Globalization, Wikitelligence and why the free market isn't so free

When thinking on globalization,

One cannot lose sight of the nation,

So China's priorities

derail Western authorities

Oh, unsuspecting hegemonic creation

Globalization is a hot topic word in media. Depending on who you ask, globalization will solve all the world's problems or sink us into a morass of economic and social inequality, all while ruining our environment. Still, globalization itself is rarely defined, though authors who bandy about it do so with an agenda. The Steger was particularly useful in distinguishing three different globalism agendas: market globalism, left justice globalism and jihadist globalism, all of which take advantage of globalization and advances in technology to further their own needs, they all "articulate and translate the rising global imaginary - notions of community increasingly tied to the global - into concrete political programmes and agendas."

Moreover, there is a lot of tension in the readings between the ideas of globalism replacing nationalism as a prevailing ideology (a la Friedman) and nationalism experiencing a resurgent power and relevance in defiance against a globalist agenda, particularly one that focuses on Western and Americentric ideas. As Gray says, “Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift.” Therefore, paradoxically, it is nationalist motivations that are fueling a movement towards globalization: taking advantage of economic, technological and social opportunities globally to advance a national (or other unifying group—whether religious, ideological, racial, etc.) agenda.

The uncoupling of capitalism, democracy and globalization was a crucial feature of the Gray article and key to understanding the implications of globalist agendas across the world. While most cursory looks at globalization would seem to promote a leveling of the playing field, in reality, political entities all want to be ‘more equal than others’. It is difficult to imagine who would willingly forsake either an existing position of cultural and economic dominance or a chance to achieve it.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the reading was the framing of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as responses to unchecked capitalism and economic inequality. Having always looked at the rise of National Socialism through the lens of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles as being the direct cause of hyperinflation and unemployment, it is compelling to consider it through the lens of unchecked free market rapaciousness and draw correlations to modern economic inequalities—particularly as those tendencies manifest themselves right now in both secular and religious ways.

In terms of academic and pedagogical implications, the Lanier felt the most directly relevant. In concerns about collectivism and collaborative references like Wikipedia, the tyranny of the majority would necessitate reducing things to the lowest common denominator and thus diminishing the social intelligence. There have already been studies done that show that modern students accept most of what they read on Wikipedia and other internet sources as factual without stopping to consider the credibility of the source—a source that, as Lanier points out, is becoming more difficult to trace as anonymity and collective intelligence are becoming more common on the web. My girlfriend and I had a long conversation about this article and this very point, where she contested that for Wikipedia to have developed any credibility at all, it had to be mostly factually accurate, otherwise people would not use it and its lack of reliability would have rendered it obsolete. When I countered by comparing it to a physical encyclopedia (considered a legitimate source by most instructors, whereas Wikipedia is not), she pointed out that the masses can serve a similar function to the editorial gatekeepers behind a conventional encyclopedia, and we cannot easily (nor is anyone inclined to) trace the individual identities or biases of authors of Encyclopedia Brittanica articles either. Moreover, Wikipedia and internet authorship opens up a more democratic set of views that, if critically vetted by responsible readers, can be far more valuable than a conventionally published text. Or, as she put it, “History is written by the winners, but at least on Wikipedia, sometimes it’s written by losers”. These considerations will have to be factored in by modern educators who have to re-evaluate their own ideas of source legitimacy and train their students in effective critical evaluation.