IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 10

better public service provision,
and more concern for keyworkers
and employment rights [27]. Building on universal Internet access,
open source platforms to support
local collective action would be a
key enabler of increased neighborhood cooperation.
Thirdly, these platforms, as well
as encoding deep social knowledge for solving collective action
problems, visualising " conceptual
resources, " and contributions to, for
example, UN achieving Sustainable
Development Goals, could also help
citizens visualize and nurture roots.
Moreover, the " ecosystemic " nature
of these interlinked platforms is
important: as Weil wrote " Reciprocal exchanges by which different
sorts of environment exert influence on one another are no less
vital than to be rooted in natural
surroundings " [1, p. 43].
The fourth is social: we simply
need better education and more
meaningful employment.
The fifth is political: " divide and
rule " is a well-known political strategy as well as an efficient search
algorithm. But in the populist pursuit of political authority, it seems
to have been refined somewhat,
into " de-root and rule. " It seems the
populists have identified an effective power-grabbing strategy by
de-rooting half the population, and
then using mass press propaganda
and social media filter bubbles to
con that half into voting for people
and policies that only aggravate
uprootedness. In the long-run, there
is little wisdom in this, because just
like their industrial and environmental policies, it is simply unsustainable (for those of us who can
see and care about the shadow of
the future, anyway).
On that last point, we note, not
without sadness, the following comment by T. S. Eliot in his Foreword to
L'Enracinement:

10

" This book is in that category
of prolegomena to politics
which politicians seldom read,
and which most of them would
be unlikely to understand or to
know how to apply " [1, p. xiv].

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/
articles/revolt-of-the-rich/
[11] T. Helm. Brexit fuels brain drain as
skilled Britons head to the EU. The Observer, 2 August 2020. https://www.theguardian
.com/world/2020/aug/02/brexit-fuels
-brain-drain-as-skilled-britons-head-to
-the-eu
[12] R. Partington. UK manufacturers facing
biggest worker shortage in 30 years. The
Guardian, 3 January 2019. https://www
.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/03/uk
-manufacturers-face-biggest-worker-shortage
-in-30-years-brexit
[13] J. Pitt and A. Nowak. The reinvention
of social capital for socio-technical systems,
IEEE Technology & Society Magazine 33, 1,
pp. 27-33, 2014.
[14] J. Pitt, A. Rychwalska, M. RoszczynskaKurasinska, and A. Nowak. Democratizing
platforms for social coordination. IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag., 38(1):43-50, 2019.
[15] J. Pitt. Techno-feudalism, IEEE Technol.
Soc. Mag., 39(3), 2020.
[16] G. Goodell, X, IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag.,
39(4), 2020.
[17] J. Pitt, J. H. Clippinger, and C.
Sørensen. Values, axial currencies, and
computational axiology: Digital currencies
can do more than buy stuff. IEEE Technol.
Soc. Mag., 37(3):56-63, 2018.
[18] M. Sandel. What Money Can't Buy:
The Moral Limits of Markets. Pernguin,
2014.
[19] J. Muller. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press, 2019.
[20] A. Topping, 'Fear of failure' giving
UK children lowest happiness levels in
Europe. The Guardian, 28 August 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand
style/2020/aug/28/fear-of-failure-giving
-uk-children-lowest-happiness-levels-in
-europe
[21] G. Génova and M. Roasario González.
Educational Encounters of the Third Kind.
Science and Engineering Ethics 23, pp.
1791-1800, 2017.
[22] M. Lewis. The Fifth Risk. W. W. Norton
& Co., 2018.
[23] E. Alabrese, S. Becker, T. Fetzer and D.
Novyd. Who voted for Brexit? Individual and
regional data combined. European Journal
of Political Economy, 56:132-150, 2019.
[24] F. O'Toole. Heroic Failure: Brexit and
the Politics of Pain. Apollo, 2019.
[25] D. Graeber. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.
Simon & Schuster, 2018.
[26] N. Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise
of Disaster Capitalism. Random House,
2007.
[27] D. Ferguson. Only 12% want a return
to the old 'normal' Britain after Covid-19.
The Observer, 12 July 2020. https://www
.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/12/only
-12-want-a-return-to-the-old-normal-britain
-after-covid-19

For post-pandemic renewal, we
need politicians who have read,
understand, and can apply Weil's
ideas, not populist would-be autocrats who can tick off moves from
the authoritarian's playbook.

Acknowledgment
I am grateful for the very helpful
comments of Stephen Marsh and
Gonzalo Génova, although this does
not imply that they necessarily agree
with the analysis and propositions
advanced here.

Author Information
Jeremy Pitt is with the Department
of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London.

References

[1] S. Weil. The Need for Roots: Prelude to
a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind.
Translated by A. Wills. Routledge, 2002.
(First published as L'Enracinement, Editions
Gallimard, Paris, 1949; first published in English by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.)
[2] W. Hohfeld. Some Fundamental Legal
Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, 23 Yale Law Journal 16, 1913.
[3] M. Sergot. A computational theory of
normative positions, ACM Trans. Comput.
Log. 2, 4, pp. 581-622, 2001.
[4] A. Artikis, M. Sergot and J, Pitt. Specifying norm-governed computational societies,
ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
10, 1, pp. 1-42, 2009.
[5] A. Jones and M. Sergot. A formal characterisation of institutionalised power, Journal
of the IGPL 4, 3, pp. 427-443, 1996.
[6] J. Pitt, L. Kamara, M. Sergot and A. Artikis.
Voting in multi-agent systems, The Computer
Journal 49, 2, pp. 156-170, 2006.
[7] A. Maslow. A theory of human motivation, Psychological Review 50, 4, pp. 370-
396, 1943.
[8] J. Ober. Democracy and Knowledge.
Princeton Univ. Press, 2008.
[9] R. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse
and Revival of American Community, Simon
& Schuster, 2000.
[10] M. Lofgren, " The revolt of the rich, " The
American Conservative, August 27, 2012.

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