The Digital Age
Demystify the complex systems controlling wealth and power and reclaim agency. Led by pioneering activists, this journey explores how finance, big tech, and more intersect to deprive communities of sovereignty. Together we'll map leverage points to build capacities and rewrite stories towards collective flourishing.
hosted by Nathalie Nahai
Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of The Hive Podcast, a series that enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. With a diverse background in human behaviour, persuasive tech and the arts, Nathalie brings a unique vantage point from which to examine the complex challenges we face today.
Module 1Charting the throughlines of agriculture, technology, energy, pharma and global trade, and more.
In this opening session we chart the throughlines of agriculture, technology, energy, pharma and global trade, and more to better understand the power dynamics of the global economy across geographies and peoples. In the process, we explore the story of the growth of corporate power, monopolies and wealth ...
Module 2Explore abstract worlds of finance and monetary systems, accumulation of power and wealth.
This session builds from the opening week to explore the abstract worlds of finance and monetary systems. We continue to explore the accumulation of power and wealth through these systems, and see how the major players are related, or even the same. We look at “hegemonic cultural processes”, or the ways in...
Module 3Zero in on the digital age to critically analyse how power and control are exerted in emerging and existing technologies.
This session zeroes in on the digital age to critically analyse how power and control are exerted in emerging and existing technologies. We look at data, the media, geopolitics, and surveillance capitalism. What really is the digital age bringing about? What lies at the centre of the technology around and ...
Module 4Dive into the fascinating world of self, identity and personhood.
This session dives into the fascinating world of self, identity and personhood, and how they are being influenced and shaped by emerging technologies. What do these systems have to gain from reaching into our identities and relationships? What is the currency in the digital age, if not exactly money? What ...
Module 5Explore a world of resources that are managed together, where we are all stewards, all stakeholders.
In this session, we explore a world of commons: where resources are managed together, where we are all stewards, all stakeholders. How can we resist the idea that Silicon Valley algorithms know better? How do we rewrite the rules? How can we revalue diversity and the local? How could technology mirror ecol...
Module 6Reimagine humanity, body, myth, and embrace a more holistic and flourishing future.
Reclaiming the future is possible. Though these vast systems of power and control seem entirely inconceivable to overcome, knowing how they work, the stories that they tell, the people they are trying to create, we can begin to rewrite and reclaim. The only way out, as they say, is through. And one way thr...
hosted by Vandana Shiva
World renowned intellectual and advocate for the preservation and celebration of biodiversity against genetic engineering and the negative impact of globalisation. She is an important voice in favour of people-centered, participatory processes; support to grassroots networks; women rights and ecology. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an “environmental hero” in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.
hosted by Camila Moreno
Camila’s is a researcher in Rio de Janeiro and her main study subject has been the interfaces between reasoning on climate change and the greening of capitalism. She is a working group member of Political Ecology of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO – Conselho Latinoamericano de Ciências Sociais) and the International Council of Red for a Latin America Transgenic Free (RALLT).
hosted by Brett Scott
Brett Scott is an economic explorer and financial hacker traversing the intersections between money systems, finance, digital technology and cities. He is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (2013), and collaborates with a wide range on groups on diverse topics, including banking systems, financial activism, digital finance, blockchain technology, hacker culture, technology politics and the dynamics of cashless society.
hosted by Alnoor Ladha
Alnoor is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules (www.therules.org), founding partner of Purpose (www.purpose.com) and board member of Greenpeace USA (www.greenpeace.org). Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling, and technology. As a founding member and the executive director of The Rules, he is part of a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers, and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.
hosted by Carl Miller
Carl combines data and analysis with immersive, first-hand reporting to understand how all of our lives are changing. He's tried to re-create himself from hidden data, visited information warfare bases, exposed autocratic states manipulating Wikipedia, interviewed fake news merchants, lived in a political-technology commune, met Taiwan's digital democrats and become involved in the struggle for control of an online assassination market.
hosted by Scott Timcke
Scott Timcke (PhD, Simon Fraser University) is a political economist of digital technology and democratic life.
hosted by Indra Adnan
For over twenty years, Indra Adnan has been writing, consulting, network-building and event-organising on the themes of future politics, conflict transformation, the role of the arts and integral thinking.
hosted by Neema Githere
Neema Githere (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, artist, and grassroots theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age, Githere’s work prototypes relationality-as-art through experiments that span community organizing, social design, travel and image-making. Githere is a 2023-24 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, where they are working on a project entitled “Data Healing: A Call for Repair”.
hosted by Manish Jain
Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems, cultural imaginations and inter- cultural dialogue.
hosted by Helena Norberg-Hodge
Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the local economy movement. Through writing and public lectures, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for four decades.
hosted by Manda Scott
Born and raised in Scotland - and still a Scot at heart - Manda has been, variously, a veterinary surgeon, veterinary anaesthetist, acupuncturist (people and animals), crime writer, columnist, blogger, economist - and author. In between, she teaches shamanic dreaming, creative writing and concept-based dog training.
Why this course?
Globalised corporate growth continues to be an unchecked force that unleashes extraordinary impacts on our entangled world. In recent years, evidence of this has only intensified. What is the true cost of the economic system operating in its current form? What does it mean if corporations flourish while we see this rise of wealth inequality, depleted ecosystems and exploited communities?
For most of us, the absurdity of it all is clear as day. What remains a mystery is what we can do to reclaim power and control in the context of globalised capitalism. The tools available to us seem incomparable to the scale of the problem, especially with the continuing, rapid evolution of technology, that seems to only entrench the current system.
How can we chart a path forward when the system we seek to change is so complex? How can we reclaim power and control, if we don’t even know how the system really works?
In this six-week course, we’ll take a critical and in-depth look at where we find ourselves to better understand the lines along which power is operating in this age. We seek to demystify who and what controls us, and the throughlines between the worlds of agriculture, healthcare, finance, technology, in the context of colonialism and capitalism. We explore the story that it’s all connected, that these worlds all follow the same logic of power and control.
Unravelling this story will then open up paths towards reclaiming our personal and communal agency.
Taught by some of the world’s leading pioneers, activists and educators—many of whom have played a vital role in changing laws, transforming systems and creating meaningful impact across generations—this course will take you on a journey of critical learning.
Together, we’ll map out the leverage points within our current systems of power, and explore the practical and personal ways in which we can join our efforts to create a more flourishing future for all.
We will open the course with the intention of understanding how systems really work. Traversing the global food system, the elusive world of finance and banking, Big Pharma and philanthropy, and more, we will dive deep into how wealth is accumulated, how money influences it all, and who pulls the strings behind the everyday systems we’re all embedded in. Then, we turn our attention to the augmented digital age, and seek to understand how the same principles and powers govern this age, too. Here, we unravel digital capitalism, deconstructing technology and exploring the politics of emerging technologies, and how they are transforming how we perceive ourselves and our relationships.
The second part of the course asks: what could reclaiming power and control look like in the digital age? In a world where entire structures and systems reinforce those who have power and control, how can we truly seek sovereignty, with and for each other? We will look at the mammoth tasks of creating capacities and building collective agency through civic infrastructure, learning from those who are in this space. Finally, we will navigate towards flourishing futures through rewriting stories. How can we reimagine humanity, body, and myth, in this age and beyond?
