This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘N’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
A ‘natural person’ is a living, breathing human. All citizens of a state are presumed to have certain rights and freedoms – though the extent of those rights is largely a matter of personal wealth, as the costs of using the legal system represent an economic barrier to realizing those rights. This is in contrast to ‘bodies corporate’, such as limited liability companies or partnerships, which legally are offered a similar set of rights to natural persons, including certain ‘human rights’. More importantly bodies corporate cannot die, so always have an advantage over the varying life chances of a natural person.
‘Feudalism’ was a Medieval economic system where a monarch or lord owned everything, and demanded work in return for the right to exist from the workers (‘serfs’) who were tied to the lord’s land by law. Today the rise of on-line private commercial spaces, and the Silicon Valley libertarian ideology which underpins Western on-line culture, is giving rise to ‘neofeudalism’: The competing power of a few wealthy individuals who control the technologies which enable the modern world, where people are tied by contracts or licenses they cannot negotiate to allow them to work in that space, often giving a large proportion of their earnings to the operator with few rights in return. As this ‘gig economy’ increasingly undermines many parts of the ‘real economy’, so overall workers rights, conditions, and earnings are further eroded – again, reinforcing the power of the much smaller elite at the heart of the technological state.
It’s impossible to summarize such a broad political philosophy in a paragraph, but… Developed from Classical Liberalism during the ‘Technological Revolution’ immediately after the Second World War, a more politicized version of liberal economics arose which argued for the primacy of economic values over state and public interests: It advocated the extension of private rights to all parts of the nation state through the privatization of public assets; opposed any form of collectivism which opposed the interests of capital, such as trades unions; and has overturned many of the checks on corporate power won from the late Nineteenth Century, driving an ever-greater gap between society’s rich and ‘everyone else’. Popularized by economists on the political right in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, Neoliberalism was used a force to promote Western economic imperialism in the post-war era. That process saw its rise (in the UK and USA respectively) with Thatcher and Reagan, its peak with Blair and Clinton, and arguably went into decline after the financial crash of 2008 – resulting in the polarized politics these states are experiencing today as vested interests battle to be the ‘next big ideology’ (which some are labelling ‘Neofeudalism’).
Based within the more primitive ideas of Nineteenth Century Luddites, who opposed new technologies which were ‘harmful to commonality’, modern-day Neoluddites oppose the development of new technologies and industrial processes which destroy not just human well-being, but which affect the wider fabric of the natural biosphere. Neoluddism is not a defined group, but a spectrum of groups who share a similar perspective on new technology, and especially the rapid concentration of economic power which globally networked information technologies have enabled over the last three to four decades. Though opposition may specifically focus on habitat destruction, or genetic modification, or the manipulation of communities through digital media, the latest area of concern has been AI, and in particular AI’s potential to destroy human creativity by replacing it with cheap ‘slop’. And rather than just ‘breaking machines’, Neoluddite responses are increasingly geared towards creating practical alternatives to the technology in people’s lives, breaking not just its control and manipulation, but also the economic and technocratic control these system impose across society.