IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 7

1980s and 1990s America through
the decline in civic participation,
Weil was dismayed by the social,
spiritual, and cultural malaise afflicting 1920s and 1930s France in
particular, but also Western " civilization " in general. This she attributed
to the false values of materialism,
consumerism, and populism, which
were the consequence of uprooted-
ness. The causes of uprootedness
were the subject of analysis in the
second part of L'Enracinement.

not for the country, environmentally
speaking, seeing it only as an asset
to strip and an opportunity to extract
wealth; and nor for its people, seeing them as nothing more than a
commodifiable and expendable
revenue stream. Hence it can be
seen the hollowing out of venerable
political parties, which are reflated
by what are effectively personality
cults, devoted to the vanity, obsessions, and narcissism of a single
man (and so far it has always been
a man). Moreover, these are also the
countries that are rolling back environmental protections, and have
the highest Covid-19 fatalities as a
percentage of population (despite
the potential benefits of well aboveaverage GDP).

Uprootedness
Weil defined uprootedness as a condition (in the sense of an illness)
associated with the destruction of
ties with the past, the dashing of
expectations for the future, and the
dissolution of communities. She
identified four causes of uprootedness: military conquest, economic
domination, money fixation, and the
means of education.2 Each of these
will be examined in turn, in relation
to both when it was written, and its
contemporary relevance.

" It [uprootedness as a consequence of military conquest]
reaches its most acute stage
when there are deportations on
a massive scale " [1, p. 44].
Again, in modern times, there
is nothing so coarse and obvious
as deportations, but in the U.K. the
corollaries of Brexit and a " hostile immigration policy " have been
an increase in re-location of U.K.
citizens, and return of other EU
citizens, to mainland Europe,3 of
primarily skilled, educated and economically productive people [11],
and a corresponding unwillingness
of EU citizens to re-locate to the
U.K., with the result that there are
significant labor shortages in the
health, manufacturing, service, and
agriculture sectors [12].

" When the conqueror remains a
stranger in the land of which he
has taken possession, uproot-
edness becomes an almost
mortal disease among the sub-
dued population " [1, p. 44].
Weil was writing, presumably,
with the 1940s Nazi conquest of
Western Europe in mind; but in
modern times it has not been military conquest per se that has been
the cause of uprootedness, but the
notion of neo-colonialism [10]. This
has resulted in political authorities
that are in a country and ruling it,
but not of it, which seemingly care

" Even without a military con-
quest, money-power and eco-
nomic domination can so
impose a foreign influence as
actually to impose this disease
of uprootedness " [1, p. 44].

2

Before her time, but Weil might now include
" massification, " both as the imposition of the
uniformity of thought through mass media,
and the uniformity of thought that is produced
by, say, insufficiently-resourced mass higher
education.

DECEMBER 2020

3

∕

This might be called the " Brexodus. "

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

We have argued this point in
these pages before, in the monetization of social capital [13], the private
ownership of the means of social
coordination [14], and the manifestation of techno-feudalism [15]; and
the theme is further explored by
Goodell [16]. But what is new here
is seeing how all of these trends are
the product of transnational corporations exerting economic domination
over a nation that its government
is somewhere between " too weak "
and " shamelessly collusive " to prevent; and how all are contributing to
twenty-first century uprootedness.
" The social relations existing in
any one country can be very
dangerous factors in connexion
with uprootedness. ... One of
them is money. Money
destroys human roots ... by
turning the desire for gain into
the sole motive " [1, p. 44].
Fast-forwarding eighty years: the
consequence of the digital monetization of socially-constructed
values [17] is that everything is
put up for sale. There are two concerns with this, as analyzed in [18]:
inequality and corruption. Widening
inequality would not matter quite
so much if it were only luxuries
that were inaccessible, but once
all goods and services of value are
for sale, and necessities are only
accessible to those with affluence,
then social inequality becomes a
cause of social instability. The issue
of corruption affects not just the
trade in those goods and services,
but also the values themselves: as
Weil herself puts it " nothing is so
clear and so simple as a row of
figures " [1, p. 44]; uprootedness
occurs in part when the pursuit of
those figures is a primary social
driver; when social status is afforded only to those few who have the
largest figures; and when for many,

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