This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘A’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
‘Affluence’ is a psycho-social phenomena which projects not simply wealth or economic power, but to some extent a righteous entitlement to that lifestyle. Affluence is not merely the possession of wealth, but the demonstration of that through the lifestyle the individual chooses to express. Under Consumerism, affluence is a property that has been elevated into an entire culture through ‘conspicuous consumption’, and the valorization of consumption as a means to demonstrate the value of the individual. This psychological aspect of affluence, first noted by researchers such as Thorstein Veblen, is problematic because it create false perceptions of well-being. In classical philosophy and theology various texts warn against not wealth, but ‘the love of wealth’, because of the harmful effects it has on the individual and the community around them. In the modern day, where the affluence of a small global minority is responsible for most global ecological destruction, that hard-to-break link between affluence and well-being is at the root of our inability toaddress the ecological crisis.
Beginning around the Fifteenth Century in Europe, changes in land management, and in particular the ‘inclosure’ of what were open fields into defined plots used for specific crops, led to increases in agricultural production. This accelerated in the Eighteenth Century in parallel with the Industrial Revolution: Increased production of steel allowed more refinements in farm machinery, at lower cost compared to human labour, boosting production with less people required; and this in turn drove the increasing numbers of rural landless people into the first large urban cities to work in the growing industrial trades. This model of development continued until the 1950s when the application of plant science led to the Green Revolution. The greater significance of Medieval/Modern changes to European agriculture – and their role within the plantation systems of European colonialism – is that it mirrors the rise of economic liberalism and its creation of ‘the factory system’: It is not simply that people have been isolated from nature, and relocated to ‘manufactured’ urban societies, through their severance from the land; the imposition of a simplified, mechanistic approach to farming, driven largely by economic principles, has amplified human impacts on the environment to a scale never seen before.
When someone is separated from an innate part of their historic or cultural being they are said to be ‘alienated’ from that thing. This not only lessens that person by severing part of their skills, ability to support their needs, or identity, but is often done in order to facilitate domination or control of the individual. Alienation was raised as a major component of the modern economy by Marxists, but that definition has taken on a wider meaning within anti-consumerism and anti-colonialism debates. Today the rise of digital networks, and the parallel decline of traditional jobs and retail services, is further alienating people from direct contact with one another, as they are forced, in isolation, to organize more of their basic needs via digital machines – a key part of the rising power of technological ‘neofeudalism’. The warping of perceptions created by this anti-socialization process in turn is creating a range of negative outcomes, from greater anxiety, to worsening well-being as anxiety takes a toll on mental health, to stochastic violence as false narratives are algorithmically amplified by digital networks.
The vestige of England’s common land system, allotments were plots of land owned by the church or local councils, given to or rented by local residents for growing food. In the early Twentieth Century these plots received legal protection because of their importance for the local economy and well-being. Development pressures, and the privatization of public assets from the 1980s, has meant large areas of allotments have been sold for other uses over the last fifty years – eliminating a large proportion of local autonomous food production with it.
It’s impossible to summarize such a broad political philosophy in a paragraph, but… Anarchism holds that the individual should be free to associate with others in order to provide for the essential needs of themselves and their community. Sometimes defined as ‘resistance to all unjust hierarchy’, the ultimate purpose of Anarchism is ‘the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is the abolition of private property and government’. Anarchism, therefore, is a political theory that aims to create a society which is without political, economic, or social hierarchies. ‘Anarchy’ does not mean an absence of social order, it means that order is created, dynamically, between individuals and groups of people directly; it is a social system which works for the maximization of individual liberty and social equality. For liberty without equality is only liberty for the powerful (e.g., Capitalism); while equality without liberty is a justification for slavery (e.g., Soviet Communism). Anarchism doesn’t overthrow representative democracy; it takes the principles of democracy to their logical conclusion by allowing all to participate directly in decision-making on an equal basis – ideally based upon consensus rather than the dictatorial nature of ‘majority rule’.
‘Anarcho-primitivism’ (A/P) is a critical view of modern society’s origins and present-day organization based on ‘deep ecological’ principles. Building upon its foundations within Anarchism, A/P proposes that the shift from primitive subsistence gathering to organized agricultural production gave rise to social stratification, coercion, alienation, and the exertion of ‘property rights’ by a minority over the majority – long before (as Anarchism proposes) industrialization gave rise to the urban alienation of the mass of the people. A/P advocates a transition towards simpler ways of life through deindustrialization, an ending of mass production and consumption, the abolition of divisions of labour and economic specialization, and the abandonment of large-scale technologies.
Anthropocentrism is the belief – from religion, to psychology, to philosophy – that humans are a unique and separate part of the universe, and this separateness makes us the focus of all universal events. Anthropomorphism is the practise of applying human-like characteristics to other species – such as pets, or the animals which feature in children’s stories – in order to bridge that gap between our supposed human uniqueness, and the loneliness and alienation created by believing that we are separate from the natural world. Both of these tendencies within the human psyche have the tendency to isolate us from our natural state as biological beings, reinforcing our artificially created ‘duality’ which separates us from the biosphere which supports us. This in turn allows human societies to exploit and destroy the natural ecology which ultimately sustains them because they do not perceive their fellowship with the natural world.
Following-on from the Information Revolution, AI replaces not only physical human labour from industrial production using more complex machines, it can now replace human mental creativity – albeit at a far higher cost in energy and resource consumption, and with a qualitatively limited results. While technological advances have traditionally affected the trades and working classes, AI directly threatens many middle class roles in society – and as yet there is no clear indication as to what this may mean over the next decade or so, let-alone the next half-century. The stumbling block to the AI Revolution is the step-change in energy consumption that these systems create, more than trebling the growth rate of energy consumption in the IT sector. There is also an unanswered question as to whether the economics of AI will produce a financial return across the whole economy, for everyone, given the potential damage a collapse in employment might have on consumer-demand. Just as other technological revolutions have given rise to a new political-economic ideology, increasingly the power AI gives to a small elite may create a ‘new feudal’ (or ‘Neofeudal’) political order.
Increasingly ‘aspiration’ is a control mechanism over society – especially the middle class and petty bourgeoisie – to make people more pliant workers and consumers under Neoliberal capitalism. Beginning in the Nineteenth Century, the idea of ‘aspiring to better ones-self’ was, within the then dominant ideology of Utilitarianism, the belief that improving one’s education and morality would lead to better employment, higher earnings, and therefore a more materially rich and socially superior lifestyle. However, in the late Twentieth Century, as Neoliberalism’s deconstruction of the traditional economy made work more precarious, and traditional social mobility shut-down under Neoliberal austerity economics, ‘aspiration’ became the belief that progress was directly proportional to material consumption rather than morally or educationally ‘bettering yourself’. In reality, ‘aspiring’ to be a better part of a collapsing economic system represents no viable future at all.
‘Attention economy’ describes the process of creating digital platforms, operating via the Internet and especially mobile ‘apps’, which psychologically engage the user and therefore enhance of process of digital surveillance and data collection – creating greater monetization/profit for the operator from the user’s data shared as part of this process. This implicitly breaks-down user privacy, and creates financial incentives for ever-greater privacy intrusion in order to maintain income from the system. As this process has intensified, becoming a key part of how digital platform generate revenues, the psychological pressures this creates on the individual – from rising exposure to advertizing on every screen to the constant pressures of notifications and updates – has been associated with a worsening of mental health across society.