A departure from talking tech —

I went to see the new Michael Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story at Nova yesterday evening. I hadn’t done much research on it beforehand, as I seeing it to help my friend’s fundraiser. Based on the title alone, I thought it was going to be a tale about consumer excess and advertising. It was actually about capitalism as the ideology that has dominated the US political system since at least Reagan. I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears by the scenes of workers fighting for their most basic entitlements after their company shuts down their factory, families “squatting” in their own foreclosed homes (in virtually completely ruined neighbourhoods), and a Congresswoman loudly stating her dissent in parliament.

The breath-taking hubris of banking execs reminded me of scenes in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, another doco I saw a few months ago. It was good to be explicitly reminded where power lies these days: corporations and their lobbyists. The democratic process struggles when the table is tipped. (Witness.) But you need to stand so far back to notice it these days.

I had a fleeting thought: “This wouldn’t happen if women ruled the world.” And then I immediately wondered if I actually believe that. It’s too hard to speculate, if it is just power that corrupts, and would equally so corrupt women, or if there is something testosterone specific in the way the world is run today. (I find it interesting that the first person in Enron to say internally, “Something’s not quite right,” was a woman.)

If we did have women ruling the world, they would have had to infiltrate power as it stands (unlikely in my lifetime) or at least infiltrate the political system and somehow try and build other power systems from the bottom up. And, well, currently I don’t think we hit them where it hurts. 87% of the community sector is women. Women are doing the caring work, but it is mopping up, not targetting the problem at its core.

I don’t really have a neat conclusion. The film was a great reminder to me of how major parts of the world work in a fundamentally unfair way. While it is tempting to do the mopping up, which is visible, immediate and necessary and helpful in its own right, I want to set my sights (and everyone else’s) higher. I don’t really know how to go about that yet.