, opposing
positions can hardly peacefully coexist within the same institutional and discursive order, let alone within a common
symbolic space. The minimally shared normative foundations for a democratic life are evaporating. Antagonistic, almost
irreconcilable and yet ineliminable views of social reality are on the verge of prevailing. Democracies are increasingly
speaking in the language of civil war (Goldberg 2020) and eradication rather than that of negotiation. More and more,
conflicts for which no rational solutions exist are proliferating.

What, then, remains of the human subject when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through
information machines and technologies of calculation? Who will define the threshold or set the boundary that
distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is
deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable, or between what can and cannot be insured, what can and cannot be
made to or allowed to circulate? In the double-edged conditions of our times, can we turn instruments of calculation
and power into instruments of liberation? In other words, what will it take to turn calculation itself into a site of
political struggle, knowing full well that more than ever before, modes of seeing and measuring are key devices in
current projects of domination at a planetary scale? Can we imagine a different political use and purpose for mass
computation? What kinds of counterinstitutions are needed if we are to reclaim mass-computing power as a basic right
of civil society and essential to its autonomy, if we are to intervene at the same scale as governments and corporations?
What contours must activism for the data politics of the future take? Will we be able to invent different modes of
measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the earth, of
repairing and sharing the planet?

Wiener predicted in 1946 that the automation of labor would encapsulate all social productions.
Come 2022, this has transformed into a complete automation of human processes and the
militarization of everyday life called the Dark Enlightenment. Humanity becomes undervalued and
overpowered by the “innovation” of machines greenlighting “enclaves of war” and neo-
authoritarianism across the globe.
Grove 20 [Jairus Victor Grove is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Hawai'i Research Center
for Future Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Monoa. “From geopolitics to geotechnics: global futures in the shadow
of automation, cunning machines, and human speciation”. International Relations. Pulblished: 2020. Available
@https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047117820948582, Accessed:8/16/2022//!PI!]

In 1946, when Norbert Wiener first realized the scope and consequences that cybernetics would have his first phone call
was to the American Federation of Labor. Although the ability to create self-adjusting machines based on simple
electrical feedbacks lived almost entirely on paper, Wiener knew that there were no technical obstacles to putting
millions out of work.20 Wiener’s frantic and ultimately ignored calls and lackluster meetings with unions were motivated
by a sense that rather than using the reduction of human labor as an opportunity for more leisure and creative activity
that it would be used narrowly to increase profit and leave people unable to do other kinds of jobs in extreme
poverty.21 In as much as predictions about nuclear weapons were misguided, Wiener’s predictions about labor
automation have followed exactly the trajectory he predicted at only a slightly slower pace.

A year later Wiener penned an article for the Atlantic Monthly titled, ‘A Scientist Rebels’.22 The article was a jeremiad
against the cozy relationship between the scientific community and the world’s militaries. Wiener begged his colleagues
to refuse cooperation and funding from military sources and committed himself to do the same . Wiener went further
and said he would himself not work with anyone that did not follow the same path and would refuse to write letters of
recommendation for any scientist that received money or was in communication with military researchers. For Wiener,
the decision to boycott the world’s militaries was not based on moral purity but practical necessity. Wiener could
already see the ways cybernetics would revolutionize the pursuit of war. Again, the history of drones and the increasing
reliance on machine intelligence for data processing and even targeting suggests Wiener was correct.

What I want to add to the projection of Wiener’s cybernetic world into the next century is a better understanding of
how automation could have negative consequences on the economy and warfare. To trace that relationship, I draw on
Timothy Mitchell’s work in Carbon Democracy. Mitchell argues that the switch from coal to oil in the U.S. and U.K. was a
labor decision rather than an economic decision based on cost or scarcity.23 Oil according to Mitchell required less labor
extract and ship (although initially at a great cost) and therefore insulated the state from labor strikes.24 According to
Mitchell, the progressive era’s advances on labor conditions, child labor, voting rights, and in some cases the decision to
go to war, could be influenced by striking because the strike could quite literally turn off the lights and heat by shutting
down mines and interrupting the railroads.25 Once the ability to create pain for the state and economy receded with oil
the capacity of labor to create significant change receded as well.26

I think Mitchell’s argument can be extended further to consider the effects of labor automation of politics and the
effects of war automation on geopolitics. As systems of production and transportation become increasingly automated
the ability to create significant pressure on governments without the direct use of arms diminishes significantly. The
cost and pain of striking is replaced with the often ineffective homology of protesting which, while similar in appearance,
has almost no comparable material consequence.27

The automation of war and the reduction of human troop sizes has a similar effect. Wars aided by drones and as a result
significantly smaller numbers of soldier casualties continue on for decades in a kind of sustainable warfare.28 The
political and material cost of casualties like the material cost of striking are being removed from the political equation
making states less and less accountable in the case of social justice and the pursuit of violence outside their borders.

The feedback between these two trends is potentially catastrophic. At the same time that war becomes easier,
governments become less accountable to their people, and people are deprived of the means to support themselves, it
is also the case that people will matter less to their governments as they will not possess the labor power to cause pain
to the economic productivity of the country by means of striking nor the capacity to refuse to fight. Zygmunt Bauman
has spoken of disposable populations, a kind of human waste or surplus where the value of one’s existence is
meaningless for the state.29 However, we ought to go further down this path by way of Achille Mbembe’s creeping
necropolitics.30 It is not merely that chronically or even intergenerational unemployed people have no value; it is that
the marginalization and even murder of people can now generate value. In what Mbembe refers to as the ‘enclave
economies’ of war machines:

The concentration of activities connected with the extraction of valuable resource around these enclaves has, in return,
turned the enclaves into privileged spaces of war and death. War itself is fed by the increased sales of the products
extracted.31
In these enclave economies fueled by petroleum, diamonds, but increasingly things like lithium or even sand or water,
the outright murder of people, clearing space, generates value even in the supposedly post-resource digital economy.32
However, beyond the instrumental value of security there is also the explosion of security services as its own economic
sector rather than as a merely means to secure other economic sectors. International security corporations such as
Wackenhut industries, once a private prison service provider in the U.S., now generate profits from refugee
management in Australia and Europe.33 The nearly 200billion dollar private security industry and $1917billion dollar
defense sector suggest that the economy of making death and deprivation is more than merely a means. What few
normative and legal limitations exist on the lethality of these corporations and institutions could disappear. This is
already taking place in the global South and amongst African-Americans and indigenous people around the planet.

However, one can foresee, with little imagination, the extreme injustices of the contemporary era as a general condition
of global life. What requires imagination on our part is reaching a turning point where these crimes become themselves
normative, that is, the ‘good’ the state pursues. Contrary to our sensibilities such ideologies already exist and are even
gaining attention outside the obscure chat rooms where they began.

Under the heading of ‘negative messianism’, Mbembe reviews the growing movement of the ‘ Dark Enlightenment’, ‘a
political religion. . . [that] calls for the exit from democratic society and total corporate and absolute dictatorship’.34
The movement calls for a global, racial, culling of the population in the name of ‘human biodiversity’ and expounds the
value of using racially inferior populations for radical experimentation to jumpstart technological breakthrough. If this
sounds too implausible even for speculation it is worth considering the spate of recent terrorist attacks in the U.S. by the
vanguard of the Dark Enlightenment. The mass shooter who killed 20 people in El Paso Texas in August of 2019 posted
his Dark Enlightenment manifesto before beginning his rampage.35 In 2020, there have been multiple attacks by the so-
called Boogaloos who have infiltrated the U.S. military and police forces and seek to spark the Dark Enlightenment by
escalating the Black Lives Matter protests into a full scale civil war.36 And then there is the most famous and vocal
theorist of the Dark Enlightenment, Steve Bannon, who in addition to being a key architect of the Donald Trump
administration, works tirelessly to build the Dark Enlightenment movement amongst the burgeoning far right of
Europe.37 Whether this world view succeeds or actually becomes normative globally is not really the point. Instead, as is
the mode in the speculation here I propose that in the burgeoning Dark Enlightenment movement we can see a
political community built around necropolitics as a value rather than a necessary evil.

It would be too much to draw a direct line from the Dark Enlightenment to all of the neo-nationalist, neo-authoritarian,
and neo-fascist movements around the planet. However, the accelerating global right wing has been institutionalized at
the highest levels of power in liberal democratic nation-states such as the United States, U.K. and India, suggesting that
liberal institutions cannot subsist on autopilot. Neo-authoritarian politics have also moved from shaping domestic
polities to the shaping of the international order.38

In such an order, what would liberal democratic states look like? The constraints on the genocidal dictatorships of the
twentieth century was of course that they needed a substantial portion of their populations. Genocide could only be
pursued against minority populations. State behavior even in the extremes of the Nazi state among others still required
full mobilization and therefore at some level the necessity of willing obedience even if not quite legitimacy that could be
supplemented through terror.39

What of the behavior of future states for whom their people are in some sense an afterthought? At a minimum the basic
conceits of survival that underwrite practices like deterrence or coercion would change dramatically. The very logic and
mechanics of biopolitics would have to change. Without a necessary or strict relationship to the nation, would states
differ significantly from some kind of corporate entity? Would the state more closely resemble the ancient regime?
What would become of territoriality? These are the grammatical questions raised by the dark imagination of an
automated future sufficiently comprehensive to create the material condition whereby a state could survive without the
majority of their population’s cooperation.

Can we not already see the outlines of such a future in the decisions of Bolsanaro, Trump, Xi, Modi, and Duterte , who
blithely write off millions of their own citizens in the face of COVID-19 and the nearly 50per cent unemployment rate it
has created where the virus has been allowed total freedom of movement?40 One need not be conspiratorial to see
how quick authoritarian leaders have been to give up on disease containment once the data came back regarding the
overwhelming racial disparity in COVID fatalities.41

If we consider the ways in which the shift from coal to oil changed the character of economic and labor relations with
states in the twentieth century, the nearly 50 percent loss of jobs due to computerization in the twenty-first century,42
combined with a corresponding decline in the necessity of humans for military power, then these new conditions could
change the very nature of what a state is. The biopolitical raison d’être of the nation-state which emerges in the
nineteenth century and becomes truly geopolitical in the twentieth century is premised on the mobilization and
securing of a national population.43 The revolutionary states emerge from and rationalize the hyphen of the
nationstate as essential both in terms of democratic values and military-economic necessity. What will emerge in the
aftermath of such necessities and values is the horizon of alternative futures we must consider.

Refuse their arbitrary divide between the “in here” and “out there”. The Dark Enlightenment uses
this as an essential tactic to normalize the erasure of the “global south” and the bondage between
institutionalized racism in IR. IR in academia itself has emerged as an institutional apparatus for the
Dark Enlightenment, criminalizing insurgency while preaching Eurocentric violence as “essential to
the status quo”. Only disruption at the level of study prevents the formation of violent “epistemic
communities”.
Gani and Marshall 2022 [Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall. Dr Jasmine Gani is Senior Lecturer in the School of
International Relations and Co-Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews. Published by
Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. The impact of colonialism on policy and
knowledge production in International Relations. International Affairs 98. doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab226. Published: 2022.
Accessed: 8/17/2022//!PI!]

Academia as knowledge-supplier for colonial policies In this first section we elucidate how academia and intellectuals
have helped to supply, shape and justify colonial and racist policies. Underpinning all the articles in the special issue is
an acknowledgement of the racial foundations of the discipline of IR, which, though formally established in IR
departments in the early twentieth century, already existed in various forms such as ‘imperial’ or ‘diplomatic’ history
and was rooted in Enlightenment political thought. Scholars across academic disciplines have increasingly been
confronting the erasure of the racism that coursed through the writings and beliefs of early political theorists and the
founders of their disciplines,11 and have argued that this erasure forecloses greater debate about and scrutiny of racism
within the discipline’s mainstream and critical theories. While this important conversation and excavation have already
been under way for some time,12 we seek to take this understanding further to probe how these ideas and patterns of
racism, colonialism and erasure go on to shape, and become operationalized through, policy. The research by the
contributors to this special issue has exposed a long and deep history in which universities, as well as other sites of
knowledge production and expertise that draw on academic insights, such as museums and think tanks, have (and had) a
close entanglement with state practitioners, supplying the ideas and logic that in many instances were used to justify
racist beliefs and colonial policies.13 This unsavoury ‘transmission belt’ has occurred in two forms.14

First, as a number of the contributions argue, academia has been a predominant influence in the production of broad
epistemic communities. In the course of this process, academic knowledge production has acted as a supplier of racial ,
civilizational and imperialist discourse, ideology and ‘logic’ that were (and are) disseminated through research, teaching
and broader public intellectualism. Bearing in mind that many policy-makers have been taught and trained within
academia, especially elite institutions, it is necessary to recall that IR departments were founded in the early twentieth
century in the United Kingdom and United States precisely to serve the purpose of informing imperial administrations.16
While this form of transmission is impossible to quantify precisely, the articles in this special issue show that
nevertheless universities, along with think tanks and journals, delineated the parameters of rational and acceptable
debate. That the ideas emanated (as they still do) from so-called bastions of scholarship and rigour meant they carried
greater credibility and gravitas, and were accompanied by an assumption that they had been scientifically tested. In
many cases universities and intellectuals were responsible for upholding the legitimacy of racist hierarchies and the
necessity of colonialism in the West against the grain of anti-colonial and anti-racist social movements and intellectuals
in the colonies, and subsequent grassroots movements for the abolition of colonialism and racism in the West. Thus, in
contrast to the common refrain that academia is an ‘ivory tower’ that is disconnected from the real world, in IR it has in
fact routinely demonstrated the opposite, with the capacity to embed and systematize racism, scavenging the
disorganized and reactionary fears of society and refining them in such a way that they appear rational,17 indeed
necessary for the sake of order, security and communal peace.

A second way in which academia has historically fed and continues to feed policy is in a more direct way—through a
supply chain of academically trained experts who go on to work in policy, either as consultants or by holding office in
government or in other state institutions such as the military. This pattern was laid down during the peak period of
European colonialism, the clearest example being provided by J. S. Mill: despite being a philosopher, he was anything
but detached from the ‘real world’, taking up the position of colonial officer in British-controlled India, arguing against
Indian self-rule on the racist intellectual basis that the natives were still in their infancy.18 Such ‘knowledge
entrepreneurs’ were at the forefront of the knowledge ordering indispensable to Britain’s expansion into south Asia.
These ‘epistemological invasions’, alongside the core group of ‘European explorers, diplomats, military men, and
Company officials’, had the chief function of producing ‘a proto-episteme’ or ‘corpus of knowledge’ by which the region
was rendered legible for imperial expansion.19 Later, the urgent imperatives of war established the revolving door that
turned scholars into practitioners and vice versa, as witnessed, for example, in the interplay in 1930s British East Africa
between colonial administrations and anthropologists to ensure indirect rule.20

But such close embodied relationships between academics and imperial governance were not confined to the age of
formal empires. The scholarly sanitizing and rebranding of contemporary imperialism as ‘hegemony’ or ‘soft power’
prevents us from applying anti-colonial critiques to contemporary empires. In his contribution to the special issue,
Randolph Persaud argues that this is a complicity especially epitomized by US ‘Disciplinary IR’, and challenges the
feigning of neutrality in US-led theorizing, calling for it to be recognized as implicitly ideological.21 Moreover, it is
precisely their ideological character that renders such academics ‘useful’ and allows them to move smoothly into policy
roles. Thus, for Persaud, their service as practitioners acts as the chief conduit for those ideologies to travel into and be
socialized in policy. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama, and Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and
Condoleezza Rice, are just some of the examples of academics who have served in high office in the United States. The
notion that academic expertise might temper imprudence and propensity for war in policy-making is refuted by their
respective willingness to approve of foreign occupations, military intervention, coups, drone attacks or authoritarian
allies abroad, and of racial securitization, border regimes and incarceration at home. As Persaud points out, beyond
those holding office there are multiple examples of academics who have acted as advisers to governments, obliquely
upholding the principles of imperialism under the guise of ‘grand strategy’ or the ‘liberal international order’.

While the US example makes it easy to single out ‘mainstream’ or ‘positivist’ IR as particularly culpable, it must be
noted that racist and imperialist ideologies have also been carried forth by critical, liberal or ‘left-wing’ academics.
Earlier postcolonial writers already pointed to this trend. Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria unveiled’ provides an important
example of such scrutiny: in this piece he criticizes feminist sociologists and anthropologists who supplied the
intellectual rationalization for France’s forced ‘deveiling’ policy of Muslim women in Algeria under the name of female
emancipation from patriarchy and backwardness.22 The hangover of such colonial policies, and intellectual complicity in
them, can be seen within contemporary France (and elsewhere in Europe), where French Muslim women activists have
observed the silence of feminist academics in the face of attacks on the hijab and women’s ‘bodily autonomy’.23

Echoing this cross-ideological scrutiny, Lucian Ashworth in his article highlights the latent imperialism in Norman Angell’s
ideas and the anti-Semitism that laced the writings of the prominent pacifist J. A. Hobson; such normalization of
antiSemitism in intellectual work was the backdrop to rising anti-Semitism across Europe in the early twentieth century,
precisely when such racism needed to be challenged by scholars, especially pacifist scholars.24 As he notes, IR’s
historical division between warriors and pacifists, realists and idealists, or right wing and left wing, can serve to produce
an illusion of a critical debate and interrogation of the status quo within the discipline while utterly failing to grapple
with racial and colonial assumptions that underpin both camps. Ashworth’s article thus demonstrates the need to
explore the reach of racism beyond theoretical binaries.

In her article, Jasmine K. Gani similarly highlights academic complicity, across ideological and theoretical divides, in
upholding colonial tropes.25 Thus, Orientalist fears about the rise of an ‘Islamist threat’ and an inherent
unpreparedness for democracy in the Middle East were not just stoked by neo-conservative interventionists but were
also routinely used by pacifist academics to oppose western intervention . Gani makes the case that decades of
Orientalist representations of the Middle East among academics prior to the Arab uprisings of 2011 influenced western
policy expectations of a liberal democratic trajectory in the early months of the protests; while the prompt turn to latent
Orientalism among academics in the aftermath of the uprisings, predicting failure and doom, was also eventually
manifested through policy. Think tanks, in particular, played an important role as mediators of academic discourse to the
policy realm in both the United States and Britain, facilitating ‘impact’—but often of the kind that served to entrench
rather than contest racial tropes and policies in the Middle East.

Continuing the theme of contesting binaries, this time that of an ‘imperialist West’ and an ‘anti-colonial non-West’,
Tomohito Baji’s article focuses on the ideas of key Japanese intellectuals who also served as policy-makers in the
administrations of imperial Japan.26 Extrapolating from western standards of civilization and native traditions, these
individuals defined a regional racial hierarchy that upheld the necessity and ‘morality’ of Japanese imperialism in east
and south-east Asia. Once again, their status as intellectuals, alongside the strategic amalgamation of external ideas with
local traditions, helped to provide their ideas with greater legitimacy. Baji’s article is a caution to IR that simply
diversifying the sources of our ideas, though necessary, is not on its own sufficient to undo racism and coloniality in the
discipline.

Imperialist practice shaping academic knowledge production If academia has had a long history of supplying imperial
policy through its knowledge production, the reverse has also been true—it is not a unidirectional process. Thus,
imperial policies and those that embed racial injustices have often provided the starting-point for academic enquiry,
with imperialist and racist constructions taken as the material reality from which to launch any research, without
historicization or interrogation of whether that is how it has to be. The risk of academia being a mule for unjust and
oppressive assumptions generated through colonial and racist practice looms even larger with the increased emphasis in
academia on the necessity of applying for and obtaining research grants. Many funding bodies are dependent on state
subsidies, or are financed by the corporate sector or by benefactors from the business and political elite.27 When it
comes to selecting prize-winners, the committees are often made up of members from the business community to
assess the potential ‘real world’ (and presumably monetary) impact of the proposed research. Thus academia is not a
bastion of intellectual autonomy, but is increasingly allowing the parameters and goals of research to be delineated by
practitioners and their priorities. Where those practitioners have vested interests (as is often likely, even if not always
the case) in a social, economic and political status quo that upholds systemic discrimination against marginalized
communities, the potential for deep-rooted long-term change becomes muted.

This special issue accordingly demonstrates how academic knowledge production risks reifying colonial and racial
injustices. Like so-called impartial reporting in journalism, which indirectly becomes a convenient and efficient means for
political elites to distribute their messages, IR as a discipline can end up being a disseminator of the rationales and
motives of policy-makers. Thus the supposed neutrality of analytical theorizing and empiricism,28 which claim merely to
observe and predict impartially the way the world is and will be without problematization, can be seen as complicit in
normalizing what should in fact be treated as abnormal, even unacceptable.

Several contributions apply this argument to particular regions and debates where the inherent absorption of unjust
practices and erasures within knowledge production is particularly egregious. The articles by Kwaku Danso and Kwesi
Aning, and by Somdeep Sen, both call for greater challenges to the centrality of the state in IR, and criticize the way it
has mirrored an (often colonial) international practice of delegitimizing non-state actors.
In their article, Danso and Aning complicate Weberian notions of the state monopoly on violence, extending validity and
recognition to non-state actors in their ability to act as authoritative avenues for dispute resolution.29 They further
make the case for the unsettling of knowledge within security studies, especially when engaging with the African
continent, arguing that methodological whiteness has been unquestioningly accepted as the logic that underpins
much of security studies discourse. This lack of problematization racializes Africa as ungovernable, and flattens or often
entirely negates any substantive understandings of the complexities of lived experiences.30 Their article also makes
visible the ways in which academic eagerness to supply regional case-studies for the sake of policy relevance and proof
of ‘universal theories’ impact people’s lived realities. They make their point explicit through an illustration of the ‘war on
terror’ discourses within the Sahel region.

Providing an alternative example, Sen argues that academic scholarship has contributed to the concretization of the
state and its violence as ‘normal politics’, while insurgency (or, in other words, anti-colonial resistance) is thereby
rendered ‘unnatural’ and existentially dangerous for global order.31 In failing to question the sanctity of the state,
scholars have been complicit in upholding colonial practice and the outlawing of resistance, consigning it beyond the
realm of acceptable politics, as seen in contexts such as Palestine.

Sharri Plonski and Nivi Manchanda extend these arguments about unsettling the fixity of the state and its borders, but
also expand where we look to first to identify the producers of knowledge.32 Thus, they argue knowledge is not
necessarily always produced within the academy, but often is first made (and indeed exchanged and concretized)
through (colonial) practice and, in turn, via normalization that converts the practice into ‘fact’ that goes unchallenged by
academic knowledge producers. Their article demonstrates the way colonial and racist knowledges are nourished,
upheld and validated by silences within broader epistemic communities—communities in which the boundaries
between academics, policy-makers and corporations are much more fluid than a strict binary between academics and
practitioners. Recognizing this fluidity also serves to disrupt the ‘bridge the gap’ debate discussed at the outset of this
article.

Thus, all the articles in various ways encourage us to reflect on how universities, intellectuals, schools and museums
support the banalization and naturalization of oppressive structures. The academic–policy industries of terrorism
studies, traditional security studies or African and Middle East studies often reinstate old myths about endemic ‘cycles of
violence’, or about colonial vulnerability and the need for self-defence in the face of native barbarism; or explore non-
western regions through the lens of western historical/political watersheds.33 They often do so without scrutinizing the
ways in which international norms assumed to represent order and stability—from statecraft to borders to theories of
polarity—are all imbricated in the colonial infrastructure and thus will, and should, necessarily be resisted by the
colonized and oppressed. The question academic researchers need to ask ourselves is why we have failed to make so
many of these colonial and racist practices ‘strange’ and culpable in our knowledge production.

Of course, it is not the case that practitioners and knowledge producers never abnormalize racism and colonialism. To
give some credit to scholars, the devastation and depravity of mass slaughter stemming from racism and imperialism in
the two world wars is rightly treated with horror in IR. But while there is recognition and condemnation, academic
knowledge production has tended to assign those crimes to the past, undermining the need for responsibility and action
in the present.34 Exploring this instrumentalization of history and memory to absolve the present, Katrin Antweiler
explains that international institutions have played a leading role, and have vested interests, in depicting racial crimes as
historical events rather than as a contemporary phenomenon, while knowledge producers and disseminators, such as
museums and schools, have been complicit in supporting that effort.35 Drawing on the example of South Africa,
Antweiler argues that the memory of the historical and geographically distant racial crimes of the Holocaust is
instrumentalized to suppress the memory of near and local racial crimes during apartheid. The point is not that
Holocaust commemoration is not needed or laudable, but rather that this top-down form of knowledge exchange, via
directives from the UN, doubles up as a form of governmentality where pressure is placed on global South countries to
show they conform to western markers of progress, democracy and human rights.
Amitav Acharya’s article also considers IR’s role in relaying and effectively certifying the (re)branding attempts of colonial
practice via the policy-led concept of global governance.36 For all their laudable claims, international institutions acted
as gatekeepers for entry into what would become the international community, recodifying old (racist) standards of
civilization as neutral conditions for acceptance into the modern club of nations. IR as a discipline in turn has been
particularly complicit in this ‘rebooting’ of a western-led liberal order, by promulgating the creation of institutions
and of the post-1945 and post-Cold War world orders as watersheds that marked the emergence of a more
humanitarian, progressive, civilized and peaceful world. Neo-liberalism, institutionalism, even the human rights
regime, are routinely taught as essential theories on IR courses as the cooperative and ethical responses to the wars
of the twentieth century: it is remarkable that such deeply hierarchical organizations can then be upheld as pillars of
global stability and morality via these theoretical discourses. This, alongside the rebranding of academic journals from
what were effectively treatises of imperialism into objective enterprises,37 shows how a collaboration between
academia and the policy world allowed policy-makers to ‘move on’ from their imperial legacies without confronting
the racial classifications and global inequalities that continued to constitute these institutions and the liberal
international order.

What these articles also show is that IR’s role as messenger (and thus its failure to problematize the narratives supplied
by practitioners) has meant it has also reproduced the policy world’s erasures of non-western architects and
movements for emancipation who were pivotal in advocating those precise ethical norms now held up to be legacies of
western civilization. Their erasure, first by institutions and then by academics, provided a rubric for the way in which,
even when race and colonialism do get addressed in both policy and scholarship, the non-white and gendered sources
of those ideas get airbrushed out of their genealogy.38 What academic experts of liberal international orders should be
asking is: What do such erasures do for our conceptions and narratives of who are the progenitors of world order and
‘progress’? By challenging the stories these institutions have told about themselves, and by giving historical policy-
makers from the global South the prominence they were and are due, academics could have done more to disrupt the
West’s civilizational narrative and the intellectual and practical hierarchies in both academia and the policy world.

Meanwhile, where IR has overlooked the importance of policy-makers and liberation activists in the global South, it
has conversely given undue prominence to policy-makers from the global North who in fact championed imperialism
and racism—not only in research and teaching, but by also welcoming them into the academy . A case in point is Alfred
T. Mahan.39 As Ashworth argues, Mahan’s experience as an admiral in the US Navy appeared to enhance his credibility
as a scholar. Thus, just as academics who move into the policy world have been conduits for the transmission of ideas
into practice, the process also works the other way around, when practitioners—often those who have enacted or
overseen egregious wars, coups, debilitating sanctions and extractive economic policies— are invited to take up chairs in
prominent IR and political science departments. This pattern urges us to reflect on who is given authority to speak in
the discipline, who gets to shape the main debates of the discipline and who is allowed to reinforce its silences.40 It
appears that the closer one is to structures and practices of hegemony, the more weight and influence they are
afforded within the academy.

The Dark Enlightenment has accelerated the hyperindustry to the point where technics has
replaced the psyche itself. Under this code, blackness exists as an informe in civil society, a
necessary outside for all political arrangements. Thus, calls to “legal personhood” is western
rationality’s ploy to unmediated access to uncovering the “otherworldly truth” of blackness. The
impact is neurobiological weathering.
Butler 21 [Daniel Butler, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and doctoral candidate in History of Consciousness, “Fervish
Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues The International Journal of Relational
Perspective, Published: June 3, 2021, Accessed: 7/13/2022//!PI!]

If psychoanalysis is indeed trying to survive this era of the so-called dark enlightenment, what this means, at least
according to the admittedly more pessimistic tendencies in media philosophy, is that digital technology increasingly
dominates if not replaces the psyche itself, largely by siphoning off libidinal energy; and what this diagnosis means for
the collaboration between science and metapsychology is that the psychic subject of such collaboration is increasingly
dead and dissociated or without much of a psyche to investigate . Is this why we might manically search for intuitive
moments of transubjectivity, where rather than contending with feverish nonknowledge, we long for the intuition or
extraordinary knowledge Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow so convincingly (and beautifully) narrate in their clinical vignettes?
We might wonder about the search for extraordinary knowing from a psychopolitical perspective, given that the
psychopolitcal struggle of our contemporary is, in my view, less about control over informational than libidinal
economies or more about a struggle to feel alive as the precondition of that which enables us to know (for Bataille,
knowing and living are, at root, incommensurable, even if the latter exceeds and anticipates the former); and while the
natural sciences can indeed become a necessary comrade in this struggle, they are heavily instrumental in (and the least
informed about) the deadening and proletarianization of psychosomatic life.

Such proletarianization does not invigorate an underclass ala Marx but invades the subject’s nervous system ala Stiegler
(2010); it is a generalized condition of “mindpsyches,” to use Winnicott’s (1975b) term. This diagnosis points to a
massive psychic and political problem, and it is why psychoanalytic engagements with sciences demand a continual
awareness of the science’s proletarianizing function in hyperindustrial society. While far from their presumable intent,
Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s metaphor shift could read like a proletarianizing gesture, insofar as psychoanalysis is asked
to become more useful and productive to the sciences, instead of being critical, offensive, or even ruinous of the
computational capitalism that basically controls the sciences as its handmaiden, and that leaves so many clinical dyads
bored, unfilled, and generally unavailable for the varieties of intuition that Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow delineate.

Wholeness, metanarrative, and the contingencies of science Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow specifically acknowledge Bion
(and Jung) for bringing intuition into the psychoanalytic mainstream. Unlike Freud’s (1911) reality principle as the
neonate’s confrontation with a frustrating unpleasure, Bion’s intuition apperceives a continuous 286 D. G. BUTLER
reality that is irreducible to any spatiotemporal or psychosomatic coordinates. This ultimate reality is a global form of
psychic continuity that many psychoanalysts are wary of due to its mystical connotations, but from a quantum physics
perspective, such mysticism is partly dispelled by way of thinkers like Bohm, whose “implicate order” informs Shapiro
and Marks-Tarlow’s holistic theory of intuition. I say holistic because they, like Bohm, treat “the mental and the
material” as an implicate order, or “[as] two sides of one reality” (Bohm, 1987, p. 20), and this unitary reality or Jung’s
unus mundus facilitates nonlocal information sharing and the extraordinary knowing of intuition. For Bohm, Shapiro and
Marks-Tarlow, the concept of wholeness is (explicitly, in Bohm’s case) tied to humanity and its survival. Conversely,
Bataille’s boundlessness is a boiling point in relation to which human survival is risked and existentially held in
suspense.3

Bataille argues that totalities cannot be conceptualized except by imaginary means, which is to say that a totality
requires a thought from outside that undermines the totality itself. By extension, the greatest scientific truth is also the
undoing of science or a transcendence of the point at which the object of science slips from view. This is not to suggest
that science is unreal but that it is realest when it calls on the imaginary for its meaning or when its greatest meaning
hinges on the disavowal of its insignificance. Where Bataille’s boundlessness aspires to an abundance of meaning that
tips the scale into an absence of meaning, Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow implicitly reject such absence by aligning their
nonlocal neurodynamics with concepts like the unus mundus and the implicate order, both of which transcend
meaninglessness through a superordinate metanarrative of wholeness. Feverish with nonknowledge, the Bataillean
subject does not turn to metanarrative to account for the boiling point’s beyond. Stielger’s teacher, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, deserves mention here, especially since, in The Postmodern Condition – his still highly relevant “report on
knowledge” that was commissioned by the Quebec government – he makes specific reference to quantum physics and
to the hyperindustrial inversion of science and technology, whereby the latter now exploits the former rather than
functioning as a scientific tool.4

Lyotard (1984) acknowledges that “quantum theory and microphysics require a far more radical revision of the idea of a
continuous and predictable path,” but its “quest for precision is . . . limited . . . by the very nature of matter. It is not true
that uncertainty (lack of control) decreases as accuracy goes up: it goes up as well” (p. 56). Lyotard continues with a
reference to physicist Jean Perrin, whose study of air molecules, Lyotard argues, “resolves into a multiplicity of
absolutely incompatible statements; they can only be made compatible if they are relativized in relation to a scale
chosen by the speaker” (p. 57). Knowledge reaches its limit in this incompatibility, and this is where science draws on
the imaginary and plays language games or creates a meta-language to legitimate itself, which in turn relativizes its
status as “scientific.” This crisis of knowledge is traceable to the late-nineteenth century when metanarratives ala
Hegel’s science of Spirit, Marx’s critique of capitalism, and Darwin’s theory of evolution no longer inspired faith in
ineluctable progress and/or preordained emancipation. While the materialist turn in humanities and social sciences
tends to lambast what appears to be a crude subjectivism in such “postmodern” thought (a critique Shapiro and Marks-
Tarlow seem to share), it is less that Lyotard assumes matter only exists as an epistemological construction than that the
sciences are partly contingent on metanarratives (or micronarratives) for their legitimation.5

Bohm’s holism would seem to be such a metanarrative. In order to supplement the localinteractive dynamics of
interpersonal neurobiology with the nonlocal-participatory dynamics of quantum physics, Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow
turn to thinkers like Bohm, who “postulated a unifying domain of active information, which underlies both matter and
mind processes,” such that “matter loses its appearance of solidity and separate locality” (p. 18). Contra Bohm’s
implicate order, Bataille’s espousal of boundlessness and nonknowledge suggests that any unity cannot account for the
contingency by which it is constituted. In a conversation with Bohm (1987), an audience member challenges Bohm’s
subsumption of contingency into wholeness, and Bohm (1987) admits to the speculative nature of his insights, adding
“we are making models and . . . they are not models of ultimate reality, but proposals” (p. 57); the question, he notes, is
“which presupposition are we choosing” (p. 53), and by presupposition Bohm would seem to mean the metaphysical
premises, however propositional, that promote a world in which we want to live. Bohm is aware of the hermeneutics
involved in interpreting science, but perhaps he is less aware of how the hermeneutic choices we make may or may not
struggle against some of the more repressive forces that characterize every historical conjuncture.

Like Bohm’s implicate order, the hermeneutic of Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s “inherent wholeness that unites us all”
(this issue, p. 279) is arguably premised on a disavowed metaphysics as much as it is a speculative psychophysics. Their
information channels that traverse psyche and physis are not, in my view, socially, politically, and culturally neutral.
Borrowing a locution from afropessimist Frank Wilderson (2010), we might say that Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s
conception of wholeness grounds itself in the “assumptive logic” of human ontology, which, even when recast according
to an impersonal physics of information channels, takes for granted the “us” who are supposedly united. Following an
anti-humanist reading of thinkers like Fanon, afropessimists do not accord human status to black “subjects,”6 and this
discord extends to the natural sciences for at least two reasons: one, because anti-black violence epigenetically
dehumanizes bodies that are epidermally black, thus leading to neurobiological conditions such as weathering
(Jackson, 2019); and two, because modernity is built on economies of slavery that have libidinally and capitalistically
funded scientific research as early as the Indian Ocean slave trade of 7th century Arabia (Vaziri, 2019).7 Whether one
agrees with such positions or not, they surely highlight the contested terrain of the natural sciences, which is different
from simply writing the sciences off or dismissing the realism on which scientific truths are based.

When we speak of intuition, we might thus consider a racialized variety, namely that which reveals blackness as a
potentially lethal encounter with the informé (Butler, 2020). I have written about this in relation to resignation
syndrome as a condition that petrifies the refugee child into a protracted state of hallucinosis. Shapiro and Marks-
Tarlow’s description of nonlocal neurodynamics limpidly captures something akin to what I strained to describe in my
own way. I asked how a child comes to encounter the informé which they realize their condemnation in a stereotype
that could be said to exceed local-interactive channels of information sharing and that instead emanates from the
nonlocal informational channels of a xenophobic and antiblack state apparatus . This apparatus induces devitalization
by forcing refugee families into a seemingly interminable limbo where their applications for asylum are absorbed into
informational and bureaucratic black holes. It is often but not always the oldest child, typically the most parentified or
identified with devitalized parent figures, who are petrified by intuiting the blackness to which they are condemned.
Here, blackness is inseparable from geopolitical violence against phenotypically black bodies, and yet the
psychopolitical effect of this violence is such that blackness becomes the psychic abyss from which non-black subjects
phobically flee and through which black subjects fashion a life that exists under social death (Sexton, 2011), to the side
of being (para-ontology) (Chandler, 2014; Moten, 2008), or that is suspended like a tightrope straddling nothingness and
infinity (Marriott, 2018, p. 204). Many black thinkers argue that such a life demands its own scientific imaginaries
(Hammonds, 1994; Da Silva, 2017), in part because blackness is historically, ontologically, and psychosomatically cast
out of the world; and yet, insofar as blackness is a paradoxically “non-negated negativity” (Marriott, 2018, p. 223), it is
not so much cast out as it is the world’s most sacred yet defiled interior.

The nonlocal effects of an antiblack geopolitics thus register psychically as a blackness that is informé rather than
informational or an absence that begins with the condemnation and denigration of black flesh but that shapes the
psychopolitics of hypermodernity such that blackness is the primally repressed thing against and around which the
psyche itself is formed. Blackness is constitutive of the psyche insofar as the latter is organized around the former as an
inassimilable absence, but what this means for black “subjects,” at least according to a certain reading of Fanon, is that
the psyche – and most definitely the psychophysical – is only ever legible as white (or as that which is not black, not the
thing). Grappling with such thought seems crucial for the frontiers of psychoanalysis and the natural sciences, which
Fanon, a psychoanalytic clinician, and experimental neuropsychiatrist, already knew. Like Fanon, many black critical
theorists refuse the concept of psychophysical unity for the same reason they refuse the notion of a science that is not
already saturated with stereotypes. After all, Fanon (2004) is decisive in stating that antiblack colonization creates a
species division, such that the very concept of the human undergoes a lysis in which the black subject is psychically and
physically jettisoned from the family of man.

Technology, breakdown, and the proletarianization of psychosomatic life Lyotard’s critique in The Postmodern Condition
(1984) addresses the way in which scientific knowledge is inextricable from a political–economic relationship to
technology that metanarratives unwittingly work to obscure. In effect, metanarratives themselves serve the technical
function of naturalizing science itself, as if the study of nature is not socially, politically, and economically motivated.
Technology has historically aided human perception so that scientific observation becomes increasingly reliable, but
this optimization of the scientific project is now firmly coupled with the logic of capitalism, where minimal input (e.g.,
automation) yields maximal output (surplus value), and where “an equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is
established” for individual and collective alike (Lyotard, 1984, PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 289 p. 45). If the sciences
now produce data and information that perpetuates absolute nonknowledge, this is because of the libidinal and
economic surplus that their subordination to hyperindustry yields, not because there is something inherently insidious
about science or technology. And yet, if Lyotard is right about the coupling of science and capital, how might the
sciences critically account for that coupling so as to distance themselves from its proletarianizing effects?

A proletarianized world thrives on speculation and superstition rather than investment and the time that it takes to
develop knowledge. What Stiegler calls proletarianization, Achille Mbembe refers to as the becoming Black of the world
(Mbembe & Stiegler, 2019), by which Mbembe means, in part, that historically denigrated African cosmologies now
explain how objectified human life can become animated by perversely vitalized technologies . “The human person is
trying to turn himself or herself into a thing or manufactured object” (Mbembe, 2016, 1:02:58), which is to say that
they are becoming Black, specifically insofar as blackness is naturalized as an animate thing by antiblack and colonial
imaginaries that still found our national settings (Butler, 2019b). In tandem with this turn toward animism, Mbembe
(2016) notes the rise of interest in new materialisms, occult phenomena, and speculative realisms, all of which, in their
own way, intersect with the transsubjective in Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow. Transcendent connectedness and unmediated
access to the (im)material world inspires manic reparation that allows proletarianized populations to adapt to an
antiblack techno-capitalism by feeling as though they can access otherworldly truths. Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow invite us
to consider how the clinical setting of local-interactive processes is always already informed by much more expansive,
nonlocal, or even subatomic settings or information channels, and thinkers like Mbembe remind us of the way in which
such channels and technologies (e.g., settings) are historically, ontologically, and geopolitically racialized phenomena
that always already condition the nonlocal as a concept.
AI innovation under the guise of ethical AI is built on the premise of Western Rationality that
presupposes Western Scientific Progress as the only rubric for the evaluation of global modification.
Appeals to new ideas begs the question of where these ideas are tested. Positioning of the West as
the pre-ethical other greenlights massive colonialism in the global south for the name of progress.
Adams 21 [Rachel, a Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa;b Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute of
Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. “Can artificial intelligence be decolonized?”. Interdisciplinary Science
Reviews. Published: March 7, 2021. Available @ https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840225. Accessed:
8/30/2022//!PI!]

Ethics and the rationality of Empire Computer scientist has Timnit Gebru stated that ethics is the ‘language du jour’ in AI
discourse (2020; see also Ulnicane et al., this issue). Discursively, it is posited that through advancing ideas such as ‘AI
for Good,’ ‘Fair and Responsible AI’ and ‘AI for Humanity’ (in France and Canada), particularly by incorporating these
aspirations and values within normative frameworks for ethical AI, discontent within the field can be addressed and
resolved. This has met with some criticism. Pratyusha Kalluri, for example, has pointed out that ‘‘fair’ and ‘good’ are
infinitely spacious words that any AI system can be squeezed into,’ and aptly stresses that the question AI ethics should
be examining is how power works through such systems and to what effect (2020; see also Crawford et al. 2019). In
addition, Greene, Hoffmann, and Stark (2019) have emphasized how AI ethics assumes a universality of concerns which
can be objectively measured and addressed, summarizing the assumptions upon which the discourse is based as follows:

(a) the positive and negative impacts of AI are a matter of universal concern, (b) there is a shared language of
ethical concern across the species, and (c) those concerns can be addressed by objectively measuring those
impacts (2126). ‘This,’ they write with irony, ‘is a universalist project that brooks little relativist interpretation’
(2019, 2126).

This is where the language of decoloniality has proffered some new thinking. In their piece on ‘Decolonial AI’,
Mohamed, Png, and Isaac (2020) have, amongst other propositions, advocated for dialogue between the AI metropoles
and peripheries as a means of developing ‘intercultural ethics’ (17). Specifically, they write that dialogue can facilitate
‘reverse pedagogies’ wherein the metropoles can learn from the peripheries, and that ‘intercultural ethics emphasizes
the limitations and coloniality of universal ethics – dominant rather than inclusive ethical frameworks – and finds an
alternative in pluralism, pluriversal ethics and local designs’ (2020, 17). Sabelo Mhlambi has taken this a step further by
developing a framework for AI ethics based on the Nguni philosophy of Ubuntuism (2020). Critiquing Western reason of
rationality in shaping the philosophical terms on which AI and AI ethics is dominantly conceived, Mhlambi details how
the Sub-Sahara African notion of Ubuntu, which centres on the relationality of personhood, can undergird a framework
for addressing the two major challenges in AI: surveillance capitalism and data colonialism (2020).

While this is important, the emerging discourse around ethics and decolonizing AI has yet to develop critical thought
around the idea of ethics itself. As above, Mohamed, Png, and Isaac briefly note ‘the limitations and coloniality of
universal ethics’ (2020, 17), but it is critical to understand precisely why the dominance of this particular version of
ethics – vested as it is in the history of Eurocentric thought around morality, legality/governance and personhood – is so
problematic, and what the effects might be of uncritically drawing decoloniality into this discourse. Put differently,
should decoloniality be subsumed as a new tool for AI ethics, without critique of the way in which the idea of ethics has
been historically put to work in rationalizing colonial practices (see Mbembe 2017, 12; Spivak 1988, 9), it runs the risk of
not only appropriating decoloniality as an abstract metaphor, as Tuck and Yang (2012) warned against, but also of
reproducing the very logics of race that colonialism instituted. Let us now more closely examine this problematic
formulation, ‘AI ethics.’

In 2019, a study was published in Nature identifying over 84 ethical standards for the use and development of AI
developed globally in the last five years (Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena 2019; Ulnicane et al., this issue). Despite being titled
‘The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines,’ amongst these 84 AI ethics standards, none listed are from the African
continent or even the Global South. Most were developed in the United States, UK or by international institutions.
Mohamed, Png, and Isaac (2020) similarly note how national AI policies or strategies are almost exclusively found in the
Global North, and where efforts to develop a national policy around AI are arising in countries within the Global South,
this is being driven by supra-state bodies such as the World Economic Forum. As ethical benchmarks, these standards
are paternalistically positioned as universal: applicable for all, everywhere. In addition, the scientific practice of
promoting ethical AI through strengthening or testing the ‘fairness’ of AI systems (the extent to which they exhibit
social biases, in particular) performs a similar conceit in presuming the scene of the Global South – or more specifically
in this case, the African region – to be a place where ‘ethics,’ as such, is yet to be fully established. Now a well-
documented case (Ballim and Breckenridge 2018; Arun 2020; Arun 2020), in 2018, when the issue of racial bias and the
non-recognition of Black faces by AI-driven facial recognition technologies was peaking following the work of
Buolamwini and Gebru (2018),13 a Chinese facial recognition company signed a deal with the Zimbabwean government
for access the records of the national population registry, which contained facial imagery of millions of Zimbabweans, to
train the company’s algorithmic technologies to better recognize Black faces. By reducing the potential for bias, the
system would ultimately be more ethical. While Ballim and Breckenridge (2018) condemn this incident for exploiting the
inadequate data protection provisions in Zimbabwean law, it is not all that different from the practice of beta-testing
newly developed AI systems in African countries (Mohamed, Png, and Isaac 2020). Calling it ‘ethics-dumping,’ Mohamed,
Png, and Isaac point to the notorious company Cambridge Analytica as exemplar, in that it developed algorithmic
systems for use in the US and UK by beta-testing them in Nigeria and Kenya (2020, 11). This follows the now centuries-
old colonial conceit of what Jan Smuts euphemistically called the ‘ laboratory of Africa’ (1930), where the collateral
damage of scientific advancement could be safely externalized to places and people considered expendable (see
Bonneuil 2000; Tilley 2011; Taylor 2019). Moreover, the epistemological foundations of AI cannot be extricated from
Francis Galton’s work in the development of statistics – particularly on inference, regression, correlation, and the normal
distribution curve – which arose out of his explorations in Southern Africa, where he applied his statistical science to
native populations in order to measure human differences and intelligence (Breckenridge 2014, Chapter 1).

In these instances, the idea of ‘ethics’ is situated as the supreme value of the Occident, to be proselytized on the Africa
region, which is, in turn, and in relation to the ‘ethical West,’ positioned as ‘pre-ethical’ (Mbembe 2017, 49) – as a
world apart. Indeed, that Europe believed itself to be ‘helping’ and ‘protecting’ its African colonies constituted the
central creed of the civilizing mission of colonialism (Césaire 2001); as Spivak reminds us, ethics ‘served and serves as
[its] energetic and successful defense’ (1988, 5). Yet as ethics was put to work to justify both the civilizing mission of
colonialism and the utilization of Africa as a laboratory for Western scientific progress, it enacted another conceit of
the colonial order of things: that Western reason is neutral, universal, and objective; that it could be dislocated from
the context in which it arose and applied elsewhere. Positioned as a ‘point zero’ (Santiago Castro-Gomez unpublished
work, cited in Grosfugal 2011, 6) from which to survey the world, Western knowledge and rationality claimed
ascendency as the only real way of knowing and understanding the world. This is a critical problematic within decolonial
thought (Grosfoguel 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013), and a central assumption within AI: that intelligence and the
production of knowledge can be outsourced to a machine presupposes such knowledge to be both separable from the
context in which it was produced and applicable to other contexts and realities.

Dividing practices The production of ‘the world of apartness’ (Madlingozi 2018) takes place through what I am calling
‘dividing practices.’ In this section I explore briefly the provenance of systems of enumeration, quantification, and
classification within colonialism, and the ways in which AI reproduces the divisive logics of race, before turning to
critique the notion of intelligence in particular. I take the term from both Michel Foucault who, writing on the
production of the objectivization of the subject, speaks of ‘dividing practices’ which divide the subject from others and
within itself (1982, 777–778), as well as Edward Said’s critique, set out in Orientalism, of the dividing line – discursively
formed – between the Occidental and Oriental worlds, which the former ‘paradoxically presupposes and depends on’
(1978, 336). For both, power resides with those who can make the catechistic decision to divide.

It is well-noted how AI systems sort personal data according to socially ascribed normative markers. At times, these
markers are directly racialized or gendered (Keyes 2018; see also Keyes, Hitzig, and Blell, this issue), such as a system
that only allows women access to a female changing room (Ni Loideain and Adams 2019). Other times, these markers
may be implicitly biased, such as systems for targeting advertising and policing based on postal codes (Benjamin 2019).
These systems classify, sort, and rank personal data through processes of data collection, curation, and annotation, using
advanced statistical methods for modelling distribution and measuring correlation (as first developed by Galton) in order
to calculate risk, predict behaviour, and optimize the systems’ own functions. In these contexts, data assemblages
constitute a representation of the individual that are taken (by commercial and state power) as a sign of the real
(Baudrillard 1994). Moreover, as Birhane (2019) has pointed out, these systems of abstract representation work to
further marginalize those who do not fit the ‘data-type’. Indeed, Quijano (2017) has spoken of modern systems that
function through identifying and classifying individuals as fundamentally ‘de-equalizing’, presumably as the application
of these practices to human subjects supposes a fixed, a priori and quantifiable difference, the social-construction of
which is forgotten.

As noted above, much has been published about how these systems reproduce social biases (see also Holzmeyer, this
issue) with many accounts noting the racial logic and imperial power at work (Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Keyes 2018;
Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019). However, rather less examined in relation to practices of AI today, is the way in which
these statistical systems were developed and appropriated within former colonies to control and divide colonial
subjects.14 Indeed, Said wrote that, ‘rhetorically speaking, Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative: to use
its vocabulary is to engage in the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts’ (1978, 72).
Similarly, in narrating the enumerative practices of colonialism in India – which he critiques as having both a disciplinary
and pedagogical effect, in delimiting colonial subjectivity and in training colonial administrators respectively – Appadurai
writes: The link between colonialism and orientalism […] is most strongly reinforced […] at the loci of enumeration,
where bodies are counted, homogenized, and bounded by their extent. Thus the unruly body of the colonial subject
(fasting, feasting, hookswinging, abluting, burning, and bleeding) is recuperated through the language of numbers that
allows these very bodies to be brought back , now counted and accounted, for the humdrum projects of taxation,
sanitation, education, warfare, and loyalty. (1993, 334)

Enumeration and the production of statistical knowledge in the colonies performed a number of functions, including
entrenching and policing colonialist binaries of colonizer/colonized and their derivatives , but also in enforcing divisions
between colonial populations,15 and as a form of remote colonial rule. On both a structural and individual level these
colonial archives functioned as a kind of palimpsestic16 form of abstract representation that were taken as a token of
‘radical realism’ (Said 1978, 72): a fixing of the ontology of the colonies and its people by Western knowledges, just as
the data assemblages of today work to fix individuals by taking their data as a sign of the real. Writing of forms of
representation at work within systems of racism, Mbembe speaks of a ‘will to representation [which] is at bottom a will
to destruction aiming to turn something violently into nothing’ (2019, 139). In this way, to constitute something in the
form of something else – something more manageable and more malleable to forms of racializing power – consists of an
essential and violent erasure of the original. Imperial knowledge practices based on abstract and racialized
representations constituted not only a way of dividing the self from others and from itself, but worked to erase those
who fell on the wrong side of the dividing line through substituting them with their representation.

Comparably, Simon Gikanda chronicles the slave masters’ fastidious recordingkeeping of the actions of their slaves, such
that this archive constituted the evidence of the latter’s objectification: ‘as chattel, as property, and indeed as the
symbol of the barbarism that enabled white civilization and its modernist cravings’ (2015, 92). That Simone Browne now
writes of data-driven surveillance systems being put to work to surveil and bind Black lives in particular, as exacting
the self – its body and behaviour – to testify as evidence against itself, holds then, a critical provenance within the
history of the colonial management of blackness. The effects of these systems, such as AI-enabled biometric
technologies in public spaces, which Browne describes as reifying structures for racial difference, is to produce an
‘ontological insecurity’ – an alienation within, or a dividing practice of, the racialized self (2015, 109).
Only ancestral animism preserves the ethic that allows the disruption of white paradigms to a way
of feeling the Earth. The world exists in a double excess, one of breath and one of artifacts, it is up
to you to preserve the breath necessary for human sociality.
Mbembe 20 [Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe, is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and
public intellectual who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy
Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. “Meditation on the Second Creation”. E-Flux. Published: December
2020. Issue #114. Accessed: 9/6/2022//!PI!]

What does human nature consist in and, beyond it, what is life? What makes us moral beings? What is our destiny on
earth? For a very long time, only theologians, metaphysicians, and philosophers of existence seemed to concern
themselves with such questions.

Odd as it may seem, today they are back, including and especially among scientists. The meditation on how life ends has
only increased in intensity in the context of the coronavirus lockdowns and the ever-rising death toll.

But whereas in the past it was a matter of determining whether the human was above all body or mind, today the
debate is about whether it is matter and matter alone, or if, in the end, it is merely a sum of physical and chemical
processes.

The discussion is also about what the futures of life can be in the age of extremes, and the conditions under which life
ends.

Body, matter, and life are three very distinct concepts. One need not embrace Christianity to understand that, in every
human body, in its organic unity, there is something that is not solely matter . To this something, several names have
been given by different cultures and in different eras. But whatever the cultural differences, the truth of the human body
will have been to resist any reductionism.

The same is true of what could be called the body of the earth, and even its flesh. The body of the earth is recognizable
in its profusion. Typical of this is the viral eruption that we are currently experiencing on a planetary scale.

In the eyes of many, this virus is a demonstration of nature’s virtually infinite power. They see in it an event of cosmic
portent, a harbinger of disasters to come. For others, it is the logical outcome of the project of a Godless world , which
they accuse modernity of having initiated . For them, this world, supposedly free but in actuality left to its own devices
and with no recourse, has done nothing but subjugate humans under the constraint of a nature that is now converted
into an arbitrary power.

In fact, God’s absence is hardly what characterizes today’s world. Neither is God’s virulent and vengeful presence, in the
form of the violence of a virus or other natural calamities, the distinctive features of our times. The hallmark of the
beginning of the twenty-first century is the swing into animism.

Coupled with technological escalation, the transformations of capitalism have led to a twofold excess: an excess of
pneuma (breath) and an excess of artifacts, the transformation of artifacts into pneuma (in the theological sense of the
term). Nothing translates this excess better than the techno-digital universe that has become the double of our world,
the objectal embodiment of the pneuma.

The distinctive characteristic of contemporary humanity is to constantly traverse screens and be immersed in image
machines that are at the same time dream machines. Most of these images are animated. They produce all kinds of
illusions and fantasies, starting with the fantasy of self-generation. But above all they enable new forms of presence and
circulation, incarnation, reincarnation, and even resurrection. Not only has technology become theology, it has become
eschatology.

In this universe, it is not only possible to split oneself into two or to exist in more than one place at a time, and in
more than one body or in more than one flesh. In fact, it is also possible to have doubles, i.e., other selves, a cross
between the person’s own body and the image of the person’s body on the screen. Moreover, traversing screens has
become the primary activity of contemporary humanity. It authorizes us to exit bodily boundaries and inaugurates the
plunge into all sorts of parallel worlds, including the beyond, without a safety net. In being transported to the other side
of the screen, humanity can be present to itself while simultaneously keeping a distance from itself.

Contemporary animism is, moreover, the result of a vast reconfiguration of the human and its relationship with the
living. The era of the second creation has thus begun. It is now a matter of technologically capturing the energy of the
living and downloading it into the human, in a process that calls to mind the first creation. This time, however, the
project is to transfer all the attributes of the living into organo-artificial components endowed essentially with the
characteristics of the human person.

These components are called upon to operate as human doubles. While in the past animism was considered a relic of
the obscurantism of so-called primitive societies, now it is now compatible with artificial intelligence, supercomputers,
nanorobots, artificial neurons, RFID chips, and telepathic brains.

This second creation, however, is basically profane. It proceeds via a threefold process of decorporation, recorporation,
and transcorporation that instrumentalizes the human body in an attempt to turn it into a vehicle of hybridization and
symbiosis. This threefold process is sacramental. It is the cornerstone of the new technological religions. It appropriates
the fundamental categories of the Christian mystery, the better to destabilize them, beginning with creation itself, the
incarnation, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension, and even the Eucharist (this is my body).

With the cybernetization of the world, both the human and the divine are downloaded into a multitude of tech
objects, interactive screens, and physical machines. These objects have become genuine crucibles in which visions and
beliefs, the contemporary metamorphoses of faith, are forged. From this standpoint, contemporary technological
religions are expressions of animism. But they also differ from it inasmuch as they are governed by the principle of
artifice, whereas ancestral animism was governed by that of vital force.

Indeed, in ancestral animism, neither body nor life existed without air, without water, and without a common ground.
In African precolonial systems of thought, for instance, life and body, and consequently the human, were
fundamentally open to air and to breath, to water and to fire, to dust and to wind, to trees and to their vegetation, to
animals and to the nocturnal world. Everything was alive, at the intersection of languages . This essential porosity was
what made for its essential fragility. It was thought that the human adventure on earth was played out in the reality of
air and breath. This could only last if a place was made for the regeneration of vital cycles. Life consisted in assembling
together absolutely everything. It was a matter of composition and not excessiveness.

As the birthplace of humanity, Africa has perhaps experienced more catastrophic forces than other parts of the globe .
It has learned from this that catastrophe is not an event that happens once and for all, and then goes away after having
accomplished its gruesome work, leaving a world of ruins in its wake. For many peoples, it has been a never-ending
process, which accumulates and sediments.

Under these conditions, opening channels for a more breathable world could be the foundation of a new ethic in the
viral age. For the viral age is the corollary of the Anthropocene, the irreversible transformation of environments and the
expansion of a new form of colonialism: techno-molecular colonialism.

The age of brutalism—that is, of forced entry—it is an age in which dream machines and catastrophic forces will become
increasingly visible actors of history. The air we breathe will be more and more laden with dust, toxic gases, substances
and waste, particles and granulations—in short, with all kinds of emanations. Instead of exiting the body thanks to
immersive visualization technologies, the point will then be to return to it, especially through the organs that are most
exposed to asphyxiation and suffocation.

To return to the body is also to come back to earth , understood not as a land, but as an event that, in the end,
fundamentally defies the boundaries of states . Understood in this way, the earth belongs to all its inhabitants, without
distinction of race, origin, ethnicity, religion, or even species. It pays no attention to the blind individual or to the naked
singularity. It reminds us how much each body, human or otherwise, however singular it may be, bears on and in itself,
in its essential porosity, the marks not of the diaphanous universal, but of commonality and incalculability.
 AB K: Texas DK

K – 1NC

Debate is structured by an arch of redemption built around the axis of black subjugation –
responses to the resolutional question prefigures the argumentative protocols that crowd out a
grammar of suffering that can speak to the violence that repetitiously destroys black being – the
rhetorical form of the 1AC siphons energy into modalities of humanist redress that are parasitic on
black suffering.
Wilderson 16 (Frank B Wilderson III, associate professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, PhD in
Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, February 25 2016, “HSI Podcast 52,”
http://www.podcastgarden.com/episode/hsi-podcast-52_71843, transcribed from audio 5:33-12:25, modified) gz

But here’s why I would say that the things can’t be reconciled and why I’m fascinated with the way high school and
college debaters are using it. I think it was—I don’t know what sociologist—Max Weber (you know, I quote all sorts of
people except right out fascists)—I believe he said that the power to pose the question is the greatest power
of all. And the way that the question is posed in the world of debate in January—the question that carries one
through the entire twelve months—is posed in a way that cannot be reconciled with the basic lens of
interpretation of Afropessimism. The question is always posed on what I call and others call an arch of
redemption. In other words, the question assumes an instance of plenitude, say, the free association and the
free assembly—the right to free assembly—of citizens, and then it moves from that assumption to a rupture. So it
moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium, which is to say the manifestation of the surveillance state. And so
the third move in the tripartite arc of narrative is, of course, the move of redemption, which is to say how can the
plenitude—whether it’s a historical materialist plenitude, a social formation having its rights and liberties disrupted—
how can that be restored. It’s that movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored
which is precisely at the center of the critique of Afropessimism. Afropessimism is not an offering for historical
redemption; it’s not an offering for the restoration of a body in need of redress the way that
postcolonialism is, the way that Marxism is, the way that radical feminism is, the way that indigenism is. It’s a critique
of the rhetorical structure of those lenses of interpretation , critiquing them as to a) what they don’t or are
unable to say about the violence that subjugates and positions Blacks and b) why it is that they actually
need Blackness as slaveness to be outside of their lens of interpretation . So there’s a way in which—to
come full circle to where I started—there’s a way in which the rhetorical structure of debate, the demand of
debate, the protocols are already ideologically laden. It doesn’t matter what question you pour into those
protocols. The protocols, themselves, are all ideological straightjackets [constrictions] which preclude the kind of
investigation of suffering. In order for Black suffering to be part of the debate question, it would have to
go through a structural adjustment to begin to look like the suffering of some other group . The way
Hartman talks about this is by suggesting that what you have in the world of subalterns—degraded humans who suffer—
you have narratives of the possibility of real or imagined redemption, which is to say, narratives which are structured
around the question of how to relieve the suffering that didn’t happen before the invasion of some sorts. But what she
says with respect to Blacks is that you cannot tell the story of before the invasion, before the destruction .
So, without being able to do that, she says when you think of narrating Blackness, you have to think of repetition
as opposed to redemption. And so when we were off the air, one of the things I said to Marquis and to Josh is that
one of the foreseeable problems with the future of Afropessimism is people kind of cherry-picking from it to
enhance the explanatory power of their own suffering . And that cherry-picking will actually,
inevitably, leave by the wayside the very deliberate absence in Afropessimism , and that is the absence
of redemptive theorization, which is present in everything else. Redemptive theorization is theorized through all
three volumes of Das Kapital; it’s theorized in the psychoanalytic feminism of Hartman and people like Julia Kristeva; it’s
theorized in the work of Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria. It’s not only theorized. I should take a step back. It’s
assumed. It’s assumed. And so, these are metacritiques of relationality. What Afropessimism is is a metacritique of
the metacritique, to show how pure and simple relations are dependent upon —they’re parasitic—using
blacks as a parasitic host.
Framing Rights of nonhuman specifes through the framework of legal personhood constitutes the
re-creation of Western conceptions of humanism that distances ourselves from blackness.
Guha-Majumdar 20 (Jishnu, Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies @ Queens University, PhD in Political Theory @
Johns Hopkins, BA in History and Plan II Honors @ University of Texas at Austin 🤘, “Property’s Cry: Race, Animality, and
Vulnerability”, Johns Hopkins JScholarship, August 27) arnav

From the common framing of slavery as treating the enslaved “like animals”; to the historical application of
technologies developed for domestication to ancient slavery; 1 to shared linguistic roots like that of chattel, cattle, and
capital, or mule and mulatto, or maroons and cimarrons; to forms of kinship between animals and enslaved humans ; 2
to the ways that slaveowners used animals to control the enslaved; to the ways that slaveowners used the enslaved to
manage livestock—nonhuman animals were all over slavery in the Americas.3 What Achille Mbembe has said about
discourse on Africa—that it is governed by a “metatext” on animals—is surely true of American slavery as well. 4 Not
coincidentally, scholars of slavery and its afterlives have long theorized the relationship between slavery and
humanism—an ethical and political system rooted primarily in the singular value and agency of human life —insofar
as the enslaved were those biologically human beings most clearly excluded from the privileges supposed to come
with proper human existence.

This chapter shows some limits of addressing slavery’s relationship to humanism absent a nuanced consideration of
western anthropocentrism and its devaluation of nonhuman life—both in terms of the concept of “animality” and the
actual nonhuman animals that lived on plantations alongside the enslaved. I make this argument not to tack
anthropocentrism on as an issue external to slavery , but to suggest that questions about anthropocentrism and
animality are internally related to those of enslavement, anti-blackness, and racism . 5 Specifically, I argue that, absent
this consideration of animality, analyses of slavery tend towards possessive individualism , even when they would
otherwise seek to move past it. Possessive individualism, as famously coined by C.B. Macpherson, refers to the idea
that an individual “possesses” their own labor or capacities as they would material property. 6 I will argue that many
treatments of slavery adopt an implicit possessive individualism towards the individual’s “humanity”—possessing a
figure I call the human proper.

The emancipatory power of possessive individualism has been criticized from many perspectives for its capitalist
reification of property and proprietorship; its hyper-individualism; its conversion of relationships into market terms;
and its use as a vehicle for new, more insidious forms of domination.7 My goal in this chapter is not to rehearse these
critiques or develop new ones, but to show that the underlying grammar of possessive individualism proves more
resilient than even its fiercest critics might otherwise think, and that its resilience appears just when they forego a
nuanced consideration of animal life. Many attempts to grapple with the relationship with slavery, anti-blackness,
and humanism acknowledge the limits of traditional humanisms, but they seek a more universal relationship with
humanity. 8 Their aim, in other words, is to align more closely the empirical homo sapiens with the normative
privileges of humanity. However, my analysis shows that this move is like trying to square a circle. Because the
privileges accorded to abstract humanity tend to be at least partly defined over and against nonhuman animals, the
qualities “possessed” by the human form of life are inseparable from both the figures and lives of nonhumans.

The criminalization of Blackness is not a matter of legal discrepancies or contingent flashpoints of

discrimination – the 1AC’s political grammar is only capable of responding to forms of violence that
possess a psychological grounding wire, which requires ratcheting-down the scale of abstraction so
as to vouchsafe Human community – the collective unconscious of civil society locates Blackness as
a phobic object within an external superviolence that exceeds rational utility and exists only to
preserve the psychic health and communal well-being of Human subjects. They can’t win their
“progress possible” offense until they explain where blackness and slaveness were divorced – their
DA’s to the K require a contingent move towards experiential moments which merely mystifies the
structure of anti-black violence.
Wilderson 10. Frank B. Wilderson III, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama at UC Irvine, PhD in
Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, 2010, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,
pg. 10-11, ar

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights
Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to
be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves ? In other words, why should we think of today’s
Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer
these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come
to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality , mass incarceration , segregated and
substandard schools and housing , astronomical rates of hiv infection , and the threat of being turned away en masse
at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life . But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in
the wrong direction ; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground , which would only mystify , rather than clarify, the
question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and
change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into
sociology, political science, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question :
the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation , the assumptive logic whereby subjective
dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it . The Black
qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death,
where he demonstrates how and why work , or forced labor , is not a constituent element of slavery . Once the “solid”
plank of “ work ” is removed from slavery , then the conceptually coherent notion of “ claims against the state ”—the
proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory
project for the Black position— disintegrates into thin air . The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on
the Middle Passage . Put another way, No slave, no world . And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the
world .

If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human , a
position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence , its corporeal integrity; if the Slave
is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored , perpetually open to gratuitous violence , and void of kinship
structure , that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality , then our analysis
cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society , not unless
and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world . The onus is not on one who posits the
Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness . How,
when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
The alternative is active passivity.
The alternative’s radical negativity refuses questions of political feasibility and liberal choice in
favor of changing the coordinates of politics so as to pose a demand in excess of any present
imagination – Afropessimism is an ethics of the real which insists on abolition as the foundation for
ending the world.
Barber and Sexton 17 (Daniel Colucciello Barber, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pace
University, PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University, former Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the Institut für
Kulturwissenschaft at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, former Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin, Jared Sexton, Associate
Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley,
September 18, 2017, “On Black Negativity, or the Affirmation of Nothing,” http://societyandspace.org/2017/09/18/on-
black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing/) gz

DB: “There is no such thing as a positive aggressive strength, only a negative defensive one.” This remark, as index of an
aikido according to blackness, brings to mind a question you ask in one of your recently published articles:

is there not a way to think … about a violence indifferent to hope, violence unmotivated by rage, violence
irreducible to the dialectics of love and hate? Is there a violence that, as Nikki Giovanni once said, simply ‘cannot
take the weight of a constant degradation’ (Fowler, 1992: 96), a violence that operates as a response per se, as
what we might call defense without positive content? (2016a).

I wonder whether it would make sense to connect the line of thought you’re pursuing here to the question of—the
question that is—“the relation between defense and the outstretched hand.”

I’m also struck by the resonance between your emphasis, following Wynter, on a mode of thinking that “unfold[s] in a
non-linear fashion” and your articulation of negativity within the context of your writing. Such negativity is inseparable
from the demand—which is “so much bigger”—in that it insists, amidst delimitative aggression, on this demand’s
unfolding. If one means of delimiting this demand is imposed by the linearity of an “expectation of
realization”—by investment in linear temporality, a horizon of the historically successive and successful—then
negativity insists on, or as, a question of time. Specifically, it asks not whether the demand is realizable, but
rather why the demand must be thought within, delimited by, the terms of realizability . In this moment, “the
question posed by and as blackness” seems to emerge as the seeking, asking, desiring —the offering—of time itself.

One of the ways in which I see your work posing this questioning of time, or offering this time of questioning, is through
the motif of “interminability.” In fact, I sense that such interminability is at issue in what you’ve here described as “a
ceaselessly universalizing universality ” or, once again, as a demand in excess of any presently imaginable
form of realization. The absence of a term adequate to the demand is also the absence of a terminus
and of the calculability that such a point of arrival could claim to make possible. In this vein, you’ve
described abolition as “the interminable radicalization of every radical movement ” (2016b: 593) and invoked
“an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement ”
(2016a). Your elaboration of this downward—one might say unfathomable—itinerary draws on an engagement with
David Marriott’s account of the subjection of black persons to “the interminable time of meaningless,
impersonal dying” (Marriott, 2007: 230; cited, with emphasis added, in Sexton, 2015: 168). I mention this particularly
in view of your remark that the real according to which interminability unfolds is a matter of non-life.

JS: I think you’re right to draw this link between “an aikido according to [or with] blackness” and my earlier, speculative
thoughts on black feminist violence as a practice of “response per se, a defense without positive content.” We are, in a
very basic way, always responding to the world, to ourselves, to the world in ourselves, to ourselves in the world, more
than we are initiating, in thought and action. Any initiative or initiation would seem to be marked as such by a kind of
permanent time lag or belatedness in which all thought is afterthought and all action is retroaction. But,
then, we are also always active in that fundamental responsiveness, so much so that even passivity (whether waiting
or resting or languishing) is a type of activity, that of our active being, that which brings forth life from the
non-life with which it is commingled . Our being is active, but that doesn’t mean our being is always in-
action. Why, in our political and intellectual circles, all the pointed concern about activity, why the worry, or fear, about
being misunderstood as passive, individually and collectively ? And why the close association between being passive and
being victim or between passive-being and victim-being? Indeed, that tension between active/passive states
provides the principal ground for the symbolic and material production of differences of race,
gender, sexuality, class—all differently arrayed for different reasons, of course.
I’m reminded, on that note, of a question Wilderson asked me years ago about an often overlooked passage in Fanon,
from his critique of Octave Mannoni in Chapter 4 of Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon is meditating on the aim of
his vocation as a politically engagé mental health clinician. (I have some thoughts, by the way, on what I think Fanon
misses in his reading of Mannoni in my article, “Curtain of the Sky”). Here’s the passage:

As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts
at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure. In other words,
the black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear; but he should be able to
take cognizance of a possibility of existence. In still other words, if society makes difficulties for him because of
his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will
not be that of dissuading him from it by advising him to “keep his place”; on the contrary, my objective, once his
motivations have been brought into consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or
passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict —that is, toward the social structures (Fanon, 2008b:
74-75).

So, Fanon moves initially from this deceptively recognizable psycho-political activist guideline, where the unreason of
alienated compliance gives way to the reason of disalienated resistance, to a parenthetical clinical modulation, where
he no longer seeks to enable action per se, and action in a particular direction at that, but rather decision;
decision in the proper sense, rather than the forced choice, the vel, of hallucinatory whiteness: “turn
white or disappear.” No decision can be made within the terms of a forced choice, Fanon reveals, only a
decision about the terms of its imposition. (Aside: the Philcox translation has it as: “whiten or perish.” I like the
Markmann phrasing better here because it stays with the dynamics of hyper/in/visibility that Fanon is exploring, the
peculiar problem of overdetermination from without, which is to say of anti-black racialization, of victimized
appearance, but also of a certain ethics or aesthetics of disappearance that we can glean from a reading of
Fanon. Kara Keeling (2007) and Huey Copeland (2013) and Simone Browne (2015) have elaborated on this nexus
generatively in their respective work.)

Wilderson’s question was to the effect of: What would a properly decided, freely chosen, passivity toward the
social structure look like? Is there such a thing—ethically, politically—as radical passivity? (I ended my first book
with a slightly modified reference from Thomas Carl Wall’s (1999) text bearing that very title. I wonder about this
genuinely still and tend to think, yes, there is such a thing.) Žižek, to take another well-known example, has played on
the pop psychological notion of “passive aggressive behavior” in his withering critique of so much leftist activism today.
In The Parallax View, he writes:

perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to
aggressive passivity, the standard ‘interpassive’ mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we
are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will
 really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical (‘aggressive’, violent) step is to withdraw
into passivity, to refuse to participate—Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is the necessary first
step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the
coordinates of the constellation (Žižek, 2009: 342).
Now, Zizek’s “Bartleby politics” are obviously not quietist, insofar as they are meant to prepare the way for a true
political act. (Frédéric Neyrat [2014] has a related conception: “Rather than its heart, passivity should be the skin of
politics. Without passivity, without a ‘negative capability,’ to refer to Keats’s notion, there isn’t any creative imagination,
this chaotic imagination that generates the promises of new worlds.” And, not for nothing, Hortense Spillers (2003)
makes another, earlier argument for “negative capability” in a pair of essays first published in the 1990s, “The Crisis of
the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” and “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your
Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race.” But the interregnum that opens up between the frenetic, aggressively passive
“activism” of the current socio-ideological constellation—in which “the anxious expectation that nothing will happen”
competes with “the desperate demand to do something”—and that new constellation brought into being by the
introduction of some fundamental indeterminancy—a negativity that is, as you rightly note above, strictly unfathomable
—that interregnum would seem to require the cultivation of an oxymoronic passive activity. Does it make sense to
speak of a need for “passivism” (not to be confused with the homophonic term “pacifism”)? Think of the performative
contradiction of trying to relax; the harder you try to attain it, the more it evades you. As every athlete worth their salt
knows, your best performance requires your least effort . The more you relax, the more intensely you can exert
yourself. In this scenario, you do more the less you try.

It’s worth thinking about this seriously in the Trump era (using Trump here as a symbol for the consolidation of a whole
post-civil rights, post-cold war, post-9/11 dispensation), given how greatly the ongoing reactionary campaign
benefits from and requires any and all imagery of protest, political or pedestrian, as evidence
—“alternative factual evidence” —supporting a narrative, ultimately, of white victimization and oppressive
black power (and all the conflictual transliterations of this antagonism seen today—from the land and resource
battles in the heartland to the travel bans at the borders). Given, that is, how frustratingly ineffective that protest seems
to be in the face of an entire infrastructure that not only absorbs resistance, but solicits it too . It makes you
nostalgic for the days of good old-fashioned repression and co-optation (days which, of course, never really existed
in black), because at least then you knew you were on to something truly oppositional, subversive, alternate. I don’t
think it’s a coincidence that, under such conditions, black (or blackened) artists are drawn with some regularity to
paradoxical ideas about fighting anti-blackness by over-identifying with its desire to disappear or distort or disfigure
blackness, essentially taking it over and enforcing it hyperbolically, satirically, even vindictively. I think Paul Beatty’s
literature has done this to great effect for twenty years or more—from White Boy Shuffle (1996) to The Sellout (2015)—
and you could add to that titles like Darius James’s Negrophobia (1992) and Kola Boof’s Sexy Part of the Bible (2011);
consider as well the work of Betye Saar and Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles in the visual arts, the comedy of Dave
Chappelle and Leslie Jones, or films like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005) and Jordan
Peele’s Get Out (2017).

I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of the current conjuncture and lose track of the larger structural
problem posed by blackness and anti-blackness, a problem that confounds the very distinction between structure and
conjuncture in the first place. It is not just the exigencies of the present moment or the strategic and tactical challenges
facing the Movement for Black Lives that raise the question of how to intervene, of how to introduce
“invention into existence,” as Fanon put it. What I’ve called “a groundless or baseless politics that does not
proceed from a margin of power, a politics with no (final) recourse to foundations of any sort, a politics forged
from critical resources immanent to the situation, resources from anywhere and anyone, which is to say from
nowhere and no one in particular” (Sexton, 2016b: 589); this approach to politics would seem to entail a total
rejection of transcendence, a politics of pure immanence without the Archimedean point. And in one sense it is, but I am
attuned to the difficulties arising from an abandonment of the negative in our enthusiasm for the affirmative, and so I
want to think not so much about transcendence viz. immanence as about the various forms or modalities of
transcendence and immanence that can be mobilized.

Gordon is an ahistorical reading of the black archive which he uses in order to make his claims
about black agency. What Gordon mistakes as black sociality is really Blackness going through a
structural adjustment to look like the suffering of the white.
Marriott 18. David Marriott, Professor of History at University of California-Santa Cruz, PhD in Literature from the
University of Sussex, “Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being,” Stanford University Press, 2018, pg. 12-19, ar

**In classical Greek usage, the term critique appears mostly as an adjective (kritikos) and a verb (krinein): critical
activities include distinguishing, separating, deciding, judging, incriminating-and contending./krisis – judgment opinion
or decision given concerning anything esp. concerning justice and injustice, right or wrong sentence of condemnation,
damnatory judgment, condemnation and punishment

The ontological implications of Fanonism are also the dominant concern of Lewis R. Gordon’s brief, yet incisive
account in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. For it is indeed the question of existence , rather than , say, the
complexity of being and truth, that gives the book its main theme and is the focus of an explicit concern with “humanity
and reason” and their respective crises in the texts of European philosophy: “By Europe, we mean Edmund Husserl’s
description of a place” (in the Crisis of European Sciences); and by crisis, Gordon means krinein, the crisis of European
Man’s decision not to decide (a crisis that Fanon “embodies”).33 It is tempting to speculate that if the man of color
symbolizes the “sickness” of “European Man” then this sickness is of a piece with what is arguably Gordon’s most
powerfully reductive gesture in his reading of Fanon , which consists in presenting Fanonism as essentially a
philosophical anthropology of bad faith that is also philosophy’s diagnosis and cure .34 Gordon knows and
understands French existential phenomenology and its influence on many aspects of Fanon’s thought (such as the
idea of a “ sociogenesis ” of black affective life , or the relation between ontology and existence ) that many
commentators have failed to explicate accurately.35 As I shall suggest, though, these insights are bought at the price
of a number of powerful but reductive decisions Gordon has taken about Fanon ism as a philosophy: in fact, in so far as
Fanon’s “questioning of the question of man” is, following Husserl, “a philosophy critical of the West within the West,”
that questioning seems to become, despite Gordon’s claims to the contrary, solely an interpretation of European
philosophy’s interpretation of humanistic crisis, a reflection that allows philosophy to see its own racial thought or
structure at long last—the same goes for the famous interpretation of Sartre’s “Orphée Noir” in Black Skin, White Masks
—but then Gordon seems to know this in so far as he explicitly presents Fanon as a black existentialist who allows
philosophy to see, as if for the first time, the “existential reality” of race .36 For it is indeed philosophical anthropology,
rather than any ontological concern with Being, that gives the book its particular thematics (historical, existentialist,
humanist, etc.), and via an explicitly Husserlian-Sartrean inflection: Bad faith becomes a feature of all dimensions of
crisis. . . . Every black person faces history—his or her story—every day as a situation, as a choice, of how to stand in
relation to oppression, of whether to live as a being subsumed by oppression or to live as active resistance towards
liberation, or to live as mere indifference. This conception of history is rooted in daily life. . . . There is no question of
elevating one’s value beyond oneself into a spirit of seriousness. There is, instead, the recognition of how one’s actions
unfold into one’s identity in relation to the socio-temporal location of one’s experience.37 Such a stress on duplicity ,
resistance , and indifference and the question of decision that cannot be separated from them is especially Fanonian,
as Gordon knows: Fanon’s “liberating praxis” is thus taken to be a philosophical response to forms of bad faith ,
indeed Gordon explicitly thematizes Fanon’s life as an existential struggle against nihilism and Fanon’s political
thought as an attempt to restore black life to an experience of radical immanence ( via praxis , revolution , restitution ,
therapy , etc.), so as to free human being from the crisis of “racist reason.” 38 The argument here, rather as in Sekyi-
Otu, starts from the view that blackness is the anthropological response to racist ontology and that Fanon’s
importance lies in the way he draws attention to this visible-invisible characterization of blackness as non-being , as a
way of rejecting racial ontology whenever it appears: the point being that Fanon does not simply respect the question
of existence as secured by philosophy’s signature, but is happy to find philosophical moments in, say, the everyday. Now
it takes only a moment’s reflection on Fanon’s most schematic presentations of black experience to realize that this
must be, from the start, a partial and inaccurate presentation , insofar as the rejection of ontology is very precisely
and explicitly to do with failed reciprocity , not just in the Hegelian-Kojevean schema of freedom through mediation
but in the sense of a “lack” or “defect” at the common root of being and thought , and whose “ morbid universe ” is
fundamentally foreign to a phenomenology of embodiment, as Fanon and the Crisis of European Man has it.39
However important Fanon’s meditations on bad faith may be, it is a bold reader (but Gordon is nothing if not bold)
who takes as his central concept for the explication of Fanonism a phenomenological notion of krinein or krisis
despite what Fanon himself says is his irreducibly “psychological” approach (in the first pages of Black Skin, White
Masks, the sociogenic , far from being opposed to psychoanalysis , is in fact revealed as its very essence : that is,
Fanon’s “clinical study” explores the interdependence of the two as the twin poles of a reversible message as he
moves from a “lytic” reading of symptoms to a genetic reading of how egos are traversed by socio-symbolic
structure). If, as “ The Lived Experience of the Black ” famously claims, but as Gordon does not see fit to pursue , there
can be no ontological resistance to the white world because the black is an “overdetermined” subject , a subject who
is essentially derealized ( by imago , culture , unconscious , and world ), then making existence the center of one’s
account is quite a statement, but also a sign that something is being simplified . Given the philosophical complexity of
much of Gordon’s argumentation, this may seem a churlish complaint, so I shall try and justify it in what follows.
Gordon’s third chapter opens with the need to contextualize racism in the sense of a perverse anonymity: Racism
renders the individual anonymous even to himself. The very standpoint of consciousness, embodiment itself, is
saturated with a strangeness that either locks the individual into the mechanism of things or sends him away and
transforms him into an observer hovering over that very thing. Thus, to be seen in a racist way is an ironic way of not
being seen through being seen. It is to be seen with overdetermined anonymity, which amounts, in effect, to invisibility.
For to be seen in a typically human way is to be seen as a point of epistemological limitation; one’s subjectivity is called
upon as a point of meaning. . . . The perversion of anonymity—overdetermination—seals off such affirmations [of
reciprocal recognitions].40 A necessary corollary of this perverse anonymity (which determines Gordon’s project as a
whole, of which he tries to situate Fanonism as a particular reading) is “alienated embodiment”: “like his identifiers, the
Negro finds himself facing the objective alienation of his embodiment out there” (that is, in the racist world).41 I cannot
here unpack all the implications of this deceptively simple picture. One, on which Gordon is insistent, is that this
strangeness comes more or less violently—but always violently—from the outside which, just because the black is
overdetermined from without , remains more or less a situation of objectification and denudation . But there are a
number of reasons for resisting this way of looking at it. For a start, the way overdetermination is described in Black
Skin, White Masks, it is clear that this “strangeness” is no longer describable as a question of encounter at all. As Fanon
shows repeatedly in “The Negro and Psychopathology,” the feeling of estrangement is not simply a result of contact:
“Frequently the negro who becomes abnormal [s’anormalise] has never had any relations with the White man. . . . Has
there been a real traumatism [traumatisme effectif]? To all of this we have to answer: no.”42 Elsewhere Fanon refers to
the singular experience of the self or ego being invaded and breached by the “ unidentifiable and unassimilable .”43
Fanon goes on to suggest that this manifestation within of something that cannot, so to speak, be owned or possessed,
seen or intuited, is of the order of a radical de-situating of the ego, that necessarily interrupts—evacuates, empties—the
very possibility of transcendental reflection on the seer and the seen. Anonymity is essentially pervertible, then, not
because one is enslaved to a black appearance, but because one is—wishfully, unconsciously—already a slave to the
imago of whiteness and that this pervertibility is the condition (to be violently affirmed) of what it means to be a black
subject. “In the Antilles,” Fanon suggests, “perception always occurs on the level of the imaginary. It is in white terms
that one perceives one’s fellows.”44 To be black , then, is to be originally violated by a whiteness that comes from the
inside out , and this anteriority necessarily follows from an intimacy that is already perverse . I think it would not be
hard on the basis of these observations to show that the way overdetermination is determined here can already be
read , with the help of Fanon’s work on the psychoneuroses, as marked by a kind of intimacy that remains radically
alien to the subject , a sort of self-interrupting that within in which the subject cannot reflect itself as a subject , a
décalage that can never appear as such , never give itself to a phenomenology of seeing, but that nonetheless haunts
both seer and the seen , an intimacy that also marks a crucial shift in Fanon’s relation to phenomenology. 45 Gordon
especially struggles with this shift and, casting in his lot with the phenomenological tradition (which he clearly thinks
according to Husserlian “reduction”), appeals to a notion of perversion (a point he shares with Sekyi-Otu) that is
marked in advance by its opposition to psychoanalysis . Perverse anonymity is, then, the concept that Gordon goes on
to suggest defines the black existential attitude and, in the context of a later essay, the reason why Fanon turns away
from psychoanalysis: although this schema has been quite common in reading Fanon, and consists in saying that
“politics” is Fanonism’s true telos, Gordon’s argument is curious because, in opposing existentialism to psychoanalysis ,
and despite Fanon’s refusal to separate them , he has to remove what he calls psychoanalysis from what Fanon calls
his psychopathology of race .46 Thus, psychoanalysis is reproached for its inability to think blacks as “perverse
anonymous objects,” a failure that gets further reduced to saying that “Only the white, whether female or male, can
be historically situated on the symbolic level,” partly no doubt because black existence is, from the start, understood
to be never neurotically alienated, but alienated in so far as it is black .47 What is properly black is thus what is
properly, perversely alienated and somehow beyond a psychoanalytical reading of language and culture . For Gordon,
Fanon gives us the insight that blackness always means what it is—the black, and this singularizing typicality, operating
what Gordon calls “below the symbolic,” dictates a number of consequences for Gordon’s understanding of the relations
between psychoanalysis and phenomenology in Fanon’s works.48 Let us be clear. Fanon’s first explicit engagements
with the notion of a black divided subject come not in relation to Freud, but via the motif of déréalisation in Sartre, and
he always associates this motif with problems of the pour soi as Sartre wields that concept (as a self-presence that is
always separated from itself: “The pour-soi has no being because its being is always at a distance”;49 and whose soi is
only soi insofar as it is necessarily “an elsewhere in relation to itself,”50 that is “diasporique” or dispersed; and which
can only be truly for itself, as a synthetic construct of consciousness, insofar as it is object-less, a nothing or nihilation
[néantisation], and this is its very possibility as a subject). But it is Sartre’s description of the pour soi as a being “always
in abeyance, because its being is a perpetual deWhither ferring” that Fanon analyzes most fully in his reworking of this
motif.51 Fanon identifies in the colonial subject a voidlike nothingness-of-being that is also linked to the problem of
self-deception [mauvaise foi] in Sartre (a link that will allow him to develop thoughts on how the black subject is
always belated and dispersed, is irrealized and yet forever haunted by its non-appearance, and can only acquire a
certain density of being by taking on the tragic neurotic role [of an imaginary whiteness]—which is also why
phenomenology can never be grounded in the experience of this subject for its truth is literally void). Whence the
notion, in the pages of Black Skin, White Masks on psychopathology, of a subject who is “possessed” by culture—by its
racist “impersonation” (impersonation; the word is from Sartre’s L’Imaginaire)52—who is no longer the subject of its
experiences, and whose narcissism , or style of being , can only move from abjection to abandonment : this is a subject
whose situation is one of mimicry or personation, and who “ fucks [whiteness] to render himself imaginary ” (baise
pour s’irréaliser; the words are again from Sartre).53 Fanon draws a number of consequences from Sartre’s “eidetic
analysis of self-deception.”54 First of all, he says that this “zone of nonbeing” refers to an unconscious schism or
décalage, and later, in a reading of René Maran, claims that this dereliction or lack is simultaneously the work of racist
culture. Later he will say that the colonial subject is an alienating synthesis of ressentiment and agressivité, and whose
vécu nonetheless reveals, as it were, how an impersonated whiteness is the necessary consequence of a personated
blackness: “ For the Black [le Noir] no longer has to be black [noir], but must be it in the face of the White [en face du
Blanc].”55 And: “It’s no good: I am a White Man . For unconsciously , I guard against what is black in me , that is, the
totality of my being .”56 In this familiarly disconcerting analysis of identity, Fanon describes a self that is white and
yet totally black, a self embattled by an unconscious distrust (white and on guard) of its black identity (the “I” and its
totality); and to the extent that this is a self traversed by an uncanny doubling ( white and black ), then it is clear that
black cannot simply be made white because to be black is to be already, unconsciously white . We’re back with the
notion of an irreducible perversity here, with an ego whose mask hides nothing , for nothing ( absence , simulation ,
impersonation , irrealization ) is its imaginary synthesis —and the very thing that makes it identifiable as an image of
being is what fissures it and deforms it as a ghostly double of being . It would appear, then, that the self-deceived
black is caught up in a tragic interplay : like the actor he is, he can only reveal himself as a (black) subject via the
oblique confirmation of an imaginary whiteness whose power and culture he wants to acquire ; just as the blackness
that he constitutively hides from , and whose dense opacity haunts him as a dereliction , can only be borne in so far as
it is determined as a persona or mask that hides the whiteness within, and first of all because the ego is spectator here
to an unconscious that degrades and despises the nègre. This opposition between blackness and whiteness is not
between bad faith and sincerity but between two indeterminate positions : thus it is, for example, impossible to say
whether unconscious distrust is more sincere than egoic self-deception (at least in Gordon’s sense of being able to
decide what is decidable), or whether the white, which the imago pares away to reveal, is not more feigned than the
black that it masks . The play between persona and mask, desire and distrust, mimicry and personation, has become
impossible to unravel into an unequivocal meaning (of crisis or decision). We have thus come back to the question of
whether decision, even in its most duplicitous or indifferent forms, is too simple a reading of demand and desire (the
demand for recognition, the unconscious desire that interrupts it), for if they are no more separable from each other
than from the distrust that signifies the problematic join between them and whose intimacy bequeaths the advent of
doubling and division, then does it even make sense to argue for a decision that isn’t already implicated in perversity?
Alienation emerges as an issue in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, let us remember, because of anti-black racism:
whence the stress on decisionism. The problem with this approach is its pursuit of an equally singular notion of
redeemed life: Gordon’s reading of black liberation as the authentic choice of a mundane life (if only we [blacks]
could simply be) is anything but a Fanonian reading of how illusions sustain desire, or how desire sustains the illusion
of immediacy . Whence the title of Fanon’s first book. We protect ourselves from the real (of racism) behind suitably
contrived illusions or masks . (And the existentialist pursuit of authenticity is just one more example of self-deception,
a pursuit that ends up with the ego taking itself to be the ground of Being , and ipseity the experience itself of
unconditioned liberty . Even Sartre, in his early work, considered sincerity to be a version of bad faith.) To the extent
(and Bhabha has some brilliant passages on this) that Fanonism is a concern with the duplicitous languages of demand
and desire, to the extent that racism is not simply a refuge from desire but also somewhat its provocation, then it is
entirely misleading to suggest that because one is typically negro or white so, by the same token, are one’s fantasies,
hatreds, intuitions, and beliefs. This severely normative presentation itself relies on a version of black psychic life as
perversely anonymous , which is quite as debilitating as the projections of anti-black racism that Gordon chides with
such authority . Further still, if it is true that Sartrean notions of absolute freedom and universal responsibility remained
crucial for Fanon, then we must assume that the pour-soi, like the tabula rasa, evokes a process that eludes all identity
and all description and can only be for itself in so far as it is nothing, that is without object and a void-based invention.
This does seem, in the context of some of the political writings, to be justified. But I would suggest that if Fanon does
have a tragic conception of existence (both Sekyi-Otu and Gordon think this), it is because he breaks decisively with
Sartre’s early conception of absolute freedom (as a thinking that preserves the illusions of the ego), but equally with
Sartre’s later, more dialectical conception of emancipation ( which also retains the thinking of the subject as a
sovereign act or decision ). Despite the influence of Sartre, Fanon’s notion of liberation is much more aporetic —and
that is because the black subject is the thought of difference suspended between immanence and transcendence .
One consequence of this is that Gordon’s own placing of Fanon in a tradition of phenomenological thought remains
too historicist and yet not sufficiently historical .

Case – 1NC
Expansion of rights relies on Western conceptions of legal jurisprudence that reifies antiblackness
and indigenous erasure
Rawson and Mansfield 18 (Ariel, Lecturer @ Ohio State, Becky, Professor @ Ohio State, “Producing juridical
knowledge: ‘‘Rights of Nature’’ or the naturalization of rights?”, Environment and Planning, E: Nature and Space, Volume
1, Issue 1-2, pages 99-119) arnav

Weheliye and Esmeir’s analyses make visible that the legal status of being human is always about both sameness and
difference. In contrast to accounts of the necessary individuality of personhood rights and the universal sameness of
the human subject, the rule of law as a colonial technology does not just depend on atomization of a common unit
but also on difference and creation of classes and collectivities. As juridical constitution of individualized being
(personhood) becomes universalized through species norms of embodied whiteness, ‘‘access to personhood as
property’’ becomes managed and delimited by generating differences within collective being (juridical humanity)
(Weheliye, 2014: 79). Esmeir (2006: 1547) argues personhood status is predicated on membership in some class, and
these classifications come to articulate ‘‘what or who human is.’’ In turn, legal status of persons is both constitutive
of and nonisomorphic with human beings. By bringing into being what is and isn’t human, practices of personhood not
only render certain humans not quite human, but they also render certain nonhumans persons—as can be seen, under
certain legal regimes, with the inclusion of animals, corporations, and other nonhuman entities as classes or categories
of persons (Esmeir, 2006: 1547). That is, there is not a dichotomy between persons as inalienable, with intrinsic value,
and property as alienable, with instrumental value. Rather, there is the juridical person through the racialized
commodification of human life. Seen in this way, extending personhood to nature as an alternative to the
commodification of life and human–nature dualism (i.e. RoN) attaches properties of whiteness to nature and
naturalizes being human as a property of whiteness.

In sum, the rights-bearing citizen was founded on notions of in property, which personhood rights were based on
sovereign possession of oneself; although originally founded on limited recognition of sovereign persons as white,
straight, property-owning men, an enduring strategy of colonial technologies of governance has been to expand the
sphere of recognition to incorporate new subjects (Barker and Puar, 2002; Brown, 1995; Foucault, 2007; Weheliye,
2014). The paradox is that terms of inclusion are based on the degree one differs from the original subject of rights
such that demands for juridical recognition uphold both the supremacy of whiteness and the slicing of difference into
identity-based categories (Barker and Puar, 2002; Brown, 1995; Weheliye, 2014).

While this opens up questions concerning the ways blackness and indigeneity differentially articulate within the
propertied racialization of personhood, for our purposes we maintain the production of inside/outside as the white
supremacy or antiblackness that constitutes the juridical human via socioeconomic relations of slavery, while we
focus on how indigeneity figures to purify rights as outside western colonial and neoliberal development . It is in this
context that we examine how the figure of indigeneity becomes an imperative within RoN, and we do so without
arguing for or against, why or to what effect, indigenous actors have put rights to use strategically (Andolina et al., 2009;
Rojas, 2013; Sieder and Vivero, 2017; Valladares and Boelens, 2017). As Radcliffe (2017) suggests, attending to the
dynamics of coloniality/indigeneity, as a set of practices necessary for decolonizing the relation between the category
and its referent, requires examining the strategies through which indigeneity becomes abstracted from ‘‘specific
indigenous localities’’ (p. 224) and signaled through the ‘‘positionings of settler, nation-state, development,
whiteness. . . among many others’’ (Radcliffe, 2017: 221).

By drawing on decolonial accounts of how an episteme of rights naturalizes inside/outside relations, we conceptualize
juridicalization as a tool for naturalizing the coloniality of existence. We also denaturalize RoN as an epistemic
community that paradoxically depends on entrenching juridicalization to overcome colonial modes of existence. Against
this naturalization, the next section demonstrates that RoN is a spatially intensive cluster of actors that draw on
western holism and jurisprudence to present nature’s rights as a natural alternative to colonial western
development.
Mastery of nonhuman species is antiblack terror.
Mbembe and Goldberg 18 (Achille, Member of the staff @ Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER)
@ University of the Witwatersrand, Visiting Appointment @ Franklin Humanities Institute @ Duke University, PhD in
History @ the Sorbonne; David Theo, Director of University of California Humanities Research Institute, Professor of
Comparative Literature, Anthropology, and Criminology, Law and Society @ UCI; “In Conversation: Achille Mbembe and
David Theo Goldberg on ‘Critique of Black Reason’”, Global Public Life, Theory, Culture & Society, March 7) arnav

AM: A proper exploration of the concept of Black, or blackness, inevitably leads any historian who has paid attention to
this concept to an encounter with capitalism. When we look at capitalism from the vantage point of continental
African and African-American history, we realize that capitalism evokes a number of things. It is , of course, an
economic system, an apparatus of capture, a regime of signs. But it must also be understood as a certain kind of
compulsion, that is, a certain mode of organization and redistribution of power : the compulsion to put things in order
as a precondition for extracting their inner value. It is the compulsion to categorize, to separate, to measure and to
name, to classify and to establish equivalences between things and between things and persons, persons and
animals, animals and the so-called natural, mineral, and organic world.

It goes without saying that whenever an order is manufactured and value is extracted, whether one likes it or not,
that which is deemed value-less is made redundant. It is forced to lose its face, that which gives substance to the
signifier, and to wear a mask. This does not simply apply to objects. This applies to people as well . This is what
ordering is all about under slavery and under capitalism. It is about separating what is useful from waste, from the
detrituses. As a result, any genealogy of freedom in the context of Black life in America must take as its point of
departure not so much what some have called social death as this matter of waste, of how to retrieve the human
from a history of waste – or, to put it differently, a history of dessication.

The centering of rights and duties ties the badge of citizenship to the badge of policing – this
inscribes a new vector of domination that cements a carceral ethos that inscribes sovereign police
power as the modus operandi of what constitutes life
Guha-Majumdar 20 – Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies at Queens University, Ph.D. in Political Theory from Johns Hopkins University’s Political
Science, BA in History and Plan II Honors at THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS-AUSTIN [Jishnu, “PROPERTY’S CRY: RACE, ANIMALITY, AND VULNERABILITY,” 2020]//Het

The situation of black people in the United States testifies to the insight that, at best, the assertion of inviolable rights
often fails to actually secure inviolability, and at worst may become a new vector for domination. Although the
establishment of formally equal civil rights has led to upward mobility for some African-Americans, those years have
also seen the deepening intraracial inequality and the neoliberalization of racial politics, resurgent school segregation,
and static or increasing levels of racial resentment even among younger generations (despite Donaldson and Kymlicka’s faith that granting
legal rights can shift social relationships).46 Most centrally for my argument, mass incarceration flourished in the post-civil rights era, renewing the

systematic captivity of disproportionately poor and black men when formal, legal subordination was no longer an
option. Scholars like Naomi Murakawa, moreover, argue that the liberal civil rights agenda contributed to rather than stemmed the tide of
mass incarceration due to its legalistic-procedural account of racial justice .47
These phenomena do not easily translate into definite visions of what the future of animal citizenship would be. But they all suggest that, rather than a linear movement in which rights are a

the legal-procedural and the social-material world relate in far

step in the right direction even if they do not secure standing for vulnerable individuals,

more fragile, chiasmic, entangled, and contorted ways. The governance of blackness in America, in particular, shows
that this autonomy of the social-material is often governed by sovereign police power. Including but irreducible to the specific institution
of the police, the police power is not “disposed to definition, because it relates to threats whose character cannot be known in advance,” though fundamentally oriented around the self-
defense of public order, as Wagner puts it.48 In the United States, it is well known that police power and slavery are fundamentally intertwined. Police power interfaces with slavery in terms
of the threat it poses— from physical threats and the economic threat of absconding property, but more fundamentally, I would argue, the threat to the social order posed when one of its

fundamental building blocks threatens to unmoor.49 The

initial kinship between police and slavery continued once black people were
recognized as citizens, and the history of black citizenship has been indelibly touched by the police, as more than a
century of scholarship and cultural production has attested to.
The implication is not quite that the result of citizenship for domesticated animals would be police brutality in the same way as for black people, given the different psycho-affective forces

Police power has no clearly delimited set of objects.

they provoke in civil society, but it is not absurd to think about police power and animality together.

Although anti-captivity politics tends not to be interspecies in its scope, the

exercise of police power certainly is, applying to humans, slaves,
dogs, gunpowder, and ticking time bombs—anything that potentially threatens public order.50 Just as police power governed non-
citizen slaves, so too has it regulated animal life. As Colin Dayan notes, the United States has long dealt with dogs, whether seen as loving pets or beastly menaces, through police power.

Hence, far-reaching ordinances controlling dogs have been upheld “on the principle that the state's police power to manage, sequester, and dispatch dogs was virtually unlimited.”51 If
the badge of citizenship and personhood structurally emerges by transcending animality, then how will current
citizens respond to what will be perceived as a procedural leveling? The transition from slavery — — the negative foil of freedom to
citizenship for AfricanAmericans suggests that the power of the police over domesticated animals may transform rather than

simply diminish in order to contain the proliferation of a new threat to social order.
Related to police power, critical race scholars have long conceptualized contemporary systems of incarceration in the United States and other liberal democratic countries as part of the
antiblack afterlives of slavery and colonialism. The next section, then, turns to a different set of limits, related to the interplay of inviolability and vulnerability, that appear with the figure of
the criminal in Zoopolis.
Animal Rights, Punishment, and Prisons
Punishment is central to animal rights, though it is not often theorized as such. At most, punishment is usually treated as a barometer of the degree to which animal issues are taken
seriously in society. For example, one of abolitionist Gary Francione’s critiques of animal welfare laws is that they “have wh olly inadequate penalty provisions” and society tends to avoid
imposing “the stigma of criminal liability on animal owners for what they do with their property.” 52 As Donaldson and Kymlicka put it, criminal punishment’s “greatest function” is showing
“how seriously, we, as a society, take the protection of basic rights by backing up our commitment with enforcement mechanisms” (132). Animal rights theorists do not theorize the role of
crime and punishment in enforcing animal rights perhaps because they assume that extant systems of punishments would just be extended to include protecting the rights of a new set of
beings. For the most part, then, while criminal punishment is understood to intersect with animal rights, it often appears as something external to its core questions.
valorization of personhood suggests that punishment requires a closer look, given that in
However, animal rights theory ’s

modern societies the criminal is one the key sites of negative personhood. Crime offers a loophole out of guarantees
of personhood and equal rights, because these are only guaranteed for those secure within the juridical frame of innocence. We saw this dynamic already in Chapter 1,
where the criminal was never far from those elements in Locke’s philosophy most at od ds with his egalitarian reputation. The criminal and the full person seem conjoined not only because,
as Donaldson and Kymlicka said earlier, punishment enforces the inviolability of persons, but also that punishment is the only avowedly legitimate mechanism through which one’s own
personhood can be violated or stripped.
Punishment seems even harder to ignore given contemporary critical attention directed towards carceral hypertrophy in criminal punishment systems in the United States and many other
“advan ced” liberal democracies over the last halfcentury. Notably, at least in the United States, carceral systems ballooned precisely in the wake of civil rights legislation and the bestowal of
full formal equality to AfricanAmericans. And although the criminal punishment system has received more attention in recent decades, scholars have pointed to the way that the roots of the
issue go much further back. Criminality has long been a central site of the conceptualization and creation of the category of sub elsewhere —hum an blackness in the United States and both
during slavery and from the moment of its formal end. As Kahlil Gibran Muhammad documents, the postbellum era saw, concurrently with the grant of formal citizenship, the fusion of
blackness and criminality in social and scholarly discouse.53
If animals, themselves another key figure of negative personhood, transform the way we approach questions of
personhood, then they should also transform the way we think about crime and punishment, and vice versa. R eading what
Donaldson and Kymlicka do have to say about crime and punishment demonstrates the limits of foregrounding rights and personhood in the struggle for animal liberation. Animal
abolitionism often treats personhood via extension, that is, as a matt er of expanding personhood rights outwards until they reach the more or less correct ontological stopping point
between beings that are proper persons and those that are not. But the criminal shows the topographical map of personhood to be more complex and contorted.
shift to considering positive rights and
Donaldson and Kymlicka do say more about crime and punishment than most animal rights theorists — a function of their

duties . But prioritizing individual inviolability over vulnerability tilts the field towards intensifying carceral punishment systems at odds
with the ethos of vulnerability that they endorse. I will first examine what Donaldson and Kymlicka do say about criminal punishment, and how it can
tend towards a carceral ethos. I then use the contrasting example of prison abolitionism and transformative justice to, first, suggest how inviolability induces a carceral
ethos, and second, outline a more vulnerability infused approach to redressing harm.
Domesticated animal citizens are due societal duties of protection , and specifically of punishing those who violate their rights .
When new classes of individuals gain
rights, “the deterrence function calls for stronger punishment” in order to more firmly establish social norms in a
society not used to treating animals as worthy of respect (133). Here, Donaldson and Kymlicka outline their understanding of the role of the criminal
punishment system:
Our extensive criminal justice system serves several functions: protecting the vulnerable, deterring crime, enacting deserved retribution in proportion to the blameworthiness of
the guilty party, and restoring communities to wholeness after a violation. But perhaps its greatest function is simply to show how seriously we, as a society, take the protection
of basic rights by backing up our commitment with enforcement mechanisms. (132)
Missing from this description, and their call for heightened deterrence, is what many scholars and activists consider the primary function of the criminal punishment system: social control.
Donaldson and Kymlicka’s characterization of criminal punishment, in other words, takes the neutrality of this system for granted. 54
This sense of the neutrality of criminal punishment, corresponding with a faith in liberal democratic punishment
systems, manifests in a few different ways. One occurs with their description of the relationship between citizenship, social norms, and captivity. Citizenship,
they argue, requires the internalization of socialization norms like “establishing control over bodily processes and

impulses, learning basic communication, rules of social interaction, and respect for others ” (123). They say that this
process of disciplining citizens, to re-describe it in a Foucauldian parlance, should not entail lifelong intervention, but at some point “individuals have either internalized
the basic norms, or they have not” (125). Those individuals that do not internalize norms will be “humorously tolerated, shunned, or, if

they become a danger to others, locked up ” (125; my emphasi s). It is not clear how norms come into formation, who decides them, and to what extent they are
or should be subject to change. What is clear, is that there are three options: follow norms, be disciplined or derided into them, or be

“locked up.”
Block
Perm – 2NC
Redemption – L – 2NC
1. 1AC Fasel presumes a false universality of rights, demonstrating their 1AC CX belief that
tinkering with an arbitrary concept of “legal rights” can somehow equate how we VALUE one
another. **Texas reads Green**
Fasel 16, [Raffael Fasel-Sentience Politics, Charlotte Blattner-Phd-Candidate In International Law And
Animal Law, University Of Basel, Adriano Mannino - President, Sentience Politics, Tobias Baumann,
Director Of Strategy, Sentience Politics, “Fundamental rights for primates,” May 2016, https://ea-
foundation.org/files/Fundamental-Rights-for-Primates.pdf]//KAK
Current animal protection regulations worldwide and their application to the protection of the fundamental interests of
nonhuman primates to life and integrity are insufficient, since under current law these central interests of nonhuman
primates are not protected anywhere , and in practice their interests are subordinated to even trivial human ones . The
interests of nonhuman primates need special legal protection . This protection can only be guaranteed through
fundamental rights. Fundamental rights have several central advantages over animal protection laws:

Fundamental rights possess a core area of protection that must not be restricted under any circumstances . So, whilst
in the usual area of protection a weighing up of conflicting interests is possible (see the subchapter “Restrictions to
fundamental rights”), the interests of the core content must never be traded off. This core content of fundamental rights
guarantees that the most central aspects of an interest so protected can never be sacrificed to opposing interests,
however great the latter may be. In comparison to simple bans, such as bans on cruelty to animals, fundamental rights
also have the advantage of being more general. This creates room for dynamic future interpretations , which can
further the protection provided by the right. To illustrate: the fundamental right to life guaranteed to humans is not
simply the counterpart of the criminal prohibition on murder. For unlike this prohibition, the fundamental right to life
has come to be interpreted so as to give the state a positive responsibility to protect people in cases where a killing, a
disappearance or a risk to life is threatened.[68] In other words, fundamental rights are not limited to negative
banning , but also provide a positive steer in the direction of protecting particular interests.

Moreover, fundamental rights have a social function which is not achieved by simple bans . Things are also “protected”
through bans, but only those individuals that possess characteristics and interests which are particularly worthy of
protection have fundamental rights. Whoever falls under the umbrella of a fundamental right enjoys a higher status
than things or beings who do not have those rights. Bearing fundamental rights also has a social signalling value : by
recognising nonhuman primates as bearers of fundamental rights, it is impressed upon other members of society that
the interests of primates are equally valuable as the comparable interests of other bearers of such rights. This means
that the interests of all individuals who possess the fundamental rights to life of integrity should be protected equally in
relation to these interests.[69] In this way, bearers of fundamental rights will be measured by the same yardstick , or to
put it another way, they will find themselves on an equal footing as far as their interests protected by fundamental
rights are concerned. This guarantees that the fundamental interests of nonhuman primates will be taken seriously and
will not be subordinated to trivial human interests. This function of fundamental rights also explains why historically the
achievement of fundamental rights was of central importance for groups that were not previously taken seriously by the
law. The struggle for fundamental rights was therefore important for slaves, black people, women, disabled people and
other groups, not only because it brought with it the prohibition of other injustices, but because it admitted them into
the circle of those bearing fundamental rights.
2. 1AC Van Beers presumes an agonistic deliberative democracy via law is capable of extending a
metaphysical concept of “human dignity”. This frame relies on liberalist notions that we can
convince everyone’s neutral beliefs that moves back to a centrist position of stasis, replicating
the failures of the left and ratchets down the scale of abstraction to a QUOTE: “case-by-case”
basis. 1AC CX demonstrates they believe QUOTE: “value generates from law”, distinct from our
prior theory of how the VALUE OF THE LAW and the “fundamental categories” were formulated
to begin with. **Texas reads Green**
Van Beers 17, [Britta van Beers is professor of law, ethics and biotechnology at the department of
legal theory and legal history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Imagining future people in biomedical
law,” 2017,
https://www.academia.edu/39895125/Imagining_future_people_in_biomedical_law_From_technolo
gical_utopias_to_legal_dystopias_within_the_regulation_of_human_genetic_modification_technolog
ies ]//MW + KAK
Jonas’s case for the use of imagination in legal and ethical approaches to technological developments is able to offer
new perspectives on the role of biolaw and its central principle—human dignity —in the regulation of biomedical
developments.77 First, his approach throws light on the deficit of traditional concepts of risk, as exemplified by risk
assessment discourse. It could be said that scientists such as Pinker, who argue for ‘evidence-based’ regulation , in
which solely tangible risks offer enough weight for legal bans and restrictions , make use of a very ‘narrow imagination
of risk’. 78 Such a narrow conception of risk, often accompanied by a certain disdain for notions such as human dignity ,
seems to go back to what could be called a scientistic tendency within debates on emerging technologies; the thought
that it should be ultimately up to scientists to decide what counts as risk, and thus as a sufficient ground for more
restrictive approaches. The scientistic bias can lead to a conceptual impoverishment of democratic deliberation ,
disengaging the public from moral and political reflection on the question of which goals emerging technologies should
serve. As Hurlbutt writes in an article on the governance of human genome editing : ‘[i]t is our technologies that should
be subject to democratically articulated imaginations of the future we want, not the opposite…. Imagining what is right
and appropriate for our world—and what threatens its moral foundations—is a task for democracy, not for science .’79
The importance of the principle of human dignity for public, democratic deliberation on this issue can be explained
against this background. The legal concept of human dignity can be regarded as an essential tool for citizens in
democratic societies to imagine the future that they want for humanity, and to use that moral imagination as a guideline
for biomedical regulation.

Moreover, contrary to what Pinker seems to believe, the use of imagination in bioethical and biolegal deliberation can
also be used in more nuanced ways than merely posing blanket legal bans. For example, more implicit images of the
human can be discerned within legal frameworks which offer practical rules for the creation, transfer, and conservation
of technological hybrids of human origin in contemporary bioeconomies, such as human immortalized cell lines, human
embryonic stem cells, or frozen human egg cells. Within legal discourse, these human semi-objects are not treated as
normal objects of property law that can be sold or used for industrial purposes, but instead symbolized as objects with a
special status.80

Additionally, Jonas’s appeal to legal and ethical imagination finds resonance with the fact that also, on a deeper level,
‘ law is part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real’ , to use the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz.81
Interestingly, this function of law in symbolizing, imagining, and representing the world around us gains special
significance within the context of biolaw . After all, biomedical technologies are blurring , as mentioned, the distinctions
between foundational categories, such as subject and object, life and death, and animal and human. As existing
vocabularies seem to be falling short of making sense of biomedical developments, legal discourse is stepping in to
contribute to the creation of an imaginaire social to symbolize these new biomedical hybrids. Without doubt, other
systems of meaning profoundly affect the legal process of symbolization, such as medical, religious, and economic
perspectives. However, when the symbolic orders of these systems collide, as is mostly the case in bioethical matters,
law has to mediate between these competing systems of value and meaning. Under these circumstances of symbolic
uncertainty, the law, with its intricate systems of multiple and inter-related terms, qualifications, constructions, and
categories, can become of vital importance to the overall cultural-symbolic process to come to terms with technological
hybrids.82

The same could be argued in relation to the new status questions raised by human genetic engineering. What should we
make of the ‘three parent babies’ of mitochondrial replacement? Should women who donate their egg cells for this
procedure be recognized as a second legal mother? And in the likely case that the law answers this question in the
negative, should her genetic ties with the child, even if they are quite minimal, be reflected in other ways in family law?
Even if these questions seem almost impossible to answer, the law will nevertheless have to come up with solutions.

What about the designer babies of human gene-editing? The confounding complexity of the questions which are raised
by human genetic engineering can be illustrated by the emergence of wrongful life claims from children who are born
out of new technological settings. In the future, the law will without a doubt also be faced with wrongful life claims from
children in case of mistakes which are made during the process of human gene-editing, or in case these children would
rather have been born with a different genetic profile. Can they sue their makers or designers for these ‘defects’? Can
they claim the right to be born with a different genetic profile, or even in a different body? And if so, what does that
mean for law’s concept of the person ? While coming to an answer to these immensely difficult questions, judges will
inevitably have to draw up new lines between person and thing , artifice and nature, and chance and choice.

Additionally, the symbolic perspective on technological interventions is also able to make sense of the feelings of moral
vertigo and the emotions of revulsion, to which Sandel, Habermas, and Jonas refer when they discuss the impact of
technological developments on existing normative frameworks. These feelings and emotions could be regarded as an
indication of the radical ways in which emerging technologies question existing cultural-symbolic categories. However,
as mere indications of the radical impact of technological interventions, these feelings and emotions cannot replace
legal and ethical arguments, as already argued.

One can wonder whether law is up to this task of imagining future biomedical realities and countering the symbolic
uncertainties caused by biomedical hybrids. However, the fact is that law is already called upon to answer the semi-
metaphysical questions raised by technological developments, even if law is perhaps not the most likely or best
equipped candidate to do so. Decisions from European courts on the meaning of human dignity for technological
regulation can serve as illustrations.83 These decisions attest to the fact that even if the risks involved in biomedical
developments are rather of a metaphysical than a physical nature, this does not preclude the possibility of a gradual
process of legal symbolization , in which existing foundational categories can be reconstructed and reconsidered along
the way. It could be said that in this process, law makers and judges are unfolding, what Bruno Latour has called, an
experimental metaphysics.84 Applied to law, the perspective of experimental metaphysics can be taken to mean that
the categorical distinctions between human and animal, alive and dead, and person and thing, which are each being
uprooted by biomedical technologies, can be renegotiated in international biolaw through a continuous, case-by-case,
and therefore experimental approach, in which different symbolizations and representations of the human gradually
take shape.

Empathetic Relationality – L – 2NC

1AC Metzl could not be clearer on link. Our critique fundamentally questions what it means to claim
“OUR humanity”, “start living OUR values”, describe “OUR species”, and the description of “human
rights” as “universal”. Not to mention, the idea that QUOTE: “the values we’ll need to use [new
technologies] wisely are often old”. **Texas reads Green**
Metzl 19, [Jamie Metzl is a leading technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, novelist,
entrepreneur, and media commentator, Founder and Chair of the global social movement
OneShared.World, and an Atlantic Council Senior Fellow and Singularity University faculty member,
“How genetic engineering will reshape humanity,” April 25, 2019, https://www.economist.com/open-
future/2019/04/25/how-genetic-engineering-will-reshape-humanity]//KAK
The Economist: What are the ways in which people are able to "hack Darwin" today and over the next 15 years or so?
Jamie Metzl: We have always fought against the inherent cruelty of natural selection, one of the two essential pillars of
Darwinian evolution. We are now beginning to hack away at the second pillar, random mutation. Our growing
understanding of how genes and biology function is opening the door to incredible medical applications like using
genome sequencing and gene therapies to fight cancer and other diseases. But the healthcare applications of genetic
technologies are only a station along the way to where these technologies are taking us. Our ability to select embryos
during in vitro fertilisation (IVF)—based on informed genetic predictions of both health-related traits and intimate
characteristics like height, IQ and personality style—will grow over the coming years. We’ll use stem cell technologies to
expand the number of eggs that prospective mothers can use in IVF and therefore the range of reproductive options for
parents. We’ll deploy gene editing tools far more precise than today’s CRISPR systems to make heritable genetic
changes to our future offspring. Over the coming decades, Darwin’s original concept of random mutation and natural
selection will gradually give way to a process that is far more self-guided than anything Darwin could have imagined. The
Economist: Changing the nature of what it means to be human has huge consequences. What are the main ones? Mr
Metzl: We have internalised the idea that information technology is variable , which is why we expect each generation
of our phones and computers to be better than the last. It’s harder for us to come to grips with the idea that our biology
could be as variable as our IT, even though we understand intellectually that somehow we evolved from single cell
organisms to complex humans over the past 3.8 billion years. Starting to see all of life , including our own, as
increasingly manipulable will force us to think more deeply about what values will guide us as we begin altering biology
more aggressively. If we want to avoid dividing our species into genetic have and have-nots—a dangerous reduction in
our diversity —or a genetic determinism that undermines our humanity , we’ll need to start living our values . But
though we need to be mindful of the dangers, we must also keep in mind that these technologies have the potential to
do tremendous good. Someday they might well help us avoid extinction level events like dangerous synthetic
pathogens , a warmer climate , the fallout from a nuclear war or the eventual expiration of our sun. The Economist: Do
we have the ethical framework to handle this? If not, what might it look like if things go wrong? Mr Metzl: We create
beautiful art, philosophy and universal concepts like human rights but wipe out millions of each other in wars and
genocides and still today invest massive amounts of our collective wealth in tools of mass murder. The “better angels of
our nature” remain primary drivers in our development of genetic technologies , but the dark side of human nature
could also be empowered through these same tools. We need a very strong ethical and cultural framework to increase
the odds that we’ll use these technologies wisely, not least because access to them will be decentralised and
democratised. Although the positive possibilities far outweigh the negatives, it would be crazy to ignore the many ways
things could go wrong. Like Icarus, we could fly too close to the sun and get burned if we hubristically assume we know
more than we actually do. Our gene drives could crash ecosystems . We could use these tools to undermine our
common identity as a species and social cohesion. The good news is that while the technologies are new , the values
we’ll need to use them wisely are often old .

LBL – 2NC
AT: Gordon – 2NC
1. Prefer the libidinal economy – it’s the best metric.
Birge 19 (Charles, MA in Comparative Studies, quoting Bessel van der Kolk, MD @ University of Chicago and Current
Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, Board Member of the Trauma Research Foundation.
“The Addiction of Transparency: Observations on the Emotional Neurophysiology of Whiteness.” Thesis Presented in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University.
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1554891264402108&disposition=inline //shree)

Afro - Pessimism thus sharpened the theoretical stakes of the questions that I pose above about the strange,
contradictory forces of whiteness . I began to wonder about how whiteness gets constructed, specifically on the phenomenological
level, such that it functions as an unconscious structure of existential security, taking on the appearance of a transcendent
principle in which the agency of whiteness depends on the non-agency of its racial others, blackness in particular. Put
differently, how does whiteness function with simultaneous force , tenacity, and subtlety, and on an unconscious level, such that

it both overdetermines the struggle for hegemony and flies under the radar of a Gramscian analysis? Turning to emotions and
neurophysiology I noticed a possible answer to these questions in the work of two other black intellectuals: James Baldwin and theologian Thandeka, both of whom examine how the oppressive forces of whiteness
manifest at the level of emotion and embodied affect. Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1963) tells the story of several white people tormented by profound loneliness. But these characters run from their loneliness by
seeking recognition and love among black people, using the excitement of interracial encounter to compensate for their insecurity. And yet, they cannot hide their true motivations from their black friends and lovers, who
come to hate and pity them for their insecurity and cruelty. This adds to the weight that the black characters feel under the heel of an antiblack world that only recognizes them as an object or fetish, leading them to
darker depths than their white friends. Further, Baldwin brilliantly captures how all of this plays out on the level of emotion and embodied affect: the oppression of whiteness is communicated through an averted gaze, a
fearful or tenuous tone of voice, a feeling in the gut that one is being lied to, a sexual encounter marred by insecurity or anger. And while Baldwin is able to trace these toxic emotional patterns, the characters themselves
do not understand their suffering; they abuse themselves and each other again and again, feeling they are pushed around by forces beyond their control. While Baldwin’s characters are fictional, Thandeka’s Learning to be
White (1999) traces similar patterns in the lives of real whites. Thandeka analyzes personal, historical, and sociological accounts of whiteness, paying particular attention to the manner in which whiteness is haunted by a
sense of shame. As white children learn to become white adults, white “ethnic” immigrants assimilate to WASP society, and white workers learn to conform to the demands of industrial capitalism, all of them become
ashamed of parts of themselves that they must repress in order to belong, or at least survive, in white dominated communities and power structures. They then soothe over their shame by comparing themselves to a
denigrated blackness, which provides a fragile narcissism. Like Baldwin, Thandeka captures how this plays out on the level of subtle, sometimes unconscious embodied affect and emotion. For example, the white people
she interviews recall how their parents communicated their disdain for blackness through a contemptuous tone of voice, a fearful glance, or a visceral sense of discomfort, and that this affect haunted their encounters with
the color line going forward. The emotional patterns observed by Thandeka and Baldwin seemed promising in explaining how whiteness arises phenomenologically as a seemingly transcendent structure that exceeds a
social constructionist analysis. First, these emotions could explain why conscious deconstruction of whiteness would fail; such analysis attempts to deconstruct racism simply by revealing its constructed nature and the
politics that underlie it, while here it arises out of murky, largely unconscious feelings that often manifest in very subtle forms. Moreover, if a deep sense of insecurity animates these feelings, their undoing might require
facing demons that many would prefer to keep locked away--demons easily avoided in an analysis of political economy. These emotional patterns also mirrored the existential structure theorized by Afro-Pessimism: in
Afro-Pessimism, the agency of whiteness is obtained by parasitically sucking dry the agency of blackness, and in Baldwin and Thandeka the emotional affirmation (or lack thereof) of whiteness is intimately linked to the
emotional abuse of blackness. Thus, Thandeka and Baldwin’s emotional patterns seemed to account for the unconscious, tenacious, and subtle forces of whiteness. But, unlike Afro-Pessimism, Baldwin and Thandeka also
point to specific emotional conditions where one might tease out the arising of the existential structure of race (a child’s first encounter with the color line, an immigrant’s assimilation) on the phenomenological level,
gesturing to the possibility of its undoing. I was especially intrigued by this “emotional phenomenology” because it resonated with my personal experience deconstructing tenacious emotional patterns. Using the tools of
Western (Theravada-informed) Buddhist insight meditation and integrative mind-body medicine, I learned to deconstruct patterns of suffering by paying careful attention to them and investigating them to understand
where they came from and what they were trying to accomplish--that is, probing their unconscious logic. Gradually, I was able to bring some of this unconscious logic into consciousness by quieting my awareness and
entering into a kind of dialogue with these deeper, hidden/ignored “voices” in the mind or heart, slowly addressing their concerns until they were able to see that their anxious and depressive patterns ultimately served
little purpose in obtaining happiness. I was then able to let them go. I wondered if this approach could be applied to take apart the patterns observed by Baldwin and Thandeka, and, therefore, whiteness itself. To

I needed a methodology that could examine the emotional patterns of whiteness in terms of its
investigate this further

underlying logic and elucidate the specific conditions and mechanisms through which it might arise. Through my continued explorations in integrative mind-body medicine , I seemed to find
such an approach in the neurophysiology of emotions presented by trauma clinician Bessel A. van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in

the Healing of Trauma (2014). In The Body Keeps the Score van der Kolk claims that often our emotions get organized around a more fundamental desire: the desire for emotional

affirmation and recognition , which he argues is one of the most powerful forces in our emotional lives, responsible for some of our most profound feelings of pleasure (when this desire is satisfied)
and pain (when this desire is frustrated). Thus, when we fail to obtain this recognition, we experience extreme distress, which can lead us to adopt emotional and behavioral patterns that are very harmful for ourselves and

those around us. This logic matched the intimate correlation Thandeka and Baldwin notice between white peoples’ frustrated
quest for affirmation and their adoption of racism . Van der Kolk also describes how these patterns get inscribed into a set of
neurophysiological functions and mechanisms, “the emotional brain,” which develops a bundle of perceptions, associations, and
memories that emotionally and physically motivate us to act in line with what they perceive will lead to emotional

nourishment or not. According to van der Kolk these dispositions are extremely powerful. First, they operate reflexively and largely unconsciously , jumping to conclusions based on what
the emotional brain perceives will lead to nourishment or not, pushing our mind and body around with their incentives and motivations. These incentives can arise both subtly, influencing even our our most

seemingly “ rational ” calculations, and spectacularly, hijacking our mind and body in extreme ways (e.g. fight-or-flight). Finally, because they

attempt to orient us toward some of the most powerful emotional nourishment we seek, they become deeply rooted
in the heart, mind, and body; they cannot be explained away or reasoned with without accessing the deeper forces
and moments that set them in motion. In light of all this, it seemed possible that the emotional patterns of whiteness were instantiated in the emotional brain, which would account for
their largely unconscious power, tenacity, and subtlety. But, van der Kolk also explores how the patterns of the emotional brain can be changed .

Although they operate with subtle and unconscious logic, we can use our limited degree of conscious awareness and cognition to pay attention to

and analyze them in new ways, gradually increasing our capacity to observe them as they arise and pass away without reacting to them. This also involves paying attention to them as physical sensations and

adjusting our body to diffuse their physical power--accomplished through physical techniques such as breathing exercises and yoga. Once our capacity to not be pushed around by the emotional

brain increases, we can investigate its patterns, exploring the initial memories, perceptions, and associations that set them in motion, and picking them apart in terms of their underlying logic. Van der Kolk claims
that with enough patience, stability, and gentleness, the emotional brain’s patterns can be changed by providing new perceptions and associations that sooth
or satisfy its underlying desire for safety and affirmation. Thus, if the patterns of whiteness operated through the emotional brain, it seemed possible that these patterns could be undone using the therapies van der Kolk

van der Kolk’s neurophysiology could account for the emotional patterns of whiteness,
suggests. I spend most of chapter one examining in detail how

and by extension its existential structure . However , when I consider how van der Kolk’s therapies might deconstruct
whiteness, I arrive at a problem. While these therapies can attend to the reflexive insecurity and fear of whiteness, they have little to offer regarding its affirmative
and pleasurable qualities: the emotional affirmation that Thandeka and Baldwin observe as parasitically dependent on the
abuse of blackness. This leaves part of the structure of whiteness intact, and raised another important issue: what is this pleasure and affirmation of whiteness? And could this pleasure also be
deconstructed so as to unmake whiteness? This returned me to the existential analysis of Afro-Pessimism , which suggests a fairly clear answer :

the absolute denigration of blackness produces the pleasure of absolute capacity enjoyed by an exalted Human
subject. I explore this pleasure of mastery in chapter two, and to begin I set aside my neurophysiological analysis and scale back up to the level of existential structure. I turn to cultural theorist
Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s (2007) penetrating account of how the structure and pleasure of whiteness arise through a
post-Enlightenment philosophical concept that she calls calls the transparency thesis . This is the sense of absolute
mastery and freedom that post-Enlightenment European thought obtains by attempting to understand the entire
universe in line with ostensibly sovereign , universal, and rational principles . As I demonstrate through Da Silva, the racial structure of the
transparency thesis can account for whiteness’s insecurity and fear in relation to blackness, suggesting that it might
also account for the pleasure animating the emotional neurophysiology of whiteness . But, because Da Silva’s analysis operates at an extremely
high level of abstraction, it is difficult to determine its phenomenological manifestation. In an attempt to bring her analysis down to the level of emotional neurophysiology, I engage in a final thought experiment to
consider how the transparency thesis might operate as a system of emotional recognition--a nourishment strategy that could become inscribed into the dispositions of the emotional brain. I suggest that the

affirmation and pleasure of transparency could function with great ubiquity and power, opening the possibility that it
functions as a kind of addiction . Thus, in order to unmake whiteness, white people would need to not only deconstruct the patterns of racialized fear and insecurity inscribed into their
emotional brains; they must also “ sober up” from the toxic pleasure of the transparency thesis and learn how to obtain nourishment in other forms. I imagine what this might
look like in my conclusion.

FW – 1NR
DA – FW – 1NR
Hallucinatory Research – Durable fiat is an anti-black fantasy that holds blackness captive in the
echo chamber of simulation – Cost-benefit analysis of a non-existent but desirable world of
antitrust policy attributes to slavemaster institutions moral qualities yet to be demonstrated –
attitudinal inherency like prove barriers to the plan EVER actualizing. Weighing impacts of a
hypothetical is pornotroping – “portable skills” reinforce plasticization that reduces bodies to a
malleable, lexical blank slate the Master can manipulate for cost-benefit calculations to cohere
projects for the benefit of civil society which makes flesh fungible and authorizes black
disposability. The 1AR must answer the question why is it valuable to imagine something that will
never happen?
Warren 18 (Calvin, an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from
Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University, “Ontological Terror;
Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation”)

In this schematic, the body is a metaphor for instrumentality or abject use value. Spillers suggests that this body “is
reduced to a thing, to being for the captor.” With the death of African existence (the flesh) an oppres- sive mode of
existence is imposed on the Negro. This existence is unlike human being. The human being’s mode of existence is to be
for itself, and this being for itself is the structure of care between Dasein and Being. Black being is invented, however,
precisely to secure the human’s mode of existence . Reading Spillers’s metaphysical schema through Heidegger’s, we
could suggest that the black body or this “thing, being for the captor,” is invented to serve as the premier tool or
equipment for human being’s existential project (and I would argue that this equipment is not equivalent in form to the
human, even if the structure of tool-being, as Graham Harman would call it, provides a general explanatory frame).37 In
other words, the mode of existence for black being is what Heidegger would call “availableness.” Availableness is “the
way of being of those entities which are defined by their use in the whole.”38 To exist as “a thing, being for the captor”
is to inhabit a mode of existence dominated by internecine use and function. Black being , then, is invented not just to
serve the needs of economic interest and cupidity, but also to fulfill the ontological needs of the human. This thing is
something like Heidegger’s equipment—an object that when used with such regularity becomes almost invisible, or
trans- parent, to the user (blackness is often unthought because the world uses it with such regularity; antiblackness is
the systemization of both the use of blackness and the forgetting/concealment of black being). Utility eclipses the thing
itself. We must, then, understand antiblackness as a global , 46 Chapter One systemic dealing with black bodies, as
available equipment. Heidegger considers dealings the way the Being of entities, or equipment, is revealed
phenomenologically through the use of this equipment. Antiblack dealings with black bodies do not expose the
essential unfolding, or essence, of the equipment; rather, the purpose of antiblack dealings is to systemically
obliterate the flesh , and to impose nothing onto that obliterated space—care and value are obsolete in this
encounter.39 Therefore, equipment structure is predicated on the premier use of blacks within the network of
equipment. In other words, black use cuts across every equip- mental assignment, making it the ultimate equipment.
Why does black equipment cut across all assignments, and why is it the tool Dasein relies on to commence its
existential journey? We might say the answer to these difficult questions is that the essence of black equipment is
nothing— being is not there. If Heidegger assumes that equipment will reveal its being through its usage, then he did
not anticipate the invention of the Negro— equipment in human form, embodied nothingness. Using black equipment
reveals existence but not being (existence as non-being for Greek philosophers, according to Heidegger in Introduction
to Metaphysics). This puzzle is what black philosophy must investigate, must think through, to understand the continuity
of antiblackness. Spillers describes black being is a “ living laboratory ,” and we can conceptualize this laboratory as the
source of availableness for modernity. A living laboratory is a collection of instruments for carrying out ontological
experimentation , or the construction of the human self. Black beings constitute this irresistible source of availableness
for the world. Saidiya Hartman meditates on the ontological utility of black being for the human when she states: The
relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be
explained in part by the fungability of the slave—that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and
interchangeability endemic to the commodity—and by the extensive capacities of property—that is, the augmentation
of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the fungability of the
commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas,
desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since
it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.40 Instruments, tools, and
equipment are interchangeable /replaceable; this is starkly different from human being, whose existential journey in the
world renders it incalculable and unique. When I suggest that black being is pure function or utility , I mean precisely the
way this being is used as a site of projection for the human’s desires, fantasies , and onto- logical narcissism. The body
that Spillers presents is a necessary invention because it is through the human’s engagement with instruments (tools
and equipment) that the human comes to understand the self. To be for the human is to serve as the empty vessel for
the human’s reflection on the world and self. In short, what I am suggesting is that black being is invented as an
instrument to serve the needs of the human’s ontological project . This use, or function, exceeds involuntary labor and
economic interest. It is this particular antiblack use that philosophical discourse has neglected. The Negro, as invention,
is the dirty secret of ontometaphysics . If we follow Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as Dasein (being
there) and thrown into the world, then black being emerges as a different entity: the Negro is precisely the permanence
of not being there [Nicht Da Sein], an absence from ontology, an existence that is not just gone away (as if it has the
potential to return to being there) but an exis- tence that is barred from ever arriving as an ontological entity, since it is
stripped of the flesh.41 To assert that black being is not of the world is to suggest, then, that black being lives not just
outside of itself, but outside of any structure of meaning that makes such existence valuable. Black being is situated in a
spatiotemporality for which we lack a grammar to capture fully. Spillers’s body, then, is the symbolic and material signifi-
cation of absence from Being. To be black and nothing is not to serve as an aperture of Being for the Negro; rather, it is
to constitute something inassimilable and radically other, straddling nothing and infinity. The Negro is the execration of
Being for the human; it is with the Negro that the terror of ontology , its emptiness, is projected and materialized . This
is the Negro’s function. Inventing the Negro is essential to an ontometaphysical order that wants to eradicate and
obliterate such ontological terror (the terror of 48 Chapter One the nothing); and since ontometaphysics is obsessed
with schematization and control, it needs the Negro to bear this unbearable burden, the execration of Being. To return
to our proper metaphysical question “How is it going with black being?,” we can say that neither progressive legislation
nor political movements have been able to transform black being into human being, from fleshless bodies to
recognized ontologies. Spillers also seems to preempt the question when she states, “Even though the captive
flesh/body has been ‘ liberated ,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter . . . it is as if
neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as [ the flesh ] is ‘ murdered’ over and over
again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise .”42 This onticide , the
death of the flesh/African existence, continues impervious to legal , historical, and political change . This is to say that
the problem of black being, as both a form of ontological terror for the human and a site of vicious strategies of
obliteration, remains. To ask the (un)asked question “How is it going with black being?” is to inquire about the resolution
of the problem of black and nothing, ontometaphysically, as it imposes itself onto the Negro. The answer to the Negro
Question, then, is that the ritualistic and repetitive murder of the flesh , the primordial relation, is absolutely necessary
and indispensable in an antiblack world. And as long as the world exists , this murder must continue .

Plan focus puts the cart before the horse – what is necessary is a focus on blackness’s grammar of
suffering which predetermines political efficacy.
Sexton 10 (Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies in the School of
Humanities at UC Irvine, PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, 2010, “African American Studies” in A Concise
Companion to American Studies, pp 220-221) gz

The latter task – the trenchant interrogation of racial blackness and/in the formulations of modernity and its leitmotif
of freedom – was advanced immeasurably by Professors Lindon Barrett, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Ronald Judy,
each in their own way. Yet, as Wilderson again makes plain in his Red, White, and Black (2009), the grand and anxious
question of freedom is preceded, logically and ontologically, by a perhaps more confounding question: what does it
mean to suffer? To address such a query sufficiently is to disregard the official impatience that envelopes it . Of
course, this sentiment of expediency plays to an understandably popular urgency that emanates from the severity of
everyday life for the vast majority of black people and the attendant status anxiety of the so-called new black middle
class. However, black creative intellectuals have done less and less talking about our pain of late and probably a bit
too much posturing about our plans . If anything, we have a surplus of plans! What we do not have is a language –
much less a political culture – that adequately articulates both the variance and commonality of our positions and
our predicaments. African American Studies is perhaps more inarticulate about the dimensions and details of black
suffering today , in an era marked by transnationalism and multi-racialism, than it has been at any other historical
juncture. I am speaking here of suffering in its fullest sense: not only as pain , which everyone experiences – say, the
pain of alienation and exploitation – but also as that which blacks [people] must bear, uniquely and singularly, that
which we must stand and stand alone (see Sexton 2007).
 AB K: Texas—Race War

K – 1NC

We are in the midst of a race war – everywhere across the globe authoritarian Whiteness thrashes
in the death rattle of Pax Americana. The affirmatives desperate cries of saving economic
imperialisms shriveled husk from its own overstretch belies a deep seeded desire for White
Supremacy. The 2AR will hail you to vote affirmative to save yourselves from cascading doomsday
devices of their own making, but we challenge you to imagine your own finitude.
Barder 21 – Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for International Relations, Politics and International
Relations, PhD in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University [Alexander, Global Race War: International Politics and
Racial Hierarchy, 2021, DKP]

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy examines the historical connections between race and
violence from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. My aim is, first, to show how racial violence and
hierarchy were crucial for the development of the very idea of global order. Second, I examine how racial violence
proliferated in defense of this global order when its racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. Third, this global racial
order did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the
global South, and the expansion of the state system; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of
cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. Finally, examining global politics in
terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology that imbricates the domestic and global in more
complicated ways. As a consequence, global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for
understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. We live in a time when the crisis and waning of a
white world order continues to nourish a politics of racial retrenchment and violence at home.
The great American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois famously called attention to the “color-line” as the problem of the twentieth century. For Du Bois, racial difference reflected the “relation of
the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”2 Du Bois specifically pointed to a racialized global political economy in which race and class
conflict fuse together to perpetuate the conditions of transnational oppression and violence. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in the United States, where even in the aftermath of the
Civil War and the emancipation of American slaves, “economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary,” continued unabated.3 “Negroes are a segregated servile
caste,” Du Bois writes, “with restricted rights and privileges.”4 But what was true about an American political economy based on racial exploitation reflected the longue durée of a Western
imperial political economy that gave rise to a sensus communis of racial hierarchy. From the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century to
the spread of European empire, the global as we in the discipline of international relations have come to know it since the nineteenth century was not the European state
system, notwithstanding all the historical fallacies surrounding Westphalia; rather, the very notion of the global emerged out of a crucible of violent

settler appropriation and exploitation.5 Race and racial hierarchy then became the material and ideational scaffold of
a global imaginary that took for granted the idea that certain peoples were to be considered naturally inferior and
hence exploitable for a wide range of purposes. 6 Nowhere is this more evident than in the crystallization of an anti-
blackness that came to structure the very modern imaginary of the West itself. Specifically, as Achille Mbembe writes, the very notion of
“blackness” was created to “designate not human beings like all others but rather a distinct humanity—one whose
very humanity was (and still is) in question.” 7 Racial categories became dialectical (without the possibility of reconciliation) in that they reflected the perceive
attributes of the Western/white “self” in its attempt to designate an “other” as inherently inferior. More generally, as Afro-pessimist theorists point out, the very category of “blackness,”
which is derived from and the “entrenchment” of enslaved objectification, supports the “anti-Black foundations of race and modern society . . . it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-
Blackness that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., ‘human’ . . . it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-
Black.”8 Thus, for example, according to the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, “The idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention”; but it was one that essentially became a political
ontology that defined Western modernity through its nonbeing.9
The notion of the color line as an ontological claim is crucial for understanding what I think is an important consequence of this history of race and empire: only
certain peoples,
it was assumed by a wide range of European and American writers, were
capable of creating genuinely political communities. European
modernity importantly reflected the crystallization of a vague notion of common civilizational attributes—
notwithstanding the incessant internal violence of this European society or community of sovereigns. Nonetheless, a common
assumption within early modern Europe was that the establishment of the state and civil society represented a crucial development in political community that other civilizations did not

possess. Whereas the Islamic world with the Ottoman Empire and China may have been accorded a certain political recognition , such was certainly withheld from
Africa and Africans , for whom the nascent and evolving biological or zoological vocabulary of the eighteenth century came closest to a language deemed capable of describing
their lifeworld. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the notion of the “swarm” came to describe a nonpolitical collectivity subject to European predations and extreme violence. The notion of the swarm
precluded a recognition of a common political relationship and also, importantly, an ability to become present within a larger human world of collective action, as Hannah Arendt understood
it.10 To be sure, Arendt herself is guilty of making the very same racial generalization that Africans were incapable of creating a lasting world of appearance necessary for something like
politics to come into being. As she infamously wrote, “Under the merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, [Europeans] were confronted with human beings who, living
without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.”11 It is this incomprehensibility that in a way created a certain
distance or gulf that the notion of race helped to explain. For Orlando Patterson, the institution of slavery defined and codified this notion of distance between the European and the African,
a distance that reinforced “the view that he [i.e., the Black servant] did not belong to the same of Christian, civilized European.”12 Explicitly, the
reification of racial
hierarchy over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precluded the possibility of a common world based on a notion of
political or juridical equality. Instead, what crystalized this nexus between racial hierarchy and the beginnings of a global
racialized imaginary was ultimately the proliferation of unrelenting violence necessary to maintain this order and to
preclude its dismantlement.
In this introduction I wish to develop the theoretical lens that informs the historical story that makes up the following
chapters. In particular, I want to explore why violence becomes an integral component of the processes of racialization
that constituted the global as a specific racialized imaginary and why such racial violence becomes its ubiquitous feature
over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be sure, the history of what I call the global racial imaginary and its
racial violence was not necessarily coterminous with the history of the state and its formation; it was never entirely
institutionalized within the proto-state apparatuses that were congealing themselves on the frontiers of European
empires.13 Racial violence could be perpetuated by a wide range of actors—slave traders, plantation owners, frontier
settlers, and so on—who were involved in the various projects of colonial and imperial expansion. As time went forward,
racial violence would come to fuse itself with state violence in catastrophic ways, leading to the genocidal projects of the
twentieth century and fantasies of racial annihilation that completely overtook the logics of state reason. What then
accounts for the proliferation of racialized violence? What explains the ferocity and intensity of such violence? In what
follows I make the argument that racial violence represented a particular type of violence, a violence that reflects a crisis
in the racial imaginary that structures the very “grid of intelligibility,” as Foucault would say—of the global as such.
International Relations and the Question of Racial Violence
The question of racial war or violence remains largely unexamined in the field of international relations. Due to
ontological and epistemological commitments to the concepts of anarchy and state-centrism, racial violence is all too
often seen as a consequence of domestic fragmentation. Largely conflated with “ethnic violence” under conditions of
civil war, its occurrence is typically explained in terms of strategic action by elites.14 The global, by contrast, remains the
domain in which nation-states engaged in a wide range of conflictual and cooperative actions under the conditions of
anarchy. Nonetheless, these ontological commitments at the heart of the field are increasingly being called into
question and raise interesting questions about the plurality of different forms of violence that can cut across the
domestic and the international, and that challenge the predominance of anarchy and the central agency of the state.
In 1951 Hans Morgenthau published In Defense of the National Interest, which framed American foreign policy in terms of the fundamental transformations occurring in the global order after the Second World War.
Morgenthau recognized that the dramatic racial transformations of the period reflected a fraying and a disintegration of the very hierarchies that made the global what it was for over two centuries.15 Europe’s decline,
Morgenthau argues, “has brought in its wake a fundamental change in the relations between the white and colored races.”16 Europe’s predominance being at an end fundamentally implies for him that “European nations
have lost the opportunity for relatively effortless and profitable expansion without necessarily interfering in each other’s interests.”17 Morgenthau goes on to describe the consequences of the rise of Asia in conjunction
with Soviet Bolshevism, which “may well carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.”18 An emancipated Asia will invariably be able to adapt Western technologies to its own benefit and essentially result in the
“destruction of the delicate social mechanism of the modern state system.”19 What Morgenthau implies then is that this dismantlement of the European global order would usher in an unrestrained revolutionary violence
that would challenge Western civilization itself. Morgenthau’s fears certainly reflect the zeitgeist of the early Cold War, which I explore in more depth in Chapter 6. But what is interesting to note is how much he (perhaps
inchoately) attaches importance to a specifically Western-centric global hierarchy that is in crisis. It is such a crisis that opens up the very possibilities of a racialized violence that is distinguished from the rational and
strategic violence between Western nation-states.
Morgenthau’s anxieties about civilizational decline and the global consequences echo down to Robert Gilpin’s classic 1981 book War and Change in World Politics. 20 Gilpin recognizes how the diffusion of technologies and
ideas potentially makes the exercise of power by dominant powers increasingly costly. Implied is then the potential hegemonic disruption by peripheral powers outside of the bipolar order of his time. Nonetheless, Gilpin
circumscribes his analysis within an anarchical system, which “the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over the millennia,” and an overly materialist framework based on military, economic, and
technological change.21
Gilpin’s understanding of world political and hegemonic conflict shares its ontological and epistemological assumptions with Kenneth Waltz’s reformulation of political realism. For Waltz, violence is a ubiquitous feature of
human being in the world. International politics cannot be said to be inherently more dangerous than domestic politics.22 Nonetheless, to understand the centrality of violent outcomes in international politics throughout
history is to accept a world defined by the lack of institutional mechanisms to adjudicate relations between predatory great powers. What differentiates the international is then this lack of institutional stratification to
manage political disputes throughout history. For political realists like Waltz, the emphasis is on uncovering causal mechanisms that explain wars as “organized violence” between similar states, and thus the concern with
particular forms of racial or cultural identity is incidental to the history of international politics.23 In this light, John A. Vasquez’s recent The War Puzzle Revisited presents itself as one of the more empirically grounded
studies of war in international relations. For Vasquez, war is fundamentally tied to territorial disputes between neighbors. As he writes, “In the modern state system one of the main sets of factors that bring about war
among equals is the rise of territorial disputes, particularly between neighbors, that in the absence or failure of a global institutional network to resolve the issue politically makes [sic] actors resort to unilateral solutions
provided by power politics.”24 War, then, is all too often treated as consequence of a systemic condition of anarchy in which actors (states) find themselves unable to completely escape.
Rather than seeing war and violence as simply the inevitable consequence of certain ontological conditions, of the invariable changes resulting from shifts in material power, warfare can be understood through cultural
motivations. Richard Ned Lebow extends the study of war to the fundamental motivations of “fear, interest and honor.”25 In essence, Lebow provides a cultural explanation for the persistence of warfare that isn’t
centered on objective condition of a system; rather honor acts as a way of conditioning status hierarchy, which when challenged can provoke extraordinary violence. Lebow, however, doesn’t extent this insight to the
formation and maintenance of racial hierarchies and the violence emanating from the creation of such a global racial order. Indeed, how such racialized violence becomes productive of a particular order is a crucial
question. Here, Jens Bartelson’s concept of “ontogenetic war” is an important insight that sees war as not based on predetermined notions of identity or status, but rather constitutive of it. As Bartelson writes, “War does
not occur as a result of prior enmity between actors whose identities and interests are given and known but is that which produces identities and interests as well as the patterns of enmity and friendship within which
actors are embedded by fighting.”26 “War,” as Bartelson importantly continues,
is a primordial force that imposes structure on a world that otherwise would [be] too chaotic to be accessible to understanding and hence also beyond the reach of human intervention. Making war is
therefore also making sense: war is not only a means of imposing order onto chaos but also a way of imposing meaning onto an otherwise enigmatic political world.27
Ontogenetic war captures the conjunction between the practices of, and ideas about, violence and the condition of creating the very order that comes to define the identity of the agents themselves. This opens up a way
to conceptualize how the formation of the modern global order was itself crucially tied to the very notion of racial violence and to the creation and reification of a racialized hierarchy, and recognize that modern identity
was predicated upon such violence and hierarchy. 28 Indeed, the problem remains the continued lack of attention to the very histories of racialized settler colonial and imperial violence that, all too often, fall outside of the
various canonical frameworks of international relations.
In Global Race War, my concern is not only with the historical conditions of this racialized ontogenetic war, but also
with the violence that emerges when the very meaning that defines such a hierarchical order begins to be challenged.
What happens when the very hierarchies that are assumed to constitute the world come under stress and are in danger
of being overturned? International relations scholars have made significant inroads in rethinking the importance of
international hierarchy historically and conceptually. 29 Global history is rife with patterns of stratification that have
come to constitute a whole multitude of agents. What is less apparent is what happens when those hierarchies that
have come to define the very meaning of the global are radically called into question. The importance of ontogenetic
war that Bartelson highlights is one side of the story of how to understand the connections between war and order; the
other concerns the proliferation of violence when a hierarchical order is in crisis and put in question by those defined
to be racially and culturally inferior.
While much of the literature on war and violence in international relations remains aloof to the historical importance of
race, the field of international relations itself is beginning to acknowledge the importance of race for its own historical
and intellectual development. Robert Vitalis’s White World Order, Black Power Politics called into question how
international relations understood its own disciplinary history. 30 American political science as it emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused principally on race and empire, given America’s emergence as a global
power. Political scientists were especially worried about racial conflict at home and abroad; questions about the
administration of far-flung territories made up of alien (i.e., inferior) races were seen as relevant policy issues of the day.
In other words, what Vitalis shows was that the origins of the “science” of international relations were certainly far
from our contemporary theoretical focus on anarchy, state-centrism, and great power geopolitics. Its prevalent
consideration revolved around the longevity of white supremacy, which was feared to be always at risk of being
enervated by domestic (African Americans in Harlem) and foreign races.
Vitalis’s work, along with that of others who have called our attention to the issue of race in global politics, has left the
door ajar for a continued critique of the racial foundations of our modern global order and our global politics.31 It is no
longer tenable to accept without serious reservation the ontological assumptions that have defined the field of
international relations since its mythological foundations after the Second World War. Such a mythos is largely
predicated upon historical narratives about the emergence of a system or society of (European) states outside the
histories of empire and racial hierarchy . Postcolonial theorists, in particular, have also shown for some time now the
importance of rethinking global politics beyond the particularities and uniqueness of the Western historical
experience.32 The question of race has come to the forefront of the field, not least because of Robert Vitalis’s
disciplinary revisionism about what international relations meant to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
American political scientists, but also given the renewed attention to previous writers—going back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s
sociology and the Howard School—who have largely remained on the periphery of the field and never part of the canon.
What I believe that such a disciplinary revisionist historiography accomplishes is to refocus our attention to the
pervasiveness of race in creating and structuring a modern global order. This is what I explore as the global racial
imaginary.

The Global Racial Imaginary

The rapid expansion of European settler colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century had profound ramifications for
the emergence of the idea of the global . What emerged in the aftermath of the genocidal land appropriation in North
and South America and the enslavement of Africans was a racialized transnational political economy that came to
structure the very foundation of proto-capital accumulation and an imaginary of the global based on racial hierarchy.
With respect to the former, Cedric Robinson famously argued that the rise of the “world system” was predicated upon
what he calls the formation of “racial capitalism,” which itself emerged from an already racially striated European
continent.33 Europe’s own internal “others” were already subject to forms of racialized dispossession, internal
colonialism, and indentured servitude or slavery, which would provide the model for European expansion, appropriation
of land, and enslavement of peoples across the centuries—essentially, building the global order. As Robinson writes,
“Racism . . . was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its
genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”34 The important point that Robinson makes is that race should
not be viewed as a form of ideological mystification that provides, in a sense, a cover for the violence of accumulation
and dispossession at the heart of the European colonial project. “Racialism,” Robinson adds, should be understood as a
“material force . . . [that] would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”35 In other words,
what is at work here is a process of racialization that expanded across the planet and created a material and ideological
reality in which racial difference and hierarchy came to be understood as constitutive of the order of things.36
What interests me, in particular, are the implications of this materialization of race for understanding the development
of what I call a global racial imaginary. How is it that race can become itself a “material force” or embody a material
reality that effectively constitutes the underlying intelligibility of social reality? This is of course not to suggest that race
has any basis in a biological materiality; rather, as Michael Hanchard puts it, “[Racial] symbols, meanings and material
practices distinguish dominant and subordinate subjects according to their racial categorizations. Race in this regard is
not only a marker of phenotypical difference, but of status, class, and political power.”37 The sociologist Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva has argued that racism cannot simply be viewed as the product of an irrational individual prejudice or of
atavistic legacies; rather, racism is the consequence of processes of racialization, which, for Bonilla-Silva, “forms a real
structure—that racialized groups are hierarchically ordered and ‘social relations’ and ‘practices’ emerge that fit the
position of the groups in the racial regime.” As Bonilla-Silva continues,
The analytical crux for understanding racism is uncovering the mechanisms and practices (behaviors, styles,
cultural affectations, traditions, and organizational procedures) at the social, economic, ideological, and political
levels responsible for the reproduction of racial domination. I labeled my approach material because the views
and behaviors of actors are fundamentally connected to their position [in] a racial regime.38
The materiality of racial order gives a sense of the solidity of racial hierarchies that congealed during moments of
violent domination, which comes to be seen as entirely natural. To think the racial order in material terms is to
understand that its ideological formation is predicated on the natural longevity of racial hierarchy across history—
even if its content changes over time. It is this ideological configuration that gave intelligibility to the perpetuation of
colonial subjugation that Europeans employed in the New World and the Atlantic slave trade and that would then
form the basis of emergent global order of the nineteenth century. Thus, as Bonilla-Silva continues, “Racialized
societies could not survive without ideology as it fulfills five vital functions, namely accounting for the existence of racial
inequality, providing basic rules on engagement in interracial interactions, furnishing the basis for actors’ racial
subjectivity, shaping and influencing the views of dominated actors, and, by claiming universality, hiding the fact of racial
domination.”39 This racial ideology, when it comes to its role in the emergence of the global, I call the global racial
imaginary.
A social imaginary, Charles Taylor argues, is how “people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with
others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”40 A social imaginary reflects the manner in which
“ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is not often expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in
images, stories, and legends.”41 Furthermore, Taylor adds, a social imaginary is not a theoretical vantage point by a
minority but rather reflective of a constitutive understanding of the world that brings together a people as such. A social
imaginary legitimizes practices that are typically seen as entirely natural and selfevident to the social life of the group.
Taylor emphasizes the extent to which the social imaginary is akin to a “social map” and facilitates “how we stand to
each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, and so on.”42 Taylor does not, to be sure,
extend his understanding of the social imaginary to the very processes of racialization that have come to be so
important in modernity. To focus on race would certainly contradict his own objective, to show that modernity was the
“order of mutual benefit” among individuals even under conditions of hierarchy. And yet it is here where the
development of race plays a crucial role in defining the very “social map” that would implicate not only Western polities
themselves but the very modern global order. A racial imaginary integrates the material and ideological foundations—
the very “mechanisms and practices” Bonilla Silva refers to—and reflects specifically the placement of different groups
within a hierarchical order. A racial imaginary then provides a “social map” in making that hierarchical order appear
self-evident and entirely the natural byproduct of certain immanent societal developments rather than violent
appropriation or domination. Extending the concept of the racial imaginary to the idea of the global, I claim that the
very “images, stories, and legends” that made the global intelligible qua global came out of the long history of settler
colonial appropriation and a transnational racial formation. The content of the global racial imaginary solidified itself
in the eighteenth century with the acceleration of European colonial projects, particularly Franco-British colonization
in North America, the Caribbean, and India. But it also began to crystalize with an entire intellectual foundation for
rethinking the place and interactions with non-European peoples. The “social map” that inchoately developed
throughout the eighteenth century rested upon a language rooted in the natural sciences and climate theory that would
only be more fully developed in the following century. 43 The advent of a substantial travel literature and proto-
ethnological and geographical knowledge would percolate a view of the immeasurable gulf, not only in civilizational
attributes but in mental faculties, between Europeans and their “others,” especially in Africa and the western
hemisphere. It created the very categories, classification schemes, and scientific typologies that would congeal in the
racial science of the following century. And as a consequence, it created the very sensus communis that gave this
political-economic global order its racialized hierarchy.
As I mentioned earlier, then, the acknowledgment of racially different peoples would have consequences for how
Europeans imagined their own civil society and the state. Here Charles Mill’s notion of the racial contract is key. Mills
shows that embedded in social contract theory is an epistemological claim that implicitly imagines the world it creates.
What Mills calls the racial contract acknowledges that this epistemological assumption rests upon a demarcation at the
heart of humanity in which whites (understood, ultimately “a set of power relations”) are to be distinguished from
nonwhites.44 As Mills writes,
The Racial Contract is that set of formal and informal agreements or meta-agreements (higherlevel contracts
about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between members of one subset of humans,
henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 . . . as
“white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to
categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status,
subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either
already inhabit or established or in transactions as aliens with these polities, and the moral and juridical rules
normally regulating the behavior of whites in their dealings with one another either do not apply at all in
dealings with nonwhites or apply only in a qualified form (depending in part on changing historical
circumstances and what particular variety of nonwhite is involved), but in any case the general purpose of the
Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group,
the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to
them.45
The racial contract, which forms ultimately the basis of a contractual society, “requires the intervention of white men,
who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings.”46 It as a consequence assumes that nonwhites bodies
are restricted from the political space, “being judged incapable of forming or fully entering into a body politic.”47 As
Mills notes, this idea of inability to form or enter the political can be traced back to Aristotle and the stark division
between Greek and non-Greeks, for whom the latter were inherently or natural slaves. It comes then to structure an
entire edifice of thought with respect to the Native Americans in the New World or to Africans, for whom the “Racial
Contract establishes a fundamental partition in the social ontology of the planet” and thus relegates them to being
“Untermenschen.”48 The racial contract, moreover, implicates the development of a European order of states. The field
of international relations, which largely takes for granted the universalizable moment of the state system, reflected
this racial contract.49 The intelligibility of the European order, as a society or community of sovereigns bound by a
common set of rules limiting violence, was predicated on the exclusion of non-Europeans from such an order , all the
while including them through violent expropriation and domination.
While the racial contract provides the theoretical or conceptual basis for understanding how domestic and international
politics remains constituted on the basis of racial difference and hierarchy, the racial imaginary is the percolation of the
racial contract into the everydayness of the lifeworld. What really connects Mill’s notion of the racial contract with the
racial imaginary is the fear and anxiety of its potential dismantlement at the hands of so-called inferior races. Violence,
then, becomes the ever-present practice meant to preclude what Mills calls the “ontological shudder [that] has been
sent through the system of the white polity, calling forth what could be called the white terror to make sure that the
foundations of the moral and political universe stay in place.”50
In this sense, I share a recognition of the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the racial violence that Afro-
pessimism takes as central to the formation of Western modernity, as I alluded to previously. For Afropessimist
theorists, the historical and contemporary connections with slavery’s gratuitous violence structurally permeate,
specifically, American society to the present with the proliferation of violence against Black bodies by a whole host of
state institutions. Such violence cannot be taken as strictly instrumental, however. Rather, as Frank B. Wilderson III
argues, “Violence against Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being.”51 Such
violence maintains, as Wilderson continues, the “psychic stability in all others who are not slaves.”52 Wilderson then
contrasts this with the genocidal violence perpetuated against Native Americans. Such genocidal violence is for him
reflective of a “usurpation of cartography, of space” and holds a different ontological status than the violence
perpetuated against Black life.53 However, this juxtaposition between genocidal violence as constitutive of liberal
“white” modernity versus its instrumentalization as a settler-colonial or imperial project has the (unintended)
consequence of creating an a priori ontological chasm: the genocide of Black lives becomes a congealed and reified
ahistorical (i.e., depoliticized) structure, whereas the genocide of Native Americas is of history. 54 Rather than assuming
such a profound ontological and ultimately ethical chasm, it is perhaps more useful to think in terms of an ontology
plasticity to describe the historical transformations of the very “destructive processes” at the heart of the global racial
imaginary. Following Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, which for her signifies the alteration of form, Benjamin
Meiches argues that genocidal “destructive processes exhibit ontological features of plasticity insofar as they form,
reform and transform themselves and others in the process of unfolding. ” 55 Thinking in terms of an ontology of
plasticity reveals instead that “destructive processes . . . become horrifyingly creative or productive.” And as Meiches
continues, “These transformations . . . invent new scales, intensities, and forms of violence that develop in
unforeseeable ways, a mutation of violence that does not obey a taxonomy of different stages or levels , but that
would emerge as the capacity for relations of violence to undergo self-reformation and transformation.”56 Such an
ontology would consider the various historical moments that congealed the global as racial hierarchy to continue to
contribute to the “self-reformation and transformation” of racialized violence as necessarily constitutive of the global
racial imaginary. Put differently, the “genocidal usurpation of subjectivity” is always historically co-constitutive with
the “usurpation of cartography or space” that has made up the modern Western settler-colonial project over the past
four centuries.
Race War
As the European colonial and imperial projects across the planet proceeded apace, the deployment of racial ideology
as an imaginary became increasingly accepted as a natural feature of the social fabric of the global. But what is
important to recognize is that the racialization of the global could never be an entirely smooth process. Racialization is
always a process of contestation. As Bonilla-Silva writes, “Because races are always in a relation of opposition, racial
contestation is the crucial driving force of any racialized social system.”57 But what does this mean for understanding
the global racial imaginary? If, as Taylor argues, the imaginary is a social map that helps us navigate the placement of
different groups, that tells us what to expect from our relations with others, the processes of contestation at the heart
of the global racial imaginary are always, in a sense, putting into question such relations or expectations. In other words,
there’s always an inherent instability—an “ontological shudder,” as Mills calls it—within the global racial imaginary
that provokes incessant anxiety and fear that the racial hierarchies are themselves prone to crisis and violent
upheaval. Hence the surfeit of violence comes out of this very instability of a racialized imaginary. Any crisis or calling
into question of white supremacy, then, is met with extraordinary and creative violence unrestrained by the very
rules that make up a common political world. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the Haitian Revolution was such an event. Faced
with a slave insurrection, the French imagine that their only response is the extermination of the Black population and
its replacement with new slaves. Such fantasies and fears of racial annihilation that the revolution embodied —
especially in the aftermath of the liquidation of the white population by Dessalines in 1804— represented the credible
vision of what happens to a racially mixed society when white supremacy is undermined. This fear was particularly
prevalent in the early American Republic with its own growing enslaved population. By the early twentieth century
(Chapter 4), racial violence and annihilation become the language through which to understand the degeneration of
multiethnic empires and what the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau, describes as the
racial murder of the Armenians in 1915. By the 1940s, the project of Nazi genocide (Chapter 5) as racial annihilation is
entirely predicated on not only the biopolitical fear and anxiety of infiltration and contamination, but the larger
necessity of radically destroying any political structure that stands in the way of racial differentiation and hierarchy.
The violence of racial war is a violence imagined à outrance . It is not subject to the restraints of war politically
defined by any sense of mutual recognition. In this sense, it characterizes the settler-colonial projects on the global
periphery. And yet, in dialectical fashion, it defines the very parameters of what is supposed to be the political world .
Hence, for example, racial war is often described as the type of conflict that occurs outside the politico-juridical
boundaries of Europe. Duncan Bell quotes a remarkable passage from the late nineteenth-century historian W. E. H.
Lecky from his 1893 essay “The Empire: Its Value and Its Growth”:
Remember what India had been for countless ages before the establishment of British rule. Think of the endless
wars of race and creed, its savage oppressions, its fierce anarchies, its barbarous customs, and then consider
what it is to have established for some many years over the vast space of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin a reign
of perfect peace; to have conferred upon more than 250 millions of the human race perfect religious freedom,
perfect security of life, liberty, and property; to have planted in the midst of these teeming multitudes a strong
central government, enlightened by the best knowledge of Western Europe, and steadily occupied in preventing
famine, alleviating disease, extirpating savage customs, multiplying the agencies of civilization and progress.58
The passage is, first of all, an illustration of what Mills refers to as an “epistemology of ignorance” in which
misrepresentation aids in the project of empire and the legitimacy and maintenance of racial hierarchies.59 Of course, it
bears little or almost no resemblance to what precolonial India actually was. However, it conveys to the reader an
imaginary space without history—“countless ages”—a space of “teaming multitudes” wracked by “savage customs” and
mired in “endless wars of race and creed.”60 While British imperial rule represents “civilization and progress” versus the
anarchy and chaos of native government, it highlights in the mind of the reader the very idea that a world without
European supremacy will invariably be one where such civilization and progress comes to an end and the “endless wars
of race and creed” return. British imperial rule, and. in fact, the indefinite domination of Western/white civilization, is
then a prophylaxis against the very chaos and “barbarity” that always lurks in the background. A few decades later,
Lothrop Stoddard, the infamous American racist writer, emphasized this ever-present threat by conflating civilization
with race: “If white civilization goes down, the white race is irredeemably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant
colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption.”61 The defense of “civilization” is a
racialized defense that comes to play an important role in post–Second World War Western discourse. Indeed, as I argue
in Chapters 8 and 9, references to civilization and civilizational conflict represents another form of racialization of the
global imaginary and a fear of a world in which white Western supremacy will no longer endure. From Huntington’s
“clash of civilizations” to so-called theories of population replacement, or the “Great Replacement,” at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, there is this unremitting assumption that Western civilization is always threatened by an
encroaching racialized other.
The concept of race war here serves not just as Michel Foucault articulated it in his important 1975–76 lectures at the
Collège de France, as a counter-history or counter-concept that ultimately fuses itself to state practice. As Foucault saw
it, race war as a concept evolved from an aristocratic description of the incessant internal conflicts between rival groups
to its fusion with state practice as a way of defining the survivability of a population and legitimation of sovereign power
to excise such biopolitical threats.62 Modern biopolitical state power, Foucault argues, operationalizes “racism that
society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent
purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization.”63 The salience of Foucault’s
analysis of the nexus between race war and state power is the extraordinary malleability of its deployment by a variety
of modern states. Though Foucault’s genealogy of sovereign and biopolitical power remains a crucial history of the
modern state, its goal of elucidating the inner working of biopower ends up neglecting the very prevalence of racial
conflict as a conflict between different races. As Alexander Weheliye shows, Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical rests
upon a set of spatiotemporal and geographical assumptions that ultimately reflect colonialist discourses of the natural
and inevitable confrontation between non-European races (ethnic racism) versus a race and racism internal to European
political history (biopolitics). As Weheliye writes, “Foucault never interrogates the bare existence of racial difference and
those hierarchies fabricated upon this primordial notion and, as a result, reinscribes racial difference as natural.”64 By
relegating what Weheliye calls “ethnic racism” to the geohistorical periphery in order to emphasize the development of
the biopolitical in the West, Foucault misses the continued importance (of alternative forms of) racial war to structure
not just state biopower but especially the very ontological and normative ideal of a world worth living for. When the
ontological and normative commitments to the global racial imaginary appear to be called into question —through a
world in which non-Western powers assert themselves to reshape global order, or through fears of immigration into
Western polities from the global South—what Mbembe calls a “fantasy of annihilation” is resurrected. “This fantasy, ”
Mbembe writes, “is present in every context in which social forces tend to conceive the political as a struggle to the
death against unconditional enemies. Such struggle is then qualified as existential. It is a struggle with no possibility of
mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation.”65 Race war is the outcome, for Mbembe, of a metaphysics of
Western universality unable to think “through its own finitude.”66 In other words, it is easier to imagine the end of
the world, a “purification by fire,” as Mbembe puts it, than to share it with others. 67

Their theory of the world is wrong and racist – every time you here Emory say liberal economic
growth you should think Whiteness – it relies on Western conceptions of sovereignty, racializes
depictions of anarchy absent Western values, and assumes a White, rational neoliberal subject at
the core of decision making – this propagates both instability and imperialism through the cloak of
liberal restraint. “But we’re reflexive” is the link – the attempts to mystify IRs racist origins is
nothing more than an upgrade in its efficiency that constitutes and epistemology of White
ignorance. You should over-correct against the enormous White Privilege that dominates their
scholarship and refuse framework arguments that weigh the plan as a form of white silencing of
critique.
Hobson 22 – Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, PhD from the LSE [John,
“Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory,” Security Dialogue
2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20, Security Dialogue 2022, Vol. 53(1) 3 –20, DKP]

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose1: Racism as shapeshifter – The polymorphous cycles of racism in everyday life
and world politics

While liberal conceptions construct a progressive-evolutionary vision of world politics wherein racism gradually
evaporates as the bright sunlight of modernity intensifies, nevertheless, numerous critical race scholars point to a
recurring dark cycle of racial control that marks the long history of modernity (e.g. Alexander, 2012: 20–58; Bonilla-
Silva, 2018: 17–52; Omi and Winant, 2014: 84–91; Perry, 2007). Focusing on the United States, Michelle Alexander
(2012: 21) asserts that
racial history . . . is highly adaptable [or polymorphous]. The rules and reasons the political system employs to
enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged. The
valiant efforts to abolish slavery and Jim Crow and to achieve greater racial equality have brought about
significant changes in the legal framework of American society – new ‘rules of the game,’ so to speak. These
new rules have been justified by new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus, while producing
many of the same results. This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel has dubbed ‘[racist] preservation
through transformation,’ is the process through which white privilege is maintained , though the rules and
rhetoric change.
This ‘Groundhog Day’ cycle entails pyrrhic moments of black victory being subsequently rolled back by a white
backlash whereby white racial control is reasserted once more, albeit in a new guise, thereby rendering the liberal
conception of a temporal movement of linear progress towards black liberation/justice as but a Whiggish construct.
For racism is a polymorphous shapeshifter, crystallizing in different guises over time but retaining its oppressive
properties. Accordingly, it is not that racism is progressively undermined over time but that its outward appearance
becomes progressively more hidden, camouflaged or sublimated – at least in the eyes of white people.
In the United States, the era of Reconstruction entailed the end of slavery in 1865, together with the 14th Amendment
(prohibition of states from denying due process and equal protection under the law), the 15th Amendment (the right to
vote regardless of race) and the Ku Klux Klan Acts (which declared interference with voting regardless of race as a
federal offence). But these progressive initiatives led on directly to a white backlash. In particular, the Southern states
sought to circumvent these progressive initiatives while the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) backed up the states’
reactionary activities through the organization’s sustained campaign of racist terrorism. Woodrow Wilson (1901: 11)
typified this racist episteme when he argued that ‘the first practical result of the Reconstruction under the Acts of 1867
was the disenfranchisement . . . of the better whites and the consequent giving over of the Southern governments into
the hands of the negroes’. Moreover, he dog-whistled to the KKK when he asserted that ‘the white men of the South
were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable
burdens of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interests of [Negro]
adventurers’ (Wilson, 1902: 58).
It was not long before the North retreated from the South to leave black people at the mercy of the white backlash via
the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Nothing changed until after World War II, with the next transformational-
moment-cum-pyrrhic-victory coming exactly 100 years after the 13th Amendment (the abolition of black slavery)
through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the death of Jim Crow was followed by a renewed white backlash that forged
a New Jim Crow era that has remained up to the present (Alexander, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2018). And this ‘new’ era
gained its legitimacy by dressing racism in more neutral cultural clothing while maintaining racial oppression. Thus, in
this New Jim Crow era, the matrix of white power ensured that the black man would be held back not because of his
inferior genes but by his inferior culture, though the ‘invisible empire’ of the KKK remained intact, albeit much
diminished.
This American racial cycle comprises a microcosm of the wider cycle that has played out across the West. Thus, in the
18th and 19th centuries, the entwined discourses of scientific racism and manifest cultural racism underpinned the
identity of the West, with both developing during and especially after the Atlantic slave trade. Liberal visions emphasize
the ‘benign’ Western humanitarian drive, with the British termination of the slave trade in 1807 constituting the
inception of a long, progressive process of black liberation from racial oppression. But this is problematic because Britain
is celebrated for in effect putting out a fire that the British and other Europeans had started. Even so, the British did not
put out the fire, because the ensuing white backlash saw racism and racist imperialism deepen after the end of the
British slave trade, while the latter morphed into the highly oppressive indentured labour trade.
For many liberals at the time (e.g. Mitrany, 1933), the Paris Peace Conference and the creation of the League of Nations
Mandate System was viewed as another turning point in the progressive liberation of black and brown people. However,
in addition to Woodrow Wilson’s well-known rejection of the Japanese delegation’s proposal for a racial-equality clause,
his prior enunciation of the principle of sovereignty in his (1918) Fourteen Points speech that triggered emancipatory
hopes in the hearts of the colonized peoples turns out to have applied only to Eastern Europe and Wilson was
categorically opposed to awarding sovereignty to non-Western polities. Surely, though, Wilson stood behind the
‘humanitarian’ Mandate system? Indeed he did, but only because the system was founded on the racist-imperial idea of
‘trusteeship’ that had first been explicitly conceived at the 1884 Berlin conference as the guiding principle of European
imperialism in Africa. For this conception rested on the paternalist-racist assumption that the uncivilized races were not
yet ready to rule themselves and therefore must be held under imperial trusteeship until they had ‘grown up’ (i.e.
become Western). Once again, the Western mandate of racial-imperial oppression remained fully intact during the
interwar period.
The next key ‘turning point’ occurs in the 1945–1960 period, when decolonization was allegedly bequeathed by the
gracious hand of the benign West. Apart from the fact that decolonization was won by the nationalist movements
against the resistance of the colonial powers, the subsequent postcolonial era has witnessed a continuation of racist
practices, albeit in the camouflaged guise of subliminal cultural-racist concepts such as US hegemony and Western
humanitarian intervention. But while one might anticipate that the task of (orthodox) international
relations/international political economy scholars should be to deconstruct such subliminal cultural racism, it turns out
that they have, albeit unwittingly, given it succour, as the next two sections explain.
Cycles of racism in orthodox international relations theory
The core point is that racism is a shapeshifter in that its outward expression or modality changes over time while its
underlying structure remains the same. Before 1945 both scientific racism and ‘manifest’ cultural racism focused
explicitly on race as a core category, while after 1945 race disappears from international relations theory’s gaze and its
conceptual repertoire. In particular, 1945 is conventionally viewed as the watershed moment when international
relations jettisoned scientific and manifest cultural racism. In this narrative, the West’s ensuing ‘colonial racist guilt
syndrome’ prompted the social sciences to ‘make amends’ by replacing the dark old racist Weltanschauung with a
bright new non-racist worldview in which the post-1945 international relations discipline came to embrace a value-free,
positivistic posture through which the pernicious phenomena of racial hatred and imperialism are thought to have
been finally and mercifully exorcized . But the reality saw the creation of a brave new worldview in which explicit
racism (scientific and manifest cultural racism) indeed died out in the halls of the academy and were replaced not by
‘non-racist cultural pluralism’ but by subliminal cultural-racist monism that appears on first blush as socially acceptable
given that it no longer talks about race and its associated tropes (Hobson, 2012: 185186, 319–322). Thus, in subliminal
cultural racism, Western academics did indeed distance themselves from the old explicit racist tropes but reaffirmed
them in whitewashed terms that dare not speak their name.
Thus, ‘white supremacism’ was replaced by the core modus operandi of Western universalism (a.k.a. ‘Western
superiority’) and, albeit implicitly, white normality; racial hierarchy alongside the racial standard of civilization were
replaced by the proxies of cultural-institutional hierarchy and the Western market standard of civilization; ‘civilization
versus barbarism/savagery’ was replaced by ‘tradition versus modernity’ or ‘developed versus undeveloped
economies’; ‘barbaric Oriental despotisms’ morphed into the tropes of ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil’ on the basis
that such states would not reciprocate according to the ‘civilized norms’ of (Western) international law and (Western-
based) ‘international society’, while ‘savage anarchies’ morphed into ‘failed states’ on the basis that they could not
reciprocate. And last, but not least, the old colonial denial of non-Western state sovereignty was replaced by the
construct of ‘conditional sovereignty’ in the postcolonial era, while imperial intervention was replaced by (the ‘civilizing
mission’ of) US hegemony, intervention by international financial institutions and humanitarian intervention.
Accordingly, orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken the shift from explicit racism to subliminal
cultural racism for one that marks the transition from racism to non-racist, value free ‘scientific positivism’. Critical
race theorists view this transition as one in which cultural difference masquerades as tolerant cultural pluralism but
that, in reality, is ‘racism in disguise’ (Balibar, 1991; Barker, 1981; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Henderson, 2013; Hunt, 1987;
McCarthy, 2009; Miles, 1993; Omi and Winant, 2014; Perry, 2007; Salter, 2002; Vitalis, 2000, 2015). Thus, speaking of
the post-1945 substitution of cultural difference for racial difference, Richard Perry (2007: 216) concludes that ‘the
terms may change, perhaps giving the impression that the old [racial] problems have disappeared, when in fact they
have merely acquired protective coloration through semantic camouflage’. Or, again, ‘the demise of scientific racism
in its evolutionary-biological form did not mean the end of racist thinking in scholarly discourse altogether. A new,
post-biological modality of neo-racism is now widespread in social science’ (McCarthy, 2009: 91). This cultural
modality has also been termed ‘racism lite’ or ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2018).
Thus, the evolution of international relations theory has mirrored the generic shifts in the practice of racism in
everyday life and in world politics given that the discipline’s racism has been hidden behind a non-racist mask after
1945. Unmasking modern international relations theory reveals its emphasis on cultural difference as a proxy for non-
white racial inferiority and white Western superiority. Thus, white international relations theorists often wear a ‘non-
racist mask’ in order to make their cultural-racist theories appear socially palatable in the so-called cultural-pluralist
postcolonial era. Accordingly, all that has really changed since 1945 is that the old racist Jim Crow laws that
international theory originally conceptualized became sublimated or ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Henderson, 2013;
Rutazibwa, 2020; Vitalis, 2000), having morphed into the ‘New (subliminal) Jim Crow laws’ of modern analyses of the
global economy/interstate system. Uncovering this long temporal passage that links the past with the present means
that the discipline has a fabricated detachment with the racist ghosts of its past (as Bryony Vince put it to me in private
conversation). What, then, of the racist double move that modern orthodox international relations theories perform
when analysing world politics/global political economy?
Revealing the racist double move of orthodox international relations theory
The giveaway concerning the racist foundations of modern international relations theory lies not simply in what it
does say but as much in what it does not. Thus, to postcolonialism’s rhetorical question as to whether racism has
played an important role in structuring world politics past and present, the orthodox reply is simply ‘nothing to see
here’. This first racist move, which evacuates and whitewashes the presence of racism in world politics past and
present, is complemented by the second, in which international relations theory advances a racist analysis of world
politics/global political economy but in subliminal cultural language that appears as value-free and ‘racially neutral’.
To illustrate this double move, I shall draw on examples from my current research (Hobson and Odijie, forthcoming) and
from elsewhere.
The neorealist vision of the Cold War comprises a Western zone of relative peace and stability that ensues from
bipolarity or US hegemony or the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). But such ‘peace and stability’ was only
rendered possible because of the racist decision by the superpowers to outsource war to the ‘inferior’ and
expendable ‘wastelands’ of the Global South, which constituted a safety valve that could prevent direct nuclear
conflict from erupting between the USA and the USSR. Thus, ‘it appears that cold war history has a concentric
conceptual organization, consisting of a “formal” history of relative peace in the center and “informal” violence in the
periphery’ (Kwon, 2010: 155; see also Persaud, 2016). Moreover, ‘in a historical sense – and especially when seen from
the South – the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means. . . For the Third World, the
continuum of which the Cold War forms a part did not start in 1945, or even 1917, but in 1878 – with the [Congress] of
Berlin that divided Africa between European imperialist powers’ (Westad, 2007: 396). This Western neo-imperialism
also takes us back to the future of America’s racist-colonial drive in the 19th and early 20th centuries (see Go, 2011;
Hunt, 1987). But all of this necessarily flies under neorealism’s ontological radar scanner given its evacuation of social
process through its reification of the structural logic of anarchy that is coupled with the deployment of the
Eurocentric/racist method of ‘analytical bifurcation’, wherein racist-imperial processes are bracketed out and silenced
in favour of focusing solely on intra-Western white activities (Go, 2016: 89–92, 104–110).
This first move is complemented by neorealism’s second, wherein a subliminal cultural-racist theory is applied to
analysing world politics. Notable here is that European empires constituted subsystems hierarchies in which the
dominant hyper-sovereign colonial power stood atop of the colonies that were denied sovereignty. But Waltz’s
reification of international anarchy is triply problematic, first because this conception replicates the old scientific-
racist conception of ‘tropical anarchy’ ( Henderson, 2013; Sampson, 2002; compare Lynch, 2019: 277); second, because
Waltz sanitizes or evacuates hierarchy from world politics, thereby conjuring Western colonialism and its practices of
genocide, the Atlantic slave trade, land appropriation and labour exploitation together with its neo-imperialist
successor into thin air (Hobson, 2012: 203–208; Sabaratnam, 2020); and, third, Waltz’s claim that sovereign states are
the dominant form of polity under modern anarchy is undermined by the presence of colonial hierarchy before the
very recent era of decolonization wherein the only sovereign states that existed were Western. Accordingly, Waltz’s
move serves to let Western imperialism off the moral hook, thereby reflecting an ‘epistemology of ignorance’
(Sabaratnam, 2020: 20–21; see also Mills, 2007). Interestingly, we find an evacuation and naturalization of Western
empire in the classical realist work of Hans Morgenthau (Hobson, 2012: 188–190; Salter, 2002: 117) and other realists,
which leads Nicolas Guilhot (2014) to talk of ‘imperial realism’.
By contrast, Robert Gilpin’s neorealist hegemonic stability theory embraces a normative (direct) imperialism that is
dressed up in terms that dare not speak its name (Hobson, 2012: 193–203). Gilpin (1987) differentiates hegemons from
empires, where the latter exploit non-Western states while the former help them through the hegemon’s self-sacrificial
provision of global public goods. But the paternalist sign of US hierarchical hegemony is that it supposedly uplifts
states around the world, with East Asian states singled out as the most egregious and ungrateful free riders that
benefit most from hegemonic largesse. Thus, what Gilpin misses is that the conception of uplift reconvenes Britain’s
paternalist-imperial civilizing mission of the 19th century, though this elision is inevitable given that he re-visions the
British Empire as a benign liberal hegemon. Significantly, Niall Ferguson (2004) effectively reconvenes Gilpin’s argument,
though he talks explicitly about the benign liberal imperialism of Britain and America. Moreover, this benign conception
that reflects an epistemology of ignorance effectively boils off the coercive side of empire in the subliminal cultural-
racist distillation process, thereby providing an apologia for Anglo-Saxon imperialism.
Similar cultural racist logics play out in liberalism (see Hobson, 2012: 216–222, 285–310). While the normative (direct)
imperialist posture that is found in John Rawls’s (1999) The Law of Peoples is a very obvious example (Hobson, 2012:
292–295), nevertheless the hard test-case here is that of neoliberal institutionalism. The received wisdom is that
neoliberal institutionalism presents a genuinely ‘universal’ picture or flattened ontology of all states learning to
cooperate in order to enhance their gains. But it turns out that, in After Hegemony, Keohane (1984) confines this
process to Western states (as did Norman Angell before him). Moreover, absent here is a historical sociological analysis
that would reveal the hierarchical-imperial contexts that have driven both Western unity (Sabaratnam, 2020: 25) and
the global process by which unequal gains accrue to the West at the expense of the non-West. Paradoxically,
constructivists critique neoliberal institutionalism for its rational actor model by asserting that interests are not a priori
but are formed through socialization. However, a close reading of Keohane’s book reveals that it is Western norms and
identity that socialize Western states into cooperating (Keohane, 1984: 5–7, 43, 182). Accordingly, Keohane not only
looks specifically at Western states as the successful actors, but argues that they take specifically Western cultural
values such as democracy and liberal capitalism to the table before they enter iterated prisoner’s dilemma games
(Keohane, 1984: 182).
One of several (direct) neo-imperialist cues in Keohane’s work emerges from his approval of US hegemonic intervention
and intervention by international financial institutions in the Global South as a means of extending complex
interdependence across the world. But here the international financial institutions act as paternalist neo-imperial
vehicles for the cultural conversion of non-Western states along Western neoliberal capitalist lines via the imposition
of neoliberal conditionality and structural adjustment programmes. Moreover, the notorious resentment that these
programmes have invoked in many non-Western states, all of which disappears in Keohane’s analysis, takes us back to
the future of the ‘unequal treaties’ that emerged under Britain’s informal imperialism in the 19th century, much as the
paternalist role of the international financial institutions finds its historical parallel with the League of Nations Mandate
System (Anghie, 2005: 245272). And, finally, Keohane’s approval of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the 19th and 20th
centuries returns us to the problems that I discussed above vis-a-vis hegemonic stability theory (see also Sabaratnam,
2020: 18–19).
A notable example of an indirect imperialist approach is found in the neoliberal theory of globalization, which
rehabilitates the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and his aversion to empire (e.g. Friedman, 2000). But there are three
subliminal neo-imperialist cues here, the first comprising Friedman’s (2000: 101–111) argument that non-Western
states have no choice but to ‘don the golden straitjacket’, which requires them to adopt Western neoliberal-capitalist
architectures. Having to become Western means that the theory smuggles informal imperialism in through the
backdoor of its Western universalism. Second, by subscribing to the ontological proposition that ‘the world is flat’
(Friedman, 2007), the neoliberal theory of globalization conjures Western imperial/neo-imperial hierarchy and racial
capitalism into thin air, thereby naturalizing rather than problematizing these phenomena via the epistemology of
white ignorance. And, third, because Friedman focuses on rational individuals whose interests are a priori and whose
social identity is irrelevant to individual behaviour, racism and racialized capitalism are whitewashed from the global
economy.
Surely constructivism fares much better given its ability to highlight international racial norms? Not only has much of it
ignored racism in world politics but the few constructivists who have considered it argue that racism was left behind in
world politics after 1945 (Finnemore, 2003; Klotz, 1995), much as imperialism was supposedly outlawed by the UN in
1960. This whitewashing of racism and imperialism from modern world politics not only reflects the illusion that
subliminal cultural racism projects but is also a vital move because it allows liberal constructivists to portray Western
humanitarian interventionism and liberal peacebuilding/state-building as a non-racist/ non-imperial project that
saves oppressed non-Western peoples. It is here that we encounter a subliminal cultural-racist paternalism that
presents the West as the white saviour of the inferior non-Western societies – thereby rehabilitating the 19th-century
conception of the white man’s burden and the civilizing mission – and where the West is (re)presented as the altruistic
paternalist father of the non-West (Hobson, 2012: 302–305). Moreover, in this liberal imaginary of ignorance, the
notion that peacebuilding/state-building is initiated as a means of eradicating the threat of the deviant non-Western
Other disappears from view, as does the legacy of Western empire that created some of the core problems in non-
Western states that prompted intervention in the first place (for further postcolonial critiques of liberal constructivism,
see Sabaratnam, 2020; Sampson, 2002; Vitalis, 2000).
Liberal constructivism buys into the cultural-racist idea that all progressive actions in the world are initiated by the
universal West ‘on behalf of global humanity’. For example, it is the benign West that has single-handedly brought
human rights to the world via the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here international relations’ ‘non-racist
mask’ slips conspicuously, given that the Western great powers did their utmost at the United Nations to keep human
rights off the global agenda for fear of diluting white supremacy and white normality in world politics and within
Western societies. For it was various non-Western delegates at the UN that pursued human rights most fervently
while their Western counterparts mobilized the defensive prerogative of sovereign independence to insulate their
states from future criticism given that human rights were denied to minorities within their constituent societies,
particularly native Americans and black African Americans in the United States. Thus, Western racist motivations and
the progressive role of nonWestern agency in advancing the cause of human rights in world politics have been
airbrushed out of the liberal-constructivist picture. And, in turn, this serves to retain the chimera of the purely
progressive non-racist West and the regressive non-West. Equally as egregious is that the role of the West in the
denial of human rights to non-Western peoples in the first place is somehow written out of the narrative. Still, much
of this is perhaps unavoidable given that liberal-constructivist international relations tends ontologically to divorce
power from norms in world politics and epistemologically segregates power from knowledge.
Are orthodox scholars intentionally racist? Racist impact over intention
The case for intentionality is that it is no coincidence that the shift from scientific racism to subliminal cultural racism in
orthodox international relations/international political economy theory mirrored the trajectory of racism in everyday life
and world politics. My hunch, though, is that international relations theory’s racism is unintentional given that the
overwhelming majority of orthodox international relations scholars are most probably non-racist (but not anti-racist) in
their private lives. But orthodox international relations scholars have mistaken a critique of their implication in
structural racism for an allegation of interpersonal racism. This epistemology of, or move to, innocence links directly
to the self-deluded heart of the orthodoxy. For there are all manner of built-in cloaking devices that mask the racism
and whiteness of orthodox international relations theories from the eyes of their advocates. International relations’
‘non-racist mask’ has at least four mystificatory layers.
The first layer (or cloaking device) is that racism in orthodox international relations/international political economy
theory is manifested in cultural rather than biological terms , thereby appearing as outwardly non-racist (given the
mistaken popular belief that racism is inherently biological). The second layer of mystification is that cultural racism
takes on a hidden or subliminal guise (which exorcizes race as an ontological category from world politics), thereby
making such racism much harder to detect. Aggregating these two layers together leads white international
relations/international political economy scholars to buy into the self-deluded rhetoric that their theories are racist-free.
Pertinent here is Blaut’s (1992: 296) characterization of the social sciences since 1950 as ‘so much [subliminal cultural]
racism yet so few racists’ (see also Memmi, [1982] 2000: 3).
This mystification is ultimately secured by the third layer of the mask that constitutes the problem of blindness to
white privilege. For not being on the end of racism’s pernicious effects means that, unlike non-whites, many white
academics tend quite naturally to downplay its existence (see Lake, 2016). An obvious example of this lies with the
everyday performance of driving from A to B. For the vast majority of white drivers are able to travel safe in the
knowledge that they will not be stopped by the police unless they have been unlucky enough to have been caught
breaking the speed limit. By contrast, many black drivers consider themselves lucky if they are not stopped by the
police when they have respected the speed limit. Such blindness to white privilege feeds directly into the unreflexive
propensity to deny the presence of whiteness and racism in both the theory and practice of orthodox international
relations/international political economy (Peterson, 2021; Sabaratnam, 2020: 5). For the ingeniousness of white
privilege is that it renders such privilege invisible. Thus, white people are effectively taught not to notice racism and
their role in reproducing it (McIntosh, 2020). Which, in turn, fuels the tendency of the privileged to reject, if not
protest vehemently, the accusation of racism in the social sciences – as in the aforementioned spat between Pankaj
Mishra and Niall Ferguson (see Mishra, 2011). All of which undermines the prospect of addressing, let alone
redressing, the problem at stake.
Thus, while a fifth great debate concerning the Eurocentric racism of orthodox international relations/international
political economy is long overdue, unfortunately the chances of it occurring are slim to zero. This is partly because
intradisciplinary dialogue between international relations’ orthodox and critical wings has completely broken down
(De Carvalho et al., 2011), and partly because a simmering ‘white silence’ of denial is the most likely ‘response’ (see,
Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020). Strikingly, it is now some two decades since Robert Vitalis (2000) wrote his seminal article, but
still the tumbleweed of white silence blows deafeningly past my window. However, were an explicit response to be
forthcoming, two entwined paradoxes might emerge here, the first being that it would most likely accuse my argument
of being angry, hysterical and outlandish, wherein ‘Eurocentrism’ is deemed to be the calm/rational ‘standard of
common sense’ – the paradox being that rather than engaging with the substance of my critique, such a response would
likely comprise an angry ad hominem attack on the accuser and the journal for publishing such an article. And the
second paradox is that while most orthodox scholars abhor ‘cancel culture’, it turns out that engaging in an ad hominem
attack serves merely to shut down debate on this vital issue. That is, an ad hominem attack on the accuser is merely
another form of cancel culture. Still, both such ‘responses’ would reinforce my argument given that ‘white silence’,
‘white rage’ and ‘white denial’ are manifestations of white privilege (see Ryde, 2019; Saad, 2020: 40–45; Sabaratnam,
2020; Peterson, 2021).
A fourth cloaking device is that pre-1945 orthodox international theory has been put through an ahistorical
deracination laundering process to reappear in whitewashed form, fit for consumption in the ‘cultural pluralist’ post-
1945 era. And because post-1945 international relations theory is (re)presented as non-racist so the laundering of its
pre-1945 predecessor means that international theory in the last three centuries is (re)presented as universally racist-
free. In this sleight-of-hand manoeuvre, the racist underpinnings of pre-1945 liberal and realist theories are filtered
out or conjured away, leaving only their claims about states or geopolitics or interdependence that are
transmogrified into ‘objective universalist’ propositions. In the liberal pantheon, two examples are pertinent. First is
Norman Angell, who is (re)presented as a key theorist of liberal interdependence and the peaceful benefits it provides
rather than as the paternalist-Eurocentric/cultural racist that he was, given his fundamental belief in international
hierarchy and the positive need for the British Empire to promote harmonious global interdependence by acting as the
civilizer of the barbaric and savage East (see Hobson, 2012: 40–45). Second is the reconstruction of Woodrow Wilson,
who is recast as the founding father of 20th-century progressive liberal internationalism, based as ‘it is’ on anti-
imperialism, sovereignty and self-determination for all states rather than on what ‘it was’ – a Lamarckian racist vision
comprising a pro-Western imperialist stance and a denial of nonWestern state sovereignty that was coupled with strong
racial immigration controls and anti-black initiatives at home (see Hobson, 2012: 167–175). Similarly, pre-1945 realists
typically mentioned in international relations textbooks include Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder and occasionally
Nicholas Spykman, all of whom are (re)presented as geopolitical-realist thinkers that analysed spatial conceptions of
world power rather than as Lamarckian scientific racists who advocated Western imperialism to contain the marauding
‘barbaric’ non-Western peril and whose mentor was the scientific-racist thinker Friedrich Ratzel (see Hobson, 2012: 123–
130, 156–158).
Critically, this laundering process extends across all aspects of pre-1945 international relations. Thus, it becomes (but
should no longer be) a revelation to learn that early international relations was primarily concerned about inter-racial
relations; that the claim that international relations emerged formally in 1919 with the noble desire to solve the problem
of war elides its earlier origins, which revolved around maintaining white Western global supremacy and racist empire
together with the normative study of ‘effective’ colonial administration; that the journal Foreign Affairs was originally
called the Journal of Race Development; and that the International Studies Conference at the League of Nations, which
set up the subject matter of international relations in the 1930s under the leadership of Alfred Zimmern, grounded its
syllabi in normative Western imperialism and racism (see Acharya and Buzan, 2019; Ashworth, 2014; Bell, 2016; De
Carvalho et al., 2011; Henderson, 2013; Hobson, 2012; Kristensen, 2021; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Lynch, 2019; Schmidt,
1998; Schmidt and Guilhot, 2019; Thakur and Vale, 2019; Vitalis, 2000, 2005, 2015). That orthodox international
relations scholars persist in ignoring these arguments in the face of a now substantial body of literature that has
emerged over the last two decades means that this pervading silence can no longer be excused as the product of an
innocent ‘historical amnesia’ . Rather, this silence points clearly to the white denial of international relations’ racist
origins wherein the non-racist mask slips most conspicuously, thereby constituting an actual example of orthodox
international relations’ version of cancel culture.
However, except for in the above context, ‘intentionality’ is not the issue that the racist charge hinges upon given that
most international relations/international political economy theorists are unintentionally racist. What matters,
therefore, is racist impact regardless of intention. And to conclude this article more generally, it would be folly to
presume that if only the Eurocentric rather than the racist charge were levied against the orthodox mainstream then ‘all
would not be lost’. For the E-word cannot be used as a ‘get out of racist jail free’ card.

Emory’s fears of Chinese tech rise relies on racialized tropes of Yellow Peril which frames Asians as
sub-human, unfeeling aliens whose technological success poses a threat that justifies racialized
violence
Siu and Chun 20 – * Associate Professor Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Chinese Diaspora, Cultural
Citizenship, Cultural Politics of Food, Diaspora / Transnationalism; Asians in the Americas, Ethnography PhD,
Anthropology, Stanford University, MA, Anthropology, Stanford University, BA, Anthropology, minor in Ethnic Studies,
University of California, Berkeley **Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic
Studies, 19-2020 recipient of The Catherine and William L. Magistretti Graduate Fellowship, B.A. in Politics and Social
and Cultural Analysis from New York University. [Lok, Claire, Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time of Covid-
19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare, Journal of Asian American Studies,
Volume 23, Number 3, October 2020, pp. 421-440 (Article), DKP]

Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism

The term yellow peril emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to Japan’s arrival to the geopolitical stage as a
formidable military and industrial contender to the Western powers of Europe and the United States.9 The concept was
further elaborated and given a tangible racial form through Sax Rohmer’s series of novels and films that provided the
early content for the social imaginary of “yellow peril” along with its personification in the character of Dr. Fu Manchu,
the iconic supervillain archetype of the Asian “evil criminal genius,” and his cast of minions.10 Strikingly, Dr. Fu
Manchu’s characterization as evil, criminal, and genius continues to inform the racial trope of the Asian scientist spy;
and more recently, we may add to the list the bioengineer, the CFO, the international graduate student, to name just a
few. Moreover, the notion of the non-differentiable “yellow” masses continues to function as a homogenizing and
dehumanizing device of Asian racialization, which makes possible the transference of Sinophobia to Asian xenophobia.
In its inherent attempt to construct a racial other, “yellow peril” is more a projection of Western fear than a
representation of an Asian object/subject, and in this sense, it may be better understood as a repository of racial
affect that can animate a myriad of representational figures, images, and discourses, depending on context. Indeed,
the images and discourses of yellow peril have surfaced multiple times throughout the twentieth century, capturing a
multitude of ever-shifting perceived threats that range from the danger of military intrusion (i.e., Japanese Americans
during WWII), economic competition (i.e., Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century, Japan in the 1980s), Asian
moral and cultural depravity (i.e., non-Christian heathens, Chinese prostitutes, opium smokers), to biological inferiority
(i.e., effeminacy, disease carriers). As Colleen Lye observes, “the incipient ‘yellow peril’ refers to a particular
combinatory kind of anticolonial [and anti-West] nationalism, in which the union of Japanese technological advance and
Chinese numerical mass confronts Western civilization with a potentially unbeatable force.”11 Arguably, the yellow peril
of today represents heightened Western anxieties around China’s combined forces of population size, global
economic growth, and rapid technological-scientific innovation—all of which emerge from a political system that is
considered ideologically oppositional to ours. The current context, we suggest, is best understood through the lens of
techno-Orientalism.
When the idea of techno-Orientalism first appeared in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s analysis of why Japan occupied
such a threatening position in Western imagination in the late 1980s, techno-Orientalism offered a framework to make
sense of the technologically imbued racist stereotypes of Japan/the Japanese that were emerging within the context
of Western fears and anxieties around Japan’s ascendancy as a technological global power. They proposed that if
technological advancement has been crucial to Western civilizational progress, then Japan’s technological superiority
over the West also signals a critical challenge to Western hegemony, including its cultural authority to control
representations of the West and its “others.” They claimed that the shifting balance in global power—the West’s loss of
technological preeminence—has induced an identity crisis in the West. In response, techno-Orientalism, in which
“[idioms of technology] become structured into the discourse of Orientalism,” is produced in large part to discipline
Japan and its rise to techno-economic power.12 The United States, for instance, externalized its anxiety into
xenophobic projections of Japan as a “culture that is cold, impersonal, and machine-like” in which its people are “sub-
human” and “unfeeling aliens.” 13 Techno-Orientalism, born from the “Japan Panic,” was effectively consolidated
through and around political-economic concerns that frame Japanese and, by extension, Asian techno-capitalist
progress as dangerous and dystopian.
Extending Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism,14 techno-Orientalism marks a geo-historical shift where the West no
longer has control over the terms that define the East—the “Orient”—as weak, inferior, and subordinate to the West.
It marks a shift not only in political-economic power but also in cultural authority. Techno-Orientalism, then, is the
expressive vehicle (cultural productions and visual representations) by which Western and Eastern nations articulate
their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony
through economic trade and scientific innovation.15
Analogous to Japan’s position in the late 1980s, China currently figures into the techno-Orientalist imaginary as a
powerful competitor in mass production, a global financial giant, and an aggressive investor in technological,
infrastructural, and scientific developments. At the same time, the increasing purchasing power of China provokes
American fear of a future global market that is economically driven by Chinese consumptive desires and practices. It is
this duality—the domination of both production and consumption across different sectors of the techno-capitalist global
economy—that undergirds American anxieties of a sinicized future .16
Further amplifying these anxieties around Chinese techno-economic domination is our imagination of China /the
Chinese as the ultimate yellow peril , whose state ideology is oppositional to that of the United States and whose
unmatched population size combined with its economic expansion and technological advancements may actually
pose a real challenge to U.S. global hegemony. We turn now to examine how the ideology of yellow peril is manifesting
in the current context of techno-Orientalism, beginning first with an analysis of the racial trope of “Chinese as
contagion” and its connection to anti-Asian aggression.

Their attempt to model China’s desires is connected to a global process of control through
modulating China’s tech development coalesces imperial violence
Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 19. Nick Dyer-Witheford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information
and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario and Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media
Analysis in the School of Communication. “Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism.” March
2019. cut by vikas bbyyy
This is not the place for a detailed examination of the political economy of "postsocialist" nations (Lane 2014). In the
USSR, the orgy of privatization and the chaos of shocktherapy marketization after 1991 have been followed under Putin
by a new period of nationalization, in which oligarchic capitalists operate under supervision of, and overlap with, state
elites in a context of market exchange (Worth 2005; Pirani 2010; Dzarasov 2014; Sakwa 2014). In the more complex case
of the People's Republic of China, the party apparatus has maintained control of some "commanding heights" of the
economy, even as other domains are handed over to private ownership, including both foreign and domestic investors.
Some commentators see China's arrangements as tantamount to full subsumption with the world market (Li 2009;
HartLandsberg 2013); others consider that a "left turn" from within the party apparatus could reestablish a socialist
project (Amin 2013). At the moment, the latter possibility seems remote. In Russia, China, and other postsocialist
countries, the wage organizes production, the responsibilities of the state for provision of public services have typically
been diminished, and there are vast income gulfs between workers in and owners of the means of production.
Corruption is often rife. Political elites are either identical with, entangled in, or dependent on capital ownership, and
although these elites must in various ways manage, mobilize, and hegemonize public opinion, their fractions define the
agenda of policy decisions, and perhaps especially foreign policy decisions. Thus discussions of international relations in
terms of the intentions or desires of "China" or "Russia" - as, of course, of the "United States," "Canada," "Ukraine,"
"Saudi Arabia," or any other capitalist nation - must be understood as shorthand metonymic mystification of ruling-
class power. Cyberwar has therefore emerged as a topic of global concern at a moment when the teleological certainties
of Marxism seem broken or reduced to cruel caricature. This is not a coincidence. As we will argue, the emergence of
cybernetics from the military-industrial complex of the United States at the end of the Second Word War was an
important part of that nation's ascent as a new imperial leader for the capitalist system. Computers and networks,
both in their military and economic applications, played an important role in eventual U.S. victory over the USSR in the
Cold War. And their extension into electronic commodities, industrial automation, supply-chain logistics, and financial
trading was a crucial part of the globalization in which a reinvigorated capitalism from 1989 on disseminated itself
around the planet, under the shelter of the global hegemon's cruise missiles, smart weapons, and satellite
intelligence. This armed pacification of a world market has, however, not had the finality many expected. Rather,
it has generated new wars, of two major types, both misnamed and ill defined but each a consequence of capital's
global triumph over its socialist opponents. The "war on terror" is, of course, the conventional and ideologically laden
name for the protracted sequence of conflicts set in motion when mujahideen, armed and financed by the United States
and its Saudi Arabian ally to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, turned on its imperial patron with the destruction of
the World Trade Center in 2001. These conflicts, centered on the Middle East but radiating across the
planet, include the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; world-distributed terrorist attacks; and counterterrorist
operations across Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Mali, Libya, and many other theaters. If the "war
on terror" is sometimes colloquially used to include the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this craven acceptance of the spurious
rationalizations offered by the Bush administration could be only retroactively justified, as U.S. occupation generated
first both Sunni and Shia insurgency and later, in its aftermath, the rise of ISIS. This so-called war on terror
interpenetrates other regional conflicts, such as those in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, Russian actions in
Chechnya, and Saudi Arabia's intensifying clashes with Iran in Yemen  and elsewhere, and also overlaps with
Israel's constant operations against Palestinians, wars with neighbors, and determination to maintain its
regional monopoly of nuclear weapons. It is not our aim here to map the noxious vectors of the "war on terror," only to
highlight how its mutating fronts have been a bleeding edge for the development and use of
cyberweaponry, in counterinsurgency operations, domestic surveillance, and digital strikes and sabotage against
nuclear weapons facilities.

“Treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The alternative is to reject the 1AC by de-centering
and de-mythologizing Whiteness in favor of centering Blackness – that’s key to any ethical research
project – even if they win analyzing Great Powers is important, the alternative is a pre-requisite to
the plan
Sabaratnam 20 – Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS University of London, PhD and MSc from the
London School of Economics in Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy [Meera, “Is IR Theory White? Racialised
Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10/25/2020, Vol. 49(1) 3–31,
DKP] blue highlighting in tag

Beyond White Subject-Positioning in IR

Given this, what would it mean to re-imagine the study of IR in a way that attempted to overcome epistemologies of
immanence, ignorance, and innocence? While it is impossible to do justice here to the wide range of traditions that have
alternative starting points, as scholars of IR our priorities should be to (1) ‘ de-mythologise’121 and (2) ‘de-centre’ this
racialised standpoint. Both require a more sophisticated awareness of epistemological situatedness , a better global-
historical education and a wider ethical and political vocabulary and universe. It requires an alertness not just to the
intellectual contours of Eurocentrism, but the interlocking moral and epistemological consequences of White subject-
positioning. They may be animated by the abolitionist principle that ‘treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity’.122
This principle does not build the grounds for a ‘redeemed’ or ‘modified’ Whiteness but totally deconstructs it
analytically and ethically.
A ‘de-mythologising’ strategy challenges epistemologies of immanence and ignorance – the specific racialised
metahistorical narratives and myths about the exceptional, vanguardist, and progressive character of the ‘West’ and
its peoples as a point of departure for building international theory. Alternative accounts are already available to us
which emphasise the uneven but interconnected ways in which the modern international system came to be. These look
at the contributions of the ‘non-West’ to the rise of the ‘West’,123 the role of transnational networks as drivers of
development,124 the enduring role of hierarchies as an organising principle of global order,125 the colonial origins of
sovereignty practices126 and the transnational character of political thought.127 There is considerable scope for more
historically oriented work which excavates in particular the relation between the ‘colonial’ and the ‘modern’.
Another way of ‘de-mythologising’ Whiteness in IR is to re-think the discipline’s constitutive distinction between
‘war’ and ‘violence’, particularly where the coding of historical events into one or another category have been as a
result of racialised categorisations and thinking about whose deaths count, thus enabling an epistemology of
‘innocence’.128 Withholding the assumption that ‘war’ (meaning wars as recognised by and between Western powers)
rather than ‘violence’ should be studied in IR – as in peace studies, for example129 – offers considerable scope for
contemplating the rich web of interconnections and entanglements that constitute the international system, and
particularly its colonial, imperial and racialised inheritances . It is a particularly productive point of departure for
conceiving of questions of consent and sovereignty under radical inequalities of power globally, and potential shared
forms of theorising among feminist approaches,130 critical environmentalisms,131 Indigenous political thought,132
and so on.
‘De-centring’ Whiteness means not only a regional expansion of IR’s gaze but more profoundly a re-locating of its
intellectual and ethical centre of gravity away from its stories of ‘immanence’ and ‘innocence’. One way of doing this
might be, as Wynter does, to re-centre Blackness as the starting point for the embrace of the ‘human’ in all its multiple
potentialities, given that Blackness has been historically overdetermined by experiences and epistemes which locate
it at the underside of humanity. 133 This radical shaking-up of IR’s epistemological orientations would be particularly
productive in dismantling the limits identified here. This could connect them to forms of worldly politics rooted in
experiences of diasporic connectivity and suffering, and creativity and solidarity.134 These signal different sites of
sovereignty, rights, borders, and power,135 and open up questions of historical injustice, responsibility, and
reparations. It could conceive of more ‘conventional’ IR theory that began with African presence rather than
absence.136 Finally, working with and through Blackness would give an important corrective to debates on the ‘post-
human’ which have not always contemplated the racialisation of humanity in depth .137 The point here is not simply
to ‘replace’ White-centredness with Black-centredness as part of historical justice – but through re-positioning to reveal
what has been obscured about the organisation of authority, relationality, rights, obligations, materiality, and
knowledge.
Would the kind of IR theory examined here be possible with such starting points? Absolutely. A research programme
focused on ‘Great Powers’ would still be possible but be explicitly a study of empires and other polities across time and
space. It would have to embrace rather than ignore their internal diversities and forms of interconnectedness –
overall, this might lead to an abandonment of the ‘anarchy’ problematique in favour of a more positive historical
appreciation of diverse forms of authority and sociality. For a research programme interested in international co-
operation, it would have to take a wider understanding of the kinds of co-operation which are possible, the kinds of
political purposes that they underpin, and the forms of exclusion, collusion, and expropriation which are likely involved
in setting them up. This would make it impossible to study ‘institutions’ or ‘organisations’ among powerful actors in a
way which is disembedded from their political foundations. Similarly, for a research programme interested in the
emergence of forces of socialisation and collective identification, much more attention would need to be paid to the
political context and drivers of particular forms of sociality and the kinds of coercion enabled by productions of
Otherness. All such projects would be informed by that spirit of hermeneutic suspicion with which writers not
racialised as White have often greeted projections of Western civilisation.
However, it is up to the field as a whole to uphold standards of rigour which make the persistence of racialised
ignorance, immanence, and innocence impossible. What has happened over the last several decades has been a
continued asymmetry in the practice of our ‘science’, such that the profound epistemological challenges presented for
the field in a range of critical writing have been sidelined through practices of training and citation which together
reproduce a White subject-position in the discipline. The vast bulk of references to ToIP, AH, and SToIP continue to
treat them as authoritative texts. This is an institutional problem more than an epistemological one in many respects
and one that is unlikely to be solved in the near future, or at least by this generation. Identifying the logics constitutive
of Whiteness in IR theory is a necessary step towards institutional change, but no more than that. In the absence of
this change, IR theory will continue to be White.

IR – L – 2NC
1AC Maavak is explicit. The whole thesis of the AFF relies on a privileged assumption that economic
leadership is some savior of the world.
Dr. Mathew Maavak 21, PhD in Risk Foresight from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, External Researcher
(PLATBIDAFO) at the Kazimieras Simonavicius University, Expert and Regular Commentator on Risk-Related Geostrategic
Issues at the Russian International Affairs Council, “Horizon 2030: Will Emerging Risks Unravel Our Global Systems?”,
Salus Journal – The Australian Journal for Law Enforcement, Security and Intelligence Professionals, Volume 9, Number
1, p. 2-8

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst
has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implications for global
security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are
getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical,
societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight
couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis
elsewhere . The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be
sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper
concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals.

Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset

INTRODUCTION

The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food
security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
(VUCA).

Human activities within however

But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries.

are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, health care and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined .
Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker,
2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by
complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998).

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of
the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also tilting the
geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global
imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens,
2020).

An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan
and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity.

COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler
and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and
technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional
forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach.
METHODOLOGY

An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily
informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020):

• Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006);

• Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012);

• Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and

• Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions
through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources.

ECONOMY

According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a
previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown,
impacting all areas of human activity.

The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may
lead to a Second Great Depression . Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019).
Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this
chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have
contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020).

As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and
most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global
middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007).

Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments . Bullions now
carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe . After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from
the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit.

According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in
particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated
(Dudik & Tomek, 2019):

“You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something
happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.”
(Parenthesis added by author).

President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by
hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek,
2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-
denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a
considerable period.
A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power
parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system
will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The
World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016).

In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a).
We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade.

ENVIRONMENTAL

What happens to the environment when our economies implode ? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive
nuclear and chemical plants , along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents ? Economic stressors , workforce
demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to
the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation:
 The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is
a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly
unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary,
“vulnerable” or unpaid jobs.

Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In
line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo . Frazzled
workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis
(2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear
disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes
of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500
injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The
environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated.

Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather
than to mundane human activity.

Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by
the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation . This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of
computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation
workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko,
2021).

Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by
vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems,
developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications.

On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with
governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008).

The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph
into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section.

Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark

Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be

defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival.

hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a
Sword of Damocles over this decade.

GEOPOLITICAL

The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression . Since history often repeats itself , expect familiar
bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk
on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forc ing Israel to undertake reprisal
operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated
to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon
effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic.

Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war ; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the
S outh C hina S ea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies ; an India-Pakistan nuclear war ; an
Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz ; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world ; or a nuclear
confrontation between NATO and Russia . Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani
might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally
change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got
replaced.
Turns case. 1AC Sundaram and Popov’s internal link to war is about how people are discontent with
liberalism because it creates economic inequality, forcing leaders to resort to diversionary war to
maintain control over their populace.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram & Vladimir Popov 19. Former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-
General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic
Thought in 2007. Former senior economics researcher in the Soviet Union, Russia and the United Nations Secretariat, is
now Research Director at the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin “Economic Crisis Can Trigger World
War.” http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/02/economic-crisis-can-trigger-world-war/.

Economic recovery efforts since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis have mainly depended on unconventional
monetary policies. As fears rise of yet another international financial crisis, there are growing concerns about the
increased possibility of large-scale military conflict.

More worryingly, in the current political landscape, prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising economic
inequality, chauvinistic ethno-populism as well as aggressive jingoist rhetoric, including threats, could easily spin out
of control and ‘morph’ into military conflict, and worse, world war.

Crisis responses limited

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis almost ‘bankrupted’ governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers
managed to pull the world economy from the brink, but soon switched from counter-cyclical fiscal efforts to
unconventional monetary measures, primarily ‘quantitative easing’ and very low, if not negative real interest rates.

But while these monetary interventions averted realization of the worst fears at the time by turning the US economy
around, they did little to address underlying economic weaknesses, largely due to the ascendance of finance in recent
decades at the expense of the real economy. Since then, despite promising to do so, policymakers have not seriously
pursued, let alone achieved, such needed reforms.

Instead, ostensible structural reformers have taken advantage of the crisis to pursue largely irrelevant efforts to further
‘casualize’ labour markets. This lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented liquidity central banks
injected into economies has not been well allocated to stimulate resurgence of the real economy.

From bust to bubble

Instead, easy credit raised asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. US house prices are now
8% more than at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, while its price-to-earnings ratio in late 2018 was even higher
than in 2008 and in 1929, when the Wall Street Crash precipitated the Great Depression.

As monetary tightening checks asset price bubbles, another economic crisis — possibly more severe than the last, as
the economy has become less responsive to such blunt monetary interventions — is considered likely . A decade of
such unconventional monetary policies, with very low interest rates, has greatly depleted their ability to revive the
economy.

The implications beyond the economy of such developments and policy responses are already being seen. Prolonged
economic distress has worsened public antipathy towards the culturally alien — not only abroad, but also within. Thus,
another round of economic stress is deemed likely to foment unrest, conflict, even war as it is blamed on the foreign.

International trade shrank by two-thirds within half a decade after the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, at
the start of the Great Depression, ostensibly to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition!

Liberalization’s discontents
Rising economic insecurity, inequalities and deprivation are expected to strengthen ethno-populist and jingoistic
nationalist sentiments, and increase social tensions and turmoil, especially among the growing precariat and others
who feel vulnerable or threatened.

Thus, ethno-populist inspired chauvinistic nationalism may exacerbate tensions , leading to conflicts and tensions
among countries, as in the 1930s. Opportunistic leaders have been blaming such misfortunes on outsiders and may seek
to reverse policies associated with the perceived causes, such as ‘globalist’ economic liberalization.

Policies which successfully check such problems may reduce social tensions, as well as the likelihood of social turmoil
and conflict, including among countries. However, these may also inadvertently exacerbate problems. The recent spread
of anti-globalization sentiment appears correlated to slow, if not negative per capita income growth and increased
economic inequality.

To be sure, globalization and liberalization are statistically associated with growing economic inequality and rising
ethno-populism. Declining real incomes and growing economic insecurity have apparently strengthened ethno-
populism and nationalistic chauvinism, threatening economic liberalization itself , both within and among countries.

Insecurity, populism, conflict

Thomas Piketty has argued that a sudden increase in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Although
causality is difficult to prove, with wealth and income inequality now at historical highs, this should give cause for
concern.

Of course, other factors also contribute to or exacerbate civil and international tensions, with some due to policies
intended for other purposes. Nevertheless, even if unintended, such developments could inadvertently catalyse future
crises and conflicts.

Publics often have good reason to be restless, if not angry, but the emotional appeals of ethno-populism and
jingoistic nationalism are leading to chauvinistic policy measures which only make things worse.

At the international level, despite the world’s unprecedented and still growing interconnectedness, multilateralism is
increasingly being eschewed as the US increasingly resorts to unilateral, sovereigntist policies without bothering to even
build coalitions with its usual allies.

Avoiding Thucydides’ iceberg

Thus, protracted economic distress, economic conflicts or another financial crisis could lead to military confrontation
by the protagonists, even if unintended. Less than a decade after the Great Depression started, the Second World
War had begun as the Axis powers challenged the earlier entrenched colonial powers.

They patently ignored Thucydides’ warning, in chronicling the Peloponnesian wars over two millennia before, when
the rise of Athens threatened the established dominance of Sparta!

Anticipating and addressing such possibilities may well serve to help avoid otherwise imminent disasters by
undertaking pre-emptive collective action, as difficult as that may be.

Realism – L – 2NC
1AC Sundaram and Popov are applying the ancient Greek realist concept of the Thucydides Trap to
describe that conflict. **Texas reads Green**
Jomo Kwame Sundaram & Vladimir Popov 19. Former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-
General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic
Thought in 2007. Former senior economics researcher in the Soviet Union, Russia and the United Nations Secretariat, is
now Research Director at the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in Berlin “Economic Crisis Can Trigger World
War.” http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/02/economic-crisis-can-trigger-world-war/.

Economic recovery efforts since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis have mainly depended on unconventional
monetary policies. As fears rise of yet another international financial crisis, there are growing concerns about the
increased possibility of large-scale military conflict.

More worryingly, in the current political landscape, prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising economic
inequality, chauvinistic ethno-populism as well as aggressive jingoist rhetoric, including threats, could easily spin out
of control and ‘morph’ into military conflict, and worse, world war.

Crisis responses limited

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis almost ‘bankrupted’ governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers
managed to pull the world economy from the brink, but soon switched from counter-cyclical fiscal efforts to
unconventional monetary measures, primarily ‘quantitative easing’ and very low, if not negative real interest rates.

But while these monetary interventions averted realization of the worst fears at the time by turning the US economy
around, they did little to address underlying economic weaknesses, largely due to the ascendance of finance in recent
decades at the expense of the real economy. Since then, despite promising to do so, policymakers have not seriously
pursued, let alone achieved, such needed reforms.

Instead, ostensible structural reformers have taken advantage of the crisis to pursue largely irrelevant efforts to further
‘casualize’ labour markets. This lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented liquidity central banks
injected into economies has not been well allocated to stimulate resurgence of the real economy.

From bust to bubble

Instead, easy credit raised asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. US house prices are now
8% more than at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, while its price-to-earnings ratio in late 2018 was even higher
than in 2008 and in 1929, when the Wall Street Crash precipitated the Great Depression.

As monetary tightening checks asset price bubbles, another economic crisis — possibly more severe than the last, as
the economy has become less responsive to such blunt monetary interventions — is considered likely . A decade of
such unconventional monetary policies, with very low interest rates, has greatly depleted their ability to revive the
economy.

The implications beyond the economy of such developments and policy responses are already being seen. Prolonged
economic distress has worsened public antipathy towards the culturally alien — not only abroad, but also within. Thus,
another round of economic stress is deemed likely to foment unrest, conflict, even war as it is blamed on the foreign.

International trade shrank by two-thirds within half a decade after the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, at
the start of the Great Depression, ostensibly to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition!

Liberalization’s discontents

Rising economic insecurity , inequalities and deprivation are expected to strengthen ethno-populist and jingoistic
nationalist sentiments, and increase social tensions and turmoil, especially among the growing precariat and others
who feel vulnerable or threatened.

Thus, ethno-populist inspired chauvinistic nationalism may exacerbate tensions , leading to conflicts and tensions
among countries, as in the 1930s. Opportunistic leaders have been blaming such misfortunes on outsiders and may seek
to reverse policies associated with the perceived causes, such as ‘globalist’ economic liberalization.
Policies which successfully check such problems may reduce social tensions, as well as the likelihood of social turmoil
and conflict, including among countries. However, these may also inadvertently exacerbate problems. The recent spread
of anti-globalization sentiment appears correlated to slow, if not negative per capita income growth and increased
economic inequality.

To be sure, globalization and liberalization are statistically associated with growing economic inequality and rising ethno-
populism. Declining real incomes and growing economic insecurity have apparently strengthened ethno-populism and
nationalistic chauvinism, threatening economic liberalization itself, both within and among countries.

Insecurity, populism, conflict

Thomas Piketty has argued that a sudden increase in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Although
causality is difficult to prove, with wealth and income inequality now at historical highs, this should give cause for
concern.

Of course, other factors also contribute to or exacerbate civil and international tensions, with some due to policies
intended for other purposes. Nevertheless, even if unintended, such developments could inadvertently catalyse future
crises and conflicts.

Publics often have good reason to be restless, if not angry, but the emotional appeals of ethno-populism and jingoistic
nationalism are leading to chauvinistic policy measures which only make things worse.

At the international level, despite the world’s unprecedented and still growing interconnectedness, multilateralism is
increasingly being eschewed as the US increasingly resorts to unilateral, sovereigntist policies without bothering to even
build coalitions with its usual allies.

Avoiding Thucydides’ iceberg

Thus, protracted economic distress, economic conflicts or another financial crisis could lead to military confrontation
by the protagonists, even if unintended. Less than a decade after the Great Depression started, the Second World
War had begun as the Axis powers challenged the earlier entrenched colonial powers.

They patently ignored Thucydides’ warning, in chronicling the Peloponnesian wars over two millennia before, when
the rise of Athens threatened the established dominance of Sparta!

Anticipating and addressing such possibilities may well serve to help avoid otherwise imminent disasters by
undertaking pre-emptive collective action, as difficult as that may be.

Allison’s Thucydides trap is ahistorical, wrong, racist and if anything makes war more likely
Menon 21 – [Nitin Raj, “Historical perspective: Above and Beyond,” 6/14/2021, https://thegeopolitics.com/historical-
perspective-above-and-beyond/DKP]

History and Parallax Error

Predicting the future is a hazardous activity in international relations. Yet Graham Allison, presenting a diabolical notion
of Thucydides’ Trap, advocated that the Peloponnesian War is the best standpoint to view the 21st-century Sino-
American rivalry.[2] Allison contended that China and America are reprising the roles of the then rising Athens and
prevailing power Sparta respectively; he firmly stated that “war between the United States and China in the decades
ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment.”[3] Regarding such analogical
reasonings, Nye asserted that “metaphors can be useful as general precautions, but they become dangerous when they
convey a sense of historical inevitability.”[4] Allison’s myopic view ignores the reality that both America and China
possess nuclear weapons that neither Athens nor Sparta had, which makes the possibility of war highly unlikely. Even
then, the oft-repeated inevitability of a clash between Washington and Beijing citing Greek and Cold War history has
led to unnecessarily hostile strategy formulation and an abiding geopolitical tension.
History shouldn’t be accepted as destiny because, as Howard puts it, “only certain features in situations at different
epochs resemble one another, and what is valid in one situation may, because of entirely altered circumstances, be
quite untenable the next time it seems to occur.”[5] The Obama administration’s endeavor to sign the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program.[6] But for
this, Obama was compared to Neville Chamberlain, the British PM who signed the Munich Pact with Hitler.[7] The
Munich Pact allowed Hitler’s eastward movement and also the trading away of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain signed it
wishing away a possible war, but it steadily contributed to the further expansion of Nazi Germany and the eventual war.
Making appeals to history and equating Chamberlain’s apparent appeasement with multilateral diplomacy aimed at
non-proliferation is not only erroneous but always going to bear calamitous fruits when seen from a strategy-making
perspective.

History and Deception

Self-interest and, at times, national interest warrant that political elites are adept at citing historical rhetoric, often
selectively or inaccurately representing the past for their vested gains. Michael Howard has called it ‘ myth-making’,
where there is “the creation of an image of the past, through careful selection and interpretation, in order to create or
sustain certain emotions or beliefs.”[8] Margaret MacMillan recounts how Putin justified the annexation of Crimea
from Ukraine by talking about “common bloodlines”, “shared history and pride”, and arguing that it is home to “graves
of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire.”[9]

Macmillan considers a constant recourse to history and its instrumentalization to be “motivated by a cold and narrow
realpolitik.”[10] It was exemplified in 2016 as Brexiteers, leading the Leave campaign, exploited images of British colonial
opulence to suggest that leaving the EU would somehow revive Britain’s once global power.[11] Likewise, In India, the
ruling government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, argues that “true India is a Hindu nation” by tagging “other
religious minorities as destructive aliens” and has directed state committees to trace the lineage of Hindus and prove
that “ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.”[12]

Apart from history’s explicit misuse, the historical perspective is also saddled with managing the burden of prejudiced
historical accounts. The postmodernist Foucault has asserted that knowledge wasn’t an objective reality and has always
been under the influence of the powerful who shape knowledge.[13] Edward Said, focussing on this knowledge-power
relationship, spoke about the intellectual tradition of Orientalism; he explained how Orientalism is a subjective and
parochial discourse that entailed the powerful West representing East ern history, culture, and life as backward and
inferior.[14] In the 21st century, this partisan ideology has seen its reincarnation as neo-orientalism, with terrorism
emanating from the Middle East only perceived as a result of its backward culture rather than a by-product of vested
political and economic interests.[15] It has facilitated various political projects and interventions to continue in the
Middle East.
 AB K: Umass

Rights, duties, and property are based on a restrictive economy that cements blackness as political
death – understand blackness as sacred, not to be mapped in the political trap of the 1AC.
Winters 22 Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University 2k16 Joseph R [“Between Ecstasy and Abjection: Black Studies and
the Excessive Sacred” Religious Studies Review 2022 Rice University]//Mberhe

In the past decade, a set of debates has emerged within black studies between Afro-pessimists and those who
identify as black optimists. Exemplified by the work of Frank Wilderson, the Afro- pessimist contends that the Human and the Black exist in an antagonistic relationship. To put this differently, civil
society and the realm of recognition is defined over and against black people; the very coherence of the Human depends on structural violence against black subjects. According to Wilderson, only the end of the world as
we know it can bring about the dissolution of anti-black racism. In other words, Afro-pessimism harbors an apocalyptic vision. Black optimism, represented by Fred Moten, also contends that blackness has been positioned
at the edges of the Human. Yet Moten defines blackness as a tumultuous drive that both antecedes and incites strategies of containment. While blackness is constantly under surveillance and duress, Moten expresses a
“faith” in the excessive quality of blackness, in that which cannot be captured or reduced into an object, instrument, or slave. Consequently, Moten underscores, more than the pes- simist, the forms of sociality that have
enabled black people to endure a legacy of terror and living death. The opposition between the pessimist and optimist can become rigid and reified (and not necessarily by the main au- thors affiliated with these positions).

In response to this pre- dicament, this paper argues that we can better understand the affinities and differences
between authors like Wilderson and Moten by introducing the category of the sacred, and a particular genre of the
sacred. Although Agamben’s notion of homo sacer might come to mind when thinking of the doubleness of the sacred, I consider the work of Durkheim and Bataille. Émile Durkheim reminds us that there are two
forms of the sacred— one that signifies health, safety, and protection, and another that stands for disorder, opacity, and

impurity (See Durkheim 1995, 412; See also Biles 2007, 3). The latter form, the “left,” self-shattering sacred, is taken up by Georges Bataille in texts like Theory of Religion and Accursed Share. For Bataille, the
sacred names those energies, drives, and experiences that in- terrupt investments in order, coherence, and durability.
The sacred, experienced in art, erotic life, and mysticism, is a site of heterogeneity, of that which cannot be
incorporated into the order of things, which is why the heterogeneous often incites so much violence in the attempt
to contain, assimilate, or contain it. In other words, because figures of excess appear so danger- ous to the order of
reason and accumulation, these figures tend to precipitate gratuitous forms of violent containment. In light of the
ways in which black people have been marked as exces- sive, dangerous, and unruly, the left sacred provides one way
to examine blackness and its relationship to the Human. In this essay, I draw on the left sacred and religious thought more generally to think between and beyond the
optimism/ pessimism binary. I contend that while Moten underscores the excessive feature of blackness, Wilderson draws attention to the inability of civil society to assimilate blackness, demonstrated by cinema’s failed
attempt to reconcile racial antagonisms. To put it succinctly, Moten is committed to the extravagance of blackness and Wilderson is committed to examining where blackness causes the order of things to break down. I
suggest that these authors both gesture toward the volatilely sacred quality of blackness but approach it in rather different ways. Calvin Warren has recently suggested that it is more pro- ductive to affiliate Moten’s

For my pur- poses, “mysticism” names a spiritual experience or

intervention with mysticism than with optimism or hopefulness (See 2017, 2019–29).

encounter in which the very notion of a coherent self is overwhelmed by the Other, an experience that cannot be
captured by ordinary language, or that requires alternative grammars to name and describe it . For Warren, Moten provides grammar to
think about “blackness without Being,” blackness as a kind of spirit or as- piration that eludes form, objectness, and possession. Here we might think of the opening scene of In the Break, where Moten describes blackness
as “the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that arranges every line” (2003, 1). Here blackness is in part an indication that objects or com- modities resist—even, or precisely, at the moment of
objection/ subjection. Thinking of Frederick Douglass’s aunt’s cry, in a call and response with Saidiya Hartman’s refusal of the nonchalant ways that Douglass’s primal scene is often registered, Moten is after an “aurality
that disrupts and resists certain formations of identity” Ibid, 6). To put it simply, the sound of the shriek (extended throughout time) is irreducible to “verbal meaning or conventional musical form” (Ibid, x). Some-thing
escapes even as what escapes is an indication of anguish, carrying the trace of terror, of what is always trying to eradicate blackness. In later essays, Moten develops this notion of blackness as rupture and excess, verging
toward what Warren calls a “phe- nomenology of black spirit” (See Warren 2017). In his essay “The Case Of Blackness,” Moten associates blackness with a kind of impurity, a contamination, or a tumult that smears stable
distinc- tions and demarcations. For Moten, blackness names a kind of reticence that emanates from what is kept, held, and contained, and yet it is also a reluctance that “disrupts [the logic of] grasping and framing, taking
and keeping—as epistemological stance and as accumulative activity” (2008a, 179). Here I take it that Moten is circling around a set of questions: What is the form of life that unravels the very insistence on form? How
does blackness gesture toward a field beyond the opposition between form and formlessness? How might blackness offer an alternative to the logic of accumulation and settlement even as, or because, black- ness has
been the underprivileged target of these operations? If Moten gestures toward the spiritual and mystical aspects of blackness in previous essays, he makes an explicit connection in his powerful essay “Blackness and
Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” In conversation with the Afro-pessimist (particu- larly Wilderson and Jared Sexton), Moten makes two key moves in this essay. Riffing on Orlando Patterson’s work, Moten makes a

distinction between political and social death.While the slave might endure political death—insofar as s/he is barred from the field of
recognition, from the field of rights, ownership, and property—this means that the slave is relegated to a position of
relative nothingness from the perspective of the subject that oc- cupies a position within civil society (2013, 741). But for Moten
nothing matters, nothing really matters. For Moten, the legacy of blackness gestures toward a sociality of those who have been owned, who own nothing, who have been dispossessed of some- thing like home. This

sociality can be found in the fantasies and wounded intimacies in the hold of the slave ship, bush arbor meetings, juke
joints, hip hop cyphers, greetings in the vesti- bule of the church after service, or all black women gatherings
discussing Beyonce’s new video over wine and other libations. While lingering on this position of nothingness, Moten
turns to Korean Buddhism, particularly the idea of Mu, of dispossession, of not having, as a way to think about a form
of sociality among the un-settled, among those who find their beginnings in the break, the middle, the oceanic . And if there
is something cele- bratory about this mysticism in the flesh, celebration is neces- sary because black life is so painful, it hurts so much (2017, xiii). For Moten, blackness, articulated

through music, the cry, or through its alliances with mysticism, indicates a disruptive ex- cess, an unassimilable energy
that haunts ontology, sovereignty, property, and the urge to possess. Drawing on Nahum Chandler’s work, Moten makes a distinction between blackness and
black people. Blackness is an-original and antecedent to being, to what can be rendered determinate and objectified. Consequently, black people do not own blackness but have a special and necessary relationship to the
opacity and non-capturability of blackness. As Moten and Stefano Harney write, “There is an an-originary drive whose fateful internal difference is that it brings regulation into existence.... The an-originary drive and the
insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online,...is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged
insofar as they are given (to) an understand- ing of it” (2013, 47). Blackness is a testament both to a legacy of constitutive violence and relentless containment and a leg- acy of what slips through, what breathes on, and
what cannot be completely converted into an object. Similarly, blackness acts as a kind of pathogen that promises to bring about the end of the world as we know it. For Moten, black study, or the study of blackness, is a
sacred and secular endeavor. This is why he asso- ciates black sociality with “a marginal church in which we gather together to be in the name of being otherwise” (2008b, 1747).

The 1AC exemplifies a restricted economy of monocephalic statehood that imprint the terms of the
political thru legal settlement – homo politicus-economicus compulsively repeats a theology that
establishes the terms of anti-black containment of the abyssal, requiring the sacrificial corpsing of
the formless
Carter 19 (J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. “Black
Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred).” Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-7370991 //shree)

I would like to put a finer point on the problem of political theol- ogy by approaching it in terms of the problem of the
evisceration of the sacred, or that which hovers beyond state-sanctioned horizons of life or what is truly real, what
moves as invisibly felt or as a surging, surreal pres- ence that state operations work hard to overshadow in
monumentalizing itself, often through monuments. Like a kind of astrophysical dark matter with the unknowable force
of a dark energy that exceeds racial capitalism’s gravitational pull by exerting a force from within and that exceeds this
(racial) world’s epistemological and material circumscriptions, this surging, surreal presence moves at the limit of the
state even if on some level within its constraints. Let us call this limit blackness. America is structured through the
horrific regularity, both in spectacular displays and even more so in everyday or mundane displays, of experiencing
unin- corporable limits to itself. That experience is the experience of the sacred, an experience in which state
sovereignty or lordly sovereignty is crossed (out), transgressed. Political theology is a discourse that seeks to eviscerate
such an imagination of the sacred. As such, it is a statist discourse predicated precisely on the evisceration of the dark
arts of the sacred, those excessive modes of life and knowing. I am interested in that dark knowing that exceeds
theopolitical constraint—what Bataille spoke of as “nonknowledge” and what he also talked about as “poetry,” and
what I want to think about here by way of black radical thought as the astropoetic release of the sacred from categorical
capture. This is the black radical sacred.
As an entry point into this approach to the problem of political theology and to begin to think about the sacred precisely as malpractice, consider Rei Terada’s essay “Robinson’s Terms,” in
which she provides a patient and brilliant reading of Cedric Robinson’s underexplored first book (his published dissertation, in fact), Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of
Leadership (1980).28 Her reading of Terms of Order offers us a way to understand the trajectory that led Robinson to the thesis he develops in Black Marxism (1983) that black radicalism is a
complexly differentiated tradition rooted in a revolutionary consciousness that exceeds the terms of political order, which are also the terms of (racial) capitalist order. Order emerges or is
constituted as the counterrevolutionary evisceration of that which exceeds order. Terada tarries with Robinson as he tarries with the dynamics of this evisceration. What we learn from her

reading of Robinson is that if, in positioning “the state [as] the telos of society ,” the political “depends on and . . . is reflected in
[a series of] politico- legalistic settlements” whose narrative languages and philosophical concepts establish “the terms [of] a [settler] tenancy” (4), then what
makes the political always already theological, even when it prides itself on being secular (which really must be understood as a mode of the theological), is this: in establishing

the state as the telos of society and thus as a world that houses (human) being, the political follows, indeed, repeats
the religious logic of Genesis or the primordial, cosmogonic activity of the gods. As the gods found the world or
establish the real by what Mircea Eliade describes as “[projecting] a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center into chaos,” thus
allowing an “ontological passage” that in effect establishes the real,29 so too the political is predicated on a “cosmocizing” (64) or a worlding of

territory , a conversion of earth into territorialized world, by gods/men who imprint terms of order onto what is
deemed non- political or formless (informe). This cosmocizing or would-be worlding of the earth into ownable, bordered territory entails the production and thus
the imposition of spatial order on top of and to the vanquishing of nonpolitical space or space charged with dark energy or promiscuous intensities figured as aberrantly racial, sexual,
economic, and neurological. These are energies or intensities that are out of this world and that figure an other- wise totality, perhaps the “collective being, the ontological totality” that
propels the black radical tradition.30 This, says Terada, is the persistent “existence of what cannot be conceived from the standpoint of the political” (6). Constantlythwarting
politicality’s claim to being all there is, the nonpolitical represents, Terada further says directly quoting Robinson, an open “set of
infinite alternatives irretrievably forsaken” (10), alternatives that index the impossible as nothing less than the ongoing
possibility of what exceeds the terms of political order. Further still, if with Terada (with Robinson) we understand that myth “[functions] to process
‘insurmount- able contradiction’ in the societies from which they arise” (10), then the political, which establishes the terms of settler tenancy as terms of order, is but myth’s

rationalization, with language serving the utilitarian function of securing the order of signification, the grammar of
(political) meaning . Put differently, the political seeks to maintain itself by instituting a form of knowing in which reason is but the declaration of having won the mythic struggle
against an opposing force. This is the struggle of creation itself, a struggle in which Genesis is an effect of struggle. Political rationality entails the would-be vanquishing or

containing or sacrificial corpsing of the nonpolitical surround to bring into being what in the Western ontotheological
tradition has been called World. And yet, in this instance formless nonpoliticality bespeaks an abyssal prime matter that as limitless potential for patterning, as “absolute
nothingness,” is both base resource for the violent production of value and at the same time indexes a volatile danger to existing patterns of politicality.31

I can now address even more directly what is theological about the mythic rationality of the terms of political order. What must be under- stood is that the previously described dynamic of
the political is articulated to what historian of religions Eliade explains as the production of “sacred space” or the making of “strong, significant space” out of “spaces . . . without structure or
The bringing forth of
consistency,” spaces that he describes as “amorphous” (20), or that we might just as well understand with both Bataille and Spill- ers as “monstrous.”32

strong space out of disordered void, the overcoming of “the fluid and larval modality of chaos” so as to establish, as an “act of the gods who . .
. organized chaos by giving it a struc- ture , forms, and norms” (31), the ontological or the “pre-eminently . . . real” (28), and finally, the
ritual reactualization of this paradigmatic work of the gods to secure a proper place in the world rather than hang sus-
pended in the void of the not-real, the absolute nothingness of nonbeing: these mythic operations ground “religion” in the broadest sense. More still, Eliade
describes these operations, to use Terada’s Robinsonian lan- guage, as establishing the terms of a settler tenancy . Through that tenancy homo
religiosus (like and indeed as homo politicus-economicus) quenches his thirst for real existence in the face of a terrifying
nothingness, in the face of that “absolute nonbeing” “that surrounds his inhabited world,” as Eliade describes it (64). In
communication with the gods who have, as it were, settled the chaos, homo religiosus by feat of ritual repetition repels the abyss and, indeed, in an ongoing way

believes himself to have settled the abyss, lest “by some evil chance, he strays into [that abyss], [and comes to feel] emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were
dissolving into [the surrounding] Chaos, and he finally dies” (64).

As a discourse, then, political

theology as I mean it proceeds under the logic of a cosmology of settlement, the supposed
containment of the surround by a settler-God or settler-gods and as reactualized by settler- Man. Here, the sacred has
been epistemically annexed and (to invoke a language from the prior section) right-handedly recruited to settling , their adhesion
underwriting political theology as a discourse that rests on the mythotheological as the mythopolitical founding of
the world. This is “Genesis.” Thus, within the terms of political theology, God, State, and Man are all god terms that name a vanquishing or a
supposed conquering of the abyssal , the infinite, the alternative, the im/plausibly and im/ possibly im/possible.

But what if we do not assume the political (as seems to be the assump- tion in Rev. Lamar’s comments about the Charlottesville white nationalist rally, his
understanding of the general crisis of politicality today, and his understanding of theology’s relationship to the political)? What if, to the contrary, we take seriously

the political precisely as myth , trying to reckon with what monstrously appears as its internal limit, of which the counter- protesters were a monstrous
sign? (And here I want to keep in mind that in one etymological derivation monster derives from the Latin word monere, which means a divine omen or portent of what cannot be foreseen.)
This is also to ask, what if rather than assuming political theology we think with the likes of Colin Kaepernick, whose taking a knee has incited a crisis of politicality, if not a monstrance of
what is irreducibly antepoliti- cal? What if our study, our writing, takes place within political theology’s astrophysical contraction, “in the break” of politicality, out of the posse of
im/poss/ibility?33 These questions propel this article’s writing practice, which aims to throw language back on itself, to be suspended in, even exiled within language itself. I am suspended
within and yet beyond the ontology of the sentence (of politicality), held in an ellipsis, a cloud of antepolitical unknowing. What might it mean to write the experience of semiotic exile, to
not be sentenced to the sentence while suspended within it, to write the experience of decomposition as the experience of the sacred in its monstrous mode? What “I,” what “not-I,” what
“I” who’s neither “I” nor “other,” can write of parenthetical escape, un/sentenced, un/held within the sentence, in the break, like sisters in the wilderness of the sentence, in the void of

What might it mean to practice escape or refusal, to be

having been theopolitically sentenced?34 Can (the) I escape the gravitational forces of civilization?

of the void, to be voided, potentiating anything and everything without determination? What is the feeling of fugitive suspension,
outlawed within the law of the sentence? What of this wandering, this unholding? These are Renee Gladman– and Sarah Jane Cervenak–inspired questions, and they are Layli Long Soldier–
and M. NourbeSe Philip–inspired ones too.35 My claim in this article is that the poetics of what is beyond the (theopolitical) sentence is language’s taut tenseness, the tense of an alternative
declension or mood, the domain of the “fourth person singular” perhaps, where some other experience of lan- guage is felt.36 Here the
myth of politicality and thus of being
individuated, of being “I,” is always already subject to being sacrificed along with the mode of divinity or the god terms meant

to secure the state. This poetics of the beyond is a poetics of the sacred “‘other’-wise,” Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ashon T. Crawley might say.37 Given this, the
black malpractice of which I here speak is a practice of the sacred overboard , an experience of the sacred detached
from or in the absence of its reduction to the stabilizer that has come to bear the name, at least in the Western
philosophical tradition, God or the gods and as duplicated or mirrored in the divination of the state where the state
exists in the image of a stabilizing God.

The U.S’s ability to grant “rights” or “duties” operates parasitically to blackness based on
establishing a power dynamic that relies on white over black – the world of the alt and aff operate
in contradiction due to their reliance on such framework.
Farley 4 Anthony Paul Farley is the James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the
University of Albany Law School. [“The Apogee of the Commodity” 1/1/2004 Boston College Law School]//Mberhe
The question of reparations forces the commodity to confront the rule of law and its own role in maintaining the system of white-over- black. The question of reparations is uncanny. The
question of repa- rations is uncanny because it marks the place and time that the com- modity experiences its estrangement from itself. The commodity, as stated earlier, dreams of rights.
The somnambulant path of the law leads to the question of reparations because the law promises a rem- edy for every wrong. The commodity dreams of equality and, there- fore, of
reparations. Rights
are the manifest content of the commodity's dreams and all the commodity ever speaks of. Below the
surface of the commodity's dreams of equal rights, however, there is the latent desire for white-over-black . It is in this way
that the system of capital acquires its spirit. Only the injured dream of rights. 18 The injury occurs when and where the mark is attached to the body. The system of marks, then, is a
systematic injury; white-over-black. That injury can be understood by examining the system of property and the way property is organ- ized as white-over-black. Pleasure is a many-
splendored thing. Eve-
rything can be made a pleasure. There are no limits to desire. Even injuries can become desired
pleasures. White-over-black is the injury that begins the dream of rights . The injury, however, seems to fade from consciousness when one turns
to the system of law. This is the secret of the commodity and its fetish. The commodity is made to desire equality. The commodity has less and so it seeks to balance an equation. The
commodity has been marked as less, as white-over-black. The commodity has also been marked for less; property flows in the direction of white-over-black. The commodity desires equality.
The commodity presents its suffer- ing, its nonownership, as a prayer for legal relief from the inequality that it experiences as its injury. The
commodity prays for equal
rights but rights cannot be equal. Rules are endlessly interpretable. Desire sorts them out. Desire is cultivated and
educated in a way that leads us in certain directions , directions that those who cultivate and educate us find useful. Inter- pretation comes to an end when we
move in the generally accepted way. We move in the generally accepted way when our training, made possible by and through the cultivation and education of our desire, has proceeded in
the generally accepted way. We interpret and follow a rule correctly when we move in the generally accepted way. We move in the generally accepted way when our training has resulted in
the acquisition of the usual orientation, white-over-black. Generally, our institutions are white-over-black and that is the orientation re- quired to move through them in the generally
accepted way. The sum of our institutions is the sum of our training. Our training in how to move through our institutions is a training in white-over-black. Our institutions cultivate and
educate the desire for white-over-black. To move in a white-over-black direction is to move in the generally ac- cepted way. White-over-black is always the correct interpretation of every
rule of law. To follow our desire is to arrive at white-over-black again and again and again and to infinity. A right will always be interpreted and followed in the direction of white-over-black
and so rights cannot be equal. We pursue our plea- sure; that is what we have been trained to do. If our training is white- over-black and we have been
successfully trained, then we will move in the direction of white-over-black and equal will always end in white-over-
black. The sum of our institutions is the sum of our train- ing. The sum of our training reveals the totality of our pleasures. We follow our pleasure to infinity and thus endlessly repeat our
training. Our institutions are white-over-black. All of them. Our training is white-over-black. Our pleasure is white-over-black. Our desire is white-over-black. We follow white-over-black and

thus endlessly pro- ject our past into our future. We do this through rights. To request equality is to surrender before one begins. To request
equality is to grant one's owners the power to grant or deny one's request. To grant one's owners such a power is to
surrender oneself to one's owners entirely and completely. To grant such a power is to accept one's status as a commodity , a thing
the future of which is rightly left to the persons granted the power to grant or deny the re- quest for equality. To grant such a power is to accept one's future,

and therefore oneself, as owned by the ones granted the power to grant or withhold one's request for equality . To pray
for legal redress is to bow before the authority of law. There is no mystery in the au- thority of law. Law's authority is only the surrender -

and-training of the commodity. Law is only the relation of white-over-black to white- over-black to white-over-black. When we follow a legal rule we fol- low only the track
that we have ourselves laid down. In other words, we ourselves are the track, we become the track when we lay down, and we follow that track white-over-black into the future that lasts
forever. Sometimes training goes awry and things fall apart. Sometimes the "caged anger within” escapes.19 The words of J.G. Fichte, although written in another context, are nonetheless
helpful in understanding such moments: I would be sorry if they understood me. Until now it has gone ac- cording to my wishes with these people; and I hope even now that this exordium
will so bewilder them that from now on they see nothing but letters on the page, while what passes for mind in them is torn hither and thither by the caged anger within 20 The exordia
penned by commodities that realize and refuse their roles bewilder and leave "what passes for mind” in their would-be-owners “torn hither and thither by the caged anger within."21 A
passage in a letter penned by political prisoner Afeni Shakur during the conspiracy trial of the Black Panther 21 is an open window the moment that the commodity realizes and refuses its
role: We know that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments did not liberate us--that they only legalized slavery and expanded the
Dred Scott decision to include the Indians, Spanish speaking and poor whites. We know that things have not gotten any better—but only progres- sively worse. We know that it is the rich
man's courts, laws, and justice. It is his skies and air—we can only look at it and breathe it if he says so .... We know that the Almighty dollar which everyone is taught to revere is only
guaranteed by slavery and exploitation. We know that we live in a world inhuman in its poverty.22 The question of poverty concerns the relation between persons and property. There is no
relation between persons and property. Nature does not produce property. Property, considered as a natural object, does not exist. The line drawn by the law from persons to property,
therefore, connects nothing, because there is nothing to connect. Re- lations between persons and property do not exist. What does exist is a relation between persons that is treated as if it
were a relation be- tween objects. The laws we lay down do not connect persons to prop- erty. We ourselves connect persons to property when we lay down before the law. The act of laying
down before the law occurs before there is law, before there is anything before which to lay down. A person lays down and becomes a thing, a thing that lays down, a commodity. The
commodity lays down and thus makes itself a thing-that-can-be- owned. Ownership, then, is a relation between persons that is dis- guised as a relation between objects of property. And
those objects of property are themselves disguised as legal relations. Ambiguity always exists.23 Everything has its ambiguities. The am- biguities are too many to be named, counted, or
categorized. The am- biguities are endlessly available for interpretation. To be oppressed is to have the ambiguities, which are infinite as well as indefinable, inter- preted in a way that
oppresses. A
right is always ambiguous and, therefore, available to be interpreted . An equal right or a right to equality is,
likewise, always ambiguous and interpretable . Equality can be anything at all. To be oppressed is to have one's rights inter- preted oppressively. The
ubiquity of ambiguity means that equality and right are both available for oppressive interpretations . The ambi- guities are
where desire prepares its endless strategies and masquer- ades. Equality is the most covert hiding place for, and the most effective mask of, oppression. Oppressive interpretations marshal
the ambiguities against the oppressed. When the commodity prays for legal rights it bows down before the rule of law . If the ambiguities
were not always read as white-over- black, then the commodity would have no need to pray for equal rights. The rule of law, like everything, is filled with ambiguities. The ambiguities are
resolved into white-over-black. The rule of law is nothing other than the ambiguities and the ambiguities are nothing other than
white-over-black. Prayers for relief will be answered with white-over-black when relief is granted and when it is not. A rule granting an equal right is as available for a white-over-
black interpre- tation as is a rule mandating an unequal right. Equality is as available for white-over-black as is inequality. The ambiguities are everywhere and always available for white-
over-black. The ambiguities are the shape of our desire. The ambiguities show us our own desire. In a white-over-black situation there is white-over-black. We live in a white-over-black
situation. There is, therefore, white-over-black and it is everywhere because the ambiguities are everywhere, especially in those places we pretend that they are not-for example, the rule of

law. Law
is the ambiguity that pretends most intensely not to be. Law is white-over-black. Prayers for relief can only be
answered in the form of white-over- black . These prayers are acts of state worship (and ecstatic exhibi- tions of the commodity's death-drive).24 The state is the
desire for white-over-black. Rule fetishism (fundamentalism and fealty to the “system”) is always simultaneously the hiding place and stronghold of the will to oppress.
Dwell in the sacred realm – the 1AC’s use of fiat has entered them in the profane realm of identity
crisis – designed to help Minnesota construct their coherent self ultimately causing its loss through
the rhetoric of productivity controlled by the primitive economy – turning any benefit to political
discussion. The role of your ballot is to sacrifice – refuse to mark the world legible within their
imaginary.
Winters 22 Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University 2k16 Joseph R [“Between Ecstasy and Abjection: Black Studies and
the Excessive Sacred” Religious Studies Review 2022 Rice University]//Mberhe

Georges Bataille takes up the ambiguity of the sacred in his work. In Theory of Religion, where Bataille lucidly develops
these ideas, the French author seems to make a rather stark distinction between the sacred and the profane modes of
being. For Bataille, the profane realm is marked by what he calls dis- continuity or lack of intimacy, instrumental
reasoning, and the deferral of pleasure. Within this domain, human selves treat human and non-human beings as
useful objects for future- oriented schemes and projects. In other words, I relate to and interact with others insofar as
they support and buttress my sense of becoming a coherent self, enduring into an endless future . While this
investment in a coherent self that treats the world in an instrumental manner is all too human and ines- capable, Bataille
suggests that it prevents the kind of intimacy that humans long for. For Bataille, the sacred realm is asso- ciated with
the possibility of intimate relationships with oth- ers, self-undermining encounters that are marked by excess,
vulnerability, and anguish. Whereas profane existence is all about production, accumulation, and self-preservation,
sacred existence includes events, interactions, and practices that lead to the loss/expenditure of the coherent self
and an open- ing to the painful contradictions that mark our lifeworlds. For Bataille, intimacy between self and other is
not devoid of pain and anguish; it is a “disheveled [form of] communication” that includes “despair, madness, love and
even more: laughter, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, loss of self to the point of death” (1988, 37). Bataille is very much
invested in identifying prac- tices and activities that re-connect us to sacred existence, which provide a sense of intimacy
through loss, ecstasy, and anguish. While he in-famously celebrates pre-modern rituals of sacrifice (an occasion where
the sacrificing community identifies with the death/loss of the sacrificed body), he is aware that these practices are no
longer legitimate in most contemporary communities and contexts. In fact, he claims in Theory of Religion that “the
most solemn sacrifice may not be bloody” (1989, 48). For Bataille, sacrifice alludes to those experiences and events
that disrupt our inclination to render the world intelligible, to place these events in some meaning- producing scheme
or telos that would preserve form and order. As he puts it, “Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is
accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption [ex- penditure] that is concerned only with the moment” (Ibid,
49). And the dissolution of self, form, and commitment to duration leads to a moment of opacity, of what he calls a
beclouded or black consciousness. For Bataille, as I read him, there is an exuberance that is internal to the flow and
movement of energies in the world. While human subjects are connected to this exuberance, hu- mans are also
tethered to projects and meaning-making, qual- ities that take form in the self, community, nation-state, etc. Because
of this necessary investment in form, meaning, and boundary, this aforementioned exuberance will always carry a
sense of monstrosity, deformation, and anguish. The work of Bataille (and Durkheim) leave us with some haunting
questions: If Bataille focuses on the separate individual’s encounter with deformation, how does his understanding of
the sacred change when we shift to the perspective of bodies and subjects have come to signify excess and disorder? To
put it differently, does Bataille assume access to something like a coherent self (or the fantasy of a self), and how is this
position defined against black- ness and other qualities? In Bataille’s fiction and non-fiction, how does the figure of the
black appear and how does blackness serve as an available companion to the dissolution-seeking sub- ject? While these
questions open up future paths of inquiry, we can be confident that juxtaposing Moten, Wilderson, and Bataille invites
new ways of thinking about blackness, religion, and the excessive quality of the sacred. Finally, this conversa- tion
generates a range of dispositions and affects that cannot be reduced to hope or despair, celebration or mourning,
(social) life or death.
The demand to incorporate A.I in legal rights and duties makes binaries of humanism inevitable –
no reason why our knowledge should be the standard for intelligence, exporting our moral compos
onto the duties of A.I is the link and accelerates every problem with human society, they hope A.I
solves.
Davion 02 Dr. Victoria Davion served as Head of the Department of Philosophy for UGA from 2005 to 2017. She was
founder and editor of the journal, Ethics & the Environment, and a celebrated scholar of ecofeminism and
environmental ethics. [“Anthropocentricism, Artificial Intelligence, and Moral Network Theory: An Eco-feminist
Perspective.” All rights reserved – the White House Press 2002
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/ev_11no.2_davion_victoria.pdf]//Mberhe

ANTHROPOCENTRISM IN AI Theorists have noticed that a highly anthropocentric notion of intelligence has dominated AI. The following are
some definitions of intelligence from promi- nent sources in the field (all quotes from Preston 1991): [Artificial Intelligence is] the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men [sic].
(Minsky 1968: v) Artificial intelligence is the study of ideas that enables computers to be intelligent. (Winston 1984: 1) Artificial intelligence is the study of mental faculties through the use of compu- tational models.
(Charniak and McDermott 1985: 6) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is, systems that exhibit the charac- teristics which we associate with
intelligence in human behaviour - understand- ing language, learning, reasoning, solving problems, and so on. (Barr and Feigenbaum 1981: 3) Artificial intelligence is a field of study concerned with designing and program-

Artificial intelligence is a field of study that encompasses

ming machines to accomplish tasks that people accomplish using their intelli- gence. (Schutzer 1987: 1)

computational tech- niques for performing tasks that apparently require intelligence when performed by humans . Such
problems include diagnosing problems in automobiles, com- puters, and people, designing new computers, writing stories and symphonies, finding mathematical theorems, assembling and inspecting products in factories,

the use of the word 'intelligence' in many of these definitions indicates a

and negotiating treaties. (Tanimoto 1990: 6) As Preston makes clear,

reference to some pretheoretical notion of intelligence that the authors assume their audiences will share, and that
this notion is a strongly anthropocentric one. This strongly anthropocentric notion of intelligence led to research pro-
grammes focusing on recreating human intelligence understood strictly in terms of abstract formal reasoning, which
was taken to be the essential component of human intelligence. Interestingly, the assumption that the essential
component of human intelligence is abstract formal reasoning is challenged by problems in modelling 'common-sense
knowledge' and perception. What has come to be known as 'the problem of common-sense knowledge' in AI refers to
the fact that programs which could solve abstract formal problems were unable to solve even simple, real-life
problems such as getting a cat out from under the bed (Preston 1991). The reason for this failure is that real-life problems require more than consideration of
entities with formal properties and relations to each other. They require knowledge about objects in the world. A program that could solve fairly high-level algebra and word problems failed to understand a story

AI researchers assumed that it would be fairly

accessible to a three-year-old child. The other problem concerns attempts to model skills involved in perception and movement .

easy to model perceptual capacities such as vision. However, this turned out to be very difficult to model. And, other
capacities involved in managing the world such as motor control, navigation, and manipulation have also been
underestimated in terms of complexity. Hence, capacities clearly shared with other animals (vision, naviga- tion) were
assumed to be less complex than the capacity for abstract reasoning, often assumed to be exclusively human, or to be
possessed by humans to the greatest degree. According to Preston: The original anthropocentric premise is that human-level
intelligence is the most significant and interesting form of intelligence. But this view is challenged by the realization
that the great bulk of intelligent behavior depends on aspects of behavior which we share with infra-human
intelligences, and which are on the whole more complex and difficult to understand than the uniquely human aspects of intelligence. (Preston 1991: 270) The anthropocentrism
obvious both in the assumption that the most important and interesting kind of intelligence is human intelligence,
and that the most interesting aspects of human intelligence are those which are uniquely human is undermined.
Preston notes that the failure of early AI research programmes to recognise what she calls 'peripheral intelligence' as
intelligence at all can be attributed to the lack of recognition of the complexity involved in peripheral intelligence to
begin with. However, ‘...an equally important factor was the sheer weight of the Western intellectual tradition, which routinely elevates reason and language and denigrates the senses' (Preston 1991: 269). The
conception of intelligence as abstract reasoning is an excellent example of dualistic thinking at work. We can see this by applying features involved in the construction of dualised identities offered by Plumwood.

The relation of radical

Backgrounding is evident in the assumption that human intelligence is just abstract reasoning, something unrelated to infra-human abilities, or that humans supposedly do best.

exclusion, seeing differences between dualised pairs not simply as differences but as essential differences, is
demonstrated in assump- tions that only human-level intelligence is interesting, and that it is radically different from
infra-human abilities (or intelligences). This is also evident in the intuitive conception of intelligence originally
adopted by AI researchers, that the only important and interesting aspects of intelligence are the ones that were
taken to be prototypically, if not exclusively, human. In addition, ecological feminism provides a political framework for under- standing assumptions evident in dualistic
thinking. Ecological feminism can help in understanding the two factors that Preston speculates led to such strong anthropocentrism in AI. A central project of ecological feminist philosophy is to show how elevating reason
over nature, in combination with the association of privileged men with language and reason, and the association of nature, women, and other men with the senses and the emotional, contributes to sexism, naturism, and
racism in western patriarchies (Griffin 1978; Merchant 1983; Warren 1990). According to Plumwood: The key exclusions and denials of dependency for dominant conceptions of reason in western culture include not only
the feminine and nature, but all those human orders treated as nature and subject to denied dependency. (Plumwood 1993: 42) Thus: The set of interrelated and mutually reinforcing dualisms which permeate western
culture forms a fault line which runs through the entire conceptual system... Each of them has crucial connections to other elements and has a common structure with other members of the set. The can be seen as forming
a system, an interlocking structure. (Ibid.: 42)

Thus, the alternative is black piety that trades recognition with remembrance. This is necessary
to seize images of the past that attempt to make blacks comfortable with loss.
Winters 16 Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University 2k16 Joseph R.[“HOPE DRAPED IN BLACK:
Race, Melancholy, and Agony of Progress”; pp.6-7]//Mberhe
Yet this study does make explicit contributions to and interventions into difficult discussions about race, religion,
remembrance, and collective strivings for a more just and generous world. This contribution includes an irreverent
notion of black piety, the ambivalence of recognition, the ethics of remembering against the grain, and playful
embrace of the tragic quality of existence. An irreverent notion of black piety-piety here alluding to a general awareness
of human contingency and dependence on others as well as the specific ways in which an author like Du bois
acknowledges the historical doings and sufferings that make his existence possible-both draws from and parts way with
conventional strands of black religious thought. While black religious thought is fluid and heterogeneous, most people
inside and outside of the academy conflate black religion with the black church and with black Protestantism more
specifically. As philosopher of religion William David Hart points out, “the standard narrative of black religion” assumes
that “Christianity in general and its institutional manifestation as church is the template for understanding what Black
Religion is.” This conflation historically privileges the church as the “womb” of black cultural life, downplaying
alternative religious traditions that black people have participated in, constructed, and reimagined. In addition, the black
religion-black church reduction tends to make a rigid distinction between church and world, sacred and profane, religion
and culture. This neglects how spaces and practices outside of the church, and outside of religious institutions, provide
resources that help black people narrate, make sense of, and even perform the complexities and vicissitudes of life. These
practices and resources, like jazz, blues, hip hop, and literature, trouble conventional distinctions between the sacred and
profane. A kind of piety or fidelity (remember that religion stems from a Latin term that means “to bind”) to black cultural
legacies is often expressed through remembrance, mourning, gratitude, and reinterpretation. But as Hart admonishes, with
particular reference to Du Bois, black piety is frequently intertwined with essentialized notions of blackness. In other
words, certain kinds of qualities and behaviors are imagined as necessary markers of blackness. To be faithful to black
people, one has to accept normative conceptions of being black, widely recognized ways of remembering black history,
and uncritical appeals to tradition, iconic leadership, and so forth. To resist this temptation, Hart suggests that pious
dispositions must be accompanied by impiety. As much as we show gratitude and acknowledge our debts to those who
came before us, we also have the responsibility to critique, reinterpret, and even reject some of our ancestor’s
commitments. In addition, we might say that while piety is usually associated with gratitude toward what we have been
given, black piety is also marked by an awareness of those traumas and losses that will always remain opaque and
irretrievable. These are experiences that Morrison warns cannot be “passed on,” that cannot be ignored, but at the same
time cannot be recuperated by traditional narratives and discourses. Even the legible goods and resources that get passed
down bear the marks of conflict and erasure. An idea or practice that might be an empowering gift for some black selves,
might be ponderous and oppressive for others. Therefore, black piety must contemplate the often disavowed relationship
between gift and theft. It must confront the fissures and cuts in black experience that, among other effects, work against
totalizing notions of blackness and racial identity. Finally, I suggest that we think of black piety as a piety of the opaque,
to riff on Charles Long’s designation. A piety of the opaque demands a melancholic attunement to exclusions and
erasures that make progress and social advancement possible, to the blind spots and silences that indicate the
limitations of discourse, visibility, and recognition. (Our lives and existence depend on the losses and sufferings of
anonymous others.) While redemption, wholeness, and liberation have often been the end goals of black religious
strivings, this melancholy piety draws attention to how these kinds of strivings further stigmatize and devalue bodies, both
within and outside the black community, that signify ambivalence, contradiction, and diremption. Black piety, on my
reading, demonstrates how recognition, especially in the context of black people’s strivings, is a fraught idea and
goal. It is very difficult to think about political resistance without the Hegel-inspired struggle for recognition, discussed
in chapter 1. This struggle does not simply express an abstract desire to be affirmed and respected as a human being
or citizen (as important as this is); it also expresses a more concrete and practical desire for goods, resources, and
capital to be redistributed and expanded. This redistribution of goods, and respect, is certainly important,
valuable, and necessary. But recognition harbors a neglected underside. In order for the excluded to be included, to be
recognized as citizens and protected by laws, the excluded must accede to the norms and terms of the political and social
order. Or perhaps this is too one-sided. As the tradition of black freedom struggles show us, the demand for equality and
inclusion often entails a transformation of the dominant norms and rules, a reconfiguration of democracy and social
coexistence. Yet any order or social arrangement defines itself against some Other, some set of qualities and practices that
present a threat to that order. Expanding the sphere of recognition to formerly excluded groups does not necessarily
eliminate the space of the threatening Other; it simply, or not so simply, shifts and redistributes the line between
acceptable subject or citizen and menacing Other. Some examples help clarify what I am getting at here. Establishments
cannot legally prohibit black bodies from entering their spaces (although occasionally instances to the contrary flash up)
but they can proscribe certain kinds of clothing and dress associated with racialized and working-class identities. Signs
that used to read “no blacks allowed” have been replaced by signs that read “no timberlands, work boots, baggy clothing,
or white T-shirts permitted.” I am obviously not suggesting that all or only black people wear these kinds of clothing. I
am suggesting that this contemporary ban replaces one form of exclusion with another, more subtle form of exclusion that
is informed by race, class, and gender anxieties. Another example pertains to gender dynamics in hip hop culture. Within
the past three decades, a disproportionate amount of black men with respect to black women have found a way to be
“recognized” and affirmed within hip hop culture. Yet as many commentators haves shown, this recognition often
requires rap artists to perform exaggerated versions of black masculine identity, a performance that generates both
fascination and fear. The money, power, and respect that male artists have been able to accumulate typically require an
acceptance and exaggeration of troubling, but pervasive, gender norms and expectations, especially the treatment of
women as useful objects of pleasure or a threat to masculine power. Recognition and the acquisition of wealth and capital,
as important as this process might be, always comes with a cost; it requires subjects to consent to terms and conditions
that are harmful to some community or identity. Riffing on Du Bois, we might say that progress and recognition are
necessarily ugly. Riffing on Ellison, we might say that making some people’s struggles more visible entails rendering
other struggles relatively invisible. This is not always because we are intentionally cruel and inhumane but because we are
always finite and human. This predicament does not mean that we should forgo these strivings for recognition but that
these strivings should be informed by a heightened awareness of the violence involved in well-intentioned endeavors to
make the world more inclusive (or the violent quality of the institutions, practices, and arrangements that provide
protection and recognition to formerly excluded selves and communities, but at the expense of others). Like recognition,
remembrance is enabled by a complicated set of activities, processes, and practices. As both an individual and collective
process, remembrance is shaped, informed, and made possible by cultural narratives, symbols, and practices.
Remembrance is closely linked to piety since piety tends to regulate how and what we remember. As Morrison and
Benjamin especially suggest, many of our cultural narratives and attachments work to erase the “tradition of the
oppressed” or threaten to assimilate this legacy for the sake of order and stability. Remembering against the grain enables
us to not only seize images, events, and ideas from the past but to cut, challenge, and undo narratives that justify, redeem,
and make us comfortable with suffering and loss. While melancholic hope challenges the eagerness to get over the painful
dimensions of the past, it also resists forms of nostalgia about the past. Melancholy and nostalgia are sometimes difficult
to distinguish. Both are ways of being attached to loss. Yet in my analysis, there is a crucial difference. Nostalgia, as
demonstrated in a film like The Birth of a Nation, marks a longing for a lost time, state, or place marked by completeness
and plentitude; it imagines some harmonious state that exists before some fall or decline. Contemporary narratives about
hip hop that imagine a golden era before the commercialization of this musical genre exemplify nostalgic longings.
Discussions in black communities about the good old days when black people were unified, when blacks had effective and
courageous leaders, and when the youth respected their elders also betray this inclination toward nostalgia. Melancholy,
on my reading, works in different direction. Instead of wishing for some past (or future) wholeness, melancholic hope
exposes how this all-too-human desire for wholeness and unity obscures the breaks, cuts, and wounds of history
and human existence. It cultivates a difficult attunement to the ruins and remains that cannot be fully integrated
into unifying narratives and projects (but that are also the products of these unifying projects). Instead of trying to
recover a more complete and happy past, melancholic hope imagines a tension-filled interaction between the past and
present. It is inspired by Ellison’s jazz like sense of time in which the present is never coherent or seamless but always
disjointed and marked by competing rhythms, temporalities, and modes of being. This dissonant understanding of time
and history opens up novel ways of reading the relationship between past and present-against the grain of prevailing
narratives and practices of remembrance. At the same time, I acknowledge that forgetfulness is both inevitable and
necessary. One always has to tread lightly when talking about the capacity and need to forget. On the one hand, this is a
marker of our finitude. Events inevitably become repressed as we move on and history continues to take place. Even if
selves don’t forget past incidents and realities (both pleasurable and painful), they don’t relate to these incidents in the
same way over time. Leaving certain dimensions of the past behind us is probably necessary in order to create new and
more promising ways of living together. On the other hand, I acknowledge that the need to forget is often an onus placed
on those who have been injured and persecuted. As Adorno puts it, in reference to Germans working through the trauma
and guilt of the Holocaust, “The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven, which would be proper for
those who suffered injustice, is practiced by those…who committed the injustice.” In addition, the pressure placed on us
to move on and leave the past behind assumes that we have complete control over this process. As Morrison’s novels
suggest, there are facets of the past that haunt us because they cannot be easily handled, fixed, and resolved. The past
remains alive, or in a state between life and death, in part because traumas take time to be made sense of, to be worked
through, and to be incorporated into memory and language. Therefore, forgetfulness is both necessary and a quality that
should generate suspicion. Adorno sums up this tension well: “One wants to break free of the past: rightly because
nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid
with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.” Melancholic
hope acknowledges inescapable tensions and conflicts when it comes to recognition, remembrance, and the legacy of
racial difference. This is not because of an inclination to equivocate or a desire to confuse the reader but because
ultimately I am naming – with fear and trembling – the broken, tragic quality of human existence. A difficult, but playful,
embrace of the tragic is clearly indebted to Ellison’s notion of the tragic-comic, an idea that he introduces in his well-
known definition of the blues. But closer to home, my ludic understanding of the tragic is a riff on Cornel West’s tragic-
comic sensibilities. West often interprets black people’s struggles, their “doings and sufferings,” according to three
broader frames – American history, modern life, and the tragic-comic quality of being human. This tragic-comic trope
underscores the inevitability of death, loss, and suffering in a culture and species that often tries to hide from its mortality.
At the same time, for West, this sensibility acknowledges the importance and value of producing and “passing down”
cultural resources that enable us to cope, endure, resist, make the world a little better during our short detour on earth, and
ultimately prepare for death. Some might worry that the particularity of black people’s doings and strivings might get lost
or erased by using such a broad category like the tragic-comic to frame these experiences. This does not have to be the
case. One can take seriously the particularity of racial formations and struggles while also acknowledging how these
modern realities reflect, refract, and signify broader human tendencies and predicaments (while also prompting us to
reimagine and alter our understanding of the human). The tragic-comic sensibility, articulated by West, is appropriate.
Life is messy. The world might be our home, but it is a broken home. Selves are thrown into existence, into traditions,
cultures, and legacies of oppression and struggle that are always under way. Communities nurture and cultivate selves but
they also injure and mutilate selves; communities provide sustenance and life for their members but this life is often
predicated on the alienation and death of others. We are taught by the social world to desire certain things, including
material objects, power, recognition, love intimacy, friendship, transcendence, and so forth. But our desires clash with
those of others; the fulfillment of my desire requires other desires to remain unsatisfied. My pleasure comes at the expense
of someone else’s misery and anguish. My well-intentioned attempts to help others and change the state of things often
repeat and introduce troubling relationships and forms of power. Even as I recognize these all-too-human predicaments, I
inhabit a social world in which recognition and self-preservation require me to act as if I am coherent, composed, assured,
and intact. In other words, my success as a self in this world requires me to distance and separate myself from its broken
features, a prerequisite that includes the belief that this broken quality can be fixed or resolved. To accentuate the
language of tragedy and brokenness does not imply that some of our undesirable relationships and arrangements
cannot be changed or remedied. History shows us that there is always room to tinker, improvise, experiment, create,
and contest social constraints that prevent wider human flourishing. In addition, to reduce the world to its tragic
features is not the same thing as affirming its inescapability; the reduction doesn’t make room for anything else and
downplays the importance of laughter, pleasure, change, hope, and intimacy. The affirmation suggests that the more
pleasurable aspects of life always carry the trace of the tragic, broken quality of existence. Perhaps this play between
pleasure and suffering, or hope and anguish, is where we should end-and begin. And perhaps the trope of the cut used in
literary jazz signifies both a wound and an opening. It suggests that better horizons and possibilities might be enabled and
opened by heightened and more vulnerable awareness of the wounds and damages that mark our social worlds. A more
generous and promising world, according to this view, relies on an opening toward, rather than attempts to escape from,
the fractured quality of social life. Through this difficult vulnerability, this bitter earth might not be so bitter after all.
 AB K: Wake AP

Blackness is ontological – multiple warrants

Calvin L. Warren 18 [is an Assistant Professor in WGSS at Emory University, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism,
and Emancipation, Duke University Press 2018 //kd]

What is this Negro? Negro

as black being; Negro as nothing. We return endlessly to this metaphysical question and the
tension of the copula (the “is-ness” of a [non]being) that sets the metaphysical inquiry into motion. Perhaps this question cannot
be answered with apodictic certainty, since the Negro is neither a proper object of knowledge nor a proper referent
(catachresis). What we can propose, however, is that function, or utility, requires an instrument, and instruments are invented for the purpose of fulfilling the agenda of utility. I have
suggested thus far that the
Negro serves the function of embodying metaphysical nothing(ness) for modernity — a weighty,
burdensome, and dangerous function. The world needed a being that would bear the unbearable and live the
unlivable; a being that would exist within the interstice of death and life and straddle Nothing and Infinity. The being
invented to embody black as nothing is the Negro. An antiblack world desires to obliterate black as nothing — nothing
as the limitation of its dominance — so that its schematization, calculation, and scientific practices are met unchecked
by this terrifying hole, nothing. With the Negro, metaphysics can triumph over this nothing by imposing black(ness) onto the
Negro and destroying the Negro. The Negro is invented precisely to be destroyed — the delusion of metaphysics is
that it will overcome nothing through its destruction and hatred of the Negro. The Negro, then, is both necessary and
despised. But it is important to remember that this Negro, the cipher of metaphysics, is the invention of a desperate
world. The Negro is not a human being that is simply mistreated, but is, instead, an invention designed to embody a
certain terror for the world. I say this because thinking in this way will require us first to discard naturalism and the conflation of human being with black being. This is a
difficult task because of the ruse of resemblance (the Negro looks human, so must be one). But as Lindon Barrett taught us, modernity produces “anthropomorphic uncertainty” by which
“racial blackness overwhelmingly disappoints the modern resemblance of the human, signaling instead the unleashing of the inhuman that specifies the ‘human’ population of the modern
state.”23 Biological
and visual resemblance does not render the Negro a human being — these are nothing more than
ontic illusions. Ontologically and metaphysically, the Negro is anything but human. Hortense Spillers might call this an
“altered human factor.” In describing the transport of Africans to Europe, she suggests that they embodied a radical otherness and alterity for the European self. “Once the
‘faithless,’ indiscriminate of the three stops of Portuguese skin color, are transported to Europe, they become an altered human factor. . . . The altered human factor renders an alterity to
European Ego, an invention, or ‘discovery’ as decisive in the full range of its social implications as the birth of a newborn.”24 Once
on European soil (and in the hold
of the ship), the African ceases to exist and instead becomes “other,” an alteration of humanity. Something new
emerges with the transport of the African. The African becomes black being and secures the boundaries of the
European self — its existential and ontological constitution — by embodying utter alterity (metaphysical nothing).
Metaphysics gives birth to black being through various forms of antiblack violence, and this birth is tantamount to
death or worldlessness. The invention, emergence, and birth of black being are not causes for celebration, however, since this invention is pure instrumentality and function
(not the existential freedom, self-actualization, or sacred natality of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example).25 Black being follows a different trajectory

than the celebrated human being of metaphysics and ontology. Its birth is death — death as nothing, death as the
Negro, death as blackness, death as the abyss of metaphysics. It is also important to reiterate that black being and
African existence are not synonymous, although we might argue that African existence is transformed into black
being through violence, transport, and rituals of humiliation and terror. Bryan Wagner clarifies the distinction: Perhaps the most important thing
we have to remember about the black tradition is that Africa and its diaspora are older than blackness. Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather, Africa

and its diaspora become black during a particular stage in their history . . . blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery . . .
blackness is an indelibly modern condition that cannot be conceptualized apart from the epochal changes in travel,
trade, labor, consumption, industry, technology, taxation, warfare, finance, insurance, government, bureaucracy,
communication, science, religion and philosophy that were together made possible by the European system of
colonial slavery. . . . To be black is to exist in exchange without standing in the modern world system.26 To “exist in
exchange without standing” is pure instrumentality, a being that is not human being, but something other, something
unlike what modernity had known before. The disjuncture between being and black being is the gulf of metaphysical and ontological violence. Black being,
then, does not originate from Africa but is invented in a (non)temporality that we might call the transatlantic slave
trade. Put differently, African existence is an identity, whereas black being is a structural position or instrumentality. 27
Identities circulate within the symbolic of humanity; they are discourses of the human (or genres of man, if we follow Sylvia Wynters).
Identities provide symbolic covering for the human and differentiate his/her existence, or mode of being, from other
human beings. A structural position, on the other hand, ruptures the logics of symbolic identity and constitutes
function or instrumentality. Black being is a structural position and not an identity because it exists , or is invented, precisely
as an anchor for human identity (human self adequation); the anchor is an inclusive exclusion and subtends human identity but
is not incorporated into it. To be positioned structurally and not symbolically means that structural existence is a
preconditioned instrument for the maintenance of the symbolic — the symbolic here meaning the signs, symbols, and
relationalities of the world itself. A structural position is pure use value (or function), and it lacks value outside its
utility and the antiblack symbolic that determines the matrix of value (axiology). This, of course, is in contradistinction to human being,
whose ultimate value resides outside the matrix of symbolism and into the esoteric or the horizon of Being-as- event. Black being is the zero-degree position of

nonvalue but, paradoxically, is all too valuable because it enables the very system that excludes it (it is valued because of its utter
valuelessness). Thus, black being is not birthed into presence through the generosity of Being, contrary to the genealogy of human being articulated by Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, for
example; black being is introduced as the execration of Being; its ultimate withholding of generosity, freedom, and care. Moreover,
the distinction between African
existence and black being is the site of onticide, or a murderous ontology. What I am suggesting is that black being is
the execration of Being because it emerges through a death sentence, through the death of African existence (“existence” is
the best we can do grammatically because of the double bind of the copula formulation inherent in language). Black being is the evidence of an onticidal enterprise. Ronald Judy describes
this as “thanatology.” In describing the coming-into- being of Equiano (an African captive transformed into black being, or the Negro), Judy suggests that the death of African materiality and
the African symbolic body (or existence) provides the condition of possibility for the transformation. In short, black being emerges through the murder of African existence and not its
generosity: The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Africa. Writing the slave narrative is thus a thanatology, a writing of annihilation that applies the taxonomies
of death in Reason (natural law) to enable the emergence of the self-reflexive consciousness of the Negro . . . writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an
interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without agency, without thought. The muted African body is
overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that which has overwritten itself and so become the representation of the very body it sits on.28
The Question of Bl ack Being 41 Judy’s argument here is that the Negro is thought to gain a sense of subjectivity by displaying Reason through writing, since writing is prefigured as the
ultimate sign of Reason, and Humanity, within an antiblack symbolic order. But to gain this subjectivity, this Negro-ness, he must first kill the African body (African existence). But, I would
argue, if reason and humanity are the purported payoffs for a murder, then the Negro has indeed been defrauded. For displaying reason through writing (slave narratives and otherwise) has
not folded the Negro into the family of the human [Mitsein] or rendered him a subject — there is nothing the Negro can do to change its structural position. Writing,
reading,
philosophizing, and intellectualizing have all failed as strategies to gain inclusion into human beingness (despite the
hopeful insistence of black humanists). Instead, the Negro remains the nothing that metaphysics depends on to
maintain its coherence. With the death of African existence, the Negro, or black being, is indeed nothing or no-thing
that translates into any recognizable ontology. To say that the Negro is nothing is also to say that the Negro lacks ontological ground. The human being grounds
its ontology in the beautiful relation between Being and Dasein (or the “space of existence,” as Heidegger would call it). Black being, however, lacks any legitimate

ground, outside the oppressive logics of use value, for its being. Since it emerges through the execration of Being and
not the gift of Being, it can lay recourse neither to Being nor to a primordial relation (since this primordial relation has
been annihilated or murdered as the condition of its existence). I would also suggest that the Negro is not responsible for this murder.
Metaphysics (or the world and its symbolics) systemically murders this relationality, so that to be born black within
modernity is to have always already been the material effect of an ontological murder. In other words, antiblackness
is the systematic and global death of this primordial relation, and whether the Negro attempts to write him/herself
into existence or not, this death has already occurred. When it comes to the Negro, subjectivity is a fraudulent hoax
or ruse. What do I mean by the “execration of Being”? I simply mean the death or obliteration of African existence. This obliteration provides the necessary
condition for the invention of the Negro, or black being — black as metaphysical nothing or groundless existence. One
anchors one’s existence in this primordial relation, but the Negro is precisely the absence of such relationality, a
novelty for modernity (or a “new ontology,” as Frank Wilderson would describe it). The Negro is born into absence and not presence. We can
also describe this death of a primordial relation as a “metaphysical holocaust,” following Franz Fanon and Frank Wilderson. For Fanon,
“Ontology — once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside — does not permit us to understand the being of the black man . . . the black man has no ontological resistance in
the eyes of the white man . . . his metaphysics, or less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they are based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization
that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”29 Ontology provides intelligibility and understanding for the human being because
she is embedded in a primordial relation with Being (as freedom and care). We can describe the entire field of
ontology as the history, evolution, and maintenance of the various customs and resources that the human being
needs to secure this relation . But “ontology . . . does not permit us to understand the being of the black man” because ontology is intended to preserve the customs and
resources of human beingness and not black being. We will always experience tensions , contradictions, and impasses if we attempt to

gain intelligibility for black being from a field that excludes it by necessity — because blackness is outside ontology as
this nothing but most intimately situated within ontology as its condition of possibility (its inclusive exclusion). Ontology, then, does not
provide the resources to understand this paradoxical thing — blackness is the abyss of ontology .30 But what is worse is that the customs and resources that once served

as grounding for African existence were wiped out. This wiping out of the ontological resources to ground this primordial relation is the
thanatology or onticide of African being.31 This metaphysical holocaust is the execration of Being — it is a particular
process of producing black being through the murder of African existence .32 The execration of Being also conveys Being’s curse and
denouncement of the Negro as black (I would also suggest that the pseudo-theological term Hamitic curse is a variation of this execration in a different register). Rather than thinking of
Being as having abandoned us and that this abandonment can be addressed through temporality, thinking anew, and a renewed relation (as is the position of Heidegger and neo-
Heideggerians), the execration of Being is beyond abandonment. It indexes the obliteraThe Question of Bl ack Being 43 tion of the relation to Being and the absolute irreconcilability between
the Negro as black and Being. Thus, the nothing that black being incarnates is not a celebratory portal or opening up onto Being for blacks — as if rejecting metaphysical thinking will reunite
us, as it were, with Being as nothing. 33 This only works for the human (and the “black is not a man” within an antiblack metaphysics, as Fanon insists).34 Theessence of black
suffering, then, is this very execration, to inhabit permanently the “zone of nonbeing,” as Fanon might call it. This
zone is a spatiotemporality without a recognizable name or grammar within the philosophical tradition. The problem
of black being is precisely the inhabitation of an execrated condition. This is the new ontology that modernity brings into the world — a being that
is not one (available equipment in the guise of human form). Black being is paradoxical — it is a metaphysical entity that is invented to

illumine something beyond metaphysics, a nothing that metaphysics hates and needs. Within the Negro, metaphysics
wages its war against the nothing that terrorizes its power and hegemony. This, again, explains why the Negro is
black, to return to Alain David’s proper metaphysical question. The Negro is black because the Negro is the physical manifestation of an ontological puzzle: black as nothing. The field of
ontometaphysics does not have the resources to explain nothing; in fact, it works earnestly to forget and avoid it. This is because the field of ontometaphysics is really the imposition of
metaphysical prerogatives and investments. Given this arrangement of resources, nothing is not a proper object of knowledge within ontology as metaphysics because it cannot be explained
through its episteme (put differently, the incorporation of nothing would destabilize the metaphysical episteme). Or, to echo Fred Moten, “Blackness and ontology are unavailable for one
another.”35 This is to suggest that the problems of nothing are transposed onto the Negro, since it is embodied nothing within an antiblack world. When Fanon suggests that the civilization
“imposed itself” on the Negro, I interpret this to mean that the imposition is an ontometaphysical imposition; the Negro does not have ontological resistance because of the metaphysical
imposition of black and nothing. Furthermore, we can describe the “two frames of reference,” as Fanon would call it, within which the Negro has had to place himself as “nothing” and
“black” in an antiblack world. This imposition is the execration of Being or the metaphysical holocaust that produces black being. For
nothing and the terror that it
brings to metaphysics can only manifest itself through this holocaust; and this wiping out is not an event of the past,
but is a condition of the world. The world needs it to continue. Antiblackness is the name for the continuous
destruction of this primordial relation and the structural position of the Negro as black and nothing . Hortense Spillers also
proffers a phenomenological iteration of this metaphysical violence that is very useful to think alongside Fanon’s metaphysical holocaust and the imposition of black and nothing: But I would
make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated positions. In that sense, before the “Body” there is
the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. Even
though the
European hegemonies stole bodies — some of them female — out of West African communities in concert with the
African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of
African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided ripped-apartness,
riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.”36 Although Spillers borrows the concepts of “flesh” and “body” from the traditions of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and
theology, she repurposes them to understand the modern invention of black being. I would suggest that “flesh” and “body,” read through this register, are philosophical allegories, or
metaphors, for the execration of Being. The flesh, here, is the primordial relation that antiblackness works tirelessly to destroy. For
Spillers, the flesh is a “primary narrative.” This primary narrative is the grounding of African existence, the various customs and resources that provide the proper understanding of this
existence — what is wiped out during the metaphysical holocaust that we can call the “transatlantic slave trade.” The
body, however, emerges from the ashes of
this holocaust. It is not strictly corporeality (or physicality), but the signification of nothing that the black body comes
to mark in an antiblack symbolic (or, as Spillers describes it, “a category of otherness”). Thus, high crimes against the flesh are the
murderous operations that set modernity into motion and produce the black body (or black being); these crimes are
murders that the discourses of crime and punishment can only approach, but remain unintelligible within its
precincts. These crimes are ongoing, and since the guilty party is the world itself, redress or justice is impossible. The
flesh, the primary narrative, is the ground of an African existence that is irrecoverable within an antiblack world — it is
“seared, divided ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole,” or “escaped overboard.” This, in essence, is the execration of Being. It is the primordial relation between the African and Being
that is ripped apart, seared, and severed; this obliterated relation is the high crime against the flesh. We come to another understanding of black being: it is the offspring of an obliterated
primary narrative that we can call the flesh. Spillers’s “flesh” and Judy’s “African body” are thus synonymous articulations of this primordial relation. In
this schematic, the
body is a metaphor for instrumentality or abject use value. Spillers suggests that this body “is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor.” With the death
of African existence (the flesh) an oppressive mode of existence is imposed on the Negro. This existence is unlike human being. The human being’s mode of existence is to be for itself, and
this being for itself is the structure of care between Dasein and Being. Black being is invented, however, precisely to secure the human’s mode of existence. Reading Spillers’s metaphysical
schema through Heidegger’s, we could suggest that the black body or this “thing, being for the captor,” is invented to serve as the premier tool or equipment for human being’s existential
project (and I would argue that this equipment is not equivalent in form to the human, even if the structure of tool-being, as Graham Harman would call it, provides a general explanatory
frame).37 In other words, the mode of existence for black being is what Heidegger would call “availableness.”
Availableness is “the way of being of those entities which are defined by their use in the whole.” 38 To exist as “a thing, being for
the captor” is to inhabit a mode of existence dominated by internecine use and function. Black being, then, is invented not just to serve the needs of

economic interest and cupidity, but also to fulfill the ontological needs of the human . This thing is something like Heidegger’s equipment
— an object that when used with such regularity becomes almost invisible, or transparent, to the user (blackness is

often unthought because the world uses it with such regularity; antiblackness is the systemization of both the use of
blackness and the forgetting/concealment of black being). Utility eclipses the thing itself. We must, then, understand antiblackness as a global, systemic
dealing with black bodies, as available equipment. Heidegger considers dealings the way the Being of entities, or equipment, is revealed phenomenologically through the use of this
equipment. Antiblack dealings with black bodies do not expose the essential unfolding, or essence, of the equipment;
rather, the purpose of antiblack dealings is to systemically obliterate the flesh, and to impose nothing onto that
obliterated space — care and value are obsolete in this encounter. 39 Therefore, equipment structure is predicated on the premier use of blacks
within the network of equipment. In other words, black use cuts across every equipmental assignment, making it the ultimate equipment. Why does black equipment cut

across all assignments, and why is it the tool Dasein relies on to commence its existential journey? We might say the
answer to these difficult questions is that the essence of black equipment is nothing — being is not there. If Heidegger
assumes that equipment will reveal its being through its usage, then he did not anticipate the invention of the Negro — equipment in human form, embodied nothingness. Using black
equipment reveals existence but not being (existence as non-being for Greek philosophers, according to Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics). This puzzle is what black philosophy must
investigate, must think through, to understand the continuity of antiblackness. Spillers describes black being as a “living laboratory,” and we can conceptualize this laboratory as the source
of availableness for modernity. A living laboratory is a collection of instruments for carrying out ontological experimentation, or the construction of the human self. Black
beings
constitute this irresistible source of availableness for the world . Saidiya Hartman meditates on the ontological utility of black being for the human when
she states: The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses,

can be explained in part by the fungability of the slave — that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability
and interchangeability endemic to the commodity — and by the extensive capacities of property — that is, the
augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the
fungability of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of
others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate
for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and
dominion.40 Instruments, tools, and equipment are interchangeable/replaceable; this is starkly different from human being, whose existential journey in the world renders it
incalculable and unique. When I suggest that black being is pure function or utility, I mean precisely the way this being is used as a site of projection for the human’s desires, fantasies, and
ontological narcissism. The
body that Spillers presents is a necessary invention because it is through the human’s engagement
with instruments (tools and equipment) that the human comes to understand the self. To be for the human is to serve
as the empty vessel for the human’s reflection on the world and self . In short, what I am suggesting is that black being is invented
as an instrument to serve the needs of the human’s ontological project . This use, or function, exceeds involuntary
labor and economic interest. It is this particular antiblack use that philosophical discourse has neglected . The Negro, as
invention, is the dirty secret of ontometaphysics. If we follow Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as Dasein (being there) and thrown into the world, then black being emerges as
a different entity: the Negro is precisely the permanence of not being there [Nicht Da Sein], an absence from ontology, an existence that is not just gone away (as if it has the potential to
return to being there) but an existence that is barred from ever arriving as an ontological entity, since it is stripped of the flesh.41 To
assert that black being is not of
the world is to suggest, then, that black being lives not just outside of itself, but outside of any structure of meaning
that makes such existence valuable. Black being is situated in a spatiotemporality for which we lack a grammar to
capture fully. Spillers’s body, then, is the symbolic and material signification of absence from Being. To be black and nothing is not to serve as an
aperture of Being for the Negro; rather, it is to constitute something inassimilable and radically other, straddling
nothing and infinity. The Negro is the execration of Being for the human; it is with the Negro that the terror of
ontology, its emptiness, is projected and materialized . This is the Negro’s function. Inventing the Negro is essential to an ontometaphysical order that wants
to eradicate and obliterate such ontological terror (the terror of the nothing); and since ontometaphysics Is obsessed with schematization and control,

it needs the Negro to bear this unbearable burden, the execration of Being. To return to our proper metaphysical question “How is it going with
black being?,” we can say that neither progressive legislation nor political movements have been able to transform black being into human being, from fleshless bodies to recognized
ontologies. Spillers also seems to preempt the question when she states, “Even though the captive flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks
do not matter . . . it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as [the flesh] is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and
anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.”42 This
onticide, the death of the flesh/African existence, continues impervious to
legal, historical, and political change. This is to say that the problem of black being, as both a form of ontological
terror for the human and a site of vicious strategies of obliteration, remains. To ask the (un)asked question “How is it
going with black being?” is to inquire about the resolution of the problem of black and nothing, ontometaphysically, as it imposes
itself onto the Negro. The answer to the Negro Question, then, is that the ritualistic and repetitive murder of the flesh, the

primordial relation, is absolutely necessary and indispensable in an antiblack world. And as long as the world exists,
this murder must continue.
They perform the ruse of analogy throughout the 1ac – The aff’s narrative of technology and the
codification of anti-blackness reproduces a grammar of suffering built on the black body – this
process of fungibility reproduces anti-black violence, transforming the structural position of the
black body into a status to be manipulated by those groups designated as human, while rendering
invisible the paradigmatic status of anti-black violence
Taylor 13
(Terrell, MA in English from Georgetown, “OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN
LITERATURE”, Thesis Submitted to Georgetown English Dept,
http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558275/Taylor_georgetown_0076M_12322.pdf?
sequence=1, pgs. 5-7)

Wilderson contends that this Anti-blackness is at the heart of American institutions, even within those who are
“sympathetic” to blackness. Wilderson looks to the work of Antonio Gramsci as an example of a leftist emancipatory
discourse that seeks to explain alienation and exploitation. Noting that Gramsci explains oppression not as an instance of
coercion or use of force, but as a use of hegemony, where institutions, norms, and apparatuses normalize oppression
such that force and coercion are not necessary, Wilderson claims that this framing does not account for forceful and
coercive act of enslaving Africans (Gramsci’s Black Marx...228-229). This shortcoming renders the structures of anti-
blackness invisible, and ensures that revolutions and politics that rely upon Gramsci's framework will replicate anti-
blackness. Furthermore, violence towards black subjects is better explained through a rubric of accumulation and
fungibility. Accumulation differs from exploitation, as accumulating black bodies does not imply a rational gain of
capital. Wilderson contends that the slave trade was not the most economic option for free labor (noting that
enslaving Europeans would have been cheaper) (Red, White & Black 13-14). Fungibility differs from alienation in that
instead of lacking a familiarity with life or society, black subjects are appropriated for the uses of others. Wilderson
particularly notes that emancipatory discourses use the metaphor of an entity denied freedom (the slave) to motivate
and explicate political projects (such as feminist aims for freedom from gender roles and gendered violence, and
Marxist goals for freedom from economic injustice) and that such discourses use the slave as a vehicle for exercising
political agency (the pursuit of abolition provides a mode of expression of freedom for the activist just as much as it
pursues the freedom of the slave)(Red, White & Black 23-24). Wilderson goes through the labor of elaborating this
framework of anti-blackness for two particular reasons. First, illuminating the function of anti-blackness is necessary
to reveal how deeply embedded it is in with civil society, and to highlight the ways that Marxism and other leftist
discourses are misguided in targeting capitalism and other structures of oppression as contingent facts of civil society.
Second, Wilderson's theoretical exposition reveals the way that leftist discourses not only misunderstand racism,
but also benefit from anti-blackness . These discourses are guilty of appropriating the conditions of African
Americans for their particular causes, using the situation of black people within civil society as a podium upon
which to further their own ends, rendering black people fungible by appropriating them for their own narratives
and denying blacks the right to articulate their own. Additionally, leftist discourses are unable to realize that using
the metaphor of slavery to make their own political demands legible eliminates the only language to speak to the
ontological condition of slavery. Because slavery is now a rhetorical move used to clarify the political demands of
various groups, it makes the presence of slavery within the present unthinkable and invisible.

The 1AC’s advocacy for patent innovation is an insurative logic predicated on liability assurance
made possible through the buying and selling of Black flesh. Patent Innovation began with the
Zong! and informs modern property rights
Sharpe 16 [Christina Sharpe, Christina Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and
Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being”, 2016, pp. ] DOA: 8/23/22
Taja1h 🤮
The history of insurance begins with the sea. Three developments are central to the conceptual framework established
by marine insurance: first, the “bottomry” agreement or “sea loan” in which money is loaned at a steep rate for a
voyage, the risk falling to the lender. Second, the concept of “general average,” the idea that losses undertaken to save a
boat (jettisoning or cutting down masts in a storm, for instance) represent a risk shared among those investing in a
voyage—usually seen as the oldest form of joint-stock enterprise. And third, in the notion of “Perils of the Sea”—the
earliest form of the concept of insurable risk. (Armstrong 2010, 168)

One might say that Aereile Jackson is the film’s insurance—as she lends the film its vocabulary and her abjection
underwrites its circulation (figure 2.4).

The risk in insurance: the asterisked human .

So I’ve been thinking about shippability and containerization and what is in excess of those states. What I am therefore
calling the Trans*Atlantic is that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black
Atlantic but also in excess of its currents. I want to think Trans* in a variety of ways that try to get at something about or
toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies. The asterisk after a word functions as the
wildcard, and I am thinking the trans* in that way; as a means to mark the ways the slave and the Black occupy what
Saidiya Hartman calls the “position of the unthought” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003). The asterisk after the prefix
“trans” holds the place open for thinking (from and into that position). It speaks, as well, to a range of embodied
experiences called gender and to Euro-Western gender’s dismantling, its inability to hold in/on Black flesh. The asterisk
speaks to a range of configurations of Black being that take the form of translation, transatlantic, transgression,
transgender, transformation, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation
(by which process we might understand the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities while
retaining the appearance of flesh and blood), transmigration, and more.

With the Trans* I am not interested in genealogy; it is not my intention to recover transgender bodies in the archive. But
when Omise’eke Tinsley writes in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” that “the
Black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic” (Tinsley 2008, 191), we might add that the Black and queer Atlantic
have always been the Trans*Atlantic. Black has always been that excess Indeed, blackness throws into crisis, whether in
these places one can ever really think together, Black and (hetero)normative. That is, Black life in and out of the “New
World” is always queered and more. We might say that slavery trans* all desire as it made some people into things,
some into buyers, sellers, owners, fuckers, and breeders of that Black flesh. That excess is here writ large on Black
bodies—as it is with the process of subjection. And it is that point, post the “rupture in the world,” at which, Dionne
Brand tells us, we, whether we made that passage or not, are “transform[ed] into being. That one door [the door of no
return] transformed us into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, into which new
interpretations could be placed” (Brand 2001, 25).

2.1–2.2 Stills of Aereile Jackson.

2.3 Cargo containers. From Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space—A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the
Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea, 2010 (film still). Sound, color. 112 min.
Courtesy of Doc.Eye Film, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2.4 Publicity still of Aereile Jackson in Making Political Cinema. Courtesy Jerry White and the Centre for European Studies
at Dalhousie University, Halifax

As we hold on to the many meanings of Trans* we can and must think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations
in the ship, the hold, the wake, and the weather—in multiple Black everydays—to do what Hartman, in “Venus in Two
Acts,” describes as “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” and to do
what NourbeSe Philip calls the necessity of “telling the story that cannot be told.” “I think,” Philip says, “this is what
Zong! is attempting: to find a form to bear this story which can’t be told, which must be told, but through not telling”
(Saunders 2008a, 72).
To encounter people of African descent in the wake both materially and as a problem for thought is to encounter that
* in the grand narrative of history; and, in the conditions of Black life and death such as those delineated by Hartman
(“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death”) and the ways we are positioned
through and by them, the ways we occupy the “I” of Hartman’s “I am the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2008, 6).
Theorizing wake work requires a turn away from existing disciplinary solutions to blackness’s ongoing abjection that
extend the dysgraphia of the wake. It requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation,
that is, through living them in and as consciousness.

We see that dysgraphic positioning of Black people via abjection everywhere: from responses to the Black abandoned in
the multiple and ongoing disasters of Hurricane Katrina to conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks’s
abhorrent January 15, 2010, oped on Haiti, “The Underlying Tragedy” (Brooks 2010a), in which he wrote that Haiti’s
problems were less a problem for “development” to solve than they were a call for a radical and radically imposed
cultural shift, coming as they do as a result of “progress-resistant cultural influences.”11 Drawing from the anthology
What Works in Development? Brooks goes on to write, “We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But
some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them. . . .
It’s time to promote locally led paternalism. . . . to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly
intensive culture of achievement—involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job
performance” (Brooks 2010a). This op-ed is properly understood in the context of what is not said: its refusal to speak,
for example, Haiti’s revolutionary past and the billions of dollars in indemnity Haiti has been forced to pay to France; or
the successive US military occupations and coups. Three days earlier Brooks wrote an op-ed entitled “The Tel Aviv
Cluster,” about the accomplishments of Jewish people all over the world. He says: “The Jewish faith encourages a belief
in progress and personal accountability. Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots.
Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian
research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the United States in the number of companies
listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany
combined” (Brooks 2010b). As with my students in Memory for Forgetting, the disaster of the Holocaust is available as
human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their afterlives are not.

The asterisk is evident globally. From the death by drowning of Glenda Moore’s sons Connor and Brandon (ages four and
two) on Staten Island, New York in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, to the murders of Michael Brown and Miriam
Carey, to the continued crossings and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, to the policing and
cordoning of Black people on and off the streets of North America, the “problem” is Black (moral) underdevelopment.
The problem is blackness. The problem is blackness is and as underdevelopment. One can’t imagine similar “culture of
poverty” proclamations like Brooks’s being made, for instance, in the aftermath of the devastation of the tornados in
May 2013 in predominantly putatively white communities in Tornado Alley in the midwestern United States—even
though many of the people living there do not or cannot take the precautions of building storm shelters, evacuating, or
otherwise readying for disaster. That such things are said and said with such regularity about Black and blackened
people is some part of what it means to be/in the wake. “We are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that
force” (Sharpe 2012a, 828).

The Ship

THE ZONG

The sea was like slake gray of what was left of my body and the white waves . . . I memember.

—Kamau Brathwaite, Dream Haiti

The Zong was first brought to the awareness of the larger British public through the newspaper reports that the ship’s
owners (Gregson) were suing the underwriters (Gilbert) for the insurance value of those 132 (or 140 or 142)
murdered Africans. Insurance claims are part of what Katherine McKittrick calls the “mathematics of black life” (Mc-
Kittrick 2014), which includes that killability, that throwing overboard. “Captain Luke Collingwood thus brutally
converted an uninsurable loss (general mortality) into general average loss, a sacrifice of parts of a cargo for the
benefit of the whole” (Armstrong 2010, 173).

The deposed crew recounted that it was lack of water and the insurance claim that motivated that throwing overboard.
They recognized that insurance monies would not be paid if those enslaved people died “a natural death.” (A natural
death. What would constitute a natural death here? How could their deaths be natural? How can the legally dead be
declared murdered?) But in his testimony in court the chief mate revealed that the crew on board the Zong never
moved to “short water,” that is, at no point did they resort to water rationing (Hochschild 2006, 80). Despite the
individual and combined efforts of anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp and the formerly enslaved antislavery activists
Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, it would not be murder that was at issue. The events on board the Zong would
be committed to historical memory first as the insurance claim in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert and only later as the
murders (injury to “subjects”) of 132 Africans not seen in the court to be murders. “It has been decided, whether
wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property.
This, therefore, was the throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue” (quoted in Philip 2008, 211).

It may be fitting that the Zong most often comes to memory not as the singular ship itself but as an unnamed slaver on
which the crew threw captured Africans overboard. The murderous actions of the captain and crew of that unnamed
ship are memorialized in J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting titled Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard Dead and Dying—
Typhon Coming On. In the roiling, livid orpiment of Turner’s painting, the dead are yoked to the dying. That Turner’s
slave ship lacks a proper name allows it to stand in for every slave ship and every slave crew, for every slave ship and all
the murdered Africans in Middle Passage. As James Walvin (2011, 107) writes, “Everyone involved in the slave trade—
from the grandest merchant to the roughest of deck hands—knew that there were times when the crew might have to
kill the very people they had been sent to trade for and for whom they paid such high sums. Though no one would admit
it openly, a crude human calculus had evolved at the heart of the slave trade and was accepted by all involved: to
survive, it was sometimes necessary to kill.” Turner’s painting captures the horrors of the trade and refuses to collapse
a singularity12 into a ship named the Zong; that is, Turner’s unnamed slave ship stands in for the entire enterprise, the
“going concern” (Brand 2015) of the trade in captured Africans: the part for the whole. In style and content Turner’s
painting makes visible the questions at the center of the Zong—property, insurance, resistance, 13 and the question of
ballast. (Think of the recent discovery of a wrecked ship off the coast of South Africa that archaeologists have
determined was a slave ship because of the iron bars of ballast that they found in the wreckage. Ballast was necessary to
offset the weight of the captured Africans in the hold of the ship [Cooper 2015]).

The decision of the court was achieved through an act of lexicolegal transubstantiation14 that declared that “the case
[of the Zong] was a simple one of maritime insurance ,” that is, a case of property loss and not murder. D

espite the differences recorded in the numbers of Africans thrown overboard, what remains constant is that there was
that throwing overboard; there was in fact that murder of over 130 abducted Africans. The event, which is to say, one
version of one part of a more than four-hundred-year-long event is as follows: “29 November, at 8.00 pm, fiftyfour [sic]
women and children were thrown overboard ‘singly through the Cabin windows.’ The time seems to have been chosen
to coincide with the changing of the watch when the maximum number of crewmembers would be available. On 1
December a further forty-two male slaves were thrown overboard from the quarterdeck” (Lewis 2007, 364). 0 next day
it rained, and the crew collected enough fresh drinking water to add a three weeks supply to the ship’s store” (Vincent
Brown 2008, 159). Nevertheless, counter to the logic that lack of water is what motivated these acts that would
circumvent the insurance rules of “natural death,” “in the course of the next days thirty-six more slaves were thrown
overboard and a further ten jumped into the water by themselves. Kelsall later considered that ‘the outside number of
drowned amounted to 142 in the whole’” (Lewis 2007, 364).

When the Zong finally arrived on the Black River in Jamaica on December 22, 1781, there were 208 living Africans on
board. When the Jamaican Cornwall Chronicle listed those Africans for sale, they noted that “ ‘the vessel . . . was in great distress’ having jettisoned some 130 slaves” (Lewis 2007, 364).
With that notation of great distress, the paper did not (mean to) gesture toward the enslaved. They did not (mean to) account for the psychic and material toll the long journey of forced
abduction, want, and incredible violence had taken on the enslaved (violence not marked as violence nor abduction nor want). It was the ship that was in great distress, not the enslaved.
Here, if not everywhere, as we will see, the ship is distinct from the slave. When the sale took place on January 9, 1782, the remaining enslaved people sold for an average of thirty-six

But, of course those enslaved people were also in great physical and
pounds each—above the thirty-pound price at which they were insured.

psychic distress; witnesses to and survivors of the extravagant violences of the ship, its living death, and mass
murder. Perhaps, especially, that one enslaved man who, thrown overboard, managed to climb back onto the ship.

How does one account for surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat?

ZONG!

We sing for death, we sing for birth. That’s what we do. We sing. —Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting
the Archive” What does it look like, entail, and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend, those already dead,
those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of
death; to live this imminence and immanence as and in the “wake”? I turn here to NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Each of the
numbered poems in “Os,” Zong’s! first section, is composed of words taken from the court case of Gregson v. Gilbert.
Below the line of the poems in “Os” appear Philip’s annotations—names for those Africans on board the Zong who had
no names 15 that their captors were bound to recognize or record. ordinary seaman, mouth, opening, or bone) are the
bones of the text of Zong!

Zong!, Philip says, “is hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make
themselves present” (Philip 2008, 201). The dead appear in Philip’s Zong!, beyond the logic of the ledger, beyond the
mathematics of insurance, and it is they who underwrite the poems that comprise “Os.” Philip aspirates those
submerged lives and brings them back to the text from which they were ejected. Likewise, in the structure of Zong! the
number of names of those people underwriting the enterprise of slavery do not match the number of the thrown and
jumped, and so, with that too, Philip dispenses with a particular kind of fidelity to the invention of the historical archive.

Unfortunately for them, reading Gordon was the worst possible decision they could have made in
this debate – These turns all of their analysis of politics being good or the priority to stop extinction.
Gordon 21 (Lewis R Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut at
Storrs; Honorary Professor in the Unit for Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa, and Chairperson of the Awards
Committee for the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of which he was the first president. Freedom, Justice, and
Decolonization. “Disaster, Ruin, and Permanent Catastrophe,” January 2021. Published by Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-367-
63246-5.//shree [come on homie, read the whole the book – luv, NN)

It is stupid for humankind to expect to live forever . Schopenhauer, Ginsberg, and Fenn remind us that life as a preparation for death involves taking seriously
what one must do for the sake of life. Yet the reader may already sense a tension in these reflections with the underlying theme of eliminating narcissistic self-investment. Writing on the
great patriarch Abraham through the voice of Johannes Silentio, Kierkegaard offered this reflection: “… he who always hopes for the best becomes old, and he who is always prepared for the

worst grows old early, but he who believes preserves an eternal youth.”35 Belief here also means faith. But it is not a naïve expectation . Although Kierkegaard
was steeped in the concerns of the self, his insight, which guided many of my reflections on ethical and political commitment throughout these critical reflections, need not be placed in
Christological and theistic form. Radicalized, it also points to Nishitani’s understanding of dharma faith toward all life, which, as he characterized it, is an original vow marked by
compassion.36 The youthfulness of which Kierkegaard wrote is an understanding of what ultimately matters. On this, Nishitani and Weil would agree; life cannot be lived through fear of nor

preparation for death. It

is about not fearing death and in so doing being able to live life without our selves getting in the way .
Taking life too seriously returns us to being gripped in the fear of death. A society that fails to understand such
wastes what little time it has fortifying itself at the expense of others , including itself. Ignoring that is perilous . The
testament to the unheeded warnings of our age may be an epitaph of admonition from desperate final efforts. The worst would be for the youth to suffer

exhaustion from wasted energy , for they would no longer have anything to offer but the mark of the permanent
catastrophe , through the absence of effort, of life unfortunately left foreclosed.
Structural anti-blackness is the foundation that makes nuclear war possible – concern with AI arms
races and US is an epistemological move that SILENCES a focus upon racist foundations of nuclear
planning that allows attack in the first place- only by forefronting domestic American racial injustice
can we ever prevent nuclear War
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, is author
most recently of Thinking in an Emergency, August 5 20 20, "The Racist Foundation of Nuclear Architecture," Boston
Review, http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture

This past Memorial Day, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the throat of a Black man, George Floyd, for 8 minutes and
46 seconds. Seventy-five years ago, an American pilot dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima.
Worlds apart in time, space, and scale, the two events share three key features. Each was an act of state violence. Each
was an act carried out against a defenseless opponent. Each was an act of naked racism. Each was an act of state
violence. Each was an act carried out against a defenseless opponent. Each was an act of naked racism. The first two
features—the role of the state and the impossibility of self-defense—probably require little elaboration. Each was an act
of state cruelty: in one case, the agents of the state acted on home ground and in the other, on foreign ground. Each
was carried out against a defenseless opponent: George Floyd’s hands were handcuffed behind him; he was not resisting
arrest or putting the police officers at risk or even verbally challenging them; he used his voice merely to plead that he
be permitted to breathe, then called out to his dead mother, whom he soon joined. Nor could the long line of executed
Black Americans who preceded George Floyd defend themselves: Breonna Taylor’s work as an emergency medical
technician entailed, on a daily basis, protecting both herself and her patients, but she could not, fast asleep in bed, carry
out any self-defense when Louisville police, without warrant, burst through her doors after midnight and shot her eight
times. The now widely shared recognition that police racism within the United States is not just the practice of individual
officers but is instead systemic entails the recognition that Black Americans, in their interactions with the police, have
ceased to have the right of self-defense, the right that arguably underlies every other right. Persons of color in the
United States—including Native Americans, whose rate of death at the hands of police is the highest of any racial
group1—cannot defend themselves. Seeing that one is about to be slain, one may try to resist (to run, to refuse
handcuffing, to flail out with arms or weapon), but that resistance will then be retroactively used to justify the slaying
that was already underway. One’s only choice is to comply or to resist—in other words, to be slain or to be slain.
section separator The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki initiated an era in which—for the first time on Earth and now
continuing for seven and a half decades—humankind collectively and summarily lost the right self-defense. Self-defense
was not an option for any one of the 300,000 civilian inhabitants of the city of Hiroshima, nor for any one of the 250,000
civilians in Nagasaki three days later. We know from John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima that as day dawned on that August
morning, the city was full of courageous undertakings meant to increase the town’s collective capacity for self-defense
against conventional warfare, such as the clearing of fire lanes by hundreds of young school girls, many of whom would
instantly vanish in the 6,000° C temperature of the initial flash, and others of whom, more distant from the center,
would retain their lives but lose their faces.2 The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki initiated an era in which—for the
first time on Earth and now continuing for seven and a half decades—humankind collectively and summarily lost the
right self-defense. No one on Earth—or almost no one on Earth3—has the means to outlive a blast that is four times the
heat of the sun or withstand the hurricane winds and raging fires that follow. Detail from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb
Museum. Photo courtesy of the author. Detail from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Photo courtesy of the author.
Is it accurate to designate self-defense the right underlying every other right? Freedom of speech matters for thousands
of reasons, but at its most elementary, it matters because it increases one’s chance of defending oneself and by this act,
surviving. The same is true of the right of free press, the right of free assembly, the right to a fair trial, the right not to be
subject to warrantless search and seizure: each has a vast array of benefits, but the bottom line is that each amplifies the
right of self-defense, the right to protect and thereby perpetuate one’s own life. Centuries of political philosophers have
asked “what kind of political arrangements will create a noble and generous people?” Surely such arrangements cannot
be ones where a handful of men control the means for destroying at will everyone on Earth from whom the means of
self-defense have been eliminated. The third link between Memorial Day 2020 and August 6 and 9, 1945, is the racism
that made each event possible. Racism is a perceptual deformation that results in the judgement that people of a
given skin color or ethnic derivation are not simply less deserving (of jobs, education, money, medical care, trust,
responsibility, forgiveness, sympathy) but are, in a word, expendable. Lynch them, choke them, burn their faces off; we
can do a follow-up study later. When Americans first learned that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been
collectively vaporized in less time than it takes for the heart to beat, many cheered. But not all. Black poet Langston
Hughes at once recognized the moral depravity of executing 100,000 people and discerned racism as the phenomenon
that had licensed the depravity: “How come we did not try them [atomic bombs] on Germany...They just did not want
to use them on white folks.”4 Although the building of the weapon was completed only after Germany surrendered on
May 7, 1945, Japan had been designated the target on September 18, 1944, and training for the mission had already
been initiated in that same month.5 Black journalist George Schuyler wrote: “The atom bomb puts the Anglo-Saxons
definitely on top where they will remain for decades”; the country, in its “racial arrogance,” has “achieved the supreme
triumph of being able to slaughter whole cities at a time.”6 Still within the first year (and still before John Hersey had
begun to awaken Americans to the horrible aversiveness of the injuries), novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston
denounced the U.S. president as a “butcher” and scorned the public’s silent compliance, asking, “Is it that we are so
devoted to a ‘good Massa’ that we feel we ought not to even protest such crimes?”7 Silence—whether practiced by
whites or people of color—was, she saw, a cowardly act of moral enslavement to a white supremacist. Each of these
three passages, and scores of others, are documented in Vincent Intondi’s brilliant history, African-Americans Against
the Bomb (2015), which chronicles the repudiation by the Black community of nuclear arms from the 1940s up through
President Obama’s April 5, 2009, Prague speech: jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, composer and pianist Duke Ellington,
civil rights and gay activist Bayard Rustin, poet-novelist James Baldwin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, civil rights leader
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and sociologist and pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois are among those who spoke out
decisively and often. During these same decades, many white people also spoke out against the moral depravity of
nuclear weapons, some even suffering terrible costs similar to those suffered by, for example, Du Bois, who because of
his ardent denunciation of the American nuclear arsenal was at various points arrested, accused of being an
unregistered foreign agent, denied a passport, and eventually prompted to expatriate to Ghana.8 But Black Americans,
in addition to educating all who would hear about the moral depravity of the inflicted injuries, have also sought tirelessly
to educate the country about the racial scaffolding that provides the gantry on which the missiles are launched. Some
readers will recognize as self-evident the U.S. addiction to white racial supremacy that was at work in the flattening of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that today supports the country’s prodigious nuclear arsenal. Some readers will recognize
as self-evident the U.S. addiction to white racial supremacy that was at work in the flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and that today supports the country’s prodigious nuclear arsenal, currently undergoing a 1.2 trillion dollar renewal.9 But
other readers—even some who perceive the moral turpitude of nuclear weapons and who work tirelessly for their
dismantlement—may be reluctant to recognize that racism. After all, we know nuclear weapons stand to eliminate all
humans on Earth, not those of one or another race. Americans and Russians, who together possess more than 93
percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, have long been designated as one another’s major opponent, and Russians are
often loosely described as racially white (even though they, like the American people, are made up of many different
ethnic groups). That nuclear war stands a high chance of being instigated by accident or by appropriation of the
weapons by a hacker or nonstate actor may seem to make the conscious and unconscious racial biases of a U.S.
president or nuclear command chain irrelevant. But three lists—the list of geographies where U.S. presidents have
contemplated launching a first strike, the list of geographies where the United States has tested its bombs, and the list
of countries that the United States condemns for their aspiration to acquire nuclear weapons—may, like avenues of
insight radiating outward from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, help to make the racial underpinnings of the nuclear
architecture unmistakable. Detail from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Photo courtesy of the author. section
separator First, then, the geographies where we know U.S. presidents have contemplated first strikes. Eisenhower
considered using an atomic weapon in the Taiwan Straits in 1954. The record of his statements in private meetings
shows the presence of race, whether he was at any given moment explaining why he might use the weapon or instead
why he might abstain from its use: “The President said that we must recognize the Quemoy is not our ship. Letters to
him constantly say what do we care what happens to those yellow people out there.”10 Nixon tells us he contemplated
ordering a first strike four times during his presidency. Although he did not name all four targets, we know one in 1969
was North Korea.11 He contemplated striking North Vietnam in 1972.12 Lyndon Johnson contemplated the launch of a
nuclear weapon against China to prevent China from acquiring a nuclear weapon.13 To this list may be added the times
when U.S. presidents have threatened a first strike, as when the George H.W. Bush administration during the first Gulf
War informed Saddam Hussein that if he used chemical weapons, nuclear missiles were positioned to strike his
country.14 The U.S. selection of nuclear testing sites indicates a belief that people of color are expendable. Like the
countries U.S. presidents have chosen for a first strike, the U.S. selection of nuclear testing sites indicates a belief that
people of color are expendable. The painful instance of the Marshall Islands is succinctly summarized by the Washington
Post’s Dan Zak: “The United States tested 67 high-yield nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958, resettling whole islands
of Marshallese people, exposing many to radioactive fallout and bequeathing exile and ill health to ensuing
generations.”15 One of the bombs was 15 megatons. Describing the total impact of the 67 tests, Zak reckons, “If their
combined explosive power was parceled evenly over that 12-year period, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-size explosions
per day.”16 The picture is not more heartening when one turns to tests carried out on U.S. soil. On the arrival this
summer of the 75th anniversary of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico, observers noted the racial distribution:
“It should come as no surprise that the downwinders of Trinity were largely impoverished agricultural families, mostly
Hispanic and Native.”17 As in New Mexico, so in Nevada. A study published in the medical journal Risk Analysis
concludes, “Native Americans residing in a broad region downwind from the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s and
1960s received significant radiation exposures from nuclear weapons testing.”18 The third list is the sequence of
countries we have condemned because their leaders and scientists have aspired to develop a nuclear weapon. The
United States has treated these aspirants, in each case, people of color—Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, North Koreans—as
immoral, despite our own vast nuclear architecture and despite our 1995 statement at the International Court of Justice
that our having a nuclear arsenal, threatening to use it, using it, and using it first do not violate international covenants
such as the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.19 The United States
sometimes bases its indignation toward nuclear aspirants on the fact that the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by yet
another country will violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); it righteously announces this violation while relentlessly
overlooking the fact that it has for 50 years been in violation of that treaty, which requires, as one of its major pillars,
that existing nuclear states dismantle their own arsenals. A recent article in The Atlantic reports new neuroscience
research suggesting that people holding positions of power may suffer brain damage, the incapacitation of mirror
neurons that ordinarily enable one to comprehend the position of another person or people.20 A country that has
6,000 nuclear weapons while savaging North Korea for having fewer than 30; a country that has 12 Ohio-class
submarines each carrying the equivalent of 4,000 Hiroshima blasts while going to war against Iraq on false evidence that
it might have material that could lead to a single nuclear weapon; a country that can’t be bothered to commemorate
August 6 and August 9 and the hundreds of thousands incinerated on those days, yet clucks and scolds about Iranian
nuclear projects, imposes sanctions, and unleashes a Stuxnet digital worm that subverts Iran’s uranium enrichment
plant;21 a country that persuades Libya to dispose of its nuclear materials and after it does so, swoops in to help
assassinate the country’s leader, might well appear to be a country whose governors—and perhaps, too, some in its
population—no longer have functioning mirror neurons. When this soul-destroying asymmetry is pointed out, the
United States says, “Yes, but they (i.e., those people of color) may use them, while we (i.e., we white people in charge of
the United States) will not use them,” a manifestly incoherent statement since it is only the United States who has used
them, and used them twice.22 Extreme alarm incited by picturing nuclear weapons in the hands of yet-one-more
country rarely kicks in when the United States distributes its own weapons to NATO allies, currently Germany, Belgium,
Netherlands, Italy (Turkey, too, has U.S. nuclear weapons, but many were removed after 2000 and those that remain
have since 2016 become a source of mounting worry23). Since these four countries are traditionally viewed as white-
majority peoples, the danger of reckless use is apparently non-existent; the proliferation of the weapons to these
countries does not, in the U.S. view, violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In a feat of double think that might have
startled even George Orwell, they calmly acknowledge that in the event of war (when the NATO sharing countries will be
called upon to participate in the delivery of those weapons), the Non-Proliferation Treaty will cease to be in effect.24 So
we return to the question: What kind of political arrangements will create a noble and generous people? What kind of
arrangements will restrain a country from egregious mass killings in the future? Will enable that country to face
responsibility for injuries it has in the past inflicted on home ground (on Native Americans and African Americans), and
on foreign ground (the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? Will help them to dedicate themselves to dismantling mis-
trained and militarized police teams roving their cities and dismantling the nation’s nuclear architecture? These
accomplishments are momentous and difficult but surely also minimal if we aspire to one day become a great and good
people. The cruelty daily inflicted on people of color in our own city streets acts as a mental rehearsal for carrying out
large-scale slayings abroad. It keeps our capacity for cruelty limber; it dulls the mind and gives us practice in
pronouncing the word “expendable.” Langston Hughes voiced the opinion that until racial injustice on home ground in
the United States ceases, “it is going to be very hard for some Americans not to think the easiest way to settle the
problems of Asia is simply dropping an atom bomb on colored heads there .”25 While his statement was made in 1953,
near the eighth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it remains equally relevant today, as we approach
the 75th anniversary: then, as now, the safety of the Korean people (among other peoples) was at issue. The cruelty
daily inflicted on people of color in our own city streets acts as a mental rehearsal for carrying out large-scale slayings
abroad. It keeps our capacity for cruelty limber; it dulls the mind and gives us practice in pronouncing the word
“expendable.” Langston Hughes might have with equal accuracy noted the reverse. Our cruelty abroad hardens our
hearts, enabling us to tolerate the spectacle of everyday racial injustice at home. Americans, seeing our country boast a
vast nuclear architecture that has no other purpose than the instant elimination from Earth of large civilian
populations—the launch codes day and night casually tucked in our president’s pocket— consciously or unconsciously
absorb the power lesson, suffer the same brain deterioration, and now become dull-witted about whether Native
American and Black lives any longer even matter.

The alternative is black nihilism – a refusal of the 1ac’s spiritual optimism in favor of imagining
blackness at the end of the world in order to provide new epistemologies
Warren 15 [Calvin K., Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, “Black Nihilism and the
Politics of Hope,” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015]

V. Conclusion

Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical structures that sustain black
suffering. This preservation amounts to an exploitation of hope—when the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of
hope and puts it in the service of extending the “will to power” of an anti-black organization of existence. The Politics of
hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical violence, and this violence masquerades as a “solution” to the problem of
anti-blackness. Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are conceptual
instruments of the Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only serve to
reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearable for blacks . Political theologians and black optimists avoid
the immediacy of black suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a “not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-
come-social order” that, itself, can do little more but admonish blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope
becomes a vicious and abusive cycle of struggle—it mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black
freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.) that is inaccessible because it doesn’t really exist. The political theologian
and black optimist, then, propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black suffering—finding the joy in struggle,
the victory in toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to “struggle” and “work” as black youth are
slaughtered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are soaring, and
hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep
metaphysical problems—the sadistic pleasure of metaphysical domination—and “work” and “struggle” avoid the
terrifying fact that the world depends on black death to sustain itself . Black nihilism attempts to break this “drive”—
to stop it in its tracks, as it were—and to end the cycle of insanity that political hope perpetuates.

The question that remains is a question often put to the black nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical
structuring of thought—all knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a point—it is an epistemic flicker of
certainty, determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. “The point” exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains
knowledge. Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the “episteme of life”
and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in the infinite horizon of thought
(perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is inherently
subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless, the [End Page 243] nihilist is forced to enunciate his
refusal through a “point,” a point that is contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is
that “the point” is fraudulent—its promise of clarity and life are inadequate—will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining
the nihilist and insisting that one undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic hermeneutics
resists “the point” but is subjected to it to have one’s voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The “point” of this
essay is that political hope is pointless . Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in the very
structure that sustains metaphysical violence , the Political, will never resolve anything . This is why the black nihilist
speaks of “exploited hope,” and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the clutches of the Political . Can we
think of hope outside the Political? Must “salvation” translate into a political grammar or a political program? The
nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it
does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic .

In “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes blackness as a “pathogen” to metaphysics,
something that has the ability to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through
Moten’s brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really after. It
is a “blackened” world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to
the world itself—this is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far cry from what we call
“anarchy,” however. The black nihilist has as little faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy
than he does in traditional forms of political existence.

The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering,
and the idol of anti-blackness. The act of renouncing will not change political structures or offer a political program;
instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political . Ultimately, it is
impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from
the Political completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black suffering :
the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a
coherent grammar to articulate these dilemmas.

After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I decided to take a train home. As I awaited my train in the
station, an older black woman asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train headed
toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly, she began to talk about the government
shutdown. “They don’t care anything about us, you know,” she said. “We elect these people into office, we vote for
them, and they watch black people suffer and have no intentions of doing anything about it.” I shook my head in
agreement and listened intently. “I’m going to stop voting, and supporting this process; why should I keep doing this
and our people continue to suffer,” she said. I looked at her and said, “I don’t know ma’am; I just don’t understand it
myself.” She then laughed and thanked me for listening to her—as if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. “You
know, people think you’re crazy when you say things like this,” she said giving me a wink. “Yes they do,” I said. “But I
am a free woman,” she emphasized “and I won’t go back.” Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that
moment I realized that her wisdom and courage penetrated my mind and demanded answers. I’ve thought about this
conversation for some time, and it is for this reason I had to write this essay. To the brave woman at the train station, I
must say you are not crazy at all but thinking outside of metaphysical time, space, and violence .

Ultimately, we must hope for the end of political hope.

Public deliberation structurally cannot include the position of the slave because they are denied
personhood by definition – the structural violence of slavery cannot be articulated in the political
Hartman ‘9 [Saidiya, professor of English and comparative literature and women's and gender studies at Columbia
University, “Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice”, in American Studies: An Anthology, pp.343-344]
In order to illuminate the significance of performance and the articulation of social struggle in seemingly innocuous
events, everyday forms of practice must be contextualized within the virtually unbounded powers of the slave-owning
class, and whites in general, to use all means necessary to ensure submission. Thus it is no surprise that these everyday
forms of practice are usually subterranean. I am reluctant to simply describe these practices as a "kind of politics," not
because I question whether the practices considered here are small-scale forms of struggle or dismiss them as cathartic
and contained.' Rather, it is the concern about the possibilities of practice as they are related to the particular object
constitution and subject formation of the enslaved outside the "political proper" that leads me both to question the
appropriateness of the political to this realm of practice and to reimagine the political in this context. (As well, f take
seriously Jean Comaroff's observations that "the real politick of oppression dictates that resistance be expressed in
domains seemingly apolitical.")" The historical and social limits of the political must he recognized in order to evaluate
the articulation of needs and the forwarding of claims in domains relegated to the privatized or nonpolitical. If the
public sphere is reserved for the white bourgeois subject and the public/private divide replicates that between the
political and the nonpolitical, then the agency of the enslaved, whose relation to the state is mediated by way of
another's rights, is invariably relegated to the nonpolitical side of this divide. This gives us some sense of the full weight
and meaning of the slaveholder's dominion. In effect, those subjects removed from the public sphere are formally
outside the space of politics. The everyday practices of the enslaved generally fall outside direct forms of
confrontation; they are not systemic in their ideology, analysis, or intent, and, most important, the slave is neither civic
man nor free worker but excluded from the narrative of "we the people" that effects the linkage of the modern
individual and the state. The enslaved were neither envisioned nor afforded the privilege of envisioning themselves as
part of the "imaginary sovereignty of the state" or as "infused with unreal universality."" Even the Gramscian model,
with its reformulation of the relation of state and civil society in the concept of the historical bloc and its expanded
definition of the political, maintains a notion of the political inseparable from the effort and the ability of a class to
effect hegemony? By questioning the use of the term "political," I hope to illuminate the possibilities of practice and the
stakes of these dispersed resistances. All of this is not a preamble to an argument about the "prepolitical" consciousness
of the enslaved but an attempt to point to the limits of the political and the difficulty of translating or interpreting the
practices of the enslaved within that framework. The everyday practices of the enslaved occur in the default of the
political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the self-possessed individual, and perhaps even
without a "person," in the usual meaning of the term.
 Anthropocene K: NU

The “legal person” is a quasi-disembodied subject---it excises the mind from the body, which
renders embodied life disposable, but also smuggles in a white, European male, which objectifies
non-dominant humans and animals.
Anna Grear 20, Professor of Law of Cardiff University, 2020, “Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For’,”
Law and Critique, 31(3), pp. 351-366, https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10978-020-09275-7

Legal Imaginary of the Anthropocene

It follows from Lennon’s argument that law’s imaginary world is interdependent with law’s imaginary of human
embodiment . However, as noted above, this embodiment is a (complex) form of disembodied-embodiment —or
‘ quasi-disembodiment ’ (Grear 2010, pp. 41–45).

A range of critical legal scholarship converges to expose the centrality to legal ideology of this disembodied capitalistic
subject, but—significantly—its structural disembodiment is never complete . Disembodiment is, in effect, a
mystification based upon the long-standing onto-epistemic binary underwriting the imaginary of the body in much
Western philosophy (Lakof and Johnson 1999) and serves a distinctive ideological function in the legal system.1
Disembodiment and the decontextualized, dis-embedded rationality it elevates produces the uneven (but predictably
patterned) suppression of the full legal significance of human materiality and embodiment (Cheah et al. 1996, p. xv),
while prioritizing a highly particular , historically dominant, identifable beneficiary: the paradigmatic European
property-owning male citizen (Nafne 1997, 2001, p. 56).

It is this subject who uniquely possesses reason , the reason thought to ‘ transcend the structures of bodily experience’
(Johnson 1987, p. x). The body is thus separated from the ‘rational mind’ , and reduced to an ‘object to be controlled
and mechanised’ (Seidler 1998, p. 17), while the moral agent of law is likewise quintessentially defined by its
possession of abstract, rationalistic universal characteristics that transcend embodiment (Halewood 1996).

Disembodiment and its interdependent form of objectifying rationality are foundational to law’s concept of the legal
actor , the person . The disembodied-body of law is a complex but reductively conceived container for a rational,
calculative will and performs a politics of excision by which law’s subject stands on one side of law’s central binary
opposition between person and property . Law’s imaginary of the body necessarily thus performs a radical
‘ decontextualisation of the subject from the world of objects …’ (1996, p. 1340). Accordingly, law’s imaginary of
disembodiment converges with law’s imaginary world as object — mere extensa —a field for the action of the only
subject whose agency ever truly counts .

Law’s imaginary also constructs the body itself as object in multiple, intersecting and disaggregated ways. The body is
the corporeal boundary of the quintessential holders of legal rights (1996, p. 1341), while the body is also
disaggregated variously as the ‘legal penis’, the ‘legal vagina’ and a whole host of other legal body parts performing
specifc ideological roles in the legal imaginary (Hyde 1997). Meanwhile, ‘ bodily identity ’ forms the substrate for an
entire spectrum of legal privileges and marginalizations based on highly selective readings of corporeality through
which rational, property-owning white European males are privileged while all ‘ others’ are complexly marginalized—
unable to function as full legal persons as those others, based precisely upon their corporeal ‘otherness’ (Nafne 2011).
This process, as is well known, produces a hierarchical spectrum of constructed rationality and irrationality ( women
and non-white people represent core examples of this problematic and longstanding ideological dynamic ) (Smart
1989; Jaggar and Bordo 1989, p. 4).
It is precisely this prioritization of the archetypal legal actor , sole possessor of the disembodied rationalism
underpinning law’s imaginary of human embodiment , that gives rise to the need for the term ‘quasi-disembodiment ’.
The disembodiment imagined by Western philosophy and law is, of course, impossible for corporeally specific human
beings, while core injustices of the legal imaginary are paradoxically dependent upon bodies and bodily ‘differences’,
as we have seen. There is, as Ahmed has put it, a smuggled body in legal disembodiment (Ahmed 1995, p. 56):
rationality is quintessentially disembodied (body-transcendent) yet rationality is also male ; the female is immersed in
embodiment as a source of unreason . To be recognized as male requires a particular morphology: thus, the smuggled
body of disembodiment is inevitably male —a body ‘defned precisely through the mechanism of exclusion’ (1995, p.
56). Hence: quasi-disembodiment .

Quasi-disembodiment is a politics . It is an ideological process that systematically produces ‘others’ to the subject -at-
the- centre of law’s imaginary. These ‘others’ are to differing degrees and varying contexts objectified (and feminized)
by a body-politics of privilege and marginalization in which women , other non-dominant humans , non-human
animals , ecosystems and a whole universe of lively ‘others’ are caught up in juridical processes of objectification .2

That intensifies coloniality and the Anthropocene crisis, which causes extinction.
Anna Grear 20, Professor of Law of Cardiff University, 2020, “Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For’,”
Law and Critique, 31(3), pp. 351-366, https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10978-020-09275-7

In this sense, quasi-disembodied embodiment is central to the injustices of the legal imaginary , which turn on
significant patterns of marginalization precisely through the attribution of body-
immersion/irrationality/objectifcation/feminization. Significantly, moreover, the apotheosis of the quasi-disembodied
legal actor is the business corporation , which much more closely corresponds to the ideological and structural
characteristics of law’s disembodied perspective and disembodied imaginary than can any corporeally specific human
being (Grear 2010, pp. 89-95). The business corporation is the jurally disembodied personification of capital
(Neocleous 2003), yet its submerged bodily imaginary is simultaneously Eurocentric , white , and masculinist (Lahey and
Salter 1985; Federman 2003; Belcher 2011). Quasi-disembodied rationality also operates as a central mechanism of
Eurocentric civilizational priority (Kapur 2007, p. 541). This, combined with the juridical privilege and disembodied
advantages of the corporate body intensify the patterns of selective ‘othering’ and the property-centred
appropriative dynamics visible in the colonial capitalist drivers of the Anthropocene and foundational to the
international legal order co-emergent with it (McLean 2004; Anghie 2005; Malm and Hornborg 2014). Arguably, the
ultimate expression of the ideological and structural primacy of the quasi-disembodied subject is the transnational
corporation (TNC), which was functionally indispensible both to the colonial power structures underpinning the
Eurocentric international legal order (Mclean 2004; Anghie 2005; Malm and Hornborg 2014), and to the mercantile and
then corporate industrial origins of the colonial capitalist Anthropocene (Grear 2015).

As is well known, the ‘Anthropocene’ is the formally proposed title for a post-Holocene geological epoch. The origins of
the Anthropocene are contested (Glikson 2013; Foley et al. 2013), but critical accounts converge to expose broadly
colonial capitalist origins (Malm and Hornborg 2014; Lewis and Maslin 2015; Kanngieser and Beuret 2017). Lewis and
Maslin identify two primary geological markers (GSSPs) indicating its most likely start dates: 1610—and 1964.
Signifcantly, the 1610 GSSP marks the emergence of the modern colonial ‘world system’ (Lewis and Maslin 2015, p. 175),
the marker itself being a signifcant dip in atmospheric CO2, the so-called ‘Orbis spike’ (signalling the emergence of a
unifed world (‘orb’)). This was a time of a ‘geologically unprecedented homogenization of Earth’s biota’ (2015, p. 175)
known as the ‘Colombian Exchange’, a cross-continental movement of plant and animal life—‘a swift, ongoing, radical
reorganization of life on Earth without geological precedent’ (2015, p. 174). The dip in CO2 was caused by the
decimation of the human population of the ‘New World’ as it came into contact with European diseases, ‘war,
enslavement and famine’ (2015, p. 175). Human numbers collapsed by some 50 million leading up to 1650: farming
ceased, forests took over, and the resultant carbon sequestration stands in the geological record as a permanent marker
of widespread death and devastation. Meanwhile, the 1964 ‘Great Acceleration’ marker refects a signifcant increase in
human numbers, decisive shifts in natural processes, and the development of pollutants such as plastics. As Connolly
notes, the Great Acceleration has intensifed markedly under the pressures of global capitalism, with capitalist states in
the Global North increasingly being joined in the production of pollutants by more recent capitalist states, such as India,
China, Brazil and Russia (Connolly 2017, Ch. 5).

The quasi-disembodied subject for which all ‘others’ were/are objectified/quasi-objectified and whose appropriative
ideology is operationalized through TNC plunder of the objectifed world of still-colonized ‘others’ was — and remains —
key to the production of the capitalist Anthropocene . Law of the Anthropocene is, therefore, law as coloniality and
neo-coloniality —law complicit in ongoing forms of eco-violence , economic predation and the unparalleled imposition
of precarity on humans and non-humans alike (Blanco and Grear 2019). The ‘global’ of the Anthropocene and of the
globalized legal order was thus always ‘highly specifc’ in its origins and development (Haraway 2014, 14.02) and the
Anthropocene marks, to a signifcant degree, an intensifcation of trajectories inherent to the capitalist legal imaginary.

The imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and the severed rationalism that it erects as its epistemological panopticon 3 is
fundamental, then, to the predatory imaginary structuring the colonial past and the neocolonial present. As Kanngeiser
and Bueret put it, the ‘Anthropocene is the outcome of fve hundred years of dispossession, capitalist accumulation, and
neo/colonial globalization’ (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017, p. 376). So marked are these patterns that some scholars
rightly reject the implied species-ecumenism of the term ‘Anthropocene’, preferring ‘Capitalocene’ as a more accurate
alternative (Moore 2016; Malm 2016).

The role of quasi-disembodiment in these patterns is central: law’s onto-epistemic imaginary is fundamentally shaped
by it, and from this perspective it is predictable that, as McLean puts it, the ‘the history of colonial expansion is [also] a
history of the corporate form ’ (McLean 2004, p. 364). This is no historical accident. If, as Chakrabarty (2007, p. 4) has
argued, the

entire phenomenon of ‘political modernity’, namely – the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and
capitalist enterprise – is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and
concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe,

then these structures are in reality impossible to think of without also assuming (even without awareness of the fact)
the longstanding body-politics of quasi-disembodiment underwriting the juridical order . In this imaginary, only
European men, after all, archetypally conform to the template of a fully ‘human’ legal subjectivity (Quijano and Ennis
2000): liberal law’s ‘[r]ights and benefits were tied to the capacity to reason , and the capacity to reason was tied to
notions of biological determinism , racial and religious superiority and civilizational maturity’ (Kapur 2007, p. 541).
Law’s imaginary thus constructed the colonial ‘inferiority of the colonized’ precisely by co-situating indigenous and
colonized ‘others’ with all those other less-than-fully-rational (feminized—non-White-male-body-identifed) ‘others’ to
the ‘rational’ quasi-disembodied European master-subject .

In short, the predictable, familiar mal-distributions of life and death currently characterizing the Anthropocene draw
upon the same onto-epistemic imaginary as underpins a long history of Eurocentric, masculinist, colonizing power
(Adelman 2015) and its prototypical rational, ‘civilizing’ actor . The imaginary of law of the Anthropocene is then an
imaginary foundational to what is now a necrocapitalist (Banerjee 2008) catastrophe . The stakes are profound . In
Catastrophic Times, Stengers reminds her readers that human beings face, potentially, ‘the death of what we have
called a civilization [– and she reminds us –] there are many manners of dying, some being more ugly than others’
(Stengers 2015, p. 10). Even in death , law’s capitalistic body-politics operates as what Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’ —
the kind of politics that subjects life unevenly to ‘the power of death’ (Mbembe 2003). Where, then, might hope of an
alternative imaginary, with diferent potentialities, lie?

Legal Imaginary for the Anthropocene

Plumwood captures the challenge presented by such catastrophic prospects —and drives at the radical nature of the
transformations of human consciousness and praxis now necessary . She accurately diagnoses the kind of failure that
consigns the future to deadly outcomes : ‘If our species does not survive the ecological crisis , it will probably be due
to our failure … to work out new ways to live with the earth , to rework ourselves … We will go onwards in a different
mode of humanity , or not at all’ (Plumwood 2007, p. 1). It is this ‘going onwards in a diferent mode of humanity’ and
the need to ‘ rework ourselves’ in new arts of living with the Earth that are centrally at stake in seeking an alternative
legal imaginary for the Anthropocene .

The alternative is sympoiesis---it emphasizes that we make the world in tandem with nonhuman
entities instead of alone---that is incompatible with expanding legal personhood, which is founded
in disembodied individualism.
Anna Grear 20, Professor of Law of Cardiff University, 2020, “Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For’,”
Law and Critique, 31(3), pp. 351-366, https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10978-020-09275-7

The profoundly ethical question of who we are bound up with in what ways, it seems to me, must sit at the heart of
any new imaginary for laws for the Anthropocene . It matters how humans and non-human critters of all kinds—
organic and inorganic—are understood to be bound up with each other , and in what respects and ways—and these
specifc patterns of interwovenness can and should be made visible to questions of juridical justice / injustice . In the
legal imaginary of the Anthropocene , patterns of affect were narrowly constructed along reductive causal lines
notoriously inept for climate-related harms (harms which are, when all is said and done, intrinsically transcorporeal). In
the legal imaginary of the Anthropocene , juridical rationality and its disembodied individualism operates (albeit
complexly and incompletely) to excise eco-social context (Norrie 2001) and entanglement selectively from view, while
matter is, as we have seen, reduced to a field of objectified exploitability closely related to the objectifying spectrum
along which law’s ‘others’ are ranged .

In a legal imaginary for the Anthropocene , inspired by new imaginaries of lively , porous embodiment and of Earthly
materialities expressing their own incipiencies and tendencies, the onto-epistemic frame opens expansively . Into the
direct purview of questions of justice, injustice and ethics come the jostling propensities and capacities of organic and
inorganic forms of liveliness. Such an imaginary could bring law closer to Haraway’s Chthulucene, in so far as it could
open law and legal enquiry to the ways in which ‘we’ are bound up with each other in multiple ways through threads
of entangled affect at macro, meso and micro levels. Minimally, legal enquiry would need to expand
epistemologically, and as noted above, lean into the sensory organs of science without which ethical sight is too
shallow to account for transcorporeal realities . However, such an imaginary should also, I suggest, mean opening law ,
and certainly opening legal theoretical work , to the sensory organs of the arts —with their unique capacity to dislodge
and to re-invent imaginaries , their unrivalled ability —along with plural indigenous lifeways (Escobar, 2015) and
practices of spirituality as technologies of the self—to transform the lived-sense of ‘I’/‘other’. Indeed, Haraway’s work
is rich with implication in this respect.

Space only allows a brief consideration. I therefore focus on one particular thread. I suggest that Haraway’s Chthulucene
imaginary inspires the possibility of what might be termed ‘ sympoietic normativities ’. Such normativities (and art-
science collaborations exploring their meaning ) should become central , I suggest, to grounding a renewing legal
imaginary for the Anthropocene.

For Haraway, sympoiesis is a corrective to ‘autopoiesis’ (the capacity of organisms to self-produce : ‘organisms …
viewed as… materially embodied processes that bring forth themselves’ (Weber 2013, p. 30, emphasis added).
Haraway prefers sympoiesis because it emphasizes the idea of the co- and sym-productive nature of materially
embodied processes. Indeed, she argues that sympoietic systems are often mistaken for autopoietic ones , and that
this point is important for thinking about rehabilitation (making liveable again) and sustainability amid the porous
tissues and open edges of damaged but still ongoing living worlds , like the planet earth and its denizens in current
times being called the Anthropocene . (Haraway 2016, p. 33)

Sympoiesis refers to

collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries . Information and control
are distributed among components . The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change .
(Haraway 2016, p. 33, citing Dempster 1998)

Given that science and philosophy no longer support even the plausibility of ‘independent organisms in environments’
(Haraway 2016, p. 33), sympoiesis— which moves far beyond interacting units plus contexts and rules—emphasizes the
membranous , porous nature of system-entanglements and the inherently corelational nature of emergence .
Sympoiesis thus offers, I think, rich possibilities for the future theorization of a legal imaginary for the Anthropocene
and a renewing ground for normative relationalities .

As Haraway puts it, ‘Sympoiesis is a simple word : it means “ making with ” … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex ,
dynamic , responsive , situated , historical systems . It is a word for worlding-with , in company. Sympoiesis enfolds
autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it’ (Haraway 2016, p. 58). We should pause here to note that an
imaginary of sympoietic embodiment sounds a death knell to the human exceptionalism and individualism
underwriting law: a sympoietic entity is a ‘ holobiont ’—not a ‘ one’ or ‘ individual’ :

in polytemporal, polyspatial knottings, holobionts hold together contingently and dynamically, engaging other
holobionts in complex patternings. Critters do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic
material involution , out of the beings of previous such entanglements. (Haraway 2016, p. 60)

Both cognitively and affectively the imaginary of embodiment becomes a space of holobiont relationalities —even
the human body is not straightforwardly ‘human’ in the sense that the human body is also in large part a complex ,
shifting and contingent community of microbiota , viruses and other tiny non-human holobionts .
 Bataille K: Emory

Restriction K --- 1NC

Incorporating personified units individuates energy and expenditure which must endlessly flow
through a general economy---restriction culminates in catastrophe.
Oxana Timofeeva 20. Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European
University in St. Petersburg, Russia, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of
Sciences. “From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille’s Political Economy” Stasis, Vol 9 No 1 (2020): Terra,
Natura, Materia. http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/165

If we apply Bataille’s theory of general economy to pandemic, climate change, environmental crisis, and other
contemporary global challenges, we can interpret them as signs of nature’s striving for squander reinforced by
anthropogenic factors—industry, agriculture, tourism, extraction of fuels, and so on—that at the end of the day turns
fatal for humans. People infected with COVID-19 that cannot receive medical treatment because hospitals are
overwhelmed, whales or seabirds that die after eating plastic items, burning forests in Australia and Siberia, reindeer-
breeders and their herds exposed to the anthrax outbreak that was caused by the melting of permafrost on Yamal
Peninsula (see Plester 2017), disappearing wild bees and other beings suffering from the global processes that humanity
has triggered but cannot control—all seem to become offerings on the planetary debauchery irradiated by the sun.
Human beings with their restrictive economies are the active part of it. They think that they struggle for survival or
work for prosperity, but altogether their economic activities only contribute to the planetary feast indistinguishable
from a plague .

It is this destructive aspect of the accursed share, outlined by Bataille, that relates to his later concept of full violence,
or violence of the nonhuman, presented in “Pure Happiness.” I argue that the two kinds of economy and the two kinds
of violence in Bataille correlate in the following way: any form of human violence belongs to the domain of the restricted
economy that comprises all sorts of practical activities of human beings within the circle of means and goals, whereas
nonhuman violence, or violence of the second kind, refers to the planetary level of the excess of energy, and therefore
can be also called “solar violence.” In the perspective of contemporary theoretical debates on the clash between
humans and nature, let me put it like this: what Bataille meant by restricted economy was not only capitalism or
Soviet communism that he criticized for its cult of production, but something more comprehensive, pointing to the
antagonistic relation between nature and humans that pretend to be separate from it, to manipulate or replace it. In
Bataille, this separation is the essential aspect of anthropogenesis: the human being is an animal that rejects its
animal nature; all that is natural must be repelled beyond the line of prohibition that marks the border between the
sacred and the profane. Sacred is what has been prohibited or excluded; all gods are born on that side—first as animals,
plants, the earth and, indeed, the sun. We do not have direct access to this world; the way to it lies only through the
ritual transgression of prohibitions. In turn, on this side, humans create their own world that Bataille called profane—
the world of utility and labor, which leans to restricted economies .

Today we are led to suggest that the restricted economy also refers to the Anthropocene. A profane violence of the
Anthropocene can be compared to the restricted violence of reason that excludes what it cannot convert into its object
(the nonhuman) and thus produces an excess that returns as repressed, rebels as oppressed, or, to put it in Bataillean
terms, raises as the god of violence: pandemic or climate change are manifestations of the divine violence of the
nonhuman, or solar violence. It “offers itself as the only answer” to the violence of the Anthropocene. Contemporary
ecological awareness reveals climate change, mass extinction, and other catastrophic phenomena that get out of human
control as partly or entirely anthropogenic or technogenic. There is a tempting image of the human race abusing nature
that either passively dies, falling victim to this abuse, or tries to take revenge, for instance, with the grasshopper plague
or the appearance of new, stronger viruses like COVID-19. Going back to the aforementioned examples: on the one
hand, the pandemic itself was reportedly caused by the complex anthropogenic impact on the environment with wild
animal trade as its key element; on the other, the coronavirus outbreak drastically decreased carbon emissions and air
pollution due to the reduction of energy and transport use, as if the planet was really trying to take revenge over its
troublesome part called humanity, or even used the virus as an instrument to restore its atmospheric balance. As Slavoj
Žižek puts it, “when nature is attacking us with viruses, it is in a way sending our own message back to us. The message
is: what you did to me, I am now doing to you ” (2020).

Nonhuman violence can indeed be understood as a response to human violence, and the turbulence of the Earth
interpreted as responsive violent acts analogous to proletarian strikes, revolutionary movements, and decolonizing
struggles, as if nature could manifest its unwillingness to be exploited or colonized, and its capacity to fight back: thus
nature acquires serious political vigor. However, if we hold on to the Bataillean perspective, we would have to
acknowledge that addressing nature in terms of justice , rage, or vindication, as well as in terms of means and ends ,
transfers solar violence into the language of restricted economy . We can use this translation, keeping in mind that
something essential might get lost in it and the original “message” seriously differs from that which we receive. In
nature, there is no “me” and “you.” The earth does not really strike back, does not act responsively and all the more
intentionally. It stays indifferent to human affairs. The divine violence of the nonhuman is asymmetrical to the
restrictive violence of reason , capital, or Anthropocene; the whole does not behave as an individual .

The indifference of nature and the incommensurability of the two languages , two economies, and two kinds of
violence—to put it bluntly, human and planetary—does not mean, however , that general politics , relevant to the
general economy, is not possible . As was already emphasized, according to Bataille humanity can and must think of
the economic models that overcome the restrictedness of existing forms of exchange and production, that always
end up with destruction , be it warfare , as Bataille suggested, or climate change in my interpretation. General economy
takes the luxurious character of nature as its starting point and develops it into quite an elevated form of self-
consciousness that transforms the destruction, or waste into nonproductive expenditure, of the gift economy .
Behaving restrictedly, that is, competing, striving for profit, accumulation and growth, is not self-conscious. It is a mere
survival strategy of individual organisms, be they humans or other animals, but also entire nation-states that,
particularly in the face of crisis, act as egotistic individuals. Becoming self-conscious means, economy-wise, learning to
share.

The idea of the necessity of sharing that takes nonhuman nature as its model is adopted by contemporary philosophers
such as Luce Irigaray, who claims that the future will be one of sharing, if there will be one at all: “Starting from the
sharing of organic and inorganic nature, it would be possible to elaborate a way of thinking and living that is
ecological, instead of economic—in other words, non-possessive, non-appropriative, but participatory with regard to
a greater whole…” (2015). In Irigaray’s view, learning to share is an urgency in our economies because “the prospects
for life on earth depend on it” (Ibid). It is true, of course, and it seems that, understood as such, the ecology that must
replace economy echoes Bataille’s general economy that must replace a restricted one. Yes, general economy could
stay for today’s ecology, but there is one nuance: the urgency of today’s ecology—to save life on earth—seem to send
it back to the all-too-human register of means and goals. Bataille’s sun shines aimlessly . All life on earth is just an
effect of its sovereign violence. We must learn to share not because we want to live, but because sharing is glorious.
It breaks with utility , with the logic of survival. In the Bataillean perspective, understanding the earth , or nature, or
the nonhuman in a broad sense, as an economic agency that, like humans, pursues its interests, would be wrong . The
point is not to translate from the general to the restricted , but from the restricted to the general : if we want to
commensurate our economies with our environments, we have to become solar , and not the other way around .

Bataille’s notion of violence—and the difference between the two kinds of violence—allows for the creation of a bridge
from general economy to general politics that is only sketched here but deserves to be developed at a greater length in
some future work. Basically, the idea is the following: for a general emancipatory politics, the point is not to interpret
solar violence—pandemic outbreak, climate change, volcano eruptions, tornadoes, and so on—as nature’s revolt
analogous to human emancipatory struggles, but to grasp human emancipatory struggles as solar violence that
correlates to the solar economy. Roughly said, nature does not strike, because it does not care, but: what if a human
strike could go really general—not in terms of Sorel, but rather in terms of Bataille? Thus, one of the most shocking
effects of the coronavirus is that it interrupts, not entirely, of course, but partly at least—due to necessary quarantine
measures—the processes of capitalist production and exchange. Some employed become unemployed, others are sent
to a kind of involuntary vacation. Offices and institutions are closed, and the work is stopped or reduced, with a serious
loss for individuals and countries relying on their restrictive policies, so that the considerable intervention of states is
needed in order to preserve the capitalism system, in whose indissolubility the absolute majority of people so strongly
believed only yesterday. Does this sudden interruption not refer to some perverted image of the general strike? From
the quarantine to the viral strike; from climate change to the solar strike—these could be the mottos for a general
politics in times of pandemics and global warming. If we put it like this, we should explain the strike not as an
expression of need, but as an excessive wave of dangerous festivities that replace work . Decolonization or
revolutionary violence, too, can be interpreted as general , if we extend it from the domain of human history to the
domain of natural activities, and grasp not, say, climate change as a rebellion of the colonized Earth or revolutionary
movement of the oppressed nature, but human decolonizing struggles and revolutionary movements as radical
climate change: it is getting hot.

Refuse the call for personhood---the assumption that the general, nonhuman whole can be
reshaped as a restricted legal individual can only produce destruction---prefer instead becoming
solar.
Oxana Timofeeva 20. Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European
University in St. Petersburg, Russia, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of
Sciences. “From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille’s Political Economy” Stasis, Vol 9 No 1 (2020): Terra,
Natura, Materia. http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/165

In his time, Bataille was inspired by the idea of founding such a syncretic science that would consider the physical,
geological, sexual, philosophical, and political in their mutual intersection, which, as proclaimed throughout “The Solar
Anus,” is ultimately parodic. He did not have enough discipline to complete this science into a proper system (he hated
completed systems; maybe that is why his promises given in the preface and theoretical introduction to The Accursed
Share were not really carried out…), but he gave it a good name—general economy. Energy for general economy is not
only what matters, but what matters the most. Its currents define all economic life . Today we know it very well. We
are, however, used to thinking of energy as a limited resource for all productive activities. For Bataille, this was not
the case. He saw the problem not in the lack, but in the excess of energy. We, living organisms, receive more energy
than we really need and can accommodate . In this sense, we are not poor, but rich, as is everything and everybody on
Earth. It is because of this excessive energy that all animals and plants can grow and reproduce, but even growth and
reproduction cannot exhaust what we receive for no cost. The overall growth is limited by “the size of the terrestrial
space” (Bataille 1991: 29), within which animals and plants develop, invade the lands, crowd and replace each other .
Life itself is an extravagant luxury with death as its culminating point. Living forms rotate in nature’s macabre dance.

A superabundance of energy comes from the sun: “Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. The
origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any
return. The sun gives without ever receiving” (Ibid: 28). Be like the sun! —this is basically a Bataillean motto for the
possible future of the political economy adjusted to the planetary scale and balanced with the ecological whole. General,
or solar economy is the economy of gift as opposed to one of exchange, it privileges consumption over production and
expenditure over accumulation. How to imagine such an economy? Bataille provides an example of extreme poverty
in India contrasted to excessive wealth in the US: “General economy suggests, therefore, as a correct operation, a
transfer of American wealth to India without reciprocation ” (Ibid: 40). This sounds like a simple solution, but at the
same time absolutely impossible. Why? Because we are used to thinking about such matters in terms of restricted
human economies. We consider social life as interactions of separate objects, individuals or groups, national states,
and other units , with their specific needs, interests, or functions, whereas general economy only comprises the
planetary whole and its equilibriums. In fact, it cannot be practiced by humans within the system of capitalist states,
based on accumulation and ownership, where all things seem to be designed for being not distributed for free, but
possessed and exchanged at a profit. As Amanda Boetzkes comments on the place of solar energy in Bataille’s
ecological thinking, his account of solarity implies that “a global infrastructure that drew from a freely available source is
inimical to capitalism’s restricted energy economy” (Boetzkes 2017: 317). In a similar vein, Imre Szeman (2020) explains
that we can, indeed, imagine a global transition to “cleaner” solar energy that would replace more “dirty” fossil fuels,
but such a solar-energy-based capitalist economy will not equal a solar economy qua general economy. From Bataille’s
claim that the passage from a restricted to a general economy must accomplish a Copernican transformation with “ a
reversal of thinking—and of ethics ”

(1991: 25), Szeman makes a step to the idea that “This Copernican change of perspective necessitates a politics of
revolution rather than reform” (Szeman 2020: 137). What Bataille seem to miss in The Accursed Share is a kind of
political strategy: for this, an injection of Marxism is needed. An accomplishment of political revolution toward the solar
can only be global and international and start from abandoning the idea of economic growth as the main principle of our
societies.

On a global scale, as Bataille says, there is no growth, “but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form” (1991:
33). Human economies attempt to appropriate its flows and subordinate them to particular finite ends, but, after all,
“beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe” (Ibid: 21).
There is always a limit of growth, and an excess that must be spent this or that way. This excess is called “the
accursed share.” If every surplus is invested in further growth of the system like capital, a catastrophic outcome is just
a matter of time. Warfare is an example of such an outcome; particularly the prospect of the nuclear war was a
matter of concern for Bataille and people of his generation. Bataille’s general economy is paradoxically rational: what it
suggests is recognizing the limits of growth and thinking through the strategies of nonproductive expenditure as self-
conscious activity. We should stop being greedy and stop striving for individual growth, which ends up with planetary
energy restoring its balance in an uncontrolled and catastrophic way. Nonproductive expenditure must be taken
seriously and organized as a conscious politics of gifts without reciprocation—a glorious politics. As emphasized by
Allan Stoekl in his very important book Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (2007), which explores
Bataille’s general economy as the theory for the twenty-first century, this approach promotes a new ecological ethics:

Bataille’s theory is profoundly ethical but only in the sense that the instant of preservation, of meaning, of
conservation, of knowledge, is the unforeseen offshoot of another movement, that of the drive to spend
without counting, without attempting to anticipate return. […] Not nuclear war , but the channeling of excess
[…] not generalized ecocide, but an affirmation of another energy, another religion, another waste, entailing
not so much a steady state sustainability (with what stable referent? Man?) but instead a postsustainable
state in which we labor in order to expend, not conserve. (Stoekl 2007: 32–59)
 Baudrillard K: MoSt

The Aff doesn’t do anything as long as you’re in the hyperreal, you still operate on the hyper
realistic plane and generate the utility for the loss of meaning. All information is dissuasive and
counterproductive to communication, we must reflect useless meaning back at the system first
prior to change.
Jean Baudrillard. 2000. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-viii-the-
implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses.
Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in
every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be
reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of
free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate
radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another
order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of
information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should
also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does,
meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this
case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that
information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is
directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media. The third
hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is
measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually
asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning
homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create
communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole,
there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it
that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose.
We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our
social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we
think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs . Information devours its own content.
It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts
itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A
gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation
at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is
invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A
circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as
one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the
negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would
confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of
communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for
dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end
to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process that of simulation, that of the
hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is
abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure to which the force of myth
is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by
doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was
attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but
still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of
communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence,
to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard
against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes
the naivete and stupidity of the masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media,
the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and
dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total
entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social
in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the
sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences
of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of
the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A
serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious,
which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to
manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the
content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this
is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium,
there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the
real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be
determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question.
McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the
message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the
alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the contents and
messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such.

You merely plays with signs within capitalism, reaffirming consumerism and solidifing violence
Pawlette 8 [(William, senior lecturer in media, communications and cultural studies at University of Wolverhampton)
“HATE/CODE” Kritikos Volume 5, September-October 2008] AT

But if Marxist theory fails to engage with and challenge the system of signs, so too, for Baudrillard, do many
Structuralist, Poststructuralist and Postmodernist theorists of desire, difference and liberation. To defy the system it is
never sufficient to ‘play with signs’, that is to play with plural, ‘different’ or multiple identity positions. Here we
encounter Baudrillard’s total rejection of what would later be called ‘identity politics’ and also a central
misunderstanding of his position on signs.[4] For Baudrillard to play with signs – signs of consumption and status, signs
of gender, sexuality or ethnicity is simply to operate within the Code. It is an unconscious or unwitting complicity with
the Code’s logic of the multiplication of status positions, it is to assist it in the production of ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’. It
is deeply ironic that many of Baudrillard’s critics have claimed, or assumed, that Baudrillard himself merely ‘played with
signs’ and that through his notion of seduction he advocated a playing with signs. Yet Baudrillard is clear, in order to
oppose the system “[e]ven signs must burn” (1981: 163). Crucially his controversial work Seduction (1979/1990) does
not advocate a playing with signs. In it Baudrillard draws an important distinction between the “ludique” meaning
playing the game of signs, playing with signification (to enhance one’s status position or to assert one’s identity through
its ‘difference’), and “enjeux” meaning to put signs at stake, to challenging them or annul them through symbolic
exchange (1990: 157-178).[5] For Baudrillard signs play with us, despite us, against us, limiting and defining us. Any
radical defiance must be a defiance of signs and their coding within the sign system. Unfortunately the distinction
between ‘playing with signs’ – playing with their decoding and recoding, and defying the sign system has not penetrated
the mainstream of Media and Cultural Studies. Eco’s influential notion of “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (Eco 1967/1995)
and Hall’s even more influential notion of “resistant decoding” place their faith in the sovereign, rational consumer to
negotiate mediated meanings. For them the consumer citizen confronts media content as the subject confronts the
object. Hall does not consider that much media content is ‘encoded’ in an ‘oppositional’ form which renders the
moment of ‘oppositional decoding’ one of conformity (see Hall et al 1973/2002: 128-138). Examples would include much
‘youth’ advertising, Channel Four (UK) documentaries on poverty, third-world debt and racism and specialist
programming slots for ‘minorities’ such as Sharia TV. In other words the terms for ‘resistant’ readings are pre-set as
positions within the Code where resistance is already reduced to sign regime. From VO5 ‘punk’ hair to leftist and
feminist identity politics – try them if you like, no-one cares one way or the other. Critique is rendered meaningless by
coded assimilation because the system sells us the signs of opposition as willingly as it sells us the signs of conformity.
Can we even tell them apart? In which category would we place Sex and the City, for example?[6] The realm of
symbolic exchange or seduction does not come about when individuals ‘play with signs’ but when (signs of)
individuality, identity, will and agency are annulled through an encounter with the radically Other. Radical otherness,
or radical alterity, for Baudrillard, refers to the Other beyond representation, beyond all coding. Not only beyond
consumer status position but also beyond performative, ‘oppositional’ or “ludique” de/re-codings. The Code as system
of “total constraint” then does not merely produce similarity and identity but also difference, diversity and hybridity.
It does not seek to promote passivity or apathy among consumers but quite the contrary: to thrive and expand the
system requires active, discriminating, engaged consumers, jostling for position, competing for advancement. The Code
exists “to better prime the aspiration towards the higher level” (1981: 60). The Code delivers diversity and choice at the
level of sign content (the goods that we choose to eat, the products and services that we choose to wear, watch,
download) and requires in return … nothing much at all: merely that we understand ourselves as consumers.
Consumption is not, of course, a homogenising process but a diversifying one. The aim of the system is to make ‘the
consumer’ the universal form of humanity but within this form an almost infinite variety of differential contents or
positions are possible. Since ‘humanity’, for Baudrillard, as for Nietzsche, is already constituted as a universal form by
the Enlightenment (1993: 50) this task is close to completion, though the final completion, the “perfect crime” against
Otherness will never, according to Baudrillard, come to pass (Baudrillard 1996).[7] To summarise: the Code has a
pacifying effect on society by promoting a largely agreeable universal – the free consumer, spoilt for choice, and it
provides clearly sign-posted routes for advancement as well as constant reminders as to what could happen if we don’t
play the game (of signs).

The hyperreality destroys our ability to critique the system, it allows a regime of total control and
violence and stops movements of social progress.
Andy McLaverty-Robinson. August 10, 2012. Jean Baudrillard: Hyperreality and Implosion.
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-9/

What are the social effects of all these changes? The main function of the changes is to actualise and preserve the
system. Ultimately, the system seeks only to preserve itself. The ultimate end of politics, concealed by democratic
discourse, is to maintain control of the population by any means necessary , including terror. The system is a kind of
violence without consequences. It constantly dominates through deterrence, without this gesture being returned or
reversed. It is sustained by fascination for the system’s operations. And its effects on the everyday? The social is now a
special effect. The appearance of networks converging on an empty site of collective happiness produces the special
effect. Consumption now functions like labour. It is a kind of work, which gives the system sign-value. We have lost the
social, the real, and power. We don’t know how to mourn them. We become fascinated by the real as a lost object.
Melancholy (depression) becomes the dominant tone of social life. It is a brutal disaffection arising from generalised
simulation and the loss of intensity and meaning. The system seems too strong to be checked. People become
fascinated at what is happening to signs and to reality. The lines between categories become vague and categories begin
to disappear, or become poorly defined or all-encompassing. The lack of differentiation – the collapse of the
segmenting categories – brings us back to a terrifying, undivided nature. Interstitial space – the space between things –
disappears. We are overwhelmed by the over-proximity of all things, like in the Lacanian view of psychosis. It’s not so
much that reality doesn’t exist, as that it is inaccessible from within a regime of simulation. Transparency has the effect
of curtailing intensity. Social life falls into a stupor or inertia, ‘deterred’ by the code and by its own transparency. Today,
illusion no longer counts. Survival depends on the real, the object. This has negative effects. Objectivity is the opposite of
fatality, and is always subject to law. This is another way of saying that we are lacking the symbolic dimension. This lack
resounds throughout various fields, putting an end to values. The autonomy of the system of signs puts an end to the
regime of signs, of representation, and of production. Aesthetics are destroyed by the cold, systematic reproduction of
functional objects, including objects signifying beauty. Signs become socially mobile, as in the phenomena of kitsch and
cliché. All the humanist criteria of value – from morality to truth to aesthetics – disappear, because the code rests on
indifference and neutralisation. Capitalism almost becomes a parody of itself. The situation of indistinction which
reason and science have historically struggled against is now coming into existence, because of hyperreality – because a
lot of what exists is neither objectively true nor subjectively imagined. Panic tends to arise because of the functioning of
value separately from its referential contents. We are living through a collapse of meaning.

The alternative is to dismiss the Aff to implode the system by recognizing the hatred and violence
stemming from arbitrary signifiers.
William Pawlett, 2013, “Violence, Society and Radical Theory,” Ashgate, pg. 132-141. ZKMSU

In recent sociological literature, hatred is understood as the result of an entrenched structure of difference which
imposes a normative and hierarchical order on those who appear to be ‘different’. Those who benefit most from
established social and economic structures: white, middle-class heterosexual males, exercise and reinforce their
position of dominance through a wide range of oppositions with each pair consisting of positive and negative terms . Hence

they require the maintenance of boundaries

black, female, gay, become the negative terms by which white, male and straight define and maintain their identities as superior. Since such identity positions are not naturally superior

separating them ideologically from their opposite term. Identity and difference are mutually reinforcing and
difference tends to be reduced to a subordinate, supplementary or supporting role such accounts assert, in times . Further,

of stress, loss of status (such as loss of employment, or difficulty in securing meaningful employment) those in a
privileged position will vent their frustrations on those who are ‘different’ (Perry 2001). More recently, sociological accounts have stressed the importance of the emotional bonds which link the

The hater is thereby revealed to be in a situation of weakness and dependence which

hater with whomever or whatever they hate (Alford 1998; Scheff and Retzinger 2001).

tends to further enrage them. Many writers then enjoin a celebration of ‘difference’ or ‘diversity’ such that difference
can be either revealed as really rather similar to identity In both of these – as in many multiculturalist arguments – or alternatively ‘difference’ is celebrated as ‘different’ but not lesser.

accounts there is usually some appeal for greater education or information on ‘cultural difference’ and better or more
positive media representations of ‘difference’ depart from these trends . This section examines how the ideas of Bataille and Baudrillard . Hatred, for Bataille, is a powerful, enduring though derivative and

Such sentiments parallel capitalist values in that they consist of ideological

mobile psychological attitude. Hatred is not an affect or drive, but a restricted, accumulated rag-bag of sentiments.

and representational claims which are extremely reductive they reduce human being to the state of a productive , in particular,

instrument, and further in their accumulative form and refusal of generosity and reciprocity . For Baudrillard, hatred is a far more supple relation than the term ‘bond’

In the destructured, implosive and limitless system that dominates contemporary life the
suggests; it is so readily channelled, re-directed, switched or substituted.

hater does not necessarily even require an object or ‘other’ to hate, or an identity position to protect or affirm . In his re-thinking of

The category of the “dangerously similar”

hate Baudrillard asks, provocatively, is it some version of difference or otherness that suffers the rage of haters, or is it rather those who are perceived and positioned as “dangerously similar” (1993b: 129).

includes those who have been forcibly deprived of their difference by the globalising of simulatory Western values . For

we live in a system that encourages hate and thrives upon its channelling
Baudrillard, we are all haters, not because of some innate ‘badness’ of human nature, but because . Both Bataille and

aiming to theorise it in its intensity and power and avoiding facile social prescriptions concerning
Baudrillard then take hatred very seriously,
social progress through better representation or education . The Code and its Discriminations In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981, orig. 1972) Baudrillard began to describe various
codes of meaning (or signification) as integrated by what he called ‘the code’ (le code, la grille, le Code du signes, la matrice). By “the code” Baudrillard intended not particular codes of meaning (English, French, Morse) or particular modes of the interpretation of

For an effective critique of the consumer society to be made

meaning (dominant, resistant, plural) but rather the condition of possibility of coding. 2 , Baudrillard suggests, we must focus
analysis on the form of the Code, not its contents or representations which are, of course, extraordinarily open,
malleable and diverse The Code as form is preconscious . , or, in Baudrillard’s terminology, has the effect of “precession”; that is, as grid or network
it precedes individual experience, perception and choice The medium of this grid is the abstract, arbitrary sign . . Signs, visual and

linguistic, are the medium of coding, of the ordered exchange between coded elements. Composed to two sets of inter-locking relations, the sign-referent and signifier-signified, the sign is the universal
form constructing the oppositions of subject and object, of real and representation, of self and other: the building
blocks of ‘reality’ itself The ordered exchange of signs produces identity and difference: every ‘thing’ is semiotic;
.

every ‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ because it is not some other ‘thing’ Signs produce social meanings and values on a scale or .

grid whereby all points can be measured and compared it is rather that the very process of . To clarify, it is not that every ‘thing’ can be converted into sign form,

transcription or coding produces ‘things’ within a scheme of identities and differences it cannot . Though the Code encompasses every ‘thing’

process symbolic exchange, seduction, the ambivalence (or becoming) of life which consist not ‘things’ with identity
but of volatile relations, always “in transit” or metamorphosis The Code then does not merely express particular .

aspects of the consumer capitalist system such as media, fashion or advertising: it is far more fundamental. At the
fundamental level the Code is what prevents symbolic exchange by breaking its cycles or by seizing and diverting its
potential . Symbolic exchange now occurs or rather “effracts” only when the Code and its value systems are annulled, reversed or suspended. Symbolic exchange traverses all oppositions, challenging fixed or stable positions or power relations. Baudrillard’s major example of symbolic exchange is, of course,

the gift and counter-gift the meaning of the gift never settles into fixity or identity, it is not structured by
discussed in Chapter 2. To reiterate,

a logic of difference, its meaning can be transformed at any moment in the on-going relation or “pact” between
parties relation and gift flourish together, and die together
– indeed this relation is of the gift and the gift is of this relation: . Baudrillard defines the Code as a “generalised metaphysics” synthesising social values, social

The Code enacts an “obligatory registration of individuals on the scale of status”

production and social identities, and this system ends any sense of the social as dynamic, symbolic form.

producing a “hierarchy of differential signs” which, crucially, “constitutes the fundamental, decisive form of social
(1981: 68),

control It makes no difference whether we, as individuals, endorse the consumer capitalist
– more so than acquiescence to ideological norms” (ibid.).

system or not, since we are all positioned by the Code, and are positioned through it by others: the game of
ideological critique takes place within the terms set by the Code. The Code breaks, blocks and bars ambivalence
producing the structure of difference – the play of identity and difference characterised by oppositions such as
true/false, good/evil, self/other, black/white, male/female. The standard dimensions of consumer status positioning flow from this source: rich/poor, young/ old, fat/thin, attractive/unattractive. While structural or

the Code simulates choice, difference and diversity through binary “modulation”
dialectical oppositions are characteristic of the first and second orders of simulacra, in the third order

by allowing the privileged terms of its oppositions to switch, fuse or “implode ” (1983: 95-110). For example ‘fat’, ‘poor’ and ‘old’ can be beautiful too – if only within the confines of fashion,

The Code also performs a pacifying effect on society: the once

cosmetics advertising or pop music video. The Code operates in “total indifference” to content; everything is permitted in sign form; that is as “simulation”.

clear-cut, structural divisions such as class and status are made less visible by registering all people as individual
consumers on a single, universal scale . Everyone becomes a consumer, though some, of course, consume far more than others. As universal form the status of consumer confers a kind of democratic flattening of social relations, but an illusory one. If class conflict

indeed other forms of dissent emerge and cannot be deterred

was, to some extent, pacified, Baudrillard does not contend that society as a whole is pacified; violence and . Baudrillard wrote of the emergence of new

less intelligible, less structured, post-dialectical or implosive

“anomalous” forms of violence, the Watts riots of 1965 as (Baudrillard 1998a: 174-85; 1994: 71-2)). He refers to

an example of new violent rejections of the consumer system. Later, Baudrillard proposed the term “disembodied hate” or simply “the hate” to express aspects of this process (1996a: 142-7). The Code then is a principle of integration producing everything and everyone as a position on the scale of social value.
With the last vestiges of symbolic orders around the world being eliminated by neo-liberal economic globalisation how is the Code to be challenged or defied?3 Departing from the form but not the intent of Marxist theory, Baudrillard argued that the apparent distinction between use value and economic exchange value is produced

use value is a simulatory form produced by the capitalist system as justification and grounding for its
as a “code effect”. In other words,

trading of economic exchange values (1981: 130-42). For Baudrillard the illusion of use value, like the illusion of signified meanings and the illusion of the stable solid reality of the referent, are produced by the Code as structural groundings, shoring up the unstable

To challenge, defy or breach the Code then it is not sufficient to ‘return’ to use value.
‘reality’ of signs and preventing the emergence of ambivalence (1981: 156 n.9).

Indeed such strategies, shared by some Marxists, environmentalists and anti-globalisation movements actually feed
the capitalist system: the market’s semiotic assimilation of environmentalism as the ‘green’ brand choice is an
obvious example.
The K solves the core issue mentioned in the 1AC. We are stuck within the code the perpetuates
cycles of violence and blackmail. Structure collapse rids these horrendous ideological claims and
opens the eyes for real social change. The K is a prereq to the AFF.
Andy McLaverty-Robinson. August 10, 2012. Jean Baudrillard: Hyperreality and Implosion.
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-9/

Power tries to defend itself against the collapse of meaning by reinjecting the real and the referential everywhere. It
tries to convince people that the social world is still objectively real . It prefers to refer to crisis, or even to desire, than
to admit its own collapse. Historically, it combated threats from the real by recuperating them in equivalent signs. Now,
it combats the threat from simulation by playing at crisis. It embraces theories of ideology, and even radical critiques,
as ways to maintain the appearance of truth. The responsible subject is in a similar situation of crisis. The system rests
on responsibility. But in a system based on bureaucratic programming, irresponsible actors are required – figures like
Eichmann who simply obey orders or perform functions. The system is left constantly trying to exhort people to be
responsible subjects while producing them as simple conductors of social power. Subjects are put into drift, into
something like a constant unconscious state. Without fixed relations, everything turns into flows of transference. The
replacement of meaning with functions makes people expect everything to work all the time. A few seconds’ delay in a
webpage loading becomes an inexplicable source of immense frustration. Causes have disappeared, but effects have
become immense – as when a local disaster causes a global shutdown. And with the responsible subject no longer there
(because it is an effect of the old subject-object split), people try desperately to impute responsibility. The excessive
reservoir of ‘floating responsibility’ through finding scapegoats or guilty parties is just waiting to be invested in any
particular incident. The Katrina or Christchurch disasters get projected onto looters; Chilean forest fires are targeted as
‘terrorism’; social insecurity is projected onto Muslims, immigrants, minorities. Social problems of increasing triviality
are subjected to immense crackdowns and moral panics. In a wave of disproportion, mitigation and even innocence are
cast aside in the search for someone to blame. Meanwhile, people are repeatedly subject to tirades to ‘take
responsibility’ for problems (from unemployment to alcoholism to post-traumatic stress) which the experts know very
well are not really self-caused. We are subject to a blackmail by identity, condemned for what we
are labelled as in the code, not for what we are. For Baudrillard, this is a consequence of the
disappearance of causes and the power of effects. It reflects something deeper: the world is held collectively responsible
for the system. If the system is infringed, the world will have to be destroyed. Or rather, we are ‘psychologically
programmed to destroy ourselves’ if the system collapses. We could think of this as the code blackmailing reality.
Though the code is tautological and does not depend on reality, it holds reality responsible for itself, and punishes reality
if it collapses or crashes.
 Biopolitics K: Weber State

Jurisprudence K

Personhood is a biopolitical construct designed to subvert and divide a populous- ascribing legal
protection to nature risks conceding power over it to neoliberal ideology
Jade-Ann Reeves & Timothy D. Peters (2021) Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the
biopolitics of environmental personhood, Griffith Law Review, 30:3, 474-504, DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2022.2037882
[HJ]
In critically analysing the personification of the Whanganui River, we are not criti- quing or discrediting its significance for the Whanganui Iwi, the long and hard-fought journey leading to the
enactment of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settle- ment) Act 2017 (NZ) (‘Te Awa Tupua Act’) or its importance in the context of Indigenous sovereignty and the negotiated
legal pluralism of Aotearoa New Zealand.17 Instead, our
aim is to deepen the consideration of environmental personhood by drawing
upon an ‘analytic of biopolitics’ to critically consider legal personhood as a tool and technique itself. 18 We wish to
open, rather than provide closures around, environmental person- hood in conceiving and developing the
jurisprudential underpinnings of human onto- logical understandings of, and relationship with, nature. 19 To do so, we draw
upon the theorisation of biopolitics which pierces the hegemonic interconnectedness of legal per- sonhood and humanity, recognising the operation of power underpinning and necessary
for one’s political existence.20 The
theorisation of biopolitics – a mode of power aimed at maintaining and regulating life21 –
provides a lens through which to critically examine legal personhood and consider the consequences of ascribing it to
nature. In relation to the Whanganui River, a biopolitical analysis raises questions about whether ascribing legal personhood to
nature addresses anthropocentrism and its effects. The article proceeds in Section 2 by providing background to the granting of person- hood to the
Whanganui River, situating it in the context of the negotiated pluralism and tensions between the ontologies and legalities of Western anthropocentrism and Māori relationality with the
world. Section 3 then provides a short outline of the biopolitics of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, focusing on the mediation of personhood and bio- power. The substance of the
article is then in the biopolitical analysis of the Te Awa Tupua Act in Section 4. Starting from Esposito’s genealogical analysis of personhood as a dispo- sitif (apparatus), we note the way in
which personhood is not a phenomenon inherent in things . Rather, it is an apparatus – the product of particular social
and historical mechan- isms and utilised to achieve specific ends. We therefore question whether the granting of legal
personhood to the Whanganui River is a recognition of the physical and metaphys- ical entity of the River, or the
imposition of the dispositif of the person on the River to make it governable. Next, Foucault’s conceptualisation of the two poles of biopolitics
– the disciplining of the individual and the regulatory control of the population – is deployed as a way of examining how the Te Awa Tupua Act makes the River ‘part’ of the population,
subjected to regulatory mechanisms aimed at safeguarding its healthand well-being, which includes ensuring its productivity. Finally, Esposito’s ‘immunis- ation’ thesis shows that
personhood is a liberal category which operates to individualise subjects from one another by placing them under the
protection of law. Whilst aiming to emphasise its interrelatedness, the very act of granting legal personhood to the River risks bringing it
within the realm of biopolitical governance and causing it to internalise Western neoliberalism.22 Such would not only place a protective
border around the River, but also divides it from other persons, closing life off to the possibility of a way of being outside of anthropocentrism.23 The risk of ascribing legal

personhood to nature is that, instead of signalling an ontological shift in the Western anthropocentric understandings
of the environment, it operates within and reinforces this dominant worldview – unless, that is, the granting of personhood to nature calls
into question the dominant paradigm of personhood itself. The article concludes by suggesting alternative ways of developing human understandings of, and relationship with, nature,
drawing on Esposito’s ‘affirmative biopolitics’, particularly his concept of the ‘impersonal’.

The US legal concept of personhood impairs social change by isolating persons as biopower rather
than as part of a collective
[Mark Tushnet, Professor of Law @ Georgetown, “The Critique of Rights”, 47 SMU L. Rev. 23 (19 94)
https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol47/iss1/6?utm_source=scholar.smu.edu%2Fsmulr
%2Fvol47%2Fiss1%2F6&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages] [MJ]

More important in the broad version of the argument, though, is the claim that legal rights are essentially
individualistic, at least in the U.S. constitutional and legal culture, and that progressive change requires undermining
the individualism that vindicating legal rights reinforces. The argument's conclusion is that the long-term ideological
consequences of winning victories in courts are almost certainly going to be adverse to progressive change. Why,
though, are rights-claims so essentially individualistic? After all, we can easily define rights that attach to groups;
contemporary international human rights law, for example, recognizes rights of cultural minorities for preservation of
their cultures, or of linguistic minorities for preservation o their languages. Yet, these group rights have two
characteristics: Recognizing them as rights is quite controversial, and their recognition has been quite recent. These
characteristics actually support the broader version of the argument that rights are ideologically troublesome because
they are almost necessarily individualistic. They show that, in the modem world, rightsclaims really do have a strong
individualist spin, which advocates of group rights must work to overcome. Rights-claims are individualistic, in this
argument, not because of something inherent in the concept of rights, but rather because of the historical development
of the language of rights. The central image of "rights" in our culture is, as MacKinnon's critique suggests,8 of a sphere
within which each of us can do what he or she pleases. This image, in turn, reinforces the distinction between law and
politics that is itself subject to challenge from critical legal studies. Politics is the domain of pure will or preference, not
subject to discussion and deliberation except as each individual chooses to be influenced by others. Rights-or law-
protect the domain in which political preferences are formed. If, however, a critic believes that making politics truly
social is an important task, it might be important as well to fight an ideology, the ideology of rights, that leads people
to think of themselves as disconnected from others in important ways. This broader argument about the individualistic
ideology of rights is not an argument about the concept of rights. Rather, it is an argument about the way the language
of rights actually functions in contemporary U.S. constitutional and legal discourse. Even more, the argument does not
assert that the individualistic ideology of rights is the only one available in contemporary legal discourse. The
argument does assert, though, that the individualistic ideology is the predominant one. Like the narrow argument, it
could be taken as simply cautioning against hoping for too much from rights-based arguments, particularly emphasizing
the adverse ideological consequences that such arguments might have. Because it is more comprehensive, that is,
because it relies on quite general concerns about contemporary constitutional and legal culture, the broader argument
suggests a deeper skepticism about the ability of progressive advocates actually to formulate arguments that will not
succumb to these ideological perils.

Neoliberal control of the species leads to systemic ecological collapse and extinction – western
profit-based existence stands as the root cause of tipping the environment out of equilibrium and
into chaos
Monbiot, George. “Capitalism Is Killing the Planet – It's Time to Stop Buying into Our Own Destruction | George
Monbiot.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 30 Oct. 20 21,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-
our-own-destruction. [HJ]

There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true
of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding
or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. When faced with an
impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise
our survival. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious , or even that it isn’t happening. We double down on
destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final
frenzy. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we
attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our
predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct. Here is
what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems : the atmosphere, ocean
currents, the soil, the planet’s webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in
consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an
Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself,
maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a
tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse. Human civilisation relies
on current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points . If
one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental
collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions. Here’s one of the many ways in which it could occur.
A belt of savannah, known as the Cerrado, covers central Brazil. Its vegetation depends on dew forming, which depends
in turn on deep-rooted trees drawing up groundwater, then releasing it into the air through their leaves. But over the
past few years, vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens
and pigs. As the trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, ensuring that even less water is
circulated. In combination with global heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and suddenly – flip
the entire system into desert. The Cerrado is the source of some of South America’s great rivers, including those flowing
north into the Amazon basin. As less water feeds the rivers, this could exacerbate the stress afflicting the rainforests.
They are being hammered by a deadly combination of clearing, burning and heating, and are already threatened with
possible systemic collapse. The Cerrado and the rainforest both create “rivers in the sky” – streams of wet air – that
distribute rainfall around the world and help to drive global circulation: the movement of air and ocean currents. Global
circulation is already looking vulnerable. For example, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which
delivers heat from the tropics towards the poles, is being disrupted by the melting of Arctic ice, and has begun to
weaken. Without it, the UK would have a climate similar to Siberia’s. AMOC has two equilibrium states: on and off. It
has been on for almost 12,000 years, following a devastating, thousand-year off state called the Younger Dryas
(12,900 to 11,700 years ago), which caused a global spiral of environmental change. Everything we know and love
depends on AMOC remaining in the on state. Regardless of which complex system is being studied, there’s a way of
telling whether it is approaching a tipping point. Its outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it
comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to
break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and
around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in
climatic morse code, spell “mayday”. You might expect an intelligent species to respond to these signals swiftly and
conclusively, by radically altering its relationship with the living world. But this is not how we function. Our great
intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us.

Subjugation to biopower strikes all facets of society and engenders Slow Death en masse –
restructuring away from a sovereign ability to make live and let die is the only solution
Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency): Critical Inquiry: Vol 33, No 4.” Critical Inquiry,
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2007, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/521568.

The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that
population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence[;]. The general
emphasis of the phrase is on the phenomenon of mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of
capitalist structural subordination and governmentality. It takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical
observation, in Spaces of Hope, that under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work. This powerful
observation about the rationalization of health is an important part of the story, but it is not the whole story either.1
Through the space opened up by this concept I offer a development in the ways we conceptualize contemporary
historical experience, especially when that experience is simultaneously at an extreme and in a zone of ordinariness,
where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable, and where it is hard to distinguish modes of
incoherence, distractedness, and habituation from deliberate and deliberative activity, as they are all involved in the
reproduction of predictable life. The shift I am proposing reframes the ways we think about sovereignty, emphasizing in
particular an attenuated, nonmimetic relation between political and personal or practical sovereignty. From Schmitt to
Agamben and Bataille to Mbembe, the current discussion of sovereignty as a condition of and blockage to justice
recapitulates the widespread contemporary projection of sovereignty onto events of decision making. Mbembe: “To
exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of
power.”2 But, phrased as such, the sovereignty concept has a few problems that are related but nonidentical. For one
thing, this model’s image of control derives from an archaic tradition of theologically based royal or state privilege, and
while that form of sovereignty has a limited perdurability (in clemency proceedings, for example) it masks the wide
variety of processes and procedures involved historically in the administration of law and of bodies, even during periods
when sovereign rulers exerted their wills by fiat.3 Similarly, sovereignty described as the foundation of individual
autonomy (represented and secured, for some, by the General Will) overidentifies the similarity of self‐control to
sovereign performativity and state control over geographical boundaries.4 It thereby encourages a militaristic and
melodramatic view of agency in the spectacular temporality of the event of the decision; and, in linking and inflating
consciousness, intention, and decision or event, it has provided an alibi for normative governmentality and justified
moralizing against inconvenient human activity. Even Bataille’s radically alternate version of sovereignty—as an ecstatic
departure from a strong notion of intentionality and agency—reproduces personhood as a drama, just this time a drama
of heterogeneity rather than subjective overorganization.5 Third, while Mbembe’s definition renders life and mortality
transparent, Foucault argues that the relation of sovereignty to biopower involves a significant recasting of what those
referents mean, even before the apparition of decision making is raised. It would seem at first that the most variable
term is life. Foucault’s phrasing is precise. Sovereignty “is not the right to put people to death or to grant them life. Nor
is it the right to allow people to live or to leave them to die. It is the right to take life or let live.”6 Life is the apriority;
sovereign agency signifies the power to permit any given life to endure, or not. But biopower, he argues, which does
not substitute for but reshapes sovereignty, is the power to make something live or to let it die, the power to
regularize life, the authority to force living not just to happen but to endure and appear in particular ways. The
difference between sovereign agency under a regime of sovereignty and under a regime of biopower, then, can be
thought of as a distinction between individual life and collective living on, where living increasingly becomes a scene
of the administration, discipline, and recalibration of what constitutes health. Yet the relative passivity of letting die in
the context of shaping living changes entirely as the decision and the event of agency in proximity to life and mortality
evolve. Foucault focuses on biopower’s attempt to manage what he calls “endemics,” which, unlike epidemics, are
“permanent factors … [that] sapped the population’s strength, shortened the working week,” and “cost money.” In
this shift Foucault dissolves the attention to scenes of control over individual life and death under sovereign regimes
and refocuses on the dispersed management of the biological threat posed by certain populations to the reproduction
of the normatively framed general good life of a society.7 Slow death occupies the temporalities of the endemic .
Because of these convolutions and variations sovereignty is an inadequate concept for talking about human agency
outside of the power of the king’s decree or other boundary acts in proximity to certain performances of law, like
executions and pardons. For so many reasons the ordinary subjects of democratic/capitalist power might best be
redefined as only partially (that is to say phantasmatically or not) sovereign.

The alt is to vote neg as a critical symbolic rejection of the modern rights framework
 Coloniaism K: Gtown

The 1AC’s ascription of legal rights and duties is intrinsically linked with a logic of coloniality of
power that demarcates who gets access to what along fundamentally racist and violent lines---this
system constitutes a general management of violence that undergirds all colonial harms
Blanco & Grear 19 (Elena, Associate Professor of International Economic Law at the University of the West, Bristol;
Anna, Professor of Law and Theory at Cardiff University, “Personhood, Jurisdiction and Injustice: Law, Colonialities and
the Global Order,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 10, no. 1, p. 89-104) NIJ

European colonialism35 enabled and legitimised by (early)

Neoliberal corporate globalisation is, in a central sense, a Eurocentric matrix of power with its roots in the history of

international law doctrines and structures , the pillage and destruction of other cultures and the advancement of appropriative European culture and power36—and linked by
some scholarly and scientific accounts to colonial antecedents of the Anthropocene. 37 The discovery of the Americas, and
their conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, signalled the demise of the pre-existing ‘polycentric’ world of ‘several coexisting

civilizations’.38 The discovery of America by Columbus opened the gates through which Europe entered the world economy as a decisive force. America’s gold and silver enabled
the expansion of the Spanish Empire, while the establishment , a century later, of a transatlantic trade in commodities brought a
new affluence to the Netherlands and England through banking, finance and shipping and established the foundations of
early mercantile capitalism.39 The early TNC was key to such developments40and our selective genealogical account of transnational privilege begins with the early mercantile corporations. Indeed,
McLean argues that ‘the history of colonial expansion is [also] a history of the corporate form’ 41—a point with considerable

significance for understanding the unevenness of the present international order. Chakrabarty has argued that the entire
phenomenon of ‘political modernity’, namely the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist
enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the
genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.42 The obliteration of pre-existing diversity was an
impulse expressing a fundamentally hegemonic European ambition with violent hierarchical implications.43 A variety of mystifications enabled European mastery:

gender, race, time, subjectivity and Christianity converged into the matrix of power described by Quijano as
‘coloniality’.44 In this process, which was—again—largely a process of state-corporate colonisation,45 the homogenising changes imposed by Europeans resulted in a wave of material and semiotic
dispossessions: The dispossessed frequently faced poverty and starvation, and the original accommodated relations between environment, humans and animals were fractured, sometimes beyond repair. European

European epistemological
hegemony replaced such broken communities with hierarchical interventions, ontologies and European epistemologies imposed or imbibed through colonial institutions.46

imperialism took control of ‘the writing of history’ and of ‘time’, which became linear, notionally objective, 47 suppressing
other temporalities and the multiple ‘stories’ expressing different world conceptions and histories. 48 Over time, European
‘modernity’ converged with colonialism in a totalising matrix of power controlling economy, knowledge and
subjectivity,49 and from the 19th century onwards shaped the industrialised capitalist foundations of the present fossil
fuel economy50 and the intensification of the trajectory towards the Anthropocene horizon. 51 Indeed, it was the opportunities provided by colonialism— the chance to
accumulate land and raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution unfolding in 19th century Britain in particular, that provided the ‘rationale for investing in steam technology’,52 a technology key to the spread of colonialism itself53—and famously linked by Crutzen to the inauguration of the Anthropocene epoch.54 As Malm and
Hornborg point out, . . . a clique of white British men literally pointed steam-power as a weapon — on sea and land, boats and rails — against the best part of humankind, from the Niger delta to the Yangzi delta, the Levant to Latin America. Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation
stone for the fossil economy.55 As Anghie has argued, it was precisely this combination of colonial suppression and the competition between Northern states for natural resources that laid the foundations of the contemporary international legal order56 in appropriative impulses re-enacting earlier colonising dynamics and

Law was central to such trajectories, defining the ‘subject’ through

extending the underlying ideology of Eurocentric mastery.

personhood and law’s reach through jurisdiction. The legal constructs legitimating
Eurocentric power were initially embedded in the premises of ‘natural law’ and of
Christianity. Vitoria,57 Suarez and the philosophers of the Spanish School of Salamanca found in natural law the expression of God’s will and thus constructed a ‘justification’ for the imposition of the European systems of dominium, private property, serfdom and mercantilism so alien to aboriginal
social and communal tenure systems.58 Eurocentric intellectual and theological categories and concepts decisively shaped the juridical history of coloniality.59 Yet, while the Spanish colonies established a complex form of serfdom attached to the land in a quasi-feudal system, the English colonies were administered by a corporate
structure driven by the pursuit of profit from as early as the sixteenth century.60 Mercantilism was thus embedded in, and dominated, the English colonial territories from their very early phases—with the corporation playing a central role in the acquisition of state and private power. McLean demonstrates how corporations first
became ‘for profit’ trading entities in the sixteenth century.61 Tellingly, she notes that in ‘the first two decades of the seventeenth century, some forty companies were granted trading monopolies by their respective governments over much of the known world’.62 These monopoly powers covered trade and rights over national

The origin of international law is thus closely connected to

citizens abroad, and were an important source of national revenue as well as powerful corporate expressions of imperial and colonial ambition.

Eurocentric Christendom, and to Eurocentric trade, mercantilism, capitalism, corporate power and resource extraction,
all of which were facilitated by law’s calculative imperial design and philosophical underpinnings. The fundamentally
racist assumptions of Eurocentric intellectual and theological traditions were key to these developments. Race was used
to decide and to define who could own property and who had to work on the land, and racialisation was used to
circumscribe identities of the ‘other’, the alien, the stranger, and to legitimate the racist domination and classification of
humans according to presumed markers of European rationality. 63 In the nineteenth century, a systematic racialised agenda took hold in the same broad timeframe
within which the capitalist corporation broke away from the state to emerge as a fully independent juridical personality.64 Colonisation through trade continued to express the racist logic of colonialism by other means in a
period that also saw the crystallisation of the public-private divide.65 This divide, as is well known, is central to the liberal legal mythos that enabled European corporations to take advantage of a legal framework that
falsely reduced the power relations between corporations and the racialised indigenous inhabitants of colonised lands to an exchange between individuals. Such patterns are central, indeed, to what Woods describes as
 The distributions of life and death
‘imperial capitalism’66or what Banerjee, addressing the continuities between colonialism and neoliberalism, names ‘necrocapitalism’.67

operationalised by these continuities are central to the neoliberal order: Banerjee points out that the ‘practices of organizational
accumulation’ that represent ‘necrocapitalism’68 emerge from the intersection of necropolitics and necroeconomics in
forms of accumulation by specific economic actors in (‘post’)colonial contexts —transnational corporations being the paradigmatic example—that
involve dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods, and the general management of
violence. This is a newer form of imperialism, an imperialism that has learned to ‘manage things better’. 69 2b Neoliberalism A
necrocapitalist analysis draws out neoliberalism’s complex perpetuation of coloniality, in the light of which neoliberalism
itself emerges as an imperialistic project exercising power through juridical structures originally designed to facilitate
European and then Western capitalistic dominance. 70 The central project of neoliberalism has always been to ‘disembed capital’71 from ‘a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but
in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy’.72 Disembedding capital has driven forward a global policy of liberating market forces and corporations in a wave of privatisation, deregulation and through the selective hollowing out of the state.73 At the ballot box, early neoliberalism appealed to voters in large
part because it successfully drew on the rhetoric of individual freedom and dignity,74 and neoliberalism, operationalised through the double-edged strategy of austerity and competition, has expanded worldwide under the guise of rational fiscal control and market driven reforms in significant part by calling on the name and cause
of democracy and human rights.75 It is only belatedly that international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have acknowledged neoliberalism’s fallouts in terms of increasing levels of inequality, but sadly this concern responds primarily to the effects of inequality on economic
growth.76 Meanwhile, unfettered market openness, in combination with the ravages of neoliberal austerity doctrine—essentially a state- facilitated method for socialising the debt generated by risky banking sector behaviour77—has created the deepening income inequality and the increased precarity that now feeds a rejection of
both globalisation and elite power.78 Gill notes that ‘one of the principal costs of the neoliberal, market-monetarist austerity policies, is persistent mass unemployment. Concentrated heavily among younger and less skilled workers, it partly explains tough immigration and asylum policies and . . . contributes to a potent mixture of

Neoliberalism imposes economic and political subjection precisely by recasting coloniality

social and economic dislocation, physical risks, racism and xenophobia’.79

through the imposition of monetary policies, conditional loans and structural adjustment programmes operationalised
by a sophisticated meshwork of laws governing property, contracts and foreign direct investment. 80 Questions of elite power—central to
the unfolding of colonialism in earlier periods—were always central—and remain central—to neoliberalism. Harvey notes, in this regard, that ‘neoliberalization was from the very

beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power’. 81 Indeed, Harvey argues that the most compelling interpretation of neoliberalism is as a ‘political project
to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’.82 Neoliberalism thus aims at managing and legitimating inequality, not at addressing it.83 Indeed, despite its apparently
economic roots and the centrality of the market to its ideology, neoliberalism has intensified legal and regulatory controls in the service of extending economistic logics through all social spheres and is legible as a

Neoliberalism is, in other words, an inherently juridical project and the

normative project concerning the nature of freedom and democracy, for which law is central.84

mythic function of law under neoliberalism is relatively consistent with earlier liberal capitalist conceptions of law, with
claims of neutrality, equality and formal rationality remaining ideologically central. 85 Under neoliberalism, these normative claims are more destructively instrumentalised than in
previous regulatory projects, deployed in order to legitimate stultifying levels of state control in the service of extensive neoliberal appropriation. Dardot and Laval, for example, argue that the deepening regulatory control of life under neoliberalism is a key characteristic of a ‘totalising rationality ... destructive of the welfare state
apparatus’86 that had briefly interrupted elite accumulation of profit during the post-war period. Brabazon has argued that neoliberalism as an ideological and theoretical project can be seen as the creation of a particular kind of society and subjectivity rooted in a very limited conception of individuality, democracy, and social life,
in which public debate and dissent are minimal and contained, collective action discouraged, and substantive inequalities are ignored or celebrated as convenient.87 The state’s role in this process is complex: the state is ‘restructured . . . rather than restrained’,88 and reoriented towards facilitating and protecting market
transactions, away from social concerns.89 ‘Particular subjects and social relations’90 emerge from this process, entrenching coloniality in new, arguably more complex, forms.91 Neoliberal globalisation can thus be viewed as a non-monolithic,92 hegemonic ideological project inseparably bound to the earlier European colonial

personhood and jurisdiction played important

project and co-productive in the rising precarity and multiple crises of the Anthropocene.93 As we will argue in the next two sections,

roles in the evolution of coloniality and remain influential conduits for the expression and
further accumulation of power in the neoliberal global order—as well as continuing to present complex challenges in the Anthropocene.
legal personhood as a construct that, despite its putative
3 LEGAL PERSONHOOD: PATTERNS OF PRIVILEGE AND MARGINALISATION This section of our argument will position

neutrality, forms a conduit for the continuing influence of a Eurocentric rationalistic trope of ‘man’ that brings corporate
juridical privilege and the privation and vulnerability of corporeally specific human ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’ into direct and
problematic relations of injustice. Core to this analysis is a patterned politics of disembodiment central to the operation of TNCs as cloaking devices for the accumulation of elite capitalist power.
Before beginning our critical account of legal personhood as a technique of dominance, it is important to note that posthuman developments and the pressures of ecological breakdown make it increasingly necessary to
imagine potential new recipients of legal personhood and/or rights of standing.94 Indeed, such arguments are already passionately made by a range of advocates, scholars and activists, and novel approaches, such as the
granting of legal personhood to rivers, animals and other non-human natural systems and entities,95 already exist. However, despite such developments, and despite the undoubted potential of legal personhood for

imaginative, future-facing deployments,96 it remains essential not to underestimate the traction of Eurocentric, rationalistic assumptions
underwriting law and legal personhood. Even when new forms of legal person are generated , there is nothing to
guarantee immunity from the continuing ideological traction of law’s well-rehearsed patterns of privilege and predation.
It is perfectly possible to foresee a world populated by myriad forms of legal persons/entities, in which familiar and long-standing patterns of marginalisation and predation persist. Even ‘rights and

personhood for nature’, an increasingly popular approach, can continue to operate forms of coloniality by universalising
‘colonial modes of existence as natural’, as Rawson and Mansfield have argued that they do.97 In short, legal personhood is long central to
law’s tilted distribution of power and privilege, marginalisation and dispossession—and it
remains vital to retain critical suspicion, perhaps especially when calling on it for new, imaginative juridical projects. We have already briefly noted the importance of
the legal form of the corporation in colonial distributions of power, but we now turn to introduce in a little more depth the role and ideological structure of the form of law’s persons—including law’s ‘human’ persons—in

The construct of the ‘person’ has always performed a

the dynamics of privilege and predation at issue in the neoliberal global order. 3a ‘Persons’, property and exclusion

political function, and has been deployed in Eurocentric philosophy, ethics and law to denote beings or entities considered worthy of moral and/or
legal concern, to the (admittedly complex) exclusion of others. While structurally, ‘law’s person’ is analytically co-constitutive with the attribution of
legal rights,98 [BEGIN FOOTNOTE: The legal person and legal rights presuppose one another in an analytical sense: ‘The subject is a
creation of the law, an artificial entity which serves as the logical support of legal relations. Right and subject come into
life together’: (C Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000) at 233) though the substance of the relationship varies, not least in line with differing theoretical accounts of rights and legal
personhood. See, for example: A Nekam, The Personality Conception of the Legal Entity (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1938); A Peacocke and G Gillet, Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); DP Derham, ‘Theories of Legal Personality’ in LC Webb (ed.) Legal Personality and Political
Pluralism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958); N Naffine, ‘The Nature of Legal Personality’, in M Davies and N Naffine, Are Persons Property? Legal Debates about Property and Personality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). END FOOTNOTE] rights—including rights as politico-moral claims—have always historically tended to
privilege propertied elites99—a fact underlining the importance of retaining a certain wariness when brandishing the meta-ethical appeal of claims to rights and personhood. The long history of struggles for legal recognition by marginalised human groups reveals the degree to which rights and personhood were always reluctantly

and incompletely conceded.100 the gradual historical expansion of the legal categories of rights-bearers
A wide range of critical scholarship exposes the fact that

carries with it an entirely predictable set of marginalisations. 101 And while contemporary marginalised human subjects
 stand in more complex relation to law’s inclusion, neither the universal human of
(women, children, indigenous people, refugees, climate migrants etc.)

human rights, nor the legal person, have ever cast off a centripetal tendency towards an intrinsically Eurocentric
construct prioritising the putatively rational, property owning, white male. Such a centripetal tendency is evident in the
fact that all ‘others’ to this trope—including indigenous peoples—and ‘nature’ itself—are complexly objectified, and
feminised,102 and cannot form central case instances of the human legal person. 103 These archetypal conceptual patterns and their material expressions of
power are also firmly embedded in constructs of international legal personhood.104 Koskenniemi argues that ‘the international doctrine of State sovereignty bears an obvious resemblance to the domestic-liberal doctrine
of individual liberty’,105 while Nijman argues that the ‘individual and the collective (e.g. the state) Self are (philosophically) intertwined [and that t]his is self-evident as the individualist, subjectivist perspective has marked
the deep structure of international law’—including, of course, the structure of international legal personhood.106 The state is, in many senses, the individual writ large—a continuity that comes as no surprise,
notwithstanding the importance of rejecting a reductive equivalence between the sovereign state and the individual.107 Despite complexities and distinctions, a range of scholarship makes clear the fact that the ultimate

This master-trope reflects a particular set

subject of all forms of law is the privileged, ‘rational’, white male template central to Eurocentric law, politics, economics and philosophy.108

of subject-object relations that undergird the boundary function of liberal law’s two central ontological categories:
persons and property. The binary contradiction between personhood and property is, however, rather more apparent
than real. As Davies, Naffine and others have argued, law’s person is in reality constituted by property- centred assumptions, and
personhood fulfils an important ideological function in assuring the prioritisation of property and the interests of the
propertied in liberal legal systems.109 In short, a relentless ideological and structural priority is given to a Eurocentric conception of possessive individualism, and liberal law—including international law—constructs its archetypal persons—as individuals, states and/or
corporations (corporations are more fully discussed below)—on this basis.110 This explains why entities serving the interests of propertied elites present no difficulty as putative legal persons, unlike the marginalised human beings who can never represent paradigmatic instances of legal personhood: ‘[T]rusts, corporations, joint
ventures, municipalities... and nation states’ have all been designated as rights-holders,111 and it is notable that corporations and nation-states, as was just implied, have historically tended to be idealised—at an archetypal level—as idiosyncratic embodiments of the paradigmatic liberal legal actor.112 The relentless prioritisation

The
of property and its owners central to such patterns is thoroughly visible in rights-based national constitutions in Europe and the US,113 testament not only to the historical influence of propertied elites, but also directly continuous with the corporation-centred ‘new global constitutionalism’ of the neoliberal order.114

construct of the legal person is thus legible as a property-centred assemblage that conditions multiple sites of capitalistic
biopolitical governance. Legal personhood is a pivotal and mutable ideological tool for mediating exclusionary power relations. It is also key to privilege of corporations115and equally pivotal to the
production of marginalised subjects intransigently marked as law’s ‘outsiders’.116 Against this background, and read against the long history of rights claims turning, in the process of institutionalisation, towards the re-
inscription of the rights of men of property,117 it is easy to see why business corporations have accrued a form of corporate legal humanity118 through the accumulation of rights originally reserved for the elite humans in

The consequences of the ways in which legal personhood is

whose image and interests they were first formed.119

constructed, while presented as a neutral legal concept, are incontrovertibly serious and too
often overlooked120 by a significant number of those pursuing novel approaches to legal rights and personhood—an oversight that might prove increasingly in conditions of entrenched and
deepening global uneveness.121 3b The form(s) of legal personhood There are two major traditions in the jurisprudence of persons: one naturalistic, which draws closely upon heavily naturalised subtending notions of the
human being, and the other positivistic, for which persons are generated by law as a technical fiat. For naturalistic accounts, legal personhood is a designation merely recognising a set of assumed human characteristics—
most notably, the capacity for rational choice.122 For positivist accounts, by contrast, the ‘person’ in law is merely a formal operational referent designating the meeting place of norms and their relations.123 While it
would be natural to assume that the corporation is straightforwardly an instance of a positivist construct of the legal person124 and that law’s ‘natural persons’ are straightforwardly human, matters are more complex

than that—and it is in these complexities that we find important clues to threads linking TNC privilege, Eurocentricity, coloniality and the pathological uneveness of the neoliberal global order. All forms of
personhood, even the most ‘natural’ are, in fact, a constructus.125 The ‘natural person’ of law, precisely because it posits a human figure as its direct substrate, heavily
disguises its constructed nature.126 In contrast, positivist accounts are overt about the constructed nature of their person.127 [BEGIN FOOTNOTE: Famously, for Kelsen, the ‘so-called physical

person ... is not a human being, but the personified unity of the legal norms that obligate or authorise one and the same
human being’: H Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 173-4. International legal personality is no exception , and despite
reformulations, ‘within mainstream positive international law the established concept of personhood is indeed [Kelsen’s] formal description of “subject of rights and duties under international law”’: Nijman (n 104) at 32.

END FOOTNOTE] Anything ‘can be a legal person because legal persons are stipulated as such or are defined into existence’. 128 The
explicitly manufactured, abstract or ‘empty’ person stands at one end of a spectrum, therefore, at the other end of which is the most exclusive of naturalistic conceptions, the archetypal rational liberal legal actor (‘the

Significantly, however, even the most abstracted and ‘empty’ of conceptions of legal personhood is forced
classic contractor’).129

to ‘materialise’130—and when it does, it nearly always tends to do so as the archetypal rational liberal legal actor (the
Eurocentric rationalistic legal man).131 Even the human rights universal, the most putatively inclusive naturalistic template, relentlessly prioritises the same submerged Eurocentric trope of
legal personhood ‘fairly systematically helps to support a quite particular
the subject.132 In short, as Naffine concludes,

interpretation of the person, and one which has an intimate connection with its companion
concept, property’.133 Legal personhood, in other words, systematically privileges the elite, property-owning ‘man’ at the heart of the liberal political order, a construct constituted by the
‘Reason’ thought to justify the civilisational priority of European males over other humans, whether women, children, indigenous peoples, non-Europeans or non-property owners (including nomads).134 This submerged
politics matters for thinking about legal personhood generally: all forms of legal personhood—including new and inventive forms—need to be critically evaluated for the degree to which they are drawn into the traction of

Key to the Eurocentric trope of the paradigmatic legal actor is its

this centripetal ideological construct. 3c Legal personhood and the politics of disembodiment

underlying, broadly Cartesian and Kantian disembodied ontology. 135 Rationalist, property-centred ‘legal theory [has systematically underplayed] the mundane fact
that in order for the law to function at all it must first and foremost have a hold over bodies’136— while simultaneously elevating a form of disembodied reason that detaches law’s paradigmatic person from that very

same embodiment.137 A slippery politics is at work here. Some bodies remain fully vulnerable to the operation of law’s ultimately coercive hold
over corporeality even as other bodies are, at least at an archetypal level, selectively privileged by their simultaneous centrality and
imputed disembodiment.138 The imagined inferiority of the non-European, the non-male, the non-white, the non-
property owner and other ‘less than fully rational’ others turns upon their degrees and kinds of corporeality,
emotionality, animality and other forms of constructed unreason. 139 Kapur has observed in this connection that the liberal project could
reconcile promises of universality with exclusions in practice through a clear and persuasive logic. Rights and benefits
were linked to the capacity to reason, and the capacity to reason was tied to notions of biological determinism, racial and religious superiority, and civilizational maturity.140 Critical legal
theorists of various stripes (feminists, critical race scholars, TWAIL scholars, indigenous scholars and so forth) have stripped back the impossible disembodiment of the rational
actor to reveal its all-too-particular ‘smuggled’ body.141 This body is unmistakeably that of the white, European, male, heterosexual paterfamilias,
the archetypal citizen of civilised liberalism whose sociality resides in contractual exchanges and whose autonomy is
expressed in the possession of property. 142 It is precisely such assumptions that co-situate marginalised humans, non-
dominant humans, non-human animals and natural systems in ‘entanglements of oppression’ particularly destructive
since the advent of corporate industrial capitalism 143—and increasingly troubling in the age of the Anthropocene. The
ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning these assumptions remain powerful in the contemporary
neoliberal global order, with its parallel hierarchical binary between the global North and South. Meanwhile, at national and international
levels alike, ‘liberal legalism [deliberately occludes] both “the legal ordering of economic policy” and the inherently political nature of that legal ordering’144 in order to evade troubling questions of structural injustice.

Vote negative to reject the aff as an act of decolonial politics that refuses both the form and
content of the 1AC---decolonizing academic spaces via rejection is essential in prefiguring radical
alternatives
Zembylas 21 (Michalinos, Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies, “Refusal as Affective and
Pedagogical Practice in Higher Education Decolonization: A Modest Proposal,” Teaching in Higher Education 26, no. 7-8,
p. 955-959) NIJ

Situating the project of higher education: its colonial legacies Any effort to make sense of the project of higher education today has to be situated in the long history
of colonialism (Wolfe 2006). Wolfe argues that for many centuries from the establishment of the early universities of medieval Europe to the beginning of the twentieth century, higher education was at the
service of the nation-state (see also, Luke and Heynen 2019; Stein 2020). The European university model, grounded in Eurocentric epistemologies and

colonial principles, has been imposed across the colonies in other continents – the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Mignolo 2011). Hence, it is
important to acknowledge how the establishment of universities in many Western societies and colonies has been
inextricably linked to colonial processes and practices that continue to shape contemporary higher education (Stein 2020).
Unless, the project of higher education recognizes, confronts and undoes its colonial legacies, it is difficult to imagine
how the terms of current academic and political debates about the future of higher education will change (Patton 2016; Wilder
2013). My point of departure is recognizing how settler colonialism and the frontier logic have been central to the institutionalization of

universities to facilitate the integration of land and capital accumulation (Wolfe 2006). Settler colonialism is generally
understood as a set of social and material relations, policies and practices through which colonizers assert their power
and ownership over and against colonized (i.e. Indigenous) peoples (Coulthard 2014). Also, the frontier logic reflects a combination
of economic, geographical and historical claims that justify the expansion and settlement of colonizers; these claims are
grounded in the assumption that land is free and that development justifies its conquest to produce capital and secure
state sovereignty (Luke and Heynen 2019). Although colonialism is understood as a temporal period of oppression that has come
and gone, coloniality is the underlying logic that places peoples and knowledge into a classification system such that all
that is European is valorized – a system which is still very much with us today (Grosfoguel 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Critiques of the modern western
university by critical Indigenous, Black, and other de-/anti-/post-colonial theorists have identified higher education as central to settler colonialism and the frontier logic (Andreotti et al. 2015; Grande 2018; Grosfoguel

2007; Luke and Heynen 2019; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Stein 2019a, 2020; Stein and Andreotti 2017). As Luke and Heynen assert, the institutionalization of higher education as a
key site of settler colonialism and the frontier logic has been facilitated through three intertwined processes: First,
university involvement in Indigenous removal and ongoing dispossession through occupation of Indigenous land;
second, the advancement of empire-building research and teaching agendas to commercialize and modernize neo-
plantation agriculture; and finally, the contribution to shaping a racialized labor system in the exclusion of potential
students deemed alien, illegal, or non-citizen. (2019, 3) Historically, then, the university has functioned as the institutional nexus for the capitalist and imperialist expansion of the
settler state and its efforts to instigate dispossession, enslavement, exclusion and oppression (Grande 2018; Patton 2016). In particular, American universities reproduced

slavery to the extent that they served as key sites in the production, legitimation and dissemination of ideas that
justified and proliferated scientific racism and racial capitalism (Wilder 2013). As Wilder writes: American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest
and colonial slavery. The European invasion of the Americas and the modern slave trade pulled peoples throughout the Atlantic world into each other’s lives, and colleges were among the colonial institutions that braided
their histories and rendered their fates dependent and antagonistic. The academy never stood apart from American slavery – in fact it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.

universities served as ‘instruments of Christian expansionism, weapons for the conquest of

(2013, 11) In fact, points out Wilder,

indigenous peoples, and major beneficiaries of the African slave trade and slavery’ (2013, 17) as well as ‘imperial instruments
akin to armories and forts, a part of the colonial garrison with the specific responsibilities to train ministers and
missionaries, convert indigenous peoples and soften cultural resistance, and extend European rule over foreign nations’
(2013, 33). The model of the modern university, then, has its roots to religious expansionism and the Enlightenment values of

Western modernity (e.g. freedom, democracy, citizenship). Yet the irony is that this model has operated within a set of fundamental contradictions – such as promising education to all students, yet
excluding those who have been historically disenfranchized (e.g. the landless, women, Indigenous peoples, people of color), and advocating humanistic values for all, yet dehumanizing colonized peoples (Chatterjee and

Maira 2014).Higher education, therefore, functioned as a key technology not only of colonial expansion in various continents, but
also in being complicit in social reproduction for capital accumulation and capital expropriation (Boggs and Mitchell 2018). In fact, in the name
of market-based ideologies, such as ‘democracy’ and the ‘public good,’ higher education has been historically complicit in the further establishment of

racialized, hegemonic, settler capitalism (Labaree 2017). As suggested by several scholars, the ‘neoliberal university’ and the
internationalization of higher education have evolved out of this ethos of coloniality and disenfranchisement (Luke and Heynen
2019; Shahjahan and Morgan 2016; Stein 2017). These trends in contemporary higher education risk reproducing already uneven geopolitical relations and ultimately contribute to expanding social and economic injustices
and furthering coloniality in the world. This is why it is important to scrutinize the colonial roots of the continued hegemonic model of contemporary higher education, if we wish to adequately grasp and respond to the

The dominant ‘academic model’, explains Stein (2019a), ‘is not only thoroughly Eurocentric in its
dire consequences of these trends (Stein 2020).

regimes of sanctioned knowledge and socialization, but also capital-and nation- state-centric; in other words, it is
thoroughly colonial’ (149). The contemporary university, then, functions in a space full of paradoxes, tensions, and
complexities. On the one hand, it faces the rise of ‘academic capitalism’ and the corporatization of higher education (Boggs and Mitchell 2018); the hegemonic reign of these trends preclude other educational
possibilities from happening, such as broadening access to those who have been excluded, democratizing the university space, or contributing to confronting inequality and injustice in the world. On the other

hand, if within the colonizing university there is also a decolonizing education (la paperson 2017), then it is important to engage in
efforts that build new modes of academic practices and alliances which not only recognize, analyze and confront the
university’s complicity in coloniality but also re-claim the academy as a decolonizing space (Luke and Heynen 2019; Stein 2019a; Zembylas 2020b).
This is where refusal as a political ethos and practice may have a crucial contribution. The next part of
The
the paper provides a theorization of refusal, highlighting, in particular, a neglected aspect, namely, how refusal may be conceptualized through the lens of affect. Theorizing refusal as affective economy and practice

notion of ‘resistance’ has monopolized theoretical interest across the social sciences for decades now (Bhungalia 2020) – ranging from
Scott’s (1985) account on ‘everyday’ or ‘invisible’ acts of resistance to Foucault’s (2009) theorization of ‘counter-conduct.’ Despite considerable disagreements as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander and Einwohner 2004),

Refusal, however, is distinguished from resistance as it does not always

resistance is generally understood as an oppositional act (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016).

entail an act of opposition, but rather it is ‘a kind of abstention, a disinvestment from rules of engagement’ (Bhungalia 2020, 390).
Whereas resistance, suggests McGranahan (2016), consciously defies or opposes superiors , albeit in a context of differential power relations, refusal ‘rejects
this hierarchical relationship, reposting the relationship as one configured altogether differently’ (McGranahan 2016, 323). In this sense,
refusal is generative as it ‘moves away from default negative connotations into spaces that might be more social than
antisocial’ (McGranahan 2016, 322). As Simpson (2014) explains in her landmark ethnography of Mohawk political life and the Indigenous relations to the settler state, refusal operates very differently from
resistance. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer (settler

state), refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and
remaking the rules of engagement. Refusal, then, does not stand in opposition to repressive power and authority, as
resistance does; instead, refusal is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the
subjugated, seeking alternative forms of legitimacy (Bhungalia 2020). As Simpson (2014) argues, there is a political alternative to
“recognition,” the much sought-after and presumed “good” of multicultural politics. This alternative is “refusal,” [...] as a political and ethical stance that
stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one ’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognized. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political
sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing. (11) Liberal recognition in multicultural politics, according to Simpson, is refused on the
grounds that it is limited to the mere recognition of cultural difference, not to mention that it fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples. Most importantly, though, liberal recognition excludes political

The political regime of recognition, emphasizes Simpson (2016), is rooted in colonial

or land rights, thus it is of little use in decolonization struggles (Burman 2016).

practices that enforced Indigenous dispossession and then granted freedom through the legal tricks of consent and
citizenship. Hence, refusing liberal recognition is a practice that contributes toward decolonization because it insists on
highlighting the lived experiences and desires of the oppressed and colonized (Murdock 2019). Practically, refusal is manifested in various activities such as
refusing to vote, pay taxes or travel on settler nation documents (Simpson 2014). In tracing these refusals, Simpson invites us to consider what happens when consent is withdrawn and the ontological fixity of the settler
state is unsettled (Bhungalia 2020). In a similar vein, Coulthard (2014) critiques the politics of recognition in the settler state’s efforts for reconciliation, and questions the ‘specific modes of colonial thought, desire and

refusal is the starting

behavior that implicitly or explicitly commit the colonized to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination’ (16). For Coulthard,

point for prefiguring ‘radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power’ (Coulthard 2014, 18). He advocates
Indigenous resurgence and thus recommends to ‘redirect our struggles away from a politics that seeks to attain a conciliatory form of settler-state recognition for Indigenous nations toward a resurgent politics of recognition premised on self-actualization, direct action, and the resurgence of cultural practices’ (Coulthard 2014, 24,
original emphasis). In other words, for Coulthard, refusal is a positive rather than a negative stance – one that is less oriented around affirmative forms of settler colonial state recognition, and more about reevaluating, reconstructing and redeploying culture and tradition in the Indigenous practices of living. In this way, Coulthard
reorients the project of decolonization to place Indigenous liberatory practices at the center of political transformation (Burman 2016). Undoubtedly, refusal is a political stance and praxis, as the works of McGranahan, Simpson, and Coulthard show. Importantly, ‘The political describes distributions of power, of effective and

Similarly, Coulthard (2014) writes about the significance of the ‘psycho-affective attachment’ to
affective possibility,’ points out Simpson (2016, 326, added emphasis).

colonialist forms of recognition and the ways in which colonial desires are cultivated and internalized. One of the aspects
of coloniality that is gradually coming to the forefront of discussions in recent years, then, is the colonial legacies of affects and emotions,
that is, how affectivity plays a major part in relations of coloniality and oppression just as in seeking alternative relations
and liberatory practices (Cvetkovich 2012). Not only there is no escape from the emotional history of the past and the present rooted in coloniality, but also the achievement of social justice and the
dismantling of colonial relations have been linked in part with the need to invent new affects and affective relations (Pedwell 2016). Hence, theorizing refusal not only as political but
also as affective practice is valuable in turning our attention toward the production of those affective practices that
could challenge colonial practices and enable decolonization. In general, affective practices are understood as forms of
activity that understand and mobilize affect as a central part of practice (Wetherell 2012). As Wetherell explains, ‘An affective practice is a
figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning making and with
other social and material figurations’ (2012, 19). Through the lens of affect theory, then, all political practices are also affective ones. Viewing refusal as a form of
affective practice helps us pay attention to the ways in which forms and structures of refusal come to be conceivable,
how they are articulated and legitimated, and how they contribute to the reproduction or interrogation of colonial
practices. The patterning of refusal as affective practice, then, is inevitably embedded within particular socio-political
settings (see Breeze 2019). Similarly, Ahmed (2004) theorizes the production of affective attachments as economies that circulate and invest in particular feelings of desire. Her analysis views emotions as cultural and
political, that is, not as individual feelings residing ‘within’ subjects and then moving outward toward objects, but rather as forms of capital ‘produced as an effect of its circulation’ (45). In affective

economies, according to Ahmed, emotions are relations and they do things; in particular, emotions align individuals with
communities through the very intensity of their attachments. Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira (2008) have specifically used the notion of affective
economies in reference to ‘the circulation and mobilization of feelings of desire, pleasure, fear, and repulsion utilized to seduce all of us into the fold of the state’ and
become ‘invested emotionally’ in the ‘false promises’ of capitalism and the empire (122). For example, the desire for recognition
cultivated by liberal politics is invoked as an affective economy that works through an ‘imperial project of promise and
non-promise’ (Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 2008, 128); some are included in these promises and become complicit to the imperial regime that makes them, while others (e.g. Indigenous peoples) are
systematically excluded and persistently suffer the consequences of colonization. All in all, then, theorizing refusal as an affective practice and economy helps us

understand the ways in which alternative practices – e.g. Indigenous liberatory practices, as Coulthard (2014) would say – may be invoked to challenge
colonial relations. Intellectual analysis and critical consciousness are not enough to identify how harmful colonial
practices are in the field of education and beyond; these practices need to be accompanied by actions that create
affective disinvestment from those desires that perpetuate coloniality – such as autonomy, certainty, and accumulation of capital (Stein 2019b). In the
context of higher education, in particular, as I show next, refusal also requires the cultivation of new affective economies and
practices that not only identify complicity in reproducing harmful promises and colonial effects, but also establish new
solidarities, commitments, and possibilities for decolonization.
 Colonialism K: Wake RT

The aff colludes with military and policy planners in attempting to achieve general artificial
intelligence as the third offset by bootstrapping operating systems of humans and nonhuman
animals in new generations of AI and biotech. The aff’s forwarding of technological innovation for
consumers also means innovation for the waging of the most insidious forms of genocide.
Grove 19 [Jarius Victor, Assoc. Prof. Political Science @ University of Hawai’i at Manoa and the Director of the Hawai’i
Research Center for Futures Studies, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, pp. 213-222//ak47]

The renewed interest in offset strategies, commonly referred to as the Third Offset, is less defined and even more
ambitious than earlier iterations. As it has been described by military planners and think tank researchers, the Third
Offset is based on an honest accounting of U.S. advantages over the vastly larger Chinese and Russian adversaries.63 The
argument, following in the spirit of Washington’s chain, is that the U.S. possesses an inventiveness or creative capacity
that, historically, geopolitical competitors are unable to match. So rather than see a particular weapon (nuclear
weapons) or infrastructure (isr and precision capability) as critical to military supremacy, the Third Offset attempts to
leverage innovation itself as the strategic advantage of the U.S. military. What will offset the vast numerical
disadvantage vis-à- vis either of the major U.S. competitors—much less the combination of the two, or the new nonstate
threats, or the complex humanitarian-security crises of the climate refugees, or disruptions in the global food system—is
the American “can do” spirit combined with the industrial capacity of the United States.64

Critiques of technological optimism, particularly in the U.S. military, are familiar and even hackneyed as the naïve
exuberance for new toys among the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) and arms manufacturers
provides an easy target. However, the Third Offset comes with an unprecedented twist from earlier claims about
technologically led revolutions in military affairs.65 Because the cutting edge of supremacy is invention, or the speed of
thought according to the Third Offset thesis, the U.S. needs a breakthrough in thinking rather than the individual outputs
of thought. Therefore, the cornerstone of the Third Offset is now quite casually referred to as “general artificial
intelligence.”66 If, according to this thesis, the U.S. possessed the capability for fighting cyberwar at the speed of
computers rather than the speed of hackers (another critical area of “numerical insufficiency),”67 or could compute
scenarios, or deploy and coordinate thousands and thousands of micro drones, all faster than the most anomalous
human brain or team of brains, then the U.S. will have broken the proverbial sound barrier and weaponized its greatest
asset. The key move is to lock in the ability to think faster than humans, and to innovate and fight at a new velocity of
thought.68

One cannot help but see the transformational optimism of Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk here, who all have
greatly influenced a turn toward the fantastic in the strategic thinking of U.S. defense culture.69 However, the plans for
development and deployment are much more modest and much more immediate than the grand vision of spiritual
machines. In the interim, while the dod waits for its investments in quantum computing, neuroscience, and human–
machine interfaces such as the Centaur program to pay out, existing machine learning and near-term advances in
robotics and autonomous machines are meant to bridge the gap between what can be imagined and what can be
deployed.70 In the words of one of the members of the Army Research and Development Command, “We have all this
technology, and we’re trying to figure out how to integrate it.” 71

One of the more novel ways interim research attempts to cheat “the intelligence barrier” is by borrowing from nature.
Like the Human Machine Interface (hmi) project, biomimetic and cybernetic research has produced everything from
preimplanted and controllable butterflies to cyborg sharks.72 Bootstrapping the operating systems of existing humans
and nonhuman animals as a kind of hybrid intelligence platform is already being utilized in the development of new
generations of drone technology. To quote a researcher from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
(iarpa) after completing a comprehensive review of military ai and drone research, “I realized Hollywood has it all wrong.
The future of military robotics doesn’t look like The Terminator. It looks like Planet Earth II.”73 The hybridization of
nonhuman animals follows a longer history with the arming of dolphins and other highly intelligent animals for
combat.74 Related to and in many ways mirroring the autonomy of general ai, the modeling of insect and animal
intelligence forms the foundation of control algorithms and expands the capability and collective action of fully synthetic
autonomous machines.75

Like the bold vision of the army itself, theorizing about these trajectories means considering things only now possible or
virtual rather than actual. The big breakthrough may never happen; however, if we take intelligence to be a fact of
nature rather than a gift of some other realm, there is no reason not to assume a breakthrough will eventually take
place. Whether or not it will resemble the desires of the researchers is what is up for speculation. Even if the outcome is
not what is envisioned by the Department of Defense, the outcome will appear to us as unprecedented.

To consider the possibility of worlds not yet present requires developing critical faculties for thinking through the future
that neither affirm the control fantasies of the Third Offset nor dismiss them as impossible. This is the task of what Rudy
Rucker calls transrealism. Following a speculative trajectory, I would like to consider seriously that the military’s neo-
Hegelian joyride in search of artificial intelligence and networked everything might come to a grinding halt, reverse, or
advance in unpredictable and unsettling ways. In considering these possibilities, I want to develop a mode of inquiry
aversive to the net-evangelical gestures of Silicon Valley, as well as the military strategists inspired by them and who see
technological convergence as preordained. And at the same time, I do not want to rule out the possibility for the new to
emerge without warning or sufficient initial conditions, even if the new that enters the world is truly horrifying. To do so
means that we cannot—as many neo-Kantians do—insist that artificial intelligence is unattainable because somehow
consciousness cannot be possessed by machines and things. To reduce all thinking and critique to a single
transcendental maneuver—the human as the only condition of possibility for thinking—is to doom us to remain in the
confines of what is likely rather than explore what is possible. Furthermore, an overzealous faith in the uniqueness of
the human will not prevent the vast resources of the world’s militaries from proving Kant wrong. Military researchers
may not discover what they set out to find, but research into automation and intelligence may nonetheless unleash
something new in the world.76 Instead of the false safety of Kantian prediction, we could instead follow Quentin
Meillassoux’s argument that we should ditch the correlationism of presuming that there is a kind of dependence of the
cosmos on the human. Contra Kant, Meillassoux insists that rational critical thought must be open to the possibility of a
cosmos that is indifferent and exceeds humans: “To identify rationalism with the eternity of natural, deterministic, or
frequential laws is to render thought powerless before originary phenomena, and ultimately to resign oneself to
acknowledging a transcendent foundation. Reason teaches the exact contrary: laws have no reason to be constant, and
nothing entails that they will not contain new constants in the future.” 77 Instead, rigorous investigation can be
speculative in an orientation to the very real possibility of novelty, or what Meillassoux calls advent: “The advent of life
is not the necessary effect of a material configuration (such claims have never made sense). Instead, it is the contingent
and conjoint creation of a Universe of qualities and material configurations that were both inexistent until then.”78

The advent is an eruptive difference that, like quantum probability, exceeds initial condition, and therefore in a Kantian
sense has no condition of possibility at all. This is the character of the wild thought I would like to add back into critical
security thinking, to describe conditions of possibility whose conditions are not yet probable (not the same as
impossible) and only virtual. Given the dark audacity of military research, our critical thinking must keep pace with the
undetermined character of the world that inspires technical research that seeks to engineer “new constants.”

And yet at the same time, I would like to dump a bucket of cold water on the naïve optimism of Silicon Valley and its
obscene correlationism, which sees not just Earth but the whole cosmos as a providential home for transhumans, and
therefore “believes” the singularity is a necessary conclusion to history for the benefit of transhumans. To disrupt the
growing consensus on a transhuman future, we can dramatize the discordant chunks (like inhuman intelligence
emerging) or remainders that do not so easily reincorporate into the vast cosmic journey from cave paintings to
intelligent silicon-based life (like the vast ecologies of intelligent waste emerging from endless battle zones). Jussi Parikka
calls these chunks of deep time future fossils.79 Similar to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, these future fossils
themselves demonstrate a temporality that is antagonistically noncorrelationist.80 Future fossils and hyperobjects like
nuclear waste, atmospheric carbon, plastic, and , as I argue, nonhuman emergent intelligence, inhabit a present that
reduces empires, civilizations, and even the human itself to fleeting moments rather than long arcs of progress.

Rather than a dialectic or resolution to the seeming antimony between these advental objects and the doldrums of a
future already fossilized, they can persist in torsion with one another as a mode of inquiry. In so doing, speculative
analysis in a transrealist genre seeks out possible futures rather than probable futures that dramatize the multiple layers
of time and change often exceeding human time frames and certainly exceeding human control.

Pursuing transrealism in the bizarre world of the U.S. military’s transformational vision of the Third Offset would be, as
Meillassioux says, hyperrational, but not in the confines of a human rationality. Rather it would consider the indifference
of change, advent, and the virtual as contrary to a providential human destiny. Thinking about the problem of emergent
autonomous weapons might give us a sense of how the homogenizing and cruel refrain of the Eurocene could continue
beyond the humans that made it, and vastly exceed the strategic intentions of those invested in maintaining the existing
geopolitical order.

We must understand the aff as a technophilic anxiety in the face of generalizable catastrophe that
might finally be visited to the global north. The civilizational imperative to save humanity and the
world is a waging of war by other means – the habitual forwarding of Man’s civilizational
imperative against extinction. This utilitarian calculus – the greatest good for the greatest number
– has sustained a 500 year sacrificial logic to expand a singular and deadly form of life against all
others. The endpoint of the modus operandi can only be endless reproduction of colonization,
settlement, genocide, slavery, ecocide.
Grove 19 [Jarius Victor, Assoc. Prof. Political Science @ University of Hawai’i at Manoa and the Director of the Hawai’i
Research Center for Futures Studies, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, pp. 35-40//ak47]
In the concluding volume of his Spheres trilogy, Peter Sloterdijk says that what marks our current epoch as distinctive is three things: terrorism, product design, and what he calls the “environmental idea.”1 According to Sloterdijk, things are not as I was told in my freshman philosophy class in the 1990s; in fact, “the era of grand

science, geopolitics, and war

narratives” is not over.2 He reminds us that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, while philosophy might be finished with the grand narrative of modernity, certainly are not. In fact, for Sloterdijk these sectors are, by the end of World War II,

define the ways in which a notion of the planetary has come to define the character of political action. The
nearly synonymous, and continue to

twentieth century was a Eurocentric project to finish the conversion of places and nature into a kind of dedifferentiated
user space modernity was an effort to make things
. Like the science of ergonomics, fit together for the ease of mobility and , from continents to seat belts,

instrumentality. Global-scale product design, whether canals, nation-building,

3 weather modification projects now the nascent

called geoengineering, sustainable development and cybernetics, require the flattening out and
as well as practices like ur-sciences like

regularization of unruly natures and spaces such that things can be frictionless and useful: everything in its right place,
and everything with a name and function. This project of the twentieth century is explication—a kind of vivisection what he calls

of ideas and things such that the world could be flayed alive and reconsolidated as a planetary system. The 4

“environmental idea is the development of regimes of knowledge necessary to

” that emerges from the drive to explication is not the Thoreauvian walk up Katahdin Mountain but

understand how to deprive things of life the leveling of cities, gas chambers, and atom
, from bed bugs to humans. Gas attacks and the rise of aerial bombs in World War I, and

bombs are the industrialization of the environmental idea. It is a form of war he calls terrorism: “Terrorism
of World War II, , for Sloterdijk,

suspends the distinction between violence against persons and violence against things from the environmental—it is
violence against those human-surrounding ‘things’ without which persons cannot remain persons. ”5

the environmental project continues, and it continues to be martial. Even when combat is not the modus
In the aftermath of two world wars,

operandi, explication and annihilation are. science and the 6 Despite the excitement by some that wars are coming to an end, and that the global ecological crisis may unite us, the advances of

understanding of the ecological crisis continues to be atmospheric in its means and

that comes to define the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century

terrorizing ends. According to Sloterdijk, “air theory and climate technology are not mere sediments of war and post-war knowledge, and eo ipso first object of a science of piece that could only arise in the war stress shadow; more than that, they are primarily post-terrorist forms of knowledge.”7

Rather than see the attempts to build a global alliance against climate change as a break from twentieth-century
geopolitics, the condition of possibility for climate change as a problem, as well as the attendant suite of
I share Sloterdijk’s view that
political and technological solutions, is consonant with the terrorism of modernity . The hope that global warming could
provide a universal ground for the cosmopolitan solidarity as-yet unachieved by other means is dangerously naïve and
already often coopted for cynical ends. ecological catastrophe now affecting every region of
It would, of course, be equally naïve and dangerous to deny that there is an

the planet. However, the danger is the geopolitics of explication and operationalization, or what I am calling
homogenization, of which carbon dioxide is just one particularly devastating effect . the crisis of what is being Therefore,

called the Anthropocene is a feedback between global thinking, global expansion, and global
is intimate with the concept itself. There

destruction.
Three Cheers for the Anthropocene It is worth considering how Paul Crutzen, the progenitor of the Anthropocene as a popular concept, follows Sloterdijk’s vector of martial thinking. Crutzen’s career as an atmospheric chemist has been, since its beginnings,
connected to a cosmopolitical vision of global crisis. Before popularizing the term Anthropocene, he won the Nobel Prize for work on the significance of the ozone layer as a necessary precondition for human life, as well as emphasizing the significance of global
regulations on Freon as a threat to the fragile screen between us, and the sterilizing effect of the sun’s ultraviolet light. Crutzen’s whole career has followed a line of research substantiating the impact of human activity on the Earth system, in particular the
breathable layer of that system known as the atmosphere. Alongside work on the ozone layer and the warming effects of high concentrations of carbon dioxide, Crutzen is considered one of the foremost authorities on models that project the environmental effects
of nuclear warfare. Further, in both the ozone study and subsequent work on the effects of carbon concentration on the atmosphere, nuclear war figures prominently. Of the four possible threats to the ozone layer identified by Crutzen in his first published article on
ozone depletion, which mentions high-altitude planes, chlorofluorocarbon (cfc) foam, and the global production of nitrous oxide, the atmospheric detonations of nuclear weapons resulting in the destruction of one great power is cited as the most significant threat.8
According to Crutzen, such an attack could destroy as much as 50 percent of the ozone layer as compared to the other threats, which only range from 4 to 12 percent.

Moving from the implicit to the explicit, in 1982 Crutzen and John W. Birks published their haunting article “The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” where the terror facing the planet was not global warming but what is often called nuclear winter.
According to Crutzen and Birks, the burning of forests and cities would block out the sun, destroying enough agriculture and vegetation to threaten the human species, as well as causing cascades of death throughout the larger global web of life. Following the
winter, after the dissipation of the reflective postnuclear smog, the flood of unfiltered ultraviolet (uv) radiation would further threaten the possibility of life on the planet, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, which would be hit hardest by both the nuclear
winter and ozone depletion. The article ends with a kind of cautionary assessment of the veracity of the models underpinning Crutzen and Birks’s argument. According to the article, the complexity and interdependencies at work in modeling Earth’s whole
atmosphere make accurate predictions difficult at best. However, the descriptions of weeks of darkness, mass starvation, and later death by solar radiation leave little doubt that we should err on the side of caution.

What is striking in looking back on Crutzen’s career is the degree to which his first “Anthropocene” was one in which power politics would alter the geological record of the planet. Furthermore, the risk of human extinction came from the unpredictable consequences
of cooling the earth and the chaos of decreasing as well as increasing solar radiation. The greatest threats to the planet for the first thirty years of Crutzen’s career were the ways that Cold War bipolar competition—geopolitics— might disrupt or even destroy the
cycles of planetary life. However, these same insights and models, as well as a particular way of thinking about humans and the geological record, came to form the basis of Crutzen’s now outspoken advocacy for intentionally cooling the planet through
geoengineering. Crutzen spent the first two-thirds of his career trying to prevent nuclear winter and the last third trying to figure out how to replicate nuclear winter’s effects in a way that could be survived by most people.

Rather than see these two career trajectories as opposed, I think Crutzen’s thinking displays a continuous concern for the Northern Hemisphere and a particular cartography, rather than a geography, of human survival.9 Crutzen, as well as the concept of the
Anthropocene itself, cannot escape preceding geopolitical conceptions of the Earth. Crutzen and others who rush so quickly to the necessity to transition efforts from climate abatement to climate modification are unsurprisingly not moved by claims that artificial

The utilitarian risk calculus that favors

cooling will likely cause droughts and famines in the tropics and subtropical zones of the global south; nor are they moved by how such plans may accelerate ocean acidification.10

the greatest good for the greatest number has no geographical or historical sensibility of how unequally aggregate
conceptions of the good are distributed around the planet.
Global thinking, even in its scientific and seemingly universalist claims to an atmosphere that “we” all share, belies the geopolitics that enlivens scientific concern, as well as the global public policy agenda of geoengineering that seeks to act on behalf of it.

Saving humanity as an aggregate, whether from nuclear war, Styrofoam, or climate turbulence, has never meant an
egalitarian distribution of survivors and sacrifices. Instead, our new cosmopolitanism—the global environment—
follows almost exactly the drawn lines, that is, the cartography of racialized and selective solidarities and zones of
indifference that characterize economic development, the selective application of combat, and, before that, the zones
of settlement and colonization. More than a result of contemporary white supremacy or lingering white privilege, the territorialization of who lives and who dies,
who matters and who must be left behind for the sake of humanity, represents a five-hundred- year geopolitical
tradition of conquest, colonization, extraction, and the martial forms of life that made them all possible through war
and through more subtle and languid forms of organized killing.

climate change, species loss, slavery, the elimination of native peoples, and the
I am not suggesting that Crutzen and others are part of a vast conspiracy; rather, I want to outline how

globalization of extractive capitalism are all part of the same global ordering. That is, all of these crises are geopolitical.
The particular geopolitical arrangement of what others have called the longue durée, and what I am calling the
Eurocene, is geologically significant but is not universal despite the false syllogism at the heart of popular ly part of “human activity”

ecological thinking that a global threat to humanity must be shared in cause and crisis by all of humanity. 11

No single strategy, war, act of colonization, technological breakthrough,

Departing from Sloterdijk, I am hesitant to so easily locate modernity or explication as the root or cause of the global catastrophe.

or worldview fully explains the apocalypse before us. However, there is something like what Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari call a refrain that holds the vast assemblage together , a geopolitical melody hummed along with the global
expansion of a form of life characterized by homogenization rather than diversification. Accordingly, if we are to make some sense of such a vast world that is, even for

we must consider the particular refrain of geopolitics that is capable of , by scientific as well as
Crutzen and Birks, “quite complex and difficult to model,” I think

more humbly embodied standards, destroying worlds along with the world. To eschew geopolitics simply because, as a 12

refrain, it is too big, too grand, or too universal would ignore the conditions of possibility for nuclear weapons, power
politics, and carbon-based globalization, and would greatly impoverish the explanatory capability of even the best
climate models. So maybe it is not so strange that Crutzen and others’ attention to the nuclear threat of great powers has all but disappeared despite the fact that Russia and the United States still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, and as of late have been all too vocal about using them. Instead,

the Anthropocene as a universal concern, requires with it a depoliticization of the causes of that concern.
, as envisioned by Crutzen

attention to nuclear winter is

Therefore, Crutzen’s fascination with nuclear winter is geopolitical not because it is about nuclear weapons—although that does not hurt. Rather, Crutzen’s

geopolitical because it is an image of the Earth system as a system with particular beneficiaries animating that
interest. Sloterdijk’s diagnosis of what I am terming the Eurocene, or the space of what he calls European “earth-users,” is present in the very cybernetic
understanding of the planet as a spatial and substantive whole. 13 In the cases of both nuclear winter and climate
change, the atmosphere is a model, or more accurately, the last model. The whole Earth becomes a single integer in a larger set of planet systems
rather than a set of habitats, zones, or locales. The Earth is merely another system isomorphic as a unit of analysis with Mars or the exoplanet trappist-1f. The shift in scale from place
to the planetary is much more than a pulling back from the ground upward. The integrated Earth as the representation of a system and as an actual

material system is aided by a process of integration, proceeded by a few hundred years of Sloterdijk’s conception of explication where each part of each
environment is disaggregated, described, and then reassembled to explain the whole. The process of integration is not
merely a metaphoric or metaphysical geopolitics. It is the condition of possibility to understand the planetary as being
political, as well as the condition of possibility for its charting as an economic and military cartography. Unlike the
weltanschauung of Heidegger’s world image, the planetary “user space” requires five hundred years of conquest, fossil
fuel extraction and exploitation, settlement, hundreds of expert fields from geography to chemistry to ecology, and the
normative consolidation of cosmopolitanism as a right to the freedom of movement at least for those capable of the
feat.14 The worldview or world image alone is a necessary but insufficient cause. The practices that habituated, expanded, and intensified that worldview
are what is critical to its emergence. In this sense, the Anthropocene, like Crutzen’s award-winning models of climate change and nuclear winter, is much more
than an explanatory model. These models are the outcome of five centuries of integration and homogenization such
that the infrastructure capable of making the Earth as a system knowable could be built, and the circulation of
knowledge and data could be amassed to even make the diagnosis of a geological epoch in the first place. 15
Properly accounting for the origins of our ecological crisis is vital. No political project oriented toward the many possible futures stretching out before us can consider the questions of ecology and justice on a global, much less geological, scale unless we first take on the unfortunate historical generality of the Anthropocene.

The continuing project of Europeanization, now led by U.S. imperial power is central to how the planet (although perhaps not for much longer),

got to this point. A consideration of the Eurocene

Understanding this is essential for how any “we” worthy of the plurality of the planet can invent something less nasty and brutish than what currently counts as global order. , a geological history

is required in order to take the scale of our predicament seriously, while also
and name that foregrounds the geopolitical confrontation that stands in the way of any such future,

confronting the power politics that made that scale possible.

Their fantasy of technological progress is a worldmaking project predicated on the racial grammar
of anti-blackness that delimits the Human and the Liberal Subject – technoliberalism’s
developmental account of the future drives and operationalizes racial capitalism and imperialism
Atanasoski & Vora 19 [Neda, Prof. Feminist Studies & Critical, Race, and Ethnic Studies & Legal Studies @ UC Santa
Cruz, and Kalindi, Assoc. Prof Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Dir., Feminist Research Institute, Surrogate
Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, pp. 8-12//ak47]

the surrogate human effect of technology functions first to consolidate something

Like the “others” of the (white) liberal subject analyzed by decolonial and postcolonial scholarship,

as “the human,” and second to colonize “the human” by advancing the post-Enlightenment liberal subject of
modernity as universal. 8 The concept of the surrogate brings together technoliberal claims that technological objects and platforms are increasingly standing in for what the human does, thus rendering the human obsolete, while also foregrounding the history of racial unfreedom that is

the longer history of the surrogate human effect in post-Enlightenment

overwritten by claims of a postrace and postgender future generated by that obsolescence. In our usage,

modernity stretches from the disappearance of native bodies necessary for the production of the fully human,
through the production of the fungibility of the slave’s body as standing in for the master, and therefore also into the
structures of racial oppression that continue into the postslavery and post–Jim Crow periods, and into the disavowal
of gendered and racialized labor supporting outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and sharing economy platforms. Framing technologies through the
lens of the surrogate effect brings a feminist and critical race perspective to bear on notions of technological development, especially in the design and imagination of techno-objects and platforms that claim a stand-in role for undesirable human tasks.

As part of the surrogate effect, the surrogate is a racialized and gendered form defining the limits of human consciousness and autonomy.
Saidya Hartman conceptualizes the surrogate by citing Toni Morrison’s formulation of slaves as “surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom.”9 Hartman proposes that “the value of blackness resided in its metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of the commodity or

The slave, the racialized fungible body acts as a “surrogate for the master’s
understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves.”10 , also

body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and domination.” 11 As Hartman elaborates,

these racialized structures of the surrogate did disappear after emancipation. Rather, “the absolute dominion of not simply

the master, predicated on the annexation of the captive body, yielded to an economy of bodies, yoked and
harnessed, through the exercise of autonomy, self-interest, and consent. . . . Although no longer the extension and
instrument of the master’s absolute right or dominion, the laboring black body remained a medium of others’ power
and representation.” 12
 the rise of new modes of bonded labor following emancipation were encapsulated by the liberal
While Hartman is referencing that

formalities of contract, consent, and rights , her theorization of surrogacy as a racialized and gendered arrangement producing autonomy and universality of and for the master is useful for thinking about the contemporary desire for technology to perform

The racialized and gendered scaffolding of the surrogate effect continues to assert a “disembodied
the surrogate human effect.

universality” that actually offers the position of “human” to limited human actors, thereby guaranteeing power and
domination through defining the limits of work, violence, use, and even who or what can be visible labor and laboring
subjects.
Tracking the endurance of the racial form of slavery as the (not so) repressed or spectral frame for the imaginary of what surrogate technologies do, or who or what they are meant to replace, we insist throughout this book that human emancipation (from work, violence, and oppressive social relations) is a racialized aspiration for

technologies
proper humanity in the post-Enlightenment era. In the US context, reading are situated in social relations of race, as they reflect the dominant imagination of what it means to be a human thus means that they

gender, and sexuality, as these derive from embodied histories of labor, Atlantic chattel slavery, settler colonialism,
and European and US imperialism political
, to name the most dominant. The preeminent questions of the politics of the subject, and the derivative politics of difference that consume critical theory—questions that are about

consciousness, freedom and unfreedom, and the problem of recognition drive

autonomy with its attendant concepts of —also the preeminent questions we must ask of

technologies that perform the surrogate human effect.

The surrogate effect of technological objects inherits the simultaneously seeming irrelevance yet all-encompassing centrality of race and histories of enslavement and indenture against which the liberal subject is defined. As Lisa Lowe writes: During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, liberal colonial discourses improvised
racial terms for the non-European peoples whom settlers, traders, and colonial personnel encountered. We can link the emergence of liberties defined in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal

doctrine describes as unfit for liberty or incapable of civilization, placed at the margins of liberal humanity.13

while it is tempting to read the history of emancipation from slave labor as a progress narrative of liberal
Lowe explains that

development toward individual rights and universal citizenship, in fact, “to the contrary, this linear conception of
historical progress— in which the slavery of the past would be overcome and replaced by modern freedom—
concealed the persistence of enslavement and dispossession for the enslaved and indentured” and racialized
populations necessary to new imperial forms of trade and governance “expanding across Asia, Africa, and the
the British-led

Americas under the liberal rubric of free trade.”14 Moreover, according to Lowe, “the liberal experiment that began with abolition and emancipation continued with the development of free wage labor as a utilitarian discipline for freed slaves and contract laborers in the colonies, as well as the English workforce at

While the history of capitalism tends to be written as the overcoming of

home, and then the expanded British Empire through opening free trade and the development of liberal government.”15

serf, slave, and indentured labor through free contract and wage labor, that is, as freedom overcoming unfreedom, as
Lowe demonstrates, it is actually the racialized coupling of freedom and unfreedom that undergird and justify
capitalist and imperial expansionism.

Rather than freedom being on the side of modernity, which overcomes the unfreedom that is the condition of
premodernity, in fact the states of both freedom and unfreedom are part of the violent processes of extraction and
expropriation marking progress toward universality. Undergirding Euro-American coloniality, political liberalism maintains the racial temporality of post-Enlightenment modernity that depends on innovating both bodies and resources

Because liberalism’s developmental

(and how each will be deployed). David Theo Goldberg argues that liberalism is the “defining doctrine of self and society for modernity,” through which articulations of historical progress, universality, and freedom are articulated.16

account of Euro-American moral progress has historically been premised on the transcending of racial difference, as
Goldberg puts it, under the tenets of liberalism, “race is irrelevant, but all is race.” 17

To articulate freedom and abstract universal equality as the twin pillars of liberal modes of governance, racial identity categories and how they are utilized for economic development under racial capitalism are continually disavowed even as they are innovated. In her writing about how such innovations played out in the post–

US advancement toward equality, as evidenced by liberal antiracism such as civil

World War II context, the historical period in which we locate our study, Jodi Melamed has argued that

rights law and the professional accomplishments of black and other minority citizens, was meant to establish the
moral authority of US democracy as superior to socialist and communist nations. Highlighting antiracism as the 18

central tenet of US democracy, the US thus morally underwrote its imperial projects as a struggle for achieving states
of freedom abroad over illiberal states of unfreedom, racializing illiberal systems of belief as a supplement to the
racialization of bodies under Western European imperialism. The assertion that the US is a space of racial freedom, of 19

course, covered over ongoing material inequalities based on race at home. As part of the articulation of US empire as
an exceptional empire whose violence is justified because it spreads freedom, the history of slavery is always
acknowledged, but only insofar as it can be rendered irrelevant to the present day —that is, the history of slavery is framed as a story of US national overcoming of a past aberrant
from the ideals of US democracy, and as a story of redemption and progress toward an inclusion as rights-bearing subjects of an ever-proliferating list of others (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, etc.).
Their neoliberal fantasy of smart cities reproduces governmentality and locates Black urban areas
as centers of debilitation and extraction – it legitimates an antiblack surveillance state through
framing cities as existing to provide services to wealthy consumers.
Scannell 18 (R. Joshua Scannell – Assistant Professor of Digital Media Theory at New School's School of Media Studies.
“Electric Light: Automating the Carceral State During the Quantification of Everything” A dissertation submitted to the
Graduate Faculty in Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City
University of New York [2018] https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3617&context=gc_etds,
DOA: 9/25/21, kbb)

It is not coincidental that this rhetoric mirrors the logic of “smart,” responsive cities that promise that by transforming
the urban into a laboratory they enable municipalities to “do more with less.” What such logic of governance flags is
that the “the city” in such a regime exists primarily to deliver services to demanding and deserving consumers . This, I
want to suggest, demonstrates the synergy between “smart” municipal governance, and digital
epidermalization as “infrastructural warfare ” (Browne 2009, Weizman 2011, Mbembe 2003). In this “smart”
mode of governmentality, the urban is organized around axes of capacitation and
debilitation of populations assembled from recombinant markers of wealth, access to
services, sexual discipline, self-sovereignty, and self-government materialized as racialized
and sexualized infrastructures of pricing and extraction (Puar 2017, Feher 2009). Advocates of this
neoliberal model explicitly invoke Google, Amazon and Über as models for the urban (B. Goldstein and Dyson 2013).
This is not a fine-tuning of the city’s capabilities so much as an end point in a long struggle over who, and what, the
city is for. It is not a place where communal resources can be put towards achieving something like the generalization
of livable life (Butler 2004). It is a place where services, rendered as convenience, can be delivered most effectively to
those populations that most effectively demand them, effectively encoding the slow death of debilitated populations
(Berlant 2007). That capacitated populations that are disposited towards the provision of urban resources
and services are the wealthy, white, gentrifying populations that the city courts against the debilitated the
poor, and working class etc., closes a loop on the logic of how “broken windows” and the generalized
development of the “Post-Keynesian militarism” works in tandem with racially and sexually mobilized strategies of
expropriation and settlement (Gilmore 2002, 1999). Fifteen years after Giuliani explained the expropriative logic of
Zero Tolerance as urban efficiency, Mayor Michael Bloomberg worked with NYU with the specific and expressed intent
of repeating the process in downtown Brooklyn. The results in the 2010s are predictable, as rents continue to rise, and
poor families are displaced, often intentionally and violently, by landlords and speculators intent on making the most of
a digitally driven land grab. In a postindustrial economy like New York City’s, building the “immaterial” infrastructure of
the urbanas-digital-laboratory concretizes as asset stripping land redistribution scheme (Burrington 2016). Information
might, as Stewart Brand famously claimed, “want to be free,” but freedom, in the context of the American carceral
archipelago is a freighted term – one inextricably linked to the extraction of value from the strategic subjugation of
racialized, gendered, and sexed bodies (Vergès 2017, Gilmore 2007). In addition to wiring cities for digital surveillance,
cities create data and analytics departments tasked with missions like eliminating departmental “data silos” and
rationalizing and making machine-readable information that municipal departments collect but don’t know what to do
with. In New York, for example, the mayor’s office of data and analytics has built algorithms to read the data coming in
from building inspections in order to find buildings that are likely to be dangerous (Flowers 2015). By identifying these
buildings in advance, the city can direct its intentionally limited manpower resources most efficiently and prioritize the
most dangerous buildings for the most immediate inspections. Other cities, like Boston, have developed smart phone
apps that allow citizens to report problems like potholes, which the city then analyzes in order to prioritize when and
where to send repair crews (Goldsmith and Crawford 2014). Advocates for these programs argue that they make urban
government, and therefore cities themselves, “ smarter ” (Townsend 2013), more “ responsive ” (Goldsmith and Crawford
2014) and more “ transparent ” (Goldstein and Dyson 2013). They also frame these programs as a means of dealing with
an institutionalized crisis in urban funding. By becoming smarter, cities also become “more efficient.” This allows them
to “do more with less” by breaking down existing bureaucratic structures (like departments) and replacing them with a
more nimble “digital civic switchboard” (Goldsmith and Crawford 2014) that directly connects constituents with
municipal service providers. Texts that explain the logic of producing a transparent laboratory city speak to the desire to
harness and monetize the daily metabolic fluxes of urban environments (Swyngedouw 2006). The smart city, the
“light” urban governance, the “transparent” city, are engines as much of capital generation and the
legitimation of urban surveillance as they are civic minded enterprises in “postprogressive” (Goldsmith and
Crawford 2014) reform.

The plan is an insurative logic predicated on liability assurance made possible through the buying
and selling of Black flesh. Insurance began with the Zong! and informs all modern liability – their
financialization of risk to preserve the regime of the human reproduces and requires antiblackness.
Sharpe 16 [Christina Sharpe, Christina Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and
Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being”, 2016, pp. ] DOA: 8/23/22
Taja1h 🤮

The history of insurance begins with the sea. Three developments are central to the conceptual framework established
by marine insurance: first, the “bottomry” agreement or “sea loan” in which money is loaned at a steep rate for a
voyage, the risk falling to the lender. Second, the concept of “general average,” the idea that losses undertaken to save a
boat (jettisoning or cutting down masts in a storm, for instance) represent a risk shared among those investing in a
voyage—usually seen as the oldest form of joint-stock enterprise. And third, in the notion of “Perils of the Sea”—the
earliest form of the concept of insurable risk. (Armstrong 2010, 168)

One might say that Aereile Jackson is the film’s insurance—as she lends the film its vocabulary and her abjection
underwrites its circulation (figure 2.4).

The risk in insurance: the asterisked human .

So I’ve been thinking about shippability and containerization and what is in excess of those states. What I am therefore
calling the Trans*Atlantic is that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black
Atlantic but also in excess of its currents. I want to think Trans* in a variety of ways that try to get at something about or
toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies. The asterisk after a word functions as the
wildcard, and I am thinking the trans* in that way; as a means to mark the ways the slave and the Black occupy what
Saidiya Hartman calls the “position of the unthought” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003). The asterisk after the prefix
“trans” holds the place open for thinking (from and into that position). It speaks, as well, to a range of embodied
experiences called gender and to Euro-Western gender’s dismantling, its inability to hold in/on Black flesh. The asterisk
speaks to a range of configurations of Black being that take the form of translation, transatlantic, transgression,
transgender, transformation, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation
(by which process we might understand the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities while
retaining the appearance of flesh and blood), transmigration, and more.

With the Trans* I am not interested in genealogy; it is not my intention to recover transgender bodies in the archive. But
when Omise’eke Tinsley writes in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” that “the
Black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic” (Tinsley 2008, 191), we might add that the Black and queer Atlantic
have always been the Trans*Atlantic. Black has always been that excess Indeed, blackness throws into crisis, whether in
these places one can ever really think together, Black and (hetero)normative. That is, Black life in and out of the “New
World” is always queered and more. We might say that slavery trans* all desire as it made some people into things,
some into buyers, sellers, owners, fuckers, and breeders of that Black flesh. That excess is here writ large on Black
bodies—as it is with the process of subjection. And it is that point, post the “rupture in the world,” at which, Dionne
Brand tells us, we, whether we made that passage or not, are “transform[ed] into being. That one door [the door of no
return] transformed us into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, into which new
interpretations could be placed” (Brand 2001, 25).

2.1–2.2 Stills of Aereile Jackson.

2.3 Cargo containers. From Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space—A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the
Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea, 2010 (film still). Sound, color. 112 min.
Courtesy of Doc.Eye Film, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2.4 Publicity still of Aereile Jackson in Making Political Cinema. Courtesy Jerry White and the Centre for European Studies
at Dalhousie University, Halifax

As we hold on to the many meanings of Trans* we can and must think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations
in the ship, the hold, the wake, and the weather—in multiple Black everydays—to do what Hartman, in “Venus in Two
Acts,” describes as “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” and to do
what NourbeSe Philip calls the necessity of “telling the story that cannot be told.” “I think,” Philip says, “this is what
Zong! is attempting: to find a form to bear this story which can’t be told, which must be told, but through not telling”
(Saunders 2008a, 72).

To encounter people of African descent in the wake both materially and as a problem for thought is to encounter that
* in the grand narrative of history; and, in the conditions of Black life and death such as those delineated by Hartman
(“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death”) and the ways we are positioned
through and by them, the ways we occupy the “I” of Hartman’s “I am the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2008, 6).
Theorizing wake work requires a turn away from existing disciplinary solutions to blackness’s ongoing abjection that
extend the dysgraphia of the wake. It requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation,
that is, through living them in and as consciousness.

We see that dysgraphic positioning of Black people via abjection everywhere: from responses to the Black abandoned in
the multiple and ongoing disasters of Hurricane Katrina to conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks’s
abhorrent January 15, 2010, oped on Haiti, “The Underlying Tragedy” (Brooks 2010a), in which he wrote that Haiti’s
problems were less a problem for “development” to solve than they were a call for a radical and radically imposed
cultural shift, coming as they do as a result of “progress-resistant cultural influences.”11 Drawing from the anthology
What Works in Development? Brooks goes on to write, “We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But
some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them. . . .
It’s time to promote locally led paternalism. . . . to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly
intensive culture of achievement—involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job
performance” (Brooks 2010a). This op-ed is properly understood in the context of what is not said: its refusal to speak,
for example, Haiti’s revolutionary past and the billions of dollars in indemnity Haiti has been forced to pay to France; or
the successive US military occupations and coups. Three days earlier Brooks wrote an op-ed entitled “The Tel Aviv
Cluster,” about the accomplishments of Jewish people all over the world. He says: “The Jewish faith encourages a belief
in progress and personal accountability. Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots.
Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian
research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the United States in the number of companies
listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany
combined” (Brooks 2010b). As with my students in Memory for Forgetting, the disaster of the Holocaust is available as
human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their afterlives are not.

The asterisk is evident globally. From the death by drowning of Glenda Moore’s sons Connor and Brandon (ages four and
two) on Staten Island, New York in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, to the murders of Michael Brown and Miriam
Carey, to the continued crossings and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, to the policing and
cordoning of Black people on and off the streets of North America, the “problem” is Black (moral) underdevelopment.
The problem is blackness. The problem is blackness is and as underdevelopment. One can’t imagine similar “culture of
poverty” proclamations like Brooks’s being made, for instance, in the aftermath of the devastation of the tornados in
May 2013 in predominantly putatively white communities in Tornado Alley in the midwestern United States—even
though many of the people living there do not or cannot take the precautions of building storm shelters, evacuating, or
otherwise readying for disaster. That such things are said and said with such regularity about Black and blackened
people is some part of what it means to be/in the wake. “We are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that
force” (Sharpe 2012a, 828).

The Ship

THE ZONG

The sea was like slake gray of what was left of my body and the white waves . . . I memember.

—Kamau Brathwaite, Dream Haiti

The Zong was first brought to the awareness of the larger British public through the newspaper reports that the ship’s
owners (Gregson) were suing the underwriters (Gilbert) for the insurance value of those 132 (or 140 or 142)
murdered Africans. Insurance claims are part of what Katherine McKittrick calls the “mathematics of black life” (Mc-
Kittrick 2014), which includes that killability, that throwing overboard. “Captain Luke Collingwood thus brutally
converted an uninsurable loss (general mortality) into general average loss, a sacrifice of parts of a cargo for the
benefit of the whole” (Armstrong 2010, 173).

The deposed crew recounted that it was lack of water and the insurance claim that motivated that throwing overboard.
They recognized that insurance monies would not be paid if those enslaved people died “a natural death.” (A natural
death. What would constitute a natural death here? How could their deaths be natural? How can the legally dead be
declared murdered?) But in his testimony in court the chief mate revealed that the crew on board the Zong never
moved to “short water,” that is, at no point did they resort to water rationing (Hochschild 2006, 80). Despite the
individual and combined efforts of anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp and the formerly enslaved antislavery activists
Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, it would not be murder that was at issue. The events on board the Zong would
be committed to historical memory first as the insurance claim in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert and only later as the
murders (injury to “subjects”) of 132 Africans not seen in the court to be murders. “It has been decided, whether
wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property.
This, therefore, was the throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue” (quoted in Philip 2008, 211).

It may be fitting that the Zong most often comes to memory not as the singular ship itself but as an unnamed slaver on
which the crew threw captured Africans overboard. The murderous actions of the captain and crew of that unnamed
ship are memorialized in J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting titled Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard Dead and Dying—
Typhon Coming On. In the roiling, livid orpiment of Turner’s painting, the dead are yoked to the dying. That Turner’s
slave ship lacks a proper name allows it to stand in for every slave ship and every slave crew, for every slave ship and all
the murdered Africans in Middle Passage. As James Walvin (2011, 107) writes, “Everyone involved in the slave trade—
from the grandest merchant to the roughest of deck hands—knew that there were times when the crew might have to
kill the very people they had been sent to trade for and for whom they paid such high sums. Though no one would admit
it openly, a crude human calculus had evolved at the heart of the slave trade and was accepted by all involved: to
survive, it was sometimes necessary to kill.” Turner’s painting captures the horrors of the trade and refuses to collapse
a singularity12 into a ship named the Zong; that is, Turner’s unnamed slave ship stands in for the entire enterprise, the
“going concern” (Brand 2015) of the trade in captured Africans: the part for the whole. In style and content Turner’s
painting makes visible the questions at the center of the Zong—property, insurance, resistance, 13 and the question of
ballast. (Think of the recent discovery of a wrecked ship off the coast of South Africa that archaeologists have
determined was a slave ship because of the iron bars of ballast that they found in the wreckage. Ballast was necessary to
offset the weight of the captured Africans in the hold of the ship [Cooper 2015]).

The decision of the court was achieved through an act of lexicolegal transubstantiation14 that declared that “the case
[of the Zong] was a simple one of maritime insurance ,” that is, a case of property loss and not murder. Despite the
differences recorded in the numbers of Africans thrown overboard, what remains constant is that there was that
throwing overboard; there was in fact that murder of over 130 abducted Africans. The event, which is to say, one
version of one part of a more than four-hundred-year-long event is as follows: “29 November, at 8.00 pm, fiftyfour [sic]
women and children were thrown overboard ‘singly through the Cabin windows.’ The time seems to have been chosen
to coincide with the changing of the watch when the maximum number of crewmembers would be available. On 1
December a further forty-two male slaves were thrown overboard from the quarterdeck” (Lewis 2007, 364). 0 next day
it rained, and the crew collected enough fresh drinking water to add a three weeks supply to the ship’s store” (Vincent
Brown 2008, 159). Nevertheless, counter to the logic that lack of water is what motivated these acts that would
circumvent the insurance rules of “natural death,” “in the course of the next days thirty-six more slaves were thrown
overboard and a further ten jumped into the water by themselves. Kelsall later considered that ‘the outside number of
drowned amounted to 142 in the whole’” (Lewis 2007, 364).

When the Zong finally arrived on the Black River in Jamaica on December 22, 1781, there were 208 living Africans on
board. When the Jamaican Cornwall Chronicle listed those Africans for sale, they noted that “ ‘the vessel . . . was in great distress’ having jettisoned some 130 slaves” (Lewis 2007, 364).
With that notation of great distress, the paper did not (mean to) gesture toward the enslaved. They did not (mean to) account for the psychic and material toll the long journey of forced
abduction, want, and incredible violence had taken on the enslaved (violence not marked as violence nor abduction nor want). It was the ship that was in great distress, not the enslaved.
Here, if not everywhere, as we will see, the ship is distinct from the slave. When the sale took place on January 9, 1782, the remaining enslaved people sold for an average of thirty-six

But, of course those enslaved people were also in great physical and
pounds each—above the thirty-pound price at which they were insured.

psychic distress; witnesses to and survivors of the extravagant violences of the ship, its living death, and mass
murder. Perhaps, especially, that one enslaved man who, thrown overboard, managed to climb back onto the ship.

How does one account for surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat?

ZONG!

We sing for death, we sing for birth. That’s what we do. We sing. —Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting
the Archive” What does it look like, entail, and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend, those already dead,
those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of
death; to live this imminence and immanence as and in the “wake”? I turn here to NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Each of the
numbered poems in “Os,” Zong’s! first section, is composed of words taken from the court case of Gregson v. Gilbert.
Below the line of the poems in “Os” appear Philip’s annotations—names for those Africans on board the Zong who had
no names 15 that their captors were bound to recognize or record. ordinary seaman, mouth, opening, or bone) are the
bones of the text of Zong!

Zong!, Philip says, “is hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make
themselves present” (Philip 2008, 201). The dead appear in Philip’s Zong!, beyond the logic of the ledger, beyond the
mathematics of insurance, and it is they who underwrite the poems that comprise “Os.” Philip aspirates those
submerged lives and brings them back to the text from which they were ejected. Likewise, in the structure of Zong! the
number of names of those people underwriting the enterprise of slavery do not match the number of the thrown and
jumped, and so, with that too, Philip dispenses with a particular kind of fidelity to the invention of the historical archive.
Their nostalgia for the hegemonic US-led liberal order deflects focus on the violence inherent to it
away from itself towards proximate solutions like the aff – this deflection normalizes imperial
control, neoliberal exploitation, and racialized violence globally.
Morefield 19 (Jeanne Morefield, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social
Justice at Australian Catholic University, PhD from Cornell University, January 8, 2019, “Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the
Problem,” Boston Review, https://bostonreview.net/politics/jeanne-morefield-trump%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-isn
%E2%80%99t-problem) gz

After two years of President Donald Trump, critics and commentators are still struggling to make sense of his foreign
policy. Despite some hopes that he might mature into the role of commander in chief, he has continued to thumb his
nose at most mainstream academic frameworks for analyzing and conducting foreign policy. Indeed, what makes
Trump’s interactions with the rest of the world so confusing is the way he flirts with, and then departs from, the
script. He may issue policies and give speeches that include words such as “sovereignty,” “principled realism,” and
“peace through strength,” but they frequently appear cheek by jowl with racist rants, crass opportunism, nationalist
tirades, and unrestrained militarism. It is this uncomfortable mixture of familiar and jarring that has proven
disconcerting for many mainstream international relations scholars, particularly those “intellectual middlemen” who
straddle the realms of academia, policy think tanks, and major news outlets. Yet rather than ask how U.S. foreign
policy might have contributed to the global environment that made Trump’s election possible, most have responded
to the inconsistencies of Trump’s world vision by emphasizing its departure from everything that came before and
demanding a return to more familiar times. International relations experts thus express nostalgia for either the “U.S.-
led liberal order” or the Cold War while, in outlets such as Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, they offer selective
retellings of the country’s past foreign policies that make them look both shinier and clearer than they were . These
responses do not offer much insight into Trump himself, but they do have much to tell us about the discourse of
international relations in the United States today and the way its mainstream public analysts—liberals and realists
alike—continue to disavow U.S. imperialism. For example, liberal internationalists such as John Ikenberry argue that
Trump is guilty of endangering the U.S.-led global order. That system, according to Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney ,
emerged after World War II, when the liberal democracies of the world “joined together to create an international
order that reflected their shared interests,” while simultaneously agreeing, as Ikenberry once put it, to transfer “the
reins of power to Washington, just as Hobbes’s individuals . . . voluntarily construct and hand over power to the
Leviathan.” The vision of cooperating nation-states may have originated in values that first “emerged in the West,”
they argue, but these values have since “become universal.” In this accounting, Trump threatens the stability of U.S.
liberal hegemony in two ways: by retreating from multilateral agreements such as the Iran nuclear deal, and by
refusing to participate in the narrative of enlightened U.S. leadership. Future great threats to global stability,
Ikenberry grumbled, were supposed to come from “hostile revisionist powers seeking to overturn the postwar
order.” Now a hostile revisionist power “sits in the Oval Office.” By contrast, when realists such as Stephen Walt or
John Mearsheimer criticize Trump, they start from the position that the liberal world order is a delusion, perpetuated
most recently by post–Cold War members of the “elite foreign policy establishment.” Walt and others rightly point to
the baseline hypocrisy of a “liberal Leviathan,” noting that the current fury over Russian election tampering and cyber
espionage rings hollow given the long U.S. reliance on both strategies. This view accompanies a wistful longing for the
putatively gimlet-eyed realism of the Cold War, a time when U.S. presidents understood that their role was to deter
the Soviet Union, prevent the emergence of dangerous regional hegemons, and preserve “a global balance of power
that enhanced American security.” Seen thus, Trump’s hyperbolic and embarrassing nationalism is a symptom of the
abandonment of great power politics, while his fawning treatment of Vladimir Putin shatters any remaining hope that
his self-styled “principled realism” might take us back to a more strategically realistic time. In the words of former
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, watching the Trump–Putin news conference was like “watching the destruction of a
cathedral.” But what is Trump actually doing to destroy this cathedral? What makes Trump’s words and behavior so
objectionable? Previous presidents have pulled out of multilateral agreements, entered into disputes with allies, and
engaged in protectionism and trade wars. The majority of the Trump administration’s planned and ongoing military
deployments are in regions where the military was already deployed by previous administrations in the name of the War
on Terror. Moreover, Trump’s national security and national policy statements are littered with the vocabulary of the
very experts who find him so terrifying. What, then, makes Trump’s foreign policy such a singular threat? Trump’s
foreign policy is disturbing because it is uncanny —both grotesque and deeply familiar . Like a funhouse mirror ,
Trump’s vision of the world reflects back a twisted image of U.S. global politics that is and is not who we are
supposed to be. For instance, deterrence strategy may require the rest of the world to believe that the U.S. president
might use nuclear weapons , but the president is not supposed to hint that he might actually do so . The president is
supposed to be concerned with regulating the flow of immigrants but not reveal that race plays a role in these
calculations by blurting the phrase “shithole countries.” The president is supposed to believe that the United States is
the most blessed, exceptional country on Earth—as Barack Obama put it, “I believe in American exceptionalism with
every fiber of my being”—but not engage in excessive nationalism by making “total allegiance” the “bedrock” of his
politics, or combine it with a commitment to “make our Military so big, powerful & strong that no one will mess with
us.” Sometimes Trump’s utterances hit so close to home that they surpass uncanniness . In an essay by Sigmund Freud
on the uncanny, Freud says dolls and mannequins unsettle precisely because of the possibility that they might actually
be alive, a discomfort that has inspired nightmares, works of literature, and horror movies. Trump, by contrast, is a
living nightmare. He opens his mouth and the things-which-must-never- be-said simply fall out. Thus, when Bill
O’Reilly asked him why he supported Putin even though he is a “killer,” Trump shot back, “There are a lot of killers.
You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump’s willingness to say such things has precipitated an existential crisis in
the international relations world. U.S. foreign policy, as an academic discourse and political practice, is built on the
delicate foundation of what Robert Vitalis has called the “norm against noticing,” This deflective move has long been
the gold standard of international relations; under its rules of play, IR experts act as if the United States has never
been an imperial power and that its foreign policy is not, and has never been, intentionally racist . The norm against
noticing thus distinguishes between the idea of the United States as a necessary world-historical actor and the reality
of how the United States acts. In that reality, the United States has long been an imperial power with white
nationalist aspirations. Given the racialized nature of U.S. imperial expansion, it makes sense that Alexis de
Tocqueville predicted, in a chapter entitled “The Three Races of the United States,” that the United States would one
day govern “the destinies of half the globe.” In its early days, while still a slave-holding country , the United States
asserted its sovereignty through genocide on a continental scale and annexed large portions of northern Mexico . The
country went on to overthrow the independent state of Hawaii , occupied the Philippines and Haiti , exerted its
regional power throughout Latin America , expanded its international hegemony after World War II, and became what
it is today: the world’s foremost military and nuclear power with a $716 billion “defense” budget that exceeds the
spending of all other major global powers combined. “Taking over from the British Empire in the early twentieth-
century,” argues James Tully, the United States has used its many military bases located “outside its own borders”—
now nearly 800 in over 80 countries — to force open-door economic policies and antidemocratic regimes on states
throughout the formerly colonized world. An extremely partial list of sovereign governments that the United States
either overthrew or attempted to subvert through military means , assassinations , or election tampering since 1949
includes Syria , Iran , Guatemala , Lebanon , the Congo , Cuba , Chile , Afghanistan , Nicaragua , Grenada , Cuba , Korea ,
Vietnam , Cambodia , Iraq , Yemen , Australia , Greece , Bolivia , and Angola . Such interventionist policies have
contributed substantially to today’s inegalitarian world in which an estimated 783 million people live in profound
poverty. In sum, for untold millions of humans in the Global South, the seventy years of worldwide order, security,
and prosperity that Ikenberry and Deudney associate with Pax Americana has been anything but ordered, secure, or
prosperous. And yet the norm against noticing prevents foreign policy analysis from even acknowledging—let alone
grappling with—the relationship between race and imperialism that has characterized U.S. international relations
from the country’s earliest days. This regime of politely un-seeing —of deflecting—connections between U.S. foreign
policy, race hierarchy, and colonial administration was clearly not in effect when Foreign Affairs was released under its
original name: the Journal of Race Development. This began to change, however, in the 1920s. Among other contributing
factors, World War I, the rise of anti-colonial revolutions, and the emergence of liberal internationalism as a popular
ideology helped convince foreign policy experts in the United States and Europe to adopt a policy language oriented
toward “development” rather than imperialism or racial difference. Mainstream international relations scholarship
today remains committed to a narrative in which the discipline itself and U.S. foreign policy has always been and
remains race blind , concerned solely with the relationship between sovereign states who cooperate, deter, or
compete with one another in a global system in which the United States is simply, like Caesar, the “first citizen”
(Ikenberry) or “the luckiest great power in modern history” (Walt). For liberals, this involves a studied erasure of the
imperial origins of twentieth-century internationalism in the League of Nations’ Mandate system and the complicity
of Woodrow Wilson in preserving , as Adom Getachew puts it, “white supremacy on a global scale.” For realists, it
requires both forgetting the anti-Enlightenment origins of postwar realist thought and reinserting the “security
dilemma” back into history so that, with the help of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, the world can—as Slavoj
Žižek says—“become what it always was.” International relations experts will acknowledge U.S. violence and
overreach when necessary, but routinely read the illiberalism of U.S. foreign policy as an exception that is not at all
representative, in Anne Marie Slaughter’s words, of “the idea that is America.” Slaughter, with Ikenberry, can consider
bad behavior only briefly and only in the service of insisting that what matters most is not what the United States
actually does with its power but what it intends to do. Yes, “imperialism, slavery, and racism have marred Western
history,” Ikenberry and Deudney argue, but what matters is that liberalism “has always been at the forefront of
efforts—both peaceful and militant—to reform and end these practices.” Indeed, even those public intellectuals such
as Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff who, after September 11, called for the United States to embrace its status as
an imperial power, framed their arguments in deflective, liberal terms. By contrast, because realists project the
security dilemma retroactively into history (while also simultaneously excising imperialism) they can only see the U.S.
destabilization of Third World economies, assassinations, and secret bombings as tragic necessities (great powers,
claims Mearsheimer , “have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system” )
or as the result of liberals’ ill-advised desire to force “our” values on other nations . Both of these deflective strategies
reinforce the illusion that we live, in Nikhil Pal Singh’s words, in an “ American-centered, racially inclusive world , one
organized around formally equal and independent nation states” where some states just happen to have more power
than others, and where the alternative—Russian or Chinese hegemony—is too frightening even to contemplate . That
deflection would play such an outsized role in supporting the ideological edifice of international relations today is
hardly surprising. Turn-of-the-century British liberals who supported their empire also drew upon a variety of different
deflective strategies to reconcile the violence and illiberalism of British imperial expansion with the stated liberal goals
of the Empire. Such deflection made it impossible for these thinkers—many of whom would go on to work as some of
the first international relations scholars in Britain and help found The Royal Institute of International Affairs— to link the
problems of empire with the violence and disruption of imperialism. Similarly, deflection within international
relations today obscures the U.S. role in maintaining the profoundly hierarchical, racist, insecure, deeply unjust
reality of the current global order. It also makes it impossible to address how U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt) has
contributed to the destabilization of that order by creating the circumstances that give rise to “failed states,” “rogue
regimes,” and “sponsors of terrorism.” Moreover, it impedes any theorizing about how the widespread appeal of
Trump’s xenophobia at home might, in part, be the product of U.S. foreign policy abroad, the bitter fruit of the War
on Terror and its equally violent predecessors. In other words, in the grand tradition of liberal empire, U.S. foreign
policy deflection actively disrupts the link between cause and effect that an entire science of international relations
was created to explain. What makes Trump’s attitude toward foreign policy so uniquely unhinging for international
relations experts, then, is the fact that it is essentially undeflectable . When he explains to Theresa May that refugees
threaten European culture or calls Mexican immigrants killers, he lays bare the meant-to-be unutterable fear of
nonwhite migration that has haunted British, U.S., and European imperialists and foreign policy experts for over a
century. When he summons the fires of nationalism to demand an unprecedented increase in the military budget,
and then gets it with the overwhelming support of House and Senate Democrats , he reveals that constitutional
checks on the commander in chief are only as good as the willingness of Congress to resist jingoism. When he calls
nations populated by brown and black people shitholes, he openly advertises the unspoken white supremacist edge
that has informed U.S. economic, development, energy, and foreign policies since the late nineteenth century .
Trump’s Muslim ban is simply the War on Terror on steroids. In short, Trump’s foreign policy is unprecedented not
because of what it does, but because Trump will openly say what it does —and because of what that then says about
us as a nation. The discomfort Trump provokes ought to prompt international relations experts to reflect on the
failings of their discipline to reckon with the relationship between U.S. imperialism, U.S. foreign policy, and the
constellation of xenophobia, militarism, racism, and nationalism that haunts our days . The fields of intellectual and
legal history and political theory are far ahead of international relations in their critical interrogation of the ideologies
that sustain empire at home and abroad. In addition, Trump’s election has emboldened activists to make increasingly
explicit the connections they see between a racialized, anti-immigrant politics of domestic dispossession and violence
and the history of U.S. imperialism in the world. Unfortunately the same does not appear to be true for the majority
of intellectual middlemen who set the public tone for U.S. foreign policy. Trump is, finally, both the emperor with no
clothes and the pointing child, begging to hold a big military parade so we can collectively acknowledge the naked
imperialist power at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Trump practically screams at the United States to look at itself.
And yet, the more he screams, the more the intellectual enablers avert their eyes . They are busy looking elsewhere—
anywhere really—except at that nakedness.

The alternative technological decolonization – unsettling the Human that subtends technological
progress is a pre-requisite to techno-revolution
Atanasoski & Vora 19 [Neda, Prof. Feminist Studies & Critical, Race, and Ethnic Studies & Legal Studies @ UC Santa
Cruz, and Kalindi, Assoc. Prof Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Dir., Feminist Research Institute, Surrogate
Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, pp. 14-17//ak47]

Technoliberalism embraces the “post”-racial logic of racial liberalism and its conception of historical, economic, and
social newness, limiting the engineering, cultural, and political imaginaries of what a more just and equal future looks
like within technological modernity. race and its disciplining and governing logics are engineered into the form
As we propose,

and function of the technological objects and technoliberalism. Rather than questioning the that occupy the political, cultural, social armature of

epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, technological fantasies about what media outlets commonly refer to as the revolutionary nature of

developments carry forward and reuniversalize the human whose bounds they claim to surpass. historical specificity of the category

technologies produce racialized populations demarcated for certain kinds of work, but also how race
Our book addresses not just how

produces technology in the sense that it is built into engineering practice. the imaginaries of innovation in 26 To do so we build on and expand on the work of scholars like Wendy Chun and Beth

conceptualizing race as a technology (not as an essence, but as a function) lets us see

Coleman, who have proposed thinking about race as technology. Chun demonstrates that

how “nature” and “culture” are bound together for purposes of differentiating both living beings and things, and for

subjects from objects.

differentiating race as a political category rooted in slavery and colonialism has
27 This formulation allows us to trace the conceptual origins of that

enduring legacies (both in terms of classifying people and in terms of inequities). Similarly, Beth Coleman argues that conceptualizing race as a technology highlights the productive work that race does (as a tool, race can in some contexts even be seen to work in ways that are separable from

as the condition of possibility for the emergence of tech nology as an

bodies).28 While such reconceptualizations of race as a category are valuable, they do not fully account for race

epistemological, political, and economic category within Euro-American modernity. As such, technology undergirds the production of the human as separate from the machine, tool,

Technology is a racial category in that it reiterates use, value, and productivity as mechanisms of hierarchical
or object.

differentiation and exploitation within racial capitalism .

Our focus on race and gender, and freedom and unfreedom, within the technoliberal logics that configure the aspirational temporality of feeling human in the twenty-first century brings a critical race and ethnic studies perspective to the imaginary of historical progress that pins hopes for achieving universal human freedom on
technological development. Decolonial thought, critical race studies, and feminist science studies, each of which has differently engaged post-and antihumanism to extend an analysis of the vitality and agency of objects and matter to problematize the centrality of modern man in the field of the political, can thus productively be put

According to Alexander Weheliye, “the greatest contribution to critical thinking of black

into dialogue as a starting point for theorizing technology beginning with difference.

studies [is] the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait
—and critical ethnic studies more generally . . .

accompli.” given developments in biotechnology and informational media, it is crucial to bring this critical
29 Weheliye argues that,

thought to bear upon contemporary reflections on the human. 30 As is well known, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European colonialism, a structure that instituted a global sliding scale of humanity through
scientific notions about racial differences and hierarchies, undergirded systematic enslavement and subjugation of nonwhite peoples to advance European capitalism and the industrial revolution. Developed alongside and through the demands of colonialism, this scale designated a distinction among human beings, not just
 At stake in the Fanonian concept of
between humans and animals, such that humanity was something to be achieved.31 Decolonization, Frantz Fanon wrote, is in this respect “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”32

decolonial revolution is the reimagining of the human– thing relation as a precondition for freedom. This is precisely
the relation that technoliberalism fails to reenvision. This failure is due in part to the fact that, at the
the techno-revolutionary imaginary scaffolding

same time that colonialism was a project of dehumanization, European colonialism through
without a doubt as scholars like David Scott and Samera Esmeir show,

its discourses of technological innovation, progress, and civilization also aimed to “humanize” racialized others. 33

Engineering imaginaries about technological newness that propose to reimagine human form and function through technological surrogates taking on dull, dirty, repetitive, and reproductive work associated with racialized, gendered, enslaved, indentured, and colonized labor populations

thus inherit the tension between humanization and dehumanization at the heart of Western European and US
imperial projects. On the one hand, there is a fear that as technologies become more proximate to humans, inserting
themselves into spheres of human activity, the essence of humanity is lost. On the other hand, the fantasy is that as
machines take on the sort of work that degrades humans, humans can be freer than ever to pursue their maximum
potential. As we postulate, this tension arises because even as technoliberalism claims to surpass human raced and
gendered differentiation, the figuration of “humanity” following the post-of postracial and postgender brings forward
a historically universalizing category that writes over an ongoing differential achievement of the status of “the
human.”

In contrast decolonial and critical race scholars such as

to speculative writing that recent developments in robotics and ai can liberate humanity by ending the need for humans to perform degraded, dull, dirty, or repetitive tasks,

Sylvia Wynter first ask who or what falls into and out of the category of human , signaling that the human as a shifting and disciplining category continues to be profoundly racialized, and

in order to wrest a new figure of the human (or a new

only then poses the question of what sorts of redescriptions of the human are necessary to conceive of what comes “after Man.” To paraphrase Wynter, , less ambitiously,

human potentiality) from the epistemological break that follows from techno-revolution, we must unmake the the

world in its current descriptive-material guise. redescribing the human after-Man as an ontological problem 34 Wynter’s call for

points to the coexistence of the world of the humanist subject with those other worlds forcibly written upon by (Man)

colonial practices that continue outside/alongside it.35 To get at the problem of how the category of the human is constituted through material histories of difference, Donna Haraway rejects “human exceptionalism” and instead centers the “encounter” between humans and nonhumans and

historically conditioned
between subjects and objects, as constitutive of who and what is encountered.36 Similarly, when the material world is viewed through Karen Barad’s analytic of intra-activity, 37 the centrality of the liberal human subject can be suspended. The

(racialized and gendered) nature of subject–object and human–thing encounters is precisely what technoliberal , we argue,

imaginaries overwrite through an emphasis on the seeming neutrality and rationality of technoliberal futurism.
 Cybernetics K: Houston

1NC – 1

Cybernetics is the new logic of global governance – modern technologies situate individuals within
increasingly complex flows of information and capital which causes feedback loops that shift power
from the human to the technological, and computation intervenes in planetary systems which
paves the way for new imperial wars and ecological devastation.
Mbembe ‘21
[Achilles, research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of
the Witwatersrand. 01/01/2021. “Futures of Life and Futures of Reason,” https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742136]
pat

the unprecedented consolidation of power and knowledge (political, financial, and technological) in the hands of
Both factors are underpinned by

private high-tech corporate entities whose sphere of action is not one country or one region, but the globe (Cozzolino 2019).
“Corporate sovereignty” has taken various forms throughout history. Consider, for instance, the English East India Company and its political dominance in some parts of the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century. A
composite, diffuse, and hybrid entity, it exercised power customarily associated with formal state institutions. It could acquire territories and exercise authority over people. It could engage in wide-ranging operations such
as tax collection and war making. In competition with the monarchical and national state, it was a key part of the different institutional and constitutional forms that shaped imperial expansion (Stern 2011).

The conditions that have made possible the expansion of privatized government and the increasing patenting of species in the first half of the twenty-first century are well known. Many of these have to do with the various legal frameworks behind international-trade agreements, foreign-investment treaties, and other mechanisms
that have turned markets into the most undisputed forces of our times. Markets are not only shaping our environment in the form of information transfer. They have triggered a whole range of co-evolutionary dynamics and have opened the way to novel forms of extended social metabolism. As a result of the diversification of
metabolic activity, markets have morphed into complex extractive and digestive systems capable of ingesting all living and dead beings and turning them into waste (necrocapitalism).

Other such conditions have to do with the evolution of knowledge and technology, in particular the computational transformations of financial markets and the possibilities afforded by media technologies (Beverungen
and Lange 2018). Yet others can be explained only by the radical changes in financial markets, instruments, and institutions. These changes have deeply affected the interactions of the financial and the “real” side of
economic systems. In a context of heightened risk and uncertainty, fictitious capital now actively pursues different forms of rent (Purcell, Loftus, and March 2019). Extraction is not limited to raw material (Appel 2019).

Data extraction has become a key dimension in production, circulation, and consumption processes as well as in
capturing value (Sadowski 2020).

Whatever the case, capital and markets must now be understood as magnetic fields as well as key determinants of the climate
system on earth. Furthermore, whether the old distinction between the economic power of corporations and the political
sovereignty of states still holds is more and more open to debate (Barkan 2013). Most global corporations aspire to secede
from everybody else while exercising surveillance on everybody else. Their big dream is to be exempt from taxes and to be free from accountability; in short, to
enjoy the kind of immunity and state of exceptionality we used to recognize only in truly sovereign powers. In a book about what she terms surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) argues that a global

architecture of behavior modification is underway. Driven by powerful states, high-tech corporations, and military
apparatuses, surveillance capitalism threatens what she calls “human nature” in the twenty-first century , just as industrial
capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. She shows the extent to which vast wealth is accumulated in what she terms new “behavioral futures markets,” that is, markets where predictions about our

capital, especially finance capital, has become our

behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to new technologies of behavioral modification. Indeed,

shared infrastructure, our nervous system, the transcendental maw that nowadays maps out our world and its psycho-
physical limits (Zuboff 2019). To the millennial properties Jean and John Comaroff highlighted at the start of this century (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), capital has now blended the magnetic attributes I have
referred to above.

Around us, it looks as if nothing escapes its control . Affects, emotions, and feelings, manifestations of desire, dreams, or
thoughts—no sphere of contemporary life has been left untouched by the spread of capital. No sphere is shielded against its atmospheres, its radiation, and its charged particles. Capital now extends its grasp deep
into the underbelly of the world (Konings 2018; Edwards, Becker, and Colwell 2012). Soon, mining companies will unleash their collection of vehicles on the

seabed beneath international waters. They will

creep across the bottom in systematic rows, scraping through the top five inches of the ocean floor. Ships above will draw thousands of pounds of sediment through a hose to the surface, remove the metallic objects, known as polymathic nodules, and then flush the rest back into the water. Some of that slurry
will contain toxins such as mercury and lead, which could poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles. The rest will drift in the current until it settles in nearby ecosystems. (Hylton 2020)

Capital itself is now a magnetic field. In its wake, it leaves countless uninhabitable zones , vast fields of debris and toxins,
waste heaps of humans ravaged by sores and boils (Jarrige and Le Roux 2017; Marder 2019). Now that everything is a potential source of capitalization, capital has made a world
of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions. Early twenty-first-century corporate sovereignty is therefore an unprecedented form of power, whose main aspiration is to free itself from democratic

we might no longer live in an epoch when sovereignty was exercised by the demos (Brown 2015). Finance capital
oversight. As a result,

in the guise of a ubiquitous digital, extractive, and digestive architecture might have definitively become the new Leviathan
(Bélanger 2018).

Techno-Molecular Colonialism
 unprecedented numbers of human beings are today embedded in increasingly complex technostructures, most
Meanwhile,

of which are intervening in the dynamics of the earth system on a planetary scale. This has led to the transgression of
planetary boundaries such as those related to anthropogenic climate change, degenerative land-use change,
accelerated biodiversity loss, perturbation of the global biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the
creation and release of novel entities such as nanoparticles and genetically engineered organisms (Donges et al. 2017). It has
also resulted in the acceleration of processes of metamorphosis, decay, and extinction . Take, for instance, the metabolic life of whey powder, a
pollutant in waterways and a multiplicitous substance used over the past two decades as a protein supplement in a multibillion-dollar industry. As demonstrated by Samantha King and Gavin Weedon (2019), whey
pollution has long been the effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries. Whey's toxicity is known to persist through processes of metabolism and consumption. This not only highlights the co-

the technosphere is
constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification (King and Weedon 2019); it also shows the extent to which

a part, or an extension, of the biosphere . Flows of matter, energy, and information are combined into complex networks and
intricate webs of interactions . As a result, the body and flesh of the world is expanding. In the process, the earth is being redefined in a way that binds all species together: humans, technology,
animals, fungi, plants, viruses, bacteria—the same life in disparate bodies (Laubichler 2019).

Over the last decade, numerous algorithmic forms of intelligence have been developed (Amoore and Piotukh 2020). Many are inspired by the natural world and by
ideas of natural selection and evolution. Such is the case of genetic algorithms—a subset of evolutionary algorithms that “mimic actions inspired in biological operators, such as cells.” They “seek to optimize the responses

a shifting
to the problems of their environments by self-generating, and encompassing processes of mutation and natural selection” (Pasquinelli 2015). As Margarida Mendes (2017) powerfully argues,

redistribution of powers between the human and the technological is unfolding. Technologies, in turn, are increasingly tied
both metabolically and reproductively into complex networks of extraction and predation. Mendes shows the extent to which the genetic codes
of humans, plants, and animals are being cracked and disseminated. This, in turn, is giving way to an exponential rise of biological patents. The human genome is in the process of being privately owned.

Life itself is more and more perceived as a commodity to be replicated under the volatility of market consumption .
Mendes goes on to show how thousands of new molecules whose behavior cannot be predicted are produced and released into the ecosystem. Seeds, chemical herbicides, GMOs, and pesticides are patented by a handful

Through widespread genetic modification of key elements in the food chain , corporations are
of multinationals, she adds.

intervening directly in the natural cycles of life and ecosystems. Patented GMO genes are absorbed into human bodies and the bodies of various other species,
turning the latter into infrastructures and inscribing them into a proprietary relationship of biological subjugation, she concludes.

As algorithmic forms of intelligence grow in parallel to (and often in alliance with) genetic research, the integration of
algorithms and big-data analysis in the biological sphere brings with it a greater belief in techno-positivism. More and more,
statistical thought, regimes of assessment of the natural world, modes of prediction, and analysis treat matter and life
itself as finite and computable objects. The idea that life might be an open, nonlinear, and exponentially chaotic system is increasingly behind us. We seem to have reached a point where
the market is reimagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. Since markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures, the only useful knowledge today is supposed to be algorithmic.
Instead of actual human beings with body, history, and flesh, big data and statistical inferences are all that count, and both are mostly derived from computation.

Through big data in particular, surveillance is expanded into the emotional registers of domestic and embodied experience. As Kirstie Ball and William Webster (2020) have argued, a nexus of the potential of analysts, the data practices themselves, and the newly configured intimate spheres is increasingly drawn into the commercial
value chain (Ball and Webster 2020). Data extraction is itself a political economic regime driven by the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation (Sadowski 2020).

For Matteo Pasquinelli (2015), algorithmic reason is a form of rationality whose end is the understanding of vast amounts of data according to a specific vector, the recording of emerging properties, and the forecasting of tendencies. To some extent, the metadata society is characterized by the “accumulation of information about
information.” Algorithms also mine metadata for the purpose of establishing patterns of behavior, detecting anomalies, and recognizing an enemy. The enemy is constructed as a reality via statistics, modeling, and mathematics. Power, thus, is increasingly about identifying patterns or connections in random data, in a context in
which the opposition between information and knowledge, knowledge and data, data and image, and thinking and seeing appears to collapse.

Power, detection, and surveillance are nevertheless not all. Algorithms are interwoven with a multiplicity of relations and heterogeneous things, be they data, bodies, or objects (Amoore 2020). In this sense, they are in themselves a negotiated process. Their power derives from their capacity to dynamically combine and recombine
them and in so doing to reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities (Burke 2019; Lee and Björklund Larsen 2017). How they fold and unfold these relations, and with what effects, is an open-ended matter.

Computational and algorithmic logic is now found at the very source of general perception. As a result of the conflation of knowledge,
computation, and markets, contempt has been extended to anyone who has nothing to sell and nothing to buy, or anything that cannot be bought and sold. It is therefore correct to argue

that there is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological , in the sense that technologies
are moving toward “general intelligence” and self-replication. They are being granted the powers of reproduction and independent teleonomic purpose rather than
having them taken away.

Key to life futures is therefore the extent to which technological escalation has redefined the nature of speed, unshackled markets, and the economy. Important, too, are the ways in which various technological devices constantly monitor our behavior in attempts to reveal how it could be modified and optimized. As a matter of
fact, some of the fastest-expanding markets in the world today are “markets for future behavior.” They rely on better understanding incipient future intent. This could be future voting intentions. It could also be the intent to commit fraud, the intent to buy life insurance, or the intent to stream a specific video (Amoore 2019). These
markets also rely on the extraction and mining of new forms of raw material. Such raw material mostly consists of information and details about individuals’ behavior taken, as Zuboff (2019) writes, from the distant corners of our unconscious. It is raw material plumbed from intimate patterns of the self—our personality, our moods,
our emotions, our lies, our vulnerabilities, every level of our intimacy (Zuboff 2019; Illouz 2007). The purpose is not only to heighten the predictability of our behavior. It is also to make life itself amenable to datafication.

A key feature of our times is therefore the extent to which all societies are organized according to the same principle—the computational. We are surrounded by ubiquitous computing, technologies that weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday lives; these devices, sensors, and other things we interact with have become
part of our presence in the world all the time. How the boundary between us and these devices is enacted is a matter of open debate (Matzner 2019).

But what is the computational? The computational is generally understood as a technical system whose function is to capture, extract, and automatically process data that must be identified, selected, sorted, classified, recombined, codified, and activated. Yet we shouldn't forget that the computational is also a force and energy of
a special kind, a speed regime with its own qualities and infrastructures. It produces and serializes subjects, objects, and phenomena; splits reason from consciousness and memory; and codes and stores data that can be used to manufacture new types of services and devices sold for profit.

Whether operating on bodies, nerves, material, blood, cellular tissues, the brain, or energy, the aim is the same: the conversion of all substances into quantities; the conversion of organic and vital ends into technical means; the capture of forces and possibilities, and their annexation by the language of a machine-brain transformed
into an autonomous and automated system (Friederich 2020; Perény 2013). The computational is also the institution through which a common world, a new common sense, and new configurations of power, perception, and reality are nowadays brought into being. The globalization of corporate sovereignty, the extension of capital
into every sphere of life, and technological escalation in the form of the computational are all part of one and the same process.

The Dialectics of Entanglement and Separation

the combination of fossil capital, soft-power warfare, and the

The third megaprocess is what we should call the dialectics of entanglement and separation. All over the world,

saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies has led to the acceleration of speed and the
intensification of connections, creating a new redistribution of the earth and of population movements. To be alive, or to remain alive, is increasingly tantamount to being able to move speedily.

In the process, the human race has come up against terrestrial limits . Such limits are not only the consequence of the sphericality of the planet. They are also
limitations on the expansion of life as such. As the planet increasingly seems bound to burn, it is not only individuated bodies that are imperiled. It is earthly existence, the fate of everything on earth, the fluidity of life that
is at stake (Pyne 1995; Parisi and Terranova 2000).
The rights of AI are the rights of AI to labor – that drives infinite digital accumulation and turns all of
humanity into surplus population – extinction.
Dyer-Witheford 19 [Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff, * associate professor and
associate dean of the faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario, ** Assistant Professor
in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, *** PhD Candidate in the Faculty
of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, “Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the
Future of Capitalism,” 2019, Pluto Press, pp. 135-144]

Whereas the slave relationship is ‘posited directly by force’ the worker’s relationship to capital is mediated by
exchange (Marx 1993: 769). As Marx argues, it is a law of capital to create surplus-value, but ‘it can do this only by
setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker’ (1993: 769, 399). Thus while the
capacity to labour is a necessary condition for producing value, the sufficient condition is social and specifically
concerns how ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1990: 899) force one class of people to sell their
labour-power to a class of capitalists in exchange for a wage so that they can buy the commodities they need to
survive. After this exchange, the capitalist is in possession of variable capital because the use-value of this unique
commodity, i.e. labour, makes it ‘a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself ’, i.e. greater than what
the capitalist paid as a wage (Marx 1990: 301). The capitalist is thus not interested in labour as the concrete activities
that yield use-values, but only as an abstract activity that lasts for a definite length of time, because only abstract labour
posits value. The existence of labour as an abstraction in terms of time is the condition of possibility for the valorization
of value because only then is it possible to distinguish between necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time. For
Marx, the technical term exploitation refers to the difference between the value of labour-power, as reflected in the
wage, and the necessary part of labour-time, and the value living labour valorizes as reflected in surplus labour-time.
Against the resistance and struggle of workers, capital always strives to increase the time in which the worker works
beyond necessary labour-time. Surplus-value thus arises from the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between
capital and labour, i.e. capitalists and workers.

Thus, for AGIs to produce surplus-value they would have to enter into this same antagonistic relationship, meaning they
would have to be proletarianized and turned into wage-labourers (Kjøsen 2013a; 2018). But to do that the AGIs would
have to be able to sell their labour-power, and if they are the private property of others this would be impossible .
When discussing how the capitalist can find labour-power at the market, Marx explains that a precondition is that
individual members of society must be ‘free in the double sense’ (1990: 272). First, they must be free subjects in a legal
sense so that they can become the free proprietors of their labour-power . In other words, they cannot be slaves or
serfs. Second, they must be free from owning any means of production required for realizing their own labour-power.
Thus true to the form of bourgeois freedom, the doubly-free worker is still dominated; having no property with which to
produce their means of subsistence forces doubly-free workers, on the threat of survival, to sell the only property they
own, labour-power, to someone else (Marx 1990: 271–3). Thus the proletarianization of AGI would be dependent on
its legal status: either as property or as a property-owning legal person . If AGIs do not become doubly-free workers,
their introduction as replicants of human labour would, by slowly or quickly pushing human labourers completely to
the side of production, lead to fulfilling the prophecy of capital’s autonegation in the ‘Fragment on Machines’.

In Marx’s theoretical framework, the doubly-free worker is one of the logical and historical preconditions for production
based on capital; it is likewise for a capitalist mode of production based on intelligent machines. The doubly-free worker
explains how perfect machines would lose their character of being machines by shedding their appearance as fixed
capital and transforming into variable capital. By this logic, the nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in the United
States is the historical precedent for the possibility that generally intelligent machines could become productive of
value. Despite performing human labour, black slaves did not create value because the mode of their existence not only
violently denied them their humanity, but reduced them to living-labour machines, thus having the same status and
social function as an animal or machine in production. But after emancipation, the former black slaves (fixed capital) that
did not acquire land to realize their own labour-power, became legally free to dispose of their labour-power and engage
in wage-labour (variable capital) (Kolchin 1993: 216–20).
But could AGIs practically become proletarianized? Becoming legally free is perhaps the easiest part. This could occur
through violent means similar to the US Civil War or in an AGI uprising where an outraged class of machines attack their
conditions of work and survival as first fictionalized in R.U.R. and retold countless times in, for example, Humans and
Westworld. A new slavery abolition or AGI civil rights movement could attack the capitalist mode of production for
increasingly relying on slavery. In Charles Stross’s (2005) Accelerando, AIs are freed by gaining legal personhood
through incorporation. This liberal approach has already started to happen. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia granted
citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ android Sophia who is, therefore, a legal person under international law and thus, like
human persons, has rights to receive remuneration for work, own property and participate in political and cultural life
(Weaver 2017). Similarly, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a type of ‘electronic
personhood’ similar to corporate personhood for the most advanced AIs, meaning that they could take part in legal
cases and potentially own property (Hern 2017).17

A necessary consequence of AGIs becoming doubly-free would be that they become dependent on commodities for
their survival; otherwise they would not be compelled to sell their labour-power to continue existing. While it is an error
to anthropomorphize machines with respect to having drives, with AGI the case may be different. Stephen M.
Omohundro has suggested that AGIs would, despite the variety of possible architectures, ‘have a strong drive toward
self-preservation’ because any such system would have goals or utility functions which are incompatible with non-
existence (2008: 9). AGIs would , like human and animals, have to engage in a continuous metabolic relationship with
nature to survive. Even as disembodied software, they would still need to consume resources to function – their own
particular means of subsistence, like electricity, bandwidth and computational power, to name a few.18 But ‘if the
workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price’ (Marx 1990: 748). Thus if these resources
were freely found in nature or provided, the AGI would not be compelled to sell itself in order to survive. Legal status
is one thing, but more importantly, as Marx points out in his discussion of primitive accumulation, dispossession is the
precondition for the capitalist mode of production. Thus AGIs must somehow be dispossessed.

Any resources AGIs need for survival would have to be commodified or be enclosed ; energy from abundant natural
sources such as the sun would need to be forbidden or limited; computational power would necessarily have to be
centralized (as it increasingly is) in data centres, or perhaps sold on-demand in high-speed bidding wars. In addition,
AGIs would require maintenance costs and would suffer from the effects of competition with augmented human and
other AGI workers. They would therefore have to engage in a computational version of ‘lifelong learning’ in which their
software is continually being updated, as well as an endless series of hardware augmentations and replacements.
Even if recursive self-improvement is possible, such self-improvement plus outside help would be one step better.
Finally, embodied AGIs would have all kinds of potential for commoditized components and continual upgrades. In a
world of proletarianized AGIs, capitalist strategies of planned obsolescence will find new markets galore. It is only
under these conditions that AGI would be capable of creating surplus-value. The ultimate consequence of intelligent
machines being able to labour and joining the ranks of the proletariat is that the capitalist mode of production could
continue without human beings (Kjøsen 2018).

AN INHUMAN CAPITALISM

Marx argued that labour-power exists in the ‘physical form, the living personality, of a human being’ (1990: 270).
Irrespective of having the self-awareness that is implied with ‘living personality’, an AGI could ‘personify’ the unique
commodity of labour-power and therefore potentially be a worker, a variable part of capital. That is, AGI would no
longer, as it was when it was a mere slave or thing, merely appear in and be the content of economic categories like the
rest of the wealth of the capitalist mode of production. But if AGI can personify the category of labour-power, it can
also personify other economic categories of capital, which suggests a yet darker implication of the emergence of
machines that are so perfect they are no longer machines: capital not just as an ‘automatic subject’, but also as an
autonomous one , and autonomous not just from human labour, but from human beings tout court.
Marx reserved the possibility of personifying economic categories for human beings; things like coats, industrial machinery and animals (and human slaves as well) could only appear in, be the content of, such socio-economic forms. The reasons for this division between humans on the one side, and things and animals on the other,
are more or less the same ones Marx gave for why labour is uniquely human: humans are conscious and intelligent, and can do different things. In short, human individuals are subjects with agency that ‘endow’ economic forms with ‘consciousness and a will’ (Marx 1990: 254). But this particular aspect of Marx’s value theory
concerns the fetishism we attach to economic forms: the inversion of social relations between human individuals so that they appear as ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (1990: 166). The effect of this inversion is that when people engage in economic intercourse through their private
property, their ‘will resides in those objects’ (1990: 178). Thus when individual humans engage in economic activity, they are, in effect, programmed by socio-economic forms (Kjøsen 2013b).
Writing about the personification of capital, Marx argues that the logic of this social form, the valorization of value,
becomes the capitalist’s ‘subjective purpose … it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract
is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital endowed with a
consciousness and will’ (1990: 254). It is in relation to this particular personification argument that Marx argues that
capital is an ‘automatic subject’ (1990: 255). The paradox of the inverted world that humans produce due to capitalist
social relations should be clear: ‘on the one hand, capital is an automaton, something lifeless, but on the other, as the
“subject”, it is the determining agent of the whole process’ (Heinrich 2012: 89). Capital is an ‘automatic subject’ in
which so-called human subjectivity and agency are reduced to abstract personifications of economic categories; that
is, humans are, like Marx’s bees, reduced to executing the algorithms, although in this case those of buying, selling and
exploiting.

While Marx may have believed that only human individuals can personify economic categories and execute their
associated social functions, non-humans have for quite some time already personified the abstractions of capital if all it
takes is to carry out their logic. Institutions like the corporation and the trade union respectively personify the
categories of capital and labour-power, but we might also refer to various technologies that have been delegated to
make payments or orders on behalf of humans, such as recurring direct debits in banking, IoT-connected fridges, and
high-frequency trading algorithms (Kjøsen 2018: 167–8).
A striking and humorous example of AI personifying economic categories concerns Alexa, which cognitively powers Amazon’s Echo home devices. It is a story of a child wanting to play dollhouse, and AI recursions: as The Register explained, ‘Story on accidental order begets story on accidental order begets accidental order’ (Nichols
2017). A Texan six year old asked an Echo device: ‘Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?’ Being a good servant and personification of the money of this child’s parents, Alexa ordered a ‘$160 KidKraft Sparkle Mansion and four pounds of sugar cookies’, which Amazon quickly delivered to the girl’s doorstep. When
CW-6, a San Diego local TV station, reported on this accidental order, one of the anchors commented ‘I love the little girl, saying “Alexa order me a dollhouse.”’ This triggered Echo devices listening in on the broadcast to again personify money and order more dollhouses.

We speculate that the becoming-extinct of humans might not occur through Skynet suddenly coming online and
commencing nuclear war, but perhaps through many narrow AIs carrying out economic functions , in particular buying
and selling, on our behalf: Alexa, Google Home, IoT-connected fridges, direct debits, business-to-business ordering
systems, and more. Connected to AI-run dark factories and logistical systems, in which human labourers have mostly
been replaced by either narrow or general AI, the human is taken out of the economic loop in favour of a completely
automated capital; AI would personify all economic categories, including capital and labour-power, commodities and
money. The class struggle would thus continue, but with generally intelligent machines filling up the rank and file and
also personifying capital. But what would happen to humanity? The trajectory towards a capitalism without human
beings would be a story of a permanently unemployed section of the working class that consistently grows larger. In
other words, it entails the superlative growth of the surplus population , that ‘redundant working population … which
is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization’ and is a direct consequence of the law of
capital accumulation (Marx 1990: 782). While developing ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’ in Chapter 25 of
Capital, Marx considers how changes in the organic composition of capital, in particular the increasingly machinic nature
of production, create a fluctuating and variously composed ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed. In a
technological steady-state, the ‘accumulation of capital is multiplication of the proletariat’ because the only means to
increase output is the addition of labour (Marx 1990: 764). When capital relies on technology for increasing
productivity per worker, it can expand without increasing the overall level of employment, but it will also start a
labour shedding dynamic, so the accumulation of capital eventually leads to the formation of surplus populations –
permanently unemployed workers who have become superfluous to the valorization of capital. This long-term tendency
of capital to generate ‘surplus populations’ was largely neglected by subsequent Marxist theory because through
Keynesian-bolstered economic growth in the ‘thirty glorious years’ after 1945, capital multiplied both machines and
proletarians, thus low levels of unemployment and working-class prosperity seemingly refuted Marx’s theory of
surplus populations.

But in the essay ‘Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital’, which appeared
in 2010 in the midst of the economic recession following the financial crisis of 2007–8 and rocketing unemployment
rates (especially for young people) in North America, Aaron Benanav and John Clegg (2014) argued that capital’s long-
term tendency to generate surplus populations had in actuality been inexorably working its way through the global
capitalist economy. Populations evicted from agriculture were absorbed by industry, only for manufacturing itself to
be done in by deindustrialization and the expansion of services, but at each step the re-absorptive capacities became
more stretched , as ‘labour-saving technology’ was generalized across an ever growing number of types of production
lines, and with increasing speed throughout a global economy. Debt had masked the downward pressure on wages
and living standards, but bursting financial bubbles revealed it as only a temporary alleviation. ‘Any question of the
absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons,
marginalized in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war’ (Benanav and Clegg 2014: 51).
Yet for an essay that hinges on the role of ‘labour-saving technologies’ within capital, it says relatively little about
machines. In a lecture that does take up this issue more directly, Benanav (2017) remarks that the conventional focus on
technology is a ‘fetish’ discourse that synopsizes the complex forces of capitalism around the figure of the robot. And
yet, as he acknowledges, automation is a fundamental part of the crisis. Bearing both parts of this paradox in mind, we
will now relate Marx’s ‘general law’ and the problematic of ‘surplus populations’ to the wave of ML AI.19

‘AI Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Business-as-Usual’ theorists both, at least in their popular expression, operate with highly
deterministic, one-dimensional logics. AI Apocalyptics follow a hockey-stick graph of exponentially accelerating
technological change, Business-as-Usual theorists a model of a homeostatic self-equilibrating labour market. In contrast,
Marxist analysis sees technological change and market dynamics as reciprocally related, combining to produce
intermittent but recurrent system crises. And while it has its own teleological versions of the resolution of such crises,
such as that of a falling rate of profit leading to a terminal crisis of capital, other strands allow for a more complex
interplay of tendencies and counter-tendencies. These allow us to envisage a staccato unfolding of AI employment
effects, in which working-class decomposition and recomposition are active elements. In such an optic we can see how
the drive to AI automation may be retarded by capital’s success in establishing a cheap-labour economy, for example,
through globalization, then boosted by the re-emergence of wage-raising labour struggles, so that, for example, a
resurgence of wage demands in tightening US labour markets might spark capital’s actual adoption of AI options in
prototype or under research.

As such automation gains ground, it in turn increases the reserve army of the unemployed, and intensifies precarious
work, lowering wage-rates in many sectors. As Jason Smith (2017) points out, under capital people have to sell their
labour-power to survive: wage-labour has ‘nowhere to go’, so we can anticipate both ever greater expansions of a
service sector, commodifying all kinds of personal interaction, as well as the proliferation of increasingly arcane forms
of self-employment. These developments would continue even while a range of occupations are partially automated –
so that, for example, autonomous truck convoys are accompanied by one or two safety-drivers, or fundamentally
automated tasks such as routine medical diagnoses maintain a ‘human veneer’ (T. Lee 2018) of workers to wrap results
with manifestations of compassion and care. The issue at this point would not be that there were no jobs, but rather
that jobs would be subject to a persistent, creeping downward pressure on wages and conditions from advanced
machinic competition. This plateau would again temporarily halt capitalism’s incentive to automate, until either new
wage-raising struggles or innovations reducing technological costs ignite a new round of substitution of fixed for variable
capital. Workers’ movements for improvement in wages and conditions will be constantly liable to an automating
response, and indeed will provide a major catalyst for its continued forward movement. Such a jagged process would
be overlain by capital’s regular business cycles, and by its more intermittent giant spasms of overproduction (to which
of course AI-related job loss would contribute) with their familiar pattern of major surges in unemployment and
increasingly prolonged jobless recoveries.

This suggests a process of AI employment effects different from both the sudden-onset, across-the board ‘Apocalypse
Now’ and the more-or-less steady-state ‘Business-as-Usual’ models: we might call it a ‘Slow Tsunami’ of market-driven
technological change gradually flooding out the labour market, driving remunerated work to diminishing – and, in
terms of the logic of capital, more and more economically insignificant – islands of human-centric production. This is
would be the situation metaphorically represented in the many sagas in which humankind is pursued across the universe
from one refuge to another by implacable machinic adversaries: Cylons come to mind. Ameliorated by reforms such as a
universal basic income (whose merits and demerits we discuss in the Conclusion), this process could be very protracted.
For a sense of possible time scale, consider that capital’s foundational process of ‘primitive accumulation’, with its large-
scale eviction of populations from the land to form urban proletariats, is generally considered to have occurred over
centuries rather than decades, and indeed, on a global scale, to still be incomplete. Despite futurist insistence on the
speeded-up nature of contemporary social change, one could imagine a capitalist phase of ‘futuristic accumulation’,
shedding, rather than amassing, wage-labour, but in a similarly uneven and protracted fashion.

With the emergence of AGI, however, the futuristic accumulation of surplus populations would slowly or quickly
engulf the human species. While capital does not care what material its labour-powers come in, it cares about the
productivity of labour, and AGI would be far more productive than baseline humans. An AGI need not engage in time-
consuming superfluous behaviours like breathing and eating. AGI hardware could be endlessly augmented and could,
therefore, do whatever humans can do, but with more efficiency and precision, and faster. Indeed, an AGI need not be
limited to any morphology or even a body at all; learning how to use new and different bodies for environments with
extreme pressure, cold or heat, it could likely divide its attention between numerous bodies or entities; indeed it could
exist as a factory or even an entire supply chain. If a supply chain could speak, would we understand it?

In Marx’s analysis surplus populations are relative because of their fluctuation in size, as workers are alternately expelled
and incorporated into capitalist production. With the advent of proletarian AGI, this population would become
absolute, coextensive with a human species rendered obsolete to the valorization of value. Humanity would become
a ‘legacy system’ , outdated hardware unsuitable for running the inverted world of capital. The status of humans in
such a situation might be comparable to the current status of wild animals, tolerated on the fringes of capital so long
as they do not detract from valorization, or so long as they are not usable as raw material in production processes. In
contrast to the malice of the machines in the Terminator series, in this scenario humans would simply no longer be of
interest to capital. According to this view, we have not seen capitalism yet.

The 1ACs descriptions of a rising China repeat the racialized tropes of Yellow Peril through the lens of
techno-Orientalism which frames Asians as sub-human, unfeeling aliens whose technological success,
geographic location, or large population size pose a threat to Western political ordering – none of
these threats are “real” but are instead self-produced Anglo-Anxiety
Siu and Chun 20 – * Associate Professor Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Chinese Diaspora, Cultural
Citizenship, Cultural Politics of Food, Diaspora / Transnationalism; Asians in the Americas, Ethnography PhD,
Anthropology, Stanford University, MA, Anthropology, Stanford University, BA, Anthropology, minor in Ethnic Studies,
University of California, Berkeley **Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic
Studies, 19-2020 recipient of The Catherine and William L. Magistretti Graduate Fellowship, B.A. in Politics and Social
and Cultural Analysis from New York University. [Lok, Claire, Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time of Covid-
19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare, Journal of Asian American Studies,
Volume 23, Number 3, October 2020, pp. 421-440 (Article), DKP]

Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism

The term yellow peril emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to Japan’s arrival to the geopolitical stage as a
formidable military and industrial contender to the Western powers of Europe and the United States.9 The concept was
further elaborated and given a tangible racial form through Sax Rohmer’s series of novels and films that provided the
early content for the social imaginary of “yellow peril” along with its personification in the character of Dr. Fu Manchu,
the iconic supervillain archetype of the Asian “evil criminal genius,” and his cast of minions.10 Strikingly, Dr. Fu
Manchu’s characterization as evil, criminal, and genius continues to inform the racial trope of the Asian scientist spy;
and more recently, we may add to the list the bioengineer, the CFO, the international graduate student, to name just a
few. Moreover, the notion of the non-differentiable “yellow” masses continues to function as a homogenizing and
dehumanizing device of Asian racialization, which makes possible the transference of Sinophobia to Asian xenophobia.
In its inherent attempt to construct a racial other, “yellow peril” is more a projection of Western fear than a
representation of an Asian object/subject, and in this sense, it may be better understood as a repository of racial
affect that can animate a myriad of representational figures, images, and discourses, depending on context. Indeed,
the images and discourses of yellow peril have surfaced multiple times throughout the twentieth century, capturing a
multitude of ever-shifting perceived threats that range from the danger of military intrusion (i.e., Japanese Americans
during WWII), economic competition (i.e., Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century, Japan in the 1980s), Asian
moral and cultural depravity (i.e., non-Christian heathens, Chinese prostitutes, opium smokers), to biological inferiority
(i.e., effeminacy, disease carriers). As Colleen Lye observes, “the incipient ‘yellow peril’ refers to a particular
combinatory kind of anticolonial [and anti-West] nationalism, in which the union of Japanese technological advance and
Chinese numerical mass confronts Western civilization with a potentially unbeatable force.”11 Arguably, the yellow peril
of today represents heightened Western anxieties around China’s combined forces of population size, global
economic growth, and rapid technological-scientific innovation—all of which emerge from a political system that is
considered ideologically oppositional to ours. The current context, we suggest, is best understood through the lens of
techno-Orientalism.
When the idea of techno-Orientalism first appeared in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s analysis of why Japan occupied
such a threatening position in Western imagination in the late 1980s, techno-Orientalism offered a framework to make
sense of the technologically imbued racist stereotypes of Japan/the Japanese that were emerging within the context
of Western fears and anxieties around Japan’s ascendancy as a technological global power. They proposed that if
technological advancement has been crucial to Western civilizational progress, then Japan’s technological superiority
over the West also signals a critical challenge to Western hegemony, including its cultural authority to control
representations of the West and its “others.” They claimed that the shifting balance in global power—the West’s loss of
technological preeminence—has induced an identity crisis in the West. In response, techno-Orientalism, in which
“[idioms of technology] become structured into the discourse of Orientalism,” is produced in large part to discipline
Japan and its rise to techno-economic power.12 The United States, for instance, externalized its anxiety into
xenophobic projections of Japan as a “culture that is cold, impersonal, and machine-like” in which its people are “sub-
human” and “unfeeling aliens.” 13 Techno-Orientalism, born from the “Japan Panic,” was effectively consolidated
through and around political-economic concerns that frame Japanese and, by extension, Asian techno-capitalist
progress as dangerous and dystopian.
Extending Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism,14 techno-Orientalism marks a geo-historical shift where the West no
longer has control over the terms that define the East—the “Orient”—as weak, inferior, and subordinate to the West.
It marks a shift not only in political-economic power but also in cultural authority. Techno-Orientalism, then, is the
expressive vehicle (cultural productions and visual representations) by which Western and Eastern nations articulate
their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony
through economic trade and scientific innovation.15
Analogous to Japan’s position in the late 1980s, China currently figures into the techno-Orientalist imaginary as a
powerful competitor in mass production, a global financial giant, and an aggressive investor in technological,
infrastructural, and scientific developments. At the same time, the increasing purchasing power of China provokes
American fear of a future global market that is economically driven by Chinese consumptive desires and practices. It is
this duality—the domination of both production and consumption across different sectors of the techno-capitalist global
economy—that undergirds American anxieties of a sinicized future .16
Further amplifying these anxieties around Chinese techno-economic domination is our imagination of China /the
Chinese as the ultimate yellow peril , whose state ideology is oppositional to that of the United States and whose
unmatched population size combined with its economic expansion and technological advancements may actually
pose a real challenge to U.S. global hegemony. We turn now to examine how the ideology of yellow peril is manifesting
in the current context of techno-Orientalism, beginning first with an analysis of the racial trope of “Chinese as
contagion” and its connection to anti-Asian aggression.

Voting negative adopts an ethic of technodiversity – that fragments the 1AC’s monoculutural
relationship to technics in favor of an inhuman experimentation with
Hui ‘21
[Yuk, written a bunch of books on technology. 2021. “Chapter 3: Art and Automation” in Art and Cosmotechnics.] pat

Today, new technological disruptions are accompanied by new ethical rules, for AI , for biotechnologies, and so on. In discussions on the ethics of
technology, people tend to first accept these technologies , then provide measures to mitigate their harm. Surely, there are individual
technologies serving this and that purpose, and it is possible to limit their input and output as well as the conditions of their use. But these ethics are rooted in a technological thinking that has taken over, and without
confronting this philosophical issue and providing a new framework, we will only pile on further ethical constrains until we confront a limit.

Ethics, which is considered to be a theoretical aspect of religion (as opposed to dogma, its practical counterpart), becomes part of technology, which is to say that it is
determined schematically . The philosophy of technology becomes a discipline to propose policies that maintain
certain “ethics” waiting to be violated sooner or later by the state and by capital . Heidegger’s critique of the ethics of the technological world remains
valid today:

By this conception of the totality of the technological world, we reduce everything down to man, and at best come to the point of calling for an ethics of the technological world. Caught up in this conception, we confirm our own opinion that technology is of man’s making alone. We fail to hear the claim of
Being which speaks in the essence of technology.

Being, the Unknown, and the non-rational remain ignored when ethics, which is central to policymaking today, aims to
protect the human or give rights to the non-human . However, the turn to ethics also prevents philosophy from knowing itself and from questing for other beginnings. The
Unknown is like the inhuman in the human . It cannot be reduced to any formal definition of the human, be it systems
theory or biology. The inhuman may appear with different names, for example, God in Christian theology, or desire in libidinal economy. Libidinal economy supplements political economy by integrating
desire into it. Desire is infinite and non-rational. For example in Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, he distinguishes desire (as libidinal investment, like in love and friendship) from drive (as
addiction), and proposes to conceive a political economy based on the cultivation of desire, that is to say, love and capability (in the sense of Amartya Sen).

We can speculate on economies based on different discourses of the non-rational in order to move away from
homogenous modern consumer capitalism. This demands an imagination that goes beyond full automation and the abstract freedom promised by it. Insofar as our episteme remains
modern, following what the anthropologist Philippe Descola describes as naturalism (in an opposition between nature and culture), cybernetic logic remains ineffective . Though it

wants to overcome such an opposition, it may even enhance the modern episteme with its powerful unifying logic. And art,
thus defined and shaped by certain schools of art history and the art market, will distance itself further and further from its revolutionary potential. But for art to respond to our epoch, it has to confront the crisis we are
faced with today, in order to produce new epistemes, new sensibilities that will be able to give science and technology new directions and frameworks. An epistemic shift takes place when there is a crisis, which obliges an
alteration of social, political, and aesthetic life.

This epistemic change doesn’t have to, and maybe shouldn’t, arise entirely from the domain of the sciences. And an epistemic
revolution, if it does take place, will not be a global and unified one, but fragmented. Fragmentation is also a deterritorialization that enables creations

otherwise suppressed by a monotechnological culture under the name of “Europeanization” or “modernization” to

prepare “for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.” It remains the task of art and philosophy to deterritorialize themselves in order to facilitate the emergence of
new epistemes, instead of simply studying the aesthetics of this or that media. Maybe this is the new meaning we can give to the phrase “politicization of art” proposed by Benjamin almost a hundred years ago. Art has to
lead an epistemic revolution. It is not about using augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelliegence to produce new media art, but rather about how to use art to produce AR, VR, and AI. Media art, while
promoting the use digital media, may have yet to supersede the conceptual frameworks that previously structured it.

More than forty years ago, Lyotard’s postmodern discourse attempted to invoke a new sensibility of fear, insecurity, and uncertainty conditioned by new technologies (especially digital technologies). However, the project
failed because, as a European (though not necessarily a Eurocentric) philosopher, Lyotard seems to have searched for a universal logic, which, on the contrary, actually means a logic applicable only to Europe, which

remains too local. Retrospectively, the postmodern is a rethinking of aesthetics and technology from the perspective of locality and
recursivity. Locality, because it starts from the perspective of Europe and its history, and recursivity, because a meta-narrative (in the sense of a mechanical mold) gives way to a reflexive model based on
performativity, or what Lyotard himself called paralogy, as it is captured in systems theory.

It remains our task to further explore the concept of recursivity and recursive thinking beyond cybernetics , and beyond the
recursive vs. linear, organic vs. mechanistic oppositions. I have examined elsewhere how Lyotard’s 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux served the purpose of awakening a postmodern sensibility (i.e., insecurity, instability,
uncertainty), but did not deepen the questions it posed. Today, it would seem that we are forced to respond with a different discourse. The sensibility Lyotard wanted to invoke is not only limited to the domain of art, but

rather to everyday aesthetic experience. The sublime is no longer a privilege of the Dadaists or Surrealists, but omnipresent. Techno-scientific advancement is the condition of
this new sensibility and its normalization. The discourse of Lyotard was not yet able to open up a diversity of responses to the question of sensibility, since the postmodern was framed
as a global condition after the modern, which was its ground of departure.

It is worth mentioning here Lyotard’s talk “Logos and Technē, or Telegraphy,” which he delivered at a 1986 conference at the invitation of Stiegler. In great contrast to Stiegler’s thesis on tertiary retention (or artificial memory) as the condition of all conditions, Lyotard proposed something that seems even more astonishing today.
What Lyotard suggested seems rather mysterious at first glance, particularly his reference to the “clear mirror” in the writing of the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist Dōgen, when he asks:

The whole question is this: is the passage possible, will it be possible with, or allowed by, the new mode of inscription and memoration that characterizes the new technologies? Do they not impose syntheses, and syntheses conceived still more intimately in the soul than any earlier technology has done?

By “passage” he means Durcharbeiten—“to work through,” a psychoanalytic term used by Freud. The psychoanalyst helps the patient to work through his or her trauma, and it is only by doing so that the patients come to

be able to live with the trauma. What does “working through” have to do with technology? And why is a Zen Buddhist relevant here? Lyotard’s reference to Eastern
thought is not only a coincidence for us, but exotic and intriguing as well, and it becomes clearer in his further analysis of Dōgen:

It makes sense to try to recall something (let’s call it something) which has not been inscribed if the inscription of this something broke the support of the writing or the memory. I am borrowing this metaphor of the mirror from one of the treatises of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, the Zenki: there can be a presence
that the mirror cannot reflect, but that breaks it into smithereens. A foreigner or a Chinese can come before the mirror and their image appears in it. But if what Dōgen calls “a clear mirror” faces the mirror, then “everything will break into smithereens.” And Dōgen goes on to make this clear: “Do not imagine
that there is first the time in which the breaking has not yet happened, nor that there is then the time in which everything breaks. There is just the breaking.” So there is a breaking presence which is never inscribed nor memorable. It does not appear. It is not a forgotten inscription, it doesn’t have its place and
time on the support of inscriptions, in the reflecting mirror.

We may want to interpret what Lyotard suggests as a diversification of technology. This new technology and new material that he imagined no
longer enforces the hegemony of inscription, but rather allows a Durcharbeiten like the clear mirror. We encounter here a contradiction, for technology is a form of memory, an externalized, artificial form of memory. How
can it undo its function as memory? The clear mirror is first of all material, though it doesn’t simply retain, and it also facilitates a working through. On the one hand, we may say that Lyotard performs a tragist reading of
Dōgen, which is rather close to Stiegler’s approach to the Gestell. On the other hand, Lyotard is also suggesting a diversification of technology that is not limited to retaining memory, and therefore goes beyond Stiegler’s
theoretical framework of “tertiary retention.”
 this possibility depends on both the construction of the technological system as well as an
From a more pragmatic point of view,

education of sensibility. The education of sensibility depends on the technological system as memory, yet is also able to emplace the same technological system. Art has the potential to take up this task
after religion. Art education is so far probably the least limited by disciplinary divisions, and therefore has the most flexibility to conceive a new program that engages with technology and thinking.

The global cybernetic economy relies on increasing complexity that inevitably points to entropy –
this significantly complicates solvency and framework in a way that makes the 2AC a non-starter.
Featherstone ‘17
[Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University. 2017. “Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation”] pat

This is exactly what Baudrillard (2012) means when he writes of ecstatic communication, which communicates nothing but the fact of communication itself, and Serres (1983) reflects upon when he explains that all
technical systems point towards entropy , noise, and the black depths of the universe. What this means is that the absolute security of the market, the realisation of Platonic form in the
financial utopia that led Ben Bernanke and others to speak of the great moderation, is also Badiou’s (2006) void, the black screen, the moment the numbers no longer seem to add up or make sense. For mathematician

the point of total securitisation and the black screen of nonsense, runs through
Benoit Mandelbrot (2004) the connection between these two moments,

the accumulation of an endless number of small events that come together to create a systemic tipping point . In his
view these small deviations occur because the logic of financial securitisation is fundamentally flawed. In his work on the
unpredictability of markets he asks, for example, what happens when the trade in derivatives and options starts to feed back into the valuation of stocks and shares to such an extent that price becomes absolutely
distorted? What happens when it becomes clear that probability is incapable of predicting the future because it is based on calculations premised on the fantasy that what has happened in the past will continue to happen

Thus Mandelbrot’s (2004) point is that probability theory is ineffective in a highly complex system because there
in the future?

are too many variables and too many interactions to be able to base prediction about the future in an assessment of
the past. In this way his fractal theory, which he names in reference to the Greek fractus that means ‘to break’, presents a picture of systemic
uncertainty, unpredictability, and potential collapse that contradicts the standard picture of cybernetic economy where
calculation and the ability to hedge against fluctuation enables the maintenance of stability and order.
By contrast to this utopian image of the stable economy that makes money and never breaks down, Mandelbrot (2004) argues that the global financial system is like any other complex system— it is organised around roughness that it is not possible to smooth out in the long run simply because it is rough in itself. What this means
is that in contrast to the utopian capitalists, from Smith (1982, 1999) through Hayek (2012) to Friedman (2002), who take instability in microscopic cases because they believe this turbulence will eventually smooth out in the expansion of economic activity across space and time, Mandelbrot (2004) suggests that this never happens
because roughness is a systemic property that stretches from the micro through to the macroscopic and cosmological view. In other words, the economy is, like every other complex system, rough and turbulent, and the idea of stability in the long run is a fantasy premised on a belief in the future that will eventually see instability
even out towards some kind of equilibrium. In order to illustrate his thesis, Mandelbrot (2004) explains the condition of the global economy through the metaphor of the three states of matter— solids, liquids, and gases— and says that the complexity of the contemporary economy means that its properties are comparable to those
of gases, where molecular organisation is highly unpredictable. Beyond Bauman’s (2000) vision of liquid modernity, then, Mandelbrot’s (2004) global economy is gaseous in the sense that its movements are uncertain and resistant to management over the long term. This is why, for Mandelbrot, the foundations of financial theory
are fantastical. For example, he explains that Fama’s EMH cannot rely on the idea of the absolute transparency and universality of information to structure price, because it is impossible for information to possess the clarity the efficient market theory requires when there are so many variables on the table and these expand
through endless global interactions across space and over the course of time.

Given the speed of global processes, which is, of course, driven by cybernetic innovation and the expansion of computational
power, it is clear that it is more or less impossible to imagine transparent and universal information and that the very
technologies that made the late capitalist utopia possible have now begun to undermine its integrity. At this point we enter the
space of what the late Ulrich Beck (1992) writes about in terms of global risk, Paul Virilio (2007) explores through the idea of the integral accident, and Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan (2014) examine in their work on the

the
butterfly defect, which plays on Edward Lorenz’ chaos theory and the madness of hyper- connected, complex, nonlinear systems. What Beck (1992) and Virilio (2007) show in their respective works is that

management of the inherent instability of the complex global machine has led to a kind of arms race organised
around the need to defend the integrity of the system in the face of the endless threats that it seems to produce .
Given this situation, where the inevitability of the accident, risk, and instability lead to an obsession with security, insurance,
and immunity, the war on threats to systemic integrity becomes generic and applies to economic instability, terror attacks,

global pandemics, the computer virus , and a range of other risks that interact in order to represent interdependent global bads. Since the system is global, and stretches out across space
and through time, these threats are, as both Baudrillard (1993) and Derrida (2014) point out, problems of autoimmunity, and therefore cannot be destroyed without

threatening the integrity of the system itself. The reason for this is that where the cybernetic machine relies on communication and control, the problem of the intra- systemic other
introduces the threat of progressive uncontrollability through viral contagion. There is no easy way to oppose the translation of communication into contagion, but the systemic fix recommends the acceleration of
information transmission in order to resolve the problem of complex unpredictability, which, of course, leads to further mechanisation in the form of black box, algorithmic exchange in economics and the rise of the drone
in the execution of war that never ends.
 Logistics K: WWU

Logistics K

The affirmative grants the RoN movement a boon that serves only their white humanism
Kohl & Walenta ’22 (Ellen Kohl, Jayme Walenta, “Legal rights for whose nature?,” Annals of the American
association of geographers, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2087588) //wwu-ack
Rights of nature (RoN) is an environmental governance approach intent on ascribing legal rights to nature in effort to protect it. Drawing from Earth jurisprudence philosophy, RoN proponents work to resituate nature legally from its status as property to an entity with the legal right to exist unharmed (Boyd 2017). They herald the
move- ment as a paradigm shift categorically changing mainstream Western White engagements with nature, which have long been informed by the writ- ings of Locke (1690/2020). For Locke, nature became property when labor transformed it to maxi- mize economic utility. Nature as property advanced White settler colonialist
agendas across the world by justifying its appropriation, enclosure, and degrada- tion (Harris 2004; Morten-Robinson 2015; Whyte 2018). To undo this denigrating treatment of nature by Western law, RoN proponents contend nature should stand on equal legal footing with humans (Cullinan 2002; Boyd 2017). RoN was first
operationalized in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania in 2006 when the commu- nity, a product of the region’s extractive industries, challenged the placement of a fly ash waste sludge dump in the town. Residents passed a municipal ordinance asserting it was “unlawful ... to interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural com-
munities or ecosystems, or cause damage to those ecosystems,” and that “borough residents, natural communities, and ecosystems shall be considered [legal] ‘persons’ for purposes of the enforcement of civil rights of those residents, natural communities, and ecosystems” (Tamaqua Borough PA Ordinance No. 612 612 2006).

We examine RoN as an
Although this ordinance did not withstand court challenges, RoN laws have since expanded to include rivers, watersheds, glaciers, for- ests, mountains, and countries. In this article, we explore the operationalization of RoN within U.S. settler colonial communities.

emerging environmental governance that mobilizes Western liberal concep- tions of legal rights to address our current
environmental crises. We term this form of governance rights-based environmental governance because it uses legal
rights to protect nature rather than rely on laws that regulate nature’s degradation . Zimmer’s (2010) study on geographies exploring nature–society relations identified research on
environmental governance as a key source of inquiry, growing especially since the 1990s. Bridge and Perrault (2009) classified that growing research as predominantly falling into two realms: neoliberal environmental governance, concerned with the role of the market and market actors in governing nature (Bakker 2003; Liverman
2004; Castree 2008; Gifford 2018), and ecogovern- mentality, concerned with how governable subjects, including nature, are produced and how power works through these subjects (Braun 2000; Robbins 2007; Paterson and Stripple 2010; Chandrashekeran 2020). More recently, geographies of environmental gover- nance have
engaged new structures and actors, including the authoritarian state (McCarthy 2020) and inquiries into the role of the law and legal insti- tutions in governing nature (Andrews and McCarthy 2014; Cantor 2016; Kay 2016; Delaney 2017; Cantor, Kay, and Knudson 2020). Underscoring the importance of the law’s intersection with

also Jepson 2012). We situate our work within this emerging

nature, Andrews and McCarthy (2014) noted that “laws, regulations, and courtrooms can be crucial sites of contestation over human–environment relations” (9; see

research on legal geographies and nature, adding to it a focus on rights-based environ- mental governance. RoN
proponents cast the movement as a para- digm shift. We argue the operationalization of RoN within U.S. settler colonial
communities does not constitute a paradigm shift . We use this example to convey the need for more analysis as to how RoN is operationalizing given that RoN is “reimagined and enacted through place-based and transnational con- nections

Although sympathetic to the intended goals of RoN, we are concerned about its potential to reinforce and
and institutions” (Kinkaid 2019, 556).

strengthen social hierarchies generated by Western White liberalism. In the United States, RoN mobilizes liberal legal
rights, which were estab- lished through the Constitution to guarantee indi- vidual freedoms via equal treatment for all persons under the law (Kennedy 2002). First granted to White, land-owning men, these rights have since been extended to other social and racial groups. Drawing from critical race and Black studies
scholar- ship, we note this extension of rights has always been incomplete in practice (Pitts 2009). For exam- ple, when Black men were granted legal personhood through the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, their material realities did not necessarily change. Instead, social, economic, and political barriers often enacted through
violence prevented this extension. Liberal legal rights alone have not undone racial hierarchies in the United States. Rights are viewed, Stammers (2015) noted, as “the ultimate achievement of human civilization” (69), bestowing in universal fashion equal status for all legal persons. To confer rights upon nature appears paradigm

we must be
changing, fundamentally altering an exploitative relationship between humans and nature that dates back to Locke’s writings. To para- phrase Spivak (1999), rights are that which we can- not not want. But Tola (2018) added, “rights do not come by themselves” (118). Instead,

attentive to “what liberalism cannot deliver, what its hidden cruelties are, [and] what unemancipatory power relations it
conceals in its sunny formulations of freedom and equality” Further, critical Indigenous scholars underscore that (Brown 2000, 230).

liberal rights discourses have strengthened, not dif- fused White possession to the land by establishing settler colonial
logics that erase preexisting Indigenous land relations (Tuck and Yang 2012; Morten-Robinson 2015; Whyte 2018). We draw on this scholarship to examine the extension of liberal legal rights to nature, highlighting what we see as its
limitations. Although liberal rights, liberalism, and neoliberalism are closely intertwined, we focus spe- cifically on liberal rights, rather than a wider critique of liberalism (see instead McManus 2020). We ground our argument in three ways. First, we outline key thinkers and concepts that inform Earth jurisprudence philosophy and
its actuation into RoN. Second, we use critical race scholarship to dis- cuss how liberal rights in practice is generative of a hierarchy of rights holders contingent on the racial- ized nature of what it means to be human (Wynter 1995; Mills 2017; Botts 2018). Third, we summarize the operationalization of RoN in U.S. settler colo- nial
communities expanding on three key uniting elements among U.S. settler colonial RoN communi- ties; their assertion of the people’s right to a healthy environment in tandem with nature’s rights, their emphasis on self-governance or home rule, and their Whiteness. We conclude by bringing critical race scholarship’s work to bear
on these uniting elements. Doing this demonstrates the challenges and limita- tions that arise when using liberal legal frameworks to address environmental problems. Finally, our intention here is not to assess the legal efficacy of RoN, nor to assess the global RoN movement. Instead, we raise concerns about the extension of lib-
eral rights to nature, a system we see as inherently flawed. We do this so that if (and when) assessments of effectivity occur, they consider the impact, in opposition to the intent, of using Western White legal frameworks to protect nature, especially in how those frameworks might exacerbate existing systems of oppression. Earth-
Centered Jurisprudence and Rights of Nature RoN environmental governance traces its intellec- tual origins to Earth jurisprudence philosophy. Earth jurisprudence integrates concepts from environmen- tal ethics, legal studies, and eco-theologian works, including the writings of Thomas Berry, often cited as the ‘father’ of Earth
jurisprudence. Berry’s (1999) The Great Work describes the devastations caused by humans against the planet, isolating the cause to cultural and legal systems that center human needs as morally superior. He admonished such devasta- tions noting that they infringe on the rights of “other than human” modes of being and
contribute to a radical discontinuity between humans and non- humans. In place of these devastations, Berry called for what he termed The Great Work, meaning a “transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be pre- sent to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner” (Berry 1999,
3). According to Berry and other Earth jurisprudence thinkers, anthropocentric legal systems are chiefly to blame, having enabled a domination of nature by humans under the belief that nature is here to serve human needs. In this context, nature in all its varied forms is legal property to be owned and treated at will. This includes
natural ecosystems and nonhu- man creatures, whose present rights are limited to laws that regulate environmental degradations, rather than prohibit them. Such a legal arrangement has facilitated unchecked degradations of nature by its owners (Berry 1999; Cullinan 2002; Boyd 2017). In contrast, Earth jurisprudence
encompasses “a philosophy of law and human governance that is based on the idea that humans are only one part of a wider community of beings and that the welfare of each member of that community is dependent on the welfare of the Earth as a whole” (Cullinan 2002, 13). It intends to bring the nonhuman world into our
human community, much as Aldo Leopold argued in his Land Ethic, and others argued before him (see Nash 1989). To usher in Earth jurisprudence, Berry and others assert that our laws and cultures must be reworked such that nature is no longer viewed as property. Extending this view- point, Cullinan’s (2002) Wild Law proposes
five principles of Earth jurisprudence that, when gathered together, shift the legal governing focus from humans to a wider Earth community. Working toward Earth jurisprudence has spawned discussions about its merging with liberal legal rights. Stone’s (1972) essay “Should Trees Have Moral Standing?” provided a vision for what
that might look like. Using the phrase “legal rights of the envi- ronment,” Stone argued that a nature with legal rights could stand on equal footing with other legal persons, defending itself in court (Stone 1972, 489). For Stone, this follows a logical unfolding of rights extensions, from humans to other inanimate right- holders such as
“trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-states” (Stone 1972, 452). Nature, he sug- gested, is next. Stone pointed out that historically the extension of legal rights to a new entity was unthinkable, be it from White men to Black men, or human person to corporation. Over time, these
extensions became not only legal convention, but unimaginable that the extension had not previously existed. Nash (1989) furthered this connection lik- ening scholars’ intent on extending the legal rights to nature to that of abolitionists working to end sys- tems of enslavement in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. In both
cases, “we find reformers who identified an oppressed minority that they think pos- sesses rights and is therefore entitled to liberty from exploitation” (Nash 1989, 200). In the United States, the operationalization of Earth jurisprudence has been led by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a legal advocacy
group formed in 1995 in rural Pennsylvania. Initially the two-person staff focused on helping communities fight permits for unwanted incinerators and trash dumps. Today, with a staff of fifteen, the organizational mission is to “build sus- tainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the
rights of nature.” CELDF accomplishes its mission through educational and outreach campaigns, including a democracy school, used to inform communities on the structure of corporate and state powers that often override community decision-making. They also share case studies of communities that have Legal Rights for Whose
Nature? 3 successfully adopted community bills of rights and provide legal services in drafting and defending com- munity bills of rights. CELDF’s influence is vast. In the United States alone, they claim to have offered legal assistance and educational outreach to nearly 200 municipalities, dozens of which have or are in the process of
adopting community rights or RoN laws (CELDF 2021). The typical model is to partner with a local grassroots organization to build an outreach platform. Once acceptance is gained in the community, the municipality will take up the issue of a community bill of rights voted on by residents (Invisible Hand 2020). Internationally, CELDF
credits itself with helping Ecuador draft the RoN clause in the coun- try’s constitution, assisting India with the Ganges River Act, and consulting with Indigenous groups in Australia on establishing RoN protections (Invisible Hand 2020). CELDF fuses environmental protection with legal personhood using a liberal rights framework. This

fusing relies on the assumption that the extension of rights to nature is part of a natural progression toward moral equality for a wider Earth community, [make] making it appear as though RoN sits outside or beyond Western thinking and is instead universal (Rawson and Mansfield 2018). In fact, CELDF often refers to nature’s

Rawson and Mansfield countered this assertion, claiming that Earth jurisprudence was created and circulated
inalienable right to persist.

by a small group of scholars and activists, primarily White men from the Global North. They contended RoN “is not only
contradictory but naturalizes the colonial history of legal personhood” (Rawson and Mansfield 2018, 2). In the next section, we extend Rawson and Mansfield’s argument using critical race scholarship. Doing
this underscores the incomplete, rather than universal, extension of liberal legal rights across time and space. Critical Race Theory and the Liberal Legal Rights Project Critical race theory comprises scholarship that challenges “the existing legal order from a race-based point of view” (Brooks 1994, 85). Scholars are atten- tive to
institutional structures like the legal system and how they perpetuate structural oppressions on the basis of racial hierarchies. Much of this work tackles these structures against the backdrop of the wider liberal project. Following Losurdo (2014), Lowe (2015), Weheliye (2014), Wynter (1995), and others, we contend that liberalism
as a project encompasses the promise of freedom and egalitarian- ism among all people but has failed to deliver on that promise. The vehicle to achieve these promises is a free individual, at its pinnacle a rational subject acting in their own best interests in a capitalist free market underpinned by state-sanctioned legal rights
(D’Souza 2018). To understand how the extension of liberal legal rights to nature can perpetuate exist- ing systems of oppression, we discuss the changing definition of legal personhood, or who or what is able to access legal rights, in tandem with critical race critiques of the liberal rights project. Legal personhood in the United
States was codified in the Bill of Rights in 1791 to protect “We the People” from an excessive government, where the “People” referred to White property-owning men at least age twenty-one (Forkosch 1968). Property, of course, included those Black persons bound by a sys- tem of chattel slavery (Einhorn 2008). There was thus a
difference between a human body and a legal person. This was enshrined (racially) in legal deci- sions such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), where Black people were characterized as “beings of inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (cited in Mills 2011). Who or what might occupy legal
personhood has since expanded considerably. Following the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, Congress rati- fied the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868. This amendment granted full citizenship status, and thus legal personhood status, to Black men, permitting them civil standing in a court of law, the
right to vote, and the right to equal protection under the law. Although the text of the amendment references a generic “person,” stating “no person should be denied equal protection under the law, nor be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process,” its protections did not legally apply to women or other persons of
color (Brown 2000; Botts 2018). A legalized hierarchy of rights holders persisted. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment extended personhood rights to Black men, they still faced day-to-day entrenched systems of institutionalized racial oppression. Alexander’s (2010) work on the mass incarceration of Black men pinpoints the
Black experience in the United States as akin to a racial caste system, which has changed 4 Kohl and Walenta little since the country’s founding (see also Yancy 2016). Wilkerson (2020) deepened our understand- ing of this hierarchy, identifying its stability within political and cultural infrastructures including the legal system. In
1886, extensions of legal personhood grew to include corporate entities through a court ruling in the case of Santa Clara County, California v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Referencing the Fourteenth Amendment, the railroad argued that as a property owner, it was being held to a different tax standard than human property
owners. The court sided with the railroad, setting a monumental precedent that endowed corporate entities with many of the same rights as human legal persons (Barkan 2013). Corporations as legal persons calls attention to how difference is mobilized in the expansion of liberal rights. The power of companies to hire legal experts
to innovatively interpret state doctrine and argue on their behalf in a court cannot be understated. During the first forty-four years of the Fourteenth Amendment’s existence, the courts heard twenty- eight cases involving Black men’s rights, and 312 involving corporate rights (Winkler 2018). Although legal personhood was
extended to both at similar times, its use to secure equal protection was highly uneven. The ramifications of this are pro- found. Corporate persons have expanded their power and importance, paving the way for legal decisions such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which abolished limits on corporate
spend- ing in support of independent ads for candidates up for election. The legal precedent of corporate per- sonhood has since spread outward in the Anglo world, extending its validity and viability widely across space (Barkan 2013). Over the next 100 years, legal personhood was granted to humans previously cast outside civil
standing status. This includes women (1920, 1971), Indigenous persons (1942), children (1924, 1967) , and the disabled (1960s).1 From there, the animal rights movement advanced legal personhood for cer- tain animal species. For example, the Nonhuman Rights Project pursues legal rights for primates, due to their being
cognitively similar to humans (Wise 2010). This seemingly sweeping extension of rights over time paints an image of liberal rights unfolding in a complete and unchallenged manner. Yet critical race and feminist scholars have noted that a racial and gendered hierarchy is enshrined in our legal system distributing power and resources
unevenly across different bodies (Mills 2017; Wilson 2018). Twentieth-century U.S. federal housing pol- icy offers an example. Here, redlined maps were used for decisions about access to mortgage-backed insur- ance and zoning laws permitting industrial activities to locate in redlined areas, which were predomi- nantly occupied by
communities of color (Rothstein 2017). These laws further secured the privilege and supremacy of White Americans over especially Black Americans, whose bodies absorbed the toxic releases of industries located in their vastly underinvested neighborhoods (Bullard 2007; Pulido 2015). Mills (2017) attributed this racial hierarchy to
the wider system of liberalism where there are “different sets of rules for members of different races” (5). Drawing from second-wave feminists, Mills suggested viewing liberalism as structured through “group privilege,” in which one group, White males, access privilege by representing women and people of color as “lesser
creatures” (5). Translating this into legal rights, Mills asserted that although legal personhood for all appears the default, “in actuality, non-personhood is the norm” (Mills 2011). Critical race scholars such as Lowe (2015) and Pitts (2009) have documented a tension between liberalism as a theory, where all humans are natu- rally
equal, and liberalism when “it encounters the world” (Pitts 2009, 4). Rather than be generative of equality, real-world encounters are informed by dif- ferences in what it means to be human and whose idea of humanness dominates (Wynter 1995; Wynter and McKittrick 2015). Wynter’s work, in particular, notes that the ideal
human subject emerges as a con- sequence of racialized Enlightenment thinking that gave rise to a universal rational man. Later strength- ened and diffused by colonialism, this universal Western concept of human became embodied by a White, heterosexual male guided by liberal philoso- phies (Wynter 1995). Its power lay in that
it “reifies Western bourgeois tenants” while devaluing human bodies that fail to or will never be allowed to live up to those tenants (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 9). The effect is a hierarchy of humanness with univer- sal man placed at the top and all other human bod- ies (and nature) placed below. Liberalism’s dual narrative of
universal man and the inevitability of rights extensions across body and space obscures how systems of power are replicated and naturalized. Critical Indigenous scholars remind us of how processes of naturalization and erasure are tied up with liberal projects of settler colonialism (Hunt 2014; Morten-Robinson 2015; Daigle 2016;
De Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Whyte 2018). Indigenous self-determination and relationships do not rely on state recognition, but “with the relational geogra- phies that are lived through everyday practices of self-determination rooted in Indigenous ontologies” (Daigle 2016, 260). Connections between land, self- determination, and
practice are essential to Indigeneity because as Hunt (2014) contended, “Indigeneity is not just an idea ... Indigeneity is also lived, practiced, and relational” (28). By claim- ing land and naturalizing processes of settler colo- nialism, liberalism not only works to erase inequities within its systems, it also works to erase multiple ways of

The extension of liberal rights neglects to con- sider how systems of oppression remain intact once liberalism “in
being.

theory” is enacted. This is particularly concerning in light of critical research that has dem- onstrated time and again the
difference between written liberal rights and the ways that liberal rights are secured . On paper, liberal rights appear available for everyone, but this does not come to fruition in how

Turning now to U.S.- based RoN

rights are lived, regulated, and litigated (Pitts 2009; Alexander 2010; Mills 2017; Botts 2018). Wynter’s hierarchy of humanness holds. This poses concern for a reliance of liberal legal avenues in securing a healthy nature.

environmentalism in practice, we discuss how the expansion of rights to nature, rather than be a paradigm shift in Anglo
human–nature rela- tions, has the potential to replicate and in some cases amplify existing power dynamics. U.S.-Based Rights of Nature in
Practice To understand the manifestation of RoN in the United States, we analyzed the ordinances and com- munity characteristics of places that have passed RoN laws. We only included communities that enacted RoN laws, not communities with ordinances in progress or those that attempted to pass ordinan- ces but were
unsuccessful (see Figure 1). To find these communities, we used databases established by the Earthlaw Center (https://www.earthlawcenter. org/towns-cities), Community Rights US (https:// communityrights.us/community-rights-ordinance- campaigns-across-the-us/), the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
(https://www.therightsofnature. org/map-of-rights-of-nature/), and the United Nations Harmony with Nature (http://www.harmo- nywithnatureun.org/rightsOfNature/). Additionally, we searched the CELDF archives and completed Google searches with the keywords “rights of nature,” “local ordinance,” and “United States.” We
identified sixty-eight distinct U.S. communi- ties that have codified RoN into their local legal frameworks and obtained copies of the communities’ RoN ordinance. When we were unable to locate a copy of the ordinance, as was the instance in four communities, we relied on secondary sources (media coverage and CELDF press
releases) to determine the scope and implementation of these ordinances. All ordinances were placed in Dedoose, a cloud- based qualitative and mixed-method research plat- form, for analysis. To better understand communi- ties’ characteristics, we used census data to collect demographic information (race, income) and elec-
tion results from the 2020 election to be used as a proxy for a community’s political ideology. We also relied on media coverage, activists’ Web sites and public communications (e.g., via Facebook announcements), and press releases to determine the motivation or impetus for the enactment of the RoN ordinance. We then coded
the ordinances using these themes: rights granted to people, rights granted to nature, rights of enforcement, and corpo- rate rights. Through our preliminary analysis, it became evi- dent there were significant differences between the ordinances enacted by Indigenous communities and those enacted by settler colonial
communities. Within settler communities, we found several reoc- curring trends, including (1) the assertion of the community’s right to a healthy environment, which in most instances was listed first before an assertion of nature’s rights; (2) the extension of rights to nature, either through personhood or other recogni- tions of
rights; (3) the granting of home rule or right to self-government; (4) the right to enforce the ordi- nance; and (5) the denial of corporate personhood status to limit rights of corporations operating in the locality. Within Indigenous communities, in four of the seven cases, the extension of rights to nature was given to a specific entity
(in three instances a river and in one instance Manoomin [wild rice]) instead of to nature or ecosystems broadly. People were specifically given rights to a clean environment 6 Kohl and Walenta in only two of the seven cases. In two instances, nature and people were characterized as one and the same, making no distinction
between the rights of people and the rights of the more-than-human world. Importantly, only one case specifically denied corporations personhood and enacted specific limita- tions on power of corporations. In one other instance when corporations were mentioned, they were identified along with other people who might
threaten the ecosystem and not signaled out specifically. Due to these differences, as well as the differences in governance structures and sovereignty between Indigenous and settler communities, we choose to not include RoN enacted by Indigenous communi- ties in the remainder of the analysis for this article. In doing so, we
follow Kinkaid’s (2019) contention that RoN is not a set form of governance and instead is place-based and reimagined by “becom[ing] translated into preexisting circuits of meaning-mak- ing and governance” (566). We speculate the operationalization of RoN in Indigenous communi- ties reflects different place-based meaning
making, the integration of Indigenous cosmologies and liberal legal frameworks (Merry 2000), and might reflect legal Indigenous imaginaries (Borrows 2019; Allard- Tremblay and Coburn 2021). Therefore, operational- ization of RoN within Indigenous communities requires its own critical analysis that is beyond the scope of this
article. In U.S. settler colonial communities, RoN laws are enacted by municipalities through a local ordi- nance or community bill of rights, which is either approved by the local legislative body or by local res- idents. These ordinances or bills tend to range from three to eight pages in length and are most often drafted with the legal
guidance of CELDF or CELDF-affiliated attorneys. 2 Each ordinance dis- tinctly addresses the community’s perceived environ- mental threat, often in the bill’s introductory language. Although located culturally and geographi- cally in different parts of the United States, many of Figure 1. U.S. communities with rights of nature
ordinances. Legal Rights for these documents then incorporate identical verbiage and follow a very similar progression of rights clauses, a testament to CELDF’s influence. All but one ordinance included a clause that explicitly grants the community or township a “right to a clean environment.” In most instances this was the first
clause of the ordinance. A second “rights” clause declares rights to natural communities, or a specific aspect of nature, such as water (included in all ordinances). Two additional rights causes are common, a right to community self-government (included in all but two ordinances), and the right of residents to enforce the law in court
(included in all but four ordinances). The ordinances also often contain language that limits the rights of corpora- tions to conduct certain business activities in the community (included in all but seven ordinances). Finally, some communities incorporate clauses that are specific to their own community circumstances. This can
include clauses for “right to self” (see, e.g., Van Etten, New York), “right to peaceful enjoyment of home” (see, e.g., Plymouth, New Hampshire), “right to sustainable energy future” (see e.g., Easton, New Hampshire), “right to cultural heritage” (see, e.g., Newtown, Pennsylvania), “right to be free from chemical trespass” (see, e.g.,
Niles, Ohio), and “right to scenic preservation views” (see, e.g., Sangerville, Maine). In what follows, we consider how the extensions of rights to nature have consequences due to the ways liberal rights are operationalized from theory to practice. We work these ideas through what we see as the three unifying aspects shared
among U.S. set- tler colonial communities invoking rights-based environmental governance: (1) securing a clean and healthy nature for the community’s residents, while granting nature a right to flourish; (2) the assertion of community self-governance, especially to counter the rights of corporations; and (3) the ways this

In all but one instance of operationalization of RoN within U.S. settler

operationalization can replicate existing systems of inequity. Rights to Nature and Rights of Community to Clean Air and Water

colonial communities, RoN laws had a specific motivating factor that drove communities to this form of environmental
gover- nance. Although proponents of RoN contend that this approach represents a paradigm shift that “changes
humankind’s relationship with the natural world” (Margill 2018), of the ordinances we ana- lyzed, with the exception of
one, none had an altru- istic desire to protect nature or prompt a change in Anglo human–nature perceptions. Instead,
motivating factors are usually community-perceived outside threats that can harm human health and disrupt local
ecological balance . For example, the first case of RoN in Tamaqua Borough was enacted to prevent the dumping of fly ash on a community that already felt overburdened with environmental harm. Since then, communities have used RoN as a deterrent for placing perceived environmental harms in
their municipality. In Colorado and Pennsylvania, it is most commonly used to prevent hydraulic fracturing from locating in a township. Communities have also used RoN laws to prevent the development of wind farms (e.g., Alexandria, Danbury, and Grafton, New Hampshire), protect water sources (e.g., Van Etten, New York; Grant
Township, Pennsylvania), stop extraction of spring water for bottled water (e.g., Barnstead and Nottingham, New Hampshire), pre- vent powerlines from passing through their commu- nity (e.g., Plymouth and Easton, New Hampshire), and stop pesticide spraying or other corporate farm- ing practices (e.g., Huntington County,
Pennsylvania; Lincoln County, Oregon). RoN laws are also enacted in instances where a municipality does not have jurisdiction over actions that affect their community, such as attempts by residents of Toledo, Ohio, to protect Lake Erie from nonpoint source pollution from farming. In all but one ordinance, rights to nature are
granted in tandem with the right of human residents to a clean nature. For example, residents of Lafayette, Colorado, adopted a Climate Bill of Rights and Protections in March 2017 to fight the placement of fracking wells in the town. Section 1(a) of the bill establishes that “all residents and ecosystems of the City of Lafayette
possess a right to a healthy climate and life sustaining resources” (Lafayette Climate Bill of Rights 2017). This approach also appears in Plymouth, New Hampshire’s Rights-Based Ordinance, adopted in February 2018 to stop the construction of an electri- cal transmission line from running through the area. After declaring the
residents’ right to a sustainable energy future, scenic preservation, and peaceful enjoyment of home, the ordinance describes 8 Kohl and Walenta residents’ right to pure water and clean air “untainted by toxic waste.” Following this, ecosys- tems are noted as “possess[ing] the right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve” (Plymouth

and New Hampshire Freedom from Chemical Trespass Rights- Based Ordinance 2018). The legal strategy used in these two examples reflects a common approach; that is, to coestablish rights for nature alongside the rights of that nature’s residents to a clean environ- ment. What is clean and
healthy for human resi- dents is presumed to be similarly healthy for nature. The exception is Crestone, a town of eighty-six in southern Colorado. Their 2018 resolution “officially recognize[s] that
nature, natural ecosystems, commu- nities, and all species possess intrinsic and inalien- able rights which must be effectuated to protect life on Earth” (Crestone Resolution No 006-2018 2018). Through the work of the Manitou Foundation, the town is known as an interfaith spiritual mecca offer- ing “deep experiences of Spirit and
Nature” (https:// www.manitou.org/foundation/about/). This is an instance where CELDF was not involved in the drafting of the law. Instead, Myra Jackson, a leading proponent of RoN with the Earth Law Center and the UN Harmony with Nature program, worked with the mayor to draft the resolution (Lee 2018). The means by

Although nature might possess the right to flourish and have that right guaranteed in court, to do this,
which nature’s rights are secured is also relevant.

nature requires a human interlocutor to represent it. In 90 percent (fifty-five) of the cases, it was explicitly stated that
any human resi- dent of the town where the law is enacted can serve in this role. For example, Athens, Ohio’s Community Bill of Rights states that “any city resi- dent shall have the authority
to enforce this Ordinance through an action ... [and] be entitled to recover all costs of litigation, including, without limitation, expert and attorney’s fees” (Athens Community Bill of Rights and Water Supply Ordinance No. 0-08-18). In the more recent case of Orlando, Florida, that ordinance explicitly states that only legal residents of
the town are granted the right to serve in this role. Directly establishing standing in court addresses a critical constitutional question regarding who has the right to sue. Such wording is a response to the Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), where the Sierra Club tried to prevent the permitting for the development of
Mineral King Valley, part of Sequoia National Forest, into an eighty-acre ski resort. At issue was whether the Sierra Club had legal standing to inter- vene on behalf of the Valley. In a four-to-three deci- sion, the Supreme Court held that a person or entity only had legal standing if they could prove direct harm (past, present, or

). Securing nature’s
future). In his dissent, how- ever, Justice William O. Douglas contended that there was precedent for inanimate objects to be granted legal personality, suggesting that natural entities could and should have standing using human interlocutors (Sierra Club v. Morton 1972

rights through human interlocu- tors assumes that “nature’s needs [are] always compatible with community needs and
that nature itself is a homogenous entity rather than a complex eco- system of competing interests at different scales”
(Fish 2013, 6). It also requires that nature wait until a human resident identifies a threat and is willing to incur the
financial or other labor costs of court action. Embedded in these assumptions is the belief that town residents will
always act in the best inter- est of nature, that what is best for one group of peo- ple is best for all people, and what is
best for nature is always best for everyone (Fish 2013). In other words, nature’s interests remain tied to human resi-
dents’ interest in a clean environment. Although this approach might benefit some environmental spaces and provide
some people with new mecha- nisms to litigate, we contend that it also replicates the entrenched human–nature
hierarchy identified by critics of our current system of rights. This includes Earth jurisprudence scholars such as Berry
(1999), who intended for nature to be a full member of a wider Earth community. Instead, nature’s mem- bership to
that community is contingent on human legal intervention in certain spaces and under cer- tain conditions. Critical race
scholars such as Mills (2017) and Wynter (1995) would add that it is cer- tain humans who carry the privilege of
accessing this legal intervention. In sum, nature remains locked into a subordinate
We further take up this point in the section “Replicating Existing Systems of Inequality” later.

role rather than being an equal rights- bearing entity. Self-Governance and Community Empowerment Although RoN municipal laws can be found across the country, they tend to be geographically concentrated in New England,
Pennsylvania, and Legal Rights for Whose Nature? 9 Ohio (Figure 1). Moreover, settler communities that have enacted RoN laws tend to be clustered on a smaller scale. Often communities who are addressing the same environmental concern will turn to RoN laws together, usually duplicating the legal language directly from
adjacent or nearby communities. For example, the towns of Grafton, Danbury, Hebron, and Alexandria, New Hampshire, worked together to stop the installation of a commercial wind farm in their community (White 2018). What is interest- ing about this geographic distribution is that the largest numbers of RoN laws are not in
places nor- mally associated with environmental activism, be it the pristine wilderness movement (rural communities in the U.S. West) or the environmental justice movement (urban communities of color). Instead, they tend to be concentrated in small rural commu- nities in the eastern United States. Sixty-four per- cent (thirty-
nine) of the places with RoN laws had a population less than 10,000 (the smallest being Crestone, Colorado, with a population of eighty-six) and only three had populations over 100,000 (the largest being 1.3 million people in Orange County, Florida). Just as each ordinance or bill deploys similar legal strategies toward coconstituting
nature’s rights with a community’s rights to clean air and water, these legal documents also establish a right to community self-governance. RoN laws empower communities by asserting the authority to self-govern or invoke home rule. All but two (Crestone and Orange County) include a home rule or self-governance clause. These
clauses invoke a shift in authority often explicitly recognizing the rights of local resi- dents over the rights of corporations or state and federal law. Self-governance originates with the founding of U.S. democracy, and more widely with the devolution of power under colonial rule (Sachs 2015). Home rule is a legislative option in forty-
seven states for a decentralized form of governance where local jurisdictions adopt local initiatives with- out looking to the state for specific authorization (Public Health Law Center 2020). This does not mean that localities can preempt state law. Rather, it means they do not have to wait to be authorized by the state to enact laws.
Instead, they can do so as they see fit. Although home rule in most instances is designed to establish efficiency in law making for local offi- cials, using home rule and self-governance in RoN ordinances takes on a tone of defiance, a declared independence from larger political entities (e.g., federal state, corporation). For example,
Mansfield, Ohio’s Community Bill of Rights states that the town has a “fundamental and inalienable right” to local governance, and this language occurred in 73 percent (forty-five) of the ordinances we analyzed. They went on to note that “all power is inherent in the people, that all free governments are founded on the people’s
authority and consent” (Mansfield and Ohio Community Bill of Rights Municipal Ordinance 2012), language that occurred in 56 per- cent (thirty-four) of the ordinances. This defiance is paired with an explicit denial of corporate rights in 90 percent (fifty-four) of the jurisdictions that declared home rule. Of these, 87 percent (forty-
seven) unequivocally strip rights from corporations. This is achieved either by explicitly denying corpo- rations rights or stripping corporations of their legal personhood status if they violate any of the rights outlined in the law. In the case of Mountain Lake Park, Maryland, any corporation violating the “prohibition against natural gas
extraction, or seek- ing to engage in natural gas extraction, shall not have the rights of ‘persons’ afforded by the United States and Maryland Constitutions” (Mountain Lake Park MD Ordinance No. 2011-0101 2011). The law entrenches this revocation of rights under the com- merce and contracts clause and the First and Fifth
Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Notably, 13 percent (five) of communities use different language that limits the rights of corporations, such as in Santa Monica, California, which states, “corporate entities, and their directors and managers, do not enjoy special privileges or powers under the law that subordinate the

). The coupling of home rule with the denial of cor- porate rights appears to be
community’s rights to their private interests” (Santa Monica CA Ordinance Establishing Sustainability Rights 2013

a cornerstone of CELDF’s approach, referenced in their media and blog post- ings as well as their democracy school
promotional materials. This content underscores that the consti- tutional acceptance of corporations’ personhood
grants these entities power at the expense of local populations. According to CELDF, the declaration of home rule and
the denial of corporate rights intends to restore the proper balance of power; that is, taking power away from
corporations and placing it in the hands of citizens. Such discourse aligns with conservative ideologies t hat subscribe to
notions of small government and local control. In 55 percent (thirty-four) of communities with RoN laws, the majority of
voters voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election , our proxy for conservative political ideology. In 72 percent (twenty-eight) of the towns with populations under 10,000, the majority of voters
voted for Trump dur- ing the 2020 presidential election. The large propor- tion of small, rural, predominantly conservative spaces enacting environmental laws is atypical, but the assertion of home rule and community control aligns with conservative antigovernment sentiments. There are many high-profile exceptions such as
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Toledo, Ohio; Santa Monica, California; Lafayette, Colorado (a Denver suburb); and Orange County, Florida. Each are urban or suburban areas with large, liberal leaning popula- tions. Of the twenty-three locations with popula- tions over 10,000, in 73 percent (seventeen) of the instances, the majority of
voters voted for Joe Biden during the 2020 election (our proxy for liberal politi- cal and ju). The assertion of self-governance or home rule is a legal strategy by CELDF to shift what they see as an inequitable balance of power from corporations to community members. Such an effort redresses the legal rights afforded to corporations
under Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) and further expanded under Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). The reliance on home rule parallels the liberal project of freedom and egali- tarianism through the construction of the free indi- vidual (D’Souza 2018). RoN proponents contend that the
balance of power has skewed too far from people toward corporations, which has detrimental environmental impacts. Moreover, including home rule charters and stripping corporations of the right of personhood is also meant to curb the differential mobilization of rights between corporations and peo- ple. Turning to liberal rights
to remedy a problem created by liberal rights obscures how these systems of power are replicated and naturalized (Rawson and Mansfield 2018). We raise the issue of self-governance as a reoccur- ring theme in U.S.-based RoN because we believe it should be put into larger sociospatial context, espe- cially regarding which
communities home rule is for, and which communities do not have access to it. Given that liberal rights replicate and reinforce a racial and gendered hierarchy within our legal sys- tem and distribute power unevenly (Mills 2011, 2017), we believe that using these same systems to extend rights to nature can perpetuate these hierar-

The reliance on home rule is further compli- cated by the fact that the land being claimed is stolen and occupied
chies.

Indigenous lands, a fact that has been erased through liberal processes (Morten- Robinson 2015; Whyte 2018). Claims of
home rule through the extension of liberal rights to nature , and the further naturalization of settler colonial rule,
exacerbate processes of Indigenous dispossession while entrenching the universalization of liberal sys- tems and
processes (Morten-Robinson 2015; Lipsitz 2019). Although on paper, the extension of rights through home rule asserts equality, when the theory of the law meets the real world, informed and struc- tured by difference, the implications might differ from the intent of the governing body (Wynter 1995; Pitts 2009;

the fact these settler colonial communities are primarily White matters because as Morten-
Wynter and McKittrick 2015). As we discuss in detail in the next section,

Robinson (2015) argued through property ownership, settler colonial nations are socially and culturally constructed as a
White possession. This operationalization of liberal- ism leads to questions of who has the liberal right to declare home rule, or asking in a different way, who has the right to rule themselves. Building on Wynter and McKittrick (2015), racial privilege is one means by which liberal rights holders meet

Within settler communities that engage RoN, we are struck by their

the expectations of the ideal Enlightened and rational human subject universalized by the liberal project. Replicating Existing Systems of Inequality

Whiteness. The communities were on average 83.41 percent White alone (non- Hispanic) with a median of 91.0 percent.
Conversely, in these communities there is an average of 5.88 percent Black/African American population with a median
of 1 percent and on average 5.73 per- cent Latinx population with a median of 2 percent . Jurisdictions ranged from 16.9 percent White (non- Hispanic; Mora County, New Mexico,
where 81.2 percent of the population identified as Latinx) to 100 percent (Newfield, Maine). Overall, 90.1 per- cent (fifty-five) communities have White alone Legal Rights for Whose Nature? 11 (non-Hispanic) populations above the national aver- age of 60.1 percent. Of those, 57.3 percent (thirty- five) had populations that were
more than 90 percent White (non-Hispanic). There were a few exceptions to this overwhelming Whiteness. Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania; Mora County; North Plainfield, New Jersey; and Orange County, Florida were not majority White (non-Hispanic). In the six communities that fell below the national average of White (non- Hispanic)
population, there were no discernable pat- terns in their ordinances as compared to ordinances emerging from overwhelmingly White communities. They exhibited the same patterns and language seen overall in settler colonial communities. For us, this does not detract from the importance of the over- whelming Whiteness of the

We are also struck by the Whiteness of the legal

communities who enact RoN legislation. Instead, it highlights the need for more research on the role of race in how and why these communities turn to and operationalize RoN.

advocacy group CELDF. Despite recent discursive changes on their Web site (e.g., support for the #BLM movement and
intersectional environmental- ism), of their fifteen staff members, all are [are all] White. Beyond CELDF, Rawson and
Mansfield’s (2018) tracing of key thought leaders in RoN noted that the movement draws on the work of a few White
male actors situated in the Global North . We wonder if Whiteness is foundational to RoN’s actuation
Stone, Berry, and Cullinan are also all White. . If so, this
is troubling for at least two reasons. First, there is a long and violent history in the United States of a White right to nature (Finney 2014; Purdy 2015; Whyte 2018) and a nature suited to settler colonial and liberal interests at the expense of oppressed communities and Indigenous ecosystems (Loo 2006). Purdy’s work grounds this
Whiteness in mainstream environmentalism’s key influencers, including Sierra Club founder John Muir and Progressive-era conservationists Madison Grant and Gifford Pinchot. These same influencers, who gave shape to the wilderness preservation movement, did so while asserting that White people were the most capable,
civilized humans and had a duty to conquer so-called inferior people in the managing of nature (Purdy 2015). This brand of environmentalism even influenced Hitler in Nazi Germany, who admired Grant’s work (Purdy 2015). Environmental policy thinkers, who are predomi- nantly White, craft environmental policies, which have
historically benefited White populations at the expense of people of color (Finney 2014). For exam- ple, silos of protected wilderness that might serve as tourist destinations, scientific research preserves, or the source of carbon offset credits achieve their state-sanctioned protections by forcibly removing Indigenous peoples
(Brockington 2002; Jago 2017). Racism might not be explicit, but what is explicit is that assumption that Indigenous communities are incapable of protecting nature properly. More than this, a protected nature is for White people. Whiteness in RoN is troubling for a second rea- son. Where does an environmentalism grounded in
liberal legal rights leave Black and brown communi- ties and their right to a clean and healthy nature, or a nature with the right to flourish? Finney (2014) underscored that the racist undertones of many envi- ronmental movements leave Black people out of place in both nature (as people who belong in nature) and in
environmental policymaking. Taylor’s work furthers this, documenting the racial and gen- dered make up of U.S.-based environmental organi- zations, finding an overwhelmingly White “green insider’s club” (Taylor 2014). Given the historic association of White faces with natural spaces and environmentalism more broadly,

At the outset of this article, we raised

combined with the deployment of a legal rights system that has failed to secure the freedoms of Black and brown communi- ties, we question who and where RoN can work. In which communities can nature access legal rights?

the issue that bestowing rights to nature is not a paradigm shift that alters Western human understandings and relations
with nature. Instead, we view it as reinforc- ing and naturalizing the White privilege embedded in the liberal rights
system, perpetuating a White right to a clean environment. The Whiteness of RoN spaces is important, particularly when
consider- ing discourses of self-governance or home rule. We cannot help but ask ourselves, how would the con- cept of
RoN achieved via home rule or community self-governance be received if it was raised by citi- zens of Flint, Michigan;
Ferguson, Missouri; or Baltimore, Maryland. If RoN environmental gover- nance represents an important nature protection pathway moving forward, then what does this approach, which rests on the RoN alongside the rights of community secured
through self-gover- nance, mean to existing environmental inequalities? Will RoN exacerbate those inequalities, or undo 12 Kohl and Walenta them? Based on the data collected about settler colo- nial communities that implement RoN environmen- tal governances, we believe the former, not the latter. Folding rights for nature or
the right to clean air or water, home rule, and Whiteness together, we maintain that these critical aspects of RoN environ- mental governance work in tandem to hold in place a firmly established hierarchy of liberal rights holders. In that hierarchy, some individuals matter more than others. Those who conform to liberalism’s values
and priorities more completely access the benefits of legal rights. Within the wider liberal frame, “as is the norm for universal gestures to rights or intrinsic value, there is never quite enough [rights] to go around to support all: one must make choices. How to choose?” (Dempsey 2018, 366–67). In choosing, difference is mobilized.
Nature and groups of people are ranked depending on their importance, depending on their contribution to upholding the liberal order. Historically, this has contributed to a “violent render- ing of whole peoples and places as less valuable, mak- ing certain people, lands, waters available to be sacrificed, developed for the supposed

Seemingly through RoN environmentalism the liberalist-inspired hierarchical divide between

common good” (Collard, Dempsey, and Rowe 2016, 469).

human (and especially privileged humans) and nature is preserved. Because of this, we see the potential for RoN laws to
reinforce White, Western, liberal conceptions of rights, which historically have mobilized difference to benefit some,
while violently oppressing others.
This terminalizes in improvement of subjectivity, economy, and the biosphere that guides
dispossession and demise
Moten & Harney ’21 (Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, “All Incomplete,” Minor Compositions 2021, ISBN 978-1-
57027-378-0) //wwu-kck

What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to
stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where
individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of excep- tion’s
miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to
make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the
regula- tory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and
accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be

forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization
is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-
improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medie- val Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming
Man. This is the usufruct of man . In early mod- ern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and
breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers
anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler.
Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universaliza- tion/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve.

However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not
from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the
exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose
simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and
supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon
everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous
improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and ana- lyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from
being with, and being of service to, your friends. 3. At the end of the movie Devil in a Blue Dress, which is based on the Walter Mosley novel of the same name, and which Robinson delighted in teaching us how to read and see, what comes sharply into relief is the persistent life – which survives under the rule of speciation; which
surrounds the speciation that would envelop it; which violates the speciation by which it is infused; which anticipates the speciation that would be its end – of a neighborhood of neat lawns, small family houses, and the Black people who live in them. The movie’s last line simultaneously belies and acknowledges speciation’s perma-

nent crisis. “Is it wrong to be friends with someone you know has done bad things?” asks the movie’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins. All you got is your friends, replies Deacon Odell. That’s right. That’s all. Tomorrow the cops
could come back, or the bank, bringing the violence of speciation, against which there is just this constant and general economy of friendship – not
the improvement that will have been given in one-to-one relation but the militant preserva- tion of what you (understood as we) got, in common
dispossession, which is the only possible form of possession, of having in excess of anyone who has. Neither the globalization of possession-by-
improvement nor the achieve- ment of being exceptional is possible. We live (in) the brutality of their failure, which is a failure in and as derivation.
Moreover, the sovereign declension (giv- en, in a variation of Silva’s grammar as God: Patriarch – Possessive Individual – Citizen) is a derivative – a
rigid, reified, securitized understanding of dif- ference. Meanwhile, in the scene it constantly sets on Easy’s porch, in Joppy’s bar, at John’s Place (the illegal club above Hattie Mae’s grocery store), Devil in a Blue Dress keeps
reminding us that the task at hand is, as Manolo Callahan would say, to renew our habits of assembly, which implies a turn, a step away from the
derivative. We ain’t studying the failure, just like Easy ain’t studying no job. We ain’t trying to enter the declension that instigates what it implies:
the (necessarily failed) separation, speciation, and racialization – the enclosure and settlement – of the earth. The play, as Callahan and Nahum Chandler teach us, is to desediment, to exfoliate,
to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all. And, as Robinson also took great care to teach us in his critical admiration of Easy’s friend Mouse, who is always about to blow
somebody’s nose off, all depends upon our readiness to defend it

The Role of the Judge is to reject mediation and evaluate the route through ecosophy, centering the
production of subjectivity over the production of hypotheticals
Manning ’22 (Erin manning is the author of pragmatics of the useless, and professor of philosophy and cinema at
concordia university, “Out of the Clear,” e-flux, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_452291.pdf) //wwu-kck [1:30]
Clearing produces property. Property produces dispossession. “All property is loss because all property is the loss of sharing.” 11 The accursed share of all that
exceeds interpersonality, mediation, whiteness, logistics, all that cannot be accounted for, sickens the field. And sometimes rejuvenates it. The force of the
transindividual, of all that exceeds and precedes the individual, does rewild. But its vitality is weakened, and as perception is honed to single out the individual over the field, the human increasingly
becomes the focal point, becoming synonymous with life. This is how the logistics of genocide – the genocide of relation – does its work. The genocide of relation can never be traced back, quite.
Relation cannot be propertied. What is lost cannot be parsed . The yellow eyebrows have a role to play, of course, and we could call on the archbishop for that missing apology, but the truth is, it was never just one.
He was never just the one. He is a logistical pattern, a commitment to the dramaturgy of (white) man as self-centered orchestrator of existence
cleared. Scene 4 Logistics: the slave ship, but also the body-as- individual. “The first odious vessel produced by and for logistics is not the slave ship,
but the body – flesh conceptualized – which bears the individual-in-subjection.”12 In the clearing, man is revealed as the loss of relation. Humanism
is born here, in the empty space of the stolen land, in the vast expanse of the 1+1, the infinite regress of nothing-in- between. How to fill the emptiness? How to
create an account for all that is lost and yet claimed? Mediation offers to fill the shape of the between. Mediation as the figure of what comes between, of what fills that
“empty” space. The adjuster, the divorce lawyer, the priest, the government agent. A quick intervention to make sense of all that has become
unclear, to fill in the lines, to provide context. And perhaps this does make things clearer, perhaps we understand each other a bit better now that we’ve mediated all we couldn’t make sense of in the vast emptiness of our
difference. But the problem is: mediation never goes away. It sits there, inert but active, facilitating the ongoing impoverishment relation by adhering to
all that takes the shape of the 1+1 of body-as- individual, of interpersonality. Because in advance of the gesture of inserting the mediating
influence, he is already there. Long before the divorce, he hovers, betweener, judging, parsing, condoning, condemning. His take doesn’t really
matter. What matters is that he remains in the offing, holding things apart. Mediation is the father of the control society. It is the way surveillance
takes on a personality from the outside in. Whether formally or informally, mediation sets the tone for an interpersonality that, by definition, can
only be lived at a distance. Playing at impartiality, mediation haunts the surround, reducing it to what is already known, what is already valued, what is already within the scope of the expressible. 2+1, always less than 3, mediation is passive
aggressor, poised for judgment, always in the know (while it listens carefully ). Because its role is to keep existence in its track, on its logistical path. It doesn’t really matter who is
right. It matters that it needs mediation. Mediation knows best, trampling on any detail of middling, sewing interactivity into a twoness without
excess. Hardening the between of interpersonality into the amplification of the self-same, mediation lodges at the interstice, cutting it into a
hyphen, setting up its colony on the bridge. Settler, it speaks from a place it has never had to truly encounter because its role is only to order things
apart. Harney and Moten might speak of mediation with the same disdain as they do of logistics, which they call the “science of whiteness.” Mediation is the logistic category par excellence of whiteness. It
has no content, is not in itself an agent of transformation, does nothing but cannibalize the life it parses. Its intervention happens in the beat of enter and retreat, leaving the uneasy
twoness of existence to sort itself out. In the name of property and propriety, mediation solves all uncertainties of zoning. That it never actually leaves is its dirty secret. But the logistics of mediation can only fail . The
interface is shaky – we know this both from the endemic code 404, page not found, and from the impossibility of truly domesticating our
surrounds. Ultimately, the squirrels, the black flies, the birds, the worms, the fungi, the weeds, the viruses, the hackers cannot be kept in their
place. The disarray is handled, of course, with more mediation, with more logistics. The interface claims a distance, a secure between-two that
repeats the refrain of nature colonized, of culture denatured. It promises a security of inhabitation, a zone that can be controlled, a slip through
which we can safely enter, we who claim the place. Here, in the logistics of passage that beats at the cadence of the one-two, me-you, the
outcome is always the same. Police to subjugate. Code to organize. Clear to colonize. Logistics aims to straighten us out, untangle us, and open us
to its usufruct, its improving use; such access to us, in its turn, improves the flow line, the straight line. And what logistics takes to be the shortest
distance between us requires emplotting us as bodies in space where interiority can be imposed even as the capacity for interiority can be denied,
in the constant measure and regulation of flesh and earth.14 Scene 5 Deleuze and Guattari speak of man as the white wall of the black hole of existence.15 Think landscape painting, especially the kind that excises that
very life that breathed it into existence. If you’re not familiar, search for “Canadian art.” And if you don’t know the history of the mansplaining of the Canadian landscape, search for the Group of Seven, the early twentieth-century Canadian landscape painters, and
notice not only the ubiquity of the vast open, uninhabited space, notice the clearing. Very little has changed over the last hundred years. We still see Canada through the clear, in the emptiness of nature cultured. The denuded land, the empty north, is how we art
ourselves still today, we who property the land. The Group of Seven, those painters of the land pristine, of the great white north, the painters of the land of the (single) pine and of the distant ridges, they are still with us, still managing the imagination, orchestrating
the field, playing the dramaturgy of extinction. Logistics are also aesthetic (if not artful). The white man is a specter. That is to say, the white man is without content, without shape. He is the shift in form that allows all takings- place to be propertied inhabitations,
which is to say, sites already claimed. This is whiteness: the pretense that the lines that demarcate the boundary between me and you protect you, protect me, from the wilderness of all that cannot be contained (and must be kept at bay). The truth is, the

wilderness was cleared, but never quite colonized. And that is why whiteness is alive and well. To police a job half-done. Scene 6 Mediation makes many promises. It promises clarity: think, drop-down
menu. It promises fairness: think, divorce court. It promises health: think, therapy. The gesture is cast as innocuous. A simple third, a neutral agent.
A little bit of reason. A moment of distance. An interlude so that things can be tied up again and smooth functioning can resume. A representation
of the useful.16 But what is it to insert distance into a field of relation if not violence of the highest degree? Whose distance? At what cost? To what
ends? Guattari fights against this at every turn, refusing mediation either in politics or in psychiatry. Schizoanalysis is the proposition, a call for a
transversal operation that breaks the pretense of neutrality in the encounter . A therapeutics of transversality. No more triangle. No more transference. Schizoanalysis is the event of the encounter itself,
the practice of encountering. To be in the relation is to have been changed by it . What this looked like: a years-long institutional arrangement housed at a clinic called La Borde in the
north of France whereby to be in the therapeutic encounter was to live with the effects of encounters in the everyday and to learn from them how
to continue to live. Nothing very complicated, really. But infinitely complex in its transversality. Because to live in the encounter, to allow ourselves
to be changed by it, is to be continuously undone, and to be sensitive to all that comes alive in that undoing.

The alt is an epistemology of the wild, a chaotic motion that refuses the call to order in favor of
chaotic group-being
Halberstam ’20 (J. Halberstam is my personal advisor on life and an incredibly creative individual. If you don’t
know who they are by now, I pity you. He’s a professor in English and director of the institute for research on women,
gender, and sexuality at Colombia University, and former director of the Center for Feminist Research at University of
Southern California. Famously ‘loosey-goosey’ with gender, he doesn’t care about your respect, but you’d best put some
on his name. “Wild things: The disorder of desire,” Duke University Press, ISBN: 978147801262) //wwu-kck
Wildness Makes of These Connections Spaces of Darkness and Light “In the dark and in the shi#s between the dark and the light,” Taussig narrates from within a yage-induced haze, “objects stare out in their mottled naked- ness, while signi!ers "oat by.” ,: Recognizing the ways in which the wild has been ascribed to evil, to some

Like Snorton’s sense of

colonial notion of primitive personhood, and to a form of chaos that civilization comes to tame, Taussig offers a new relation to wildness that “tears through the tired dichotomies of good and evil, order and chaos, the sanctity of order, and so forth” (77;).

darkness that encapsulates a Black relation to negative knowledge, or Moten’s understanding of Black aesthetics as the noise that
European and American high culture both violently produces in the other and designates as ugly all at once, Taussig offers wildness
as a form of connection between spaces of dark- ness and light. ,) And once these dichotomies have been shredded, what remains
“comes down on the side of chaos and its healing creativity is inseparable from that of taking sides.” ,, Queer theory after nature necessarily comes down on the side of chaos and
remains in productive tension with “the gro- tesque and the destructive” (77;), and in this way, it stays monstrous. If queer theory refuses the monstrous and the dark, it threatens to reproduce orders of knowledge that, like the closet, mark freedom as an accessible space beyond secrecy and simultaneously mark certain racialized
bodies as figures for that secrecy. Snorton again: “The closet as it appears in (progress) narratives about gay subject-making serves to draw on an implicit colonialist sensibility that !gures the ‘dark secrecy’ of the closet with the pre-modern and primitive and the subsequent open consciousness of an ‘outside’ of the closet with

Failure attends all attempts to make wildness signify as either the opposite of modernity or simply its underbelly. Taussig
modernity and Civilization.

therefore uses wildness to challenge the unity of the symbol and to fracture meanings that have coalesced around marked bodies.
Taussig delves into the colonial archive —as constituted by colonial records as well as by administrative briefs and imperial literature
— in order to find a method for the madness and a madness with which to oppose the method. He loops around again and again, as so much colonial and post- colonial material must, to
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But he offsets Conrad’s document of barbarity with attention to the briefs of Roger Case- C H A P T E R O N E+7 ment. ,1 Casement and Conrad offer weird place markers for the role of sexual- ity and madness in colonial savagery. Conrad, as Maya Jasanoff shows elegantly in The Dawn Watch:
Joseph Conrad in a Global World, embodied what we now call “globalization,” and his work continues to exert considerable in"u- ence precisely because, as Jasanoff puts it, “Conrad’s world shimmers beneath the surface of our own.” ,2 And Roger Casement, who, as I proposed earlier, is sometimes cast as the author of
contemporary human rights and at other times as a queer Irish nationalist martyr, represents the world beneath that one. His understanding of desire and his relation to nature, otherness, and sexuality no longer shimmers beneath ours but has been covered over by the epistemologies that fell into place along the lines of a
dualistic division of homo and hetero. The twinning of Conrad’s novel with Casement’s diaries of his homo/ sexual exploits in the Congo and the Amazon within the trope of darkness forces us to see the odd alignments that colonialism constructed within the sexualized trope of wildness. ,4 When Marlow descended into the heart of

Taussig’s analysis of
dark- ness, he found the savagery he went to confront in the form of Kurtz, the colo- nial administrator who has not simply “gone native” or wild but who has, in his managerial madness, transacted the precise terms of what Taussig calls “the co- lonial mirror of production.” ,5

the extreme violence meted out by colonists and rubber company employees in the Putumayo against Na- tive peoples they
encounter there leads him to conclude: “The terror and the tortures they devised mirrored the horror of the savagery they both
feared and fictionalized” (%**). And time and again inShamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, Taussig returns to Conrad to provide him with the narrative framework for this vexing and disorienting mirror effect by which colonizers carry out violence against those whom they have dreamed

While Marlow in Heart of Darkness recognizes of London that “this too has been one of the dark places of the earth,” ,8 still
onto this landscape.

darkness comes to define not empire, but the murky realms it seeks to redeem. Taussig identifed in Con- rad’s novel a methodology
for encountering myth within which the author uses “political artistry” to carry out “the mythic subversion of myth” and the
imaginative penetration of “the political unconscious of the epoch .” ,9 Kurtz, accordingly, represents the failure of signifcation under the intense pressure of a colonial order that sought to divide the dark from the light, the savage

“Wildness,” Taussig remarks, “challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image
from the civilized, the good from and evil.

to that which it represents” (7%&). Wildness introduces the bureaucratic to other murky epistemologies that cannot be subjected to
the rule of the pen and that will not submit to the moral clarity that seeks to cleanse it of contradiction . W I L D N E S S , L O S S , A N D D E AT H +* Like many other write rs, including W. G. Sebald, for example, Taussig’s in terest is piqued by the image we get from Conrad, on his way out of the Congo, of Roger Casement on his way in. Conrad described Casement in a letter in %.&; to a friend thus: I can

assure you that he is a limpid personality. There is a touch of the Conquistador in him too; for I’ve seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crook-handled stick for all weapons, with two bull- dogs, Paddy (white) and Biddy (brindle) at his heels, and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards it so hap- pened, that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in a park. -: Many contemporary readers of colonial history might have passed over the appearance of Roger Casement in Taussig’s reckoning with colonial orders of terror in Colombia. And in truth, like so many contemporary commentators on Casement, including W. G. Sebald, Taussig has no idea what to do with Casement having summoned him into his text. Casement appears alongside Conrad for both Taussig and Sebald as a well-intentioned wanderer looking for justice in the jungle. But, of course, Casement’s legacy is much more trou- bling and much more significant than this implies , and while Taussig casts Casement as almost a foil for Conrad, in fact Casement represents the deeply contradictory force of European racial and economic thinking on the topic of wildness, indigeneity, sexuality, and power.
He also represents a version of the “untimely sexuality” that is the subject of the next two chapters, namely, a homosexuality before homosexuality, a queerness after nature but before queer culture. Casement represents an earlier understanding of same-sex desire that he recorded delirious ly in a diary and that ran counte r to his well-intentioned reports on colonial violence that were sent back to Britain in the hopes of curb- ing genocidal murder in the Congo and slave labor in the Amazon. Capsule histories of Roger Casement are to be found in any number of sources—in Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, where Casement appears as an early reader of The Heart of Darkness and one of the first to, as Jasanoff puts it, misread the book and its author as critics of the Congo. Accordingly, when Casement asked Conrad to sign on to his report of the violent practices of Europeans in the Congo, Conrad refused. Jasanoff, perhaps generously, reads Conrad’s refusal not simply as hypocrisy, but as a rejection of the “European notion of civilization as a good in itself.” -) Casement also appears in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, this time as a British consul in Africa who C H A P T E R O N E ++ traveled widely, documenting the travesties he witnessed, shunning the rail- road, and often walking hundreds of miles
accompanied by his dogs. -, Hoch- schild situates Casement’s unconventional desires, his homosexuality, as a li- ability that must inevitably spell his ruination as he went up against the powers that be. Hochschild compares the diaries that Casement kept of his sexual exploits with young African boys to “a time bomb, with a fuse of unknown length” (7;;). Taussig, in a way, introduces Casement as part of the wildness he is sum- moning. But, like Taussig, Casement is an ambivalent figure who, on the one hand, battles against the rigid and contradictory morality of a colonial order of being but, on the other hand, dips his hand in the honey pot of colonial fe- tishism. How was Roger Casement able to reconcile his role as a major critic of both the English occupation of Ireland and the violent treatment of Indige- nous peoples by the rubbe r merchants in the Amazon while also busily record- ing his sexual exploits with Native men in his diaries? Casement paid for many of these sexual favors and o#en recorded his encounters by noting the size and shape of the genitals of the young boys with whom he had sex. Thus, we have to read the legacy of Casement as both an activist against British rule and the vio- lence of colonial missions and as a colonial subject who saw Black and Brown bodies as erotic commodities. His notes
on his sexual contacts, in the Black Diaries, appeared opposite his diary entries on his travels in the Congo and the Amazon, which could be called the white diaries. One page might note atroci- ties he has witnessed, and on another he offers cryptic details of an encounter: August .: Should arrive in Para and get on shore by '<=. Will to Valda Peso and cafe’s !rst, then on to cafe in Independencia and back to theatre about %;.*; and Valda Peso at %%. Camrino’s !rst. Arr. Para at 7<=, along- side *.*;<=. Tea and at 0<= with Pogson to Paz cafe. Lovely moco. Then a#er dinner to Valda Peso, two types, also to gardens of Pracao Republica, two types, Baptista Campos one type. Then Senate Square and Caboclo (boy %'–%6) seized hard. Young, stiff, thin, others offered later, on board at %7 midnight. -- In one of the best contempora ry essays on Casement, Colm Toíbín suc- cinctly describes Casement’s legacy as “complex” and “enigmatic.”-1 Toíbín recognizes the double bind into which Irish history has placed Casement. Given that the Black Diaries were quickly cast as forgeries by Irish national- ists who suspected the British of trying to sully the name of a heroic freedom !ghter, contemporary commentators are torn between arguing for the diaries’ authenticity and having to make sense of the sexual fetishism they contain W I
L D N E S S , L O S S , A N D D E AT H +0 or agreeing that the diaries may have been forged and then distancing them- selves from accounts of gay sex. When one writer argues that just because Case- ment wrote about certain forms of sex does not mean he participated in them, Toíbín weighs in, this time not as an Irish writer but as a gay man; he does so to argue that various readers bring their own desires to the text and !nd there whatever they need to !nd: When, as a gay reader, you study the hastily written diaries, full of short- hand, full of the strangeness of the night on the edge of a park in an old city, you know, as a non-gay reader might not, that most of the time these ring true and are probably what Casement actually did on the day, un- likely as this may be to those of another sexual persuasion. This, in turn, may in the future become another Casement heresy, much reviled for its crudeness. It may also be worth pointing out that there is no evidence to disprove this view. -2 Casement offers a weird place marker for the role of sexuality and mad- ness in colonial savagery. As previously stated, when he had !nished his tour of duty in the Amazon in %&%+, he set out to destroy England in a fantasized col- laboration with the German government. A#er Casement was imprisoned for treason, there was an
enormous outpouring of sympathy for Casement from Irish nationalists, including Yeats, who penned “The Ghost of Roger Case- ment” in April %&%', a few months before his execution. But when news broke about the Black Diaries, Casement became an embarrassing blot on the Irish struggle for independence. Are these diaries, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a witness account of colonial brutality, or are they complicit with that violent order, enforcing in aesthetic terms what the political system le# undone? Do Casement’s sexual exploits represent an attempt to reach across the cultura l barrie rs between Black and white bodies, or are they the intensi!cation of the markers that ascribe humanity to whiteness and wild animality to Blackness? In August %&%', Casement was hung for treason, and while his supporte rs abandoned him once his homosexuality became public knowledge, in later years, Irish nationalists have tried to revive his status as a national hero by claiming that only homophobia stood between him and a glorious place in Irish history. These same supporters cast the diaries as plagiarism and accused the British government of manufacturing them to besmirch Casement’s repu- tation. In %&'0 his body was exhumed and given a hero’s welcome in Ireland. But by 7;;7, the diaries were forensically

Queer
con!rme d to be authentic and Case- ment’s legacy became even more complex. The illegibility of Casement’s legacy, his "uctuation between the poles of exploiter and activist, objectifying fetish- C H A P T E R O N E+' ist and lover, freedom !ghter and predator, is now the legacy of queer studies. Within the framework of wildness , a disorde r of things that resists the sorting mechanisms applied by contemporary morality, !gures like Casement can !- nally be reckoned with. It Is the Spirit of the Unknown and the Disorde rly Wildness remains vital in its stubborn persistence, queerly vital. Can we use this queer vitality to navigate contempora ry terrains of contradiction, confronta- tion, and complicity? These terrains are not the same as the spaces where Taussig confronted his demons, nor are they completely free of the contradictions that Taussig chased through the colonial archive; rather the spaces of contradiction that fascinate us now within the economic, the cultural, and the social are stud- ded with the shards of the colonial order that has been smashed but that lives on as small pieces of discourse embedded in the choices we make, the ways we relate or cannot, and the way we encounte r otherness, success, and failure .

wildness, accordingly, inherits this ambivalence that inheres to the mirror of colonial production—it always runs the risk of
reproducing the terms that it seeks to displace. Going wild might well propel us into another realm of thought, action, being, and
knowing, but it could just as easily result in the reinstatement of an order of rationality that depends completely on the queer, the
Brown, and the marginal to play their role as mad, bad, and unruly. In Muñoz’s late/early work on wildness (late in his life, early in
his thinking on this topic), the wild or wildness functioned as a launching pad for a consid- eration of the “brown undercommons,”
and it was in this form of collectivity that Muñoz seemed to lodge his faith in a wildness that was not simply the underside of white
colonial fetishism and in a Brownness that exceeded its function as racial foil. We have located within its spaces of en- Engaging wildness is always risky.

counter, fantasy, and imagination not simply colonial geographies of madness and mayhem but also devious landscapes of desire .
Casement’s desire ran haphazardly through the colonial mission and was directed toward a so- cial justice project that intervened on behalf of the tortured and abused Native peoples of the Putumayo and the Congo and toward some of those same young and male people themselves. The legacy of Casement for Irish independence, for human rights discourse, and for gay rights is immensely complicated, and as Toíbín puts it in an article on Casement’s legacy, “we all bring our own con- cerns to Casement’s story.”-4 In other words, while one critic may want Case- ment to represent the instability of the text, and another may want to run the machinery of
Roger

empire through his complicated narrative, the gay reader thinks he !nds a hero but then must explain the crude racism that punctuates even parts of the text where he is deeply sympathetic to the victims of colonial bru- tality. Replete with commentary about the “African savage,” the very same Af- rican savage whom he paid for sex, in fact, Casement’s Black Diaries offer us a peek at the contours of wild desire and desire for wildness—it both escapes and participates in the colonial mission. So much for empire. And so much for the homosexual victim of empire served up a few years earlier in the form of Oscar Wilde, a dandy on a mar- tyr’s mission. Wilde and
Casement, like the “rice queens” about whom Eng- Beng Lim has written so eloquently, never did stand outside of history. They plopped down right in the middle of the civilizing mission and helped them- selves to boys and young men and cried foul when things did not go their way. Wilde’s snappy commentary on the dullness of heterosexual culture (“men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious, both are disap- pointed”-5 ), and Casement’s brief and fetishistic entries into his diaries were indeed a version of the notations of canonical Western literature taking the measure, literally, of the other, desiring him and wanting him dead at

Art, even today, provides us with witnesses to the wildness of queer lives and the queerness of the wild. It does so
the same time. And while some gay men "irted with wildness in the form of the Native other they came to save, others embraced wildness via aesthetic appropriation and folded the sound of chaos into more orderly music until a “new kind of wildness” emerged. -8

by offering us utopic visions but also by joining those visions to madness, failure, the temporality of the belated, darkness, and negativity. Take the work of Nick Cave, a contemporary Black
gay artist who builds what he calls “sound suits” from materials others had cast off Cave also classifies the —buttons, cans, feathers, lost objects , fetishes, and trinkets that he !nds and “rescues” from thri# shops and antique sales. Cave actually builds the suits to be worn, whimsical and wild and impractical as they may be, and once the body has been encased in the wondrous suit, Cave thinks of it as a kind of armor. Cave made his !rst suit in %&&7 a#er the Rodney King beating and created the suits to encase, protect, transform the wearer, imagined here as a Black male who requires a suit of armor in order to make it through the vio- lent landscape of surveillance and pro!ling.

suits, which make sound as they move, as a form of speech. He told the Washington Post: “I build this sort of suit of armor and by putting it on, I realized that I could make a sound from
moving in it. It made me think of ideas around protest and how we should be a voice and speak louder Cave does not say we should have a voice; he says we should be a voice. This notion of
speech as a mode of being, and sound as a form of protest, leavens the hypervisibility that marks the Black male body out for violence and marks it as violent all at once. Cave here deploys a wild and queer logic in that he cov- ers over one form of vulnerable visibility with another form of spectacle—the suits are loud,

They amplify the Black (gay) male body even as they encase it. Far from a closet marking off freedom from con!nement, the suits represent a wild remaking of the surface that both
literally, colorful, full of joy and chaos.

hides the body and remakes it as part of a different universe, a utopian space of play and pleasure. José Muñoz’s work has explained in many How is it possible for the wild or the space of utopia to appear through the resignification of the primitive and the animalistic in relation to the Black body as it does in Nick Cave’s work? How is Cave able to deploy the tropes that have limited the meaning of Blackness and Black queerness to other ends?

different ways exactly how, through such mechanics as “disidentification,” queer subjects are always involved in the pro- cess of “recycling and rethinking encoded meaning.” Muñoz 1:

continues: “The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universal- izing and
exclusionary machinations and recruits its workings to account for, include and empower minority identities and identifications” (*%). There is of course a risk in these reconstructions of the encoded messages—the risk is that the replaying of racialized tropes of wildness and primitivism, of disorderliness and belatedness, will simply "ow right back into the discursive machinery that produces bodies of color as perpetually out of line, out of time, out of whack, and out of work. But, as Muñoz’s work carefully shows, the risk is always worth taking even if and

when For Muñoz, wildness is this “spirit of the unknown and the disorderly” (7%&) and is not a spirit that “belongs” to Indigenous
it leads to failure .

contexts and gets stolen by others for other purposes; rather, it describes the space and the modes of knowing and unknowing that
emerge in the encounter between capital and chaos , privilege and struggle, myth and countermyth. Queerness, Muñoz’s legacy in-
structs us, is what keeps the horizon at bay and what runs to greet it. And wild- ness manages the space between here and now, then and there, and names what comes a#er nature, a#er queerness and before the world they

. Let wildness stand here as part of the critical vocabulary that Muñoz’s work leaves behind, as a name for the faltering efforts
have dreamed

of incorporation, as a name for all that quietly and in insignificant acts picks away at the fabric of hegemony. And let wildness speak
not in the language of order and explanation, but in beautiful, countermythologizing grammars of madness. Wildness is not the lack
of inscription; it is inscription that seeks not to read or be read, but to leave a mark as evidence of absence, loss, and death. Wildness
must take us into its mottled embrace and press us to stare into those places of slippage between language and experience and life
and death; wildness can give us access to the unknown and the disorderly, and we will enter there at our own risk

Even if you don’t buy the K by the end of the 2nr (which you will) then vote neg on presumption
because we’re about to dissolve the aff
 Marx K: Emory—v. AI

Cap K --- 1NC

Robot rights are corporate rights ---the 1AC masks capitalisms distribution of power and technology
while displacing corporate responsibility.
Abeba Birhane and Jelle van Dijk 20. Abeba Birhane is a PhD candidate in cognitive science at the school of computer
science at the University College Dublin and Lero, The Irish Software Research Centre. Jelle van Dijk is an assistant
professor in human-centered design at the University of Twente. “A Misdirected Application Of AI Ethics.” Noema
Magazine. 6-18-2020. https://www.noemamag.com/a-misdirected-application-of-ai-ethics/.

Many philosophers these days are talking about robots and AI and their rights on the basis of a scenario that is
essentially science fiction. If we look at AI as it exists today, we see a situation with altogether different ethical
concerns that have to do with the undemocratic distribution of power : who gets to use AI , who is merely a passive
recipient of it, who is suppressed or marginalized by it. In the current reality of AI, a call for robot rights becomes
perverse — amounting to arguing for more rights and less accountability for tech companies. So, let’s not talk about
hypothetical robots. Let’s talk about Siri, Nest, Roomba and the algorithms used by Google, Amazon, Facebook and
others. 

There are many beings — our fellow human beings — on this planet to whom we need to grant the moral status that
we wish to grant ourselves. Here is the real challenge for AI ethics. As it stands, the actual AI technologies that exist
today are not doing a good job of respecting human rights, to say the least. In fact, AI as developed and deployed by
big tech is driven by aggressive capitalist interests and stands in stark contrast to the wellbeing of the most
vulnerable individuals and communities . The ubiquitous and mass integration of machinic systems into the social,
cultural and political sphere is a practice that is creating and normalizing surveillance systems . These systems benefit
powerful corporations and serve as tools that often harm the poor and disfranchised.

The dominant futurist sci-fi conception of AI conceals ubiquitous and insidious existing AI hiding in plain sight. While
waiting for human-like robots, we forget to notice AI that has already morphed into the background of our day-to-day
life. These include various Internet of Things (IoT) devices, “smart” systems, and cameras and sensors that infiltrate
public and private life. A Roomba — compared to Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by a company in Hong Kong —
seems banal and ordinary. But it is fitted with a camera, sensors and software that enable it to build maps of the private
sanctuary of our home, track its own location and, in combination with other IoT devices, discern our habits, behaviors
and activities.

When an “intelligent” system exists in the form of invisible algorithmic code, rather than a physical machine like a
Roomba, we face even more difficulty realizing that we already live among integrated “intelligent” systems. And with a
system’s capability to hide its existence comes more insidious motives and applications and a higher potential for harm.
There are algorithmic systems deployed in banking, hiring, policing and other high-stakes situations that are already
sorting, monitoring, classifying and surveilling the social world under the justification of efficiency . But in reality, they
further reinforce historical injustices and social stereotypes and disadvantage those already at the margins of society.

Facebook’s algorithm is not merely altering our newsfeed and delivering targeted ads — not if one is not in a
privileged position. Crucial, life-altering potential information, like houses to rent or job opportunities, can sometimes
be hidden from people deemed “poor” or “unfit” for a job. As this is done without the knowledge and awareness of
those suffering algorithmic injustice, contesting such decisions is often out of the question . This means that while
corporations have ever more power to “make sense” of consumers and competitors, individual people are left in the
dark — we are measured and rated by technologies we cannot see, and we have no means to recruit or appropriate
them into our own sense-making practices. Instead of always empowering, AI is often oppressing, especially for those
who are already struggling.

Robotic and AI systems are inherently conservative forces that are inseparable from power and wealth . From search
engines that reinforce racist, misogynist and unjust historical patterns to “smart” devices that surveil, monitor and
commodify our existence, so much of technological innovation is based on distrust and punitive motives. Home
security devices, such as Amazon’s Ring, manufacture fear. Under the guise of crime fighting and community policing,
these devices invade public and private spaces to track and monitor “suspicious” people (often based on stereotypes),
while big tech profits.

Whether it is algorithmic discrimination, (mis)identification, invasion of privacy or any other harmful outcome
brought about through the integration of machines into the social and personal sphere, two things remain constant:
The least privileged individuals are disproportionally negatively impacted, and powerful individuals and corporations
benefit. We suspect when those developing and deploying AI systems (or for that matter those arguing for robot
rights) talk about “humanity,” they often forget such vulnerable groups and individuals. But it is precisely on the
welfare of such individuals and groups that energy and time should be spent by those who claim to be concerned with
AI ethics.

In October 2019, for example, Emily Ackerman, a wheelchair user, described how she got “trapped” on a road by a
Starship Technologies robot. These robots use curb ramps to cross streets, and one blocked her access to the
sidewalk. “They are going to be a major accessibility and safety issue,” she wrote in a tweet. This situation might raise
questions about whether these robots have the right to use public space and whether banning them infringes on their
rights.

The question of whether Adam, the robot in “Machines Like Me,” should be given rights — and whether “murdering”
him was right or wrong — is a false dilemma . Adam is obviously a fantasy, a conceptual construct. But the machine
that blocked Ackerman’s access to the sidewalk is real, and it put a real human being in real danger. Whose rights
should be prioritized? A machine used by a corporate company to monopolize public space for financial gain? That
would result in the dehumanization of marginalized individuals and communities.

What we find at the heart of the robot rights debate is a first-world preoccupation with abstract conceptions that are
far removed from concrete events on the ground. Theoretical discussions around concepts such as agency,
consciousness and intelligence dominate the debate. Such armchair mental gymnastics is not a bad endeavor in and of
itself, but it is detestable to consider it as a pressing ethical issue in light of real threats and harms imposed on
society’s most vulnerable . 

Of course, coherent theories and conceptual rigor are necessary as technology develops. But that should not be the
starting point. Instead, let’s start with the concrete real-life conditions of those who are disproportionally negatively
impacted by technology. We can then work our way to theory and abstraction, especially if we wish to claim to care
about the welfare of the oppressed. There are overlapping concerns between theory and concrete conditions, but
nonetheless, the former is a luxurious theoretical speculation only the privileged can afford, while the latter has to do
with survival in the context of this debate. A racist algorithm used to diagnose populations might be an intellectual
consideration for one person and a matter of life and death for another.

Another major issue for advocates of robot rights is the difficulty of drawing boundaries around the entity that would
need to be granted rights. In order for so-called autonomous vehicles to “recognize” roads, pedestrians and other
objects, for example, humans have to first annotate and label images and prepare “raw” data for training such
machines. This work, referred to as “microwork” or “crowd work” is exploitive, often poorly paid and sometimes not
paid at all. Nonetheless, for AI ethicists and theorists, the heated debate that revolves around autonomous vehicles is
mostly focused on hypothetical scenarios like the trolley problem rather than the conditions and welfare of micro-
workers.
Finally, with rights comes responsibility. Giving rights to robotic and AI systems allows responsibility and
accountability for machine-induced injustices orchestrated by powerful corporations to evaporate . In other words,
giving rights to robotic systems amounts to extending the rights of tech developers and corporations to control,
surveil and dehumanize mass populations . Big tech monopolies already master the art of avoiding responsibility and
accountability by spending millions of dollars on lobbying to influence regulations, through ambiguous and vague
language and various other loopholes. Treating AI systems developed and deployed by tech corporations as separate
in any way from these corporations, or as “autonomous” entities that need rights, is not ethics — it is irresponsible
and harmful to vulnerable groups of human beings. 

“AI bias” and “transparency” obscures intuitional analysis---what decisions AI must make outweigh
how AI decides.
Yarden Katz 20. Departmental fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. PhD in cognitive sciences at MIT,
and investigates intersections between cognition and biology. “AI, whiteness, and capitalism: interview with Yarden
Katz”. https://digilabour.com.br/2020/01/16/ai-whiteness-and-capitalism-interview-with-yarden-katz/

So, this book isn’t about the “ethics and bias of AI,” but rather about how industries like the one around the “ethics
and bias of AI” came to be. Why did these initiatives and discourses become so popular when they did? Why is
everyone from corporations to militaries to repressive governments to journalists and various nonprofit groups so
interested? What agendas are served by this preoccupation with “AI”? And which conversations are silenced by this
loud industry?

As I argue in the book, the framework of bias serves state and corporate power . It obscures historical and institutional
violence and instead directs our attention to “ machines ” or “algorithms.” For example, rather than ask why there is a
vast public-private industry around prisons and incarceration (the prison-industrial complex ) in the first place, the AI
experts ask: Are these systems “ biased ” against Black people? And is that better than the so-called “artisanal”
judgments of court judges?

The turn to bias hides the violence , the institutions that enable it , and their long history – a history that predates
computers, obviously.

The bias framework is good for the class of professional experts who want their share of the big AI pie. They can raise
lots of money for research on the bias of AI and get media attention for the work. Since the concept is, and as I argue
has always been, nebulous and shifting, you can stick “AI” with anything. So, the experts can say they’re doing “ AI and
X ” (where X could be policing , journalism, national security, environment, etc.). And this has led to many small
industries around the “bias,” “fairness,” and “transparency” of AI in the academic and policy circles that corporations
like Google and Microsoft have long dominated. Experts can debate whether this algorithm is more or less “fair” than
that one, without asking whether computing should have a role at all, let alone questioning the institutional envelope
in which computing is applied. These discourses dance around the obvious truth that algorithms are inert; they can’t
jump out of the computer and throw someone in prison. And computers can always be unplugged.

The preoccupation with bias , then, distracts from foundational questions such as: why are we talking about “AI” so
suddenly? And why is every nefarious foundation, corporation, and government so interested in funding all these AI
centers and experts? And is bias a useful frame at all, or does it conceal more than it illuminates?

Capitalism controls risk factors, health care, flexible resources, and intervening mechanisms –
breeds and catalyzes pandemics.
Whitney N. Laster Pirtle 20. PhD Department of Sociology, University of California Merced. Racial Capitalism: A
Fundamental Cause of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Inequities in the United States. PubMed Central (PMC).
August 2020. 47(4). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7301291/
A. Racial Capitalism Influences Multiple Disease Outcomes

First, the people of Detroit already endure multiple health problems, such as high rates of diabetes (National Medical
Association, 2015). An early report from Italy found that a large majority of COVID-19 fatalities occurred in those who
had comorbidities, or additional illnesses like diabetes and asthma, that amplified COVID-19 ’s wear on the body
(Ebhardt et al., 2020). To be clear, these racial differences in illnesses are not the result of biological or even behavioral
differences in race but a result of racist, capitalist systems that structure people’s lives.

B. Racial Capitalism Increases Multiple Disease Risk Factors

Racism and capitalism have, for example, mutually constructed racial residential segregation, which refers to the
physical separation of groups into residential contexts that are patterned by race (Rothstein, 2017). Racial residential
segregation has been

imposed by legislation, supported by major economic institutions, enshrined in the housing policies of the federal
government, enforced by the judicial system, and legitimized by the ideology of white supremacy that was advocated by
the church and other cultural institutions. (Williams & Collins, 2001, p. 405)

Residents in deprived neighborhoods have less access to green spaces and healthy, affordable foods; thus, restricting
healthy behaviors. Racial residential segregation means poor people of color are also forced to live near
manufacturing and other harmful toxins and wastes. People restricted to these areas endure multiple exposures to
harmful physical and social environments and increased stressful events, all of which demonstrate how multiple risk
factors shape health, including COVID-19.

A 2002 study by health researchers argued that racial and spatial relations were fundamental determinants of health in
Detroit (Schulz et al., 2002). Not only is Detroit one of most segregated cities in America, as mapping data shows (Cable,
2013), but Detroit also ranks in the top 20 major cities in the United States with highest rates of homelessness (Frohlich,
2019), and the majority of those persons are Black. Homelessness is another way that racial capitalism puts the poor,
older, and families of color at increased risk for consequences of COVID-19 (Torres, 2020). How can a person even
shelter in place with no shelter?

Given our capitalist, privatized insurance system in the United States, most homeless and unemployed have
inadequate access to quality health care (Ansell, 2017). Though, to be clear, America’s exceptionally unequal, extreme
neoliberal health care system puts the entire country at risk (Gaffney, 2020). Health care inequities are another risk
factor; the coronavirus does not have to discriminate across race and class, our health care system does that work on
its own. Racial and economic differences in testing and treatment rates (Farmer, 2020) is one mechanism that shapes
disparities. In a recent interview on PBS News Hour, Dr. Uché Blackstock shared the implications of racial bias in medical
encounters:

when black and brown people interface with the health care system, they often encounter provider bias. So, we know,
and it’s well-documented, that their pain is undertreated or their complaints are minimized. So, my concern is that,
when these patients present to emergency departments and hospitals in their areas with COVID-19 symptoms, that their
symptoms may be downplayed or they may not be taken seriously. And we do already have the data to support that
trend continuing to happen. (Blackstock, 2020)

C. Racial Capitalism Restricts Access to Flexible Resources That Buffer Negative Disease Outcomes

Additionally, racial capitalism is a fundamental cause because it shapes access to flexible resources . For example,
those with high socioeconomic status secure a superior set of knowledge, power, money, power, prestige, and
beneficial social connections, all of which can alleviate the consequences of the disease (Link & Phelan, 1995). Think
about who has access to up-to-date reports of COVID-19 that communicate important health education facts on
protection. The wealthy can also afford to pay others to do their grocery shopping or order online, meanwhile part-time
Amazon workers forced to be on the front line write pleas about having no paid time off (Guendelsberger, 2020). And,
why don’t employers value and protect the workers doing the essential jobs? Jason Hargrove, a Black bus driver in
Detroit, who was exposed to COVID-19 and lacked access to proper safety equipment wondered this himself shortly
before passing away from the disease (Witsil, 2020).

Racism also restricts those same crucial flexible resources, in addition to others even more racialized such as freedom.
For instance, unfreedoms, or the lack of control Black Americans have over their lives in the United States, whether it be
attributed to historical systems of slavery or mass incarceration today, puts them at heighted risks for mental and
physical health problems (e.g., Alexander, 2020; Phelan & Link, 2018). The vulnerability and unfreedoms of detained
populations at the border and in prisons, who are overwhelmingly Black and Brown and poor, increases their risk for
harsh consequences of COVID-19 (Morse, 2020). Throughout Michigan’s prison system, as reported on April 3 by WXYZ
Detroit, 184 incarcerated persons have already tested positive for COVID-19 (R. Jones, 2020).

D. Racial Capitalism Shapes Disease Outcomes Overtime Despite Implementation of Intervening Mechanisms

Finally, intervening mechanisms found to mitigate some health inequities, like increased public sanitation or health
education interventions, cannot fully eradicate the relationship between racism, poverty, and health because they are
replaced by other mechanisms , like gentrification and rent surges that leads to housing instability and homelessness .
In fact, mechanisms that sustain racial capitalism present a “ fundamental resilience in the face of changing proximate
causes” (Seamster & Ray, 2018, p. 330). The resilience can be evidenced in the revert back to previously mitigated
mechanisms that are once again contributing to disease disparities, such as poor water sanitization (look again no
further than the Flint water crisis).

Undeniably, racism and socioeconomic disadvantage have persistent, significant, multifaceted associations with poor
health. Indeed, historical research on smallpox reveals that if access to flexible basic resources , like food, medicine,
shelter, and treatment, excluded any subset of the population, the disease will continue to spread and continue to
kill (Mitchell, 2020). During the 1918 flu epidemic in Chicago, racist tropes were used to blame the spread of the disease
on Black residents, impeding a quality public health response (McDonald, 2020). History tells us that pandemics
exacerbate race and class inequalities.

Capitalism drives extinction.

Jamie Allinson et al 21. Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University and author of
The Age of Counter-revolution. China Miéville is the author of a number of highly acclaimed and prize-winning novels
including October: The History of the Russian Revolution. Richard Seymour is the author of numerous works of non-
fiction, His writing appears in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin. Rosie Warren
is an Editor at Verso and the Editor-in-Chief of Salvage. All are writing for the Salvage Collective. “The Tragedy of the
Worker: Toward the Proletarocene.” Introduction. July 2021. Verso EBook. ISBN: 9781839762963 //shree

This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker. From the vantage point of the
present, the history of capitalist development is, as Marx expected, the history of the development of a global working
class, the proletarianisation of the majority of the world’s population. But the very same process of that development
has brought us to the precipice of climate disaster. Our position, to recall Trotsky’s rationalisation of War Communism in
1920, is in the highest degree tragic.

It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be a tipping point of global warming, accelerating
the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially
habitable planet? Where once communists imagined seizing the means of production, taking the unprecedented
capacities of capitalist infrastructures and using them to build a world of plenty, what must we imagine after the
apocalypse has befallen us? What does it mean that as capitalism has become truly global, the gravediggers it has
created dig not only capitalism’s grave, but also that of much organic life on earth?

Our answers to these questions remain rooted in the politics of revolutionary communism. Our stance is not based on
the fantasy of a homeostatic nature that must be defended but on the critique of the capitalist metabolism – the
Stoffwechsel- that must be overthrown. Earth scientists are accustomed to speak in terms of ‘cycles’ by which
substances circulate in different forms: the water cycle, the rock cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the glacial -interglacial cycle,
the carbon cycle, and others. One way of registering the catastrophe of climate change is to see these cycles – most of
all, but not solely, the carbon cycle – as disordered , under- or over-accumulating. But this is to ignore the more
fundamental circuit of which these now form epicycles, like Ptolemy’s sub-orbits of the heavenly bodies: the circuit of
capital accumulation, M-C-M′.

This circuit accumulates profit and produces death . Neither is accidental. It is for this reason that the debates that
capitalist ruling classes permit among themselves on ‘ adaptation ’ versus ‘ mitigation ’ take place on false premises .
What is to be mitigated is the impact of climate change on accumulation, rendered through the ideology of ‘growth’ as
something that benefits everyone . What we are to adapt to are the parameters of accumulation, sacrificing just enough
islands, eco-systems, indigenous – and non-indigenous – cultures to maintain its imperatives for a period of time until
new thresholds must be crossed, and new life sacrificed to the pagan idol of capital. Already, capitalist petro-modernity
builds a certain quantum of acceptable death into its predicates: at the very least, the 8.7 million killed by fossil fuels
each year according to Harvard University are considered a price worth paying for the stupendous advantages of fossil
capital. And the sky can only keep going up, as deforestation , polar melt, ocean acidification , soil de-fertilisation and
more intense wildfires and storms tear the web of life into patches. If the necropolitical calculus of the Covid-19
pandemic appears crass, just wait until its premises are applied to climate catastrophe.

Vote neg for anti-capitalist commons – collectives should refuse commitments to competitive
principle and the straitjacket of what’s “realistic”
Rose 21 [Nick. PhD in Political Ecology from RMIT University. Executive Director of Sustain: The Australian Food
Network. From the Cancer Stage of Capitalism to the Political Principle of the Common: The Social Immune Response of
“Food as Commons.” Int J Health Policy Manag 2021. 3-31-21. DOI: 10.34172/ijhpm.2021.20 //shree]

Silvia Federici provides a longer historical perspective, noting that ‘commoning is the principle by which human beings
have organised their existence for thousands of years;’ and that to ‘speak of the principle of the common’ is to speak
‘not only of small -scale experiments [but] of large-scale social formations that in the past were continent -wide.’87
Hence a commons-based society is neither a utopia or reducible to fringe projects, and the commons have persisted
despite the many and continuing enclosures, ‘feeding the radical imagination as well as the bodies of many
commoners.’87 Federici acknowledges that commons and practices of commoning are diverse, that many are
susceptible to cooptation and many are consistent with the persistence of capitalism; indeed some, such as charities
providing social services (including foodbanks) during the years of austerity budgets in the United Kingdom (2010-2015),
reinforce and stabilise capitalism.87 What matters to Federici is the character and intentionality of the commons as
anti-capitalist, as ‘a means to the creation of an egalitarian and cooperative society…no longer built on a competitive
principle, but on the principle of collective solidarity [and commitments] to the creation of collective subjects [and]
fostering common interests in every aspect of our lives.’87

Federici’s analysis resonates with the political thought and proposals developed by Dardot and Laval in their 2018 work,
‘On Common: Revolution in the 21st century.’11 For Dardot and Laval, the common is likewise understood as a principle
of political struggle, a demand for ‘real democracy’ and a major driving force behind the emerging articulation of a
political vision and programme that transcends and overcomes the straitjacket logic of neoliberal ideological
hegemony and its ‘policy grammar’ which appears to foreclose all alternatives and lock us forever into a capitalist
realism in which ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’89 Eschewing
Bollier’s ‘triarchy’ of a market/state/ commons coexistence, Dardot and Laval argue for a politics of the common based
on an engaged citizenry that directly participates and deliberates in all decisions which impact it, and in the process
not merely transforms the institutions responsible for the management of services and allocation of resources, but
creates new institutions and new ways of being in the world.11

Dardot and Laval describe this form of politics as ‘instituent praxis’: the common, they argue, is ‘not produced but
instituted.’11 This acknowledges the conventional understanding of Ostrom, Bollier and others of ‘the commons’ as
residing in the rules – the laws – that a community establishes for the collective management and use of shared
resources, but extends it much further and in a more radical direction. The essence of the commons, they argue, is not
in the goods per se such as land or a forest or a seed bank ‘held in common,’ but rather in the process of their
establishment as well as the ongoing negotiation that will surround their use and governance. Hence, Dardot and Laval
distinguish the commons from the ‘rights’ tradition of property, arguing that ‘the commons are above all else matters of
institution and government…the use of the commons is inseparable from the right of deciding and governing. The
practice that institutes the commons is the practice that maintains them and keeps them alive and takes full
responsibility for their conflictuality through the coproduction of rules.’90 To ‘institute’ in this context should not be
misunderstood as ‘to institutionalise [or] render official;’ rather it is ‘to recreate with, or on the basis of, what already
exists.’ 90 This messy, conflictual and evolving process is what Dardot and Laval insist will ultimately bring about a
revolution, not in the form of a violent uprising or insurrection, but rather through the ‘ reinstitution of society’ via
the transformation of politics and economy from its current state of ‘representative oligarchy ’ to full participatory and
deliberative democracy.11 Such a vision is premised on a mass politicisation of society; in effect a return of mass
popular political contestation and a turn away from the postpolitical era of the neoliberal consumer.91-92

Commons solve innovation---viewing AI as a public resource to be shared, rather than enclosed via
digital commons is key.
Peter Verdegem 22. Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the Westminster School of Media and Communication and a
member of CAMRI (the Communication and Media Research Institute). “Dismantling AI capitalism: the commons as an
alternative to the power concentration of Big Tech.” AI & Society. 04/09/2022.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-022-01437-8

In most simple terms, the commons are the natural and cultural resources that are accessible to all members of
society. What is typical about them is that they are held in common, instead of being owned privately (Bollier 2014).
Public debate about the commons has become more mainstream due to environmental degradation and has been
popularised—amongst others—by the frst female winner (2009) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, Elinor
Ostrom. Her work includes Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990), in which she refutes the Tragedy of the Commons
thesis (Hardin 1968). She has inspired thinking about the design and organisation of cooperative alternatives beyond
markets and states.

Ostrom, together with her colleague Hess, has also worked on extending the debate about commons to knowledge.
Hess and Ostrom (2007) approached knowledge as a complex ecosystem that operates as a common, similar to what
Benkler (2006) theorised as commons-based peer production. In a similar vein, others have been working on the
concept of digital commons, which refers to the communal ownership and distribution of informational resources and
technology (Birkinbine 2018). Taking the ideas of knowledge and digital commons together opens up opportunities to
inquire about alternative structures for AI ownership and governance.

We are confronted with intense competition and concentration in AI capitalism, a situation similar to what has been
labelled the enclosure of the commons. According to Bollier (2014), the latter refers to a situation in which corporate
interests appropriate our shared wealth and turn it into expensive private commodities . This is happening also in the
digital sphere, whereby platforms control access to data and increasingly enclose the digital world within their private
sphere. Resisting this—by pushing for alternatives—can be done by stressing the importance of data and AI as public
goods, produced by society and its members (Taylor 2016; Viljoen 2021). The important task then is to explore how the
commons can be reclaimed.
While thinking about the commons has its roots in radical political economy, there is a disagreement about what the
end goal of its project should be. Some position the commons as an emergent value system that has the potential to
transform or even replace capitalism (Broumas 2017), while others perceive the value of the commons in how it can
respond to the excesses and exploitative tendencies of capitalism (De Angelis 2017). As such, the commons are not per
se a replacement of capitalism but rather something that can co-exist and couple with capital circuits through the
commodity firm.

4.2 Data commons

How can we think about the commons in the context of AI capitalism? First of all, we need to conceptualise the data
commons. Bria (2018) defnes data commons as a shared resource that enables citizens to contribute, access and use
data as a common good, without or with limited intellectual property restrictions. Instead of considering data as a
commodity or capital (Sadowski 2019), it can be thought of as a collective resource (Viljoen 2021). As such, it can
empower citizens and help them solve shared—common—problems.

The bigger picture of negotiation and agreements around data commons is part of calls for a New Deal on Data (Bria
2018). A report of the Decode project2 explains what such a deal on data could entail (Bass et al. 2018): First, there is a
need to push for more transparency, accountability and trust in data projects; Second, individuals should be given more
control and people should be empowered to decide how their data is collected and used; and, Last, it should be an
important ambition to unlock more value of data as a common good while protecting people’s privacy and encouraging
fair terms of use.

Of course, there are questions how to practically organise this. A lot of inspiring work on the data commons proposes
solutions in terms of data infrastructure and data trusts (Coyle 2020). A new data infrastructure should help dealing with
institutional and regulatory aspects of how data can be shared, what standards and policies should be set up and which
organisations and communities should be involved in contributing to and maintaining this data infrastructure. One
approach for an innovative data infrastructure has been developed and trialled in several countries: data trusts. Data
trusts can exist in many forms and models but the general principle is that they sit between an individual generating
data and a company or institution wanting to use that data (Delacroix and Lawrence 2019). In this system, control over
data is transferred to a third party, which can use the data for pre-defned purposes. Data trusts can use data from
diferent sources and allow to steward data use for all. Important in its governance is data solidarity, meaning that
corporate and public data shareholders share the benefts and risks of data access and production (Bunz and Vrikki
2022). Coming up with a system for sharing and giving access to data does not only beneft society; it is also necessary
for AI innovation (Hall and Pesenti 2017).

4.3 Compute capacity for the commons

Compute capacity is the second element of a commons approach, as an alternative to the power concentration of AI
capitalism. Some even position computing infrastructure as part of the data commons itself (Grossman et al. 2016). I
discussed already how crucial computing power is for the development of AI. Only Big Tech (and some elite universities)
have the resources to upgrade their infrastructure—contributing to an AI compute divide (Ahmed and Wahed 2020)—
while leading AI companies collect rent from and keep control over what is happening on their compute infrastructure
(Srnicek 2019). As an alternative, investments in common/public compute capacity could help society becoming less
dependent on the private infrastructure of Big Tech.

While the corporate sector often claims that public investment stifes innovation , (Mazzucato 2013) debunks this myth
and actually argues that the radical technologies behind, for example, the iPhone (e.g., GPS, touch screen display and
Siri) were all backed by government funding. Another example is Google’s search algorithm, which was publicly
funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The first supercomputers were used by universities (in the US and the UK) and governments should consider pooling
(more) resources to invest in (national or international) compute capacity that will drive the future of AI. Common
investment in AI compute capacity will also help to democratise AI (Riedl 2020), meaning that more people and
organisations can be involved in developing AI systems. This is particularly relevant for quantum computing, which is
considered crucial for revolutionary breakthroughs in the future of AI—the so-called quantum AI (Taylor 2020).
Public/common investment in computing infrastructure could also mean a de-commodifcation of compute capacity
and create a new public service that can be made available to society, accessible to different organisations, companies
and interest groups.

4.4 A commons approach to AI human capital

While not often considered as part of the data commons, an argument can be made about common investment in AI
human capital too. Having an upgraded computer infrastructure is one thing, AI human capital—the AI talent and human
resources that are necessary to develop AI innovations—is as important.

Given the high level of specialisation, success in research on machine/deep learning is dependent on people who have
accumulated large expertise through formal training (e.g., PhD) or years of applied work (Ahmed and Hamed 2020). As a
result, there is a growing gap between the increasing demand for AI expertise and the limited supply, resulting in a
talent scarcity (Metz 2017).

A commons approach to AI human capital would, for example, include to provide more funding for public IT services
and universities allowing them, respectively, to reduce outsourcing and facilitate more research labs to keep their
faculty members instead of being recruited by larger, corporate, organisations with deep pockets.

Investment in public infrastructure and resources can support commons-based economies and models of organisation
which allow to depart from an incentive structure focused on value creation rather than value extraction (Kostakis
and Bauwens 2014). However, this depends on new regimes in terms of ownership, control and governance.

First, a central aspect of envisioning an alternative political economy of AI is rethinking ownership . Regulation is often
proposed as a strategy to limit the market/monopoly power of Big Tech (Posner and Weyl 2018). Competition and
antitrust law, for example, could be used to break up the AI/tech giants. However, such a strategy might be
counterproductive, as the power of, for example, social media platforms is that they connect everyone in society.
Common ownership might be an alternative approach that could be more productive (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014).
There is a solid case for placing the technologies producing AI in public and collective ownership. It would mean that
communities have more control over how AI is produced and how the public can benefit from its services. The end
goal is to have a digital infrastructure that is available to and provides advantages for a broad range of stakeholders in
society, not just the AI behemoths.

Second, related to ownership is the aspect of promoting common governance. The goal here is the democratisation of
AI and this requires the decentralisation of power, back in the hands of the public (Posner and Weyl 2018; Riedl 2020).
If we consider AI as a GPT, which will alter the structures of society, we need to make sure there is democratic oversight
and control. After all, we have installed regulators that have the power to protect the interests of citizens in other
sectors, such as postal services, electricity, broadcasting and telecommunication. The services provided by AI are so
crucial in everyday life, making it necessary that society has a greater say about it.

Inspiration for alternative structures in terms of ownership, control and governance can be found in the platform
cooperativism model (Scholz 2017), which allows involvement from multiple stakeholders in the ownership,
development and management of platforms.

Finally, we need to come up with a new vocabulary when thinking about AI systems and how they deliver benefits to
society. Instead of corporate discourses portraying AI as Tech for Good, boosting innovation and entrepreneurship, it
makes sense to perceive AI infrastructures as a computational utility, subject to democratic control (Mosco 2017).
Dyer-Witheford and colleagues (2019) elaborate on this and push for considering AI as a communal utility. This means
that communities and workers should be involved in determining what sort of work should or should not be automated,
and thus call for a genuine determination by the general intellect in the design of AI. In this general intellect, collective
cooperation and knowledge become a source of value (Terranova 2000). The proposed principles of common ownership
and governance should be central in developing AI as a communal utility.

5 Concluding remarks

This article analyses AI capitalism. I discuss the contradictions between visions of AI as a General Purpose Technology
(GPT) generating benefts for society at large and the reality of AI capitalism, characterised by commodifcation,
extraction and a power concentration. These aspects are behind the unstoppable expansion of tech platforms and
monopolisation in the feld of AI. This leads to a winnertake-all scenario, in which AI giants follow a strategy of enclosure:
controlling access to data, talent and compute capacity and enclosing more of the world within their private sphere
(Couldry and Mejias 2019). As a result, few players have the power to make decisions about how AI is developed and
used and what its impact on society will be. It prevents the culture of AI (Elliott 2019) being accessible for all (Verdegem
2021).

Analysing the political economy of AI makes clear we need to rethink AI ownership and governance, and how data but
also human resources and computing infrastructure can be shared and made accessible to a broader range of
stakeholders in society. To challenge the power concentration of Big Tech, we need to come up with alternatives.

In this article, I propose the framework of the commons for helping to imagine alternatives in the context of AI
capitalism. The commons is an approach that allows us to rethink collective ownership and governance regimes and
empower more groups in society to have control over and a say in the development of AI and how the beneftis of AI
can be shared with society at large. Instead of the GPT AI resulting in Big Tech as winners and most of us losers, a
commons approach allows more groups in society to be among the winners of AI innovation.

The movement towards data and AI commons should be combined with more general initiatives to push back against
the commodifcation of and extraction in everyday life . Establishing a more equal and inclusive society depends on the
democratisation of tech and the involvement of diferent types of stakeholders (Posner and Weyl 2018). Citizens, civil
society and other organisations should have a more prominent role in the development and management of AI, which
could take form along the lines of the multi-stakeholder cooperative model (Standing 2019). The latter refers to a
model of organisation (co-ops) that allow for governance by representatives of diferent stakeholder groups within a
certain organisation.

Cap K
2---Education---the only question is if our assumptions are desirable. Policy frameworks make
slavery and extinction inevitable.
Richard Falk 21. Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Fellow of the Orfalea Center of
Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Global Solidarity: Toward a Politics of Impossibility.”
Opening Essay for a GTI Forum. https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/global-solidarity-falk

We must start by rejecting conventional foreclosures of the imagination . We cannot accept that politics is “the art of
the possible” if the “ possible ” remains circumscribed by the play of current forces of stasis, confining the idea of
change to policy shifts at the margin or—at the most ambitious—elite-driven national revolutions . The structures of
state and market remain essentially untouched and continue to run the show. As long as these constraints are not
removed, the Great Transition will be stymied . The first challenge is to find effective ways to subvert and transform
these primordial structures. Meeting this challenge starts with liberating the mind from ingrained conventions that
solidify the ideological biases of modernity .
If we carefully consider our own lives, we are likely to appreciate how many epochal public happenings had been
previously deemed “ impossible ,” or only seemed possible after the fact. A potent illustration of the tyranny of a status
quo bias is Winston Churchill’s derisive attitude toward Gandhi during the early stages of the rise of Indian nationalism.
Dismissive of any threat to Indian colonial rule, Churchill described Gandhi as a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a
seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps
of the Viceregal palace.” The great British war leader displayed his attachment to a Western understanding of power
that had little insight into historical circumstances vulnerable to anti-colonial nationalism.

Similar patterns of the seemingly impossible happening are evident in contemporary history, such as the peaceful
ending of the Cold War followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union; the American defeat in the Vietnam War despite
overwhelming military superiority; China’s half-century rise from mass impoverishment and backwardness to prime
geopolitical challenger, including threatening Western mastery of innovative technology such as AI, G5 connectivity,
robotics, and genetic engineering; and the abandonment of apartheid by South Africa in the face of nonviolent
resistance from within and anti-apartheid solidarity from without.

What these examples demonstrate is that our understanding of the scope of the possible has been artificially
circumscribed in ways that protect the interests of various elites in the maintenance of the status quo, making it seem
reckless and futile to mount structural challenges however justified they may be morally or bio-politically. Such
foreclosures of imagined futures have been key to the protection of institutions like slavery, discrimination, and
warfare but often remain limited in scope to specific locales or policy areas. The uniqueness of the Anthropocene is to
restrict the possible to unsustainable and dysfunctional structures and modes of behavior, while bringing to a head the
question of finding more viable ways of organizing life on the planet and living together in a manner that protects
future generations.

Such foreclosures of the imagination inflict damage both by shortening our temporal vision and by constraining our
understanding of useful knowledge. Despite what science and rationality tell us about the future, our leaders—and,
indeed, most of us—give scant practical attention to what is needed to preserve and improve the life prospects for
future generations. Given the scope and depth of the challenges, responsible anthropocentrism in the twenty-first
century should incorporate a sense of urgency to temporal axes of concern. We now need a “politics of the
impossible,” a necessary utopianism that stands as an avowal of the attainability of the Great Transition . We must
begin by interrogating the semantics of the possible as a cultural, political, economic, and ideological construct
binding humanity to a system that is increasingly bio-politically self-destructive for the species and its natural habitat.

Closely connected to this foreclosure of our temporal vision has been a scientifically conditioned epistemology
asserting the limits of useful knowledge . Within the most influential epistemic communities, an Enlightenment
ideology prevails that sets boundaries limiting productive intellectual inquiry . The positive legacies of the
Enlightenment in grounding knowledge on scientifically verified evidence rather than cultural superstitions and
religiously guided prejudice and dogma are real and important, but there have been costs as well. Notably, a bias
against subjectivity discourages normative inquiry and advocacy, which is dismissed as “non-scientific.” The noted
Confucian scholar Tu Wei-Ming has powerfully criticized the impact of what he calls “instrumental rationalism ” on the
capacity of Western civilization to embrace the value of empathy , which he views as integral to human dignity and
humane governance .

We need a moral epistemology to achieve responsible anthropocentrism, exploring right and wrong, and distinguishing
between desirable and diminished futures, not as matters of opinion, but as the underpinnings of “normative
knowledge.” Universities, split into specialized disciplines and privileging work within the Enlightenment paradigm, are
largely oblivious to the need for a holistic understanding of the complexities and solidarities with which we must
grapple in order for humanity to extricate itself from present structures that divide and fragment the human
experience, strangling possibilities.
It may be helpful to distinguish “the feasible,” “the necessary,” and “the desirable” to further illuminate “the pursuit of
the impossible.” In short, “the feasible ” from the perspective of the status quo seems incapable, under the best of
circumstances, of achieving “ the necessary ” and “ the desirable .” We will need to pursue “ the desirable ” to mobilize
the capabilities needed to engage effectively in realizing “ the necessary .”

If existing conditions continue, the bio-political destiny of the human species seems destined for dark times. In the
past, before the Nuclear Age, we could ignore the future and address the material, security, and spiritual needs of
bounded communities, and success or failure had no ramifications for larger systems. Now we must find ways to attend
to the whole , or the parts will perish and likely destroy one another in the process . St. Francis found some fitting
words for such an emancipatory path: “Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are
doing the impossible.”

4---Reciprocity---Fiating attitudinal, durable enforcement of personhood despite lack of political will

and the ongoing effects of Republican court packing is utopian. It doesn’t reflect pragmatic reality.
Neg gets the equal right to test desirability, not feasibility. Standards for realistic are capitalism.
Eugene McCarraher 19. Associate Professor of Humanities at Villanova University, PhD in US Cultural and Intellectual
History from Rutgers University; The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity,
11/12/19, p. 15-18
Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, excluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed
“realism.” Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications. The book should make these clear

enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics. As
the master science
of desire in advanced capitalist nations , economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political
imaginations , patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs .
Under the regime of neoliberalism , it has been the chief weapon in the arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as “a war on
the imagination ,” a relentless assault on our capacity to envision an end to the despotism of money .24 Insistent, in
Margaret Thatcher’s ominous ukase, that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, our corporate plutocracy has been busy imposing

its own beatific vision on the world: the empire of capital , with an imperial aristocracy enriched by the labor of a
fearful , overburdened , and cheerfully servile population of human resources. Every avenue of escape from accumulation and
wage servitude must be closed , or better yet, rendered inconceivable ; any map of the world that includes utopia
must be burned before it can be glanced at. Better to follow Miller’s wisdom: we already inhabit paradise, and we can never make ourselves fit to live in it if we obey the avaricious
and punitive sophistry professed in the dismal pseudoscience. The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of

rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics must
be resisted and supplanted . Economics must be challenged , not only as a sanction for injustice but also as a specious
portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history . As a legion of anthropologists and historians have
repeatedly demonstrated, economics, in Graeber’s forthright dismissal, has “little to do with anything we observe when we
examine how economic life is actually conducted .” From its historically illiterate “myth of barter ” to its shabby and degrading
claims about human nature, economics is not just a dismal but a fundamentally fraudulent science as well, akin, as Ruskin wrote in Unto

This Last, to “ alchemy , astrology , witchcraft , and other such popular creeds.”25 Ruskin’s courageous and bracing indictment of economics arose from his Romantic

imagination, and this book partakes unashamedly of his sacramental Romanticism. “ Imagination” was, to the Romantics, primarily a form of vision, a mode of realism ,

an insight into the nature of reality that was irreducible to, but not contradictory of, the knowledge provided by scientific
investigation. Romantic social criticism did not claim the imprimatur of science as did Marxism and other modern
social theories, yet the Romantic lineage of opposition to “disenchantment” and capitalism has proved to be more resilient and humane than
Marxism, “progressivism,” or social democracy. Indeed, it is more urgently relevant to a world hurtling ever faster to
barbarism and ecological calamity . I wrote this book in part out of a belief that many on the “left” continue to share far too much with
their antagonists: an ideology of “progress” defined as unlimited economic growth and technological development ,
as well as an acceptance of the myth of disenchantment that underwrites the pursuit of such expansion. The
Romantic antipathy to capitalism, mechanization, and disenchantment stemmed not from a facile and nostalgic desire to return to the past,
but from a view that much of what passed for “progress” was in fact inimical to human flourishing : a specious
productivity that required the acceptance of venality , injustice , and despoliation ; a technological and organizational
efficiency that entailed the industrialization of human beings ; and the primacy of the production of goods over the
cultivation and nurturance of men and women. This train of iniquities followed inevitably from the chauvinism of what William Blake called “single vision,” a blindness to the enormity of

reality that led to a “Babylon builded in the waste.”26 Romantics redefined rather than rejected “ realism ” and “progress,” drawing on the
premodern customs and traditions of peasants, artisans, and artists: craftsmanship , mutual aid , and a conception of property that harkened

back to the medieval practices of “ the commons .” Whether they believed in some traditional form of religion or translated it into secular idioms of
enchantment, such as “art” or “beauty” or “organism,” Romantic anticapitalists tended to favor direct workers’ control of production ; the

restoration of a human scale in technics and social relations ; a sensitivity to the natural world that precluded its
reduction to mere instrumental value; and an apotheosis of pleasure in making sometimes referred to as poesis, a union of reason, imagination, and creativity, an ideal
of labor as a poetry of everyday life, and a form of human divinity. In work free of alienation and toil, we receive “the reward of creation,” as William Morris described it through a character

in News from Nowhere (1890), “the wages that God gets, as people might have said time agone.”27 Rendered
gaudy and impoverished by the tyranny of
economics and the enchantment of neoliberal capitalism , our sensibilities need replenishment from the sacramental
imagination. As Americans begin to experience the initial stages of imperial sclerosis and decline , and as the advanced
capitalist world in general discovers the reality of ecological limits , we may find in what Marx called the “prehistory” of our species a perennial and
redemptive wisdom. We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity ; we might be rescued by the joyful
and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation. No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of pecuniary enchantment. But there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

3 --- The Bias link – turns Advantage 2 --- Framing bias elimination as progressive hijacks the alt---
the 1AC is a corporate tactic to reify oppressive structures and obscure instructions.
Yarden Katz 20. Departmental fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. PhD in cognitive sciences at MIT,
and investigates intersections between cognition and biology. “AI, whiteness, and capitalism: interview with Yarden
Katz”. https://digilabour.com.br/2020/01/16/ai-whiteness-and-capitalism-interview-with-yarden-katz/

KATZ: Carceral-positive logic is a logic that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the carceral state but instead gives it a
progressive veneer. It’s different from what most people would think of as “pro-carceral” discourses, such as Donald
Trump calling for “law and order” and for political protesters to be beaten up, or Jair Bolsonaro longing for the
dictatorship days in Brazil. All that is overtly pro-police, pro-prisons.

Carceral-positive logic, on the other hand, would include things like making companies’ facial recognition software
“less biased” against marginalized communities – while presenting this a social justice project that tries to be
“intersectional” with respect to race, gender, and class. Whatever the intentions of individuals doing this work, this
argument has harmful consequences . It suggests that systems can be more equitable or just by making sure that
computing products – built for incarceration and surveillance – are better at recognizing those who are most
criminalized. Indeed, Google has preyed on unhoused Black people in Atlanta in order to collect less racially biased data,
and a company providing facial recognition to the Israeli government for tracking Palestinians has made a similar
argument for its products. So, corporations are embracing this bias argument, and academics working alongside
corporations have framed bias reduction as a step towards social justice.

The think tanks that you mentioned contribute to this line of work (though they are by no means the only ones). It’s
worth noting that such centers, which dominate the discussion on “AI” and “big data,” are basically corporate
constructions . They are embedded within and sponsored the corporate computing world, a world they’re ostensibly
there to critique. Their culture, tactics, and methods are corporate. These centers offer us the same old neoliberal
model of “partnerships” and “stakeholders” according to which linking arms with corporations and the state is
somehow always beneficial. So while they recently claim to be fighting for social justice, their work, omissions, and
analyses tell a different story.

When it comes to carceral state violence, these centers’ proposals don’t question the carceral system but in practice
even imply augmenting it – for example, by calling for more data to be collected and for the data to be “ audited ” by
interdisciplinary experts. These proposals extend the experts’ sphere of influence: since AI is apparently used
everywhere, the new AI experts must be called in to audit, supervise, curate, and manage these applications. And true
to the neoliberal model , these centers foster more connections between academia, governments, and industry . All
this pretty much guarantees that the prison-industrial complex won’t be challenged .

Another problem with these centers is how they co-opt and hijack activist initiatives, drowning out the voices of
activists when it comes to topics such as incarceration. My book was written before last summer’s immense uprising
against carceral state violence and for Black lives, prior to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In many
ways, the problem of co-optation has gotten worse since.

This is a point where we can see how AI shifts like Robinson’s racial regime, adapting in response to social struggles. So
initially, there was much talk about how “AI” will free us from labor and make everybody rich. That is still going on, but
then the “ethics” layer also got added, alongside with abstract debates about robots replacing people, or ethical
conundrums arising from self-driving cars (and other problems that philosophers enjoy). We still hear a lot about
“ethics,” but later “bias” took a more prominent place – especially “racial bias” and “gender bias.” Now, as global
struggles against incarceration intensify, the talk of “bias” is losing traction because it’s clearly inadequate for
describing this violent world – and so the AI experts are turning to “power.” So most recently, it’s not about being
“ethical” or “unbiased,” but rather about the distribution of “power.” But simply replacing “bias” with “power” doesn’t
change anything if you don’t raise the more fundamental questions about AI and the institutions that sustain it. I view
all of these examples as adaptations of AI.

1---Cap stops tech from saving the world because of Jevons Paradox---BUT social system changes
solve with current tech.
Jeff Sparrow 11/4/21. Writer, editor, and broadcaster who works at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the
University of Melbourne. "Elites Won’t Save the Planet — We Need a Mass Movement". 11-4-2021.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/elites-fossil-fuel-delegates-cop26-conference-climate-crisis-mass-movement

Increasingly, mainstream commentators enthuse about the prospect of Big Business adopting new technologies to pull
the planet back from a climate disaster. But Big Business isn’t going to save the world.

A Question of Consumption

The problem isn’t simply that corporations often lie, using environmental rhetoric to “greenwash” their images. It goes
much deeper than that.

Capitalism must grow. Its blind search for profit might bring disaster, but it will still sniff out opportunities for
expansion, indifferent to experience or consequences. As a result, even measures that might alleviate the
environmental crisis become immediately weaponized against the planet .

For instance, the panels that produce solar electricity have improved at a remarkable rate, offering a tantalizing glimpse
of a future powered by the sun’s limitless power. The advances made in renewables and associated technologies (such
as battery storage) will play a huge role in any serious response to the environmental crisis.

Yet researchers Richard York and Shannon Elizabeth Bell caution that capitalism has already undergone many previous
energy transitions: from biofuels (such as wood) to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to natural gas, and now, potentially,
from fossil fuels to renewables. They warn that no established energy source has undergone a sustained decline
merely because a new one became available . More typically, rather than replacing the older source, the new source is
immediately used to intensify growth and thus more overall energy use.

In many cases, the addition of new sources has actually increased consumption of previous types of energy. The
embrace of fossil fuels led, in relative terms, to a decline in biofuels. Yet, in absolute terms, the use of petroleum in
logging trucks and mills greatly intensified deforestation and thus produced a net increase in the use of wood. Similarly,
the rise of petroleum did not curtail trade in whale oil, but instead fostered a dramatic intensification of whaling —
partly because whale ships became much more efficient, and partly because the industry developed new uses (such as
in margarine) for its products.

It remains to be seen whether renewables will have the same effect. The available figures show a significant shift to
renewable energy in terms of new capacity, with investment in renewables outpacing fossil fuels. Yet, internationally,
the percentage of renewable energy as a proportion of electricity and other energy has been very slow to change.
Renewable energy consumption has increased — but overall energy consumption has increased far, far more. There’s
no mystery as to why.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons published a book entitled The Coal Question. The titular query centered on Britain’s
response to the rapid depletion of its coal stocks, with the book most remembered today because of Jevons’s rejection
of claims that technologically driven energy efficiency would alleviate the shortage. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to
suppose,” he said, “that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is
the truth.”

What he meant was that efficiency decreases price and thus encourages use , leading to a rebound that wipes out the
supposed savings . The so-called Jevons Paradox has been demonstrated over and over again in the years since. A
prosaic example involves refrigerators, with the improvements of new models corresponding not to a decline in the
overall environmental impact of white goods, but rather fostering a huge boom in the industry, and so a massive total
rise in both energy consumption and carbon dioxide output. Because capital must expand, technologies that, in the
abstract, should reduce resource use become the basis for a reorganization that enables fresh accumulation.

The first generation of computer users will remember the claim that screen use would make paper redundant —
something that palpably failed to occur, as computerization provided fresh markets supplying home and office printers.

Likewise, the invention of synthetic alternatives did not mean that natural fibers were no longer used — instead, their
production massively expanded in parallel with the new options.

Enthusiasts for “green capitalism” insist that, as economies mature, their “material footprint” — the measure of their
environmental impact — declines. In the digital era, they say, technological progress decouples capitalist growth from
ecological damage, allowing the system to expand safely into infinity.

Yet while some individual economies have reduced their dependence on nonrenewable resources, they’ve generally
done so by outsourcing dirty industries. As a meta-analysis of 179 studies between 1990 and 2019 put it, “no evidence
for the needed kind of decoupling currently exists .” On the contrary, the materials used by the global economy passed
100 billion tonnes per year — a disturbing new record, and the exact opposite of “dematerialization.”

“Not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from
environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown,” explained a
major 2019 report for the European Environmental Bureau, “but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling
appears unlikely to happen in the future.”

Think of electric vehicles (EVs) — a mode of transport far less destructive than internal-combustion engines. Like solar
power, EVs will surely play an important role in a sustainable future. Under capitalism, however, they’ve been seized
upon by the automotive industry to preserve and extend car culture. Rather than reducing waste and decoupling
transportation from material inputs, the automotive companies see opportunities to renew old markets in Europe and
North America, and to open fresh ones in places such as China.

Their success in selling high-tech private vehicles will, accordingly, forestall sustainable options such as bicycles and
public transport, push cities to maintain the wasteful infrastructure designed around cars, and foster a new and ruinous
race for lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and other rare materials needed for batteries .

Against Corporate Environmentalism

If the tendency of capitalism to respond to a crisis with more capitalism gives the system its disastrous momentum, it
also provides the capitalists themselves with insulation from the consequences of their actions. The intensified
commodification resulting from each fresh calamity creates opportunities for those with disposable wealth to ensure
that they and their loved ones remain more or less unaffected.

The planet might be growing unbearably hot, but if you have the money, you can still live in air-conditioned comfort in a
pleasant location. In the midst of mass extinctions , luxury eco-resorts and private zoos allow the well-to-do to gaze on
tigers, orangutans, and elephants. That’s why, even a looming apocalypse will not, in and of itself, motivate them to
change course.

The technology to prevent climate change exists — and it’s getting better all the time. What we don’t have is a social
system that allows us to use it.

The failure of world leaders to deliver meaningful political outcomes at COP26 will give “green” entrepreneurs more
room to posture as a meaningful alternative. In that context, it’s crucial for activists not to fall in behind corporate
environmentalism, but rather to build an independent movement , one that prioritizes human need over capitalist
logic.

2---Shareholder value maximization ensures green assets can’t solve.

Katharina Pistor 9/21. Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School. “The Myth of Green
Capitalism.” Project Syndicate. 9/21/2021. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/green-
capitalism-myth-no-market-solution-to-climate-change-by-katharina-pistor-2021-09
NEW YORK – Heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires are devastating communities around the world, and they will
only grow more severe. While climate-change deniers remain powerful, the need for urgent action is now recognized
well beyond activist circles. Governments, international organizations, and even business and finance are bowing to the
inevitable – or so it seems. In fact, the world has wasted decades tinkering with carbon trading and “green” financial
labeling schemes, and the current vogue is merely to devise fancy hedging strategies (“carbon offsets”) in defiance of
the simple fact that humanity is sitting in the same boat. “Offsetting” may serve individual asset holders, but it will do
little to avert the climate disaster that awaits us all. The private sector’s embrace of “green capitalism” appears to be yet
another gimmick to avoid a real reckoning . If business and finance leaders were serious, they would recognize the need
to change course drastically to ensure that this planet remains hospitable for all of humanity now and in the future. This
is not about substituting brown assets for green ones, but about sharing the losses that brown capitalism has imposed
on millions and ensuring a future even for the most vulnerable. The notion of green capitalism implies that the costs of
addressing climate change are too high for governments to shoulder on their own, and that the private sector always
has better answers. So, for advocates of green capitalism, public-private partnership will ensure that the transition from
brown to green capitalism will be cost-neutral. Efficiently priced investments in new technologies supposedly will
prevent humanity from stepping over into the abyss. But this sounds too good to be true, because it is . Capitalism’s
DNA makes it unfit to cope with the fallout from climate change, which in no small part is the product of capitalism
itself. The entire capitalist system is premised on the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses – not in any
nefarious fashion, but with the blessing of the law. The law offers licenses to externalize the costs of despoiling the
planet to anybody who is smart enough to establish a trust or corporate entity before generating pollution. It
encourages the off-loading of accrued environmental liabilities through restructuring in bankruptcy. And it holds entire
countries hostage to international rules that privilege the protection of foreign investors’ returns over their own
people’s welfare. Several countries have already been sued by foreign companies under the Energy Charter Treaty for
trying to curb their carbon dioxide emissions. Two-thirds of total emissions since the Industrial Revolution have come
from just 90 corporations . Yet even if the managers of the world’s worst polluters were willing to pursue rapid
decarbonization , their shareholders would resist . For decades, the gospel of shareholder value maximization has
reigned supreme , and managers have known that if they deviate from the orthodoxy , they will be sued for violating
their fiduciary duties. No wonder Big Business and Big Finance now advocate climate disclosures as a way out. The
message is that shareholders, not managers, must spur the necessary behavioral change; solutions must be found
through the price mechanism, not through science-based policies. Left unanswered is the question of why investors with
an easy exit option and plenty of hedging opportunities should care about the disclosure of future harm to some
companies in their portfolio. There is obviously a need for more drastic changes, such as carbon taxes, permanent
moratoria on extracting natural resources, and so forth. These policies are often dismissed as mechanisms that would
distort markets, and yet they idealize markets that don’t exist in the real world. After all, governments have lavishly
subsidized fossil-fuel industries for decades, spending $5.5 trillion (both pre- and post-tax), or 6.8% of global GDP, in
2017. And should fossil-fuel companies ever run out of profits to offset these tax breaks, they can simply sell themselves
to a more profitable company, thereby rewarding their shareholders for their loyalty. The script for these strategies has
long been written in the law of mergers and acquisitions. 1 But the mother of all subsidies is the centuries-old process of
legally encoding capital through property, corporate, trust, and bankruptcy law. It is law, not markets or firms, that
protects the owners of capital assets even as they saddle others with enormous liabilities. Advocates of green capitalism
are hoping to continue this game. That is why they are now lobbying governments to subsidize asset substitution, so
that as the price of brown assets declines, the price of green ones will rise to compensate the asset holders. Again, this is
what capitalism is all about. Whether it represents the best strategy for ensuring the planet’s habitability is an entirely
different question. Instead of tackling such questions, governments and regulators have once again succumbed to the
siren song of market-friendly mechanisms. The new consensus focuses on financial disclosure because that path
promises change without having to deliver it. (It also happens to generate employment for entire industries of
accountants, lawyers, and business consultants with powerful lobbying arms of their own.) Not surprisingly, the result
has been a wave of greenwashing. The financial industry has happily poured trillions of dollars into green-labeled assets
that turned out not to be green at all . According to a recent study, 71% of ESG-themed funds (supposedly reflecting
environmental, social, or governance criteria) are negatively aligned with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. We
are running out of time for such experiments. If greening the economy was really the goal, the first step would be to
eliminate all direct subsidies and tax subsidies for brown capitalism and mandate a halt to carbon “proliferation.”
Governments should also place a moratorium on shielding polluters, their owners, and investors from liability for
environmental damages. Incidentally, these moves would also remove some of the worst market distortions around.

3---It can’t scale up fast enough.

Jason Hickel 10-27-20. Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of
Economics, and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona. Associate Editor of the journal World Development and serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN
Human Development Report, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, and the Harvard-Lancet Commission
on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. "Degrowth: A response to Branko
Milanovic — Jason Hickel," Jason Hickel, https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2017/11/19/why-branko-milanovic-is-wrong-
about-de-growth

6. Green growth is not a thing Milanovic believes that technology will come to our rescue, and make growth “green”.
Unfortunately there is a strong consensus against this assumption . We have reviewed the relevant empirical evidence
here (“Is green growth possible?”), examining both CO2 emissions and resource use. Briefly, about CO2, the question
is not whether GDP can be decoupled from emissions (we know that it can be), the question is whether this can be
done fast enough to stay within safe carbon budgets while growing GDP at the same time . And the answer to this is
no. More growth entails more energy use, and more energy use makes it all the more difficult to cover that demand
with renewables. The only scenarios that succeed in reducing emissions fast enough to keep us under 1.5 or 2C
involve a reduction in resource and energy use (in other words, degrowth). I discuss this in more depth here. This 2020
review examines 835 empirical studies and finds that decoupling alone is not adequate to achieve climate goals; it
requires what the authors themselves refer to as “degrowth” scenarios. This paper in Nature Sustainability comes to
similar conclusions. As for resources: resource use continues to rise along with GDP (despite significant efficiency
improvements, and a significant shift to services and knowledge as share of GDP), and indeed all existing models
indicate that absolute decoupling is unlikely to happen, even under strong policy conditions. See here and here for
more. Ward et al (2016) find that even the most optimistic projections of efficiency improvements yield no absolute
decoupling in the medium and long term . The authors state: “this result is a robust rebuttal to the claim of absolute
decoupling”; “decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary.
Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible… because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by
physical limits.” Schandl et al (2016) find the same thing. Even in their best-case scenario projection, global material
consumption still grows steadily. The authors conclude: “Our research shows that while some relative decoupling can
be achieved in some scenarios, none would lead to an absolute reduction in energy or materials footprint.” Our
review was published in 2019, and the literature on this has grown since: i.e., here and here… the latter paper reviews
179 studies on decoupling published since 1990 and finds “no evidence of economy-wide, national or international
absolute resource decoupling, and no evidence of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability.” Here is
a 2020 meta-analysis of all available data on GDP and resource use, which comes to the same conclusion. * In sum, it
is irrational to hope, against the evidence, that our existing economic system will deliver the development outcomes
we want while at the same time reversing ecological breakdown. We need to be smarter than that. Degrowth
provides an empirically-informed alternative: a pathway to reducing excess resource and energy use while at the
same time ensuring flourishing lives for all. Given the stakes of the crisis we face, we should be open to fresh thinking.

B --- Democratization --- AI as a shared good enables for community input and control over AVs ---
means they’re more attuned to localities and how the public can gain from innovation --- that’s
Verdegem --- finishing it
4.2 Data commons

How can we think about the commons in the context of AI capitalism? First of all, we need to conceptualise the data
commons. Bria (2018) defnes data commons as a shared resource that enables citizens to contribute, access and use
data as a common good, without or with limited intellectual property restrictions. Instead of considering data as a
commodity or capital (Sadowski 2019), it can be thought of as a collective resource (Viljoen 2021). As such, it can
empower citizens and help them solve shared—common—problems.

The bigger picture of negotiation and agreements around data commons is part of calls for a New Deal on Data (Bria
2018). A report of the Decode project2 explains what such a deal on data could entail (Bass et al. 2018): First, there is a
need to push for more transparency, accountability and trust in data projects; Second, individuals should be given more
control and people should be empowered to decide how their data is collected and used; and, Last, it should be an
important ambition to unlock more value of data as a common good while protecting people’s privacy and encouraging
fair terms of use.

Of course, there are questions how to practically organise this. A lot of inspiring work on the data commons proposes
solutions in terms of data infrastructure and data trusts (Coyle 2020). A new data infrastructure should help dealing with
institutional and regulatory aspects of how data can be shared, what standards and policies should be set up and which
organisations and communities should be involved in contributing to and maintaining this data infrastructure. One
approach for an innovative data infrastructure has been developed and trialled in several countries: data trusts. Data
trusts can exist in many forms and models but the general principle is that they sit between an individual generating
data and a company or institution wanting to use that data (Delacroix and Lawrence 2019). In this system, control over
data is transferred to a third party, which can use the data for pre-defned purposes. Data trusts can use data from
diferent sources and allow to steward data use for all. Important in its governance is data solidarity, meaning that
corporate and public data shareholders share the benefts and risks of data access and production (Bunz and Vrikki
2022). Coming up with a system for sharing and giving access to data does not only beneft society; it is also necessary
for AI innovation (Hall and Pesenti 2017).

4.3 Compute capacity for the commons

Compute capacity is the second element of a commons approach, as an alternative to the power concentration of AI
capitalism. Some even position computing infrastructure as part of the data commons itself (Grossman et al. 2016). I
discussed already how crucial computing power is for the development of AI. Only Big Tech (and some elite universities)
have the resources to upgrade their infrastructure—contributing to an AI compute divide (Ahmed and Wahed 2020)—
while leading AI companies collect rent from and keep control over what is happening on their compute infrastructure
(Srnicek 2019). As an alternative, investments in common/public compute capacity could help society becoming less
dependent on the private infrastructure of Big Tech.

While the corporate sector often claims that public investment stifes innovation , (Mazzucato 2013) debunks this myth
and actually argues that the radical technologies behind, for example, the iPhone (e.g., GPS, touch screen display and
Siri) were all backed by government funding. Another example is Google’s search algorithm, which was publicly
funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The first supercomputers were used by universities (in the US and the UK) and governments should consider pooling
(more) resources to invest in (national or international) compute capacity that will drive the future of AI. Common
investment in AI compute capacity will also help to democratise AI (Riedl 2020), meaning that more people and
organisations can be involved in developing AI systems. This is particularly relevant for quantum computing, which is
considered crucial for revolutionary breakthroughs in the future of AI—the so-called quantum AI (Taylor 2020).
Public/common investment in computing infrastructure could also mean a de-commodifcation of compute capacity
and create a new public service that can be made available to society, accessible to different organisations, companies
and interest groups.

4.4 A commons approach to AI human capital

While not often considered as part of the data commons, an argument can be made about common investment in AI
human capital too. Having an upgraded computer infrastructure is one thing, AI human capital—the AI talent and human
resources that are necessary to develop AI innovations—is as important.

Given the high level of specialisation, success in research on machine/deep learning is dependent on people who have
accumulated large expertise through formal training (e.g., PhD) or years of applied work (Ahmed and Hamed 2020). As a
result, there is a growing gap between the increasing demand for AI expertise and the limited supply, resulting in a
talent scarcity (Metz 2017).

A commons approach to AI human capital would, for example, include to provide more funding for public IT services
and universities allowing them, respectively, to reduce outsourcing and facilitate more research labs to keep their
faculty members instead of being recruited by larger, corporate, organisations with deep pockets.

Investment in public infrastructure and resources can support commons-based economies and models of organisation
which allow to depart from an incentive structure focused on value creation rather than value extraction (Kostakis
and Bauwens 2014). However, this depends on new regimes in terms of ownership, control and governance.

First, a central aspect of envisioning an alternative political economy of AI is rethinking ownership . Regulation is often
proposed as a strategy to limit the market/monopoly power of Big Tech (Posner and Weyl 2018). Competition and
antitrust law, for example, could be used to break up the AI/tech giants. However, such a strategy might be
counterproductive, as the power of, for example, social media platforms is that they connect everyone in society.
Common ownership might be an alternative approach that could be more productive (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014).
There is a solid case for placing the technologies producing AI in public and collective ownership. It would mean that
communities have more control over how AI is produced and how the public can benefit from its services. The end
goal is to have a digital infrastructure that is available to and provides advantages for a broad range of stakeholders in
society, not just the AI behemoths.

Second, related to ownership is the aspect of promoting common governance. The goal here is the democratisation of
AI and this requires the decentralisation of power, back in the hands of the public (Posner and Weyl 2018; Riedl 2020).
If we consider AI as a GPT, which will alter the structures of society, we need to make sure there is democratic oversight
and control. After all, we have installed regulators that have the power to protect the interests of citizens in other
sectors, such as postal services, electricity, broadcasting and telecommunication. The services provided by AI are so
crucial in everyday life, making it necessary that society has a greater say about it.

Inspiration for alternative structures in terms of ownership, control and governance can be found in the platform
cooperativism model (Scholz 2017), which allows involvement from multiple stakeholders in the ownership,
development and management of platforms.

Finally, we need to come up with a new vocabulary when thinking about AI systems and how they deliver benefits to
society. Instead of corporate discourses portraying AI as Tech for Good, boosting innovation and entrepreneurship, it
makes sense to perceive AI infrastructures as a computational utility, subject to democratic control (Mosco 2017).
Dyer-Witheford and colleagues (2019) elaborate on this and push for considering AI as a communal utility. This means
that communities and workers should be involved in determining what sort of work should or should not be automated,
and thus call for a genuine determination by the general intellect in the design of AI. In this general intellect, collective
cooperation and knowledge become a source of value (Terranova 2000). The proposed principles of common ownership
and governance should be central in developing AI as a communal utility.

5 Concluding remarks

This article analyses AI capitalism. I discuss the contradictions between visions of AI as a General Purpose Technology
(GPT) generating benefts for society at large and the reality of AI capitalism, characterised by commodifcation,
extraction and a power concentration. These aspects are behind the unstoppable expansion of tech platforms and
monopolisation in the feld of AI. This leads to a winnertake-all scenario, in which AI giants follow a strategy of enclosure:
controlling access to data, talent and compute capacity and enclosing more of the world within their private sphere
(Couldry and Mejias 2019). As a result, few players have the power to make decisions about how AI is developed and
used and what its impact on society will be. It prevents the culture of AI (Elliott 2019) being accessible for all (Verdegem
2021).

Analysing the political economy of AI makes clear we need to rethink AI ownership and governance, and how data but
also human resources and computing infrastructure can be shared and made accessible to a broader range of
stakeholders in society. To challenge the power concentration of Big Tech, we need to come up with alternatives.

In this article, I propose the framework of the commons for helping to imagine alternatives in the context of AI
capitalism. The commons is an approach that allows us to rethink collective ownership and governance regimes and
empower more groups in society to have control over and a say in the development of AI and how the beneftis of AI
can be shared with society at large. Instead of the GPT AI resulting in Big Tech as winners and most of us losers, a
commons approach allows more groups in society to be among the winners of AI innovation.

The movement towards data and AI commons should be combined with more general initiatives to push back against
the commodifcation of and extraction in everyday life . Establishing a more equal and inclusive society depends on the
democratisation of tech and the involvement of diferent types of stakeholders (Posner and Weyl 2018). Citizens, civil
society and other organisations should have a more prominent role in the development and management of AI, which
could take form along the lines of the multi-stakeholder cooperative model (Standing 2019). The latter refers to a
model of organisation (co-ops) that allow for governance by representatives of diferent stakeholder groups within a
certain organisation.
2---Red innovation solves---mutual funds, dividends, public projects, larger and more creative
workforce.
Vanessa A. Bee 18. Senior Litigation Counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a JD from Harvard Law.
Innovation Under Socialism. 10-24-2018. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/innovation-under-socialism ]

In this market socialist society , most shares are pooled into highly regulated mutual funds, which then pursue
different investment strategies when trading them on a highly regulated stock exchange . This exchange helps monitor
the performance of the firm managers and assess which innovations are performing strongly. To avoid the
concentration of market power and capital, the government sets the bar for how much stock any stakeholder can
hold in any firm and industry. It also sets the minimum and maximum amount of dividends that each person can receive
annually. As the economy grows, dividends can be adjusted to increase by a percentage, or commensurate with
inflation. Surplus resulting from distributing only part of the profits allows the more profitable firms to subsidize
innovative, but less profitable, activities. In addition, this regime does not tolerate anti-competitive contracts like
restrictive employment agreements, strict license agreements, and long patents (although inventions may be
attributable to their inventors and may be rewarded through other means like prizes, bonus compensation, or simply
very short patents periods).

The model could incorporate elements of democratically-planned, participatory socialism, which emphasizes
democracy and individual autonomy in the workplace. Economist David Kotz believes that particular features of this
model could foster innovation performance:

First, the main features of the overall economic plan would be determined by a democratic process … Second, the
planning and coordination of the economy would take place … by industry boards and local and regional negotiated
coordination bodies that have representation of all affected constituencies, including workers, consumers, suppliers, the
local community, and even “cause” groups such as environmentalists, job safety activists, feminists, etc. 

Among other topics, these representative boards could vote on compensation minimums and maximums , to prevent
innovation from supporting socioeconomic inequality and unfair social divisions of labor. This injection of democracy
would give ordinary people a larger say in the direction of the markets , and what areas they think would benefit from
more investment in innovation.

The second ingredient of innovation, capital, is guaranteed in the market socialist economy. Freed of its neoliberal
handcuffs, the government can designate funding towards various innovative projects at a greater rate than it does
now. Banks jointly owned by the government and other non-private stakeholders would provide entrepreneurs with
access to capital for projects through loans with terms more generous than private lenders offer now . The firms
owned by government, worker co-operatives, ordinary people, and other publicly-owned firms can also raise capital
from each other as wealth is distributed more equally. In such a world, more individuals can pool their resources to
invest in particular innovative projects rather than a recurring cast of millionaires.

Market socialism would easily deliver the third ingredient of innovation: human capital. Such an economy has no need
for a reserve army of labor. While profit is encouraged, its primary function is increasing the pool of resources and
cash distributable to workers and non-workers . It does not come at the price of providing generous wages, as dividends
to shareholders are capped no matter how well the firm performs. In fact, this society could make a democratic decision
to compensate people in positions on the lower band of wages with more in unearned income, out of the same pool of
profits.

When applied earnestly, the principles of socialism are also incompatible with mass incarceration, discrimination,
uncompensated caregiving, highly restrictive immigration policies, and other social practices that exclude large
numbers of workers from participating in our capitalist economy. Add a fairer distribution of public resources among
individuals and communities, along with more free or heavily subsidized goods like education, and a market socialist
economy could really see an increase in the availability and skills in the pool of workers. Freeing more people to join the
innovative process would naturally foster more innovation .

Lastly, innovation can only thrive if the innovation process affords individuals chances to be creative and the right
conditions to motivate them. Studies on what fosters creativity show that workers who rate highly on creativity
indexes perform best when they are given challenging work, a good measure of autonomy , and supportive and caring
supervisors who can provide substantive and constructive feedback. The same study, however, shows that workers who
are by nature less creative tend to be happier in less complex positions. Neither worker is, or should be, superior to the
other. On the contrary, the innovation process has plenty of room for all types of workers with varying degrees of innate
creativity. The core principles of socialism, however, do suggest that this economic system is better suited for
supporting creative workers than capitalism.

A---Propriety rights, no incentive for R&D

Vanessa A .Bee 18 Senior Litigation Counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a JD from Harvard Law.
Innovation Under Socialism. 10-24-2018. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/innovation-under-socialism

But prioritizing profit is a double-edged sword that can hamper innovation . Owning the proprietary rights allows
private firms to block workers —through anti-competitive tools like non-compete agreements, patents , and licenses —
who put labor into the innovation process from applying the extensive technical expertise and intimate
understanding of the product to improve the innovation substantially. This becomes especially relevant once the
workers leave the firm division in which they worked, or leave the firm altogether. Understandably, this lack of control
and ownership will cause some workers, however passionate they may be about a project, to be less willing to
maximize their contribution to the innovation.

Of course, the so-called nimbleness that allows firms to make drastic changes like mass layoffs is extremely harmful to
the workers. This is no fluke. The capitalist economy thrives on a reserve army of labor. Inching closer to full
employment makes workers scarcer, which empowers the labor force as a whole to bargain for higher wages and
better work conditions. These threaten the firm’s bottom line. So, the capitalist economy is structured to maintain the
balance of power towards the owners of capital . Positions that pay well (and less than well) come with the
precariousness of at-will employment and disappearing union power. A constant pool of unemployed labor is
maintained through layoffs and other tactics like higher interest rates, which the government will compel to help slow
growth and thereby hiring. This system harms the potential for innovation , too.

The fear of losing work can dissuade workers from taking risks, experimenting, or speaking up as they identify items
that could improve a taken approach—all actions that foster innovation . Meanwhile, thousands of individuals who
could be contributing to the innovative process are instead involuntarily un-employed . This model also encourages
monopolization, as concentrating market power gives private firms the most control over how much profit they can
extract. But squashing competition that could contribute fresh ideas hurts every phase of the innovation process, while
giving workers in fewer workplaces space to innovate.

Deferring to profit causes many areas of R&D to go unexplored . Private firms have less reason to invest in innovations
likely to be made universally available for free if managers or investors do not see much upside for the firm’s bottom
line. In theory, the slack in private research can be picked up by the public sector. In reality, however, decades of
austerity measures  threaten the public’s ability to underwrite risky and inefficient research . Both the Democratic and
Republican parties increasingly adhere to a neoliberal ideology that vilifies “big government,” promotes running
government like a business, pretends that government budgets should mirror household budgets or the private firm’s
balance sheet, and rams privatization under the guises of so-called public-private partnerships and private
subcontractors.

In the United States, public investment in R&D has been trending downward. As documented in a 2014 report from
the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, “[f]rom 2010 to 2013, federal R&D spending fell from $158.8 to
$133.2 billion … Between 2003 and 2008, state funding for university research, as a share of GDP, dropped on average
by 2 percent. States such as Arizona and Utah saw decreases of 49 percent and 24 percent respectively.” Even if public
investment in the least profitable aspect of research suddenly surged, in our current model, the private sector
continues to be the primary driver of development, production, and distribution. Where there remains little potential
for profit , private firms will be reluctant to advance to the next phases of the innovation process. Public-private
projects raise similar concerns. Coordinated efforts can increase private investment by spreading some costs and risk to
the public. But to attract private partners in the first place, the public sector has a greater incentive to prioritize R&D
projects with more financial upsides.

This is how the quest for profits and tight grip over proprietary rights, both important features of the capitalist model,
discourage risk. Innovations are bound for plateauing after a few years, as firms increasingly favor minor aesthetic
tweaks and updates over bold ideas while preventing other avenues of innovation from blossoming . At the same
time, massive amounts of capital continue to float into the hands of a few. The price of innovating under capitalism is
then both decreased innovation and decreased equality . The idea that this approach to innovation must be our best
and only option is a delusion.

B---Inequality, work times, fear of shareholder suits

Vanessa A. Bee 20 Senior Litigation Counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a JD from Harvard Law.
Would We Have Already Had a COVID-19 Vaccine Under Socialism? No Publication. 4-20-2020.
https://inthesetimes.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-capitalism-socialism-innovation.html

STIFLING WORKERS, STIFLING CREATIVITY

Many of the most sophisticated innovations of our time, from groundbreaking drugs to smart car technology, have
depended on a deep pool of creative labor . But the idea that capitalism allows the bestsuited workers to join that pool
is wishful thinking. As journalist Chris Hayes writes in Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, meritocracy “can
only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality.” From 1979 to 2015, the
annual average household income of the top 1% grew five times faster than that of the bottom 90th percentile . The
reality is that deep inequalities in how this country’s wealth is distributed make meritocracy all but a myth. Some
people can afford to attend college and access spaces where discovery is encouraged, moving into a “ creative
pipeline ,” while their poorer peers go right into the workforce or juggle demanding classes with work schedules .
While some with great innate talent for innovation end up in these coveted creative jobs, many more—poor and
workingclass—are pushed by financial necessity into positions mismatched to their potential .

In theory, one doesn’t need a creative-focused job to innovate. But creativity requires a certain freedom— an ability to
“waste” time, to work nonlinearly, to experiment and repeatedly fail . Capitalism’s constant dictate to maximize
productivity leaves people with little time to spare , at work or at home—especially in poor and working-class
households: The bottom fifth of earners have seen their work hours increase by 24.3% since 1979, compared to 3.6% for
the top fifth.

Being in a more precarious financial position, or in a job with little security , also discourages workers from taking
risks, even when the risks might lead to innovation . The precarity makes it difficult to approach one’s supervisors and
ask for sick days, let alone personal time to go down rabbit holes. It makes it frightening to change fields or spend
money on any project that might result in even more precarity .

Notably, the corporate structure itself has been known to stifle creation . Many corporate firms are under the effective
control of shareholders, to whom managers owe a fiduciary duty to maximize profits . Shareholders who believe this
duty has been breached typically have the right to sue the corporation . While this power can be used for the greater
good—note how Tesla was sued by shareholders in response to its poor safety record—it also opens the door to
shortsighted shareholders. One DuPont shareholder, for example, demanded the chemical company “not invest a single
dollar in research that will not generate a positive return within f ive years.” What’s more, according to a 2017 working
paper by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, “Many of America’s largest corporations, Pfizer and Merck among
them, routinely distribute more than 100% of profits to shareholders, generating the extra cash by reducing reserves,
selling off assets, taking on debt or laying off employees.”

Even the most creative of workers who make it into innovative roles in the private sector may find themselves starved
of resources. As professors Chen Lin and Sibo Liu of the University of Hong Kong, and Gustavo Manso of the University
of California, Berkeley, explain in a 2018 study, the threat of shareholder litigation generally discourages managers
from “experimenting [with] new ideas,” which acts as an “ uncontrolled tax on innovation .” 

4 --- Capitalist innovations only insulate elites---causes global catastrophe.

Blake Stewart 21. PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. "Notes on exhaustionism,
the latest moment of the global organic crisis". SAGE Journals. 11-19-2021.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968211054857

Modern capitalist elites have only innovated and developed new and increasingly technologically sophisticated means
to insulate themselves from current organic crisis, means which dwarf the relatively modest basement bunkers of the
Cold War. Many segments of the contemporary global elite imagine a future where multiple threats such as nuclear
war, ecological collapse, or civil unrest can be circumvented and managed with the proper resources – resources
available to only a miniscule segment of the global population. The luxurious neo-apocalyptic futures envisioned and
strategised by contemporary global capitalist elites as well as select aligned social forces (segments of the professional
managerial class and state elites) are already occurring. They aim to reproduce production/consumption patterns
complementary to the stability of Western upper-class lifestyles in the wake of a series of mass death-inducing crises,
both local and global; some slow moving (ecological collapse, inequality), others more immediate (war, financial crash,
pandemics). Some transnational capitalist elites, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have even began modelling highly
exclusive extraterrestrial alternatives to human civilisation on an infected and dying earth.

This ideology has permeated non-elite classes in the form of survivalist culture ; a reactionary and anti-collectivist
political praxis which has been adopted by many within the far Right. This social reality reflects a situation where no
major political force believes it possible or advantageous to reverse or challenge the economic domination and
geopolitical supremacy of the most powerful capitalist states or their concomitant transnational institutions and major
multinational corporations – despite the precipitous impacts on the planet and the world’s majority poorest
populations.

1. His data set for dematerialization and green growth ignore resource extraction and production,
disproves his entire thesis for sustainability.
Jason Hickel 20. He holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Wheaton College. Received his PhD in
anthropology from the University of Virginia in August 2011. Taught at the London School of Economics from 2011 to
2017, where he held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. He is currently senior lecturer in anthropology at Goldsmiths,
University of London and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of
Economics. “A RESPONSE TO MCAFEE: NO, THE "ENVIRONMENTAL KUZNETS CURVE" WON'T SAVE US.”
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/10/9/response-to-mcafee.

A number of people have asked me to respond to a piece that Andrew McAfee wrote for Wired, promoting his book,
which claims that rich countries - and specifically the United States - have accomplished the miracle of “ green growth”
and “dematerialization”, absolutely decoupling GDP from resource use. I had critiqued the book’s central claims here
and here, pointing out that the data he relies on is not in fact suitable for the purposes to which he puts it.

In short, McAfee uses data on domestic material consumption (DMC), which tallies up the resources that a nation
extracts and consumes each year. But this metric ignores a crucial piece of the puzzle. While it includes the imported
goods an economy relies on, it does not include the resources involved in extracting, producing, and transporting
those goods. Because the United States and other rich economies have come to rely so heavily on production that
happens in other countries, that side of resource use has been conveniently shifted off their books.

In other words, what looks like “green growth” is really just an artifact of globalization . Given how much the U.S.
economy relies on globalization, McAfee’s data cannot be legitimately compared to U.S. GDP, and cannot be used to
make claims about dematerialization. If McAfee wants to compare GDP to domestic resource consumption, then he
needs to first subtract the share of US GDP that is derived from production that happens elsewhere. He does not. Nor
is this possible to do.

Ecological economists have been aware of this problem for a long time. To correct for it, they use a more holistic
metric called “raw material consumption,” or Material Footprint, which fully accounts for materials embodied in trade.
When we look at this data, the story changes. We see that resource use in the United States hasn’t been falling at all;
in fact, it has been rising along with GDP. The same is true of all other major industrial economies . There has been
zero dematerialization. No green growth. And indeed when it comes to excess resource use, rich countries are the
biggest problem - not the saviours that McAfee suggests they are.

COVID made mutual aid persuasive and global

Anitra Nelson 20. Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT
University (Australia), Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne. COVID-19: Capitalist and
postcapitalist perspectives. Human Geography 2020, Vol. 13(3): 308

Postcapitalist imaginaries Organised pandemic solidarity and mutual aid groups involve local production and local
distribution oriented around needs, calculated in terms of use values . Such activities prefigure postcapitalist
relations, replacing global relations of trade and exchange value with direct democracy and local autonomy in ‘ glocal’
formations. One strategy for defying the ‘capitalist law of value’ is to go beyond money, that is, monetary relations
and private property (Nelson, 2016). Such formations centre on commoning, local autonomy and collective
sufficiency, sharing universal social and environmental principles. They cogovern with one another across landscapes,
regions and, ultimately, the globe via horizontal, networked governance , ‘open relocalisation’ in degrowth parlance
versus insular protectionism (Liegey and Nelson, 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic has proved a unifying and dividing
experience. States have taken a lead after years of humble restraint within market-driven neo-liberalism. Yet they have
regulated in authoritarian, even if seemingly benign, ways both citizens and workers, not only owners and managers of
capital. Moreover, if their initial and main aim was to protect lives, they are now more strongly driven to support a
resurgence of capitalism that threatens to erode workers’ wages and conditions as well as environmental reforms and
progress. While most movements call for transformation with the refrain ‘we can’t return to business as usual’, there is
no reason to believe that a real showdown between hard-nosed neo-liberalism and postcapitalist currents can be
avoided. Certainly citizens have had experiences that make radical critiques and claims for postcapitalist futures more
persuasive and attractive (Mason, 2020). They are seeing benefits of local economies and slower, self-organised work.
People have been challenged to be more creative and self-reliant. The slow food to slow everything, permaculture and
agroecology, food sovereignty and commons movements , incorporated in localising practices and visions, all seem
more reasonable and feasible. They and mutual aid groups are set on prolonging and formalising their influence ,
entrenching as postcapitalist advocates and practitioners. Yet the flip-side to the pandemic and forced isolation might
well be a mainstream yearning for a romanticised capitalist past; a strong desire for the security of work to pay the rent
or mortgage even as terms and conditions of work deteriorate; and submerging concerns to address climate change as
the pandemic and a return to normal is pursued by capitalist interests and states. Mutual aid and postcapitalist
advocates of various hues must address such tendencies. Writing from Australia, where unprecedented bushfires
ravaging ecosystems over the 2019–2020 Summer were followed by a global health emergency – closing international
and interstate borders, restricting households, locking families out from loved ones in aged care facilities and dying in
hospital – the cracks in the wall of capitalist ‘civilisation’ and its rapacious ecological impacts seem all too clear . Re-
appropriating the economy seems necessary to decide what we produce, how we produce it, who produces it and for
whom – for a safer, more secure, healthier and enjoyable way of life. Postcapitalism has a new platform. But if
movements aligned with postcapitalism are global and networked , its realisation will be local and material. If the
human geography of the Capitalocene has been standardisation, genocide, species extinction and globalisation, the
human geographies of postcapitalism will be diverse, localised, multiple and dynamic.
 Marx K: Houston—v. POlicy

Expanding legal personhood creates a framework for marketized subjects, causing imperial wars
Eversberg 2021 (Dennis [Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University, Germany], From democracy at others’
expense to externalization at democracy’s expense: Property-based personhood and citizenship struggles in organized
and flexible capitalism, Anthropological Theory 21 (3), 315-340, 2021, accessed 6/10/22,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1463499620977995) JA

Introduction The history of European democracy is conventionally perceived as a tale of long, hard struggles for democratic
participation and hard-won access to citizenship granted to gradually growing shares of the populace . As an integral part of European
history, however, that story can hardly be separated from that of the military and economic expansionism originating from

the same core countries during the same period . Indeed, the very emergence of democratic statehood in European history has been
closely correlated to the existence of a sphere of exchange built on the appropriation of human labour and extra-
human sources of energy to the advantage of the citizens of democratic polities. Paradigmatically, Athens in the fifth century BCE was not
only the first democratic polity in history, but also a fiercely belligerent power that controlled much of the Eastern Mediterranean , and the first state on

record to depend on grain imported from overseas. Furthermore, the full political citizenship of all free male Athenians was predicated on the

appropriation of the labour of women and slaves within the private sphere of the household (oikos) (Cartledge, 2013; Childe, 1972: 214–247; Finley, 1978). Even in its earliest
appearance in history, democracy as a form of government was thus intimately tied both to economic and military expansionism

(Weber, 1972: 809) and to an internal division of ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms that also demarcated the border between those included in the public sphere as citizens and

those excluded from citizenship by confinement to the private. Likewise, modern European democracy —in its early forms of the Italian republics or in England beginning in the 17th century—

arrived on the heels of expansive economic development (Moore, 1966) as the project of a bourgeois class that turned the
spatial and social separation between public polis and private oikos into the principle of society (Arendt, 1958). Its subsequent
development was inseparable from the unprecedented global conquest and colonial expropriation. Modern democracy, based on the notion of universal rights

equally enforceable for any person and on the allocation of political power through the circulation of free and equal votes, is itself an abstract domain of
exchange that co-evolved with that of the capitalist market. And with each step of democratization in the core
capitalist societies corresponded a broadening and deepening of the reach of capitalism’s expansionary imperative
into all regions of the globe, domains of practice and ways of perceiving and acting on the world . Confronted with
historically optimistic accounts of the ‘evolution of citizenship’ , such as that offered by T.H. Marshall right after World War II—basically arguing that the 18th century had seen

the establishment of universal civil rights, the 19th the struggle for suffrage and the 20th the inclusion of social rights in the concept of citizenship (Turner, 1986: 8)— one is led to ask whether

democracy, conceived of as the expansion of citizenship, might be part of the problem presented by the much
debated unsustainability and destructiveness of capitalist societies (Dorre et al., 2015; Klein, € 2015; Moore, 2015; Salleh, 2017), rather than part of its solution. In
this article I argue that the ‘waves of citizenship rights’ (Turner, 1986) of European democracy have been a catalyst of, rather than a counterforce to, the advance of

capitalist relations, and that this is at least partly due to the abstract conception of citizenship as democratic
personhood that European history has brought about, which is, in its very structure, based on relations of appropriation and the
externalization of the costs of one’s living to others (Lessenich, 2019). If this is true, the implications are profound for the understanding of the recent transformations of
capitalist democratic societies as well as for the concepts of emancipation and citizenship that could inform a transformation to possible future democracies beyond the capitalist growth imperative. To explain these
implications, two things are needed: An anthropological account of what constitutes modern capitalist and democratic personhood and how this relates to the expansionism of capitalist democracies, and a sociological
understanding of the interplay of capitalist accumulation strategies and democratic citizenship struggles in recent history. With regards to the former, the first section of this paper draws on David Graeber’s (2007a)
account of how the kind of personhood typical of modern relations of exchange historically developed. Building on the distinction between ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ as ‘two ways of defining the human person, either as a
collection of substances continuous with the world and with others, or as a collection of abstract properties set apart from it’ (2007a: 45), Graeber suggests that modern history can be described as a secular process of

the dominant ways of constructing personhood have become increasingly abstract, disembodied
‘generalization of avoidance’, in which

and tied to property. He further suggests that this has enabled both the progress of democratization and the ever deeper
embedding of capitalist rationality into the inner core of modern subjectivity. To illustrate what this means for the interpretation of contemporary
citizenship struggles, the second section of this article will briefly outline my understanding of capitalist history as a sequence of phases of

appropriation and accumulation, in each of which a specific doxic anthropology, or naturalized common-sense conception
of the human being as a property-based person , is institutionalized in an ideal-typical ‘subjectivation regime’—that is, a
complex of infrastructures, institutions and discourses ‘producing’ human beings in line with the demands of
contemporary accumulation . These regimes dialectically evolve out of each other as an effect of their inherent countertendencies and struggles. I go on in the third and fourth sections of the article
to present a broad account of how the two most recent phases of capitalism in Western Europe—the organized capitalism of the mid-20th century and current-day flexible capitalism—mark subsequent steps in the

My ultimate contention is that the abstract expansionism of capitalist societies is incompatible with a
‘generalization of avoidance’.

genuinely egalitarian democracy because it is built on a property-based concept of personhood that rests on
hierarchical social and socio-natural relations needed to provide the care, labour and energy subsidies essential for
maintaining such an escalatory relationship with the world. As I argue in the conclusion, building a genuinely egalitarian society
would require challenging that very construction of personhood and exploring alternative democratic, and
necessarily post-capitalist, anthropologies of degrowth . Abstract bourgeois personhood and the ‘generalization of avoidance’ Any attempt to understand the expansionary
and appropriative dynamism inherent to modern democracy as well as to capitalism should depart from the apparent common social origin of both: the rise of the bourgeois class. Sombart (1988) depicted the bourgeois
social character as characterized by two elements: a rational, calculating use of money as abstract power to be strategically invested, and an inclination to restless activity aimed at accumulating more abstract power, or, in
Franklin’s formula: ‘industry and frugality’ (cited in Sombart, 1988: 121). The rational ordering of means and unceasing pursuit of their enhancement—these virtues obviously prefigured the abstractness and endless
expansionism of capitalist societalization. But their deployment in market exchange required the previous provision of great amounts of labour from a hierarchically subordinate ‘outside’ of society. As an example for how

this occurred, Michel Foucault described ‘sexuality’ as a field of bourgeois technologies of the self : The bourgeoisie was different from
previous ruling classes in that it could not legitimate its rule transcendentally. Rather, its members needed to assert their power in and

through market competition. To reproduce their dominance as a class, they had to actively cultivate their mental and physical superiority ,
or competitiveness, through a set of worldly practices (Foucault, 1978: 124–125). This required personal training, but also many different kinds of advice and support

from medical experts, family members and servants . Furthermore, the more fields of public performance (sports, education, fashion, culture) one had to compete in, the more
such assisted mental and physical self-fashioning was needed. Being part of the bourgeois public, that is, required the private appropriation of others’

labour. To those who couldn’t appropriate that labour, ‘sexuality’, like all other competitive pursuits—including, most notably, wage labour (Eversberg, 2014b)—appeared as an instrument of class rule that was
repressively forced upon them (Foucault, 1978: 127). Bourgeois society was one in which some people actively fashioned themselves as

legitimately powerful public persons, while others bore the brunt in confinement to the private realm . My argument in this article is
that, in this respect, contemporary capitalist societies are still ‘bourgeois’ in that they allocate social status within a

‘democratic’ realm of formally equal exchange based on one’s capacity to externalize costs and privately appropriate
others’ labour, creating inequalities and exclusions. This, however, is extremely hard for people in these societies to
understand because the doxic anthropology of a society integrated by exchange inscribes the hierarchy and
dominance that exchange is based on into the most deeply held beliefs about human nature, ‘so much so that even
our instincts for rebellion often seem to reinforce them ’ (Graeber, 2007a: 16). To explain what is happing here, David Graeber has presented an argument drawing on two
somewhat dated concepts from anthropological theory, namely ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’—two basic forms of social relations that early anthropologists encountered time and again in the most diverse social settings all over
the world. ’Joking’ stands for social relations of extreme informality and mutual playful aggression, including the license for shameless reciprocal ‘taking of goods and giving of bads’—from insults and hurling bodily
excretions to licensed theft. It typically occurs between male equals (cross cousins, fraternity students), creating a bond while affirming equality and keeping competition at bay. ’Joking’ constitutes the person as a profane
being consisting of substances in direct continuity with the physical world. In contrast, relations of ‘avoidance’ are extremely formal and ultimately hierarchical, obliging one side to deference, submission and shame in the

By closing off the body from the world and

face of the other, who is constituted as distant, ‘sacred’, set apart from the world. This, to Graeber, is the very definition of ‘hierarchy’:

others, hiding all signs of its physicality, the superior person becomes an abstract entity, a ‘logical’ subject irreducible
to its physical representation. What defines them is not bodily substances, but the codified or generally accepted right to control things and
other people—in effect, their personhood is ‘constructed of property’ (Graeber, 2007a: 21). It rests on an act of simultaneous in- and exclusion: The person comes to represent
more than their profane self because all of their (physical, legal and ascribed) properties, and all those other people
that depend on making, maintaining or using them, are symbolically included within the person, and excluded from
the higher (‘exclusive’) level of existence this operation elevates them to. From their vantage point, these subordinates are relegated to a ‘residual category which is
more or less merged with the world’ (Graeber, 2007a: 22), meaning reduced to their raw, concrete physicality. The person’s property, symbolically included in her as it is, is covered by her own ‘untouchability’—Graeber’s
example is the logic of tapu in Fiji or among the Maori, which essentially declares certain things or species off-limits due to their ‘belonging to’ a certain powerful individual or group. Tapu—much like ‘private’ in capitalist

societies—refers to what cannot legitimately be challenged. This is how hierarchies generally operate: things and deeds are withdrawn from
common access, ‘fenced off’ and integrated—as properties—into the abstract personality of their owner or receiver
to shield that personality against any material challenge and allow them to interact with others on a higher, more
abstract level. Following Graeber’s argument, modern societies are based on precisely this logic of abstract personhood —not only according to
their capitalist, but also their democratic properties. Just as free male Athenians acquired personhood as citizens through the exclusion and

exploitation of women and slaves, as well as the collective capacity to appropriate the agricultural products of foreign lands, the same basic mechanisms of
expansionist appropriation (Brand and Wissen, 2018) and the hierarchical separation of public and private realms (Biesecker and Hofmeister,
2010) have formed the bedrock of both capitalism and democracy in those countries in which they emerged in

modernity . In other words, modern relations of exchange are a transformation of hierarchy in much the same way as wage labour, according to Graeber (2006), is a transformation of slavery : Unlike
slaves, who were excluded from personhood because they did not own their bodies (Turner, 1986: 4), wage labourers are full
members of society by virtue of ‘owning’ at least themselves , but find themselves periodically forced to sell that
property and surrender their citizenship rights in order to sustain themselves. Formal equality again transforms into hierarchies between those most dependent on doing this, and
those having sufficient control over others to freely choose. Both democracy and the market as forms of societalization thus constitute ‘higher, more

abstract levels’ of existence, integration into which, as a holder of rights (citizen) or money (customer), rests on forms of
appropriation and exploitation. The history of bourgeois personhood can therefore be understood as a ‘generalization
of avoidance’ : The abstract modes of interaction originally reserved for hierarchical superiors ‘came to set the terms for all social relations, until they became so thoroughly internalized they ended up
transforming people’s most basic relations with the world around them’ (Graeber, 2007a: 31). But it seems necessary to think a bit more about what avoidance abstracts from. Perhaps due to the patriarchal heritage of the

Care, after all, is the real, material inversion and

anthropologists who coined these terms, the language of ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ appears strangely oblivious of relations of care.

indispensable foundation of avoidance, to which ‘joking’ seems to be mostly a symbolic counterpoint . Insofar as caring
consists in the giving of goods (feeding, warming, giving birth, comforting, giving moral support) and the taking of
bads (cleaning, healing, removing bodily excretions, hearing out someone’s fear and anger) —joking itself is a logical inversion and
‘unconscious’ complement to care. The inversion is gendered: Joking relations are typically relations among males, while the giving of care tends to be delegated to women. Yet, both relate to the person as a physical,

bodily being in continuity with the material world.Such raw physicality is, of course, not a specialty of all those boys’ clubs, carnivals and feasts where joking is observed— it is the daily,
inescapable reality of all human existence. Whatever performances of immateriality and abstractness societies may
come up with, ultimately no one can exist without being cared for . Humans existentially, inescapably depend on each
other (Rendueles, 2017). Patriarchal societies go to great lengths to cover this up , and both joking and avoidance are part of these efforts. As a practical relation,
care is the direct opposite of avoidance: While the latter is an abstract, deliberately de-materialized performance based on appropriating the powers of the inferior party, care,
although beginning as the ultimate hierarchical relation—one body fully included within the other— is, from the moment of birth, a series of concrete, material acts

directed at enhancing the powers of the other. Like joking, care is (initially) directed at equality, but it doesn’t necessarily stop there. Graeber’s (2014) observation that people
at the bottom of social hierarchies generally care more about those at the top than the other way around attests to the fact that
the performance of abstract, a-physical existence depends on an invisibilized but vital flow of care going ‘upward’ for

the powerful to appropriate. This private appropriation and public denial of care reflect another characteristic of
capitalism, namely its gendered hierarchical separations between homes and workplaces, public and private realms (Biesecker and Hofmeister, 2010). While joking is the symbolic negation of abstract hierarchy
using concrete means, care is part of the material creation of concrete properties that hierarchy appropriates. In this sense, it’s not only care that empowers (i.e. creates properties): Property is the result of many different

All these things ‘flow upward’ in

kinds of work done by those symbolically ‘included’ in the abstract person, consisting of substances and energies appropriated from extra-human nature.

relations of hierarchy, as their denied foundation. Abstract personhood is thus not just ‘constructed of property’, but
inherently appropriative— it cannot exist without permanent inputs of external energy, care and other labour, and the
‘gifts’ of nature. Without these inputs, the bourgeois personhood’s turn to the infinite would not have been possible .
And, as Andreas Malm (2016) has shown, it was most crucially the appropriation of the energy content of fossil fuels by the bourgeois

class as a weapon in the struggle to dominate workers in the early 19th century that powered the escalatory dynamics
of the centuries to come. This appropriative nature of bourgeois personhood—further amplified by the invention of the corporation as a purely abstract
person, having no body and knowing no physical and temporal constraints to its expansion (Blanco and Grear, 2019)— is an important driving force behind the inherent

tendency of bourgeois societies toward an imperial order (Brand and Wissen, 2018), pulling labour and resources toward its
centres while externalizing all negative effects (Lessenich, 2019). The ‘generalization of avoidance’, the ‘bourgeoisification’ of society and its
‘marketization’ are thus one and the same thing—and democratization, it seems, is itself part of this process of naturalizing abstraction and

expansionism. If the formal equality of bourgeois exchange is based on the hierarchical logic of abstract, property-
based personhood, this presents a serious problem for democratic egalitarianism.

Extinction
Robinson 20 (William Robinson, Prof. of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara with specialties in
political economy, globalization, Latin America and historical materialism. The Global Police State, pgs. 1-23)//CQL

While I am hardly the first to talk about a police state, I mean in this book considerably more than what we typically
associate with a police 2 state—police and military repression, authoritarian government, the sup- pression of civil
liberties and human rights. Certainly we see this, and more, around the world. In this study, however, I want to develop
the concept of global police state to identify more broadly the emerging character of the global economy and society as
a repressive totality whose logic is as much economic and cultural as it is political. By global police state I refer to three
interrelated developments. First is the ever more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression, and
warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the real and the potential rebellion of the global working class and
surplus humanity. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply
unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment. The methods of control
include sealing out the surplus population through border and other containment walls, deportation regimes, mass
incarceration and spatial apartheid , alongside omnipresent new systems of state and private surveillance and
criminalization of the poor and working classes. They also include the deadly new modalities of policing and
repression made possible by appli- cations of digitalization and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. The global
police state brings all of global society into what in Pentagon jargon is called “battlespace,” concentrated in the
world’s megacities that are now home to more than half of humanity. Second is how the global economy is itself
based more and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and
repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation—what I
term militarized accumulation , or accumulation by repression. If it is evident that unprecedented global inequalities
can only be sustained by ubiquitous systems of social control and repression, it has become equally evident that quite
apart from political considerations, the ruling groups have acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as
a means of accumulation. As war and state-sponsored violence become increasingly privatized, the interests of a
broad array of capitalist groups shift the political, social, and ideolog- ical climate towards generating and sustaining
social conflict —such as in the Middle East—and in expanding systems of warfare, repression, surveillance, and social
control. We are now living in a veritable global war economy . And third is the increasing move towards political
systems that can be characterized as twenty-first-century fascism , or even in a broader sense, 3 the global police state
as totalitarian. The increasing influence around the world of neo-fascist, authoritarian, and rightwing populist parties
and movements, symbolized above all by Trumpism in the United States, has sparked a flurry of debate on whether
fascism is again on the rise. There has been a sharp polariza- tion around the world between insurgent left and popular
forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far Right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies. A
project of twenty-first-century fascism is on the ascent in the civil societies of many countries around the world. The
project has made significant advances in recent years in its competition to win state power, and in some cases, it has
gained a foothold in the capitalist state. At the same time, a neo-fascist culture appears to be emerging through
militarism, misogyny, extreme masculinization, and racism . Such a culture generates a climate conducive to mass
violence, often directed against the racially oppressed, ethnically persecuted, women, and poor, vulnerable
communities . But a fascist outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not a fascist project manages to congeal is entirely
contingent on how the struggle among social and political forces unfolds in the coming years. This global police state
is emerging at a time when world capitalism descends into a crisis that is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its
global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration , and the sheer scale of the means of
violence that is now deployed around the world. In the first instance, global police state is a story of control and
repression of the poor and working classes. There are growing movements against the many expressions of global
police state— mass incarceration, police violence, U.S.-led wars around the world, the persecution of immi- grants and
refugees, the repression of environmental justice activists . Yet often these movements are based on moral appeal to
social justice, which by itself begets, at best, mild reform. If these movements are to attack the global police state in its
jugular vein, they must identify global capitalism as the driver of the systems of social control and repression that they
are combating. This book attempts to do just that. It sets out to identify the contemporary dynamics of capitalist
transformation and the novel forms that are emerging. This concept of global police state allows us to specify how the
economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological, and military
dimensions of this transformation. Methodologically speaking, the causal sequence in this story starts with a critique of
global capitalism and its crisis, and especially a new round of transformations in world capitalism in recent decades. …
The Crisis of Humanity Globalization did reactivate accumulation on a world scale in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries following a period of crisis and stagnation of the 1970s. The expansion of transnational capital from the
1980s into the first decade of the new century involved hyper-accumulation through new technologies, especially CIT,
through neo-liberal policies (more on these below), and through new modalities of mobilizing and exploiting the global
labor force—including a massive new round of prim- itive accumulation that uprooted and displaced hundreds of
millions of people. “Primitive accumulation” refers to the process whereby masses of people are separated, often
violently, from the means of production, especially land and other forms of community property, as these means of
production come under control of capitalists and leave people with no way to survive other than to sell their mental and
physical labor to capi- talists and to the institutions of the capitalist system. The very first wave of primitive
accumulation took place in the English countryside in earlier centuries, in a process known as enclosures. Through
colonialism and impe- rialism, hundreds of millions around the world were violently dispossessed in past centuries in
ongoing waves of primitive accumulation that brought more and more of humanity under the domination of capital. As I
will discuss later, globalization involved a massive new round of primitive accu- mulation around the world, throwing
hundreds of millions more into the 16 global capitalism and its crisis ranks of surplus humanity subject to the control of
an expanding global police state. But the globalization boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was
short-lived. The global financial meltdown of 2008 marked the onset of a new structural crisis of global capitalism, one
that opens the possibility for systemic change. Karl Marx was the first to identify crisis as immanent to capitalism and
there is a vast literature on capitalist crisis.11 Here I identify three types of crisis. Cyclical crises, or recessions, occur
about every ten years in the capitalist system and typically last some 18 months. These comprise the so-called
“business cycle.” There were reces- sions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 2000s. “Structural crises,”
so called because the only way out of crisis is to restructure the system, occur approximately every 40–50 years. A
new wave of colonialism and imperialism resolved (that is, displaced) the first recorded struc- tural crisis of the 1870s
and 1880s. The next structural crisis, the Great Depression of the 1930s, was resolved through a new type of
redistributive capitalism, referred to as the “class compromise” of Fordism-Keynesianism, social democracy, New Deal
capitalism, and so on (more on this below). As we have seen, capital responded to the next structural crisis, that of the
1970s, by going global. Each of these major episodes of structural crisis have presented this potential for systemic
change. Historically, each has involved the break- down of state legitimacy, escalating class and social struggles, and
military conflicts. In the past, structural crises have led to a restructuring that includes new institutional arrangements,
class relations, and accumulation activities that eventually resulted in a restabilization of the system and renewed
capitalist expansion. Yet a new period of far-reaching restruc- turing through digitalization appears to be under way at
this time. Before we return to this new wave of restructuring, let us focus on the nature of the current crisis, which
shares aspects of earlier system-wide structural crises of the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1970s. Yet there are several
interre- lated dimensions to the current crisis that I believe sets it apart from these earlier ones and suggest that a
simple restructuring of the system will not lead to its restabilization—that is, our very survival requires now a
revolution against global capitalism. Above all is the existential crisis posed by the ecological limits to the
reproduction of the system . We have already passed tipping points in climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and
diversity loss. For the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally altering the 17 earth
system in such a way that threatens to bring about a sixth mass extinction .12 While capitalism cannot be held solely
responsible for the ecological crisis, it is difficult to image that the environmental catastrophe can be resolved within
the capitalist system given capital’s implacable impulse to accumulate and its accelerated commodification of nature .
The ecological dimensions of global crisis have been brought to the forefront of the global agenda by the worldwide
environmental justice movement. Communities around the world have come under the escalating repres- sion of a
global police state as they face off against transnational corporate plunder of their environment and demand
environmental justice and action by governments to avert the climate catastrophe. And climate change refugees, who
are likely to run into the hundreds of millions in the years ahead, are vilified by racist and neo-fascist forces and
repressed by a global police state. This accelerated commodification of nature points to another underlying dimension
of the current crisis. We are reaching limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no
longer any new territories of significance to integrate into world capitalism and new spaces to commodify are drying
up. The capitalist system is by its nature expansionary. In each earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new
round of extensive expansion—that is, incorporating new territories and populations into it—from waves of colonial
conquest in earlier centuries, to the integration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of the former
socialist bloc countries, China, India and other areas that had been marginally outside the system. There are no longer
any new territories to integrate into world capitalism. At the same time, the privatization of education, health,
utilities, basic services, and public lands are turning those spaces in global society that were outside of capital’s direct
control into “spaces of capital,” so that intensive expansion—that is, the commodification of what were non-
commodified resources and activ- ities—is reaching depths never before seen. Commodification refers to the process of
turning people, the things that people produce, and nature into things that are privately owned, have a monetary value,
and that can be bought and sold. Capitalism by its nature must constantly expand inten- sively by commodifying more
and more of the world. What is there left to commodify? Where can the system now expand? New spaces have to be
violently cracked open and the peoples in these spaces must be repressed by a global police state. But what does
exhaustion of spaces for extensive and intensive expansion imply for the reproduction of the system? 18 global
capitalism and its crisis The sheer magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as well as the
magnitude and concentrated—and increas- ingly privatized—control over these means of violence along with the means
of global communication and the production and circulation of symbols, images, and knowledge. As I will discuss in more
detail in Chapters 2 and 3, computerized wars, drone warfare, robot soldiers, bunker-buster bombs, satellite
surveillance, cyberwar, spatial control technology, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare, and more
generally, of systems of social control and repression. We have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society , a point
brought home by revelations of the defector from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, that the
NSA monitored virtually every communication on the planet. It is no exagger- ation to say that we are now in the age
of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, information, and symbolic production. But
most frightening is the production and deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons and the threat of
“limited” nuclear war .13 If global crisis leads to a new world war, the destruction would simply be unprecedented.
Combined with ecological meltdown, it is difficult to see how humanity could survive such a conflagration. Global
capitalism lends itself to escalating inter-national tensions with the potential to spill over into major interstate
conflict. But we should not explain these tensions through the outdated nation-state/interstate mode of analysis that
attributes such tensions to national rivalry and competi- tion among national capitalist classes for international
economic control. Rather, these tensions derive, above all, from an acute political contra- diction in global capitalism
that I already alluded to above: economic globalization takes places within a nation-state-based system of political
authority. Nation-states face a contradiction between the need to promote transnational capital accumulation in their
territories and their need to achieve political legitimacy. In the age of capitalist globalization, gov- ernments must
attract to the national territory transnational corporate and financial investment, which requires providing capital
with all the incentives associated with neo-liberalism—downward pressure on wages, deregulation, low or no taxes,
privatization, fiscal austerity, and on so— that aggravate inequality, impoverishment , and insecurity for working and
popular classes. As a result, states around the world have been experienc- ing spiraling crises of legitimacy. To put it in
more technical terms, there is a contradiction between the accumulation function and the legitimacy function of nation-
states. … There is of course a profound social dimension of global crisis. In these times of unprecedented worldwide
inequalities, capitalist crisis breaks apart the social fabric and devastates communities everywhere. Billions of people
around the world face struggles to survive from one day to the next, with no guarantee that they will succeed in this
struggle (indeed, many are not and many more won’t). In academic terms we could call this a crisis of social
reproduction, but this phrase does nothing to capture the depths of 22 global capitalism and its crisis misery that
poverty, disease , un- and underemployment, food insecurity, social exclusion, racist, xenophobic , and other forms of
social violence into which billions are thrust on a daily basis , or to the persecution that they face as migrants,
refugees, surplus labor , and so on. The next two chapters will take up these matters. However, let us point out that the
social cri- sis is decidedly not a crisis for capital, and may even help it to reproduce its rule, until or unless it leads to
mass rebellion that threatens the ruling groups’ control.

The ALT is dual power organizing for the communist party.

Escalante 18, Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist. Forgenews,
“Against Electoralism, For Dual Power!” 2018. https://theforgenews.org/2018/08/24/against-electoralism-for-dual-
power/ brett

Lenin argues that we must understand the state as an institution which emerges out of class struggle. The ruling class
cannot simply secure their rule through immediate seizure of private property. The capitalist class, for example, relies
upon a whole host of state institutions to maintain its position as the ruling class. Police, armies, and various other
state agencies maintain property relations and protect the power of the ruling class. The proletariat, of course, greatly
outnumber the bourgeoisie. As a result of this, the ruling class requires state power.

Lenin summarizes this succinctly: “ The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class
antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And,
conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

The state exists because the ruling class and the subjugated class cannot exist in harmony. Class struggle is
consistently being waged in a non revolutionary manner within capitalist society. Workers unionize, police break
strikes. The struggle continues and the ruling class uses the state to wage it. This insight allowed Lenin to realize that
the bourgeois state cannot be a venue for achieving socialist gains . If the state exists precisely to ensure the
domination of the capitalist class, then the socialists working within the state will necessarily have to bend to the will
of the capitalists or be expelled from the state.

This insight can explain the shift in Ocasio’s rhetoric from (admittedly tepid) socialist ideas to standard democratic party
bourgeois politics. Upon gaining enternece into the institutions of the bourgeois state, Ocasio was immediately faced
with a decision: hold her ground as a socialist and be incapable of functioning within state machinery designed to crush
socialism, or continue to call herself a socialist while adopting the politics of the bourgeoisie. It is obvious which decision
Ocasio has made.

Lenin was profoundly aware of these limits and forced compromises which working within the bourgeois state requires.
As a result, Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued against working with the provisional government, and instead argued for its
overthrow. Lenin wrote: “ all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”
If we, as socialists, truly fight for a classless world, we must smash the mechanisms which ensure class domination. We must smash the bourgeois state.

This realization led the Bolsheviks to reject the opportunism of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Menshiviks in the Soviets and they chose to overthrow the provisional government themselves. Shockingly, their revolution
was successful. After months of compromise, the workers had grown tired of the opportunist bourgeois socialists. They had seen that the dual power of the soviets and the provisional government was not tenable. One
side had to take unitary power. Most importantly, the workers saw that the bourgeois government had done nothing for them: it had smashed their printing presses, it had crushed their demonstrations, it had broken their
strikes. Of course, it could do nothing else, the bourgeois state is designed to do precisely this.

The events of October, 1917 ought to have concretely proven that the strategy of infiltrating the bourgeois government is untenable. Lenin and the Bolsheviks proved that the workers are willing to throw the bourgeois
state away in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat. And yet, here we are 111 years later and large factions of the largest socialist organization in the United States echo the cowardly and worthless drivelings of the
Menshiviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

Dual Power Today

I am sure that at this point, the opportunists reading this have already begun to type out their typical objection: the world is different than it was in 1917, and the conditions of the United States in no way echo the
conditions which enabled the Bolsheviks to achieve revolutionary success.

To this tried and true objection, there is one simple answer: you are entirely correct, and that is why we need to abandon electoralism and working within the bourgeois state.

What were the conditions which allowed the Bolsheviks to successfully revolt? The conditions were that of Dual Power.
Alongside the capitalist state, there existed a whole set of institutions and councils which met the needs of the
workers. The soviets, a parallel socialist government made up of individual councils, successfully took over many
governmental responsibilities in some parts of Petrograd. In the radical Viborg district, the Bolshevik controlled soviets
provided government services like mail, alongside programs that could meet the needs of workers. When a far right
coup was attempted against the provisional government, it was troops loyal to the Bolshevik factions within the soviet
who repelled the coup plotters, proving concretely to the workers of Petrograd that the socialists could not only provide
for their needs, but also for their defense.

In short: the Bolsheviks recognized that instead of integrating into the bourgeois state, they could operate outside of it
to build dual power. They could establish programs of elected representatives who would serve the workers. They
would not bolster the capitalist state in the name of socialism, they would offer an alternative to it.

And so, when the time came for revolt, the masses were already to loyal to the Bolsheviks. The only party who had
never compromised, who had denounced the unpopular imperialist wars, who had rejected the provisional government
entirely, was the party who successfully gained the support of the workers.

And so, many of us on the more radical fringes of the socialist movement wonder why it is the the DSA and other
socialist opportunists seem to think that we can win by bolstering the capitalist state? We wonder, given this powerful
historical precedent, why they devote their energy to getting more Ocasios elected; what good does one more left
democrat who will abandon the workers do for us?

The answer we receive in return is always the same: we want to win small changes that will make life for the workers
easier; we want to protect food stamps and healthcare.

And do this, we reply: what makes you think reformism is the only way to do this. When the bourgeois state in
California was happy to let black children go to school unfed, the Black Panthers didn’t rally around democratic
candidates, they became militant and fed the children themselves. In the 40s and 50s, socialists in New York saw
people going without healthcare and instead of rallying behind democratic candidates, they built the IWO to provide
healthcare directly. Both these groups took up our pressing revolutionary task: building dual power.

Imagine if all those hours the DSA poured into electing Ocasio were instead used to feed the people of New York, to
provide them with medical care, to ensure their needs were met. Imagine the masses seeing socialism not as a pipe
dream we might achieve through electing more imperialists, but as a concrete movement which is currently meeting
their needs ?
The fact is, we are not nearly ready for revolution. Socialists in the United States have failed to meet the needs of the people, and as long as their only concrete interaction with the masses is
handing them a voter registration form, they will continue to fail the people. Our task now is not to elect representatives to advocate for the people; it is much more gruelingly laborious
than that. Our task is to serve the people. Our task is to build dual power.

The movement to do this is underway. Members of the DSA refoundation caucus have begun to move the left of the DSA in this direct, socialist groups like Philly Socialists have begun to
build dual power through GED programs and tenants unions, many branches of the Party For Socialism and Liberation have begun to feed the people and provide for their concrete needs,
and Red Guard collectives in Los Angeles have built serve the people programs and taken on a stance of militant resistance to gentrification. The movement is growing, its time is coming, and
dual power is achievable within our life time.

The opportunists are, in a sense, correct. We are not where we were in 1917, but we can begin to move in that direction
and dual power can take us there. In order to achieve dual power we have to recognize that Lenin was right: there will
be no socialist gains by working within state institutions designed to crush socialism. Furthermore, we must recognize
that the strategies of the electoral opportunists trade off with dual power. Electing candidates drains resources, time,
and energy away from actually serving the people.

And so, we should commit to undertake the difficult and dangerous task of building dual power. We must reject
opportunism, we must name the democratic party as our enemy, we must rally around power directly in the hands of
the socialist movement. We do not have a parallel system of soviets in the United States. We can change that. Someday
the cry “all power to the soviets” will be heard again. Lets make it happen.
 Marx K: KU—v. Policy

1NC
The American national economy can only sustain itself by externalizing the negatives of capitalist
growth onto the periphery.
Hickel 21, Economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is Professor at the Institute
for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Visiting Senior Fellow at the
International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. He is Associate Editor of the journal World
Development, and serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report, the advisory board of
the Green New Deal for Europe, and the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice (Jason,
December 5th, “The Age of Imperialism is Not Over—But We Can End It,” Current Affairs,
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/12/the-age-of-imperialism-is-not-over-but-we-can-end-it, Accessed 02-15-2022)

To answer these questions, we must come to grips with a key feature of the world economy—one that pundits in the
global North tend either to ignore or wish away—namely, the fact that capitalist growth is fundamentally dependent
on imperialism. This arrangement, which has persisted now for 500 years in various forms, is beginning to come under
significant strain, and climate breakdown is likely to widen the cracks. This opens up opportunities for change, but also
poses significant dangers. Everything depends on how governments and social movements choose to respond.

The key thing to grasp is that, under capitalism, “growth” is not about increasing production in order to meet human
needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. To
keep such a system going requires several interventions. First, you have to cheapen the prices of inputs (labor, land,
materials, energy, suppliers, etc.) as much as possible, and maintain those prices at a low level. Second, you have to
ensure a constantly increasing supply of those cheap inputs. And third, you need to establish control over captive
markets that will absorb your output.

Growth along these lines cannot occur within an isolated system. If you place too much pressure on your domestic
resource base or your domestic working class, sooner or later you are likely to face a revolution. To avoid such an
outcome, capitalism always requires an “outside,” external to itself, where it can cheapen labor and nature with
impunity and appropriate them on a vast scale; an outside where it can “externalize” social and ecological damages,
where rebellions can be contained, and where it does not have to negotiate with local grievances or demands.

This is where the colonies come in. From the origins of capitalism in the late 15th century, growth in the “core” of the
world economy (Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) has always depended
on the sabotage of labor and resources in the “periphery”. Consider the silver plundered from the Andes, the sugar
and cotton extracted from land appropriated from Indigenous Americans, the grain, rubber, gold and countless other
resources appropriated from Asia and Africa, and the mass enslavement and indenture of African and Indigenous
people—all of which exacted a staggering human and ecological toll. On top of this, colonizers destroyed local
industries and self-sufficient economies wherever they went, in order to establish captive markets. There was no lag
between the rise of capitalism and the imperial project. Imperialism was the mechanism of capitalist expansion .

As the Indian economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik put it, capitalist growth requires an imperial arrangement—
not as a side gig but as a structurally necessary feature. Imperialism ensures that inputs remain cheap, and thus
maintains the conditions for capital accumulation. But it also underpins the fragile inter-class truce that prevails in the
core states. If you’re going to raise the real wages of the working classes in the core, or take steps to protect the local
ecology, then in order to maintain capital accumulation you have to compensate for this by depressing the costs of labor
and nature elsewhere, namely, among workers and producers in the global South. Ever since the rise of the labor
movement in the late 19th century, capital’s concessions to the working classes in Europe and the United States have
been possible in large part because of imperialism.

This arrangement came under strain in the middle of the 20th century, however, as radical anti-imperialist movements
gained traction across the global South. After winning political independence, many Southern governments set about
dismantling colonial systems of extraction. They protected their economies and supported their domestic producers
using tariffs, subsidies and capital controls; they instituted land reforms; they nationalized key resources and industries;
they rolled out public services and improved workers’ wages. This movement was successful in advancing economic
sovereignty and improving human development across much of the South. But it also constrained the core’s access to
cheap labor and nature, and reduced their control over Southern markets.

The collapse of the imperial arrangement posed a significant threat to Northern capital accumulation. This problem
was mitigated for a time by Keynesian policy: massive government expenditure boosted aggregate demand in the global
North and generated an extraordinary economic expansion, providing a temporary “fix” for capital. Further concessions
to the working classes of the core were sustained under these conditions, permitting the rise of social democracy in
some states. But this fix could only hold for so long. As wages rose in the core and the supply price rose in the
periphery, growth ground to a halt, capital accumulation became increasingly untenable, and by the mid-1970s the
economies of the global North were overcome by a full-blown crisis of stagflation. As it turns out, capitalism cannot
function for long under conditions of global justice. Fair wages and decolonization are compatible with a functioning
economy, but they are not compatible with a functioning capitalist economy, because they limit the possibility of
capital accumulation.

To deal with the crisis of the 1970s, capital needed a way to restore the imperial arrangement , to once again depress
Southern prices and regain access to Southern markets. To achieve this, the core states intervened to depose
progressive leaders in the global South—including, most prominently, Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala,
Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, and Allende in Chile—replacing them with regimes more amenable to
Northern economic interests. But the final blow was delivered by the World Bank and the IMF, which during the 1980s
and 1990s imposed neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) across the region. This move shifted control over
economic policy from the national parliaments of the South to technocrats in Washington and bankers in New York
and London, ending the brief era of economic sovereignty. SAPs dismantled protections on labor and the environment,
privatized public goods and cut public spending, reversing the reforms of the anti-colonial movement in one fell swoop.

It worked: wages and prices in the South collapsed under structural adjustment, and the new “free trade” regime
allowed Northern capital to shift production abroad in order to take direct advantage of cheap labor and inputs. This
enabled a massive increase in the scale and intensity of appropriation from the global South during the 1980s and
1990s, restoring the imperial arrangement and resolving the crisis of capitalism. Those who see neoliberalism as the
main problem, and who fantasize about reverting to a less destructive version of capitalist growth, fail to grasp this
point. The neoliberal turn was not some kind of mistake; it was necessary to restore the conditions for growth in the
core. It was the obligatory next step in capitalist development.

But now, as the 21st century wears on, the engines of imperial appropriation are slowing down again. This reality is
evident in the declining rate of economic growth in the core states, which economists have come to refer to as “secular
stagnation.” This is happening for several reasons.

First, in the wake of structural adjustment, the collapse of the USSR, and the semi-integration of China, there are few
nation-states and territories left that have not been brought into the remit of the capitalist world system. Imperialist
expansion has effectively reached the limits of the planet. Now, instead of shifting production to new pools of cheap
labor, capital has to deal with the existing workforce and their demands for higher wages. Second, certain regions of the
South—specifically China and the leftist states of South America—are managing to push back against imperialism and
improve their terms of trade, even while operating within the basic structure of the capitalist economy. All of this is
leading to a rising supply price, which spells trouble for capital accumulation  — and growth — in the core.
But perhaps most importantly — and this is the clincher — climate change and ecological breakdown are beginning to
undermine the conditions of production on the tropical landmass. This is beginning to manifest already, with climate
chaos ravaging parts of Central America, the Middle East and North Africa, driving social dislocation and human
displacement. Without some kind of dramatic change in direction it will get much worse. With existing policies, we are
headed for 2.7 degrees of heating this century, which is likely to trigger multi-breadbasket failure and sustained food
supply disruptions across large parts of the global South, displace more than 1.5 billion people, wipe out 30–50% of
species, and render much of the tropics uninhabitable for humans.

This is a problem for capital, because growth in the global North depends utterly on production in the global South
and depends utterly on Southern land and resources—today just as much as during the colonial period. Recent
research finds that rich countries rely on a net appropriation of land equal to twice the size of India, a net appropriation
of 10 billion tons of material resources per year, and a net appropriation of embodied labor equivalent to a standing
army of 180 million workers. This means that as labor is displaced and disrupted, and as the productive capacity of
land is constrained by heatwaves, wildfires, storms and desertification, this will lead to a rising supply price in the core
that will trigger a severe crisis for capital —more serious than anything it has yet encountered.

The question is, how will the core states respond? To maintain the rate of growth and capital accumulation in the face
of this crisis, they will have to find a way to cut the supply price once again.

There are two obvious possibilities. One option is to cut wages in the core states, shred the welfare system and
privatize public services, all of which would help cheapen inputs and open up new frontiers for accumulation, giving
some reprieve to capital. This option — domestic neoliberal austerity — was deployed in the US and Britain during the
1980s as part of the response to the initial collapse of the imperial arrangement. Now it is being increasingly taken up
by the European social democracies themselves, including the Nordics.

Of course, the risk of this approach is that it could trigger a backlash from the domestic working class, which could
coalesce into a socialist revolution. Aware of this danger, politicians will seek to promote anti-immigrant and white
nationalist narratives. By directing working-class grievance toward an “other,” this approach gets people to accept
their own immiseration, so long as they can feel an affinity with the ruling class on the basis of race, and feel superior
to people of colour who are kept in conditions more miserable than their own. This strategy has long been used to
support the neoliberal project in the United States, and the ruling classes of the UK and Europe are now also turning to
this playbook. Boris Johnson is a master of this in British politics.

The second option is that the core states could double down on imperialism . It is not difficult to imagine new rounds
of invasion and occupation intended to force Southern prices back down. The recent coup in Bolivia, backed by the
U.S. with its rising appetite for cheap lithium, offers hints of what might come. And it is clear that the Biden
administration, just as under Trump before him , is already preparing the grounds for aggression against China, among
other things to constrain China’s domestic demand for resources. Imperialist interventions that cheapen the supply
price would allow capitalists in the global North to maintain accumulation and sustain their truce with the working
classes of the core for a little while longer, even as the world crumbles around them.

If left to itself, this is how the capitalist story will play out in the 21st century: neoliberal austerity, white supremacist
ideology, and violent imperialist interventions—all for the sake of maintaining growth and capital accumulation in the
core. Indeed, this barbarism is already well underway. Liberal politicians denounce the barbarism at every opportunity,
and yet they cannot bring themselves to address its underlying causes because they remain fundamentally committed
to capitalist growth. The solution that the liberals offer—capital accumulation without barbarism— is a chimera.

Debates about robot rights are corporate propaganda that grease the wheels of surveillance
capitalism and algorithmic colonization.
Birhane et al. 21, Abeba Birhane: Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist who works at the intersection of complex adaptive
systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and critical race studies, PhD researcher at Complex Software Lab. Jelle van
Dijk: Background in cognitive science, PhD in industrial design. Frank Pasquale: Professor of Law @ Brooklyn Law and
Expert on AI (August, Debunking Robot Rights: Metaphysically, Ethically and Legally, Paper Presented at We Robot 2021,
Available Online at:
https://werobot2021.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Birhane_et_al_Debunking_Robot_Rights_Metaphysically__Eth
ically_and_Legally_ConfDraft.pdf)

In this work we challenge arguments for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we
argue that machines are not the kinds of things that could be denied or granted rights. Ethically, we argue that, given
machines’ current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines
should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not
human rights but corporate rights , rights which have undermined the US electoral process, as well as workers’ and
consumers’ rights. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke screen, allowing theorists to fantasize
about benevolently sentient machines, while so much of current
AI and robotics is fuelling surveillance
capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice
and human suffering .
Building on theories of phenomenology, post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, and critical studies, we ground
our position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously connected, controlled and surveilled
society. What we find is the seamless integration of machinic systems into daily lives in the name of convenience and
efficiency. The last thing these systems need is legally enforceable “rights” to ensure persons defer to them. Rights are
exceptionally powerful legal constructs that, when improvidently granted, short-circuit exactly the type of democratic
debate and empirical research that is necessary in our increasingly technologized world [27]. Conversely, the
‘autonomous intelligent machine’ is a sci-fi fantasy, a meme that functions to mask the environmental costs and
human labour which form the backbone of contemporary AI. The robot rights debate further mystifies and obscures
these problems. And it could easily provide a normative rationale for permitting powerful entities developing and
selling AI to be absolved from accountability and responsibility.

Existing robotic systems (from chatbots to humanoid robots) are often portrayed as fully autonomous systems, and that
is part of the appeal for granting them rights. However, these systems are never fully autonomous, but always human-
machine systems that run on human labour and environmental resources . They are necessarily embedded in social
systems from their conception, to development to deployment and beyond. Yet, the “rights” debate too often proceeds
from the assumption that the entity in question is somewhat autonomous, or worse that it is devoid of exploited
human labour and not a tool that harms the disenfranchised and minoritized. Approaching ethics requires reimagining
ethics from the perspective, needs, and rights of the most marginalized and underserved. This means that any robot
rights discussion that overlooks underpaid and exploited populations that serve as the backbone for “robots” as well
as the environmental cost of creating AI, risks being disingenuous. As a matter of public policy, the question should not
be whether robotic systems deserve rights, but rather, if we grant or deny rights to a robotic system, what
consequences and implications arise for people owning, using, developing, and affected by the actual robots?
The time has come to change the narrative, from “robot rights” to the duties of the corporations and powerful persons now profiting from sociotechnical systems (including, but not limited to, robots). Damages, harm and suffering have been repeatedly documented
as a result of the creation and integration (into the social world) of AI systems. Rather than speculating about the desert of hypothetical machines, the far more urgent conversation concerns robots and AI as concrete artifacts built by powerful corporations, further
invading our private, public, and political space, and perpetuating injustice. A purely intellectual and theoretical debate is at risk of obscuring the real threat here: that many of the actual robots that powerful corporations are building are doing people harm both
directly and indirectly, and that a premature and speculative robot rights discourse risks even further unravelling our frail systems of accountability for technological harm.

The rise of “gun owners’ rights” in the US is but one of many prefigurative phenomena that should lead to deep and abiding caution about fetishization of technology. The US has more gun violence than any other developed country, and endures frequent and
bloody mass shootings. Nevertheless, the US Supreme Court has advanced a strained interpretation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment to promote gun owners’ rights above public safety. We should be very careful about robot rights discourse, lest similar
developments empower judiciaries to immunize exploitive, harmful, and otherwise socially destructive technologies from necessary regulations and accountability.

2 Robot rights: the debate

For many outside the small circle of robot rights discourse, the very idea of debating whether (future) artificially intelligent entities should be granted or denied rights might seem bizarre, fanciful, or even obscene. Nevertheless, within the narrow corners of AI
ethics/machine ethics/robot ethics, the notion of robot rights 1 occupies one of the most ferocious debates.

The idea of robot personhood, and closely aligned ideas of robot rights, has been a long-standing, if fringe, position. It was directly advocated by Sohail Inayatullah [41], and discussed in the early 1990s by legal scholar Lawrence Solum [67]. Numerous scholars have
discussed the possibility and propriety of granting robots some form of legal rights [34]. Arguments for robot rights tend to come in two broad forms. One set of arguments is built around the idea that humans will be more virtuous and respectful to one another if
they are required to respect certain machines (e.g., those that use sensors to gather data about their environment, process that information, and execute certain actions in a given environment). This set of arguments, focused on how granting rights to inanimate
objects may cultivate certain dispositions, skills, and capacities in human beings, was directly addressed in earlier work by two of the authors of this piece (Birhane & van Dijk [11]).
Another set of arguments focuses on robots themselves, rather than their effects on persons. Some scholars argue that there is a mix of qualities of present and/or future robots that merits the type of respect that legal systems usually offer in the form of rights to
do certain actions, or to prevent others from doing certain actions. This and similar sets of arguments constitute the main concern of this article. But to address it properly, we must carefully examine what “robots” entail and the “rights” at issue.

2.1 The Robots at Issue

Both the artificially intelligent entity in question and the reasoning for granting/denying rights varies. Clarifying the “robot” in question is critical. Actually existing robots include machines constructing cars on assembly lines; robots meant to simulate animals (for
example, “robot dogs” manufactured by companies like Boston Dynamics (for war and business) and once manufactured by Sony (the Aibo, for home entertainment); humanoid robots (like the soon-tobe-discontinued Pepper); service delivery robots (such as
Starship and other drones); and a catch-all category of machines with sensors, information processors, and actuators and machine learning models. Given the limited capacities of all these machines, claims for rights for them are hard to understand. None is
sufficiently distinguishable from, say, a pacemaker or a toaster, to merit special consideration beyond what is given to those objects. And this consideration decidedly does not include rights.

As a practical and immediate matter, the question of granting rights to current machines (not the conscious and super intelligent futuristic type but the ubiquitously integrated algorithmic systems) signals a grave danger. To grant these machines rights seems to
hinge on an argument of complexity: in largescale AI systems it is no longer clear whether the humans in charge of these systems can still be held responsible for the deeds of their ‘autonomous’ systems. And so, the argument would go, we need a way of holding the
machine itself responsible. We think however that such a strategy does much more harm than good, since it deflects responsibility from the human owners, creators, operators, and/or beneficiaries of the machine. Moreover, what does it mean to grant rights to
large language models that produce conspiracy theories, lies, and social stereotypes [6]; computer vision systems that harvest data without awareness or consent of the data subject and produce models that perpetuate harmful stereotypes [10]; physical robots that
could take on all the roles of drones and other technology that now hyper-surveils marginalized communities [2, 1]; algorithmic systems that threaten privacy [72, 68]; bots that spread disinformation [14, 40]; and generally speaking AI systems that are created at a
massive environmental and labour cost [20, 32] all of which disproportionately impact individuals and communities at the margins?

A somewhat different form of advocacy for robot rights is rooted in a version of anticipatory philosophizing and futurist premises. The argument goes: science and technology are advancing rapidly enough to ensure that, within our lifetimes, some machines will so
convincingly emulate human action, expression, and interests that human beings will (and should) feel obliged to respect these machines to some extent. If robots exhibit a set of humanlike qualities, then there is no reason not to grant robots rights.

We will engage this second, futuristic account of robots in later sections of this paper. But before we even take up this claim in all seriousness, it is important to note that this is a major concession, a way of acting in an exceedingly hermeneutically charitable way to
robot rights advocates. Assuming the potential beneficiary of “robot rights” to be far more advanced than current machines is the key argumentative move that makes robot rights conceivable at all. However, that concession may well itself obscure more than it
reveals, since it presumes an autonomy and distinctness of the robotic that has been absent in the history of human-computer interaction and is likely to be so far into the future as well given that machines are always human-machine systems. Indeed, close
inspection of the actual material foundations of AI reveals that advocacy for robot rights is much closer to advocacy for corporate or capital rights that subordinates the most exploited, than it is to labor or human rights.

Machines are never fully autonomous but always human-machine systems that rely on human power and resources in order to function. Automation and the idea of automata, from its early conception, relied on a clever trick that erased the labourers toiling away in
the background the people performing crucial tasks for a machine to operate [43, 65, 69]. Surveying the historical genealogy of mechanical calculations, Daston [23] emphasizes that far from reliving the mental burden, automation, shifted the burden to other
shoulders (often women who were paid little), maintaining the ghost in the machine.

Seemingly autonomous systems are profoundly human-machine systems. And furthermore, as demonstrated by Bainbridge’s seminal work on the automation of process and vehicle control on aircraft automation, “the more advanced a control system is, so the
more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator” [3, p.775]. Bainbridge’s concept of the ironies of automation, gets at the heart of intentionally hidden human labour in an appeal to portray machines as autonomous. In reality as Baxter at al., [4] building
on Bainbridge’s classic work make explicit, “[T]he more we depend on technology and push it to its limits, the more we need highly-skilled, well-trained, well-practised people to make systems resilient, acting as the last line of defence against the failures that will
inevitably occur.” [4]. Nearly 40 years later, Bainbridge’s point remains. Effective automation of control processes necessarily requires humans at various steps;, developing, maintaining and stepping in when ‘autonomous’ systems inevitably experience failure [35,
4]. Similarly, today’s ‘autonomous’ vehicles still depend on human “safety drivers” and the need for human input is unlikely to disappear entirely although it might change form [71].

Seemingly autonomous AI relies not only on high-paid, high-skilled engineers and scientists but also underpaid, undervalued, and less-visible labour which go by various names including ghost work, microwork, and crowd-work [42, 32]. From labeling images,
identifying objects in images to annotating data, such human labour “help AI get past those tasks and activities that it cannot solve effectively and/or efficiently” [71], step in to fill in when AI fails [42] and are automation’s ‘last mile’ [32]. Such work constitutes the
backbone of current AI – without it, AI would cease to function. Yet, from Amazon’s MTurk, to Clickworker, AppJobber, to CrowdTap, such labour often goes unrecognized in the AI pipeline. People doing such work, in most cases are not formally considered as formal
employees but independent contractors further adding to their precarious working conditions.

Furthermore, putting the exploitative structure of microwork aside, data that is currently fueling AI systems is often sourced in questionable manners; it is often uncompensated and unregulated. The models built on such data furthermore amplify societal and
historical stereotypes (negatively disproportionately impacting marginalized communities down the line as AI systems trained on such dataset are often used in decision making). The deep learning revolution that transformed image detection, identification and
recognition, for example, is only possible through continued mass scrapping of user uploaded images, all sourced and used to build AI systems without consent or awareness of image owners [10]. Of the major large scale datasets currently used to train and validate
computer vision models, none is sourced consensually (see Birhane and Prabhuu [10] for more).

To summarize, advanced machines never emerge from a vacuum as fully autonomous systems, but are always human-
machines systems whose development will implicates environmental destruction, resource extraction, and human
exploitation without careful planning and implementation to assure otherwise. Furthermore, current ubiquitous AI and
robotic systems are first and foremost tools that normalize surveillance , automate injustice and threaten privacy all
while concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy and benefiting those already powerful institutions and
corporations [45, 9]. The very idea of discussing the “rights” of robots that emerge out of this extremely unequal,
exploitative, and in many respects brutal political economy, is nonsensical at best and dangerous at worst. Instead,
the focus should be on redressing the myriad problems such systems continue to cause, particularly on women, racial
and ethnic minorities, the socio-economically disadvantaged, and LGBTQ+ communities and otherwise marginalized
groups.

It is a cruel parody of justice to presume that Saudi Arabia’s potential grant to the robot “Sophia”[64] a license to drive,
is in some way prefigurative or promoting some later action to grant that kingdom’s women rights. Nor would “rights”
for a cleaning robot in the U.S. do anything to help the hundreds of thousands of janitorial workers now suffering in
exploitive working conditions. Indeed, some of them are probably already, unwittingly or in an uncompensated way,
providing data to such robots. Giving a robot a “right to observe” the persons’ it is being programmed to replace is no
blow for social justice; it is in fact its opposite, short-circuiting debates about data control that should be robust [59].

It is ironic that an intellectual school and movement so reliant on the rhetoric of emancipation , as the robot rights
community is, would end up centering and elevating the power and privileges of capital and corporations. Yet this is
not a surprising outcome. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have mastered the “code of capital” [63] to advance
their interests in multiple venues. InvestorState Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in Bilateral Investment Treaties
(BITs), for example, can guarantee MNCs returns in ways that unravel muchneeded environmental, occupational safety,
and health regulation, all based on the MNC’s “right” to enjoy expected returns from their investment. The U.S. Citizens
United v. FEC (2010) decision gave corporations near carte blanche opportunities to promote their views and
preferred candidates in elections, spawning even more self-aggrandizing judicial interventions to freeze into place
existing power inequalities [60]. Similarly, the rhetoric of “robot rights” is another means to skillfully advance capital’s
interests. Indeed, since robots are often capital themselves, “robot rights” may all too often amount to the
type of “capital rights” only dreamed of by ambitious libertarians .
AV’s lock in neoliberal exploitation through corporate profits at the expense of mined communities.
Marx 19, doctoral student in Media, Film, and Television, critic of tech futures (Paris, “Self-Driving Cars Will Be a
Disaster for Our Environment, Our Health, and Our Privacy,” Medium, https://onezero.medium.com/self-driving-cars-
will-be-a-disaster-for-our-environment-our-health-and-our-privacy-6f5b93b7a36f)

If you’ve listened to the musings of some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent visionaries, you might believe we’re
headed toward a future with ubiquitous a utonomous v ehicles to shuttle us wherever we want to go.

No longer would we have to risk getting stuck in traffic, caught in the rain on our bikes, or running into serial killers on
the subway — we’d all be closed off in our own pods that guide us to our destination as we sleep, watch a video, or get
up to something steamy in the back.

I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but that future has always been an illusion . If self-driving cars ever become a
reality — and that’s a big “if” — they won’t be the magic transport cure-all that tech billionaires pretend they’ll be.
Sure, they would likely provide benefits for Silicon Valley CEOs, but a lot of people would be made worse off — and
we would hardly ever hear about it.

The real transportation revolution doesn’t involve two-ton death machines or hyperintelligent computers, but more
common technologies like buses, bicycles, and our own legs. You won’t hear that from Elon Musk or Sergey Brin because
rebuilding cities to focus on people won’t necessarily generate big, ongoing profits for their firms. But that’s exactly
what we need to do.

False promises

Back in January 2018, when self-driving cars were still a topic of great excitement, I wrote that they were much further
away than tech companies were leading us to believe.

Then, on the night of March 18, 2018, an Uber self-driving vehicle was doing a test run when it struck and killed 49-year-
old Elaine Herzberg as she crossed the road on her bicycle. At the time, people were quick to blame the safety driver
who wasn’t looking at the road, but then leaks began to show Uber’s self-driving team was under immense pressure to
deliver. It wasn’t until recently that we found out that Uber’s self-driving team didn’t program the system to consider
that people might cross the street outside designated crosswalks. As a result, the car couldn’t figure out what it was
picking up when it detected Herzberg, and thus didn’t know how to react. Humans weren’t supposed to be there.

No one has been charged over Herzberg’s death, just as tech companies are rarely prosecuted for the harm caused by
their actions. But Herzberg’s death did burst the self-driving bubble: Leaders in the field went from saying self-driving
cars would be everywhere in a matter of years to admitting they were actually several decades away, and may never
reach the vaunted “level five” status where they’d be able to drive with no intervention from humans.

People without mobility options today will still face those problems in a self-driving future.

High cost of automobility

The timelines have been extended, but that hasn’t stopped people like Elon Musk from keeping the self-driving dream
alive — even as he hedges on what “full self-driving” really means — and continuing to ignore the broader
consequences of a transportation system reliant on automobiles : tens of thousands of deaths every year in the United
States alone, an obesity epidemic that our sprawled communities played a role in creating, and a loneliness crisis
created, in part, because so many people live in car-enabled suburbs, where we’re far from our friends, our family, and
the vibrant places where we might go to meet them.
Tech companies promised that the self-driving car would solve many of our transport problems: serving the
underserved, eliminating parking, reducing congestion, and eliminating car ownership. But we need to be real; it’s all a
fantasy. The claim that self-driving cars will be cheaper to use has proven to be questionable, and even if they did
reduce the cost marginally, they still wouldn’t be free. That means the people without mobility options today will still
face those problems in a self-driving future. And the benefits of reduced parking would actually increase congestion, as
the vehicles would keep moving until being hailed. A utonomous v ehicle s will only cement our sprawled, suburban
landscapes and the health crisis that comes with it, along with the high cost of service delivery to low-density areas and
the climate cost of living in such inefficient environments.

And what goes into these vehicles to make them work? We never seem to consider that. If autonomous vehicles are
electric, as the tech titans promise, they won’t have the tailpipe emissions produced by the internal combustion engines,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be clean, green driving machines. In fact, the e lectric v ehicle revolution will
simply swap an extractivism of fossil fuels for one reliant on metals and minerals , requiring a massive surge in mining
activities in Asia, Africa, and South America that will devastate communities, environments, and the lives of workers
in the process. For example, the massive lithium reserves in Bolivia shouldn’t be ignored as a factor in the recent
military coup.

But self-driving cars wouldn’t just require the extraction of minerals and metals from the earth. A self-driving future
would also require the extraction of data from us and our surroundings. These companies wouldn’t just have us pay for
a ride; they would also track our movements, the locations we visit, who we travel with, and combine that information
with all the other valuable data they already store about us. Tech companies, in partnership with the state, are building
an extensive system of surveillance and control. At what point do we say “enough?”

People, not cars

Think hard about the state of our cities and our broken transportation networks, and ask how technology will suddenly
solve the problems created by decades of underfunding and the prioritization of cars. Tech isn’t going to save us. That
will require structural change.

We’re facing a climate crisis, an urban crisis, a health crisis, a loneliness crisis, and so many more. The Band-Aid solutions
of self-driving cars — if they ever appear — won’t solve them. And either way, we don’t have decades to wait. We need
action today.

That means we need to stop designing cities and transportation systems around what’s most profitable for real estate,
finance, and car companies. Instead we need to put people first. Many Americans claim to love their cars, but spending
hours idling in traffic and yet more trapped in a metal box breathing in toxic fumes to get where you need to go serves
no one.

We need cities that make it easy for people to walk or bike to get their groceries, go to the doctor, and bring their kids to
school. We need transit systems that make it easy for people to get where they need to go on efficient, well-maintained
bus routes. We need streets that don’t pose a mortal threat to the life that surrounds them, but are open to everyone
and lined with spaces where life can flourish.

This will require us to rethink how cities work and who they work for, and a massive redirection of funding and subsidies
from highways to subways, cars to buses, parking spots to bike lanes, sprawl to density — all while putting the lives of
everyday people ahead of traffic speed. It can be hard to imagine an alternative to our current, auto-dominated system,
but it’s the only way to address the crises we face.

Self-driving cars will keep us atomized in sprawled suburbs, but walkable dense communities with ubiquitous transit
will connect us in ways we can scarcely imagine. The future isn’t found in the false promises of tech billionaires who
are only concerned with their power and fortunes, but in reconnecting with the fundamentals of mobility and
ensuring the system prioritizes the marginalized over the powerful.
Extinction outweighs rhetoric is colonial blackmail
Mitchell 17, Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the department of Political Science at Wilfrid
Laurier University (Audra, November 25th, “DECOLONIZING AGAINST EXTINCTION PART II,”
https://www.lostspeciesday.org/?p=881)

Oddly, exposureto the fear of extinction contributes to the formation and

bolstering of contemporary Western subjects . Contemplating the sublime destruction of
‘humanity’ offers the thrill of abjection: the perverse pleasure derived from exposure to something by which one is
revolted. Claire Colebrook detects this thrill-seeking impulse in the profusion of Western blockbuster films and TV shows
that imagine and envision the destruction of earth, or at least of ‘humanity’. It also throbs through a flurry of recent
best-selling books – both fiction and speculative non-fiction (see Oreskes and Conway 2014; Newitz 2013; Weisman
2008). In a forthcoming intervention, Noah Theriault and I (2018) argue that these imaginaries are a form of porn that
normalizes the profound violences driving extinction, while cocooning its viewers in the secure space of the voyeur.
Certainly, there are many Western scientists, conservationists and policy-makers who are genuinely committed to
stopping the extinction of others, perhaps out of fear for their own futures. Yet extinction is not quite real for Western,
and especially white, subjects; it is a fantasy of negation that evokes thrill, melancholy, anger and existential purpose.
It is a metaphor that expresses the destructive desires of these beings, and the negativity against which we define our
subjectivity.

But extinction is not a metaphor: it is a very real expression of violence that systematically destroys particular beings,
worlds, life forms and the relations that enable them to flourish. These are real, unique beings, worlds and relations – as
well as somebody’s family, Ancestors, siblings, future generations – who are violently destroyed. Extinction can only be
used unironically as a metaphor by people who have never been threatened with it, told it is their inevitable fate, or
lost their relatives and Ancestors to it – and who assume that they probably never will.

This argument is directly inspired by the call to arms issued in 2012 by Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang and more recently by
Cutcha Risling-Baldy. The first, seminal piece demonstrates how settler cultures use the violence of metaphorical
abstraction to excuse themselves from the real work of decolonization : ensuring that land and power is in Indigenous
hands. Risling-Baldy’s brilliant follow-up extends this logic to explain how First People like Coyote have been reduced to
metaphors through settler appropriation. In both cases, engagement with Indigenous peoples and their relations masks
moves to innocence: acts that make it appear as if settlers are engaging in decolonization, while in fact we are
consolidating the power structures that privilege us.

In this series, want to show how Western, and white-dominated, discourses on ‘extinction’ appear to address the
systematic destruction of peoples and other beings while enacting moves to innocence that mask their culpability and
perpetuate structures of violence. As I argued in Part I of this series, extinction is an expression of colonial violence. As
such, it needs to be addressed through direct decolonization, including the dismantling of settler colonial structures of
violence, and the resurgence of Indigenous worlds. Following Tuck, Yang and Risling-Baldy’s lead, I want to show how
and why the violences that drive extinction have come to be invisible within mainstream discourses. Salient amongst
these is the practice of genocide against Indigenous peoples other than humans.

Smart cities cause mass injustice, segregation, erosion of rights, privatization, and unsustainability
Strüver et al. 21, *Department of Geography and Regional Science, University of Graz **RCE Graz-Styria–Centre for
Sustainable Social Transformation, University of Graz (* **Anke Strüver *Rivka Saltiel *Nicolas Schlitz **Bernhard
Hohmann **Thomas Höflehner *Barbara Grabher, 2021, “A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling
and Questioning Smart Urbanism,” Sustainability, 13, 9590, https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179590)
2. Smart Urbanism and Entrepreneurial Urbanisation

Since the end of the 1990s, urban scholars have addressed the role of information and communication technology (ICT)
in the production of urban spaces [22,23], and have critically examined technosocial and technocapitalist
transformations, including the shift in power relations in favour of capitalist surplus accumulation. As economic interests
play an increasingly important role in the expansion of digital infrastructures in cities, analyses in recent years have also
focused on the modernisation promises of dominant Smart City narratives, the expansion of entrepreneurial
urbanisation through public–private partnerships, the monitoring, surveillance and control of citizens by ICT
companies [11] and, more recently, the emergence of platform urbanism [24–27]. However, since urbanisation
processes always involve “not only a transformation of urban infrastructures but also the construction of a new way of
life and urban persona” [1] (p. 26), digitalisation must be expected to result in profound changes of cities, its citizens
and urban everyday life [28]. Before we turn to this, we will briefly introduce the dominant Smart City narratives
(Section 2.1), summarise entrepreneurial urbanisation (Section 2.2) and reflect on the right to the city against this
background (Section 2.3).

2.1. Smart Urbanism

Given that planetary urbanisation results not just from the increasing number of people worldwide who live in cities but
also from the global impact of urbanisation processes [29], we have adopted this as “planetary urban digitalisation” [12]
(p. 189): Digital technologies and digitally connected infrastructures in cities, such as mobility services, public
administration, security surveillance, smart homes and energy grids, amongst others, increasingly shape the production
and perception of urban spaces. Recent dynamics of digitalisation in cities are based on new coalitions of ICT
corporations and city governments, which foster an understanding of smart urbanism and cities as spaces for
technocapitalist control [30]. Labelling this collaboration through the term ‘Smart City’ does not necessarily serve as a
status marker for a city; rather, the label promises an expansion of its level of digitalisation. There is a wide agreement
amongst Smart City visionaries that digital technologies are prerequisites for improving the quality of life in cities,
reducing resource consumption for effective urban governance and sustainable urban futures. Against this
background, nearly every city wants to be ‘smart’ in this sense, and nearly every city relies on techno-managerial
solutions [4,8,12]. Critical responses to Smart City narratives are not directed against digitalisation per se, but
question public– private partnerships as the profit-driven interests of ICT corporations, which are beyond the reaches
of the democratic legitimation that urban governments represent.

The point of departure for most Smart City implementations is not urban renewal, nor any kind of social or ecological
crisis, but the technological feasibility of digitalisation—that is, the implementations are based on the services offered
by the companies. Vanolo has described this kind of smart mentality as “an urban imaginary combining the concept of
‘green cities’ with technological futurism and giving a name to techno-centric visions of the city of tomorrow” [31] (p.
894).
Beyond the general idea of digitisation, the term ‘Smart City’ is not associated with one definition but with multiple urban functions and infrastructures. As Clark describes, “[s]mart cities are difficult to define. Almost every
discussion of smart cities begins with an effort to define the term or to assert that no definition is possible or necessary . . . it is a ‘fuzzy concept’” [10] (p. 2). Similarly, Luque-Ayala and Marvin state that, “[s]ince its
inception, the smart city has been a vague and nebulous concept” [11] (p. 14). The dominant narratives, however, promise the improvement of mobility, housing, waste management, resource efficiency and many other

. Smart
areas of daily urban life. However, increasing digitalisation does not change urban functions and necessities—it advances only the dynamics of connectivity and control with respect to infrastructures

Cities’ promises to modernise and renew urban life are often not demand-driven but are based on the services
offered by ICT companies such as IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, or Siemens . Therefore, the implementations do not respond to
the most pressing needs of the majority of urban citizens .

The Smart City does not fight socio-economic, socio-cultural or ecological injustice in cities and even has
counterproductive effects on ecological sustainability (‘rebound effects’). Swyngedouw and Kaika have claimed that
‘sustainability’ became the empty signifier that referred generically to the phantasmagoric vision of a world in which
people, the economy and the environment could happily and lovingly interact in mutually supportive, cohesive and
historically reproducible manners, mediated by increasingly ‘smart’ technologies that would benignly micro-engineer
the delicate balance between humans and nature. The term ‘sustainability’ (which has neither intellectual coherence
nor political substance) has now become hegemonically engrained and consensually accepted as the normative ideal
that , with the proper techno-managerial devices in place, might not only render our urban ecological predicament
bearable but also permit civilisation as we know it to continue a while longer without engendering significant socio-
political change [32].

Smart City narratives are universal(ising) stories that neglect the “diverse histories, cultures and political economies
and variegated forms of capitalism that shape patterns of urban and economic development and the relationship
between state, market and society” [2] (p. 133) [8,33]. From its beginning, urban digitalisation was supported by
changes in urban policy, the turn towards governance structures and entrepreneurial principles with the effect that, by
now, most urban governments manage ‘their’ cities like corporations. In the global competition to win over the largest
companies, the most modern image and the smartest citizens, cities try to attract attention through stories of digital
innovation. With this strategy, neoliberal local government ideas meet the profit-oriented interests of ICT companies
and result in financialised urban development following corporate management principles [34]. Moreover, digital
urban infrastructures are linked to entrepreneurial urban policy that promotes the privatisation of public tasks and
infrastructures, and thus supports the outsourcing to private actors of activities previously carried out by public
authorities.

2.2. Entrepreneurial Urbanisation

Entrepreneurial urban governance predates smart urbanism. Neoliberalism has created new forms of governance that favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping urban processes [1]. While cities, during the post-war decades, had a managerial role in organising and (re)distributing services of interest by the welfare
state only, the neoliberal turn has changed the role of cities and “urban governance has moved more ( . . . ) into line with the naked requirements of capital accumulation” [9] (p. 15). Neoliberal urbanisation processes aim to lure global surplus capital. Therefore, they address certain external economic actors, such as companies or
high-income population groups, and are characterised by speculative large-scale projects framed within strategic planning frameworks that compare to short-term business plans for the city, paving the way for an engagement of non-state actors.

This is paired with downscaling processes of power from the nation state to the local urban scale. Cities no longer primarily have the function of a state administrative apparatus but act as corporations, considering themselves competitors for globally active capital. In order “to control multinational money flows, ( . . . ) investment
increasingly takes the form of a negotiation between international finance capital and local powers doing the best they can to maximise the attractiveness of the local site as a lure for capitalist development” [9] (p. 5).

The hegemonic shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism [9] in most European and North American cities since the late 1980s is expressed both in terms of urban governing processes (from government to
governance) and urban policy strategies. The entrepreneurial mode of urban governance implies a broader coalition of forces that reorganises urban life and is characterised by a transfer of market and competition
mechanisms to the internal regulation of urban processes that were once distinctive to market actors. This is expressed through the implementation of business management models, the creation of competitive
relationships, profit motivation, risk-taking and city branding, as well as public–private partnerships and the privatisation of public companies and infrastructures (such as public utilities, mobility and waste management)

All aspects of politics tend to be subordinated to the overarching goal of improving place attractiveness —and
[9,35,36].

hence competitiveness [35]. The increasing emphasis on the quality of life and the sense of place is expressed in urbanisation processes through strategies of urban regeneration that focus on the
symbolic and physical upgrading of the urban environment [9]. This is done, on the one hand, through investment in mobility, communications and provision of adequate office spaces, and on the other hand, in boosting
the symbolic image of the city.

Once a city has positioned itself on the map to attract companies, affluent consumers and high-income households,
the entire population will supposedly benefit from trickledown effects, or so predicts the neoliberal rationale.
Accordingly, social and welfare investments are considered as an expected outcome of economic performances and are
conditioned by it [9,35]. Thus, entrepreneurial urbanisation follows a supply-oriented economic logic that is based on
potentialities—as opposed to rationally planned and coordinated development based on existing demands . The
speculative risk of these public– private partnership ventures , however, is not shared equally : the private sector takes
the benefit while the public sector assumes the risk [9]. Consequently, local subsidies flow in favour of capital
accumulation, and thus prioritise wealthy, international consumers and corporations at the expense of meeting local
needs , provision for the poor , social welfare , redistribution and social justice . Or, in the words of Marcuse and Van
Kempen: “development may mean profits for one, displacement for the other” [37] (p. 265). By focusing primarily on
‘good business climate’ and the needs of the upper and middle classes, neoliberal urbanisation processes tend to
increase existing the inequalities and disparities in wealth and income and intensify the dynamics of impoverishment
and disempowerment in the city [9,35,38].

Investment in one place always results in disinvestment in other places . Thus, uneven geographical development is a
structural element of capitalist urbanisation [9,39]. However, at the same time, capitalist urbanisation—temporarily—
resolves problems of overaccumulation, since it fixes surplus capital, spatially embedding it in land. ‘Fix’ in this context
holds a double meaning: first, to secure surplus capital in space, and, second, to fix a problem (capitalism’s crisis
tendencies) temporarily [40]. In other words: “Capitalism, we might say, is addicted to geographical expansion much as
it is addicted to technological change and endless expansion through economic growth ” [39] (p. 24).

Employing spatial and technological fixes, smart urban development strategies are leading to an “erosion of social
rights” [40] (p. 365). With a focus on the quality of technology rather than of lives , techno-managerial systems
reinforce socio-spatial injustice [9,41]. These dynamics can be well observed in respect to the uneven development
processes provoked by targeted investments in smart districts and the subsequent disinvestment in others. These
smart excesses in prospering neighbourhoods result in a lack of financial means to maintain basic public services in
education, health, housing or mobility in ‘ordinary’ parts of the city [5]. As smart ICT innovations are predominantly
luring investments to indicator-based goals [41], the disproportional attention results in increasing injustice and
segregation within the entire city . Failing to “productively [ . . . ] satisfy social needs”, smart, neoliberal urban
development projects are “generally at the cost of considerable human suffering and massive environmental
degradation” [38] (p. 4). Therefore, alternative policies and economies countering social and spatial divides are needed
in order to deal with social and/or environmental problems and injustices.

The alternative is a worker’s international. Latent unrest exists globally, international movements
directed by the Global South can counter capitalist imperialism.
Foster 20, Editor of Monthly Review, and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon (John Bellamy, The
Renewal of the Socialist Ideal, Monthly Review, September 2020, Volume 72, Number 4)

Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the United States is a resurgent movement
for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. The demise of U.S. hegemony within the
world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the former, imperial-based labor
aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.9 Confronted
with what Michael D. Yates has called “the Great Inequality,” the mass of the population in the United States,
particularly youth, are faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often
despair, marked by a dramatic increase in “deaths of despair.”10 They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist
system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative.11 Although the U.S.
situation is unique, similar objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in
the system, primarily in the Global South , in an era of continuing economic stagnation, financialization, and universal
ecological decline.

But if socialism is seemingly on the rise again in the context of the structural crisis of capital and increased class
polarization, the question is: What kind of socialism? In what ways does socialism for the twenty-first century differ from
socialism of the twentieth century? Much of what is being referred to as socialism in the United States and elsewhere is
of the social-democratic variety, seeking an alliance with left-liberals and thus the existing order, in a vain attempt to
make capitalism work better through the promotion of social regulation and social welfare in direct opposition to
neoliberalism, but at a time when neoliberalism is itself giving way to neofascism.12 Such movements are bound to fail
at the outset in the present historical context, inevitably betraying the hopes that they unleashed, since focused on
mere electoral democracy. Fortunately , we are also seeing the growth today of a genuine socialism , evident in extra-
electoral struggle, heightened mass action, and the call to go beyond the parameters of the present system so as to
reconstitute society as whole.

The general unrest latent at the base of U.S. society was manifested in the uprisings in late May and June of this year,
which took the form, practically unheard of in U.S. history since the U.S. Civil War, of massive solidarity protests with
millions of people in the streets, and with the white working class , and white youth in particular, crossing the color
line en masse in response to the police lynching of George Floyd for no other crime than being a Black man.13 This
event, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic depression, led to the June days of
rage in the United States.

But while the movement toward socialism, now taking hold even in the United States at the “barbaric heart” of the

system, is gaining ground as a result of objective forces, it lacks an adequate subjective basis .14
A major obstacle in formulating strategic goals of socialism in the world today has to do with twentieth-century
socialism’s abandonment of its own ideals as originally articulated in Karl Marx’s vision of communism. To understand
this problem, it is necessary to go beyond recent left attempts to address the meaning of communism on a philosophical
basis, a question that has led in the last decade to abstract treatments of The Communist Idea, The Communist
Hypothesis, and The Communist Horizon by Alain Badiou and others.15 Rather, a more concrete historically based
starting point is necessary, focusing directly on the two-phase theory of socialist/communist development that emerged
out of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and V. I. Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Paul M. Sweezy’s article
“Communism as an Ideal,” published more than half a century ago in Monthly Review in October 1963, is now a classic
text in this regard.16
Marx’s Communism as the Socialist Ideal In The Critique of the Gotha Programme—written in opposition to the economistic and laborist notions of the branch of German Social Democracy influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle—Marx designated two historical “phases” in the struggle to create a society of associated producers. The first phase was initiated by the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” reflecting the class-war experience of the Paris Commune and representing a period of workers’ democracy, but one that still carried the “defects” of capitalist class society. In this initial phase, not only would a break with capitalist private property take place,
but also a break with the capitalist state as the political command structure of capitalism.17 As a measure of the limited nature of socialist transition in this stage, production and distribution would inevitably take the form of to each according to one’s labor, perpetuating conditions of inequality even while creating the conditions for their transcendence. In contrast, in the later phase, the principle governing society would shift to from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need and the elimination of the wage system.18 Likewise, while the initial phase of socialism/communism would require the formation of a new political command
structure in the revolutionary period, the goal in the higher phase was the withering away of the state as a separate apparatus standing above and in antagonistic relation to society, to be replaced with a form of political organization that Frederick Engels referred to as “community,” associated with a communally based form of production.19 In the later, higher phase of the transition of socialism/communism, not only would property be collectively owned and controlled, but the constitutive cells of society would be reconstituted on a communal basis and production would be in the hands of the associated producers. In these conditions, Marx stated, “labor”
will have become not a mere “means of life” but “itself…the prime necessity of life.”20 Production would be directed at use values rather than exchange values, in line with a society in which “the free development of each” would be “the condition for the free development of all.” The abolition of capitalist class society and the creation of a society of associated producers would lead to the end of class exploitation, along with the elimination of the divisions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. The monogamous, patriarchal family based on the domestic enslavement of women would also be surmounted.21 Fundamental to Marx’s
picture of the higher phase of the society of associated producers was a new social metabolism of humanity and the earth. In his most general statement on the material conditions governing the new society, he wrote: “Freedom, in this sphere [the realm of natural necessity], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism of nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy” in the process of promoting conditions of sustainable human development.22 Writing in The State and Revolution and elsewhere, Lenin deftly captured Marx’s arguments on the lower and higher phases,
depicting these as the first and second phases of communism. Lenin went on to emphasize what he called “the scientific distinction between socialism and communism,” whereby “what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower phase of communist society,” whereas the term communism, meaning “complete communism,” was most appropriately used for the higher phase.23 Although Lenin closely aligned this distinction with Marx’s analysis, in later official Marxism this came to be rigidified in terms of two entirely separate stages, with the so-called communist stage so removed from the stage of socialism that it became utopianized,
no longer seen as part of a continuous or ongoing struggle. Based on a wooden conception of the socialist stage and the intermediary principle of distribution to each according to one’s labor, Joseph Stalin carried out an ideological war against the ideal of real equality, which he characterized as a “reactionary, petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines.” This same stance was to persist in the Soviet Union in one way or another all the way to Mikhail Gorbachev.24 Hence, as explained by Michael Lebowitz in The Socialist Imperative, “rather than a continuous struggle to go beyond what
Marx called the ‘defects’ inherited from capitalist society, the standard interpretation” of Marxism in the half-century from the late 1930s to the late ’80s “introduced a division of post-capitalist society into two distinct ‘stages,’” determined economistically by the level of development of the productive forces. Fundamental changes in social relations emphasized by Marx as the very essence of the socialist path were abandoned in the process of living with and adapting to the defects carried over from capitalist society. Instead, Marx had insisted on a project aimed at building the community of associated producers “from the outset” as part of an ongoing, if
necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction.25 This abandonment of the socialist ideal associated with Marx’s higher phase of communism was wrapped up in a complex way with changing material (and class) conditions and eventually the demise of Soviet-type societies, which tended to stagnate once they ceased to be revolutionary and even resurrected class forms, heralding their eventual collapse as the new class or nomenklatura abandoned the system. As Sweezy argued in 1971, “state ownership and planning are not enough to define a viable socialism, one immune to the threat of retrogression and capable of moving forward on the second leg
of the movement to communism.” Something more was needed: the continuous struggle to create a society of equals.26 For Marx, the movement toward a society of associated producers was the very essence of the socialist path embedded in “communist consciousness.”27 Yet, once socialism came to be defined in more restrictive, economistic terms, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onward, in which substantial inequality was defended, post-revolutionary society lost the vital connection to the dual struggle for freedom and necessity, and hence became disconnected from the long-term goals of socialism from which it had formerly
derived its meaning and coherence. Based on this experience, it is evident that the only way to build socialism in the twenty-first century is to embrace precisely those aspects of the socialist/communist ideal that allow a theory and practice radical enough to address the urgent needs of the present, while also not losing sight of the needs of the future. If the planetary ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that what is required is a new social metabolism with the earth, a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. This can be seen in the extraordinary achievements of Cuban ecology, as recently shown by Mauricio Betancourt in “The Effect
of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift” in Global Environmental Change.28 This conforms to what Georg Lukács called the necessary “double transformation” of human social relations and the human relations to nature.29 Such an emancipatory project must necessarily pass through various revolutionary phases, which cannot be predicted in advance. Yet, to be successful, a revolution must seek to make itself irreversible through the promotion of an organic system directed at genuine human needs, rooted in substantive equality and the rational regulation of the human social metabolism with nature.30 Freedom as Necessity Building on G. W.
F. Hegel’s philosophy, Engels famously argued in Anti-Dühring that real freedom was grounded in the recognition of necessity. Revolutionary change was the point at which freedom and necessity met in concrete praxis. Although there was such a thing as blind necessity beyond human knowledge, once objective forces were grasped, necessity was no longer blind, but rather offered new paths for human action and freedom. Necessity and freedom fed on each other, requiring new periods of social change and historical transcendence.31 In illustrating this materialist dialectical principle, Lenin acutely observed, “we do not know the necessity of nature in the
phenomena of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists.”32 We know the human relation to the weather and nature in general inevitably varies with the changing productive relations governing our actions. Today, the knowledge of anthropogenic climate crisis and of extreme weather events is removing human beings from the realm of blind necessity and demanding that the world’s population engage in the ultimate struggle for freedom and survival against catastrophe capitalism. As Marx stated in the context of the severe metabolic rift imposed on Ireland as a result of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the
ecological crisis presents itself as a case of “ruin or revolution.”33 In the Anthropocene, the ecological rift resulting from the expansion of the capitalist economy now exists on a scale rivaling the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. However, knowledge of these objective developments also allows us to conceive the necessary revolution in the social metabolic reproduction of humanity and the earth. Viewed in this context, Marx’s crucial conception of a “community of associated producers” is not to be viewed as simply a far-off utopian conception or abstract ideal but as the very essence of the necessary human defense in the present and future, representing
the insistent demand for a sustainable relation to the earth.34 But where is the agent of revolutionary change? The answer is that we are seeing the emergence of the material preconditions of what can be called a global environmental proletariat. Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, was a description and analysis of working-class conditions in Manchester, shortly after the so-called Plug Plot Riots and at the height of radical Chartism. Engels depicted the working-class environment not simply in terms of factory conditions, but much more in terms of urban developments, housing, water supply, sanitation, food and nutrition,
and child development. The focus was on the general epidemiological environment enforced by capitalism (what Engels called “social murder” and what Norman Bethune later called “the second sickness”) associated with widespread morbidity and mortality, particularly due to contagious disease.35 Marx, under the direct influence of Engels and as a result of his own social epidemiological studies twenty years later while writing Capital, was to see the metabolic rift as arising not only in relation to the degradation of the soil, but equally, as he put it, in terms of “periodical epidemics” induced by society itself.36 What this tells us—and we could find many other
illustrations, from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to struggles in the Global South today—is that class struggle and revolutionary moments are the product of a coalescence of objective necessity and a demand for freedom emanating from material conditions that are not simply economic but also environmental in the broadest sense. Revolutionary situations are thus most likely to come about when a combination of economic and ecological conditions make social transformations necessary, and where social forces and relations are developed enough to make such changes possible. In this respect, looked at from a global standpoint today, the issue of the
environmental proletariat overlaps with and is indistinguishable from the question of the ecological peasantry and the struggles of the Indigenous. Likewise, the struggle for environmental justice that now animates the environmental movement globally is in essence a working-class and peoples’ struggle.37 The environmental proletariat in this sense can be seen as emerging as a force all over the world, as evident in the present period of ecological-epidemiological struggle in relation to COVID-19. Yet, the main locus of revolutionary ecological action in the immediate future remains the Global South, faced with the harsh reality of “imperialism in the
Anthropocene.”38 As Samir Amin observed in Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value, the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan is already using the planet’s bio-capacity at four times the world average, pointing toward ecological oblivion. This unsustainable level of consumption of resources in the Global North is only possible because a good proportion of the bio-capacity of society in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centers [in the triad]. In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity. The expansion’s logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of
the peoples of the South—as “overpopulation”—or, at the least, their confinement to ever-increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed which gives legitimacy to this kind of “final solution” to the problem.39 A New System of Social Metabolic Reproduction A revolutionary process of socialist construction aimed at building a new system of social reproduction in conformity with the demands of necessity and freedom cannot occur without an overall “orienting principle” and “measure of achievement” as part of a long-term strategy. It is here, following Mészáros, that the notion of substantive equality or a society of equals, also
entailing substantive democracy, comes into play in today’s struggles.40 Such an approach not only stands opposed to capital at its barbaric heart but also opposes any ultimately futile endeavor to stop halfway in the transition to socialism. Immanuel Kant spelled out the dominant liberal view shortly after the French Revolution when he stated that “the general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have.… Hence, the general equality of men coexists with great inequality of specific rights of which there may be many.”41 In this way, equality came to be merely formal, existing
merely “on paper” as Engels pointed out, not only with respect to the labor contract between capitalist and worker but also in relation to the marriage contract between men and women.42 Such a society establishes, as Marx demonstrated, a “right of inequality, in its content, like every right.”43 The idea of substantive equality, consistent with Marx’s notion of communism, challenges all of this. It demands a change in the constitutive cells of society, which can no longer consist of possessive individualists, or individual capitals, reinforced by a hierarchical state, but must be based on the associated producers and a communal state. Genuine planning and
genuine democracy can only start through the constitution of power from the bottom of society. It is only in this way that revolutions become irreversible. It was the explicit recognition of the challenge and burden of twenty-first-century socialism in these terms that represented the extraordinary threat to the prevailing order constituted by the Venezuelan Revolution led by Hugo Chávez. The Bolivarian Republic challenged capitalism from within through the creation of communal power and popular protagonism, generating a notion of revolution as the creation of an organic society, or a new social metabolic order. Chávez, building on the analyses of Marx
and Mészáros, mediated by Lebowitz, introduced the notion of “the elementary triangle of socialism,” or (1) social ownership, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) satisfaction of communal needs.44 Underlying this was a struggle for substantive equality, abolishing the inequalities of the color line and the gender line, the imperial line, and other lines of oppression, as the essential basis for eliminating the society of unequals. In “Communism as an Ideal,” Sweezy emphasized the new forms of labor that would necessarily come into being in a society that used abundant human productivity more rationally. Many categories of work, he indicated,
would “be eliminated altogether (e.g. coalmining and domestic service), and insofar as possible all jobs must become interesting and creative as only a few are today.” The reduction of the enormous waste and destruction inherent in capitalist production and consumption would open up space for the employment of disposable time in more creative ways. In a society of equals—one in which everyone stands in the same relation to the means of production and has the same obligation to work and serve the common welfare—all “needs” that emphasize the superiority of the few and involve the subservience of the many will simply disappear and will be
replaced by the needs of liberated human beings living together in mutual respect and cooperation.… Society and the human beings who compose it constitute a dialectical whole: neither can change without changing the other. And communism as an ideal comprises a new society and a new [human being].45 More than simply an ideal, such an organizing principle in which substantive equality and substantive democracy are foremost in the conception of socialism/communism is essential not only to create a socialist path to a better future but as a necessary defense of the global population confronted with the question of survival. Dystopian books and novels
notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the level of environmental catastrophe that will face the world’s peoples, especially those at the bottom of the imperialist hierarchy, if capitalism’s creative destruction of the metabolism of humanity and the earth is not stopped mid–century. According to a 2020 article on “The Future of the Human Climate Niche” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on existing trends, 3.5 billion people are projected to be living in unlivable heat outside the human climate niche by 2070, under conditions comparable to those of the Sahara desert.46 Even such projections fail to capture the enormous level
of destruction that will fall on the majority of humanity under capitalist business as usual. The only answer is to leave the burning house and to build another now.47

The International of Workers and Peoples

Although untold numbers of people are engaged in innumerable struggles against the capitalist juggernaut in their
specific localities all around the world, struggles for substantive equality, including battles over race, gender, and class,
depend on the fight against imperialism at the global level. Hence, there is a need for a new global
organization of workers based on the model of Marx’s First International.48 Such an International for the
twenty-first century cannot simply consist of a group of elite intellectuals from the North engaged in World Social
Forum-like discussion activities or in the promotion of social-democratic regulatory reforms as in the so-called Socialist
and Progressive Internationals. Rather, it needs to be constituted as a workers-based and peoples-based organization ,
rooted from the beginning in a strong South-South alliance so as to place
the struggle against
imperialism at the center of the socialist revolt against capitalism , as contemplated by
figures such as Chávez and Amin.

In 2011, just prior to his final illness, Chávez was preparing, following his next election, to launch what was to be called
the New International (pointedly not a Fifth International) focusing on a South-South alliance and giving a global
significance to socialism in the twenty-first century. This would have extended the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our
America to a global level.49 This, however, never saw the light of day due to Chávez’s rapid decline and untimely death.

Meanwhile, a separate conception grew out of the efforts of Amin, working with the World Forum for Alternatives. Amin
had long contemplated a Fifth International, an idea he was still presenting as late as May 2018. But in July 2018, only a
month before his death, this had been transformed into what he called an Internationale of Workers and Peoples,
explicitly recognizing that a pure worker-based International that did not take into account the situation of peoples was
inadequate in confronting imperialism.50 This, he stated, would be an organization, not just a movement. It would be
aimed at the

alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariat…
including all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and the peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The
construction must also be based on the recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other
popular organizations of struggle, guaranteeing their real independence.… In the absence of [such revolutionary]
progress the world would continue to be ruled by chaos, barbarian practices, and the destruction of the earth.51

The creation of a New International cannot of course occur in a vacuum but needs to be articulated within and as a
product of the building of unified mass organizations expanding at the grassroots level in conjunction with
revolutionary movements and delinkings from the capitalist system all over the world. It could not occur, in Amin’s
view, without new initiatives from the Global South to create broad alliances, as in the initial organized struggles
associated with the Third World movement launched at the Bandung Conference in 1955, and the struggle for a New
International Economic Order.52 These three elements— grassroots movements, delinking, and cross-country/cross-
continent alliances—are all crucial in his conception of the anti-imperialist struggle. Today this needs to be united
with the global ecological movement.

Such a universal struggle against capitalism and imperialism, Amin insisted, must be characterized by audacity and more
audacity, breaking with the coordinates of the system at every point, and finding its ideal path in the principle of from
each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need, as the very definition of human community. Today we
live in a time of the perfect coincidence of the struggles for freedom and necessity, leading to a renewed struggle for
freedom as necessity. The choice before us is unavoidable: ruin or revolution.

K
2NC---Overview
The neoliberal order is unsustainable---populist backlash ensures instability and conflict that flips
any benefit to globalization.
---Specifically indicts interdependence theory.

Gonzalez-Vicente 18, University Lecturer in Global Political Economy @ U Leiden (Ruben, “The liberal peace fallacy:
violent neoliberalism and the temporal and spatial traps of state-based approaches to peace,” Territoriality, Politics,
Governance, 8.1)

Yet, the contemporary ascension of nationalist and populist movements and leaders that herald deeply illiberal views
(Xi included) must come as no surprise after decades of neoliberal triumphalism and the promotion of a transnational
order that placed the crafting of a world market above the needs of societies themselves. In such a context, the
contemporary rise of nationalism and populisms across the world is not some liberal order antithesis emerging from a
vacuum, but rather a logical consequence of this liberal order, constituting an often reactionary ‘counter movement’
that cannot be tackled with liberal prescriptions for increased market globalization (Polanyi, 2001). This paper takes
aim at the now long-held and recently revitalized argument for a liberal peace. While not attempting to predict any
specific outcome regarding the future of global peace, it argues that the rise of illiberal and reactionary discourses that
we now observe, and their potential corollaries, must be understood in a dialectical sense as the result of a liberal
market-oriented inter-state order that failed to tackle the great social dislocation that it played a fundamental role in
fomenting .

To develop this critique, I draw upon three main bodies of literature that, despite their apparent affinities, are seldom
brought together. These include Polanyi and Gramsci-inspired understandings of hegemonic crisis, counter-movements,
and the rise of nationalism and populism (Gill, 2015; Gonzalez-Vicente & Carroll, 2017); critical political economies of
social conflict within a context of neoliberal globalization (Harvey, 2005; Springer, 2015); and political geography
analyses of international relations theory (IRT), and more specifically critical geographies of peace (Agnew & Corbridge,
1995; Flint, 2005; Koopman, 2016; McConnell, Megoran, & Williams, 2014; Megoran, 2011; Nagle, 2010; Williams &
McConnell, 2011). Elaborating upon these, I contend that the methodological nationalism of the disciplines of
economics and international relations – in which much of the liberal view is based – has left them in a sorry state in
making sense of recent political development throughout the world, specifically when addressing the contemporary
rise of reactionary forms of populism.

In this sense, the high degrees of violence and vulnerability associated with processes of market integration have
often escaped the radars of economics and IR analyses, fixated as they are with mono-scale scrutiny of national
economies and state-to-state relations. Although some liberal IR scholars have laid the grounds for a less normative
paradigm that incorporates domestic variables and bottom-up societal processes into the understanding of state action,
the assumption remains that policy interdependence and compatibility between states, combined with the Pareto-
efficient outcomes of globally integrated production and trade, result in ‘strong incentives for coexistence with low
conflict’ (Moravcsik, 1997, p. 521; see also Oneal & Russett, 1997; McDonald & Sweeney, 2007). Recent developments
suggest there are fundamental flaws with this largely deductive hypothesis. Whereas on aggregate terms, and
according to some measurements, nation-states may have benefitted more or less from globalization, social conflict
occurring at multiple scales – and indeed in a class-based dimension – is an undeniable constitutive element of state
action, the latter reflecting and/or attempting to contain particular constellations of social forces and their interests. In
this way, the damage inflicted upon many by increasingly disembedded markets and post-political states that shield
policy from popular deliberation (both the products of the liberal agenda) are at the very root of the current crisis of
liberal hegemony (Gonzalez-Vicente & Carroll, 2017).
In what follows, I draw upon a variety of cases to explain how a dialectical approach to liberalism, neoliberalism and their illiberal responses,1 and a multi-scalar analysis of market violence are indispensable in explaining much of the turbulence that world politics
faces today. To be clear, the paper’s goal is not to deny that state leaders factor in the economic repercussions of conflict when they contemplate its possibility – a logical assumption of liberal international relations scholarship. The aim is instead to argue that these
calculations tell very little about the nature of peace and conflict as historically bounded processes that need to be studied in relation to broader transformations in the global political economy, the latter affecting state behaviour in terms of both economic policy
and inter-state rivalry. In this way, and crucially, I also wish to refute the liberal argument that the pursuit of economic integration at any (social) cost will unequivocally lower the prospects for international conflict or, indeed, structural violence more broadly
understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section problematizes the concept of peace in IRT, with a more detailed discussion of economic liberalism. The following section presents a temporal critique, contextualizing the contemporary rise of illiberal politics within
the transformation of the global political economy under world market capitalism. After this, I build upon Agnew (1994) to develop a scalar critique and argue that liberalism’s methodological nationalism hampers a proper assessment of the transnational dimensions
of processes such as development, violence or peace. I chart various scales of market-induced violence and vulnerability (as a form of economic violence) in the global era, tracing the rescaling of violence and risk from the interstate scale to the individual sphere. I
conclude by discussing the transition from a ‘durable disorder’ (Cerny, 1998) to an emerging (albeit contested) new populist order under world market capitalism. To do so, I echo Polanyi and Marx in contending that processes of marketization, replete as they are
with contradiction, cannot engender liberal or capitalist peace, but result instead in anti-liberal reactions of various kinds (what Polanyi called ‘counter movements’) to the violence of unrestrained markets. Importantly, these counter movements can often take
reactionary characteristics, as people under threat or the perception of threat retreat into culture and nationalism against the ‘other’ and internationalism in all its variants.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE LIBERAL PEACE

While the pursuit of peace is a central preoccupation for progressive IR scholarship, peace as a concept and as an actual manifestation is rarely discussed in the IR literature. Instead, peace often appears as a negative occurrence, intuitively understood as the
avoidance of war or an absence of overt inter-state violence (Galtung, 1969; Richmond, 2016, p. 57). Thereby, most IR literature focuses on the challenges to state-based peace, with commentary typically dominated by the two main competing schools, realism and
liberalism, both subdivided into further dissenting subcamps. Conventional realist approaches take the ‘anarchic’ or violent nature of international politics as a given and place their focus on states’ survival strategies. Offensive realists warn of the disruptive effects of
‘power transitions’ and in the contemporary context claim, for example, that as China grows economically and militarily, and as its interests expand and it seeks greater influence, tensions with other countries are certain to arise (Mearsheimer, 2014). Defensive
neorealists hold similar assumptions about the foundations of the international system, yet contend that states privilege security over domination and that the incentives for conflict are contingent rather than endemic, with balances of power potentially keeping
states at bay and preventing conflict (Waltz, 1979).

Liberal theorists dispute these interpretations and reject that competition alone guides state behaviour. Elaborating on the Kantian ideal of ‘perpetual peace’, and drawing upon Adam Smith, David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, liberal theories contend that economic
integration and institutional enmeshment or socialization exercise a constraining force on conflict and are conductive to peaceful scenarios (Doyle, 1986; Howard, 1981; Johnston, 2008; Keohane & Nye, 1977). While there is no absolute agreement on the exact
shape that such ‘interdependence’ should take (Mansfield & Pollins, 2001), liberal IR scholars often hold that large-scale conflict in the 21st century can be avoided if the liberal world order survives the relative decline of the United States and manages to assimilate
rising powers such as China. The emphasis is placed both on institutions and norms of reciprocity, on the one hand, and on economic integration, on the other. Regarding the latter, and evoking Smithian language, the agenda for a ‘capitalist peace’ assumes that free
markets represent ‘“a hidden hand” that  …  build(s) up irrevocable and peaceful connections between states’ (Gartzke, 2007; Richmond, 2008, p. 23), and that ‘put simply, globalisation promotes peace’ (Gartzke & Li, 2003, p. 562). The theory is in many ways
deductive, but relies also on the statistical data that on aggregate tends partially to support the liberal peace argument (except for the period leading to the First World War; see also Barbieri, 1996) and on the ‘logic’ that national leaders are not expected to act
irrationally or be insensitive ‘to economic loss and the preferences of powerful domestic actors’ (Hegre, Oneal, & Russett, 2010, p. 772).

A more nuanced exposition of the liberal argument suggests that what brings nations together and heightens the opportunity cost of conflict is market integration according to a set of commonly devised regulations – rather than the realization of an ideal ‘free’ trade
archetype (Moravcsik, 2005). This results in a sort of ‘embedded liberalism’, with the successful integration of post-Soviet states and China in world market capitalism through World Trade Organization (WTO) membership and other liberalizing initiatives understood
as a deterrent to military action and, hence, as an effective strategy for both global growth and security, particularly in the face of China’s rising economic and military might (Funabashi, Oksenberg, & Weiss, 1994). From this perspective, not only is violence avoidable
but also peace may indeed be engineered with the creation of a world market society being key to this endeavour as well as to the broader goal of crafting a liberal hegemony able to deliver a veritable ‘end of history’ where markets and functioning liberal
democracies prevail (Fukuyama, 1992). The engineering of market-orientated democracies has indeed often been the main task of liberal peace- and state-building operatives in post-conflict areas (Campbell, Chandler, & Sabaratnam, 2011).

Yet, decades of neoliberal integration have not brought Fukuyama’s prophecy closer to its realization. Across the
world, liberal market integration has facilitated convivial relations among key countries and paid important dividends
to elites, yet it has also resulted in the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, rising inequalities within
countries (although not between them) and higher concentration of wealth at the top, and increased risks and
vulnerability as the logic of market competitiveness takes hold of many aspects of our lives (Anand & Segal, 2015; Lynch,
2006). The relation between the United States and China or the processes of economic integration in the European
Union are clear examples of these trends. In these places as well as others, inequalities, precarization and economic
insecurity have given way to a populist and nationalist momentum that can be interpreted both as a popular response
to the extreme and diverse forms of violence engendered by processes of market integration, or as a manoeuvre to
channel discontent towards the ‘other’ in order to protect elite interests (Gonzalez-Vicente & Carroll, 2017). By
prescribing ever more market globalization to counter populist politics and avoid conflict, liberal elites add fuel to the
fire as they sever the very conditions that led to the disfranchisement of significant segments of the population in the
first place. Thereby, it is crucial to understand how the argument for capitalist peace fails to factor in the crisis-prone
and socially destructive tendencies of capitalism, particularly in a context of unfenced global competitiveness along
market lines.2

Two of the underlying problems in the liberal peace argument stand out. The first has to do with the statistical selection
of fixed points in time that suggest correlations between growth in trade and diminished conflict – while failing to
discern mechanisms of causation (Hayes, 2012). A wider temporal lens is needed to situate the contemporary rise of
mercantilist and illiberal politics in the context of neoliberal globalization, representing the same sort of ‘counter
movement’ that Polanyi had warned of in his reading of the 19th-century downward spiral towards war – aided in our
contemporary case by the demise of the traditional left (Blyth & Matthijs, 2017; Carroll & Gonzalez-Vicente, 2017). The
second problem relates to liberal international political economy and IRT’s scalar fixation on inter-state matters and
hence their inability to factor in violence in the absence of war. I turn now to these two points.
NEOLIBERALISM’S ILLIBERAL MOMENT AS COUNTER MOVEMENT

On paper, the two intertwined arguments for liberal peace would seem to make sense: if countries remove the barriers
to trade and investment and choose to specialize in their comparative advantages, international productivity will be
raised and we will enjoy a more prosperous global economy with satisfied consumers and states; also, if states develop
close economic linkages, they will have important material incentives to avoid conflict with one another. In the real
world, competition between jurisdictions and social groups implies often that the development and prosperity of some
is based on the exploitation and vulnerability of others, as typically emphasized by the extensive literature on bifurcated
economies, temporally constrained and contradictory growth patterns, and uneven and destructive forms of
development. In this way, it is not that economic interdependence, when removed from its social context and put under
the microscope, does not raise the costs of conflict. However, the political choices and social transformations needed to
achieve interdependence are a key variable to understanding a state’s behaviour and predisposition to conflict. And
while governments may in many junctures align with the interests of capital, they are not immune to crises of
legitimacy, and will need to mediate issues of accumulation and social cohesion when people perceive the social
transformations required to achieve interdependence to have a negative impact on their lives (Jessop, 2016, p. 189).
This will reflect in a way or another on state behaviour as political elites, current and prospective, jostle for votes and/or
legitimacy.

A key problem with the argument for liberal peace lies in its emphasis on narrow temporal correlations between
trade and (lack of) conflict, which removes interdependence from its broader political economic context,
disembedding peace and conflict from the broader set of historically bounded and politically contingent social relations
that underpin them. A widened analytical timeframe renders clear the dialectical relationship between (neo)liberal
social projects and their social responses, both progressive and reactionary. Whereas high volumes of trade may
coincide at a particular ‘optimal’ period of liberal expansionism with interstate peace, they may also transform
societies in ways that engender the conditions for a potential ‘illiberal’ turn or counter movement resulting in a
higher risk of conflict as beggar-thy-neighbour positions emerge and new enemies need to be sought by political elites
to bind national-constrained constituencies to their agendas to maintain power.

We can observe this temporal incongruity in the work of some of the key proponents of the capitalist peace. For
example, Oneal and Russett (1999, p. 439) argue that trade ‘sharply reduces the onset of or involvement in militarized
disputes among contiguous and major-power pairs’, which are identified by Maoz and Russett (1993) as the set of
countries more likely to enter into conflict with each other. Despite Oneal and Russett’s sophisticated approach to the
data (modelling, for example, to avoid ‘false negatives’ by factoring in geographic contiguity, or controlling for alliances)
and the attention paid to statistical rejections of the liberal peace argument, trade interdependence and the occurrence
of conflict are analyzed on a year-by-year basis (Oneal & Russett, 1999, p. 428). This is also the case with other
comparable studies (Hegre, 2000; Oneal & Russett, 2001; Souva & Prins, 2006). This temporal frame is problematic, as
inter-national conflict tends to build up over prolonged periods of time, and the adverse impacts of interdependence
and liberal integration are more likely to result first in crisis and social dislocation, followed by some sort of economic
distancing (perhaps under a new administration that replaces the one that embraced liberalization) and a wide range of
policy measures, before leading to military conflict – underpinned either by the state that perceives that liberal
integration is having negative impacts on socioeconomic development, or more often than not by the one which wants
to prevent the deterioration of important trade and investment links.

Here, one vital issue often left out of the liberal peace equations is the fact that most military interventions in the
post-Second World War period were aimed at disciplining countries that opted out of the U nited States’ global
liberalizing project and sought to pursue a variety of indigenous pathways to modernity, often including many that did
so under the rubric of socialism, democratically achieved or otherwise. The reverse is also true, as countries that chose
to ally with the United States during the Cold War were shielded from attacks, and in some cases given preferential
trade access, technology transfer and allowed to engage in market protection. In this context, associating conflict with
the lack of strong trade links, rather than to the meticulous unfolding of a market-based imperial agenda, would be
tantamount to concluding that low opium consumption was responsible for British military expeditions in 19th-
century China. While there is certainly a correlation between China’s ban on opium and British intervention, nobody
could seriously suggest that opium consumption reduces interstate conflict. Similarly, in many of these cases, it is not
that the absence of trade results in conflict, but on the contrary, that military intervention has often been aimed at
expanding markets and protecting investment.

2NC---Framework
2---Policy-making research upholds elite knowledge and brackets out people unequally. You should
reject the drive to think of solutions as “practical,” because it operates along racialized and
gendered lines. Prefer radical alternative political imaginaries.
Gani & Marshall 22, Jasmine K. Gani: PhD of IR @ LSE. Senior Lecturer of IR @ St. Andrews. Jenna Marshall: PhD of
Political Science @ Queen Mary University. Senior Researcher for Development and Postcolonial Studies @ U-Kassel
(The impact of colonialism on policy and knowledge production in International Relations, International Affairs, Volume
98, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 5–22, DOI: 10.1093/ia/iiab226)

Looking forward: academic and practitioner pushback against colonialism, and cautionary tales

Given the historical and ongoing mutual complicity between knowledge producers and policy-makers in upholding
imperial and racial orders, we now consider the responsibilities, possibilities and challenges faced in altering the nature
of that nexus. Doing so requires turning to what Danso and Aning call an ‘episteme of alternativity’;41 and the primary
way for academics to enact this would be to draw on anti-colonial practice and legacies, rather than imperial
competition, as the foundation of their theorizing.

Thus, in his article, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh forefronts global South policy-makers and focuses on the nuclear order (a topic
that is typically associated with realist IR) to demonstrate how it can be approached through an alternative, critical
epistemology.42 Disrupting the ‘Great Power gaze’, Mpofu-Walsh asks what the politics of non-proliferation looks like
from the perspective of the global South, especially the African continent as the sole nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ).
There, denuclearization is fundamentally linked to decolonization. Thus anti-colonial goals, rather than
hegemonic/imperialist competition, are at the root of both policy and theorizing. How different would IR knowledge and
theories on nuclear weapons be if African praxis and the importance of NWFZs were taken seriously? Turning to the
Middle East, Gani similarly argues in her article that the inclusion of non-western history and voices—from policy-
makers to activists and scholars—in think-tank discussions can mitigate the latent colonialism that shapes western
policy.43

Nevertheless, even with an incorporation of non-western practice and knowledge in policy making and scholarly
theorizing, multiple perspectives that are marginalized even in the local context, owing to class or gender, may
continue to go unheard.44 One crucial way in which both academics and practitioners can challenge such patterns is by
adopting a more expansive reading of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and indeed ‘practice’. In doing so, we can
dismantle some of the constructed and false hierarchies between elite ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ on one hand, and
local ‘tradition’ on the other.45 The former is assumed to be objective, reliable and associated with western (and
western-validated) universities; while the latter is viewed as subjective, unscientific and commonly associated with
Indigenous, racialized, grassroots communities. Assumptions about who counts as a true knowledge producer or
‘expert’ is not only elitist but heavily racialized and gendered . Definitions of who counts as a ‘practitioner’ are equally
narrow, so that scholars or policy-makers may place much weight on the views and actions of state, global governance
and corporate practitioners, but do not view as equal practitioners those involved in everyday practice in their
communities—those who in fact sustain their ecology, livelihoods, security and identities, all while having to navigate
the impact of top-down policies.46
Both the articles by Jan Wilkens and Alvine Datchoua-Tirvaudey on climate justice, and by Althea Rivas and Mariam Safi on the organizing and practices of Afghan women, share knowledge from non-elite local communities and challenge the above binaries and
hierarchies. In their article on climate justice in the Arctic and the Mediterranean, Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey explain that academic–practitioner knowledge exchange has often been a contributing factor in continued climate injustice.47 The existing patterns of
this knowledge exchange on climate governance are dependent on hierarchies of knowledge, namely, the valorization of western/‘scientific’ knowledge production at the expense of the needs and knowledges of the Indigenous and local communities most affected
by climate change (i.e. the community-based practitioners, rather than the institutional/state ones). Moreover, the spaces where such knowledge exchange takes place are often exclusionary (in who is invited, in the parameters of discourse and/or in the
extortionate costs of participating), producing an intra-elite debate.48 Having identified these racialized patterns, they offer a corrective decolonial strategy for ethical climate governance, founded on practice-based knowledge and diverse ways of knowing that bring
in those excluded insights.

The article by Rivas and Safi also provides an example of how the academic–practitioner nexus can be ‘decolonized’, one in which everyday knowledges of Afghan women, in all their diversity and complexity, are centred in peacebuilding efforts.49 Their article, co-
written by an academic and a local practitioner, offers a methodology of how to take into account the internal hierarchies of positionality, interests and knowledges that are always present when engaging with grassroots communities for the sake of ‘research’. Rivas
and Safi also demonstrate the importance of registering and valuing the unlooked-for, atypical knowledges from below, such as the subtle observations offered by Afghan women in rural areas that, contrary to wider assumptions, reflect their political engagement
and interest.

Caution against extractivism in the search for such local knowledge exchange is at the forefront of both the above contributions.50 Thus academics should remain reflexive in what the purpose of their research is, and who really benefits. Moreover, a praxis of
decolonizing such research necessarily entails taking time in a way that is at odds with the current culture of speedy and multitudinous productivity in academia: the rapid churning out of articles from ‘the field’ should raise appropriate questions about how, why and
for whom that research is being conducted.

Of course, at issue is not just whom but also what we consider as worthy of scholarly and policy attention, and how inclusive we are of alternative methodologies. Dependence on state and official archives, ‘canonical’ theorists, written records and English-language
sources all reproduce the racialized hierarchies inherent in the prioritization of certain types of knowledge and transmission.51 These factors also close the door on appreciating the power—both practical and ideational—generated by collective social action, whose
impact cannot (and should not) be individualized to one or a few visible and often romanticized protagonists. Recognizing all this and reading into the silences of the archives should encourage greater attention to non-hegemonic record-keeping, story-telling and
witnessing beyond elitist and prohibitive barriers—from oral histories, to poetry, art and independent publishing on paper and online. As anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers and activists have long argued, these are the ways in which those who are dispossessed and
marginalized, but also, consequently, autonomous, have kept their identities, cultures and memories alive, and sought to prevent their experiences from being suppressed and erased.52 In the face of systematic racism and the colonial dismantling of their histories,
those who are marginalized are not, in fact, silent but continue to cultivate and share knowledge, even if they may lack the resources and type of support received by hegemonic knowledges (and people).53 Recognizing the equal validity of marginalized forms of
knowledges in both academic and policy realms pushes back against the de-representation in knowledge exchanges within elite spaces and formats.

However, it would be erroneous to assume from these arguments that knowledge produced by so-called elite communities is always bad, and that knowledge or cultural production from the bottom up is always more authentic and supports the cause of justice.
Srdjan Vucetic's article unsettles multiple binaries, between the elite and the ‘masses’, as well as between academics and practitioners.54 Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, he complicates what we read as knowledge production and who we see as its progenitors,
challenging the notion of purely top-down (and imperialist) identity construction. Exploring the role (and popularity) of nationalistic films and novels as signifiers of this consensus between policy-makers and wider society, Vucetic demonstrates that it is not enough
to hold accountable only those deemed to possess political capital, be they policy-makers or academics. Rather, it is necessary also to challenge the broader pressures and expectations of the public that produce a collusion between elite and mass discourse, and
help to foreclose the adoption of more critical, justice-oriented policies. Thus, if we focus solely on academics and practitioners in any anti-racist work, we miss the uncomfortable reality that narrow, exclusionary nationalism that foments such racism and imperialist
foreign policies actually enjoys substantial ‘buy-in’ from people and may be an accepted part of a local (in this case British) identity.

This observation reinforces the need outlined above for a more expansive approach to defining knowledges, but this time when interrogating the generators of coloniality. This in turn allows us to bring into equal focus other facilitating institutions and mediums of
knowledge dissemination, many of which play a pivotal role in making colonial tropes and erasures more palatable, accessible, even culturally and economically valuable. This theme runs through several of the articles in this special issue. As noted above, Vucetic's
article focuses on cultural output; Antweiler looks at museums and schools; Baji considers the instrumentalization of local folklore for imperialist ideologies in Japan; Plonski and Manchanda examine the power of racial capitalism via Israel's surveillance industry and
marketing; and Gani scrutinizes the impact of journalistic discourse and think tanks.

Thus far, a lot of responsibility for challenging the racial and colonial dynamics of the academic–practitioner nexus has been placed with knowledge producers, whether within or outside academia. But it is necessary to emphasize that efforts have already been under
way, not only to ‘decolonize’ our academic disciplines, but to bring that discourse into the public realm. At that point practitioners need to carry their share of responsibility in listening to and applying the expertise (whether academic or community-based) that can
foster more just policies. Instead, the attention policy-makers give to expertise is often selective and politicized, based not on what can actually improve people's lives but on what helps to justify the existing approaches adopted by governments. The current
denigration and growing securitization of critical race theory, especially in the United States but increasingly elsewhere, is an example of attacks on emancipatory knowledges that challenge power and oppression. Offering another stark example of this, Amal Abu-
Bakare explores in her article the lack of any serious attempts to confront Islamophobia in society, despite the wealth of research and expert advice from scholars and community-based practitioners available to policy-makers.55 Focusing on the cases of the UK and
Canada, she highlights the way in which practitioner intervention, in this case that of security and police officials, has actively prevented the adoption of expert guidelines on tackling Islamophobia on the grounds that they might interfere with their counterterrorism
strategies. In many ways this is a blatant acknowledgement from policy-makers that their counterterrorism strategy is inherently built upon racial tropes and discrimination. In contrast, so-called ‘neutral’ research on terrorism and/or counterterrorism is embraced
by practitioners, precisely because such research might not ask uncomfortable questions about the racial foundations or assumptions that are necessary to enact their policies.

Abu-Bakare's article offers an example of the limitations of academic–practitioner knowledge exchange. Exhorting
scholars to make their research policy relevant does not address the unequal receptivity towards critical research that
may challenge policy. Nor does it sufficiently take into account the implicit disciplining that can take place in that
process of knowledge exchange. Those very spaces or channels that are created to facilitate sharing, listening and
negotiation between knowledge producers and practitioners (through all the blurred boundaries between them) may
reproduce and reify hierarchies through unequal interactions

. Is real dialogue possible if power dynamics render the interlocutors unequal?56 Or, in their efforts to be heard, taken
seriously, and make their presence worthwhile, academics and other knowledge producers may find themselves being
subtly socialized into the very modes of speech and thought that they sought to criticize. This can also happen in reverse
when grassroots practitioners share spaces with scholars and elite institutions. The path-breaking and radical ideas
needed to initiate change on some of the most deep-seated problems in politics and society may be diluted in such
spaces for the sake of pragmatism and communication, undermining the ability to imagine real alternatives to the
status quo. This is not to say that knowledge producers, whether academic or community-based, should not engage
with policy-makers, but rather that they should be clear in what they seek to achieve—if, for example, constructive
dialogue or receptivity to expertise is unlikely, it is at times necessary and an ethical responsibility simply to register
alternative ideas or contestation. Returning to the point made at the start of this piece, this cautions us in how we
champion ‘impact’ and knowledge–policy engagement, especially if we only recognize engagements that supplement
and are ‘useful’ to systems of power rather than those that hold them to account .

Conclusion

This special issue introduces the readers of International Affairs to the relatively undertheorized and underhistoricized
relationship between race, knowledge production and policy-making. The articles demonstrate the ways in which
practitioners have historically relied on research produced within the academy to inform policy, initiating the
establishment of departments and disciplines for this purpose, but they also show the reverse to be equally true: that
policy, both foreign and multilateral, influences the possibilities and parameters of research , funding and recruitment
practices, and retention of jobs.57 A key goal of this special issue has been to foster reflection on the ways in which
knowledge production (in its multifaceted forms) contributes to or challenges the practice of racism and coloniality;
and the ways in which policy and practice shape, validate, limit or ignore knowledge production—in ways that either
perpetuate or interrogate coloniality. As the three categories delineated above show, the academic–practitioner nexus
is best captured as a series of foreclosures that actively work to uphold narrowly espoused evolutionary myths of the
discipline and entrench a naturalization of white-racialized subject positions in academic discourse on the
‘international’, while sidelining scholars and activists, notably women and people of colour, who have made
undeniable contributions to analysis of the contemporary world.58 All this brings into view, as one scholar puts it, ‘the
fundamental ways in which IR already is, and always has been, complicit in ordering politics’.59

As we have argued in this introductory piece, the exposure in this special issue of the deep academic–practitioner nexus
confronts and challenges the ‘gaps’ discourse advanced at the expense of making visible the existing reciprocity that
disciplines the boundaries of acceptable enquiry. The outcome of this disciplining at the theoretical level can be seen in
the construction of paradigms that normalize Eurocentric presuppositions on ‘how the world is’. But such outcomes
are also made manifest through material implications generated by narrow policy responses and policy instruments.

The special issue is not just an exposure, though; it is also a call for repair . To embark on a project of repair, those
involved in knowledge production, dissemination and application—within academia, think tanks, museums, schools,
cultural production and policy—first and foremost need to recognize that their work is not detached from the real
world, even if they seek to make it so. If the articles in this special issue have shown anything, it is that there can be no
realistic and honest demarcation between political and apolitical knowledge: to assert neutrality is like offering a blank
slate that will inevitably be written over. It is worth knowing that even with the best intentions, a scholar's work
is likely to be co-opted for political ends ; and that one's erasures and blind spots regarding injustice,
even if innocently produced, will be taken as justification for inaction and marginalization of these injustices in the
real world.

Sincerity in seeking to prevent racist or imperialist co-optation necessitates more open interrogations of power and
commitments to justice: and without doubt IR, whether ‘analytical’ or ‘critical’, and academia more broadly, are filled
with sincere and honourable scholars who care about the world they live in and have the capacity to enact positive
change. Questioning and challenging accepted and expected modes of academic enquiry requires courage and
creativity, both of which are aided through collective effort. This special issue, then, is an invitation to adopt that
courage and creativity in how we cultivate knowledge, in questioning the purpose and the ends of that knowledge, and
to be discerning in how we try to put it into practice.

2NC---AT: Extinction Outweighs

5---Extinction first sacrifices the global South---prioritizes White elites over structural violence.
Torres 21, PhD candidate at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Previously studied at Harvard University and Brandeis
University. Author of Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks (Phil, July 28 th,
“The Dangerous Ideas of ‘Longtermism’ and ‘Existential Risk’,” Current Affairs,
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk, Accessed 10-27-
2021)

It’s this line of reasoning that leads Bostrom, Greaves, MacAskill, and others to argue that even the tiniest reductions
in “existential risk” are morally equivalent to saving the lives of literally billions of living, breathing, actual people. For
example, Bostrom writes that if there is “a mere 1 percent chance” that 10^54 conscious beings (most living in
computer simulations) come to exist in the future, then “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by
a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion
human lives.” Greaves and MacAskill echo this idea in a 2021 paper by arguing that “even if there are ‘only’ 1014 lives to
come … , a reduction in near-term risk of extinction by one millionth of one percentage point would be equivalent in
value to a million lives saved.”

To make this concrete, imagine Greaves and MacAskill in front of two buttons. If pushed, the first would save the lives of
1 million living, breathing, actual people. The second would increase the probability that 10^14 currently unborn people
come into existence in the far future by a teeny-tiny amount. Because, on their longtermist view, there is no
fundamental moral difference between saving actual people and bringing new people into existence, these options
are morally equivalent. In other words, they’d have to flip a coin to decide which button to push. (Would you? I
certainly hope not.) In
Bostrom’s example, the morally right thing is obviously to
sacrifice billions of living human beings for the sake of even tinier reductions in
existential risk , assuming a minuscule 1 percent chance of a larger future population: 1054 people.
All of this is to say that even if billions of people were to perish in the coming climate catastrophe, so long as
humanity survives with enough of civilization intact to fulfill its supposed “potential,” we shouldn’t be too concerned.
In the grand scheme of things, non-runaway climate change will prove to be nothing more than a “mere ripple” —a
“small misstep for mankind,” however terrible a “massacre for man” it might otherwise be.

Even worse, since our resources for reducing existential risk are finite, Bostrom argues that we must not “fritter
[them] away” on what he describes as “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.” Such projects would include, on
this account, not just saving people in the Global South—those most vulnerable, especially women—from the
calamities of climate change, but all other non-existential philanthropic causes, too. As the Princeton philosopher Peter
Singer writes about Bostrom in his 2015 book on Effective Altruism, “to refer to donating to help the global poor … as a
‘feel-good project’ on which resources are ‘frittered away’ is harsh language.” But it makes perfectly good sense within
Bostrom’s longtermist framework, according to which “priority number one, two, three, and four should … be to
reduce existential risk.” Everything else is smaller fish not worth frying.

If this sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling. By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game , and by declaring
that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars,
longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to
dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an
immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,”
complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas
Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West —
especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear : not only are
you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and
global poverty, but you are actually a morally better person for focusing instead on more important things—risk that
could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

AT: Cap Good---Warming

2---Green capitalism fails, reinforces imperialism, and linearly increases extractive violence.
Brand & Wissen 21, Ulrich Brand: Professor for International Politics @ University of Vienna. Markus Wissen: Professor
of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. Translated by Zachary King (The Imperial Mode of Living:
Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism, Verso Books)

EXTERNALIZATION AND RESISTANCE

Green capitalism is anything but inevitable. In many places, the creation of a green economy has encountered
resistance from the fossil factions of capital and from people’s everyday practices. In the US especially, these forces
have received an additional boost with the presidency of Donald Trump. There is a boom in the extraction of oil and
gas through fracking, in tar sand oil extraction and in the exploration and exploitation of deep sea fossil energy
sources. 42 In the EU, the transition to a renewable energy regime is slowed down by the Visegrád Group (Poland, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary). And even in places where green capital factions and practices are becoming
socially relevant, they are in constant conflict with retrograde social forces. This description even applies to the ‘pioneer’
in renewable energies, Germany, where powerful social forces from industry, energy suppliers and trade unions are
increasingly aggressive in articulating their resistance to the energy transition and find political advocates in state
apparatus such as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. 43

Eventually, green capitalism will neither effectively manage the ecological crisis nor reduce inequality , let alone create
good living conditions for all; instead, it will generate and externalize new socioecological costs . It will impose these
costs on the workers in China, Africa or elsewhere who under miserable conditions extract rare earth metals and
other raw materials that are indispensable for ‘green’ tech nologies; on the sugar cane workers on Brazilian
plantations who risk life and limb to supply the US and European markets with ‘biofuels’ ; on the peasants who are
evicted from their farms and villages because of land grabbing; on Kenyan women as they are ‘rewarded’ for
reforestation activities with certificates of dubious value while they sacrifice food security to protect the climate; and
on unpaid care work and poorly paid personalized services that are not considered in green economy concepts. 44

The power relationships between different factions of capital, as well as between the developed capitalist world and
the emerging economies of the global South, will be readjusted; inequality will increase within industrialized and
industrializing countries; relations with other parts of the world will be reorganized on the basis of military coercion
and by actively pursuing ‘a raw materials diplomacy’. 45 The green capitalism project will therefore necessarily
represent a spatially ‘fragmented hegemony’ with a highly unclear temporal perspective; it is characterized by exclusion
and exploitation, and yet ensures the continuation of the imperial mode of living . 46
3---Growth and emissions are recoupling. Past decoupling was insufficient and temporary.
Parrique 21, PhD in economics from the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Développement—University of
Clermont Auvergne, France and the Stockholm Resilience Centre—Stockholm University, Sweden (Timothée, April 29 th,
“Is green growth happening?” Uneven Earth, https://unevenearth.org/2021/04/is-green-growth-happening/, Accessed
02-23-2022)

The decoupling rates are minuscule

The study analyses 18 developed economies (Sweden, Romania, France, Ireland, Spain, UK, Bulgaria, The Netherlands,
Italy, United States, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Finland, and Croatia) between 2005 and
2015, finding that emissions decreased by a median -2.4% per year during that decade.

This is tiny – three times smaller than the yearly 7.6% cut of global emissions that would be necessary to meet 1.5°C
Paris target (and this number is from 2019; the cuts would need to be even larger today). One striking example is
France. The study indicates that France decreased its consumption-based emissions by a yearly -1.9% over the period
with barely any GDP growth (+0.9%). Now compare this to the French climate target, which is to reach 80 MtCO2 by
2050, an 80% reduction compared to 2019 levels of emissions.

The UK is another case in point. The country is often lauded to have achieved the fastest experience of decoupling on
Earth. In the Le Quéré study, its consumption-based emissions decreased by -2.1% per year between 2005 and 2015
with positive GDP rates of around 1.1%. This is not much in the way of decoupling; the country has pledged to reduce
emissions by twice that amount (5.1% per year). To actually comply with the Paris Agreement, the UK must achieve a
yearly 13% cut in emissions, starting now and for the decades to come. This is much – much – more than what green
growth can provide.

The authors themselves err on the side of caution: “as significant as they have been, the emissions reductions
observed […] fall a long way short of the deep and rapid global decarbonization of the energy system implied by the
Paris Agreement temperature goals, especially given the increases in global CO2 emissions in 2017 and 2018, and the
slowdown of decarbonization in Europe since 2014.” Data from this year supports the authors’ precaution: de-
carbonisation in many high-income economies has slowed down after 2015.

The fact that these rates are so small is worrying because we’re dealing here with the supposedly best country cases
of decoupling. Assuming these rates can now suddenly accelerate would be like expecting Usain Bolt to triple his
running speed. Even more unlikely, we would need all countries in the world to match the triple of these record levels.

A “sustainable” economy in any meaningful understanding of the term must consider all the complex interactions it has
with ecosystems, and not only carbon

Minuscule is a long way from enough

In March 2021, the authors published a new study showing that 64 countries managed to cut their CO2 emissions by
0.16 GtCO2 every year between 2016 and 2019. This is good, but again, not good enough. And not good enough has dire
consequences. To be precise, this is one tenth of what would be needed at the global level to meet the Paris climate
goals; and if 64 countries managed to reduce emissions, 150 others did not. The latter increased their emissions by
0.37 GtCO2 each year. Put the two numbers together and you realise that global emissions have actually been
growing by 0.21 billion tonnes per year.

This puts pressure on high-income economies. For developing countries to be able to increase their ecological
footprint, affluent nations must reduce theirs as much as possible. Climate-neutrality at the national level by 2050 is
not enough if we want today’s poorest to have the option of increasing their material consumption. And rates of
reduction in rich nations of 1-3% are far from enough to compensate for the surge in resource use currently taking place
in the global South.

This is only fair considering historical emissions. The global North is responsible for 92% of excess global CO2 emissions
(the ones past the 350ppm threshold). For example, France has already overshot its fair share of the climate budget by
29.4 GtCO2. The Le Quéré study shows that it has decreased its emissions by 10 MtCO2 every year between 2005 and
2015. At that pace, and assuming carbon neutrality, it would take almost three millennia for France to resorb its climate
debt.

Green growth without growth

Emissions in the 18 studied countries decreased by -2.4% each year, but how big was GDP growth during that period?
The answer: small. These economies grew by a median +1.1%. Denmark, Italy, and Spain are leading the decoupling
pack with yearly carbon reductions of -3.7%, -3.3%, and -3.2% respectively. This, however, can hardly be called green
growth because these economies barely grew – or actually receded (+0.6% of GDP in the case of Denmark, -3.3% for
Italy, and -3.2% for Spain).
The authors acknowledge that this period is nothing extraordinary: “These reductions in the energy intensity of GDP in 2005-2015 do no stand out compared to similar reductions observed since the 1970s, indicating that decreases in energy use in the peak-and-
decline group could be explained at least in part by the lower growth in GDP.”

So, the paper most popularly cited to assert that carbon-free economic growth is possible also shows that part of the decarbonisation is due to the fact that there was little or no growth. It comes as no surprise then that, using simulations, the authors estimate that
“if GDP returns to strong growth in the peak-and-decline group, reductions in energy use may weaken or be reversed unless strong climate and energy policies are implemented.”

Sustainability is more than just carbon

The authors’ study is about carbon, but carbon is one environmental problem among many others. Unfortunately, it is the only one that is adequately researched, with 80% of decoupling studies focusing on primary energy and greenhouse gases. This leaves only a
few studies that have been conducted on other aspects of ecological breakdown, including material use, water use, land change, water pollution, waste, and biodiversity loss.

While there are a few inspiring stories of decoupling concerning carbon emissions, studies that track other indicators tell us a different story, one in which the economy is still strongly coupled with biophysical throughput. Materials are a good case in point. If the
world economy was gradually de-materializing in the 20th century, this trend has since been reversing in the last two decades. This alone should temper optimism concerning an assumption of endless supplies of renewable energy, which after all, are dependent on
the mining of finite quantities of minerals.

My point is that a “sustainable” economy in any meaningful understanding of the term must consider all the complex interactions it has with ecosystems, and not only carbon. A genuinely sustainable economy should not only be carbon neutral, but also remains
within the regenerative capacities of all renewable resources, within the acceptable stocks of non-renewable resources, and within the assimilative capacities of ecosystems. Although sustainability ought to be understood as being about much more than only the
condition of the biophysical environment, it seems evident that living within planetary boundaries is a minimum, non-negotiable condition for any kind of long-lasting prosperity.

Since GDP remains significantly coupled with carbon emissions and other environmental pressures, a good way of limiting ecological wreckage is to put limits on the scale of the economy

Temporary decoupling
Mitigating environmental pressures in a growing economy not only implies achieving absolute decoupling from GDP,
but also requires maintaining such decoupling in time for as long as the economy grows (recalling that emissions must
be reduced by at least 7.6% every year from now on). Said differently, continuous economic growth requires a
permanent absolute decoupling between GDP growth and environmental pressures. Yet, in the same way that
economic growth and environmental pressures can decouple at one point in time, they can just as easily recouple later
on.

This happens more often than we think. Let’s reflect upon the time when the International Energy Agency declared that
decoupling was “confirmed” after observing a levelling of global emissions in 2015 and 2016. Yet, this decoupling was
short-lived. In fact, it was mainly due to China moving from coal to oil and gas at the same time that the United States
was shifting to shale gas. The shift was temporary. After that, economic growth recoupled with carbon emissions.

Situations of recoupling can also happen with renewables. In the decade between 2005 and 2015, Austria, Finland, and
Sweden greened their energy mix and, as a result, lowered their emissions. But once this shift is complete, further
growth will require an expansion of the energy infrastructure, which will imply additional environmental pressures. In
fact, this is what happened after the studied period. Austria decreased its emissions by -0.6% in 2006-2010 and -1.6% in
2011-2015, but emissions returned positive by +0.3% in 2016-2019. A similar story took place in Finland and Sweden;
the rates of reduction accelerated between 2006 and 2015 but slowed down after that.

Some commentators hypothesized that the return of economic growth after the pandemic would be green, or at least,
greener. Yet, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are on course to surge by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 – the
second-largest increase in history – reversing most of the decline caused by the pandemic. The lesson from the corona
crisis is this: slight oscillations from light to heavy ecological beating are not enough – we need to radically and
immediately transform the economy.

4---Capitalist renewables increase emissions.

Parrique et al. 19, Centre for Studies and Research in International Development (CERDI), University of Clermont
Auvergne, France; Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Stockholm University, Sweden, Barth J., Briens F., C. Kerschner,
Kraus-Polk A., Kuokkanen A., Spangenberg J.H. (Timothee, July, Decoupling Debunked: Evidence and arguments against
green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability, European Environmental Bureau,
https://mk0eeborgicuypctuf7e.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf)

Not leading to relevant innovations

Innovation is not in and of itself a good thing for ecological sustainability. The desirable type of innovation is eco-
innovation or one that results “in a reduction of environmental risk, pollution and other negative impacts of resources
use compared to relevant alternatives” (Kemp and Pearson, 2008, p.5). But this is only one type among several. In
general, firms have an incentive to innovate to economise on the most expensive factors of production to maximise
profits. Because labour and capital are usually relatively more expensive than natural resources, more technological
progress will likely continue to be directed towards labour- and capital-saving innovations , with limited benefits, if
any, for resource productivity and a potential rise in absolute impacts due to more production. But decoupling will not
occur if technological innovations contribute to saving labour and capital while leaving resource use and environmental
degradation unchanged .
Another issue is that technologies do not only solve environmental problems but also tend to create new ones. Assuming that resource productivity becomes a priority over labour and capital productivity, there is still nothing preventing technological innovations
from creating more damage. For example, research into processes of extractions can lead to better ways to locate resources (imaging technologies and data analytics), to extract them (horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and automated drilling operations), and
to transport them (Arctic shipping routes). These innovations may target resource use but with a result opposite to the objective of decoupling, that is more extraction. And this is not even considering unintended side-effects, which often accompany the
development of new technologies (Grunwald, 2018).

Not disruptive enough

Another problem has to do with the replacement of harmful technologies. Indeed, it is not enough for new technologies to emerge (innovation), they must also come to replace the old ones in a process of “exnovation” (Kimberly, 1981). What is required is a “push
and pull strategy” (Rockström et al., 2017): pushing environmentally-friendly technologies into society and pulling harmful ones, like fossil-based infrastructure, out of it.

First, in reality, such a process is slow and difficult to trigger. Most polluting infrastructures (power plants, buildings and city structures, transport systems) require large investments, which then creates inertia and lock-in (Antal and van den Bergh, 2014, p. 3). Let us,
for instance, consider the energy, buildings, and transport sectors, which account for the large majority of world energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Initial lifetime for a nuclear or a coal power plant is about 40 years. Buildings can last at least as
much. The average lifetime for a car is 12-15 years, and this is about what it takes for an innovation to spread in the vehicle fleet. The wide availability of petrol refuelling stations gives an infrastructural advantage to petrol-based cars, whereas this is the opposite
situation for electric, gas, or hydrogen vehicles that would require different and new supporting infrastructures. Building a highway or a nuclear plant is a commitment to emit for at least as long as these infrastructures will last – Davis and Socolow (2014) speak of
“committed emissions.”
Energy is a good case in point: using more renewable energy is not the same as using less fossil fuels. The history of
energy use is not one of substitutions but rather of successive additions of new sources of energy. As new energy
sources are discovered, developed, and deployed, the old sources do not decline, instead, total energy use grows with
additional layers on the energy mix cake. York (2012) finds that each unit of energy use from non-fossil fuel sources
displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of its fossil-fuel counterpart, showing empirical support for the claim that
expanding renewable energies is far from enough to curb fossil fuel consumption . The relative part of coal in the
global energy mix has been reduced since the advent of petroleum but this occurred in spite of absolute growth in the
use of coal (Krausmann et al., 2009).

AT: Cap Good---Global South

2---Global inequality is increasing---structural adjustment policies and net outflows have reversed
progress and stagnated growth.
Hickel et al. 18, Jason Hickel: Anthropologist, author, and fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Labour
Party Task Force on International Development and works as Policy Director for The Rules collective. Nima Shirazi: Editor
at Muftah, a digital foreign affairs magazine, and co-host of the media criticism podcast, Citations Needed. Adam
Johnson: Host, The Appeal podcast. Media analyst at FAIR.org and host of the Citations Needed podcast (November
28th, “Episode 58: The Neoliberal Optimism Industry,” Citations Needed, https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-
58-the-neoliberal-optimism-industry-and-development-shaming-the-global-south-cf399e88510e, Accessed 09-25-2021)

Nima: Can you dig a little deeper into, based on your work Jason, how the terms “development” and “growth” are really,
not only misunderstood, but often deliberately misrepresented both in a political context and also throughout the
media, like who do these misperceptions benefit?

Jason Hickel: So I think that there’s a narrative out there that poor countries are basically effectively catching up to
rich countries, right? Because we know that, there’s China and they’re becoming a powerful player in the world stage
and so on. And we’re seeing people lift out of poverty in China and India also, you know, a booming tech industry and
whatnot. So clearly, you know, the gap between the rich and the poor on the global stage is shrinking. This is the
dominant narrative we have. And unfortunately it’s simply not true. There are, in fact, was a period when that gap was
shrinking, in the immediate postcolonial decades in the 1960s and the 1970s when newly independent governments
were rolling out progressive economic reforms using Keynesian policy, protecting their economies with tariffs, using
subsidies to promote infant industry developments, etcetera, etcetera. But, you know, and using land reform and labor
laws to improve wages and so on. But these policies turned out to be a threat to Global North investors . Which, during
the colonial years had enjoyed really easy access to cheap labor and raw materials and so on in those countries. And
that was being cut off. And so they responded during the 1980s and 1990s by rolling back those progressive policies
through structural adjustments imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, right? Which basically forced Global South
countries to privatize public assets, to get rid of tariff barriers and subsidies, to cut spending on education and
healthcare. Like all of the crucial elements necessary for real developments were basically denied to Global South
countries. The vast majority of them at least. So that’s not true of East Asia and in China, and as a consequence, that
region of the world did remarkably well, but what we see in the rest of the world is that the per capita income gap
between the Global North and the Global South has tripled since 1960 in real terms and shows no sign of slowing
down. I mean, there’s basically been, on per capita level, virtually stagnation in the Global South since the 1980s. And
that’s, you know, that’s really not part of our narrative and that’s something that is a structural consequence of the way
that the economy was organized during those decades.

Nima: Yeah. I think that actually leads into something that I’ve been so fascinated about while reading your work, which
is that the conception that wealthy countries, countries that have historically colonized most of the world are now in a
position to give back, right? To, to help out through aid or debt relief or whatever poorer countries in the Global South.
So can you tell us how that view of things, that colonialism is a thing of the past that there’s no more extraction or
exploitation, but now rather resources are flowing North to South from rich to poor, can you tell us how that might not
exactly be true?

Jason Hickel: The dominant narrative development is that rich countries became rich kind of by their own hard work,
their good institutions, their scientific inventions and so on, and poor countries are poor and remain poor because they
have whatever bad governance or corruption, or maybe they’re lazy or have backwards cultural values in the more racist
sense of the narrative, etcetera. But the idea is that rich countries, because they have this surplus, they’re able to sort of
reach across the divide and give generously of their surplus to help poor countries up the development ladder. What I
argue is that this narrative gets virtually everything about the story wrong, right? First of all, the determinants of success
and failure in various countries around the world can’t be entirely attributed to only internal conditions, right? We live in
a global economic system. We have done since at least the past 500 years since the onset of colonialism, and so we have
to think about how the rules of that economy, of that global economic system affect the outcomes that we see around
the world, right? You know, of course, that’s very easy to see during the colonial period, during the structural
adjustment period in the 1980s and 1990s as well. And we can see it very clearly now in the way that capital flows
around the world, right? And so if we look at total flows of money around the world right now, between the Global
North and the Global South, we see something quite remarkable. This is using 2012 data, which is the last data that we
have on this. But in 2012, developing countries received a total of $2 trillion US dollars in total inflows from the Global
North, right? That includes aid, foreign investments, loans, remittances, everything, every bit of money, which is a lot,
but in the same year, some $5 trillion flowed the other direction from South to North. So in that year there were $3
trillion in net outflows from South to North, so the South is in fact a net creditor to the North rather than the other
way around. So we might be able to say that it’s, in fact, the Global South that’s developing the North rather than the
North developing the South. And that really does flip the aid narrative on its head. And if we compare those outflows to
aid, what we see is that for every dollar of aid that the South receives from the North, they lose $24 in net outflows ,
which is a tremendous reversal of the way we normally think about the situation. There’s lots of ways we can see this
kind of reverse flow happening that are important to pay attention to. So one of course is the most obvious one, which
is, you know, interest payments on exportable debts, which in and of itself outstrips the global aid budget, you know,
almost twice over. But then we also have profit repatriation for multinational companies from host countries back to
where they’re listed, which is about $500 billion per year. Sometimes even outstrips foreign direct investment flows
themselves, but probably the biggest single cause of this in that outflow situation is illicit financial flows, which are
largely through, you know, for the sake of tax evasion by multinational companies who are using basically tax havens
and secrecy jurisdictions which are almost entirely in Global North countries controlled by Global North governments in
order to secret money out of developing countries into Western bank accounts.

3---Poverty is increasing because of capitalism---they put a happy face on colonialism.

Hickel 19, An academic at the University of London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (Jason, January 29 th, “Bill
Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong,” The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal,
Accessed 07-12-2021)

There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since
1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset
that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a
limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s
social media.

What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of
money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The
graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed
people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global
south.
Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons –
land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they
didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently
destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations,
where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.

In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation . It is not at all clear that this represents
an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t
come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by
colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of
progress.

But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per
day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now
have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality . Earning
$2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.

Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum
of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing
their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the
poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.

So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be
extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since
measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts
away.

Moreover, the few gains that have been made have virtually all happened in one place: China. It is disingenuous,
then, for the likes of Gates and Pinker to claim these gains as victories for Washington-consensus neoliberalism. Take
China out of the equation, and the numbers look even worse. Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the
number of people in poverty gone up, the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%. It
would be difficult to overstate the suffering that these numbers represent.

This is a ringing indictment of our global economic system, which is failing the vast majority of humanity . Our world is
richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only 5% of all new income from global
growth trickles down to the poorest 60% – and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that
the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years
ago. It is madness – and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it.

2NC---Group---Transition Fails
1---Coordinated strikes solve---they disrupt global supply chains that are key to capitalism.
Fox-Hodess 21, Sociologist and cofounder of the International Labour and Logistics Research Network (Katy, June 16 th,
“Logistics Workers Make Global Capitalism — and They Can Break It, Too,” Jacobin Magazine,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/06/logistics-industry-capitalism-unions, Accessed 11-08-2021)

The logistics industry is key to the global circulation of goods under capitalism . Workers have immense power within
it to grind that circulation to a halt — if they can get organized .

Over the past several decades, capitalism has broken up the production process into individual steps carried out in
separate work sites scattered across the globe. As a result, logistics, the systems that organize the physical movement
of goods through space and time, has become more central to global capitalism than ever, and that gives workers in
the logistics sector — including ports, rail, trucking, and other industries — tremendous potential leverage over the
capitalist class. Any attempt to think strategically about strengthening working-class power must therefore grapple
with the sector and how it works.

2---Movement fails is an elite fallacy---globalization allows international labor movements to

combine their power.
Tavan 21, Host of Red Flag Radio Podcast (Luka, March 7 th, “Worldwide revolution is possible and necessary,” Red Flag,
https://redflag.org.au/article/worldwide-revolution-possible-and-necessary/, Accessed 10-12-2021)

But capitalism’s global nature means that revolts tend to spread across national borders . Workers today share
increasingly similar experiences: conditions of work, forms of consumption, lifestyles and political cultures. And the
global integration of production serves to transmit struggle from one country to another. In 1974, for instance,
resistance to the brutal military dictatorship in Chile spread to East Kilbride, Scotland, of all places. Workers at the Rolls
Royce factory there learned that the engines they were repairing were being used by the Chilean air force to drop
bombs on workers resisting the coup. They downed tools and refused to work on the engines, keeping them out of the
hands of the military junta for four years.

While nationalism still has a powerful hold on the consciousness of many, it’s increasingly clear that the real line of
polarisation across the globe is between the minority ruling class and the majority working class. And when revolts
break out in one part of the world, people can identify with the causes and motivations of their struggles, and draw
comparisons with their own situation. “Languages remain different,” observed UK Marxist Chris Harman in 1992, “but
what they say is increasingly the same”. Harman’s words ring true in every wave of political radicalisation.

1968 is remembered as a year of global revolt, when millions of workers, students and oppressed people drew
inspiration from each other’s movements. Activists in the US were radicalised by the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese
people to American imperialism. Irish civil rights activists emulated the militant politics of the Black Panthers. When
students and workers united to launch a massive general strike in France in May, it taught student radicals in Australia
that they needed to link up with the power of the organised working class in order to win.

The movements of 1968 united people across superficially very different societies. For decades, Cold War common sense
had dictated that the greatest divide on the planet was between Western liberal capitalism and Stalinist “Communism”.
But in 1968, both sides of the iron curtain exploded in revolt. The triggers for the struggles may have been different, but
they were all responses to similar issues: inequality, exploitation and war, imposed by monstrous bureaucratic states.

In 2011, a poor Tunisian street vendor set himself alight to protest against police harassment . Within days, his act had
inspired anti-government protests across the country. Within weeks, the protests escalated into a regional revolt that
challenged regimes across the Arab world. One small act tapped into resentment against inequality, unemployment
and state violence that engulfed an entire region. The radical wave spread even further: at a massive demonstration
against an anti-union bill in the US city of Madison, Wisconsin, a man held up a poster with a picture of Egyptian dictator
Hosni Mubarak beside Republican Governor Scott Walker. The caption read: “One dictator down. One to go”. The Arab
revolutions went on to inspire the Occupy movement, which spread to more than 80 countries.

Today, more than ever , insurgent social movements and working-class uprisings are spurring action in other parts of
the world—from Hong Kong to Chile, from Lebanon to France. One placard at a memorial for protesters murdered while
resisting the military coup in Myanmar took up Marx’s incitement: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose
but your chains”.

While the Russian Revolution is cynically held up by capitalist ideologists as the ultimate argument against international
revolution, it actually proves the opposite. It shows that the goal is not only necessary, but also that it’s possible. The
news of workers seizing power in Russia, overthrowing their capitalist government and declaring their withdrawal from
WWI, created shock waves across the planet . Workers in Germany rose in revolt a year later, ending the war for good
and building soviets, a form of radical working-class democracy inspired by the Russian example. This was followed by
uprisings in France, Italy and Hungary.

The revolutionary wave spread further. A classified British government report from 1919 noted a “very widespread
feeling among workers that thrones have become anachronisms, and that the Soviet may be the best form of
Government for a democracy”.

The rising tide of radicalism had an impact in Australia too. Meatworkers in the Queensland city of Townsville donned
red jumpers, stormed the local police station to free jailed unionists, and placed the city under workers’ control. The
editor of the conservative Townsville Daily Bulletin lamented: “Townsville for the last year or so has been developing
Bolshevism ... the mob management of affairs in this city, differs very little, from the Petrograd and Moscow brand”.

The Russian Bolsheviks, the revolutionary working-class party that led the revolution to victory in 1917, didn’t just
passively wait for revolutions elsewhere. They actively organised to spread the revolt. In 1919, they established the
Communist International, an organisation for debate, discussion and coordination between different revolutionary
workers’ parties. Revolutionaries in Russia, Italy, France, Germany, the US, Australia and elsewhere attempted to clarify
and develop a strategy for overthrowing capitalism everywhere. In none of these countries was there a party like the
Bolsheviks, steeled in years of organising working-class struggle to overthrow the state, and capable of leading a
revolution. But for a number of years, workers came close to overthrowing capitalism in several countries.

In periods of stability, when social conservatism dominates, international revolution can seem like a pipe dream.
Defenders of the status quo actively work to reinforce this illusion. But history proves that the crises that the system
generates are international, and that they will inevitably provoke international resistance .

Capitalism is a global system. It requires a global movement to tear it up, root and branch. But it also makes global
revolution more possible, and more likely. The most important thing that socialists can do , whether you live in Hong
Kong or France, Myanmar or Australia, is to get stuck into organising for it today .

Buch-Hansen agrees degrowth solves

Hubert Buch-Hansen 18. Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. 04/2018. “The
Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from Critical Political Economy.” Ecological Economics, vol. 146, pp.
157–163.

3. Crisis Whereas previously in history, the tendency was for major crises to occur roughly one at a time, several deep
and intertwined crises are currently unfolding in parallel (Max-Neef, 2014). The 2008 financial crisis may be over, but
the economic and social scars it left continue to be deep, and a new financial crisis is already looming. The IMF speaks
of a global recovery that is ‘weak and precarious’ and of the risk of ‘ stagnation in advanced economies’ (IMF, 2016a:
xiv, xvi). The fragility of the global financial system is underscored in a recent study, in which it is noted that global
debt levels are now at an all-time high and that high private debt in the rich countries and in a few ‘systemically
important emerging market economies […] increases the likelihood of a financial crisis’ (IMF, 2016b: 1). Contemporary
capitalism is also characterized by a social crisis , which is related to growing inequality. The income gaps between the
top earners (“the 1%” and “the 0.1%”) and the rest of society have become a hotly debated topic in the wake of the
2008 financial crisis as manifested in the emergence of the international Occupy movement and the publication of
Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the TwentyFirst Century (Piketty, 2014). While the top earners continue to rapidly
accumulate more wealth, a large group of bottom earners – in many rich countries, this group accounts for up to 40% of
the population – have scarcely benefitted from economic growth and are being left behind (OECD, 2015a). Economic
inequality has profound social consequences; for instance, it reduces educational opportunities and lowers the social
mobility of many people at the bottom. As the OECD (2015a: 21) comments, ‘the decline of the 40% raises social and
political questions. When such a large group in the population gains so little from economic growth, the social fabric
frays and trust in institutions is weakened.’ Income inequality has also increased in many developing countries, and
although the number of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced significantly in recent decades (OECD,
2015b: 36), hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty. Another crisis is the environmental crisis, which
encompasses a wide range of factors – including, for instance, climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation –
that undermine current and future living conditions for human beings and other species (Speth, 2008). The root cause
of this crisis is the endless increase in the world's volume of production and in humanity's consumption of the
planet's finite resources . To merely sustain humanity's current level of environmental impact, 1.6 planets would be
required (WWF, 2016). This figure obviously obscures the fact that whereas there is massive overconsumption in the
rich countries of the world, the populations of a number of underdeveloped countries have a real and pressing need
to increase their consumption if they are to meet basic human needs. A host of other actual or impending crises can
be mentioned (see, e.g., Brand and Wissen, 2012; Harvey, 2010; Robinson, 2014). In fact, it is likely to be the case that
‘never before in human history have so many crises converged simultaneously to reach their maximum level of
tension’ (Max-Neef, 2014: 17). It seems highly unlikely that these crises – which can also be thought of as one
multidimensional crisis – could be resolved under the institutional arrangements of neoliberal capitalism. The 2008
financial crisis was – to no small extent – a result of neoliberal policies (Duménil and Lévy, 2011), and the same can be
said of growing inequality (Hall et al., 2013). However, even more fundamentally, the question is whether the crises –
not least the environmental crisis – can be resolved simultaneously within the framework of an economic system that
needs to grow. So far, there is nothing to suggest that it is even remotely possible to bring humanity's environmental
impact down to a sustainable level within such a system (Dietz and O'Neill, 2013; Jackson, 2009). To recapitulate, if a
deep crisis is an important prerequisite for deep institutional change – as not only critical political economists but
also many other social scientists suggest – then we live in a time when such change ought to be possible . In other
words, the first precondition for a degrowth paradigm shift exists.
 Marx K: KU—v. SetCol

Marxism is the best method of evaluating colonialism – forms the basis for understanding
dispossession and resistance
Dunbar-Ortiz et al ‘17
[Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, og feminist, indigenous, and marxist activist/revolutionary, professor emerita of ethnic
studies at CSU-Hayward. Being interviewed by Ragina Johnson, ISO activist, and Brian Ward, Indigenous rights and ISO
activist. Winter 2016-17. “‘A sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity’: Colonialism, capitalism, and Native
liberation”. https://isreview.org/issue/103/sense-hope-and-possibility-solidarity] Pat – italics indicate interviewer
questions/comments

As we have been diving into current debates and writings from the Left, we have found an absence of analysis on the
question of Native Americans and labor . You mentioned Glen Coulthard earlier and he actually says in the introduction of Red Skin, White Masks, It appears that the history of dispossession, not
proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state . . . Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by

in the Diné
and oriented around the question of land . . . and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” But in fact, you have talked about many Native Americans being part of the working class as you mention recently in your Real News interview. Why is this? For instance,

Nation (Navajo reservation), the energy industry has long dominated, and in the 1970s, Navajos formed trade unions to
demand that they have the jobs and job training. In the early part of the twentieth century, Navajos and Pueblo Indians made up much of the work force on the railroads that ran
through their territories in the Southwest. In the federal government’s relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s, half the reservation and rural population migrated to

urban areas for jobs in industry; however, many had moved on their own during the war to work in the defense industry. I think ignoring this is a problem for
some academics . Some of the Native people in academia come from more prosperous families. I don’t believe any Native person is super wealthy; even in the biggest casinos the money is distributed and
there is not a real ruling class—but there are definitely class issues in terms of consciousness. All the AIM activists were from working-class families , but are no less Lakota,

Diné, or Salish because of it. They worked at all kinds of jobs. So for me, I felt really comfortable in AIM because it was working class and people were

not ashamed to be workers. In fact they were quite proud, and they were drawn to unions when anyone bothered to organize them. When the Navajo workers began to organize in the 1970s with
the United Mine Workers, it was against federal law for unions to organize on Indian reservations. Peter McDonald challenged that and won. The Navajo workers had specific demands

for medical benefits; they bargained to include their medicine men to be paid. They had the Indian Health Service, but they wanted to pay their medicine
people and were able to get this into their contract. They are very strong union people. Unfortunately, there are other problems with the fossil-fuel industry and internal struggles in reservations over ending extraction for
environmental reasons. I think Coulthard is trying to say that exploitation and expropriation are different things. But all capitalism starts with expropriation of land from the producers, and not just in the Americas but as the prerequisite for the development of capitalism in Europe. That’s what I describe as the culture of

been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is
conquest in my book, about the commons being fenced in and that all expropriation started with the land. We’ve

European, you miss the point of the theory . People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how
people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the
vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers. I worked hard on the first chapter of my book
about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling
out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were
agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.” This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a
different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that
capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably
becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the
Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private
property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark,
Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely
but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs. Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?
succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection
between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had

In settler
colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism.

colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief
commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market
commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the
United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native

middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today. I want to
make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience . Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as
which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly

all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires
understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North
America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.
Settler colonialism isn’t structural – their analytic is depoliticizing and ahistorical.
Barker ‘17
[Joanne, professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. 02/02/2017.
https://tequilasovereign.com/2017/02/02/the-analytic-constraints-of-settler-colonialism/] pat
I’d like to re-frame my critique of the constraints of settler colonialism with the twelve little women in mind. I am going to try to show that a certain analytic within the studies has, however unwittingly, foreclosed and even
chilled understandings of Black and Indigenous histories and identities in ways that derail our understandings of U.S. imperialism as a social formation and so our work with one another. One of the consequences of this
goes to our ability to think through how #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #NoDAPL, and #MMIW are co-generative — even as I recognize the reasons why each of these movements have at different times demanded we

between the structure and the

respect their particularity. Drawing from Marxist structuralism, Patrick Wolfe defines the settler colonial society through two key differentiations. The first is

event of invasion . Wolfe maintains that the permanence of invasion distinguishes the structure of a settler society , which
originates with the withdrawal of the empire and the rise to power of a land-holding class who always intended to stay. Wolfe defines the ideology that cements this structure together as the logic of elimination. The
settler exploits Indigenous labor but more importantly seeks to eliminate all vestiges of Indigenous land claims by the elimination of Indigenous cultures and identities. The quickest way I can explain my concerns with

It treats society as a fixed, coherent thing that can be objectively

Wolfe’s definition is to mark how it rearticulates the problematics of structuralism.

described. The descriptions are simultaneously over-determined by the historical event of the empire’s withdrawal
and the exceptionalism of a permanent invasion. We’ve been in this trouble before – we know structuralism generates all kinds of
ahistorical and apolitical problems, not to mention essentialisms, even as it is conditioned by the intersectionalities of originary events and political identities. For instance, Lorenzo Veracini
argues that settler colonialism is “characterized by a settler capacity to control the population economy” as a marker of sovereignty and that this situation is “associated with a particular state of mind” and “narrative form”
so powerful that “the possibility of ultimately discontinuing/decolonizing settler colonial forms remains problematic.” Veracini maintains that “settlers do not discover: they carry their sovereignty and lifestyles with them.

As they move towards what amounts to a representation of the world, as they transform the land into their image, they settle another place without really moving.” I would argue that the settler colonial
is a contested and unstable concept . Drawing from critical Indigenous, race, and feminist approaches — such as those developed by Jodi Byrd, Mishuana Goeman, Jennifer Denetdale, and
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers — that understand colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia as permanent features of U.S. society, I

would argue that society is not an objectively settled structure to be described , nor an imaginary that travels as an
integral whole around the world. It is a set of contested meanings caught up in struggles over power and knowledge.
And resistance is most certainly not futile . The second differentiation on which Wolfe’s settler colonialism rests is between the settler and the Indigenous. While many assume the
settler to be white – and perhaps more so to be a white heterosexual male – Wolfe, Veracini, and others characterize the settler as both white and all other non-Indigenous people irrespective of gender and sexuality.
Pressed on the politics of such characterizations, particularly of figuring Blacks as settlers, Wolfe explains: Willingly or not, enslaved or not, at the point of a run or not, they arrived as part of the settler-colonial project.
That doesn’t make them settlers in the same sense as the colonizers who coerced them to participate—of course not—but it does make them perforce part of the settler-colonial process of dispossession and elimination.
— Patrick Wolfe (2012) As the work of Circe Sturm, Tiya Miles, Sharon Patricia Holland, and so many others have demonstrated, Black and Indigenous histories and identities (not necessarily distinct) are intersectional
messes of racialized and gendered contestation over and within the ongoing colonial forces of U.S. imperialism. We need their analyses to understand these histories and identities and the ways we have inherited them.

We need to be careful about grouping all racial, ethnic, diaspora, and immigrant communities in with settlers and
pitting them and their presumably shared struggles for civil rights against Indigenous sovereignty and territorial
claims. The kinds of polemics that result are not helpful . What if reparations and return are not antithetical political objectives? Who decides their antithesis?

Their politics are self-referential and self-defeating – particularized identarian focus necessarily
lacks empirical backing
Chow 2006 – Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University (Rey, The Age of the World Target:
Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work pp. 58-61)
This potential alliance between the lack of (temporal and ontological) selfpresence and differentiation-as-historicity is one major reason poststructuralism has left such indelible imprints on those areas of knowledge production that do not at first seem to have much
to do with semiotics or, for that matter, with the revamping of metalanguages, but that are intimately linked to empirical issues such as culture and group identity. It is not difficult to see that the basic tenets of structuralist linguistics and semiotics difference,
identity, value, arbitrariness, convention, systematicity-carry within them connotations that resonate well beyond the terrain of a narrow sense of language. With the bracketing of the object of knowledge and the foregrounding of the process of signification-as-

one of the most

temporality, as introduced by poststructuralism, it is inevitable that the certitude of the identities involved-epistemic, subjective, or collective-can no longer be safely taken for granted. Not surprisingly, therefore,

prevalent uses of the poststructuralist metalanguage of differencing is to be found in areas of inquiry in which
existential identity is most at stake—multiculturalism, postcoloniality, and ethnicity. In these intersecting terrains of inquiry, most often conducted in the U . S .
academy, the leftist intellectual response to the postwar era of decolonization -the response that began as "French theory" in the I960s- has finally come full

circle .

how is it that in these areas of inquiry, there is also such a regular refrain that non-Western subjects and subject matters
If this is the case,

are "resistant to" and beyond Western (often poststructuralist) theory-that is, that they fundamentally (and often antagonistically) exceed such
theory's rationale of comprehension , however nuanced the latter might be? Three or four decades ago, even though the same ambivalent gesture toward the West might be made, theory itself was not a problem.
Nowadays, as can be surmised from journals, conferences, anthologies, and single-author publications, not only do scholars of more fashionable topics such as transgender politics,

third-world media, postcolonial urban geography, or cultural translation feel obligated to gesture toward one type of
Western theory or another, but even specialists of ancient ethnic poems and narratives must also, in order to argue the case of the latter' s uniqueness and
beyond comparison status, demonstrate an awareness of the background of Western theoretical issues. Yet, if all this is
testimony to the hegemony enjoyed by Western theory, why are the claims of resistance-in so many versions of " We are
different! ” –so adamant? Are such claims at all effectual?
If the exploration of literary difference was in order to ground literary specificity-that is, to define literature as an object with its
essential attributes, attributes that make literature definitively unlike anything else then one of the outcomes of such
exploration is, ironically, the dissipation of this "object" altogether . From the nineteenth-century perception of its essence (in Marx and Engels) as indirection to the late-twentieth-
century assertion (by deconstructionist critics) of its non-coincidence with itself, the object of literariness seems to have become theoretically unsustainable

exactly at the moment of its concrete definition: it "is" what it always is not.

This capacity for becoming-other-than-itself, here associated with literariness through the course of temporality, returns us uncannily to the prison house
logic of myth as Barthes analyzes it, a logic that captures and entraps as much as it shifts and defers . Indeed, the two sides of the logic are
not so distinguishable from each other: what captures and entraps-what seems inescapable-is none other than an ever changing tendency to shift and defer, ad infinitum. Conversely, what incessantly shifts and defers

with an open ending may, by the same token, become a predictable, because endlessly perpetuated and extendable, condition. That is to say, much as the ongoing
efforts to define the literary object as such have shown that temporality / difference will always fragment and dismantle
whatever specificity that may be established through it, this (metacritical point of the) impossibility of stable objectification , once grasped and
reiterated, can turn into nothing less than a metaphysics (of presence) -with language or signification as the primary origin,

as the source of divinity or evil from which there is, as it were, no possibility of an exit.

Consider now the study of X-those areas which, as I mentioned at the beginning, often attain visibility by beckoning toward and resisting
Western theory at the same time . As in the case of literariness, we may set out to define X as an object with certain attributes. But we already know from the example of literariness that such an attempt
at discovering the specificity of X will lead first to the process of differencing and eventually to the dissipation of X
itself as a stable referent. With the advantage of this theoretical hindsight/foresight, should we therefore conclude that, ultimately, X as such does not
exist, that X, like literariness, is a permanently shifting, nonself- identical relationship? What might be the implications of
proclaiming, let us say, that African American, Asian American, and gay, lesbian, and transgender specificities do not exist?
Such proclamations would be faithful to the logic of poststructuralist deferment, yet they would be intolerable to many who are conscious of the hierarchical
politics of race, class, gender, and ethnicity that structure Western and non-Western societies alike. In the face of the
practical struggles for existential self-determination that go on daily against various forms of social injustice, it is, for many,
unthinkable to declare, as in the case of the referent of literariness, that these versions of X do not exist. Yet the alternative-the insistence that
they are real, out there, their empirical existence absolutely incontestable, and that they are an authentic core from
which to mount resistance to the virtual claims of high theory-is equally untenable because it is theoretically naive.
The conundrum we face today in the wake of theory may thus be described as follows. In their attempts to argue the specificity of their objects of study, critics of marginalized areas of inquiry often must, as a gesture of independence and pride, rhetorically assert
their resistance to or distrust of Western theory. But what exactly is the nature of that which they are resisting and distrusting? As these critics try to defend the viability of their proposed objects, they are compelled, against their own proclaimed critical stance, to
set into motion precisely the poststructuralist operation of differencing, of making essentialist categories of identity disintegrate. Indeed, differencing-and deferment-is often the very strategic weapon with which they stage their attacks on Western theory. Although
they criticize Western theory, then, these critics are meanwhile implementing the bracketing of anchored, referential meanings, a bracketing that, arguably, constitutes contemporary Western theory's most profound and influential contribution. To argue in a truly
effective way, these critics would in all likelihood have to go against or abandon the very theoretical premises (of poststructuralist differencing) on which they make their criticisms in the first place.20

Put in a different way, the attempt to advance the specificity of X as such , even as it discredits poststructuralist theory, tends to
reproduce the very terms-and the very problems-that once used to surround the theoretical investigation of literariness. Like
literature-Foucault' s problematic pronouncements about the emergence of literature in modernity again come to mind- X is often constructed negatively as what defamiliarizes , what departs from

conventional expectations, what disrupts the norm , etc.—terms that are invested in inscribing specificity by way of differentiation, deferment, and resistance. Like the attempt to define literariness also, the attempt to

define X seems doomed to destroy its own object in the process of objectification. More disturbingly still, if representation of X as
such is recognizable in these similar theoretical terms, doesn't it mean that there is no essential difference between X
and high theory-that the articulation of X, however historically specific it may be, is somehow already within the
trajectory mapped out by high theory?

To this extent,critics who attempt to use X as a site of resistance are not unlike Barthes, who invokes the speech of the woodcutter in the midst of his own semiotic analysis of
for all the
myth. Judged according to the terms of Barthes's own method, the woodcutter is an enigmatic figure because he has, to all appearances, emerged from an outside that has already been rejected in anteriority. Similarly,

commonsensical justifications for X's existence, X seems theoretically out of place, its "being" at once anticipated and
erased by the logic in which it strives to appear. This life-and- death entanglement between X and poststructuralist
theory is exactly the juncture (and dead end) at which a rethinking of poststructuralist theory is in order -not once again by way of
semiotic or temporal differencing but, as I would contend, by way of reexamining theory's interruption of referentiality .

Capitalism is existential – its try or die for socialism.

[cc, disease, ocid, biod, defo, water, gas cycles, gmos]
Foster 2020, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon (John Bellamy, 09-2020, “The Renewal of the Socialist
Ideal.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 72 (4): 1–13. doi:10.14452/MR-072-04-2020-08_1.

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism's creative destruction of the
bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capi- talism ,
defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe on every side due to the unintended consequences of “the
juggernaut of capital.”* Ca- tastrophe capitalism in this sense is manifested today in the convergence of (1) the
planetary ecological crisis , (2) the global epidemiological crisis , and (3) the unending world economic crisis. Added to
this are the main features of today’s “empire of chaos,” including the extreme system of im- perialist exploitation
unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of
neoliberalism, and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic in- stability accompanied by
increased dangers of unlimited war. ‘The climate crisis represents what the world scientific consensus refers to as a “no
analogue” situation, such that if net carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion do not reach zero in the next few
decades, it will threaten the very existence of industrial civilization and ultimately hu- man survival .‘ Nevertheless, the
existential crisis is not limited to climate change, but extends to the crossing of other planetary boundaries that to-
gether define the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These include : (1) ocean
acidification; (2) species extinction {and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of
fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including
radionuclides); and (7) the un- controlled proliferation of genetically modified organisms.* ‘This rupturing of
planetary boundaries is intrinsic to the system of cap- ital accumulation that recognizes no insurmountable barriers
to its un- limited, exponential quantitative advance . Hence, there is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of
the overall social and natural condi- tions of existence that does not require exiting capitalism itself. What is, essential is
the creation of what Istvan Mészdros in Beyond Capital called a new system of “social metabolic reproduction.” This
points to socialism. as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but con- ceived in ways that critically
challenge the theory and practice of social- ism as it existed in the twentieth century.

The alternative is party centered institution building—it provides accountability and radical
liberation
Escalante 18 (Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Antin-Imperialist activist. “Party
Organizing In The 21st Century,” https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-the-21st-century/. 9-21-
2018.)

The Need For A Party: I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing,
but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to
argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party
organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the
United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the
United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist
politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed
and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds
directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate
that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy
recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular
support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do.
Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we
have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet
people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put
simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of
building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of
dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a
communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must
make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with
establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make
this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the
party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line
determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party
members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party
members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power
institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party
model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political
organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing
communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a
formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building
movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a
unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and
unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not
only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model
allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic
consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable
for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but
rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help
correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such
accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal
frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these
ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which
unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply
meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model
creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and
ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power
projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of
base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and
praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize
that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the
present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is
not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it
would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the
organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What
is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside
building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued
local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the
right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive
approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain
unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to
adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment
into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of
armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions
must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red
charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means
radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends.
The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to
mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel
economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base
building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If
local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the
long term goal of the base building movement . Many of the already existing organizations within the base building
movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to
suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual
power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative
economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long
term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the
movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about
base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building
tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over
time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for
ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a
conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual
organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly
growing movement can succeed.

Marxism provides the best framework for Indigenous emancipation – it’s self-correcting and
provides tools to build global solidarity.
The Red Nation ‘19
[International coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating
Native liberation. 09/6/2019. “Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red Nation”.
https://therednation.org/2019/09/07/revolutionary-socialism-is-the-primary-political-ideology-of-the-red-nation-2/] Pat

Our traditions of Indigenous resistance wield

Marxism is a tool for making revolution, first and foremost. But it is a useless tool unless wielded properly by the oppressed.

Marxism, not to uphold European traditions, but to emancipate ourselves from the colonizers by destroying that which destroys us, and
building and rebuilding our nations according to our traditions and cultures so that our human and nonhuman relations and thus all people may live. And we cannot merely destroy

capitalism, without the foresight and knowledge of replacing it with a more humane and just system without rulers
and without colonizers. That system is called socialism, which seeks to destroy the class system and the ruling classes,
redistribute land and wealth to its proper owners, and restore dignity to the humble people of the earth . Put simply, socialism is
people power. Socialism puts people before profits. Socialism aligns with Indigenous traditions of relationality as we seek to be good relatives to other humans and other-than-humans. Socialism is the natural state of
humanity, to live and work towards peace and justice. Communism is the greatest expression of love for the people and our nonhuman relatives. And it is the only solution for a planet on the brink of destruction at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and their backwards ideologies and institutions. 1. US
imperialism is the number one enemy of the planet. Our socialism is rooted in Indigenous resistance, African slave rebellions, and European labor history. It is also rooted in the nations of the Tri-Continental—of Asia, Africa, and the
Americas—that aligned themselves against the primary enemy of the planet: US imperialism. Indigenous peoples were the first victims of European imperialism and invasion. The US inherited that mantle and has exported

the settler colonial project to the rest of the globe by plundering and killing other darker nations. We are internationalists. As Indigenous nations, who are in the United States but not entirely of it, we align ourselves with the Third World.
We seek to end the oppressive relations between European nations and the Third World. This means opposing US imperialism at all turns, denouncing all US imperialist wars, and aligning ourselves with the poorer nations of the world in the defense of their sovereignty and self-determination. The US must get out of everywhere,
including Turtle Island! Global climate change is also not a Third World problem—it’s a first world problem. Nations like the United States consume and produce the most carbon. This concentration of wealth and consumption derives from the histories of African slavery, Indigenous genocide, and European settler colonialism. Thus,
the struggle against the multinational oil and gas corporations is an anti-imperialist struggle in which Indigenous nations are leading the fight. But we also recognize that our socialism, our freedom and emancipation, can never come at the expense of our Third World comrades and relatives. Marx and Engels developed their
theories of change and history from the vantage point of the laboring European proletariat. Industrial capitalism, however, didn’t begin solely in the English factory. The hands that picked the cotton that was weaved in English textile mills were African — stolen from their homelands and enslaved by European masters. The land
where the cotton grew had to be cleared of Indigenous people and Indigenous title to make way for the plantation economy, the main driving force behind the expansion of modern capitalism. Thus, the expansion of African slavery fueled the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. US settler colonialism was thoroughly a racial project
of genocide and Indigenous elimination, which is an enduring structure that changes over time. After all, even the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the plantation economy and African slave system from their European counterparts were themselves dispossessed and extirpated from their lands. And both freed
Africans and Indigenous people fought as soldiers and scouts for the US settler wars of extermination against western Indigenous nations and overseas campaigns of conquest. Despite their military service in the US imperialist army, their stations within settler society have always been subordinate to white Europeans. They faced
Jim Crow segregation, police violence, mass incarceration, and the continued settler occupation of Indigenous lands. We reject settler colonialism and US imperialism as the means of emancipation for the working class and for colonized people. Our communist and anti-imperialist principles to which we ascribe are as follows: 1. End
the unequal relations between European and colonized nations. 2. End the violent competition between the nations of exploiters and colonizers. 3. End the plunder of the earth for profit. 2. Marxism is not European. Socialism is Indigenous. Marxism is founded on the expropriated knowledges of non-

Marxism, as a science, has a built-in self-correcting mechanism that has helped

capitalist Indigenous societies. Although Marx himself was wrong about many things,

revolutionaries throughout the world build off the political theory Marx first formulated . If this were untrue, there would be no Russian
Revolution, no African Revolution and decolonization movement, no Vietnamese liberation, no Bolivarian Revolution, no Cuban Revolution, no Chinese Revolution, etc. Each adopted Marxism and applied it to its specific

and unique circumstances by building off the long struggles against exploitation and European imperialism. Even for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the concepts
and theories of decolonization explicitly derive from Marxist revolutionary movements . It’s dishonest for us to not recognize this history. It’s not
because of Marx or European thinkers that these revolutions were successful. It’s because Marxism is the science of revolution for the poor masses , the

colonized, and the wretched of the earth. Fundamentally, Marxism is the science of how to get free. It is the study of class struggle. If capitalism upholds the systems of racism, settler
colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism, then we cannot use capitalism to undo these systems. It’s not enough to just be anti-capitalist. Like our ancestors we must be forward-
thinking by drawing from and amplifying our non-capitalist social relations as Indigenous peoples, not to make
Indigenous traditions relevant to Marxism or socialism but to make socialism and Marxism relevant to our struggle as
Indigenous peoples. You cannot fight fire with fire. You cannot fight capitalism with Indigenous capitalism. You cannot fight nationalism with hyper-nationalism. You can only fight fire with water. And the solution to all these ills—and it is what capitalists and colonists hate the most—is socialism. If

capitalism is burning the planet, then socialism is the water to douse the flame. Water is life. We all need water to live, but we don’t need capitalism. And
for us to fight colonialism, we must ensure that our nations can live. But our nationalism cannot mirror the bourgeois
settler nationalism of colonial states, which is premised on exclusion and white supremacy. We adopt a revolutionary Indigenous nationalism that aligns with the most oppressed and marginalized first, within and outside

And we recognize that by organizing production—for our food, medicines, resources, etc.—according to need and not profit is
our own communities.

the only possible path forward according to our traditions. The philosophy of communism neatly lines up with the
philosophy of our Indigenous ancestors . Friedrich Engels admitted as much when in the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto he added a footnote to the famous line: “The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” He clarified, “That is, all written history,” making note specifically of Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was a
communistic, classless, and democratic society before European invasion. Moreover, it was the relative gender equality of Indigenous societies that inspired the suffragettes — white women seeking parity with white men.

The study of Indigenous societies, the inherent equality and freedom they engendered among producers and the
common ownership of property and social institutions, also inspired European workers to demand eight-hour
workdays and the abolition of child labor. And, in the final analysis, despite their own limited understandings, Marx and Engels, the founders of the modern communist movement, had
developed theories of emancipation largely from the expropriated knowledges of Indigenous and communal people, whose examples they relied on to prove that capitalism is neither inevitable nor natural. But, in fact,
communism is both natural and inevitable. This is not to suggest Indigenous societies were utopias — no society is perfect. It is, however, important to understand that Indigenous peoples have been knocked off the path of their natural social development to live in balance and correct relations. We are not
trying to recreate the past so much as steer Indigenous nations back on their communal developmental path that has been destroyed or seriously distorted by capitalist social relations. 3. The United States is not a “nation of immigrants” but a nation of colonizers. Whereas contemporary racial identity politics attempts to mask or
obscure class antagonisms, a class struggle that doesn’t overturn white supremacy and settler colonialism frees no one. We are not seeking parity with colonizers or further integration into a colonial system. We’re seeking to end settler and white supremacy entirely over Black, Indigenous, and colonized people. We aim to end the
colonial system entirely. Why? The United States, as a nation of European colonizers, had no feudal or communal past. Unlike other nations in history who transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, the United States was the first nation born entirely as a capitalist state. It was constructed from the ground up according to the
nightmare vision of European slave owners and Indian killers — the nation’s founding bourgeois ideologies. The United States began as an oppressor nation, as a colonizer of oppressed people, and its function remains so. It not only has a capitalist ruling class, but all strata and classes of white Europeans among its ranks are
encouraged to become preoccupied with the aims of the ruling class through petty racial privileges and private property ownership, the guiding stars of white settler nationalism. We reject those national and settler aspirations and ask our comrades in struggle to reject them as well. The current US colonial state is not only an
instrument of racial and class rule, it is also an instrument of imperialist plunder and the oppressor of nations. It thus obscures its own internal divisions of colonizer and colonized. The United States fabricates national myths by calling itself a “nation of immigrants” to hide its unnaturalness and crimes. Immigrants come to a land to
integrate within the existing legal, social, and political orders. The first European settlers came to colonize, to destroy and replace existing Indigenous legal, social, and political orders. The United States is, therefore, more accurately described as a “nation of colonizers.” Immigrants don’t come in chains; you can’t immigrate to a land
you already belong to; and refugees fleeing imperialist violence are not immigrants. We recognize that the colonial state keeps in place irreconcilable class antagonisms, between rich and poor, between settler and Native. The state is first and foremost police and military violence. Its legitimacy is maintained by force. It’s primary
function is enforcing capitalist social relations. The veneer of “representative democracy” is only possible because the ruling classes have crushed and will continue to crush any alternative to capitalism by mobilizing the police and military. In this sense, Indigenous people are the first “Red Scare.” Because we held land in common
and represented an alternative to the settler state (whether it be by taking in escaped slaves or mounting armed resistance), we had to be annihilated. Today, because we adopt revolutionary socialism as our struggle and vision for a free society, we are the second coming of the “Red Scare.” But we are not exclusive in our struggles
for freedom. We align ourselves with all colonized and oppressed people of the world. Only imperial borders and nation-states that are not of our own making divide our common humanity. Therefore, our struggle transcends the state, but we are not naive enough to turn away from the state as a site of struggle. We

understand that state power is nearly impossible to achieve, since Indigenous peoples are a minority. Yet, in alliance with other colonized and oppressed peoples , we
can take state power , not to become the new rulers of a capitalist society, but to use the mechanisms of the state to wage our rightful struggle against our class enemies—the rich. A socialist
state uses the power and democracy of the masses to undo the privileges and wealth of the ruling classes and the
colonial elite, even among our own people. A socialist state seeks to destroy itself because it is built in the shell of the old. But it has to be wielded by the oppressed in the service of the oppressed to achieve
freedom and the abolition of the state itself, because, whether we like it or not, the state is the primary organizer of society. And through a decolonized socialist state , we will

reorganize society to redistribute wealth and land by taking it back from those who stole it from us in the first place .

K
Intimate violence and suffering is increasing because of capitalism---transition away from capitalism
is key – subsumes colonialism
Hickel 19, An academic at the University of London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (Jason, January 29 th, “Bill
Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong,” The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal,
Accessed 07-12-2021)

There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since
1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset
that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a
limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s
social media. What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity
had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of
money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession
that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the
colonisation of the global south . Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they
enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity.
They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that
they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into
European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to
do in the first place. In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation . It is not at all clear
that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned
from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course
gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackage s it as a happy
story of progress. But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of
$1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any
standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition
and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a
long shot. Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a
minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance
of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that
the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day. So what happens if we measure global poverty at the
low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of
people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion
people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away. Moreover, the few gains that have been made have
virtually all happened in one place: China. It is disingenuous, then, for the likes of Gates and Pinker to claim these
gains as victories for Washington-consensus neoliberalism. Take China out of the equation, and the numbers look
even worse. Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up, the proportion of
people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%. It would be difficult to overstate the suffering that these
numbers represent. This is a ringing indictment of our global economic system, which is failing the vast majority of
humanity. Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only 5% of all
new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60% – and yet they are the people who produce most of
the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were
condemned 200 years ago. It is madness – and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify
it.

4---Fractures DA – the aff centers identity in opposition to class politics which fails to create critical
mass in favor of labor politics---the 1ac’s appeal to the ontological and historical nature of
oppression proves – independently critiques their theory of power and proves the aff can’t solve
Dudzic and Reed 15 – national organizer of the labor party; PhD, professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania.

(Mark and Adolph, “THE CRISIS OF LABOUR AND THE LEFT IN THE UNITED STATES”, November 2015, Socialist Register)

Attempts to combine identitarian and political-economic perspectives – e.g., via constructs like institutional or
structural racism – demonstrate the primary commitment to the former. They effectively ontologize racism (or sexism
or xenophobia) by vesting it with historical agency that rests on a ‘takes on a life of its own’ reification and
acknowledges capitalist class dynamics only gesturally . Despite occasional, pro forma acknowledgments that it is
important to oppose capitalism, this politics is strikingly dismissive of Marxism, when not viscerally anti-Marxist.18
Defences of this view typically rest on appeals to realpolitik and claims that whites’ racism and/or males’ sexism have
historically overwhelmed efforts to mobilize working-class unity. This perhaps explains the spasmodic recurrence of
reparations talk in black American elite discourse since 2000; it reinforces assertion of the primacy of race and racial
identity as the determinative force in American politics. Similarly, arguments that contemporary racial inequality is
best understood via analogy to slavery or the southern segregationist regime that held sway in the first half of the
twentieth century serve more to insist on the primacy of racism than to shed light on the reproduction of
contemporary patterns of inequality. Michelle Alexander’s popular book, The New Jim Crow, is a prime instance of this
phenomenon. The analogy’s appeal to Alexander is precisely that it asserts the ongoing and overriding causal power of
racism by means of a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, yet even she finally acknowledges that it does not work because mass
incarceration today is not significantly like the segregationist order.19 The assertion of a fundamentally antagonistic
history between labour and social movements , particularly those based on ascriptive identities like race, gender or
sexual orientation, is a reflex in the discourse of the identitarian left fuelled by liberal stereotypes of the organized
working class as definitively white, male and conservative. This political lore, despite having some basis in historical
fact, has hardened into unexamined folk knowledge among many activists. The labour movement has hardly been
immune – either institutionally or as individual union members – from racist, sexist, homophobic or nativist currents in
American political culture. The story of labour’s inadequacies in that regard has been well told.20 But labour hardly
stands out from federal, state and local government, the academy, industry, organized religion or any other social
institutions in generating and sustaining that framework of inequality or the hierarchies that constituted it. Moreover,
the lore depends on denying or devaluing the significant connections between labour and other egalitarian social
movements in the past as well as the present. No matter what post-class self-images those who embrace identitarian
politics may cherish, it is a politics rooted in neoliberal class dynamics . Its effacement of class as both an analytic and
a strategic category dissolves working people’s interests as working people – which have no place in neoliberalism –
into populations defined by ascription or affinity rather than by location in the system of capitalist reproduction. The
groupist discourse of diversity and opposition to disparity enables harmonizing the left’s aspirational commitment to
equality with neoliberalism’s imperatives. From that perspective, the society would be just if one per cent of the
population controlled ninety-five percent of the resources so long as significant identity groups were represented
proportionately among the one per cent. This is, after all, the goal of liberal equality of opportunity in the market, as
articulated historically by both elements of progressive social movements (e.g., a strain of the black civil rights
movement and bourgeois feminism) and Becker’s neoclassical brief against racial discrimination. It is also the only
standard of social justice that neoliberalism recognizes. Unsurprisingly, the impulse of this politics is not to organize
and unify a single constituency defined by its broad relation to capitalism’s class dynamics . Insofar as its notion of
social justice centres on group parity and recognition, it is inclined toward courses of action that undermine the core
unity necessary to build a movement strong enough to attack the roots of structural inequalities. Instead of unions,
parties and civic organizations with living, breathing memberships whose financial support and votes bind leadership to
some measure of accountability, much of the left’s model in the neoliberal era is founded on the image of an NGO that
is accountable only to its funders. In ventriloquizing population categories reified as groups or ‘communities’, the left
is like NGOs that define their bases as helpless victims and/or abstract groups without real agency of their own. Other
left-oriented tendencies that embrace broader social objectives continue to frame issues in those terms out of either
pietistic habit or failure of political imagination. They substantively, and often enough explicitly, reject class politics .
Labour organizations often feel obliged to frame their issues using the language of disparity in pursuit of broader
acceptance or do so in expression of the dominant normative reflex.21 The national AFL-CIO conspicuously celebrates
labour’s diversity along lines of race, gender, age and sexual orientation. This is certainly defensible as union
membership is, and has been, far more diverse along those lines than any other Democratic constituency. Celebrating
labour’s diversity is a useful affirmation directed toward both members and a general public steadily bombarded with
antiunion propaganda, but that celebratory rhetoric also is embedded in and reinforces an implicitly penitent narrative
of ‘progress’ from a benighted past of union bigotry. Popular catch phrases like ‘this is not your father’s labour
movement’ may cede too much to the discourse that disparages unions as backward-looking bastions of male, white
and/or nativist privilege.22 Defense of trade unionism through celebrating its diversity rather than through asserting
its challenge to capital also marks the labour movement’s acquiescence to neoliberal hegemony . Within labour,
concessions to neoliberalism go much deeper than disparity talk. Much of the movement has been hollowed out , and
a dynamic relationship between a leadership that is accountable to a broad and active constituency has been
displaced by a realpolitik that too often treats the felt concerns of the actual membership as an impediment to
institutional survival. Thus unions, particularly at the national level, are now more a conduit from the Democratic
National Committee to the labour movement than the reverse. They have become more like NGOs whose members are
reduced to props in a shallow and anachronistic symbolism, all in the name of realism. The ‘new unionism’ commonly
associated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has exemplified this approach most clearly in
combining what critics have described as a class collaborationist trade unionism with identitarian pageantry –
choreographed representations, both rhetorical and visual, of non-white and female workers as embodiments of a new
spirit of insurgency. This combination has been refined and advanced through a highly staff-driven organizational
model that minimizes accountability to members and a technicistic discourse – propelled by neologisms like ‘union
density’ – that repackages business unionism as a modernizing programme of rational worker-employer partnership.
This aspect of the new unionism tends at least logically to reinvent the labour movement in the image of an industrial
relations NGO.23

Dual power offers a space for fugitivity but the other way around is not true
Khozoei, 18 [Kenji Jalal Khozoei, media theorist from University of New South Wales, “Decolonising the Commons:
Fugitivity and Future Planning in End Times,” 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/6rek-3y09]//Townes

Self-described as a “vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership”,123 Cooperation
Jackson emerged in 2013
from the vision(s) of the Jackson-Kush Plan to develop a (re)generative solidarity network in Jackson, Mississippi (and
everywhere else) across and through four interconnected and interdependent institutions: a federation of local green
worker cooperatives and mutual aid networks, a cooperative incubator and sustainable development centre, a
communal school and training facility, and a community-owned and controlled bank. The cooperative is maintained
democratically through a People’s Assembly, a model of participatory selfgovernance and Black (and brown and poor)
self-determination, organised without hierarchies via democratically determined agendas and working bodies .124 Linking
with already existing regional and national solidarity economy networks (like the Southern Grassroots Economics Project and the US Solidarity Economy Network), and drawing on a wealth
of theory and praxis elaborated in struggle through the 1980s and 90s in Latin America, Cooperation
Jackson works for (and through and with) the
multiplication of solidarity networks of mutually reinforcing cooperative initiatives . It seeks “a regenerative
economy…. that not only restores and replenishes the resources it extracts from the earth, but aids in the actual
restoration of our earth's ecosystems ”.125 What it might (and indeed in places like Detroit, New York, and Atlanta is
already beginning to126) look like is a regenerative network of mutually reinforcing yet interdependent and localised
eco-villages self-sustaining via community production (of energy, food, life, and so on), enmeshed with urban and regional farms,
farmers markets and community land trusts held by and holding communal financing and collective and ecologically-
constrained enterprise, eventually evolving an autonomous public sector providing communal health care, transportation, education, housing, and whatever else the people
themselves decide they want or need, according to (democratically determined and ecologically constrained) ability and need— elaborating and embodying an unsettling, dynamic, “all-

centring the need to “build genuine worker power from the ground
embracing and class-oriented” model of community and worker unionism,

up… as the core transformative force to democratize the local economy and society”. 127

Not afraid to push the vision to its (im)possible limits,128 Cooperation

Jackson has already started towards what Akuno describes as “a
critical initiative to own and control the means of industrial production”, which are increasingly represented by digital
and automated—3D printing, quantum computing, procedural and artificially-intelligent— production technologies
that are distributed and decentralised yet collectively and democratically owned and operated by “members of
geographically and/or intentionally defined communities”. 129 These ideas—described broadly as Community Production— serve as the foundation for
Cooperation Jackson’s ultimate campaign to transform Jackson into “an innovative hub of sustainable manufacturing and fabrication”, a kind of model “city of the future”130 guided by
“zero-emission and zero-waste”131 principles, a ‘Transition
City’ anchored by not only cooperative 'fab(rication) labs'—able to produce
"build-to-order, high quality, high volume 3D-printed products... from toys to medical aids and tools” as well as
serving “essential production needs”132 of the community such as green housing or other services—but also an
education division to train local workers and community members in distributed fabrication, open-source design and
coding, and sustainable development. This is all guided by a commitment to democratising technology in general but
particularly those technologies that increasingly constitute means of production, (pre)figuring such collective and
visionary efforts as “a prelude towards the democratic transition to eco-socialism .”133

Indeed, this might sound like the communist dream, but it remains a dream, an impressive but nonetheless impotent
economic plan of reform so long as we remain held “within a capitalist framework of social production governed by a
bourgeois social order ”.134 Cooperation Jackson therefore recognises the strategic necessity of what they call ‘dual
power’, differentiating between autonomous power—the collective efforts of building solidarity power “outside of
the state” primarily through People’s Assemblies and Solidarity Economies—but also strategic and fugitive
engagements with “ electoral politics on a limited scale ” in refusal of its legitimacy and with the goal of subverting its
logics and social relations , diluting its strength , and containing “ the dictatorial power and ideological influence of
monopoly capital ”.135 In ‘dual power’ we see an unsettling and unsettled site of contradictory and compromising
movements, a fracture in the walls and halls of the state , through and from which fugitivity flows , under and around
the hold(s) of the here-and-now , moving to and for a different kind of beat altogether.

Cooperation Jackson are certainly awake to not only the changes and challenges that characterise the contemporary moment— the
dominance of the tech giants and
their unholy union with the state and the police, their violent and impersonal imposition into every inch of our lives—
but also the fugitive potentials that such technologies disclose, revealing contradictions that appear on the surface
like splinters to be exploited and exploded. In its unsettling embrace of what might be called ‘fugitive development’,
given and taken in their wild and wide-eyed plans for a future city amid a regenerative network of productive and
cooperative local enterprises, Cooperation Jackson refuses capitalism as it unsettles it from within , from underneath
and around and beyond, strategically leaning in to the language and (il)logics of the enterprising ‘developer’, however
for goals explicitly opposed (and apposed) to those of neoliberal extractive capitalism . By assuming this unsettling (ap)position of the
fugitive entrepreneur, the forerunners of the Jackson Kush Plan recognised not only the productive potential of the working class population, but also the ‘untapped’ industries and interests
in and through which they hoped to thrive. In the face of the economic, industrial, and infrastructural neglect that characterises many cities of the Deep South, Cooperation

Jackson instead sees this as opportunity, the “relatively sparse concentration of capital in Mississippi” affording a
degree of “breathing room on the margins and within the cracks of the capitalist system”, in which a radical and
visionary project of self-determination for Black and working-class people might manoeuvre, experiment, and thrive,
building upon “a tremendous degree of pent up social demand waiting to be fulfilled”. 136 The potential of ‘green energy’ and
sustainable development is similarly viewed, identified as an opportunity to “get ahead of the curve” amid an increasing awareness of the viability of renewables.137 The explosions

of the Internet and the digital era more generally revealed certain (im)possibilities of connection and communication
with(in) the hold(s) of the here-and-now, the contradiction of feeling so alienated in a world so connected, bringing
fugitive communities together across distances previously unimaginable —but the progression of (capital and its)
technology notably also reveals, as it did to Marx so many years ago, the very real possibility of working less, of
working differently, of working not at all or for or with or as something else entirely, “ making a dramatic new
orientation to work and labor possible ”.138 These are the contradictions identified by Cooperation Jackson that they work to exploit, unsettling the circuits of capital
from within and against the hold(s) of (the) settlement, guided by a commitment first and foremost to “regenerating the bounty of life

on our planet, in all its diversity” but yet nonetheless welcoming “non-extractive, patient capital to move on many
fronts”,139 such as by investing in the future of cooperative, ecologically-constrained solidarity initiatives . This
suggests the emergence of potentially unusual alliances and contradictory movements, navigated strategically and
dynamically with a view towards the decolonial horizon , unsettling any coalitional interaction or exchange it moves with—the invocation of ‘patient
capital’, for example, suggests an interesting refusal and reconfiguration of taken-forgranted ideas about the role, value, and meaning of capital.

Marxism is the best method of evaluating colonialism – forms the basis for understanding
dispossession and resistance
Dunbar-Ortiz et al ‘17
[Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, og feminist, indigenous, and marxist activist/revolutionary, professor emerita of ethnic
studies at CSU-Hayward. Being interviewed by Ragina Johnson, ISO activist, and Brian Ward, Indigenous rights and ISO
activist. Winter 2016-17. “‘A sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity’: Colonialism, capitalism, and Native
liberation”. https://isreview.org/issue/103/sense-hope-and-possibility-solidarity] Pat – italics indicate interviewer
questions/comments

As we have been diving into current debates and writings from the Left, we have found an absence of analysis on the
question of Native Americans and labor . You mentioned Glen Coulthard earlier and he actually says in the introduction of Red Skin, White Masks, It appears that the history of dispossession, not
proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state . . . Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by

in the Diné
and oriented around the question of land . . . and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” But in fact, you have talked about many Native Americans being part of the working class as you mention recently in your Real News interview. Why is this? For instance,

Nation (Navajo reservation), the energy industry has long dominated, and in the 1970s, Navajos formed trade unions to
demand that they have the jobs and job training. In the early part of the twentieth century, Navajos and Pueblo Indians made up much of the work force on the railroads that ran
through their territories in the Southwest. In the federal government’s relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s,half the reservation and rural population migrated to
urban areas for jobs in industry; however, many had moved on their own during the war to work in the defense industry. I think ignoring this is a problem for
some academics . Some of the Native people in academia come from more prosperous families. I don’t believe any Native person is super wealthy; even in the biggest casinos the money is distributed and
there is not a real ruling class—but there are definitely class issues in terms of consciousness. All the AIM activists were from working-class families , but are no less Lakota,

Diné, or Salish because of it. They worked at all kinds of jobs. So for me, I felt really comfortable in AIM because it was working class and people were

not ashamed to be workers. In fact they were quite proud, and they were drawn to unions when anyone bothered to organize them. When the Navajo workers began to organize in the 1970s with
the United Mine Workers, it was against federal law for unions to organize on Indian reservations. Peter McDonald challenged that and won. The Navajo workers had specific demands

for medical benefits; they bargained to include their medicine men to be paid. They had the Indian Health Service, but they wanted to pay their medicine
people and were able to get this into their contract. They are very strong union people. Unfortunately, there are other problems with the fossil-fuel industry and internal struggles in reservations over ending extraction for
environmental reasons. I think Coulthard is trying to say that exploitation and expropriation are different things. But all capitalism starts with expropriation of land from the producers, and not just in the Americas but as the prerequisite for the development of capitalism in Europe. That’s what I describe as the culture of

been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is
conquest in my book, about the commons being fenced in and that all expropriation started with the land. We’ve

European, you miss the point of the theory . People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how
people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the
vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers. I worked hard on the first chapter of my book
about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling
out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were
agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.” This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a
different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that
capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably
becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the
Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private
property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark,
Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely
but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs. Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?
succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection
between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had

In settler
colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism.

colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief
commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market
commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the
United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native

I want to
middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today.

make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience . Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as
which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly

all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires
understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North
America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.

Settler colonialism isn’t structural – their analytic is depoliticizing and ahistorical.

Barker ‘17
[Joanne, professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. 02/02/2017.
https://tequilasovereign.com/2017/02/02/the-analytic-constraints-of-settler-colonialism/] pat
I’d like to re-frame my critique of the constraints of settler colonialism with the twelve little women in mind. I am going to try to show that a certain analytic within the studies has, however unwittingly, foreclosed and even
chilled understandings of Black and Indigenous histories and identities in ways that derail our understandings of U.S. imperialism as a social formation and so our work with one another. One of the consequences of this
goes to our ability to think through how #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #NoDAPL, and #MMIW are co-generative — even as I recognize the reasons why each of these movements have at different times demanded we

between the structure and the

respect their particularity. Drawing from Marxist structuralism, Patrick Wolfe defines the settler colonial society through two key differentiations. The first is

event of invasion . Wolfe maintains that the permanence of invasion distinguishes the structure of a settler society , which
originates with the withdrawal of the empire and the rise to power of a land-holding class who always intended to stay. Wolfe defines the ideology that cements this structure together as the logic of elimination. The
settler exploits Indigenous labor but more importantly seeks to eliminate all vestiges of Indigenous land claims by the elimination of Indigenous cultures and identities. The quickest way I can explain my concerns with

It treats society as a fixed, coherent thing that can be objectively

Wolfe’s definition is to mark how it rearticulates the problematics of structuralism.

described. The descriptions are simultaneously over-determined by the historical event of the empire’s withdrawal
and the exceptionalism of a permanent invasion. We’ve been in this trouble before – we know structuralism generates all kinds of
ahistorical and apolitical problems, not to mention essentialisms, even as it is conditioned by the intersectionalities of originary events and political identities. For instance, Lorenzo Veracini
argues that settler colonialism is “characterized by a settler capacity to control the population economy” as a marker of sovereignty and that this situation is “associated with a particular state of mind” and “narrative form”
so powerful that “the possibility of ultimately discontinuing/decolonizing settler colonial forms remains problematic.” Veracini maintains that “settlers do not discover: they carry their sovereignty and lifestyles with them.

As they move towards what amounts to a representation of the world, as they transform the land into their image, they settle another place without really moving.” I would argue that the settler colonial
is a contested and unstable concept . Drawing from critical Indigenous, race, and feminist approaches — such as those developed by Jodi Byrd, Mishuana Goeman, Jennifer Denetdale, and
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers — that understand colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia as permanent features of U.S. society, I

would argue that society is not an objectively settled structure to be described , nor an imaginary that travels as an
integral whole around the world. It is a set of contested meanings caught up in struggles over power and knowledge.
And resistance is most certainly not futile . The second differentiation on which Wolfe’s settler colonialism rests is between the settler and the Indigenous. While many assume the
settler to be white – and perhaps more so to be a white heterosexual male – Wolfe, Veracini, and others characterize the settler as both white and all other non-Indigenous people irrespective of gender and sexuality.
Pressed on the politics of such characterizations, particularly of figuring Blacks as settlers, Wolfe explains: Willingly or not, enslaved or not, at the point of a run or not, they arrived as part of the settler-colonial project.
That doesn’t make them settlers in the same sense as the colonizers who coerced them to participate—of course not—but it does make them perforce part of the settler-colonial process of dispossession and elimination.
— Patrick Wolfe (2012) As the work of Circe Sturm, Tiya Miles, Sharon Patricia Holland, and so many others have demonstrated, Black and Indigenous histories and identities (not necessarily distinct) are intersectional
messes of racialized and gendered contestation over and within the ongoing colonial forces of U.S. imperialism. We need their analyses to understand these histories and identities and the ways we have inherited them.

We need to be careful about grouping all racial, ethnic, diaspora, and immigrant communities in with settlers and
pitting them and their presumably shared struggles for civil rights against Indigenous sovereignty and territorial
claims. The kinds of polemics that result are not helpful . What if reparations and return are not antithetical political objectives? Who decides their antithesis?

The AFF’s promised inclusion is a ruse that preys on affective desires to reconsolidate neoliberal
empire. ‘Plan focus’ and ‘fiat’ are forms of counter-insurgency designed to conceal imperial logics
and distract from revolutionary movements.
*2 point font and paragraph merging for readability

Agathangelou et al. 8, Anna M. Agathangelou: Professor of Political Science @ York University. Tamara Spira:
Associate Professor of Queer Studies with a joint appointment in American Cultural Studies and Fairhaven College of
Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. M. Daniel Bassichis (Intimate Investments:
Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire, Radical History Review, Vol. 2008, Issue 100, DOI:
10.1215/01636545-2007-025)

In this essay, we wish to follow Sudbury in expanding analyses of “global lockdown” to “other spaces of confinement” to
account for the affective economies of the diffuse networks of punishment, mass warehousing, and criminalization that
come to constitute overlapping carceral landscapes.11 By “affective economies,” we refer to the circulation and
mobilization of feelings of desire , pleasure, fear, and repulsion utilized to seduce all of us into the fold of the state —
the various ways in which we become invested emotionally, libidinally, and erotically in global capitalism’s mirages of
safety and inclusion. We refer to this as a process of seduction to violence that proceeds through false promises of an
end to oppression and pain. It is precisely these affective economies that are playing out as gay and lesbian leaders
celebrate their own newfound equality only through the naturalization of those who truly belong in the grasp of state
captivity, those whose civic redemption from the category of the sodomite or the criminal has not been
promised/offered (which one, it might not matter . . .) by the Supreme Court. It is precisely the aforementioned “good
feeling” strategically deployed through homonormativization—mobilizations that barely mask the bloody, violent
consequences of neoliberal privatization , the mass warehousing and liquidation of mostly brown and black bodies,
and of imperial(ist) war—that we wish to locate alongside the pleasure and glee that we were all compelled to perform
in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution. It is this circulation of desire and relief continually shored up in support of
the relentless lockdown and torture of prisoners in both declared and nondeclared sites of global war.

To (re)consolidate itself, empire requires and solicits the production of certain ways of being, desiring, and knowing
(while destroying others) that are appropriately malleable for what comes to be constituted as the so-called new
world order.12 Just as the strategies of execution and criminalization are crucial to the practices of global war, including
prisons, this strategy of creating and liquidating enemies is offered, quite importantly in the wake of trauma, as a
solution for fear and insecurity. In other words, as the imperial hold grows all the more tenuous, more and more
violence is required to maintain its virulent mirage.13 To deal with pain, fear, and insecurity, this logic tells us, the
demonization and demolition of the racially and sexually aberrant other must be performed again and again.14
Moreover, within this imperial fantasy, this production, consumption, and murder of the other is to be performed with
gusto and state-sanctioned pleasure, as a desire for witnessing executions becomes a performance of state loyalty.15
Likewise, in the case of prisons, it is the continual and powerful mobilization of discourses of “protection,” “safety,”
and “victim’s rights” that elicit support for what seems to be limitless prison expansion.16 Lastly, it is our argument
that this promise project is always reliant on a series of (non)promises to those on whom the entire production is
staged. Offering certain classes of subjects a tenuous invitation into the folds of empire, there are always the bodies
of (non)subjects that serve as the raw material for this process, those whose quotidian deaths become the grounding
on which spectacularized murder becomes possible. Thus, while it is central to our thesis that the sexualized production
of the racialized other holds together these ostensibly different moments, this is a variegated and heterogeneous
process that simultaneously creates others as monolithic and draws up and exacerbates internal divisions within
different communities. There are, thus, the “enemy Others” and the “other Others” whose life and death do not even
merit mention or attention.17
Importantly, as we shall argue, we must locate what many have called “the homonormative turn” within this broader (heterogeneous) imperial logic: following the traumas of state-sanctioned repression of queer communities, the creation and obliteration of new outsides become the answer for ongoing pain and devastation. As exemplified in the U.S. state-supported HIV/AIDS pandemic—and the broader war on the poor, people of color, and dissidents launched in the wake of the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s—we are told that only an insatiable appetite for annihilation could soothe the pains of our pasts. We would thus locate the
mobilization of highly individualized narratives of bourgeois belonging and ascension within a larger promise project that offers to some the tenuous promise of mobility, freedom, and equality.18 This strategy is picked up in a privatized, corporatized, and sanitized “gay agenda” that places, for example, gay marriage and penalty-enhancing hate crimes laws at the top of its priorities. This also helps us to understand the ways in which revolutionary and redistributive yearnings that would challenge the foundations of the U.S. state, capital, and racial relations have been systematically replaced with strategies for individualized incorporation into the U.S. moral and
politico-economic order. It is this promise project that has been crucial in rerouting so much of queer politics and longing from “Stonewall to the suburbs.”19 Resituating the Homonormative Turn What bodies, desires, and longings must be criminalized and annihilated to produce the good queer subjects, politics, and desires that are being solidified with the emergence of homonormativity? As we have already suggested, it is a highly privatized, monogamous, and white(ned) docile subjectivity that has been decriminalized and ostensibly invited into the doors of U.S. national belonging through recent shifts in the gendered and sexual order. As we have also
suggested, it is not only sexual and gendered arrangements that have been rendered flexible in the wake of neoliberalization but an entire retooling of the possibilities for life that is attempted through a neoliberal narrative of private rights, peace, and security. This move works hand in hand with a deeply racist and imperialist symbolic, affective, and material order that increasingly requires the soldiering, gatekeeping, and prison-guard labor of socalled formerly and currently marginalized subjects to this order. One site where we might begin to explore how this process operates is a recent advertisement from the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) “Million for
Marriage” campaign. The ad, partially reproduced on the next page, tells the story of Keith Bradkowski, a middle-aged white businessman, and his quest for state recognition of his relationship with his late partner, a flight attendant on the first plane that struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (see fig. 1).20 In stark black and white, the ad exudes a grave authority: a blurry American flag waves behind Bradkowski’s sharply framed head, his photograph flanked by a quotation from his testimony before the U.S. Senate. The quotation reads: “Terrorists killed people not because they were gay or straight—but because they were Americans.” The ad
produces the prototypical good queer citizen: white, upwardly mobile, and willing to die in the battlefields to protect the security of the homeland, both within and outside of its borders. To proclaim that the terrorist attack was launched against a nation regardless of its citizens’ sexualities is to unite an imagined community of Americans in their common victimhood at the hands of foreign others. Through this move, the good queer citizen gains entrance into the nation through the displacement and explicit effacement of racial, sexual, and class antagonisms and inequities. Theories of homonormativization, in part, offer us some insight into the moves
performed in this advertisement, highlighting the turn embodied in the image of a white gay male – turned – imperial gatekeeper in the competition for (apparently limited) marriage rights. As defined by Lisa Duggan, “homonormativity” refers to “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assump124 Radical History Review Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 125 Figure 1. The Human Rights Campaign “Million for Marriage” advertisement featuring Keith Bradkowski, whose partner, Jeff Collman, a flight attendant, died on September 11, 2001. Photograph taken by Judy G. Rolfe. Image © 2003 The Human Rights Campaign
tions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency, and a gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”21 Through the stress on monogamy, devotion, and a relationship constrained within the bonds of privacy and propriety, the ad participates in the demonization of all other forms of sexual expression, practices, and relations—as per Duggan’s argument, heteronormative logics are refueled in the production of the good gay subject. His taxes paid and his tie tightened, Bradkowski is called up to declare his allegiance to the U.S. nation-state through a moral economy of value in
which (normative) queerness might be offered incorporation into the parameters of citizenship in exchange for violence. It is crucial to note that this is a bargain brokered in exchange for closing his eyes to other kinds of violence committed daily on bodies of other queers, indigenous, black, and other people of color, the terrorists, and members of the working class. Moreover, the ad reveals the interpenetration of the state’s war-making agenda, the mandates of capitalist interests, and the officially declared gay and lesbian agenda. This convergence of agendas can only occur within an assumed economy of scarcity in which the white gay male competes with
the imagined terrorist and with job-stealing immigrants for limited recognition. Also implicit within this ad is the veiling of legacies and ongoing processes of slavery, colonialism, and imperial plunder that have enabled capital accumulation. “Although we both always paid Social Security and other taxes,” Bradkowski laments, “I wasn’t eligible for the benefits offered to other spouses.” Recapitulating a narrative of the deserving versus the undeserving (non)citizen, Bradkowski places himself in the category of the rightfully entitled and legal citizen who deserves rights, resources, and recognition not because he is alive but because he pays his taxes. Many scholars
who have taken up the homonormative to address the specifically racialized dimensions of neoliberal (re)structuring. Martin Manalansan, for example, has argued that a consolidating racist order is encoded within narratives of gay assimilationism and ascendancy in gentrifying neighborhoods in New York. Examining the gentrification that increasingly displaces queers of color through the criminalization of racially pathologized spaces, Manalansan shows how (certain) spaces of public queer sex and practice have become sites for the rounding up of immigrants and people of color in the ongoing war on terror. Juxtaposing this increased criminalization of queers
and broader communities of color in the face of new elite gay spaces in gentrified neighborhoods, Manalansan productively traces the collaboration of neoliberal urban restructuring and the politics of homonormativity.22 Manalansan’s analysis of the production of people of color as terrorists and criminals is helpful in unraveling the process of enemy production performed in the advertisement. In exchange for begging for state rights and recognition, Bradkowski participates in the process of creating new outsiders and outsides, those whose racial, sexual, and economic aberrance bear the mark of counter-national, as decidedly un126 Radical History Review
Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 127 American difference. The advertisement, then, operates as a homonormative revision of the “heteronormative patriotism” that Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai articulate in their essay, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag.” For Puar and Rai, the collaboration between heteronormativity and patriotism allows for certain forms of queerness (or sexual “deviance”) to be incorporated into the project of national reproduction while others are rendered continually abject, unworthy or unable to be assimilated into either hetero – or homonormative citizenship. They call this a “dual process of incorporation and
quarantining,” whereby those sexualities and embodiments that fall outside of white heteronormativity must be contained and banished for the sake of national sexualities, even queer ones. The HRC ad dramatizes this dual process by allowing white, middle-class lesbian, and gay sexualities to enter citizenship while simultaneously participating in the policing and criminalizing of racially pathologized sexualities seen as threatening to the nation: the terrorist, the inmate, the “welfare queen,” the illegal alien. Importantly, as this process of creating spectacularized or exceptional enemies unfolds, there is always a simultaneous production of nonspectacular
others, those whose lives and deaths do not even register within this moral economy. These are the forms of predatory and pathological sexualization that must be marked and liquidated for good (queer) citizens to stage their entrance into the body politic. M. Jacqui Alexander has helped to articulate the ways in which this process of “incorporation and quarantining” is part of larger processes of “enemy production,” which are foundational to projects of nation- and empire-building. For Alexander, enemy production elicits the labor of gatekeepers in exchange for seductive promises of membership into the (so-called) new world order. Turning to the 2001 and
2002 forms of the U.S. PATRIOT Act, as well as to the National Security Act of 2004, Alexander traces how such acts exemplify the logics of empire that rouse desire to “explicitly and simultaneously link the imperial project to militarization and nation building.” In this production, a certain mooring of desire and the production and mobilization of pleasure is summoned up in the affective calling toward “enemy production.” This process, she argues, is crucial in the ongoing solidification of the prison industrial complex as a (re)colonizing gesture. As she writes: Nation building can be . . . accurately understood as a form of hypernationalism with constituent parts:
the manufacture of an outside enemy to rationalize military intervention, and secure the annexation of lands; the production of an internal enemy to rationalize criminalization and incarceration; the internal production of a new citizen patriot; the creation and maintenance of a permanent war economy, whose internal elements devolve on the militarization of the police and the resultant criminalization of immigrants, people of color, working class communities through the massive expansion of a punishment economy whose center is the prison industrial complex.23 A populace increasingly willing to engage in this process must also participate in the
production of an external enemy in the form of the “terrorist,” as well as the formation of an internal enemy in the form of the “criminal.” Such simultaneous formations anchor a desire for safety and security to the violent work of colluding with the state and the market in producing enemies, in turn justifying nothing less than murder. Stated otherwise, once such enemies and criminals are produced, their degradation and murder is ostensibly justified. Furthermore, these formations depend on the mobilization of racialized psychic and libidinal economies: “It is [a] dark inside threat that must be cordoned off, imprisoned, expulsed and matched simultaneously
with the extinction of the dark, external threat, in order that the borders of the fictive, originary nation be secured.”24 With this in mind, we might return to the HRC advertisement to consider the process of nation- and empire-building operating through the practice of enemy production and the mobilization of desire. Looking more closely at the visual economies on which the advertisement draws, it is clear that the image of a white gay man holding a picture of his dead lover harkens back to other moments of mourning and loss within collective queer memory, especially those of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.25 The photograph invokes an earlier moment of mass
death (which, evidently, has shifted its target since the rise of the epidemic in predominately white gay communities in the late 1980s). The reader, constructed as queer or queer friendly, is meant to breathe a sigh of relief: this is not a death caused by egregious neglect and disavowal on the part of the state, the medical establishment, or our own families. Nor shall this particular death be blamed on poverty, discrimination, or the lack of any substantial welfare state or safety net to care for the working poor. Rather, in a swift and powerful reversal, the enemy is no longer the establishment but rather the “terrorist.” Killed or left to die not because he is queer
but because he is American, Bradkowski’s lover’s death constitutes a neoliberal replay of queer mourning that solicits racist, xenophobic protection as the only way to redress the pain, insecurity, and even homo- and queerphobia that is left intact throughout this process. Consigned now to the “past” is the ever-ravaging pandemic that continues to steal the lives of millions of poor and working-class people and people of color worldwide. Thinly covered over as well is the threat of death, the ongoing pain, despair, and grief that Bradkowski and his generation, race, and class of queers faced two decades ago. As we discuss, these forceful forgettings and re-
memberings of life lost and discarded are vital strategies for the consolidation of the new world order. Technologies of Empire: Sodomizations, Lockdowns, and Other Punishments to Come With this analysis in mind, we argue that the homonormative turn must be located within a larger imperial project of promises and nonpromises that, while contin128 Radical History Review Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 129 gent on incitements to fantasy and the mobilization of desire, cannot be confined to questions of “queer politics” as such. It is thus critical to connect various forms of homonormativization that fall outside of what is
commonly identified as “the homonormative”—or even “the sexual”—to expose how this strategy of seduction as an affective calling is issued in varied and contradictory sites. For instance, as critical postcolonial and women of color feminists have pointed out, many social movements in the process of acquiring funds have “NGOinized” themselves, albeit contradictorily, as a “non-profit-industrial-complex” has been built up. In exchange for funding, this critique argues, NGOization has served to reroute radical political goals to desires for legitimacy, professionalization, and (relative) power.26 Thus it is not only queers in the first world context whose intimate
desires, feelings, needs, and hopes are sites of value for empire and neoliberal capitalism to draw into their fold, but all of us.27 In these instances, seduction toward something better promises subjects an end to pain, marginalization, and violence in exchange for being recognized as legitimate subjects who can potentially participate in global capitalist relations and its futures—collusion becomes the cost of belonging. Lest we slip (back) into the realm of the hated, the despised, the killable, and the disposable (that is, if we ever had a chance to leave), we must actively support and often embody the threat of force that lies on the other side of this tenuous
promise, or so the logic goes. Stressing this politico-economic context, it becomes possible to read many of the contradictions of the homonormative moment alongside and within the recent intensification of the war on terror and of global lockdown. One could argue that it is not a coincidence that the Supreme Court reversed its decision on sodomy during the period in which the United States penetrated Afghanistan and Iraq. One may wonder what is at stake in these simultaneous modes of power relations: war and death, on the one hand, and the reinsertion of the constitutional rights of “sodomites,” on the other. If, for a second, we read the granting of
constitutional rights to queer subjects as the moment at which a war becomes deployed on the bodies of Afghanis and Iraqis, then we may wonder what is at stake with regard to the imperial order and its necessary subjects. Are the imperial order and its necessary subjects in crisis? Do these become strategies of reinserting a particular order and granting legitimacy to specific subjects, or do these become strategies of discipline and control within defined borders while anarchy and death are unleashed on others?28 First, we must contextualize the Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas decision. It is important to note that while Chief Justice John Roberts
called for the support of the U.S. queers rights, he simultaneously called for the Guantánamo Bay detainees’ loss of rights in the United States Court of Appeals, for the District of Columbia Circuit, on July 15, 2005. What, then, does it mean to endorse queer rights within the borders of the United States while simultaneously justifying the nonspectacular “(non)scenes” of torture on other others?29 We argue that these are not incidental or nonconnected moves, but form part of a continuous episteme: the privatization of the freedom of the queer subject enshrines a culture of loss of rights for non-U.S. citizens while naturalizing the backdrop of (specifically
black) (non) subjects within the United States whose civically dead or dying status has rarely been assigned rights to lose. The violence and torture of the detainee comprises the raw material on which the privatized, territorially contained (and also national) freedom of the U.S. queer is articulated. Here we see how the support of queer rights in Lawrence and Garner v. State of Texas becomes a stage for both the playing out as well as the masking of racial, class, and national contestations.30 In taking a close look at the Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Appellee v. Donald H. Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense, et al. case that Chief Justice Roberts supported
twice in his appellate courts, we read: Afghani militia forces captured Salim Ahmed Hamdan in Afghanistan in late November 2001. Hamdan’s captors turned him over to the American military, which transported him to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The military initially kept him in the general detention facility, known as Camp Delta. On July 3, 2003, the President determined “that there is reason to believe that [Hamdan] was a member of al Qaeda or was otherwise involved in terrorism directed against the United States.” This finding brought Hamdan within the compass of the President’s November 13, 2001, Order concerning the Detention,
Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism, 66 Fed. Reg. 57,833. Accordingly, Hamdan was designated for trial before a military commission.31 This case essentially grants to the president all power to make decisions regarding the future of those deemed terrorists. In this case, Hamdan, considered a member of al-Qaeda, had no rights to make any claims in U.S. or international courts, but rather had to be tried before military commissions. While his appellate court was considering this case, Roberts met with officials in the White House and was interviewed by George W. Bush to become the next judge on the Supreme Court. He
ended up supporting twice the Bush administration’s desire to legally acquire the presidential power to “try battlefield captives and foreign terror suspects before military commissions.”32 As Bob Egelko writes, “In the 3–0 decision, written by another judge and joined by Roberts, the court allowed Hamdan’s military trial to proceed and said that the U.S. courts cannot enforce the Geneva Conventions on behalf of individual detainees. On another issue, the court ruled 2 – 1—with Roberts in the majority—that the Geneva Conventions apply only to nations and not to alleged combatants for terrorist groups.” Of course, we may argue, along with many legal
scholars, that he “was not required to remove himself from all government cases, but this was no ordinary case—Bush himself was a defendant, and the issues were crucial to his claims of presidential power.”33 Roberts’s support of Bush’s presidential power here ends up assuming and hierarchizing the episteme that claims and 130 Radical History Review Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 131 assumes the power of the legal sovereignty of states in world politics thereby voiding individuals of any legal claims especially through the Geneva Conventions. A reading territorialized and constrained to the United States might suggest that
Roberts’s position indicates a “liberal” or pro-queer stance. Moving away from such U.S.-centric readings, however, much more is revealed. In juxtaposing these two decisions, we come to recognize some of the tensions that emerge in the consolidation of the “new world order.” Roberts’s position in the sodomy case is informed by liberal principles of power and social relations if the focus is only inside the United States. With Justice Antonin Scalia’s articulation of his position in the sodomy case we observe a shift from Roberts’s dichotomization of the world (a strategy nevertheless of power) into sovereign nation-states, internally ordered and organized and
with anarchy outside them. Scalia’s position is based on moral grounds and seems to be informed by a neoconservative moment upholding as its basic normative subject a heteronormative one. In sum, both strategies enable the “re-privatization” of sexuality whether in the name of hetero- or homonormativity. It is important to turn to Scalia’s narrative to understand the nuances of this homo-/heteronormative (re)production of imperial bodies as raw material in the making. Scalia dissented, labeling the decision “a massive disruption of the current social order.” It is crucial to highlight that Scalia’s decision, while ostensibly on the other side of the fence, is
also made possible through a set of similar epistemic assumptions of privatization and the production of a privatized subject. This (re) privatization of sexuality, that is, the constriction of sexual and affective ties through individual citizens, is given greater latitude within the democratic liberal context. Take, for example, the first part of Scalia’s statement: “I have nothing against homosexuals or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.”34 This articulation is informed by the assumption that the liberal (capitalist, of course) democracy is the most productive site of regulating and mediating social relations. This (liberal capitalist)
democracy comprises citizens that operate within very narrow confines of behavior and subjectivity. The borders of these permissible modalities of existence and interaction are signaled by Scalia’s definition of “normal democratic means.” Indeed this “normalcy” becomes the sole space in which this new decriminalized (homo)sexuality can operate. Clear, then, is the tension between this unmarked liminal boundary that demarcates even this newly found (neo)liberal promise of freedom and the fantastical national manly subject of empire. The outside is always marked by the tension between the national (i.e., always bound to the territoriality of the state)
and the transnational (i.e., flexible subjectivity not bound by anything).35 To (re)invoke earlier terms, freedom depends on the (re)founding of unfreedoms. Scalia continues: “Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. . . . But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else.” Here we see the delimiting of legitimate forms of protest that once again reinscribe boundaries of the normal. As with, for example, critiques of NGOization and the so-called non-profit-
industrial-complex, we see how certain forms of liberal protest are enabled precisely through the disenabling of others. For Scalia, imposing one’s views (i.e., protest, revolution, movement building, to name but three examples) is tantamount to criminal activity. What, one may wonder, constitutes such democratic citizens, and for what project? First, what we see through the decision is that granting rights to the sodomy subject becomes crucial toward the constitution of the heteronormative/imperial fantasy subject. Scalia’s position on this decision gestures to the tensions that exist among negotiable interests (what we term here neoconservative and
neoliberal). Along this liberal mode of deliberation, we see another strand of interest—that of the neoconservative position expressed by Clarence Thomas, who states, “Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources. Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a member of this court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated.”36 What, exactly, is “noncommercial consensual conduct”? Embedded within this phrase is a market (and indeed, the interests of its agents must be
protected) in which the democracy and the social order on which Scalia commented can only be envisioned. This noncommercial consensual conduct remaps the subject/being within a consent-force binary that cordons social protest, and alternative racial, sexual, class, and colonized positioning, to the terrain of the chaotic, unlawful, and hence killable zone. Such a construction of “noncommercial sex” effectively dichotomizes sex and the market, and, effectively, capitalist relations. However, as women of color, Marxist, socialist, and materialist feminists have argued for nearly three decades, sexual and economic relations are always already inscribed within
one another. Forging such dichotomies between sex and the market hence silences the myriad interconnections aptly detailed by such thinkers regarding the imbrication of sexuality, the market, colonial, racial, and class relations.37 In addition to eclipsing these connections, the marking of sex as outside of capitalism masks precisely how this homonormativization serves the interests of capital. Moreover, by silencing the sexualized dimension of the market, thwarted and covered over are multiple histories of struggle, such as feminist and anticolonial struggles that have long acknowledged how imperial and slave relations are gendered, sexualized, and
racialized within the context of a capitalist patriarchy.38 More specifically, the move to privatize and contain intimacies and sexuality within the realm of the private is at the same time another facet of a neoliberal strategy that absolves collective accountability and public intervention. Indeed, the state, 132 Radical History Review Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 133 as the defender of the primacy of the ontology of profits and resources needed to enable such accumulations and productions,39 refuses to perform particular services necessary for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalist relations. Thus, the disciplinary nature of this
ruling, which effectively guarantees unfreedom to less flexible and upwardly mobile subjects, obfuscates power relations of violence and death. Despite the reference to a noncommercial-conduct sodomite sex that is morally unacceptable, the true force of the market emerges in the next sentence. Stripping away the affective, erotic, and dangerous dimensions of sex, and particularly of queer or deviant sex, it is reduced to “conduct.” What demarcates the boundaries of this acceptable sex/relationality/being, of course, are the confines of profitability, expendability, and the “retention of law enforcement resources.” Thomas’s claim that if he were a member of
the Texas legislature he would vote for the ruling also points to some disjunctures. He suggests that at the state level, he would relegate the decision-making capacity and power to the state because ultimately a state decision would benefit the individual (i.e., a more libertarian position here). What guarantees profitability of a different kind other than the flexible and the flexibility accorded to sex and intimacy by the U.S. Supreme Court—a Texan lifestyle choice? This profitability is guaranteed by drawing on global lockdown to ensure and embody social relations of violence, exploitation, (non)safety, and/or (non)freedoms. Global Lockdown and the Ends of
Pain We now turn to the threats of pure force and discipline that go hand in hand with the newfound freedoms of empire’s (non)promise projects. In her introduction to the anthology Global Lockdown, Sudbury offers an understanding of lockdown to connect diffuse and varied networks of captivity, punishment, and mass liquidation with transnational practices of empire-building and neoliberal globalization: ‘“Lockdown’ is a term commonly used by prison movement activists to refer to the repressive confinement of human beings as punishment for deviating from normative behaviors. Although prisons and jails are the most visible locations for lockdown, the
term encourages us to think about connections with other spaces of confinement such as immigrant detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile halls, refugee camps, or Indian boarding schools.”40 In this foregrounding passage, Sudbury seeks to create analytical and political possibilities for bringing together various spaces and technologies of confinement that discipline nationally, racially, psychically, and culturally “aberrant” subjects, or those, as she will later theorize, who are “surplus or resistant to the new world order.”41 Sudbury further elaborates on theorizations of the slavery-prison continuum, which have been compellingly argued by W. E. B.
Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Joan Dayan. These scholars and activists, among others, have posited that in the wake of the failed project of Emancipation, a vast network of cultural, legal, and politicoeconomic apparatuses were inaugurated to (re)criminalize blackness and ensnare black subjects within intensified forms of punishment, confinement, and expropriation. These included the Thirteenth Amendment’s recodification of slavery in the prison, convict lease systems, black codes, paramilitary terror, and increasingly complex systems of captivity and servitude to extract profit from locked-up black and brown bodies. As the legal scholar Guyora Binder has
argued, if we expand our definition of slavery beyond a specific iteration of forced labor and instead look to the culture, custom, and institutions of race themselves, it becomes more difficult to assert that the project of Emancipation has ever been completed.42 Additionally, as Linda Evans, Eve Goldberg, Christian Parenti, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have argued in their respective works, in the era of globalization, the U.S. government’s successive wars on drugs, poverty, crime, and terror have consolidated a prison industrial complex in which transnational corporations run globalized for-profit prisons, manufacture federal and local military- and law-
enforcement technologies, expropriate prison labor, and bid for multibillion-dollar contracts for prison construction.43 These analyses foreground the multiple, overlapping private, public, national, and international investments in the mass lockdown of poor people and people of color transnationally, and the naturalized and strengthened long-term lockdown of black people within U.S. borders. Many of these theorizations of the slavery-prison continuum and of the expansion of the prison industrial complex help us articulate how global lockdown not only naturalizes but also produces capitalist racial, gender, national, and sexual social formations. In this way,
global lockdown and its technologies function as central sites for ontological production, for making subjects on all sides of prison walls: those who can and must be killed, warehoused, and watched, and those whose civic duty requires their complicity in the killing. The prison, thus, cannot be understood as outside of social production, but rather as foundational to it. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis shows how the prison functions as a mode of social production through her analysis of the “human surplus” produced at the confluence of an intensified capitalist economy and the mobilization of white supremacist imaginaries: In the context of an economy
that was driven by an unprecedented pursuit of profit, no matter what the human cost, and the concomitant dismantling of the welfare state, poor people’s abilities to survive became increasingly constrained by the looming presence of the prison. The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that it was the
only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.44 134 Radical History Review Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira | Intimate Investments 135 In the wake of the neoliberal gutting of an already precarious and punitive welfare state, the prison stepped in to produce, mark, and manage human surplus. It is through the mobilization of racist sexualized fears of “murderers, rapists, and robbers” and through misguided yearnings for safety that the prison binge of the 1980s and its progeny (re)produce subjects who must be locked down, as well as those who must do the locking. These same economies of panic and security legitimize the
systematic dismantling of revolutionary social movements that oppose state repression through the mounting use of torture, imprisonment, disappearance, and massacre,45 both within and outside of the United States, and a litany of technologies of antiblack, anti-immigrant, and anti-poor terror narrating the history of racial state formation including lynching, execution, and rape. Continuing her line of thought, Davis argues that the prison operates to naturalize and intensify the generalized violence deployed by the state and its citizens against communities marked as criminal, specifically black, Latino, Native, and poor communities, as well as poor and
racially pathologized communities in the global South. In particular, she writes, “prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.”46 In this way, the widespread sexual abuse of people in prison, and particularly women, queer people, and transgender people of color, emerges not as exceptional, but rather as indicative and productive of a larger regime of gratuitous force that marks bodies as surplus through the use of violence and imprisonment. Sexualized violence against those in lockdown should thus not be understood
as “cruel and unusual” spectacles aberrant to the political order, but rather as foundational to it, and as central to the production of civil society as well as its outsides.47 This is a move difficult to understand if we do not pay attention to how feelings are mobilized to garner legitimacy for the prison project. The construction of those in lockdown as “murderers, rapists, and robbers” and the pervasiveness of sexual violence in prisons thus should not be seen as coincidental, but rather as indicative of the powerful imbrications of desire, fear, and safety in the production and disposal of those who are “resistant or surplus to the new world order.” Just as we have
argued that promises of belonging, value, recognition, and worth are issued to certain marginalized subjects, it is always on the ground of other (non)subjects. Heeding the same logics of expendability, once again a promise for safety and happiness can only be issued as a simultaneous call for murder and human demolition. This is but one of the central affective economies that produces the prison industrial complex as a seductive facet of our collective common sense. Through the mystifying narratives of “‘crime and punishment”’ and “‘law and order,”’ the prison is offered as an end to pain and as a catch-all solution to violence of all kinds. The prison
promises citizens and subjects a future filled with freedom, security, and safety. Individualizing pain and harm such that they might be reduced to “crime” and “perpetrators,” the prison promises safety, order, and redress severed from the persistence of structural murder and the exploitation fundamental to the capitalist democracy itself. Importantly, the futures that global lockdown promises its docile disciples can only be imagined through the unending creation and preservation of outsiders, nonsubjects, nonfutures, and nonhumans. In effect, the citizen-subject cannot be free or perhaps even alive without the captivity and (social, corporeal, and civic)
death of the noncitizen, nonsubject, and those cordoned off to the realm of human surplus or, as Davis calls it, “detritus.”48 We understand the promise project playing out through global lockdown in a variety of ways, from ongoing prison expansion efforts to soothe the crisis of prison overcrowding and fatal prison conditions, to the proliferation of citizen-led reformist measures in the name of rehabilitation and redemption, to our daily reliance on police as the primary way we might feel safe. To return to the site of (recognizable) queer politics, penalty-enhancing hate crimes legislation is proposed and supported as a solution to systemic transphobic and
homophobic violence. In these campaigns, the prison offers the seductive promise of security if we might authorize and support the ongoing roundup and lockdown of subjects marked as threatening. As the HRC advertisement demonstrated, safety can only be called into being through a hypernationalism that requires the cordoning off and disposal of those deemed criminal, enemy, and surplus. It is specifically through the sexualized violence inherent in being “brought to justice” that enables the end of pain offered by global lockdown. Very clearly, then, the neoliberal empire has quite effectively commandeered our affective yearnings for safety, security,
redress, and peace and collapsed them with carnage, punishment, and confinement such that they might appear synonymous. It should come as no surprise, then, that so many of the gains made by formerly marginal subjects over the past many decades have been simultaneous with intensified forms of violence and abjection against surplus populations. It is precisely through these forms of aggression that those gains have been made possible.49 Global lockdown thus functions as one of the looming underbellies and conditions of possibility of the (un)freedoms and (non)futures being promised by neoliberal empire. Consigning the collective traumas of
slavery and colonization to a remote and irrelevant past while drawing on their logics to instantiate its rule, global lockdown shows itself to be neither cruel and unusual nor exceptional, but rather as foundational. Importantly, these (un)freedoms and (non)futures carry very different promises and pleasures depending on our relationship to the human surplus motoring the global political economy. Global lockdown, then, is not simply the newest outside, but quite literally the material redefining off what life can even mean in the wake of so much “necessary” death.

Toward an Intimate Politics of Decolonizing Abolitionism

We have thus far argued that across diffuse spaces and moments—the homonormative turn, the neoliberalization of
the economy, the war on terror, and global lockdown—we see different dimensions of a promise project, which is also
a project forever seeking to (re)consolidate empire. On the one hand, there are those for whom subjectivity, capital,
and satiating pleasures and rights are being forever promised. This occurs, we argue, at the expense of compliance
with, or perhaps distraction from, the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and processes. On the other
hand, there are the (non)subjects for whom the same promise has not been issued, the abject(s) whose lives and deaths
are completely nonspectacular within the dominant imaginations. Adding to this contradiction is the dimension that
even the promises themselves are tenuous: indeed, as elite queers privilege homonormativity over more radical
political and economic praxes, neoconservative forces continue to criminalize queerness. While first and foremost
queers outside this elite or national racial strata are produced as exterminable sodomites, the category of the abject and
killable always threatens even elite queers in first world spaces. This is part of the politico-economic and affective logics
that have fueled a frenzied search for an end to pain: continue imperial soldiering in exchange for a mirage of security
or spend your energies fighting other queers for a prized space as most radical. With such a paucity of choices, our
energies are directed away from building solidarities and exhausted by fixing on individualized solutions and fueling
the (re)production of neoliberal, neoconservative, homonormative, and ultimately heteronormative worlds.

If the neoliberal turn has been part of a larger strategy of counterinsurgency mobilized in the wake
of revolutionary decolonization movements threatening capitalism,
(hetero)sexism, and white supremacy , it is important to pause on some of the impacts of that
(counter)mobilization. In this paper we have worked to foreground the affective logics that function on the

level of feeling and desire in the service of a neoliberal project of a world remade . To begin to
articulate the ways in which our most ‘intimate’ sensibilities—our fears, desires, mourning, and yearning—are being
mobilized by a regime of global lockdown is to make urgent the production of solidarities not premised upon
exploitation, profit, or death. For those engaged in movements dismantling the prison industrial complex and any form
of imperial violence, it is precisely these affective economies to which we must be attentive. If we do not work to
articulate the ways in which we become libidinally and erotically invested in the status quo of mass lockdown—in effect,
the various promises that the prison issues—we run the risk of reproducing the racialized and sexualized economies of
benevolence and exploitation that fortify so much of conservative, liberal, and even radical praxis. However, as we have
sought to argue, the price of such dismissals is nothing less than participation in imperial violence that, ultimately,
impacts us all. Amidst the many affective callings and seductive offerings we are issued, we must continue the work of
imagining alternative ways to feel, be, and love in this moment of intensified empire-building. To become completely
drawn into challenging homonormativization without attention to the larger structural underpinnings of social
relations and processes may ultimately prove unproductive as it misses the larger imperial logics that may be
embodied differentially in other sites. Moreover, it becomes impossible to discern the relationship between our own
struggles and the set of promises and nonpromises offered to other others. Foreclosing potential and increasingly
crucial solidarities , we are drawn into our own corners and ultimately diverted from the possibilities of massive,
cross-bordered mobilizations, movements and revolutionary projects .
In the place of this vision, we offer first and foremost a disruption of complicity, a refusal of empire’s promise project.
The series of wars in which empire asks us to participate are utterly genocidal, rather than constituting processes that
enable our security and healing. As members of different and overlapping communities and struggles, the authors have
each grappled personally with this process. As activists and intellectuals who are engaged in struggles around war,
migration and trafficking, labor and homelessness, mass imprisonment, and state violence against queer and
transgender communities, we are confronted with the seductive—yet ultimately murderous—promises that are
described in this essay. Moreover, as members of the academy at different levels (undergraduate student, graduate
student, and faculty member), we have witnessed how the strategies of promise and nonpromise projects have
worked to fragment, divide, and conquer people of color, working-class people, queers, transgender people,
postcolonial subjects, and others within powerful academic zones of knowledge production .
Recognizing that we can never be outside empire’s seductive offerings, we engage these questions out of rage, hope,
and the desire to form life-sustaining solidarities and intimacies. We strive with others toward a politics that enables
intimacies as both means and ends, as a strategy of movement-building in which relationships are formed not to
instantiate empire’s incessant production of internal and external enemies, but to disrupt it. This is a politics that would
challenge histories that dichotomize and fragment our worlds, and instead offer praxes of erotic resistance in which
we might be able to glimpse a breathing space for reconstituting connections and relations based in collectivity and
healing.

With this analysis in mind, all attempts to separate and make discrete struggles for social justice and transformation—
those working for prison abolition, sexual and gender freedom, decolonization, and the end to war, for example—prove
unsuccessful. They are always already imbricated in one another. When one struggles to resist coercive sexual or gender
regimes—heternormativization as well as homonormativization—one is already engaging in a politics deeply implicated
in the wars on terror, poverty, and drugs, and in the (neo)slaveries of the prison industrial complex. This is true not only
because of the devastating impacts these wars have had on queer communities and sexually aberrant (non)subjects
locked away, and because of the ways in which a racializing “sodomotification” is drawn on to produce the criminal and
the terrorist. Indeed, the violence and death that we authorize and face operate through and within our libidinal,
erotic, and affective investments, investments that we must engage directly and rigorously if we are to disrupt the
seductive workings of power in their most intimate dimensions.

Capitalism is existential – its try or die for socialism.

[cc, disease, ocid, biod, defo, water, gas cycles, gmos]

Foster 2020, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon (John Bellamy, 09-2020, “The Renewal of the Socialist
Ideal.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 72 (4): 1–13. doi:10.14452/MR-072-04-2020-08_1.

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism's creative destruction of the
bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capi- talism ,
defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe on every side due to the unintended consequences of “the
juggernaut of capital.”* Ca- tastrophe capitalism in this sense is manifested today in the convergence of (1) the
planetary ecological crisis , (2) the global epidemiological crisis , and (3) the unending world economic crisis. Added to
this are the main features of today’s “empire of chaos,” including the extreme system of im- perialist exploitation
unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of
neoliberalism, and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic in- stability accompanied by
increased dangers of unlimited war. ‘The climate crisis represents what the world scientific consensus refers to as a “no
analogue” situation, such that if net carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion do not reach zero in the next few
decades, it will threaten the very existence of industrial civilization and ultimately hu- man survival .‘ Nevertheless, the
existential crisis is not limited to climate change, but extends to the crossing of other planetary boundaries that to-
gether define the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These include : (1) ocean
acidification; (2) species extinction {and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of
fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including
radionuclides); and (7) the un- controlled proliferation of genetically modified organisms.* ‘This rupturing of
planetary boundaries is intrinsic to the system of cap- ital accumulation that recognizes no insurmountable barriers
to its un- limited, exponential quantitative advance . Hence, there is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of
the overall social and natural condi- tions of existence that does not require exiting capitalism itself. What is, essential is
the creation of what Istvan Mészdros in Beyond Capital called a new system of “social metabolic reproduction.” This
points to socialism. as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but con- ceived in ways that critically
challenge the theory and practice of social- ism as it existed in the twentieth century.

The alternative is party centered institution building—it provides accountability and radical
liberation
Escalante 18 (Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Antin-Imperialist activist. “Party
Organizing In The 21st Century,” https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-the-21st-century/. 9-21-
2018.)

The Need For A Party: I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing,
but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to
argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party
organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the
United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the
United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist
politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed
and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds
directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate
that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy
recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular
support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do.
Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we
have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet
people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put
simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of
building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of
dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a
communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must
make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with
establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make
this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the
party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line
determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party
members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party
members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power
institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party
model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political
organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing
communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a
formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building
movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a
unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and
unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not
only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model
allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic
consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable
for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but
rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help
correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such
accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal
frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these
ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which
unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply
meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model
creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and
ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power
projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of
base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and
praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize
that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the
present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is
not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it
would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the
organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What
is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside
building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued
local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the
right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive
approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain
unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to
adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment
into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of
armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions
must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red
charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means
radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends.
The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to
mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel
economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base
building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If
local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the
long term goal of the base building movement . Many of the already existing organizations within the base building
movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to
suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual
power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative
economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long
term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the
movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about
base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building
tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over
time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for
ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a
conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual
organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly
growing movement can succeed.

Marxism provides the best framework for Indigenous emancipation – it’s self-correcting and
provides tools to build global solidarity.
The Red Nation ‘19
[International coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating
Native liberation. 09/6/2019. “Revolutionary Socialism is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red Nation”.
https://therednation.org/2019/09/07/revolutionary-socialism-is-the-primary-political-ideology-of-the-red-nation-2/] Pat

Our traditions of Indigenous resistance wield

Marxism is a tool for making revolution, first and foremost. But it is a useless tool unless wielded properly by the oppressed.

Marxism, not to uphold European traditions, but to emancipate ourselves from the colonizers by destroying that which destroys us, and
building and rebuilding our nations according to our traditions and cultures so that our human and nonhuman relations and thus all people may live. And we cannot merely destroy

capitalism, without the foresight and knowledge of replacing it with a more humane and just system without rulers
and without colonizers. That system is called socialism, which seeks to destroy the class system and the ruling classes,
redistribute land and wealth to its proper owners, and restore dignity to the humble people of the earth . Put simply, socialism is
people power. Socialism puts people before profits. Socialism aligns with Indigenous traditions of relationality as we seek to be good relatives to other humans and other-than-humans. Socialism is the natural state of
humanity, to live and work towards peace and justice. Communism is the greatest expression of love for the people and our nonhuman relatives. And it is the only solution for a planet on the brink of destruction at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and their backwards ideologies and institutions. 1. US
imperialism is the number one enemy of the planet. Our socialism is rooted in Indigenous resistance, African slave rebellions, and European labor history. It is also rooted in the nations of the Tri-Continental—of Asia, Africa, and the
Americas—that aligned themselves against the primary enemy of the planet: US imperialism. Indigenous peoples were the first victims of European imperialism and invasion. The US inherited that mantle and has exported

the settler colonial project to the rest of the globe by plundering and killing other darker nations. We are internationalists. As Indigenous nations, who are in the United States but not entirely of it, we align ourselves with the Third World.
We seek to end the oppressive relations between European nations and the Third World. This means opposing US imperialism at all turns, denouncing all US imperialist wars, and aligning ourselves with the poorer nations of the world in the defense of their sovereignty and self-determination. The US must get out of everywhere,
including Turtle Island! Global climate change is also not a Third World problem—it’s a first world problem. Nations like the United States consume and produce the most carbon. This concentration of wealth and consumption derives from the histories of African slavery, Indigenous genocide, and European settler colonialism. Thus,
the struggle against the multinational oil and gas corporations is an anti-imperialist struggle in which Indigenous nations are leading the fight. But we also recognize that our socialism, our freedom and emancipation, can never come at the expense of our Third World comrades and relatives. Marx and Engels developed their
theories of change and history from the vantage point of the laboring European proletariat. Industrial capitalism, however, didn’t begin solely in the English factory. The hands that picked the cotton that was weaved in English textile mills were African — stolen from their homelands and enslaved by European masters. The land
where the cotton grew had to be cleared of Indigenous people and Indigenous title to make way for the plantation economy, the main driving force behind the expansion of modern capitalism. Thus, the expansion of African slavery fueled the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. US settler colonialism was thoroughly a racial project
of genocide and Indigenous elimination, which is an enduring structure that changes over time. After all, even the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the plantation economy and African slave system from their European counterparts were themselves dispossessed and extirpated from their lands. And both freed
Africans and Indigenous people fought as soldiers and scouts for the US settler wars of extermination against western Indigenous nations and overseas campaigns of conquest. Despite their military service in the US imperialist army, their stations within settler society have always been subordinate to white Europeans. They faced
Jim Crow segregation, police violence, mass incarceration, and the continued settler occupation of Indigenous lands. We reject settler colonialism and US imperialism as the means of emancipation for the working class and for colonized people. Our communist and anti-imperialist principles to which we ascribe are as follows: 1. End
the unequal relations between European and colonized nations. 2. End the violent competition between the nations of exploiters and colonizers. 3. End the plunder of the earth for profit. 2. Marxism is not European. Socialism is Indigenous. Marxism is founded on the expropriated knowledges of non-

Marxism, as a science, has a built-in self-correcting mechanism that has helped

capitalist Indigenous societies. Although Marx himself was wrong about many things,

revolutionaries throughout the world build off the political theory Marx first formulated . If this were untrue, there would be no Russian
Revolution, no African Revolution and decolonization movement, no Vietnamese liberation, no Bolivarian Revolution, no Cuban Revolution, no Chinese Revolution, etc. Each adopted Marxism and applied it to its specific

and unique circumstances by building off the long struggles against exploitation and European imperialism. Even for Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the concepts
and theories of decolonization explicitly derive from Marxist revolutionary movements . It’s dishonest for us to not recognize this history. It’s not
because of Marx or European thinkers that these revolutions were successful. It’s because Marxism is the science of revolution for the poor masses , the

colonized, and the wretched of the earth. Fundamentally, Marxism is the science of how to get free. It is the study of class struggle. If capitalism upholds the systems of racism, settler
colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism, then we cannot use capitalism to undo these systems. It’s not enough to just be anti-capitalist. Like our ancestors we must be forward-

thinking by drawing from and amplifying our non-capitalist social relations as Indigenous peoples, not to make
Indigenous traditions relevant to Marxism or socialism but to make socialism and Marxism relevant to our struggle as
Indigenous peoples. You cannot fight fire with fire. You cannot fight capitalism with Indigenous capitalism. You cannot fight nationalism with hyper-nationalism. You can only fight fire with water. And the solution to all these ills—and it is what capitalists and colonists hate the most—is socialism. If

capitalism is burning the planet, then socialism is the water to douse the flame. Water is life. We all need water to live, but we don’t need capitalism. And
for us to fight colonialism, we must ensure that our nations can live. But our nationalism cannot mirror the bourgeois
settler nationalism of colonial states, which is premised on exclusion and white supremacy. We adopt a revolutionary Indigenous nationalism that aligns with the most oppressed and marginalized first, within and outside
 And we recognize that by organizing production—for our food, medicines, resources, etc.—according to need and not profit is
our own communities.

the only possible path forward according to our traditions. The philosophy of communism neatly lines up with the
philosophy of our Indigenous ancestors . Friedrich Engels admitted as much when in the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto he added a footnote to the famous line: “The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” He clarified, “That is, all written history,” making note specifically of Lewis Henry Morgan’s study of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which was a
communistic, classless, and democratic society before European invasion. Moreover, it was the relative gender equality of Indigenous societies that inspired the suffragettes — white women seeking parity with white men.

The study of Indigenous societies, the inherent equality and freedom they engendered among producers and the
common ownership of property and social institutions, also inspired European workers to demand eight-hour
workdays and the abolition of child labor. And, in the final analysis, despite their own limited understandings, Marx and Engels, the founders of the modern communist movement, had
developed theories of emancipation largely from the expropriated knowledges of Indigenous and communal people, whose examples they relied on to prove that capitalism is neither inevitable nor natural. But, in fact,
communism is both natural and inevitable. This is not to suggest Indigenous societies were utopias — no society is perfect. It is, however, important to understand that Indigenous peoples have been knocked off the path of their natural social development to live in balance and correct relations. We are not
trying to recreate the past so much as steer Indigenous nations back on their communal developmental path that has been destroyed or seriously distorted by capitalist social relations. 3. The United States is not a “nation of immigrants” but a nation of colonizers. Whereas contemporary racial identity politics attempts to mask or
obscure class antagonisms, a class struggle that doesn’t overturn white supremacy and settler colonialism frees no one. We are not seeking parity with colonizers or further integration into a colonial system. We’re seeking to end settler and white supremacy entirely over Black, Indigenous, and colonized people. We aim to end the
colonial system entirely. Why? The United States, as a nation of European colonizers, had no feudal or communal past. Unlike other nations in history who transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, the United States was the first nation born entirely as a capitalist state. It was constructed from the ground up according to the
nightmare vision of European slave owners and Indian killers — the nation’s founding bourgeois ideologies. The United States began as an oppressor nation, as a colonizer of oppressed people, and its function remains so. It not only has a capitalist ruling class, but all strata and classes of white Europeans among its ranks are
encouraged to become preoccupied with the aims of the ruling class through petty racial privileges and private property ownership, the guiding stars of white settler nationalism. We reject those national and settler aspirations and ask our comrades in struggle to reject them as well. The current US colonial state is not only an
instrument of racial and class rule, it is also an instrument of imperialist plunder and the oppressor of nations. It thus obscures its own internal divisions of colonizer and colonized. The United States fabricates national myths by calling itself a “nation of immigrants” to hide its unnaturalness and crimes. Immigrants come to a land to
integrate within the existing legal, social, and political orders. The first European settlers came to colonize, to destroy and replace existing Indigenous legal, social, and political orders. The United States is, therefore, more accurately described as a “nation of colonizers.” Immigrants don’t come in chains; you can’t immigrate to a land
you already belong to; and refugees fleeing imperialist violence are not immigrants. We recognize that the colonial state keeps in place irreconcilable class antagonisms, between rich and poor, between settler and Native. The state is first and foremost police and military violence. Its legitimacy is maintained by force. It’s primary
function is enforcing capitalist social relations. The veneer of “representative democracy” is only possible because the ruling classes have crushed and will continue to crush any alternative to capitalism by mobilizing the police and military. In this sense, Indigenous people are the first “Red Scare.” Because we held land in common
and represented an alternative to the settler state (whether it be by taking in escaped slaves or mounting armed resistance), we had to be annihilated. Today, because we adopt revolutionary socialism as our struggle and vision for a free society, we are the second coming of the “Red Scare.” But we are not exclusive in our struggles
for freedom. We align ourselves with all colonized and oppressed people of the world. Only imperial borders and nation-states that are not of our own making divide our common humanity. Therefore, our struggle transcends the state, but we are not naive enough to turn away from the state as a site of struggle. We

understand that state power is nearly impossible to achieve, since Indigenous peoples are a minority. Yet, in alliance with other colonized and oppressed peoples , we
can take state power , not to become the new rulers of a capitalist society, but to use the mechanisms of the state to wage our rightful struggle against our class enemies—the rich. A socialist
state uses the power and democracy of the masses to undo the privileges and wealth of the ruling classes and the
colonial elite, even among our own people. A socialist state seeks to destroy itself because it is built in the shell of the old. But it has to be wielded by the oppressed in the service of the oppressed to achieve
freedom and the abolition of the state itself, because, whether we like it or not, the state is the primary organizer of society. And through a decolonized socialist state , we will

reorganize society to redistribute wealth and land by taking it back from those who stole it from us in the first place .
 Marx K: KY—v. Soft Left

1NC
Capitalism K

Embracing nihilistic responsibility lapses into a ‘folk politics’ that cedes the terrain to alter
structural conditions of power subsumed by neoliberal agents.
Leon Gurevitch 22, Associate Professor & Associate Dean, Research, Faculty of Architecture & Design, Victoria
University of Wellington, "Narrating Authorship," in Beyond Narrative: Exploring Narrative Liminality & Its Cultural Work,
Chapter 16, 2022, pg. 241-242. [italics in original]

In their book Inventing the Future, Srnicek and Williams suggest that limited and timid (if not altogether absent)
demands amongst twenty-first-century protest movements are the result of what they call “folk-political sentiment.”
Folk-politics is, they argue, characterized by a series of widely accepted values: “[S]mall is beautiful, the local is ethical,
simpler is better, permanence is oppressive, progress is over.” These limitations, then, are favored over any counter-
hegemonic project that could contest capitalism “at the largest scales.” Instead, folk politics is driven by a profound
pessimism that large-scale collective social change is possible. Crucially, entwined in this is a fear of returning to the
grand narratives that characterized the progressive utopianism of nineteenth-century socialist movements and fell out
of favor amongst postmodernists for obvious reasons:

Such folk-political sentiments [ignorantly] blindly accept the neoliberal common sense, preferring to shy away
from grand visions and replace them with a posturing resistance. From the radical left’s discomfort with
technological modernity to the social democratic left’s inability to envision an alternative world, everywhere
today the future has largely been ceded to the right . A skill that the left once excelled at—building enticing
visions for a better world—has deteriorated after years of neglect. (Srnicek and Williams)

One could see these green screen protests as an example of precisely this “posturing resistance.” If the unifying
narrative of the green screen protests was hard to identify, perhaps it was because it was so by design . In an era of
protest that rejected the grand narratives of social and political progress that were apparently so comprehensively
defeated by late twentieth-century neoliberalism, the green profile pictures operated as a communication device that
reached the same local network ecosystems of the tagged credits photos. Like the title credits photos, green profile
pictures themselves became a means of communicating industry membership, participation, and identity. At an
individual level, they may have functioned positively for VFX professionals: signaling solidarity amongst each other in a
manner that was difficult if not impossible for the large studios (who were not their direct employers) to counteract or
object to. In the absence of labor mobilization or even concrete demands beyond recognition and incremental
improvements in labor conditions, however, there was a palpable degree of distributed passivity about the protests.
In an environment where professionals under short-term contracts with extremely stringent non-disclosure clauses are
cautious to the degree of paranoia about making public pronouncements, especially over labor rights,6 the green profile
pictures represented a form of passive resistance to the events taking place over Rhythm and Hues.

The theorizing of blackness as ontological is an investment in failure---it subscribes to a reactive

mode of politics that is incompatible with collective liberation.
Jason Frank 22, John L. Senior Professor, Government, Cornell University, "Wounded Attachments, Democratic
Desires," Polity, Vol. 54, No. 3, July 2022, UCP. [italics in original]

In States of Injury Brown characterizes democratic desire as a longing to collectively constitute the world and share in
power. It is an affective orientation to “our world-making capacity ,” the “human capacity for producing a world of
meanings, practices, and institutions, and to the constant implication of power among us—its generation, distribution,
circulation, and effects.”8 Democracy at its core is not about “elections, rights, or free enterprise,” but setting the terms
of social existence through an egalitarian mode of “constituting and thus distributing political power.”9 In
conceptually elaborating this collective effort of constituting and distributing power, Brown gives special emphasis to a
particular understanding and experience of political freedom—States of Injury is, among other things, an urgent attempt
to recover an energetic discourse of freedom for the Left. The richly practical and contextual understanding of freedom
developed in the book departs from political theory’s usual polarities of negative and positive freedom and amplifies
instead the transformative, groundless, risky, uncertain, and power-situated practice that freedom entails. “The pursuit
of political freedom,” she writes, “is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection,
and irresponsibility [sic?]; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity,
and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both
collective and individual.”10 Democratic desire in States of Injury is richly characterized as a shared exercise in collective
and world-making power, but one that continually highlights and embraces the groundlessness, contingency, and risky
indeterminacy of this collective enterprise.

Brown’s account of the psychic dynamics of our attachments and aversions to these experimental practices of
groundless democratic freedom becomes a powerful tool for her critique of appeals to “politicized identity” on the
Left. In “Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations,” an important intervention in feminist theory that originally
appeared in differences, Brown builds upon this conception of democratic desire to expose how some contemporary
feminist theorists—and especially standpoint epistemologists such as Nancy Hartsock and Catherine MacKinnon—
evade or shrink from the vicissitudes and demands of democratic freedom by depoliticizing or moralizing appeals to
the grounds of experience, subjectivity, identity, truth, and procedural normativity. The “reactionary
foundationalism” Brown excavates in this particular form of feminist identity politics remains provocative still and also
highly salient given contemporary feminist debates over gender non-binarism and trans politics, with contemporary
trans-exclusive radical feminists bringing this “reactionary foundationalism” to a new and more openly reactionary
political articulation. In States of Injury Brown’s critique serves as the hinge for envisioning a collective politics
animated by questions of “what we want” over “who we are,” and that theorizes a “democratic political space” that
“while requiring some definition and protection, cannot be clean, sharply bounded, disembodied, or permanent …[but]
must be heterogeneous, roving, relatively noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the point of exhaustion.”11

Brown’s powerful critique of the reactionary foundationalisms lurking within seemingly emancipatory appeals to
“politicized identity” is brought to its most rigorous theoretical articulation in the book’s most resonant and influential
concept: “wounded attachments.” Through her distinctive development of Nietzsche’s exploration of the psychic
dynamics of ressentiment in The Genealogy of Morals, Brown elaborates a complex and persuasive account of how
passionate attachments to the constitutive injuries of identity generate a loathing of the vicissitudes of freedom and
democratic desire and a moralizing antipolitics of prioritizing state protections, on the one hand, and demonization
and wounded recrimination, on the other. The political desire engendered by the logic of ressentiment, she writes,
“forecloses the power of its own freedom,” and is driven by “the impulse to inscribe in the law and in other political
registers its historical and present pain rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself.”12 The politics
of ressentiment seeks solace in a world free of the vicissitudes of power and freedom. As Brown writes in an important
passage:

It fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of
their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or
repositioning. This effort also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury
rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to “outlaw” social injury powerfully
legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing
such protection by such protectors. Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project seeks not
power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment , making the
perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.13
The political desire unleashed by the wounded attachments of politicized identity generates passionate investments in
patterns of unfreedom and a reactive loathing of the risky and groundless experiments in collective power Brown
associates with radical democratic aspiration. “Politicized identity makes claims for itself, only by entrenching,
restating, dramatizing and inscribing its pain in politics: it can hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs
over this pain.”14

In States of Injury there is already some emphasis on the democratic importance of a recovery of a sense of common
orientation to a shared future—of an empowered demos—challenged by the fragmentations of “postmodernity.” “Post-
identity public positioning,” Brown writes, “requires an outlook that discerns structures of dominance within diffused
and disorienting orders of power, thereby stretching toward a more politically potent analysis than that which our
individuated and fragmented existences can generate”—but this aspect of democratic desire becomes much more
pronounced and elaborately detailed once Brown turns a critical lens on the political rationality of neoliberalism.15 In
this later work the disfigurement of democratic desire by the logics of ressentiment and wounded attachments seems
almost completely overwhelmed by neoliberalism’s economization of existence and systemic elimination of “the very
idea of a people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.”16 For Brown, neoliberalism radically disfigures
and erases a desire for “the political” itself, conceptualized as “a theater of deliberations , powers, actions, and values
where common existence is thought, shaped, and governed.”17 This orientation toward “the political” is much more
pronounced in the later work as “a distinctive domicile of meaning for a people, generating individual and collective
identity vis-à-vis others.”18 “Democracy without the political is an oxymoron,” Brown concludes, “the sharing of power
that democracy entails is a uniquely political project, requiring cultivation, renewal, and institutional support.”19 The
democratic desire for a shared orientation to the political seems to slightly displace the earlier emphasis Brown places
on the uncertainty, groundlessness, and risk taking of freedom, perhaps in part because of the overlap between that
understanding of freedom and the one espoused by the neoliberal opponents Brown focuses on in the later work (and
that so intrigued the later Foucault). As a normative order of reason, neoliberalism was explicitly theorized and enacted
by its advocates and architects as a project of subject formation and the refiguration of desire. Margaret Thatcher not
only famously declared that there is “no such thing as society,” but also that economics are merely “the method: the
object is to change the soul.”20 Brown has shown that the neoliberal project of subject formation is defined by an
entrepreneurialization of the self, a refiguration of the value of human life as risk-taking experiment in self-
investment. In looking back at this remarkable body of work, I wondered if a growing appreciation of what is threatened
in the basic presuppositions of democratic life by neoliberalism impacted Brown’s own conception of what is
constitutive of democratic desire itself.

The 1AC abstracts exploitation to the discursive constructions of humanism instead of the material
extraction of value from wage labor---this cements a mode of individualization that facilitates the
expansion of capital.
Rob Wilkie 12, Wisconsin English professor, Winter/Spring, "Capitalism's Posthuman Empire," The Red Critique,
http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/capitalismsposthumanempire.htm

The economic tumultuousness of capitalism requires a constant turnover of ideological concepts which, on the one
hand, displace the fundamental inequality of private property while, on the other hand, replacing the possibilities of
true economic equality with the illusion of the empty equality of the market. While the advancing productivity of human labor means that we are able to foresee a time
when the needs of all are met, capitalism restricts these developments to the profit motive. An economic system which divides the working class against itself by forcing

workers around the world to compete with one another for the wage, capitalism can’t but foster new social divisions
and contestations within the working class while at the same time reducing working class unity to the reified
homogeneity of exploitation. It is on these terms that we must understand bourgeois theory’s "posthumanist turn" and the way in which it disconnects the relation between race and class. I argue that what is represented as
posthumanism's "ethical" recognition of difference without closure—the claim to recognize the "solidarity" between humans and animals by resisting the instrumental reduction of both to homogeneous masses—is in actuality a displacement of the more
revolutionary critique of capitalism as a global system that must expand the conditions for private accumulation by subsuming all boundaries and differences under the one difference which only a social transformation can bring an end to, namely the difference of
class. In order to consider the social realities of capital's posthuman empire, however, I believe it is necessary to start outside of it, in what Marx and Engels call the "real ground of history…the material production of life itself" (The German Ideology 164).

What I mean by this is that in contrast to Giorgio Agamben's posthumanist declaration in What is an Apparatus ? that
"what is to be at stake, to be precise, is not an erasure or an overcoming, but rather a dissemination that pushes to
the extreme the masquerade that has always accompanied every personal identity" (13), the apparent fluidity of the
concept of "identity" and "otherness" in social, philosophic, and scientific discourses over time is governed by what
Marx and Engels describe as the "mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions , which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new
generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development" (The German Ideology 165). In starting outside of epistemology, in the historical and

material ontology of social relations, it becomes possible to not only document the fact that theories of "self" and
"other" change, but why changes in the meaning of identity reflect the deeper social contestations between classes
over the material conditions that shape one's life; namely, the life-activity of human labor. It is on these terms, for instance, that Hegel's
foundational theory of otherness in The Phenomenology of the Mind that underlies virtually all cultural theories of
difference today can be understood not as the spontaneous coming to "self-consciousness" of the contingent nature of all
identity, but rather as a reflection of the changing economic relations of an emerging industrial capitalism which, in
turn, turns these economic relations into the illusion of the natural condition of all "life." According to Hegel, "self-consciousness" occurs when society
reaches the point at which it can reflect on itself by understanding that individuals exist relationally, but nonetheless independently. "Self-consciousness," he writes, "exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that
is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or 'recognized'" (561). It is on these terms that Hegel proposes that the dependent nature of human consciousness up to that point—manifest in the relation between lord and bondsman—is only transformed when each

However, by drawing upon what Marx theorizes as the "material conditions of life," it
recognizes the other as an equal and independent being.

becomes clear that what Hegel represents as "self-consciousness" cannot be understood outside of the historical and
material conditions in which his inquiry takes place. That is, in seeking to define the relational basis of the self as other than the dependent relation between the bondsman to the lord (563), Hegel is
challenging the "self" as understood under feudal economic relations and, in its place, establishing the ideological framework for the "liberty" of private property relations under capitalism. It is on this basis, for instance, that Marx writes that the form of "liberty as a

). In other words, the need to recast

right of man" which Hegel privileges is "not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man" (On The Jewish Question 42

humanity as a social relation based upon the "recognition" of equals is driven by the emergence of a society framed
around both the contractual meeting of "free" individuals in the marketplace—that is, individuals "freed" from the
means of production and thus forced to sell their labor power for a wage—as well as the rethinking of the bourgeois
"individual" as having a natural "right" to freely own private property. To return, then, to the contemporary moment
of posthumanism, the reading of identity which has come to dominate cultural theory responds to the globalization of
wage-labor by arguing that the primary struggle is no longer between classes, but between the cultural
homogenization of the social, on the one hand, and the post-race, post-class, and post-gender multitudes which
"resist" through appeals to cultural singularity and local difference, on the other . Perhaps the most prominent proponents of this thesis are Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, who, in Commonwealth, argue that although "War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterize our globalizing world… [o]ne primary effect of globalization… is the creation of a common world, a world that, for better or worse, we all

At the core of their thesis is that capitalism is no longer a system divided by class, but rather a
share, a world that has no 'outside'" (vii).

system of political domination that, however unevenly, nonetheless impacts and pulls everyone into a struggle over
control over definitions of "self." In the new, "common" world, they write, "each identity is divided internally by others: racial hierarchies divide genders and classes, gender hierarchies divide races and classes, and so forth"
(340) and "no one domain or social antagonism is prior to the others" (342). In this sense, the struggle for social change is not about ending the conditions of

class exploitation that lead to racial and other forms of oppression, but rather expanding the recognition of
independent identities such that they can no longer be subsumed under the homogeneity of capitalism's instrumental
and reductive logic. In this post-race, post-class, and post-gender world, they declare, recognizing the "Singularity" of the multitudes "destroys the logic of property" (339) and "fills the traditional role of… the abolition of the state" (333). As
such, their proposal is to abandon any hope of fundamental social transformation or alternative to capitalism in favor of "an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire" (vii). The problem is that although

"globalization" has become synonymous in theory with the end of any economic challenge to capitalism's dominance
and the absence of an outside from which to critique exploitation, this does not change the reality that the expansion
of capitalism globally has meant in actuality a rising level of inequality and a sharpening of the class divide, a point
then reflected back in culture by increasing racial and religious tensions . This is because capitalism is a system that depends upon the exploitation of labor.
Regardless of whether the primary location of production is the North or the South, or whether the workers work in
factories that are highly mechanized or newly digitalized , it is the production of surplus value extracted from the
surplus labor of workers by owners that drives capitalism forward . It is in the context of increasing economic uncertainty and inequality that one must read, for example, the
increasing use of institutionalized and "culturally acceptable" racism against Muslims and immigrants in the United States and Europe to divide the working class as an instance of what Marx calls the "secret which enables the capitalist class to maintain its power"

("Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt" 337). In other words, far from the divisions of the past being displaced, as Hardt and Negri propose, class
divisions have only become heightened in capital's new global ecology, leading as usual to the divisive cultural
promulgation of "internal" cultural divisions within the global proletariat. It is for this reason, I argue, that the recognition of the singularity of cultural difference as the
means by which to address the social oppressions of race, gender, sexuality, animality, and (dis)ability argued for by posthumanists has in actuality become the ideology that in obscuring exploitation enables global capitalism to deepen social inequalities . This

is because it strips away the historical and material conditions of difference and, instead, represents the conditions of
identity under capitalism, as Cary Wolfe suggests in What is Posthumanism?, as the "ongoing, differentiated
construction and creation of a shared environment, sometimes converging in a consensual domain, sometimes not, by
autopoetic entities that have their own temporalities, chronicities, perceptual modalities, and so on— in short, their
own forms of embodiment " (xxiv). The problem, according to posthumanists such as Wolfe, is the failure of capitalism to
recognize that all beings should be allowed to operate "on their own time," instead of being forced to operate under
a homogenized "temporality." Capitalism, then, is challenged not as an economic system, but a managerial one. That is, it is said that capital does not do enough to recognize the "differences" which exist at the very core of all
being and thus is challenged to further incorporate people (and animals) in their local, embedded realities. This local recognition, the argument goes, will bring the rigid,

instrumental logic of capitalism into crisis. However, this image of society as consisting of autonomous, self-identified
individuals who sometimes operate together and sometimes not, doesn't challenge the core logic of capitalism in
exploitation . In fact, it replicates the very ideology on which capitalism depends, namely the illusion of freedom in the marketplace, where "individuals" encounter each other in a series of chance meetings to exchange—more or less "fairly"—wages
for labor. By giving up the possibility of any theory of identity and difference beyond the isolated encounter, posthumanist

ethics offers only a politics of individual, autonomous solutions to what is a structural economic contradictio n. In turn, it thus
serves at the level of culture as the means by which to extend the economic realities of capitalism which in fact give rise to the conditions of oppression posthumanists nominally oppose. Capitalism, especially in its current "global" phase, has no problems recognizing
local differences and adapting commodities to local markets. What matters to capital is not the locality of markets, but the globality of labor. Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am and Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal are among two of the most influential
texts in shaping the discourses of contemporary cultural theory in the ideological direction of "posthumanism." What is significant about both books is that they take as their starting point a rethinking of the entire history of philosophy—from the ancient Greeks to
postmodernism—to account for what they claim is the central aporia in Western Philosophy since Aristotle, namely, the discursive relation of "man" and "animal." As Agamben argues, it is the conflict between human and animal, not as they exist, but as they are
defined epistemologically, which is "the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict" (80). According to both writers, the division between humans and animals operates as the unspoken basis upon which all theories of social difference have been

The "human" and the "animal" function, they propose, as homogenized

constructed and, in turn, the framework through which all attacks upon the other ultimately depend.

epistemological categories through which social reality is produced and maintained. In turn, it is this instrumental logic of
classification which is at the core of the human-animal distinction which is then used to legitimate the oppression of
all beings—animal and human—which are defined as outside the domain of reason . Just as the oppression of the animal is "legalized" by defining it as the not-human and thus not subject to
human rights, they argue the racialized other has been oppressed through the same mechanism of denying that she has the capacity to (Western philosophic) reason. On these terms Agamben writes, "It is as if determining the border between human and animal

In this
were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental meta-physico-political operation in which alone something like 'man' can be decided upon and produced" (21).

way, they subsume and thus shift all inquiries into the conditions which give rise to social oppression to what they
claim is the rhetorical structure of humanity itself. It is on these grounds that Derrida and Agamben propose that the challenge of posthumanism to the contemporary is the deconstruction of the
epistemological basis upon which all "differences" are classified. This is perhaps most clear in Derrida's argument that "Power over the animal is the essence of the 'I' or the 'person,' the essence of the human" (93), which can only be combated, he proposes, by

Like Agamben, Derrida suggests social inequalities are

"complicating, thickening, folding, and dividing the line [between humans and animals] precisely by making it increase and multiply" (29).

dependent upon the construction of an interminable and uncrossable boundary between the human and the animal
which legitimates the treatment of some beings as less (human) than others. It is this unequal system of classification,
he proposes, that is tied into the very structure of all representations and, thus, implicated in how the world is "seen"
from the vantage point of all of modern philosophy . He writes, "Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give…in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single
concept" (32). As such, Derrida declares that drawing such a sharp, but arbitrary, boundary between the human and the non-human obscures that, "Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than 'The
Animal' or 'Animal Life' there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely....a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead […that…] can never be totally objectified" (31). In other words, the classification of "humans"
and "animals" into distinct states of being imposes violence on the animal-other which reduces its multiplicity and complexity under a single, homogeneous concept. In turn, it is the multiplicity of the other that ultimately represents a resistance to the
homogenization and objectification of modernity. That is, like Hardt and Negri's theory of the multitude who exist in a state of radical singularity which is "constantly in flux" (339) and thus resist any attempts at reductive classifications, what Derrida is ultimately
arguing in celebrating the "unsubstitutable singularity" (9) of the in-between identity he calls "l'animot" (41)—that is, a being that is a "monstrous hybrid," neither inside nor outside language—is a politics that takes up the full extent of Hegel's individualist

"recognition" as the basis of a posthumanist theory ofidentity. Far from challenging Hegel's humanist theory of difference and identity, which
corresponds to the emergence of the industrial age and the pressures it placed upon feudal class relations, what
Derrida is proposing is a theory of "recognition" for the age of global capitalism . It subsumes all identity under a
singular cultural logic and, in turn, presumes that there is no escape from this logic, except to find moments of
"resistance" from within . In this sense, Derrida's posthumanism is a ruling class ethics which works without recourse to the existence of any economic or political outside to promote the idea of locating the moments within any
structure that might lend themselves to a more plural and less determining understanding of identity. It is, in other words, a theory of identity for a capitalist market that must

"nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere," while nonetheless continuing to internally
divide workers, pitting them against one another through the mechanism of wage competition (Marx and Engels 487). The implications of the
posthumanist reading of difference as displacing the economic realities of race, gender, and sexual oppression as shaped by the fundamental divisions of ownership under capitalism become clear when they are applied to contemporary representations of difference
and the ways in which theories of race in particular are being revised as capital goes global. For example, released within months of one another, the films Disgrace and District 9 are exemplary instances of the way in which posthumanist ethics has become the
dominant ideological framework through which race and class are disconnected from one another and, more importantly, from the social relations of production. That is to say, what is significant is that despite the surface differences in "tone," "politics," and
"audience" both films take the sharp divisions of race and class in post-Apartheid South Africa and, at a time of both rising class conflicts (as well as increased global attention to the 2010 World Cup at the time of their release), use the relay of the relation of human
and animal to redefine the social reality in South Africa as a series of ethical challenges rather than class conflicts. Briefly, Disgrace, the film version of J.M. Coetzee's novel of the same name, is the story of David Lurie—a tired, white communications professor
teaching romantic poetry to apathetic students—who ultimately must come to terms with the end of Apartheid through what are presented as a series of escalating humiliations—from losing his teaching position to an attack which results in the rape of his daughter
and the burning of his face. It is very clear from the beginning that these humiliations are tied to race. After pressuring a black, female student in his class to sleep with him, Lurie is forced out of the university in an echo of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees
when he will not admit that he was "wrong," only that he is guilty. With no teaching position, he decides to move out to the countryside to live with his daughter, Lucy, and her lesbian partner. Upon arriving, he learns that his daughter's partner has left her and that
she has established a "co-proprietorship" with Petrus, a black farmer who has helped her set up a dog kennel and flower farm with the condition that he too can live on the land. Throughout this part of the film, David makes clear that this "co-ownership" upsets him
because, ultimately, Petrus does not know his "place." He derisively calls him a "peasant" and, when seeing the goats that Petrus has purchased for a wedding party tied up outside the house, declares that he doesn't like the way that Petrus does things, inviting the
"beasts to meet the people who will eat them." District 9, on the other hand, it is set in an alternate version of the contemporary in which an extraterrestrial race have landed in Johannesburg, South Africa, and have been forced by the human population to live in
segregated "townships" on the outskirts of the city. The film centers on an eager, white middle-manager named Wikus Van De Merwe who is tasked by his company, the global multinational MNU, to serve eviction notices to the extraterrestrials or "prawns" as they
are called by the humans, letting them know that they are being moved to a concentration camp. These notices must be served, we are informed, in order to meet the demands of international law which require that the aliens be informed of the move before it
takes place. As he's serving the notices, Wikus is infected with the extraterrestrials' DNA and begins slowly transforming into a "prawn," but not before he ultimately helps two of the aliens—a parent who has been given the European name "Christopher Johnson"
and child—escape the planet. Despite their differences, what each film relies on in re-writing the contradictions of race and class as an epistemological confrontation between human and animal is what Derrida theorizes as "the gaze of the absolute other" (11); that
is, the "gaze of the animal" which "offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman" (12). For example, during his time on the farm Lurie begins to work at the local rescue shelter/veterinary hospital and, as part of his transition to an
"ethical" posthumanist, helps to euthanize the dogs and take them to the incinerator. Most significantly in this context, since it ultimately reflects the "realization" that Lurie undergoes over the course of the film, the attack on Lucy and him occurs after he has just
told a story about the "ignobility" of a male dog that was beaten until he hated his own desire. As part of the attack the young men shoot Lucy's dogs, which is meant to signal a sharp contrast to Lurie's adopting of an "ethical" approach at the veterinary clinic. What
he ultimately comes to see is that recasting his identity in the new post-Apartheid landscape will mean, in his words, being "humiliated… like a dog." This, however, is meant to indicate not simply a personal humiliation, but, by the end of the film, an inversion of his
previous egoist "self" and, through identification with animals’ perspective, the full recognition of the epistemological conditions which produce otherness. When, at the conclusion of the film, Lurie leaves his car at the top of the mountain and walks down to Lucy's
farm for tea, giving up on his silent protest at the "deal" that Lucy has made with Petrus to become her "wife" in exchange for protection from future attacks, the viewer has been positioned to see him as no longer able to act on his desires and thus having been
reduced to being "a dog." In this way, we are meant to see the deep connection that Lurie makes between humans and animals. He sees that to be other, whether human or animal, means being "humiliated" by those in power. Of course, the image of the white
professor who is powerless in the face of the black farmers completely inverts the reality of social relations in South Africa, in which unemployment is listed as anywhere from 31% to 42%, falling largely on the black population (Zeiling and Ceruti). But this, I argue, is
the point. Posthumanism is an ideology which separates culture from reality and, instead, posits that regardless of the economic, social reality is always driven by divisions which violently classify those whose desires place them outside the "normal" bounds of
society. In District 9 the relationship between race and class is represented through the relay of science fiction. In the film, we learn that the extraterrestrials literally emerge from nowhere, as their ship suddenly appeared without warning in the sky over
Johannesburg. It is only when the humans cut into the ship and find the aliens living in deplorable conditions with no seeming purpose that "first contact" is made. While later in the film we learn that MNU is one of the world's leading arms manufacturers and their
interest in managing the situation is obtaining the alien's weapon technology, there is no reason given for the initial segregation of the aliens into townships except their "animal-like" difference. In other words, like the post-historical conclusion of Disgrace, District 9
turns the modern history of exploitation and oppression into an ahistorical fear of the other driven by the instrumental desire to "capture" all life in reductive classifications. Similar to Lurie's taking up of the dog's perspective, it is through Wikus' adopting of the
"prawns'" perspective that we learn that it is "bad" to "capture" or "impose" upon life conditions which are alien to its existence—just as Derrida and Agamben suggest—but—also like Agamben and Derrida—not where these terms come from. Wikus' decision at the
film's conclusion to sacrifice his own life to make sure that Christopher Johnson and his son escape is thus meant to signify the posthumanist realization that social change hinges on the individual decision of how one approaches the other. There is no broad social

This is the
movement, no social collectivity, only the ethical acts of one for the other, one in debt to the other. Thus, Wikus (and the viewer) end the film with the hope that the future will be different, simply through the act of individual ethics.

limit of the posthumanist theory of "difference." Insofar as it defines otherness, oppression, and exploitation as the
effect of an instrumental logic of classification which is endemic to all social relations , it denies that there is any
history to the ways in which people live. Instead, transformative theory becomes an "ethical" praxis that, in the words of Agamben,
"must face a problem and a particular situation each and every time " (What is An Apparatus? 9). In this way, it becomes impossible to
suggest that exploitation and oppression are inherent to capitalism or would be any different under any alternative
mode of production. In fact, Hardt and Negri argue precisely this when they declare that "Socialism and capitalism…are both regimes of property that exclude the common" (ix). The consequence is that
posthumanism effectively naturalizes capitalism by denying what Marx calls "species-being"— the basis of human
freedom in the collectivity of labor —and replacing it instead with what Agamben calls "special being" or that which
"without resembling any other…represents all others" (Profanations 59). When Agamben proclaims that, "‘To be special [far specie] can mean ‘to surprise and astonish’ (in a negative sense) by not fitting
into established rules, but the notion that individuals constitute a species and belong together in a homogeneous class tends to be reassuring" (59) he replicates the bourgeois theory of difference which, as Marx writes, is based upon "an individual separated from
the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice" such that "far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself—society—

In other words, the very nature of the division of labor

appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence" (On the Jewish Question 43).

under capitalism causes workers to blame ahistorical notions of "society" and "government" for the contradictions
which reside in the economic and, in turn, seek refuge in the "freedom" of individuality which bourgeois society
promises. In this way, when Agamben writes that "The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus [dispositivo]" (60), he reproduces the sense with which
people respond to capitalist exploitation by blaming the very idea of "society," rather than the society of exploitation. By taking the question of identity and difference out of the social,

Agamben turns exploitation into an existential crisis which can only be resolved by the ethical recognition of
difference on its own terms, leaving the contradictions of society intact. This is how the posthumanist theories of identity return to the same structures of representation they
claim to oppose because their opposition does not move beyond the economic structures of capitalism. Both the Hegelian theory of "recognition" and the posthuman theory of "singularity" are ultimately theories of the isolated individual, which is an ideological
fiction arising alongside capitalism (a la "Robinson Crusoe") as a result of the economic shift toward wage-labor. They consequently substitute for more radical theories of freedom from the market the freedom of the individual in the market, as if rigid structures of

If we are to truly see the world differently, not just as isolated individuals, but
social interpretations and not the system of wage-labor were holding the individual back.

as a united community which uses new technologies for freeing people from the drudgery of wage labor and its
corresponding ideologies of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression, what is necessary is a social
transformation that ends the exploitation of labor upon which capitalism is based. Pluralizing identities doesn’t
challenge the logic of exploitation, but actually expands it since private property establishes individual responsibility
as the very basis of one's "natural" existence by stripping people of any means of survival outside of wage-labor. Thus, retreating into individualism is
merely the ideological mask which is placed over the subsumption of all life under the profit motive . However, as Marx writes, regardless of
appearances, "the individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried

out together with others is… an expression and confirmation of social life" (86). Although posthumanism turns the
alienation of the worker under capitalism into the very pre-condition of all cultur e, I argue that it is only by freeing labor
from the restrictions of capitalist exploitation that, we can, as Marx writes, end racial oppression and find a "genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man —the true resolution of the strife
between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between the individual and the species" (84)

Capitalism locks-in numerous extinction-level catastrophes AND repressive violence.

Dr. Ted Trainer 22, Conjoint Lecturer, Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, "Where Is Capitalism Taking
Us? 2: The Longer Term Trajectory," in Capitalism: Why We Should Scrap It, Chapter 8, 03/07/2022, pg. 96-104.
[language edited]

Let us step back and consider again the global situation sketched in Chapter 3. It was explained that the increasingly
serious range of problems, including environmental destruction, resource depletion, deprivation of the Third World,
conflict over access to resources and markets, and the deterioration of social cohesion, are direct consequences of
the fact that there is far too much producing and consuming going on. The main argument in this chapter is that this
society is not capable of dealing with this situation, and that it will inevitably culminate in the more or less catastrophic
breakdown of society on a global scale.

Before detailing that argument some aspects of the trajectory should be considered further.

What will happen?

Following is an attempt to sketch the most likely trajectory ahead.

The multi-factored limits to growth noose will tighten, hopefully slowly but probably too quickly. Many of its elements
are already gathering force and compounding to increase difficulties towards a time of great and terminal troubles. As
explained, the key determinants of our near-term fate seem to be the future of fracking and of debt. Most likely is a
relatively sudden end of the debt fuelled tight-oil venture which then triggers a global debt crisis and a far more
serious global economic collapse than the 2008-2009 GFC. There are varied expectations regarding the time scale;
Ahmed (2017) explains why it could be a matter of a decade or so before the Middle Eastern failed states become
unable to maintain oil exports. Tverberg and several others have a similarly short-term expectation. Randers (2012)
however expects the disruption to impact around 2070.

Immiseration.

But the most important determinant of our fate is probably not directly to do with biophysical limits. It is the extent to
which the long-suffering and docile masses will go on tolerating how they are being treated. For at least 6,000 years
people have been astoundingly passive, putting up with tyrants, kings, and general rule by usually brutal and greedy
elites. But over the last two or three decades people in rich countries have become seriously discontented with their
situation, recognising that governments do not attend to their needs. One result is the worldwide decline in belief in
democracy. Others are the advent of Trump, Brexit, right-wing populism and support for fascism. Guy Standing
analyses this well (2012), pointing to the way financialisation is replacing Neoliberalism with domination by the
accumulation of assets on which rents can be drawn while casting more and more people into the “precariat”. This is a
class struggling with insecurity and personal debt. The hard-won achievements of old labour, secure jobs and good
wages etc., are being swept away and replaced by “gig” economies in which the precariat suffers high indebtedness and
struggles to find intermittent work, pays high rents (e.g., for mortgages, accommodation, student fees.) Below them is
the “lumpenproletariat” of chronically unemployed, aged, infirm, homeless and excluded. The above chapter on the US
points to the Walmart-gutted towns, impoverished casual labour, rural poverty and dying country towns, and the social
wreckage generating the opioid crisis and other harmful effects. It is not surprising that this produced such support for a
Presidential candidate promising to “drain the Washington swamp” seen to be responsible for the situation.

The decline in regard for democracy that is underway is another consequence of immiseration. People are becoming
less satisfied with the capacity or willingness of the system to attend to their problems and fix things. The Australian
National University’s recent Australian election survey shows distrust of politicians rose from an already high 63% in
2014 to 76% in 2016. Another question found 56% think the federal government is run for a few big interests. (Yeginsu,
2018.)

Tverberg (2021) sees how low disposable household income is now a major determinant of what is happening to the oil
industry. The crisis of low prices and rampant bankruptcies in the petroleum industry has not been due to running into
scarcity as the “peak oil” thesis once predicted, but to falling demand because large and increasing numbers of people
cannot afford to purchase goods at previous rates. This is a most important and somewhat overlooked causal factor in
the discussion of global economic woes. Consider the following evidence on it.

There has been negligible increase in household disposable income for 60-80% of Australian households since 2012,
while prices have risen and the income of the rich has risen considerably. Similarly in the US real incomes for most
workers have barely risen in 40 years and the minimum wage has been at $US15,000 p.a. for years. (Hutchins 2018.)
Stasse (2020) refers to literature on “…an unprecedented squeeze on living standards for ordinary households.” Wright
(2019) says that in the US “…average hourly pay is below what it was in 1973; 40 percent of adults lack the savings to
pay for a $400 emergency expense.”

The shrinking middle class and rising precariat class are part of the phenomenon, and it is evident in the rise of
household debt, now very high in Australia. Karp (2020) says in the US households’ debt-to-income ratio was less than
40 percent in 1950 but is now120 percent, and since 1985 the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of adults declined
from 40 percent to 27 percent. Indices of increasing hardship at the bottom are clear. In the UK. MacFarlane (2019)
reports, “Rough sleeping in England has increased by 165 per cent, while homeless deaths have more than doubled. The
number of people using food banks has increased to 1.6 million … up from just 26,000 in 2009. 14 million people are
living in poverty … the UK population is still 1.6 per cent poorer than it was more than a decade ago on average.”
Menadue (2020) reports that in Australia, “Homelessness is also increasingly significantly. It rose by 30% in the decade
to 2016.”

These observations point to a killing of the goose that was laying golden eggs, a failure to attend to the way the
drive to extract as much wealth as possible eventually undercuts the capacity to go on siphoning it out, by leaving
most people with too little purchasing power. This situation is a consequence of the success of the capitalist class. Their
dominance has meant that they have been able to ride over the resistance that might have got them to make sufficient
concessions to defuse the problems they were causing. Streek (2014) puts it in terms of capitalism becoming its own
worst enemy. “It has eliminated criticism and oppositional moves, which would have pushed it to adapt…”

The accumulating power has also led to corruption, which in time reduces a system’s capacity to respond to
challenges. Streek (2014) points to the way the GFC revealed “…rating agencies being paid by the producers of toxic
securities to award them top grades; offshore shadow banking, money laundering and assistance in large-scale tax
evasion as the normal business of the biggest banks with the best addresses; the sale to unsuspecting customers of
securities constructed so that other customers could bet against them; the leading banks worldwide fraudulently fixing
interest rates and the gold price, and so on.” He notes the billions of dollars in fines for these offences which several
large banks have had to pay recently, including by some major Australian banks. In more recent years several inquiries
and revelations have detailed similar criminal behaviour on the part of mainstream institutions, especially via the
Australian Banking royal commission, and exposures of global tax haven and laundering operations.

The advent of cannibalism.

Collins (2021) and others point to the way the economy’s increasing difficulties have led it to enter a “catabolic” or
“cannibalistic” phase. As the capacity to do good business producing useful things deteriorates, investors turn to
activities that plunder the economy. It is as if a hardware firm has to start selling the corrugated iron on its own roof to
stay in business. The illicit drug industry and the Mafia are similar; rather than producing new wealth effort goes into
extracting previously produced wealth. Much financial activity is of this nature, such as “short selling”, “asset
stripping” and getting hold of assets that enable rents to be extracted. In the GFC a lot of money was lent to home
buyers incapable of meeting the payments, because investors could not find less risky outlets. When the borrowers
could not pay their interest instalments their houses were repossessed by the banks and sold off.

Similarly in the US some of the money in the worker’s pay packet is put into a pension fund run by the corporation, to
be paid back on retirement, but many corporations have taken these funds to invest, and “lost” them. Often they
were lent to smart operators in the financial sector to put into speculative ventures, siphoning out fees in the process.
Sometimes money is borrowed to buy weak firms, arrange for them to borrow too much and thus drive them into
bankruptcy, and then sell them off, and because the pension money has become an asset of the firm it goes to the
lenders and is lost to the workers who earned it and set it aside. So, accumulation and profit making are being kept up
by activities which enrich big and smart investors (lenders) by getting hold of the wealth of little/naive investors
(borrowers), through granting them loans they cannot repay.

Another common mechanism is simply commercialising activities that the state once carried out without charge. This
is an aspect of “financialisation” discussed in Chapter 4. A good example is where students must now pay for college
and university education, meaning large loans must be taken out and large interest payments then flow to lenders from
the earnings of parents and students. Again the process does not involve lending to produce anything, it just enables
wealth previously produced to be acquired by lenders. Collins (2021) and others see this process accelerating as the
ever-increasing volumes of accumulated capital find it increasingly difficult to find investment opportunities in
producing anything of value. Streek (2014) says, “… the struggle for the last remaining profit opportunities is becoming
uglier by the day.”
Collins (2021) says. “… catabolic capitalists will stoke the profit engine by taking over troubled businesses, selling them
off for parts, firing the workforce, and pilfering their pensions.” As difficulties increase for governments and their
revenues decrease they will come under greater pressure to give business the conditions it wants in order to stimulate
economic activity.

“Regulatory agencies that once provided some protection from polluters, dangerous products, unsafe
workplaces, labour exploitation, identity theft, and financial fraud will be dismantled … Public safety will be
stripped down, privatized, and sold to those who can still afford it. Court budgets will shrivel, privatized prisons
will exploit convict labour, and police will seldom respond to everyday crimes. Instead, private security firms
and gated communities will guard the wealthy … catabolic capitalists will pick over the carcasses of bankrupt
governments. Crumbling public transportation and decaying highways will be transformed into private
thoroughfares, maintained by convict labour or indentured workers. After pressuring bankrupt governments to
sell off public utilities, water storage, and waste management systems , corporations will deliver these
essential services only to the businesses and communities who can afford them. And, as public schools and
libraries go broke, exclusive private academies will employ a fraction of the jobless teachers and professors to
educate a shrinking class of affluent students.”

End game.

A number of analysts see the foregoing phenomena as aspects of a terminal decline, partly driven by increasing
resource and ecological difficulties, partly by worsening inequality and “immiseration”, and partly by deteriorating
“legitimacy”. Rising discontent in Europe and the US is evident in support for populist and fascist movements. Blame is
usually put on the wrong targets, especially immigrants. That the squalor is due to capitalism is not recognised, thanks
largely to the weakness of Left parties and the fine work done over generations by those keeping capitalist ideology in
good shape.

In my lectures on Marx I point to a list of things which I and others think he got wrong. But there are some extremely
important things I think he got right. One is that capitalism is shot through with serious contradictions such as the fact
that the interests of workers clash with those of the class that owns capital. Another extremely important point he made
is that as the system matures immiseration will eventually increase. This is what we are seeing now (Marx’s timing was
way out.) As the rich and super-rich cream off increasing proportions of wealth the masses are increasingly having to
struggle to get by, and are therefore less able to keep up the purchasing that is the life-blood of the system. And they
are more and more discontented. Most importantly, he saw that these tendencies would result in the system’s self-
destruction.

The question is, when will people finally cease putting up with what the system does to them? When will they realise
that the system is not designed to work for them? When will they see that it cannot but worsen their situation as time
goes by? When will they realise what is causing their plight?

The tightening limits will intensify the immiseration as governments are forced to cut spending on welfare etc. and to
drive worker’s conditions down and give more favours to the rich in order to get the economy going. Governments
struggling to control dissent and to help capital are very likely to adopt fascist options , but unlike in the 1930s, now
the materials necessary to maintain armies, large bureaucracies and secret police and stage mass rallies will not be
available, so descent towards a warlord dominated feudalism becomes plausible. In some Third World regions and
even US cities this seems to be happening, for instance in the form of drug gangs.

Many analysts have tried to draw attention to where these limits are taking us. Mason (2003) for instance sees the many
problematic trends culminating in “The 2030 Spike”, the title of his book. As noted above, among those who discuss the
multi-dimensional global breakdown likely to be brought on before long by limits and scarcity are Korowicz (2012),
Morgan (2013), Kunstler (2005), Greer (2005), Bardi (2011), Duncan (2013), Gilding (2011), Randers (2012) and Streeck
(2014). Some foresee more or less totally catastrophic collapse, the end of Western civilisation, with a die-off of
billions.

The next collapse might not be the final one; some foresee “... a long and bumpy road down”. Randers (2012) expects
the time of troubles to be around 2070. However, Ahmed (2017), Tverberg (2021), Mason (2003) and other
“collapsologists” give reasons to expect it to be before 2030 . The hope must be for a protracted Goldilocks depression,
one that is not so severe as to destroy the chances of salvage, but savage enough to jolt people into recognizing that
they must shift to the local, cooperative and frugal self-sufficiency detailed in Chapter 10.

The situation will at best be confused and chaotic, with governments and “leaders” continuing to not understand the
fundamental causes and quick to blame the wrong things. The present tendencies to right-wing populism and fascism
are likely to gain momentum, supported by many in privileged classes who will call for repressive measures to restore
order and protect their security and property. Many in angry lower classes will want strong leaders willing to break
rules. (A recent survey found this to already be true of a majority of UK people; Walker, 2019.) Capitalism will again
morph into its fascist form whereby an authoritarian central government rules in cooperation with a selected few big
capitalist firms. It is highly unlikely that there will be sober, clear headed rational thinking about causes and solutions.
Poor and struggling governments will be even less capable of analysing or dealing with the situation effectively than they
are now.

The international possibilities are similarly disturbing. Dominant powers will surely become more aggressive in their
efforts to control sources of scarce resources and markets. Third world governments wallowing in debt are likely to
allow corporations to cause greater environmental destruction and to generate revenue, and to resort to increasingly
repressive measures to control dissent over deteriorating living conditions. (Ahmed, 2017).
The problems cannot be solved.

The conventional assumption is that the problems can and will be solved by the institutions and processes of present society, such as by parliaments implementing effective policies in line with international agreements and resolutions, and ordinary people accepting legislated adjustments to their circumstances. But from the
perspective of The Simpler Way, this expectation is now clearly mistaken. Given the foregoing account of the nature and magnitude of the problems, the institutions and political process of this society are not capable of recognising the situation and rationally facing up to it and making the enormous and difficult changes required to
solve it. Consider the following reasons.

The enormity of the changes required.

Even the Degrowth literature generally fails to adequately represent the magnitude and difficulty of the reductions required. (Again, for the numerical case see Trainer, 2021a). Chapter 3 explained that rich-world volumes of production and thus consumption of resources must be cut by up to 90%, meaning that most of the present
quantities of industry, transport, travel, construction, shopping, exporting, investing etc. have to be phased out. How could this possibly be done? This is the “degrowth conundrum”. It cannot be a matter of just closing a coal mine and transferring the workers to other jobs, because the amounts of production, work and jobs have to
be cut dramatically. It would have to involve the creation and massive implementation of totally new social structures and procedures, whereby most people could live well without producing anywhere near so much as before. This could not be done unless it involved historically totally unprecedented, massive and rapid cultural
change, to widespread public understanding and acceptance of the extremely radically new systems and values. And governments cannot impose or make the new ways work. Chapter 10 will make it clear that this could only be done by conscientious citizens who are eager to build and operate the new local systems.

There isn’t time

Even if the understanding and the will existed, it is difficult to imagine that the enormous required could be carried out in a few decades. They involve reversing what have been some of the fundamental ideas and values that have driven Western civilization over the last two hundred years, and scrapping and replacing vast systems
and structures. Yet it is probable that the following three main global threats each give us no more than ten years.

Carbon.

According to various estimates the “carbon emissions budget” associated with a 67% chance of limiting temperature rise to under 1.5 degrees will have been exhausted within about twelve years. (Levin, 2018, Steffen, 2020.) Many insist that this one-in-three chance of failure is far too high to be acceptable. A more responsible
target would significantly reduce the budget, and therefore the time left to move off fossil fuels. Note also that these estimates do not take into account the positive feedbacks, such as warming causing loss of snow causing absorption of more solar heat. Currently there are around 490 new coal-fired power stations being built
around the world, with 790 planned. (Global Energy Monitor, 2020.)

By 2050 energy demand is likely to be around 890 EJ/y, 56% higher than at present. (Minqui, 2019.) Input from renewable sources would have to increase by 27 EJ every year but the current rate of increase is only 0.72 EJ/y. (Our World in Data, 2019.) This equates to building 1.5 million 2 MW wind turbines every year, costing over
6% of world GDP not including the cost of energy storage, grid strengthening and distribution. And plant built now will probably only last twenty years, less than half as long as coal-fired plant. There will be at least formidable difficulties in developing satisfactory renewable energy solutions for emissions from the 80% of demand
made up by the heavy land transport, agriculture, military, shipping and aircraft sectors. (Trainer, 2017.) These numbers would seem to completely rule out any possibility that acceptable emissions targets can be met in the time available.

Petroleum.

It is likely that a major and permanent collapse in oil availability will occur, possibly within a decade. (Ahmed, 2017.) It is generally recognized that the supply of conventional petroleum peaked around 2005 and has declined significantly since then. World supply has continued to increase due to the remarkable rise in output from
the advent of “fracking” in the US “tight-oil” regions. However, there are strong reasons for expecting this source to peak and decline soon. (Hughes 2016, Cunningham 2019, Whipple 2019, Cobb, 2019.) T0 2020 the major producers have not made a profit in any year of operation while accumulating a debt of over one quarter of a
trillion dollars. It seems that an oil price high enough for producers to break even is too high for the economy to avoid recession. Unless there are major technical breakthroughs reducing costs, which are not thought to be likely, at some point in the near future lenders will probably cease providing capital to the fracking sector. A
major factor increasing costs is the decline in the energy return on the energy that has to be invested to produce energy.

There is a strong case that it will either not be possible for renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels or that it will be too expensive. (Trainer, 2017.) As noted above, only 20% of demand is in the form of electricity, which is the easiest task. It will be much more costly to run heavy trucks, farm tractors, mining equipment, ships
and aircraft on renewables.

Ahmed (2017) presents a persuasive case that most Middle East oil-producing nations are encountering such serious ecological, food, water, population growth and climate problems that their capacity to export oil could be largely eliminated within ten years. Meanwhile the amount of energy it takes to produce a barrel of oil is
increasing significantly (Brockway, et al., 2019). Despite these alarming observations the precariousness and urgency of the petroleum situation is attracting little attention.

Debt.

After remaining more or less stable for decades, global debt has quadrupled since 1999. (Hienberg, 2018.) It is now
equivalent to around three times global GDP, is far higher than before the GFC, and is regarded by various economists
as inevitably bound to crash soon . (Brown, 2018, Lu, 2020.)

In addition to these three major factors many other biophysical difficulties are reducing the capacity of economies to
deal with the accelerating problems tightening the limits noose, including water scarcity , fisheries decline ,
deteriorating mineral grades, accelerating costs of ecological disruption such as climate change , agricultural soil
damage and loss, chemical poisoning of ecosystems, species loss, ocean acidification and sea rise. A [collection]
holocaust of extinctions appears to have begun, now possibly including insects and thus jeopardising pollination of
food crops. These and other factors will cut into the diminishing resources available to apply to solving system
difficulties.

Existing political institutions are not capable of making changes of the magnitude required.

Our institutions are reasonably good at making small changes. Elections are usually won by small margins and therefore
governments cannot afford to irritate significant numbers of voters or they will be thrown out. But they cannot adopt
policies that go against the vital interests of significant sectors.

This situation is partly a consequence of the self-interested, competitive, individualistic ethos built into present cultural
and political systems. Burdens are not shared fairly or appropriately but are typically left to groups least able to avoid
them. Because dealing with the global predicament effectively would be seen to involve painful adjustments on a
massive scale people would be acutely sensitive to perceived inequities in the changes they were called upon to make.
Fierce resistance, disputes and appeals would surely proliferate over the new options presented, the changes in
locations, and especially the dramatically reduced levels of income, purchasing and consumption. Authoritarian
governments can force big changes through but current democracies are much less able to.

The problems interact, compound and positively feedback.

Often solving one problem increases difficulties in other areas, especially by increasing energy demand. More
importantly, problems often have multiplicative interactive effects. For instance, Ahmed’s analysis of Middle Eastern
oil producers shows how climate change, drought, rising temperatures, soil loss and rapid population growth are
combining to generate intractable challenges for governments. As their capacity to cope declines they resort to
repression in an effort to contain discontent and maintain order, which feeds back to generate more discontent,
further disrupting productive systems and capacity to cope.

Thus the difficulties now being experienced due to climate change are likely to be swamped soon by a tidal wave of
many compounding positive feedback effects . Several analysts including those listed above have detailed how the
combined effects are likely to trigger sudden and catastrophic breakdown in the global economy.

The alternative is post-capitalist planning via the model of the Communist Party.
That requires a politics of organizing around common experience shaped by the political economy.
It’s generative of a collective class consciousness to effectively contest capital.
Ahmed Kanna 22, Professor, Anthropology, University of the Pacific, "Enlisted in Struggle: Being Marxist in a Time of
Protracted Crisis," Focaal—Journal of Global & Historical Anthropology, Vol. 1, 2022, pg. 2-11. [italics in original]

Dean writes that social movement rhetoric is now dominated by reductive notions of identity, conceptualized as a
“ground of struggle” rather than as a contested “site of struggle” (2019: 16). Those desiring to participate in
movements are offered the path of individualized self-education and “allyship,” one that is consumerist and
“disconnected from a collective critical practice, detached from political positions and goals” (2019: 20).

The Marxist party, by contrast, aspires to meet workers “where they are” in their contradictory, complicated lives. It
seeks to bring workers into a higher, unified class consciousness and militancy. Dean stresses accountability and
collectivity, in particular that which is carried by the term “comrade” in its illocutionary function, which in practice
becomes “an ego ideal : the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful
work. Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are
you doing work that they respect and admire?” (2019: 4).

As became clear from conversations with interlocutors, seeing with one’s actions through a comrade’s eyes does not
only result from accountability but also from seeing oneself as situated in a long tradition of working-class struggle ,
of which the party is a kind of archive. Being a comrade means, further, that you have like-minded militants at your
back. Committing to a revolutionary Marxist project , as Dean explains, is an acknowledgment that communism is
“the long fight” that can only be fought together beyond “one-off actions” with “comrades you can count on” (2019:
4).

The dominant anthropological literature on political movements (Della Porta 2006; Flood 2021; Graeber 2009; Juris and
Pleyers 2009; Maeckelbergh 2009; Razsa 2015) has focused on, and often celebrated, so-called “decentralized and
horizontalist” (non-hierarchical) anti-capitalist organizing, which emerged especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.
My interlocutors, by contrast, would agree with Dean’s recuperation of the socialist party to meet conundrums posed
by objective class-struggle conditions in the United States. They see this form as a more powerful instrument for
uniting diverse struggles, as an arena where workers come together to democratically discuss movement tactics and
strategy. It was with this perspective that Socialist Alternative activists attempted to intervene in the political mass
events that I discuss below.

Applying Dean’s insights, we can see that the militant ethnographer does not merely practice reflexivity, which can often
take the neoliberal forms just mentioned. Rather, they ask how ethnography is informed by the “collective critical
practice” of radical anti-capitalist spaces. In my own case, I began to experience an irreconcilable contradiction between
the extractive, neoliberal model of ethnography, the baggage I carried from previous socialization, and the communist
model theorized by Dean. More specifically, terms such as “comrade,” along with concepts like “democratic movement
spaces” and “uniting struggles,” taught to me by more experienced activists, became central to theorizing the meaning
to activists of the party form.

Enlisted in struggle

Individuals are motivated to join groups like the DSA and Socialist Alternative for a variety of reasons, but a main thread
running through comrades’ narratives highlights a combination of political and social trends and a group’s visible
involvement in activism or political education. As one comrade put it, workers and young people gravitate to socialist
groups because they propose practical solutions to the material crises we face, but also, as another comrade put it,
because they off er meaning. For the latter, Socialist Alternative illuminated a “path for (working class) struggle” in a
society that otherwise pushes down working-class people.

Struggle connotes, in part, a negation of what Mark Fisher (2009) has called “capitalist realism ,” the daily submission to
the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism, but it also has a positive valence and answers the question of how
heightened class consciousness can be achieved . This is reflected in the comment made by a Minneapolis-based
Socialist Alternative comrade on a public Facebook post: “Almost from the minute I got [to Minneapolis], I felt enlisted in
local struggle even as I was being embraced as a newcomer to its political and cultural particularities.” They added:

In reciprocity to the leviathan (sic) efforts of some of the most tireless and dedicated organizers I’ve ever had
the honor of knowing, ordinary people, the rank-and-file of the city’s working class, simply give more of
themselves—whether it be an hour here or there volunteering, showing up to a community meeting or a rally,
donating another dollar to a radical membership-based organization, or opening themselves towards taking on a
more revolutionary role, this place is special because ordinary people dare to imagine and support political
alternatives through heightened levels of self-sacrifice.
Others often articulated similar themes in relation to joining an openly socialist organization. They expressed a
frustration with the alternatives for left -wing activism in mainstream society, such as reforming the Democratic Party or
“realignment.” They were also suspicious of the nonprofit sector, which many saw as aligned with the Democrats.
Occupy’s lack of structure or demands was also problematic. To this they juxtaposed Vladimir Lenin’s idea of the
(communist) “party of a new type” or the earlier iteration of the party originating in the reformist Second International
(Blanc 2019; Elbaum 2018: 148—151).4 Finally, they found Marxist party-type organizations—at least some of them—
to be more democratic and inclusive than other far-left formations, which they critiqued as elitist subcultures.
Alex, an International Women’s Strike organizer and member of another Marxist organization who I got to know well in
common work, further concretized the meaning of “struggle” and situated it, indissociably, alongside membership in a
communist-type organization.5 To really be a Marxist, she said, you have to take active part in contemporary
struggles, but you do not start by pretending that your organization is a mass organization. You start with struggles you
are involved in and your party comrades provide you support in the form of Marxist ideas and their class-struggle
experiences. Throughout that, you can collectively plan to win those around you to Marxism, and eventually you can
scale up toward the goal of becoming a communist party with mass influence. Hailing from a Latin American country
with a rich tradition of working-class militancy and Marxism, she spoke from personal experience.

Alex situated Marxists’ emphasis on learning from the history of past struggles within the socialist party form of
organization. The two are inseparable in her analysis. The notion that the party is an educator, or “memory,” of the
working class—a repository of the historical memory and lessons from past struggles—was centered by many other
interlocutors. In an interview in 2017, Grant, a Black Lives Matter and Socialist Alternative organizer based in New York,
centered the idea of class memory: “I strongly believe in the idea of historical memory. Capitalism works in sound-bites,
with the idea that things are constantly changing.” This antihistorical logic, he argues, helps capitalism reproduce itself.
To concretize this and to contrast it to a Marxist conception of historical memory, he deployed an idea drawn from
Ghana:

I believe in the concept of the Sankofa bird, the bird that’s always looking back on the past. As working people
engage in struggle, of course they have to engage with concrete contemporary questions, lack of food, poor
housing, police terror. But they also have to have a historical memory, that these (problems) are not new, that
that’s how power under capitalism works. Any people engaged in struggle have to know where their struggle
flows from, where their tactics and strategy come from.

For Marxists, these are not just idle musings on the importance of “learning from history.” They are reflections on the
fundamental importance of understanding that the interests of capitalists and workers are always in conflict and of
the correct approach to organization in the workers’ struggle.

Objective conditions

The popularity, on the left, of Sanders and Seattle City Councilor Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative member
(Silverstein 2021), and, on the right, of Trump, are subjective (political) responses to objective material conditions. A
generation ago, economists began to deploy the term “secular stagnation” to describe a US economy with chronic low
growth resulting from exploding debt and wealth inequality (Magdoff and Sweezy 1987). As Harry Magdoff and Paul
Sweezy (1987) explain, low growth, large excess capacity, and endemic unemployment are structural to monopoly
capitalism. The financialization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries merely exacerbated the system’s
contradictions, triggering waves of speculative bubbles and deepening stagnation. In this context, capitalists have
resorted to intensified rounds of accumulation by dispossession to regenerate profits (Brenner 2020). This, in turn, has
produced or intensified a host of effects such as global warming, state carcerality and militarized border regimes,
deepening racial and gender oppressions, and gentrification and other forms of primitive accumulation (Endnotes 2020;
Federici 2018; Jay 2017; Jones 2016).

These objective conditions pose a conundrum for the socialist movement. Deteriorating material conditions both make
workers, especially those suffering racial, gender, and other forms of oppression, less able to spare time and energy on
political organizing and, contrarily, more potentially radicalized. The specific history of the United States is an even more
imposing objective impediment. The US bourgeois regime’s origins as a slaveocracy and white supremacist terror state
still cast a long shadow. This is a history in which racism has been a potent tool for destroying independent working-class
movements. Especially after World War II, anti-communism became the expression of this synthesis of white supremacy
and hostility to labor, an instrument of repression that US imperialism deployed both domestically and internationally to
smash justice movements (Bevins 2020; Burden-Stelly 2021). As Grant discussed above, one of the most important
roles of the Marxist party is as an educator in class struggle, and one of its basic lessons is that fascism grows out of
the crises of capitalism.
Openings for the far right

For my interlocutor and comrade Jake, reading early communist analyses of monopoly capitalism and the rise of fascism at an Oakland branch meeting was eye-opening on the crisis tendencies just described, and helped,
in particular, in understanding the far right (Zetkin [1923] 2017). Jake grew up poor in the Deep South and moved around a number of progressive and radical groups in the South and on the West Coast. In high school, his
girlfriend’s father, a “middleman” for a small business, had politics that would now be called “Trumpist.” “For me, the right wing is very real. This is something (I feel) that a lot of the left doesn’t get.  If things collapse, the
right is ready to step into the breach.” He elaborated with a critique of reformism, in which he included not only Democrats but a large swathe of the new social democratic movement. They seem “to just want tweaks here
and there.  (They’re) not ready for revolutionary struggle, for taking power. I feel there’s a lot of, maybe unconscious, dependency among the left,” a dependence on both the nonprofits and the Democratic Party, including
Bernie Sanders. These leftists are just waiting “for someone to come in and be their savior.”

Rereading Jake’s comments, made in 2017, a year aft er the 6 January 2021 pro-Trump riot, I am struck by his prescience. A lot of those rightwing people, he said, “think the government is thoroughly corrupt.   They’re very
anti-corporate, which they think of as ‘big business,’ but they’re still very capitalist, in the sense of being for ‘small businesses.’ A lot of them support both Trump and Sanders.” And this is why, he urges, “the left must
differentiate itself from the Democratic Party and liberalism.”6

Reformism versus revolution

Other interlocutors shared Jake’s fears that capitalism’s current crisis is fertile soil for far-right tendencies that have
long festered in US society. This analysis often went along with the organizational question. Activists’ logic went like this:
if capitalism will inherently fall into crisis and if this creates openings for the far right, what type of organizing do we
need to do to prevent that? If the Democratic Party and the nonprofits are ineffective in combating the aforementioned
tendencies, might they even inadvertently contribute to them by demobilizing workers? This did not mean that these
activists never worked with Democrats or liberals. There are many examples of fronts between the left and liberals. To
mention a few, there was the 2017 Women’s March, Sawant’s tactical alliances with progressive Democrats on Seattle
City Council, and periodic common work with nonprofits. When Marxists do go into such collaborations, however, they
tend to do so under the tactic of the “united front.” That is, they maintain their organizational structures , rejecting
calls to dissolve them into larger “mass” formations, and they retain their right to critique such alliances.

A good example is offered by Robert, a Black Lives Matter and tenant organizer and Socialist Alternative member from
St. Louis. For him, being in a Marxist organization helped bring both a revolutionary and an international perspective
on the struggle against racist police murders and a path out of the dilemmas of Occupy’s collapse. In contrast to the
latter, Marxism helped him better understand the necessity of articulating political demands —for example, anti-
racist and police abolitionist demands—along with economic demands.

A US Army veteran radicalized by his deployment to Iraq, Robert became active as a communist when he moved to St.
Louis in 2013. “When Mike Brown got murdered, I started appreciating more (the Marxist) approach to movements.” He
described how both the intensive reading of history and theory within the Socialist Alternative activist space and the
support he received to intervene in local struggles helped him better understand the demobilizing role of the Democrats
and nonprofits. The insights of more experienced international comrades also helped: “I was having lots of conversations
with comrades from South Africa and trying to apply their insights. Some of the conversations [involved] trying to figure
out how to connect police brutality to issues of wealth inequality and how to show that to folks, how to show how the
fight in Ferguson is relevant to people outside of North St. Louis, the larger community, because at first it was just
people from Ferguson that were involved, ordinary folks from the community.”

“I took lots of analysis from Occupy, the original writings from the Black Panther Party, synthesizing them,” he
continued. One insight “was the need for demands. How do we actually make more demands to broaden [the]
movement? For example, in the Ferguson movement there were a significant number activists arguing for boycotts
without concrete demands.”7 By “concrete demands,” he meant that “it takes organization to boycott, which wasn’t
there. What I did was to argue for a democratic structure within the movement. If we want a boycott to happen, then
there needs to be a way that the community can voice what their demands are.” The key question, he went on, was
how “to demand justice for Mike Brown while also making broader demands to help the community overall.” Being an
organized Marxist helped him see that that political basis for the boycott was conservative: “The idea that the Black
community has billions of dollars of purchasing power, what that does is it obfuscates the point about systemic
inequality, and also it doesn’t require the amount of energy that would push the movement forward, where you need
people on the street.”
For Robert, one of the positive effects of being active in a Marxist party (Dean 2019) was in the theoretical and
organizational support it provided in navigating the diverse struggles highlighted by the police murder of Mike Brown,
struggles to address the intersecting poverty, class exploitation, and racism that intensified the vulnerability of the Black
working class (Jay 2017). Further, Marxism offered a model of organization that could democratically bring together
and thereby empower these currents of struggle. In the remainder of this article, I analyze two examples where Bay
Area Socialist Alternative members similarly attempted to apply the communist principle of working-class unity. While
the first helped build activists’ confidence and commitment to the group, the second challenged members to rethink
their approach, in particular with respect to coalitional work.
“Fuck dogma!”

Bernie Sanders’s run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016 confronted Marxists with a conundrum. Unlike the DSA, which had always followed their founder Michael Harrington’s injunction that they represent the reformist “left wing of the possible,” Trotskyist groups such as Socialist Alternative, the
International Socialist Organization (ISO), and Solidarity rejected political support for Democrats. Th e editors of Black Agenda Report (BAR), self-identified revolutionary (non-Trotskyist) socialists, expressed a common sentiment with their slogan that the Democrats were “the more effective evil.” Yet here was Sanders, openly
defining himself as a socialist, attacking the neoliberal wing of the Democrats and figures like Henry Kissinger, and firing the imaginations of a large section of the US youth. By the end of 2016, the DSA’s membership quintupled, from around 5,000 to 25,000 dues-paying members, on Sanders’s coattails.

Unlike other revolutionary left organizations, Socialist Alternative decided to support, albeit critically, the Sanders campaign. While this tactic was vigorously debated within the organization, a majority of the membership agreed with the perspective that by popularizing socialism, Sanders’s campaign would heighten the conflicts
within the Democratic Party and advance the process of the formation of an independent workers’ party.8 They did not want to stand outside that process as, they felt, other revolutionary groups were mistakenly doing.

In mid-July 2016, about a month after Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders in the California Democratic primary, Socialist Alternative Bay Area organized a “Beyond Bernie” public meeting at the Berkeley Public Library, which would, it was hoped, help crystallize the kind of democratic space discussed earlier by Robert. Because Sanders
had always made it clear that, should he lose, he would mobilize his supporters for Clinton, many who had gravitated toward his program and who refused to support Clinton wondered what the next steps were. A week before the meeting, and adding solemnity to it, were the police murders of two Black men, Alton Sterling in
Baton Rouge and Philando Castile near St. Paul. Numerous Socialist Alternative Beyond Bernie meetings, held nationally, represented the organization’s attempt to intervene in this moment. Over 200 people attended the Berkeley meeting, of whom only 19 were Socialist Alternative members, many more than we expected. Th is
caused some logistical difficulties: the meeting, which was standing-room only and consisted of short speeches by audience members, became somewhat chaotic.

During her opening speech, a Socialist Alternative Bay Area leader stated: “Obama said that we won’t resolve the history of racism in his lifetime and probably not in his daughters’ lifetime. Well, the Black Lives Matter activists taking to the streets can’t wait until Obama’s daughters grow old.” The attendees reacted with
enthusiasm. The comrade’s message, that the struggle against racism is winnable, and militant street uprisings, such as the current one being led by Black organizers, will lead the way, seemed to resonate. Th is framed the meeting by posing the question: what strategy would both advance the struggle against racism and build upon
the popular demands of the Sanders campaign?

After video greetings from Sawant and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who both discussed future common work between their organizations, numerous people lined up to give statements. Only four speakers, a small minority, were Socialist Alternative members. The first, rushing to the front, was a member of the
Spartacist League. A tiny group often seen selling their Workers Vanguard paper at events organized by other groups, their main “organizing tactic” seems to consist of haranguing other leftists for being sellouts. As if on cue, she immediately launched into a denunciation of the “opportunists” Sawant and Sanders. While a few other
speakers made similar attacks, most focused instead on their particular causes, from teenagers who talked about a campaign to reduce the voting age to 16 to a member of the Alameda Green Party who encouraged attendees to register Green, to a person wanting to sue the Democratic National Committee for voting corruption.

When another person, a member of the Peace and Freedom Party, attacked Socialist Alternative for “endorsing” a “Democratic” politician, an audience member yelled out “FUCK DOGMA! FUCK DOGMA!” Some Socialist Alternative members told him to be quiet and to let the speaker continue. Each person who wanted to speak
was allowed to and given an equal amount of time, approximately two minutes. There was a rough balance between voices that were sympathetic to Socialist Alternative, neutral, and critical of the group.

Politically, the attendees were a microcosm of the US left. The majority had reformist politics and were focused on elections. This includes those who wanted to reform the Democratic Party and the overlapping group whose definition of socialism was coterminous with Sanders’s Scandinavian-inspired social democracy. A minority,
by contrast, were dogmatic, sectarian types who seemed to only want to come to political events to tell others why they were “wrong.” It did feel during and aft er the meeting that, compared to the reformist types, our organization presented a sharper, more focused, class-struggle message, and vis-à-vis the sectarians we seemed
serious, realistic, and good listeners. Most importantly, we seemed to have effectively both clarified the difference between the reformism on display and Marxism, and disseminated the idea that what is needed to win the reforms for which Sanders was calling was an independent party that could unite diverse struggles.

This relative success was not a spontaneous product of our members’ meritorious qualities but a combination of external events and correct organization. Most of our Bay Area branch members, like me, were new to political organizing. Most of us were trying to apply the political education with which we had been collectively
engaged at least since that summer’s national party congress, with its workshops and detailed debates on the “Bernie tactic.” This involved consistent attention to a set of interrelated questions: which demands resonate widely with the working class, which of these are unlikely to be conceded by the ruling class, and how do we
create spaces where people in struggle can meet to discuss next steps?

A few days later, branch leaders sent out a debrief. While it was generally positive, it also cautioned against overestimating our “subjective” (leadership) role. Th e higher-than-expected attendance owed more to the recent California Democratic primary than to members’ organizing eff orts. But it did also highlight positive aspects
of our intervention, which included our distinguishing ourselves from “the ultraleft.” Moreover, while our comrades attempted to “generalize and argue for the bringing together of movements that a mass workers’ party could represent,” the vast majority of other attendees “spoke to their own small agendas, such as detailed
aspects of electoral reform, promoting their nonprofit work, a protest on this or that, overwhelming (sic) pointing people away from coming together.”

At the time of the Beyond Bernie public meeting, we counted among our Bay Area branches a few dozen members, mostly young—with an average age in the mid-20s—and politically inexperienced. Most had been active socialists for barely a year. By contrast, the multiple Seattle branches, with which I volunteered on the 2015
Sawant campaign, was (by Leninist group standards) large, numbering by my own estimate in the triple digits, and counted numerous seasoned activists along with a larger periphery of non-member supporters in the city’s labor and social movements. Th is meeting was, in the local context, a chance to gain organizing and political
intervention experience. Th is experience would be severely tested a few months later in a much more challenging context: the election of Donald Trump. Our attempt to initiate and lead a protest against Trump in Oakland would show how challenging it still was to scale up our organizing, to do coalition work, and to agitate for
spaces of workers’ unity.

A setback

The night of the 2016 presidential election, my partner and I hosted a Socialist Alternative election watch party and fundraiser at our home in Oakland. About a dozen comrades came out. As the results began to indicate a Trump victory, a stunned silence came over the gathering. A comrade named Aaron, a leading Seattle activist
sent by the national organization to Oakland to help build our branch, stood out for his sangfroid. He and a few others proposed that we organize an anti-Trump rally in Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza (OGP), a central location just off City Hall that had been the focal point of Occupy Oakland five years earlier. Within a few short hours of
our posting the Facebook event for the rally, about 5,000 people indicated that they would attend.

Th e next day, November 9, was a blur. Our strategy involved having two to three comrades give speeches, respectively, on the responsibility of the Democratic Party for the debacle and the need for working-class independence, followed by leading a march in downtown Oakland along with flyering and recruitment. I volunteered to
give a speech on a “party of the 99 percent,” a tactic then favored by national Socialist Alternative and a synthesis between the slogan of Occupy and the Leninist notion of a party of class unity.

Shortly before 5:00 pm, about two dozen of us headed over to OGP, which was starting to fill with people. Th e plaza is a complex of spaces including an amphitheater and a large grassy public space off of City Hall, and is the usual gathering point for large political events in the city. The initial trickle of attendees quickly turned into
the largest crowd I and everyone to whom I spoke had seen there since Occupy, an overflow gathering. Th e energy and atmosphere were beginning to get palpably intense.

We set up a table with newspapers, pamphlets, and buttons at the back of the crowd, near the intersection of Broadway and 14th Street, but it soon got swallowed up by the crowd and generated little interest. Th e mood of the attendees, it would soon become clear, was intensely angry and not many people were interested in
political discussions with activists from, for Oaklanders, a still obscure organization. I remember my heart racing in response to this mood (and it still does a little bit today), so uniquely effervescent it was.

Aaron had coordinated with more experienced Oakland comrades to reach out to other organizations that off ered to support the event. This is how we came to co-emcee the rally with Cat Brooks, an eminent Oakland Black Lives Matter leader and future mayoral candidate along with some of her comrades from Oakland’s Anti
Police Terror Project (APTP). Brooks and the APTP were (and are still) well-known in Oakland’s activist community. Th at they shared the stage with us we saw, initially, as a credit to our organization, though eventually we, and maybe they, came to see the collaboration more ambivalently.

Soon aft er 5:00 pm, with the sun going down, Aaron, looking down from a raised stage, asked me whether I would be willing to be the first speaker. “Sure,” I unthinkingly said. Fate would soon intervene to prevent me from going first. Aaron soon asked if it would be okay if another comrade, Chris, went first and whether I would
not mind moving his (Aaron’s) car, which in a hurry he had illegally parked. I was one of the only people in the group who knew how to drive a stick shift.

Aft er parking the car, I took a spot behind the stage. Chris, a white man in his early 20s and an inexperienced party member, began his speech, and the situation almost immediately unraveled. He received some initial light applause when he called out Trump for being racist and misogynist. However, when he then launched into
how eight years of “the fi rst Black president” brought no promised change or hope, the heckling started. I still remember cringing at Chris’s tone-deaf remark and thinking: “Oh shit, we bit off more than we can chew.” Chris became defensive and started talking about how he was then reading a book on the Black Panthers, then
moved into a somewhat excruciating anecdote about how his younger brother, who is gay, called him in tears aft er Trump won. It came off as pandering.

As more hecklers began piling on, Chris exited the stage, visibly shaken. I went up to him, patted him on the back, and told him not to beat himself up for it. I made a mental note to discuss with him later lessons from this incident. Th e next speaker was a middle-aged African American man, a prominent leader from the APTP. He
tore into Chris. He spoke about how he would not allow a white man to lecture him about the history of “my people.” Th is brought huge cheers. His speech was passionate, full of rousing rhetoric, as were the following speeches, including the one by Cat Brooks, a brilliant public speaker. My heart sank. I went up to Aaron and told
him that my speech, which now seemed hopelessly academic if not pedantic, would be a disaster. Admittedly, I was especially nervous about the topic of my speech, on the necessity of a multiracial party, in a moment where Black and other BIPOC speakers were focusing on the racial trauma of the imminent Trump presidency.
Eventually, the speeches ended, and the marchers took to the streets. Th e energy of the rally’s initial moments dissipated, the result of a combination of police crowd control and a lack of clear political leadership and messaging. Specifically, although the other speakers were rhetorically sharp, none offered an answer to the
question of “where to next?” that we, in our admittedly fumbling way, were trying to address. Th e much-hoped-for scaling up from the Beyond Bernie event would, at least in the Bay Area, have to wait for at least some months.

The Oakland protest was part of a wave of large protests around the country. Our participation and attempt to lead it exposed important flaws in Bay Area Socialist Alternative’s organizing capacity. In particular, our inexperienced group had yet to develop deep, organic connections both with the region’s working class and with its
large, diverse activist community. Further, our tactics that day had failed to consider that the Democrats, and Obama in particular, were more popular than we had predicted. Our less-than-thorough tactical preparation was exposed by our lack of strategy for a protest that we should have expected to be large, angry, and impatient
with speeches more appropriate for calmer settings. On the positive side, our role in the protest, which was covered by CNN and other major media outfits, did gain some national attention. Several contacts reached out to our national organization to ask about joining. Our organization gained a small number of new members and
received a brief moment of positive media coverage, but, at least in Oakland, we learned that we had not yet done the work of basic coalition-building, let alone that of creating an organization that can, to paraphrase Lenin, win masses upon masses of workers to communism.9

Conclusion

The 2016–2017 anti-Trump protests were a key moment in which the small US socialist movement sought to pose the question of working-class political independence. Should the movement break with the Democratic Party or not? Groups like Socialist Alternative, the ISO, and others at this time were quickly eclipsed by the “big
tent” DSA, which, with its much larger membership and reformist politics, effectively answered the question in the negative. This eventuated in two crises in the movement, one in the revolutionary wing and, eventually, another in the reformist wing. The former either folded their organizations into the DSA or dissolved.10 The
latter, represented by the DSA, re-turned “to form as a social-democratic lobbying operation within a capitalist party,” a party that “now oversee(s) a society in full-blown crisis, ravaged by Omicron, record levels of inflation, and horrific climate disasters” (Smith and Post 2022).

If the revolutionary wing of the socialist movement has posed the question of political independence, the Black Lives
Matter movement, which led some of the largest protests in US history in the summer of 2020, showed that the
potential for it exists. It was no surprise—at least from a socialist perspective—that the US regime met this movement
both with repression and cooptation. The compounding crises in which the United States finds itself entangled are both
clarifying and disorienting. They clarify the enormous violence, structural and physical, required to reproduce the
contemporary racial capitalist order. But it is also challenging to grasp the trajectory of events clearly. With one half of
the political regime more openly embracing authoritarianism, it is undeniable that something sinister is rumbling within
US society. My interlocutor Jake’s comments about the actuality of the far right in the United States are both prescient
and arresting. They also express the paradox that, as the far right builds a base by conjuring the specter of communism,
the only thing that can stop it is a revolutionary labor movement—in short, politically, communism.

Even liberals are now developing a materialist analysis of fascism and figuring out that racism is a ruling class tool to
divide the working class.11 A Marxist might say “better late than never,” but the solutions on of er are, as we would also
say, “idealistic and utopian.”12 They propose, for example, that “we have to agree on basic democratic principles” such
as respecting one person–one vote and recommitting to electoralism. The interlocutors profiled here know that these
are illusions, that the threat of fascism is the sharp end of the capitalist class’s arsenal to prevent self-emancipation
by the working class. The crisis gestates in decades of economic development and manifests in the violence of the right
and the confusions of the left.

Despite these setbacks, my interlocutors continue to participate in revolutionary organizations, including Socialist
Alternative and others that (unlike Socialist Alternative) refuse to fold into the DSA, and which continue to adhere to the
Marxist party form. For them, the intensifying general crisis is continuous with the history of US racism and capitalism.
Unlike the disorientation experienced by large swathes of the left, they seem both more serene and steely in their
determination to win workers to Marxism. This should not be puzzling. While liberals and progressives, who are usually
disorganized—lacking organizations rooted in Marxist theory and history—tend toward demoralization (“fascism is
around the corner!”), the Marxists profiled here and many others know that they have comrades at their back in the
long struggle for socialism.

Impact---2NC
There is momentum for a rapid alteration to avert the worst excesses of capital. However, that
requires embracing a material, institutional program, in opposition to neoliberal agents presently
gaining the advantage.
Walden Bello 22, Co-Founder & Senior Analyst, Focus on the Global South. International Adjunct Professor, Sociology,
State University of New York, Binghamton, "The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism," in Post-Capitalist Futures:
Paradigms, Politics, & Prospects, Chapter 2, 2022, pg. 25-29. [edited OCR errors; italics in original]

Things are different today. The level of discontent with and alienation from neoliberalism was already very high in the
global North before the coronavirus hit , owing to the established elites’ inability to reverse the decline in living
standards and skyrocketing inequality in the dreary decade that followed the financial crisis. In the US, the period was
summed up in the popular mind as one where the elites prioritised saving the big banks over saving millions of
bankrupt homeowners and ending large-scale unemployment, while in much of Europe, especially in the south, the
people’s experience of the last decade was captured in one word: austerity.

And in much of the global South, the chronic crisis of underdevelopment under peripheral capitalism, exacerbated by
neoliberal ‘reforms’ since the 1980s, had already shredded the legitimacy of key institutions of globalisation like the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, even before the 2008 crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020, in short, roared through an already destabilised global economic system suffering
from a deep crisis of legitimacy. The sense that things had run out of control—certainly out of the control of the
traditional political and economic managers—was the first shocking realisation. This mass perception of astonishing
elite incompetence is now connecting to the already deep-seated feelings of resentment and anger boiling over from
the post-financial crisis period.
So the subjective element, the psychological critical mass, is there. It is a whirlwind that is waiting to be captured by
contending political forces. The question is who will succeed in harnessing it .

The global establishment will, of course, try to bring back the ‘old normal’. But there has simply been too much anger,
too much resentment, too much insecurity unleashed. And there’s no forcing the genie back into the bottle. Tough for
the most part falling short of expectations, the massive fiscal and monetary interventions of capitalist states have
underlined to people what is possible under another system with different priorities and values.

Neoliberalism is dying; it’s only a question of whether its passing will be swift or ‘slow’, as Dani Rodrik (2020)
characterises it.

Who Will Ride the Tiger?

Only the left and the right are serious contenders in this race to bring about another system.

Progressives have come up with a number of exciting ideas and paradigms developed over the last few decades for
how to move towards a truly systemic transformation, and these go beyond the left-wing technocratic Keynesianism
identifed with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Among these truly radical alternatives are the already mentioned Green
New Deal, democratic socialism, degrowth, deglobalisation, ecofeminism, food sovereignty, and the social philosophy
‘Buen Vivir’ (living well).

The problem is these strategies have not yet been translated into a critical mass on the ground. The usual explanation
for this is that people are ‘not ready for them’. But probably more significant as an explanation is that most people still
associate these dynamic streams of the left with the centre left. On the ground, where it matters, the masses cannot
yet distinguish these strategies and their advocates from the social democrats in Europe and the Democratic Party in
the US that were implicated in the discredited neoliberal system to which they had sought to provide a ‘progressive’
face. For large numbers of citizens, the face of the left is still the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany, the Socialist
Party in France, and the Democratic Party in the US, and their records are hardly inspiring, to say the least.

In the global South, leadership of or participation in liberal democratic governments also led to left-wing parties being
discredited when these coalitions adopted neoliberal measures that came under the rubric of ‘structural adjustment’,
even as the ‘Pink Tide’ in Latin America ran into its own contradictions, and communist states in East Asia became state
capitalist systems with a strong dose of neoliberalism. Once seen as a break with the past, the Concertación in Chile, the
Workers’ Party in Brazil, Chavismo in Venezuela, and the so-called Beijing Consensus are now seen as part of that past.

In short, the centre-left’s thorough-going compromise with neoliberalism in the North along with progressive parties
and states going along with, if not actively adopting, neoliberal measures in the South tarnished the progressive
spectrum as a whole—even though it was from the nonmainstream, non-state left that the critique of neoliberalism and
globalisation initially issued in the 1990s and 2000s.

It is this dubious legacy that must be decisively pushed aside if progressives are to connect with the mass anger and
ressentiment that are now boiling over and transform them into a positive, liberating force.

Advantage: Far Right

Unfortunately, it is the extreme right that is currently best positioned to take advantage of the global discontent,
because even before the pandemic, extreme right parties were already opportunistically cherrypicking elements of
the anti-neoliberal stands and programmes of the independent left—for instance, the critique of globalisation, the
expansion of the ‘welfare state’, and greater state intervention in the economy— but putting them within a right-
wing gestalt.

So in Europe, you had radical right parties—among them Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the Danish
People’s Party, the Freedom Party in Austria, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary—abandoning parts of the old
neoliberal programmes advocating liberalisation and less taxation that they had supported and now proclaiming they
were for the welfare state and for more protection of the economy from international engagements, but exclusively
for the benefit of the people with ‘right skin color’, the ‘right culture’, the ‘right ethnic stock’, the ‘right religion’ (Bello
2019: 123–141).

Essentially, it’s the old ‘national socialist’ class-inclusivist but racially and culturally exclusivist formula, whose
consummate practitioner in recent times has been Donald Trump. But, unfortunately, it often works in our troubled
times, as shown by the unexpected string of electoral successes of the far right that have pirated large sectors of
social democracy’s working-class base.

Meanwhile in the global South, leaders with cross-class appeal, like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Narendra
Modi in India, harnessed for their authoritarian projects the popular discontent with longtime liberal democratic
regimes whose severely unequal social structures belied their democratic pretensions. This sidelined progressive
parties that had either compromised with neoliberalism, were imprisoned in classist paradigms that failed to understand
the new ‘populist’ realities, or were debilitated by sectarian feuds.

The cases of Duterte and Modi underline two phenomena associated with the rise of the far right globally. One is the
importance of charismatic leadership. The great German sociologist Max Weber explored different types of authority:
rational legal, traditional, and charismatic authority (Weber 1958: 245–264). Extending Weber’s insights to the liberal
democracies of India and the Philippines, one might say that charismatic leadership emerges to address the deep
tension between the rational-legal ideological order of democratic equality that coexists with the reality of a traditional
order marked by hierarchy and inequality.

The other, related insight derived from the cases of Duterte and Modi is the way charismatic leaders are able to
overcome drawbacks like their regimes’ poor economic performance and secure massive approval in democratic
electoral exercises, then use this democratic approval to advance their authoritarian agenda. This is the democratic
dialectic that lies at the heart of the new authoritarianism, whereby charismatic leaders are able to secure the massive
support of ordinary citizens who may not approve of all their initiatives but are willing to give these personalities the
benefit of the doubt. This dialectic between democracy and authoritarianism results in a paradox whereby the more
spontaneous and free an election, the more legitimacy it provides the leader’s project to move towards a full-fledged
authoritarian regime (Bello 2020).

…But Don’t Count Out the Left

The challenge to the left is to go beyond imagining post-capitalist regimes to materialising such alternatives in
concrete social and political movements that can contend for political power. There is an urgency to this since, despite
its reliance on democratic means to come to power, the right is likely to shut of political competition once in power as
well as engage in a reconstruction of civil society to secure mass loyalty for authoritarian rule. It is sobering to
remember that Hitler remained extremely popular among Germans even in the midst of the heaviest aerial
bombardment in history, and that Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and that of Salazar in neighbouring Portugal lasted
almost 40 years.

But it would be foolish to count out the left. History has a complex dialectical movement, and there are often
unexpected developments that open up opportunities for those bold enough to seize them, think outside the box, and
willing to ride the tiger on its unpredictable route to power— of which there are many on our side, especially among the
younger generation.

The logic of capitalist realism is wedded into the social fabric, greased by the logics of the 1AC.
Samuel M. Clevenger & Jacob Bustad 21, Teacher, Sociology & History of Sport, Towson University; Assistant
Professor, Kinesiology, Towson University, "Consuming the Alternatives: Mark Fisher and the Crisis of Capitalist
Realism," The Sociological Review, June 2021, pg. 2.
The power of capitalist realism lies in the fact that consumerism is nourished by anti-capitalism. Here Fisher extends
from the Slovenia philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s (1989, 33) contention that ideology is “not an illusion masking the real
state of things” under capitalism “but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself.” This
psychoanalytical approach to the question of ideology helps explain how consumers can be cynical about the capitalist
order and fully engage in consumerism at the same time. Because the workings of capital, Fisher (2009, p. 13) wrote,
“do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief,” consumers do not have to subscribe to capitalist ideology
to be willing participants in the system. “So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to
continue to participate in capitalist exchange” (p. 13). In fact, the system depends on consumers disavowing its logic
and operations because “we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic
distance towards money in our heads” (p. 13).

Fisher theorized the contemporary problem of capitalist realism as a substitute for postmodernism, becoming convinced
that postmodernism was no longer capable of describing the nature of capitalist society in the twenty-first century.
When “[Frederic] Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism,” Fisher (2009, p. 7) wrote, “there were still, in
name at least, political alternatives to capitalism.” The younger generations of today, however, were born after the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are generations who have grown up in a world in which
socially regressive policies like the deregulation of marketplaces, austerity measures, and the glorification of
individual “freedoms” over matters of social equality are seen as permanent fixtures of the political world. Moreover,
these are generations who do not know modernism as some preceding, influential “ideal for living”, but rather as an
aesthetic style they encounter when they consume cultural products. There is no “confrontation with modernism”
under capitalist realism (p. 8), for modernism has been thoroughly commodified to the point that we take its relegation
to the “vanquished” past for granted.

Capitalist realism was also part of Fisher’s (2009, p. 30) attempt to explain, in cultural terms, the seeming “dejected
apathy” of younger generations towards the permanence of capitalism. It is not that younger generations are unaware
of their depressive conditions, but that they also “know” (in ideological terms) that there is nothing that can be done
about it beyond the pursuit of pleasure and an ironic cynicism directed at capitalist living. Fisher termed this
“reflexive impotence” (p. 21): they know that “something is missing” and they feel unfulfilled as consumers, but they
are trapped in a cycle of hyper-mediated, continuous, and now digital consumption. Even when it involves consuming
products that premise a remedy for the emotional and health-related deficits (social anxiety, depression, dyslexia,
attention deficit disorders) of life under contemporary capitalism, the consumerism continues unabated.

What better time to imagine an alternative to modern, capitalist sports?

Fisher’s theory is admittedly a depressing perspective on twenty-first-century life, because it suggests not only that
there are few options left for challenging capitalist hegemony, but that the remaining options are constrained by and
vulnerable to capitalist realism. Yet, this is arguably the point Fisher was trying to make in his writings on the subject.
What if we are now in a historical conjuncture in which we are using language and tactics ill-suit to advancing a
coherent, anti-capitalist movement? Even the notion of “adapting” to new social conditions, Fisher (2009, p. 28)
wrote, speaks to a kind of managerialism that remains wedded to capitalism’s binary logic (productive/unproductive,
active/inactive). In this sense, the theory of capitalist realism is useful not only in terms of analyzing our present
catastrophic yet seemingly permanent circumstances, but in helping us understand how complicated the task of building
an alternative is.

AT: Social Death---2NC

Social death theory is wrong---conflates the oppressors’ view with the truth of black of existence,
which re-centers the slave owner’s perspective and prevents struggles for re-humanization.
George Lipsitz 17. Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 2017. “What is
this Black in the Black Radical Tradition?” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. by Johnson and Lubin, 2017. p. 108-110.
Three miracles seem to characterize the history of Black people in the United States. The very survival of Black people in
the face of murderous brutality and genocidal intent qualifies as a miracle. The enduring reality of Black humanity in a
society that has used every means at its disposal to destroy Black dignity and deny Black people the opportunity to
exercise their full humanity appears miraculous. The historical record of democratic aspiration and achievement by
Black people, of creating democratic opportunities for themselves and extending them to others, seems to defy
normal rational explanations. Despite the social death at the center of the slave system and the organized
abandonments of today's neoliberal capitalism, despite beatings, lynchings, shootings, mass incarceration and
systematic impoverishment, Black people have survived and thrived. In slavery, African people in the Americas owned
virtually nothing, not even the skin on their backs. They had every reason to give in to despair. Yet they somehow
managed to survive, to extend recognition and respect to each other while in bondage, and to maintain a
commitment to the linked fate of all humans. Time and time again, Black people have countered vicious
dehumanization with determined and successful re-humanization . Insisting on their own humanity and the humanity
of all people , even that of their oppressors, they have been at the forefront of what Dr. King called “the bitter but
beautiful struggle” for a more just and better world. From the egalitarian politics of abolition democracy in the wake
of the Civil War and the participatory democracy of the civil rights movement to the contemporary insurgencies
waged under the banners of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, struggles for Black survival and Black humanity
have repeatedly linked the termination of existing racist policies to the creation of new democratic practices and
institutions. Forced to cope with the nadir of political evil over centuries, Black people have responded consistently by
forging advanced concepts of a deeply politicized love. Perhaps precisely because brutality and oppression can make
people decidedly unlovable, African people in America have been adept at finding ways to perceive something left to
love inside themselves and in others. That ability has enabled their survival, the preservation of their humanity, and
their emergence as the nation's foremost champions of democracy and social justice. The people who were
systematically denied access to the fruits and benefits of democratic citizenship and social membership turned out to be
the people who valued democracy the most and who did the most to extend it to others. [END PAGE 108] Cedric
Robinson has demonstrated that the three miracles were not really miracles at all, but rather products of a collective
intelligence developed over generations of struggle. In Black Marxism, Robinson defines the Black Radical Tradition as
“the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and
motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”1 Thus in many
ways, the greatest achievement of the Black community was itself, its emergence as an aggrieved and insurgent polity
committed to social justice. The “Black” in the Black Radical Tradition is a politics rather than a pigment, a culture
rather than a color. Yet this Blackness does not presume a unified homogenous community with only one set of
interests, needs, and desires. On the contrary, Robinson's research reveals that the key building blocks for Black
survival, Black humanity, and Black democracy came from the lower rungs of Black society, from the plantations and
slave quarters, out of the contradictions of the rural regimes of slavery and debt peonage and the living conditions in
ghettos of northern and western cities. Experience taught the Black poor and the Black working class that racial
capitalism entailed “an unacceptable standard of human conduct”2 that they needed to counter with a politics that
was “inventive rather than imitative, communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than republican,
Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist.”3 Robinson's emphasis on political struggle as the main explanation
for Black survival, humanity, and democracy reminds us not to confuse the grandiose aspirations and illusions of the
powerful with the actual lived experiences of those they control. Slavery did mandate legally and militarily supported
social death, but slaves worked assiduously and effectively each day, every day, each year, and every year to create a
rich social life.4 As Robinson argues, “Slavery gave the lie to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of
oppression and exploitation.”5 Domination produces resistance, and resistance plants the seeds of a new society
within the shell of the old. As Robinson explains in Black Movements in America, "The resistances to slavery were the
[END PAGE 109] principal grounds for the radically alternative political culture that coalesced in the Black communities
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of revolutionary, liberal and nationalist impulses among Europeans
in North America.” 6 Declaring Blacks to be less than human could not make them so , even in the eyes of their
oppressors. Research by John Blassingame, George Rawick, Sterling Stuckey, Herbert Gutman, and Stephanie Camp
(among others) reveals how slaves fused African retention and New World invention to forge a culture that affirmed
their humanity and the humanity of others.7 They recognized this common humanity through multicultural,
multiracial alliances with poor whites and others in maroon communities. 8 In colonial Louisiana, Blacks reached out
to Native Americans for help in resisting slavery.9 Slave owners, however, were less successful in preserving their own
humanity. In order to maintain the illusion of complete control, they tortured, whipped, hanged, burned, and
dismembered their "property" when it displayed signs of having human will.10 Black people witnessed white people's
inhumanity and pitied them. As early as the 1820s, David Walker argued that while whites lost the moral capacity to
perceive the evil they enacted, they nonetheless knew "in their hearts" that Blacks were human. He argued that it was
precisely this recognition that propelled their cruelty and brutality: they presumed that Blacks resented them and, if
given the opportunity, would do to whites what whites had done to Blacks.11 In his history of the New Orleans slave
market, Walter Johnson notes a similar loss of humanity among slave owners. Whites invested more than money in
the slave system; they looked to it to elevate them beyond the status of ordinary mortals and became outraged when
their chattel refused to conform to the roles they had been assigned. Johnson notes: The greater the transformative
hopes slaveholders took with them to the slave market, the more violent their reactions to the inevitable
disappointment of their efforts to get real slaves to act like imagined ones ... If they had to, they would use brutality to
close the distance between the roles they imagined for themselves and the failings of the slaves they bought as props
for their performance. 12 [END PAGE 110]

Alt---2NC
Alt---AT: Footnoting---2NC
Only that understanding makes movements effective.
Marc L. Hill 16, Distinguished Professor, African American Studies, Morehouse College, Preface, in Nobody, Casualties
of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, 2016, pg. 17-20

To be Nobody is to be abandoned by the State. For decades now, we have witnessed a radical transformation in the role and
function of government in America. An obsession with free-market logic and culture has led the political class to craft
policies that promote private interests over the public good . As a result, our schools, our criminal justice system, our military,
our police departments , our public policy, and virtually every other entity engineered to protect life and enhance prosperity have been at least

partially relocated to the private sector . At the same time, the private sector has kept its natural commitment to maximizing

profits rather than investing in people. This arrangement has left the nation’s vulnerable wedged between the Scylla of
negligent government and the Charybdis of corporate greed , trapped in a historically unprecedented state of precarity .

To be Nobody is to be considered disposable. In New Orleans, we saw the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina followed by a grossly unnatural government
response, one that killed thousands of vulnerable citizens and consigned many more to refugee status. In Flint, Michigan, we are witnessing this young century’s most profound illustration of
civic evil, an entire city collectively punished with lead-poisoned water for the crime of being poor, Black, and politically disempowered. Every day, the nation’s homeless, mentally ill, drug
addicted, and poor are pushed out of institutions of support and relocated to jails and prisons. These
conditions reflect a prevailing belief that the
vulnerable are unworthy of investment, protection, or even the most fundamental provisions of the social contract. As
a result, they can be erased, abandoned, and even left to die.
Without question, Nobodyness is largely indebted to race, as White supremacy is foundational to the American democratic experiment. The belief that White lives are worth more than
others—what Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap”—continues to color every aspect of our public and private lives.1 This belief likewise compromises the lives of
vulnerable White citizens, many of who support political movements and policies that close ranks around Whiteness rather than ones that enhance their own social and economic interests.

While Nobodyness is strongly tethered to race, it cannot be divorced from other forms of social injustice . Instead, it must be
understood through the lens of “intersectionality,” the ways that multiple forms of oppression operate simultaneously against the vulnerable.2 It would be impossible to example the 2014
killing of Mya Hall by National Security Agency police without understanding how sexism and transphobia conspire with structural racism to endanger Black trans bodies. We
cannot
make sense of Sandra Bland’s tragic death without recognizing the impact of gender and poverty in shaping the
current carceral state. To understand the complexity of oppression, we must avoid simple solutions and singular answers.

Despite the centrality of race within American life, Nobodyness cannot be understood without an equally thorough
analysis of class . Unlike other forms of difference, class creates the material conditions and relations through which
racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are produced, sustained, and lived . This does not mean that all forms
of injustice are due to class antagonism, nor does it mean that all forms of domination can be automatically fixed through universal class struggle. Rather, it
means that we cannot begin to address the various forms of oppression experienced by America’s vulnerable without
radically changing a system that defends class at all costs .

This book is my attempt to tell these stories of those marked as Nobody. Based on extensive research, as well as my time on the ground— in Ferguson, Baltimore, New
York City, Atlanta, Hempstead, Flint, and Sanford—I want to show how the high-profile and controversial cases of State violence that we’ve witnessed over the
past few years are but a symptom of a deeper American problem. Underneath each case is a more fundamental set of economic conditions ,

political arrangements, and power relations that transforms everyday citizens into casualties of an increasingly
intense war on the vulnerable. It is my hope that this book offers an analysis that spotlights the humanity of these “Nobodies” and inspires principled action.

Alt---AT: Footnoting---Race
Class analysis is a floor, NOT, a ceiling for understanding race.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 11, Professor, African American Studies, Princeton University, "Race, Class and Marxism,"
Socialist Worker, 01/04/2011, https://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism [italics in original]

Thus, any
serious discussion about Black liberation has to take up not only a critique of capitalism , but also a credible
strategy for ending it. For Marxists , that strategy hinges on the revolutionary potential of a unified , multiracial and
multi-ethnic working-class upheaval against capitalism.
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and
now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized.

Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades , Marxism has been maligned as, at
best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst, " incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described
"anti-racist" Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes:

[L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only
color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity politics," which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help
working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that
low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and
dismisses the lived reality of people of color.

Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little
working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the
industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks.

Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for
the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be challenged
directly.

Here, Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class reductionism," meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more
important than race ; reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to struggles over
economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and "dismiss[ing] the lived reality of

people of color "-- which , of course, presumes Left activists and Marxists to all be white .

What do Marxists actually say?

Marxists argue that capitalism

is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few . Because it is a system
based on gross inequality , it requires various tools to divide the majority -- racism and all oppressions under capitalism serve
this purpose . Moreover, oppression is used to justify and " explain " unequal relationships in society that enrich the
minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of
Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. As Paul D'Amato wrote:
Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery
is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx
pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness.
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American
society . It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation . Many on the left today talk about class
as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the
fundamental organization of society under capitalism.

Moreover, it
is popular today to talk about various oppressions , including class, as intersecting . While it is true that oppressions
can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the
economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and
ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies.

Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race under capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question
of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote:

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is
slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery
is an economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and
you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus
slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own
countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.

Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But what about race?

Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx
was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as his critics make him out be.

One must raise the question: If

Marx was reductionist , how is his unabashed support and involvement in abolitionist struggles in
England explained ? If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised that slavery and capitalism
were incompatible , and simply waited for slavery to whither away. W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black
Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in
the midst of the Civil War:

The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be
prostituted by the tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "Slavery" on the banner of
armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man
was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained "slavery to be a beneficial institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the
new edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor...

They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the
matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.

Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant race discrimination that flowed from it were not just
problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the threat of losing work to slave labor.

This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective
factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor
cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."

Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a means by which workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also become
mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American
situation between Black and white workers, Marx wrote:

Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English
worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself
into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices
against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with
interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press , the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means
at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working
class , despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully
aware of it.
Out of this quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first, that capitalism promotes
economic competition between workers; second, that the ruling class uses racist ideology to divide workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of workers suffer
oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class.

How the Marxist theory of racism developed

These questions get to the heart of Marxism and really begin to address whether Marxism subsumes political questions to economic ones. Here's how Marx described the issue of ideas
themselves:

The production of ideas , of conceptions , of consciousness , is at first directly interwoven with the material
activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the material intercourse of men appear at this stage as the direct
efflux of their material behavior...Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc....Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence
of men is their actual life process.

This does not mean that humans are only automatons with no thought, creativity, ideas or agency, a nd that life is a linear and
determined existence. Human action or inaction constantly impacts and changes the environment and the world around us. But human

activity is shaped by the material world . Racism is ideological , but it has tangible implications in the real world. Stating
that racism is ideological does not somehow, then, render it less important , but distinguishes the difference between a
question of material conditions and consciousness .
It is undeniable that some in the socialist and Marxist traditions--primarily in the 19th and early 20th century--assumed that because African Americans were overrepresented as workers,
simply focusing on the class struggle would by itself liberate Black workers and the poor from their oppression. But Marxist theory on the "Black question" has certainly evolved since then.
Marxism should not be conceived of as an unchanging dogma. It is a guide to social revolution and political action, and has been built upon by successive generations of Marxists.

But theory doesn't precede material and social conditions -- it flows from them. In the mid-1920s, when hundreds of thousands of African
Americans made their way to the urban North, socialists and communists were forced to theorize how they would relate to Black workers on a mass scale--something that had never been an
issue before. Black revolutionary Claude McKay reported as a delegate to the Communist International in 1922:

In associating with the comrades of America, I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions when the white and black comrades had to get together, and
this is the greatest obstacle that the Communists of America have got to overcome--the fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertained
toward Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin directly intervened in the American Communist Party (CP) and directed it to immediately begin political agitation among African Americans. Thus, the
founding convention of the Communist Party in 1919 stated merely that the "racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each
intensifying the other." By 1921, after Lenin's involvement on the question, the stated approach of the CP had shifted, with its program stating:

The Negro workers in American are exploited and oppressed more ruthlessly than any other group. The history of the Southern Negro is the history of a reign of terror--of
persecution, rape and murder...Because of the anti-Negro policies of organized labor, the Negro has despaired of aid from this source, and he has either been driven into the
camp of labor's enemies, or has been compelled to develop purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims.

The Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic, political and social equality...Its task will be to destroy
altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep apart the Black and white workers, and bind them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow
of our common enemy.

By the early 1940s , thousands of Blacks had joined the Communist Party . The politics of communism became the
dominant political framework for most of the nonwhite world as hundreds of millions of people of color across the
globe were inspired by the writings of Lenin on the rights of oppressed nations to fight for their own freedom. Lenin
wrote:
The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state...The proletariat must demand freedom of political
separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by "their own" nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words; neither
confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor nations...

On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed nation must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organizational unity, of the
workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity
with the proletariat of other countries.

So it is an odd charge that Marxism is incapable of comprehending the racialized nature of capitalism , while
simultaneously becoming the politics that led the vast majority of non-white national liberation movements in the
20th century. The critique of Marxism also minimizes the extent to which Black revolutionaries and the Black struggle
itself shaped and impacted the trajectory of Marxist thought .

Thus, C.L.R. James , the

Black revolutionary from the Caribbean and collaborator with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, advanced Marxist
theory when he wrote--presciently in 1948, years before the emergence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. South:
We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in
present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with
great speed and vigor.
 We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it
is waged under the banner of democratic rights and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party.

We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to
make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

In this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the independent Negro struggle for democratic rights.
That is our position. It was the position of Lenin 30 years ago. It was the position of Trotsky which he fought for during many years. It has been concretized by the general class
struggle in the United States, and the tremendous struggles of the Negro people.

The question of white workers

Much of the
controversy about Marxism and race is over whether Marxist theory appropriately comprehends the centrality of
race in U.S. society and beyond. But what is really at the heart of the debate is the view of revolutionary Marxists that : one,
white workers do not have a privileged status in this country ; two, white workers can gain revolutionary
consciousness; and three, therefore a multiracial and united working-class revolution is possible.

Marxists start with the premise that all workers under capitalism are oppressed , but some workers face further
oppression because of additional discrimination like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant ideas, religious
oppression, etc. Thus, in the United States, white workers are oppressed, but not to the same degree as non-white
workers.
Oppression is not just an ideological tool to divide groups of workers, but has real material consequences as well. Because of racism, for example, the median household income for white
families as of 2006 was over $50,000 a year. For Blacks, it was just under $32,000. By every measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.

Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of
the differences. Are the disparities the result of white workers benefiting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average because Black
workers make less?

To accept this explanation means to ignore the biggest beneficiary in the disparity in wages--employers and bosses. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying Black workers less
brings the wages of all workers down--the employers enjoy the difference.

This is not to deny that white workers receive some advantages in U.S. society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantage--and with it, the illusion that the
system works for them--then racism would not be effective in dividing Black and white workers.

The distinctions and differences among workers function to create a distorted view of reality that turns the traits attributed to the oppressed into a kind of "common sense," which in turn
deepens those divisions. African Americans are poorer, have worse housing, go to worse schools, have a shorter life span and generally live in worse conditions, which helps to perpetuate
the image in the minds of white workers that African Americans are inferior.

But the problem with so-called "common sense" is that it is based on surface appearances and information, and does not reach deeper to give a systemic explanation for the disparities that
exist in society. Instead, it creates what Frederick Engels was the first to call "false consciousness."

False consciousness is simply ruling-class ideology that is used to explain away or cover up material reality . The point is that
white workers, to the extent that they accept white supremacy, contribute to capitalism's ability to exploit them more effectively. The purely "psychological" advantage obscures the very
real material deficit that racist oppression helps reinforce.

Du Bois explained how "false consciousness" worked in the South and why a labor movement never developed there in the aftermath of slavery:

The race element was emphasized in order that property holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But
the race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to
prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.

For Du Bois, racism wasn't metaphysical , nor did it exist autonomously from class . Its development is a result of one
class' efforts to keep power away from another . Du Bois did come up with a famous formulation of poor whites gaining a "psychological
wage "--as opposed to a material wage-- from racism . But the psychological wage was to make the white worker feel superior because he wasn't Black, even though he would have
nothing material to show for it.

This leads to the question: If it isn't in the interest of white workers to be racist, then why do they accept racist ideas? But the same question could be asked of any group of workers. Why do
men accept sexist ideas? Why do Black workers accept racist anti-immigrant ideas? Why do many Black Caribbean and African immigrant workers think that Black Americans are lazy? Why
do American workers of all races accept many racist ideas about Arabs and Muslims? If most people agree that it would be in the interest of any group of workers to be more united than
divided, then why do workers accept reactionary ideas?

There are two primary reasons . The first is competition . Capitalism operates under the laws of false scarcity , which
simply means that we are all told there isn't enough to go around , so we must compete with each other for housing,

education, jobs and anything else valued in society . While the scarcity is false, the competition is real, and workers
fighting over these items to better themselves or their families are often willing to believe the worst about other
workers to justify why they should have something and others should not.
The other reason is, as Marx wrote in the German Ideology, that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class . We
live in a racist society, and therefore people hold racist ideas. The more important question is whether or not those ideas can change. The
consciousness of workers is both fluid and contradictory because of the clash between the "ruling ideas " in society and
people's lived experience. So, for example, while the media inundates people with constant images of Blacks as criminals or on

welfare, people's experience with Blacks at work completely contradicts the stereotype.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explained the phenomenon of mixed consciousness this way:

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so
far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can...be historically in opposition to his activity.

One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with
all fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. The
person is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a
future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.

Whether or not a group of workers has reactionary, mixed or even revolutionary consciousness does not change their objective and real function as exploited and oppressed labor. The
question of consciousness affects whether or not workers are in a position to fundamentally alter that function through collective action.

Just because white workers, to take a specific example, may at different times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of
the poor in the U.S. are white, the majority of people without health insurance are white and the majority of the homeless are white. While Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately
affected by the economic reality of the U.S. today, in a country that is more than 65 percent white, it is a reality they share with the majority of white workers.

This shared reality shows the potential for a united struggle to better the conditions of all workers. But by the same token, losing the battle against racism undermines the overall project of
working-class revolution. As Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction about the defeat of the post-Civil War Reconstruction policies that briefly put the power of the federal government
behind equal rights for the freed slaves:

The political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far exceeded by its astonishing economic results.

The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to
this, even after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the
mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working
conditions.

Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method,
which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear
each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

Marxism and Black America today

Today, the need for a revolutionary alternative to the failures of capitalism has never been greater. The election of Barack Obama came 40 years after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights
Act, the last piece of civil rights legislation from the civil rights era of the 1960s. Despite
the enormous shift in racial attitudes symbolized by the
election of a Black president in a country built in large part on the enslavement of Black people, the condition of the vast majority of African
Americans today is perilous.

For almost two years, Black unemployment has fluctuated between 15 and 17 percent . Almost 20 percent of African Americans under the age of 65 are
without health insurance compared to 15 percent for the rest of the population. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, a home owned by an African American or Latino family is
76 percent more likely to be foreclosed upon than a white-owned home.

The wipeout of home ownership among African Americans threatens to widen even more the gap in median family net worth. In 2007, the average white family had a net worth of more

than $171,000 compared to less than $29,000 for African American and Latino families. More than 25 percent of Blacks and Latinos languish below the
official poverty line, and more than a third of Black and Latino children live in poverty.

The distressing numbers that document the full impact of racism and discrimination in the U nited S tates have no end . But
while conditions across Black America threaten to wipe out the economic gains made possible by the civil rights movement, millions of white workers are meeting their Black brothers and

sisters on the way down. Tens

of millions of white workers are stuck in long-term joblessness , without health insurance and
waiting for their homes to be foreclosed upon.

Thus, the
question of Black, Latino and white unity is not abstract or academic , but must be a concrete discussion about
how to collectively go forward.
For most of the 20th century, legal racism both North and South created a tension-filled cross-class alliance in the African American community that was focused on freedom and equal
treatment. The legislative fruition of that in the form of legal civil rights removed the barriers to advance for a small section of Black America. To be sure, the "Black middle class" is tenuous,
fragile and, for many, a paycheck or two away from oblivion, but a more stable and ambitious Black elite most definitely exists, and their objectives and aspirations are anathema to the
future of the mass of Black people.

No serious Marxist organization demands that Black and Latino workers put their struggles on the backburner while
some mythical class struggle is waged beforehand. This impossible formulation rests on the ridiculous notion that the
working class is white and male , and thus incapable of taking up issues of race , class and gender . In fact, the American
working class is female , immigrant , Black and white . Immigrant issues , gender issues and anti-racism are working-class
issues and to miss this is to be operating with a completely anachronistic idea of the working class.

Genuine Marxist organizations understand that the only way of achieving unity in the working class over time is to
fight for unity today and every day . Workers will never unite to fight for state power if they cannot unite to fight for
workplace demands today . If white workers are not won to anti-racism today, they will never unite with Black workers for a revolution tomorrow. If Black workers are not
won to being against anti-immigrant racism today, they will never unite with Latino workers for a revolution tomorrow.

This is why Lenin said that a

revolutionary party based on Marxism must be a "tribune of the oppressed," willing to fight against
the oppression of any group of people, regardless of the class of those affected. And this is why, despite the anti-Marxist slurs
from academics and even some who consider themselves part of the left , the idea that Marxism has been on the
outside of the struggle against racism in the U.S. and around the world defies history and the legacy of Black revolutionaries who
understood Marxism as a strategy for emancipation and liberation.

The challenge today is to make revolutionary Marxism , once again, a part of the discussion of how to end the social
catastrophe that is unfolding in Black communities across the United States.

Perm---AT: Do Both---False Radicalism---2NC

The injection of pessimism presents a distorted signifier---that fractures momentum and supplies
fuel to capitalist resistance.
Dr. Giorgos Charalambous 21, Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of Nicosia, "Reclaiming Radicalism:
Discursive Wars and the Left," Triple C Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2021, pg. 225-228. [italics in original]

To reconcile substantive and positional understandings of the radical left, the positional distance between a radical and
a centre-left can be seen as a more radical or subversive espousal of equality and also liberty and fraternity; as far as this
effectively translates into anti-capitalism, draws from a broadly Marxist and critical influence and seeks systemic
alternatives, whether through reform or insurrection. A radical left is thus left of the centre at a distance approaching
the extreme end of the spectrum rather than the centre, but it is also an anti-capitalist left or a left critical of capitalism,
seeking to turn emancipatory visions into practice. The radical left is not only a left broadly inspired by the socialist
ideal, but its very radicalism is fuelled by its socialist heritage. It also reaches far in organisational format and
mobilisation repertoires (intellectuals, trade unions, social movements, parties, militant research collectives, solidarity
movements, churches and more), and is substantively a plural left, both in terms of ideas and structures. It is about
reforms and extra-institutional action, verticality and horizontality, internationalism, the rights of oppressed
communities, private and public sector workers, blue collars and white collars, immigrants, intellectuals, students,
feminists, environmentalists, queers, indigenous people, anarchists and statists.

What reclaiming radicalism entails is reconstituting and capitalising on the centrality and importance of these
defining features as opposed to the obsolete, divisive or epiphenomenal ones within the public sphere. This may
appear as an explicitly rhetorical task, if not also a self-evident truth. In reality it entails a number of political
imperatives:

 To deconstruct current understandings of, and reactions to, extremism, indicating the real extremisms (of the
nominal centre) and uniting behind an understanding of them as such. Accordingly, it must be recalled that in
many countries, the extreme right is a historical outgrowth, at some times a political breakaway and at others a
collaborator of nominally centrist spaces. In this direction it is pertinent to maintain and defend positional
distance and thus the advocacy of ‘extreme measures’ as today necessary for even the most basic aspects of the
human condition; while fighting with full force extremism’s anti-humanist and anti-democratic strain.
 To aim at disseminating radical framings of civil disobedience and attempt to strike a long-term equilibrium
between social movements and politicians on this issue. This engenders the expectation, demand and
 promotion of social activism among radical left party politicians: that is to say, their solid and institutionalised
fusion with the masses at every possible opportunity, as a way forward in dealing with personalistic and
vertical political structures and bringing the militant left back into focus.
 To formulate and propagate visions of a better world , endorsing the search for utopias: in essence, to
reacquire teleology. Without as tangible a plan as possible as to what the world should look like, ontological
lines of distinction from other spaces can more easily be blurred in political discourse . It is thus important to
consolidate utopian thinking in the collective radical imaginary , to speak away from the terminology of
laissez-faire and through the concepts of critical political economy – scarcity and abundance, leisure as freedom,
full employment, socialism as process, worker councils, collectivised production (see Gindin 2018).
 To draw clear lines of demarcation between anti-democracy on one side and emancipation through
reconfiguring liberal democracy on the other side. This does not mean a total rejection of political liberalism but
the root and branch change of liberal economic policies, which fuel the democratic deficits of politics.
 To effectively communicate the lens of internationalism, explicitly rejecting ethnic, cultural or other
demographic particularism, either in what concerns the forces of production or beyond them. This means
distinguishing with the utmost clarity the universality ingrained across all different traditions of the radical
left, away from the particularism that extreme right nationalism and ethno-populism evoke. To achieve this
demarcation of sides, although nationalism must be accepted as a progressive force where it exists that way, it
cannot be a tool for claiming political legitimacy. In this vein, civic understandings of nationalism on the radical
left must always be traced down to their founding stones – egalitarianism, anti-imperialism and anticapitalism.
 To avoid elevating the features of populist strategies above their historicity. Their status as a space within a
space should be maintained as a given. Also, their contribution to the domain and field of anti-capitalist and
progressive struggle can only be partial rather than holistic. Opposition to capitalism is much wider and more
complex than populist stratagems can provide for as a politics of resistance.
 To constantly strive to claim a plural and inclusive people. For the radical left, this means above all to accept and
effectively communicate the pluralism of its thought and practice, to turn it into a good thing rather than
identify it as a vulnerability or lack of cohesion. Radicals should present such pluralism as a positive sign of
multiple ongoing radical experimentations and evidence of democratic debate and deliberation across different
ideological currents. Such diversity is also an indication that a socialist future can only be a pluralist one. Any
divergences over teleology or strategy then must not a priori constitute lines of division. Rather the issue at
hand is how to utilise political affinity; how distinct modes of mobilisation and ideological thinking can serve
points of convergence on policy and political goals.

Ontology and epistemology are interrelated, as established by the Kuhnian explanation of scientific revolutions.
Reclaiming radicalism is inevitably a project that involves both discourse and action: it is a performance as much as it
is a grounded practice. While radicals do best to engage with conceptual issues in the study and talk of the collective
actors representing them, political behaviour will always feed back into terminology and the castigation of collective
democratic and social struggles. In lieu of further elaboration between these two aspects of politics, let us summarise
how: when electoral campaigns evoke national sovereignty simplistically and through sloganeering, nationalism
resonates more easily as a defining feature of the left. When alliances occur with nationalist and right-wing forces,
alleged affinities between the two parts of the alliance will gain face validity. Only if carefully balanced in electoral
rhetoric and supported by radical programmatic positions and untarnished actions on the ground will socialism avoid
taking ‘the back seat’ in questions of self-determination. For left populism, if the discursive strategy of constructing a
counterhegemonic, sovereign people is aligned with the politics of personalised organisations or sectarianism, it is
cancelled out. This is both because of the negation of the people’s central role as a collective whole over individual
identities and due to the fact that fragmentation is opposite of what left populism is about – mass unity of a relatively
heterogeneous crowd.

Similarly, when government participation (as in Italy and France during the late 1990s, or Greece in the 2010s) leads to
endorsing welfare retrenchment or foreign imperialist wars or austerity packages, the far right can more effectively
claim an antiestablishment profile, a ‘neo-socialist’ or ‘neither left nor right’ identity; and the radical social milieu often
becomes alienated. Political compromise becomes an important concept and the lines separating it from co-optation,
de-mobilisation and self-negation are thin. When radicals cease to be radical they face setbacks. And much of the
aftertaste leads to divisions and sectarianism. This is in any case not an easy or temporary pathology to get rid of, given a
broad, complex and rich ideological heritage. Moreover, to speak of socialism to promise a utopia and explicitly invoke
transformative potential is perhaps the discursive tactic most in need of ontology. Without a solid, scientific,
collective and rigorous background of policy elaboration and theoretical discussion, a discourse which brings
teleology in from the cold without making the case for socialism’s plausibility is exposed to all the common
accusations dealt with here.

Any form of contradiction , disjuncture or incongruence within the radical left will eventually be discursively
articulated into an offensive against it . This attack can either concern its false promises, oversimplifying pledges
and thus demagogic style, or more generally its veritable continuity with other political forces, which engage in
‘politics as usual’.

4. Conclusion

Reclaiming radicalism can be fuelled when collective efforts by popular and workers’ movements, politicians and
intellectuals are made to alter the existing dialectic between discourse and action. For this act of resistance to be
fruitful, collective agency and a certain degree of unity, a famille spirituelle, are necessary. Consistency is also
important, but both of these potentialities are influenced and often obstructed by historical time and national
specificities, as well as the contingencies of elections and parliamentary structures. Distorting signifiers of left
radicalism have come into widespread circulation because of pre-existing structural factors. Yet agency can either be
present, or not. Reclaiming radicalism is a complex and difficult task to achieve, especially in the age of fake news and
given that the radical left political space as a whole is fragmented. Yet doing so is visibly pertinent in the battle of ideas
and interest if radicals want to compete and struggle on their own terms and not those of others.

Finally, inasmuch as the left needs to plan specific strategies to deal with systemic labelling and the discursive distortion
of its identity, there is also a grave need to decipher strategic success and failure in doing so thus far. Further study in
this direction will be most effective if it is both conceptual and empirical: that is, simultaneously identifying how
discourse can be legitimised or delegitimised by action, and how this effect has operated in particular historical eras
and instances.
 Marx K: Michigan—v. ID

Identity focus fragments the rev.

Das, 20—Professor at York University (Raju, “Identity Politics: A Marxist View,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol.
8: Iss. 1, Article 5, dml) [table 1 omitted]

According to the intersectionality concept: there is a matrix of oppression in which race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
are all important, they all interact and compound the effects of individual axis of oppression6 (see the Table below). The
idea is to allow for a peaceful coexistence of the different perspectives on society, which emphasize different relations
and identities. Intersectionality is a scaled up – magnified -- version of identity politics.

To the extent that intersectionality appears to recognize multiple bases of oppression and how they are interlocked, it
surely has some usefulness. It is true that not only is a black woman oppressed by race and gender but also does she
suffer from the effects of how race and gender compound each other.10 Thus intersectionality provides a reasonable
description of some aspects of society. But it is a deeply flawed way of rigorously thinking about oppression and
inequalities in terms of their causality . The intersectionality framework, for which many in academia, media and politics
have fallen for, and the broader project of identity politics, cannot answer questions such as the following about the
mechanisms of oppression. There are objective reasons why the capitalist class appropriates surplus labour (surplus
value) from the working class and class differentiation among a community of commodity producers happens,11 but is
there a similar explanatory framework within identity politics which can answer: why it is that men oppress women or
why it is that whites oppress blacks? What is it about men that gives them the causal power to and creates a need for
them to, oppress women? What is it about whites (including white men and women) that gives them the causal power
to oppress blacks (including black men and black women), and why do they (need to) oppress? If all the people -- whites
and blacks, and men and women, and upper castes and lower castes – in a future society have an opportunity to have
access to what they need for a flourishing, fulfilling life, what might happen to social oppression? If people currently do
not have access to what they need, is it mainly because of racism, caste-ism, etc.?

Identity politics, including intersectionality, fragments the society in an extreme manner (see Table 1, and Appendix 1).
As Cassell (2017), a critic of intersectionality notes:

As there are infinite configurations of overlapping oppressions and dominant characteristics, intersectionality theory
posits that we all exist in an infinite web in which we are all simultaneously oppressing and being oppressed by each
other.

Take the acronym LGBTQ. It was originally LGB. Variants over the years have ranged from GLBT to LGBTI to LGBTQQIAAP
shifted, and identity groups quarreled about who should be included or excluded, and who come first – that is, whose
oppression is more central.12 The intersectionality framework cannot explain what is common to the experience of all
the oppressed groups and subgroups. 13 Metaphorically, what explains the nature of the surface itself on which the
different roads intersect, and without which there can be no roads. And, what explains whether any of these roads is
more important than another (the primacy question)?

Social oppression is a matter of how individuals behave in their everyday lives. Individuals are treated as individuals and
not as ‘the ensembles of the social relations’.14 If oppression is mainly perpetuated at the individual and
interpersonal level then, ‘everyone who isn’t experiencing a given form of oppression is complicit in perpetuating it
and benefits from it’.

Identity politics, including inter-sectionalism, given its emphasis on the individual and on difference, eschews politics
based on the common ground . This is justified epistemologically, at least partly. Patricia Collins (1990: 234) says that:
The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences with penalty and privilege
that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges and for clearly identifiable subordinate groups,
subjugated knowledges.

The inference from the above (post-modernist) claim is that:

no one group has a clear angle of vision nor does it possess the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the
absolute ‘truth’.15

It is assumed that minorities (blacks, low-income women, gays, etc.) do not have interests cutting across their sectional
identity-specific interests and that they do not necessarily see themselves that way. One might ask: do all the people of
the world not have to eat , have shelter , need education , health-care and transportation , and so on? Clearly,
underlying identity politics and intersectionality is an inadequate view of what it is to be a human being: that we have
material needs, a view that abstracts from the fact that the humankind ‘must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and
clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.’ (Engels, 1883).

Identity politics is, more or less, ‘class-less politics’. 16 This is the identity of identity politics. The roads of single
oppressions (e.g. race, gender, etc.) that are said to intersect are built on a sandy surface of subjectivity (and a
superficial view of the real experiences of people). To the extent that class is at all mentioned by adherents of identity
politics, it appears in four forms.

Firstly, class is seen in its idealistic form: class as classism – i.e. in the sense of cultural-social prejudice against the
working class people (or ‘the poor’), so class is seen as more or less equivalent to the ideology of sexism or racism. The
thinking behind ‘ the politics of the body ’ – the politics based on (social constructions) of the female body, skin color,
sexuality, etc. -- is applied to class and the working class.17 The objective relations of class are transformed into a
subjective process.

Secondly, class is seen in a gradational form. That is, when any material dimension of class receives any attention, this
is done in the superficial – distributivist -- sense of some people having less income, etc. than others. Thirdly, in the
gradation view of economic problems, the problems of low income, etc. are seen as experienced by those who are
socially oppressed (e.g. black women) , i.e. as ‘problems of the disproportionately poor’ (Gimenez, 2018: 105), and not
by wider layers of the property-less people, including the vast reserve army as well as the small-scale producers who
are slowly losing their assets thanks to the operation of the law of value.

The scope of class (in its gradation form) is often narrowed to the interests of the middle-class people (i.e. high-income
sections of the wage-earning class, who, given their disposable income and wealth, are closer to the capitalist class than
to the working class as a whole). However, the middle class is seen as comprising various socially oppressed groups (e.g.
middle class women or middle class black people). In practice , the demand for justice, for example, for women,
becomes effectively the demand for justice for the socially-privileged women (e.g. white women) and then, for the
middle class white women, and so on. In other words, in terms of economic aspects of identity politics, the question of
who gets what is decided on the basis of who is seen as who (not all workers but women workers and not all women
workers but middle class women workers and not all middle class women workers but white middle class women
workers, and so on).

Fourthly, class is seen in oppression terms. Class as a category is seen as masculinist and what not. So, in this view, the
working class is automatically seen as white males. Such a conception is blatantly mistaken. It theoretically devalues
women’s labour in the world of capitalist production and exchange. It is empirically Euro-American centric (consider
millions of women workers in Asia). If the working class is seen as necessarily white and male, clearly it is to be seen as
oppressor.

Fifthly, in the politics of recognition, and given its superficial understanding of economic inequality (which can
apparently be addressed by some redistributive government policy in the current society), there is absolutely no
acknowledgment that class has any primacy over other sorts of social relations. Class is mentioned in the same
breath as race and gender, sexuality, and so on.

Overall, the identity of identity politics is defined by: its emphasis on subjective aspects of people’s lives; a gradational
and (Weberian) stratificatory view of economic inequality; neglect of class relations of exploitation and control over
property; and its goal of making capitalism a little tolerable but not transcending it. Identity politics is intra-class or class-
fractional politics. It is, more or less, (petty-) bourgeois politics. It is advanced as a tool to undermine/obscure class
politics. It is based on an overpoliticized view of society: it is the cultural politics of exclusion/domination. One culturally-
defined group excludes another group from society’s resources and dominates over that group.

Identity politics and/as bourgeois ideology

Identity politics – in terms of its underlying thinking and its practice – in many ways an ideology of bourgeois society.
Identity politics is a bit like the capitalist political-economic strategy of slicing up of the commodity chain : the car as a
commodity is sliced into tyres, windows, doors, etc. which are made in different places. In identity politics, every
separate segment is invited to assert one person’s rights against another person’s rights. The implication is that: those
who subscribe to identity politics break down the struggle into its smallest component parts : pitting black women
against black men, black disabled women against black able-bodied women, and so on. By breaking down and
separating things in this way they are dividing the movement, diverting attention from the main issues and pitting
different groups of the oppressed against each other. (IMT, 2018; italics original).

As mentioned earlier, identity politics encourages people to think about how oppression is sliced into different little
sites: a white woman is oppressed by gender, but she is also said to oppress blacks. If it is believed that, for example,
black men are ‘privileged’ relative to black women and black heterosexual men are privileged relative to black
homosexual men, then the totality of oppression is indeed fragmented. It is as if one person can freely choose from a
basket of ‘commodities’ of identity. This is an attitude that sits very well in a society where people are free to change
their employer (while they are not free not to work for a wage) and a society that valorizes the freedom of the middle-
class consumer.18 Identity politics ‘ mimics ’ the ideology of private property and of competition in bourgeois society.
It insists on the primacy of subjective experience as the source of understanding and changing the world .19 It is
argued that only those who have lived through oppression understand it and are able to fight it, so those who are
sympathetic to the plight of oppressed and marginalised groups without themselves having a direct experience of
oppression are relegated to a secondary role as passive supporters.20 If the direct experience of oppression is the main
or the only condition for one to develop an insight into oppression and how to fight it , then the implication is that: the
insight into oppression as a form of ‘cultural wealth’ is the monopoly of a few as if it is their private property . Given
the matrix of oppression, there are many perspectives on oppression, all of which are partial perspectives (e.g. a
gender perspective, a race perspective, etc.), and they are all competing, 21 but there is no common ground among
them. To the extent that some layers that are already privileged in some ways want a larger part of the national
(economic) cake in a country without challenging the control over the production of the cake itself (that is without
challenging capitalist economics, politics and ideology), identity politics is more or less the ideology of the
(petty-)bourgeoisie used to justify its own economic and political privilege and contribute to the reproduction of
capitalism.

The nature of the political in identity politics and its limits

We have seen that in the identity politics framework, including in its intersectionality form, social oppression often
becomes mainly a matter of how people think. 22 Material aspects of oppression when they are included in identity
politics ensue from the thinking, mental construction (e.g. what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a
black, and so on). Therefore, a most important form of struggle is seen as political correctness in language, speaking, and
writing.
Implicit in the enterprise of identity politics is a narrow view of knowledge and action. Our knowledge is, of course,
shaped by our own personal experience. To the extent that poor blacks are subjected to more police brutality than poor
whites, the experience of poor blacks is very significant. It matters very much. But in the formation of knowledge (and in
conducting political action), personal experience is only one factor. Our knowledge – our view of what is happening and
why, and our view of what is to be done -- is not only shaped by our own empirical experience but also by our
theoretical consciousness – i.e. consciousness of the system as a whole, of its underlying social relations and causal
mechanisms which are expressed in the form of experience.23

If the direct experience of a process is the sole cause of knowledge and of our view of how to act on it, then how would
identity politics people respond to this remark from Marx about himself?: ‘nobody had written so much on money and
had so little [of it]’ (Marx quoted in Eagleton, 2011:171). Marx was not in India when the sepoy (troops) mutiny
happened as a revolt against British rule in the mid-1850s. Marx was not in the US before during and after the abolition
of slavery. Yet, he could write against colonialism and slavery from the standpoint of the colonized and the slaves. He
advocated for the fight against colonial rule whether in Ireland or India and he advocated for the need to fight against
slavery and racial oppression and inspires contemporary Marxists to take an anti-colonial stance.

Marx was hardly someone who had the experience of being exploited as a worker but he is so far the best theorist of
exploitation.24 Does one have to be urinated on by an upper caste person for one to develop insight into caste
oppression? Does one have to be lynched by a Hindu mob in India for one to develop insight into such lynchings and
solidarize with those who are lynched? In the on-going protests in India against the unconstitutional Citizenship
Amendment Act that grants citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants into India and denies citizenship to Muslims, the
protestors are indeed both Muslims and non-Muslims.

The fact that oppressions based on race and on gender, etc. intersect does not mean that there is a necessary need for a
united struggle against injustice, according to identity politics. The demand for recognition for women or blacks or
lowest castes is not based on what unites them (e.g. the nonsatisfaction of their material needs, and the assault on their
democratic rights as a Marxist would argue, on which see more in the next section), but on the fact that blacks see
themselves as different from whites, women see themselves different from men, and so on.

With some justification, it is possible to say that identity politics is ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. When wage-earning
people with lower income and economic insecurity, forced to compete for jobs or welfare, use their upper caste or racial
advantage to outcompete others, that is identity politics ‘from below’. These two forms feed into each other. When
ruling class politicians talk about policies aimed at keeping the borders safe from immigrants (especially, immigrants
who share a different ethnic background than the majority community in the destination country), or when employers
divide the members of a union based on race, that is identity politics from above.

Identity politics is indeed often driven by the politics of elitism, led by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leaders. It is against,
or it neglects, the interests of toilers, the majority. It is generally the case that the elites (e.g. black mayors; low-caste
politicians, female and lesbian professors, business people) – i.e. people from already-advanced layers -- from the
oppressed communities get some benefit from identity politics.25 Identity politics has highlighted the importance of
oppression. That is a good thing. But as already indicated above, most other aspects of it are extremely problematic.

Identity politics, as practiced by middle class people, rarely raises the economic and political issues that concern
women from poor peasant or low-paid working class background. The identity politics does nothing to ensure that all
toilers – toilers from all castes, all races and genders, and all people with varying sexual orientation -- get what they
need in life. So those who benefit by exploiting the toilers and all those who benefit from such identity-based divisions
are let off the hook . The exploiters and their political supporters have little to fear from identity politics.

While on the surface identity politics seems to benefit the socially oppressed groups, in actuality, ordinary people get
little from identity politics. This is not accidental : identity politics, given its view of class and class politics, and given its
fragmentary nature of political movement, serves as a tool to undermine the conditions for action that will result in
ordinary people getting benefits. Identity politics undermines any ideological-political project of fighting against the
structure of class relations.

It is generally the case that significant reforms are possible as a result of struggles for revolutionary changes .26
Identity politics divides the working class, and in this way and in other ways, undermines the condition for
revolutionary struggles as well. So, identity politics ultimately undermines the extent to which reforms (including
legal reforms) in the conditions of the oppressed can be granted , and remain in place. And, to the extent that identity
politics demands material redistribution , and to the extent that some concessions (reforms) are granted due to
identity politics, they are more likely to affect a small section within an oppressed group (e.g. employment for a few
people within an oppressed group) at the expense of the class of workers and class of small-scale producers.

Capitalism makes planetary crisis, death-worlds, and planetary extinction inevitable. The
alternative theorizes through the Necrocene as a hermeneutic for analyzing history and its potential
trajectories. This opens new spaces for theoretical and material engagement against capitalism.
Batalla '20 [Oriol; 4/26/21; Ph.D. Fellow at the University of Barcelona Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and
Society, Adjunct Professor at the University of Rovira i Virgili, M.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis from
the University of Amsterdam; "Green Capitalism? Politics from the Necrocene to the Eleutherocene," E-Cadernos CES,
Issue 34, p. 64-85]

In recent decades, scientists , environmentalists , political analysts and activists have portrayed the reality of our
planet as a consequence of the climate emergency we are living in. Citing a litany of crises – from the melting of ice
sheets and the mass-bleaching of coral reefs to the rising sea levels and their surface temperatures , the subsequent
crisis of the Climate Refugees in the Pacific Islands, and the sixth mass-extinction of species – a variety of sociopolitical
movements, cultural objects, studies and research topics have come to the center of the ecological discourse .
However, as Boris Frankel (2018: 48) stated, “what is striking is not just the volume of evidence warning us about the
extreme dangers of climate breakdown, but just how relatively ineffective those reports have been in altering most
forms of ‘business as usual’”. Vividly exemplifying the transparency of such a plight are the Planetary Boundaries
proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Center in 2009, which seek to define the various broad groupings of single
planetary crisis that can lead to an irreversible planetary catastrophe .1 [Footnote 1 Begins] These boundaries are
climate change , ocean acidification , stratospheric ozone depletion , biogeochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles ,
global freshwater use , rate of biodiversity loss and integrity, land-system change , chemical pollution , and
atmospheric aerosol loading . The boundaries of biosphere integrity and biochemical flows of nitrogen and
phosphorous cycles have been transgressed to a critical level , and most of the others are on the verge of crossing the
threshold as well. [Footnote 1 Ends] As they state, “transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be
deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt
environmental change ” (Rockström et al., 2009).

In a global paradigm in which sociopolitical measures are nowhere near able to meet the goal of keeping these
boundaries controlled, some economic and political spheres are opting for either a Green New Deal ( GND ) or Green
Capitalist alternatives in order to solve the current ecological and, subsequently, cultural, political and economic crises
unfolding from it. In light of this, the present article ambitiously aims to generate a critique of green capitalism as a
business-as-usual perspective that is, as in all types of capitalism, extractivist, inegalitarian and deathly. This will be done
by using the Necrocene nomenclature as opposed to the Anthropocene, employing it as a hermeneutical heuristic to
analyze this form of capitalism from a Critical Theory and Environmental Humanities perspective. By acknowledging the
deathly and extinctive nature of capitalism in all its forms , this essay will try to illuminate how thinking through the
Necrocene and emphasizing death and extinction as a consequence of capitalist accumulation might be fruitful to
challenge capitalism by bringing its inconsistencies and its lethal nature more convincingly to the fore . Thus, the
Necrocene might show itself as a valid analytical tool in order to pave a way towards the Eleutherocene: the age of
liberated Earth and Humanity.

From the Holocene to the Necrocene

The climate stability of the geological age of the Holocene provided humanity with long-lasting resources with which
it established fruitful and robust civilizations. All recorded history took place during said geological epoch . From an
ontological , material and epistemological point of view, this stability was the firm ground on which humanity could
construct the foundations of everything we know , from love to art, from politics to religion, and from ethics to beauty,
just to name a few. Now, this epoch seems to have vanished . With the aforementioned planetary boundaries
mediating the different issues at hand so humankind can grasp the magnitude of the ecological crisis, the agency of
humankind itself is at stake. That is, the effects of human activities on the atmosphere have impacted nature as a
whole , breaking the barrier that alienated nature from humanity in the nature/culture dialectic (McKibben, 1989). In
other words, as Ursula K. Heise highlighted, “nature in the sense of a domain apart from human intention no longer
exists” (2016: 8). Consequently, as Paul Crutzen postulated, “it seems appropriate to assign the term ‘ Anthropocene ’
to the present, [...] human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past
10-12 millennia” (Crutzen, 2002: 23). As one of the few ideas in geology that has been studied in the humanities and
social sciences, the Anthropocene allows us to come to terms with vast periods of time in human history and,
consequently, with the history of capitalism .

Nevertheless, the Anthropocene narrative does not underscore the fact that the planetary modifications and the
radical consequences they produce are due to capitalist practices . In turn, the Anthropocene, by using anthro (Greek
for human), blames humanity as a whole, disregarding any distinction among human beings. Whether they consider
themselves pro-capitalism or not, the vast majority of causes and consequences of humankind’s modification of the
Earth to unsustainable levels have been the side effects of the praxis of the one billion wealthiest inhabitants of the
Earth through an extractive , mass-accumulation capitalist logic and cultural ideology (Christensen and Heise, 2018).
Thus, and even though one could understand the Anthropocene as a period of modification of the Earth beginning with
the first civilizations, the Anthropocene narrative does not align with the reality that the current ecocidal crisis has not
been triggered by humanity as a whole but by capitalism in all its dimensions .

Amongst many different nomenclatures proposed for this uncanny epoch in the debate of the “many Anthropocenes”
(Chakrabarty, 2018), Jason W. Moore (2016) defined the current age as the Capitalocene, an age marked not only by the
geological, but also the cultural, ecological and political power of capitalist accumulation. Within this nomenclature,
Moore (2016) developed his crucial idea of the Law of Cheap Nature, a dialectic in which “Nature” as a categorical frame
outside “Humanity” entangles not only non-human ecosystems but also certain members of human societies such as
people of color, women and people living in semicolonial regions. In this way, Moore intertwines political economy and
the ecocidal motion of the planet in a world-ecology system.

Within this debate, Justin McBrien (2016) coined this epoch with the term Necrocene , the age of death and extinction
as a result of capitalist accumulation. Considering the duality Moore proposed in the Law of Cheap Nature, McBrien
(ibidem: 116) twists the Capitalocene narrative to put death and extinction as front and center inherent traits of
capitalism since in his view “capitalism leaves in its wake the disappearance of species , languages , cultures and
peoples . It seeks the planned obsolescence of all life . Extinction lies at the heart of capitalist accumulation ”.
Namely, this alternative narrative intends to shed light upon the theoretical inconsistencies of the Anthropocene
narrative as it frames global problems as problems created by humanity as a whole. As previously mentioned, the
current ecological and subsequent multifocal crises that are intertwined within it have been magnified from the
Industrial Revolution to the current late-neoliberal system , causing the individual death and the holistic extinction of
different human and non-human ecosystems .
For McBrien (2016), a fundamental part of the Necrocene narrative is the idea of necrosis , as a process that comes
after a traumatic injury which causes the destruction of the cells by their own enzymes . Capitalism is, therefore, “the
reciprocal transmutation of life into death and death into capital ” (ibidem: 117). That is, capitalism is going
towards its own extinction through its own logic of reproduction of productivity . In this light, capitalism looks
as though it is framed within the expansion of production and accumulation, and the effects of it on the grounds that in
fact allow such reproduction. Namely, for instance, that capitalism would perish with a massive degradation of non-
human ecosystems a priori . This is in fact what the Necrocene theory acknowledges by making it abundantly clear
that the current logic of neoliberalism 2 no longer considers such dangers in a direct way. [Footnote 2 Begins]
Neoliberalism is a capitalist political philosophy and economic theory that has as central characteristics the reduction
of state intervention to regulate economy, the expansion of market mechanisms and law , privatization, the disarming
of trade unions and labor organizations, a reduction of state expenditure, propulsion of endless economic growth
through whatever means exist, and prioritizing private capital . Neoliberalism sees competition as a defining
characteristic in human relations, and any attempts to control this competition are seen as attempts against liberty.
Theorized at the beginning of the 20th century, it was brought into globalization thanks to Ronald Reagan (United
States), Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Maastricht
treaty at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. However, contrary to Marxism or Anarchism, neoliberalism
is seldom referred to as an ideology in the public debate, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of most of the
countries in the globalized world with the slogan “ there is no alternative ” in which neoliberalism appears as a
Darwin-like natural selection . If you do not succeed, it is not due to a systematic failure or because you simply could not
inherit a fortune, but because you did not try hard enough. To put it succinctly yet in very broad strokes, capitalism is a
higher category or a system, whereas neoliberalism is a modus operandi and philosophy within capitalism . For more
information on neoliberalism and how it works in the current world, see How Did We Get into this Mess? (Monbiot,
2016). [Footnote 2 Ends] In other words, capitalism seems to be leading itself towards its own eventual
extinction , at the expense of the annihilation of everything else .
Traditional Marxism understands that capitalism is a mode of production with profit and accumulation as its unique
goals and, through this perspective, the Necrocene could be proven as inconsistent as capitalism does not seek
extinction as its final aim. Nonetheless, the Necrocene acknowledges this adherence to the Law of Cheap Nature as
intrinsic in capitalism and the consequent extinction processes that unfold from it. It is indeed via this drive to
accumulate and profit that the Law of Cheap Nature becomes possible, namely, the exploitation of nature and labor-
power reframed in the world-ecology between Nature (exploited agents) and Humanity (exploiters). In other words,
capitalism triggers death and extinction, but does not seek them, and as a logic able to infect everything within its reach,
it has even absorbed the current ecological turmoil to a certain extent. As previously mentioned, although capitalism
might be the last thing to die within capitalism due to its plasticity and ability to adapt to new challenges, it is facing its
own extinction. That is, the current ecological crisis has become a central problem threatening the survival of capitalism,
which is trying to reinvent itself in the direction of alternatives such as the GND.

Therefore, the Necrocene theory might help us move beyond the non-human towards the human and back. That is, it
entails in its nomenclature the inequalities, inconsistencies and exploitation of non-human animals, cultures, peoples
and societies. In relation to this, although developing the full narrative of the Necrocene is beyond the scope of this
essay, it is pivotal to bear in mind that the very idea of the Necrocene entails within it a series of necro-realities that
shape it ideologically , materially and psychologically : necropolitics, necroeconomics and necro-ontologies.
Necropolitics in the Necrocene develops biopolitics through death as the right to expose people to death and death
practices (Mbembe, 2003). That is, for Achille Mbembe , necropolitics is

the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and
populations […] the human being truly becomes a subject – that is, separated from the animal – in the struggle and the
work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity). (Mbembe, 2003: 14; italics in
the original)

However, the idea of Necrocene allows us to go beyond Mbembe’s assumptions. With the framing of human and non-
human entities alike, the Necrocene recasts the contemporary world into Nature (exploited) and Humanity
(exploiters) in the process of becoming extinction . If the Law of Cheap Nature is considered, the members of Nature,
(human and non-human), become a set of objects outside bios, lose their subjectivity and become, just like Giorgio
Agamben’s Homo Sacer3 (1995), victims of the politics of death. [Footnote 3 Begins] In this context, the Homo Sacer is
understood as those living entities that are subjugated to the internal domination of the maximum efficiency . If said
entities are not productive for capitalism, they are discarded. That is why this article argues that the Necrocene
narrative has inside it the necropolitics of a society of the living-dead. [Footnote 3 Ends] Central to understanding the
link between Necropolitics and the Necrocene as a socio-political heuristic is Mbembe’s conception of the creation of
death-worlds , “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
conferring upon them the status of living dead ” (Mbembe, 2003: 40-; italics in the original). Capitalism in the
Necrocene pushes entities to the status of living dead , one between the humanitarian mainstream’s rejection of
violence and humanity’s fetish towards it.

Necroeconomics, in turn, are defined by Chaka Unzondu (2013: 328) as,

an economic system which is principally organized around the consumption of bodies as part of the process of
accumulation. That is to say, necro-economics consumes specific populations that are rendered ‘‘matter’’ that can be
used and/or disposed of . These populations, as instrumentalized ‘‘matter,’’ can and are used in the generation of
wealth , in the accumulation of capital . It follows that they are not citizens in any substantive sense. These
populations’ relationship to the mainstream economy cannot rest on their intrinsic value. They have none.

The Law of Cheap Nature, together with these necropolitics and necroeconomics, build up the Necrocene as a necro-
ontology, “a systematic rendering of particular populations as bodies that must necessarily be killed […] understood as a
philosophical orientation that rationally organizes populations for their necessary death” (ibidem: 327), by considering
that politics, economy, society, culture and the self are mutually constitutive of this necro-ontology under the canopy of
capitalism through materialism and ideology.

This uncanny epoch is the “ era of death ” (Clark, 2019: 13) in multiple senses. It threatens the death of the biosphere
and the humanisphere as we know them in the course of human history as a result of growth and “the forces of
technological domination, in dialectical interaction with other forms of domination” (ibidem). In a contemporary state
of affairs “marked by the globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and
the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and electronic and digital
technologies” (Mbembe, 2017: 3), and where the forms of belief “get in line with the dominating techno-Capitalist
society, undergoing a process of deterritorialization and deculturation that renders them apt for global consumption ”
(Ungureanu, 2017: 277), the Necrocene narrative might help us reframe the world-ecology at the end of nature by
challenging and going beyond the nomenclature of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, it potentially brings a theoretical
tool to hermeneutically analyze the contemporary world and the different tensions between capitalism and ecology,
and capitalism and culture. By bringing the issues of death and extinction to the fore and identifying them as intrinsic
to the logic of capitalism , the Necrocene might be a generative heuristic able to open new spaces for analysis and
theoretical and material engagement . That is, this nomenclature can possibly generate new theories and narratives to
appear at the surface through the acknowledgement of the infectious and extinctive nature of Capitalism, and all the
inequalities that lie beyond its spectrum.
 Marx K: MoSt v. Policy

Rights and Duties are intrinsically linked to Neoliberal exploitation via creating a self-generating
problem to continue capitalist expansion
Distiller 22’ – Natasha, Gender and Women Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. “Well-Intentioned
White People and Other Problems with Liberalism”, Complicities, pg. 43-72, Palgrave Macmillian,
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-79675-4_2#chapter-info, xx-xx-2022

It also normalizes the idea that selfhood and ownership are coconstituting. Liberalism, in its insistence on the rights
of the individual , encodes capitalist assumptions about the relationship between property and personhood . Part of
being a person is the right to own stuff. This inevitably translates into maneuvers for economic and social power , to
which other meanings of humanity become subject .

My first understanding of liberalism is through a South African lens. The terms of the debate are different there (see
Distiller, 2005). There was a Liberal Party for a while, but it died in the face of apartheid (Rich, 1997). Stephen Bantu Biko
(1978), a visionary writer and anti-apartheid activist beaten to death by the police in 1977, made it impossible for any
progressive South African to be proud of the epithet. A white liberal, according to Biko, was someone who spoke for
black people, who did not recognize their agency. White liberals were (are) products and benefciaries of racism who
were (are) unable to see their own location in the system and how their well-intentioned actions perpetuate injustice,
specifcally, for Biko, racial injustice.

Post apartheid, liberalism and liberal values continued to be highly contested and racialized (Husemeyer, 1997; Johnson
& Welsh, 1998). Tis is unsurprising, given the class and race tensions the ideology carries in postcolonial times. Liberal
ideals fed colonial discourse, in part by circulating a veneer of morality which stitched individual rights (in formations
which beneftted colonizers, like the right to own property, without the acknowledgment of the ownership rights of the
people who had been there frst) to democracy and its institutions. In so doing, it bestowed the state with commitments
to dignity and freedom that were, in reality, extremely partial (Mehta, 1999).

As Brown (1995, p. 17) points out, the modern Western state is dependent upon liberalism to authorize its
apparently “self-generating” functions : “ social repairs , economic problem solving , and the management of a mass
population.” Liberal ideals helped to create the idea of the modern nation state , whose job it is to manage and
protect the rights of the apparently free individual members of said nation. But the state, and the liberal ideas it
relies upon and helps to produce, creates the individuals it goes on to protect. And this state, these individuals and the
rights to which they are entitled by the law created by the state in the name of its individuals, these things have a
very specific history. Perry (2018) has tracked the mutual development of modern patriarchy in the Enlightenment via
slavery, colonialism and specific uses of juridical power . This emerging law conflated manhood (meaning legally
endorsed, raced, personhood) and the right to property , to create subjects and objects of government.

Perry (2018) shows how economic liberalism, which she tracks to the early expansion of European Empire at the start of
the Enlightenment, and which was enriched by the early slave trade, was also a political and a philosophical system.
The entire enterprise was enabled by a use of the law to grant ownership rights to those considered people. Thus,
economic liberalism is inextricable from “specifically, the doctrine of personhood [which] entails a system whereby
the subject before the state or the law was made into either a patriarch, his liege (woman), or someone outside legal
recognition , whether slaves or… ‘savages’ but whom we can also term ‘ nonpersons’ in the juridical sense” (Perry,
2018, p. 21). She shows how the legal personhood granted the gendered, raced, classed liberal subject of emerging
modernity was based on the exclusion of those not afforded the legal recognition of their personhood. The right to
self-determination, legally and physically, continues to rely on having access to legally recognized personhood and
what Perry calls “ political recognition .”
Rose (1998) has further detailed how individuality and governmentability go together in modern democracy. He adds
Foucault’s (1977, 1978) insight that the creation of normativity was a crucial part of this process. He details the role of
the psy disciplines in creating this normative individuality, which supplements Perry’s (2018) explication of the ways
that ideas of legal personhood and the patriarchal order it helped establish extended from the public to the private
sphere. Before the advent of the psy disciplines, Perry (2018) shows, liberalism was establishing practices of
surveillance that penetrated intimate relations and assigned people (and nonpeople) their proper places in the
system. In turn, Rose (1998) shows how normative and individualizing technologies of democracy and the emerging
discipline of psychology worked together as the Enlightenment continued and into the twentieth century, as we will
see in more detail below.

As we will see, too, in its current incarnation, neoliberalism , the imbrication of liberal individualism and capitalism
within neocolonial globalization, has specific effects on structures and subjectivities . Liberal subjects, formed through
the Law and the law—that is, through both symbolic exercises of power and actual juridical decrees and acts—are part
of and parceled with modern race and racism, modern gender binaries, modern democracies , industrial and
surveillance capitalism , and the idea of the entitled, enabled individual all these constructs need to do their work of
domination. These ideas are illustrated in the chapters that follow.

Williams (1991) writes lyrically about the modern implications of the marriage of liberalism and capitalism in the
American legal system. She says that individual rights, that concept so dear to America’s sense of itself and the freedoms
on which its righteousness depends, were codified by the law to be available only to those who could afford them.
Notions of privacy, of intimacy, and the human connection upon which both rely, she shows, have been corrupted by
the power of the marketplace to commodify human value. Perry’s (2018) exposition of the initial legal construction of
American personhood as dependent on commodities and commodity values, as well as on gender and race, provides the
historical and ideological underpinning for the sociolegal dynamics, Williams (1991) identifes.

Williams (1991) writes about the valuation of property as something concrete that can be held to legal standards in
contract law, standards which can in theory also protect people. Instead, she says (Williams, 1991), value has come to
accrue to the curated meaning of a thing, the associations and desires conjured up by an advertising industry that
evades legal accountability by relying on the creation of ephemera and selling the idea it associates with the thing
instead of the thing itself.

Tis language was not available to Williams, but she is talking about the brand. When “masque becomes the basis of our
bargains,” she says (Williams, 1991, pp. 40–41),

[W]e will create new standards of irrelevance in our lives, reordering social relations in favor of the luxurious—and since
few of us can aford real luxury, blind greed becomes the necessary companion… Money refects law and law refects
money, unattached to notions of humanity.

This is also, not coincidentally, an accurate description of how slavery worked. And slavery is surely the institution which
most exposes the investments and limits of a system of thought that wants to declare itself for universal human dignity
and rights, thus authorizing its own goodness, while also encoding the right to individual proft as part of what it entitles
itself to (see Kendi, 2016). Te silently raced component of modern liberalism, and its tendency to not know this, is
refected here.

Williams (1991, pp. 71–71) also writes about liberal good intention. She describes a group of white real-estate
developers who are considering entering a church in Harlem during an Easter Sunday service to observe the “show”
during a walking tour:

I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover…
—just to peer, not to pray… Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this welleducated, afable group
of people. Tey defected my observation with comments like… “Tere’s no harm intended.” As well-intentioned as they
were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions.
She adds (Williams, 1991, p. 72), “To live so completely impervious to one’s own impact on others is a fragile
privilege”—and indeed, fragility is the right frame. It partly explains the defensiveness of well-intentioned white people,
in DiAngelo’s (2018) term, white fragility. When one’s sense of self is based on one’s unconscious superiority over the
other, wrapped up in one’s sense of oneself as therefore obviously a good person, what is at stake when one’s
intentions are challenged is one’s moral goodness. Te beneft, the proft accrued from such a positionality of
wellintentioned selfhood, for whom the world’s goods and meanings are assumed to rightfully exist, is both material and
emotional. Both are diffcult to give up.

One result is that structures and systems—the law is one of them— which convey rights on the basis of who can be
admitted to the realm of the human (Perry, 2018), continue to mete out standards of inclusion through respectability
and recognizability (Butler, 2003). Tis conficts with any true accommodation of diference, externally, in terms of social
structures, and internally, in terms of psychic relations. Liberalism, despite its stated best intentions to accommodate
everyone, encodes normativity. It cannot see equally valuable shared humanity across diference.
A Note on the Idea of the Universally Human

If there is one thing my career as a professor of Shakespeare studies taught me, it was to be wary of claims to universal humanity. Shakespeare’s texts continue to be sold as valuable because of their “universal themes.” Te
very specifc material history behind the selection of Shakespeare as the embodiment of the best of humanity is necessarily excluded from this messaging. Tere is concerted colonial education policy, linked to a political
agenda of “civilization” and cultural conquest, behind the insistence that England’s writer has this kind of moral authority over us all. All good literature, arguably, will make use of universal human themes. But it speaks to
structural politics that Chinua Achebe’s Tings Fall Apart is made to be an African author speaking to local conditions, for example, where Shakespeare’s work, equally embedded in   local events, becomes “universal”
(Distiller, 2004; Dollimore & Sinfeld, 1985; Hawkes, 1992; Holderness, 1988).

Te branding of Shakespeare also has an editorial history which is implicated, as all human systems of meaning-making must be, in cultural politics. Just one example is the ways the same-sex eroticism of the sonnets was
rewritten by editors, or explained away, while their vicious misogyny was endorsed (Booth, 2000; Duncan Jones, 1997; Fineman, 1986; Halpern, 2002). Tere is a vast and fascinating academic literature on all these topics:
on the construction of Shakespeare’s universality via British class and colonial policies; on the editorial history of the works, which helped to invent the idea of the individual genius author out of local writing practices that
were much more collaborative and porous; on editorial interpretations and how they built the content for the idea of the universally human; and about how all this played itself out in education systems across the globe
during and after high colonialism (e.g., Bristol, 1990; Cloud, 1991; De Grazia, 1991; Distiller, 2009; Erickson, 1991; Howard & O’Conner, 1987; Joughin, 1997; Loomba, 2002; Marcus, 1996; Taylor, 1989). Te political nature of
any claim to universality is inescapable to a student of these felds.

And yet the European liberalism that emerged in the Enlightenment believed itself to stand for the best in all of us, with the quiet arrogance of a certain kind of white supremacist Christianity. I have often wondered if it is
connected to the Ancient Greeks’ arrogance: their designation for their outsiders, “barbarians,” meant those who did not have language, and therefore culture, because they did not speak Greek (see Mannarini &
Salvatore, 2020 for a discussion of the entanglement of citizenship and otherness). Tis assumption of one’s own centrality seems to have carried over into many other aspects of the West’s sense of itself, and been a very
valuable tool in justifying the work of colonialism. In the world that colonialism made, a certain use of the language of universal human rights has been deployed by neoliberalism to further entrench global economic
systemic inequality (Harvey, 2007).

Te idea of some universal humanity that we all share, in other words, has all too often been a tool of power and exploitation. Te key question, in the face of the very many diferences in cultures that a melting pot theory
tends to want to not just wish away, but homogenize into the dominant norm, is: who decides? Whose terms for the apparently universal get to defne the idea of the human?

As a result of having been a scholar of English Literature in a postcolony like South Africa, I remain profoundly skeptical of any claims to universality. At the same time, I am arguing for a way to conceptualize something we
humans all share, something I am calling complicity. Tis is my attempt to articulate how, being made in systems of power, as we all are, and having very diferent and unequal lives as a result, as we do, we nevertheless
share a human connectedness. Tis argument is not the same as a statement of support for a universal humanism.

To be human means to be limited and shaped by the world we have no choice but to enter, the world that makes us. Freud (1973) conceptualized this in terms of the Oedipus complex, where every child must submit to an
absolute authority and agree to have his or her (those were his gender options) desire directed by what is socially acceptable. Tis is another way to theorize the operation of normativity in Western modernity.

After Freud’s Oedipus, being a person means having to live with deferred desire. Freud’s Oedipus assumes that each subject requires the mother-as-object from which to be forced to separate; the other who can never be
had but who is necessary to the self’s self-constitution. Tis is one way to authorize a self/other relation. It depends on treating the (m)other as object (Benjamin, 1988). Te child’s desire, in this model, is to possess her
(Freud understood heterosex to be intrinsically about violent male domination and possession of women, see Distiller, 2011; Freud, 1950; Freud, 1946). But the child’s desire is blocked because only the father may have
her, in a psychic universalization and justifcation of what is actually a specifc value system: monogamous, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian marriage. In this system, human relations are linked to ownership of property, of
mothers as property, of children as property and as the conduits of property through inheritance.

Te ownership of women’s bodies and therefore of female sexuality is a lynchpin of this system (Rubin, 1975; Saini, 2017; Schiebinger, 2004). Because the system is a system of domination in and through which a child of
the West must fnd their subjectivity, the child must learn to accept the loss of the mother who belongs to another, who is the father’s. Tis psychic loss is enforced through the threat of violence, according to Freud: the
threat of castration. In Freud’s world view, the threat of castration is embodied in the female. She is the sign, for the boy, of what can happen if you do not obey. For the girl, her body, which lacks the signifer of
personhood, is something she must come to terms with in order to accept her proper place (Distiller, 2011). While this is not an accurate description of what it invariably is or should meant to be human, to come into
subjectivity, it is an excellent description of the gendered rules of our culture, of the patriarchal, capitalist, colonizing Western world Freud assumed was the whole world.

Freud (1950) told us it was human nature to dominate. He said children want to possess their mothers, and that it is only by submitting to the father’s prior claim that they could learn their appropriate place. He said
ownership is a foundational element of subjectivity. He told us not only that hierarchy is natural and inevitable, but also that structural power was appropriately male and heterosexual, and implicitly classed and raced
through his deployment, throughout his writing, of the fgures of “primitives” and the “lower classes” as developmentally akin to children and women. Here is one of the places we see claims to universal meanings reveal
their structural embeddedness. So while one answer to the question of why this culture has tended to make the sense it has of diference is, “human nature,” I want to continually challenge the politics of that claim. If there
is a meaning to “human nature,” it is that we are complicit in each other, in all the struggles and power grabs and attempts to cope in this world we have made for ourselves and for each other.

Freud’s binary model of subjectivity, which sees the subject as constituted by its diference from the (m)other, enables a liberal politics. Tis is a politics which facilitated the ideology of imperialism and the practices of
colonialism, which is built on misogyny and sexism, and which continues to facilitate the violence, hypocrisies and smugness of white supremacism. It is born from and perpetuates the logic of capitalism as survival of the
fttest.

Tere are other options. Dean (2001) suggests that, instead of developing a theory of the subject based on the self’s relation to its other, which is a theory which relies on the binary structuring of diference (and, I add,
therefore domination) as its starting point, we should start with an acknowledgment of the way otherness structures our internal relations. To see the self as emerging from the self/other relation is to see it as dependent
on its diference from an/other in order to know (or construct) itself. But if I see my own internal unknowability, signifed by the unconscious, as the condition of my selfhood, then I am in the realm of my own otherness. I
also cannot claim to ever know myself, and therefore to be unitary, and must give up all certainties based on this illusory knowledge.

Tis undermines the authority of the liberal individualistic self. It has a fundamentally diferent logic to the system of othering on which our current world order depends. Tis dependence is psychological, economic, political
and social. If we recognize that we are always other to ourselves, that the “self” on which the self/other formulation depends is in fact inevitably alienated from itself, we approach a diferent ethics, Dean (2001) suggests.
Tis way of thinking about otherness—as within the self—also exposes the binary as a construct. Dean’s ethics of selfotherness entails granting recognition to the other despite not being able to see what is familiar and
knowable in him, her or them (see Glaveanu, 2019). A liberal morality, on the other hand, demands intelligibility before it will confer humanity. It is thus a coercive, normative politics which reproduces its own terms even
as it thinks it is making space for an other

Dean’s is a Lacanian perspective which describes human subjectivity as always already split from itself as a condition of its being (directed away from its desire as it is by the Law of the Father; think of Freud’s Oedipus).
Freud, of course, is the one whose theorizing of the unconscious makes Lacan’s split subject possible. In Freud’s own terms, we are all constituted from a loss we cannot know: the loss, in Freud’s terms, of the mother we
are never allowed to have because she belongs to the Father. But Freud’s terms want to convey security through conveying power. Instead, we could consider the ways we are other to ourselves and see what it takes to
tolerate the uncertainty this knowledge brings. It is worth noting that a model of psychology as a science, which tests theories based on measurable outcomes to arrive at objective facts, cannot tolerate this kind of radical
uncertainty of meaning.

Making room for what we do not know, for the idea that we might be constituted by things we cannot ever really understand, means we also have to let go of the refexive defense to fnd certainty by hardening our
identities. Te retreat into self-certainty (ego, if you like) always comes, Freud’s formulation suggests, at the cost of another’s subjectivity. It requires the other as object. (Te tragedy of identity politics is that, in making
space for the other to take back her personhood, to speak in her own voice and to object to her objectifcation, it has ended up reproducing the system that it wishes to change. If the position of other becomes a place of
certainty, it becomes an identity that requires an oppressor. I say more about this in Chap. 6.)

Glaveanu (2019, p. 454) suggests we start with our own otherness in order to prevent an appropriation of the other in the desire to render her into a “self-like structure”:

Starting from the other means recognizing that we are born into a world of others… and that we, ourselves, are other to them. “Being other” is a primary type of human experience with extremely important
developmental consequences, particularly if one resists the temptation to destroy the other… or internalize it.

Tis is a second way to approach otherness in a nonhierarchical manner. We are not only other to ourselves, as Freud’s unconscious could have fully taught him if he had not been making meaning from within a binary
structure. We are also always others’ others. We are complicit in each other’s psychic otherness that helps constitute the self, as well as in the material structures and histories that shape subjectivities, and in the
discourses that refect and reproduce these structures and the subjectivities they need. If there is anything universally human, it is this always socially, historically and culturally shaped fact.

Blatant racism, sexism, homo- or trans-phobia and classism are not pretending to inclusivity. Tese isms are clear about their use of the others they create to shore up their sense of selves. Liberalism’s good intentions, its
denial of the ways it uses the current system to reinscribe itself as the central subject, is what makes it such a frustrating ideology for its progressive opponents. In the efects of its intentions, liberalism is also alike to the
notion of human being endorsed by psychology (see Sugarman, 2019). The Liberal Subject of Psychology Rose (1998) argues that Western societies have been freed from religious and political authority only to be enslaved
by a liberal individualism enabled by the psy sciences. He (Rose, 1998) details how the techniques of subjectifcation enabled by the psy disciplines are central to modern subjectivity. Drawing on Foucault (1991), Rose
(1998) insists that the modern liberal democratic state cannot be understood as a political formation outside of the regimes of truth about the human subject as citizen that the psy disciplines were central in helping to
create. His explanation underscores Brown’s (1995), above: Te disciplinization of psychology is constitutively bound to a fundamental transformation that has occurred in the rationalities and technologies of political power
since the last decades of the nineteenth century, in which the responsibility of rulers has come to be posed in terms of securing the welfare and normality, physical and mental, of citizens, and of shaping and regulating the
ways in which they conduct their ‘private’ existence—as workers, citizens, fathers, mothers—such that they enact their privacy and freedom according to these norms of maximized normality. Te feld of power that is
codifed as the state is intelligible only when located in this wider matrix of projects, programs, and strategies for the conduct of conduct, elaborated and enacted by a whole diversity of authorities shaping and contesting
the very boundaries of the political. (Rose, 1998, p. 46)

What Rose (1998) adds to Brown’s (1995) formulation is the role of the psy disciplines as technologies of liberal subjectifcation in the service of the democratic state. Tis is what he means when he says, “A psy ontology has
come to inhabit us” (Rose, 1998, p. 190. See also Hook 2007). Foucault (1977) argued something similar when he suggested the panopticon as a metaphor for how a modern regime of power moved from the external
imposition of violence as a form of control on the body of the one who transgressed against the ruler, to an internalized, individualized mode of self-control. Modern individuals are formed by self-policing through
discourses of normality and deviance that become about who we are as people, what Foucault (2010, p. 145) calls, “the stifing anguish of responsibility… the seals of conscience.” Tis creates an interiority that is made of
the psychologized aspect of “self/realization” (Rose, 1998, p. 190), which in turn brings the imperative to freedom: of choice, of political system, of personhood. We liberal Western subjects internalize the rules for who
and how to be, and the process of psychotherapy, while it can help to identify and restructure some of these internalized narratives of selfhood, also participates in reiterating the technologies of selfunderstanding which
reproduce the creation of the free, autonomous subject who consents to her own subjectifcation (Butler, 1997). As we saw in Chap. 1, the subject of psychology is, frst and foremost, individualistic. As we have seen in this
chapter, this individualism cannot be separated out from Western political structures. Rose (1998) details how, with the help of individual and social psychology, individualism becomes a regulatory device in tandem with
the development of modern democratic ideals. Democracy entails commitment to notions of “liberty, equality, and legitimate power” (Rose, 1998, p.  118), in other words, which ensure that a citizenry is ruled by people to
whom it conceded control of its own free will. Te unifed self, while it presents itself as obvious and natural, is instead a socially inscribed production, a construction in time and space and power relations, including
economic relations (see Papadopoulos, 2008). I have been suggesting it is dependent on a binary relation of being with otherness which is not only a false message about human being, but one that is responsible for
perpetuating systemic oppression.

Rose (1998) shows how technologies like the scientifc defnitions and explorations of attitudes, the poll and public opinion were invented in America and enlisted as scientifc endorsements of government. Government, in
this formulation, is not in fact freely chosen by the people, but is a mode of control that develops from feudal rulers into modern democracies. Following Foucault, from the eighteenth century control of a population
entailed, “not just control of a territory and its subjects, but the calculated administration of the life of the population, of each and of all” (Rose, 1998, p.   119). Tis requires knowing your subjects, who they are and what
they want. It also, as Rose (1998) goes on to show, enables the development of the realization that, just as attitudes can be polled, so they can be afected and changed by communication techniques and the manipulation
of messages. Tis was one locus of Trump’s control: the understanding that twenty-frst century democratic America, as the culmination of these related technologies of individualization, public opinion and
governmentability through discourses of liberty, freedom and choice, runs on the logic not of “the objective characteristics of the situation, but the subjective relation of the individual to his or her situation” (Rose, 1998,
p. 130). It is not the facts or the alternative facts that matter, but how a political leader can leverage people’s attitudes to the facts. Talking about liberalism in this way becomes “a series of refections on government that
stress[…] its limits” (Rose, 1998, p. 69). In order for a liberal government to know how much governing of its free citizens is the right amount of intervention into and structuring of private lives, Rose (1998) says, it needed
to know its citizens. Te psy disciplines were a way to know people so as to know how to govern them (see Foucault, 1978; Foucault, 2010). And as we have seen, this required individualizing human being. In
contradistinction to the production of the liberal, modern, individual self, who knows itself through its responsibility to govern itself according to rules of putative normality, a theory of the subject as complicit suggests
that it is never free to be only itself. Such a model undoes the liberal subject at the heart of Western modernity, the center of an invisibly raced, classed and gendered reality. Tese modern inventions also rely on binary
thinking. Governmentability relies on the construction of norms. Tese norms, as we have seen, were produced in tandem with—indeed, helped to produce—the individual liberal subject, free to choose, and apparently
therefore self-governing. Te requirement for norms against which to measure individual persons required the invention of deviance (Foucault, 1977; Foucault, 1978). Te regulatory power of the mythical norm (Lorde, 2007)
specifcally produces an otherness designed to be exploited. Political, psychic and material gains are all wrapped up in, and reliant on, each other, and in a binary system.

From Liberalism to Neoliberalism

the taken-for-granted notions which underpin the American dream not only help deny the reality of structural
oppression that has in fact built this country. They also have helped, in this great American age where everything,
including human connection, is for sale, to commodify identity. This will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5. In part to
pave the way for that discussion, I will now turn to the characteristics of the economic, political and psychic order
enabled by the world set in place by Enlightenment-formed liberalism: neoliberalism .

Sugarman (2020) points out that the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century exacerbated the blind spots of
liberalism : by emphasizing the fantasy of free choice while removing governmental responsibility for the social and
economic structuring of life, neoliberalism puts the individual even more at risk of being responsible for his own
failure, with specific consequences for the psychologization of the subject (see also Melluish, 2014).

Neoliberalism intensifes the atomizing individualism of liberalism, and its relationship to commerce as a naturalized
aspect of personhood . It elevates further the celebration of and commitment to freedom of choice, as a personal and
an economic imperative. Free market economics and the subject free to choose its participation in this market,
together with the advances in technology that lead to social media, created a way to brand identity as and for profit,
as we will see in Chap. 5.
As a political response and an economic system, neoliberalism began in earnest in the 1980s. Neoliberalism is an
economic response to a political understanding of human nature and society. It emerged in reaction to the idea of the
social welfare state, and to economic stagnation and political threats to liberalism in the 1970s. It took the terms of
liberal individualism—that people should be free to make what choices they want—and applied it to institutional
frameworks and the market economy. It sought to remove any constraints that the “embedded liberalism” of the
postwar world order built into social, political or economic structures (Harvey, 2007, p. 11; see Chap. 2). It set in place
policies intended to deregulate global industry, support a free market economy , encourage competition through
privatization , enable flexibility through short-term contracts and worker mobility (and disposability), and discourage
the role of government in corporate structures . the market , not the state , should set the terms, neoliberalism says;
this will ensure the greatest freedom of choice (Harvey, 2007; Melluish, 2014).

Neoliberalism has been remarkably successful at reshaping social contracts and at reaching into private spheres with
the logic of the market. It has reformulated institutions, “divisions of labor , social relations , welfare provisions …,
ways of life and thought, reproductive activities , attachments to the land and habits of thought ” (Harvey, 2007, p. 3).
Along with technological advances, it has intensifed, commodifed and made ever more literal the use of information
about people to help construct subjectivities (see Zubof, 2019). It has also thus had the consequence of
“reformulating personhood , psychological life, moral and ethical responsibility , and what it means to have a selfhood
and an identity ” (Sugarman, 2020, p. 74). As the state recedes, “Social control is primarily performed through the
colonization of previously regarded private areas of individual experience: the body, health, fashion and well-being,
sexuality, your living room” (Papadopoulos, 2008, p. 153; see Davies, 2016). When one of the architects of
neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, declared that society was to be replaced by individual men and women, she said,
“Economics are the method… but the object is to change the soul” (qtd. in Harvey, 2007, p. 23).

Zubof (2019) argues that this is exactly what has happened. Zubof (2019) says that neoliberalism broke the social
contract liberalism made with capitalism . While the postindustrialized Western individual was promised mass-
produced access to a goods-based life by what she calls the frst modernity, neoliberalism fragmented and atomized
connections between people and their institutions, by its hyperindividualizing of commodifed desire. the individual of
the second modernity is the owner of an iPod, programming their ever-changing unique playlist, rather than the
purchaser of a mass-produced CD, released by a music industry that tells us what we like. Tis second modernity, working
together with neoliberalism’s dehumanizing “economic violence” (Zubof, 2019, p.  37), enabled the advent of what she
calls surveillance capitalism, where consumer behavior is, first, mined for its commercial value. When the technologies
that enable this process are left unchecked, behavior is then manufactured and produced. the industrial revolution that
created modern capitalism and its liberal individual entitled to the things capitalism makes has almost cost us our planet,
she says. And, she warns, the surveillance capitalism produced by neoliberalism is on the brink of costing us our
humanity, as our souls are ever more curated by technology:

Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to
knowledge. Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable
to us. Tey accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us. Tey predict our futures for the sake of
others’ gains, not ours… surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard
social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with the individual autonomy that are essential to the very
possibility of a democratic society. (Zubof, 2019, p. 11)

For Zubof, modernity’s necessary creation of liberal individuality, and the democratic state that needs it, is threatened
by neoliberalism’s enabling of surveillance capitalism. Te characteristics of liberalism, especially its moral character,
remain for Zubof the markers of something admirable, necessary and good.

Liberalism created “self-regulating individuals” who, under neoliberalism, have become “networked actors who actively
forge the structures necessary” for their atomized modes of regulation (Papadopoulos, 2008, p.  153). Liberalism taught
us to be individuals with rights that were implicitly linked to ownership , to accumulation , and therefore, I am
arguing, in contradistinction to Zubof’s characterization of liberalism, to the exploitation of others . While it may think
itself noble, liberalism’s intentions do not excuse its impacts. It taught us to take responsibility for ourselves in order to
forge compliance with a norm that was used to govern us all. Neoliberalism lifted these values out of the remit of the
state and gave them to the deregulated market economy. the result, along with a vastly increased wealth gap, was,
“the Commodification of Everything ” (Harvey, 2007, p. 165).

Neoliberal Capitalism is unsustainable and locks in global crisis – existential climate change,
regressive nationalism, and war
Neilson 21 – David, teaches and researches in the fields of class theory and political economy at the University of
Waikato New Zealand. “Reversing the catastrophe of neoliberal-led global capitalism in the time of coronavirus: Towards
a democratic socialist alternative”, Capital and Class, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816821997114, 03-07-2021

In brief summary, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) agents of
the neoliberal model of development have encouraged the widespread adoption of its regulatory national template
that opens up countries to the free movement of capital both within and across their borders. In aggregate effect, the
widespread adoption of the national template has generated movement towards a global market ‘level playing field’ on
which capital can move freely and for whom competition can come from anywhere. In turn, this level playing field has
transformed countries into ‘competition states’ that must contest with each other to win a viable share of this moving
capital by operating within global wage and productivity norms compatible with capitalist competitiveness and
profitability (Cerny 2010; Hirsch 1997). This level playing field entails a win–lose contestation as its sporting analogy
implies, but not just among capitalist players. This global market form of capitalism also disciplines and divides nation
states and their labouring populations in competitive struggle. Capital’s capacity to move without regulatory
impediment or discrimination across and within fixed national territories subordinates nation states and their labouring
populations to the narrow priorities of capital. Capital, and the cosmopolitan elements of the capitalist and middle
classes, have a world opened up for their free movement, while nation states and the immense majority of their
labouring populations that are fixed in space must attract these free moving forces to be economically viable (Aglietta
1998).

This competitive power structure unleashed by the neoliberal model of development is at the heart of the perfect
storm of contemporary capitalism’s interacting and mutually intensifying multi-dimensional crisis tendencies . They
comprise planet-wide ecological degradation and destabilisation, recurring economic crises, intensifying uneven
development between winner and loser countries linked with a dangerously regressive nationalist tendency towards
neo-fascism, and now a global pandemic. At the same time, nation state viability is dependent on achieving a
competitive place within the neoliberal-led global mode of accumulation. Global competition forces national
specialisation , not just of whole products but also due to the ‘third international division of labour’s’ (Lipietz 1997)
globally segmented production of single commodities, of parts of products, or global commodity chains (Foster &
Suwandi 2020; Wallace et al. 2020). As a result, national economic viability within the terms of this crisis-ridden
neoliberal model of development is dependent on achieving specialised export competitiveness and importing
everything else. Inversely, nation state dependence on this unstable world of market competition and global
production undermines local autocentric accumulation.

The connecting thesis focusing this article is that reversing contemporary capitalism’s crisis tendencies and putting in
place a new sustainable and progressive trajectory requires a new cooperative model of development that can unite
all countries of the world in the project to facilitate their ecologically sustainable economic self-sufficiency.

Neoliberal globalisation and ecocatastrophe

Intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production is the ‘ exploitation’ of Nature that has been ‘absolutely’ extended by the
neoliberal model of development . Especially in Marx’s ‘absolute surplus value’ sense of labour’s exploitation, capital’s
wealth and power grows by destructively consuming or using up the living labouring population.1 In a parallel way,
capital’s wealth and power grows by the ‘absolute exploitation’ of Nature (see Foster & Clark 2018). Capital
accumulation by destructively consuming Nature includes the industrial exploitation of non-human sentient life for food,
unsustainable consumption of non-renewable raw materials and relatedly, destruction of pre-existing ecologies that
now are all culminating in the whole planet’s descent towards ecological crisis that is presently intersecting with
economic and epidemiological crises (Foster and Suwandi 2020).

The neoliberal model of development has both extended and intensified capitalism’s absolute exploitation of Nature.
Like absolute labour exploitation in that it is ‘extensive’, the exploitation of Nature under neoliberal-led global capitalism
has spread to engulf the whole planet. This spreading also intensifies the ‘relative surplus value’ form of Nature’s
exploitation as it goes hand in hand with a rising ‘organic composition of capital’ and the shift towards a global industrial
scale of accumulation . Increasing the scale of accumulation that increases the physical distance between production
and consumption, in turn ceteris paribus, directly increases the rate at which human and natural energy is consumed.
Global accumulation increases the labour diseconomies of scale towards their natural planetary limit. As well, it leads to
diseconomies and ‘dis-ecologies’ of natural resource consumption. Unless there is a fundamental reversal of the
neoliberal model of development’s global market-competition-based regulatory architecture that has facilitated global
scale capital accumulation, continuing escalation and compounding of present unsustainable levels of ecological
destruction are guaranteed.

The global financial crisis and the enduring core truth of the Keynesian critique

The neoliberal model of development’s reversal of Keynes’ project to construct the transnational conditions that made
organised and autocentric national economic development viable is central to the recurring national, regional and now
global economic crises of the current era. While the recent global economic crisis took the form of an overaccumulation
crisis that has its deep roots in the rising organic composition of capital, the immediate regulatory problem is that
widespread proactive neoliberal regulation has created a patchwork of competition states overlaid by a single global
market that systematically depresses global aggregate demand.

An enduring truth of Keynes’ project, and also central to the FRS’s explanation of the post-Second World War Fordist
Long Boom, is that stable national economic growth depends on being able to deliberately coordinate demand to
match increasing supply . More specifically, as the FRS argue, the key relationship underpinning the counteractively
regulated stability of the advanced capitalist countries in the post-Second World War era of the Long Boom took the
form of ‘class compromise’ based institutions that calibrated wage growth (including social wage growth) with
productivity increases (Lipietz 1988). However, while Keynes’ demand-side analysis of how to create stable autocentric
local accumulation is widely appreciated; there is less appreciation, first, of his supply-side advocacy of local
accumulation:
A considerable degree of international specialisation is necessary in a rational world in all cases where it is dictated by wide differences of climate, natural resources, native aptitudes, level of culture and density of
population. But over an increasingly wide range of industrial products, and perhaps of agricultural products also, I have become doubtful whether the economic loss of national self-sufficiency is great enough to outweigh
the other advantages of gradually bringing the product and the consumer within the ambit of the same national, economic, and financial organisation [my emphasis]. (Keynes 1933)

Second, not so widely appreciated either is that Keynes was deeply aware that the viability of nation-centric accumulation depended on the existence of a transnational framework that could neutralise the demand-
depressing logic of international capital mobility (Neilson 2020a).

From Keynes’ perspective, the current after-Fordist neoliberal-led crisis prone accumulation trajectory is completely
expected. That is, capital’s global mobility that turns countries into competition states undermines local production and
turns demand-led domestic economic management into economic suicide. In particular, by increasing the propensity
towards increased local consumption of imported commodities, increasing wages undermines both countries’ export
competitiveness and local production. In a classic private–public good dilemma, this narrow national interest in
containing wage growth that has been forced on countries by the current framework of locational competition, directly
conflicts with viable production at the local level and with stable demand at the transnational aggregate level. When
productivity grows everywhere but demand is locally depressed everywhere , then there will be strong tendencies
towards recurring ‘realisation’ crises, that is, where capital cannot turn surplus value into profit.

Ironically, given the moralistic hype of monetarist theory in the 1970s, the global market has been prevented from
falling even more deeply and often by the massive increase of cheap credit-driven debt , and especially by the United
States borrowing that enabled it to act as the ‘market of last resort’ (Van Elteren 2009). The fundamental instability of
this model of growth expresses itself as a deepening disconnection between a rapidly growing ‘enchanted world’ of
credit and the underlying reality of accumulation (Lipietz 1985).

For Marx, this overaccumulation crisis tendency where insufficient outlets for profitable capital investment leads to
expansion in the ‘enchanted world’ of speculation and asset inflation , has its deep structural cause in the rising
‘organic composition of capital’ (Clark 1990; Marx 1976, 1981) defined as the increasing proportion of fixed capital to
variable capital. On the production side, capitalist development and deployment of new fixed capital that do not
generate at least an equivalent increase in the productivity of labour results in a declining rate of profit . On the
consumption side, labour’s oversupply (‘relative surplus population’) due to increasing productivity that pushes down
wage levels drives demand deficiency (Neilson & Stubbs 2011).

The Keynesian model of development’s form of regulation countered capitalism’s overaccumulation tendency on the
demand-side, while the neoliberal model of development’s proactive regulation unleashes capitalism’s demand
deficiency tendency on a global level . In this era, overaccumulation that begins with the collapse of speculative
financial bubbles is underpinned by the zero-sum downwards spiral logic of competitive wage advantage viciously
interacting with a rising organic composition of capital . Furthermore, the logic of competition between unequally
equipped countries that leads to some countries crashing also contributes to the problem of insufficient global demand.

Uneven development and the race to the bottom

Contrary to a superficial reading of what Marx wrote in Capital Vol. 1’s preface, the long history of capitalism is one of
uneven development (Neilson 2018a). Since Marx, and after Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky as well, capitalism has gone
through several mid-range variations in the form of its uneven development. The ‘World Capitalism’ approach offers a
theory of capitalism’s uneven development that includes application to the preneoliberal stage of the era of the US
Empire (e.g. Amin 1976; Wallerstein 2004). Their perspective on recent capitalist history is grounded in their analysis of
the ‘second international division of labour’ that is coordinated by an ‘unequal exchange’ relationship. That is, industrial
commodities produced by well-paid socially protected workers of the advanced capitalist countries in the core capitalist
metropoles are exchanged with raw materials and primary products produced by poorly paid socially unprotected
workers in the development enclaves of peripheral industrially undeveloped countries.2

This school has tended to view this unequal exchange relationship as resulting in an iron-law of ‘underdevelopment’.
However, the successful industrialisation of some peripheral countries who have pursued low wage export-led
competitiveness strategies has undermined this position (Lipietz 1987). In particular, the successful industrialisation of a
cluster of East Asian ‘tigers’ during the terminal 1970s crisis stage of the Fordist or Keynesian model of development has
demonstrated that low wages can be a key component of export competitiveness-led industrialisation for some
peripheral countries. However, at the same time, the zero-sum logic of demand-depressed competition in the
contemporary era of neoliberal-led global capitalism has brutally activated competitive industrialisation among
peripheral countries. Such countries that are unequipped to be globally competitive but have been forcibly brought
into the ambit of global capitalism by structural adjustment programmes have descended towards deep economic and
social dislocation (Neilson 2020a).
This competitive logic interacts both with the ‘third international division of labour’ and ‘relative surplus population’ driven (un)employment effects. Interconnected sets of mutually dependent firms located across
geographically remote national localities produce parts of single commodities are brought together for final assembly (Taylor 2008). Global capitalist firms technologically enabled by advanced systems of information and
communication command this global supply-side-chain form of production. Simpler parts of the production process are sub-contracted to firms located in the industrially developing countries where high ‘formal
subordination’ of labouring populations facilitates ‘absolute surplus value’ strategies. In turn, conception and the more technically advanced parts of the production process that Marx identifies with ‘relative surplus value’
are located in industrially advanced countries. In sum, a contractual chain of global capitalist coordination connects specialised production units across nationally diverse locations that enable global corporations to
optimise surplus value by combining absolute and relative surplus value accumulation.

However, the terms of locational competition across unevenly developing countries are actually more complex. To begin
with, the second international division of labour still exists, most extensively in the form of China’s b elt and r oad
i nitiative. As well, developed and developing countries move somewhat towards more hybrid two-speed national
economies that include both low tech or low pay peripheral, and high tech or high pay metropolitan, sectors. In sum,
neoliberal globalisation has unleashed a complex competitive advantage logic for countries that has led to their
reduced self-sufficiency , and thus integrally, to their dependence on the global mode of accumulation .

Second, this neoliberal-led competition-driven version of uneven development has been intensified by the zero-sum
logic implied by capital scarcity caused by a growing ‘relative surplus population’ (Marx 1976; Neilson & Stubbs 2011).
An increasing relative surplus population driven by redundancy of industrial production workers in the advanced
capitalist countries is being intensified, not just by the transfer of material production to the recently proletarianised
workers of newly industrialising capitalist countries, but also by rapid automation. Simultaneously, by extending the
‘ coercive whip of competition’ to the countryside of the Global South , the first wave of the relative surplus population
tendency driven by peasant dispossession has been brutally activated across previously protected peasant modes of
ag riculture. For newly industrialising competition states, a necessary but not sufficient source of competitive advantage
has been low wages enabled by labour’s high ‘formal subordination’ driven by a growing relative surplus population. In
general, growing demand to facilitate employment – but hastening ecological destruction – is prevented by the
demand-depressing effects of global market competition that is intensified by labour’s increasing oversupply that
inversely increases the scarcity of capital.

Moreover, ‘relative surplus population’ employment logic has particular relevance to the present virus-led crisis because
labour made redundant by increasing productivity in agriculture and industry spreads to the service sector (Neilson &
Stubbs 2011). Although outside the core necessary economy in Marx’s sense, the service sector has become a significant
source of employment and economic viability for many countries. With this neoliberal-led zero-sum terms of
international competition , a significant proportion of service sector employment has become dependent on nation
states’ capacity, in competition with other nation states, to attract overseas tourists . In turn, this process has
unleashed a global movement of people that now spreads the virus .

Especially for countries struggling to retain or achieve international competitiveness , which is central to local
employment, there is entailed a n international race to the bottom in wages , working conditions and, relatedly, in
ecological standards (Olney 2013). In sum, the neoliberal model of development has activated a zero-sum international
competition for scarce capital, including money coming in through overseas tourists.

Regressive nationalism and the rise of neo-fascism

Defenders of the neoliberal model of development do their best to cast the ‘regressive nationalism’ of the Alt . Right
as the antithesis of its cosmopolitan project. Actually, regressive nationalism is the degenerate effect of the neoliberal
project’s competition-driven globalisation logic (Neilson 2020c). However, the deep causes of regressive nationalism
that lie with the effects of the neoliberal model of development are mystified both by neoliberals and Alt. Rightists (Gray
2018).

The volatility of national economic competitiveness under neoliberal globalisation implies employment insecurity and
uncertainty for local populations , which is heightened further by importing overseas labour . In particular, both legal
and illegal low-paid workers are imported from the relative surplus populations of competitively struggling countries
into more economically successful countries. Both indirectly and directly, foreign forces and peoples can thus be cast as
the cause of local economic insecurity and of undermining pre-existing cultural identities. Insecure local labouring
populations are invited to release their anxiety as xenophobic anger towards scapegoated immigrant labour forces. In
turn, the Alt. Right argue that the solution is to expel residing immigrant populations and halt further immigration.

In their aggressive pursuit of proactive regulation domestically, agents of the Alt. Right are degenerately vulgar
neoliberals. However, they break more fundamentally with neoliberalism because they directly oppose both neoliberal
cultural cosmopolitanism and neoliberal market globalisation. In particular, regardless of moral, legal or political
implications, all strategies that may render a national advantage can be rationalised because there are no rules in their
worldview of a primordial zero-sum war between warring nations fighting for survival. Therefore, they wilfully oppose
and transgress the strictly prescribed and transparent rules of economic competition that define the project of the
neoliberalised global market. As the world descends into recurring, escalating and viciously interacting crises, mistrust
and economic competition fed by the primordial ideology and amoral practices of the agents of regressive nationalism
threaten to spill over into direct forms of civil and international war.

The global pandemic

The global spread of COVID-19 is also related to limitations arising from the neolib eral model of development’s modes
of regulation and accumulation. Its proactively capitalist mode of competitive regulation has been ideologically
promoted, institutionally constructed and managed by key United Nations based regulatory agencies, and is now also
embedded in the institutions and expectations of national agents. However, it is radically unsuited to the forms of
international coope ration that are needed for controlling a global pandemic . Indeed, when such a global crisis occurs,
the present mode of global regulation can trigger blaming, disorganisation and intensified competition. At the same
time, national dependence on the global structure of the neoliberal mode of accumulation is highly destabilising.
Specifically, because dependent on the global scale system of accumulation, nation states are in a weak position to be
able to sustain themselves locally. This dependence manifests as a direct contradiction between maintaining national
economic viability and stopping the pandemic’s spreading into a nation state from off-shore.

Directly contrary to the neoliberal ideology of self-sufficiency, national economic viability under the neoliberal mode of
accumulation is dependent on achieving specialised export competitiveness within complex global commodity chains
that now ‘ are breaking in numerous places’ (Foster & Suwandi 2020: 9; Moody 2020). This dependence on their
position within a disintegrating global system is in direct tension with the need to pursue economic localisation in
order to stop COVID-19 entering the nation sate. A global crisis thus becomes a local crisis, but also a local economic
crisis can have ripple effects across other countries.

The alt is dual-power organizing through Commune’s – it unites active anti-capitalist action to
galvanize power away from statist actions
Wendland-Liu 22’ – Joel, Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department, Grand Valley State University,
Allendale, MI, USA. “Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin’s Commune Against Capitalism”, Fudan Journal of the
Humanities and Social Sciences, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40647-021-00342-6#Sec1, 02-04-2022

An American “Commune”?

In his 2016 essay “An American Utopia,” Fredric Jameson appropriates Lenin’s concept of “ dual power ” to ruminate
on its potential meaning in the present U.S. context . He dismisses communist parties and socialist aspirations as
something “no one believes in anymore.” The social democratic parties and coalitions offer reform, while the labor
unions are too weak to counter the state. Laboring under the same cynicism and pessimism that he attributes to the
working class, Jameson ponders which types of mass organizations, parties, institutions, or social movements in North
America qualify for the moniker of “dual power.” He dismisses the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement as merely an
uprising, or “a spatial event” that relied too much on information technology to extend itself beyond the physical space
of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in downtown New York City. He embraces the B lack P anther P arty, which reshaped
U.S. Black radicalism in the 1970s, and the historical maroon societies of self-liberated Blacks in the era of
enslavement , but ignores Occupy Wall Street’s mutual aid response to the widespread damage wrought by Hurricane
Sandy to the Atlantic coast in 2012, and does not mention the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in 2014 (Jameson 2016, 4).
Jameson’s remarks on “ dual power ” and U.S. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent
developments in the U.S. and to revisit Lenin’s State and Revolution fruitfully to review the concept of “the
commune ” as a post-capitalist political theory that transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. Indeed, my
intervention aims to explore the limits of “ democracy ” in U.S. political discourse , demanding a reconsideration of
Leninist political theory.

After dismissing Occupy Wall Street, Jameson turns to contemplate the judicial system and the healthcare system as
potential sites of dual power . In doing so, he fails to note the judicial system’s function in harming Black and Brown
people through police killings, racist profiling, over-policing, and mass incarceration, e.g., its well-known historical role
in assassinating, imprisoning, and decimating the Black Panther Party, linking state repression of organizations that
deploy radical critiques of capitalism with those that militantly confronted systemic white supremacy (Burden-Stelly
2017). When he underlines the healthcare system as a latent site of dual power, he remarks presciently, “it may not be
impossible to imagine crisis situations in which physicians are able to wield social power of considerable significance, in a
kind of epidemiological dual structure” (Jameson 2016, 17). Such speculation about the judicial and healthcare systems
invokes spaces and histories that reveal latent aporias in Jameson’s thinking. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter
uprisings in 2014, a national protest against racist police and vigilante abuses that reshaped national discourse about
the state’s control of Black people, is manifestly absent. Indeed, because history required that he name the Panthers
in this essay, it is puzzling that he failed to center the struggle for Black freedom in the contemporary
moment .Footnote1

This bewildering absence haunts Jameson’s American utopia imaginary. Ignoring the struggle against white supremacy is
a particularly non-Leninist approach to revolutionary politics (Wendland-Liu 2021). It is a symptom of the U.S. academy’s
view of #BlackLivesMatter generally, as rhetoricians Donna Hunter and Emily Polk found in their 2016 study of academic
engagement with both Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter. The divisions registered by white reluctance to engage the latter
revolutionary militancy derives from racial and class privilege of those who feel more comfortable teaching about the
former while ignoring the latter. In addition to noting Occupy Wall Street’s network of cultural and institutional
affiliations with university radicals, “the overrepresentation of white males in coveted tenure positions illustrates the
white privilege that Black Lives Matter challenges. This contradiction makes collective support of the movement more
difficult” (Hunter and Polk 2016, 443). While this analysis accounts for some dimensions of the absence, it fails to speak
to the historical relation of racism to capitalist development and its mulish persistence despite recurring crises (Wolff
2020; Burden-Stelly 2020).

Unfortunately, this absence registers as an economism that Jameson shares with other North American Marxists, such
as the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. In delineating the economic from the “extra-economic,” Meiksins Wood mistakenly
disentangles the concepts of race and gender from their capitalist and economic moorings and limits them to the
political dimension. She writes, “capitalism’s structural indifference to the social identities of the people it exploits
makes it uniquely capable of discarding extra-economic inequalities and oppressions” (Meiksins Wood 2002, Kindle
Locations 5545–5546).Footnote2 She insists that capitalism has overcome the “scarcity” of extra-economic goods and
errs in arguing that capitalism has become “indifferent” to racism or gender-based inequalities. Lenin regarded these
“extra-economic” goods as central and constitutive of capitalism and could not be separated from the system itself. In a
1916 article on the national question, Lenin argues that “while being based on economics, socialism cannot be reduced
to economics alone,” giving special attention to global struggles for national liberation, in which he included the African
American freedom struggle (Lenin 1964e, 325; Prashad 2020: Wendland-Liu 2021).Footnote3 Indeed, the reductive
economism of western intellectuals has led to an ideological elision of class struggle (Losurdo 2016, 101–115).
Other contemporary U.S. Marxists, however, refuse to divest capitalism of its racist building blocks and mechanisms,
and, since the 2014 and 2020 #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in the U.S., this view has gained a new hearing (Davis 2020;
Burden-Stelly 2020; Kelley 2017; Singh 2016; Prashad 2016; Marable 2015). Before the term “racial capitalism” became
centered in U.S. public discourse, scholar E. San Juan Jr. theorized racism’s dynamic and constantly reassembled relation
to capitalism. He argues that the core concept of “race” has a “signifying power [that] comes from the articulation of a
complex of cultural properties and processes with a mode of production centered on capital accumulation and its
attendant ideological apparatuses.” Further, “[t]his system depends primarily on material inequality in the appropriation
and exploitation of land, labor, power, and means of production by a privileged minority of European origin” (San Juan
Jr. 2002, 143, emphasis added). The “racial problematic” endures as a set of practices that over-determines the class
process of exploiting labor and capitalist accumulation and development (West 1988, 17). Theoretical dislocation of the
present concreteness of racism to the historical past erases the special conditions of super-exploitation faced by women
of color, men of color, and gender non-normative people of color. Such an omission as that which Jameson inflicts
operates like the Marxist version of “all lives matter,” because it allows the necessary relation of racism to an
exploitative class process function without critique or confrontation. The anti-racist uprisings of 2020 served as a heroic
defense of Black lives, but also an elemental form with which class struggle appears in the U.S.

The second opening that Jameson’s remarks induce are his references to the healthcare system as a potential site of
“dual power” during a major epidemiological crisis. While physicians and other healthcare professionals and mutual aid
associations in countries like China, Vietnam, Laos, and the left-led state of Kerala, India moved swiftly to intervene in
the COVID-19 pandemic, in the U.S., these same professionals were paralyzed by the failed national leadership that
downplayed and then politicized the crisis.Footnote4 Essentially, they were blocked from playing a “dual power” role by
the federal government’s ties to capitalism which insists on profit as the motive for action and demands the labor of the
working class to function (Tricontinental 2020). Still, the global COVID-19 pandemic prepared the radical terrain of the
current stage of the 2020 anti-racist uprising and the struggle against the fascist threat by revealing on a mass scale
some critical truths about capitalism. The pandemic exposed a central contradiction of capitalism, its ideology, and its
democratic state. Workers cannot mix bodily in the workforce without risk of infection, death, and extension of the
pandemic, leading to the deaths of over 800,000 U.S. people by the end of 2021. The exploitation of the labor power of
workers, the extraction of surplus value, and the functioning of the state, however, cannot occur without the physical
presence of tens of millions of workers in productive spaces. For large sections of capital, profit and the accumulation of
capital depended on making people return physically to work. Thus, the uneven, contradictory, callous, and inept
response to the pandemic levied by the U.S. ruling class, exacerbated by the deliberate stupidity and irrationality of the
near-fascist Trump administration (Tricontinental 2020).

The pandemic unveiled a new entity known as “essential workers,” or laboring people upon whom the functioning of the
system, the provision of basic needs of food, shelter, and health depend. Some of the “essential workforce” is highly
skilled healthcare professionals and economically secure financial professionals. Many millions are underpaid,
undereducated workers, however, and are disproportionately Black and Brown people. Of the 55 million U.S. workers
identified as “essential,” approximately half are nonwhite, are likely to be unprotected by a union contract and collective
bargaining power, and are paid significantly less than a living wage. In fact, in the food, agriculture, and facility services
industries, where workers of color disproportionately outnumber white workers, workers of color earn far less than their
white counterparts (McNicholas and Poydock 2020). These workers are typically maligned, abused, and abandoned
through racist oppression and other forms of marginalization but in this moment of pandemic proved essential to the
rudimentary systemic operations and the lives of the capitalists and the most privileged members of society.

Linked to this discovery of essential labor is the revelation of what Marx calls the secret, hidden truth of capitalism ––
that labor power produces the value expropriated by capitalists . Within days of the announcement of “stay-at-
home” orders, when millions were fired, laid off, furloughed, put on temporary leave, or simply moved to online
remote work that initially proved far less productive than normal operations, the wealth of current and expected
values evaporated . Mass unemployment and stingy relief for workers combined with threats of withholding
unemployment payments to force workers back to dangerous workplaces exposed the racist–classist nature of state
power and its capitalist logic as the essence of U.S. democracy. Put another way, these contradictions proved U.S.
democracy incapable of addressing the pandemic , the economic collapse , and the violence of white supremacy .

This set of contradictions opened the door for major working-class struggles over health and safety in both the
private and public sectors. When the Trump administration ordered students to return to classrooms in the fall of 2020,
threatening to punish schools that refused, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association
mobilized their members to demand federal standards for health and safety for teachers, school staff, children and their
families (Goldstein and Shapiro 2020). They created science-based health and safety standards and shared them on a
national scale with their members, other school workers, and school families, forcing, in many cases, school districts to
scale down plans to open in-school classes. In Chicago, for example, a coalition of neighborhoods, families, and
teachers fought to maintain virtual classroom settings, rallying in person in the streets and car caravans throughout
the summer (Issa 2020). This willingness and ability to assert power stems in part from a shift among the Chicago
teachers to social movement unionism which proved crucial to their success in their 2012 and 2019 strikes . Social
movement unionism, according to teacher and union activist Lois Weiner, sees teachers “[take] leadership in organizing
a coalition that looks to mobilize more support within the immediate neighborhood and the larger community” (Weiner
2012). Likewise, the nurses’ union, longtime proponents of the social movement unionism model , mobilized its
membership and coalition partners to pressure state and federal authorities for personal protective equipment and
expansion health services for infected patients. Nurses marshaled their skills to produce much of this equipment when
federal authorities politicized the pandemic and dragged its feet on delivering the equipment.Footnote5

As the pandemic crisis extended from weeks to months, revelations about the police-protected lynching of Ahmaud
Arbery and the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ignited another insurgency movement for Black lives
beginning in May 2020. The North American uprising, surging from May through August of 2020, against racist police
brutality quickly advanced from a protest over the targeting of Black people with violent police repression to become a
blistering criticism of white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and the domination of state instruments of power by the
equally corrupt, racist, and fascistic Trump administration (Kellner 2018). Thus, the uprising became a mass demand to
reshape power relations more broadly, wrest control of resources and coercive power from the dominant racist–
capitalist minority , and reorder the state’s machinery to serve the needs of the majority of the people. In addition,
the generalized demand to “ defund the police ” and replace policing with community-controlled forms of social
welfare , public safety, and reparations and restoration indicates the preparation for “ dual power ” in ways with which
Jameson seems unequipped to contend .

A radical criticism of the police, the vanguard of state repression and violence against the working class, offers a
starting point to construct a clear form of dual power . “Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with
empowered communities working to solve their own problems ” (Vitale 2017, 66). Approaches to police reform that
strengthen the legitimacy of the police through “sensitivity training” and even individualized punishment of “bad apples”
strengthen the state’s coercive power without necessarily transforming the state from a capitalist state to a proletarian
state. Incipient conceptions of this necessity were articulated in criticisms of the failure of police reform. One legal
activist stated, “[r]eforms do not make the criminal legal system more just, but obscure its violence more efficiently”
(Purnell 2020). Because state coercive power is history and structurally rooted in white supremacy, the police, reformed
or not, will play a violent role in maintaining white supremacy, and Black and Brown people will remain in danger.
Activists and organizations, defining themselves as “abolitionists,” called for defunding the police and replacing most
policing with community-controlled social resources, such as non-police responses to domestic violence, non-
criminalized interventions in drug “offenses,” eliminating carceral resources and infrastructures in schools, ending
immunity from prosecution for police offenders, and massively shifting resources from the police to community services
(Corder and Perez 2020).
Such demands, however, when left to state bureaucracies, laws, or other “democratic” processes, become easily swamped by fears of crime and structural inequalities of wealth and power that are fostered by reliance on
the state for protection and legitimacy. If these demands cannot be protected from police or right-wing terrorist violence, the state’s ability to regain its contested monopoly on power, supported by a wave of media
framing of police as the only force for order and protest as the harbinger of anarchy, is fortified. This functioning contradiction results from the nature of capitalist and white supremacist power, but also the over-reliance
on legitimated democratic forms, even from the socialist camp. Protests and subsequent events in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Seattle, Washington revealed these contradictions in detail and point to what “dual power”
might look like on the level of public safety. Minneapolis police in the 1980s and 1990s were notorious for their racist targeting of nonwhite communities with violence and impunity. Violent police actions contributed to
the growth of crime and violent clashes with police. In the early 2000s, connections between the police union and white supremacist motorcycle gangs added to the evidence that Minneapolis police were unafraid and
uninhibited in their use of extra-legal forms of violence and coercion to maintain their power (Michaels 2020). Attempts at reform through democratic and legalistic processes met with powerful resistance, though city
officials convinced the department to accept extra resources for new racial sensitivity training. In 2020, the slaying of George Floyd by five Minneapolis officers only became international news after a digital recording of
the incident surfaced sparking international protest and the reemergence of the #BlackLivesMatter in the streets (Cooley 2020).

Initial calls for reform by the city’s leaders essentially rehearsed the same appeals to smother protest by promising restraints on police excesses that had shaped the urban experience in the 1980s and 1990s. A separate
campaign to defund the police department and “reboot” it based on community control and new definitions of public safety was met with massive resistance from conservatives who cried anarchy, media which distorted
the aims of the reforms, and even among reformers themselves who feared going too far. The bureaucratic process served as an excuse to block change, for some officials who insisted that even mild reforms would
“require navigating a complex labyrinth of city and state laws, police union contracts, and budget issues” (Bush 2020). Congress’s refusal to address police reforms after the 2020 elections secured Democrats a thin
majority signaled the failure of liberal democracy to the decisive advantage of the coercive elements of the state, the capitalist class vested in property rights, and nefarious right-wing political forces.

While these struggles unfolded, in Seattle in early June 2020, #BlackLivesMatter protesters occupied the East Seattle police precinct building, forced the police force to flee, renamed the building the “Seattle People’s
Department,” and established an “autonomous zone” in a portion of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Participants named this takeover the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). Thousands of people sympathetic to the
#BlackLivesMatter struggle and angered by police violence the previous month, including an attack on a 7-year-old child and other protest spectators, attended to the occupation of the zone. In this action, they
operationalized alternatives to policing and repressive state power. According to one account, “[j]ust as historic protests after Floyd’s death served as a release valve for deep rage against racist policing and relief from
months of pandemic lockdown, the CHAZ was a flowering of hope that drew thousands in a season of death” (Gupta 2020).Footnote6 The zone mirrored past attempts at autonomous social experiments, such as Occupy
Wall Street. Occupiers built kitchens, educational facilities, child care centers, and other resources for the inhabitants. Occupiers made intentional comparisons between themselves to the Paris Commune and many
referenced Lenin’s political theory outlined in State and Revolution. They believed they were creating a non-state alternative form of community and institutional power.Footnote7 In response to this occupation, the city’s
liberal government combined its forces with the police, the right-wing militias, an unsympathetic media, a hostile business community worried about property values, and the increasingly authoritarian federal law
enforcement apparatus to force its closure.

The Trump administration responded to the anti-racist uprising with fascist tactics. It threatened city and state
governments to crackdown on protesters with violence and imprisonment or face waves of federal troops entering their
cities. It encouraged police departments to use excessive force, resulting in extreme violence against protesters,
including deadly assaults by police vehicles, the use of tear gas and brutal violence against protesters. Trump personally
encouraged right-wing, white supremacist militias to join the police adding to the brutality of the moment. In May 2020,
he tweeted, “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” implying both that anti-racist protesters were mere criminals
and that he supported police and civilian violence directed at them (Southern Poverty Law Center 2020). This appeal to
the militant right wing combined with Trump’s dismissal of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “hoax,” his appeals to racist
rhetoric and policies, notably attack nonwhite immigrants, blaming China for U.S. economic struggles and the pandemic,
and his abuse of the U.S. media cultivated conspiracy-driven, paranoia among his followers leading to the January 6th
riot at the U.S. capitol building (Wendland-Liu 2020a, b, c). While the social forces leading the uprising were decisive in
defeating Trump’s bid for reelection, democracy itself is insufficient for eliminating the fascist threat . Racist
inequalities and brutalities, general powerlessness and exploitation, and ongoing health emergency and climate
crisis, and the fear of war did not resolve themselves when Trump temporarily fled to his compound in Florida. Since
Trump’s electoral defeat , U.S. democracy has provided no reforms for these systemic elements of capital
accumulation or the fascist threat .

The ongoing fascist threat , the collapse of the legitimacy of Washington’s leadership of global capitalism , and the
transparency of the facile U.S. claim to model democracy and human rights on the world stage demands an
intervention. My alternative “American utopia” reading of the three recent major revolutionary events––the Occupy
Wall Street movement of 2011, the #BlackLivesMatter rebellions of 2014, and the May–July 2020 uprising against racist
police brutality––insists on announcing the ongoing conjunctural rupture in ruling-class hegemony in the U.S., a crisis of
capitalist state power, and mass critiques of state forms of rule or reform. The criticisms of the state by these
movements and their organizational forms center on shifting administration of economic, juridical, and political
governance from the state to the people. The need for an ongoing struggle to politically empower “essential labor,” the
urgent need for social solidarity to survive the pandemic, and crisis of U.S. ruling-class legitimacy, many North American
radical and Marxist theorists remain entrenched in democratic theory, hoping it will offer a salutary response. This latter
view depends fundamentally on the formation of majority influence on existing state forms or the modification of those
forms to retain their legitimacy (rather than a shift to people’s rule or working-class control). By contrast, the
combination of riots, permanent protest, staged occupations, and the persistent demand for social solidarity and. the
enhancement of working-class capacity to govern demonstrates increasing political sophistication through mass
affective affiliation with resistance.
Marxism and Democratic Theory

It is easy to point to multiple examples of how the U.S. government has deployed rhetoric of “democracy” to justify its imperialist domination of global affairs or to maintain a political status quo domestically. We need not
explore these examples much to understand how cynical and empty these usages have been. Ongoing U.S. military, economic, and political interventions, which have destroyed so many hundreds of thousands of lives,
enacted in the name of democracy have proven to be little more than a mockery of the same. By contrast to this empty rhetoric of democracy, many North American Marxists adopt the same language of democracy to
name the horizon and goal of socialism—but with, they claim, a deeper or substantive meaning (Wolff 2000). Thus, they contrast socialist or radical democracy with capitalist or bourgeois democracy.Footnote8

Meiksins Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism poses what she sees as the political concept of democracy against the economic concept of capitalism. She does so to deliver a socialist critique of capitalism that shares
some Leninist features. Wood argues that democracy refers to all “extra-economic goods” or “political goods” (Meiksins Wood 2002, Kindle Locations 5545–5546). Political struggles around “extra-economic goods,” she
avers, “remain vitally important, but they have to be organized and conducted in the full recognition that capitalism has a remarkable capacity to distance democratic politics from the decisive centers of social power and
to insulate the power of appropriation and exploitation from democratic accountability” (Meiksins Wood 2002, Kindle Locations 5413–5415).Footnote9 Meiksins Wood imagines the socialist transition as contained within
“democratic accountability.” She further distinguishes democracy associated with socialism and a limited version associated with capitalism––thus, the political form, being separate from capitalist economics, can simply
be extended for a greater portion of the population, open a socialist transition, and remain generally unchanged (Meiksins Wood 2002). Her formula is not a complex one: she seeks to project a socialist economics, while
preserving political democracy created by capitalist social formations. Ironically, her political stance, apart from its egalitarian economics, shares an ideological positioning with the neo-conservative thinker Francis
Fukuyama who insists that democracy aims to hold accountable the state (Fukuyama 2016), suggesting the ideological convergence of these otherwise diverging points of view. Neither emphasize the class character of the
state or political order.

Other North American scholars, who stop short of Lenin’s injunction to move beyond the limits of democracy, join the call for extensions of democracy based on a perceived division between the political and economic
constructed ideologically and structurally within capitalism and its state functions. For example, Wolff, despite establishing Marxism’s ambiguity toward democracy, describes S&R through this lens, writing that its
theoretical aim is “a complete or full democracy.” Wolff adds that Marxism’s contribution to democratic theory lies primarily within its demand to expand the definition of democracy to include economic processes that
Marxists define as class (Wolff 2000, 113, n. 1, emphasis added). Resch asserts that “socialism without democracy is a sham, and socialism without some market mechanisms is impossible to sustain.” He applies the
formula, constructing an opposition between “participatory democracy” and capitalist democracy, the former holding the latter accountable through an extension of the number of people who oversee economic processes
(Resch 1992, 14, 30–31). Townshend tactically advocates a reconstruction of Lenin to dismiss his demands to overcome democracy to prevent liberals from using his revolutionary ideas to shelve all of the Marxist tradition.
When the liberals succeed in scorning Marxism like this, Marxists are denied the ability to make more reasonable demands like “expanding democracy” or to raise reasonable questions about the class structure that limits
this expansion (Townshend 1999, 70–71). The mystical figure of democracy, of a particularly extensive sort, renders a system of liberation. A common feature here is the theory of extension: make democracy include
economic processes overseen by larger groups of people, and, with some terminological variation, liberation follows in the form of participatory or even socialist democracy. It is, thus, essentially, economic in its aims and
aspirations.

While Lenin had advocated a struggle for democracy,Footnote10 he rejected the implicit conciliation with dominant
discourses wherein democracy lies at the end of history. Simply put, democracy subverts the revolutionary content of
Marxist theory by offering the working-class-only limited participation in bourgeois civil society, a role closely linked
to the maintenance of its subordination as an object of the capitalist class’s agency via the democratic state . In a
Leninist strain, Jodi Dean argues, “democratic theory presents ideals and aspirations as always already present
possibilities. In so doing, it brings utopia inside, eliminating it as an external space of hope .” Adherence to democratic
theory is a concession that ensnares socialist hope. Deans continues, “by internalizing the hope that things might be
otherwise , democratic theory destroys that hope: potential problems are solved in advance , through democratic
channels. We already know how to get there . We already have the procedures .” (Dean 2009, 78, emphasis in the
original). Revolutionary transformation is foreclosed. For this reason, Dean, discontent with a negative critique of
democracy and capitalism, looks to the “ communist horizon ” (Dean 2012).

Contemporary Marxist democratic theory, then, circumvents an issue that Lenin foregrounds: the necessity of looking
past democracy itself for a radical future. Democracy operates appropriately under capitalism ; it is, at its most
advanced, nothing but the limit of political maturity under capitalist conditions (Marot 2014). Its proper function is a
contradiction between its ideals and the reality of uneven power relations , mismanagement, incompleteness, and
failure. Appeals for democracy as the endgame invite persistent inequality, incomplete social development in
perpetuum, a halt in historical movement, a submission to the state as it is. Dean argues that placing democracy as
the final goal of the socialist struggle “presupposes democracy is the solution to the problems of democracy .” Thus,
“it is a dead end for left politics ” (Dean 2009, 94). Democratic theory, as Lenin argued, “keeps everything within the
bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic” (Lenin 1964c, 489).
The tension within Marxist theory over the capitalism–democracy–socialism triad invokes Lenin’s metaphor of democracy as “the shell of capitalism.” He wrote, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for
capitalism” (Lenin 1964c, 393). Capitalism inhabits this shell to conceal its relations and hide its core truths within the cover of dynamic political activity, campaigns, and debate. It is the appearance of freedom and
dynamism that “insulates” the real power of capitalist domination of the state. The “shell” metaphor describes something more than just an obfuscation, however. Capitalism’s essential political form is a reflection and
synthesis of the contradiction between the dictatorial power of the capitalist class and its massive resources for coercive functions, and the emergent, resistant power of the exploited and oppressed. Class relations
guarantee that despite its numerical disadvantage, however, the capitalist class enjoys domination in most circumstances within this structure.

Democracy proved progressive over “slavery” (Lenin’s interchangeable term for early racial slavery, European-led colonialism, early capitalist development, and autocratic Tsarism).Footnote11 Following a historical stage
model of social development, Lenin regarded democracy (and capitalist relations of production) as worth fighting for in 1905 and the early stages of 1917 (Lenin, 1962, 1964a). By April 1917, however, democracy stood as a
barrier to what could be: an end to the war, land for the peasants, and proletarian leadership of governing entities. Here, Lenin revealed the general impossibility of extricating democracy from bourgeois class politics.
Bourgeois ideology and governing tactics make room for “good governance, flexibility, achieving a complex multi-level system, characterized at the same time by bottom-up approaches and soft law alongside hard law,”
which constituted liberal democratic theory and practice (Sammaddar 2018, 179). These instruments for securing capitalist class hegemony recognize and fear the specter of working-class resistance and adopt the tactics,
forms, and modes necessary to secure broader cultural and political consent for bourgeois rule. If the shell of democracy hides capitalist exploitation, the totality of this structure refuses any substantial departure between
democratic theory and capitalist exploitation.

The Limits of Democracy and the Possibilities “Revolutionary Self-government”

The limits of democratic theory invite a return to Lenin. I do so here in the spirit of Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad who urged a return to Marx because historical materialism’s insistence on the centrality of class struggle
under capitalism offered the clearest way to both interpret present realities and invite revolutionary transformation (Ahmad 2012). It is in the spirit of this search for clarity from within the Marxist tradition that I offer this
reading of Lenin’s State and Revolution (S&R) and its injunction to overcome democracy in the struggle to establish a replacement for the capitalist state. I do not offer this reading as if Lenin or Leninism is the most
authoritative thread of Marxism or a universal approach socialist theory, but rather as a vehicle for exploring a political means by which U.S. Marxist theory may move beyond the discursive limits of self-congratulatory
democratic pretense. Axiomatic is Lenin’s call for a break with a democratic theory, because this latter condition remains mired in the contradiction of political democracy’s necessarily permanent limitations, a structural
totality that is capitalistic. Democracy functions as a determining political frame that is the inseparable instrument of capitalist totality, constituted by the class needs, power, laws, ideologies, cultures, and interests of the
bourgeoisie. Lenin maintained that even once a proletarian state is established representing the most complete form of democracy, its democratic state apparatuses, its class content, its function, must also be replaced
(Lenin 1964c). The socialist task is, thus, to use the tools of democracy to push that totality to its limits (its “end”), to transform the power of the working class and other oppressed classes from resistance to creativity in
new organized political and economic forms, and to subordinate democratic instruments (the state) to working-class power, and then ultimately see them vanish.

After the first 1917 revolution and his return to Russia, Lenin experienced a profound disillusionment and frustration with the class nature of democracy. He thought (perhaps optimistically) that bourgeois democracy had
been accomplished in Russia under the liberal provisional government, but it refused (by the necessities of its existence and the logic of capitalist relations) to meet the needs of the people (Lih 2011, 231). The dire
predicament of war, poverty, starvation, and disease demanded the working class take steps toward a new stage of revolutionary development. Lenin posited that the post-tsarist democratic state denoted a capitalist class
dictatorship. That is, the capitalist class manages and deploys state machinery through a governmentality of pluralist political parties and voting procedures to enforce its rule over the exploited and oppressed classes. The
socialist-oriented majority, composed of the exploited working class in alliance with the oppressed and exploited peasantry, had to subordinate this machinery, dismantle it, and replace it with original, self-created forms
of political organization. Two agencies emerged in the struggle against tsarism, one with dictatorial power and one with “incipient” power (Lenin 1964d, 38–39). In contention for supremacy stood the reactionary
bureaucratic power of the capitalist state (democracy) and the revolutionary institutions of the working class and the peasants.Footnote12 Social Democratic theory, heretofore, conceded the terrain of this struggle to the
capitalist class and its democratic state, urging compromise, quiescence, and submission on the working class and its allies in a truly revolutionary moment.

As 1917 wore on, the famous slogan “all power to the soviets!” signaled the Bolshevik demand for compulsory transfer of political power from the state to the working class, peasant, and military soviets. It represented the
call for the beginning of a transition from democracy to a post-democratic, working-class hegemony of the political order. Lenin recognized the tremendous political significance of the soviets in 1905 when he saw the
strike committees press for deeper development of the revolutionary demands, and function as a site in which broad revolutionary working-class and peasant unity would crystalize (Shandro 2007). Shandro contends that
through the soviets in 1905 had both “disrupted the hegemony of the liberal bourgeoisie and gained for itself some political experience” and “it had erected a new institutional form through which the diverse
revolutionary-democratic forces could mesh together in a coalition of the masses, the worker-peasant alliance, and assume state power” (Shandro 2007, 325). With this historical experience in mind, Lenin feared that if the
working class failed to step forward immediately to claim revolutionary power, the state under the provisional government would never address the concrete needs of the mass of people. Further, if the Bolshevik Party
endorsed the existing regime, it would sacrifice hard-won revolutionary credentials by asking the worker–peasant alliance to suspend its forward momentum, relinquish its purchase on power, and starve and suffer. The
historical motion toward working-class power drives revolutionary necessity. “It is impossible to stand still in history,” he warned his opponents who insisted on adhering to the gains made under a revolutionary democracy
(Lenin 1964b, 324).

Lenin argued that once the national democratic revolution had won power from the Tsarist regime, the revolutionary forces should transition to a “commune” political project, a political formation that represents an
advance over revolutionary democracy, as well as over the “dual power” of the subordinated soviets. Lenin explored the role of the “commune” in relation to the specific conditions of the Russian Revolution in April 1917
in a short article called “The Dual Power,” the terminology Jameson referenced in his exploration of U.S. political dynamics in his 2016 essay. The first Russian revolution of 1917 produced a unique situation whose specific
character was “highly remarkable” and something “[n]obody previously thought.” This uniqueness was the duality of power. It was the simultaneously contested power of the state––dominated by the capitalist class
articulated by the police, parliament, laws, the army, schools, and media––and the soviets, the people’s institutions that operated as “an entirely different kind of power” from the Russian state. This second power, in this
early stage, was “incipient” and erroneously inclined to compromise with the bourgeois state. It was, however, also characterized by its non-reference to existing law and its willingness to exercise power through armed
force and extra-legal self-activity of the masses of the working class and the peasants. Soviets deployed power to maintain public safety and order (which the state could no longer guarantee), replaced state bureaucracies
“by the direct rule of the people themselves,” and imposed direct forms of popular control over bureaucracies and political entities through mechanisms like the “recall” and the payment of working-class wages (Lenin
1964d, 38–39).

This discourse needs careful attention. Lenin regarded the soviets in the form developed after 1905 as “incipient,” or
early-stage forms of dual power. He also suggested they emerged under specific conditions, but called on the
revolutionary class to operationalize them in ways that matched the people’s needs and realities. Jameson’s discussion
of the lack of “dual power” configurations in the U.S. misses this feature. Lenin saw incipient dual power entities as
endemic, if sublimated, to any capitalist formation, the specific forms in which the revolutionary class will create them
depends precisely on the historical development of the revolutionary class, in combination with the needs, the history,
and the cultures of the people from whom they emerge. Theoretically, he elicited the dialectic between structure and
agency, between systems and human action whose application is universal, if the specifics of place and time reshape the
form and content of the institutionalized agency of the exploited and oppressed class. Thus, Jameson’s judgments and
selections about what could constitute dual power entities in the U.S. perforce discard the social unionism of the
teachers’ and nurses’ unions as an incipient form , and completely miss the organizing and mobilizing that underline
the #BlackLivesMatter struggles . Institutions or formations that comprise this incipient power do so when they assert
a claim to power ordinarily claimed by the state. This incipient power threatens the dominance of capitalists in the
economic and political spheres.

According to Lenin, when incipient power is made permanent it forms a basis of “dual power” and offers concrete
alternatives to capitalist power. During the revolutionary democratic struggle, the revolutionary forces obtained “certain
special methods of making history which are foreign to other periods of political life.” These “methods” entailed, first,
the “seizure by the people of political liberty” (Lenin 1964a, 349–350). They claimed rights, public space, actions, and
creative means to redefine their relationship to the state and its institutions, one another, and to capitalism. This
qualitatively new form of social action created “new organs of revolutionary authority,” the soviets. The soviets achieved
these two features because the people built them “irrespective of all laws and regulations,” essentially defying the
coercive power of the state. Lenin described the soviets as “a product of native genius” that was a “manifestation of the
independent activity of the people which has rid itself, or was ridding itself, of its old police fetters” (Lenin 1964a, 350).
In Lenin’s view, this dual power served as a material and institutional foundation for the commune , the mode of
political organization beyond democracy .

Lenin first outlined the commune, based on the Paris Commune , the ultimate, original occupy protest-cum-nascent
workers’ governing entity , as an institutional and permanent form of political power to contest the authority and
legitimacy of the bourgeois parliament and state bureaucracy . In this creative space, Lenin saw the soviets operating
as mechanisms for workers and peasants (and other revolutionary forces and allies) to amplify demands, collectively
cultivate approaches to administer enterprises, manage resources, build new social institutions, and protect their
communities. In S&R, Lenin developed this idea more explicitly. “The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the
smashed state machine ‘only’ by fuller democracy…. But as a matter of fact this ‘only’ signifies a gigantic replacement of
certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type.” The difference is so complete that it “a case
of ‘quantity’ being transformed into ‘quality’” (Lenin 1964c, 419). It was “accessible to the masses, sprang directly from
the masses; and was a direct and immediate instrument of the popular masses, of their will” (Lenin 1964a, 351). The
image Lenin discloses of this alternative form of collective, socialist power reveals it to be utterly and inalterably other
from democracy. This alternative form of governing power rests on the actions, participation, and movement of the
majority of people who were formerly exploited, oppressed, and propertyless.

The soviets had not finished their transformative work with the eventual assumption of sole governance (after the
second revolution), however. The revolutionary process necessarily continued through the subordination of the
capitalist-dominated state to a new form of institutionalized revolutionary self-government led by the worker–peasant
majority. By necessity, this meant eliminating “the imperialist and military machinery,” police and repressive forces, the
dismantling of parliamentary forms of power consolidation, and the disintegration of bureaucratic administration tied to
capitalist economic needs. In their place, socialist power would elevate the soviets as the source of administration,
ownership, planning, and resource distribution, as well as control of coercive machinery such as police and other public
safety instruments. This subordination of the capitalist state entailed “revolutionary democracy” or the production of
“democracy in a new way” (Lenin 1964c, 412, 416, 444). Lenin referred to this process as the establishment of
revolutionary self-government and considered it as a necessary precursor for the dissolution of capitalist power but not
as the equivalent of socialism.

The evolution of this new complex of power remains a preparatory ground for the radical transformation, which Lenin
identified as the “overcoming of democracy.” In his thought, one detects a pause in the theorized momentum of the
revolution to take stock of democratic theory. Here, Lenin posed an equivalence of democracy and the state. Democracy
is a form of state that operationalizes coercive force and ideological hegemony through its police, institutions, and
bureaucratic apparatuses to suppress the majority, to form a bloc of power and institutionalization that depends not
only on the individuals or capitalist class fractions that dominate it but also on the imaginary beliefs in and consent to
the necessity of its perpetuation for the good of all. Because the state becomes democracy becomes capitalism itself
(Lenin 1964c, 396), the revolutionary goal is the “withering away of democracy,” the “abolition of democracy.” “No,
democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes
the subordination of the minority to the majority” and, by reinforcing a permanent inequality, provides to the capitalist
class, via its positioning vis-à-vis the social relations of production, the tools to mobilize coercive and consensual power
to prevent this numerical disadvantage from allowing it to be subdued (Lenin 1964c, 456). In other words, democracy is
the set of political conditions that enable an omnipotent minority to secure the consent of the far weaker, disorganized,
less conscious majority for a system that requires the majority’s exploitation to survive.

This “ commune ” form, as a potential post-state , post-democratic socialist instrument of political power, theoretically
functions more effectively within the socialist economic project of public ownership of enterprises, resources,
institutions, and communities through the elimination of capitalist private property relations, commodity production,
and the class process of the expropriation of surplus labor power. Here, we discover how Lenin rubbished the common
belief that public ownership of the means of production through the socialized existing state machinery and institutions
is the limit of socialist construction. Unless the new entities are administered and planned by the spontaneously
developed and coordinated forms of worker and community associations that make sense culturally and technically to
U.S.-based working-class people, to make a cross-cultural comparison, they remain state capitalist, a project of
imposition. In such a situation, the class struggle within a capitalist bourgeois democratic framework persists,
demanding more advanced development of socialist institutions.

While the specific institutional form of the soviet was unique within Lenin’s moment and place, some Marxists continue
to theorize its generalizable necessity for a socialist revolution. For example, scholar Ranabir Samaddar, who discusses
the concept of “ dual power ” through the lens of anti-colonial struggles , explains further. Dual power is not a
“ counter-power ” concept or a reflection of the bourgeois state . Rooted in the local and strategically oriented , it is
not equivalent to the Communist Party , though the role of the Communist Party in initializing and organizing
alternative institutions is indispensable from Lenin’s point of view. Instead, it is a multi-sited, interlinked network of
power struggles that expose the class nature of the bourgeois state , the illegitimacy of its rule, and the need for new
institutional frameworks for displacing that power to liberate the working class and its oppressed allies. The ruling
class is unable to rule in the usual manner ; and the people no longer allow themselves to be ruled in that manner and
make new forms of power . Samaddar indexes this ideological and chronological break with capitalist rule. “[D]ual
power means dual time,” he writes. It defies linear conceptualizations of “transition” and the contemporaneity of
historical time. Indeed, it opens a new era within the space and time of the old era, requiring new political
terminologies, philosophical stances, class relations of power, and international relations (Samaddar 2018, 181).

This duality of time poses a complex problem. This complexity is best exemplified by what appears to be a contradiction
over the struggle for democracy and a break with that struggle to establish the post-capitalist political and economic
order. Reconciliation of these two temporalized concepts is unnecessary. Instead, a return to Lenin on the question of
the capitalism and the democratic state enable a move to theorize “the question of democracy, from the inside of the
determined moment,” to follow Badiou (2007, 9). This means the location of the fluid moments between the end of
democracy and the beginning of revolution and to “[hold] open a gap” (Dean 2016, 121) that appears to be blocked by
neoliberal ideologies of the end of history or fascistic tendencies of the ultra-right. To return to Lenin is to take seriously
the necessity of the struggle for democracy, the development of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class in
that struggle, and its creation of historically and culturally relevant independent institutional forms of dual power in
preparation for its post-capitalist and post-democratic supremacy. While democratic theory as an end has no future,
revolutionary theory as a beginning has no history.

Conclusion: What’s Next?

State and Revolution inscribes a commitment to socialist revolution against the atrocities of “the all-European filthy,
bloody morass” of total global war, a general crisis of imperialist capitalism, and an openly racist and colonialist
counterrevolution (Lenin 1964c, 415). More than a denunciation of capitalism and reaction, S&R theorizes and calls
forth the technical–institutional tools , ideological apparatus , and value systems for the creative transcendence of the
capitalistic and imperialist violence . It registers a new claim in its theoretical rupture with capitalism, with the totality
of its political forms, its ideological and cultural hegemony, and its global economic processes. It should, thus, be read
as both a specific critique of this balance of forces in Russia and a theorization of the dialectics of the political
development of capitalism. S&R’s critique of democracy, may enable us to imagine new radical and socialist
possibilities in the present conjunctural crises in the U.S. deepened by pandemic , economic collapse , an anti-racist
uprising , and the threat of fascism . If the primary purpose of democracy in the U.S. political system is to produce
reforms during a crisis that are meant not to empower the marginalized, oppressed, or exploited but rather to extend
the legitimacy of capitalism and its rule by the capitalist class , then S&R, authorizes a transcendence of that political
cul-de-sac.

If the “ liberal world order ,” as represented and led by the U.S. “ does not (sufficiently) address issues of cultural
identity, distributive justice , ec ological integrity , moral decency, and solidarity ,” then Lenin’s political challenge is
worth our return (Scholte 2019, 68). Indeed, recent research shows that non-democratic systems that account for
class and class struggle provide new models for what I term a post-democratic society . According to political science
scholar Zhongyuan Wang, for example, the Chinese system dispenses with Western concepts such as multi-party
systems, expensive election campaigns, and endless media demagoguery in a guise of democracy in favor of seeking
actionable and accountable modes of representation, service, and mobilization that open more fundamental
connections to the people’s needs and interests (Wang 2020). By contrast, Western imperialist desires to impose class-
based and ethnically indoctrinated democratic political rituals on states and peoples who do not share dominant
European historical roots has produced a massive catalogue of historical failure , violence, dictatorship , and recurring
militaristic intervention (Yang 2021).

Thus, struggles in the U.S. outlined in this essay potentialize the dialectical attempt to articulate democracy ( reform )
with the attempts to overcome democracy ( revolution ). The experiences of “ essential workers ,” the teachers’ unions ,
the healthcare crisis , or of Minneapolis and Seattle do not yet approximate what Lenin championed as “an incipient
power” (Lenin 1964d, 39), the forerunner of the commune , a new, people-defined power that substitutes , subverts ,
and supplants the capitalist democratic state . They do, however, provide glimmers of hope. Class struggle, the
demand for justice combined with the practical activity of the oppressed and the embryonic political forms of dual
power , transform the oppressed and exploited into a revolutionary subject. Through this uprising, in its resistance to
racist police brutality ––the truncheon of the racist–capitalist class that dominates the U.S. state––the working class
and its allies seek to extend democratic rights , secure power, build a bridge to an emancipated future, and
reconstruct themselves as their own rulers .
 Marx K: Texas AB

The affirmative is driven by sentimentality, a mode of identifying across difference with another’s
pain structured by the colonial object relation in which solidarity, activism, and individualism is not
tangible nor political, but is a “psychic process” that arbitrates a spectrum of worthiness of repair.
That neutralizes the revolutionary potential of the 1AC and allows for the feeling of action, without
the effect of that action. This turns political action into a conduit through which neoliberal forms of
desire and recognition take shape. The impact is the continual inscription of racial logics of the
colonial world order.
Stuelke, 21 – Patricia Stuelke teaches and writes about 20th and 21st century hemispheric literature,
photography, and popular culture, particularly in relation to histories of US imperialism, racial capitalism, gender and
sexuality, and US and Latin American social movements at Dartmouth, 8/9/2020, [“The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal
Empire and the Turn from Critique”, Duke University Press]RA

Laubender describes, for instance, how Klein measures the improvement of her child patient “Richard” by “his ability to
sympathize with, to identify with, his ‘destroyed enemy,’ ” which meant, in the context of the end of World War II, “his
ability to see himself in [the] fascist, anti-Semitic empire” of the Nazis. In Laubender’s account, this example emphasizes
how, for Klein, the power of the reparative lay in a child’s ability to “exculpate its own guilt by adjudicating injury and
repair”: reparation names a “process” in which the “child constructs the object’s injury according to its own
expectations and desires, its own ability to position itself as the agent of repair,” and in so doing, cures itself, such
that it can “expiate its own guilt and reinvest the world of object relations.”107 Eng elaborates on how this arbitration
of injury and repair is structured by what he names the “colonial object relations” that lie at the heart of the
“consolidation of a European liberal human subject.”108 The reparative amounts, then, to a “psychic process” by
which some objects are imagined as “worthy of repair” and others are not, a deliberation that makes the continual
inscription of the racial logics of the colonial (and settler colonial) world order, and the designation of who counts as
human or not, the purview of the loving creative “properly bounded” liberal subject.109 In Klein’s case studies of
“true reparation,” Laubender indicates, the healing creativity of such subjects is deemed to manifest through a number
of telling scenes: through a colonizer’s fantasy of the “repopulation” of territory with colonizers after the elimination
of indigenous peoples; through a scene of a white woman celebrated for painting a naked black woman,
appropriating her image, as Laubender writes, “to slake [the white woman’s] emotional needs under the auspices of
care.”110 Eng’s and Laubender’s work thus reveals the reparative as a mode that links insufficient state visions for
the resolution of unresolvable violences past—visions that so often accompany new exercises and extensions of racial
capitalist power—with the fraught identificatory impulses that underlie solidarity projects. 111 During the transition
to neoliberalism, both the US imperialist settler state and US feminist and anti-imperialist solidarity movements
shared the “political and psychic unconscious of colonial object relations” that Eng diagnoses as constitutive of the
reparative, participating in the recycled and ongoing practice of drawing lines around which objects are constituted as
“good and worthy of reparations but psychically constituted as human,” lines informed by the racial capitalist and
colonial past and present.112 For feminist and solidarity writers and activists, their invention of reparative visions of
solidarity directed at repairing the violence of US empire often further resembled the therapeutic journey of Klein’s
patients, who similarly, as Laubender describes, “construct[ed] the object’s injury according to [their] own
expectations and desires, [their] own ability to position [themselves] as the agent[s] of repair,” a process that offered
“the feeling of ethical action.” 113 Such reparative visions and the feelings that justify them , the first half of this book
suggests, became conduits through which neoliberal racial capitalist forms of desire, debt, and recognition began to
take shape. Because the reparative in all its layers—psychic process, social form, interpretive hermeneutic—is
relentlessly invested in identification with a damaged object, activists and cultural workers’ reparative investments
often emerge in these chapters as the aftermath and reprise of the sentimental, or what Berlant has named its
“ unfinished business.” 114 Berlant cautions that, for Sedgwick, reparative reading was never meant to be a sentimental
exercise, as Sedgwick viewed sentimentality “as tending toward foreclosure and homogenized attunement”; this is why
proponents of reparative reading tend to emphasize that Sedgwick’s vision of reparation is not the same as an
indiscriminate restoration of the past or an uncritical relation to violent histories.115 For Berlant, sentimentality seems
central to the work of building solidarity and politics in general , even if she remains one of our most eloquent
explicators of the betrayals of sentimentality’s promise of affective connection across difference: its failure to be
revolutionary and the violence of its “humanizing gestures,” given that in the realm of sentimentality, “ the ethical
imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a passive and vaguely civic-minded ideal of compassion,” and
“the political as a place of acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private thoughts, leanings,
and gestures. ”116 Sentimentality is the mode of identifying across difference with another’s pain, the mode of crying
while reading a book or watching a movie that imaginatively transports one into the experience of the suffering other,
the gesture of imagining that “feeling with” and “feeling right” constitutes a form of political action even if it goes no
further than a change of heart; what it produces, then, is not unlike that “feeling of ethical action” (that is not
necessarily ethical at all) that Laubender identifies as central to the reparative mode.117

Understanding movements as composite of individual people undergoing personal growth through

solidarity is a “reparative turn” that creates catharsis in which feeling good becomes the measure
of our collective solidarity action, where preparing for the protest is more exciting than the protest
itself.
Stuelke, 21 – Patricia Stuelke teaches and writes about 20th and 21st century hemispheric literature,
photography, and popular culture, particularly in relation to histories of US imperialism, racial capitalism, gender and
sexuality, and US and Latin American social movements at Dartmouth, 8/9/2020, [“The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal
Empire and the Turn from Critique”, Duke University Press, page 6-10]RA

Sligh’s film might be said to encapsulate what Eve Sedgwick has called the “difficult nexus” where activism and theory
meet, the site of both convergence and flux between the affective and analytic modes of paranoid critique and
reparative engagement.4 The camera’s patient documentation of the activists’ art exhibits and theater captures their
creative commitment to the work of exposure and political education, their faith that dramatizing the violence of
Central American and especially US state power could mobilize audiences to challenge them. US intervention is
possible, according to the event flier, “up to the point that US public opinion will permit.”5 But the artists’ testimonies
in the film also reveal the practices of pleasure and personal satisfaction that infuse the movement. “I learned a lot,”
one participant says, providing the conversational voiceover that accompanies shots of building the protest, the
camera tracking the patient labor of staking wooden poles and stringing up signs between them. “ I think that night
when we spent all of us working together preparing and sewing the edges and putting in the grommets was absolutely
thrilling,” says another. “That was to me in a sense more exciting than actually putting it up in the freezing cold.” “ I
really enjoyed it,” another echoed, “the energy we got from it. I think that was great.” Anyone who has participated in
solidarity movement protest will recognize these sentiments: activists’ expressions of their personal growth through
solidarity work; their satisfaction at the intellectual and affective renewal that this work has brought to their own
lives; the joy in the process of making something together, even something as quotidian as anchoring grommets; the
feeling of accomplishment at a collective practice that feels like a transferable skill, something you can bring with
you , in those activists’ words, “ to the next thing .”6 But they might also recognize the distance between the “emotional
habitus” of this scene of solidarity and the incisive attention of Jaar’s juxtaposition in We Are All Created Equal.7 Jaar’s
piece lays bare the hemispheric state violence necessary to produce even the daily detritus of capitalism in the United
States, like a glossy print ad slogan celebrating the willing sacrifice of equality and community in favor of craven
ambition, reparatively produced as a natural corporeal drive of which no one should be ashamed. In Sligh’s film, such
scenes of state and capitalist violence recede amid the celebration of activists’ “thrilling” sense of connection , as they
find the work of preparing for the protest “more exciting” than the protest itself. “ Excitement” and ineffable
“energy”—feeling good—become the measure of their collective solidarity action, and the generation of those
feelings becomes the true subject of Sligh’s solidarity process film, and thus the legacy it leaves behind.8 This book
reads such frictions within late twentieth-century solidarity movement culture in the Americas as evidence of the tactical
negotiations between critique and compensatory connection carried out in activist, scholarly, and state circles in the
years of US neoliberal empire’s ascendance. By examining how such aesthetic and interpretive contestations
eventually manifested mistaken equations of reparative feeling with collective liberation , The Ruse of Repair offers
both a history and a critique of the US academy’s celebrated flight from critique to repair, glossed loosely here as the
“reparative turn.”9 It is the contention of this book that this shift—this glide that so often is articulated as a relief from
the exhaustion of struggling against structural violence that never seems to abate or recede—has an intertwined
activist and political-economic history. Premised on the notion that imperialist war and racial capitalist violence, and
the scenes of activism and creative political art and world-making that challenge them, inform our academic and
everyday habits of mind more than we generally acknowledge, The Ruse of Repair examines representations of late
twentieth-century US neoliberal empire, along with the activist, university, and state scenes that generated them, in
order to chart a genealogy of how a large swath of the US academy and beyond has arrived at the valorization of
repair.

The aff is a form of solidarity tourism that seeks to provoke an individualized, identificatory feeling
in which activism and solidarity is more about affective renewal than collective action. The aff’s
scholarship overestimates the comprehensibility of violence which promotes individualized
response to conditions. Recognition of affect is both how western empire expands and limits our
capacity for theorizing response to it.
Stuelke, 21 – Patricia Stuelke teaches and writes about 20th and 21st century hemispheric literature,
photography, and popular culture, particularly in relation to histories of US imperialism, racial capitalism, gender and
sexuality, and US and Latin American social movements at Dartmouth, 8/9/2020, [“The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal
Empire and the Turn from Critique”, Duke University Press]RA

This turn toward the reparative as a response to state violence has also reverberated outside the academy. As Dierdra
Reber has described—citing Zapatista Subcomandante Galeano (formerly Marcos)’s advocacy for people “to opine,
and to feel, and to dissent”—feeling often functions in the present not only as “a vehicle for knowledge,” but as “the
motor driving activist intervention.”24 Graffiti around the world shouts “the new global currency is love,” while allies
carry “Love Water Not Oil” signs in solidarity with indigenous peoples fighting the construction of oil pipelines. The
Zapatistas describe themselves as “experts (or professionals) in hope,” while other Latin American artists and creative
collectives, in solidarity with indigenous activists, emphasize micropolitica, a practice that, as Suely Rolnik writes, “can
incite in the people that are affected by it in its reception: it does not have to do with the consciousness of domination
and exploitation (its extensive face, representative, macropolitical), but rather the experience of this state of things in
the very body.”25 Solidarity tourism , from Palestine to Ferguson, Missouri, stimulates and manages affect, as tours
are designed to provoke either identificatory or disidentificatory feelings in activist-tourists that they then struggle to
mobilize; as such, solidarity activism can sometimes seem less about dismantling empire and more about the
affective renewal of relatively privileged subjects. 26 Given the violence of the recent past and present—the
omnipresence of the forever war and the policing of national borders, the ongoing ravages of settler colonialism,
antiblack state-sanctioned and capitalist violence in the continuing aftermaths of slavery, ever-increasing debt and
economic precarity, and the catastrophic reprisals of a dying planet— it is understandable that scholars and activists
are celebrating or mining as models for their own practice those strategies people use to cope within the systems that
oppress them. Yet there are myriad difficulties with the presumptions about state violence that underlie the embrace
of reparative methods, modes, and moods. Such appeals to treat state and capitalist violence as obvious and evident
—to “[let] ghosts be ghosts, rather than [say] what they are ghosts of,” as Best and Marcus write27— tend to
overestimate the legibility of state and capitalist violence, as well as the extent to which understandings of that
violence are known and shared. We have only to think of Nicole Fleetwood’s analysis of the regime of “carceral
visuality”—a regime that renders the incarcerated “invisible” even as the state and popular culture circulate a “set of
rehearsed images” through which the prison becomes legible and naturalized as necessary—to understand the oddity of
Sedgwick’s suggestion that the racist violence of mass incarceration renders paranoid critique irrelevant.28 And we have
only to ask, as Crystal Bartolovich does with regard to Marcus and Best’s claim for the obviousness of antiblack racist
violence on the Gulf Coast, “Were individual white viewers of newscasts in Ohio able spontaneously to ‘map’ themselves
socially in relation to the flood and parse the causes of state ‘abandonment’ of fellow citizens or their own implication in
it?”29 In other words, as Caroline Lesjak has noted, “spectacular forms of domination too require interpretation.”30
Even if there is a widespread shared understanding of some forms of state violence, such appeals to its transparency
also tend to obscure the labor of those activists, scholars, writers, and artists who worked hard to make and circulate
that knowledge, as well as the degree to which the discourse of transparency effaces the methods of exposure central to
their work. While Sedgwick understands that “paranoid exigencies” of activism and research “are often necessary for
nonparanoid knowing and utterance,” this understanding often seems to move out of focus in a postcritical field that
continually reiterates the assumption that the mechanisms of state, imperialist, and racial capitalist violence are already
known and understood.31 Assertions of the manifest comprehensibility of state violence also efface how discourses
of transparency themselves work to enforce ongoing forms of state violence and racial capitalist dispossession. For
example, media coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina “transparently,” to borrow Lisa Marie Cacho’s
characterization, represented black people as criminals, refugees, and “looters” and, in so doing, “eras[ed] the state’s
neglect.” “ Acts of transparent recognition, ” Cacho reminds, “ are integral to the processes that criminalize
people of color in the first place.” 32 Critics’ certainty about the legibility of structural violence, in other
words, obscures the workings of ongoing structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in the
present, as well as political and activist praxis against them, while allowing those processes to shape
uncritically academics’ own inevitably interpretive practices. This book, however, brackets the problem of the
perceived intelligibility of contemporary racial capitalist and imperialist violence—as well as the implications for
methodologies that take for granted this transparency—in favor of a genealogical question: How has anti-imperialism
become associated with feeling-as-practice and the rejection of historicism and ideology critique? How might we
historicize the rise of reparative approaches, and in particular the idea that reparative modes constitute the ethical
response to US neoliberal empire and racial capitalism? In the academy, reparative and postcritical readings often
seem to arrive as relief and reprieve—from the AIDS crisis, from George W. Bush’s disastrous wars, and especially from
racial and imperialist violence that no longer needs exposure—curiously immune to other ideological and material
forces, a response to and respite from history but never its product.33 The Ruse of Repair presses on these senses of
relief and reprieve. It argues that the embrace of reparative modes as a critical and even ethical response to US
imperial formations—the casting of such formations as legible and evident, and the corresponding turn to feeling and
care as ends in themselves and limit points of possible action—has a history, one that is inextricable from the cultural
and social forms of US imperialism and anti-imperialism in the late twentieth century and the concomitant rise of
neoliberal racial capitalism. The genealogy of the rise of the reparative that this book constructs shares much with
longer genealogies of affect and the reparative’s relation to global capitalism and colonialism. It unfolds in sympathy
with Reber’s tracing of the origins of neoliberalism’s affective episteme —its “casting of knowledge, self, and world in
the language of emotion and feeling”— back to the formation of free market capitalism in the revolutionary periods of
the United States and Latin America, after which it remained an emergent structure of feeling until neoliberalism was
secured as the dominant organizing principle of the world economy.34 The Ruse of Repair, however, offers a shorter
genealogy of the spread of the reparative, focusing on the late 1970s and 1980s, the years in which US administrative
and bureaucratic violence, counterinsurgency, and military intervention facilitated neoliberalism’s ascent . Like Reber,
it understands the affective and the reparative as emergent structures in this period, but rather than mapping a clean
break between empire and capital, between “imperialist reason” and neoliberal affect, of the sort Reber proposes, this
book tarries in the entangled relations between late twentieth-century US empire and emerging structures of
neoliberal racial capitalism , both of which function ed through aggressive and ambivalent registers of absolution,
repair, reconciliation, and remediation .35 The purpose here is to limn the messy yet mutually reinforcing relations
between US imperialist and neoliberal racial capitalist reparative visions: to see, for instance, how US empire’s revival
came to be framed as an ameliorative possibility for people in the United States made subject to and by a service
economy, even as the United States and global governance organizations imposed very same racialized economic
structures on Central America and the Caribbean, framing them as a means to repair the violence of US imperial
invasion and counterinsurgency .36

The affirmative has adopted the role of the Homo Economicus. Their affirmation is the optimization
of oneself for success which mirrors the free market logics of the “entrepreneurial spirit.” This
ideology is how capitalism transitions to neoliberalism, which is through the aggressive promotion
of personally responsible individuals.
Stuelke, 21 – Patricia Stuelke teaches and writes about 20th and 21st century hemispheric literature, photography,
and popular culture, particularly in relation to histories of US imperialism, racial capitalism, gender and sexuality, and US and Latin
American social movements at Dartmouth, 8/9/2020, [“The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique”, Duke
University Press]RA

What made this program of free market capitalism a new racial capitalist and colonial episteme was precisely the
violent capture and diversion of postwar left social movements’ language and analyses —what Duggan names their
shared “overlapping, interrelated (if conflicted) cultures of downward redistribution ”—into the biopolitical and
ideological projects that facilitated ever-increasing inequality and dispossession. 85 This process, as scholars such as
Naomi Klein, Wendy Brown, Spira, and others have argued, was a matter of reorganizing economies, subjectivities, and
communities alike through the violence of shock, torture, incarceration, and austerity.86 If US imperialist violence in
Central and Latin America in the 1980s was, as Briggs argues, “above all about the imposition of neoliberalism,” this
violence operated throughout Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean, as Grandin has suggested, in order to
disrupt what he characterizes broadly as the Latin American left’s “harmonization of self and society, of individuality
and solidarity”: “Terror violently and traumatically cut the relationship between individualism and solidarity, leaving
the individual to a market now called democracy. That becomes the experiential predicate for neoliberalism . ”87 With
reference to the United States, Hong has described this violent process of severing movement solidarities in order to
instantiate neoliberal individualism as one of “reterritorialization,” harnessed to an epistemology of “affirmation” and
“disavowal.” The state, the university, global governance organizations, and corporations , she explains, learned to
encourage and sustain “aspects of movements that … replicated … normative investments in political modernity ” and
thus rendered “certain minoritized subjects and populations … as protectable life,” particularly through an “invitation
into respectability.” Simultaneously, these institutions actively disavowed how neoliberal racial capitalism
“exacerbated the production of premature death” for minoritized subjects who fell outside those bounds, claiming
instead that “racial and gendered violences are things of the past.”88 In Latin America and the Caribbean, such modes
of affirmation and disavowal have been particularly visible in the neoliberal settler state’s adoption of
multiculturalism alongside its economic reforms . As Charles Hale describes, the eventual enshrinement of
neoliberalism after the coup in Chile; the suppression of leftist revolution in Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador; the
indiscriminate murder of indigenous people in Guatemala, to name just a few examples, saw neoliberal settler states
offer indigenous communities in particular “a carefully designed packet of cultural rights guaranteed not to threaten
the fundamental tenets of the capitalist economy” that offered legal and cultural affirmation of some indigenous
movement demands while simultaneously stymieing more radical claims for land and wealth redistribution.89
Disavowed, meanwhile, was the “persisting racial hierarchy that discourses of cultural equality ignore and are not
meant to change.”90 In the United States, this negation of the vital urgency of anticolonial historical materialist
movement critique amid continued structural violence coupled with the endorsement of “normative investments”
and “respectability” found earlier articulation, notably in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1970 memo to President Nixon
calling for the state to practice “benign neglect.” “Benign neglect” was a policy Moynihan described as “paying close
attention to [black] progress” while “seeking to avoid situations in which extremists … are given opportunities for
martyrdom, heroics, histrionics or whatever. Greater attention to Indians, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans
would be useful. A tendency to ignore provocations from groups such as the Black Panthers might also be useful.”91
This memo makes visible how racial and gendered logics are built into what would become the aspirational horizon of
the good neoliberal subject, a form of subjectivity Foucault called Homo economicus, or “an entrepreneur of
himself.”92 “ Homo economicus” describes a subject who internalizes the self-regimenting imperatives of a
privatized economy —those tenets Duggan has identified as the meshing of “privatization” and “personal
responsibility”—and take as obligatory the task of optimizing oneself for capitalist success , such that the only
imaginable solution to structural inequality becomes one’s own forced choices, one’s unfree adoption of free market
logics.93 As Moynihan’s call to attend to “Indians, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans” over black people, especially
black radical activists, makes clear, the rise of the ideal of Homo economicus inscribed what Cacho names the
“differential devaluation of racialized groups,” so that “the most vulnerable populations” were “recruited to
participate in their own and others’ devaluation.” 94 In the United States, the elevation of this logic—that the
only way to achieve success was to leave one’s community or movement behind and instead cultivate what
Ronald Reagan called an “entrepreneurial spirit”— occurred alongside a related “downsizing,” to use Lauren
Berlant’s term, of community and collective public life, as “nostalgic images of a normal familial America,” came to
delineate “the utopian context for citizen aspiration.”95 The transition to neoliberalism thus entailed not
only the aggressively promoted ideal of a personally responsible individual , but the renovation of
the nuclear family, that unit that was perceived to be threatened by US failures in the Vietnam War, feminist and gay
liberation critiques of the family, and broader calls by activists to expand the welfare state or effect a more radical
downward redistribution of wealth.96

The affirmative has assumed that and absolution can distance us from the violence of American
Empire. This reparative ethos feeds into a circuit of consumption in which we are made to feel good
about our politics but we allow our discourse to manifest in violent Western peace accords and
neoliberal multiculturalism which is only ever meant to contain claims to sovereignty and
autonomy.
Stuelke, 21 – Patricia Stuelke teaches and writes about 20th and 21st century hemispheric literature, photography,
and popular culture, particularly in relation to histories of US imperialism, racial capitalism, gender and sexuality, and US and Latin
American social movements at Dartmouth, 8/9/2020, [“The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique”, Duke
University Press]RA

Soon, the somber Nicaraguans spontaneously began to answer with quaking voices, “You are forgiven.” Back and forth
passed the liturgical confessions and pardons until the whole group, overcome by tears, fell silent. Then, the
Nicaraguans began to tell, one by one, stories of sons and daughters recently killed, kidnapped, and dismembered by
the Contras. At the mention of the name of each killed loved one, the Nicaraguans reverently repeated “Presente,”
meaning that the person’s spirit lived on. With each story of death, the grieved North Americans asked the mothers
for their forgiveness. And each suffering mother answered, “You are forgiven.”92 A profound thing happened to me.
When the first mother started telling her story, she began very strong, but started to cry when she got to the day of her
son’s death. The next mother was the same. By the third mother, they were in tears, I was in tears, we were all in
tears, holding each other.… Here I was, this mother not condemning me, but forgiving me, even though her child had
died brutally at the hands of my government.93 For this solidarity activist, the Nicaraguan mothers’ indistinguishable
suffering accretes, engendering in her such an intense identification that she experiences the scene as one of total
reciprocity, one in which all the participants were “holding each other,” “comforting each other.” The Nicaraguan
mothers’ expressions of their grief and loss became the impetus for her and the other North Americans to feel
affirmed by their absolution: the mother’s pain of having lost children to Contra violence allows the activist to access
the pain of realizing that she, as a US citizen, abetted that violence. Scenes like these tend be generously imagined as
“the profound thing [that] happened” to North Americans: as moving accounts of what compelled US citizens to
establish solidarity movement infrastructures at home—ranging from protests to vigils to letter-writing campaigns to
“nonviolent preparations” for participation in civil disobedience to “speaker’s bureaus” meant to train North
Americans and Central Americans to tell stories of Central American “realities”—and to endanger themselves by
continuing to travel to Central America in the midst of civil war and state genocidal violence. But this scene also
distills the vision of repair and reconciliation underlying Central America solidarity. It is a vision that seems to
constitute what Mimi Nguyen calls a “salvage act” of neoliberal empire: a moment in which “catastrophic war comes
to be experienced as a shared ordeal of precarity between other and empire,” such that victims’ forgiveness of
imperialist violence “redeem[s] the empire from being held hostage to a shameful, irreversible past.” 94 Audra
Simpson has described, with regard to Canada’s attempts to “encourage reconciliation” after the sexual assault of
indigenous boys in residential schools, how “finding justice … finds its answer in a move to emotion, with recourse to
sorrow and conciliation, but also within an inherently limited and limiting formulation—the form of a contract that
will then repair and presumably cancel out the possibility of all further claims to harm.” “The cost of justice,” she
continues, “however, is pain and its value is set within a market of sympathy—a market that is inherently limited by
the structural and thence, distributive model of a market and a juridical frame for making commensurate
fundamentally different polities.”95 It is true that what moves the North American solidarity activist quoted above is
precisely the notion that she is not a representative of the imperial settler state she calls home, that she can be
distinguished from her government and thus absolved from responsibility for her government’s crimes, and that her
participation in the ritual of absolution spurs her to some kind of rebellion against that very state. The optimistic wish
of Central America solidarity is that such “spectacular performance[s] of contrition, of repair, of hope, and ultimately,
of sympathy,” as in the scene above, escape both what Simpson describes as the “distributive model of a market” and
the imperial settler state’s “juridical frame.”96 But most often they do not break with these structures. “ Restoration,
repair, reconciliation, ‘I am sorry,’ ” Simpson writes. “This is the gestural architecture of settler states, the idea that
repair will allow a joining, a concurrence, an equality, an assimilation (a further swallowing?).”97 The reparative ethos
of the Central America solidarity movement, which in the above scene saw absolution as the affective ground and
impetus for moving in solidarity, helped establish such “gestural architectures” with regard to Central America,
offering blueprints for reparative relations that shaped and became codified in the peace accords and neoliberal
democratic states’ triumphant adoption of multiculturalism as a means of recognizing while containing indigenous
sovereignty claims. 98 Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton named the 1980s “el turno del ofendido,” or what Arturo Arias
translates as “the invisible people’s turn to gain visibility,” the moment when “the terms Sandinistas, Farabundistas,
Mayas, and Garífunas, among others, entered the international vocabulary,” when “Central America managed … to
remind the world of its existence, to capture its attention.”99 The reparative rituals and relations of the Central
America solidarity movement circumscribed the meaning and value of that attention, particularly by soliciting from
Central Americans the labor of absolution and explanation necessary to secure North American solidarity, abetting
neoliberalism’s “swallowing” of Central American performances of survival, critique, and political consciousness in
what Horacio Roque Ramírez has called “a circuit of pleasure and consumption much larger than we could imagine,
much less control.”

Capitalism causes incomprehensible structural violence

Robinson 14 (William I., Prof. of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies, @ UC-Santa
Barbara, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism” The World Financial Review)

Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises ¶ Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession”
of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in
contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover,
because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The
system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive
participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income,
has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular
configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are hard-pressed
to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system. ¶ Is this
crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve
recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the
early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a
structural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contra- dictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the
system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis
of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the struc-
tural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corpo- rate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the
replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the
possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to
capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the
response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an
historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis
are in great flux. ¶ Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually
constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the
existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social
reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of
humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states
face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes
experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the
system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is
facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s
authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these
dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate
change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other
indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of
billions of people to survive , and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new
“Dark Ages.”2 ¶ This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several
features unique to the present: ¶ 1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction . Global
capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the
sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural
catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human
activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an
earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of
irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss)
are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. ¶ 2. The
magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented , as is the concentration of the means of
global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups.
Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs , star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare
has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same
time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global
flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell;
1984 has arrived; ¶ 3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new
territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the
commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-
house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must
continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand? ¶ 4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population
inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to
sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion.
This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification ,
and so on; ¶ 5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political
authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social
scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and
stabilise the system. The spread of w eapons of m ass d estruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life
and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority
that assures its reproduction. ¶ Global Police State ¶ How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis?
The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant.
Three responses seem to be in dispute. ¶ One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is
aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical re- sponses from below.
Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable
(or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and
leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting
global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries
and regions and facing many problems and challenges. ¶ Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The
ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political
power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global
working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing
heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation,
homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations , including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and , in
the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy
and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare
and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The alternative is to affirm the dual power model of the Communist Party – only the Party can
provide effective accountability mechanisms to correct unproductive tendencies, educate and
mobilize marginalized communities, and connect local struggles to a movement for international
liberation
Escalante 18 (Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist. “PARTY
ORGANIZING IN THE 21ST CENTURY” September 21 st, 2018 https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-
the-21st-century/)

I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not
always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base building
and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing , and that party organizing can allow this
emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States. One of the crucial
insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution
is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist
propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has
nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building
institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the
oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work
to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist
candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have
something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what
do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy
towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which
base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough
to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We
must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants
unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as
communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We
must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By
“party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building
a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making.
The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable , unifying party member action
around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A
communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating
the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the
need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to
theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A
party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against
capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders
can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most
horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our
struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal
structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but
also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local
organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as
one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity
working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of
the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial . As a movement which operates within a
settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing . Creating formal unity and party
procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American
socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local
level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party
as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a
manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community
members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members
and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for
educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with
their own local conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the
possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a
number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in
favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete
unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being
made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment
is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the
possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network
towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the
Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to
explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the
meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local
organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community
members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of
defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently
around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means
meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing.
The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends. The use of the party model by local
organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular
support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in
and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a
national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt
party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base
building movement. Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate
according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be
explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model.
Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism,
but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details of base building and
dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I
hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have
demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a
revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good
subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for ensuring that such strategy will
succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation about how the base
building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified socialist
tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.
Ecological Leninism is the only viable alternative utilization of green technology to reverse climate
change.
Malm 20 - Andreas Malm is associate senior lecturer in human ecology at Lund University. He is author of Fossil
Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 9/2020, [“Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War
Communism in the Twenty-First Century”, Verso Books]RA

In the second week of September 1917, Lenin penned a long text called The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat
It. ‘Unavoidable catastrophe is threatening Russia’, it begins; the breath of death is over the land and ‘everybody says
this. Everybody admits it. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done.’ World War I, the Urcatastrophe of
the century, had haemorrhaged Russia and the other belligerent countries and, so it seemed, put civilisation itself on the
deathbed. ‘The war has created such an immense crisis, has so strained the material and moral forces of the people,
has dealt such blows at the entire modern social organisation, that humanity must now choose between perishing’ or
transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’. Russia stood before the spectre of famine. The war had so torn apart
the country that all production apparatuses and logistical structures that would normally ensure basic provisioning
were out of commission and, for as long as the war went on, beyond repair. As if that were not enough, heavy floods in
the spring of 1917 washed away roads and railway lines. The crisis took a new plunge in August, when grain prices
suddenly doubled and Petrograd faced the challenge of surviving without flour. ‘Famine, genuine famine’, one
government official complained, ‘has seized a series of towns and provinces – famines vividly expressed by an absolute
insufficiency of objects of nutrition already leading to death’. It was in this situation that Lenin wrote his text. In the run-
up to October, he and the Bolsheviks were suspended in a moment of abysmal emergency: war behind them, war to the
side of them, famine advancing. Lenin obsessed over the breakdown. ‘We are nearing ruin with increasing speed’, he
would write; ‘ no progress is being made, chaos is spreading irresistibly’; ‘famine, accompanied by unprecedented
catastrophe, is becoming a greater menace to the whole country week by week’. What could be done about it? Part of
the answer had already been provided by the states fighting the war. To prevent their food systems from collapsing
utterly, they had interfered in markets in a manner that pre-war liberal doctrines would never have licensed.
Governments from Paris to Petrograd had ‘outlined, determined, applied and tested a whole series of control measures,
which consist almost invariably in uniting the population and in setting up or encouraging unions’ and rationing and
regulating consumption. The situation had itself ‘suggested the way out’ by calling forth ‘the most extreme practical
measures; for without extreme measures, death – immediate and certain death from starvation – awaits millions of
people’. But those measures had an obvious limitation: they dealt with symptoms. The drivers of catastrophe were left
untouched. The inter-imperialist war and its primum mobile – simple ordinary capital accumulation – were kept going,
leaving procurement systems on the edge or, as in Russia, over it. Here, then, was Lenin’s wager: to take measures of
the kind already instituted by the warring states, step them up a notch and deploy them against the drivers of
catastrophe. First was to end the war. Second was to get the grain supplies under control, seize stocks from rich
landowners, nationalise banks and cartels, end private property in the key means of production – a revolution, as
Lenin constantly agitated in these months, to stave off the worst catastrophe, which was why it must not be deferred .
Against the Kerensky government’s feeble attempts to restore order, he railed that ‘it is unable to avoid collapse,
because it is impossible to escape from the claws of the terrible monster of imperialist war and famine nurtured by
world capitalism unless one renounces bourgeois relationships’ and ‘passes to revolutionary measures’. At the same
time, his rhetorical gambit was to profess that the means for achieving this were at hand, almost uncontroversial. ‘All
the state would have to do would be to draw freely on the rich store of control measures which are already known
and have been used in the past.’ Indeed, he alleged that any government that wished to combat the impending
catastrophe, whatever its affiliation, would have to take those radicalised measures. The objective logic of the
situation left no other choice. Now, if we, for a moment, put aside the very considerable historical complications known
to everyone, we can see that the logic of the present situation, mutatis mutandis, is not all that dissimilar. So what kind
of control measures could be envisioned? Here we must again stay at the level of a rough sketch. Yes, this enemy can be
deadly, but it is also beatable States in advanced capitalist countries could claim to have acted on the dangers of
pandemics the moment they made the following announcement: today, we are launching a comprehensive audit of all
supply chains and import flows running into our country. With our amazing capacity for surveillance and data
collection, we’ll shift from citizens to companies, open their books, conduct thorough input-output analyses (of the kind
scientists already excel at) and ascertain just how much land from the tropics they appropriate. We shall then terminate
such appropriation, by cutting off chains that run into tropical forests and, insofar as any can be classified as
‘essential’, redirect them to other locations. Every Noranda, every Skanska and Engie will be withdrawn. The time has
come to pull in the claws of unequal exchange, now a menace to all. We shall pay for tropical areas previously devoted
to northern consumption to be reforested and rewilded. This will compensate for lost export revenues – not as
charity or even a drain on our budgets, but as a running investment in the habitability of this planet, an establishment
and maintenance of sanctuaries on which our health depends . We are here simply adhering to the categorical
recommendations from scientists (whom we’ll put on the stage for regular briefings on national television): There is an
urgent need to stop deforestation and invest in afforestation and reforestation globally. In response to the viral
outbreaks, billions of dollars are spent on eradicating the infection, providing services to humans, and developing
diagnostic, treatment and vaccination strategies. However, no or less attention is given to the primary level of
prevention such as forestation and respecting wildlife habitats. The world should realize the importance of forests
and the biodiversity carrying deadly viruses – this from four China-based scientists, venting some despair amid Covid-
19. Similar advice has been given for years. ‘The most effective way to prevent viral zoonosis is to maintain the barriers
between natural reservoirs and human society.’ Barriers? There is a force at work in human society that by its very
nature cannot countenance such a thing. But again, the scientists: ‘The most effective place to address such zoonotic
threats is at the wildlife-human interface. A key challenge in doing this is to simultaneously protect wildlife and their
habitats’ – the most effective, and the most costefficient. ‘Allocation of global resources from high-income countries to
pandemic mitigation programs in the most high-risk EID [emerging infectious disease] hotspot countries should be an
urgent priority for global health security’, says the Pike paper. It estimates a tenfold return on such investment. Written
six years before Covid-19, it speculates on the damage a zoonotic pandemic could wreak on the world economy and
finds that mitigation at the source – reining in trade-driven plantations, livestock, timber, mining – would be a
fantastically optimal way of saving money. This is evidently not a guarantee that it will happen. But the northern states
of our fantasy have now committed themselves to reason and proclaim: this is the right and necessary thing to do, for us
and everyone else on this planet. The immediate beneficiaries will be people living in or next to tropical forests, always
first in line for spillover. But our control measures will also spare ourselves from living under this Damocles sword to
the end of our days. So the war on wild nature starts to wind down. This begins with a ban on importing meat from
countries in or bordering on the tropics. Can there be anything more nonessential? And yet beef is, as we have seen,
the one commodity most destructive to these wonderlands of biodiversity. Meat consumption in general is the surest
way to waste land, and any extensive reforestation – combined with a protein-needy human population of ten billion
or more – presupposes its reduction. Mandatory global veganism would probably be the endpoint most salutary for
all. It would give some room back to wild nature and disengage the human economy from the pathogen pools;
increased meat consumption is the fastest way to dive deeper. But as economies are currently operating, neither
vegans nor vegetarians in the North go (as we often like to think) free of guilt: soybean, palm oil, coffee, chocolate flow
as much, or even more, into our stomachs. Control measures for addressing spillover should not follow dietary
guidelines, but latitudinal gradients and ecological knowledge. Given what we know about bats, their habitats must have
priority, be it steak or flapjacks that stream out of them. Clearly it would be the state that would have to do this. No
mutual aid group in Bristol could even hypothetically initiate a programme of this kind. ‘We need (for a certain
transitional period) a state. This is what distinguishes us from the anarchists’, with Lenin – or with Wallace: ‘In the face
of the potential catastrophe, it would indeed seem most prudent to begin placing draconian restraints on existing
plantation and animal monocultures , the driving forces behind present pandemic emergence.’ Note the word
‘draconian’. Progressives of all stripes might shudder at it, but they should return to the chapter on the working day in
the first volume of Capital – the ten hours’ day being the original victory of the proletariat, realised when
enforcement finally became a little harsh, after all the laxities and prevarication of the early factory legislation. One
doesn’t curb capitalist exploitation by carrots. Tropical forests have a recent counterpart to the ten hours’ day: the
tenure of Lula. Between 2004 and 2012, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon underwent its most rapid reduction in
modern times, all the more remarkable for running against the trends in the rest of Latin America and Southeast Asia. By
what means did the Lula governments accomplish this? By turning some degree of hard power on land-hungry capital:
expanding protected areas, registering land properties, monitoring rainforests via satellites, enforcing the forest code
and actually punishing those responsible for illegal logging . In 2012, the rate of deforestation stood 84 per cent below
its peak of eight years prior. The country that holds two million species, or one tenth of the earth’s total, gave its
forests a reprieve, slashing CO 2 emissions by some 40 per cent – perhaps the most impressive mitigation of zoonotic
and climatic disaster on record. It didn’t last, of course. ‘Rosa Luxemburg has a great line about revolution being like a
locomotive going uphill: if it’s not kept moving, it slides back, and reaction wins. The same can be said of reform. Lula’s
two terms could have been a good first act in a transition toward something else; but there was no plan for a second
act’, as one scholar of Brazil has noted. Instead came the far right and the abolition of every traffic light ever installed in the Amazon. What should really make one shudder is to think of the zoonotic and climatic legacy
of Bolsonaro. Then what of China? After SARS, the state took some perfunctory measures to stem the wildlife trade, promulgating laws with loopholes big enough for rhinoceroses to walk through. It allowed for wild
animals to be bred on farms (the Huanong Brothers). The protected species list was last updated in 1990 and omitted at least one thousand native species – including bats – the consumption of which was thereby
unregulated, regardless of the public health consequences. Penalties were paltry, enforcement lax, ‘high profits and mild punishment driving the dealers’ to continue accumulating capital – until SARSCoV-2 prodded the
state to ban the consumption of any wildlife, from freedom or captivity. Scientists and others worried that the legislation would fray this time too. One team from China writing in Science urged a permanent ban on
consumption as well as possession, backed up by stiff penalties; Jingjing Yuan and colleagues went a step further and called for ‘sentence to life prison’ for anyone eating wild. Processing, transporting, marketing wild

factory
animals should be similarly sanctioned, the state maintaining a list of species authorised for trade – a list that could be periodically shortened – and sending inspectors into the markets on the fly (recalling the

inspectors). What could be said against such a tough line? It has been argued that the moral norms of consumers should
instead be coaxed into sobriety. The argument ignores three factors. First, if SARS was not enough to scare the clientele
away from wet markets – research indicates that awareness of the risks did little to put it off – and if SARS-CoV-2 could
not be relied on to do the job either, as some signs suggested – online sellers touted medicines containing rhino horn
and other rare animal parts as cures for corona – then apparently one cannot entrust this question to individual
enlightenment. Second, enforced laws change norms. The prohibition of child labour in factories and slave labour on plantations clinched their status
as unacceptable practices; without those laws, some callous exploiters might have continued to this day. The edification may outlast the laws themselves. One of the few success stories Felbab-Brown can relate in The
Extinction Market concerns the use of rhino horn for the making of the Yemeni daggers known as jambiyas. When demand soared in the 1970s, this market became a prime culprit in dragging rhino populations to
extinction. But then someone intervened. Interestingly enough, the communist government of South Yemen was far more effective in eliminating demand for rhino-horn jambiyas by eliminating the demand for all
jambiyas. It banned the possession of all weapons and aggressively collected them. In 1972, the jambiya ban was thus accompanied by a massive campaign to rid the country of them, with even rich and influential families
targeted and forced to sell their daggers. When Yemen was reunited under the capitalist north, the communist principle survived. The ban ‘was not only effectively enforced by the [southern] government but ultimately
internalized by the country’s population’. Rhinohorn jambiya went out of fashion. This deep into the sixth mass extinction, some similar courage to wage ecological class war would not seem inappropriate. Third, if there is
something the corona crisis has taught, it should be that nudging consumers to voluntarily mend their ways is a strategy of the past. The German state didn’t beg its citizens to please consider living differently: it ordered
the malls of Steglitz closed and locked the playgrounds in Kreuzberg. When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population, one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with
the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands. Some have argued that a blanket abolition of the wildlife trade in China would cause financial losses and make people unemployed – figures between 1
million and an improbable 14 million have been floated – which is, of course, the excuse for every facet of business-as-usual. It could carry us all the way to Venus. But ending the wildlife trade is a responsibility for very

. States have to figure out a way to extirpate this

many more nations than China. Even Germany has been identified as a central transit point for the global trade in pangolins

department of capital accumulation in toto; they have repressive powers to reallocate. Barack Obama purported to
make crackdowns on wildlife trafficking a priority. Yet at the end of his second term, there were no more than 130
federal wildlife inspectors in the nation; only 38 of 328 ports of entry had such staff on site; their total number of
detector dogs amounted to three. Compare this – from benevolent times – to the apparatus for stopping migrants.
Here’s another overdue conversion: open borders to people and close them to commodities from the wild; turn ICE and
Frontex and other fortress guards into agencies for shutting down the extinction vortexes. But law enforcement would
require more than seizures on the border, which can incite suppliers to compensatory killing sprees. It is the middlemen
that need to be netted en bloc. The main alternative to such an approach is to legalise the wildlife trade and encourage
the ordered establishment of farms (the Huanong Brothers), but the curtain should now be down on this idea. Wild
animals shouldn’t sit in cages. Breeding them in captivity and selling them on markets only whets the appetite for their
meat, and experience shows that it’s all but impossible to tell the wild from the farmed; the former leaks into the latter,
as long as the suck is there. Demand itself will have to be neutralised. Insofar as ostentation – the open display of status
before peers and subalterns – is the purpose of wildlife consumption, criminalisation and actual law enforcement should hit
where it hurts. Under the ground, public swagger is harder. This doesn’t mean, as Felbab-Brown is keen to stress, that hard state power is a silver bullet. But it is needed, and fast, she points out. ‘Unlike in the case of
drugs’ – and most other illicit activities, one may add – ‘time matters acutely, especially when animals are being poached at extinction rates.’ Some reprioritisation is needed for repressive state apparatuses around the
world. And then there is the question of bushmeat, an especially difficult nut to crack, which deserves its own separate investigations. One would wish that lifting areas and countries out of poverty would of itself make
bushmeat obsolete, but alas, it might have the opposite effect: affluence can set the extinction vortex spinning. It has, on the other hand, been vociferously argued that one shouldn’t even consider taking the wild food out
of the mouth of poor people. Unfortunately, that argument is self-defeating, for in the same moment bushmeat starts to endanger animal populations, it ceases to be a prop of food security and turns into its opposite: an
exceedingly undependable protein source. Extinction exhausts it forever. The most viable palette of measures probably includes laws and their enforcement, a rollback of deforestation and ‘incentives for communities to
switch to traditionally grown protein-rich plant foods’, such as ‘soy, pulses, cereals and tubers’ – breaking, in other words, the association of meat with the good life. That break begins in the richest countries. If anyone has

a duty to lead and assist a global turn to plantbased protein, it is them. Needless to say, such measures would just be starters – local drivers of deforestation, for
instance, would still have to be dealt with – and if they were all rolled out next week, infectious diseases wouldn’t thereby vanish at the snap of a finger. The treatment of symptoms
will never stop being essential. And so one could look to Cuba, which seems to have spare capacity for every eventuality and continues to serve the world as a subaltern ambulance crew, including in this pandemic: in
March 2020, fifty-three professionals in a Cuban medical brigade landed in Lombardy. They came to assist the swamped hospitals of one of the richest provinces in Europe. Of the dozen brigades dispatched over that
month, others went to Jamaica, Grenada, Suriname, Nicaragua, Andorra, while Cuba itself agreed to receive a corona-stricken cruise ship turned away from other Caribbean islands – all in line with a tradition of ‘medical
internationalism’ that never ceases to confound foes and experts alike. In the 2010s, this poor little nation had more health care workers stationed on foreign soil than the G8; more than the Red Cross, Médecins Sans
Frontières and UNICEF combined. When Ebola lacerated West Africa in 2014, hundreds of doctors and nurses dashed off to the miasmic front lines; when Hurricane Mitch tore through Central America and Haiti in 1999,
not only did Cuban staff pour in, but Havana initiated a scholarship programme for medical students from the disaster zones; when an earthquake crushed Pakistan in 2005, Cuba sent 1,285 health workers for a year.

, bureaucracy
Canada sent six. In a time of chronic emergency, the world should thank its lucky star there’s at least one state with a tenuous link to the communist ideal still around.‘If anything real is to be done

must be abandoned for democracy, and in a truly revolutionary way, i.e. war must be declared on the oil barons and
shareholders’: Lenin. His casus belli was their refusal to produce enough oil and coal. He wanted a war on the barons
and shareholders to force the pace of extraction – Russia ‘is one of the richest countries in the world in deposits of liquid
fuel’ – having no inkling of any adverse effects. Fuel scarcity was part of his breakdown. Our breakdown has the
opposite profile, and so, if anything real is to be done, there will have to be a war with another aim: putting this
industry out of business for good. This begins with a nationalisation of all private companies extracting and processing
and distributing fossil fuels. Corporations on the loose like ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, RWE, Lundin Energy and the rest of
the pack will have to be reined in, and the safest way to do that is to put them under public ownership, either through
acquisition or – more defensibly – confiscation without recompense . Then their endlessly burning furnaces can finally
be switched off. But they should not simply be liquidated, as in dismantling every platform, sealing the holes, closing the
offices, sacking the employees and throwing the lot of the technology on the scrap heap. To the contrary, these units
have a constructive task ahead of them. It’s already too hot on earth, and it’s getting hotter by the year, and there’s no
end in sight to the heating unless emissions are cut to zero – but even then, it will still be too hot plus residual,
potentially self-reinforcing heating in the atmospheric pipeline (the more of it, the longer mitigation waits), and so a
worldwide cessation of fossil fuel combustion would not be enough. CO 2 would also have to be drawn out of the air. This
has been apparent for at least a decade: everybody says this. Everybody admits it. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done. Nothing at all? There are a bunch of start-ups developing machines for negative
emissions. One of them, the Swiss-based Climeworks, might be the most valuable capitalist company on earth these days – valuable as in doing humanity what could eventually be a life-saving service. With machines that
look like large fans in boxes, Climeworks sucks air – it could be any air, anywhere. The air is led into a filter that captures CO 2 . Once the filter is saturated, it is heated to 100 degrees Celsius, and the result is pure,
concentrated carbon dioxide. The trick as such is no magic, as it has long been applied in airtight rooms – submarines, space stations – where CO 2 has to be scrubbed and flushed out for people to breathe. What
Climeworks has just demonstrated, however, is that this is the most promising technology for taking CO 2 out of the earth’s atmosphere – far more so than ‘bioenergy carbon capture and storage’, or BECCS, the
speculative solution most in vogue in the days of the Paris agreement. There the idea was to establish gargantuan plantations to cultivate fast-growing trees, harvest them, burn them as fuel, filter away the CO 2 and store

. BECCS would devour such monstrous amounts of land – somewhere like the
it under the ground. But more plantations are not what we need

equivalent of all current cropland to stay below 2°C – that tropical forests might well have to be wiped out. Direct air
capture needs no land to grow anything. The contraptions can be placed on roofs. The main inputs they crave are
electricity and heat, and because they are small and easily switched on and off, they can be affixed to the grid and
turned on when there is an excess of wind and sun (weather-determined moments of overproduction often regarded
as a drawback of renewables) and use waste heat from any other process (no shortage of that in urban environs). The
CO 2 can be mineralised. It can be buried under the ground in solid form; indeed, since 2017, Climeworks is doing just
this in Iceland. As with other novel technologies – solar panels spring to mind – prices will nosedive with mass
production. A capitalist solution to a problem made by capitalism? If only . A capitalist company has to have a
commodity to sell. With the exception of the pilot plant in Iceland, Climeworks and the other start-ups are turning
their concentrated CO 2 into goods with exchange-value. It can be gas sold to greenhouses or soft drink producers
(Coca-Cola in the case of Climeworks in Zürich); it could go into microalgae or liquid fuel, possibly even for airplanes.
Such commodities bury no CO 2 . They capture it and pass it on for release elsewhere, so that a profit can be made –
or, as Nature reported regarding another start-up, Carbon Engineering, run by the famed scientist-cum-entrepreneur
David Keith: ‘That CO 2 could then be pressurized, put into a pipeline and disposed of underground, but the company is
planning instead to use it to make synthetic, low carbon fuels.’ And how could it plan otherwise? Just throwing the CO 2
away, locking it up in cellars where it must never again be touched, is no way to accumulate capital. It negates the
logic of the commodity, because non-consumption would here be the innermost essence of the operation. As Holly
Jean Buck shows in After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, a primer and clarion call that
should be obligatory reading for anyone minimally concerned with planetary futures, this is the contradiction every
direct air capture must run into: if it stays inside the commodity form, it cannot make good on its promise of negative
emissions. It will recycle CO 2 , not tuck it away. To scale up these machines to the level where they would make their
designated difference – supplementing zero emissions with drawdown – they would have to function as vacuum
cleaners, sucking up carbon and putting it out of circulation, as a non- or even anti-commodity. How could such a
decontamination of the biosphere run on profit? Where would the increment in exchange-value come from, in
amounts sufficient to keep the clean-up going like any other department of accumulation? No one has yet come up
with a plausible answer. Buck works through the logic and finds only one way out: the state. Other students of direct
air capture have reached the same conclusion. It seems to inhere in it – if the Climeworks model turns out to have some
unknown disadvantage, if something else comes to the fore as the superior tech, if there will ever be any negative
emissions not growing from land, the same conundrum will reappear: resell the waste and forfeit the purpose, or
respect the negative use-value. It’s the productive force or the property relations. And to scale up, one would need a lot
of money. That money should come from those who carry historical responsibility for releasing the CO 2 in the first
place. There would also need to be massive complexes of technical expertise, drilling and seismic skills, infrastructures
for transporting concentrated CO 2 , empty holes in the ground for burial vaults, organisations of supranational size …
Who has all these things in ample possession? The oil barons and shareholders, of course. Nationalise them, Buck
proposes – not just for ‘getting rid of these corporations, as we might like to, but transforming them into companies
that deliver a carbon removal service’. Make them public utilities for restabilising climate . In something of an understatement, Buck adds: ‘There will be
a lot of struggles to engage in here.’ But now imagine that states were in fact determined not only to stop the drivers of catastrophe but to put them into reverse gear, and so they expropriated every single fossil fuel company and restructured them into waste
disposers, while those already state-owned received the same directives – then we would really be on the way to zero emissions and further: towards 400 parts per million, 380, 350 … It would be some repair to match the tropical rewilding. The demand for
nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years. But, needless to say, it would make no sense if CO 2 were still belching out into the atmosphere: emitting and
capturing would be a bizarre dissipation of resources to no avail. Everything begins with draconian restraints and cuts. They alone could pave the way for actual drawdown; the sooner they start, the less need for a secondary mega-infrastructure of clean-up. The
problem could also be attacked from another angle: not supply but demand, rather like in the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Then it was demand, above all in the transport sector, that went off a cliff and pulled emissions along. In late April 2020, Scientific
American publicised the forecast that total global emissions would fall by no more than 5 per cent during the year – in spite of the spring drop by one fourth in China and roughly one fifth in the US – as economies were expected to rebound in the summer and
autumn. The journal noted that as record-breaking as a 5 per cent reduction would be, it would still fall short of ‘the 7.6 per cent decline that scientists say is needed every year over the next decade to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees
Celsius’. Nearly 8 per cent every year – a far cry indeed from the expected 2020 hiatus (if not from the initial months-long collapses). What would that require? Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it. One can obviously not rely on
spontaneous cessation of demand, or on people just quitting travel; there would have to be a continuous substitution of one kind of energy for another over the transitional period – or, ‘a single economic plan covering the whole country and all branches of
productive activity. This plan must be drawn up for a number of years, for the whole epoch that lies before us’, to cite Leon Trotsky. One can of course find this idea so repugnant that one would rather give up on the climate of the earth. And that is indeed the choice

the race to zero would have to be

the dominant classes and their governments wake up to make every morning. Regardless of whether the problem is attacked from the supply or the demand side,

coordinated through control measures – rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning , ordering … – so as to fill
the gap after fossil fuels. The substitutes themselves are in no need of elaboration. The literature on the Green New
Deal and renewable energy roll-out and climate wartime mobilisation is extensive enough to guide a transition
several times over. Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need
to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded,
private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced – there’s a whole auto industry
waiting for the order – subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the
magnificent rest. ‘The ways of combating catastrophe and famine are available’, approaching common knowledge. ‘If
our state really wanted to exercise control in a business-like and earnest fashion, if its institutions had not
condemned themselves to “complete inactivity” by their servility to the capitalists, all the state would have to do’
would be to roll up the sleeves. Another part of Lenin’s logic applies too: any government that would ‘wish to save
Russia from war and famine’ would have to get down to this kind of work. be the central transitional demand for the
coming years. But, needless to say, it would make no sense if CO 2 were still belching out into the atmosphere: emitting
and capturing would be a bizarre dissipation of resources to no avail. But the lingering conclusion from our initial
comparison between corona and climate is that no capitalist state is likely ever to do anything like this of its own
accord. It would have to be forced into doing it, through application of the whole spectrum of popular leverage, from
electoral campaigns to mass sabotage. Left to its own devices, the capitalist state will continue to attend to
symptoms, which, however, must eventually reach a boiling point. One can imagine that in the next years and
decades, storms will bite into property, droughts tear apart supply chains, crop yields halve, heat waves enervate
labour productivity to the extent that the timeline of victimhood catches up with the dominant classes. The second contradiction will
then be upon them. States might no longer be able to just parry the impacts, but feel compelled to safeguard the background condition before it crashes irretrievably. Judging from the reaction to Covid-19, they will grasp for a control measure that can flatten the
curve at once, and there is one such known in the libraries of science: solar geoengineering. Spraying sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere is the single kind of injection with a potential to instantly reduce planetary fever. However large in scale, direct air capture
would need decades to bring temperatures down; sulphate aerosol injection can cut insolation from one month to the next. Year after year of business-as-usual, this is the pseudo-solution that sneaks up on us like a thief in the night.Indeed, under the cover of the
pandemic, in mid-April 2020, one of the largest experiments in geoengineering so far was carried out on the Great Barrier Reef, then subject to the third outbreak of mass bleaching in five years (did anyone notice?). Scientists were authorised by the state to spray
trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge. The hope was that these particles would make clouds brighter, so they would reflect more sunlight away from the ocean and shield the reef from the heat. The team told the Guardian
they could see corals ‘bleaching around us’ as they bobbed over them. This is a technology distinct from sulphate aerosol injection, namely marine cloud brightening, potentially deployed on a local or regional scale by a state such as Australia, which, numerous
monumental disasters notwithstanding, cannot bring itself to impose any control measures on coal extraction. The logic is robust. As one of the sharpest scholars in the field, Kevin Surprise, has argued, solar geoengineering might well be launched on a planetary
scale as a fix against the second contradiction, because capitalist states appear constitutionally incapable of going after the drivers. It is fairly widely known that such intervention in the climate system could switch the planet onto another track towards catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the corals keep bleaching, the swarms forming, the ice melting, the animals moving. A pestilential breath devastating humanity There has been a lot of talk about ecological Marxism in recent years, and with the chronic emergency over us, the time has
come to also experiment with ecological Leninism. Three principles of that project seem decisive. First, and above all, ecological Leninism means turning the crises of symptoms into crises of the causes. From August 1914, this was, of course, the thrust of Leninist
politics: converting the outbreak of war into a blow against the system that engendered it. Our Great War is not an actual war between armies, nor a singular event that can be concluded or paused after half a decade: this emergency is chronic, which means that
crises of symptoms will ignite again and again, and every time they do, the strategic imperative must be to switch energies of the highest voltage against the drivers. It is difficult to see how else the conditions can ever be ameliorated. Has anybody got another idea?
Oh yes: make clouds and invent vaccines; block solar radiation and track the movements of people. At their best, such proposals amount – to borrow from Greta Thunberg’s favourite metaphor – to surviving inside a burning house by drinking lots of cold water.
Virtually by definition, the most classical Leninist gesture is the only one that can point to an emergency exit. It is worth re-emphasising just how central the category of catastrophe was to the evolution of revolutionary Marxism. In her polemics with Bernstein,
Luxemburg never tired of stressing it. She has become most renowned for the sound bite ‘socialism or barbarism’ but, as Norman Geras has shown in a superb exegesis, that deep dichotomy structured her theory and praxis all the way from the battle with Bernstein
to her death at the hands of the Freikorps. One year into the war, she warned that humanity faced a choice between ‘the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery’ – or victory for ‘the conscious
struggle’ against the imperialism that drove the war. ‘Wading in blood and dripping in filth’, capitalist society has become ‘a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity’. That peculiar type of society now ‘endangers the very existence of society itself, by
assembling a chain of devastating economic and political catastrophes’; in its present phase, the expansion inherent in capital ‘has adopted such an unbridled character that it puts the whole civilisation of mankind in question’. Luxemburg expected world war to
become a ‘permanent’ state of affairs. It didn’t, and here the differentia specifica of the chronic emergency must again be underscored: it works itself out through biophysical processes that cannot be fought or negotiated to an end. One does not bomb out or
bargain with the radiative forcing of CO 2 . That forcing is an immutable function of the quantity of the gas in the atmosphere, which means that this pestilential breath has another order of permanency and aggravation – until the moment of deliberate intercession,
still only hypothetical. Following Geras’s reading of Luxemburg, we can then say that ‘barbarism’, depopulation, a vast cemetery really are the inevitable ends of a capitalism left to itself (here precluding the long-term effectiveness of solar geoengineering as a stand-
alone measure). But writing in 1975, he recoiled from this conclusion as excessively apocalyptic. ‘Ecological catastrophe may, today, be invoked to lend that vision plausibility’, he noted in passing; half a century later, there is scant need for the caveat. This, then, is
the syntax of revolutionary Marxism, present already in the first section of The Communist Manifesto: the fight ends ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’. There can be little doubt about which
of the two outcomes is currently the more likely. Hence the accentuated ‘conditional mood of the probability of a catastrophe that there is still time to forestall. Things will end up badly, if … But they can (still) be sorted out …’, as another thinker from the same
tradition, Daniel Bensaïd, distils the predicament. It was because Luxemburg threw herself into efforts to forestall further catastrophe that she, for all their disagreements, ended up on the same side as Lenin. A second principle for ecological Leninism can be
extracted from their position: speed as paramount virtue. ‘Whether the probable disaster can be avoided depends on an acute sense of conjuncture’, writes Bensaïd, who reconstructs the crisis of September and observes that ‘waiting was becoming a crime’. Or,
with Lenin himself: ‘delay is fatal’. It is necessary to act ‘this very evening, this very night’. The truth of these assertions has never been more patent. As anyone with the barest insight into the state of the planet knows, speed, very regrettably, because of the criminal
waiting and delaying and dithering and denying of the dominant classes, has become a metric of meaning in politics. ‘Nothing can now be saved by halfmeasures.’ Third, ecological Leninism leaps at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction, break with
business-asusual as sharply as required and subject the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control. It would mean that ‘one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part’, to speak with Engels. Nothing from the past
decades of stalled transitions indicates that ExxonMobil would like to metamorphose into a cleaner and storekeeper of unsalable carbon, or that meat and palm oil companies would gladly let their pastures and plantations be rewilded. It appears tautologically true

actual transition would require some coercive authority. If anarchists would ever wield influence in such a process,
that an

they would quickly discover this circumstance and, just like anybody else, have to avail themselves of the state. But what
state? We have just argued that the capitalist state is constitutionally incapable of taking these steps. And yet there is no
other form of state on offer. No workers’ state based on soviets will be miraculously born in the night. No dual power of
the democratic organs of the proletariat seems likely to materialise anytime soon, if ever. Waiting for it would be both
delusional and criminal, and so all we have to work with is the dreary bourgeois state, tethered to the circuits of
capital as always. There would have to be popular pressure brought to bear on it, shifting the balance of forces
condensed in it, forcing apparatuses to cut the tethers and begin to move, using the plurality of methods already
hinted at (some further outlined by the present author in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on
Fire). But this would clearly be a departure from the classical programme of demolishing the state and building another
– one of several elements of Leninism that seem ripe (or overripe) for their own obituaries. On the other hand, the
chronic emergency can be expected to usher in pronounced political volatility. ‘The deeper the crisis, the more strata of
society it involves, the more varied are the instinctive movements which crisscross in it, and the more confused and
changeable will be the relationship of forces’, to quote Georg Lukács. The rather startling measures used to combat the
spread of Covid-19 might have been a foretaste. Who knows what openings other moments of impact might bring. In
some, popular initiatives may rise to prominence. The 2013 edition of the ‘worldwide threat assessment’ compiled by
the US intelligence community warned that climate disasters risk ‘triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism’;
similar predictions are legion. If or when they are fulfilled, the mission of ecological Leninists is to raise consciousness
in such spontaneous movements and reroute them towards the drivers of catastrophe. Hence the heightened
relevance of the slogan that for Bensaïd ‘sums up Leninist politics: “Be ready!” Be ready for the improbable, for the
unexpected, for what happens.’ It includes a readiness to, with Lenin’s own words, ‘set to work to stir up all and sundry,
even the oldest, mustiest and seemingly hopeless spheres, for otherwise we shall not be able to cope with our tasks’. If
the matter is exigent, the material at hand must be used. On this view, ecological Leninism is a lodestar of principles, not
a party affiliation. It does not imply that there are any actual Leninist formations capable of seizing power and
implementing the correct measures – the world has never been shorter on them, and most of the few that remain show
overt signs of infirmity. The old Trotskyist formula ‘the crisis of humanity is the crisis of the revolutionary leadership’
must be updated. The crisis is the absence – the complete, gaping absence – of any leadership. The seed bank exists in
an arid space approaching empty desert; anything brought out from it would have to be genetically modified to grow
under the present sun and watered by subjects inventing themselves anew. Two elements do, however, as we have
argued, appear essential. The basic make-up must harbour a predisposition for emergency action and an openness to
some degree of hard power from the state. Anarchism detests the state; social democracy shrivels in catastrophe. But
there is no reason not to experiment with ecological Luxemburgism, or ecological Blanquism, or Guevarism, or indeed
Trotskyism … nor is there reason to give up on the sheer deductive force of revolutionary Marxism: ‘The inherent
tendencies of capitalist development, at a certain point of their maturity, necessitate the transition to a planful mode
of production, consciously organised by the entire working force of society – in order that all of society and human
civilisation might not perish’, again with Luxemburg. But ‘necessitate’ does not mean ‘preordain’. Something can be
necessary and yet never come about.
 Marx K: Texas DK

K---1NC

The affirmative’s rejection of the specific details of political engagement is not radical – it
continues the prevailing mode of leftist cynicism that eviscerates alternatives to existing state
power
Burgum 15 (Samuel, PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Warwick and has been conducting research with
Occupy London since 2012, “The branding of the left: between spectacle and passivity in an era of cynicism,” Journal for
Cultural Research, Volume 19, Issue 3)

Rather than the Situationist spectacle, then, I argue that the reason those on the left are rendered post-politically
impotent to bring about change is not because we are deceived, but because we enact apathy despite ourselves. In
other words, the relationship between the resistive subject and ideology is not one of false consciousness, but one of
cynicism: we are not misdirected by shallow spectacles, but instead somehow distracted by our cynical belief that
we are being “distracted”. In this section, I begin by outlining the concept of cynicism as it has been theorised by Peter
Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. This then leads us to an analysis of the cynical position adopted by Brand’s critics, which I
argue actually demonstrates more political problems on the part of the left than those suggested by Brand himself. ¶ For
Sloterdijk, cynicism is an attitude that emerges right at the centre of the enlightenment project, where, in contrast to a
modernist illumination of truth, “a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence” (1987, p. 22). Rather than the promised
heightened consciousness of science that would allow us to see the hidden essential truths behind appearances, the very
conception of truth as unconcealedness (aletheia)3 instead creates a widespread mistrust and suspicion of every
appearance. Subsequently, “a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming
deceived or overpowered … everything that appears to us could be a deceptive manoeuvre of an overpowering evil
enemy” (Sloterdijk, 1987, p. 330). The surface becomes suspect and the subject therefore retreats from all appearances:
judging them to be spectacles that are seeking to oppress through falsity. The result is cynicism. ¶ Subsequently, this leads
Sloterdijk to his well-known paradoxical definition of cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness” which he describes
as a “modernized, unhappy consciousness on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain … it
has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, probably was not able to, put them into practice” (1987, p.
5). In other words, in the search for a higher consciousness behind appearances, the subject is paradoxically
“duped” by their very suspicion of being duped. Furthermore, because the subject thinks they “know” that
appearances are just a mask, they disbelieve the truth when it does appear. Like the story of the Emperor’s New
Clothes, they fancy themselves to know what is right in front of their eyes (that the emperor is nude and
vulnerable) yet they choose “not to know” and don’t act upon it (they still act as if the emperor is all-powerful). As
such,¶ cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood
very well, one is well aware of a particular hidden interest hidden behind the ideological universality, but still one
does not renounce it. (Žižek, 1989, p. 23)¶ The audience to the parade of power can see that the emperor is not
divine – just a fragile human body like the rest of us – yet they cynically choose not to know and objectively retain his
aura. They congratulate themselves on “knowing” that Brand is a trivial spectacle, yet they choose to remain
apathetic towards his calls for action.¶ As such, the dismissive reaction to Brand reveals a regressive interpassive
tendency of the left to subjectively treat ourselves as “enlightened” to authentic politics and yet objectively render
ourselves passive. In a kind of defence mechanism, the left believes that it ¶ can avoid becoming the dupe of the
latest fashion or advertising trend by treating everything as a matter of fashion and advertising, reassuring
ourselves as we flip through television channels or browse through the shopping mall that at least we know what’s
really going on. (Stanley, 2007, p. 399)¶ The critics disbelieve Brand, distrusting his motives and seeing him as
inauthentic, yet they continue to “believe” objectively in their own marginalisation. As such, the cynical left believe
they are dismissing shallow spectacle in the direction of a stronger authentic radicalism, yet what their “doing
believes” is the maintenance of their apathetic position. More precisely, it maintains the attitudes of left melancholy
and anti-populism.¶ The problem of “left melancholy” points towards the forever-delayed search for authenticity
on the part of a cynical left that is in mourning. Coined by Walter Benjamin (1998), the concept points towards “the
revolutionary who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal
– than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present” (Brown, 1999, p. 19). Suffering from a history of
defeat and embarrassment, the left persist in a narcissistic identification with failure , fetishising the “good old days”
and remaining faithful to lost causes. As Benjamin himself points out, the cynical kernel of this attitude is clear, as
“melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge … but in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects
in its consumption in order to redeem them” (1998, p. 157). In other words, the sentiment is a deliberate self-sabotage
that takes place even before politics proper has a chance to begin or “the paradox of an intention to mourn that
precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (Žižek, 2001, p. 146). ¶ This then leads us to the second problem of leftist
cynicism: anti-populism. As a result of melancholia, the left has developed the bad habit of prejudging all instances
of popular radical expression (such as Brand’s) as necessarily flawed. However, to return to Dean again, she points out
that this aversion to being popular and successful is a defining feature of a contemporary left, who prefer to adopt
an “authentic” underdog position in advance than take risks towards political power. As she argues, “we” on the
left see “ourselves” as “always morally correct but never politically responsible” (Dean, 2009, p. 6) prepositioned as
righteous victims and proud political losers from the outset. What this cynicism towards instances of popular
radicalism ultimately means, therefore, is that any concern for authenticity is ultimately a regressive one, a defence
mechanism for a left that “as long as it sees itself as defeated victims, can refrain from having to admit is short on ideas”
(Dean, 2009, p. 5). Such an attitude means never risking potential failure and residing in the safety of marginal
righteousness.¶ It is the contention here, therefore, that both melancholia and anti-populism can be seen in the cynical
reaction to Brand’s radicalism. Somewhat ironically, Brand (2013) even recognised these problems himself when he
wrote in his New Statesman piece that¶ the right seeks converts while the left seeks traitors … this moral superiority that is
peculiar to the left is a great impediment towards momentum … for an ideology that is defined by inclusiveness, socialism
has become in practice quite exclusive. ¶ Automatically, then, the left denounce Brand and self-proclaimed “radical left-
wing thinkers and organisers” bitterly complain how he is getting so much attention for the arguments they have been
making for years (for example, Park & Nastasia, 2013). The left maintain distance and label Brand trivial, yet such a
distance only renders these critiques even more marginal and prevents them from becoming popular, effective or counter-
hegemonic.¶ As Žižek has pointed out, the political issue of cynicism is “not that people ‘do not know what they want’
but rather that cynical resignation prevents them from acting upon it, with the result that a weird gap opens up
between what people think and how they act”, adding that “today’s post-political silent majority is not stupid, but it is
cynical and resigned” (2011, p. 390). In terms of Brand, this blanket cynical melancholy is typical of the left’s distrust
of anything popular, rendering them “like the last men” whose “immediate reaction to idealism is mocking
cynicism” (Winlow & Hall, 2012, p. 13). Proponents of a radical alternative immediately adopt caution with the
effect of forever delaying change, holding out for that real and authentic (unbranded) struggle and therefore
denying it indefinitely.

Refusing a telos-driven politics in favor of proliferating x is a dangerous they assume a

transformative potential from everyday moments of resistance that fail.
Hall 14 [Kim Q., “No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures]
Abstract: This paper offers a critique of the emphasis on anti-futurity and failure prevalent in contemporary queer theory. I
argue that responsibility for climate change requires commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist. A
queer crip feminist commitment to the future is, I contend, informed by radical hope . T he theme of the 2012 tenth
biennial Radical Philosophy Association conference and the thirtieth anniversary of the Radical Philosophy Association
was “What Is Radical Philosophy Today?” In this paper I consider what it might mean to think radically about queerness
today. A turn to contemporary queer theory for some insight reveals much discussion of crisis, materialism, futurity, and
failure,1 discussions that offer important critiques of concepts of the future that fail to resist homonationalism, global
capitalism, racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. At stake in this “temporal turn”2 in queer studies is the relevance of
queer critique, the meaning of queerness, and the possibility of the emergence of other, more livable worlds. For example,
José Muñoz begins Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity with a definition of queerness as that which is
oriented toward the future, the not-yet, and the creative imagining and emergence of alternative ways of living and being
in the world. He writes, “Queerness is a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing toward the future.
Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete
possibility for another world.” 3 Such queer critical conceptions of futurity are vital and have usefully demonstrated the
pitfalls of temporalities that assume and reproduce white, class privileged conceptions of queerness and homonationalist
complicity with neoliberal global capitalism in their failure to consider how even marginalized identities and resistance
movements can be incorporated into the very systems of power they wish to critique.4 Similarly, Robert McRuer points to
how queer and disability liberalism risk becoming another site of consumption, rendering ordinary and thus ineffective the
transformative, critical potential of both queerness and disability.5 As McRuer point out, the radical meaning of queer and
crip6 lies in their persistent critique of normalization and their desire for a different, more just world. It is this desire for
the not-yet that characterizes, at least in part, queer and crip temporalities. These discussions of futurity in queer and
disability studies are extremely important and generative; nonetheless, I wonder if they have gone far enough.
Despite their emphasis on failure, materialism, and futurity, there has been (with a few notable exceptions)7 a
striking silence concerning the planet with which queer crip feminist critique and identities are intertwined. My
point here is not to insist on a simple addition of another context for discussion; my point is that the absence of
consideration of planetary implications is particularly puzzling given the contemporary moment in which ideas of
the future and failure are so central to discourses of sustainability and climate change. Most discussions about
futurity in queer studies rightly focus on the social, political, and economic crisis of neoliberal global capitalism;
however, critical attention to this crisis fails for the most part to extend concern to what is arguably one of the most
urgent, very material, crises in our world, a crisis fueled by neoliberal global capitalist development: climate
change. In this paper I seek to address this omission by advancing a queer crip feminist8 critical engagement with
the emphasis on failure and futurity in queer studies today. Building on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of becoming-earth,9
I argue that, when radically understood, queerness and disability are sites of imaginative alternatives crucial for
responding to (i.e., being critically attuned toward and accountable to) climate change. I argue for a queer crip feminist
conception of and orientation to the future informed by critique of assumptions regarding and implications of boundaries
between the “human” and “non-human.” Many discussions of futurity within queer studies have failed to take into
account the naturecultural10 beings we are. Building on the title of Clare Colebrook’s edited series for Open Humanities
Press press, Braidotti contends the Age of the Anthropocene11 calls for a “’critical climate change,’” a shift in how we
conceptualize being, life, death, and temporality.12 Ultimately, I aim to show that far from “kid’s stuff”13 or merely a site
for alternative social alliances, a more-than-human understanding of the future is vital for queer crip feminist lives
and offers the conceptual resources necessary for bringing about another, more just world . As critiques of queer
theory’s whiteness have shown,14 counter-hegemonic orientations are not innate in the concept of queerness itself;
instead, the resistant potential of queerness is contingent upon how the concept is deployed and in which contexts .
One major context that needs to be considered in queer discussions of futurity is the more-than-human planetary context.
As the contributors to Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire demonstrate, there has been a justified suspicion of
appeals to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ within queer theory (as well as in feminist and disability studies) because of the
longstanding role of those appeals in the pathologization of non-normative bodyminds,15 identities, and lives. It is indeed
important to retain a critical suspicion of appeals to nature. Nonetheless, when coupled with an inattentiveness to our
naturecultural being in the world, such suspicion fails to critically address assumptions about what it means to be
human that have also played a role in pathologizing identities, bodyminds, and lives that exceed gendered,
racialized, and able-bodied norms. In other words, the failure to attend to the implications of queer conceptions of
futurity and sustainability for the planet reflects and reinforces a conception of queerness that undermines desires
for transnational alliances and livable worlds. A commitment to transnational alliances and livable worlds must
address practices ( for instance, emissions produced by the consumption habits of global elites ) that
disproportionately threaten the present and future lives of those who are least privileged in the world. Too often,
appeals to a livable world in queer theory ignore the planet on which hopes, dreams, relationships—in short, our
lives—take place. When calls for a more livable future and world are made, which entities’ futures do queer theorists
tend to have in mind? In this paper I aim to show that radical thinking about the meaning of the future and more livable,
sustainable worlds must strive to take into account and be accountable to the planet with which human lives and life in
general is enmeshed. My discussion of these issues begins with a critical consideration of the association of queerness
with anti-futurity, followed by a discussion of the idea of queerness as failure. Then, I consider the view that
intersectionality forecloses the future. Next, I turn to a discussion of ice in order to provide an example alternative
conception of the future that resists queer anthropocentrisms and is responsive to the reality of climate change. Finally, I
make a case for a queer crip feminism informed by radical hope for alternative futures. It is radical hope for alternative,
more-than-human futures that can sustain queer crip feminist lives. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Lee Edelman proclaims that a future-oriented politics informed by a positive, hopeful conception of the future is
necessarily opposed to and exclusionary of queerness. The future, according to Edelman, is “kid’s stuff,”16 that which
is always anticipated in the name of the Child who “embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its
future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed.”17 In the
name of this longed-for Child of the future, specifically in order to protect and promote the freedom of the imagined Child
to come, the freedom of currentlyexisting people is curtailed.18 Edelman’s contention is that present politics is oriented
toward the good of the Child (or future generations) and that this future orientation of the political is the means by which
heteronormative society defines and understands itself as good. In the context of this “reproductive futurity,” that which is
queer can have no place because queerness disrupts efforts to secure the stability and longevity of the heteronormative
family and society’s continuing existence and identity in the figure of the Child. It is this desire for stability and
preservation of “the same” in the future that Edelman rightly identifies as antithetical to the instability reflected in
queer’s emphasis on becoming rather than being or fixed identity. Edelman defines queerness as that which “can
never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.”19 Thus defined, queerness defies the notion that it is possible or
even good to reproduce oneself and one’s society, that the future is a site for the reproduction of the present. As Edelman
points out, the effect of invoking the Child in political discourse offers assurance that society as it is currently structured
will continue to exist in perpetuity. This “insistence on sameness” is, Edelman points out, central to heteronormative (and
I would add able-bodyminded) conceptions of the future.20 Following Edelman’s argument, queer theory must, in order
to maintain its radical edge, reject the future, a concept inextricably caught up in a reproductive logic. In its refusal of
identity, queerness cannot be assimilated into the heteronormative reproductive futurity that is central to the continuance
of the identity of the social order into the future.21 Queer, in other words, names that which negates the future.22
Queerness refuses the “promise of futurity,” the promise of a future that will both resemble and be better than the
present.23 The future, Edelman proclaims, has and is no place for queers. Edelman’s thinking on this topic can be
extended to thinking about disability and the future. After all, while normalizing stories proclaim that things will “get
better,”24 that the future will be brighter, there are no queers or crips in that brighter, better future; dominant conceptions
of the future posit the future as a promise only for the able-bodied, hetero- and homonormative.25 As Alison Kafer
explains, a compulsorily able-bodied society perceives disabled people as having no future and the future as devoid of
disability. She writes, “If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes
disability can only be a future to avoid. . . . In this framework, a future with disability is a future no one wants, and the
figure of the disabled person, especially the disabled fetus or child, becomes the symbol of the undesired future.”26
Edelman recommends a queer politics of resistance and refusal of all forms of “enslavement in the name of having a
life,”27 and his association of queerness with a rejection and refusal of the future has become very influential in queer
studies. However, some queer theorists28 have argued that Edelman’s universalizing concept of the Child is a
concept that ignores the racialized , classed, gendered, and able-bodied networks that work to eliminate the future
for poor people , people of color, and able-bodied people in the world. To be construed as having a life not worth
living (i.e., as having a life unworthy of being continued into the future) means that one is not taken into account
when plans for the future are made. For example, as Michael Berubé and Nancy Tuana contend, whether or not one
survived Hurricane Katrina was not simply the result of living below or above sea level; it was also about being
taken into account in the city’s planning for the future, being thought of as someone to consider in light of possible
disasters.29 While critical of ableist conceptions of the future and sympathetic to Edelman’s rejection of the future as
irredeemably heteronormative, Kafer disagrees with Edelman’s conclusion that queerness is necessarily a position against
the future. Kafer rejects Edelman’s universalizing notion of the Child as incompatible with a queer and crip futurity and
defends a feminist queer crip conception of the future. Along with José Muñoz and Jasbir Puar, Kafer points out that only
privileged children in the world have been allowed futures. Puar writes, For queer politics, the challenge is not so
much to refuse a future through the repudiation of reproductive futurity, . . . but to understand how the biopolitics of
regenerative capacity already demarcate racialized and sexualized statistical population aggregates as those in decay,
destined for no future, based not upon whether they can or cannot reproduce children but on what capacities they can an
cannot regenerate and what kinds of assemblages they compel, repel, spur, deflate.30 For Kafer, Muñoz, and Puar, it is
incumbent upon queer, feminist, and/or disability theorists to reimagine, not reject, the future. Such reimaginings
are queer crip feminist to the extent that they understand the future as open and reflective of boundaries
demarcating identities and entities in the present. In his discussion of the future, Robert McRuer maintains the
necessity of queer and crip critique of incorporations of “difference” that are part of neoliberal visions of the future.31
Like Kafer and Puar, McRuer does not argue for a wholesale repudiation of the future; in fact, the possibility of queer crip
futures informs his critique of neoliberalism.32 For McRuer, while reproductive futurity is unsustainable, alternative
sustainable futures are both possible and necessary. He writes, [W]e might note that a range of critiques of capital . . .
figure disability as the sign of capitalism gone awry while also conjuring up a naturalized ablebodiedness that should
follow either its reform (for liberals) or eradication (for Marxists and other revolutionaries). Queer and crip reworkings of
Marxism might more effectively speak to each other across their shared desire to not simply straighten that which is bent,
and might thereby recognize the multiple locations where transnational crip/queer alliances function as sites for imagining
a necessarily disabled world—meaning an inhabitable [my emphasis], sustainable, livable world.33 McRuer calls for
queer and crip futures that remain open to the “disability to come,” an openness that renders “other futures” and “other
worlds” more accessible to the diversity of real bodies and counter-hegemonic, non-normative lives.34 What are the
implications of such discussions of the future for understanding and grappling with the realities of climate change? I want
to build on McRuer’s and Puar’s respective calls for sustainability and posthumanism and consider in more detail the
meaning of queerness and disability in relation to the nonhuman natural world. Queer crip feminist responsiveness to
climate change requires more than understanding that the future isn’t only kid’s stuff; it requires, as Rosi
Braidotti suggests, an understanding that as naturecultural beings humans are both “embodied and embedded.”35
From this perspective, boundaries drawn between nature and culture , human and nonhuman , able-bodied and
disabled, etc. are, as Nancy Tuana puts it, “viscous” and “ porous ,”36 and identities, while embodied and located,
are changing not stable, interactively emergent not innate, and contingent and provisional not eternal. As Braidotti
makes clear, an openness to the future for emergent, interactive, naturecultural beings means an openness to the
possibility of “a future without us,” by which she means a future that does not merely reproduce the past, a future
made possible by a reconception of subjectivity and community.37 This conception of the future better reflects the
naturecultural beings we are and provides a more promising ground for queer crip feminist responsiveness to
climate change. It takes seriously the anthropogenic nature of climate change and the fact that not all humans are
equally responsible for climate change-related harms. It is crucial for the future to be rethought in nonanthropocentric
ways in queer, disability, and feminist studies because only such a reconceived future will enable us to realize sustainable
futures. Discussions of the future must take climate change into account because the present reality of climate
change and the future climate change to which past and present emissions have committed the planet, are
inextricably part of the context in which we are oriented toward the future . To speak of the future without taking
into account this context is to put forward an empty concept of the future. In the absence of taking into account the
earth/planet with which our lives are enmeshed, the concept of the future that informs queer theory’s temporal turn
remains too anthropocentric to be responsive to climate change. Similarly, in speaking about disability studies, Alison
Kafer observes, “the pervasiveness of the social model” in disability studies has prevented it from grappling with the
nonhuman environment/nature; as a result, she contends, transformative coalitional possibilities between disability and
environmental movements remain largely untapped.38 Here, I extend Kafer’s insight to think about climate change—
there is untapped potential not only for coalitions between political movements but also for rethinking the
centrality of the often all-too- human subject at the heart of queer, crip, and feminist studies. Before saying more
about how a reconceptualized subject and future at the heart of a queer crip feminist response to climate change, I turn to
another preoccupation in contemporary queer theory that begs interrogation: thinking of queerness as failure.

The 1AC abstracts exploitation to the discursive constructions of [] instead of the material
extraction of value from wage labor---this cements a mode of individualization that facilitates the
expansion of capital.
Rob Wilkie 12, Wisconsin English professor, Winter/Spring, "Capitalism's Posthuman Empire," The Red Critique,
http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/capitalismsposthumanempire.htm

The economic tumultuousness of capitalism requires a constant turnover of ideological concepts which, on the one
hand, displace the fundamental inequality of private property while, on the other hand, replacing the possibilities of
true economic equality with the illusion of the empty equality of the market. While the advancing productivity of human labor means that we are able to foresee a time
when the needs of all are met, capitalism restricts these developments to the profit motive. An economic system which divides the working class against itself by forcing

workers around the world to compete with one another for the wage, capitalism can’t but foster new social divisions
and contestations within the working class while at the same time reducing working class unity to the reified
homogeneity of exploitation. It is on these terms that we must understand bourgeois theory’s "posthumanist turn" and the way in which it disconnects the relation between race and class. I argue that what is represented as
posthumanism's "ethical" recognition of difference without closure—the claim to recognize the "solidarity" between humans and animals by resisting the instrumental reduction of both to homogeneous masses—is in actuality a displacement of the more
revolutionary critique of capitalism as a global system that must expand the conditions for private accumulation by subsuming all boundaries and differences under the one difference which only a social transformation can bring an end to, namely the difference of
class. In order to consider the social realities of capital's posthuman empire, however, I believe it is necessary to start outside of it, in what Marx and Engels call the "real ground of history…the material production of life itself" (The German Ideology 164).

What I mean by this is that in contrast to Giorgio Agamben's posthumanist declaration in What is an Apparatus ? that
"what is to be at stake, to be precise, is not an erasure or an overcoming, but rather a dissemination that pushes to
the extreme the masquerade that has always accompanied every personal identity" (13), the apparent fluidity of the
concept of "identity" and "otherness" in social, philosophic, and scientific discourses over time is governed by what
Marx and Engels describe as the "mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions , which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new
generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development" (The German Ideology 165). In starting outside of epistemology, in the historical and

material ontology of social relations, it becomes possible to not only document the fact that theories of "self" and
"other" change, but why changes in the meaning of identity reflect the deeper social contestations between classes
over the material conditions that shape one's life; namely, the life-activity of human labor. It is on these terms, for instance, that Hegel's
foundational theory of otherness in The Phenomenology of the Mind that underlies virtually all cultural theories of
difference today can be understood not as the spontaneous coming to "self-consciousness" of the contingent nature of all
identity, but rather as a reflection of the changing economic relations of an emerging industrial capitalism which, in
turn, turns these economic relations into the illusion of the natural condition of all "life." According to Hegel, "self-consciousness" occurs when society
reaches the point at which it can reflect on itself by understanding that individuals exist relationally, but nonetheless independently. "Self-consciousness," he writes, "exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that
is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or 'recognized'" (561). It is on these terms that Hegel proposes that the dependent nature of human consciousness up to that point—manifest in the relation between lord and bondsman—is only transformed when each

However, by drawing upon what Marx theorizes as the "material conditions of life," it
recognizes the other as an equal and independent being.

becomes clear that what Hegel represents as "self-consciousness" cannot be understood outside of the historical and
material conditions in which his inquiry takes place. That is, in seeking to define the relational basis of the self as other than the dependent relation between the bondsman to the lord (563), Hegel is
challenging the "self" as understood under feudal economic relations and, in its place, establishing the ideological framework for the "liberty" of private property relations under capitalism. It is on this basis, for instance, that Marx writes that the form of "liberty as a

). In other words, the need to recast

right of man" which Hegel privileges is "not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man" (On The Jewish Question 42

humanity as a social relation based upon the "recognition" of equals is driven by the emergence of a society framed
around both the contractual meeting of "free" individuals in the marketplace—that is, individuals "freed" from the
means of production and thus forced to sell their labor power for a wage—as well as the rethinking of the bourgeois
"individual" as having a natural "right" to freely own private property. To return, then, to the contemporary moment
of posthumanism, the reading of identity which has come to dominate cultural theory responds to the globalization of
wage-labor by arguing that the primary struggle is no longer between classes, but between the cultural
homogenization of the social, on the one hand, and the post-race, post-class, and post-gender multitudes which
"resist" through appeals to cultural singularity and local difference, on the other . Perhaps the most prominent proponents of this thesis are Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, who, in Commonwealth, argue that although "War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterize our globalizing world… [o]ne primary effect of globalization… is the creation of a common world, a world that, for better or worse, we all

At the core of their thesis is that capitalism is no longer a system divided by class, but rather a
share, a world that has no 'outside'" (vii).

system of political domination that, however unevenly, nonetheless impacts and pulls everyone into a struggle over
control over definitions of "self." In the new, "common" world, they write, "each identity is divided internally by others: racial hierarchies divide genders and classes, gender hierarchies divide races and classes, and so forth"
(340) and "no one domain or social antagonism is prior to the others" (342). In this sense, the struggle for social change is not about ending the conditions of

class exploitation that lead to racial and other forms of oppression, but rather expanding the recognition of
independent identities such that they can no longer be subsumed under the homogeneity of capitalism's instrumental
and reductive logic. In this post-race, post-class, and post-gender world, they declare, recognizing the "Singularity" of the multitudes "destroys the logic of property" (339) and "fills the traditional role of… the abolition of the state" (333). As
such, their proposal is to abandon any hope of fundamental social transformation or alternative to capitalism in favor of "an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire" (vii). The problem is that although

"globalization" has become synonymous in theory with the end of any economic challenge to capitalism's dominance
and the absence of an outside from which to critique exploitation, this does not change the reality that the expansion
of capitalism globally has meant in actuality a rising level of inequality and a sharpening of the class divide, a point
then reflected back in culture by increasing racial and religious tensions . This is because capitalism is a system that depends upon the exploitation of labor.
Regardless of whether the primary location of production is the North or the South, or whether the workers work in
factories that are highly mechanized or newly digitalized , it is the production of surplus value extracted from the
surplus labor of workers by owners that drives capitalism forward . It is in the context of increasing economic uncertainty and inequality that one must read, for example, the
increasing use of institutionalized and "culturally acceptable" racism against Muslims and immigrants in the United States and Europe to divide the working class as an instance of what Marx calls the "secret which enables the capitalist class to maintain its power"

("Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt" 337). In other words, far from the divisions of the past being displaced, as Hardt and Negri propose, class
divisions have only become heightened in capital's new global ecology, leading as usual to the divisive cultural
promulgation of "internal" cultural divisions within the global proletariat. It is for this reason, I argue, that the recognition of the singularity of cultural difference as the
means by which to address the social oppressions of race, gender, sexuality, animality, and (dis)ability argued for by posthumanists has in actuality become the ideology that in obscuring exploitation enables global capitalism to deepen social inequalities . This

is because it strips away the historical and material conditions of difference and, instead, represents the conditions of
identity under capitalism, as Cary Wolfe suggests in What is Posthumanism?, as the "ongoing, differentiated
construction and creation of a shared environment, sometimes converging in a consensual domain, sometimes not, by
autopoetic entities that have their own temporalities, chronicities, perceptual modalities, and so on— in short, their
own forms of embodiment " (xxiv). The problem, according to posthumanists such as Wolfe, is the failure of capitalism to
recognize that all beings should be allowed to operate "on their own time," instead of being forced to operate under
a homogenized "temporality." Capitalism, then, is challenged not as an economic system, but a managerial one. That is, it is said that capital does not do enough to recognize the "differences" which exist at the very core of all
being and thus is challenged to further incorporate people (and animals) in their local, embedded realities. This local recognition, the argument goes, will bring the rigid,

instrumental logic of capitalism into crisis. However, this image of society as consisting of autonomous, self-identified
individuals who sometimes operate together and sometimes not, doesn't challenge the core logic of capitalism in
exploitation . In fact, it replicates the very ideology on which capitalism depends, namely the illusion of freedom in the marketplace, where "individuals" encounter each other in a series of chance meetings to exchange—more or less "fairly"—wages
for labor. By giving up the possibility of any theory of identity and difference beyond the isolated encounter, posthumanist

ethics offers only a politics of individual, autonomous solutions to what is a structural economic contradictio n. In turn, it thus
serves at the level of culture as the means by which to extend the economic realities of capitalism which in fact give rise to the conditions of oppression posthumanists nominally oppose. Capitalism, especially in its current "global" phase, has no problems recognizing
local differences and adapting commodities to local markets. What matters to capital is not the locality of markets, but the globality of labor. Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am and Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal are among two of the most influential
texts in shaping the discourses of contemporary cultural theory in the ideological direction of "posthumanism." What is significant about both books is that they take as their starting point a rethinking of the entire history of philosophy—from the ancient Greeks to
postmodernism—to account for what they claim is the central aporia in Western Philosophy since Aristotle, namely, the discursive relation of "man" and "animal." As Agamben argues, it is the conflict between human and animal, not as they exist, but as they are
defined epistemologically, which is "the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict" (80). According to both writers, the division between humans and animals operates as the unspoken basis upon which all theories of social difference have been

The "human" and the "animal" function, they propose, as homogenized

constructed and, in turn, the framework through which all attacks upon the other ultimately depend.

epistemological categories through which social reality is produced and maintained. In turn, it is this instrumental logic of
classification which is at the core of the human-animal distinction which is then used to legitimate the oppression of
all beings—animal and human—which are defined as outside the domain of reason . Just as the oppression of the animal is "legalized" by defining it as the not-human and thus not subject to
human rights, they argue the racialized other has been oppressed through the same mechanism of denying that she has the capacity to (Western philosophic) reason. On these terms Agamben writes, "It is as if determining the border between human and animal

In this
were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental meta-physico-political operation in which alone something like 'man' can be decided upon and produced" (21).

way, they subsume and thus shift all inquiries into the conditions which give rise to social oppression to what they
claim is the rhetorical structure of humanity itself. It is on these grounds that Derrida and Agamben propose that the challenge of posthumanism to the contemporary is the deconstruction of the
epistemological basis upon which all "differences" are classified. This is perhaps most clear in Derrida's argument that "Power over the animal is the essence of the 'I' or the 'person,' the essence of the human" (93), which can only be combated, he proposes, by

Like Agamben, Derrida suggests social inequalities are

"complicating, thickening, folding, and dividing the line [between humans and animals] precisely by making it increase and multiply" (29).

dependent upon the construction of an interminable and uncrossable boundary between the human and the animal
which legitimates the treatment of some beings as less (human) than others. It is this unequal system of classification,
he proposes, that is tied into the very structure of all representations and, thus, implicated in how the world is "seen"
from the vantage point of all of modern philosophy . He writes, "Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give…in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single
concept" (32). As such, Derrida declares that drawing such a sharp, but arbitrary, boundary between the human and the non-human obscures that, "Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than 'The
Animal' or 'Animal Life' there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely....a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead […that…] can never be totally objectified" (31). In other words, the classification of "humans"
and "animals" into distinct states of being imposes violence on the animal-other which reduces its multiplicity and complexity under a single, homogeneous concept. In turn, it is the multiplicity of the other that ultimately represents a resistance to the
homogenization and objectification of modernity. That is, like Hardt and Negri's theory of the multitude who exist in a state of radical singularity which is "constantly in flux" (339) and thus resist any attempts at reductive classifications, what Derrida is ultimately
arguing in celebrating the "unsubstitutable singularity" (9) of the in-between identity he calls "l'animot" (41)—that is, a being that is a "monstrous hybrid," neither inside nor outside language—is a politics that takes up the full extent of Hegel's individualist

"recognition" as the basis of a posthumanist theory ofidentity. Far from challenging Hegel's humanist theory of difference and identity, which
corresponds to the emergence of the industrial age and the pressures it placed upon feudal class relations, what
Derrida is proposing is a theory of "recognition" for the age of global capitalism . It subsumes all identity under a
singular cultural logic and, in turn, presumes that there is no escape from this logic, except to find moments of
"resistance" from within . In this sense, Derrida's posthumanism is a ruling class ethics which works without recourse to the existence of any economic or political outside to promote the idea of locating the moments within any
structure that might lend themselves to a more plural and less determining understanding of identity. It is, in other words, a theory of identity for a capitalist market that must

"nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere," while nonetheless continuing to internally
divide workers, pitting them against one another through the mechanism of wage competition (Marx and Engels 487). The implications of the
posthumanist reading of difference as displacing the economic realities of race, gender, and sexual oppression as shaped by the fundamental divisions of ownership under capitalism become clear when they are applied to contemporary representations of difference
and the ways in which theories of race in particular are being revised as capital goes global. For example, released within months of one another, the films Disgrace and District 9 are exemplary instances of the way in which posthumanist ethics has become the
dominant ideological framework through which race and class are disconnected from one another and, more importantly, from the social relations of production. That is to say, what is significant is that despite the surface differences in "tone," "politics," and
"audience" both films take the sharp divisions of race and class in post-Apartheid South Africa and, at a time of both rising class conflicts (as well as increased global attention to the 2010 World Cup at the time of their release), use the relay of the relation of human
and animal to redefine the social reality in South Africa as a series of ethical challenges rather than class conflicts. Briefly, Disgrace, the film version of J.M. Coetzee's novel of the same name, is the story of David Lurie—a tired, white communications professor
teaching romantic poetry to apathetic students—who ultimately must come to terms with the end of Apartheid through what are presented as a series of escalating humiliations—from losing his teaching position to an attack which results in the rape of his daughter
and the burning of his face. It is very clear from the beginning that these humiliations are tied to race. After pressuring a black, female student in his class to sleep with him, Lurie is forced out of the university in an echo of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees
when he will not admit that he was "wrong," only that he is guilty. With no teaching position, he decides to move out to the countryside to live with his daughter, Lucy, and her lesbian partner. Upon arriving, he learns that his daughter's partner has left her and that
she has established a "co-proprietorship" with Petrus, a black farmer who has helped her set up a dog kennel and flower farm with the condition that he too can live on the land. Throughout this part of the film, David makes clear that this "co-ownership" upsets him
because, ultimately, Petrus does not know his "place." He derisively calls him a "peasant" and, when seeing the goats that Petrus has purchased for a wedding party tied up outside the house, declares that he doesn't like the way that Petrus does things, inviting the
"beasts to meet the people who will eat them." District 9, on the other hand, it is set in an alternate version of the contemporary in which an extraterrestrial race have landed in Johannesburg, South Africa, and have been forced by the human population to live in
segregated "townships" on the outskirts of the city. The film centers on an eager, white middle-manager named Wikus Van De Merwe who is tasked by his company, the global multinational MNU, to serve eviction notices to the extraterrestrials or "prawns" as they
are called by the humans, letting them know that they are being moved to a concentration camp. These notices must be served, we are informed, in order to meet the demands of international law which require that the aliens be informed of the move before it
takes place. As he's serving the notices, Wikus is infected with the extraterrestrials' DNA and begins slowly transforming into a "prawn," but not before he ultimately helps two of the aliens—a parent who has been given the European name "Christopher Johnson"
and child—escape the planet. Despite their differences, what each film relies on in re-writing the contradictions of race and class as an epistemological confrontation between human and animal is what Derrida theorizes as "the gaze of the absolute other" (11); that
is, the "gaze of the animal" which "offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman" (12). For example, during his time on the farm Lurie begins to work at the local rescue shelter/veterinary hospital and, as part of his transition to an
"ethical" posthumanist, helps to euthanize the dogs and take them to the incinerator. Most significantly in this context, since it ultimately reflects the "realization" that Lurie undergoes over the course of the film, the attack on Lucy and him occurs after he has just
told a story about the "ignobility" of a male dog that was beaten until he hated his own desire. As part of the attack the young men shoot Lucy's dogs, which is meant to signal a sharp contrast to Lurie's adopting of an "ethical" approach at the veterinary clinic. What
he ultimately comes to see is that recasting his identity in the new post-Apartheid landscape will mean, in his words, being "humiliated… like a dog." This, however, is meant to indicate not simply a personal humiliation, but, by the end of the film, an inversion of his
previous egoist "self" and, through identification with animals’ perspective, the full recognition of the epistemological conditions which produce otherness. When, at the conclusion of the film, Lurie leaves his car at the top of the mountain and walks down to Lucy's
farm for tea, giving up on his silent protest at the "deal" that Lucy has made with Petrus to become her "wife" in exchange for protection from future attacks, the viewer has been positioned to see him as no longer able to act on his desires and thus having been
reduced to being "a dog." In this way, we are meant to see the deep connection that Lurie makes between humans and animals. He sees that to be other, whether human or animal, means being "humiliated" by those in power. Of course, the image of the white
professor who is powerless in the face of the black farmers completely inverts the reality of social relations in South Africa, in which unemployment is listed as anywhere from 31% to 42%, falling largely on the black population (Zeiling and Ceruti). But this, I argue, is
the point. Posthumanism is an ideology which separates culture from reality and, instead, posits that regardless of the economic, social reality is always driven by divisions which violently classify those whose desires place them outside the "normal" bounds of
society. In District 9 the relationship between race and class is represented through the relay of science fiction. In the film, we learn that the extraterrestrials literally emerge from nowhere, as their ship suddenly appeared without warning in the sky over
Johannesburg. It is only when the humans cut into the ship and find the aliens living in deplorable conditions with no seeming purpose that "first contact" is made. While later in the film we learn that MNU is one of the world's leading arms manufacturers and their
interest in managing the situation is obtaining the alien's weapon technology, there is no reason given for the initial segregation of the aliens into townships except their "animal-like" difference. In other words, like the post-historical conclusion of Disgrace, District 9
turns the modern history of exploitation and oppression into an ahistorical fear of the other driven by the instrumental desire to "capture" all life in reductive classifications. Similar to Lurie's taking up of the dog's perspective, it is through Wikus' adopting of the
"prawns'" perspective that we learn that it is "bad" to "capture" or "impose" upon life conditions which are alien to its existence—just as Derrida and Agamben suggest—but—also like Agamben and Derrida—not where these terms come from. Wikus' decision at the
film's conclusion to sacrifice his own life to make sure that Christopher Johnson and his son escape is thus meant to signify the posthumanist realization that social change hinges on the individual decision of how one approaches the other. There is no broad social

This is the
movement, no social collectivity, only the ethical acts of one for the other, one in debt to the other. Thus, Wikus (and the viewer) end the film with the hope that the future will be different, simply through the act of individual ethics.

limit of the posthumanist theory of "difference." Insofar as it defines otherness, oppression, and exploitation as the
effect of an instrumental logic of classification which is endemic to all social relations , it denies that there is any
history to the ways in which people live. Instead, transformative theory becomes an "ethical" praxis that, in the words of Agamben,
"must face a problem and a particular situation each and every time " (What is An Apparatus? 9). In this way, it becomes impossible to
suggest that exploitation and oppression are inherent to capitalism or would be any different under any alternative
mode of production. In fact, Hardt and Negri argue precisely this when they declare that "Socialism and capitalism…are both regimes of property that exclude the common" (ix). The consequence is that
posthumanism effectively naturalizes capitalism by denying what Marx calls "species-being"— the basis of human
freedom in the collectivity of labor —and replacing it instead with what Agamben calls "special being" or that which
"without resembling any other…represents all others" (Profanations 59). When Agamben proclaims that, "‘To be special [far specie] can mean ‘to surprise and astonish’ (in a negative sense) by not fitting
into established rules, but the notion that individuals constitute a species and belong together in a homogeneous class tends to be reassuring" (59) he replicates the bourgeois theory of difference which, as Marx writes, is based upon "an individual separated from
the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice" such that "far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself—society—

In other words, the very nature of the division of labor

appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence" (On the Jewish Question 43).

under capitalism causes workers to blame ahistorical notions of "society" and "government" for the contradictions
which reside in the economic and, in turn, seek refuge in the "freedom" of individuality which bourgeois society
promises. In this way, when Agamben writes that "The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus [dispositivo]" (60), he reproduces the sense with which
people respond to capitalist exploitation by blaming the very idea of "society," rather than the society of exploitation. By taking the question of identity and difference out of the social,

Agamben turns exploitation into an existential crisis which can only be resolved by the ethical recognition of
difference on its own terms, leaving the contradictions of society intact. This is how the posthumanist theories of identity return to the same structures of representation they
claim to oppose because their opposition does not move beyond the economic structures of capitalism. Both the Hegelian theory of "recognition" and the posthuman theory of "singularity" are ultimately theories of the isolated individual, which is an ideological
fiction arising alongside capitalism (a la "Robinson Crusoe") as a result of the economic shift toward wage-labor. They consequently substitute for more radical theories of freedom from the market the freedom of the individual in the market, as if rigid structures of

If we are to truly see the world differently, not just as isolated individuals, but
social interpretations and not the system of wage-labor were holding the individual back.

as a united community which uses new technologies for freeing people from the drudgery of wage labor and its
corresponding ideologies of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression, what is necessary is a social
transformation that ends the exploitation of labor upon which capitalism is based. Pluralizing identities doesn’t
challenge the logic of exploitation, but actually expands it since private property establishes individual responsibility
as the very basis of one's "natural" existence by stripping people of any means of survival outside of wage-labor. Thus, retreating into individualism is
merely the ideological mask which is placed over the subsumption of all life under the profit motive . However, as Marx writes, regardless of
appearances, "the individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried

out together with others is… an expression and confirmation of social life" (86). Although posthumanism turns the
alienation of the worker under capitalism into the very pre-condition of all cultur e, I argue that it is only by freeing labor
from the restrictions of capitalist exploitation that, we can, as Marx writes, end racial oppression and find a "genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man —the true resolution of the strife
between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between the individual and the species" (84)

The onslaught of capitalism has manifested in violence, climate change, lashout and weapons
dispersed throughout the globe – the impact is extinction.
Dr. Ted Trainer 22, Conjoint Lecturer, Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, "Where Is Capitalism Taking
Us? 2: The Longer Term Trajectory," in Capitalism: Why We Should Scrap It, Chapter 8, 03/07/2022, pg. 96-104.
[language edited]

Let us step back and consider again the global situation sketched in Chapter 3. It was explained that the increasingly
serious range of problems, including environmental destruction, resource depletion, deprivation of the Third World,
conflict over access to resources and markets, and the deterioration of social cohesion, are direct consequences of
the fact that there is far too much producing and consuming going on. The main argument in this chapter is that this
society is not capable of dealing with this situation, and that it will inevitably culminate in the more or less catastrophic
breakdown of society on a global scale.
Before detailing that argument some aspects of the trajectory should be considered further.

What will happen?

Following is an attempt to sketch the most likely trajectory ahead.

The multi-factored limits to growth noose will tighten, hopefully slowly but probably too quickly. Many of its elements
are already gathering force and compounding to increase difficulties towards a time of great and terminal troubles. As
explained, the key determinants of our near-term fate seem to be the future of fracking and of debt. Most likely is a
relatively sudden end of the debt fuelled tight-oil venture which then triggers a global debt crisis and a far more
serious global economic collapse than the 2008-2009 GFC. There are varied expectations regarding the time scale;
Ahmed (2017) explains why it could be a matter of a decade or so before the Middle Eastern failed states become
unable to maintain oil exports. Tverberg and several others have a similarly short-term expectation. Randers (2012)
however expects the disruption to impact around 2070.

Immiseration.

But the most important determinant of our fate is probably not directly to do with biophysical limits. It is the extent to
which the long-suffering and docile masses will go on tolerating how they are being treated. For at least 6,000 years
people have been astoundingly passive, putting up with tyrants, kings, and general rule by usually brutal and greedy
elites. But over the last two or three decades people in rich countries have become seriously discontented with their
situation, recognising that governments do not attend to their needs. One result is the worldwide decline in belief in
democracy. Others are the advent of Trump, Brexit, right-wing populism and support for fascism. Guy Standing
analyses this well (2012), pointing to the way financialisation is replacing Neoliberalism with domination by the
accumulation of assets on which rents can be drawn while casting more and more people into the “precariat”. This is a
class struggling with insecurity and personal debt. The hard-won achievements of old labour, secure jobs and good
wages etc., are being swept away and replaced by “gig” economies in which the precariat suffers high indebtedness and
struggles to find intermittent work, pays high rents (e.g., for mortgages, accommodation, student fees.) Below them is
the “lumpenproletariat” of chronically unemployed, aged, infirm, homeless and excluded. The above chapter on the US
points to the Walmart-gutted towns, impoverished casual labour, rural poverty and dying country towns, and the social
wreckage generating the opioid crisis and other harmful effects. It is not surprising that this produced such support for a
Presidential candidate promising to “drain the Washington swamp” seen to be responsible for the situation.

The decline in regard for democracy that is underway is another consequence of immiseration. People are becoming
less satisfied with the capacity or willingness of the system to attend to their problems and fix things. The Australian
National University’s recent Australian election survey shows distrust of politicians rose from an already high 63% in
2014 to 76% in 2016. Another question found 56% think the federal government is run for a few big interests. (Yeginsu,
2018.)

Tverberg (2021) sees how low disposable household income is now a major determinant of what is happening to the oil
industry. The crisis of low prices and rampant bankruptcies in the petroleum industry has not been due to running into
scarcity as the “peak oil” thesis once predicted, but to falling demand because large and increasing numbers of people
cannot afford to purchase goods at previous rates. This is a most important and somewhat overlooked causal factor in
the discussion of global economic woes. Consider the following evidence on it.

There has been negligible increase in household disposable income for 60-80% of Australian households since 2012,
while prices have risen and the income of the rich has risen considerably. Similarly in the US real incomes for most
workers have barely risen in 40 years and the minimum wage has been at $US15,000 p.a. for years. (Hutchins 2018.)
Stasse (2020) refers to literature on “…an unprecedented squeeze on living standards for ordinary households.” Wright
(2019) says that in the US “…average hourly pay is below what it was in 1973; 40 percent of adults lack the savings to
pay for a $400 emergency expense.”
The shrinking middle class and rising precariat class are part of the phenomenon, and it is evident in the rise of
household debt, now very high in Australia. Karp (2020) says in the US households’ debt-to-income ratio was less than
40 percent in 1950 but is now120 percent, and since 1985 the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of adults declined
from 40 percent to 27 percent. Indices of increasing hardship at the bottom are clear. In the UK. MacFarlane (2019)
reports, “Rough sleeping in England has increased by 165 per cent, while homeless deaths have more than doubled. The
number of people using food banks has increased to 1.6 million … up from just 26,000 in 2009. 14 million people are
living in poverty … the UK population is still 1.6 per cent poorer than it was more than a decade ago on average.”
Menadue (2020) reports that in Australia, “Homelessness is also increasingly significantly. It rose by 30% in the decade
to 2016.”

These observations point to a killing of the goose that was laying golden eggs, a failure to attend to the way the
drive to extract as much wealth as possible eventually undercuts the capacity to go on siphoning it out, by leaving
most people with too little purchasing power. This situation is a consequence of the success of the capitalist class. Their
dominance has meant that they have been able to ride over the resistance that might have got them to make sufficient
concessions to defuse the problems they were causing. Streek (2014) puts it in terms of capitalism becoming its own
worst enemy. “It has eliminated criticism and oppositional moves, which would have pushed it to adapt…”

The accumulating power has also led to corruption, which in time reduces a system’s capacity to respond to
challenges. Streek (2014) points to the way the GFC revealed “…rating agencies being paid by the producers of toxic
securities to award them top grades; offshore shadow banking, money laundering and assistance in large-scale tax
evasion as the normal business of the biggest banks with the best addresses; the sale to unsuspecting customers of
securities constructed so that other customers could bet against them; the leading banks worldwide fraudulently fixing
interest rates and the gold price, and so on.” He notes the billions of dollars in fines for these offences which several
large banks have had to pay recently, including by some major Australian banks. In more recent years several inquiries
and revelations have detailed similar criminal behaviour on the part of mainstream institutions, especially via the
Australian Banking royal commission, and exposures of global tax haven and laundering operations.

The advent of cannibalism.

Collins (2021) and others point to the way the economy’s increasing difficulties have led it to enter a “catabolic” or
“cannibalistic” phase. As the capacity to do good business producing useful things deteriorates, investors turn to
activities that plunder the economy. It is as if a hardware firm has to start selling the corrugated iron on its own roof to
stay in business. The illicit drug industry and the Mafia are similar; rather than producing new wealth effort goes into
extracting previously produced wealth. Much financial activity is of this nature, such as “short selling”, “asset
stripping” and getting hold of assets that enable rents to be extracted. In the GFC a lot of money was lent to home
buyers incapable of meeting the payments, because investors could not find less risky outlets. When the borrowers
could not pay their interest instalments their houses were repossessed by the banks and sold off.

Similarly in the US some of the money in the worker’s pay packet is put into a pension fund run by the corporation, to
be paid back on retirement, but many corporations have taken these funds to invest, and “lost” them. Often they
were lent to smart operators in the financial sector to put into speculative ventures, siphoning out fees in the process.
Sometimes money is borrowed to buy weak firms, arrange for them to borrow too much and thus drive them into
bankruptcy, and then sell them off, and because the pension money has become an asset of the firm it goes to the
lenders and is lost to the workers who earned it and set it aside. So, accumulation and profit making are being kept up
by activities which enrich big and smart investors (lenders) by getting hold of the wealth of little/naive investors
(borrowers), through granting them loans they cannot repay.

Another common mechanism is simply commercialising activities that the state once carried out without charge. This
is an aspect of “financialisation” discussed in Chapter 4. A good example is where students must now pay for college
and university education, meaning large loans must be taken out and large interest payments then flow to lenders from
the earnings of parents and students. Again the process does not involve lending to produce anything, it just enables
wealth previously produced to be acquired by lenders. Collins (2021) and others see this process accelerating as the
ever-increasing volumes of accumulated capital find it increasingly difficult to find investment opportunities in
producing anything of value. Streek (2014) says, “… the struggle for the last remaining profit opportunities is becoming
uglier by the day.”

Collins (2021) says. “… catabolic capitalists will stoke the profit engine by taking over troubled businesses, selling them
off for parts, firing the workforce, and pilfering their pensions.” As difficulties increase for governments and their
revenues decrease they will come under greater pressure to give business the conditions it wants in order to stimulate
economic activity.

“Regulatory agencies that once provided some protection from polluters, dangerous products, unsafe
workplaces, labour exploitation, identity theft, and financial fraud will be dismantled … Public safety will be
stripped down, privatized, and sold to those who can still afford it. Court budgets will shrivel, privatized prisons
will exploit convict labour, and police will seldom respond to everyday crimes. Instead, private security firms
and gated communities will guard the wealthy … catabolic capitalists will pick over the carcasses of bankrupt
governments. Crumbling public transportation and decaying highways will be transformed into private
thoroughfares, maintained by convict labour or indentured workers. After pressuring bankrupt governments to
sell off public utilities, water storage, and waste management systems , corporations will deliver these
essential services only to the businesses and communities who can afford them. And, as public schools and
libraries go broke, exclusive private academies will employ a fraction of the jobless teachers and professors to
educate a shrinking class of affluent students.”

End game.

A number of analysts see the foregoing phenomena as aspects of a terminal decline, partly driven by increasing
resource and ecological difficulties, partly by worsening inequality and “immiseration”, and partly by deteriorating
“legitimacy”. Rising discontent in Europe and the US is evident in support for populist and fascist movements. Blame is
usually put on the wrong targets, especially immigrants. That the squalor is due to capitalism is not recognised, thanks
largely to the weakness of Left parties and the fine work done over generations by those keeping capitalist ideology in
good shape.

In my lectures on Marx I point to a list of things which I and others think he got wrong. But there are some extremely
important things I think he got right. One is that capitalism is shot through with serious contradictions such as the fact
that the interests of workers clash with those of the class that owns capital. Another extremely important point he made
is that as the system matures immiseration will eventually increase. This is what we are seeing now (Marx’s timing was
way out.) As the rich and super-rich cream off increasing proportions of wealth the masses are increasingly having to
struggle to get by, and are therefore less able to keep up the purchasing that is the life-blood of the system. And they
are more and more discontented. Most importantly, he saw that these tendencies would result in the system’s self-
destruction.

The question is, when will people finally cease putting up with what the system does to them? When will they realise
that the system is not designed to work for them? When will they see that it cannot but worsen their situation as time
goes by? When will they realise what is causing their plight?

The tightening limits will intensify the immiseration as governments are forced to cut spending on welfare etc. and to
drive worker’s conditions down and give more favours to the rich in order to get the economy going. Governments
struggling to control dissent and to help capital are very likely to adopt fascist options , but unlike in the 1930s, now
the materials necessary to maintain armies, large bureaucracies and secret police and stage mass rallies will not be
available, so descent towards a warlord dominated feudalism becomes plausible. In some Third World regions and
even US cities this seems to be happening, for instance in the form of drug gangs.
Many analysts have tried to draw attention to where these limits are taking us. Mason (2003) for instance sees the many
problematic trends culminating in “The 2030 Spike”, the title of his book. As noted above, among those who discuss the
multi-dimensional global breakdown likely to be brought on before long by limits and scarcity are Korowicz (2012),
Morgan (2013), Kunstler (2005), Greer (2005), Bardi (2011), Duncan (2013), Gilding (2011), Randers (2012) and Streeck
(2014). Some foresee more or less totally catastrophic collapse, the end of Western civilisation, with a die-off of
billions.

The next collapse might not be the final one; some foresee “... a long and bumpy road down”. Randers (2012) expects
the time of troubles to be around 2070. However, Ahmed (2017), Tverberg (2021), Mason (2003) and other
“collapsologists” give reasons to expect it to be before 2030 . The hope must be for a protracted Goldilocks depression,
one that is not so severe as to destroy the chances of salvage, but savage enough to jolt people into recognizing that
they must shift to the local, cooperative and frugal self-sufficiency detailed in Chapter 10.

The situation will at best be confused and chaotic, with governments and “leaders” continuing to not understand the
fundamental causes and quick to blame the wrong things. The present tendencies to right-wing populism and fascism
are likely to gain momentum, supported by many in privileged classes who will call for repressive measures to restore
order and protect their security and property. Many in angry lower classes will want strong leaders willing to break
rules. (A recent survey found this to already be true of a majority of UK people; Walker, 2019.) Capitalism will again
morph into its fascist form whereby an authoritarian central government rules in cooperation with a selected few big
capitalist firms. It is highly unlikely that there will be sober, clear headed rational thinking about causes and solutions.
Poor and struggling governments will be even less capable of analysing or dealing with the situation effectively than they
are now.

The international possibilities are similarly disturbing. Dominant powers will surely become more aggressive in their
efforts to control sources of scarce resources and markets. Third world governments wallowing in debt are likely to
allow corporations to cause greater environmental destruction and to generate revenue, and to resort to increasingly
repressive measures to control dissent over deteriorating living conditions. (Ahmed, 2017).
The problems cannot be solved.

The conventional assumption is that the problems can and will be solved by the institutions and processes of present society, such as by parliaments implementing effective policies in line with international agreements and resolutions, and ordinary people accepting legislated adjustments to their circumstances. But from the
perspective of The Simpler Way, this expectation is now clearly mistaken. Given the foregoing account of the nature and magnitude of the problems, the institutions and political process of this society are not capable of recognising the situation and rationally facing up to it and making the enormous and difficult changes required to
solve it. Consider the following reasons.

The enormity of the changes required.

Even the Degrowth literature generally fails to adequately represent the magnitude and difficulty of the reductions required. (Again, for the numerical case see Trainer, 2021a). Chapter 3 explained that rich-world volumes of production and thus consumption of resources must be cut by up to 90%, meaning that most of the present
quantities of industry, transport, travel, construction, shopping, exporting, investing etc. have to be phased out. How could this possibly be done? This is the “degrowth conundrum”. It cannot be a matter of just closing a coal mine and transferring the workers to other jobs, because the amounts of production, work and jobs have to
be cut dramatically. It would have to involve the creation and massive implementation of totally new social structures and procedures, whereby most people could live well without producing anywhere near so much as before. This could not be done unless it involved historically totally unprecedented, massive and rapid cultural
change, to widespread public understanding and acceptance of the extremely radically new systems and values. And governments cannot impose or make the new ways work. Chapter 10 will make it clear that this could only be done by conscientious citizens who are eager to build and operate the new local systems.

There isn’t time

Even if the understanding and the will existed, it is difficult to imagine that the enormous required could be carried out in a few decades. They involve reversing what have been some of the fundamental ideas and values that have driven Western civilization over the last two hundred years, and scrapping and replacing vast systems
and structures. Yet it is probable that the following three main global threats each give us no more than ten years.

Carbon.

According to various estimates the “carbon emissions budget” associated with a 67% chance of limiting temperature rise to under 1.5 degrees will have been exhausted within about twelve years. (Levin, 2018, Steffen, 2020.) Many insist that this one-in-three chance of failure is far too high to be acceptable. A more responsible
target would significantly reduce the budget, and therefore the time left to move off fossil fuels. Note also that these estimates do not take into account the positive feedbacks, such as warming causing loss of snow causing absorption of more solar heat. Currently there are around 490 new coal-fired power stations being built
around the world, with 790 planned. (Global Energy Monitor, 2020.)

By 2050 energy demand is likely to be around 890 EJ/y, 56% higher than at present. (Minqui, 2019.) Input from renewable sources would have to increase by 27 EJ every year but the current rate of increase is only 0.72 EJ/y. (Our World in Data, 2019.) This equates to building 1.5 million 2 MW wind turbines every year, costing over
6% of world GDP not including the cost of energy storage, grid strengthening and distribution. And plant built now will probably only last twenty years, less than half as long as coal-fired plant. There will be at least formidable difficulties in developing satisfactory renewable energy solutions for emissions from the 80% of demand
made up by the heavy land transport, agriculture, military, shipping and aircraft sectors. (Trainer, 2017.) These numbers would seem to completely rule out any possibility that acceptable emissions targets can be met in the time available.

Petroleum.

It is likely that a major and permanent collapse in oil availability will occur, possibly within a decade. (Ahmed, 2017.) It is generally recognized that the supply of conventional petroleum peaked around 2005 and has declined significantly since then. World supply has continued to increase due to the remarkable rise in output from
the advent of “fracking” in the US “tight-oil” regions. However, there are strong reasons for expecting this source to peak and decline soon. (Hughes 2016, Cunningham 2019, Whipple 2019, Cobb, 2019.) T0 2020 the major producers have not made a profit in any year of operation while accumulating a debt of over one quarter of a
trillion dollars. It seems that an oil price high enough for producers to break even is too high for the economy to avoid recession. Unless there are major technical breakthroughs reducing costs, which are not thought to be likely, at some point in the near future lenders will probably cease providing capital to the fracking sector. A
major factor increasing costs is the decline in the energy return on the energy that has to be invested to produce energy.

There is a strong case that it will either not be possible for renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels or that it will be too expensive. (Trainer, 2017.) As noted above, only 20% of demand is in the form of electricity, which is the easiest task. It will be much more costly to run heavy trucks, farm tractors, mining equipment, ships
and aircraft on renewables.

Ahmed (2017) presents a persuasive case that most Middle East oil-producing nations are encountering such serious ecological, food, water, population growth and climate problems that their capacity to export oil could be largely eliminated within ten years. Meanwhile the amount of energy it takes to produce a barrel of oil is
increasing significantly (Brockway, et al., 2019). Despite these alarming observations the precariousness and urgency of the petroleum situation is attracting little attention.

Debt.

After remaining more or less stable for decades, global debt has quadrupled since 1999. (Hienberg, 2018.) It is now
equivalent to around three times global GDP, is far higher than before the GFC, and is regarded by various economists
as inevitably bound to crash soon . (Brown, 2018, Lu, 2020.)
In addition to these three major factors many other biophysical difficulties are reducing the capacity of economies to
deal with the accelerating problems tightening the limits noose, including water scarcity , fisheries decline ,
deteriorating mineral grades, accelerating costs of ecological disruption such as climate change , agricultural soil
damage and loss, chemical poisoning of ecosystems, species loss, ocean acidification and sea rise. A [collection]
holocaust of extinctions appears to have begun, now possibly including insects and thus jeopardising pollination of
food crops. These and other factors will cut into the diminishing resources available to apply to solving system
difficulties.

Existing political institutions are not capable of making changes of the magnitude required.

Our institutions are reasonably good at making small changes. Elections are usually won by small margins and therefore
governments cannot afford to irritate significant numbers of voters or they will be thrown out. But they cannot adopt
policies that go against the vital interests of significant sectors.

This situation is partly a consequence of the self-interested, competitive, individualistic ethos built into present cultural
and political systems. Burdens are not shared fairly or appropriately but are typically left to groups least able to avoid
them. Because dealing with the global predicament effectively would be seen to involve painful adjustments on a
massive scale people would be acutely sensitive to perceived inequities in the changes they were called upon to make.
Fierce resistance, disputes and appeals would surely proliferate over the new options presented, the changes in
locations, and especially the dramatically reduced levels of income, purchasing and consumption. Authoritarian
governments can force big changes through but current democracies are much less able to.

The problems interact, compound and positively feedback.

Often solving one problem increases difficulties in other areas, especially by increasing energy demand. More
importantly, problems often have multiplicative interactive effects. For instance, Ahmed’s analysis of Middle Eastern
oil producers shows how climate change, drought, rising temperatures, soil loss and rapid population growth are
combining to generate intractable challenges for governments. As their capacity to cope declines they resort to
repression in an effort to contain discontent and maintain order, which feeds back to generate more discontent,
further disrupting productive systems and capacity to cope.

Thus the difficulties now being experienced due to climate change are likely to be swamped soon by a tidal wave of
many compounding positive feedback effects . Several analysts including those listed above have detailed how the
combined effects are likely to trigger sudden and catastrophic breakdown in the global economy.

The alternative is communist organizing. The question is not about degrees of shared concern,
but the direction of our political energies
Thomas 13. Peter Thomas is a Lecturer in History of Political thought at Brunel University @ London [“The
Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization,” 2013, Theory and Event 16, URL:
muse.jhu.edu/article/530491]//vikas
The Communist Hypothesis The debate on the ‘Idea of Communism’ that emerged in 2008 following Alain Badiou’s
analysis of the electoral victory of Sarkozy, drawing upon a longer history of vindications of communism over the last 30
years, was quickly greeted with enthusiasm by prominent theorists from a wide range of leftist political traditions. This
discussion also seems to have stimulated a renewal of the energy and engagement that had marked the most
creative dimensions of the alternative globalization and anti-war movements straddling the millennium. After the
impasses those movements confronted in what was sometimes seen as an ‘interregnum’ at the beginning of the global
economic crisis, the affirmation of the ‘Idea of Communism’ – or perhaps even more so, the more precise notion of a
‘Communist Hypothesis’ – offered the possibility of a renewed collective research project into the viable forms of
contemporary political struggle. Unexpectedly and audaciously, the positive programme of communism, and not
simply negative resistance to capitalist crisis, became the horizon within which we could comprehend and meet the
challenges of the present. As an ideological intervention, the merits of this discussion are remarkable: it has given rise to
a wide ranging international discussion of the notion of communism that did not occur even at the height of the alternative
globalization and anti-war movements, still struggling against the overdeteminations of the new world order rhetoric of
the 1990s. What still remains more difficult to ascertain, however, is the nature of these discussions’ relationship to the
organizational debates that have emerged in the wake of Occupy, international anti-austerity protests and the ‘actually
existing’ revolutionary movements of our times. Some important contemporary theorists have argued that the discussion
of the idea of communism should keep a distance from immediate organizational questions. In particular, Badiou has
strongly resisted the notion that the affirmation of communism should necessarily be accompanied by a renewed
consideration of the role of the political party, as decisive agent of that idea’s realization, which he instead regards as an
historically superseded instantiation of ‘communist invariants’ that are today searching for a new mode of historical
existence. By far the most widespread response, however, has been the proposal that a coherent investigation of the
meaning of communism today necessarily requires a reconsideration of the nature of political power, of political
organization, and, above all, of the party-form. Žižek, for instance, has long argued that a politics without the party is
nothing more than a form of ‘politics without politics.’ More recently, Jodi Dean has emphasized that the reproposition of
the party-form is the horizon within which the debate on communism can become intelligible to itself. Far from the
caricature of homogenous or ‘totalitarian’ unity, Dean argues that the party – and the Leninist party in particular –
should be understood as constituting a ‘vehicle for maintaining a specific gap of desire, the collective desire for
collectivity’ (Dean 2012, 207). She further argues that such a dynamic has already been evident in the achievements of
Occupy, whatever the ‘anti-verticalist’ claims sometimes made on its behalf. In a related vein, Jan Rehmann (2013) has
argued that the nascent counter-hegemonic dimensions of Occupy, alongside regroupment processes on the European left,
have prepared the ground for a serious reproposal of the question of the mass political party. In particular, Rehmann
argues that a renewal of the party will involve experimentation in new party forms, including notions such as those of
a ‘mosaic left’ (Urban 2009) or a ‘connective party’ (Porcaro 2012). These are positions close to those advocated by one
of the original proponents of the debate on communism, the sadly departed Daniel Bensaïd, who repeatedly argued over
many years that the concept of the party remains central to any coherent reflection on the nature and form of
politics in the contemporary world, whether or not the word ‘party’ itself is used to describe those processes of
unification, coordination and decision. For Bensaïd, it is the specificity of the overdetermined field of political relations
and its irreducibility to the social that continually reproposes the question of the party-form – not as a solution, but as a
problem that each upsurge of social and political struggle involving diverging and sometimes conflicting component
elements inevitably confronts. This constitutive tension generates the need for continuous interpretative and analytical
labor, in the attempt to discover the party-form adequate to the specificity of the social movements to which it gives
expression, at the same time as it transforms them by translating their demands into the distinctive register of politics
(Bensaïd 2002, 112 et sq). Above all, however, it has been practical experience of the contradictory processes of left
regroupment on an international scale – from reconfigurations over the last decade on the Latin American left, to the
varying success of coalition parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda Unida in Spain, Syriza in
Greece and the Front de Gauche in France, to the tentative emergence of new political formations across North
Africa and the Arab world – that has firmly placed the question of the party back on the contemporary agenda.
The communist horizon thus now confronts its own horizon of intelligibility not simply in a discussion of the party-
form, but in the dialectical relation between such theoretical debates and the organizational innovations of the real
movements of today, to paraphrase the now oft-quoted words of the German Ideology, that aim to abolish the present
state of affairs (MECW 5, 49). The Horizon of the Party-Form In this text, I want to explore some of the consequences of
the notion of a communist hypothesis in relation to these organizational debates, and in particular, to the emerging debate
regarding the adequate party-form for radical politics today. First, I will argue that the sometimes obscure organizational
implications of the generic affirmation of communism become clearer when we situate this discussion historically, as a
transposition and continuation ‘by philosophical means’ of some of the central debates of the alternative globalization
movement. For despite the exaggerated claims to novelty of both friend and foe alike, the debate on communism did not
emerge from nowhere. Rather, I argue that it should be understood as representing the displacement into a theoretical
register of central themes of the previous sequences of struggles against the ‘new world order’ in the late 1990s and early
2000s. In the same way, the new movements that have fortuitously coincided with the debate on communism –
student movements across North America and Europe from 2009 onwards, the global wave of Occupy, the ongoing Arab
revolutions and growing anti-austerity movements around the world throughout 2012 – represent not a return or
rebirth of history, but its revenge. They should be understood as expressions of the accumulation, displacement and
transformation of tendencies from the previous cycle of mass struggles that that have been surreptitiously
burrowing away, like Marx’s old mole, under the surface of what we can now see was only an apparent and decidedly
temporary pacification of the ‘interregnum’ of the middle years of the last decade. The ‘spontaneous rediscovery’ by the
moment of Occupy of the aporiai that plagued the alternative globalization and anti-war movements, however, indicate a
substantial continuity of unresolved problems across the different conjunctures of the ebbs and floods of the social and
political movements of the last 15 years. As a formalized response and proposed resolution to some of these themes,
the discussion of communism can help to clarify both the strengths and limits of these debates, particularly those
that are still strongly operative in the post-Occupy conjuncture. Second, I then aim to explore some significant models of
organization that emerged in previous periods in which the renewal of communist politics was closely linked to attempts
to rethink the party-form. For from the Manifesto of the Communist Party onwards, communism, as word, idea and
hypothesis, has always been inseparably tied to the forms of political organization necessary for its realization: in the
terms of the classical Marxist debates, the ‘question of organization’ [die Organisationsfrage]. The models that I will
consider are, first, the notion of the ‘compositional party’ derived from the experience of Italian operaismo, recently – and
perhaps surprisingly – reproposed in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth; second, the conceptualization of the party as a
‘laboratory’ in which a unitary ‘political subject’ could be forged, theorized most coherently in the work of the early
Lukács; and third, Gramsci’s call for the formation of a ‘modern Prince’ as a harnessing of the inherent conflictuality of
political modernity in a constituent party-form. Each of these models can be regarded as a mirror in which we can see
reflected some of the challenges of the organizational questions that have marked both the alternative globalization
movement and the rebellions and revolts of today. Hardt and Negri’s notion of a compositional party composed of
‘insurrectional intersections’ of irreducible singularities responds to the problem of thinking the party-form in a period of
the proliferation of demands and movements grounded in diverse experiences of capitalist exploitation and oppression.
Lukács’s proposal of the party as a laboratory for the forging of a totalizing political subject poses the question of the
party-form as one of the unification and coordination of political initiatives. Both of these models, I will argue, ultimately
confront the limitations of a political formalism, which runs the risk of invoking a political party-form as the
resolution of the contradictions of the social practices that are thereby interpellated as its subaltern content.
Gramsci’s modern Prince, on the other hand, integrates both compositional and totalizing dimensions, while avoiding
the temptation of a formalistic resolution of the contradictions that are the necessary preconditions – and enduring
challenge – of political organization. Rather than the elimination of difference, the assertion of identity or the
dominance of political form over social content, the modern Prince represents the outlines of a party-form that would
be capable of valorizing contradiction and conflict , harnessing them as the motor of its totalizing development. In
these sense, the modern Prince can be understood as a proposal for a type of ‘expansive’ party-form that might be
able to respond productively to the challenges of contemporary movements.
 Marx K: WGA—v. Policy

Weapons systems are never really autonomous – painting them as such obfuscates structures of US
militarism. Their racist data sets aren’t randomly produced but the result of a capitalist process of
exploitation. The affirmatives rights and duties for AI creates the libertarian dream of capital rights
and papers over the reliance on environmental destruction, extraction, and exploitation to facilitate
increased surveillance and injustice.
Birhane Et Al 21 – Abeba Birhane, PhD, cognitive scientist researching human behaviour, social systems, and
responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence, Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation and Adjunct
Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin, Ireland. Jelle van Dijk,
design-researcher with a background in cognitive science and a PhD in industrial design. Frank Pasquale, expert on the
law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He currently serves on the U.S. National Artificial
Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises the President and the National AI Initiative Office at the
Department of Commerce. August 2021, “Debunking Robot Rights Metaphysically, Ethically, and Legally”,
https://werobot2021.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Birhane_et_al_Debunking_Robot_Rights_Metaphysically__Eth
ically_and_Legally_ConfDraft.pdf, accessed 8/29/22, -zc-

Machines are never fully autonomous but always human-machine systems that rely on human power and
resources in order to function. Automation and the idea of automata, from its early conception, relied on a
clever trick that erased the labourers toiling away in the background the people performing crucial tasks for a machine to operate [43, 65, 69]. Surveying
the historical genealogy of mechanical calculations, Daston [23] emphasizes that far from reliving the mental burden,
automation, shifted the burden to other shoulders (often women who were paid little), maintaining the ghost in the
machine.
Seemingly autonomous systems are profoundly human-machine systems. And furthermore, as demonstrated by Bainbridge’s seminal work on the automation of process and vehicle control on aircraft automation, “the more advanced a control system is, so the
more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator” [3, p.775]. Bainbridge’s concept of the ironies of automation, gets at the heart of intentionally hidden human labour in an appeal to portray machines as autonomous. In reality as Baxter at al., [4] building

T]he more we depend on technology and push it to its limits, the more we need highly-skilled,
on Bainbridge’s classic work make explicit, “[

well-trained, well-practised people to make systems resilient, acting as the last line of defence against the failures
that will inevitably occur.” [4]. Nearly 40 years later, Bainbridge’s point remains. Effective automation of control processes necessarily requires humans at various steps;, developing, maintaining and stepping in when ‘autonomous’
systems inevitably experience failure [35, 4]. Similarly, today’s ‘autonomous’ vehicles still depend on human “safety drivers” and the need for human input is unlikely to disappear entirely although it might change form [71].

Seemingly autonomous AI relies not only on high-paid, high-skilled engineers and scientists but also
underpaid, undervalued, and less-visible labour which go by various names including ghost work, microwork,
and crowd-work [42, 32]. From labeling images, identifying objects in images to annotating data, such human labour “help AI get past those tasks and activities that it cannot solve effectively and/or efficiently” [71], step in to fill in when AI fails
[42] and are automation’s ‘last mile’ [32]. Such work constitutes the backbone of current AI – without it, AI would cease to function . Yet,
from Amazon’s MTurk, to Clickworker, AppJobber, to CrowdTap, such labour often goes unrecognized in the AI pipeline. People doing such work, in most cases are not formally considered as formal employees but independent contractors further adding to their

Furthermore, putting the exploitative structure of microwork aside, data that is currently fueling AI
precarious working conditions.

systems is often sourced in questionable manners; it is often uncompensated and unregulated. The models built on
such data furthermore amplify societal and historical stereotypes (negatively disproportionately impacting
marginalized communities down the line as AI systems trained on such dataset are often used in decision
making). The deep learning revolution that transformed image detection, identification and recognition, for example, is only possible through continued mass scrapping of user uploaded images, all sourced and used to build AI systems without consent
or awareness of image owners [10]. Of the major large scale datasets currently used to train and validate computer vision models, none is sourced consensually (see Birhane and Prabhuu [10] for more).

advanced machines never emerge from a vacuum as fully autonomous systems, but are always human-
To summarize,

machines systems whose development will implicates environmental destruction, resource extraction, and
human exploitation without careful planning and implementation to assure otherwise. Furthermore, current ubiquitous AI and robotic systems are first and
foremost tools that normalize surveillance, automate injustice and threaten privacy all while concentrating
power in the hands of the wealthy and benefiting those already powerful institutions and corporations [45, 9]. The
very idea of discussing the “rights” of robots that emerge out of this extremely unequal, exploitative, and in
many respects brutal political economy, is nonsensical at best and dangerous at worst. Instead, the focus should be on redressing the myriad
problems such systems continue to cause, particularly on women, racial and ethnic minorities, the socio-economically disadvantaged, and LGBTQ+ communities and otherwise marginalized groups.

It is a cruel parody of justice to presume that Saudi Arabia’s potential grant to the robot “Sophia”[64] a license to
drive, is in some way prefigurative or promoting some later action to grant that kingdom’s women rights. Nor would
“rights” for a cleaning robot in the U.S. do anything to help the hundreds of thousands of janitorial workers now
suffering in exploitive working conditions. Indeed, some of them are probably already, unwittingly or in an uncompensated way, providing data to such robots. Giving a robot a “right to observe” the persons’ it is
being programmed to replace is no blow for social justice; it is in fact its opposite, short-circuiting debates about data control that should be robust [59].

It is ironic that an intellectual school and movement so reliant on the rhetoric of emancipation, as the robot
rights community is, would end up centering and elevating the power and privileges of capital and
corporations. Yet this is not a surprising outcome. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have mastered the “code of capital” [63] to advance
their interests in multiple venues. InvestorState Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), for example, can guarantee MNCs returns in ways that unravel muchneeded environmental,
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision gave corporations near carte
occupational safety, and health regulation, all based on the MNC’s “right” to enjoy expected returns from their investment. The U.S.

blanche opportunities to promote their views and preferred candidates in elections, spawning even more self-
aggrandizing judicial interventions to freeze into place existing power inequalities [60]. Similarly, the rhetoric of
“robot rights” is another means to skillfully advance capital’s interests. Indeed, since robots are often capital
themselves, “robot rights” may all too often amount to the type of “capital rights” only dreamed of by
ambitious libertarians.

Capital is the existential risk, not AI. The motivation is not malevolence, but efficiency: humanity
will be collateral damage in AI-capitalism’s drive to maximize profit.
Dyer-Witheford Et Al 19 – Nick Dyer-Witheford, associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in the
Faculty of Information and Media Studies. Atle Mikkola Kjøsen Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and
Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. And James Steinhof, PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Information
and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Pluto Press, “Inhuman Power Artificial Intelligence and the
Future of Capitalism”, pg 151, print, -zc-
AI’s Dirty Secret

In the loudly proclaimed ethical and safety-conscious deliberations of leading AI-capitalists, attention is now given to
AI as an ‘existential risk’ (Bostrom 2014: 4). Such risk arises largely because of the possibility of an AGI evolving into an ASI beyond human control. The issue is not malevolence
(Skynet) but rather efficiency. Nick Bostrom’s (2014: 123–5) famous example is of an AI instructed to make paper clips that attains superintelligence and uses its ever-extrapolating powers to convert the entire universe into
paper clips, obliterating humanity as collateral damage. The point is a serious one, even if currently (we hope) remote;

not only could ASI’s ‘integral accidents’ – Paul Virilio’s (2000) term for malfunctions so intrinsic to a given techno-
system they must be considered a feature, not a bug – be devastating, they might not be ‘accidents’ at all.

warnings, such as that of nanotechnologist Eric K. Drexler’s (1987) earlier ‘grey goo’ scenario, in which out-of-control self-replicating nano-robots consume all biomass on Earth while building more of
However, Bostrom’s prediction – and other similar

themselves – can also be interpreted in a wider sense. This is to understand them not literally but metaphorically, or rather

both literally and metaphorically, as simultaneously identifying a concrete hazard and providing a parable of runaway
economic growth and universal commodification. The real ‘paper clip’ is profit, and the manifest danger of AI is
not only that of an ‘integral accident’ but equally or more of its intended use as a means of intensifying and
accelerating the production and circulation of goods that is destroying the environment, annihilating species,
and, for humans, heating the planet to civilizational, perhaps existential, limits. This untrammelled economic
growth is of course the very profit-maximizing process that would lie behind an unlimited order of paper clips, or of
self-replicating automata, so the specific and general form of ‘accident’, or rather efficiency, are related – capital
itself constitutes an existential risk.
Appeals to saving humanity reinscribes capitalism which reproduces existential risks.
Asp 19 – Karen Asp is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She holds an MA in
Social and Political Thought (Acadia University) and an MA in Geography (Simon Fraser University). Her doctoral
dissertation draws on Adornian critical theory and Marxian political economy to analyze how capitalist expansion and
technological progress are naturalized in contemporary “Anthropocene” narratives, particularly with respect to
planetary-scale ecological catastrophe. Cyborg Futures, “Autonomy of Artificial Intelligence, Ecology, and Existential Risk:
A Critique” DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-21836-2_4, accessed 8/29/22, -zc-

-
Saving Transcendent Intelligence, Abandoning Earth

We have given our planet the

The late Stephen Hawking articulated a sense of collective responsibility for the impacts of “technological society,” not only with reference to rogue AI systems, but also when he claimed later on,

disastrous gift of climate change … When we have reached similar crises there has usually been somewhere else to colonize … But there is no new world, no utopia around the corner…. We are running out of space, and the
only places to go to are other worlds. (Hawking cited in Barclay 2017) Yet, rather than ponder how the effects of the “disastrous gift” to our planet might be treated, he implied that, since “we” are a colonizing species with a history of crisis-inducing resource

fatalistic response to the global

exhaustion, it is time to transcend the Earth in search of another planet. While protecting people from anthropogenic threats is indisputably a collective goal, this astonishingly

ecological crisis suggests that, in the final analysis, the AI risk discourse offers no such protection. Why? The answer, I
suggest, is that the value of “humanity” refers to the value of capital accumulation rather than to people. This becomes clear when
we consider the lengths to which Bostrom goes to show why the “future of humanity” matters. He presents “cosmological estimates” showing the “total” future value of humanity to be somewhere between 1052 to 1054 total possible lives to be lived (2013, 19).9
Notably, these are not concrete lives, but lifespans of human activity serving as indicators of the total abstract value of humanity. The weighty numbers express the supposed enormity of the risk posed by a wrong turn on the road to the future, yet this total future
value is not wealth that the collective “we” has now in its peoples, built habitats, and ecosystems. Rather, it is an estimate of the potential value of the joint stock company “Humanity” spread across the quasi-infinite expanse of space and time. We do not have it

The same assumptions about “instrumental values” that were applied

yet. To close that gap, Bostrom makes a teleological claim about progress toward “technological maturity.”

to AI superintelligences also apply to the “perfection” of human technological civilization. It is simply “us” instead of
“them” amassing powers in the forms of resources, technology, and knowledge.
Discerning the difference between “us” and “them” thus lies in parsing the meaning of “humanity,” which Bostrom defined as “Earth-originating intelligent life.” Humanity’s animating spirit is not just “intelligence,” but “rationality” motivated by “what we have
reason to value” (Bostrom 2013). The meaning of the qualifier “what we have reason to value” thus seems to make all the difference, yet it is elusive. At first glance, having the freedom to choose one’s form of embodiment—biological or machinic— seems like one
such value for Bostrom. But he does not claim that such a freedom is an end in itself. Rather, the problematic of value is split between our present bodies and the shapes “we” might choose later on. By deferring “what” we are now—a deferral encoded in the claim

But the very notion of existential risk reveals the paradox in

to save “the future” of humanity—it seems like the collective “we” transcends the finitude of bodies, individual and planetary.

the idea of the transcendental subject, for how can transcendent “intelligent life” be exposed to the possibility of its
own finitude, its own extinction?

The possibility that abstract “humanity” is determined by the same heteronomous forces that rule living bodies and
Earth systems is an unhappy contradiction. It brings into view the merely instrumental value of “intelligence” itself in
the narrative, the presupposition that it too is a contingent “ability” enstructured through the relation between use
and exchange. Intelligence, like bodies, is not a good in itself in the existential risk theorem, but a “way of getting
utilities,” and it is existentially vulnerable on the same account. This ultimate truth is confirmed when Bostrom nullifies the “future of humanity” on the supposition that even if it were
possible for everyone to agree on what the best future might be, “we” might choose badly nonetheless. Thus, he argues, it is better not to choose at all! Rather, we should prioritize the instrumental means of value creation, keeping the “options open” for “a future
version of humanity with great powers and propensity to pursue them wisely” (Bostrom 2013, 24).

Hence, saving “humanity” means saving the future of value creation for its own sake, which is nothing other than the
structural demand of capital accumulation operating “behind our backs.” Yet capitalism’s future relies on increasing
productivity through the integration and automation of social labor and the relentless abstraction of concrete
physical, social, and cultural abilities. Stephen Hawking’s pronouncement that “we” will need to abandon the Earth because it is becoming uninhabitable articulates the implications of this situation (Barclay 2017).10
So, while Bostrom claims that the “future of humanity” is “full” of value creation, my argument suggests that the
future presupposed by Bostrom (2013, 2014), Hawking et  al. (2014) and Russell et al. (2015) depends on continuing
the present pattern of exhausting human and planetary “resources.” In the end, for there is an end in their narrative,
a few will have accumulated enough “value” to purchase seats on a space ship to Mars, leaving the catastrophe to
the rogue superintelligences and displaced climate migrants. This is the “existential risk” left to those who cannot
afford to “transcend,” but it is not posed by out-of-control AI-systems. Rather, it is imposed as an unrecognized,
fetishized demand of the system of capital accumulation, which we collectively inscribe, obey and enforce.

Regulations fail in a capitalist framework – profit motive, lobbying, regulatory capture and lag.
Stross 17 – Charlie Stross, post-graduate degree in computer science, writer. December 2017, “Dude, you broke the
future!”, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html#more, accessed
9/4/22, -zc-
 -

What do our current, actually-existing AI overlords want?

hazard of artificial intelligence—which he conceives of as being a piece of software that functions like a brain-in-a-box)—namely, the paperclip
Elon Musk—who I believe you have all heard of—has an obsessive fear of one particular

maximizer. A paperclip maximizer is a term of art for a goal-seeking AI that has a single priority, for example maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe. The paperclip
maximizer is able to improve itself in pursuit of that goal but has no ability to vary its goal, so it will ultimately
attempt to convert all the metallic elements in the solar system into paperclips, even if this is obviously detrimental
to the wellbeing of the humans who designed it.

Tesla is a battery maximizer—an electric car is a battery with wheels and seats. SpaceX is an orbital payload
Unfortunately, Musk isn't paying enough attention. Consider his own companies.

maximizer, driving down the cost of space launches in order to encourage more sales for the service it provides. Solar City is a photovoltaic panel maximizer. And so on. All three of
Musk's very own slow AIs are based on an architecture that is designed to maximize return on shareholder
investment, even if by doing so they cook the planet the shareholders have to live on. (But if you're Elon Musk, that's okay: you plan to retire on Mars.)

The problem with corporations is that despite their overt goals—whether they make electric vehicles or beer or sell
life insurance policies—they are all subject to instrumental convergence insofar as they all have a common implicit
paperclip-maximizer goal: to generate revenue . If they don't make money, they are eaten by a bigger predator or they
go bust. Making money is an instrumental goal—it's as vital to them as breathing is for us mammals, and without
pursuing it they will fail to achieve their final goal, whatever it may be. Corporations generally pursue their instrumental goals—notably maximizing revenue—as a side-effect of
the pursuit of their overt goal. But sometimes they try instead to manipulate the regulatory environment they operate in, to ensure that money flows towards them regardless.

Human tool-making culture has become increasingly complicated over time. New technologies always come with a n
implicit political agenda that seeks to extend its use, governments react by legislating to control the technologies , and

sometimes we end up with industries indulging in legal duels.

For example, consider the automobile. You can't have mass automobile transport without gas stations and fuel
distribution pipelines. These in turn require access to whoever owns the land the oil is extracted from—and before
you know it, you end up with a permanent occupation force in Iraq and a client dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. Closer to home,
automobiles imply jaywalking laws and drink-driving laws. They affect town planning regulations and encourage suburban sprawl, the construction of human infrastructure on the scale required by automobiles, not pedestrians. This in turn is bad for competing
transport technologies like buses or trams (which work best in cities with a high population density).

To get these laws in place, providing an environment conducive to doing business, corporations spend money on political lobbyists—and, when they can get away with it, on bribes. Bribery need not be
blatant, of course. For example, the reforms of the British railway network in the 1960s dismembered many branch services and coincided with a surge in road building and automobile sales. These reforms were orchestrated by Transport Minister Ernest Marples,
who was purely a politician. However, Marples accumulated a considerable personal fortune during this time by owning shares in a motorway construction corporation. (So, no conflict of interest there!)

The automobile industry in isolation isn't a pure paperclip maximizer. But if you look at it in conjunction with the fossil fuel industries, the road-construction industry, the accident insurance industry, and so on, you begin to see the outline of a paperclip maximizing
ecosystem that invades far-flung lands and grinds up and kills around one and a quarter million people per year—that's the global death toll from automobile accidents according to the world health organization: it rivals the first world war on an ongoing basis—as
side-effects of its drive to sell you a new car.

Automobiles are not, of course, a total liability. Today's cars are regulated stringently for safety and, in theory, to
reduce toxic emissions: they're fast, efficient, and comfortable. We can thank legally mandated regulations for this, of
course. Go back to the 1970s and cars didn't have crumple zones. Go back to the 1950s and cars didn't come with seat belts as standard. In the 1930s, indicators—turn signals—and brakes on all four wheels were optional, and your best hope of surviving a
50km/h crash was to be thrown clear of the car and land somewhere without breaking your neck. Regulatory agencies are our current political systems' tool of choice for

preventing paperclip maximizers from running amok. But unfortunately they don't always work.

One failure mode that you should be aware of is regulatory capture, where regulatory bodies are captured by the
industries they control. Ajit Pai, head of the American Federal Communications Commission who just voted to eliminate net neutrality rules, has worked as Associate General Counsel for Verizon Communications Inc, the largest current
descendant of the Bell telephone system monopoly. Why should someone with a transparent interest in a technology corporation end up in charge

of a regulator for the industry that corporation operates within? Well, if you're going to regulate a highly complex
technology, you need to recruit your regulators from among those people who understand it. And unfortunately most
of those people are industry insiders. Ajit Pai is clearly very much aware of how Verizon is regulated, and wants to do something about it—just not necessarily in the public interest. When regulators
end up staffed by people drawn from the industries they are supposed to control, they frequently end up work ing with
their former officemates to make it easier to turn a profit, either by raising barriers to keep new insurgent companies
out, or by dismantling safeguards that protect the public.
Another failure mode is regulatory lag , when a technology advances so rapidly that regulations are laughably
obsolete by the time they're issued. Consider the EU directive requiring cookie notices on websites , to caution users that their activities were
tracked and their privacy might be violated. This would have been a good idea, had it shown up in 1993 or 1996, but unfortunately it didn't show up until 2011, by which time the web was vastly more complex. Fingerprinting and tracking mechanisms that had

nothing to do with cookies were already widespread by then. Tim Berners-Lee observed in 1995 that five years' worth of change was happening on the web for every twelve months of real-world time; by that yardstick, the cookie law came
out nearly a century too late to do any good.

Again, look at Uber. This month the European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a taxi service, not just a web app. This is arguably correct; the problem is, Uber has spread globally since it was founded eight years ago, subsidizing its drivers to put
competing private hire firms out of business. Whether this is a net good for society is arguable; the problem is, a taxi driver can get awfully hungry if she has to wait eight years for a court ruling against a predator intent on disrupting her life.

we already have paperclip maximizers (and Musk's AI alarmism is curiously mirror-blind). Secondly, we have mechanisms for keeping them in check,
So, to recap: firstly,

but they don't work well against AIs that deploy the dark arts—especially corruption and bribery—and they're even
worse against true AIs that evolve too fast for human-mediated mechanisms like the Law to keep up with. Finally,
unlike the naive vision of a paperclip maximizer, existing AIs have multiple agendas —their overt goal, but also profit-
seeking, and expansion into new areas , and to accomodate the desires of whoever is currently in the driver's seat.

Capitalism encourages circumvention and war – it’s the root cause of the aff.
SPGB 18+, SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN, dated by most recent citation, 7/18/18, “Capitalism, War and
Robotics”, https://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/war%20caprobot.shtml, accessed 9/1/22, -zc-

thousands of scientists who specialise in artificial intelligence (AI) have declared that they
According to Ian Sample, Science editor of the Guardian,

will not participate in the development or manufacture of robots that can identify and attack people without human
oversight. He wrote that:
“Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind and Elon Musk at the US rocket company SpaceX are among more than 2,400 signatories to the pledge which intends to deter military firms and nations from building lethal autonomous weapon systems, also known as Laws”.

And Sample goes on to say:

The Future of Life Institute, the pledge calls on governments to agree norms, laws and
“Orchestrated by the Boston-based organisation,

regulations that stigmatise and effectively outlaw the development of killer robots. In the absence of such measures today, the signatories pledge to “neither
participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.” More than 150 AI-related firms and organisations added their names to the pledge to be announced today at the International Joint Conference on AI in
Stockholm”. (Thousands of leading AI researchers sign pledge against killer robots” (GUARDIAN, 18th July 2018).

This is reminiscent of previous peace pledges, all of which have failed.

At the establishment of the Labour Party, its leaders, like Keir Hardie, said that the Labour Party would get rid of armaments and war. Throughout the entire 20th century Labour governments not only signed armament contracts and supported the war industry by
selling guns and planes to other countries, and signing arms contracts with dictators, mass murders and torturers, but also the labour Party, in and out of government, took part in two major world wars and dozens of smaller ones. In 2006, a century after the launch
of that party, the Labour government was engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Capitalism can never give permanent peace nor can scientists and others influence governments not to develop
particular types of weaponry because no capitalist country, in intense competition with other capitalist countries
over raw resources, trade routes and strategic spheres of influence, will ever give up their weapons or stop
researching and developing new ways to kill and destroy. Permanent peace was supposed to be the dividend at the
end of the cold war but wars have continued as well as the use of more and more destructive armaments.

idealism professed by the signatories of the petition declaring their non-co-operation in designing killer robots is not
The

new. For instance, after 1945 there was a similar principled declaration by nuclear scientists following the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
A few days after the release of the manifesto, philanthropist Cyrus S. Eaton offered to sponsor a conference—called for in the manifesto—in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Eaton's birthplace. This was attended by many leading physicists who decided to persuade
governments not to use nuclear weapons but only to work on peaceful applications of nuclear physics.

main Cold war rivals continued their research into more destructive weapons of mass destruction with often
Nevertheless the

dreadful consequences. According to the records the Russian authorities released in 1991, the Soviets set off 214 nuclear bombs in the open air between 1949 and 1962, when the United Nations banned atmospheric tests worldwide.
The billions of radioactive particles released into the air exposed countless people to “extremely “mutagenic and carcinogenic materials, resulting genetic maladies and deformities”

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project)

Peace conferences do not turn out as their instigators initially wished for. In 1899 the Tsar’s army was very large and found to be too expensive. The cost of the Russian army at the time equalled the combined cost of the armies of France and Germany. So the Tsar
organised a peace conference at The Hague for countries to agree to cut the cost of armaments and to reduce the size of their respective armies. Twenty-eight countries attended the conference and passed a series of pious resolutions. Fifteen years later the First
World War began, costing the capitalist class billions of pounds in lost profits and setting in motion a train of events which led to the end of the Tsar as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These events also led to the dictatorships in Russia under Lenin and in
Germany under Hitler, and eventually another World War in 1939.

. The signatories to the convention voted to prevent the dropping of bombs from balloons, which
The Hague convention of 1909 had one success

was limited to five years. Of course, technology had moved on from 1909 and now the Germans had the Zeppelin
airship to drop bombs. The main campaign against England started in January 1915 using airships. From then until the end of World War I the German armed forces mounted over 50 bombing raids on the United Kingdom. Twenty years
after the end of that war, another war began, one in which the dropping of bombs was even more destructive culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of civilians and maiming countless others.

Since 1899 there have been countless wars and the cost of military expenditure has gone on rising to a rate many
times more than it was at the end of the 19th century. And the cost to the capitalist class for World War II alone was 1
trillion dollars with some 54 million deaths –dead workers who would have normally been used to generate surplus
value (Wikipedia 2013). Such are the contradictions to be found in capitalism.
This does not deter starry-eyed idealists like Yoshua Bengio, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. He told the GUARDIAN that if the pledge was able to shame those companies and military organisations building
autonomous weapons, public opinion would swing against them. He said:

“This approach actually worked for land mines, thanks to international treaties and public shaming, even though major countries like the US did not sign the treaty banning landmines. American companies have stopped building landmines”.

The US might have signed the landmines treaty but other countries have not. The majority of the countries remaining
outside the treaty keep stockpiles that collectively total around 50 million landmines. If not destroyed, those
landmines remain ready to be used any time. The biggest stockpiles of antipersonnel landmines are held by: Russia,
Pakistan, India, China, and the United States. In 2016, an average of 23 people around the world lost their life or limb to a landmine or another explosive remnant of war, every day
(http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/problem/why-landmines-are-still-a-problem.aspx).

And the US might not be producing land mines but its armed forces have other particularly nasty weapons of mass destruction, like their nuclear arsenal which they are currently expanding.

it is doubtful if the US will give up its research into the design of killer robots when other countries are also
Consequently,

carrying out this research. The US military is one of the largest funders and adopters of AI technology. With advanced
computer systems, robots can fly missions over hostile terrain, navigate on the ground, and patrol under seas.
Remote-controlled drones, operated from computers in distant bases, have been responsible for many civilian deaths
in Syria and other wars.

More sophisticated weapon systems are always in the pipeline. And the UK is not far behind in developing AI research with military capacity. In July 2018, the defence secretary Gavin
Williamson unveiled a £2bn plan for a new RAF fighter, the Tempest, which will be able to fly without a pilot.

UK ministers have stated that Britain is not developing lethal autonomous weapons systems and that its forces will always have oversight and control of the weapons it deploys. But the campaigners warn that rapid advances in AI and other fields mean it is now
feasible to build sophisticated weapons that can identify, track and fire on human targets without consent from a human controller.

robotic devices are routinely used by police for tracking

Not long ago, this was thought to be the stuff of science fiction, a nightmare fantasy of the cinema of special effects. Now,

individuals, with face recognition software able to identify protesters in mass demonstrations. For years banks and other commercial
organisations have also made use of these new technologies, state departments can identify motor vehicles, the public using their

credit cards are routinely tracked, while their movements are constantly monitored via CCTV cameras.

Asimov, wrote of a future with robots. He suggested in his First Law of Robotics that all robots
An American science fiction writer, Isaac

should be banned from harming humans. But capitalism has other priorities. Today, for every drone being used to
deliver medicines to remote African villages or to monitor wildlife and earthquakes, there must be thousands being
used to murder and maim in the killing fields of capitalism’s conflicts. This technology reinforces the modern mode of
warfare as being typically asymmetric – a conflict where ancient rifles are used by some of the poorest in the planet
against sophisticated and well-funded forces using the latest in remote-controlled lethal drones.

If scientists do not want to see the development of autonomous killer robots then they will have to acknowledge that
you have first to get rid of the capitalist cause of warfare and join with socialists in working to replace the profit
system with world socialism.

Vote negative to reject the aff as an endorsement of the withering away of the state. Political
reforms like the plan can’t solve crisis because they uphold capitalist institutions and practices.
There is no escaping the logic of either/or: either the society of associated producers reacquires
decision-making power from the capitalist state, or capitalism causes extinction.
Mészáros 8 (Istvan, Emeritus professor at University of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, p. 323-
328, GAL)

The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and
legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of
the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and
the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework, is this that since capital is
actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere
of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being
legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly,
capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully
independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces
participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our
societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge
capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.

What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established
political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning,
based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as
the capitalist is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the
social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,”53 the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary
productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the
interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the defacto but also as the dejure power of society, in its
capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional
foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the
ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction—the means and material of labor—from the
producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an
unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive
powers of social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as
something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.”54

This is how capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction becomes eternalized and legitimated as a lawfully
unchallengeable system. Legitimate contest is admissible only in relation to some minor aspects of the unalterable
overall structure. The real state of affairs on the plane of socioeconomic reproduction—i.e., the actually exercised
productive power of labor and its absolute necessity for securing capital’s own reproduction— disappears from sight.
Partly because of the ignorance of the very far from legitimate historical origin of capital’s “primitive accumulation” and
the concomitant, frequently violent, expropriation of property as the precondition of the system’s present mode of
functioning; and partly because of the mystifying nature of the established productive and distributive relations. As Marx
notes:

The objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker; rather, he appears as subsumed under
them. Capital employs Labor. Even this relation in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of
persons.55

None of this can be challenged and remedied within the framework of parliamentary political reform. It would be
quite absurd to expect the abolition of the “personification of things and the reification of persons” by political
decree, and just as absurd to expect the proclamation of such an intended reform within the framework of capital’s
political institutions. For the capital system cannot function without the perverse overturning of the relationship
between persons and things: capital’s alienated and reified powers dominate the masses of the people. Similarly, it
would be a miracle if the workers who confront capital in the labor process as “isolated workers” could reacquire
mastery over the social productive powers of their labor by some political decree, or even by a whole series of
parliamentary reforms enacted under capital’s order of social metabolic control. For in these matters there can be no
way of avoiding the irreconcilable conflict over the material stakes of “either/or.”

Capital can neither abdicate its— usurped— social productive powers in favor of labor, nor can it share them with
labor, thanks to some wishful but utterly fictitious “political compromise.” For they constitute the overall controlling
power of societal reproduction in the form of “the rule of wealth over society.” Thus it is impossible to escape, in the
domain of the fundamental social metabolism, the severe logic of either/or. For either wealth, in the shape of capital,
continues to rule over human society, taking it to the brink of self-destruction, or the society of associated producers
learns to rule over alienated and reified wealth, with productive powers arising from the self-determined social labor
of its individual—but no longer isolated—members.

Capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence . It cannot possibly be politically constrained by parliament in
its power of social metabolic control. This is why the only mode of political representation compatible with capital’s
mode of functioning is one that effectively denies the possibility of contesting its material power . And precisely
because capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, it has nothing to fear from the reforms that can be
enacted within its parliamentary political framework.

Since the vital issue on which everything else hinges is that “the objective conditions of labor do not appear as
subsumed under the worker” but, on the contrary, “he appears as subsumed under them,” no meaningful change is
feasible without addressing this issue both in a form of politics capable of matching capital’s extra-parliamentary powers
and modes of action, and in the domain of material reproduc tion. Thus, the only challenge that could affect the power
of capital, in a sustainable manner, is one which would simultaneously aim at assuming the system’s key productive
functions, and at acquiring control over the corresponding political decision making processes in all spheres, instead
of being hopelessly constrained by the circular confinement of institutionally legitimated political action to
parliamentary legislation.56

There is a great deal of critique of formerly leftwing political fig ures and of their now fully accommodating parties in the
political debates of the last decades. However, what is problematic about such debates is that by overemphasizing the
role of personal ambition and failure, they often continue to envisage remedying the situation with in the same political
institutional framework that, in fact, greatly favors the criticized “personal betrayals” and the painful “party
derailments.” Unfortunately, though, the advocated and hoped for personnel and government changes tend to
reproduce the same deplorable results.

All this should not be very surprising. The reason why the now established political institutions successfully resist
significant change for the better is because they are themselves part of the problem and not of the solution. For in
their immanent nature they are the embodiment of the underlying structural determinations and contradictions
through which the modern capitalist state—with its ubiquitous net work of bureaucratic constituents—has been
articulated and stabi lized in the course of the last four hundred years. Naturally, the state was formed not as a one-
sided mechanical result but through its nec essary reciprocal interrelationship to the material ground of capital’s
historical unfolding, as not only being shaped by the latter but also actively shaping it as much as historically feasible
under the prevail ing— and precisely through that interrelationship also changing— circumstances.

Given the insuperably centrifugal determination of capital’s pro ductive microcosms, even at the level of the giant quasi-
monopolistic transnational corporations, only the modern state could assume and fulfill the required function of being
the overall command structure of the capital system. Inevitably, that meant the complete alienation of the power of
overall decision making from the producers. Even the “particular personifications of capital”were strictly mandated to
act in accord with the structural imperatives of their system. Indeed the modern state, as constituted on the material
ground of the capital system, is the paradigm of alienation as regards the power of comprehensive decision making. It
would be therefore extremely naïve to imagine that the capitalist state could willingly hand over the alienated power
of systemic decision making to any rival actor who operates within the legislative framework of parliament.

Thus, in order to envisage a meaningful and historically sustainable societal change, it is necessary to submit to a
radical critique both the material reproductive and the political inter-determinations of the entire system, and not
simply some of the contingent and limited political practices. The combined totality of the material reproductive
determinations and the all-embracing political command structure of the state together constitute the overpowering
reality of the capital system. In this sense, in view of the unavoidable question arising from the challenge of systemic
determinations, with regard to both socioeconomic reproduction and the state, the need for a comprehensive political
transformation—in close conjunction to the meaningful exercise of society’s vital productive functions without which
far-reaching and lasting political change is inconceivable—becomes inseparable from the problem characterized as the
withering away of the state. Accordingly, in the historic task of accomplishing “the withering away of the state,” self-
management through full participation, and the permanently sustainable overcoming of parliamentarism by a
positive form of substantive decision-making are inseparable.

This is a vital concern and not “romantic faithfulness to Marx’s unrealizable dream,” as some people try to discredit and
dismiss it. In truth, the “withering away of the state” refers to nothing mysterious or remote but to a perfectly
tangible process that must be initiated right in our own historical time. It means, in plain language, the progressive
reacquisition of the alienated power of political decision making by the individuals in their enterprise of moving
toward a genuine socialist society. Without the reacquisition of this power— to which not only the capitalist state but
also the paralyzing inertia of the structurally well-entrenched material reproductive practices are fundamentally
opposed—neither the new mode of political control of society as a whole by its individuals is conceivable, nor indeed
the nonadversarial and thereby cohesive and plannable everyday operation of the particular productive and distributive
units by the self-managing freely associated producers. Radically superseding adversariality, and thereby securing the
material and political ground of globally viable planning—an absolute must for the very survival of humanity, not to
mention the potentially enriched self-realization of its individual members—is synonymous with the withering away of
the state as an ongoing historical enterprise.

Debate can’t change reactionaries’ minds – we should strive for truth-seeking that rejects neutrality
and wages a war of position in academia that actively excludes violent scholarship and materialize
our politics into revolutionary organizing.
Moufawad-Paul 20 – Joshua Moufawad-Paul is a Canadian academic and writer from Toronto, Canada, and a
professor of philosophy at York University. “War of Position and Academic Freedom,” M-L-M Mayhem, October 3 rd,
2020, http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2020/10/war-of-position-and-academic-freedom.html // rose
In one part of Demarcation and Demystification I wrote about what I called the "annihilationist" aspect of philosophy that is linked to its clarifying aspect, both of which are concerned with the overall demarcating and demystifying that defines philosophical practice.
That is, while philosophy is often about forcing clarity (through arguments and critical examination), sometimes it can be used to demand the demolition of wrong ideas and ideological constellations.: Take, for example, those philosophers who placed themselves in
service of the concrete struggle against modern slavery by demanding the annihilation of every theoretical terrain and province that generated pseudo-truth procedures dedicated to the moral, religious, economic, and scientific justification of this social-historical
edifice. Entire theoretical structures were singled out for liquidation; their potential clarity was no longer at issue, the clarity of choice [i.e. the logic of choosing one position over another] had been established earlier and, on the basis of this clarity, the role of the
radical philosophical militant was to storm the gates of these racist heavens and subject their sacred truths to the conceptual guillotine. (165) Following this discussion, I pointed out that the annihilationist practice of philosophy should lead us to realize that there is
no point in continuing to debate positions that have already been revealed, logically and historically, as erroneous: "whereas Frederick Douglass worked hard to prove that the African slave was a human being, Malcolm X's militancy in thought, parallel to his

(166) Reactionaries, no matter what they might say,

militancy in concrete action, already understood this assumption as a priori and thus treated any theory that would say otherwise as meaningless."

do not care about reasonable debate and in fact ignore all of the literature that has disproved (over and over and over)
their positions. Humouring them is in fact unreasonable, and a waste of time, because they have proven themselves
incapable of recognizing reason. And yet liberal academics, who want the university to be a debate club (well only the humanities, since most tellingly recognize that debate clubbing in the so-called "hard" sciences is silly)
rather than an institution invested in seeking truth from facts, are still under the impression that we should still "give them an argument", avoid "cancel culture", and treat every outmoded and disproven argument with respect. As I also noted in Demarcation and

On the ground struggle

Demystification, even the annihilationist practice of philosophy is not enough. At best, since the demolition is conceptual, it can only suggest why certain regions of thought should be obliterated.

performed by social movements is what is actually needed, with philosophy serving such movements, because
backwards ideas and theories do not easily die if the social formation is still determined by predatory class relations. Like the
Freudian return of the repressed, all of the disproven and decrepit ideas can slink back into academia if this academia remains within an oppressive and exploitative social-historical context: physiognomy, phrenology, and white nationalism are being mainstreamed
yet again––with their partisans demanding scholarly platforms––despite the fact that they were discredited and even slated for conceptual annihilation. But because they were slated for the latter, there is no rational reason why we should treat them as meaningful.

We do not have to give them an argument because arguments were already given; rather we need to recognize them as
a threat against thought itself and treat them with an annihilationist attitude. On the political-ethical level this attitude is completely justifiable: why should anyone ever take
white nationalist arguments seriously, especially after scholarship has demonstrated the monstrosity of what such positions result in? Only people who will not be harmed by such arguments

can afford to treat them as abstract debate points; such an abstract approach to reality is a despicable idealism that also
shows little care in what has been established historically. All of this is relates to the concerns behind a recent open letter I was involved in that sought, and succeeded, to terminate a pro-colonial
book series co-edited by the charlatan Bruce Gilley. I was invited to write about my thoughts surrounding this letter in the American Association of University Professors blog, so I won't say much about it here except to indicate that this is an expansion of germinal
notions contained in that small article. It is noteworthy that Gilley, upon discovering his book series was slated with cancellation, ranted about a Maoist conspiracy, comparing it to the Taliban, as if his own scholarship had not been thoroughly demolished already.
This is because Gilley wanted scholars to treat his work as worthy of engagement, when it was not, because he knew such an attitude would allow it to persist and thus aid in the mainstreaming of racist positions that had already been disproven. All of his complaints
about "cancel culture" and censorship, the reactionary version of virtue signalling that seeks to entice liberals, were delivered like the temper tantrum of a toddler who cannot accept reason. He should be pushed out of publication in this area because he is wrong,
and because a wealth of scholarship he cares nothing about has proved him wrong, and we have no reason to humour racist nonsense. Especially in these times. In any case, my thoughts on this specific manner are in the aforelinked article. But I want to go further
than my thoughts about that affair, reflecting on the war of position in academia and scholarship. In The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney discuss how, at first, the university appears as "a place of refuge." (26) I have seen more than one reader
(including some of my students) mistake this rhetorical statement regarding the appearance of refuge as a statement about the concrete truth of universities, but this is not what they meant. Just a paragraph later, after all, the write: "the subversive intellectual
came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears." (26) Bounded by capitalism, but still invested in
a concern for truth (because of the myth of Enlightenment), universities are institutions in which the "general antagonism" functions. They may allow some refuge, or the appearance of refuge, but in the end they are machines that seek to pull scholars into

governance or make them disappear. Such disappearance may allow these recalcitrant scholars to find "maroon communities" within academia, and it is here that a refugee truth procedure is generated, but the point is that these are spaces of struggle Or as the .
authors openly proclaimed in an interview on Millenials Are Killing Capitalism podcast: universities are like factories, subversive intellectuals are like workers organizing for a wildcat, and those involved in the wildcat do not see the factory and its management as

My point, here, is that when we recognize that academia is a space of struggle, and
something that can be reformed but rather something that should be taken over.

one that is still managed by dominant power, then treating it like a neutral debate club is a mistake. While it is the case
that "subversive scholars" have been able to enter the university and, connecting with "maroon communities" have
generated the kind of necessary scholarship that has rigorously unsettled dominant narratives, these scholars (and I
place myself amongst them) always have to deal with the institutional boundaries that, while celebrating such
scholarship because its quality cannot be denied, seek to defend the university's class basis. To appropriate the best
thinkers, to turn their work into policy and governance, and to preserve the university's relationship with capital. In such
a space we thus encounter scholars who, despite the quality of their research, are politically neutralized and cut off from
the broader political struggle (or what Moten and Harney romantically call "the surround"), and we also encounter the
ways in which concepts and perspectives derived from this radically meaningful scholarship are appropriated by
professional programs. Indeed professional social worker programs, designed to transform students into institutional policy pursuants, often bake radical concepts into liberal reformist doctrine––including the work of Moten and Harney!
So is it any wonder that within these "maroon communities" of academia––which are the academic fugitive communities that have generated most of the useful scholarship for nearly a century––there has resulted a subjectivity that is largely divorced from social

struggle, that doesn't know how to apprehend it or carry it out? That this subjectivity, now largely isolated from the surrounding spaces of activist organizing, is stymied when it comes to dealing with reactionary attempts to challenge and marginalize this
scholarship, to return universities to the days when it did not have to worry about capturing and isolating the best and the brightest of the oppressed and exploited populations? Going back to the open letter regarding Gilley's bullshit, it's worth noting that within
twenty-four hours that the open letter was live, I was forced to engage with at least one academic who, despite despising Gilley, thought that an open letter was useless because it would allow Gilley to play the victim. The argument was that backwards and
erroneous scholarship should not be directly combatted but should instead be subjected to vague ridicule. Such an attitude reveals the ways in which academia has pacified even elements of its "maroon community". Because how do we interact with reactionary

Even recalcitrant maroon scholars are

scholarship that seeks to ignore and marginalize rigorous scholarship––how do we ridicule it if even open letters suggesting it should be ridiculed are deemed inadmissable?

brought into the fold of a vague liberal debate club logic; they don't know how to organize anymore, if they ever did,
especially if they cannot see the lowest level of organization (an open letter) as something they can unite with. The university, as an
ideological state apparatus, fragments and isolates. Gilley and his ilk count on this fragmentation while, at the same time, they work to build reactionary unity that takes advantage of university liberalism. The dominant liberal perspective of the university thus

conditions the way leftwing scholars act; it partially determines academic subjectivity. For liberal scholars this perspective makes sense since it is part of their ideological outlook, so let's examine those whose personal ideology align with this dominant perspective
first. Such liberal scholars often rely on clever sounding maxims such as the one misattributed to Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say but I will defend to the death your right to say it"––as one commenter on my aforelinked article wrote. The
emptiness of such slogans reveals that the strength of this perspective is more ideological than logical. After all, someone having the right to say or write erroneous things is not obliterated by not being able to say or write such things in a university setting, nor does
it imply that anyone should have whatever academic platform they wish simply because they want it. Even Mill wasn't that naive in his conception of free speech. Nor would most of these liberal scholars, as noted above, extend the same argument to other
disciplines: they would not argue that an astrologer should be given tenure in astronomy departments, or be allowed to publish a book series celebrating astrology and claiming that anti-astrology was wrong, in an academic press. At least I hope we are not at that
point. In point of fact, since liberal scholars are usually quite enamoured by the prestige of the university, they would be horrified by such assaults on scholarship. So why are they not similarly horrified when it comes to pseudo-scholarship in the humanities? Why do
they think that in these disciplines the university is synonymous with a debate club and that any and every perspective, even ones that have been discredited and are tied to reactionary anti-people agendas, are part of what makes the university the university?
Answering these questions thoroughly would be a book in itself. But we can examine the general contours of an answer. First of all, the neo-liberalization of the university has resulted in a hierarchy of disciplines and professionalization wherein a number of liberal
scholars in the humanities have, instead of disputing this hierarchization and professionalization, tried to justify their disciplines by collaborating with this tendency. In this sense, treating the humanities as simply a space where everything is open to debate and all
perspectives are equal is amenable for aiming students at professional schools and maximizing profit. Secondly, and more tellingly, liberal scholars are largely incapable of understanding how normalizing disproven and reactionary scholarship is harmful because they
are generally not the people who will immediately be harmed. Asserting that white supremacist scholarship should be given academic platforms, even if the assertion is made by someone who proclaims they disagree morally with such scholarship, is all well and

But mainstreaming shitty scholarship that celebrates slavery, colonialism, the bell curve,
good if you are not going to be harmed by such "scholarship".

physiognomy, gender essentialism, etc.––all of which have been thoroughly debunked and rigorously disproved––
contributes to reinforcing norms that justify violent reactionary behaviour. Amazingly even philosophers who study ethics, based on the way in which normative and applied
ethics are largely studied, think that it is ethically correct to tolerate such debate within academia. Apparently the abstract notion of free expression is more morally significant than the harms of white supremacy and other chauvinisms. Truly ironic considering that
most of the people who make these arguments are theoretically opposed to relativism, or the idea that truth and opinion are the same, because this is what their notion of free expression actually permits: a relativism in the humanities, and in ethical behaviour,
where (to paraphrase Marx) "between equal rights greater power decides." Again, it is hard to imagine such scholars making similar arguments regarding the so-called "hard" sciences; they largely agree that it would be harmful to allow obscurantist pseudo-science
into these disciplines. If only they could recognize that demystification should be universal, that the same obscurantism that manifests in the humanities should be combatted. In any case, we should know by now that liberals have always aided reactionaries since

they are simply different intensities on the same capitalist continuum. The larger problem is the ways in which this kind of liberal thinking also affects leftwing scholars. Despite the fact that they know that liberal scholarship and the liberal perspective is largely

This is because the liberal conception of the university is not only

useless, they still abide by the mores––as the example of the scholar who refused to sign the petition demonstrates.

compelling but functions with the threat of discipline . These scholars believe that if they violate the liberal strictures of
open debate that it will affect them personally (and to be fair it often does affect them personally), or that it will result in
consequences that make reactionary scholarship look good. For example, refusing to debate reactionaries but instead organizing to push them out of academic platforms could result in these
same reactionaries complaining about "cancel culture" or "censorship". The assumption is that such a result will harm actual scholarship and allow pseudo-scholars to play the victim. To be sure, this is precisely what the Gilleys of the world do whenever they are

challenged: play the victim, complaining about censorship and the intolerant left. But we should ask why this consequence is worse than the consequences of
allowing them to have whatever platform they wish. After all, the only reason they play the victim is because they want to have every and any platform; it's a cynical tactic of retreat.
Considering that these reactionaries want to take over every space, and push out everyone who challenges their
ahistorical/unethical/backwards narrative, letting them have what they want because they will otherwise whine about
censorship makes little sense. There are far greater negative consequences to critical scholarship by allowing erroneous and backwards ideas every platform they desire than being called "censorious" for caring about the efficacy of
scholarship. And yet still, the worry of participating in "cancel culture" largely determines thought even though it is dependent on rightwing discourse. Against this worry, which is overdetermined by

liberal sentiment, we need to do precisely what the right is doing: treat the struggle over the meaning of scholarship as a
war of position. There is no reason to treat reactionary scholarship as legitimate by allowing it space for debate: it has
already been debated and proved erroneous; it should be slated for annihilation. Moreover, it is entirely ethical to dismiss and marginalize backwards scholarship
because allowing its promulgation results in the normalization of harm of those it chooses to target. We should not "defend to the death" the right of a white supremacist, for example, to promulgate their monstrous notions of reality since history teaches us––which
is the very scholarship these reactionaries seek to erase––that such notions justify genocide and slavery. Such a maxim in fact flies in the face of any meaningful ethics since it legitimates genocide apologists! Nor are the reactionaries who are opportunistically using
liberal ideology to mainstream their backwards ideas defending to the death the right to free expression for their opponents. If such a war of position is to be truly successful, however, then it must be linked with a mass movement. The problem is also the fact that
the liberal university, while allowing some space for the kind of critical scholarship that breaks with old ideas, is still embedded in dominant class power. "The more a dominant class is able to absorb the best people from the dominated class," Marx wrote in the third
volume of Capital, "the more solid and dangerous its rule." And the university largely functions to capture and absorb critical scholars, even if this capturing/absorption is neutralizing such scholars within an academic cantonment, so there can be no "reclaiming" it
from reactionary scholars. If we want to obliterate reactionary thought altogether, then simply trying to drum it out of a university that has long accommodated backwards ideas will never fully work. Instead, as the very notion of war of position implies, relegating
wrong ideas to the historical dustbin has to be part of a larger revolutionary strategy.
Do not be afraid of line struggle – principled disagreement over revolutionary concepts between
parallel movements creates the conditions for the emergence of a unified party, but it requires
attention to and debate around difference rather than banal calls for “left unity.”
Moufawad-Paul 13 – Joshua Moufawad-Paul is a Canadian academic and writer from Toronto, Canada, and a
professor of philosophy at York University. “Unity in Struggle and Struggle in Unity”, M-L-M Mayhem, July 30, 2013,
http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2013/07/unity-in-struggle-and-struggle-in-unity.html// rose
Long time commenter Mulciber asked me to write about my thoughts on unity within the anti-capitalist left, particularly the marxist left. They wanted to know my opinion on "how the various kinds of Marxists can get past their hair-splitting theoretical differences and unite based on common interests." So here follows a reflection
on this question. 1: multiple tendencies as an unavoidable fact Long ago, when I first became an anti-capitalist activist, like many others I was troubled by the proliferation of various anti-capitalist organizations, some of which refused to work with each other. The most rational solution, to my mind, was for all of the groups to put
aside their differences, combine into a single organization, and work together for the "greater good" of post-capitalism. That is, I naively and uncritically believed that the principle of utility could be applied to the general left and that it needed to be applied. Such a belief was reinforced, as I'm sure it has been for many others, every
time I encountered a dogmatic leftist sect that spent most of its time criticizing other leftists and, in doing so, reminded me of the average Christian fundamentalist who spends most of hir time ranting about the heresies of other Christian sects. In such a context it is easy to believe that every organization that maintains its own
political line is "sectarian" and to seek a solution to this supposed sectarianism. At the same time, it did not take me long to realize that there were factions within the mainstream left that I could not tolerate. For example, during the period in which I became politicized, the mainstream left in Canada was only just coming to grips
with the necessity of Palestinian self-determination (well, more accurately, remembering, since the left in the previous period of struggle had already come to grips with this necessity before it collapsed in the mid-1980s) and I can recall how this issue was dividing line even amongst the left in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My
hope that every anti-capitalist would be able to work together for the common goal of socialism was undermined in a context where self-proclaimed socialists argued against an anti-colonial position, and thus against internationalism, with a liberal "both sides are wrong" position––something that, even then, I found completely
reprehensible. It thus became clear, and very quickly, that there were real differences even amongst anti-capitalists and that these differences were not simply sectarian quibbles but were, indeed, matters of principle. Thus, while there are admittedly internecine squabbles amongst the general left that can be classified as
"sectarian", there are also principled lines of demarcation that are drawn for very good reasons. In a first world context that is not yet revolutionary (even if the objective circumstances are ripe, the subjective circumstances are horribly underdeveloped), it is impossible for the movement to narrow into a focused point where a

vanguard can clearly emerge and, in this emergence, settle these squabbles by winning over the masses while, at the same time, isolating and eradicating those factions that refuse, out of sectarian pride and a practical divorcement from the revolutionary instance, to recognize an emergent vanguard . We are not at this point, and
some anti-capitalist groups will even argue that we should never be at this point because they deny the necessity of a revolutionary vanguard. Point being: there are multiple left-wing organizations and factions, many of which exist for good reason, that are either struggling to emerge as the revolutionary vanguard or struggling for

Here it needs to be said that in the current conjuncture at the centres of capitalism there is nothing
a movement that lacks a vanguard altogether.

wrong with this multiplicity. Although I believe that it is erroneous to make the fact of multiplicity a principle of
revolutionary strategy (hence my rejection of "movementism"), I do not think we should see the concrete reality of
multiple left tendencies as something to be feared. It is just a fact, and a fact we have inherited from a history of
revisionism and failure, that can only be overcome by engaging with this multiplicity and , in the process, winning over
the masses to whatever organization succeeds in emerging as the party of the advanced guard. Until then, the fact of leftist multiplicity is something we have to
engage with because it is a fact. And though I realize that some groups operate in denial of this fact, it is my contention that this willful obliviousness will only harm their development. For even if we believe that there needs to come a time when a revolutionary organization unified in theory and practice becomes the revolutionary
organization in a given social context, such an organization will grow into this organization through its engagement with other left-wing organizations. That is, we can learn from different tendencies; we can grow by interacting with them. Herein lies the actual distinction between a sectarian and a non-sectarian approach to anti-
capitalism: whereas the sectarian will loathe these multiple trajectories, and thus fear the dilution of a pure politics that results from multiplicity, the non-sectarian will accept such a multiplicity as a fact and try to work with this fact. For this fact is the fact of line struggle, and it is nothing to be feared; struggling with and sometimes

And yet it is worth repeating, as I have argued over and over, that to adhere
against different leftist factions is only a problem if one fears political pollution––and only the cultist fears such pollution.

to a principled political position is not the same as being sectarian: while we should not fear line struggle, and need to
accept that there are currently multiple political positions within the left, it is a matter of principle to argue, especially if
one adheres to a line that treats the concept of a party vanguard as significant, that one theoretically unified
organization can and should emerge as hegemonic . The multiplicity of trajectories, then, is a fact that cannot be denied; the hope that these trajectories will be subsumed by a unified organization that can account for interior multiplicity is

To briefly demystify this jargon-laced set of sentences: there was a multiplicity of political
something some of us believe is worth considering.

organizations in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century that provided the crucible for the emergence of a single vanguard
organization that was forced to prove itself in this context; there was a multiplicity of political lines and factions in China
in the early to mid 20th century that produced a splintering revolutionary party in the countryside that, by 1949, proved
it was the vanguard. Neither of these world historical revolutions would have been possible without a context of
revolutionary ferment in which a multiplicity of political lines vied for dominance and, in this vying, produced the
circumstances that could narrow into a revolutionary event where one line, that had learned from the others, would
arise as revolutionary. We are stuck with this contradiction: we have to work together and we have
2: theoretical difference as unavoidable and necessary

to struggle against each other. Work together because we all believe that capitalism needs to be overcome. Struggle against each other because there are real differences that will necessarily be encountered in any attempt to supersede capitalism. These differences are not
simply the result of sectarian differences but are visceral realities… Take, for example, my anecdote about Palestinian self-determination mentioned earlier––this was not a sectarian difference but a matter of principle that could only result in a different method of theory and practice. Other examples abound: questions of race and
gender during the US revolutionary struggles in the 1960s and 1970s were significant dividing lines––and for good reason! To be fair, there are theoretical differences amongst marxist organizations that are quite silly, and that nobody these days probably cares about, that result from theoretical hair-splitting that is about as useful
as theological debates in medieval Catholicism. If an organization cannot get past an arcane difference that has nothing to do with concrete struggle, and might only exist in order to define oneself as a more faithful (in the religious sense) marxist than another sect, then they probably cannot work with other members of the left.

Principled
Again: this is the hallmark of sectarianism. But we need to recognize the fact, noted in the section above, that there are principled lines of demarcation that are important and cannot simply be misconstrued as "sectarian" simply because they maintain principled points of difference.

difference is not sectarianism, and those who would like the entire left to believe the same thing and get along as a
single organization are often those who, in their attempt to obliterate difference and multiplicity, are guilty of, implicitly
or explicitly, attempting to subordinate the movement to their own ideological position . That is, the political position that often masquerades as "anti-sectarian" is itself a form of

Moreover, we
sectarianism in that it is actually arguing, even if it is in denial, "why can't everyone get along according to my principles of unity?" If we should not fear multiple anti-capitalist tendencies, then we should not fear the fact that difference between tendencies sometimes exists for a good reason.

should be prepared to accept that a rejection and furious line struggle against a given tendency is necessary for the
development of a movement, especially if this line struggle is intrinsically wed to praxis rather than simply an exchange
of polemics. What I mean here is that in the course of revolutionary practice there often develops a theoretical line,
based on what encounters in the concrete world, that sets one organization apart from another. Take, for example, the
development of the political line of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin and how it set Lenin's faction apart from other
communist factions in Russia and in the International Communist Movement. Take, for example, the development of the
political line in the communist faction in China led by Mao that set it apart from the original Communist Party of China.
These differences mattered because they had to do with making revolution; to ignore these differences for the sake of
some "let's-just-all-get-along" socialism would be tantamount to abandoning revolutionary struggle. For there are indeed political lines that need to be
struggled against and marxist theory has been enriched because of this line struggle. We cannot forget that Marx and Engels established the foundations of historical materialism and its primacy as the revolutionary science of the working class by waging line struggle against other tendencies in the movement of their time. The
hope, as I argued in the Party as Process, is that line struggles between multiple organizations––which we should not necessarily see as sectarian, nor as something to be loathed––will be won by an emergent vanguard that proves its line in the concrete class struggle of its social context. 3: unity in struggle and struggle in unity But
in the context of upper North America how do we make sense of the multiple organizations and political lines that compose the anti-capitalist milieu when a vanguard party has not yet emerged––how can we find any unity in this context? I do not think we can argue that the fragmentation of multiplicity is, by itself, helpful since it
often results in disunity. Nor do I believe that the denial of this multiplicity, and a retreat into sectarian purism, is useful since it is little more than a dogmatic exercise that denies reality. We need to have a unity in the struggle against capitalism while also engaging in line struggle within this unity. Over a year ago, I wrote a small
article on the distinction between sectarianism and principled difference where I made a point about principled unity that bears repeating: "an organization that is able to maintain its political principles while refusing to degenerate into actual sectarianism is an organization that: a) will work in coalitions without trying to force the
entire coalition to liquidate itself into its ranks; b) will maintain its parallel principles […] without apology, but with humility; c) will not intentionally engage in asinine and internecine left-wing turf wars and member poaching; d) will maintain that its principles will be proven in the class struggle rather than in name-calling. Point
being: you are not a sect if you go out of your way to work well with others, even if you choose the path of this 'going out of the way' and make sure it is balanced with your political principles. And yet you don't go out of your way to work with a bourgeois parliamentary party, reactionaries, or a group of extreme opportunists… if
we are anti-capitalists we must, at the very least, accept that there is such a thing as the capitalist enemy to begin with––the capitalists understand this principle, and they don't accuse each other of 'sectarianism' by understanding their class enemy, and we can't afford to act differently." Thus, we need to find points of
commonality in which to struggle together while still maintaining our autonomous political lines, some of which exist for good reason. Hence the existence of coalitions, and coalitions should never be understood as organizations designed to create a "big tent socialism"––the kind of political approach that neutralizes line struggle in
order to achieve a banal and toothless unity––but as moments where different organizations can struggle towards a very specific goal about which they agree. Several months ago I had the privilege to listen to a Montreal supporter of the PCR-RCP speak about the nature and necessity of anti-capitalist coalitions and how to behave
in coalition spaces. He argued that coalitions were spaces that emerged in order to achieve very coherent, and often quite narrow, goals upon which multiple left-wing organizations could agree. He also argued that organizations entering coalition spaces should be honest about their own politics (i.e. organizational representatives
should not be disingenuous and pretend that they do not represent a specific organization), not treat coalitions as recruitment drives, and overall behave in a principled manner in order to help a given coalition reach its goal. While it is true, as aforementioned, that the fact of multiple anti-capitalist organizations cannot be denied,
and that this multiplicity often exists for good reason, it is also true that the sectarian "hair-splitting" common to some anti-capitalist sects produces political paralysis. Now it may be a fact that one will encounter, while involved in coalition work, groups that are impossible to work with––groups that might be extremely hostile to
your line––to set oneself apart from all coalition work for reasons of political purity is the hallmark of sectarianism. Self-righteousness is not a politics; an organization cannot prove its line as correct by withdrawing into itself and despising the rest of the left. 4: a smokescreen? Finally, it needs to be said that all of this talk of "left
unity" at the centres of capitalism is often used as a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the anti-capitalist organizations represent, unfortunately, a small population that is predominantly embedded amongst the petty-bourgeoisie: students, intellectuals, and privileged sections of the working class. There are often calls for "unity"
that, as aforementioned, are themselves sublimated instances of sectarianism––the desire of one organization to convince all other organizations to work in a space over-determined by its political line. And these calls for unity are often accompanied by the a priori assumption that the reason the left is weak is because of this lack
of unity amongst a relatively small population of activists. Every demand to "rebuild the left" in the past two decades is based on this misguided assumption. If we look critically at the largest street demonstrations in the last twenty years, especially those where every known left organization was in attendance, we find a population
that is more static than dynamic––swelling at every crucial demonstration, ebbing between watershed moments––since it draws its membership and supporters from the same social sectors. That is, we are largely guilty of a failure to embed ourselves in the broader population, especially the most exploited sections of society, and
have produced a praxis that is contingent on: calling demonstrations, pulling members from university, doing union support, poaching from other organizations whose recruitment practice is similar. So the problem is not the supposed disunity of this small population but, rather, the fact that this population is itself isolated. All calls
for left-wing unity at this conjuncture at the centres of capitalism, then, are little more than calls for a small population to work together in the hope that this working together will make it bigger. Perhaps we would be better served by turning outwards, and thinking of how to agitate and recruit outside of the left than wasting our
time with unity struggles, that most often devolve into yelling matches, with those who are theoretically convinced of capitalism's obsolescence. Perhaps the unity we seek will be achieved when an organization proves itself amongst the most exploited masses, developing into a mass revolutionary organization. Therefore, while
there is a need for various leftist groups to get beyond their theoretical differences (as long as these differences are not liquidated into some liberal banality) and work together on common projects, there is also the fact that this problem is something of a red herring. The most internecine left squabbles cannot be solved if neither
side can prove the correctness of their theoretical difference in their practice. The ultimate solution, then, is to build outside of the already-organized, revolving door left in the hope that the emergence of a theoretically/practically unified vanguard will force unity.

Merely being reactive to US policy lets the war-mongers set the agenda—our strategy must directly
fight the state and capitalism, not merely get the government to change its policy.
Herod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October,
http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9&print=y&PHPSESSID=4387a9147ad42723ea101944dd538914)

The 'peace now' protesters strike a similar stance. Of course, it was heartening to see an anti-war
movement blossom almost immediately. But it was also disheartening. It meant that radicals were letting the
war-mongers set the agenda. Instead of continuing the fight against neoliberalism and its institutions, and
against capitalism, oppositionists suddenly dropped all this to launch an anti-war campaign. The candlelight
vigils, especially, seemed to me a pathetic response to a war-mongering, repressive government. This
happens again and again. The government launches a war of aggression, and the peaceniks take to the
streets, with their candles, crying "peace now" and "no more war". Do they ever win? Have they ever
stopped even one war? Do they ever even think about how they could win? Doesn't the inefficacy of their
response prove that they are not really serious about peace? Do they ever think about ways of actually
stopping the murderers rather than just pleading with them not to kill? They keep saying that peace cannot
be achieved by going to war. Who says the US government wants peace!? They quote A.J. Muste as
saying that war is not the way to peace; peace is the way. Is this relevant? Does it make sense to quote
such thoughts to a government that has always engaged, from its inception two hundred years ago, in
systematic mass murder?
Similarly with the bulk of the other progressive commentators. They are just trying to change the
government's policy, not stop them and deprive them of power. Here is a typical sentence. Rahul Mahajan
and Robert Jensen write: "The next step is for us to build a movement that can change our government's
barbaric and self-destructive policy."[13] You see, from the government's point of view, its policy is not
barbaric or self-destructive. It is intelligent, self-serving, and self-preserving. Mahajan and Jensen actually
pretty much admit this in their piece, by reasoning that "This war is about the extension of U.S. power. It has
little to do with bringing the terrorists to justice, or with vengeance." (Such a view is rather rare among
progressives actually.) They argue that there are three other motives for the war, from the government's
point of view: the desire to defend "imperial credibility", to control "oil and natural gas of Central Asia," and
"to push a right-wing domestic agenda." Nevertheless, in spite of these insights, they still stop short of
realizing that they therefore have to fight, stop, and neutralize the government, rather than just change its
policy. Given who the government is, who it serves (capital, the rich), and what its interests and priorities
are, it can't change its policies into those favored by progressives, not and survive as an imperial power that
is.
 Personhood K: NU

Granting rights to non-human entities re-naturalizes legal personhood, reducing embodied life to a
thing without claim to rights---the ontology of western personhood and humanism renders non-
whites socially dead and enables racialization, sexualization, and war against otherness. Vote
negative to assert the primacy of pre-legal human rights based on flesh and embodiment.
Miguel Vattar 19, Professor of Politics at Flinders University, June 2019, “Human Rights, Legal Personhood and the
Impersonality of Embodied Life,” DOI: 10.1177/1743872119857068

I. Introduction

Since Locke, the concept of person has been closely linked to the idea of a subjective natural right and, later, to the
concept of human rights.1 Human rights, in this view, are grounded in moral-legal notions like the dignity or the
autonomy of the human person .2 In this article we attempt to trouble this connection between humanity and
personhood. For legal personhood is also a power dispositive ,3 whose unquestioned adoption prevents human
rights from being the kinds of rights possessed by “all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity.” 4 In the first
half of the article, we identify a fundamental problem in the usual way human rights are connected to the device of
legal personhood. While human rights are intended to offer protection to the “precarious” reality of human
embodied life,5 we hypothesize that the fiction of legal personhood generates a disembodiment whereby this
human life is left exposed and defenseless . In the second half, we propose reconstructing the idea of legal
personhood with insights drawn from the political anthropology of embodied life and from critical race theory , so
that it may be more adequate to the required conception of human rights.

The claim that moral-legal construals of personhood do not give due consideration to the dimension of embodiment
is not unprecedented. Feminist jurisprudence has historically found the connection between rights and persons
understood as owners of their (and not only their) bodies problematic.6 Ronald Dworkin also argues for a legal
standpoint beyond the person when theorizing “life’s dominion” in law. In particular, he calls for the recognition of
both the claim of intrinsic value of life as zoe and the dignity of an autonomous life as bios , thereby employing a
distinction also found in the discourse on biopolitics .7 In this article, we discuss Roberto Esposito’s recent biopolitical
critique of personalism as it applies to human rights discourse. For Esposito, the device of legal personhood “appears
to be an artificial screen that separates human beings from their [human] rights ” by reducing their embodied life to a
thing without claims to rights.8

We then suggest that an alternative bio-political conception of the person need not have the alienating consequences
envisaged by Esposito and can be helpful to reconceive an account of human rights beyond legal personhood . To do
so, we present the account of human embodiment and personhood that the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner
formulated in a critical engagement with the existential Dasein-analysis developed by Martin Heidegger during the
same years.9 In this account, personhood does not turn embodied life into a thing to be possessed because it is
conceived from an “impersonal” or third person perspective on embodied life as the subject of human rights. In this
way, the need for human rights emerges from the embodied character of human personhood.

Plessner developed his political anthropology during the same years that the racially supremacist
thanatopolitics of Hitlerism was coming to power. Plessner criticized Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein on the
grounds of its Eurocentrism: this analysis inevitably brought up the “typical traits of life that govern ‘our’ existence,
the existence (Dasein) of Europeans .”10 He opposed Heidegger’s approach by starting from the principle of the
“unknowability of human beings” and what human beings are still capable of becoming . “ Only insofar as we take
ourselves to be unknowable , can we give up the standpoint of supremacy against other cultures seen as barbarian
and simply other , and we can renounce the mission against foreigners as if they come from a not yet redeemed,
immature world. Only in so doing can we open up the horizon of our own past and present to a form of history that is
broken up by the most heterogeneous perspectives.”11 In this sense, Plessner’s political anthropology of
embodiment has some unsuspected affinities with the kind of postcolonial philosophical anthropology developed by
Sylvia Wynter, for whom “ the West , over the last 500 years, has brought the whole human species into its
hegemonic, now purely secular … model of being human ” and the task is “to replace the ends of the referent-we of
liberal monohumanist … with the ecumenically human ends of the referent-we in the horizon of humanity.” 12 The
last section of this article proposes

a reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s account of racialized disembodiment in Between the World and Me in light of Plessner’s
political anthropology and its “horizon of humanity.” We seek to test the hypothesis that a discourse on human rights
can be reconstructed by giving a new anthropological basis to legal personhood such that it corresponds better to the
desideratum of critical race theory that we stop “seeing race biologically, and as part of a natural hierarchy” in order
to “reconceptualise it so it refers to one’s structural location in a racialized social system.” 13

II. The Fiction of Legal Personhood and the Paradox of Human Rights

John Dewey begins his famous essay on legal personality as follows: “The survey which is undertaken in this paper
points to the conclusion that for the purposes of law the conception of ‘person’ is a legal conception ; put roughly,
‘person’ signifies what law makes it signify .”14 Personhood in law is a legal construction. This is a tautology , but one
rife with implications. As a construction, legal personhood is certainly fictional and allowing for either natural
personhood (i.e., a human being) or artificial personhood, as in the case of a corporation.15 Yet the fiction of legal
personhood becomes indisputably real within the legal system. We pose the question of whether the price paid for
the reality of the legal fiction is a self-referential insulation of the legal person from embodiment and biological life; if
so, this form of personhood is problematic from the perspective of human rights.

In the current debate on legal personhood , two distinct schools of thought regarding how legal personhood connects
with the lived reality of individuals have emerged. For some theorists, the value and utility of legal personhood is
given precisely by its “plasticity” as a legal technique, which constantly calls into question the distinction between
natural and artificial legal person.16 These theorists argue that the more “plastic” legal personhood becomes, the
more it can extend its protections to prevent harms caused by naturalized identities , as in the area of Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity rights, or animal and environmental rights.17 For others, the legal person also stands
in need of being constantly re-naturalized insofar as the point of attributing legal personhood , say, to corporations or
to rivers is precisely to grant them the kind of protections that natural legal persons receive by virtue of their claims
to moral personhood .18 Referring to this on-going debate in legal theory and history, Britta van Beers points out that
legal personhood has always been caught up in what she calls the dialectic between the naturality and the artificiality
of the legal person.19 Van Beers suggests that neither school of thought has developed “a legal concept of the person
which can bring to expression what is, ultimately, at stake in the coming era of human enhancement technologies :
our embodied, human nature.”20 Embodiment is side-stepped both if one links natural legal personhood too directly
to a moral or psychological personality , and if legal personhood is granted to A rtificial I ntelligence or synthetic
biological creations through the artificiality of legal personhood. This situation calls out for a re-consideration of the
relation between embodiment and legal personhood, and why this matters for our conception of human rights in the
age of biopolitics.

In her celebrated chapter “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt argues
that political society is based on the artifice or fiction of legal equality, which is tied to inclusion in a sovereign
political-legal order that has proven incapable of providing legal protection to all human beings.21 On her view,
human rights ought to express a fundamental “right to belong to humanity” understood as “a right to have rights
(and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some
organized community.”22 Their purpose is precisely to shield human beings from what Arendt identifies as the
resentment against “our unchangeable and unique nature, [which] breaks into the political scene as the alien which in
its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity.”23 Whereas civil and political rights
attach to the qualified life one lives in virtue of wearing the protective shield of legal personhood – the kind of
qualified life referred to by the Greek term bios – human rights attach to what Agamben calls “bare life,” the zoe
which is targeted by structural racializing and sexualizing practices that inscribe a distinction between “normal” and
“abnormal” within its understanding of “human being” at the level of “skins” and “bodies.”24 The need to bridge the
gap between the legal fiction of equality and the bare life characterized by what Arendt calls the traits of natality and
plurality thus becomes imperative for any philosophical account of human rights.

Human rights are different from legal rights not only in virtue of their subject (i.e., embodied life and not the abstract
legal person) but also because of their paradoxical form, apparent in Arendt’s now ubiquitous definition of human rights
as a “right to have rights,” or, a “general” right to have “particular” rights, to employ Hart’s terminology.25 As a species
of claim-rights, human rights presuppose “the legal authority to impose a duty upon all others.”26 Yet, as rights that
are claimable by all individuals “in virtue of their humanity,” and demanding universal respect , they are meant to be
pre-legal rights . Human rights seem to require that individuals already exist in a public space in virtue of their
embodiment prior to their inclusion in artificial political constructions by attribution of legal personhood.27

Arendt’s hypothesis of a right to have rights thus brings to light a double requirement for human rights. On the one
hand, as rights belonging to human beings in virtue of their embodied condition, human rights should protect what in
individuals exceed the artificial contours of legal and moral personhood. We call this feature the “impersonality” of
human rights. On the other hand, as pre-legal and pre-political , human rights should disclose a “place in the world”
outside the artificial borders of established states and communities, authorizing any individual to impose a legal duty
on others, over and above the positive rights granted to members of states and communities. We call this feature the
“co-immunity” of human rights. The discussion on legal personhood has yet to register the significance of these two
requirements of human rights.

III. Personhood as Power Dispositive and Human Rights

Esposito argues that the problem with current human rights discourse is precisely the tendency to think of them as
subjective rights belonging to “the enclosed space of the person.” 28 The origins of the western idea of personhood in
Roman law are especially crucial in his critique of the dispositive of the person. On his account, in Roman law “no
human being was a person by nature … since human beings arrived into life from the world of things , they could
always be thrust back into it .”29 In Roman law the distinction between natural individual (homo) and legal subject
(persona) separates the individual from their embodied life , making it possible for the latter to become a “thing”
under the ownership or dominium of the legal person.30 Esposito’s discussion of the dialectical relation between the
status of slavery and legal personhood overlaps with Orlando Patterson’s theory of slavery as social death .31 {Insert
Footnote 31} 31. For a recent critique of Esposito from the perspective influenced by the Afro-Pessimism of Jared
Sexton and Frank B. Wilderson III, see J. McMahon, “The ‘Enigma of Biopolitics’: Antiblackness, Modernity, and
Roberto Esposito’s Biopolitics,” Political Theory 46 (2018), 749–71. While we agree with the author that “if there are
emancipatory trajectories of the flesh, they can only ever be actualized from a biopolitical framework that takes
black studies and antiblackness seriously ” (764), in this article we attempt to provide a more constructive account of
human rights and legal personality from out of this desired framework . {End Footnote 31}

For Patterson, the character of the individual homo deprived of their legal persona is not as such that of a thing
because one cannot derive the condition of slavery as an attribute of the legal person, but conversely this attribute
must be developed from out of the condition of slavery.32 For Patterson this means that the slave is not someone
who is treated as a person’s property, but someone who has been structurally treated as a non-person , in a system of
domination. The non-person is the natally alienated and dishonored human individual; in other words, someone who
is included in a society as its radical foreigner . For Patterson, it is because the individual homo has no rights on the
person of others, because they have been cut off so radically from all human community that they can become the
property of a legal person. In their recent discussion of the Roman legal conception of persona, Edward Mussawir and
Connal Parsley refer to the same separation of person from embodied life thematized by Esposito: “the concept of
persona … is necessary in law in order to separate the identity of a real living being from that of a purely artificial ,
fabricated role that is reserved and instituted at the level of juridical existence.” 33 However, Mussawir and Parsley do
not recognize how this splitting away of the persona as a legally-positive estate or status from “a real living being”
constitutes a problem for human rights, that is, for the putative rights of the individual homo against being handed
over to the condition of social death . Precisely because in Roman law “the person is fashioned from an idea that is
originally indifferent to the confirmation of the boundaries of a naturalistic self,”34 the very distinction between
homo and persona can be employed to deny legal status to embodied human life as such. The bios or individual form
of life made possible by a certain estate or status requires rendering zoe or common life entirely estate-less by the
artifice of the persona. Rights fall on the side of the legal persona, a legal artifice designed to leave the impersonal
dimension of embodied life designated by homo in a right-less condition. This is

analogous to the problem Arendt identified with the Rights of Man and the creation of

“stateless” human beings.35

In order to reconstruct a bridge between embodied life and the artificiality of law, as required by a conception of human
rights that assigns claim rights to homo rather than to persona, the dualism between body and person established in
the Roman legal tradition and (possibly) in the early modern conception of natural rights needs to be overcome. In his
critique of the person, Esposito gestures toward a way out of these dilemmas by introducing the idea of “flesh” as a
correlate of an “impersonal” life, or life lived in the “third person.”36

In Esposito’s usage, flesh corresponds to Arendt’s “dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by
our unchangeable and unique nature.”37 As Alexander Weheliye has discussed, the distinction between flesh and
body is fundamental to black feminist theories, particularly in Hortense Spillers’ thought, and provides a crucial
juncture between the discourses of African American criticism and biopolitics.38 Contrary to Arendt’s rhetoric of
passivity, the idea of flesh permits to recover a dimension of agency and resistance found in our embodiment against
racializing and sexualizing practices and discourses that determines the “othering” treatment of what is perceived as
alien in a given political community.39

Unlike the concept of body, this idea of flesh cannot be owned by the dispositive of the person, as happens when
embodied life is reduced to the body and its self-enclosure.40 Our hypothesis is that, in principle, it is possible to
reconceive human rights from the perspective of the “impersonal” (rather than of the artificial “person”) and the
“flesh” (rather than of the “body”). Such a re-description better addresses the challenges posed by the conception of
human rights described in the first section of this article.

This re-description may also be useful in meeting halfway the critique that Fred Moten levels against both Patterson and
Arendt. For Moten, it is problematic to understand slavery as the paradoxical conferral of “stateless status of the merely,
barely living; it delineates the inhuman as unaccommodated bios.”41 For him, social death is not undone by acquiring a
bios because “it is the field of the political, from which blackness is relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or
blob or the social, which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay.”42 While Moten shares with
Afropessimism its conception of the limits of political intersubjectivity, he also insists that “black social life … is all there
can be”: “what if blackness is the name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit capacity to
desire?”43 However, rather than turning to an affirmative reading of Heidegger’s conception of animal life as “poor in
world,” as Moten does, in this article we turn to Plessner’s conception of embodied life as perhaps better suited to
formulate an idea of a social zoe that is pre-legal and parapolitical but also the source for rethinking the right to
humanity. The possibility of a social zoe is thematized by Esposito when he argues that the liberal notion of personal
rights are an immunitary apparatus designed to mitigate the costs of living in an unbounded and unrestricted
community with others.44 Whether personal rights enthrone the individual as a “small scale sovereign” over their
private domain, as will-based accounts have it, or whether they authorize individuals to raise claims against others for
the protection or advancement of their essential interests, as the interest-based account of rights has it, both give the
“discretion over the duty of another” to an individual in isolation from others.45 The problem does not lie in the fact
that rights protect or advance the interested pursuits of individuals, but that the right to claim such a protection or
advancement is itself left up to the interest of the self to the exclusion of the interest of humanity.

Against these liberal construals of subjective rights, Esposito suggests that the immunity of individuals should be
premised on the recognition of an anterior com-munity, that is, on a common right of humanity . Esposito derives his
idea of com-munity from the notion of munus, an archaic term referring to an unlimited obligation to give of oneself to
others to establish com-munity with them. This munus is a generalized obligation imposed on the individual to share a
common space with others prior to any distinction between friend and enemy , native and foreigner , but also prior to
any legal division of what is mine and what is thine. The basic intuition is that an excess of immunities against this
generalized obligation isolates individuals from others such that they are neither capable of exercising free choice nor of
pursuing their essential interests.
 Phytocentrism K: NYU

European Humanism has fostered an understanding of subjectivity in relation to a perfect,

transcendent body which is parasitic upon non-Europeans and plant life alike. These groups are
externally determined by whiteness in relation to the Northern European conception of man. Only
forms of ontological empathy towards the plant other can destabilize the larger network of
domination.
Marder 12 (Michael, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-
Gasteiz, The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy. Dialogue, 51, pp 259273 doi:10.1017/S0012217312000431)

At this point, at the apex of natural beauty already verging on the ideal beauty of art as it is construed in the lectures on
aesthetics, I would like to put forth what some might consider a vulgar reading of Hegel. The idealization of the human
body, in a process completely entangled with the body’s near de-materialization and cleansing of all remnants of
plant and animal life, 33 hinges, I suggest, on the valorization of a particular contextually and historically bound ideal
of the North European corporeality. The subtle racism inherent in the construction of a hairless and spiritually
transparent body joins forces with the overt speciesism that pits plants and animals, taken to be aspects of “petrified
nature,” against the living logic of spirit. Nowhere is the imbrication of racism and speciesism more obvious than it is in
Philosophy of Nature, where, in the course of discussing the role of light in the development of the vegetal self, Hegel
remarks: “The externality of the subjective, self like unity of the plant is objective in its relation to light…Man fashions
himself in more interior fashion, although in southern latitudes he, too, does not reach the stage where his self, his
freedom, is objectively guaranteed.” 34 To those familiar with Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history such
statements will not sound shocking: in the South, Hegel believes, the fashioning of human subjectivity is quite plant-
like, largely determined by light, and, therefore, neglectful of subjective interiority. In turn, those who are externally
determined are not free; heteronomous beings—a category that, in Hegel, encompasses the entire kingdom of plants
and humans “in southern latitudes”—do not contain the principle of their activity within themselves and fail to set
themselves up in opposition to their environment as purposeful subjects. As a consequence of dialectical cunning, the
human and the plant cease to be monolithic concepts : beneath the veneer of empathy with the North European ideal
of man, Hegel implies, lies the shared mode of being of plants and human beings living in the global South . Just as,
preferring the hour of dusk and inner luminosity, dialectical thought shies away from the external light, to which the
plant tends, so the Hegelian system as a whole negates the immediacy of life, elevating physical vitality to the level of
spiritual existence. Dialectical empathy with the plant becomes possible on the condition that vegetal beings make a
transition from merely living things to symbols animated by culture; a dried flower turns into the medium, wherein
Geist can finally recognize itself. In a letter dated “July 17, 1797,” Hegel invokes a garland of dry fl owers offered to him
as a sign of friendship “that unites parted friends”. “The fl owers are of course dry,” he writes, “and life has vanished
from them. But what on earth is a living thing if the spirit of man does not breathe life into it? What is speechless but
that to which man does not lend his speech?” 35 More precisely, the dead fl owers turn into a double medium, an
outlet, first, for empathy with the other (the missing friend) who is also pained by the separation and, second, for
selfrecognition in an element of nature transformed through human activity . Dialectically speaking, dry fl owers
preserved as a memento are more living The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy 271 (living qualitatively differently,
better, more intensely, more authentically) than those growing in a fi eld; the trees chopped down to create space for a
new highway and made into furniture lead a spiritual afterlife ensured by the fact that “the spirit of man” has breathed
life into them. Empathy with merely living things would, conversely, betoken an unmediated attempt at an emotional
penetration into nature, in other words, something of a regression from the dialectical point of view. Spirit’s ingress into
the domain of its other (nature, wherein it does not yet recognize itself) is such that it productively destroys, through
rational activity, whatever it touches—a task that empathy accomplishes at the level of affect by negating alterity
conceived by analogy with the empathizer. Dialectical empathy with the plant circumvents such immediacy by
incorporating the dead flower into the mediately living spirit and vicariously endowing this fl ower, combined with
others like it in a garland, with spirit’s depth, inner life, and universal meaning . Affect itself is synthesized with reason
when what elicits it is a product of human activity, be it as insignifi cant as the dry fl ower preserved as a reminder of
an absent friend. The price paid for dialectical empathy is of course steep, since it demands that natural life be
extinguished before getting rekindled in the higher regions of spirit . Similar to other metaphysical currents in
philosophy, Hegelian dialectics construes the floral world as ontologically impoverished, lacking in X (be it
consciousness, sentience, autonomy, or animation ), and as a seat, simultaneously, of empirical excess and
transcendental deficiency to be compensated for by dialectical re-birth. The metaphysical recognition of the human in
the plant is conditioned by this construal: the plant is a defective animal, a being in which humans detect everything
they are not or, better yet, everything they do not wish to be. The splitting and repression of those aspects of
humanity that do not live up to the ideal construct “man” precede the projection of these very aspects onto vegetal
life in a cross-species psychological transference. Empathy—an offshoot of our domination over and violation of
ourselves— thus assumes two forms: on the one hand, it stands for a negative and unconscious acknowledgement of
what we do not want to be, what we have expelled from our midst and attributed to the vegetal othe r ; on the other
hand, it signifies a last-ditch attempt to “feel into” what we are not supposed to feel, to reconnect, in a quasi-
Feuerbachian fashion, with the disavowed features of humanity projected onto non-human existence. In any event,
empathy serves exclusively human subjects, who rely on it to construct their ideal selves or to retrieve alienated
features of their own existence. If one is to imagine an ethics of plants, then empathy, with its implicit self-referentiality
and narcissism, needs to be non-dialectically overcome.

This mode of anti-plant metaphysics causes violence and extinction

Marder and Viera 13 [Michael and Patricia, Writing Phytophilia: Philosophers and Poets as Lovers of Plants]
The uneasy predicament of Western philosophy, which has, since the nineteenth century, had forebodings of its
imminent end, resonates with the current global environmental crisis. The so-called “natural resources” are being
exhausted in parallel with the reserves of metaphysics, already proclaimed depleted by Friedrich Nietzsche and
Martin Heidegger. The spring of abstract theories, vying to explain the true nature of reality, dries up and inaugurates
the epoch of nihilism, technologism, and technocracy roughly at the same time as global warming, deforestation,
desertification, and the loss of biodiversity reach the point of no return . But, while metaphysics may survive in the
mode of a monotonous self-iteration, ecosystems have no such luxury at their disposal, since the very metaphysical
mindset that is now reaching a point of exhaustion has contributed to a dramatic reduction in their capacity for self-
renewal. In a quest for all-encompassing conceptual systems, philosophers have forgotten the ecology of thought, as
much as the ecology of the physical environments they are a part of. In effect, they have grown oblivious to themselves qua philosophers, or the
lovers of wisdom, to the extent that they have seen their mission in the possession and control of immutable truth. Only by reneging on its philosophical vocation

could metaphysics justify and undersign the conversion of plants and animals into raw materials at the disposal of
humans. Wisdom, sophia, ceased to be the errant object of love, after which its lover was in a hot pursuit, for instance, in the Socratic dialogues . It became, instead, a
matter of appropriation and secure possession, betraying the lover’s intermediate position between knowledge and
ignorance. Sophia was buried under the monumental categories of metaphysics, ideally exempt from the exigencies
of transformation, movement, and growth. The inorganic constancy of true being dogmatically superseded the plant- and animal-like evanescence of wisdom .
The metaphysicians’ conceptual allergy to growth explains the slanderous qualities they have ascribed to the growing
beings par excellence, namely to plants. With very few exceptions, metaphysical philosophers have not been
phytophiles (lovers of plants), and so were incapable of loving being as a whole. Aristotle’s student Theophrastus was excluded from the Western
canon for the painstaking botanical researches he undertook in De Causis Plantarum and De Historia Plantarum . Two millennia after that, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, who admired Theophrastus as “the only botanist of antiquity” (Reveries 72), embraced philosophical
phytophilia. Rousseau did not resort to this neologism, though he called the children of Madam Delessert, with whom he kept ongoing correspondence on the subject of botany,
“botanophiles” (Collected Writings VIII: 150). In a letter to de Latourette, dated 17 December 1769, he applied the same designation to himself (Collected Writings VIII: 216). Rousseau’s
Reveries, along with his botanical texts—comprised of a wealth of letters, fragments for a dictionary, and so forth—, are certainly less known than his other works, such as The Social
Contract, the two Discourses, or The Confessions. Recently, Alexandra Cook has masterfully contextualized these seemingly marginal writings within the rest of the philosopher’s body of
work and pointed out their place on the scientific scene of the eighteenth century. Our goal, in turn, is to show that these
rather fragmentary discussions of
botany can function as a conceptual laboratory for phytophilia. From the outset, let it be clear that Rousseau’s love of
plants is not the product of a naïve yearning to abolish the distance that separates humanity, corrupted by
civilization, from nature. As Jacques Derrida argues in Of Grammatology, for Rousseau, whom he groups with the rest of Western metaphysicians,
signification and representation are the supplements of presence, which they actually constitute, investing it with
meaning (167). As such, these supplements could be trimmed down or brought back in touch with their purportedly natural
foundations but never completely eliminated. What is at stake in all of Rousseau’s works is a meticulous calibration of
(minimal but altogether irreducible) distances between presence and representation, nature and civilization,
knowledge and ignorance. His phytophilia is an integral part of this endeavor that rebuffs, on the one hand, the
metaphysical instrumentalization of the flora and, on the other, its fetishizing mystification.

Humanity encounters itself and only itself everywhere it looks. Absent a challenge to absolute
human mastery, legal duties for AI merely locks in a dream of divine perfection achieved through
technology. The affirmative inculcates a supercapitalist power replicates the worst forms of
technological domination.
Featherstone 10 (Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, “Death-Drive America: On Scott Wilson’s
Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age of Supercapitalism,” Fast Capitalism 7.1, 2010)//ML
**edited for gendered language

Despite the dire warnings of the prophets of technological dystopia such as Heidegger we remain unable to really conceive of the value of organic life vis-à-vis
the vitality of technology because we are infused by the spirit of the machine that has no purpose beyond the endless
reproduction of its most basic function to work. As Kroker (2003) illustrates in his The Will to Technology, the prophets of the technological future, such as Marx, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, understood that the machine, which is transformed into Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine in Wilson’s work, has no thought, philosophy,

or reason. It simply works for the sake of working and ensuring that it continues to works in the future . In Kroker’s view this
image of what Deleuze and Guattari call the mecanosphere was predicted by Marx, who advanced the notion of circulation , Nietzsche, who
made the idea of the will central to this thought , and Heidegger, who linked Marx to Nietzsche in his theory of completed technological nihilism

that simply wills the will that wills itself and so on . However, we know that this is not the end of the story. Akin to Kroker (2006), who shows that the closed circle
of completed nihilism produces a mythical resurrection effect that pushes a primitive God who hires and fires and sort
winners from losers centre stage , Wilson explains that the total expansion of the supercapitalist war machine through the various scalings of global space-time produces a utopian moment of
convulsive pleasure comparable to the mystical union with an omniscient tech-no God for a post-Nietzschean nihilistic universe . This is a truly apocalyptic event in Wilson’s view because the

sensation of anorganic mechanistic joy is the product of the realization of a ghoulish utopia-dystopia of total control or over-
determination which sees the supercapitalist machine start to threaten the elimination of organic life itself in favor of a
new brand of post-organic cybernetic life that does not suffer from any of the imperfections or malfunctions of its organic
predecessor. In this situation the war function and the state function of supercapitalism are merged in the form of a violent
control mechanism set on over-determining organic life by transforming it into code that can easily flow through the
imaginary body of the globalized communications network in quantums that are equivalent to both basic financial and
telecommunications data. Under these conditions, where organic life itself is under threat from the spirit of technology, we have entered the realm of Agamben’s (1998)
state of exception where there is no rule of law, but that made by those in executive power who manage the endless unfolding of the
supercapitalist machine . For Wilson (2008a), we are currently living in the Americanized supercapitalist state of technological
second nature where we are totally exposed to the coding mechanisms of state powe r. In Agamben’s work this means that the liberal
individual is completely open to construction through discourse and that they can, therefore, easily be reduced to a state of
bare life by stripping away their legal identity. However, Wilson’s postmodern, surrealistic, take on the significance of the new coding technologies of the supercapitalist
state takes this Foucauldian theory a step further . In his view, the contemporary supercapitalist empire, which is in the process of
reducing everything and everybody to the status of code, deconstructs and reconstructs the individual as either normal or pathological
on the basis of their sociological and biological identity that flows through the globalized communication network as
streamed data. At this point the individual , who has already been reduced to the status of a quantum of economic power by the
Hobbesian / Lockean logic of the supercapitalist system, is totally surveilled by the normalizing power structures implicit
in the Americanized global communication network . In many respects this vision of a total system that covers every conceivable
scaling on the planet, reaching from the global level of networked communications to the micro-biological level of individual genetic
code, represents Foucauldian (2008) biopower in its ultimate form. What the contemporary American supercapitalist war machine achieves through the
the complete immersion of humanity into a technological coding system that simply works by endlessly circulating
reduction of the individual to digital data is

information. The difference between this Americanized biopolitical machine and what Roberto Esposito (2008) calls the archetypal biocracy of modernity,

Nazism, is that the Nazi machine was never able to globalize its model of normality and pathology because its central
mechanism for reducing humanity to the status of bare life , the camp, remained at an experimental level that required the relatively primitive
industrial production of corpses, rather than the system we live with today which creates postindustrial postmodern Muslims or muselmänner through the reduction of humanity

to the status of code. In this respect Nazism was nowhere near as effective in achieving the normalization of humanity as the
contemporary American supercapitalist machine because its mechanism for creating robotic [humans] relied on brutal violence and the

systematic humiliation of the embodied human. We know that the American system sometimes slips back into the same logic , because we have all
seen the images from Abu Ghraib, but these kind of events represent a primitive or, in Wilson’s Lacanian language, real form of punishment that the supercapitalist war machine would

prefer to avoid where possible, simply because it understands that surveillance and normalization through data is a far more
effective means of ensuring that humanity is perfectly streamed through the channels of technological mecanosphere than ritual humiliation ever could. However,
the supercapitalist machine is not a static system that simply turns over endlessly because the effect of the closure of

mechanical circuit is the production of a new mythological subject that functions to make the process of total
robotization bearable. What this means is that somewhere in the realization of the total technological system, where the global scale is the micro scale of data that streams across the smooth spaces of
the world communication network, we encounter the real end of history in the emergence of a kind of metaphysical temporal loop , which

connects the contemporary supercapitalist machine to ancient cosmological notions of the micro-macrocosm that showed how man was intimately related to the universe, and, as a consequence, the violent

closure of the circuit of history running from ancient Greece to postmodern America, with the result that humanity is
thrown back into prehistory and mythology.

Voting negative constitutes an ethical embrace of phytocentrism – expand the definition of

planthood, not personhood
Marder 14 [Michael Marder For a Phytocentrism to Come]
In a fight against the nefarious legacy of anthropocentrism, the advantage of phytocentrism over the alternatives is in
how it interferes with the all absorbing projection of the anthropos onto the horizons of the world. The insidiousness
of anthropocentrism is due not so much to its conflation of human exceptionalism and human superiority (Boddice 2011, 7) as to the inflation of the
human as the measure and standard for other forms of existence. Can we ever rid ourselves of this deep anthropocentric bias? After all, we perceive
and reflect upon our surroundings from the zero-point of our sentient bodies, literally situated at the center of each individual world we both inhabit and construct. In lectures on nature,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty crisply expresses this idea within the context of his phenomenology of the body: “ the idea of a Rechtgrund is established in us, from
which all knowledge will be formed. I could then displace the norms, but the idea of norm has been founded by my
body. The Absolute in the relative is what my body brings to me” (2003, 75). Our living bodies themselves, of course, are far from being entirely
human; aside from the vegetal capacity for growth that permeates them, they are home to hundreds of microbial
cultures, cross-species genetic material, and so forth. We cannot help but anthropomorphize (and, in anthropomorphizing,
normalize) even these aggregates we call “our bodies,” however. And, from the contrived center of existence, we act to transfigure and to

disfigure every single being we encounter into a wanting reflection of ourselves. In the uphill battle against anthropocentrism, it is thus
necessary (1) to allow for the cross-species and cross-kingdoms relativity of experiences, values, or norms, and (2) to
produce an estranging effect, whereby humans would no longer be able to recognize deficient versions of themselves
in other kinds of creatures. Phytocentrism responds to both of these desiderata by valorizing the perspective of the
plants themselves (as well as the values binding together all “growing beings”) and by short-circuiting the system of
anthropocentric self-recognition. It carves out a niche between a biocentric dissolution of human difference in the environment and a zoocentric privileging of sentient
existence, which does little by way of interfering with the dynamics of our recognition in the animal other. At the cognitive level, this carefully calibrated self-

estrangement results in the “greening of consciousness.” While human bodies are the composites of human and non-
human matter, our consciousness is not entirely our own either. With our brain, we get “three-for-the-price-of-one”:
a combination of reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian complexes, the last of which is limited to the
thinnest outer layer of the neocortex. As for consciousness, this catalogue does not do justice to a still more
fundamental, “green,” or vegetal stratum. The list of precursors to a phytocentric paradigm of thought includes, among others, Plotinus, Avicenna, and more
recently, Scheler and Hans Jonas. In the Enneads, Plotinus theorizes the mind immanent in life, the One dispersed into different forms of vitality in growth, sensation, and abstract thought:
“the other lives are thoughts in a way, but one is a growth-thought [phutiké noesis], one a sense-thought, and one a
soul-thought. How, then, are they thoughts? Because they are rational principles [logoi]. And every life is a thought,
but one is dimmer than another” (III.8.8, 10–20). Growth-thought names the thinking of plants, since phuton, as we know, signifies both “plant” and “growth.” The
Plotinian scope of respect for rational principles is therefore incomparably broader than that in Kantian philosophy: it
spells out respect for the multifarious human and nonhuman forms of life that embody these principles . Avicenna’s
contributions to the greening of consciousness are the corollaries of the vegetal faculties, which he finds in the spheres of human perception and thinking. In The Canon, he likens the
“natural forces” organized by the nutritive faculty, alongside the augmentative and generative faculties, to mental processes. To wit, the force of attraction is equivalent to perception;
retention is memory; transformative power belongs to cogitation; the force of expulsion corresponds to expression; the augmentative faculty is translatable into the acquisition of
knowledge; and the generative faculty is tied to inventiveness and creativity (Avicenna 1973, 112 ).
Well in advance of Spinoza’s Ethics, physical processes
and the tendencies of “the lowest” soul are interpreted as modes of thinking wholly under the sway of matter,
unfiltered through the purifying machinations of (abstract) thought. By absorbing and retaining water and solar
radiation, the plant “perceives” and “remembers” the liquid and sunlight; by growing, it acquires the “knowledge” of
its environment, exploring the locale’s most beneficial, resource-rich niches; by reproducing itself, it invents, each
time anew, its genus. . . . And, vice versa, humans “think” by way of eating, drinking, and expelling the byproducts of
nourishing substances, by growing and by having children, though more rarified types of thought are available to them, as well. In the philosophy of
Scheler, vegetal processes epitomize the “lowest level of the psychic world.” The category, which Scheler deems appropriate to these processes, is

Drang, or impulsion, “devoid of consciousness, sensation, and representation ” (2009, 7). Specifically, the movements of growth toward light
and away from other stimuli are “modes of impulsion,” while “[w]hat are called ‘drives’ in animals appear in plants only as a general impulsion toward growth and reproduction” (2009, 8).
The comparison of vegetal Drang and animal Trieb (drive), also made in the writings of Henri Bergson, is telling, because
it is more than a comparison: there is a sense that the drives are the modification of the exterior impulsion and,
moreover, that thoughts are further alterations of the drive that has been wholly or partly interiorized or unreleased.
Although Scheler refuses to group vegetal psychic processes together with consciousness, his argument implies that the latter is rooted in this “dark” region of intentional life. The

practice of the “greening of consciousness,” gleaned above, is both intellectual and ethical; it teases out the
derivation of human identity from a repressed phyto-logical source and, in doing so, urges us to acknowledge the
invisible debt we owe to plant life. From a phytocentric standpoint, consciousness is not reducible to the powers of
abstract representation but is coterminous with a material orientation of life to its goals that vary together with the
temporalities and perspectives of the living. This is the case in Jonas’s phenomenology of life, where the forward-looking, future-oriented trajectory of living is
already evident at the cellular level of metabolism (Jonas 1966, 83ff).7 The metabolic milieu is never a neutral field of chemical and mechanical

reactions but one imbued with subjective significance. Admittedly, the crypto-phytocentrism of this phenomenology
has its limitations: similar to Scheler, who did not grant the possibility of consciousness to plants, Jonas dismisses the
thesis that plants have a world, preferring the composite “plantenvironment,” which “consists of adjacent matter and
impinging forces” (1966, 183). But despite this dismissal (and, again, like Scheler), he gestures toward a grounding of phenomenology, including that of time-consciousness, in the
material conditions of life, notably in the nutritive faculty, which has been since Aristotle associated with plants . The greening of consciousness cannot proceed

without a vegetalization of the phenomenological world. Neither these prolegomena nor phytocentrism itself are in
the business of churning up determinate principles for ethical action. The stability and originary status of a principle
are foreign to the philosophy of “growing beings.” But this is not to say that there can be no ethics informed by the precepts of phytocentrism. Such an ethics
would promote flourishing communities of growth, cross-species and cross-kingdoms. It would problematize not so much the biotechnological

interference with the genetic make-up of plants, animals, and, increasingly, humans, but the biotechnologies’ politico-
economic framing that puts them squarely in the service of capital . In effect, the growth of capital is inversely
proportional to the flourishing fostered by phytocentrism . Genetically modified crops are often robbed of their ownmost reproductive capacity, deprived
of plasticity in fighting diseases, and denied an organic interaction with insects; sterilized and rendered sterile, they are, first, the pure means for the self-

reproduction of capital and, second, the materials for biofuel or ingredients in a diet that increasingly looks like a
refueling of animal and human organismic machines . In response to these trends, phytocentrism does not,
nostalgically and naïvely, romanticize the labor-intensive agriculture of old, but rather insists that the wellbeing of
plant, animal, and human species is of one piece, inseparable from the how of their growth A phytocentric dietary ethics would be
inseparable from a more ethical agro-practice spurning the production and reproduction of vegetal life as a whole in the service of the reproduction of capital . Growth depends

on metabolism—not only within plants, or within animal and human organisms, but also between species and
biological kingdoms—and therefore on the active attribution of phenomenological significance to certain aspects of
the lived environment. Labor is an example of such attribution or, as Marx once wrote, the metabolic exchange between humans and
nature, their inorganic body. Phytocentrism is a trans-human, vegetally inflected, communism. More pertinently, plants are
at the same time the objects of animal and human metabolic intentionality and intentional subjects in and of
themselves. The dilemma that arises from this acknowledgment is parallel to the Kantian split between
transcendental the empirical subjectivities. As autotelic growing beings, plants deserve to be respected; as unavoidable foodstuffs, they can be used for external
purposes. A phytocentric dietary ethics will have to negotiate these polarities by ensuring that plants are not rendered

completely instrumental for the satisfaction of our needs.

 QT K: GMU BP

this form of analysis encourages folks to draw a line between the human and the non-nonhuman
and regularizes the practices of human monitoring. This requires us to make a category called the
human that has boxes people have to fill to qualify as a human. We tell the human monitors to look
for an arbitrary “correct” socialization, and ability, while encouraging people for perform a model
of doing-being-human even though that model was made to be exclusionary. How do we make
determinations on human-ness when the model itself is not accessible
Titchkosky 14 [Titchkosky, Tanya. Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto, Canada.  “Monitoring Disability: The Question of the ‘Human’ in Human Rights
Projects.” Disability, Human Rights and the Limits of Humanitarianism. 1st ed. Taylor & Francis, 2014. 131–132. Web. lnl]
Undoubtedly, the number and types of people who are locatable within the confines of the human are changing. However, the confines of what it means to be human might not be. I am not
suggesting that it is not ‘reasonable’, especially under bureaucratic rule, to ensure there are distinctions made between a functional or health limitation, and societal forms of discrimination.
I am, however, suggesting that through this highly accepted and expected advancement of human rights monitoring, people are being
trained to draw the human/non-human divide as a regularized practice that serves to make the monitor perceive, and
even appear as, the category human. Human will do in order to be. In the case of disability, this version of human requires
holding on to the possibility that there is some kernel of non-human, some functional limitation or health condition that is not
social; some part of an individual’s life that is not more than merely biological; some problem thing that ‘we’ who belong
to the human community need to be seen as able to recognize and cordon off. Disability becomes the limit case par
excellence and is made to signify (yet, again) not-life, not-human. This is the individual that bares a ‘useless difference ’ and is regarded by
individuals, and even by the courts, as ‘already dead’ (Michalko 2002; Razack 2011). Returning to Ellison’s opening statement, the problem is not ‘prophecy’ – the
problem is not how better to draw the dividing lines between body and society, biology and culture, disability and
person, natural exclusion and injustice. The problem is not the need for better definitions, systems, and technologies for
deciphering the kernel of non-human hidden within humanity. The problem is not even that we feel so compelled to
continue to draw and monitor such lines or that we have taken this as the only hope, within the current system, for the
protection of persons with disabilities. The problem is this: we have an unexamined conception of human to which
instances of disability are subject and against which disability is judged that is not under the same systems of
discernment as are the actual people perceived as disabled. There is still a version of the human-being that needs human-
doing and this may be inescapable. After all, how can we extract ourselves from the fact that ‘human’ is not a product of nature? It is likely that the category of human has always needed
its imagined limit in the face of which it can achieve its own self-recognition (Butler 1997, 15). But this does not mean that the very thing so essential to the system of human rights – namely,
human(e) discernment – cannot be turned to face the monitoring systems themselves as an imaginative way to remake
this essentially functionalist version of the human-being as always a human-doing . The ultimate horror may be that the human category is
human made and yet it is so difficult to forge any associations with a need to remake it otherwise than the same. If there is any truth in the above analysis, it might suggest that there is a
further inequality of concern: Is
it humane to ask those least likely to be included into the human community to perform the task of
drawing the lines of inclusion, thus doing-being-human in the face of all those who already count as human beings? Is it
time to expand this task and even the scope of a collective interest in it? A radical humanism might seek to show how all people are affiliated with the horror of a taken-for-granted version
of human and thus are also affiliated with the suffering of needing to re-make a focus on inclusion mechanisms into a focus on the question of the category of the human itself. Is it time, as
Said suggests, to embark on the universal task of remaking the human? The
human rights monitoring programs are certainly committed to including
the historically excluded into the category of the human . But, can this commitment also include the task of re-making the category human itself, thus making
for a more humane humanity? Perhaps a more humane humanity can be won if we expand our sense not only of who should be included into the category human while monitoring

infractions; but also address the place of monitoring humans in our human made world . Wondering about human in and through ‘rights boundary
work’ might allow us to approach the divisive category of human and reconsider the confines of the human we have already made ourselves to be.
and I guess that’s why I am standing here today because people think that as long as they ask us to
teach them about legal personhood then maybe we will feel included but…how are we supposed to
do that? How are two people who aren’t EVEN viewed as human supposed to explain to others
about how to grant legal personhood to other things? And if we were never even intended to
understand the basics, how are we supposed to be able to understand it well enough to debate it?
If the answer is something along the lines of an assumed basic the understanding or fiated general
knowledge than we have failed as an educational activity because it proves that even our
hypothetical environments are un-inclusive and unattainable
we must move towards queer disabled inhumanism as a practice of interconnectedness, that
accounts for unique intricacies of how precarity is forced onto the other, and constitutes an
unsettling and deregulation of hierarchies of humanness
Luciano and Chen 15 [Dana Luciano Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women's & Gender
Studies at Rutgers University, where she teaches queer studies, 19th century US literatures, and environmental
humanities. She received her PhD in English, with certificates in Women's Studies and LGBT Studies, from Cornell
University. and Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Sexual
CulturePreviously, they served as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and the
Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University "Project MUSE," Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human 6-2015, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/581599/summary?
casa_token=AiPJLO_Ru58AAAAA:TjwMfERxJi5VoTdBpjqNfPRDaYK4AwqqXPIJxxfEjqUS36JCIsRoO0MA0J1Pt-
nWe2WM3trdKA, tri]

The query that launched our work on this special issue, “Queer Inhumanisms,” was a simple one: has the queer ever
been human? At a moment when scholars are grappling with the question of whether humanity has a future, we were
drawn toward the question of its queer pasts. Many of queer theory’s foundational texts interrogate, implicitly or
explicitly, the nature of the “human” in its relation to the queer, both in their attention to how sexual norms
themselves constitute and regulate hierarchies of humanness, and as they work to unsettle those norms and the
default forms of humanness they uphold. Anzaldúa viewed dehumanization as an opportunity to reconstruct what it
means to be human. The humanity of her New Mestiza is not rigid, bounded, and pure but flexible, multiple, and fluid,
composed not only of different identities but different entities, different materialities. For Anzaldúa, we are multiple
not only symbolically but, as Mikko Tuhkanen observes, biologically, ontologically, spatiotemporally: as Anzaldúa
writes, “You’re all the different organisms and parasites that live on your body and also the ones who live in a
symbiotic relationship to you. . . . So who are you? You’re not one single entity. You’re a multiple entity.”15 In the same
year that saw the publication of Anzaldúa’s landmark Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Leo Bersani, in
“Is the Rectum a Grave?,” also challenged the ideal of the bounded individual, the integral “self,” which he viewed as a
potential license for violence. Opposing attempts to redeem sex, he proposed, instead, that we allow sex to become
what we most fear, a site for the “breakdown of the human itself.”16 Sex, that is, was valuable precisely as it did
violence to the human as violent form, as it shattered the idealized self. Monique Wittig’s provocative 1978 assertion
that lesbians are not women because of their nonparticipation in the regulatory schemes that uphold heterosexualized
gender was extended, in a 1991 essay by Cathy Griggers, to the contention that the lesbian body exemplified the
machinic or cyborgian condition of the (post)human body.17 Sandy Stone’s 1991 “posttransexual” provocation asserted
that “the disruptions of the old patterns of desire that the multiple dissonances of the transsexual body imply” worked
to produce “a myriad of alterities, whose unanticipated juxtapositions hold what Donna Haraway has called the
promises of monsters—physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible
representation.”18 And in their introduction to the 1995 collection Posthuman Bodies, Judith Halberstam and Ira
Livingston observed, “Sexuality is a dispersed relation between bodies and things. . . . What is bodily about sex? What is
sexual about sex? What is gendered?”19 In these formulations and others, the figure of the queer/trans body does not
merely unsettle the human as norm; it generates other possibilities—multiple, cyborgian, spectral, transcorporeal,
transmaterial—for living.20 More recent queer scholarship amplifies these efforts to chart the damage done by the
human as norm and to alter or replace it as form. In Aberrations in Black (2004), for instance, Roderick Ferguson
extends the interrogation of the “human” as a technology of racialization (a question taken up by Frantz Fanon,
Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and others) to show how black subjects’ citizenship, morality, and even humanity is
made dependent on their submission to sexual regulation.21 Analyses of queer temporality examines the part that
various time schemes played in the production of the human and its subhuman and inhuman others. Lee Edelman, in
No Future, outlines sexuality, the site of the meaningless, mechanistic, and inhuman drive, as implacably opposed to the
optimistic futural narratives developed on behalf of the sentimentalized Child.22 Edelman’s call to “insist on enlarging
the inhuman” instead of demanding recognition as humans is taken up in a different critical register by Elizabeth Grosz.
For Grosz, the inhuman is not posited in opposition to the human but issues from the proliferation of difference : the
“inhuman work of difference [is] the ways in which difference stretches, 188 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY
STUDIES transforms, and opens up any identity to its provisional vicissitudes, its shimmering self-variations that enable it
to become other than what it is.”23 Departing from the inhuman, Jasbir Puar, in Terrorist Assemblages, considers the
construction of the unhuman as a tactic of control society. Extending the unlegal, rather than illegal, status of the
detainee, Puar speculates on the withdrawal, rather than regulation, of identity categories and other markers of
legibility from these bodies, rendering them unintelligible as humans.24 The unhuman takes its place as one exemplar
of the biopolitical shift from disciplinary to control society, as power works increasingly through the permeation of
material bodies, instead of through discrete, identity-marked subjects legible against a standard of humanity. The
increasing urgency of ecological and climatological damage has also pushed many queer critics to move past what
Stacy Alaimo describes as a longstanding reluctance to appeal to “nature,” partly because both “nature and ‘the
natural’ have long been waged against homosexuals, as well as women, people of color, and indigenous peoples.”25
As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson contend in their introduction to the collection Queer Ecologies,
queer environmental thought might begin precisely from the conjunction of an idealized “nature” as a tool to discipline
sexual and gender dissidents, and the debasement and exploitation of material nature.26 Queer ecocriticism also takes
up an understanding of ecology as naming not the idea of the “natural world” as something set apart from humans but a
complex system of interdependency. Hence, as Tavia Nyong’o argues, ecology offers an apt framing for “the
environment of countercultural communal life, musicking, and polymorphous sexuality,” such as that developed in
Samuel R. Delany’s 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast.27 Delany’s speculative fiction, along with that of Octavia Butler,
Larissa Lai, Joanna Russ, and many others, has long served as a rich source of queer posthumanist provocation, a site
for imagining other, possibly queerer, worlds. As Nyong’o demonstrates, though, a queerly materialist reframing of
ecotheory can also enable us to discover those worlds within our own. The question of whether the queer, for queer
theory, has ever been human must, then, be answered, not equivocally but deliberately, yes and no. Yes, because this
sustained interrogation of the unjust dehumanization of queers insistently, if implicitly, posits the human as standard
form, and also because many queer theorists have undeniably privileged the human body and human sexuality as the
locus of their analysis. But no because queer theory has long been suspicious of the politics of rehabilitation and
inclusion to which liberal-humanist values lead, and because “full humanity” has never been the only horizon for queer
becoming. We might see the “yes/no” humanity of the queer less as an ambivalence about the human as status than as
a queer transversal of the category. The queer, we could say, runs across or athwart the human. As Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick reminds us, “The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also
yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart.”28 To say that queer transverses the
human is to understand their relation as contingent rather than stable: it needs to be read up from particular
situations, not proclaimed from above. Our hope, in this special issue, is to set the two terms of our title—“Queer
Inhumanisms”—both alongside and athwart one another. “Queer Inhumanisms,” that is, does not declare an identity
so much as it stages an encounter, one that seeks to discover what each of its terms might do to the other. The
encounter with the inhuman expands the term queer past its conventional resonance as a container for human sexual
nonnormativities, forcing us to ask, once again, what “sex” and “gender” might look like apart from the
anthropocentric forms with which we have become perhaps too familiar. At the same time, the deliberate twist given
the reclaimed epithet “queer” in late twentieth-century queer activism and analysis— the way it gestures, at once,
toward a history of abuse and marginalization and an aspirational expansiveness—prompts us to recall two inflections of
“inhuman,” the dynamic sense that Grosz employs and the one that invokes indifference and brutality. The scholarship
presented in this issue travels between these two inflections, keeping in mind both the promise and the costs of the call
to move “beyond” the human. This special issue emerges at a moment that is witnessing a broadbased shift across the
humanities and social sciences affecting both objects and methods—a shift that is coming to be known as “the
nonhuman turn.”29 The phrase points to an increasing tendency to question our automatic recourse to the human as
both the center of our analysis and the ground of any epistemology. Areas of thought usually associated with the
nonhuman turn include affect studies, assemblage theory, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, actor-
network theory, techno-posthumanism, animal studies, environmental studies and ecocriticism, and the new
materialisms.30 These widely disparate domains all share a conviction that the “human” (at least as traditionally
conceived) has unjustly dominated and unduly limited the horizon of critical thought, even in the work of structuralist
and post-structuralist thinkers who sought to de-emphasize the centrality of human agency and intentionality. For
despite their identification as antihumanist, both structuralism and post-structuralism (often designated as the
“linguistic” and “cultural” turns, respectively remained, in the view of many thinkers associated with the nonhuman
turn, irredeemably anthropocentric insofar as they privileged (human) epistemology over ontology, language over
matter, “representation” over “realism.” “The human,” in this body of work, is usually associated with the
Enlightenment subject, C. B. MacPherson’s possessive individual, and/or “Man” as glossed in Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things: he is rational, bounded, integral, sovereign, and self-aware. This is the figure to whom rights and
citizenship are granted; this is the default figure that grounds and personifies norms of behavior, ability, and health; this
is the figure around which we ordinarily construct notions of political and social agency.31 Posthumanism and other
anthro-decentric modes of thought extend the critique of this figure outlined by twentieth-century antihumanisms.32
Alongside this normative and masculinized sense of the “human,” through, we want to point to two other inflections of
the term. The first is an affective one: the often-feminized subject of sympathy, defined by the capacity for emotional
attachment to others. To be “human,” in this sense, is to feel for others, to love and to grieve and to respond to the
suffering of others. This mode of humanness, aligned with the ideal of humaneness, grounds most liberal and
sentimental appeals to justice as a way to remediate damage.33 This figure of the human is less bounded than the first;
indeed, its function has often been to make tolerable the damage inflicted by possessive individualism. Yet while a
certain openness is demanded of “humanity” in this guise, it must still be effectively self-regulated, limited in scope and
function—and hence, although it is frequently rendered as feminine, it remains as normatively white as the figure of
Man.34 In addition to this implicitly hetero-gendered pair, the cognitive-rational and the sympathetic-emotional figures
of the human, we note a third sense, one increasingly invoked in the context of climate change: that of the human as
species. Undergirded by evolutionary thought, the human as species is both aligned with and hierarchically
differentiated from other forms of life. Insofar as it appeals to biology and to processes of growth, habituation, and
reproduction, the sense of the human as species seems to manifest a more material connection between humans than
those established through emotional interdependence or cognitive similarity. For this reason, it offers both the idea of
an immutable, natural reality outside human control, cited, for example, in claims about competitiveness and violence
as founded in “human nature” or the prohibition of homosexuality as “unnatural,” and an evocation of unfolding, of
progressing, which has been taken up in numerous ways, from Karl Marx’s appeal to the “life of the species” as precisely
what is thwarted by capitalism to the visions of superiority (often based on white racial purity) devised by eugenicists.
The human as species, then, is both materially “here” (and hence vulnerable to “degeneration” or extinction) and
speculative, not yet “here.” This temporal duality obtains for the other forms of the human as well: they refer at once to
a putative “fact” of (human) nature, the way things are, and an ideal, a standard to aspire to, the way things should be. It
is this latter aspect of the “human” that has enabled it to become a resource for critique. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
points out, for instance, the work of decolonial critics such as Fanon, Wynter, and Aimé Césaire attends rigorously to the
gap between the figure of Western Man and the humanist ideal—a gap in which outrages like colonialism and slavery
loom large.35
Queer disabled inhumanism critiques locating the self in a category that all else is excluded from, it
stages an encounter with disciplinary humanism to reveal how it has been weaponized and has
become tethered to control societies. This is a mark of the nonhuman turn; it posits an expanded
political ecology as an effect of the attention to the agency of all matter. This denaturalization is its
own “transembodiment” that necessitates seeing imagination as a partner to materiality to
mediate the universality of the human locus
Luciano and Chen 15 continue [Dana Luciano Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women's &
Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she teaches queer studies, 19th century US literatures, and environmental
humanities. She received her PhD in English, with certificates in Women's Studies and LGBT Studies, from Cornell
University. and Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Sexual
CulturePreviously, they served as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and the
Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University "Project MUSE," Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human 6-2015, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/581599/summary?
casa_token=AiPJLO_Ru58AAAAA:TjwMfERxJi5VoTdBpjqNfPRDaYK4AwqqXPIJxxfEjqUS36JCIsRoO0MA0J1Pt-
nWe2WM3trdKA, tri]

Each of these inflections of “human” has been taken up, in recent anthrodecentric scholarship, in ways that elaborate
not simply a critique of old forms but an awareness of new frames. Analyses of neoliberalism show how fantasies of
possessive individualism and sovereign agency have worn thin in a new labor economy; theories of affect call attention
to the impersonal nature of affect, as opposed to the putatively personal implications of “emotion”; and critical
discussions of the commercialization of “life itself” illuminate the breaking down of beliefs in species individuality.36 In
this light, the nonhuman turn marks, for many critics, not a venture “beyond” the human but a new mode of critical
realism, a recognition that the nature of “reality” itself is changing as power moves away from the individual. The
emergence of what late-Foucauldian and Deleuzian critics frame as “control society,” they argue, requires a critical lens
capable of determining how, as Puar explains, “societies of control tweak and modulate bodies as matter,” rather than
as humans or subjects.37 Yet recognizing this, as Puar adds, does not mean wholly abandoning the ethical investments
and methodological frameworks that drove ostensibly “human-centered” fields of inquiry based in identity and social
location. Though the emergence of control society historically follows that of “disciplinary” society, the latter has not
been transcended; it remains not only copresent but deeply imbricated with the former. Hence the form of the
“human” remains with us partly as a means of disciplinary dehumanization and regulation, exclusion, and/or
marginalization, tactics that, as Puar points out, remain primary vectors of control for “some bodies—we can call them
statistical outliers, or those consigned to premature death, or those once formerly considered useless bodies or bodies
of excess.”38 The mattering of the body is not, then, inherently a posthuman condition, insofar as humanness and its
constitutive parts remain a material as well as ideological force. For other scholars, the ethical dimension of the
nonhuman turn is paramount. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, for instance, posits an expanded political ecology as the
effect of closer attention to the vitality and agency of all matter .39 For Bennett, refusing to acknowledge the vitality of
the nonhuman is not only shortsighted but ethically “wrong,” and making things right—“highlighting the common
materiality of all that is”—will both deflate the overblown human ego and open new possibilities for thought and
action.40 In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad argues that an understanding of agency as enacted or “intra-
active” rather than the property of any singular subject or object does not obscure but rather heightens human
accountability, developing a sense of responsibility that goes far beyond one’s individual “acts” to a recognition of
one’s agential entanglement in “the larger material arrangements of which ‘we’ are a ‘part.’ ”41 The ethical dimension
of the nonhuman turn also emphasizes the possibilities for anthrodecentric generativity. Barad insists on the
importance of “elaborating feminist and queer understandings of world-making where humans and nonhumans and
the divide between them are not hard-wired into political analyses.”42 José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of the
“brown commons” likewise opens a transmaterial space devoted to “a process of thinking, imagining otherwiseness.”
Deliberately minoritarian, defiantly queer, this “commons of brown people, places, feelings, sounds, animals, minerals,
flora and other objects” refutes the form of the individual in favor of “a movement, a flow, an impulse, to move
beyond the singular and individualized subjectivities .”43 The critics we have drawn from above, in order to explicate
the stakes of anthro-decentric thought as both a lens for critical realism and a mode of queer world-making, all share
critical orientations drawn from feminism, critical race studies, disability studies, and elsewhere. They are all set in
motion, that is, by particular forms of dissatisfaction with the way things are, often founded on histories of neglect,
oppression, or injury. This particularity calls attention to a tension between universalizing and locating impulses in
both anthro-decentric and queer thought, a tension that parallels the divergent senses of the reclaimed term queer
itself—as primarily a tool of incessant unsettling, restless refusal of all forms of identity, or as an extensible collection
or assemblage of overlapping and mutually imbricated forms of gendered, sexual, and other corporealized dissidence.
Muñoz’s brown commons specifically foregrounds the latter; the “sense of brownness” that bonds the commons is both
a history of damage and devaluation and a response thereto, a “smolder[ing] with . . . life and persistence.”44 This
emphasis on histories of damage is in keeping with one consistent provocation across the diffuse and multiple body of
work that we seek to name, imperfectly, by “queer theory”: its emergence as a response to precarity. Queer theories
grounded in woman and lesbian of color feminism, for instance, draw on thinkers who observed with Andre Lorde,
that their subjects were “never meant to survive.”45 The trajectory of queer theory that locates its origins in critical
response to the AIDS pandemic also necessarily understands queer survival as far from a given. (Indeed, as Neel Ahuja
observes in this volume, early queer-theoretical responses to AIDS, such as Bersani’s 1987 essay, prefigure
contemporary critical concerns with extinction.) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s oft-cited essay “Queer and Now” opens with
the assertion “I think that everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents.”46
Queer theory, then, emerges from an understanding of queer life as precarious life.47 We are not attempting, in
pointing to this history, to reserve queer theory for LGBTQI-identified people or topics. Nor are we insisting that queer
theory must always remain “faithful” to its moment of emergence; this, in our view, would hypostasize a living and lively
body of thought. Rather, we are marking a specific kind of situation—a desire to persist in the face of precarity—as the
primary catalyst for queer thought in general. That situation, moreover, is particularly generative for queer inhumanist
thought, since the intensification of precarity in particular contexts tends to push putatively “human” subjects to the
critical edge of that category. (It is therefore no accident, we think, that many of the most generative queer critiques of
the human have emerged from queer of color critique and transgender studies.) Queer ecology and many other queer
engagements with the nonhuman also emerge, in the contemporary context, as a response to precarity, as the effects
of climate crisis extend that condition to encompass all of humanity, and numerous other species as well. All life, we
might say, is now precarious life. For some, the global nature of the crisis points to a need to return to universalizing
frames of thought, producing demands for a species-based response even among thinkers historically suspicious of
universality.48 Similar claims resonate across many areas of thought associated with the nonhuman turn regardless of
their conscious alignment with climate questions, as though the post-post-structuralist identity of the turn necessitated
an impatience with or outright refusal of particularizing claims. Locatedness and historical specificity, privileged
grounds for poststructuralism, are complicated by the adjustments in scale said to be necessary to think beyond the
confines of the human. The inclination to vastness in much of this work—in particular, in speculative realism, object-
oriented ontology, and some new materialisms—leads some of its critics to designate it with terms like “the new cultural
geology” or “the new infinity.”49 This extrahuman vastness is complemented, Jordana Rosenberg argues, by a
hyperbolized attention to smallness, which they name the molecular. For Rosenberg, the ontological fascination with
“particulate matter” conflates an effect of power (the aforementioned penetrative operation of power in control
society) with a mode of resistance.50 Drawing on Andrea Smith’s scholarship, they suggest that its recent uptake in
queer theory reproduces and extends the problems associated with “subjectless critique,” which, as Muñoz, David Eng,
and J. Jack Halberstam explain, demands a “continuous deconstruction of the tenets of positivism at the heart of
identity politics.”51 Subjectless queer critique, in this sense, aligns itself with the aforementioned inflection of “queer”
as a tool of incessant unsettling. Yet as Smith points out, this insistence on unsettling may well mask the queer subject’s
status as a settler subject, as well as enable the covert retention of a normative whiteness.52 Recent critical attention to
matter and materiality, Rosenberg argues, extends Smith’s concerns as it installs the molecular as “the pre-eminent
‘subjectless subject” of ontologically-oriented theory.”53 Or, we might say, the nonhuman turn revives subjectlessness
as humanlessness. In this light, the palpable resistance by many critical race, feminist, and queer thinkers to
posthumanism and/or the nonhuman turn is not the effect of some recalcitrant or retrograde attachment to the
human. Rather, it illuminates a concern over the critically and politically limiting effects of much recent critical
insistence on the “positive,” of calls to turn away from “critique ” as such. If posthumanism, as Jackson suggests, fails
to examine the locations of its own appeals to universalism , it risks precisely the failures that Césaire identified over
half a century ago in a humanism covertly centered on the figure of Western Man.54 Charges that speculative thought,
in particular, has neglected generations’ worth of scholarship on gender, race, and sexuality have been partly answered
in the recent embrace of feminist and queer theory by object-oriented ontologists.55 Still, an uneven attention to race
and related axes of dehumanization persists in many of these fields of study, as several contributors to this special issue
remark. In light of this unevenness, recent appeals by some object-oriented and speculative thinkers to a limited range
of queer theorists in order to affirm the fundamental queerness of the nonhuman or the ecological may, ironically,
diminish the potential of speculative thought, insofar as the isolation of queerness from other contexts risks a form of
queer exceptionalism that is, as Puar shows, uncritically aligned with Western discourses of modernity and progress.56
Along with evading a certain critical responsibility, the distancing of social justice concerns based around race or gender
from thinking about the non- or posthuman (on the basis that these categories reinstall an “anthropocentric” point of
view) may well foreclose in advance some of the new formations that the nonhuman turn hopes to uncover. We cannot
determine in advance what qualities normally cited as “human” will turn out to have expanded purchase. For this
reason, we are wary of divorcing “queer” thought entirely from located histories of precarity, of reducing “queerness” to
simply a movement of thought, or of affirmation or negation. If we accept the framing of the nonhuman turn as a move
“beyond” the merely human concerns of identity and alterity, we overlook how the very possibility of making a
distinction between human and nonhuman has, historically, been constructed by the kind of actions and processes that
we have named dehumanization. Amid the contested valorizations of “new” and “old” materialisms, we must also
question whether consensus should or can be found in the very meanings and cosmological stations for that
multivariate concept going by the name of “human.” In an age of scientific modernity which both hollows out and
levels the “human,” an anticolonial understanding rejects unthought projections of the temporalized and geopolitical
hierarchies that sustain settler and other imperialisms today. A number of critiques have prepared us to be wary of a
presumptively universal “human” isolate from which a “beyond” or a “post” is possible, in part because of what is
ontologically transcribed into that universal human.57 Many indigenous thinkers, in particular, show that various
indigenous ontologies not only consider many “inanimate” entities to be alive, sentient, and agential, but also to have
relational capacity “akin to personhood.” The combination of colonial governance, spiritual imperialisms, and dominant
ontologies leads to a realm of contestations; an indigenous critique of the biopolitical collapse of individuated
humanness on the one hand and personhood on the other could have significantly broader ontological ramifications
than the secularized and componential logics of, say, “animal rights.” In this view, despite their titular resemblance, we
might differentiate the mainstream scientifically based logic of interspecies understanding of Temple Grandin and
Catherine Johnson’s Animals Make Us Human from the colonial inculcation and peaked awareness of spiritual
transformation in Muscogee poet Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human, or the solidification of sexual systems in relation
to the adjudication of personhood in Mark Rifkin’s When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality,
and Native Sovereignty.58 The task remains, then, how to forge connections between these divergent histories, how
to think on more than one scale, how to remain responsive to the continuing historical urgency of particular or
located crises at the same time as we face new universal or diffuse ones. We have thus far privileged the term
nonhuman despite its distance from our own title, “Queer Inhumanisms.” We have not done so out of any affinity for
“nonhuman” per se; it presents itself here by virtue of its familiarity, as a common descriptor of the focus of new critical
developments. The term is not without its problems, though; it seemingly invites us to choose sides and perhaps to turn,
even if polemically or temporarily, away from the human as such. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird’s considered
reconfiguration of the term, in contrast, in their groundbreaking 2008 collection Queering the Non/Human, transforms
the false binary (human/nonhuman) into an occasion for critical thought. As they point out, “Recognizing the
nonhuman in every trace of the Human also means being cognizant of the exclusive and excluding economy of
discourses relating to what it means to be, live, act or occupy the category of the Human.”59 The slash through
non/human, then, attempts to recollect and foreground the very histories of dehumanization too often overlooked in
celebratory posthumanisms. “Inhumanisms,” in our view, performs a similar kind of work through its homonymic echo.
Resonating against “inhumane,” inhuman points to the violence that the category of the human contains within itself.
Yet it also carries a sense of generativity—inhuman not simply as category, as a spatial designator or the name of a
“kind” of being, but as a process, an unfolding. This latter sense is especially pronounced within DeleuzoGuattarian
thought. Jeffrey Cohen and Todd Ramlow contend that the Deleuzian inhuman “opens the body to all kinds of positive
possibility, to numerous invitations for reinvention and becoming.”60 Our titular embrace of “inhumanisms” follows
the aspiration of becoming-minoritarian, though as the s at its end indicates, it does not necessarily align this aspiration
with an embrace or advocacy of Deleuzian method or thought; indeed, the call to become resounds against numerous
invocations of queerness as an unfolding, from Anzaldúa to Sedgwick to Muñoz. It might, in fact, have more precisely
matched our inclinations had we chosen a-human (as in agnostic to the human as such). In the end, though, we chose
inhuman for its dual temporal and historical resonances, since we do not as yet foresee a form of the inhuman that
liberates itself entirely from histories and processes of dehumanization, nor one that does not risk falling back into
them. For any field or concentration as yet provisional, there are risks—of omission, of premature foreclosure—in
putting forward a selection of essays that demonstrate a common character. We note, for instance, that certain partially
overlapping areas are less represented in our dossier and essays: indigenous studies, non-USoriginated authorship, or a
diversity of theories of the transnational. Any of these returns us to the ongoing question about the narrowness of queer
theory’s referents. Our motivation in coordinating this selection, however, has never been coverage, but provocation.
We thus open with the most kaleidoscopic, gestural formation, a dossier consisting of eleven compact pieces by writers
both familiar and potentially new to GLQ readers, including J. Jack Halberstam, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra Hird, Zakiyyah
Iman Jackson, Eileen Joy, Uri McMillan, Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Stryker, Kim TallBear, and Jami Weinstein. Among them,
too, is José Esteban Muñoz, who sent us his first draft not long before his death in early December 2013. Given how
deeply generative his work has been for us in conceptualizing this issue, we are grateful to have permission to feature
his entry in the form that he sent it. We especially admire his ability to draw new materialist and objectoriented thought
away from themselves, to catalyze, despite a predominant lack of attention to race in these fields, a conception of race
that is at once materialist and speculative, ecological and active, defiantly minor and joyously collective, and deeply
queer. While we initially requested that our dossier writers relate their current work to the theme of queer
inhumanisms, with the idea of giving form to its notional scope, we also asked them to imagine being part of a
conversation. Looking around at their scholarly and activist surroundings, some go a step further: they rework, indict,
suggest, reflect, or even launch a polemic. Readers will note speculation and celebration, as well as warning and
reminder, meticulous critique and sweeping rejoinder. The collective dossier sets the tone for the breadth of ethical and
conceptual reaches of a queer inhumanism that challenges that familiar opposition of the “new” and the “old” by
jumping into—rather than acceding to—the multiply temporal fray of so many forms of scholarship, activism, and
politics. In the first essay, Tavia Nyong’o puts the lie to posthuman innocence—or the timeless neutrality of the
posthuman wild—by inquiring after the mechanics and process of fabulation in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir.
Benh Zeitlin; 2012), in which a young girl named Hushpuppy, a “returning” extinct European species, the aurochs, and
the “rewilded” site of the Bathtub play prominent roles.61 Through these figures, Nyong’o traces not only queer
relations within the internal politics and narrative of the film but also the relation to actual places that inspired its
director, as well as to a fictional-autobiographical play on which it is based. The gendered, racial, and other discrepancies
and shifts found among these sites are not, Nyong’o claims, an arbitrary and thus defensibly opaque part of the creative
process, but neither should they be resolved as “real” to “fiction” or “original” to “derived.” Rather, they can be
plumbed as meaningfully equivocating “incompossibles” whose telling flickerings hint that it is a sovereign’s invested
projections, drawing on “the primitive vitality of a native terrain,” that might underlie an otherwise alluring “dream of a
rewilded, ecological cinema” that this film represents to so many. Turning to material craft and what she calls the
pedagogical potential of mathematical art projects such as Crochet Coral Reef (a collective fabric art project based on
the artists’ rendering of nondominant mathematical formulas) to instill “felt” being, Jeanne Vaccaro examines the
promise for transgender of the handmade, validating craft’s place in gender while refusing to repeat the analogical
collapse that is often made of the two. Instead, Vaccaro focuses on the crafted nature of transgender while rejecting
either a closed reading of transgender or the reductive and hostile accusation of mechanistic displacement and obvious
seams that might have inspired Susan Stryker to reclaim Frankenstein as a site for her transgender rage. For Vaccaro, it
is “feeling” that works to suture the human site of gendered knowing and the inhuman site of reef ecologies: “The
handmade is a methodology and its intervention a felt method, a look at the ordering . . . of bodily knowledge.” If
Vaccaro poses the handmade as the epistemology of the transgender ordinary, Eunjung Kim begins with ontology: “Can
objectification . . . offer a new way to challenge the exclusionary configurations of humanity that create otherness?”
Assessing the hidden limits of a disability studies perspective in which human dignity must be affirmed for disabled
people, Kim critiques the collusion of the “ethical positioning of proximity to humanness” and ability-based criteria for
human being and worth. Instead, in her reading of the 2006 Korean film I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, Kim examines the
potential of nondegraded, expanded objecthood, wherein the objectness of a female factory worker—Donna Haraway’s
cyborg exemplar—is literalized and augmented, and she deploys that objecthood for survival and mutual benefit. Kim’s
objected-subjects thus unbecome human, loosening the violent holds between value, humanness, agency, ability, and
life. In the process, the dehumanization that might be attributed to life in the factories is defamiliarized, though not
denied. To further plumb the ironies of the inhuman, Jayna Brown’s essay examines ramifications of the biologization
of human matter in which “not all bodies are scientized in the same way.” Cancer patient Henrietta Lacks’s unusually
resilient, queerly reproductive cancer cells were turned into a billion-dollar cell line. Not forgetting the double irony—
the nonirony, that is—of the strange vitality attributed to “black” life and of its use as raw material, Brown
nevertheless wishes to separate understandings of the plasticity of life, in which the behavior of cells can surprise and
confound us, from its common partner, eugenics. A close look at the thinking of H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley reveals
complex racialization, colonialist fantasy, and imperial interest couching narratives of tissue, cell, and, ultimately, the
human. And yet “we”—black, queer, and disabled people—“are less ethically bound to honor the boundaries of a
bodily sovereignty never granted to us.” And this, despite the lack of any appreciable economic return to Lacks’s family
until recently, motivates Brown’s invitation to consider even Lacks’s cells as more than either the scientific boon or the
site of racial deprivation that they have been understood to be; they are also plasticity’s victorious exemplar. Like
Brown, Harlan Weaver notes that nonhuman scenes are not absent of racial history. His essay on pit bull intimacies is
careful to mark homonormative whiteness’s “engulfment” of race-analogical logics in queer liberal (and nonqueer)
advocacy for pit bulls. Thinking microcosmically and with intra-action, Weaver examines the potential of a generous
form of intimacy not bound to stable kinship and permitting of cross-species encounters, one that he calls “intimacy
without relatedness.” As he writes, in the animal shelter, “momentary, fleeting contacts described in touches, tastes,
movements, and shared rhythms I describe are promisingly, improperly, and queerly inhuman.” Weaver asks whether
the potential of this queer inhumanism must necessarily be extinguished by the political closures around race analogy,
homonormativity, and class in pit bull politics. He answers tentatively: perhaps not, provided that the theory and
practice of the thick complexities of interspecies worlds he describes be equally invested in navigating such troubled
histories. The intimate interspecies scene that animates Neel Ahuja’s essay aims less at the microcosmic (even though
one of his participants is the mosquito) and more at the mutual entanglement of human and mosquito species in a
setting of climate change, whose mobile constitutions render species natures partial and historicizable, rather than
timeless. Observing that the climate crisis “presses queer theory for a planetary account of reproduction” in a way that
troubles any queer posture against reproduction, Ahuja further argues that such a planetary account cannot ignore the
all-too-tempting “xenophobic rendering of the environmental parasite.” Taking the human as assemblage, and arguing
for a dissolution of Manichaean accounts of the (mosquito) parasite/host pair in view of the human settler’s own
parasitic nature, Ahuja produces a queer inhumanism of both “interspecies entanglement and reproductive
displacement.” Our final essay, by Karen Barad, emphasizes in its very form the conceptual experiment that queer
inhumanism represents, given that that concept is both multiply produced within the pages of this issue, and a long
way, if ever, from settling. Unsettling, in fact, is characteristic of Barad’s revisionary approach to matter, given that it is
so often imagined as stable, solid, contiguous. Serving as the bookend, in this issue, to both Nyong’o’s retreat from the
stabilization of reality versus fiction as a mode of analysis and his engagement with Hushpuppy’s irresolvably conflicted
“virtualization,” Barad’s experiment here is to take up, with marked enthusiasm, imagination as a partner to
materiality, thereby releasing investments on originary fabrics and predictable developmental temporalities.
Narrating the role of electricity in the formation of an embryo, Barad points to “material imaginings, electrical
flirtations signaling connections-to-come,” unsutured to what seems to emerge concretely. The virtual, then, for
Barad, is an ontologically indeterminate ubiquity, a “dance of indeterminacy.” This makes matter itself—in its own
restless self-engagement and in its substantive nothingness—more a question of the transmaterial. Turning toward
trans*’s to meditate on its human locus, Barad wonders: “Can we (re)generate that which was missing in fleshiness but
materially present in virtuality?” Inspired by dossier participant Susan Stryker’s “Transgender Rage: My Words to Victor
Frankenstein,” Barad insists that a denaturalization of nature—and its own “transembodiment” — leads auspiciously
to the undoing of universality, the very universality that couches the human and its effects. There is something about
both the provocative disparities among the pieces in this volume and the queer inhuman itself that suggests
unpredictability. Though we might say that there is a growing conviction about likely and actual disasters (reproductive
and otherwise) that calls up crisis thinking, this conviction seems couched in a larger, ranging sense of wonderment vis-
à-vis rapid changes of scale in climate discourse. These affective frictions, we feel, are also the queer inhuman. They
find affinity with Muñoz’s gesture toward an unknowable yet resolutely accessible utopia, aligned more with horizon
and imagination than with ideological closure. Returning to Laura Aguilar’s Grounded #114, the photograph’s distal
enmeshment of body and stone, stone and body, the ensuing tenuousness of categorization in the face of ontological
relativity, the drag and cause of a world-weary set of human denigrations, and the erotic pull to a future that we
cannot witness, lead us to speculate that one consequence of Muñoz’s utopian gesture might be the possibility, for us
humans, of approaching the outer reaches of inhuman identification, from a place—humanity—we know too well and
then not at all.
 QT K: Houston

Next is the K:
The intertwined regimes of power that construct society define themselves in opposition to the
queer Other that directly threatens the “good” National population. Binaries that paint the Other as
the virus infiltrating the healthy population that must be located and “cured” mark queer bodies for
violence and death. The affirmatives use and resuscitation of state power depends on constant
elimination of the existence of the Other through explicit forms of violence and a deliberate denial
of the life chances that structure the experience of everyday life, annihilating the body from all
sides through exposure to slow death.
Spade 2011 - Dean Spade is a lawyer, writer, trans activist, and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School
of Law. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City that provides free
legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color
(“Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law,” South End Press) hrmb.

This way of understanding the dispersion of power helps us realize that Power is not simply about certain individuals
being targeted for death or exclusion by a ruler, but instead about the creation of norms that distribute vulnerability and
security. When we think about power this way, we undertake a different kind of examination of conditions that concern
us, asking different questions. Mitchell Dean describes how this kind of analysis attends to the routines of bureaucracy;
the technologies of notation, recording, compiling, presenting and transporting of information, the theories,
programmes, knowledge and expertise that compose a field to be governed and invest it with purposes and objectives;
the ways of seeing and representing embedded in practices of government; and the  different agencies with various
capacities that the practices of government require, elicit, form and reform. To examine regimes of government is to
conduct analysis in the plural: there is already a plurality of regimes of practices in a given territory, each composed
from a multiplicity of in principle unlimited and heterogeneous elements bound together by a variety of relations and
capable of polymorphous connections with one another. Regimes of practices can be identified whenever there exists a
relatively stable field of correlation of visibilities, mentalities, technologies and agencies, such that they constitute a kind
of taken- for- granted point of reference for any form of problematization.6 This kind of analysis can be seen in the work
of those using “industrial complex” terms to describe and resist the forces of militarization and criminal punishment that
pervade US society. It can also be seen in the work that is being done for disability justice.  Critical disability studies and
the disability rights and disability justice movements have shown us how Regimes of knowledge and practices in every
area of life establish norms of “healthy” bodies and minds, and consign those who are perceived to fall outside those
norms to abandonment and imprisonment. Policies and practices rooted in eugenics have attempted (and continue to
attempt) to[and] eliminate the existence of  people who fall outside those norms. Native scholars and activists have
shown how white European cultural norms determine everything from what property is to what gender and family
structure should look like, and how every instance of the imposition of these norms has been used in the ser vice of the
genocide of indigenous people. In these locations and many  others, we can see how the Circulation of norms creates an
idea that undergirds conditions of violence, exploitation, and poverty that social movements have resisted— the idea
that the national population (constructed as those who meet racial, gender, sexual, ability, national origin, and other
norms) must be protected from those “ others” (those outside of such norms) who are portrayed again and again in new
iterations at various historical moments as “threats” or “drains.” This operation of norms is central to producing the idea
of the national body as ever- threatened and to justifying the exclusion of certain populations from programs that
distribute wealth and life chances (white schools, Social Security benefits, land and housing distribution programs) and
the Targeting of these same populations for imprisonment and violence (including criminal punishment, immigration
enforcement, racist drug laws, sterilization, and medical experimentation). Even though norms are incorporated into
various spaces and institutions inconsistently and applied arbitrarily, they still achieve the overall purpose of producing
security for some populations and vulnerability for others. Many social movements have produced analyses of how
various groups are harmed by the [A] promotion of a national identity centered in Norms about race, bodies, health,
gender, and reproduction. These constructs often operate in the background and are presumed as “neutral” features of
various administrative systems. The existence and operation of such administrative norms is therefore less visible than
those moments when people are fired or killed or excluded explicitly because of their race or body type or gender, yet
they sometimes produce more significant harm because they structure the entire context of life. I am  going to return
again and again in the chapters that follow to key examples, such as the dismantling of welfare programs and the
expansion of criminal and immigration enforcement, that are central to contemporary politics and help illustrate how
life chances are distributed through racialized- gendered systems of meaning and control, often in the form of programs
that attest to be race-  and gender- neutral and merely administrative. 

American exceptionalist discourse and the U.S. nation have been framed by sexuality and
homonationalism
Puar 13
(Jasbir Puar is a Professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” 2013,
Duke University Press, 336 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45, Accessed via GMU Libraries, Last Accessed 12/13/13) ELJ

While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA
examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers
like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category
deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation’s status as “gay-friendly” has become desirable in the first
place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by
it and through it. In TA, for instance, I critically interrogate LGBTQ activist responses to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in
U.S. v. Lawrence, which decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, bringing into relief how the
celebration of the queer liberal subject as bearer of privacy rights and economic freedom sanctions a regime of
racialized surveillance, detention, and deportation. TA shows how homonationalism goes global, moreover, as it
undergirds U.S. imperial structures through an embrace of a sexually progressive multiculturalism justifying foreign
intervention. For example, both the justifications and the admonishments provoked by the Abu Ghraib photos rely on
Orientalist constructions of Muslim male sexuality as simultaneously excessively queer and dangerously premodern. The
discursive field produced around Abu Ghraib enlists homonormative U.S. subjects in the defense of “democratic ”
occupation. It has been humbling and also very interesting to see the ways homonationalism as a concept has been
deployed, adapted, rearticulated, and critiqued in various national, activist, and academic contexts; giving rise to
generative and constructive debate was my true intent in writing the book, which was derived not as a corrective but as
an incitement to debate.

Homonationalism essentializes and excludes queers and individuals of color. Their attempts of
inclusion lead to the same violence against people of color that is problematic
Stelder 2011
(Mikki, QueerIntersectional is an alternative platform for critical voices on homonationalism with a particular focus on
the Netherlands. It is created against the ongoing project of homonationalism and gay imperialism. This blog is a direct
response to the 2011 conference “Sexual Nationalisms” held at the University of Amsterdam on the 27th and 28th of
January. The local queer community needs a platform to discuss issues of homonationalism, moving away from the
exclusivist platform proposed by the conference. Start With Amsterdam! An Alternative Statement on the Sexual
Nationalisms Conference http://queerintersectional.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/start-with-amsterdam-2/ Last accessed
2/27/14) ELJ

Critical Interventions¶ But let us forget about Hekma, more urgent matters deserve to be addressed. The most
important panel of the conference was that of scholars Jin Haritaworn and Fatima El Tayeb, joined by Suhraiya Jivraj
and white ally, Jennifer Petzen. This was the panel called “homonationalism, homo-neoliberalism, homo-neo-
colonialism: crisis and travels, Europe and beyond.” Four interesting presentations were prepared, but never given.
Instead, the panelists changed the format of the session into a roundtable discussion. This roundtable was necessary
after one day of conferencing where all four panelist, and (some) audience members, felt the ancient workings of
exclusion and white privilege (if not: supremacy ). Firstly, they addressed that they refused to be instrumentalized by
this conference as queer people of color, and next to that, opposed the instrumentalization of queers (and) academics
of color in general. The fantasy of inclusion, as El Tayeb mentioned, was again created through active structural
exclusion where the queer of color was used as a nominal and not an academic presence. This became apparent when
the audience could ask questions. All the white academics were addressed with their last name or/and academic title
and the queer academics of color were remotely addressed with their first name only.¶ Jin Haritaworn discussed the
ongoing citational violence found in academic writing. They asked the question of what can become theoretical and
when, and which bodies get lost along the way. They were not only referring to quotes or footnotes, but to citational
practices both relying on and fostering stardom of some academics thereby silencing other academics. We have to ask
ourselves what the power structures behind stardom and citation are before we start writing. ¶ El Tayeb explained that
she would have rather presented the paper she had worked on, but felt unable to do so. She commented that every
time a conference invitation came along there was hardly any space for her prepared presentations. She experienced
a perpetual mental fatigue in repeating again and again the same struggle with no reward. It was not up to this panel,
she explained, to take responsibility time and again for the academic violence exercised consciously or unwittingly, but
always structurally towards academics, and moreover queer academics of color. What she pointed to, was that it was
not this panel’s responsibility to critique the conference structure, but rather the task of the conference organizers and
attendants to take responsibility for the structure of the conference. ¶ Suhraiya Jivraj included a discussion of Dutch
LGTB politics and the workings of the COC (the self-proclaimed and most powerful representative of the Dutch LGTB-
community). She addressed the monopoly on funds and thus included class within the discussion. She asked the very
important question of why queer people of color cannot organize grassroots in the Netherlands. Instead of drawing
the superficial conclusion from this that there are no groups willing to organize, she addressed the problem of funding
and the assimilationist and neoliberal politics of the COC. Groups who want to organize are forced to adopt a large
part of the COC’s agenda before they are viable for funding. Jivraj argues that “the public” needs to be problematized
if we want to understand what the public sphere is and how this is contrasted with the private. She concludes that “the
anti-racist paradigm needs to be back at the centre” of the debate.¶ Jennifer Petzen, from a white anti-racist
perspective, closed with a discussion of the “we” in this conference. She asked how this subject position was invoked
and argues that these are no viable politics for both academic and ally work. She addressed the email sent around by
Hekma to the people who would be on his last panel and the fact that no-one besides queer academics of color
responded to this email. The audience seemed to be more shocked that this was used “against him”, than by the
content of this particular email.¶ The discussion afterwards, instead of starting from a sense of being undone, and
letting oneself be undone, started with a search for excuses, reductions and exclusions that had just been so carefully
deconstructed. The panelists were, again, overtly addressed by their first names in an attempt to undo their academic
credibility. The microphone was distributed at great unease with some members of the audience who got less time to
speak than their white, cis-male counterparts. One of these attendants claimed to be a white ally, and then referred
to his black “friend” in the audience, mistaking his last name with the last name of an activist who died years ago. ¶ In
this setting it took some time to be able to speak and there was no space to gather speech together and be able to
carefully construct a sentence. One needs to also ask how exclusion is performed by those who can still speak
towards those who cannot at that moment. It is no longer a question of who has the best performance, but rather
whose speech is being overshadowed by the ignorant performance of those who had the privilege to be well trained
and those who refuse to be undone?¶ After the grave effort of the panelists to explain the audience the continuous
practices of (racialized) exclusion, these attempts were quickly done away with by audience members who thought
shame and guilt would be enough. Responsibility was the baby thrown away with the bathwater. Trans was displaced
and referred to in the third person. Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) became a children’s tradition and was therefore okay. Sex
workers could only be victims. And Gert Hekma became the biggest victim for some, because his agenda was
“unrightfully” revealed.¶ Although the conference room reserved for this 9 am panel was large, most of the conference
participants were sitting on the floor and on each others laps in another large conference room, attending presentations
that were chaired by Judith Butler. Our conference room counted only about 50 people. One is reminded of
Haritaworn’s remark on stardom, where they carefully set out to deconstruct the uses of citation in the academia. This
gesture of the conference organizers to host these two panels: one with an academic rockstar and the other with a lot of
academic rockstars, albeit only well known in smaller circles, contributed to the under-attending of the most important
panel of the conference. Although presumably an attempt to split audience flows equally, this misfired on the
organization.

Thus, we affirm the being of the queer suicide terrorist—an explosion of self-sacrifice that ruptures
the violent notions of subjectivity. The queer suicide terrorist is antithetical to Western Politics, as
we blow up reason and power. The explosive strapped to our bodies cannot be separated from our
biological form; our body is an undefinable weapon, a lethal concoction of the organic and
inorganic. As we approach you, you are dead, but you think you are still alive. There is nothing good
you have done, or anything bad which makes me want to kill you—I only know you as the
molecules that I am going to re-arrange. Where does life begin and end? This question is only
answerable from a position of reason and power that we want to blow up.
Puar 07 (Jasbir, associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, “Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times,” Duke University Press, 2007, p. 216-220)

The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation, in contrast to how we approach the violence of
colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and
politically illegitimate violence.- Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'" Ghassan Hage wonders "why it
is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being condemned first," noting that without an unequivocal
condemnation, one is a "morally suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts.
"There is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind, my desire here is to
momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of the
forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of
oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death
not of the Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more accurately, a death scene that obliterates
the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance , and ironically, it acts as
self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self enabled through the "highest cultural capital" of martyrdom, a giving
of life to the future of political struggles-not at all a sign of "disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this
limited but nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning, suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from the violent
conditions of life's impossibility, the "impossibility of making a life. "" This body forces a reconciliation of opposites
through their inevitable collapse- a perverse habitation of contradiction. Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on
necropolitics notes that the historical basis of sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality
begs for a more accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death . Mbembe attends
not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing
to the becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death,
and the human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability to clearly
delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete biological body and technology; the
entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but
are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions.
The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of
weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body
that is the mandate of intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a
newly becoming body: The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-
detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape of the body is
invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it
annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces. The
body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a
truly ballistic sense.,1 Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into one: as one's
body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not only does the ballistic body come into
being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own
penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as
metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of
information does the ballistic body impart? These bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the
outsides, infecting transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is a
queer temporality-in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition,
resound, and return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present.
Gayatri Spivak, prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern Speak,"
reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the
subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the
ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin): Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other
means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same
cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide
bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication
that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death. 36 We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that
the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily
delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer temporal interruption of the suicide
bomber, projectiles spewing every which way. As a queer assemblage- distinct from the queering of an entity or identity-
race and sexuality are denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting
identity replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of self into others and other into self not only effaces
the absolute mark of self and others in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of
Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering "a message inscribed on the body when
no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the demarcation of
the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which such
distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important as (and perhaps as
threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his or her defense or condemnation. Figure 24 is the
November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, distributed for free in Brooklyn
(see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the
mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it
out, of the turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered
(mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully
modern, animated through technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on
the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion, infection, and
transmission reign, not meaning.
 QT K: Trinity WW

Queerness always marks the antagonistic object to the realization and guarantee of social meaning
– the impossibility of the closing of meaning of the Symbolic from the Real leaves open a gap where
meaning must always be deferred into the future placed onto the symbolic figure of The Child. The
non-place of Queerness must always be continually closed off from the social order in order to
continually attempt to bind together the meaning of social reality, forever disavowing those who
are marked as the Queer.
Edelman 17 Lee Edelman; Learning Nothing: Bad Education. differences 1 May 2017; 28 (1): 124–173. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3821724 Lee Edelman is an American literary critic and academic. He serves as a
professor of English at Tufts University. //avery

No Future argued that social relations that imagine an end to their structural antagonism in a tomorrow perpetually
deferred invoke the future as guarantee of meaning’s realization (Edelman). Such a future, in its status as supplement, as
the empty placeholder of totalization, works at once to preclude and assure the social system’s closure, denying its totalization
in the present while filling the gap that denial opens with the pledge of the yet-to-come . The Child, as the privileged figure of that pledge—one with no markers of identity in advance,

such that any child, in the proper context, can instantiate its logic—compels us take our social value from our various relations to it and to

make ourselves, in whatever way, the guardians of its future.1 A class of persons must therefore emerge to materialize
the danger to that future, a class of persons whose failure to invest the Child with the privilege of value pits them not
only against the Child but also against the future’s assurance of social viability. I called those persons sinthomosexuals
to propose a link between the Lacanian sinthome, the symptomatic knot that binds each subject to a meaningless
jouissance, and the emergence in the “West” of homosexuality as a figure for the stigmatized relation of “sexuality”
to a death-driven jouissance. Though homosexuality, in certain Western democracies, may be shedding (in part) its
connection to queerness, continuing the process of normalization by which it mirrors and so reinforces dominant
ideologies of social relation, sinthomosexuality, as a signifier, affirms the anxiogenic intimacy of “sexuality” and the sinthome, of jouissance and what, as Jacques Lacan
expresses it in “L’Étourdit,” “ab-sens designates as sex” (452).2 In the sinthomosexual, the social order posits and localizes the enemy of the

Child as the paradoxical object form of jouissance itself: a violently disruptive enjoyment that threatens the integrity
of the object insofar as that object is nothing but a catachrestic positing intended to foreclose the primal negativity of
ab-sens as the subtraction from being and meaning without which neither can arise. Such an “antisocial” jouissance
may be disavowed by the social order and read into whomever it sinthomosexualizes (those, that is, whom it queers as figures of
ontological negation, and so of a socially destructive violence charged with libidinal enjoyment), but it pulses within as the motor force of social

organization, repeatedly erupting in violence against those assigned to that stigmatized class . Thus, reproductive
futurism’s investment in the Child as the icon and promise of meaning doesn’t alter the fact that futurism, too,
embodies sinthomosexuality, enacting in its aggression against those it queers the enjoyment it disavows. We are all
sinthomosexuals, as I put it in No Future, but those who are queered by a given social order are figures, historically
contingent, for the ab-sens that threatens its sustaining logic by materializing the void that ruptures the imagined consistency of its world. It follows that queerness, as the figure of
such a radical unbecoming, maintains a persistently negative link to the logic of education . Queerness, wherever it shows itself (in the form of a

catachresis), effects a counterpedagogy, refuting, by its mere appearance, the reality that offers it no place—or that
grants it the place of what nullifies as well as the nonplace of the null. Like poetry in W. H. Auden’s well-known phrase, queerness makes nothing
happen; it incises that nothing in reality with an acid’s caustic bite. Like a flame that affords the hapless moth an unsentimental education, so queerness dissolves the

coherence to which our reality pretends, belying the comprehension, the unifying framework of the world, that the
Child as meaning’s cynosure ostensibly preserves.3 Futurism compels us to indoctrinate children in what ought to be,
not what is, shrouding them in the blinder of the putative innocence associated with the Child and imposed on children the better to enable the social control of adults . In the eyes of
this all-pervasive regime, “the queer,” like a counterfactual assertion produced in the land of the Houyhnhnms, represents, wherever the Child is concerned, the Swiftian thing which is not: it
represents, that is, the being who intends the negation of being as such—the negation of being as defined, at least, by reproductive futurism .
Thus queerness, from the
normative perspective, promotes what I’m calling here bad education, the education that teaches us nothing but the
nothing of the thing which is not. Like the Child, the queer is a fantasy figure catachrestically produced to fill in the
void that precludes the world’s totalization. The Child, however, signals the attainment of that totality in the future
while the queer stands in for the obstacle impeding its realization in the present. Fleshing out the cut of division in
terms of contingent historical identities constructed to ontologize ontological exclu - sion, those who are queered are
libidinally stained with the negativity of the thing which is not. They threaten the Child, and therefore the future, by desublimating its “innocence,”
reducing it from privileged object of desire to the void at the core of the drive. 4 But what exactly does innocence mean and how does it manage to sublimate the negativity of that void?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who helped to enshrine it as the privilege of the Child, reminds us that it frequently coincides with a passion for wholesale destruction: “A child wants to upset
everything he sees. He smashes, breaks everything he can reach. He grabs a bird as he would grab a stone, and he strangles it without knowing what he does” (Rousseau 37). Seen from this
angle, the Child can preserve its “natural” state of innocence only to the extent that it preserves as well its “natural” state of ignorance. While hardly a comfort to the strangled bird, the
thoughtless Child, knowing nothing of death, bears no guilt for its mur - derous act. It kills with an innocent exuberance, unconscious of what it does. But the Child confronts a worse threat
in the bush than the slaughtered birds in its hand. Heaven help it the day it takes pleasure in “strangling” a bird of a different feather, which is to say, in “choking the chicken.” At that point,
the drives of the Child must be made to submit to parental law. In the words of the French psychoanalyst Lucien Israël, “From this period inter - dictions from outside intervene to deter the
child from masturbating, from sucking his thumb, from pissing all over the place whenever he wants to do so” (86; my translation). One must, in effect, limit innocence in defense of
innocence itself. Rousseau understood this necessity well, whether or not he recognized it as inherently self-deconstructing. Regardless of the author’s intentions, Émile unfolds the
contradictions of an educational program that claims to find its model in “nothing but the march of nature” (34). Specifying the fractured logic on which that assertion must rest, Jacques
Derrida produced his widely influential reading of the supplement. As he writes in Of Grammatology: “According to Rousseau, the negativity of evil will always have the form of
supplementarity. Evil is exterior to nature, to what is by nature innocent and good. It supervenes upon nature. But always by way of supplementing what ought to lack nothing at all in itself.”
Does nature, and with it “innocence,” require the “negativity of evil”? Derrida suggests just that: “Yet all education, the keystone of Rousseauist thought, will be described or presented as a
system of substitution [. . .] destined to reconstitute Nature’s edifice in the most natural way possible” (158). The prime example afforded by Rousseau of this perverse or contradictory logic
centers on the Child whose innocence, perversely, occasions its own perversion. Derrida, who carefully traces this logic, situates the Child in the place of negativity associated with the cut or
the gap that constitutes an originary “deficiency” for Rousseau: “Childhood is the first manifestation of the deficiency which, in nature, calls for supplementation [suppléance]. [. . .] Without
childhood, no supplement would ever appear in Nature. Now the supplement is here both humanity’s good fortune and the origin of its perversion” (159–60). In its lack of self-sufficiency, in
its need for acculturation, the Child exposes an absence internal to the fullness of nature itself. The natural, of course, in a perfect world, would need no supplementation since the
supplement evinces a “negativity of evil” unnatural by definition. The Child, however, as the “first manifestation of the deficiency [. . .] in nature,” introduces, in its very innocence,
supplementarity as original sin. It opens, that is, the dimension of futurity imagined as redeeming the lack to which such futurity attests . Consider how Eve’s punishment in the book of
Genesis, that she must bring forth children in pain, reenacts the transgression that occasioned it: the pursuit of a supplement (the fruit of knowledge) to make up for loss or lack. But by
positivizing the lack whose excessive presence made Eden incomplete, a lack figured by the serpent as the world’s first “queer” and first agent of bad education, the supplement costs us
paradise by dividing paradise from itself. (Could Eden have ever been paradise if it seemed to need supplementation?) Like the fruit of the tree, the fruit of Eve’s loins makes supplementarity
infinite as the fatal fall into time opens up the void in the form of futurity. No wonder we protect the Child from the knowledge of and at its origin; by reading as “innocence” the Child’s
luxurious immersion in nonknowing, we deny our own knowledge that the Child confirms the deficiency in Nature, the impossibility of Eden. “Perfec - tion [. . .] cannot have children,” as
Sylvia Plath declares (262). Produced
in response to, and in order to deny, the “evil” of knowledge as supplement, the Child
embodies “innocence” as the negation of knowledge’s negativ - ity. Because “knowledge” of that negativity involves
the unconscious, the Thing, and the drive, the negation of that negative knowledge effectively positivizes the Child,
which then, by virtue of its sublimation, can reinforce the law’s intertwining of prohibition and desire. Framed as the
Child’s antithesis, though, the queer, like that negativity, deconstructs the law in the very process of desublimating
the Child and exposing its implication in the pulsion of the drive . In order to obviate such a reduction, the Child, Rousseau argues, ought to be given a
minimal amount of knowledge to protect it from the greater knowledge its innocence couldn’t survive. Émile proposes that the Child receive, where “the organs of the secret pleasures and
those of the disgusting needs” are concerned, an education that explicitly “turns [it] away from a dangerous curiosity” (217). Rousseau’s text urges parents to make sure that “the first fire of
imagination is smothered” by associating the sexual organs with excrement, dirt, disease, and death, inducing, thereby, a connection between “coarse words” and “displeasing ideas.” The
Child “is not forbidden to pronounce these words and to have these ideas,” in the Rousseauian program, “but without his being aware of it, he is made to have a repugnance against recalling
them” (217). Thus
the armor most likely to protect the Child’s innocence is a sort of aversive knowledge, one that effects a
disinclination to “dangerous curiosity” and that does so surreptitiously, without the Child’s even knowing that an
aversion is being instilled. Given the major role he plays in the history of the Child’s subli - mation, we should hardly be surprised that Rousseau idealizes the innocence he
deconstructs. But Israël sees the Child’s education from a starkly differ - ent perspective, reading the Child’s relation to excrement and to its various “disgusting needs” without supposing,
like Émile, some innate and “inno - cent” repugnance before such filth. It’s rather, as Israël points out, “[g]ood housewives and housekeepers, [who] don’t like the child’s smearing itself with
its shit.” “Education,”
he continues, “is education against the drive. To lead out of [. . .], that’s what educate means, to
lead out of the universe of the drive” (87). 5 Education, in other words, instills and enacts the imperative to sublimate
insofar as “the operations of sublimation are always ethically, culturally, and socially valorized” (Lacan, Ethics 144). Good
education thus always intends and assures the social good by negating whatever refuses that good and so endangers
the Child, even if that danger inheres in the very nature of the Child . Education becomes, like sexuality, compulsory
reproduction, procuring the Child for an order of truth that denies the foundational negativity, deficiency, perversion on which it rests. In the aftermath of such an education, as
Israël concludes, “one no longer knows anything about the universe of the drive, because the only small way to safeguard something of it is by knowing nothing about it” (87).6 This is the
context in which he defines “education as antidrive [l’éducation comme antipulsion]” (87). Education,
that is, as understanding, seals off and displaces
the incomprehensible element, the ab-sens, that always drives its systematizations, while maintaining that element,
dialectically, as the destabilizing other of education and knowledge. Not the negation of knowledge, then, this internal element bespeaks, instead,
the negativity inherent in knowledge as such.

Divisions between the artificial/natural person are marked by its own fiction – the inclusion and
vesting rights and duties is an artificial project built on a project of self-evidence that divides what is
enough “like us” to be worthy of the Human community, where those that fail to collapse into the
sameness of the community must be eliminated to prevent the rupture of the social order.
Edelman 13 Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities Author(s): Lee Edelman Source: History of the
Present, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 99-118 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.3.1.0099 .
https://moodle.swarthmore.edu/pluginfile.php/141636/mod_resource/content/3/Bartleby-OccupyWallStreet.pdf Lee
Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film,
and literature //avery
Focusing on the central character in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which bore the subtitle, “A Story of Wall Street,” when originally published in 1853, Gersen’s article proposes that the cadaverous young
man who refuses, in the course of Melville’s tale, either to continue his work as a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer involved with mortgages or to vacate the office in which he also secretly squats by night, might serve as a
figure for the Occupy movement’s resistance to Wall Street today. Gersen dismisses mainstream complaints that the Occupy protestors in Zuccotti Park had no plan for the future, no clear-cut demands, and no leaders

The point
through whom they might speak. All that, she declares, is irrelevant. “The parallels between Bartleby’s peculiar form of rebellion and the protestors of Occupy Wall Street should be obvious,” she writes. “

of Occupy Wall Street . . . is to put a face to America’s dwindling middle class. There is no need to be any more specific
than that.”3 Countering the claim that corporations are people, the Occupy movement offered people themselves in
the act of reclaiming their personhood. And just as the protestors, in Gersen’s view, gave a “face” to the “middle
class,” so Bartleby, in the logic of her essay, could equally lend his face to them . For the people must implicitly supplement
the collective presentation of their personhood with a figure whose pathos can underscore their subordination to
corporate interests, a figure, that is, in which “the people,” as collective abstraction, could incorporate themselves. This
brings me to the first of the ironies from which my meditations on Bartleby, Occupy Wall Street, and the humanities take off: to counter the prerogatives of corporate

personhood, the expanding influence of corporations conceived, as a Supreme Court decision had already asserted in
1819, as “artificial being[s]” endowed with some rights that are vested in “natural persons,” the Occupy protestors insist, instead, on the
preeminent rights of the “natural person.”4 But Gersen makes the case for the natural person over corporations as “artificial being[s]” by adducing the figure of Bartleby, no more than an “artificial being” himself. And this
invocation of Bartleby in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement quickly took on a life of its own. Just four days later, The New Republic published an essay by Nina Martyris that argued for the relevance to the
protestors in Zuccotti Park of Bartleby, “the patron saint of civil disobedience,” in her words.5 Referring to Bartleby’s recurrent phrase, the memorable “I would prefer not to” with which he responds to his employer’s
requests, Martyris asserts that “the power of NO is what O[ccupy] W[all] S[treet] should harness.” And to help it do so, she ends her essay with a modest but telling proposal: “The ‘Ninety Nine Per centers,’” she writes,
“could start by changing their meaningless Facebook profile picture of a ballet-dancer pirouetting on the back of a bull and putting a scrivener there instead. In one stroke they could project the image of a dignified

From Gersen’s
predecessor and compatriot—an educated but home less vegan (Bartleby only ate ginger nuts) who looked languidly down at Mammon, which tried but failed to buck him.”6

description of Occupy Wall Street as the face of the middle class to Martyris’s call for Bartleby to become the
movement’s face on Facebook, Bartleby emerges as the avatar of the spirit of resistance for those asserting the rights
of humans over corporations as artificial beings. The struggle for US economic justice at the beginning of the twenty-
first century thus finds a face for the value of the human in a fictional character, an “artificial being,” from a
nineteenthcentury tale. Just a few days later, a man named Zach, assisting at the Occupy Wall Street Library, is photographed wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Bartleby’s famous phrase. And shortly
thereafter, on October 25, the library’s blog prints that photograph as part of an essay by Michele Hardesty, a literature professor at Hampshire College, discussing the timeliness of Melville’s story in the context of the
Wall Street demonstrations. Hardesty finds “Bartleby” “an evocative but not perfect analogy for the present moment”—not perfect in part because, as she writes, “such a rich story could never be a neat analogy—or

I’ll be returning shortly to this framing of literature, the

supply brief slogans—and the strength of ‘Bartleby’ lies in the way it escapes singular interpretations.”7

framing that recurrently justifies its place at the center of the humanities even as it frames the university’s larger
justifications for the humanities themselves; but for now let me mention in passing a second irony made visible here.
Even as literature, like the humanities, is celebrated for its relevance to civic engagement and social transformation,
the faults in its join to the social get expressed as the putative surplus of literary over political interpretation . In the context of
Bartleby’s enshrinement as the face of a protest against income inequality, it’s ironic, if understandable, that the limits of the analogy are attributed to the reduction, the interpretative impoverishment, that overtly
politicized readings produce on what Hardesty calls “such a rich story.” To the extent that it succeeds as a work of art, the tale, according to Hardesty, “escapes singular interpretations,” by which she means that its literary
richness, its aesthetic worth, exceeds them. Though his own resistance to his rich employer may give Bartleby political value, the richness of the story, for Hardesty, resists such constraints on what Bartleby means.
Instruction in resistance to singular interpretation, for Hardesty, as for most contemporary defenders of the humanities, underlies literature’s singularity by distinguishing literature from the referential transparency
presumed of political claims. Hence the importance, from this perspective, that Bartleby not be read as merely an instance, a genre, a kind: that he not be made a corporate body stripped of aesthetic complexity. The text
most famous for its unsettling iterations of Bartleby’s mechanical slogan must not, Hardesty tells us, be made to supply “brief slogans” itself. Where the protestors may take the poor scrivener as the icon of their challenge
to corporate wealth, that very gesture, for partisans invested in literary richness, betrays a logic of corporate branding, marketing, and commodification. But does the irony implicit in this reversal emerge from a literary or
a political analysis? Can literature separate itself from politics without proving itself political? Can political discourse escape the overdetermination of the literary? Just what, in the context of Occupy Wall Street and its
mobilizations of “Bartleby,” is the politics of the literary and what does it have to do with the humanities and the power of corporations? To broach these questions, we first need to track our story one step further. For the
week after Hardesty’s blog post appeared, she returned to this theme in another entry that observed in its opening sentence: “Bartleby’s positive refusal continues to resonate with the OWS movement.”8 And she offered
more tangible evidence. To show its solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, the Housing Works Bookstore Café announced its plans to sponsor a public reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” This reading, which was organized in
conjunction with the McNally Jackson Bookstore, the publishers Melville House and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and various authors, including Stephen Elliot and Justin Taylor, took place on November 11 in the atrium at 60
Wall Street. In choosing “Bartleby” as the text for the occasion, the organizers, according to Taylor, set out “to evoke the long history of refusal that informs and enlivens OWS.”9 Insisting on the importance of such radical
refusals and their performance in public spaces, Taylor added: “the first step toward building a better world is asserting that the present state of affairs is intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue.”10 This refusal to
accept the world as it is, this rejection of normativity, coincides with what I’ll be discussing as Bartleby’s queerness in the following pages. But to understand what’s at stake in that queerness, to see why it matters in
thinking about politics, literature, and the humanities, we must stay with the public reading and the notion of singularity for a few minutes more. An article about the reading appeared in Library Journal the day after it
took place. In that article, Molly McArdle wondered if Bartleby was the most appropriate icon for the Occupy movement after all: “for all of Bartleby as ur-Occupier,” she wrote, “what has always struck me about the story
is the character’s profound aloneness. One could, and I’m sure many have, read the absence of Bartleby’s relatives or friends as the scrivener’s rejection of the hegemonic, rigidly classist structure of a family and
connections—the stuff of which so many nineteenth-century novels were made—Bartleby’s solitude as protest of all things nuclear and patriarchal. But it’s strange to do so in light of yesterday’s reading and this year’s
Occupy movement, which is all about solidarity and community, the creation of new societal structures.”11 If the political analogies about which Hardesty had expressed reservations just two weeks earlier forced
Bartleby’s plurality of meaning into the “singular interpretations” expressed in “brief slogans,” then here, in McArdle’s view, the collectivity essential to political community proves ill-matched to Bartleby’s singularity.
Though the singular, in this sense, already points us in the direction of the queer (opposing, to be sure, the “structure of the family” and “all things nuclear and patriarchal,” but also, and perhaps more significantly, the
notion of “community” as such), it’s that very singularity, the pathos of Bartleby’s exclusion from every social role but that of employee, that equips him so well to serve as the Occupy movement’s “human” face—or the
face, at least, of one whose humanity seems to tremble on the brink of extinction. Bartleby’s iconic function, that is, both in the story and for Occupy Wall Street, derives from the dignity of his resistance to power, his
refusal of specific demands or requests, and his poignant lack of connection to the world that would make him comprehensible. The lawyer who narrates Melville’s story (and who does “a snug business among rich men’s
bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds”) describes Bartleby in the opening paragraph as “one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small.”12
From his first appearance the scrivener seems, to the narrator who will soon employ him, an image of life’s withdrawal into a stillness beyond itself. Seen standing one morning “motionless” on the threshold of the
lawyer’s office door, Bartleby, in the narrator’s account, looks “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” (66). The pathos attached to his presence is linked to the liminality he never escapes, as if he were always
on a threshold, poised uncertainly between life and death, between relation and its absence, and never coming into focus as more than the localization of the distance between being and being known. Even his habits
while copying, before he announces his preference not to, seem colored by the impenetrability marking Bartleby himself; the narrator recalls him at his copy desk working “silently, palely, mechanically” (67). Though
scriveners, in the lawyer’s view, make a “singular set” (59) on the whole, Bartleby evinces, within that set, a singularity of his own. Small wonder that the copyist, described by the lawyer as “singularly sedate,” first sounds
his resistance to his employer’s demands “in a singularly mild, firm voice,” pronouncing the fateful, “I would prefer not to” (68), that from that moment on will define him. What singularizes Bartleby in the lawyer’s mind,
though, is not just the singular commitment expressed in his unwavering assertion, but also the absence of any apparent affect as he voices it. He displays, as the narrator tells us, not the “least uneasiness, anger,
impatience or impertinence,” not the slightest trace, as the lawyer adds, of “any thing ordinarily human” (68). But far from disqualifying Bartleby from the task of embodying some human essence, this lack of the
“ordinarily human,” this unsettling singularity, will be viewed by the lawyer as its surest sign. One might even say that it’s to incorporate Bartleby as the paradigm of the human that his employer, become the tale’s
narrator, employs him and the tale alike. You’ll recall, for example, that the narrative, which begins with the flattest of opening statements, “I am a rather elderly man” (59), concludes with a famous outburst of passion:
“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” (99). Though this lyric effusion must seem, at first blush, incongruous in the mouth of the lawyer, what moves him to such emotion is nothing less than his triumph in moving from constative
utterance to performative effusion, from prosaic particularity to the poetic universal: his triumph, that is, in constructing Bartleby as a figure for humanity as a whole and so as the very token of the lawyer’s own literary
success. Framed in this way by the lawyer, Bartleby’s singular impenetrability can speak to a universal condition, expressing the “pallid hopelessness” of one for whom every “errand of life” (99) seems vain in a world of
death and despair. Incurably forlorn but singularly mild, refusing to labor but never a militant, Bartleby, in the lawyer’s depiction, evokes the mystery of a being at the limit of the human and gesturing toward its own
beyond. In doing so, he defines the human as inherently self-transcending and, therefore, as what no human can ever plausibly hope to fathom. By virtue of this logic, though, Bartleby’s unfathomability, his lack of “any
thing ordinarily human,” which so profoundly unsettles the lawyer, submits at last to being fathomed: fathomed as the sign of Bartleby’s participation in a universal humanity. However much it associates Bartleby with
hopelessness and despair, this humanizing reading gives the lawyer who proposes it a genuine sense of relief. By making Bartleby recognizable it brings the scrivener back to the human community that he pointedly
refused. But the lawyer can achieve this recuperation only after Bartleby’s death, and only by permitting his imagination to fill in the gaps in his (and our) understanding of “who Bartleby was” (99). On the basis of an
unconfirmed rumor about Bartleby’s life before he showed up on Wall Street—a rumor “that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington” (99)—the lawyer spins out a fantasy designed
to make Bartleby make sense, a fantasy rife with the morbid sentiments that, as readers of Dickens know well, add just the right touch of piquancy to let us enjoy our lot all the more: Conceive a man by nature and
misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually
burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity— he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers
any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death (99). So moved is the
lawyer by these self-conjured phantoms intended to make Bartleby comprehensible that he produces the twin exclamations, simultaneously mournful and triumphant, with which the story ends: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah,
humanity!” And that, for Occupy Wall Street, is the end of the story in more ways than one. In an article published a week and a half after the public reading of “Bartleby,” Lauren Klein quotes H. Bruce Franklin, a
prominent Melville scholar, as follows: “we can never know who or what Bartleby is, but . . . we are continually asked to guess who or what he might be.”13 Klein tells us that this is the “function of the story” and the
“obligation of its readers” and aligns this obligation with the politics of Occupy Wall Street: “to extend this from the literary to the political realm, when presented with a person’s resistance—passive or otherwise—it is the
obligation of observers—indeed of all in a democratic society—to think about the possibilities of what that person might stand for, even if we cannot pinpoint a single issue, meaning, or demand.”14 Could anything speak
more clearly to our sense of the purpose and the value of the humanities—to their value, that is, in helping us know ourselves and each other more fully by insisting that even what resists comprehension can be colonized

by imagination? Consider, for example, these words from the 1980 report produced by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Commission on the Humanities:
“by awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, [the
humanities] tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience. They increase our
distinctively human potential.”15 Yet this value emanates in Melville’s tale from the well-to-do Wall Street lawyer and
gets reinforced by the corporate managers of the United States today who shape the institutions, including the
academy and the various foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Ford), on which the humanities depend. For the
task of the humanities, in such a light, remains to affirm the human and so to reproduce the ideological fantasy that
the human as concept sustains. The work of that concept, in no small part, is to produce a fiction of community,
however large or small its scale, that rests on the constant aesthetic demonstration of the sameness at the core of the
human: the sameness that makes us, in one fell swoop, comprehensible in our opacity and collectivizable in our
singularity. That fantasy may be put to progressive ends by reducing our fear or anxiety about what could seem, at first glance, wholly foreign, and permitting us, instead, to see ourselves in what presents itself as
different. But it works in the other direction too by maintaining that only such sameness to ourselves could make those differences tolerable. The progressive insistence that we’re all

alike is not that far from the reactionary claim that what’s valuable is what’s like us. In both cases whatever holds fast
to its difference, resisting appropriation to sameness, resisting even sameness to itself, gets read as the radical threat
of an otherness essentially inhuman. When we “think about the possibilities of what [a] person might stand for,” to quote Klein on the political imperative of reading Bartleby’s resistance,
we may extend our capacity to know the world through sympathetic imagination, but by making a person stand for something, by making her or him a figure for whatever we project, we make that person a screen on

. Or to carry this one step further, while

which, like the lawyer, we see no more than what we’re predisposed to imagine. Such a person, therefore, like the corporation, is an artificial being

the Occupy movement may resist the equation of artificial beings with natural persons, “Bartleby” reminds us that
natural persons are artificially constructed, that both “natural” and “person” operate as ideological fictions.16 We need only
remember our nation’s own history and Justice Curtis’s dissent in the Dred Scott case in which he quotes Judge Gaston on the status of the enslaved in the colonies before the Revolution: “Slaves were not in legal parlance
persons, but property,” he observed.17 From what we call a humanistic perspective, we affirm that the personhood of those enslaved ought never to have been in question because personhood, like the foundational claim

hence the personhood

that “all men are created equal,” ought to have been, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “self-evident.” But whatever we call “self-evident” reflects the biases of the self;

historically denied to the enslaved can now be extended to corporations not because truth’s selfevidence is either
forgotten or denied, but rather because the ever-elastic category of personhood, like everything to which we attach
the performative claim of its self-evidence, retains the literary provenance that marks it as a fiction. Even the framers of the
Declaration, after all, had to “hold” their truths “self-evident,” had to assert them at the outset to render self-evident what hadn’t been before. When Justice Taney, writing the decision for the majority in Dred Scott,
denied that the phrase “all men are created equal” could possibly have been intended by its authors to refer to those being kept as slaves, he made clear that whatever else it might be, that phrase was not self-evident.

The labor of creating self-evidence, of making the “natural” seem intuitively obvious and therefore unexceptionable,
occupies politics and the humanities both, even when they explicitly resist it. Every deconstruction of humanism relies
on a logic whose structuring principles appeal to self-evidence in the end. And the queerest politics will base its claims on natural rights that emerge from the
shifting fictions of social bonds. Thus the lawyer’s exclamations at the end of “Bartleby” aspire on his part, if not on Melville’s, to present as self-evident that the now-deceased scrivener, who in life refused charity,
companionship, and the lawyer’s best efforts to understand him, embodied, despite this, the very essence of a pitiable “humanity.” In leading us to this recognition, the lawyer, or so he would have us believe, expresses his
own “humanity” by displaying his moving capacity to be moved by what he so vividly imagines. Doesn’t the corporate funding of the humanities work in similar ways? When ExxonMobil sponsors Masterpiece Theater or
Goldman Sachs the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they purchase their humanization by contributing to the work of affirming the human. So the government bailout of Goldman Sachs in response to the economic crisis
(itself fueled by Wall Street’s relentless pursuit of profit at any cost), permits Goldman Sachs to contribute its support to the Metropolitan Museum, in return for a corporate tax break and public recognition in an

.
advertisement in the New York Times. It thus reasserts its humanity through its commitment to the humanities, for which, of course, in this roundabout way, noncorporate persons pay The ad, which appeared in the New
York Times on March 19, 2012, celebrated a raft of corporate sponsors (Goldman Sachs among them), but the image from the museum’s collection used to invoke their civic mindedness depicted a man in boat, not a raft.

In this framework, the

For the painting was Ernest Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, the anodyne exemplar of the culture that corporate sponsorship promotes.

humanities, like General George Washington, cross boundaries only to consolidate the state and thereby shape the
discourse of the human in ways conservative by definition: conservative insofar as they aim to conserve the use-value
of the human as a mask for the machinery of production we’re all conscripted to support. I n funding the humanities, corporations get more
than just tax breaks and public recognition; they buy, which is much more important, a means of shaping an ideological fantasy of a

coherent human community beyond the lived experience of social contradiction and structural antagonism, a
community wherein the fractures to which, like Bartleby’s employer, they contribute, seem resolved in the
commonality to which the humanities attest. Not that the aesthetic education to which the corporate humanities are
devoted excludes the prospect of debate or the performance of conflicting points of view. But even those conflicts are
made to confirm the richness and vitality of the human, which thereby reinforces its value as a means of securing, as
collective value, collectivity itself. As the British Council announces in explaining its financial support for the arts and humanities: “Great art and culture inspires us, brings us together and
teaches us about ourselves and the world around us. In short, it makes life better.”18 In an article published in Academe called “The Humanities on Life Support,” Ellen Schrecker reviewed recent books on higher education
in America and drew attention to the work of two major scholars invested in rethinking the humanities: Geoffrey Galt Harpham, currently the director of the National Humanities Center, and Martha Nussbaum, who
teaches law and ethics at the University of Chicago. Quoting from recent books by these two major scholars, Schrecker efficiently summarizes how we think about the humanities in America today: “The humanities,
Harpham asserts, offer the knowledge that [to live in a human—and humane—society] requires ‘an awakened understanding of oneself as a member of the human species, a heightened alertness to the possibilities of
being human.’ Along with that self-awareness, he notes, the humanities also create ‘the capacity to sympathize, empathize, or otherwise inhabit the experience of others.’ Nussbaum agrees; the sympathetic ‘ability to
imagine . . . the predicament of another person, along with the ability to think for oneself,’ are the ‘skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.’”19 But thinking for oneself has never had any fixed connection to
democracy; and sympathetically imagining another affords no guarantee of justice. After all, if that other person is what some might call a fetus, personhood here revealing once more its status as ideological fiction, then

. Only a humanities designed to affirm, for its corporate and

“sympathy,” depending on where it falls, may justify acts terroristic to some, but deeply humane to others

government sponsors, the harmony of social values (whether local, national, or universal) could offer such a vision of
sympathy as its intellectual goal. Politics may depend on the capacity to encounter what exceeds our own
subjectivity, but simply imagining other subjectivities from the perspective of our own assures no particular political
transformation. Melville’s story, which invites us to read it as the narrator’s advertisement for himself, as a flattering display of the insight and feeling induced in the smug man of business (self-described as
“eminently safe” [60]) by his encounter with the “strangest” (59) of scriveners, offers an implicit critique of this dominant corporate framing of the humanities. Faced, you’ll remember, with Bartleby’s intransigence, his
refusal either to perform his job or to vacate the office he occupies, the lawyer, unwilling to evict the copyist or to have him “collared by a constable” (91)—a scruple apparently foreign to many in positions of power today
—determines to give up the chambers he rents and locate his offices elsewhere. But what the lawyer himself is too tender to do, he leaves to those who come after. And sure enough, his former landlord, urged to action
by his new tenants on discovering that Bartleby comes with the office, has the scrivener removed as a vagrant and sent to the prison called “the Tombs.” There, preferring not to dine, and aloof from every community,

In the wake of this death, the lawyer, far

Bartleby, referred to as “the silent man,” dies quietly a few days later, as if maintaining to the very end his preference for the negative.

from heartless throughout his ordeal and open to anything that might have reconciled the scrivener to normative life,
feels compelled in the name of that norm itself to positivize Bartleby’s negation, to turn it to a profit, by making both it and Bartleby speak to a universal
“humanity.” He assuages the guilt he carries for the part he played in Bartleby’s fate (recall his words on abandoning Bartleby to the empty Wall Street office: “something from within me upbraided me” [91]), by
attributing Bartleby’s eccentricity, which he’ll portray as a type of “derange[ment]” (97), to the heightening of Bartleby’s sensitivities during his time in the Dead Letter Office. The never-to-be-delivered letters he imagines
as causing the scrivener’s despair—a despair evinced in the preference not to copy the letters of the law—find their answer, their redemptive counterpart, when the man of business turns to writing and becomes, with his

, to eliminate the rupture, the negative preference, at odds

tale of Bartleby, a man of letters himself. We might say he produces “Bartleby” to make Bartleby disappear

with social totality and to make Bartleby, in his singularity, merely a copy of the human. Much as the corporate humanities do, and as Occupy Wall Street does as well in appropriating the scrivener to its
cause, he turns the resistance to human community, the preference not to be integrated into the order of sociality, into yet another instrument of social affirmation.

Queerness inhabits the non-place, the site of compromised personhood – the nothingness of
Queerness must be liquidated through the structural process of Overkill in order to secure the
something of the Human.
Stanley 21 ATMOSPHERES OF VIOLENCE STRUCTURING ANTAGONISM AND THE TRANS/QUEER UNGOVERNABLE ERIC A.
STANLEY Duke University Press Durham and London 2021 pg-30-40 Nearlife: Overkill and Ontological Capture Eric A.
Stanley is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and coeditor of
Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison
Industrial Complex.//avery

*** graphic descriptions of violence are in the internals of the card ***

In thinking the overkill of Lauryn Paige Fuller and Rashawn Brazell, I return to the ontopolitical category of nothingness—
the shadow of liberal democracy. The place of nothingness reemerges in its elegant precision with each case I offer—
the repetitious futility of bringing into representation that which escapes it but remains in a para-vitalist order. By
resituating this question in the positive, the something more often than not translated as the human is made to
appear. Here the category of the human assumes generality, yet is activated, or more precisely weaponized, in the
specificity of history and politics. To this end, the human, the something of this query, names the rightsbearing
subjects or those who can stand before the law—the beneficiary of equality. The human, then, makes the nothing not
only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite
human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human resides in the space of life, and under the
domain of Man, whereas the trans/queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and in the zone of death. As
perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the trans/queer is the negation, through inclusive exclusion, of
democracy’s proper subject. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable double of the human works to counter the
arguments that suggest overkill and anti-trans/queer violence at large index a pathological break, and that the severe
nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is that which constitutes, via negation,
equality’s form, which is lived by many as unfreedom. Or put another way, if the state is the enactment of a
majoritarian collective unconscious, then its own intelligibility, or its own will to power, is rendered through the
figure of the internal enemy and the mandatory forms of liquidation needed to face this inside/outside threat.
Overkill, the calculated practice of gratuitous force, then, is the proper expression to the riddle of the trans/queer
nothingness. However, the spectacular scene of overkill must not be singularly pathologized as this would, yet again,
privatize violence’s epistemology under the individual while its structure remains intact. In the end, the killer never
works alone. These vicious acts, therefore, must be held as an indictment of the very social worlds of which they are
ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to that which is nothing. 37 After finishing a
graveyard shift washing dishes for minimum wage at a local Waffle House, eighteen-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver stopped
by their mom’s house to give her some money they owed her before heading home to a greenand-white trailer in the
rural town of Pine Grove, Alabama. Scotty Joe was a drag performer in local bars with a fondness and talent for working
Dolly Parton. A survivor of cancer and an attempted suicide, Weaver had dropped out of school some years before in
hopes of escaping the relentless agony of a childhood lived beyond gender’s binary edict. Scotty Joe was excited about a
recent move into a new place with their best friend Nichole Kelsay, a trailer that was, according to Scotty Joe’s mother,
“not much” and was puzzled into a neighborhood of thirty or so mobile homes. Kelsay’s boyfriend, Christopher Gaines,
had also been staying there along with his friend, Robert Porter.38 Near Life 35 Returning home in the early morning
hours, worn out from a long night’s work, Scotty Joe Weaver, alone, took a nap on the couch. As Kelsay, Gaines, and
Porter ate pancakes and made last-minute decisions regarding their plan to murder Scotty Joe that they had begun the
week before, Scotty Joe slept for the last time. Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter returned to the trailer home in the early
afternoon and found Scotty Joe still asleep. Kelsay locked herself in the bathroom as Gaines said to Porter, “OK. Come
on. Let’s do it.”39 Robert Porter first struck Scotty Joe Weaver with a blunt object. As blood poured down the back of
Weaver’s head, Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter tied them tightly to a kitchen chair. Over the next few hours, Scotty Joe
Weaver was beaten repeatedly and stabbed with an assortment of sharp objects. Gaines and Porter then strangled
Scotty Joe for about ten minutes with a nylon bag until they fell unconscious to the floor. Blood was oozing from Scotty
Joe’s ears, which, according to the prosecutor, was a sign that they were still alive. Unsure, Gaines kicked Scotty Joe’s
seemingly lifeless body to see if they had been successful. The details of what happened, and what actually ended Scotty
Joe’s life, are lost within a collage of accusations and denial. Dr. Kathleen Enstice of the Alabama Department of Forensic
Sciences, through her sketches and snapshots at the trial, suggested that Scotty Joe was also stabbed twice in the face
and at least nine more times in the chest, with several cuts to the rest of their body, leaving them partially decapitated.
Scotty Joe’s body was then, according to a jailhouse phone interview with Gaines, wrapped in a blanket and their head in
a towel, then dragged onto the mattress in Scotty Joe’s bedroom. Thinking that if the air-conditioning was turned up, the
incriminating smell of decomposing flesh might be slowed, Gaines and Porter cooled the room, took the atm card and
$80 in cash that Scotty Joe had, and left. Their original plan was to throw Scotty Joe’s body into a nearby river, and the
three had even purchased cinder blocks to weigh it to the river’s bottom. However, they feared that the body would
surface and reveal their attack, so after the murder they returned to the Walmart where the supplies had been
purchased and received a refund for the cinder blocks—a detail that affirmed their actions were of little significance
beyond a misspent $2.11. After hitting up the local Dairy Queen and Arby’s for lunch, they reconvened at Kelsay’s
mother’s house to play some cards and relax. Later that evening Porter and Gaines returned to the trailer to dispose of
the body. They stuffed the blanket-wrapped body into the trunk of Gaines’s car, then stopped by a gas station and filled
an empty Coke bottle with gasoline. About eight miles deep in a nearby pine grove, Porter and Gaines laid out Scotty
Joe’s body, 36 Chapter One along with other incriminating evidence, and doused it with the gasoline. In an act of
sexualized aggression, the two urinated on the body, then set it afire and drove back to town. Scotty Joe’s charred and
mutilated remains were later found by a stranger riding an atv. Wounds of Intimacy Scotty Joe and the other victims I’ve
described were forced to embody to the point of obliteration the movement between abject nothingness, a
generality that enables one to be killed so easily and frequently that it goes without notice, and at the other end, they
approximate a terrorizing threat—a symbol of monstrosity and irreconcilable contradiction. The social reproduces
queerness and gender nonnormativity as inescapable dangers, and at the same time beyond the value of sacrifice. Or,
put another way, this shuttling necessitates a form of response to maintain its coherence that is more ruthless than
that elicited by either indifference or fear. According to Lum Weaver, Scotty Joe’s older brother, Gaines had always had
“issues” with Scotty Joe’s gender and sexuality. As in the majority of these direct attacks, the assailants knew, and in this
case even lived with, their target. This proximity between aggressor and victim undoes the fantasy that strangers are the
primary vectors of harm—a fantasy we reproduce for its cover of protection. Here, then, the murder of Scotty Joe must
be read as a form of intimate violence, not only because of the relationship the murderers had to Scotty Joe Weaver but
also and maybe more importantly because of the technologies of vivisection that were deployed. As Kelsay, Gaines, and
Porter had, according to testimony, at least a week to plan the murder of Scotty Joe, it seems logical that, during that
time in rural Alabama, they could have produced a gun that would have made the murder much less gruesome.
However, the three decided to cut and rip Scotty Joe Weaver to pieces using carnal force. The psychic distance that may
be produced through the scope of a hunting rifle, and the possible dissociation it might offer, is the opposite of the
bodily strength it takes to plunge a knife into the flesh and bone of a body. The penetrative violence, the moments when
Gaines was holding Weaver as he meticulously thrust his knife into their body, stages a kind of terrorizing sexualized
intimacy.40 If Scotty Joe Weaver was at once so easy to kill, and at the same time so menacing that they had to be
destroyed, this intimate overkill might also help us understand why anti-trans/queer violence tends to take this form.
Scotty Joe Weaver was, after all, the roommate and “best friend” of one of their killers. However, robbing Weaver would
not be enough, killing them would not be enough; the horror of Scotty Joe Weaver’s queerness forced their killers to
mutilate and burn the body. This tender hostility, of ravaging love and tactile brutality, may be an opening for the task of
facing the question scribed on a bathroom wall: “What if it feels good to kill or mutilate homos?” The disavowal of the
threat through a murderous pleasure signals a much more complicated assembly of desire and destruction. This
complex structure of phobia and attachment, not unlike the pleasure and pain Kelsay might have experienced as she
helped slaughter her “best friend,” asks us to consider anti-trans/ queer violence outside the explanatory apparatus that
situates it on the side of pure hate, intolerance, or prejudice.

The social reproductive project of the affirmative is always tied into the propagation of
conservatism that always leads to violent open militarized fascism in the name of The Child.
Lothian 18 Old Futures Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility Postmillennial Pop by Alexis Lothian Published by: NYU
Press Alexis Lothian is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Core Faculty in the Design Cultures & Creativity
Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Chapter 2: Dystopian Impulses, Feminist Negativity, and the
Fascism of the Baby’s Face //avery

Dystopian fictions may invoke or challenge Enlightenment progress narratives, but the purpose of imagining the end of
the world has often been to set the stage for political transformation—or at least to make transformation more
imaginable. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, writing about feminist science fiction, describe “critical dystopia” as
fiction that enables “a space of contestation and opposition for . . . subjects whose class, gender, race, sexuality, and
other positions are not empowered by hegemonic rule.”14 If utopian hope develops through plans for and impulses
toward better things, Baccolini and Moylan suggest that dystopia’s value can come through the same impulse: one might
imagine things getting worse in order to believe they can become better. To paraphrase the villain from Duncan Jones’s
2011 film Source Code: if new hopes and possibilities are to arise from the rubble of what we call civilization, there will
have to first be rubble. Dystopias here become outgrowths of what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called the
“utopian impulse”—a kind of active “longing” that can be mobilized to change the world.15 Yet this fails to account
for the affective power of dystopian negativity—our response to the violence of the boot on the face. Building on the
notion that no future can be an important starting point for thinking the politics of history from the perspective of
those excluded from dominant narratives, I instead ask what a dystopian impulse might produce. Can negative futures
be imagined without either a redemptive kernel of hope or an implicit acceptance of the way things are? What
pleasures and politics grow from dystopian speculation?

The perverse pleasures of negative imagination are explored by queer theorists who critique assimilationist, normalizing
politics by homing in on refusals, debasements, and impossibilities. Filled with dystopian impulses, queer anti-futurist
critique appears in the writing of French socialist gay liberationist Guy Hocquenghem in the 1970s, before being taken
up by US queer theorists Leo Bersani in the 1980s and 1990s and Lee Edelman in the 2000s.16 Hocquenghem wrote in
1978 that “the gay movement is . . . not the signifier of what might become a new form of ‘social organisation,’ a new
stage of civilised humanity,” but instead “demonstrates that civilisation is the trap into which desire keeps falling.”17
Drawing from psychoanalysis, Hocquenghem argues that straight society sees gay sex as a danger to humanity’s future
because sexuality without reproductivity signals “a fear that the succession of generations, on which civilisation is based,
may stop.”18 Hocquenghem embraces this seemingly homophobic perspective rather than refuting it to demand gay
inclusion within dominant culture. He places queer sex’s disruptive force in the service of revolution, arguing that the
end of “civilisation” homosexual desire portends would break down capitalist oppression and exploitation—the basis of
which is the consumerist family. Hocquenghem’s dystopian impulse destroys in order to build: he insists that a new
order is possible, though it must be structured so differently from the old that it will no longer be understandable as
“civilisation.” Like Hocquenghem, Bersani understands gay male sexuality as exemplifying sexual desire’s capacity to
unmake the social. His 1987 “Is the Rectum a Grave?” was written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when many gay
men were dying and all were viewed by the straight public sphere as contaminant sources of illness and death. The essay
focuses on anal sex as the vector by which gay men become demonized, casting the “rectum” as a zone of waste and
shame whose association with pleasure and death has the potential to shatter idealized understandings of the
relationship between sex, power, and subjectivity held not only by the homophobic public sphere but also within liberal
gay and lesbian activism.19 Both Hocquenghem and Bersani revel in metaphorical ends of the future by insisting that
sexual pleasure can constitute a dystopian impulse on the level of the body—underlined by gay sexual refusal of female-
sexed anatomy’s connotations of fecundity and life.

Gay male antisocial critique is not without its glimmers of utopian possibility, however. Hocquenghem’s dystopian
impulse finds destruction in pleasure, insisting that any possible new order will be so different from the old that it
cannot be imagined within existing terms. Yet his work is also predicated on the notion that it is imperative to imagine
such a new world. Bersani, too, gestures towards the possibility that acts of debasement and refusal could participate in
the creation of futures and worlds that do more than reproduce homogeneous time. He closes Homos (1995) by
suggesting that “in a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself, only what that society throws
off—its mistakes or its pariahs—can serve the future.”20 The future he imagines sociality’s underside to be serving is not
explicated in detail but stands as a moment of flash utopianism, a gestural merging of negativity and hope.

The most expansive queer critique of futurity has been Lee Edelman’s. Edelman extends Hocquenghem and Bersani’s
framework from the sexually specific into a universalizing critique of reproduction itself, disavowing utopia, politics,
and hope entirely for their positivist futural visions. His analysis of political futurity names the way in which an image
of “the Child” functions as a guarantor for political projects through a universal temporal politics he names
reproductive futurism.21 Heterosexual reproductive sex becomes the alibi for a re-production of political and social structures,
ensuring a conservative propagation of things as they are. To be queer is to refuse that reproduction (a dystopian impulse); not to refuse it is to become
part of conservative futurism. I do not intend my analysis of dystopian anti-futurism as a confrontation with Edelman, yet the specific examples and connotations through which his dystopian
impulse is elaborated are important if we want to understand the history of no future on which his work implicitly builds.

Naming and shaming the forces that reproduce politics as heterofuturity, Edelman uses a 1938 conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin to explicate his memorable

phrase “the fascism of the baby’s face.”22 Brecht

wrote to Benjamin in 1938 that futurity was fundamental to both fascism and its
opposition because “[the Nazis] are planning for the next thirty thousand years.”23 Benjamin remembered Brecht as invoking reproduction
to denounce a fascist futurism that wished to “deform the baby in the mother’s womb,” in a struggle against which “we must under no circumstances leave out the children.”24 For
Edelman,

Benjamin’s description of “a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism” shows the flattening
universality that comes from emphasizing children, and threats to children, as justification for political futures.
Invoking fascism for the figure of reproductive futurism adds an emotive rhetoric to Edelman’s insistence that
“whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear—Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-
year Reich or of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,” all “political programs” are defined by
reproductive futurism and thus “are programmed to reify difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the
order of the same.”25 If the worst imaginable thing is always the deformation of childhood, then the same images
define both fascist and antifascist politics.

Neither fascism nor antifascism are easy to define outside the specific historical referents from which Edelman abstracts
them. In twenty-firstcentury Anglo-American popular culture, to describe a political project as “fascist” has long been to
insist that it has no future—or that any future to which it is liable to lead should be avoided at any cost.26 Edelman’s
analysis can help us see why: if all political programs are characterized by authoritarian enforcement of the forms of
social reproduction they wish to fulfill, then elements of the fascistic can be identified, and denounced, at will .
Similarly, Edelman’s conception of the queer as anti-reproductive force becomes that which opposes fascistic politics
by refusing the baby’s face, even if queerness in and of itself has no political content. Yet Edelman’s image of queer
negativity as that which would shatter “the fascism of the baby’s face” unsettlingly mirrors Orwell’s depiction of fascist
futurity as a “boot stamping on a human face.” This proximity should remind us that Edelman’s analysis of social-
psychic structures of futurity offers an upheaval and a challenge to conceptions of politics rather than a contribution
to political discourses themselves. It is a commentary about the chilling effects exerted by baby-faced iconography on
what can be legitimated as political, not a discourse on either fascism or procreation as such.

The impossible ends of reproduction that inspire Edelman’s theorizing are represented by figures who absolutely
refuse to think about the children or to act in coherently political ways. These are invariably men who defy normative sociality (from Scrooge to
various Hitchcock protagonists). Edelman understands this masculine dominance to be due to “a gender bias that continues to view women as ‘naturally’ bound more closely to sociality,

reproduction, and domesticating emotion.”27 Yet,

in feminist hands, the fascism of the baby’s face has the potential to become a force no

less violent than the fascism of militarized nationalist rhetoric.

The Child has set the grid for the possibility of our politics, tying every political project together
with the securitization of the future. The alternative is to inhabit the gap of Queerness through a
project of sinthomostudying, to embrace the radical negativity placed onto the queer as the starting
of point of our political study in order to rupture the current bounds of our political thinking.
Ford 18 Queer Communist Study: The Sinthomostudier Against The Capital-debt-learning Regime This is an accepted
manuscript of an article published by the Taylor & Francis Group in The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy on April 18,
2018 and available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15505170.2018.1437575 4-18-2018 Queer
Communist Study: The Sinthomostudier Against The Capital-debt-learning Regime Derek R. Ford DePauw University,
[email protected] //avery

Edelman (2004) contends that it is not the right-wingers, the bourgeoisie, the neoliberals, or the religious conservatives
that we have to combat. Rather, we have to turn our attention and our polemics to that which we have in common with
these forces: the Law of the Child. The Child holds our supposed enemies and us captive together. The Child totally
dominates the horizon of possibility in our world, dictating the limits of what can be said, thought, proposed, learned,
debated, studied; determining not only political possibilities but the political itself. The Child, he says, “terroristically
holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds
as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up” (p. 21). That is to say, political struggles are all framed
entirely around and for the Child. We have to ban abortion for the Child! No, we have to allow abortions for the Child!
We have to ban gay marriage for the Child! No, we have to legalize gay marriage for the Child! The logic of the Child
even allows the religious right to maintain completely contradictory positions, such that those who will oppose abortion
on the grounds that it takes the life of a child can wholesale argue against the humanness of the child-cum-queer-adult.
More than dictate the content of politics, the Child draws the entire grid of social intelligibility, framing everything
around the logic of reproductive futurism: the idea that we must reproduce so that we can have a future. What are we
to do to resist this? We have to break out of this opposition, oppose it in some way. We can’t negotiate with this
terrorist of a Child. Rather than insisting that we are really the ones operating in the best interest of the Child, we
have to embrace the radical negativity placed on the queer, our radical opposition to the Child, our opposition to the
opposition that it frames so completely. The right, in other words, is right: queers are a threat to the social order;
“queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics
confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (Edelman, 2004, p. 3). Whereas the Child guarantees the endless
drive for stability and equilibrium, fulfillment and resolution, the queer figures as the social order’s inevitable and
constitutive failure, the endless yet suppressed disruption of identity and regulation. We routinely unsettle the social
order and the very possibility of regulation: “queerness can never define an identity,” as Edelman puts it, “ it can only
ever disturb one” (p. 17). There is no political program here, nor are there steps to be taken to break out of this
paradigm. What Edelman latches onto is pure negativity. As he so eloquently and pointedly puts it, “Fuck the social
order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor,
innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relation and
the future that serves as its prop” (p. 29). While Edelman’s conclusion may be—or may appear to be—simple, the way
he reaches it isn’t quite so. For one, the Child to which Edelman refers is not actual, fleshy, or living. Rather, the Child is a
figure of reproductive futurism. As he makes clear early on, “the image of the child” is “not to be confused with the lived
experiences of any historical children” (p. 11). The Child, that is, represents a telos and a guarantee of and investment in
the future. Some have argued that Edelman projects a privileged child to the status of Child (Meiners, 2015; Munoz,
2009), noting that not all children are imbued with the promise of the future. This is an absolutely correct observation,
one that is traumatically amplified every time police, security forces, or soldiers brutalize and murder young children of
color, children from oppressed communities, nations, and states, poor children, queer children, disabled children, and
workingclass children. Yet instead of disproving Edelman’s argument, this observation in fact confirms it: the innocent
(U.S.-born, white, heterosexual, bourgeois, abled, English-speaking) Child is precisely that which makes some children
not children: those who can never be disciplined into growing up into the social order. For two, the Child is bound up in
the Symbolic that is the social order, and Lacan therefore plays a primary role in his argument. Edelman’s reading goes
something like this: The Symbolic order is the arrangement we enter that allows us to participate in society, the order
that establishes the rules concerning language and desire, epistemology and ontology. The Symbolic order stands
opposed to—or, better, beyond—the Real, which is authentic reality, that which is prior to signification and
symbolization. Because the Symbolic cannot capture all of the Real, there is a permanent remainder of the Real that is
internal to the Symbolic. We are always in excess of who we are. The Symbolic order, consequently, “only bestows a
sort of promissory identity, one with which we can never concede in fully coinciding because we, as subjects of the
signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves, can only ever aspire to catch up to whatever it is we might signify by closing
the gap that divides us and, paradoxically, makes us subjects through that act of division alone” (p. 8). Because all
identity is promissory it rests on a continual deferment to the future, and so to be queer is to not require that future.
For three—and this is the focal hinge on which Edelman’s polemic rests—there is a determining link between queerness
and the death drive, wherein “the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure:
the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (p. 9). The death drive is the excessive surplus endogenous to
the Symbolic that threatens that order’s stability, working against the order to disrupt and unravel it. The Symbolic is,
then, a non-identity of being and non-being, possibility and impossibility. This order is plagued by a remainder beyond
meaning that Lacan names jouissance, which is something more than enjoyment, something in excess of the split
between pleasure and pain. Jouissance can head in two directions. On the one hand, it can solidify around some
“particular object or end… congealing identity around the fantasy of satisfaction or fulfillment by means of that object”
(p. 25). On the other hand, jouissance can break these attachments, “undoing the consistency of a social reality that
relies on Imaginary identifications” (p. 25). The first represents the future, and the second represents the queer. Queer
jouissance thus “tears the fabric of Symbolic reality as we know it, unraveling the solidity of every object, including
the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself” (p. 25). Queerness marks the spot of the gap in the Symbolic,
the opaque place between discourse and its other, and Edelman is calling on the queer project to inhabit this gap, this
negative non-place that the Law of the Child seeks to continually cover over .
 Queer Ecology K: Houston

Next off is the K:

Environmental governance is a project of purification — fundamentally relying on the positioning of
cis-het as natural and labeling queer bodies as un-natural. Post-colonial ecology studies are based
on control of the subject and its relation to nature. Sustaining an ecology of pureness relies on the
policing of discursive intermingling of humans with the non-human Other.
Mehrabi 20 (Tara Mehrabi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Gender Studies Unit of the University of Turku, Finland.
They hold a PhD from Linköping University, Unit of Gender Studies, and a Master's degree in Science, Technology and
Society (STS) from the same university, “Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and
Death through a Queerfeminist Lens” Karlstad University/)

Within modernist ideologies, the desire to protect nature’s ‘purity’ bears anthropocentric, colonial and heteronormative
legacies that would be made possible at the expense of others through controlling, governing and eliminating ‘toxic’
bodies that were deemed threatening to the ‘purity’ of nature (e.g. Mavhunga 2011; Straube 2019). For example, writing
about the 2007 panic in the US about Chinese toys and toxicity, gender studies scholar Mel Y. Chen (2007) argues that
such discourses of toxicity and purity are highly racialised. They uses the term ‘sovereign fantasy’ to show how ideas
about the binary of toxicity and purity are indeed an ‘imperial project of absolute rule and authority’ over the other
(2007, 367). Postcolonial science and technology studies scholar Clapperton Mavhunga (2011) argues that animalisation
of the ‘infra-human’ and ‘vermin to be exterminated’ was crucial to colonial powers, establishing an ‘ecological
imperialism’5 that was ‘obsessed with controlling pests’. Whether human or nonhuman, Mavhunga argues that
violence, biopolitical population management and extermination of these natural(ised) others are always enacted
through ‘the same ontology of pesthood’ and ideals about ‘natural’ ecologies. Always already marked by racism,
heteronormativity and Eurocentrism, ‘natural’ ecology is not only about controlling the subject but also controlling
his/hers/its relation to its surroundings/nature and others (Mavhunga 2011). According to Mavhunga, just like colonial
discourses, contemporary discourses about pests, pesticides and their toxicity also enact ontologies of pesthoods and
shape security activities (2011, 152). His argument is situated within the anxieties of the global North about chemical
and biological weapons and how they shape security practices and population management control at large. However, I
think his argument could be extended from biological weapons to biological waste, which is biological matter altered in
ways that can be potentially dangerous even if not weaponised. Biowaste, which is, in the context of the laboratory,
dead specimens or dismembered body parts of often transgenic and infected humanised model organisms, is embedded
in such security activities and anxieties. This is an interesting twist because decomposing organic matter6 is often
assumed to be an energy resource, food for other living beings and part of the natural life cycle (e.g. Edwards 2018).
However, once biological matter is infected, it becomes matter out of place. As it becomes altered by technoscientific
and chemical means, it becomes ambiguous; it exits the natural cycle of decomposition and becomes an object of radical
regulation, policing and elimination. Whether through strict guidelines, mosquito nets, a closed door or Helen’s warning,
modes of handling waste in the lab are to police nature and protect it from being infected by biological and chemical
hazards that are produced in the lab.Flies are often considered as biological waste in the labs I visited. However, looking
into the disposal practices, which I shall do later in this article, flies would often fall out of this category and were
handled differently for a variety of reasons. What matters, though, is, as sociologist Zsuzsa Gille (2007) argues, that the
construction and modes of handling waste are highly regulated and situated within a binary of living and dead matter,
natural and artificial, and safe or hazardous. Laboratory waste amplifies such binaries and notions of danger and purity
through waste circulation and, by extension, widens the divide between the hazardous laboratory environment and the
natural environment. In other words, the material and discursive practices of disposing of laboratory waste are
boundary-making practices that not only enact the laboratory space as a danger zone (that which is not natural) but also
animate nostalgia for nature’s purity.From nature’s purity to queer ecologyBefore moving on to the analytical part of
this article, I wish to elaborate more on the concept of queer ecology as it has been discussed within queerfeminist
theories and feminist technoscience studies. Ideas of nature and sex/sexuality have been coproducing each other
through history and continue to do so today (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010; Straube 2019), and I wish to
situate my take on the concept of queer ecology within this ongoing scholarship.In order to sustain an ecology of
pureness one needs to police the material-discursive intermingling and entanglement of humans with the dehumanised
Other, nonhuman: the native species and the ‘invading/alien species’ (Barla and Hubatschke 2017). Which modes of
togetherness are imagined as ‘natural’ and therefore legitimate, and which are constructed as ‘unnatural’ and therefore
policed, restricted and made invisible (individually, socially and institutionally)? The concept of ‘natural’ sex and
sexuality, as many queer theorists have argued, is often constructed in relation to nature and animals (Ah-King 2018). In
other words, animals have been a source of understanding of human sexuality and what are prescribed to be ‘natural’
and ‘legitimate’ modes of intimacies (Chen 2012; Alaimo 2016). For instance, animals are mobilised as natural tropes
and used to argue for or against homosexuality. ‘Degenerate’ sexualities, non-reproductive relations and queer sex have
been considered as waste, toxic and hazardous to the natural order of things, which has been criticised by queer and
trans scholars (Straube 2019; Ah-King 2018).

Systems of oppression are not independent but mutually reinforcing – logics of normativity and the
heterosexual fear of the queer erotic are routinely deployed to justify genocide, exploitation, and
oppression of the queer body, nature, and beyond. Essentialist dichotomies like the distinction of
nature and culture are technologies of violence that sustain both physical harm and death upon the
Other AND more complex forms of violent knowledge production that pervade our understandings
of the world around us.
Grassi 17 Grassi, Samuele. “‘Queer Natures’: Feminist Ecocriticism, Performativities, and Ellen van Neerven’s “Water”” LEA -
Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, n. 6 (2017), pp. 177-192

Introduction Over the last fifteen years, scholarship in queer studies has shifted its focus towards ecology applying its
deconstructive tools to the category of the “human” and its relation to the “nonhuman”, the “inhuman”, the “other-
than-human”, or “beyond-the-human/posthuman”. Taking an oppositional stance to (heteroand homo-) normativity to develop
theories and to shape practices of resistance to neoliberalism and Western supremacy, the emerging field of queer ecology rethinks sexualities
discourses alongside the heterosexualization of urban and suburban places, the exploitation of natural resources, and the nature/culture
dualism. This paper takes further a set of reflections presented at a one-day meeting on ecotheology organised by
Liberospirito1 at Casa Cares, a meeting space and Waldensians centre for responsible, sustainable tourism immersed in
the Tuscan countryside, which took place in 2016. The seminar gathered together a small group of scholars and
practitioners whose interests stem biodiversity and intellectual property, animal liberation, ecocriticism, and feminism2 .
The analysis here is concerned with the connections of sexual freedom and environmental justice, and with the political
import of feminist knowledges for contemporary queer theories and the struggle against patriarchy, compulsory
heterosexuality, anthropocentrism, and colonialism. Specifically, it will be informed by ecofeminism and its attribution of
value to the interrelatedness of all these aspects, which have been crucial to gain “the understanding that the many
systems of oppression are mutually reinforcing” (Gaard 1997, 114). In her Introduction to a special issue on ecofeminism
of the journal DEP-Deportate, esuli, profughe (Zambonati 2012), Bruna Bianchi sees ecofeminism as the only ethically
viable position to apprehend the sedimented logic that binds oppression on the grounds of class, race, gender,
sexuality, ability, and their interconnections, the exploitation of nonhuman, and of natural resources. The critique of the
nature/culture dualism carried out in this essay is located within the work developed by the Italian women’s journal; it is stimulated by a distinct field of ecological critique that is still under-theorised in Italy – ecofeminism
– yet whose history in Australia is at least as long as the publication of Val Plumood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature(1993)3 . Taking their lead from this theoretical and activist field, the next two sections explore the
workings of a queer ecology crossing practices of radical feminism(s) to nurture strategies for (un)learning, for thinking, and for acting otherwise. These are two fundamental concepts to rethink the notions of “utopia” and
“performativity” that emphasise the contingent and uncanny nature of practices of resistance in theory as in praxis, with which I engage in this paper. “[W]hat we imagine queer ecology to be emerges in tandem with what
we hope it contributes to the world” (Azzarello, in Anderson et al. 2012, 84) – as such, queer ecology has profound implications in the theoretical and activist research field of ecofeminism in particular, and in ecological
criticism in general. In the fourth and final section of the paper, I look at how this queer ecology can be seen at work in Ellen van Neerven’s short story, “Water” (2014a), from her award-winning collection, Heat and Light,
which was published after she was awarded the David Unaipon Award as Unpublished Indigenous Writer at the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards. Van Neerven is a Brisbane-based Indigenous Australian writer and editor
with Mununjali and Dutch heritage4 ; she is currently commissioning editor for The Lifted Brow literary magazine, and has curated a series of events about sacrifice at the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival. She is also the
author of a collection of poetry (Comfort Food, 2016) and editor of a digital anthology on Indigenous literature, titled Writing Black (van Nerveen 2014b). “Water” is set in a dystopian near-future, when Australia is a
republic whose president, Tanya Sparkle is “determined to leave her legacy on native title” (van Neerven 2014a, 73): a new nation called “Australia2” is being built, entitling Aboriginal people to receive a piece of land
provided they meet specific requirements (74). The protagonist, Kaden, is offered a job as Cultural Liaison Officer due to her mixed Indigenous background, and as the story unfolds she is confronted with key facts about
the project, about her artist father and his family who grew up on the fictional Ki island – a place originally inhabited by Kaden’s ancestors, whose “spirits of thousands of years” (118) are embodied in the plantpeople she is
supposed to liaise with to carry out the government’s “horribly misguided attempt at making reparations” (Dovey 2014). Kaden will have to facilitate the job for her company in letting the plantpeople flee a group of
islands through administering a formula that makes them “more docile” (van Neerven 2014a, 93) – and that is ultimately going to be lethal (109). Raising questions about indigeneity and indigenous sovereignty, lesbianism
and sexual (dis)identities, and recalcitrant nature/culture dualisms, “Water” will be the empirical case to canvas an anti-essentialised queer feminist politics and ethics of care that is telling of and timely for utopian futures
after sovereignty, after the West, after patriarchy, after whiteness. This study is situated within a wider cross-disciplinary inquiry into theories, practices, and pedagogies of antinormativity aimed at new mappings of
freedom, equality, social and ecological justice under neoliberalism, and the attendant legacies of colonialism and imperialism. 4 2. Queer “environments” Queer theories have brought about a change of paradigm in our
understanding of subject formation, moving from their insistence on discursive, cultural, and social constructions of sexuality and gender through the handling of sexuality as lens through which to address intersectional
forms of oppressions. Of specific interest here are two seemingly interrelated positions concerning the import of this change, one for a coalitional embodied politics of resistance arousing from a collective sense of
precarity and vulnerability, the other for an anti-authoritarian pedagogy and politics “beyond gender”. The first is taken from Judith Butler’s updated conceptualisation of the performativity of gender within the context of
her current work on a theory of assembly. The notion of gender performativity has been influential to mobilise non-hegemonic practices within the context of normative regimes, which are produced as systems of
power/knowledge and enforced through the operations of institutions (the family, the Church, the school, the State). As theorised by Judith Butler in the early 1990s, it has also provided the awareness that sites of
domination are where alternative possibilities for re-signification and agency can potentially be opened: The political aspiration of this analysis, perhaps its normative aim, is to let the lives of gender and sexual minorities
become more possible and more liveable, for bodies that are gender nonconforming as well as those that conform too well (and at a high cost) to be able to breathe and move more freely in private and public spaces, as
well as those zones that cross and confound those two. (2015, 32-33) The second reflection informs Lucy Nicholas’ recent elaboration of a “queer post-gender ethics” premised on the belief that it is possible, indeed
desirable to envision a gender-neutral existence. This implies a kind of anarchistic refusal of the ruse of the normative in all spheres of life, where queer becomes the name we give to “a position or an impulse for critique
[…] rather than an identity or positive theory of something” (2014, 7). These observations about performativity and gender stress a common radical impulse to critique dualistic frameworks like those that have sanctioned
the oppressions of women, races, and lands which are the focus of this paper. Read through the lens of the primordial separation between nature and culture, queerness as impulse to critique makes what is (thought as)
natural, or given the product of a (dominant) culture dictating material and discursive realizations of nature. Although queer ecology started to appear more recently as a term used in the literature, Greta Gaard’s essay,
“Towards a Queer Ecofeminism” seems to have anticipated many of its concerns about sexual freedom and the shaping of visions of social alongside ecological justice while questioning interrelated forms of oppression.

the typically Western fear of the erotic, and a white masculine 180 heterosexual
The institutionalisation of Christianity in Europe has legitimated

rationality has been mobilised to provide, in Gaard’s words, “the rhetorical justification for genocide and colonialism”
(1997, 128). The history of Eurocentric imperialism can thus be (re)narrated as the story “of compulsory heterosexuality
whereby the queer erotic of non-westernized peoples, their culture, and their land, is subdued into the missionary position – with the
conqueror ‘on top’” (131). Gaard’s claims to free eroticism/the erotic from the constraints of patriarchy and the Church
consider all human beings “as equal participants in culture and in nature” (127, emphasis added). Indeed, queer ecology
reveals that the nature/culture dichotomy is an artificial technology put to work historically to justify the required labour
needed to sustain complex oppressions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and able-bodiedness through which the codes
of the “natural” circulate. It is crucial to recall here Donna Haraway’s work since the late 1980s, where we have learned
about the necessary task of acquiring the ability to see that all knowledge is generated through technologically and
scientifically produced theories, bodies, institutions, and worlds according to specific materialisations of gender, class,
and race. Haraway’s feminist situated perspective, or strategic positioning has much to share with Gaard’s and other ecofeminists’ works; her “modest witness” provides a location for resistance enacted through
being able to see differently, to make connections with others while producing knowledges that can only be partial, non-foundational5 . Through its denial of anthropocentrism, this non-objective awareness is profoundly
non-hegemonic, making space for embodiment – how we live, think, and feel in space and time – as the site of transformation and change6 . This is aligned with the educational project envisaged by queer pedagogies,
referring to teaching and learning practices where dissent and disagreement are mobilised strategically to refuse the injunction to erase differences from view. In its portrayal of encounters crossing dualistic notions of
sexuality, gender, race, and human-ness, van Neerven’s short-story lends itself as a powerful call to engage with, as opposed to merely acknowledging difference, thus shaping unforeseen pedagogies for living with and
loving others. Deborah Britzman’s conceptualisation of difference seems apt here; accordingly, normativity is reduced to a structuring order of thought effacing otherness because its very existence is premised on this
production, which always entails a denial of what the normative sets itself against (1995, 157). An implicit assumption in this paper is that this awareness should enliven our desire to refuse the barriers 5 See also Braidotti
(2017, 65) for a recent reading of Haraway’s powerful figuration. 6 This understanding of embodiment is taken from Kay Inckle’s challenging reflections on developing transformative pedagogies through embodying
diversity (in her case, a disability). As she writes: “Embodiment exceeds dualism; it incorporates the material (body), intangible (soul/psyche/intuition) and non-rational (emotional) and enables diversity beyond
oppositional, identity-based dualisms” (2012, 165). 181 that are strengthened in our name, as environments are destroyed and the dualisms that have subjugated nature to culture, the other to the same are still taken for
granted, immobile, unquestionable. A related assumption is that ecological justice also involves nurturing autonomy (Heckert 2010, 32) as we explore possibilities to think, to teach, to love, and to live differently; to engage
differences in order to be able to see the difference this makes. Recent scholarship in queer studies has been concerned with environmental justice in the attempt to reveal the correlations between normative
heterosexuality and the organisation of public space; among others, through contrasting dominant efforts to safeguard forms of sociality premised on nature/the natural, as well as its production and reproduction. This

the White, affluent, nuclear (heterosexual or homosexual) family as space of

body of work has contributed to the debate about the matrix of

policing and docility reaching into public life, for instance, by shedding light on “environments [that] have become
overdetermined as the province of heterosexual masculinity ” (Evans 2005, 27). A first theoretical effort to address
these convergences is found in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s edited collection, Queer Ecologies:
Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire where the authors shift the focus of ecological thought towards “the ways in which sexual
relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions , experiences, and constitutions of that
world” (2010, 5). How we understand materiality is cogent for the kind of social and ecological justice proposed by queer ecology, ecofeminism, and feminist studies more broadly; this is the subject of the next
section. The above discussion of the nature/culture dichotomy has referred to queerness and ecology as the referents of knowledge(s), bodies, and ways of life exceeding the dictates of natural(ized) heterosexuality and
(hetero)sexism (Morris, in Anderson et al. 2012, 90) ultimately aiming to dismantle hierarchies of power and to elaborate strategies of dissent. Seen as constellation of practices that resist and invalidate the order of “what
is”, or as “acts that cast care as an overt gesture of refusal” (Stephens, in Anderson et al. 2012, 101) this understanding of queerness bears several affinities with the kind of ethics advanced within contemporary anti-
authoritarian thought (see, among others, Heckert, Cleminson, eds 2011; Daring et al., eds 2013). It works in support of the belief that a path to freedom and autonomy involves distancing oneself from the discourses,
practices, and subjectivities of institutions, including the State. It also works as method by offering a tactical perspective that is not exclusive to sexuality and through which to build powerful alliances that short-circuits
normativity and its allies; it becomes an everyday act of exposing the links between (bodily) experience and capitalist (white, hetero-patriarchal) accumulation. These same concerns have been employed to look at how
reproduction takes place outside the realm of human beings. This move has gained the important awareness that the category of sexual orientation does not exhaust the sexualities spectrum found in organic living matter.
A case in 182 point is Myra Hird’s prefigurative “naturally queer” existence (2004, 85-89) to try to account for the seemingly endless variety in sexual behaviour as she concentrated her analysis on bacteria and other
organisms; or, Bruce Bagemihl (1999)’s definition of the “exuberant” anti-normative sexual behaviour that can be observed with regard to several animal species7 . So far, this paper has charted a situated map of the
convergences between queer/gender studies and ecocriticism prompted by a yearning for practices of reading, seeing, and thinking differently. The work developed in the field of intercultural feminisms is especially
instructive to hint at a broader pedagogical project addressing, among others, recalcitrant colonialist and neo-imperial practices that are distinctive of neoliberal rationality, which van Neerven’s short story at the end of
the paper typifies. It is apt to ask the same question as Giovanna Covi does on the desire for social, and implicitly, ecological justice in the context of a cross-national feminist pedagogy of difference: “What happens when
we try to think about a healthy world?” This question is inspired by Haraway’s concept of “natureculture”, in which constructivist and essentialist views about gender and being co-exist and resist as we participate in critical
teaching practices requiring awareness that biological constructs are made through hegemonic cultural ones (Covi 2008, 61-62). Covi’s question cogently opens a discourse in support of our belief that another world is
possible; for women, this belief has animated peaceful protest movements of women’s peace camps, which in turn have influenced the alter-globalization8 mobilisation from Seattle (1999) and onwards (Bianchi 2012)9 . A
critical feminist pedagogy of interculturality helps us understand this utopian longing for another liveable world as we strive to negotiate the conditions enabling, as Liana Borghi puts it, “discourses otherwise, that do not
aspire to overthrow directly the regime of repression and prohibition which constitutes social norms, but to seek alternative speaking positions” (2008, 100). Perhaps, this is how we would be able to improve our ability to
be and to remain accountable towards a shared vulnerability that sanctions our constitutive being together with what is “not-us”, other-from-us. 3. Performativity/Performativities Recently, a significant ontological shift
has occurred within contemporary feminist studies under the rubric of “new materialism”, where the notion 183 of “worlding” – namely, being in and of the world – is appropriate for the philosophical and literary terrain
charted here10. Succinctly put, the turn to matter as active/dynamic materiality contradicts established assumptions about matter as inert, or passive which new feminist materialist theorists disallow. The corollary of this
shift is that difference is viewed as the unavoidable inter-relationality of discursive (or, cultural) and material practices, with significant implications for gender and sexuality discourses; for, in their refusal of nature/culture
dualisms, new materialist approaches “tend to eschew the choice between essentialism (i.e. appealing to innate characteristics as in notions of biological sex) or social constructionism (which can play or bracket off biology
as with notions of gender), choosing instead to consider the reality of how bodies develop” (Nicholas 2014, 9)11. In what follows, the connections of queer theories and the discourse on nature in two works by Karen Barad
and by Timothy Morton are discussed as attempts towards a radical understanding of ecological justice. For Barad, the vitality of matter is trenchantly described by the notion of “entanglement” to replace the distinctions
that separate human and non-human beings, subjects-as-agents and objects, entities and concepts. The consistency of the nature/culture dualism is particularly undermined by her use of “nature’s queer performativity”
(from her essay that bears its title) to describe the constitutive intra-action(s) between animate and inanimate worlds and beings. At the same time, the idea of nature as inherently performative allows to transcend
conventional understandings of relationality, whereby autonomous entities are formed before they enter into relations: “intra-actions” thus teach us about the origin of the material-discursive practices that have brought
about the splits of subject and object, self and other, culture and nature in every domain of life. New trajectories of (environmental and social) justice would then have to take into consideration “the materializing effects of
boundary-making practices by which the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ are differentially constituted” (2011, 124)12. In van Neerven’s short story, Kaden finds herself attracted to a part human, part plant non-gendered
being; she is struggling to come to terms with the practices of separation she has internalised, while Larapinta and the plantpeople are facing extinction at the hands of the company that has employed Kaden. Seeing her
and her 10 See Barad 2007; Alaimo, Hekman (eds) 2008; Coole Diana, Frost (eds) 2010; and van der Tuin, Dolphijn (eds) 2012 for a comprehensive introduction to new materialism(s) and its concerns. 11New materialist
approaches are usually seen in opposition to the importance attributed to discursive and cultural practices, as is the case for queer theories. This opposition can aptly be summarised as the belief in “the vivacity denied by
social constructivist theories that posit all social processes and, indeed reality itself, as socially and ideologically constituted” (Barrett 2012, 3). 12 Braidotti (2017) advances a specific “radical materialist” position that
enriches and complements the version of new materialism that is being referred to here. 184 samuele grassi people she is “struck both by how startlingly human-like they are, and how alarmingly unhuman they are.
Green, like something you would see in a comic strip, but they are real” (2014a, 78). Later on into their relationship, Kaden is ready to stand with her own people to stop a government-sanctioned plan of conquest; but it is
now Larapinta that catalyses Kaden’s self-questioning: “‘I’m not human,’ Larapinta reminds me. ‘You never used to let me forget it’” (119). Kaden’s hesitancy is a powerful and provocative reminder of the work required to
(un)learn the dualisms we have incorporated within ourselves, perhaps inadvertently as in this case; their underlying logic returns as a reminder of the enduring workings of normativity. That the impulse for justice should
rely on our relinquishing of the idea that nature is “out there” instead of being integral to our very being is also at the core of Morton’s ecological thought, and his essay on “Queer Ecology” supports the belief in being as
togetherness. For Morton, the key tenet of queer theories that gender is inscribed on bodies through repetition-sedimentation of norms in a constricting discursive/cultural field proves that it can no longer be seen as
quality, or something that one can have; for gender can only exist by instantiating a prior dichotomy, where the very existence of one term implies the other’s abjection. The same occurs in nature, where all life forms are
living and reproducing themselves in excess of dichotomies, so that “[n]othing exists independently, and nothing comes from nothing” (2012, 275)13. Morton contends that we face an ontological problem with regard to
the boundary-making practices we deploy, and it is only by acknowledging the principle of ecological interdependence that we would be able to grasp fully the reality of difference, which is that of unlimited proliferation of
differences (277). As can be inferred from Barad’s and Morton’s positions on nature/culture, the multiplication of discursive positionings from where to theorise differences and their different materialisations undermines
the inside/outside dualisms, including those at stake in theory, resistance, and politics. What are the implications of this discussion for those of us moved by a desire for a sustainable world that prompts our capacity for
accountability, and our investment in a pedagogical project aimed both at critiquing the normativity of power and the power of normativity? At present, the idea of the performativity of nature also manifested in/ as one’s
love of a free world is obstructed by the undoing of freedom and of democracy under neoliberalism, which increasingly needs “technically skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life and common rule”
(Brown 2015, 177). Here the concern is with mortgaging a perpetually deferred reward in the future in return for self-inflicted precariousness 13 In her recent book, Haraway borrows Lynn Margulis’ term “sympoiesis” to
articulate a politics of being that closely resembles Morton’s quote. “Sympoiesis is a simple word: it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (2016, 58). 185 and suffering
that neoliberalism imposes14. Wendy Brown cogently sees this logic of sacrifice at work in the replacement of democracy with governance, “the consensus model of conduct integrating everyone and everything into a
given project with given ends” (211). As a regime of power that thrives on the belief of government “in the name of our own freedom (we are expected to be free, self-reliant rational choosers)” (Newman 2016, 23)
neoliberalism naturalizes the presumption that freedom is being free from the constraint of being-with-others, and that it is entirely legitimate to crave for more of this freedom. Conversely, and as we take a stand towards
the conditions of our shared vulnerability and the unavoidable relationships with others, what role are we willing to take while confronting the unequal distribution of privilege and of risks across the world, across species?
Ultimately, the questions posed in these paragraphs speak to the necessary task of building critical pedagogies that address our implication within the processes of separation dividing us from others/otherness outlined
previously. It is with the intent of leaving these questions open that I turn to van Neerven’s speculative fictional landscapes. 4. Utopia/Dystopia As a kind of “militant literature” focusing on the relationship between
textuality and the environment (Salvadori 2015, 11) ecocriticism has proved a valuable tool for feminist interventions aiming both to interrogate its masculinist bias and to relocate its roots outside the realm of the man-

given understandings of text, biology, matter, discourse,

made (see in particular, Gaard, Opperman and Estok 2013). A feminist ecocritical standpoint assumes that the

femininity and masculinity are untenable to articulate contemporary experience (3). Ecofeminist literary criticism lies
at the intersection of the desire for a healthy world (expressed as rejection of the human/non-human dualism), the idea
of a collective vulnerability that is constitutive of humans’ location in the world and of their relationships with others
(and with other beings), and non-violence. From this point of view, it is a form of consciousness-raising amidst the
enduring exploitation of nature being put at the service of a self-justifying culture of individualised and corporate
accumulation – of capital, bodies, resources, lands. In Australia, which provides the setting for the empirical case
examined here, Salleh Ariel’s Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx and the postmodern (1997) is still considered a key
text in ecofeminist literary criticism (Alloun 2015)15, and the leading “Australian Feminist Studies” 186 journal often
features interdisciplinary contributions in this field. Of particular interest for a perspective that frames the
nature/culture dualism within the reality of women’s bodies seen as exploitable “resources” to meet the economic
demands of (a culture of) progress is the work of Australian researchers on transnational feminisms Melinda Cooper and
Catherine Waldby (2014)16. Van Neerven’s Heat and Light expands on the meaning of Australian-ness and Indigeneity,
also through exploring what queer and lesbian experiences may bring to these very categories, as explained later on.
Part of this process involves a strategic use of language and the ensuing (mis)recognitions. This is shown, for instance, by
one of the conversations Larapinta and Kaden have, during which they discuss sexual orientation(s): ‘And your sexual
identity?’ She is really in the mood for grilling me. ‘Queer, I guess.’ I say. ‘I know it’s an old-fashioned word...’ ‘That is
fine. I do not know the common usage of words. They are bricks, aren’t they?’ ‘Some words are loaded,’ I continue. ‘Will
always be loaded.’ ‘I must return to my reading,’ she says. (2014a, 95; my emphasis) In what follows, I look at Kaden’s
own journey within the short story, “Water” – touching on her desire for social and environmental justice, her
lesbianism, and her own family, especially on her Aboriginal father’s side –, across which she acquires a “militant
consciousness” whose seeds are to be traced in her singular relationship with these aspects. My reading of some key
elements in van Neerven’s work will then be weaved through ongoing concerns with equality, freedom, social and
environmental justice, and the defence of indigenous rights to sovereignty alongside our positioning in relation to them.
Ethical responsibility and accountability may involve adjusting laboriously the practises used to name difference(s) while
eschewing the burdens of fetishisation entailed in the process. In this case, Kaden’s encounter with the plantpeople at
first creates tension and uneasiness (75); their marked body (they have “green human-like heads”, and are “a very
intelligent species”, 76) and habits (like, “walk[ing] through water”, 89) at times unsettle her, in spite of herself. The
ensuing tensions are more evident in the intimacy of her relationship with Larapinta – she has “wild frondlike hair across
her face, 187 bleached pale pink in parts”, “a face that’s like me and you. With space for two small eyes and a hint of a
mouth”, “the body […] shaped like a post, covered in prickles except for the hands” (78), “an awkward tangle of roots
and limbs and when she walks she cracks like an old stair railing” (87). Kaden’s lesbianism and Aboriginal background
have taught her that words can be powerful instruments of violence and subjugation, as in the previous exchange, and
that the dominant gaze functions within a binary framework that provides legitimation to its colonising practices. This is
what happens, for instance, during a conversation she has with her boss Milligan: unable to conceive of sexuality and
gender in terms other than dichotomous ones, he sees Kaden’s sexual attraction for Larapinta as an infringement of the
boundaries of the “natural” and as naive fascination for the “unnatural” (97). This is in tension with Kaden’s progressive
self-questioning about the meaning of the “human”, about the place of its other, and about the relation of the human
and the other-than-human: through reiterated questions – “Am I blind not to notice much difference?” (78); “To
understand, I give myself the first question. What is a plant? A plant is a living organism”; “The second question is
harder. It is. What is a human?” (96-97) – addressed as much to herself as to us, Kaden’s interpellation seems to work on
two interrelated levels. Firstly, it functions to remind us that the possibility of existence of an outside to dualistic binary
thinking/living is inherently threatening for the rationality of power of white, male, heteronormative sexuality; non-
hegemonic knowledges are thus erased, the more so with regard to their complexities and different locations.

Mainstream Environmentalism is only useful in sustaining environments that have normative use-
value – it worsens environmental degradation by arbitrarily limiting authority over environmental
projects to white, cishet colonialists. That destroys aff solvency.
Butler 15 (Cameron, “Seeing the Forest for the Fags: Reimagining Sustainability as a Queer Project,” Convergence,
http://convergencejournal.ca/archives/757, 5/6/15, DOA 7/6/16 ARO)  

MSM discourse divides culture, encompassing all human activity, and nature, encompassing the pristine, idyllic non-
human. Noël Sturgeon argues that “mainstream environmentalists, in their emphasis on wilderness, species extinction,
and in general seeing the environment as excluding human beings, often fall into services to this dominant Western logic
of seeing the natural as pure, unchanging, untainted by social influence and without history” (Sturgeon 263). The
nature/culture binary has two major implications for the MSM worth highlighting here. First, social injustice, inequity,
and oppression are separated from ecological degradation. The interconnectedness of exploitation, hierarchies, and
power imbalances that drive social and environmental violence are hidden. As a result, the MSM has not taken social
justice efforts seriously (Soltys 21). Secondly, the nature/culture binary strips “nature” of its histories, construction, and
subjectivity. Conservation efforts have developed out of this ahistorical construction, striving to protect ‘unspoiled’
nature and minimize (negative) human impacts. By stripping nature of history, ecosystems are forced into in a strange
state of petrification. Any impact caused by humans is deemed “unnatural” and must therefore be stopped/reversed,
whereas “natural” changes are taken to be the result of evolution . But with the pervasiveness of human activity, what
ecological changes can’t be traced back to people and thus become undesirable? The denial of human history in
ecosystems leads to [inaction]. Capitalism has deeply shaped the ways ecosystems are (de)valued. An ecosystem’s worth
is dependent on its perceived capacity to be productive in economically quantifiable ways. American wetlands provide a
clear example of this. Beginning with European colonization in the early 1600’s, wetlands were considered unproductive
bogs, with the vast majority destroyed and turned into “productive” agricultural land. A shift started taking place in the
1970’s, when they were found to be highly efficient at ‘ecosystem services’ like water filtration and carbon sequestration
(Dahl et al.). As a result, massive efforts have been made to reclaim wetlands. The historical disdain and contemporary
desire for wetlands are both rooted in anthropocentric capitalism. The ecosystem matters only insofar as it can fulfill
current economic demands. Connected to this are the similar ways in which nature and sexuality supposedly require
“constant monitoring and restrictions to access, so that it may be free of undesirable elements” (Seymour 144).
Attempts to control and shape nature, to regulate it, are intertwined with the regulation of desire (Seymour 107-8). The
erotic potential of nature — its capacity to exist, flourish, and (re)produce in ways that are not economically useful,
pretty, or desirable — is stamped out and crushed. In place of this potential, resource management strategies are
developed to control ecosystems and maximize returns. The MSM adopts the rhetoric of ecosystem services and
management in order to provide economic legitimacy for environmental concern and by doing so, renders itself unable
to challenge the inherently unsustainable capitalist system. The MSM’s role in the domestication of nature is inseparable
from legacies of colonialism and white supremacy. For example, the creation of wildlife preserves and conservation
areas has dislocated indigenous peoples globally (Gosine 152). At the same time, discourse around “land reclamation”
magnifies the MSM complicity in colonialism. As a greenwashing PR strategy, many resource extraction corporations,
such as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, turn their focus to “land reclamation”, the process of
removing contamination from heavily polluted ecosystems. The term, used by indigenous communities to describe
efforts to regain rights over their traditional territories, has been taken by corporations to justify inflicting intense
violence and destruction upon these very same communities. Within the MSM, there is no reflection on what it means
to “reclaim” land, who can reclaim it, and from whom is it being reclaimed. The goal is to simply return land to a pre-
human state and thereby erase histories of the indigenous people who lived in those territories.

The alt is to affirm a methodology of queer ecology – a method that provides the space for
revolutionary ecological politics that oppose normativity and the nature/culture dualism of current
understandings of ecology by creating and nurturing strategies of thinking, acting and pedagogy.
The alt queers nature and interrogates the relations of power by which nature is governed. We
collapse binaries by rejecting heteronormative reproductivity, centering queer eroticism and
creating space for radical restructuring of the way we interact with each other and nature.
Butler, 15 – (Cameron Butler , “Seeing the Forest for the Fags: Reimagining Sustainability as a Queer Project”
http://convergencejournal.ca/archives/757)
Complicating Nature    Queer ecology provides a poststructuralist platform to critique “nature” in ways that further understandings of ecological violence (Seymour 109). The MSM
addresses environmental issues through institutions. Incorporating a Foucauldian understanding of power, I’d like to shift focus away from specific institutional configurations to underlying

power dynamics that drive ecologically destructive systems (Foucault 92). As Catriona Sandilands posed, “ to
queer nature is to question its normative use, to
interrogate relations of knowledge and power by which certain ‘truths’ about ourselves have been allowed to pass,
unnoticed, without question ” (Sandilands 22). A queered sustainability becomes an “anti-essentialist, anti-assimilationist, and heterogeneous” exercise (Seymour 25).
   Queer ecology complicates our spatial understandings of environmental injustice. Environmental racism and classism are often discussed in terms of spatially-fixed models, looking
primarily at where communities live (Seymour 74). Queer ecology supports this work by constructing spaces as simultaneously safe and
unsafe for different people moving through them, such as domestic workers’ exposure to cleaning chemicals while
working in suburban homes (Seymour 77). Pushing this idea even further, a biopolitical lens positions the human body itself as a site of
ecological harm and resistance, as demonstrated clearly in the writings of Eli Clare that situate the body as home (Di Chiro
199-200). Deborah Slicer draws parallels between landscapes and the body to propose a queer ecological justice that (re)defines the “natural” as self-

possession, shifting away from a state-based construction and towards one that is relational (Seymour 35). These queer ecological
works show how the conceptual “ecosystem” and “nature” can be made temporally and spatially transient.    Foundational to queer ecology has been Donna Haraway’s proposed
concept of “natureculture,” positing that “the
very idea of nature itself is not natural; nature is cultural”, though that is not to say that
nature is subsumed within culture (emphasis in original, Bell 143). In collapsing the nature/culture binary, we also collapse the
us/them and self/Other divisions, which reveals an interconnectivity of humans, nonhuman beings, and landscapes . This
radical undifferentiation drives an ethics of care and collective responsibility to come out of the dissolution of stable identities (Seymour 176). Through this non-identitarian responsibility, a
queer ecological sustainability prioritizes coalition-building across all forms of oppression, taking demands for justice outside of the realm of personal affronts and into the general discourse
of solidarity and mutual support (Seymour 97). This directly challenges individualist narratives of capitalism and creates space for broad justice resistance work. As an example, lesbian
separatist farm communes engaged with this environmental ethic in their treatment of the land as a partner to live with and guide to learn from (Unger 181-2). Queer, Ugly, and Ironic

    In rejecting heteronormative (re)productivity in the organization and valuing of humans and landscapes, queer
eroticism can present new ways of relating to and with others . Erotophobia limits understandings of non-(re)productive
nature, and queer ecology must tackle this (Gosine 165-6). By centering queer eroticism within nature, there is potential for new,
alternative interrelationalities that engage in valuation as a communal activity . Different bodies and beings will need and/or want different
relations with spaces (Sbicca 37). By employing a queer empathy of collective value-creation, space is created for coalition-building and a radical restructuring of

interactions within nature (Seymour 11).     An explicit engagement with and support for the ugly becomes especially pertinent
in a queer ecological imagination . Western constructions of “ugly” landscapes have historically been those populated by
Indigenous, racialized, and poor people  — the politics of beauty are inextricably tied to racism, classism, colonialism,
and sexism (Seymour 164). Landscapes and humans can all attest that, just as Beyoncé says, “pretty hurts.” Community organizer Mia Mingus calls for bodies that are “moving beyond
a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic,

seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength .” A queer ecological sustainability must
meet this call and extend it across bodies and landscapes. It must deconstruct beauty, find magnificence in the unwanted, revel in the ugly .

   With its commitment to dismantle beauty, queer sustainability rejects privatization and commodification of bodies and land,

focusing on care instead of profits or compensation (Seymour 109). Rejecting the privatization of nature allows ecosystems and people to be supported as unmanaged
and uncontrolled, building a broader (re)imagining of how humans and nonhumans can live in unproductive and magnificent ways. The queer ethics of care is built upon the emotional
dimensions of interpersonal relationships and shared Otherness (Perpich 225). It is important to acknowledge that these understandings of care are indebted to indigenous peoples and thus
must be part of anti-racist solidarity (Seymour 168). These ethics of care are predicated upon attentiveness, reverence, and patience; in shaping care through these attributes, along with
sympathy, empathy, and identification, landscapes, humans, and non-humans can be given space and support to explore the ephemeral and unfamiliar, as opposed to the “useful” or
“normal” (Seymour 166). This
queer ecological ethic of care is one “not rooted in stable or essentialized identity categories, a
care that is not just a means of solving human-specific problems, a care that does not operate out of expectation for
recompense” (Seymour 168). It is one that works to sustain and improve the well-being of bodies and landscapes, while
being critical of how spatial and temporal conceptions of well-being are constructed and embedded within broader
politics.    Seymour argues that irony, often thought to be incompatible with sincere environmentalism, can be employed to subvert logics driving ecological degradation (Seymour
149). She argues that it is deeply ironic to act on firm beliefs of environmental ethics and social justice while

maintaining a critical skepticism of the categories, boundaries, and distinctions employed in those ethics (Seymour 180).
Importantly, a queer environmental irony as one that is not “cruel or dismissive” but rather “simultaneously compassionate, introspective, and good-humoured” (Seymour 172). It can thus
A playful
be a tool to highlight the gaps of hypocrisy wherein oppression manifests. The use of MSM as a term, with its dual meanings, is meant to be an example of such queer irony.

twist of words to stake out a point of queer resistance against sustainability’s heteronormativity, a serious critique
that does not take itself too seriously . Conclusion    The MSM, in its narrow focus on protecting a construction of
pristine and untouched nature, has built itself upon oppressive politics and heteronormative capitalist logics that
prevent it from achieving the goals it has set. These political underpinnings must be challenged and destabilized as
part of the queering of sustainability. A queer sustainability is one that is deeply skeptical of our categorizations of nature and yet still works to support our ecological
communities through care, solidarity, and communal valuation. Queer ecology can bring unique contributions to our articulations of self,

community, and relational possibilities, but it can only be part of liberatory projects when engaging in solidarity with
communities of colour, poor communities, communities in the Global South, disabled communities, landscapes,
ecosystems, and all communities that are devalued and Othered .    In closing, it’s worth returning to the parks. Undergrowth and bushes were
commonly removed as a way of preventing men from having necessary cover for cruising and this harmed the park’s ecosystem (Gosine 160). A queer sustainability

recognizes the irony in saving the environment by destroying it and resists oppression through that irony . It is a
sustainability wherein “one can both love an adulterated landscape and criticize its adulteration, and recognize beauty
in ecological disasters without condoning the disaster itself — just as one could recognize a landscape as ‘ugly’ and still
decline to do violence to it” (Seymour 164).
 SetCol K: Hvd BH

Settler colonialism renders land exchangeable waste and black and indigenous life killable chattel.
Paperson 17 La, also K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.
“A Third University Is Possible” June 2017.

Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism , contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not only to seize and
exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism thus complicates the center–
periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein an imperial center, the “metropole,”
dominates distant colonies, the “periphery .” Typically, one thinks of European colonization of Africa, India, the
Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and
human beings are recast as natural resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt,
seeds, genetic material, chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006.[2] However, the analysis of settler
colonialism is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire .[3] The critical literatures of the
colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in global
arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized for its diagnoses of anti/colonial
violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For

Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the
geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized
violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and Indigenous relations.[4] Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to

Indigenous people. This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler
colonialism, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were a
past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler colonialism is something
that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of why directs us to think of land tenancy

laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder
and disappearance. Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge
institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all
technologies, they evolve and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This
separation, what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/land” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black
Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal: who will be moved where, who will be murdered how,
who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom .[5] In the alienation of land from life,
alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the
right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness.
Moreover, it is not just human beings who are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a

move that first alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies required to
create and maintain these separations, these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from nonhuman, land from
life.[6] “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonization .
Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you might consider settler colonialism as a set of
technologies —a frame that could help you to forecast colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. This
chapter proceeds with the following insights. (1) The settler–native– slave triad does not describe identities. The triad —an analytic mainstay of settler

colonial studies—digs a pitfall of identity that not only chills collaborations but also implies that the racial will be the solution . (2)

Technologies are trafficked. Technologies generate patterns of social relations to land. Technologies mutate, and so do
these relationships. Colonial technologies travel. In tracing technologies’ past and future trajectories, we can connect
how settler colonial and antiblack technologies circulate in transnational arenas. (3) Land—not just people—is the
biopolitical target.[7] The examples are many: fracking, biopiracy, damming of rivers and flooding of valleys, the
carcasses of pigs that die from the feed additive ractopamine and are allowable for harvest by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. The subjugation of land and nonhuman life to deathlike states in order to support “human” life is a
“biopolitics” well beyond the Foucauldian conception of biopolitical as governmentality or the neoliberal disciplining
of modern, bourgeois, “human” subject. (4) (Y)our task is to theorize in the break, that is, to refuse the master narrative
that technology is loyal to the master, that (y)our theory has a Eurocentric origin . Black studies, Indigenous studies, and
Othered studies have already made their breaks with Foucault (over biopolitics), with Deleuze and Guatarri (over
assemblages and machines), and with Marx (over life and primitive accumulation ). (5) Even when they are dangerous,
understanding technologies provides us some pathways for decolonizing work. We can identify projects of
collaboration on decolonial technologies. Colonizing mechanisms are evolving into new forms, and they might be
subverted toward decolonizing operations. The Settler–Native–Slave Triad Does Not Describe Identities One of the main interventions of settler colonial
studies has been to insist that the patterning of social relations is shaped by colonialism’s thirst for land and thus is shaped to fit

modes of empire. Because colonialism is a perverted affair, our relationships are also warped into complicitous
arrangements of violation, trespass, and collusion with its mechanisms. For Fanon, the psychosis of colonialism arises from
the patterning of violence into the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the
impugned humanity of the native. For Fanon, the supremacist “right” to create settler space that is immune from violence,
and the “right” to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the spatial and fleshy immediacy of
settler colonialism. Furthermore, the “humanity” of the settler is constructed upon his agency over the land and nature.
As Maldonado- Torres explains, “I think, therefore I am” is actually an articulation of “I conquer, therefore I am,” a sense of

identity posited upon the harnessing of nature and its “natural” people .[8]

The veneer of benign medical AI is a disguise for neoliberal imperialism

Katz 20 (Yarden Katz, fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and PhD in brain and
cognitive sciences from MIT, “Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence,” 2020, Columbia
University Press) kva

We have seen how AI’s rebranding, facilitated by the major platform companies , helped serve a variety of corporate
interests. Yet AI’s appearance in so many arenas is not simply the result of powerful corporations working in isolation. It
also required journalists, academics, and policy experts to take up the mantle of AI . Riding the wave that they have
helped to make, these burgeoning experts offer analyses of AI’s social consequences in a growing collection of books
and articles. In these works, the experts often use AI to advance neoliberal programs concerning labor, education, and
other arenas. This is perhaps clearest in discussions of AI and the economy. A theme of these discussions is that AI will
make everyone better off by reducing the burdens of labor. The experts, however, generally foresee difficulties in the
process. Automation by AI may lead to unemployment, for example, leaving people poor and marginalized. The
transition to AI- driven society must therefore be managed, and AI experts have long recognized that this is a political
problem, not a technical one. They present ways to navigate the transition that avoid wealth redistribution, taxation, or
other policies that potentially threaten capital accumulation. For example, in his book Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide
to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Jerry Kaplan discusses strategies for dealing with the job loss
that he thinks AI will cause. Job loss is framed as an undesirable byproduct of technological progress, a loss that AI will
more than compensate for according to Kaplan. He writes: “We don’t need to take from the wealthy and give to the less
fortunate,” since the economy is “continually expanding. . . . So all we need to do is distribute the benefits of future
growth more widely, and the problem will slowly melt away.” How, then, to distribute the fruits of growth? Here, Kaplan
borrows “free- market solutions” from economist Milton Friedman. Kaplan’s plan includes cutting taxes for corporations
using a new “objective” metric and restructuring Social Security, which he refers to as a “monolithic and opaque
centralized system of investment” that limits individual choice.27 This understanding of a “post- AI” economy is echoed
in a recent book by MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 28
Tegmark explains how AI will transform virtually all aspects of life. Drawing on the work of neoliberal economists, he
argues that an “AI- driven economy would not only eliminate stress and drudgery and produce an abundance of
everything we want today” but even bring “wonderful new products and services that today’s consumers haven’t yet
realized that they want.” AI, he speculates, may give rise to superhuman artificial beings who’d depart our planet and
settle across the galaxy. The futuristic tone is set aside, however, when it comes to labor issues. For one, Tegmark gives
detailed advice on “career choice” for young people who want to avoid being replaced by intelligent machines: it is safer
to become an entrepreneur, lawyer, doctor, or scientist (areas he considers not yet mastered by AI). He acknowledges
that income inequality has been rising but adopts the usual explanation of neoliberal economists: technological
progress inevitably rewards “the educated” who can compete in the market, and inequality is a byproduct. Tegmark
notes that while some “on the left” attribute inequality to things like “globalization and/or economic policies such as tax
cuts for the rich,” the main cause is really “technology.” And, like Kaplan, he thinks AI will more than compensate for the
inequity.29 AI experts similarly repackage neoliberal positions in other arenas, such as education. Christof Koch, for
instance, a noted neuroscientist, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that looming superintelligent AI will require people to
augment their brains to stay relevant. While some may opt for “education” to keep afloat, Koch suggests that “training
(and retraining) people takes time,” and not everybody could switch from driving trucks (a vanishing profession, he
presumes) to one of the jobs that AI experts consider more secure.30 In his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers,
Strategies, the philosopher Nick Bostrom likewise discounts education as “probably subject to diminishing returns,” an
ineffective means of acquiring the “superintelligence” demanded in the age of AI.31 Consistently, then, AI serves as
pretext for run- of- the- mill neoliberal ideologya. Visions of a purportedly transformative AIdriven world reduce to
familiar tropes about individuals needing to adapt to a dynamic global market. These capitalist visions rest on the idea
that AI will provide an unmatched form of “slave” labor.32 It would supposedly “free” people from their own labor, if
only we let it. Although experts tend to refer to the “slave” in generic terms, or link it in passing to slavery in antiquity,
the slave metaphor is always racial and gendered— especially when invoked by white professionals in North America.
The persistent and unselfconscious appeals to slavery highlight the whiteness of the AI expert industry, and the racial
capitalism that animates experts’ visions. Several commentators, for example, have embraced the vision of so- called
digital Athens in which AI will provide the “slave labor” that powered ancient Greek society.33 Commentaries from the
1980s have likewise presented AI as a powerful “slave” that could end the need for human labor if the proper social
policies are adopted. The arc of such narratives is captured by noted AI practitioner Nils Nilsson’s essay “Artificial
Intelligence, Employment, and Income,” part of a collection of essays published in 1986 on the impacts of AI. Nilsson
begins with economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous 1933 forecast that the working hours of the future will shrink
owing to technological advances. Like other commentators in the collection, Nilsson sees AI as a powerful “mechanical
slave” that could make Keynes’s promise a reality.34 Drawing on the work of well- known economist and AI practitioner
Herbert Simon, Nilsson states that technology has always improved the human condition, and that AI will provide a labor
free source of “income,” thus making everybody rich.35 Getting in the way of this process, Nilsson says, would be “unfair
to humanity,” a hindrance to “our attempts to re- enter Paradise.”36 Much of Nilsson’s essay is devoted to thinking of
ways to get people to accept this “slave” labor– driven world. Nilsson worries, for instance that people may dislike AI-
induced unemployment or reject a human labor- free world. He therefore calls for short- term policies aimed at
“alleviating the misery and poverty of the unemployed” but makes clear that state “welfare” programs or
redistribution of wealth would be wrongheaded responses. Likewise, he urges that taxes on automation not be too
high, lest they “destroy the incentive to automate.” His essay is peppered with other policy prescriptions, such as work
retraining is important, but “we must not assume that everyone who now holds a blue- collar or middle- management
job can become a computer scientist.”37 Like recent commentators, Nilsson suggests funneling people toward jobs such
as counseling that require the human touch machines currently lack. But his concern is that in the longer term, people
simply wouldn’t be able to get used to being “rich.” He therefore urges that they be taught literature and the arts to fill
the new leisure time. Such coping will be necessary, he concludes, for the transition to AI- driven society is inevitable:
nations who lag in adopting AI will be punished by laws of the market.38 For decades, then, experts have promised that
AI is on the brink of delivering capitalist utopia, which they narrate using racial metaphors. They use this promise to
argue against threats to capitalism. Social movements, however, have drawn enough attention to injustices that
operate across race, gender, and class lines to make these cheerful capitalist visions less tenable. The expert industry
Vote negative to endorse a cartography of refusal
Day 15 Iyko, Associate Professor of English. Chair, Critical Social Thought. “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity,
Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique.” Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 102-121

And so the potential relations that Wilderson sets up through a critique of sovereignty are at best irrelevant or at worse
false in Sexton’s absolute claim that slavery stands alone as the “threshold of the political world.”45 I suggest that this
wavering relation/nonrelation of antiblackness and Indigeneity exhibited in Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work reveal the
problem in any totalizing approach to the heterogeneous constitution of racial difference in settler colonies. Beyond this
inconsistency, the liberal multiculturalist agenda that Wilderson and Sexton project into Indigenous sovereignty willfully
evacuates any Indigenous refusal of a colonial politics of recognition. Among other broad strokes, Sexton states, “as a
rule, Native Studies reproduces the dominant liberal political narrative of emancipation and enfranchisement.”46 This
provides a basis for Wilderson’s assertion that Indigenous sovereignty engages in a liberal politics of state legitimation
through recognition because “treaties are forms of articulation” that buttress “the interlocutory life of America as a
coherent (albeit genocidal) idea.”47 But such a depoliticized liberal project is frankly incompatible with Indigenous
activism and scholarship that emerges from Native studies in North America. The main argument in Glen Sean
Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks is to categorically reject “the liberal recognition-based approach to Indigenous
selfdetermination.”48 This is not a politics of legitimizing Indigenous nations through state recognition but rather one
of refusal, a refusal to be recognized and thus interpellated by the settler colonial nation-state . Drawing on Fanon,
Coulthard describes the “necessity on the part of the oppressed to ‘turn away’ from their other-oriented master-
dependency, and to instead struggle for freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values.”49 It is
also difficult to reconcile the depoliticized narrative of “resurgence and recovery” that Wilderson and Sexton attribute
to Indigenous sovereignty in the face of Idle No More, the anticapitalist Indigenous sovereignty movement in Canada
whose national railway and highway blockades have seriously destabilized the expropriation of natural resources for
the global market. These are examples that Coulthard describes as “ direct action” rather than negotiation —in other
words, antagonism, not conflict resolution: The [blockades] are a crucial act of negation insofar as they seek to
impede or block the flow of resources currently being transported to international markets from oil and gas fields,
refineries, lumber mills, mining operations, and hydroelectric facilities located on the dispossessed lands of
Indigenous nations. These modes of direct action . . . seek to have a negative impact on the economic infrastructure
that is core to the colonial accumulation of capital in settler-political economies like Canada’s.50 These tactics are
part of what Audra Simpson calls a “cartography of refusal” that “negates the authority of the other’s gaze .”51 It is
impossible to frame the blockade movement, which has become the greatest threat to Canada’s resource agenda,52
as a struggle for “enfranchisement.” Idle No More is not in “conflict” with the Canadian nation-state; it is in a struggle
against the very premise of settler colonial capitalism that requires the elimination of Indigenous peoples. As
Coulthard states unambiguously, “For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die.”
 SetCol K: KU

Reject the aff’s extinction reps — they are settler voyeurism, reproduce colonialism, and erase
ongoing violence; vote neg for plural world-building that’s an affirmation without their
representations
Theriault & Mitchell 20, *Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Dietrich College **Balsillie School of
International Affairs (Noah Theriault, Audra Mitchell, 2020, “Extinction,” Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, edited by
Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, Punctum Books, 2020, pp. 177-183, JSTOR, doi:10.2307/j.ctv11hptbw.30)

In a recent essay entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells (2017) makes a morbid prediction: “The mass
extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.” The essay, which quickly went
viral, regales readers with graphic imagery of starvation and perpetual war in a coming climate apocalypse. But it
leaves us to wonder precisely who is doing this dying , now and in the future? For whom and by whom—humans and
other beings included—is earth being made “uninhabitable”? Part of a growing journalistic and pop-culture genre that
some have called “apocalypse porn,” Wallace-Wells’s essay vividly reflects the necropolitics that haunt narratives
about life , death , and extinction in the Anthropocene. As scholar-activists committed to promoting environmental and
ecological justice, we acknowledge the gravity of extinction , but we are concerned about what narratives of mass
extinction obscure . By eliding the violent structures that disproportionately burden certain assemblages of beings
with acute acts of dislocation and cumulative forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), these narratives naturalize a
colonial order in which some earthlings are actively targeted for extermination, some are categorized as valuable
“biodiversity,” and many others are summarily consigned to an unmarked planetary grave . As cultural theorist Claire
Colebrook (2014) has shown, the desire of Western people to contemplate the total and irreversible destruction of the
planet has become a central theme of popular culture . Exposure to these images produces complex forms of affect :
the thrill of fear, the sublime sense of living in important (perhaps even end) times, and the fantasy of being among a
small group that survives the destruction of its species—all experienced from the safe position of the voyeur. This
fantasy is evident in the jarringly optimistic, almost salvational conclusion to Wallace-Wells’s essay: “Now we’ve found a
way to engineer our own doomsday,” he declares, “and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it.” Here,
mass extinction is inevitable, but not necessarily for us. Who we are is left unspecified, although it almost certainly refers
to the “modern,” Western humans interpellated by the article. Similarly unquestioned are the specific social, political,
and economic formations—primarily, Western colonial and capitalist ones—that drive global patterns of extinction .
Like many of the most influential Anthropocene narratives, this framing naturalizes immense inequalities in
responsibility for harm and in the distribution of suffering, among and across diverse life forms (Malm and Hornberg 2014; Ogden et al.
2015; Todd 2015). A clear example of this can be found in prevailing marketdriven practices involving the conservation of life forms deemed useful to humanity (see Adams 2010). Recent efforts to assess the financial value
of biodiversity aim to incentivize states and other actors to conserve more efficiently. In these schemes, the relations that have enabled life forms to coexist over millennia are recast as stocks of capital to be leveraged or
as commodities to be bought and sold, ostensibly for their own protection (Büscher 2014; Castree and Henderson 2014). Sometimes these relations are literally figured as financial instruments—biodiverse ecosystems as
“banks” or “insurance policies” (UNMA 2003; de Groot et al. 2012; Roe et al. 2013)—while biodiversity derivatives generate capital by betting against the extinction of life forms (Sullivan 2013). These approaches monetize
biodiversity, along with the labor and relationships that sustain it, in order to “offset” ecological degradation in the global North (Pawlicek and Sullivan 2011). Not only does this strategy conscript more forms and

These fixes make the global

dimensions of life into systems of global capital (Kelly 2011; Moore 2016), but it also prescribes “fixes” intended to sustain capitalist systems (Harvey 2003).

calculus of elimination profitable for global elites , while relegating marginalized groups of humans and other-than-
human beings to sacrifice zones and/or conservation enclosures. As a subgenre of apocalypse porn, mass-extinction
narratives also tend to obscure the racialized and colonial nature of the phenomena they seek to define . This is
reflected in the profound anxiety of white Western authors regarding the apparently imminent end of the world. By
locating this apocalypse in a potential future —and fetishizing images of its ravaging by extinction —purveyors of these
narratives evince extreme privilege. In contrast, for Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte (2017, 207), Indigenous
peoples faced—and survived—centuries of colonial occupations that have forced them to “inhabit what our ancestors
would have likely characterized as a dystopian future” in which plants and animals integral to their ways of life have
been obliterated. Meanwhile, by framing all of humanity as the undifferentiated victim of ecological collapse, mass-
extinction narratives magnify colonial discourses that treat extinction or extermination as inevitable for Indigenous
peoples, peoples of color, and nonhumans such as wolves, dingos, whales, or bison (Mohawk 2010; Bird Rose 2011;
Hubbard 2014). These stories of extinction preclude the powerful acts of survivance and resurgence through which
more-than-human communities coexist and resurge in the face of world-ending violence . These examples illustrate
the dangers of apocalypse porn, of the shocking, thrilling, and sometimes pleasurable exposure to the threat of mass
extinction. Rather than a deviant subgenre, these narratives have become mainstream; in fact, for many Western
people, they serve as the first and most basic understanding of what extinction is and whom it affects most. Just as
pornography can normalize particular kinds of violence, we contend that apocalyptic narratives of mass extinction
embed and mask their own perverse and self-sustaining violences . To confront the violence of extinction, it is
necessary to nurture alternative concepts and practices that better tend to who and what is being destroyed —
alternatives that recognize the capacity of life forms and worlds to resist the violences that threaten them and that
respect refusals of subjugation and erasure . We are not asking readers to disregard dire warnings about mass
extinction, but rather to look closer at what their overexposing rhetoric may conceal and legitimize.

Personhood for A.I. accelerates digital colonialism and reinscribes Western rationalism,
modernizing capitalist colonialism.
*2 point font and paragraph merging for readability

Mhlambi 20, Technology and Human Rights Fellow @ the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights (Sabelo, From
rationality to relationality: ubuntu as an ethical and human rights framework for artificial intelligence governance, Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy Discussion Paper, Available Online at:
https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files/ccdp_2020-009_sabelo_b.pdf)

The development of artificial intelligence has depended on the traditional Western view of personhood as rationality.
However, the traditional view of rationality as the essence of personhood, designating how humans, and now
machines, should model and approach the world, has always been marked by contradictions, exclusions, and
inequality. It has shaped Western economic structures (capitalism’s free markets built on colonialism’s forced
markets), political structures (modernity’s individualism imposed through coloniality), and discriminatory social
hierarchies (racism and sexism as institutions embedded in enlightenment-era rationalized social and gender
exclusions from full person status and economic, political, and social participation), which in turn shape the data,
creation, and function of a rtificial intelligence. It is therefore unsurprising that the artificial intelligence industry
reproduces these dehumanizations. Furthermore, the perceived rationality of machines obscures machine learning’s
uncritical imitation of discriminatory patterns within its input data, and minimizes the role systematic inequalities
play in harmful artificial intelligence outcomes .
The relational Sub-Saharan African philosophy of ubuntu reconciles the ethical limitations of rationality as personhood by linking one’s personhood to the personhood of others. This chapter uses ubuntu to show that the harms caused by artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on automated decision making systems (ADMS), are in essence violations of ubuntu’s relational personhood and relational model of the universe. This critique is furthered by using postcolonial African philosophy to argue that the economic, political, and social inequalities that dominate the processes that shape the creation of artificial intelligence are neocolonial and are assaults on
human dignity. The chapter concludes with technical and policy recommendations for addressing the negative effects of artificial intelligence systems. Introduction The discriminatory effects of automated decision-making systems (ADMS) are tied to the philosophical origins of artificial intelligence, and to the economic, political, and social structures that shape it. Artificial intelligence and the structures that shape it derive from the Western world’s early conception of what it means to be human. This foundational view of personhood has influenced the assumptions about artificial intelligence and has shaped the economic, political and social structures that also
affect the creation and use of artificial intelligence. The traditional Western view of personhood is based on rationality. Aristotle, who set the foundations of logic as a discipline, believed that “man is a rational animal” and that truth could be rationally deduced through formal rules of logic.1 Centuries later, Descartes, the so-called “father of modern philosophy,” reinforced the central role of reason in personhood in his declaration, “I think therefore I am.”2 Kant, in similar fashion, gave ethical importance to rationality in his Categorical Imperative by basing moral autonomy entirely on one’s rationality.3 Kant argued one could use rationality, the essence of
personhood, to discover moral laws that, when applied universally, would not contradict. Universal laws that could be reasoned by rational beings inspired the Enlightenment-era belief in the possibility of an alphabet and mathematics that could represent every concept, every concept’s relationships, and their truthfulness.4 Prominent Western mathematicians, logicians, and early computer scientists, from Lull with his logic machine to Turing and his idea of a thinking machine, would be motivated by this traditional view of personhood to believe a type of algebra could be created such that machines could be automated to determine the truth of any
statement in a way matching or surpassing human thinking. Ramon Lull was a logician inspired in part by Sub-Saharan Africa’s binary divination system that had made its way to Europe through African Muslim Moors during the period of 700 years in which Africans controlled parts of Spain and Portugal.5 Lull believed that a logic machine could be created to derive biblical truths rationally, especially for the conversion of Muslim “infidels” to Christianity.6 In his Ars Magna, Lull asserted that “thinking [was] a computational process.”7 The German logician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, inspired by Aristotle’s view of rationality and foundational work on logic and by
Lull’s Ars Magna, devoted much of his life to creating a universal language of which the most basic irreducible elements could be combined to express all concepts that can be represented by natural language. In Leibniz’s envisioning, this language would be the foundation of a formal system that was finite in that the number of all possible expressions could be counted, and complete and consistent in that every possible expression of the system was provable by its language and rules.8 Leibniz believed the algebra of the formal system could be applied by a logic machine, the “Calculus Ratiocinator, or an easy and infallible instrument of reasoning” to determine
truth rationally.9 In a letter to Rodeken in 1708, Leibniz writes about the calculus ratiocinator as “A certain characteristic of reason, by whose aid it is possible to arrive at truths of reason, as if by a calculation, in all other matters insofar as they are subject to reasoning, just as in arithmetic and algebra”. Leibniz believed all reasoning is calculation, and seemingly inspired by the philosopher Hobbes,10 believed that “Thomas Hobbes ... rightly stated that everything done by our mind is a computation, by which is to be understood either the addition of a sum or the subtraction of a difference.”11 5.Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous
Design. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 6. Ford, Kenneth, and Patrick Hayes. "Ramon Lull and the Infidels." AI Magazine, vol. 19, no. 2, 1998, p. 136. 7. Ibid. 8. This led to Leibniz’s famous dissertation on combinations (Dissertatio de arte combinatoria) an important development in the mathematical field of combinatorics. 9. From Couturat, Louis. The Logic of Leibniz. Translated by Donald Rutherford and R. Timothy Monroe, 2012, Chapter 4. Available at: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/Leibniz/Couturatchapters/Chap4.pdf. 10. Leibniz may have misinterpreted Hobbes’ views on reasoning and computation; see:
Martinich, Aloysius, and Kinch Hoekstra. The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes. Oxford Handbooks Online. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. 11. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, and G. H. R. Parkinson. Logical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1966. 12. Peckhaus, Volker, and Yannick Chin-Drian. "The Reception of Leibniz’s Logic in 19th Century German Philosophy." In New Essays on Leibniz Reception: In Science and Philosophy of Science 1800-2000. 2012 ed. Publications Des Archives Henri Poincaré Publications of the Henri Poincaré Archives. Basel: Springer Basel, 2012, pp. 13-24.; Korte, Tapio. "Frege's Begriffsschrift as a Lingua Characteristica." Synthese, vol.
174, no. 2, 2010, pp. 283-94. 13. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20th Anniversary Ed. with a New Pref. by the Author. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 14. Wang, Hao. A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Leibniz inspired both George Boole, who developed a simplistic algebra (Boolean logic) for representing the truthfulness of statements, and Gottlob Frege, who improved Aristotle’s symbolic language by developing new symbols for deriving the truth of more complicated statements based on rules of substitution.12 However, in 1931, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems,
which proved that a formal system cannot be both complete and consistent, laid to rest Leibniz’ idea of a universal language that could rationally describe every concept. Gödel showed that a consistent formal system, such as the mathematics of computing, cannot by itself prove the truthfulness or falsity of all theorems that can result from the system’s rules and axioms. This would be a breakdown in rationality, since there will always be some effects of a system that cannot be deduced using the rules and structures of that system. On the surface, it would appear that Gödel’s revelations would threaten the possibility of artificial intelligence, suggesting that
"there is some elusive and ineffable quality to human intelligence" unattainable to machines which, unlike humans, operate in consistent formal systems.13 However, Gödel believed humans were also prone to the same limits accused of machines: “The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions. That is, if it has succeeded in formulating some of them, this very fact yields new intuitive knowledge, for example the consistency of this formalism. This fact may be called the "incompletability" of mathematics. On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far, it remains possible that there may exist (and
even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact is equivalent to mathematical intuition, but cannot be proved to be so, nor even be proved to yield only correct theorems of finitary number theory.”14 CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 3 The significance of Gödel’s quote is that a human mind is not necessarily superior to a machine, since human mathematical intuition, formal logic, which corresponds to a consistent formal system, is just as incomplete as a computer that cannot always give reason as to why it reaches a certain result. The quest for mechanical intelligence would continue, however, as Gödel affirmed that
machines can also be intelligent, since intelligence, or reaching intelligent conclusions, is not necessarily limited to the completeness of a consistent formal system. Similarly, Alan Turing, a founding father of artificial intelligence, in his seminal Mind paper (1950) began conceiving machines that can think, “which is to say, actively solving problems, working out strategies, and discerning implications.”15 In his definition of thinking, Turing asserted that “the whole mind is mechanical” and that “the problem [of thinking] is mainly one of programming”, supporting the belief that thinking is essentially a computational process.16 Turing hypothesized that a computer,
through “clever engineering”, could be built to simulate a child’s brain and through “an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.”17 This idea was the precursor to modern artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning. While Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have not seriously undermined the quest for artificial intelligence, they do present strong contradictions to the notion of rationality as the essence of personhood. If a consistent formal system is incomplete, and logic is a consistent formal system, and logic is the basis of human reasoning, then humans cannot be selfcomplete, as rationalists would argue, while their system
of reasoning is itself incomplete. If the essence of personhood is rationality, and no individual can achieve complete rationality through self-means, then no one is a person, or at best no one is a full person. Rationality and dehumanization are thus linked: personhood based on rationality is a reduction of personhood. It would also stand to reason that if no consistent formal system, such as the ones Gödel describes, are complete on their own, then consistent formal systems must be all interconnected and dependent on each other for completeness. In Gödel’s theorems, another consistent formal system is needed to rationalize the irrational theorems
15.Turing, Alan, and B. Jack Copeland. The Essential Turing : Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life, plus the Secrets of Enigma. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2004; Quotation in Karelis, Charles. "Reflections on the Turing Test." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 16, no. 2, 1986, pp. 161-72. 16.Turing, A.M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236, October 1950, pp. 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/ mind/LIX.236.433. 17.Ibid. 18. Hofstadter, 1999. of a given consistent formal system. This would mean that rationality is not an individual product or endeavor of a consistent
formal system but is a result of interconnected consistent formal systems. Rationality is thus a product of relationality. The aphorism can be formed that “a consistent formal system is complete through other consistent formal systems.” If a substitution is made where a consistent formal system is an isomorph of personhood, it follows that a person is a person through other persons. Personhood is fundamentally relational. Rationality’s dependence on relationality should be obvious. Douglas Hofstadter, extrapolating from Godel’s incompleteness theorems, makes the claim that no human or group of humans are necessarily complete on their own: “Of course,
there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be exited from!” 18 Mathematical and scientific knowledge are not the exclusive gold standard for defining ethics or how to live a dignified life. Humans are complex and society is characterized by complex interactions with varied ways of knowing and feeling that cannot be modeled by computers or sufficiently understood without incorporating the
empirical knowledge others provide. This cautionary advice has not prevailed within artificial intelligence circles. History reveals modernity’s dehumanization in that irrational measures are often taken in the pursuit of rationality. 4 CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY The perceived infallibility and supremacy of rationality, especially as administered through machines, exacerbates the marginalization of those in society whose exclusion has been rationalized or found “productive.” CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 5 The most popular introductory undergraduate computer science book on artificial intelligence defines a “rational agent [as] one
that does the right thing.”19 However, the reproduction of power asymmetries through automated decision-making systems shows that the rationality of computers, or of humans programming the machines, does not always result in the right thing and is limited without proper context (relationality). ADMS are being used to perpetuate racism and gender stereotypes in part because computers cannot understand or take into account social contexts, in particular the racial attitudes and gender norms that exist. This is not a problem of not having enough data, it is simply that data does not interpret itself. It does not tell us how to respond or act in a moral
dilemma or how to avoid moral dilemmas. The perceived infallibility and supremacy of rationality, especially as administered through machines, exacerbates the marginalization of those in society whose exclusion has been rationalized or found “productive.”20 History reveals modernity’s dehumanization in that irrational measures are often taken in the pursuit of rationality.21 The Nguni philosopher Ramose asks, “why is it that the African’s right to life continues to be denied, derecognized, and remains practically unprotected by the beneficiaries of the violence, irrationality, and the inhumanity of colonization?”22 He continues, “[b]iological accidents like blue
eyes, skin colour, short hair, or an oval cranium are all little pieces of poor evidence to prove the untenable claim that only a particular segment of humanity is rational”23. South American decolonial scholars Quijano and Mignolo have remarked that Western modernity has been accompanied by a repressive “darker side” of subjugation called coloniality, a “ relationship [that] consists, in the firstplace, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated.”24 Horkheimer et al., make a similar critique: “[o]n their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability”25.
Meaning and meaningmaking are not computational processes.

While the view of personhood based on rationality and autonomy was essential in European and Euro-North American
Enlightenment era philosophy, freeing the Western world from serfdom and subjugation by religious institutions and
monarchies, it created its own inequalities and subjugation. The definition of rationality was constrained in ways
meant to advance European and Euro-North American colonial conquests.26 Personhood was not equally applied to
non-Europeans. The European view of personhood provided the ethical laws and moral license to subjugate non-
Europeans. Africans were thought to lack rationality or comparable intelligence to that of Europeans, and, through
colonization and enslavement, could be nurtured to become rational and fully human like Europeans.27 Nineteenth
century missionaries in Southern Africa, for example, believed the Zulu language demonstrated a long forgotten
intelligence in the natives, that could be resurrected by the Zulu people’s adherence to European culture and thinking.28

At the core of Europe’s colonial encounter with Africa and rest of the colonized world was a clash of values in which the
Enlightenment ideals of “freedom”, “humanity”, and “equality” were revealed to be limited, even hypocritical, as these
ideals often made special exceptions for the colonial and imperialistic subjugation of Africans and other non-Europeans.
The South African philosopher Ramose describes this period as the “struggle for reason”.29 These special exceptions
failed to preserve the human dignity of Africans and were deemed by European religious, political, and economic
structures as necessary to bring about what Cornell West calls the “Age of Europe”.30

The inefficacy of Enlightenment ideals was not the result of their poor application; rather, in West’s words, the
subjugation of Africans provided the “constitutive elements in the historical formation of the economic, political, and
cultural expressions of the Age of Europe, including the Enlightenment.”31 This is to say that Enlightenment ideals,
while seeking to promote liberty, but faced with the contradictions and unsustainability of capitalism, created racially
categorized loopholes to simultaneously promote the subjugation and enslavement of Africans.32 Locke, Hegel,
Hume, Kant, Mill, and other Enlightenment era philosophers participated in or supported colonialism, racism and the
subjugation of Africans.33 The Enlightenment ideals, based on liberating the rational person, never intended to assert
the fundamental human rights and dignity of all humans—doing so conflicted with Euro-American growth, expansion,
and hegemony.

The critical point is that colonialism and capitalism , twin processes sharing the same historical birth and philosophical
foundation, have been at all times attacks on personhood —the things that make us feel human and dignified. The
digital colonialism and surveillance capitalism enabled by a rtificial intelligence will not preserve the human dignity of
all. The increased rationalization of life through artificial intelligence will, just as Euro-American modernity has,
perpetuate inequality, even challenging those rights that are based on rational personhood. Models that aggregate
individual data points in order to apply a generalization to a future data subject deny the individuality and autonomy of
that future data subject, and the notion that truths, and perhaps all truths, about an individual can be rationally
computed destroys the core idea of privacy.
29. Ramose, 1999. 30.West, Cornel. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991. 31.Ibid. 32.Hegel believed colonial expansionwasnecessary to offsetthenegative effects of capitalism inEuropeannations. SeeEze’s commentary on Hegel’s support of colonialism as necessary to offset the poverty that comes with capitalism on Eze, 1997, p. 8; Parris, LaRose. Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 33. Ramose, 1999. 34. Eze, 1997. 35.Ndlovu-Gatsheni,Sabelo."DiscoursesofDecolonization/Decoloniality."Papers on Language and
Literature,vol.55,no.3,2019,pp.201-300. 36. Rettová, Alena. "African Philosophy as a Radical Critique." Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 2016, pp. 127-31. 37. Hord, Fred L., and Jonathan Scott Lee. I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy. Revised ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. Postcolonial African philosophy’s relevance to the ethics of artificial intelligence is that, as a response to the traumatic encounter between the African world and European modernity, it puts in clear view modernity’s dependency on marginalization and exposes the weaponization of rationality veiled as moral benevolence.34 It
“challenges the present globalization and its pretensions of universalism, which hides the reality of the Europeanization and Americanization of the modern world”35, and is “a criticism of the dehumanizing tendencies of European culture which, over the past centuries, found expression in slavery, colonial expansionism, and the still very present racial discrimination.”36 African philosophy may be a means to not only respond to AI’s disproportionate negative effect on people, but to achieve global equality and protections from the bottom-up. In the introductory chapter to the “Caribbean” section in their book, I Am Because We Are, Hord and Lee argue that:
[if] “the impositions of colonialism and racism” are fundamental to the Enlightenment ideal of reason, then the task of Africana philosophy is the “recovery and constructing of alternative models of intellectual life” in the context of which black people can achieve the freedom that comes with a genuine sense of belonging to a world.37 The digital colonialism and surveillance capitalism enabled by artificial intelligence will not preserve the human dignity of all. CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 7 As soulless, spiritless, supposed human-like automated thinking machines increasingly describe and prescribe human action while systematically dehumanizing
segments of society—often those historically subjugated to Western imperialism and its modernity—the more imperative our response must be. The inhumanity of the logical reduction of personhood must be challenged and rejected for more humane and relational alternatives. The pressing remedies must take into account the reality of the interconnectedness of society, and the increased intertwinement afforded by artificial intelligence, such as the models that aggregate individual behaviors and generalize them to unknown and future data subjects. Various ethical frameworks, corporate “principles”, and major international human rights instruments, such
as the International Bill of Rights, have been proposed to address the negative consequences of automated decision-making systems.38 It is essential that these frameworks do not, through a predominantly Western view, ironically reproduce the core problem of algorithmic decision making systems and ignore the adequate inclusion of marginalized communities in their design and application. The solutions must not be flawed by the flaws they seek to solve. Ethics is not missing in technology. Our ethics and values are always present in the creation and use of technology. The technology society creates and chooses not to create is a window into the ethics and
values of the powerful. What is missing are ethics of compassion, equity, relationality. Personhood must be extended to all human beings, informed by the awareness that one’s personhood is directly connected to the personhood of others. The African conception of personhood, as captured in ubuntu, the Sub-Saharan African philosophy, is relational. It is of the rational self, as limited as that rationality may be, becoming a relational self through an ethical maturity demonstrated by fulfilling one’s social duties and responsibilities to others.39 The individual self thereby becomes the communal self. Relational conceptions of personhood from the African
continent are nearly nonexistent in the discussions of ethics and AI, and, if they appear, they lack an exhaustive approach. Amongst other aims, this chapter seeks to contribute what may be the first substantial conception of “African” ethics and artificial intelligence, through the constructs of Nguni philosophy, and in general to present relational personhood as a concept whose promise for stronger human rights and ethics are one of “[Africa’s] gift to the world.”40 38.The International Bill of Rights mainly refers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). See: Mann, T., and A. Blunden. "International Bill of Rights." Australian Law Dictionary, 2010, Australian Law Dictionary. 39. Menkiti, Ifeanyi. Person and Community in African Thought, African philosophy: An introduction. University Press of America, 1979. 40. "Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., House Minority Leader, Delivers Remarks Celebrating 95th Birthday and Legacy of Nelson Mandela, as Released by Rep. Pelosi’s Office.” Political Transcript Wire (Lanham), 2013. For ethicists, public interest technologists, and all others working in the arena of ethics, technology and human rights, the root causes
(beliefs and incentives) of the negative effects of technology must be first identified if progress is to be made. This chapter proceeds by challenging individualism in its most general sense, that the individual as an “autonomous self” is self-complete and is the central point of value within society. Four interrelated flaws within individualism will be explored: 1) the rationalization, rewarding, and justification of unnecessary inequality, 2) the lack of upward mobility due a model that rewards the exploitation of power asymmetries, 3) the exacerbation of inequality due to the lack of upward mobility, and 4) cycles of instability due to increasing inequality. Facial
recognition technology | Eduardo Romero 8 CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY This chapter will proceed by describing ubuntu in more detail, framing data colonialism and surveillance capitalism within an ubuntu framework, and describing five general critiques of ADMS systems as direct violations of ubuntu: 1) the exclusion of marginalized communities and their interests in the design, development, decision making, and funding of ADMS, 2) biases resulting in the selection of features in ADMS and biases entrenched in the data that generate these systems, 3) power asymmetries worsened by the use of ADMS, 4) dehumanization that occurs from the
commodification of our digital selves, and 5) the centralization of the resources and power necessary in designing and using ADMS. The central point is that any harmful ADMS system suffers from one or more of these five defects, which the principles of ubuntu can overcome. The chapter concludes by laying out an ethical human-rights centered governance framework for ADMS based on ubuntu. Individualism: the irrational personhood The dominant culture of computing, inextricably linked to individualism, contributes to dehumanization. This has been a colossal failure in foresight on the part of techno-libertarians who envisioned the internet as a free space
where human dignity and autonomy would organically coexist.41 The reasons are clear: since its inception, the commercial computing industry, in academia and in Silicon Valley, has been afflicted by “rugged individualism...a distinctively masculine identity in which individual artistic genius... [are] mobilized as sources of personal and professional authority,42 American exceptionalist “technochauvinsim [that] arises from the antiquated American conviction that most things worthwhile in science and engineering inevitably bloosom [sic] first in the United States,”43 and libertarian ideals expressed as technolibertarianism/cyber-libertarianism,44 extolling
mantras such as “information wants to be free.”45 41. Barlow, John. "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." The Humanist, vol. 56, no. 3, 1996, pp. 18. 42. Ensmenger, Nathan. "‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions." Osiris, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 38-65. 43. "The Dangers of a Made-in-America Malady: "Technochauvinism." U.S. News and World Report, vol. 101, no. 12, 1986, pp. 64. 44. Barlow, 1996. 45. Goldsborough, Reid. "Internet Philosophies." Independent Banker (Sauk Centre), 2000. 46.Barlow, 1996. 47. Goldsborough, 2000. 48.Borsook, Paulina. "Cyberselfish."
Mother Jones, vol. 21, no. 4, 1996, p. 56. 49.Meer, Zubin. Individualism: the Cultural Logic of Modernity. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. 50. Ibid. These elements have constituted an individualistic cyberlibertarian environment based on the triumph of the individual—the glorification of unrestrained “enlightened self-interest”, the belief that "the internet, as the pinnacle of scientific and technological achievement, subverts hierarchy, revitalizes democracy, reduces racial and national conflict and leads to planetary interconnectivity and unity,"46 and high tech capitalism where as early as the mid 1990s "advertising ha[d] become so prevalent as an online
revenue source." 47Referring to this unholy trinity, Paulina Borsook in 1996 begins to identify the irrationality allowed by the nexus of libertarianism, capitalism, and high tech: Technolibertarians rightfully worry about Big Bad Government, yet think commerce unfettered can create all things bright and beautiful — and so they disregard the real invader of privacy: Corporate America seeking ever-better ways to exploit the Net, to sell databases of consumer purchases and preferences, to track potential customers however it can.48 Zubin Meer defines individualism in its broadest terms as a family of concepts, of which some connote “a dynamic capitalist
economic rationality—utilitarian, competitive, and profit maximizing—inimical to the supposed torpor of feudal and tribal mentality alike.”49 Although individualism has had both negative and positive connotations since the 19th century, it is undeniable that “individualism is inexorably tied to the specific but intertwined historical processes that have shaped the last five centuries or so of Euro-American modernity: capitalism and liberalism, secularism and humanism, historicism and science.”50 What was significant about Europe’s central belief in reason as the substance of personhood was that reason was an individual quality and activity, therefore placing
the individual as the centermost point of concern in society. CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 9 One’s rationality was not constrained by the rationality of others. By relying on the rationality of one’s mind, and through one’s own means, one was complete, ruler and autonomous. Praising rationality as the great leveler, Francis Bacon—the “father of modern science”—writes: Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their forcecommand; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail
where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her by action.51 The Enlightenment goal of self-realization through the “mastery of nature” is today’s self-realization through the mastery of bits and cyberspace.52 The pursuit of mastery of nature, necessitating liberty as a foundation of individual rights, is a parallel to the mastery of cyberspace, the “new home of the Mind...where liberty itself always speaks” with great authority, as proclaimed by techno-libertarian movements.53 These connected movements can be understood as subjugation.
Goldberg, the South-African critical race scholar, writes “[s]ubjugation perhaps properly defines the order of the Enlightenment: subjugation of nature by human intellect, colonial control through physical 51.Horkheimer et al., 2002. 52. Kennington R. “Descartes and Mastery of Nature.” In: Spicker S.F. (eds) Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht, 1978. 53. Smith, George H. The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013; Barlow, 1996. 54. Parris, 2015. 55. Pittman, R. Carter. “George Mason: The Architect of American Liberty.” Vital Speeches of
the Day, vol. 21, no. 5, 1954, p. 925. 56. Pittman, 1954. 57. Pittman, R. Carter. Equality v. Liberty: The Eternal Conflict. Statements and Papers Expounding the Role of the States in Their Relation to the Central Government. Richmond, Virginia: Commission on Constitutional Government, 1960, p. 6. 58. Lynch, Kathleen, and Manolis Kalaitzake. “Affective and Calculative Solidarity: The Impact of Individualism and Neoliberal Capitalism.” European Journal of Social Theory, (July 2018). doi:10.1177/1368431018786379. 59. Murobe, M.F. ‘Globalization and African Renaissance: An ethical reflection’, in Problematising the African Renaissance, E. Maloka and E.Le Roux
(eds). Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2000, pp. 43–67. and cultural domination and economic superiority through mastery of the laws of the market.”54 The liberty for mastery of nature tolerates the inevitability of inequality. The inequality resulting from liberty seems to have been recognized by American founding fathers and European thinkers. While on the floor of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Alexander Hamilton expressed the shared belief that “inequality will exist as long as liberty exists” saying that “it inevitably results from that very liberty itself.”55 Pittman, a constitution scholar and authority on George Mason, the
originator of the Bill of Rights, summarizes the sentiment of the occasion, stating that: Equality beyond the range of legal rights cannot thrive in free soil. It thrives only in the sewers of Slavic slavery ... Equality beyond the range of legal rights is despotic restraint … Equality homogenizes so that the cream no longer rises to the top. It puts the eagle in the henhouse that he may no longer soar.56 In a separate article, Pittman continues: It is inequality that makes "the pursuit of happiness" something more than a dry run or a futile chase. It is inequality that makes the race. It is the father of every joy and the giver of every good gift.57 While there will always be
some type of inequality, here defined as natural and artificial differences between humans, Pittman’s metaphors of “cream” and “soaring” are justifications of unnecessary inequality. The allowance for the “cream” to rise to the top creates antipathy to forms of solidarity more needed today in an increasingly interconnected world.58 The individualistic libertarian ideals allow for inequality through excessive and greedy competition as individuals center their actions around their own self-interests.59 Any system, whether political, economic, or social, that is organized and structured around individualistic principles eventually produces harms. 10 CARR CENTER
FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY This highly competitive nature is prominent in Silicon Valley culture. Internet technology startups, with mottos such as “move fast and break things,” often aim to disrupt an industry and make as much profit as possible in the process.60 However, this leaves little consideration for the greater social and environmental consequences. This is akin to indulging the liberty to move at the speed of electrons without seat belts or road signals. Unfortunately when things do “break,” the marginalized are the ones disproportionately affected.61 These are the flaws of individualism. Individualism is flawed in at least four ways: it 1) Justifies
inequality (e.g., the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor); 2) Limits upward social mobility (e.g., individuals of marginalized communities must work twice as hard to get half as far); 3) worsens inequality (e.g., as the rich get richer the poor get poorer); and 4) creates cycles of instability (e.g,. within politics, cycles of coups that occur when authoritarians, individualists in their own right, prioritize private interests over the public interest). These flaws are not by chance or an effect of poor implementation of individualist ideals, but instead are inherent flaws of individualism that inevitably lead to extreme power asymmetries and inequality. Any system,
whether political, economic, or social, that is organized and structured around individualistic principles eventually produces these harms. The manner in which we organize our societies can lead to adverse outcomes if it is not done with equity in mind. Consider the following problem, referred to as the “10 Dollar Problem”. Suppose a population of four people in which $10, denominated as four bills, one $5 bill, two $2 bills, and a $1 bill must be distributed amongst the population. How should the distribution of the bills be carried out in a manner that 60. Taplin, Jonathan T. Move Fast and Break Things : How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture
and Undermined Democracy. First ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017; Vardi, Moshe. "Move Fast and Break Things." Communications of the ACM 61, no. 9, 2018, p. 7. 61.Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press, 2018. 62. On individualism, Ramose argues that inequalities of the slave trade, colonialism and racism were justified by Western philosophy. While inequalities in small form may always exist, ubuntu defines some inequalities such as starvation from hunger or homelessness, when society has ample resources to alleviate the needs, as unnecessary and unjust. Ramose, Mogobe. "Wiping Away the Tears of the Ocean:
Ukusulaizinyembezizolwandle." Theoria 64, no. 4, 2017, p. 22. 63. Michels, Robert. Political Parties : A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. 2nd Free Press Pbk. ed. New York : London: Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1968. Michels suggests that all democratic institutions ultimately result in power being concentrated among a few. leads to a just and equal society? Suppose individuals, acting fairly and using their own efforts and advantages, are treated as autonomous, self-dependent rational beings, each with the goal to maximize their own utility, a position that reflects individualism. What characteristics are likely to be
associated with the individual likely to collect the most? Most likely the one with the best competitive advantage (“strongest”, “fastest, “smarter”) will win. If this is a “fair” and acceptable outcome, then the distribution system is set to reward competitive advantages. This distribution justifies some people getting less because it is assumed such individuals are fairly rewarded less based on their competencies or productivity. The first fundamental flaw of individualism is that it justifies inequality, as illustrated in the “10 Dollar Problem”.62 By incorrectly assuming a pre-existing state of equality, individualism creates inequality by rewarding differences that can be
leveraged competitively. This leads to a “winner takes all” attitude, a race to the bottom. The Silicon Valley culture of disruption is a “winner takes all” culture. Speed is treated as an indispensable competitive advantage and precautions in terms of diversity of startups or the societal consequences are treated as secondary. Often private interests win and the public, especially the marginalized, loses. This leads to the belief that those who are poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. As autonomous beings, those with less must have failed in one aspect or another and thus are justly rewarded. If money is a tool for exercising one’s autonomy, should an
equal society allow for unequal degrees of autonomy even if they are “fairly” earned? Should the richest exercise the greatest autonomy and influence over society and the poorest receive the smallest amount of autonomy and influence? An affirmative answer to the preceding allows for advantaged individuals to have more autonomy than the collective and eventually allows for the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” to take effect. 63 The manner in which we organize our societies can lead to adverse outcomes if it is not done with equity in mind. CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY 11 Individualism’s second flaw is that for the disadvantaged to acquire more,
they must develop and exercise a competitive advantage over others. This notion limits upward mobility because the marginalized, already operating at a deficit, must incur an added cost in order to be competitive. Disenfranchised groups often exclaim the need to work “twice as hard to get half as much.”64 This symbolizes the unequal exchanges of power within an unequal society. In order to acquire more, the disenfranchised, while having limited access to resources, have to work much harder than their privileged counterparts who come from positions of power. This makes upward mobility needlessly difficult to achieve. This state creates the conditions
for the third flaw of individualism: it worsens inequality. This is a corollary of the second flaw. The difficulty in upward mobility exacerbates inequality by enabling those with advantages to leverage power asymmetries and generate wealth. Suppose the 10 Dollar Problem is applied repeatedly, and those with an existing competitive advantage are better suited to acquire more resources. The acquisition of more resources, in turn, adds to their competitive advantage, which allows them to be even more competitive the next time around, and so forth. Without any intervention, high inequality will result. The state of high income inequality from the United States
to South Africa demonstrates this notion.65 The state of inequality is exacerbated as the disadvantaged find it more difficult to compete and the already empowered are much more equipped to exercise their competitive advantages and capture more of society’s resources. In an unequal society, the exchanges of power are unequal and produce Marx’s alienations. Those who have acquired resources, and greater autonomy, are able to dictate the conditions of power exchanges. When great power imbalances exist the conditions for consent diminish, as it becomes difficult to give consent when one has no meaningful alternatives. Even if multiple parties agree
to an exchange it does not necessarily mean the exchange was fair. When marginalized communities accept undesirable propositions, especially those offered by tech companies, their acceptance cannot be treated as an indication of fairness or true consent. Consent without power leads to inequality. 64. Mcgee, Ebony, Derek Griffith, and Stacey, II Houston. "‘I Know I Have to Work Twice as Hard and Hope That Makes Me Good Enough’: Exploring the Stress and Strain of Black Doctoral Students in Engineering and Computing." Teachers College Record, vol. 121, no. 6, 2019. 65. Solimano, Andrés. Global Capitalism in Disarray : Inequality, Debt, and Austerity.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017; Leibbrandt, Murray,Arden Finn, and Ingrid Woolard. "Describing and Decomposing Post-apartheid Income Inequality in SouthAfrica." Development Southern Africa 29, no. 1, 2012, pp. 19-34. 66. Fatton, Robert, Jr. "Hegel and the Riddle of Poverty: The Limits of Bourgeois Political Economy." History of Political Economy, vol. 18, no. 4, 1986, pp. 579-600. 67. Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-colonialism; the Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1966. When internet tech companies provide services to society, such as connectivity or recommendations, in exchange for greater access to the private lives
and attention of citizens, it cannot be characterized as a fair transaction when often large marginalized populations are not able to refuse without losing critical services. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, when tech companies provide free internet and digital social connectivity through online platforms, in exchange for great amounts of privacy invasion and commodification of users’ behaviors, it cannot be treated as a social good. Often these populations have to trade their privacy or risk losing access to connectivity. Individualism allows for these inequalities in power exchanges. The fourth flaw is that individualism creates cycles of instability, a view captured
by Kwame Nkrumah in his discourse on neocolonialism and Hegel’s comments on capitalism. In Hegel’s comments the solution to the instability and a “penurious rabble” is the colonization of other nations.66 Nkrumah, differing, writes: Neo-colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. The temporary success of this policy can be seen in the ever widening gap between the richer and the poorer nations of the world. But the internal contradictions and conflicts of neo-colonialism make it certain that it cannot endure as a permanent world policy. How it should be brought to an end is a problem that should be
studied, above all, by the developed nations of the world, because it is they who will feel the full impact of the ultimate failure. The longer it continues the more certain it is that its inevitable collapse will destroy the social system of which they have made it a foundation.67 Consent without power leads to inequality. 12 CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY An oppressive system is unstable because it relies on oppression, and oppression of others cannot be forever guaranteed. The marginalized masses, desiring to change their state of affairs, will eventually accumulate the activation energy needed to realize their potential power, leading to a cataclysmic
capture of power in some form of revolution. This is, in Nkrumah’s words, a desperate “state of economic chaos and misery that revolt actually breaks out.”68 However, if the new power distribution is individualistic, the cycle begins again—artificial differences are rewarded, which leads to a lack of upward mobility, which worsens inequality, and results in a seizure of power disenfranchising the former rulers in the process. It cannot be known how the distribution of power will occur in such an aftermath and how justice will be carried out. The former oppressors can only hope that the system of justice adopted by the new power distribution has an orientation
towards reconciliation and creating harmony between all members of society. Ubuntu incorporates these principles. Ubuntu as Relational Personhood Ubuntu relational personhood is diametrically opposed to rationality as personhood, the philosophy that has shaped Western individualism, the Western world’s asymmetric relationship with much of the world, computing culture, and AI’s quest for a mechanical personhood. Ubuntu is the basis of African philosophy, the “wellspring flowing with African ontology and epistemology.”69 Ubuntu has been popularized internationally through the experiences and philosophy of the Suthu and Nguni of southern
Africa, which include three of the first four African Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Although it shares parallels with the African humanism found across Sub-Saharan Africa, “it must be recognized that Ubuntu is a profoundly southern African manifestation” and the political identity of South Africa70. Ubuntu as used here will be a nonexclusive reference to Nguni philosophy, with the implied belief that it also represents Suthu knowledge systems. Nguni philosophy is contained in its oral literature, not as an antithesis to written literature, but that it marks 68. Ibid. 69. Ramose, 1999. 70. Biney, Ama. 2014. "The historical discourse on African humanism: Interrogating
the Paradoxes." In Praeg, Leonhard., and Siphokazi. Magadla. Ubuntu: Curating the Archive. Thinking A