Flying the flag for Animate
The new RSA Animate is up. It is Iain McGilchrist talking about the divided brain, the subject of his masterwork ‘The Master and his Emissary’. My bet is that it will have had a million views in just a few weeks so you can be real trend setter and be among the first 10,000. You will immediately want your friends to watch it too so you can discuss it with them.
The other good news is the very welcome signs that Animate is going to get some of the mainstream media attention it deserves. I don’t want to annoy either of the very nice journalists I have spoken to by pre-empting their pieces so of all the things I said to them I want to pick on just one.
The number changes so fast it is hard to keep up, but the latest estimate of the number of RSA lectures that have been viewed on line is fifty million worldwide. The number covers all our on-line lectures but Animate provides the lion’s share.
The RSA as a British based platform for ideas is becoming a global brand. But to my mind the Britishness extends beyond the Great Room in London and Folkestone, the studio location of Cognitive Media’s Andrew Park, the genius behind the animations (and an RSA Fellow). One of the special qualities of Animate is the combination of big ideas and great visual concepts with demotic humour; partly satirical but also sometimes as quirky and irreverent as a saucy seaside postcard.
For example, watch the McGilchrist and in the midst of profound concepts about the brain and culture there is visual reference to Eric Morcombe and Ernie Wise. Or try the visual joke involving a dog at 5.15 minutes into the David Harvey Animate, or how about the subversion of the elephant rider as cognition metaphor 3.24 into the 21st Century Enlightenment Animate. On the last of these you have be quite observant to read the elephant’s speech bubble; a reminder that Animates are worth watching several times to grab all the content.
So Animate is a great innovation success story, a great RSA success story and, at the risk of sounding jingoistic, a great British success story.
The contradictions of capitalism
It’s lazy, I know, to make my readers do the work but here are three things you should be read and watched together:
Robert Peston on the revival of financial trading, in currencies and various forms of derivatives. Once again, he suggests, a small number of people are getting very rich by pursuing activities which are of dubious value to the wider ‘real’ economy.
LSE Director Howard Davies on the failure of attempts at international reform of banking and financial trading.
David Harvey’s RSA Animate, arguing that the growing power of finance in capitalism is not an accident or a coincidence, nor is it simply a reflection of human frailty, it is an inevitable development of capitalism.
Two years ago there was much talk of regulating financial transactions and rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing. There is very little of that talk now. Arguably for good reasons, the Coalition Government is sceptical of the role of Government in supporting industry, and anyway there’s no money.
So, in a very short space of time, after the most dangerous and far reaching crises in the history of global capitalism, this country and others, like America, are going back. Back to being highly dependent on a finance sector many of whose instruments are good at making some people rich, but which mortgage the future and carry major risks of contagion, and which seem to have little or no effect on the wider economy or the livelihoods of those outside finance (apart perhaps from people who sell fine wines and yachts).
For an economic layman like me, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that capitalism has become dominated by finance because its underlying logic dictates so. I am sure there is a way of achieving a more balanced and fair economy without abolishing capitalism but at the moment it doesn’t look like anyone knows what it is. Fortunately, my ignorance may be dispelled this evening with our fascinating event this evening with the development economics expert, Ha-Joon Chang, chaired by Larry Elliott.
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