IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 8

and economic cleansing [6]): now any
trans-national "big tech" company
can stick its corporate proboscis into
the local economy of a city or a town
and drain the lifeblood from it (what
has been called neo-colonialism
[7]). While some pushback is being
observed, much social, generational, and environmental damage has
already occurred.
This damage can be specifically
identified in the obsession with markets in the energy sector, and the
reduction of individual consumers
to atomized revenue streams. For
example, one U.K. energy company
has set up a contract whereby their
"customers" can control when they
use energy. Because of the nature
of the market, the physics of electri-

storage mechanism) in order to
take most advantage of extreme
conditions. Secondly, the customers have to be time rich: they must
have time to pay attention to heavily itemized bills, track a regularly
changing price, and react when conditions might be financially favorable. And third, customers have
to already be knowledge rich, they
need to have access to education
and social networks to order to find
out about, use, and benefit from
this contractual arrangement. However, while it is possible to admire
some of the ingenuity that has gone
into creating this market edifice (or
artifice), at a time when an estimated
15% of U.K. households are suffering
from fuel poverty,1 one can reasonably ask exactly what problem is this solution actually
trying to solve? Where, one
might also ask, is the social
and environmental justice;
Anger will not bind communities
where is the community
binding and the inter-gentogether to engage in collective
erational binding?
The divergence of some
action to address climate change.
sha r ing economy appli--
ca-
tions from the original
intentions and how they could have
cal generation and distribution, and
ideally operated, to how they have
the vagaries of stochastic generaoperated in practice, has forced
tion from renewable sources, during
individuals and communities into
storms, for example, the company
"survival mode." People in survival
will actually pay people to use enermode feel excluded, may be relucgy. Extreme weather events are then
tant to share what little they do
used as an opportunity for some to
have, and may not see the potential
charge their electric vehicles and
benefits of investing in cooperamake money, even while stormtion, so it is correspondingly much
associated flooding is causing conharder to encourage, incentivize,
siderable disruption and hardship
or motivate these people to act in
for others.
the collective interest. While the
Beyond one person's financial
gain from another's misfortune,
1
"UK fuel poverty statistics are no longer availthis model is predicated on sevable as a whole from the Department of Busieral assumptions. First, the cusness, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The reasoning is that fuel poverty is a devolved
tomers have to already be asset
issue and each nation has its own definition."
rich: for example, they must either
-
Energy Action Scotland (https://www.eas.org
.uk/en/fuel-pover ty-across-the-uk_50535/).
have deployed solar cells or other
Methodologically: fair enough. But still: kind of
renewable energy generator, or own
convenient for those who do not want to draw
attention to such statistics.
an electric vehicle (or some other

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

big tech companies behind sharing economy applications have
reduced people to survival mode,
those behind social media applications have in--creasingly aggravated
(or allowed the aggravation of) this
situation. They have been responsible for systems that are, in some
respects, actually extremely creative - especially at creating anger.

Manufacturing Anger:
The Outrage Industry
Besides the deep social knowledge
of these supposedly "primitive"
societies, another feature that they
appeared to have in common was a
particular restraint on emotional attitudes, in particular anger. For example, in Ladakh, the term schon chan
("one who angers easily") was a particular insult. The effect of Ostrom's
institutional design principles -
quick, cheap, and easy access to
dispute resolution - was presumably
to moderate emotive overreaction
and to prevent escalation of conflicts
through retaliatory retribution. In
fact, this control over anger and temper can be observed in many societies, especially those in the harshest
conditions, where the survival of all
is dependent on the collective. For
example, Briggs [8] describes how
losing one's temper was seen by the
Eskimo tribe with whom she lived as
an act of selfishness and a loss of reason (ihuma), and a cause for an individual to be ostracized, because
an inability to maintain self-expression within acceptable boundaries
could not be trusted not to threaten
the collective.2
2

Less rigorously, from an anthropological perspective, AA Gill (a Scotsman) describes the English as "naturally, congenitally, collectively and
singularly, livid much of the time... Perhaps aware
that they're living on top of a keg of fulminating
fury, the English have, throughout their history,
come up with hundreds of ingenious and bizarre
ways to diffuse anger or transform it into something benign. Good manners and queues, roundabouts and garden sheds, and almost every game
ever invented from tennis to bridge..." [9].

∕

JUNE 2020

https://www.eas.org.uk/en/fuel-poverty-across-the-uk_50535/ https://www.eas.org.uk/en/fuel-poverty-across-the-uk_50535/

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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