If we look around Ireland and consider the children’s hospital debacle, we take the problems of the Dublin Underground and the inability to provide affordable housing, and contrast these with the extraordinary production rates and productivity resulting from the multinational corporations operating here. Then it will look like this: Did we notice that he sees two different worlds?
One is Ireland. Nothing gets done on time or on budget, with detrimental consequences for everyone. The other is Ireland, where we deployed the same people and achieved amazing results on time and on budget, increasing incomes and jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.
The results are not just the assets of multinational corporations. Take, for example, the success of the Irish rugby team, Ryanair, or the incredible achievements of Irish literature, theater and film. In these thoroughly diverse fields, Irish people innovate, experiment and execute better than almost anywhere else on the planet, delivering top performance. In other fields, you can’t even get the basics right.
What is the difference between these different Irish ecosystems, those that perform very well against a wide range of challenges, and those that unfortunately fail? Some ecosystems believe in the future and move forward. The other seems resigned to disappointment and makes up excuses for not achieving their goals.
Looking back to the 1920s, we see a period of experimentation with electricity, urbanization, the internal combustion engine, trucks, radio, the phonograph, and the proliferation of consumer finance. People in the West have changed their lifestyles and now have washing machines, electric kettles, dishwashers, family cars, refrigerators, televisions, three-in-one stereos, microwave ovens, and 10-story apartment buildings. During the first 60 to 70 years of the last century, daily life in the West changed significantly.
I think of my grandmother, who was born in the early 20th century, and I remember her from a pre-electronic world, a time when education was sporadic, women didn’t work, and kitchens were rudimentary. Imagine the changes that have taken place in your life. Location, disease, child immortality, and poverty were the norm, not the exception. Everything will change in her lifetime.
[ David McWilliams: Ireland will not have any political peace until we fix housing ]
My grandmother lived through and embraced accelerating change. As a West Cork Liquor Taxpayer, has she ever wondered what the impact that electricity-powered carbonated draft beer kegs would have on her business and the lives of her drinkers?
During my lifetime, this future world has slowed down. My current kitchen looks a lot like a 1980s kitchen. My grandmother went from horses to cars. We switched from the Hillman Hunter to a Toyota Yaris and drove around the narrow roads in two boxes on wheels. The first plane I flew on was not much different from the one I have now. Sure, there have been technological innovations like the Internet, but the office we work in isn’t all that different from his office in the 1980s. The property we are building is the same prototype that we built in the 1970s. Progress has stalled in a wide range of everyday areas.
A fairly new ideology called “accelerationism” attempts to explain why this happened and how to get out of stagnation. There are a variety of foundational texts on accelerationism, but a 2010 book stands out. It’s “Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism” by Benjamin Noys. His message is that rather than slowing down, we should accelerate, increase the tempo of capitalism, and embrace the possibilities that technology brings.
Accelerationism argues that just as our grandparents’ generation welcomed and adopted new technologies, we too should go “all in” with technological advances. And, just as they had done in Ireland, they created an entirely new country, political system, and constitution. Actually, a new identity.
Much of the impetus for accelerationism comes from Silicon Valley and its enthusiasm for potentially transformative technologies.
In the context of Ireland, accelerationists argue that the children’s hospital debacle, the runaway Dublin Underground and the housing crisis are all because we collectively slowed progress and turned our backs on Ireland’s challenges, instead maintaining them. He argues that this is because he has given priority to interfering with, interfering with, and preventing. than to accelerate the development of the country. Accelerationists argue that those running Ireland are not actually interested in solving the country’s problems, but are more interested in maintaining the status quo and profiting from stagnation.
The roll call of accelerationist villains is politicians, leading civil servants, ‘old media’ columnists (like myself and other Irish Times columnists), various public officials, intellectuals; They are actively spouting reasons. do not have To do something rather than offer possibilities. Into this mix they throw in a planning system, which works disproportionately better for those trying to stall than for those trying to move forward at a rapid pace.
For accelerationists, Ireland needs to be pro-growth, pro-technology and pro-big projects. In housing, this means building more to solve problems rather than just talking about them.
Internationally, much of the impetus for accelerationism comes from Silicon Valley and its technology enthusiasm for change. This kind of technological optimism is often at odds with other movements that seek to slow things down, such as those who cite environmental concerns and climate change and advocate patience rather than haste. These battle lines are often drawn on a left/right basis.
And although accelerationism is typically portrayed as a right-wing, big business movement, accelerationists point out that technological change benefits ordinary people more than the technology’s owners. They regularly cite the work of economist William Nordhaus, which shows that technology creators capture only about 2 percent of the economic value created by new technologies. It has been. The remaining 98 percent flows out into society in the form of what economists call social surplus. This interpretation asserts that technological innovation is inherently benevolent in a 50:1 ratio.
[ David McWilliams: Ireland is a rich country that feels poor ]
Who gets more value from a new technology: the one company that produces it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives?
For example, one of the unintended consequences of the washing machine in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s was that it saved millions of hours of washing clothes and allowed millions of women to work outside the home and earn their own money. This meant that I was able to earn a lot of money. There is a connection between her washing machine and the rise of the working women’s feminist movement in the 1970s.
More generally, accelerationists consider failures of infrastructure projects, such as the housing crisis and the lack of a Dublin Underground (after 50 years of debate), and blame deep forces for the lack of urgency in solving infrastructure problems. It is concluded that. Domestic people who are not interested in change.
Accelerationists think it’s a matter of attitude, not ethnicity. Irish people are not genetically predisposed to failing big projects. We are here because we want to be here. Our country needs the world to change, not to accept our position, to Ryanair rather than Irish Rail, to the IRFU rather than the FAI.