Monthly Archives: June 2020

Spike Lee is currently basking in some of the best film reviews of the year for his Vietnam War epic Da 5 Bloods, which launched June 12 on Netflix and rocketed to the top of the streamers most-watched chart, but that wont be the only new Spike Lee joint released in 2020. HBO has announced it has picked up the rights to release a filmed version of the directors Broadway show David Byrnes American Utopia later this year. The film is a recording of the musicians eponymous Broadway show, in which he performed songs alongside 11 other musicians from around the world.

David Byrnes American Utopia is a uniquely transformative experience and a perfect example of how entertainment can bring us together during these challenging times, HBO programming executive vice president Nina Rosenstein said in a statement. Spikes brilliant direction adds a level of intimacy to this powerful performance, and were so thrilled to share this groundbreaking show with our audience.

David Byrne added of the project,Spike and I have crossed paths many times over the years, obviously Im a huge fan and now finally here was an opportunity for us to work together. I am absolutely thrilled with the result. The Broadway show was a wonderful challenge as well as an opportunity it was a joy to perform and, well, best to let the quotes speak for themselves. Thrilled that this show and the subjects it addresses will now reach a wider audience.

It is my honor and privilege that my art brother, Mr. David Byrne, asked me to join him in concert, to invite me into his magnificent world of American Utopia, Lee said. And dats da once in a lifetime truth, Ruth. Ya-dig? Sho-nuff. Peace and love. Be safe.

David Byrnes American Utopia ran at Broadways Hudson Theater from October 2019 to February 2020. The concert found Byrne and his fellow musicians performing songs from his 2018 album of the same name, plus classics from the Talking Heads catalogue and Byrnes solo career. HBO has not announced a release date for Lees concert film but it did confirm it will debut later this year. Lees Da 5 Bloods is now streaming on Netflix.

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Another Spike Lee Joint Is Coming: HBO Sets Filmed Version of David Byrne Broadway Show for 2020 - IndieWire

Barbara Belvisi is building sustainable habitats, starting in the Mojave Desert in California.

But unlike the eco-lodges powered by solar panels around the world, her futuristic habitats have a unique twist: they are ultimately designed for Mars.

Our job is to build environmental control stations. The mission is [for humanity] to become a multi-planet species, says Belvisi, the 35-year-old founder of Interstellar Lab, a Paris-based startup building bio-regenerative villages.

Belvisi, a well-known French venture capitalist and entrepreneur, is part of a new wave of tech entrepreneurs setting up private companies to pioneer space exploration.

It comes as Elon Musks SpaceX last month became the first private company to launch astronauts into orbit. Its Starship rocket has been designed to carry a crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system, according to Musk.

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Speaking to Sifted, Belvisi says that her main goal when she founded Interstellar Lab two years ago was that humans could expand beyond Earth but also that we could learn how to build a more sustainable society back home.

For me, there is no point going to another planet if were just replicating the same mistake that we did on Earth, she says. When you think about living on Mars, everything has to be completely sustainable and has to be regenerative, and thats exactly what we need on Earth. So our mission is really double.

This year, Interstellar Lab is planning to start construction on a network of closed-loop biomes in the Mojave Desert, meaning that systems such as water treatment, waste management and food production are all self-contained.

If all goes according to plan, over the next 15 years they will build a total of 10 terrestrial stations, with sites in California, Florida and Saudi Arabia, as well as one in Europe (for this, Belvisi favours the Tabernas Desert in southern Spain, which is arid and in parts resembles Mars or the Moon).

The Experimental Bioregenerative Stations, or EBios, are expected to be an important way to further research on how humans could live in places with exceptionally harsh conditions (e.g. other planets).

The first section of the Californian station is expected to be finished next year, says Belvisi. But the whole village with transport systems, dedicated science area for testing life-support systems and a music centre will not be done for half a decade.

The way were doing it, its very iterative over time, so before building a full-scale station we build a demonstrator, one module designed for five people, she says. Its gonna take us five years to scale one module to a station of 150 people.

There could be one tiny snag in the whole scheme: money.

Interstellar Lab is still at the pre-seed funding stage, with some input from business angels, but it will ultimately need significant capital to fulfil its goals.

We are planning on big rounds, but Im not a big fan of Oh, lets raise a hundred million and spend the money, says Belvisi. Im very careful on how we spend the money, because I dont want it to be too capital intensive. Yes, big rounds, but we raise what we need.

The second issue will be turning Interstellar Lab into a viable business in the short term so that it doesnt have to rely on funding from state agencies focused on the grand future vision.

Just living out of the public money is not very sustainable, says Belvisi. Youre dependent on only one customer basically, so you need to find a business model.

If you stay on the dream level or too focused on the technology, its really hard, she adds. There are a lot of different groups that have been working on life support technologies, and thats where most have been struggling for years.

The business model that Belvisi and her colleagues have come up with is part tourism and part science lab, opening up their Earth-bound stations to research scientists as well as the general public. This will enable the team to work on fundamental technologies while also ensuring a steady stream of revenue.

A week-long stay will cost around $3,000 to $6,000, roughly the same as a trip to Antarctica, says Belvisi, though that will decrease over time as they scale up.

The idea that tourists might pay a high price for staying in a Martian utopia in the desert is not so far-fetched. The Eden Project, which opened in the UK in 2001 with a series of biomes that allow visitors to experience a range of different habitats, has been broadly successful.

Last year the Astroland Space Agency opened in northern Spain to recreate the experience of living on Mars. Tourists pay around 6,000 for a package of online training and three days of living in a 1.2km-long cave built out to mirror the planets harsh conditions.

The Biosphere 2 project, a biome in the Arizona desert built in the 1990s, where scientists lived for two years but struggled with managing the ecosystem (and their own clashing personalities), was broadly a disaster. But it was never designed as a tourist destination.

Belvisi says that she believes that his hospitality model can work, and indeed that it will work so well there will be plenty of copycats.

Now that weve figured out how to make money on the Earth, and to deal with space at the same time, I suspect theres going to be a bunch of competition coming out, but its good, its fair, she says. I think that the habitat sector is going to be the next big, big thing.

There are already strong players operating in or around the habitat space, with the likes of American companies Blue Origin and AI SpaceFactory worth watching, she adds.

Belvisi started her career at 23 as an investor, eventually raising over $80m and participating in 40 deals. Later she helped launch Paris-based startup incubator The Family, and founded her own asset management firm, which gave birth to Hardware Club, a $50m hybrid fund focused on robotics and hardware startups (she was also the youngest female founder of a venture capital fund in Europe, and was listed among the top 10 women in tech in France in 2018).

That same year she founded Interstellar Lab, and she tells Sifted that her background in finance helps her to manage such a complex company.

You need a background in finance to be able to build this type of company because its very infrastructural, its like each station is a small city, says Belvisi, who went to business school before moving into company building.

The young startup currently has a team of 13, split between Paris and Los Angeles, made up of aerospace engineers several coming from NASA and SpaceX as well as software engineers, scientists, architects and designers.

But the team will likely grow fast as construction starts to ramp up. We have this vision of the future. Its a beautiful motivation, she says.

A key aspect for private companies looking to be involved in space exploration is collaborating with massive governmental agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Unlike its American counterpart, which has been quick to schedule meetings and engage with private sector entities, Belvisi says that the European Space Agency has proved far more cumbersome.

ESA is a collaboration of different countries, so its not easy to be as agile as NASA can be. There is a willingness of collaboration, but there is this bureaucracy compared to the United States that can bog down processes, she says.

Hopefully they will figure out a way to collaborate faster with startups, otherwise NASA will get them all.

She adds that anything aimed at getting humanity into space ultimately needs both government and private sector input. The partnership between public and private is a necessity if we want to move forward, she says.

Like Musk, Belvisi believes that humanity will succeed in sending people to Mars within the next decade (give or take a few years), and last months Space X rocket launch has only highlighted the role private companies can play in this.

Shes also excited about NASAs next manned mission to the Moon, planned for 2024, which will see astronauts walk on the surface for the first time since 1972.

Returning to the Moon, and then going onwards to Mars, is partly about furthering our progress into space but also, much like her own sustainably biospheres, about what humans can learn today from the experience.

People dont realise, but the first time we went to the Moon, this is when the first environmental movement started because wed seen the Earth from space for the first time.

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Building a utopian Martian village in the Californian desert - Sifted

Star Trek: Picards showrunner wanted to really examine what a Utopia meant in the new series. Both Michael Chabon and series star Patrick Stewart talked to the Los Angles Times about how Picard tackles those ideas in a new way. Its not uncommon to hear Star Trek be pegged as utopian or unrealistic in conversation. But, Chabon wanted to make clear that utopia doesnt mean that everything is solved and wrapped up in a neat little bow. In fact, there are still many corners of this universe that havent been poked or prodded yet, and thats what makes the approach with Picard stick out.

Chabon offered, The rap on Star Trek is its utopian, optimistic. Over the years, a lot of these things have been tossed out by writers, like, Yes, we dont have money and Yes, we dont have war and all these admirable things, but we aspired to say, What does that actually mean? What does it mean that Jean-Luc Picard owns a winery? This is a 50-plus-year-old machine where people havent dug around inside too much.

The series star also weighed in on how this new approach fleshes out Picard in interesting ways. Michael, you also introduced emotional disturbances in Picard which had not been present before like his experience as a partially assimilated [cybernetic organism] Borg. There was no real residue from it. But there has to have been, Steward mused. What has it been like for the past 25 years, having gone through that incredibly traumatic experience and never having had the chance to talk about it or reckon with it or purge it?

Executive producer Akiva Goldsman has been adamant since before the show premiered that this is not a sequel to The Next Generation. In comments to Hollywood Outbreak, "Well we pointedly wanted to not make a sequel to Next Gen. I think that tonally, it's a little bit of a hybrid. Obviously its you will see, I hope slower, more gentle, more lyrical. It is certainly more character-based.

It also takes on the same thing that The Original Series took on, that Next Gen took on, that Discovery takes on, which is a hope for a future that is in many ways better than the world we live in today, Goldsman continued. Star Trek remains aspirational and what we get to do that DS9 got to do a little bit and Discovery got to do is to tell serialized stories, and in serialized storytelling, the characters can evolve in a way that makes it unique. So we think it's a new kind of Star Trek show, made by a lot of people who love all the old kinds of Star Trek."

How have you been enjoying Picard so far? Let us know down in the comments!

Disclosure: ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.

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Star Trek: Picard Showrunner Wanted to Examine What Utopia Really Meant - ComicBook.com

When I was a young teen, my mother tried to strangle me on a Hawaiian beach where we were homeless and living in tents. I had spent much of my childhood in the islands. I was in the minority, a haole (white) girl growing up in a liberal (if violent and dysfunctional) family and raised to appreciate the diversity of races amid the predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander culture.When I ran away to escape my mother, my grandmother took me in. She lived in Alabama.

I landed in the Heart of Dixie in March 1977 at the age of 14, and the culture shock was mind-blowing. I was accustomed to a vibrant blend of races, but in this new town there were, quite literally, opposite sides of the tracks. Blacks lived in rundown homes on one side of the railroad tracks, many in actual shotgun shacks. Whites lived wherever they wished. The first time I heard someone call a black kid the derogatory word we all know,I actually became nauseous. I couldnt imagine a more vicious and demeaning word. When I was a senior in high school, a pair of Iranian brothers moved to town and began attending my school. A small group of us befriended Mohammed and Hussein. Much of the rest of the school called them names.

My experiences with racism and homelessness prepared me to writeSame Kind of Different as Me,a bookabout a homeless Southern black man who grew up in slave conditions in the 20th century. When I first undertook that project, I knew little about institutional racism. But studying Jim Crow and the sharecropper era gave me a new perspective on the whole slavery ended 150 years ago, get over it mentality.

It is easy for white Americans to dismiss the fallout of slavery since the Civil War ended it so long ago. But during the Jim Crow era, Southern Democrats cruelly and systematically subverted the gains black Americans could have and should have made after the war. Blacks suffered for decades, a separate class, an un-people. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racism permeated much of America, especially the South.

So, yes, slavery ended 150 years ago. Street-level and institutional racism did not.

And still we are grappling with it. Police officer Derek Chauvin, a member of what should be a trusted American institution, killed George Floyd. I hope he will pay for his crime. But as America burns today, I suspect that most Americans, police officers or otherwise, are not racists. I therefore grieve for the victims of the current violence. Innocent people are being beaten and killed, paying for sins not their own. Business owners of all colors are losing their livelihoods and life savings. I do not endorse this violence.

And yet, it is completely understandable that we have arrived at this momentand not just because of racial unrest.

Instead, America is on fire because we have systematically rejected our shared moral underpinnings. We have rejected the transracial bond of humanity the abolitionists fought for. Wehave rejected civility and the common good. In recent years, we have rejected the nature of creation itself, spurning science and common sense. Finally, we have rejected the gospel of peace in favor of a savageLord of the Fliescounterfeit that separates human beings into two classes: the cultural elites and their foot soldiers ... and everyone else.

These elites, having made a name for themselves, are the loudest voices that divide us. They sit astride their 21st-century Towers of BabelTwitter, Facebook, the airwavesand look down on God and the common people. They bear false witness for profit. Their tongues are fires, as James the brother of Jesus wrote. They have set our streets aflame. Now, with their own power and privilege unthreatened, they sip lattes and provide color commentary as Americans die and cities burn, mere collateral damage on the road to utopia.

They imagine themselves progressive, but the chaos raging on our television screens is a rerun of an ancient story:

Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain thing? King David wrote 3,000 years ago. The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his Anointed, saying, Let us tear their fetters apart and cast their cords away!

Cultural elites (and their followers) have for millennia rejected Gods precepts for civil society, including moral restraint. And Gods response has always been the same: He who sits in the heavens laughs.

Not at those who are suffering, but at the futile thinking of those who believe that they, and not Christ, are the ones who can save us.

God judges individual souls, but he also judges nations. This nation has sown to the wind and is reaping the whirlwind: hatred, plague, war, and death.

This is what judgment looks like.

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The road to Utopia - WORLD News Group

Debra Messing is headed to the White House: The Will & Grace vet will star in the Starz comedy East Wing, based on the experiences of co-creator Ali Wentworths mother, who served as social secretary during Ronald Reagans presidency in the 1980s.

The potential half-hour series centers around Hollis Carlisle (Messing), a hostess extraordinaire who juggles her threatened husband, rebellious children, Nancy Reagans chief of staff and a crippling social anxiety disorder, per the official synopsis.

In addition to writing the project with Liz Tuccillo (Divorce, Sex and the City), Wentworth who starred in and created Pops Nightcap and Starzs Head Case will recur as Kelly Forbes, a stay-at-home mom who is threatened by her best friend Hollis success. Messing also serves as an executive producer.

Ready for more of todays newsy nuggets? Well

* CBS will simulcast this years BET Awards, to be held Sunday, June 28 at 8/7c. Additionally, it has been announced that actress/comedienne Amanda Seales (Insecure) will host the ceremony.

* HBO will air a filmed version of the Broadway show David Byrnes American Utopia later this year, directed by Oscar winner Spike Lee.

* The Philo streaming service has announced new packages that add programming from Starz (for an additional $5 per month) and Epix (an additional $3 per month); promotional prices are for the first three months, if ordered before July 13.

* Hulu has released a trailer for the movie Palm Springs, starring Andy Samberg (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother). The film premieres on the streamer (and in select drive-ins) on Friday, July 10:

* World of Wonder on Monday dropped a trailer for the inaugural season of Canadas Drag Race, premiering Thursday, July 2 on the streaming service WOW Presents Plus.

Which of todays TVLine Items pique your interest?

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TVLine Items: Messing's White House Comedy, BET Awards on CBS and More - TVLine

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleThe Genius of Karl Marx

Karl Marx, was of average height and powerful build, with his fiery eyes with which one could tell at the first glance that, he was a man of genius and energy. His intellectual superiority exercised an irresistible force on his surroundings. Marx was a cynical, disorderly, often idle, but capable of great bursts of sustained work. The outsized personality of Marx would win people over.

Along with his close comrade, Friedrich Engels, in one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history, Marx brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas of those men, and how they responded to and synthesized many contemporary concerns, including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

Learn more about the most influential economic thinkers in history.

The context, out of which communism arose as a system of ideas, involved three different elements; French political revolution, British industrial revolution, and German philosophical evolution.

From 1789, the French Revolution ushered in a new age in politics, the era of ideological mass politics. That revolution, its radicalism radiating from Paris, haunted socialist and communist thinkers afterward because they were headed in the right direction and then went wrong. It was a model for how to make a revolution and a cautionary tale. Its legacies were the quest for political utopia and political mass murder, then, turning into a dictatorship.

The French Revolution got steadily more radical after it erupted in Paris in 1789. First, revolutionaries broke with feudal privileges, to enshrine liberty, equality, and fraternity. Then radicals deposed the king, executed him, and suspecting treason against the revolution, they identified socalled enemies of the people and sent them to their deaths, in the Reign of Terror, from 17931794.

Learn more about why Marx never envisioned communism taking root in an agrarian society.

A new society was under construction, with Christianity abolished and a new calendar created. Appeals to defend the Fatherland and patriotism showed the growth of nationalism. The revolutionary regime became so radical to arrest revolutionaries as insufficiently devoted. One of them declared, The Revolution is a mother that eats her children.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The radical leaders were arrested and replaced by a more conservative leadership, which was soon deposed by a young military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon made himself dictator then emperor and presided over years of constant war in his bid to control Europe.

Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. Many were still attached to utopian hopes of making a new society, sought peaceful, cooperative, voluntary means of association rather than force.

Turning away from revolutionary violence, such socialists, as they called themselves, hoped that their utopias could be realized without killing, but by demonstrating new forms of association. Those ideas enjoyed popularity and by 1835, the word socialism had become current in Britain and France.

Further experiments followed in creating an intentional community. Those included the model factories of Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer, and his settlement in the United States, New Harmony in Indiana, which only lasted for two years. The followers of the French thinker Henri de SaintSimon also dreamed of a cooperative society owning all wealth, tools, and land in common.

Learn more about the major questions that shape economic systems.

Another French thinker, Charles Fourier, a clerk in Lyon, spent much time, dreaming up new principles of organizing people, who were essentially motivated by 12 main passions, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. The inhabitants would cycle through jobs, romantic partners, and in general, experience work as charming variety. Fourier was convinced that setting up even one of those phalansteries would be world-changing. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

In France, some followers of Fourier tried to establish communities along the lines he envisioned, but in the New World, his experiment proliferated. In the 1840s and 1850s, nearly 30 Fourierist colonies were established in the United States. Among those who found Fouriers ideas attractive was PierreJoseph Proudhon, who denounced central control and organization and instead called for free communes that would be loosely associated, called mutualist anarchism. He declared that property was theft.

An age of many communal experiments, where some preached and practiced, free love, breaking with traditional structures of marriage and family. Such communities proliferated in the United States, which earlier had religious communities, like the Shakers and Amish. In the 19th century, an estimated 178 socialist communities existed in the United States. Those experiments were usually shortlived, but many sprang up and continued to do so. One famous hippie commune was The Farm, founded in 1971 in Summertown, in southern middle Tennessee, still going today with 200 members.

In describing their communism, Marx and Engels, later poured scorn on the ineffectiveness of the earlier socialists, deriding them as merely utopian, definitely not a compliment, although sometimes Marx and Engels were generous and admitted that it was at an early stage of the development of the truly revolutionary ideas.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared similar ideas about socialism and communism and theirs was one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history. Both brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

French thinker, Charles Fourier, is known for dreaming up new principles of organizing people, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

Charles Fourier, a French thinker, is from Lyon, France.

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Marx, Engels, and the Rise of Communism - The Great Courses Daily News

Bath Rugs Market Global and Outlook (2016 2026)

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Global Bath Rugs Market Insights Report 2020-2026 with COVID-19 Pandemic Analysis & New Business Solutions Utopia Towels, Creative Bath,...

A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces, said Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, which has surged to the top of the New York Times best sellers list in paperback nonfiction, two and a half years after its initial January 2018 publication. I dont think theres a more important space to be talking about it.

Oluo and I were talking this January, just before the global pandemic struck, at One Cup Coffee: a no-frills, more than profit coffee shop that shares a storefront with a church, and is just down the road from a methadone clinic. The cafe is not far from Oluos home in Shoreline, Washington, a city just north of Seattle.

Ive seen the absolute best and the absolute worst in race and racism in America on the web, Oluo continued, in ways that have had true-life consequences for me and for people I love. [The internet] is a space that is just as real as face-to-face space. And we absolutely have to be looking at it politically and socially, as to how its contributing to the way in which we look and deal with each other and how we address issues of inequality and injustice.

To drive to Shoreline from the posh Seattle neighborhood in which Id been researching Amazons growing campus which exceeds anything at Harvard and MIT, the two campuses at which I work as a chaplain, in terms of glittering architectural swank Id had to pass directly by probably the largest homeless encampments Ive ever seen in my life. And Ive led interfaith groups of students to study and volunteer in large homeless encampments.

Speaking of religion and faith, Oluo and I began our 90-minute conversation (edited highlights below) by bonding a bit over our shared interest in humanism, a semi-organized movement of atheists, agnostics, and allies who try to do good and live meaningfully without belief in a God. I work as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and write about humanist philosophy as a kind of secular alternative to religion.

For her part, Oluo accepted an award for feminist humanism from the American Humanist Association in 2018. She delivered her acceptance speech to a mostly white liberal crowd who tended to think of themselves as enlightened and broad-minded and thus took it in stride when she opened by telling them to buckle up, as they ate chicken breasts on white plates and black table cloths, busily passing rolls and butter and accidentally clinking their water glasses. But when Oluo told them, I need for you to not always be looking for the harm others are doing, but look for the harm you are doing, as my friend Ryan Bell tweeted at the time, you could hear a pin drop in here.

Back to this past January, however: as we sipped simple cups of coffee and tea, I told Oluo about the thesis Ive developed over the course of my year-plus here as TechCrunchs Ethicist in Residence: that the world we call technology has grown bigger than any industry, and more impactful than a single culture. Technology has become a secular religion: quite possibly the largest, most influential religion human beings have ever created.

As youll see below, Oluo kindly tolerated, maybe even enjoyed the idea, riffing on several possible tech/religion comparisons. Like this one:

One thing tech fundamentally has in common with many religions, at least in America is that it is a white mans version of Utopia. And tech especially has this cult-like adherence to a white mans vision of a Utopia that fundamentally disempowers and endangers women and people of color.

I consider myself an agnostic (not necessarily an atheist) toward this new religion of technology, because I want to view tech the way Ive always tried to view traditional faith: as a mixed bag, something that can do both good and harm, depending on the circumstance. But as multi-billionaire entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos accumulate power; as social media misinformation sways the fate of democracies while artificial intelligence intrudes on justice systems; and as the current pandemic drives more of our life online, I sometimes wonder if Ill be forced to re-evaluate my own would-be prophesy.If were not careful, tech could become the most dangerous cult of all time.

Just a bit more context before the interview below, which Oluo and I agreed to call So You Want to Talk About Race in Tech, after her bookwhich was already a major success, but has now reached iconic status nationwide in the wake of George Floyds murder.

This article is the last installment of the roughly year-long series Ive done for TechCrunch, offering in-depth analysis of people and issues in the ethics of technology. So let me just mention that up to now my editors and I have produced 38 articles, with over 150,000 words about mostly women and people of color who happen to be leading efforts to reform and re-envision the ethics of our new technological world.

The series included interviewed Anand Giridharadas on Silicon Valleys inequality machine; Taylor Lorenz on the ethics of internet culture; and James Williams on the adversarial persuasion machine of efforts by his former employer Google among others to distract us to death.

It featured CEOs and venture capitalists disclosing childhood traumas before debating the moral merits of their creations; employees and gig workers speaking painful truth to their powerful employers; as well as deep dives into perspectives on tech feminism, intersectionality, and socialism, alongside heroic efforts to combat cultures of abuse and violent immigration policing within the industry.

Now, to introduce the interview with Oluo: which was, again, completed weeks before the current crisis, but is even more relevant today. To paraphrase the self-described zillionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, another Seattle resident with whom I met the same week as I met Oluo, the pitchforks have finally come for American plutocrats. Weve come to the point, across this country, where my fellow white people and I are not talking about race and racism because were woke, or because we want to do everything we can to make the world a better place, but because we fucking have to. As Kim Latrice Jones says in her viral video that has become emblematic of this period, were lucky what black people are looking for is equality, and not revenge.

This is perhaps doubly so in the tech world, where perhaps not all our neighborhoods and offices are literally burning at this moment, but where there is the most to lose because they could be. Tech is immune neither to COVID-19 nor to pitchforks. If Black people arent able to achieve more sustainable forms of equality in the tech world in the coming years, revenge could become the next goalpost. And it could be justified.

But I trust no one wants to go there. As Malcolm X once said on a visit to Coretta Scott King while Martin Luther King, Jr. was in a Birmingham jail:

Mrs. King, will you tell Dr. King ... I didnt come to make his job more difficult. I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was that they would be willing to listen to Dr. King.

MLK has become an almost literal civil rights deity over recent generations, deservedly so. But we may one day, hopefully a long and peaceful time from now, look back on the life and work of Ijeoma Oluo (along with several of her peers, many of them Black women) as having achieved a level of influence and inspiration that at least approaches Kings.

And while some readers might need to buckle up in order to take in what she has to say, they should remember that her vision is the more optimistic alternative for how things could go in the coming years.

So you want to talk about race in tech? Lets talk.

Editors note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Greg Epstein:To what extent has the work youve been doing, particularly since your book So You Want to Talk About Race came out, intersected with the tech world?

Ijeoma Oluo:I wrote the book as a black woman who grew up in Seattle, which is such a tech-centric city, and who worked in tech for over 10 years before I moved over to writing. So its very much shaped by these environmentsenvironments that think theyve transcended race and racism and clearly have not, and also a place where people of color are extreme minorities, especially women of color.

So the tech industry was very present in the book even when I wasnt talking about tech. Because a lot of people in tech recognized themselves and their peers in the examples used in the book.

Probably one of the most watched videos of a talk Id given is the one I gave at Google. And a lot of the tech industry, especially here in Seattle, immediately adopted the book, like, Oh, she lives here. Lets read this, this will be the thing we do for the year, as far as race and racism.

But when I walk into a tech space, I think about it the way I think about just about any other white-majority, liberal-leaning space. Which is that theres a very limited amount I can do in the time Im there; the most I can do is reinforce what the extreme minority of people of color in that room are feeling and experiencing. Because Ive lived it to an extent many other speakers cannot.

[The idea of the book as relevant to tech] also applies because as a black woman, and as a writer, I wouldnt be [where] I am today if it werent for social media, the access that it granted me.

But the cost that [social media has] had, and the way in which its giving, via tech, the exact same if not larger platforms to hate, division, and abuse, especially of people of color and women of color, and LGBTQ community, is something that needs to be discussed.

A lot of people denigrate the value of talking about race and racism in technological spaces; I dont think theres a more important space to be talking about it. Ive seen the absolute best and the absolute worst in race and racism in America on the web, in ways that have had true-life consequences for me and for people I love. It is a space that is just as real as the face-to-face space. And we absolutely have to be looking at it politically and socially as to how its contributing to the way in which we look and deal with each other and politically how we address issues of inequality and injustice.

Epstein:Great summary: [tech as] the best and the worst. I mean, Ive learned so much from Black Twitter, which is extraordinarily empowering. Then theres White Supremacist Twitter. And then theres just the sort of White Supremacist Lite Twitter, that is, sort ofTwitter.

Oluo:Its interesting [that you talk about] looking at [tech] like a religion. I think one thing tech fundamentally has in common with many religions, at least in America, is that it is a white mans version of Utopia. And tech especially has this cult-like adherence to a white mans vision of a Utopia that fundamentally disempowers and endangers women and people of color.

Epstein:I love that image; Id love for you to brainstorm with me: what are the characteristics of this white mans vision of Utopia that we see in tech culture?

Oluo:It starts with the mythologizing of white-male struggle thats at the core of tech culture. The idea that these men were outcasts who built things up from nothingthe shunned ones. And theyre going to fix the problems standing in their way. This is their success story, their ascension. So what stands in their way, are people of color, the women that arent sleeping with them, the popularity and the wealth they arent automatically getting, old-class structures that are keeping them away from the new class structure [based on] who has these skills that they, as white men, have?

And the mythology built around it feels very cult-like, very religious-like. Theres this whole origin story thats not true.

If we look at the founding of our biggest technological advances, were going to see a lot of extreme privilege, and this idea that there are rules, merits that are purely good, [things] you can do to ascend in these spaces that are going to revolutionize things. And in the tech space its really these guys saying [the criteria for inclusion are] going to be: How good are you at coding? Can you debate better than this person?

What it starts with is a fundamental centering of white maleness. And the goal is the ascension of white maleness. People of color can aid it, they can mimic it, or theyre in the way, to be overcome. Theres this argument in tech that anyone can prosper in this space. Theyve removed all the boundaries to prosperity. But the truth is, theyve moved their own personal boundaries, and left all the boundaries to people of color and women in place because they just dont exist in these origin stories, as anything other than props.

What cracks me up is, for a dogma that likes to talk about change and adaptation as much as tech does, how completely closed they are to actual change, especially for any sort of ideological change, and how terrified they are of looking around a room and not seeing people who look just like them, of taking things down to bare bones and asking, did we do this right?

There is nothing revolutionary about what many in tech are calling revolutionary right now. And many complaints people have about organized religion Wait, were still sticking to these rules from 2000 years ago? Were still threatened by change and progress? are things you can see in tech already. And its worrying, considering how recent this industry is, that [we already see tech leaders] saying, No, no, no, this is the way its always been done.

Well, where does the change come in then? Are we locking in at these prototype stages and saying, this is the way its always been done? For what, the last 20, 30 years? Its ridiculous.

But the fervor with which Ive seen white men defend [that status quo of the last 20 to 30 years] and the ways in which they talk about threats to it, also have that kind of religious fervor the same fervor that launched the internet even for people who are beyond religion.

Wrter Ijeoma Oluo

Epstein:To what extent have you talked or written publicly about your work in the tech industry?

Oluo:I dont write a lot about [my experiences in tech]. In my book theres a couple of anecdotes about work; any time I write about work, chances are it was in the tech industry, but its not specific.

The one thing I will definitely say is, I have never been more sexually harassed in my life than [while] working in tech. I have never faced more blatant accusations about my race, and whether it helps or hinders my career, than I have in tech. Ive literally been asked to my face, Do you think you got that promotion because youre black?

I have never felt more of an outsider than in tech, and its an incredibly gaslighting environment because it likes to pretend it has that all figured out.

Ive worked in places that suck on race and gender. And they very clearly suck in a way that you know [what youre getting into]. I worked in the auto industry: I knew what I was getting into there. But in tech theyre like, Oh, no. That doesnt matter here. Thats not a problem here. And it most certainly is a problem. A lot of people think everyone joins tech because they love tech, and thats going to be the thing that gets them all together, right? This great passion thats going to help you realize that gender doesnt matter, sexuality doesnt matter, race doesnt matter.

Thats absolutely not true, because the pitfall that tech falls into is the same one that every other corporation, or actually any other group in America falls into. Which is the idea that true diversity and racial justice is going to be painless for white people and there will be no adjustment. And that people of color want the exact same things you want, and value the same things you value. And somehow at the end of that, theyre going to still see you as superior in some way. None of that is true in real diversity, and in real racial justice and gender justice.

And we need to talk about it, because its not just a work environment. Ive talked to some of the biggest tech or tech-adjacent companies in the world: not only [are] real human beings going into an office every day and facing the realities of a space that does not want to acknowledge issues of racism and sexism, but [that same company] creates products that shape how we interact with each other in the world, in a way that replicates those same issues.

If you cant get your shit together first and foremost for the people in the office, youre never going to get it together for the products you serve. You cant have an all white male environment, or a majority white male environment, and think the product you have isnt going to replicate bias and harm.

And you cant create a product that you think eradicates bias and harm, while you have a work environment [in which] the people are creating it are suffering under extreme duress, and exclusion, and harm. It has to both be tackled at once. And a lot of times I find that environments try to do one or the other, and not well, and its impossible. And the ramifications of not attacking it in tech hurt more than just the people sitting in cubicles doing the work. It really hurts everyone.

Epstein:When you say it really hurts everyone, youre talking about the lack of commitment to actual justice?

Oluo:Yes. And the lack of valuing marginalized people. Even when were looking not just from a, do you like your neighbor?, but even from a profit-level standpoint.

Do you believe there is a profitable future in racial justice? Do you believe you can build products and goals around racial justice? Do you believe people of color are your customers? Do you believe that your product should adapt to them instead of them adapting to your products? Do you want their children using your products, and their grandchildren using your products? Do you want them feeling welcome and well-served by you?

If were looking at capitalism and this is a capitalist enterprise, we cant [act] like its divorced from it it matters.

And even these platforms that dont think theyre related to capitalism, think they dont sell a thing: its bullshit. Its all part of the capitalist world. And its about what you value. Do you think the voices of people of color matter? Because if they do, then the way you tackle issues around harassment and abuse looks starkly different than if you just value the voices of white men.

Epstein:A final question Ive asked of everyone Ive interviewed for this TechCrunch series on ethics: how optimistic are you about our shared human future?

Oluo:Im not more or less optimistic than I ever was. I worry. I worry about how easy it is for people in Western utilization of tech to feel like technology means they dont actually have to see anyone face to face, and they dont have to form deep connections with people, or try to build real alliances, or tie their futures and their sense of safety and community and belonging to other people.

The one thing I would definitely say, that [there] is an incredibly Western-centric view of tech. Im Nigerian American. The way in which tech is utilized in Nigeria is completely different than the way its utilized here. In Nigeria its about utility first and foremost. And about bringing people together face to face, to make African businesses run more smoothly, to help undo legacies of colonialism that have taken away physical infrastructure. To build that infrastructure online so that it can exist somewhere.

When we look at even the ways in which Nigerians use the internet to reach across diaspora, its so fundamentally different to the Western view of what the internets for and how it should be used, and I feel like theres so much to be learned there. If you want to look at where real pioneering is being done, look at the ways in which tech and internet [are] being used in Central America, South America, African nations, and many Asian nations. Look at what it looks like when communities of color say, Im going to build technology that solves the problems that we have, within these limitations of white supremacist structure.

Look at what it looks like when youre creating the internet in a society that values the group over the individual. What does the internet look like then? Because its not the dream of extreme independence in Nigeria, thats not what the internets built for, thats not a goal, thats not what you want for your kids or your family, thats not what you set out for. So then, what does the internet look like when you have a different social structure? When you think that maybe it isnt the idea that were all here pulling ourselves by our bootstraps, maybe were pulling our communities up, what does it look like then when youre creating platforms? Whole platforms created for that? Thats where if you want to feel hopeful about what tech can do thats where you need to be.

Epstein:What a beautiful answer to that question. Thank you. Thats in many ways the best answer Ive received to that question, and Ive asked it of a lot of smart people.

Oluo:Oh, thank you.

Epstein:Thank you so much for taking the time, on behalf of myself and TechCrunch.

See the article here:

So you want to talk about race in tech with Ijeoma Oluo - TechCrunch

In early May, Sidewalk Labs ambitious plans to build a sustainable utopia in the heart of Quayside, Toronto sputtered to a sudden and unceremonious end. News of the dropped project first broke when the companys CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff took to Medium to explain that the economic impact of COVID-19 had made it financially impossible to continue the resource-intensive project.

For the last two-and-a-half years, we have been passionate about making Quayside happen, Doctoroff wrote. But as unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed together with Waterfront Toronto to build a truly inclusive, sustainable community.

Doctoroff tried to soften the news by pointing out that the urban innovation and green-living concepts Sidewalk Labs developed during its time at Quayside could be applied further down the road, when another company takes on the challenge of building a smart city. But, while not technically wrong, his point feels almost hollow in the face of the projects failure. To borrow a quote from Curbeds Alissa Walker, If a well-funded Google subsidiary cant build affordable, low-emission housing, who can?

When viewed through a pessimistic lens, Sidewalk Labs exit seems to suggest that building a genuinely tech-forward, green-minded community is, at least for now, an impossibility -- and perhaps it is. But I would argue that just as the concepts developed during the now-defunct project can be applied to other smart city initiatives, so too can the projects successes and controversies inform the approach that builders use in the future. If we take a retrospective approach, Quaysides rocky history can provide a paint-by-numbers guide of what to (not) do when planning a sustainable urban utopia.

Its worth outlining the broad strokes of what Sidewalk Labs hoped to achieve in Toronto. When the company first published its detailed plans in June of 2019, the project was heralded as a neighborhood built from the internet up [...] the most innovative district in the world.

If plans had come to fruition, the neighborhood would have deserved the superlatives. Sidewalk Labs intended to construct ten new mixed-use buildings -- encompassing thousands of residential units -- out of mass timber. This material is more eco-friendly, quicker to produce, and cheaper than conventional construction materials. Besides the immediate benefit of increasing affordable housing stock, the construction project could have provided an industry-changing blueprint of how to make affordable green housing at a profit.

Other notable intentions include reducing greenhouse gases by 89 percent, implementing a pneumatic trash collection system, designing a street system that would limit car use in favor of walking and biking, and installing public wifi. The new community would also have an extensive network of sensors that would have continuously collected urban data to help guide resource-efficient housing and traffic decision-making.

According to reporting from the Verge, these and other developments would have helped create one of the largest eco-friendly communities in North America, extend no less than 44,000 new jobs to the Quayside area, and generate up to $4.3 billion in yearly tax revenue. Sidewalk Labs itself planned to invest $1.3 billion in the project and anticipated drawing up to $38 billion in private-sector investments within two decades.

The benefits are evident. Sidewalk Toronto would have set a replicable example of what cities can do to boost affordable living and lessen their carbon footprint -- a worthy goal, especially given the worlds continued spiral into a climate crisis. So, how could Sidewalk Labs let the project go so entirely?

Despite what Doctoroff and other Sidewalk Labs representatives say, COVID-19 probably wasnt the sole reason behind the collapse, though it probably was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back. Instead, the forces that drove Sidewalk Toronto to failure were interpersonal: a lack of trust and transparency.

The city is literally built to collect data about its residents and visitors, the Atlantics Sidney Fussell wrote in a scathing 2018 critique of Sidewalk Toronto.

He isnt wrong. If the Sidewalk Toronto project had come to fruition, it would have installed occupancy sensors into every home in the community to adjust temperature and minimize energy use throughout the day. It would have established an expansive network of cameras and used AI to analyze traffic patterns, monitor traffic speed, and predict collisions. Even the streets would collect data and respond accordingly; smart roadways would have used LED lights to dynamically change lane width to accommodate usage by different types of commuters.

These innovations promise safety, convenience, and energy-efficiency benefits -- and a distinct host of privacy concerns. According to The Atlantic, one former advisor and privacy expert quit the Sidewalk Toronto project after becoming concerned that Google would use the data its sister company collected to expand existing profiles of their online activity. The advisor left after project leaders refused to unilaterally ban participating companies from collecting non-anonymous user data."

Sidewalk Torontos fall prompted some citizen groups to celebrate their advocacy efforts. This outcome is a testament to the principled and courageous stance taken by citizens to protect Toronto from Googles corporate takeover, Thorben Wieditz, a representative for Block Sidewalk, told reporters for Curbed.

However, proponents of the project have long been frustrated by the implication that Sidewalk Labs is driven by capitalistic greed. Were not going to gather up all Torontonians data and sell it, were not building Sensorville, Micah Lasher, the head of policy and communications at Sidewalk Labs once commented.

We face a Catch-22. Companies like Sidewalk need to gather data to create a green, tech-forward utopia that can provide comprehensive environmental and community benefits to residents -- and yet, those residents are unable to trust the intentions driving such surveillance enough to allow the project to proceed. Without trust, sustainable communities like Sidewalk Toronto will never come to fruition.

So, what does this tell us about future smart city initiatives? From the get-go, project leaders need to address trust and transparency. They must adopt a near-nonprofit perspective that prioritizes social gain over profits to avoid accusations of corporate greed, and involve advocacy groups in their decision-making processes. Residents must understand how their data will be used, who has access to it, and what they can do to maintain their privacy in a space where data collection is a necessity. It seems an obvious truth, but it bears saying: when you build a smart city, you need to think as much about the residents as you do about the technology that powers it.

Image credit: Sidewalk Toronto

View post:

Sidewalk Labs' Failure and the Future of Smart Cities - Triple Pundit

Since the watershed moment of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and again in the midst of the current COVID-19 crisis, the concept of health system resilience has been a recurring theme in global health discussions.1 2 Although most frequently used in the context of epidemic response, resilience has also been framed as a key pillar of health,3 and invoked in high-level calls for countries to lead the work on building health system resilience.4 Yet, as the authors of one of several recent reviews observed, the concept of health systems resilience remains highly confusing and still polysemic.5 What it means depends on ones perception, ones discipline, ones function and what one wants to achieve.5 In this editorial, I will, from the perspective of a health policy and systems researcher, draw out and reflect on some of these tensions, and make some suggestions about how we might achieve greater clarity.

Building on the observations of Turenne et al, the first point is definitional. In both peer reviewed and grey literature, there is still confusion about whether the concept of resilience (as it relates to health systems) should be understood as an outcome or an ability. This distinction is not semantic. Understood as an outcome, some in the field have suggested that health system resilience can and should be measured and monitored.6 By measuring resilience, it is argued, we can help to build more resilient health systems through identification of areas for action.7 8 But an important consequence of this framing is the implication that health system resilience is an uncomplicated, even monolithic good; a goal synonymous with optimised performance. But a question that then arises is whether health systems that produce suboptimal health outcomes are somehow less resilient than those producing better ones?

The alternative framing of resilience as an ability, better aligns with the now broadly accepted observation that health systems and services are social, complex and adaptive in nature.9 When conceptualised in this way, enquiries about health system resilience focus more squarely on the dynamic nature of adaptation, without needing to make statements about the ends to which that adaptation occurs. This point is critical. History has demonstrated that health system adaptation may steer a system towards improved outcomes (normatively defined), but may equally worsen or protect less desirable features of health system function. These latter mal-adaptive processes do not necessarily imply inactive or linear responses; individuals or groups may be highly innovative and willing to change in some areas, while seeking to, indeed often in order to, protect or preserve certain interests. As Gore observed in a study of primary healthcare in India, some systems appear to adapt in ways that ultimately sustain a deficient status quo.10 Observers of the politics of healthcare in the USA over the past several decades may come to similar conclusions.

A second and related point is about our understanding of the types and intensities of shocks against which health systems are supposed to be resilient. We need to more clearly articulate the way: (1) health system shocks or disturbances occur on a spectrum of intensity, from acute and large-scale emergencies to low-level chronic stressors and (2) health system shocks or disturbances are the product of a range of different drivers or causal factorswhich in turn have implications for the types of adaptation available and appropriate in response. As already pointed out by others, the use of the phrase resilient health systems in global health literature still typically presupposes a positive response to some kind of large-scale negative shock such as the current COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, a budget crisis and so forth. But a burgeoning literature is starting to draw attention to the fact that health system disturbances may not necessarily be acute in nature. Gilson et al11 and Barasa et al12, for example, detail the chronic stressors at the level of front-line health services, and describe everyday resilience as emerging from a combination of absorptive, adaptive and transformative strategies that enable continued health service function in the face of such stressors.

But still largely ignored within the resilience literature is the possibility that shocks and disturbances arise out of intentional choices made by actors in international (eg, donor conditionalities; trade agreements), national (election promises; regulatory changes; austerity measures) or local (citizen voice mechanisms, organisational instability) spheres. Reforms to modes of governance, financing mechanisms or service delivery models, for example, are all forms of health system disturbance, capable of producing both intended and unintended consequences. Yet global health writing on resilience still rarely equates these bureaucratic, socially and politically driven changes with disturbances, perhaps due to their less sudden, more structured, and inherently political nature, features that do not align with our still default use of the term shock. Nor, again outside a few notable pieces, have the political and bureaucratic responses to these intentional disturbances been acknowledged as a form of adaptation.

Which brings me to my third point on conceptual clarity; which is, to observe a previous criticism2 1315 regarding the way resilience as a concept so often fails to incorporate consideration of agency or power relations, both of which we know to be defining features of health system function. In much of the health system resilience literature to date, the agency of actors within the health system is, at best blurred, and at worst, masked. With some few exceptions, the focus has tended to be on the ability of health systems to recover from shocks, with far less attention paid to the choices exercised by individuals or groups within the system, and the ways in which they do, or do not, exert control over processes by which that system-level resilience is shaped.16 In part, this is the natural consequence of transposing a concept originally developed with reference to ecosystems, onto social systems. Despite some commonalities these two types of systems retain key differences including that social systems embody power relations and do not involve analogies of being self-regulating or rational.17 In scanning recent reviews of health system resilience it is interesting to note the general absence of mention of power in the formulation of the concept.5 18 19

Clearer recognition of the full spectrum of disturbances (from exogenous epidemic-type shocks to political or bureaucratic stressors) in the context of social systems shot through with power, brings me to a final point. If global health researchers and practitioners are to continue to characterise health systems as social systems, then examination of their resilience (defined as an ability rather than an outcome) makes most sense when anchored to an exploration of the modes and dynamics of health system governance, at whichever level appropriate. As summarised by Blanchet et al, governance relates to the implicit and explicit rules and institutions that shape power, relationships between actors, and the actions of these actors, meaning that: managing resilience of a health system resides in the capacity of managing actors, networks and institutions that have an influence on the health system.20 In other words, by taking governance as the point of departure for enquiries about health system resilience, we are consciously focusing on the actors and networks whose choices and actions we understand that resilience to depend.

Anchoring explorations of health systems resilience on governance provides a guide for considering both the explicit and implicit power dynamics, and the competing interests and goals, of various actors who we know impact all domains and levels of the health system. Such an approach does not preclude, but rather enables exploration of the characteristics of resilient health systems, with cross-disciplinary learning suggesting these characteristics are in any case actor-dependent, including for example: (1) diversity; (2) flexibility; (3) inclusion and participation; (4) recognition of social values; (4) acceptance of uncertainty and change at different levels and (5) and the ability to foster learning.17

Two examples of analyses using different methods to examine such issues have been recently published in BMJ Global Health. One is Saulnier et als account of health system resilience from the perspective of Cambodian communities responding to floods.21 This nuanced work reveals a range of strategies implemented by individuals, families and entire villages to mitigate the health access impacts of regular flood events, but demonstrates how those same actors have limited ability to build systemic resilience given their lack of decision making space or ownership of health system processes. Such a scenario, the authors observe, leaves the community vulnerable to more severe floods and different shocks when their localised absorptive capacities fail. Here, we are reminded that what makes health systems resilient in the real world, may or may not depend on traditional supply side strategies (indeed it may be in spite of such). More disturbingly, we see too that resilience may not in fact enable high quality or equitable health services for vulnerable populations but rather, in Gore's words, underpin a deficient status quo.

Lee et al in their article "How coping can hide larger systems problems: the routine immunisation supply chain in Bihar, India"22 identify how persistent coping behaviours by front-line health workers in aid of routine immunisation, mask systemic deficiencies in the cold chain policy and logistics of that state. While coping behaviours may on the surface be seen as a form of resilience, the authors demonstrate how long term reliance on such behaviours is likely to contribute to systemic brittleness, not resilience, since: one set of personnel, those at the outermost level [] bear a disproportionate burden in supporting the system, leaving them overstretched and in a potentially very unstable situation. If circumstances were to further change or these personnel are no longer able to cope, the entire system could break down very quickly.22 The authors make the critical, if somewhat counterintuitive observation, that instituting anticoping measures and encouraging a culture in which coping is discouraged may be necessary to redress broader and deeper system-related dysfunction.

The above two articles highlight a critical distinction between asking whether the health system has the ability to respond to, and learn from, a change or disturbance, and an assessment of who or what benefits from that adaptation in the short and longer term. If we do not ask the latter (who benefits from adaptation?) we risk conflating the pursuit of resilience with the pursuit of improvements in health and equity. Put bluntly, the capacity to adapt and implied resilience it conveys become equally or more important than whether that adaptation and resilience produces improved health.

And in this, there is a further risk: that resilience is used to help push for the adoption of policies that ultimately undermine high quality or equitable systems or which contract the space available for debating such alternatives.17 The linking of resilience to health security agendas, for example, can be used to divert public attention away from existing deeply embedded health inequities and the conscious choices that shape our (often inadequate) health system responses to them, in favour anticipating how, where, and when health emergencies will happen (ie, preparation), and what sorts of responses are pragmatic and acceptable in those extreme circumstances (ie, adaptation and resilience).2 The danger of the concept of resilience being thus mobilised is greater, moreover, in the midst or immediate aftermath of dramatic systemic shocks, such as the 2014 Ebolavirus epidemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

For global health and health systems researchers and practitioners, the concept of resilience has utility, including for its ability to frame health-related challenges within a systemic approach; accounting for different types of disturbance or shock, multiple actors, dynamic processes and feedback loops occurring across different domains and levels of the health system. But resilience in health systems should not be seen as an apolitical outcome, synonymous with a strong health systems or improved population health. What promotes the ability of a health system to be resilient must be assessed in the context of the interests and intentions of health system actors and the ways in which they mobilise and channel their power. Not to do so risks allowing some abstract conception of health system resilience to, intentionally or unintentionally, displace attention and efforts away from the sorts of reforms necessary to address and improve long-standing health inequities. In current COVID-19 context, we must be particularly alert to such risks.

SMT acknowledges Kerry Scott, Veena Sriram and Seye Abimbola for their review and feedback during the formulation of this article.

. Health systems resilience: meaningful construct or catchphrase? Lancet 2017;389:1513.doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30946-7pmid:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28422019

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