Inclosure (land)
See ⇒ Land inclosure.
This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘I’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
See ⇒ Land inclosure.
Though rooted in technological developments over a few centuries from the 1400s, the Industrial Revolution combined new processes for the mass production of higher quality iron and steel, the development of steam-powered engines, and greater energy production from coal mines pumped-dry by these new steam engines, to create the large-scale, economically specialized factory systems devoted to the mass-production of goods. Though the Industrial Revolution had various phases, essentially, mass production destroyed the old economy of artisans and trade guilds, through the the expansion of economic imperialism to source cheap raw materials from around the world, and the growth of urban populations displaced by the Agricultural Revolution providing cheap labour for the factory system, which destroyed the centuries-old ‘cottage industries’ which preceded it. It was the technical and especially cultural changes enacted by the factory system which created the basis for the modern ‘liberal’ political economy we have today. This would be overturned by the Technological Revolution from the early 1900s, and the globalized economy this helped create under the framework of neoliberalism over the Twentieth Century.
See also: Agricultural Revolution, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Technological Revolution.
Initiated by the first computer systems of the 1950s, and accelerated by the creation of the first miniature transistors in the 1960s, the Information and Communications Revolution took the electrified control systems of the Technological Revolution and allowed programmable machines to control ever-more industrial processes. In parallel, the growth of the global telecommunications network, and the first global ‘Internet’ of linked electronic machines from the 1970s, allowed these machine to co-ordinate industrial operations, business administration, and financial systems, which allowed globalization to expand exponentially in the 1980s – giving a new boost economic imperialism, and the global exploitation of people and natural resources, which would ultimately be expressed as the new global political ideology of Neoliberalism by the 1990s. Today this revolution is reaching the heights of its power, and is now evolving into an Artificial Intelligence Revolution, where machines are directly replacing human mental creativity, not simply their physical capacity for work.
See also: AI Revolution, Economic imperialism, Globalization, Industrial Revolution, Neoliberalism, Technological Revolution.
IPRs are a form of property right which protects abstract or creative ideas – such as trademarks, industrial or creative designs and patents, information databases, the copyright of written works, or the performance rights of audio or video works. As trade and the media have moved on-line, so IPRs have become a far more powerful sector of the economy, increasingly used not only to prevent or obstruct people’s own creativity, but also to legitimate the on-line surveillance of people’s use of the media and registered on-line services. The advent of digital media, and an increasing on-line, always connected culture, mean that whilst IPRs were barely enforced, today they are often strictly enforced, even beyond the scope of the law, by platform operators seeking to avoid legal liability. The counter-cultural response to IPR’s is often labelled ‘free culture’.
See also: Free & Open Source Systems (FOSS), Property rights, Surveillance capitalism.
See ⇒ Permaculture.
Though there are various definitions of intensive farming, the general definition relates to the model of farming which evolved from the ‘Green Revolution’ in the 1950s and 1960s. This relies upon greater specialization of farms by concentrating on just a few products, the use of specialized seeds or animal breeds, the application of large amounts of energy in the form of electrical power or fossil fuels, and the use of large amounts of external inputs to the farming process – such as artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and increasingly specialized machinery adapted to standardize the produce for a mass market. From the collapse of bird and insect species, to the pollution of ground and surface water, to soil loss and erosion, to climate change and the depletion of water resources, the application of ‘scientific farming’ (as it was originally called) has cased global damage by destroying complex ecosystems through the introduction of crop or animal monocultures, as well as increasing the ecological footprint of the urban populations living off globally-traded commodities, and especially hyper/ultra-processed, foods.
See also: Ecological footprint, Green Revolution, Ultraprocessing.