Much effort is going into caring for vulnerable species

Originally published on Global Voices

Kiwi road sign. Photo used with permission.

All the original photos and videos were taken by Heather Milton or the author during their 2024 travels.

Our recent six-week trip to Aotearoa/New Zealand in late summer and early autumn 2024 presented the ideal opportunity to experience its amazing environment. We hadn't “crossed the ditch” (the Australasian slang for the Tasman Sea) for a holiday since 1985.

The Land of the Long White Cloud was created by volcanoes and carved by glaciers. Before the arrival of humans, its flora and fauna evolved in isolation from the rest of the world, and there were no threats to animals from land-based mammals.

New Zealanders pride themselves on the care they take to conserve their unique flora and fauna. “Kiwi,” their universal nickname, comes from the iconic bird, as shown in the sign above. It is a national symbol.

Their Tiaki Promise is a commitment to care for people and place “for now and for future generations”:

We enjoyed many day walks of varying lengths where we encountered many local bird species. The tui is one of the most popular, with its unusual song. We spotted the tui shown in the video below at Ōtari-Wilton's Bush reserve in the hills above the capital city, Wellington. The rarely-seen Stewart Island weka was foraging on an Ulva Island beach:

New Zealand has 17 species of the iconic albatross. The breeding place for the Northern Royal albatross can be viewed at the Albatross Centre near Dunedin on the South Island. It has a wingspan of up to 3 metres (9.8 feet) and may fly 190,000 kilometres (118,000 miles) across the Pacific Ocean each year.

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In addition, captive breeding programs and the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species complement each other. Te Anua Bird Sanctuary is nestled beside the lake. Here they breed takahe, kaka, whio and pateke, among others, for release into wild populations. It is open and free to the public.

Te Anau Bird Sanctuary. Photo used with permission.

An important initiative was taking place when we were in Wellington. One hundred kiwis bred in captivity were being released into the wild in the hills above Wellington.

This video slideshow below shows some of the birds we saw in the wild during our travels. It features the Northern Royal Albatross, Kereru Wood Pigeon, Stewart Island Robin, Kea, North Island Takahe Swamphen, NZ Fantail, White-fronted terns, Saddleback, and Paradise Shelduck.

Wikipedia has a List of Birds of New Zealand, with scientific and some Maori names.

While birds are clearly treasured, other animals receive a lot of attention, particularly the aquatic kind. These include whales, seals, sea lions/pakakes, dolphins, and penguins.

Fur seals faced extinction as a result of sealing in the 1700s and 1800s, but their numbers have increased significantly since being protected by law in 1978. The colony north of Christchurch at Kaikoura is an impressive haven for hundreds of seals and their pups. The walkway is a great way to get up close:

Kaikoura seal colony north of Christchurch. Photo used with permission.

Seals on a rock at Kaikoura. Photo used with permission.

On the other hand, sea lions are classified as nationally vulnerable, with numbers below 10,000. We were lucky to encounter them on the South Island coast at Sandfly Bay, Katiki Point, plus Ulva Island:

Creating pest-free habitats receives special attention in New Zealand. Sanctuaries play an important part in nurturing the natural heritage. Fenced areas such as peninsulas exclude introduced species. Wharariki Eco-sanctuary near Nelson is a recent example. Traps and poison baits are used to control predators such as rats, possums and stoats:

Trap for invasive predators. Photo used with permission.

Two island refuges stand out. Ulva Island is a very special place, off the coast of Stewart Island, just below the South Island. Like most environmental projects of this kind, there is plenty of advice to guide visitors before they take the 10-minute water taxi ride. There is a bait and trapping program as well, as rats can swim the short distance from the main island. They even use sniffer dogs. Their free brochure highlights these risks as well as the many birds and magnificent plant life, including towering trees such as the miro, rimu and totara.

Ulva is less than 300 hectares (741 acres) in area, but its luxuriant forest is packed with spectacular flora and fauna. Many of the birds seem unafraid of humans, presenting many up-close encounters. Its small beaches are popular with fearsome sea lions.

Rangitoto Island is just a short ferry ride from Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous city. It is only 600 years old and is famed for its raw volcanic landscape. Its Historical Conservation Trust is very keen to keep it pest-free, and visitors receive lots of tips on how to help to do this. This video is one example:

There are abundant display boards and signs throughout New Zealand with information about local conservation efforts. This sign at Ngakuta Bay is typical:

Ngakuta Bay birds sign. Photo used with permission.

The road sign at the popular Pancake Rocks on the west coast of the South Island shows the kind of effort taken to protect breeding birds:

Pancake Rocks street lights sign. Photo used with permission.

Curio Bay, in the Catlins east of Invergargill, is keen to protect their yellow-eyed penguins:

Penguin cutout: Protect Our Penguins. Photo used with permission.

The emphasis on conservation is not without controversy. The first day of an international SailGP event at Lyttleton Harbour near Christchurch had to be cancelled on March 23 because of the presence of a couple of Hector dolphins, members of a nationally vulnerable species. A posting of an NZ National Geographic story brought plenty of support for this action on Reddit. However, some “yachties” were unhappy with the decision.

Finally, if you’re thinking of exploring New Zealand’s natural wonders, best be prepared. The Tongariro Alpine Crossing on the north island is a spectacular and challenging day hike. Its 19.4 kilometres (12.0 miles) attracts over 100,000 visitors each year, with up to 3,000 in a single day.

The Mountain Safety Council has produced this video, giving advice on personal safety and care for the environment. It's worth viewing just for the incredible landscape:

Written by Kevin Rennie

The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has remained a prominent left-wing voice. After a failed campaign for a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, he plans to run again this June. This time, his adversary isn’t Berlin or the banks. It’s the tech companies he accuses of warping the economy while turning people against one other.

COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Varoufakis is also a prolific author; his 17th book, written as a letter to his techno-curious father, chronicles the evolution of capitalism from the 1960s advertising boom, through Wall Street in the 1980s, to the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. In its most compelling stretches, Technofeudalism argues that Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have changed the economy so much that it now resembles Europe’s medieval feudal system. The tech giants are the lords, while everyone else is a peasant, working their land for not much in return.
To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn’t pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company. On X, the more active users there are, the more people can be shown advertising or sold subscriptions. On Google Maps, he argues, users improve the product—alerting the system to traffic jams on their route.
The feudal comparison isn’t novel. But Technofeudalism attempts to introduce the idea to a wider audience. Its US release, launched the month before regulators in the US and European Union simultaneously initiated antitrust actions against Apple, also had impeccable timing.
Over Zoom, I spoke to Varoufakis, from his home near Athens, about how the tech giants have changed the economy—and why we should care about it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: That word, technofeudalism, what does it mean? How is the feudal system relevant here?

Yanis Varoufakis: Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism. Now we have moved [from one system to the other] because of this new form of super-duper, all-singing, all-dancing capital: cloud capital, algorithmic capital. If I’m right, that is creating new digital fiefdoms like Amazon.com, like Airbnb, where the main mode of wealth extraction comes in the form not of profit but of rent.

Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That’s a rent. That’s like a ground rent. It’s a bit like the Apple Store is a fiefdom. It’s a cloud fiefdom, and Apple extracts a rent exactly as in feudalism. So my argument is not that we went back from capitalism to feudalism. My argument is that we have progressed forward to a new system, which has many of the characteristics of feudalism, but it is one step ahead of capitalism. To signal that, I added the word techno.

When you’re talking about these digital fiefdoms, the idea is easier to understand in terms of platforms that take a cut of the sales, like the Apple App Store or Amazon. But can you also accuse other platforms of operating these digital fiefs, like Facebook?

Facebook is a classic cloud fief. It creates cloud capital which is attractive to you, to me, to other people who want to communicate with each other—to find friends, or post their views, or news about their dog or their cat. So you’re drawn into this fiefdom, and then the next step for Zuckerberg was to draw into the same fiefdom publishers and advertisers in order to sell them the attention of users. And then immediately after that, as Cory Doctorow so beautifully describes through his concept of enshittification, you’re a publisher, you feel great because your sales go up through Facebook, and then suddenly, you find that you’ve been downgraded. And then you have to pay a higher cloud rent in order to be re-upgraded [paying for ads, for example, for customers to find your product]. That’s typical cloud capitalism, producing technofeudalism.

I understand technofeudalism as affecting three groups of people. Can we boil down who is affected into these groups?

Yes, and I’ve given them names. The company that produces the electric bicycles sold on Alibaba or Amazon.com, this is a vassal capitalist. Most of the profit margin for that company is skimmed off by Jeff Bezos [Amazon’s founder and executive chairman] in the form of cloud rent.

Second is cloud proles, or cloud proletarians. Look at the workers in Amazon warehouses who are monitored by algorithms.

And the third one is you and me. I call us cloud serfs. Because the parallel with the serfs is that we volunteer free labor. It doesn’t matter whether we’re enjoying it or not. Every time you upload a video on Tiktok, on Facebook, on Instagram, you’re adding to the capital stock of these companies. We are adding to it directly through our labor or our movement or our existence. In that way we’re serfs, but we are more than serfs, we’re cloud serfs producing capital. And that has never happened in the history of the world.

A company like Apple might argue that instead of being a fiefdom, maybe the Apple App Store is more like a mall where companies have to rent their stores from whomever owns the building. How is technofeudalism different from the mall dynamic?

Well, hugely. Say you and I were going into partnership together with a fashion brand. We go to the shopping mall and we hire a shop, the rent is fixed. It is not proportional to our sales. The more money we make, the higher our price-to-rent margin. With the Apple Store, they get 30 percent of all sales. That’s not at all the same thing. That is the equivalent of the ground rent that the feudal lord used to extract from vassal capitalists.

What makes cloud capitalism a worse economic system than capitalism?

The first thing is from a macroeconomic perspective. When you have such a large sum of money extracted in the form of cloud rent, that money disappears from a circular flow of income. According to my calculations, between 35 and 40 percent of GDP is being siphoned off the circular flow of income by cloud rent, and that means there is less money in the economy. Investment is low, and that means less good, quality jobs in the rest of the economy.

The second reason is that this cloud capital is designed to reproduce itself through our attention and through our free labor. And platforms discovered that we spend more time doing this, producing free cloud capital for the owners of cloud capital, if we’re angry. So algorithms are primed to poison our conversations. That is highly detrimental to our democracies because consensus is really bad for cloud capital. It doesn’t want it. It wants you and me to be angry and shouting at each other.

Now, as a professor, I have noticed the effect on kids in universities in Britain, in Australia, here in Greece, in America. I find that students today are too scared of having a face-to-face conversation. They want a safe space. They do not want any challenging ideas to be presented to them in class. They protest, they will have you thrown out of university if you say something that upsets them, about anything. But give them a phone and they become toxic and ballistic. Now, that is no way of running a democracy or a civilized society for that matter.

People have already expressed dissatisfaction with capitalism in various protest movements across Europe. Why should they care that there’s been a shift to a slightly different system that’s dominated by a slightly different kind of company?

Ordinary people need to know the reasons behind the discontent. The discontented always ask: Why is this happening? Giving them an answer, in a way that makes sense to them, is hugely empowering. This is the foundation of any possibility of democracy. Because to have democracy, it’s not enough to be able to vote every four or five years. You need people who understand what is going on, who are informed about the causes of their discontent. Because if they don’t understand the causes of their discontent, then it’s easy for them to fall prey to xenophobia, to misogyny, to racism. Then they can say, it’s the Jew. It’s the Muslim. It’s the foreigner. It’s the Brit. It’s the German, whatever. Then people latch on to simple solutions, which is the beginning of fascism.

Are we at the beginning of fascism? And if so, is that really technofeudalism’s fault?

I think that fascism is already on the rise. In France almost 45 percent of the population are supporting a neofascist [Marine Le Pen]. In Italy, we have a neofascist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. That was not the doing of technofeudalism, because technofeudalism came later. What happened is, the rise of cloud capital and the siphoning off of money from the circular flow of income increases the discontent within people. At the same time you have the algorithms which make money and accumulate cloud capital to the extent that we hate one another. Hate is the fuel of facism. So if you blend discontent, the fact that most people can’t make ends meet, and you throw in there the hatred that is reinforced by the algorithms, that’s fascism.

So if we have this new system that is fueling a new fascism, then what should we do about it?

Well, many things. But to begin with, let’s understand where we are, so we don’t blame the foreigners. We don’t blame women. We don’t blame trans people. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way towards recreating the circumstances for a decent conversation between us.

In economic terms, we need to introduce a cloud tax immediately. Tax Amazon 5 percent for every transaction that takes place on its platform. Then, introduce a capacity for you and me to own a digital identity so we don’t need Google or Facebook to vouch for who we are on the internet. Having a state-issued digital identity will go a long way towards restoring or handing you property rights over your data, because at the moment you do not own your data.

You can introduce interoperability. I am on X. I can’t go to Bluesky. Let’s say that Elon Musk decides to block me because I said something he didn’t like. He has blocked me before for a couple of weeks. Now, I have more than a million followers on X. I cannot leave without losing them. If I go to Bluesky, I have 10 followers. Interoperability would mean that if I go to another platform, to Bluesky, when I post something on Bluesky, then my 1 million followers on X can hear it.

It’s interesting you mention interoperability, because that’s one of the proposals in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which feels like it’s at least trying to get at some of the problems you’ve outlined. Do you think it goes far enough?

No, it certainly doesn’t go far enough. There are some interesting ideas in there, like interoperability. But nobody in government is actually working on this. This is my problem. Not that it is a hard task, but there is nobody working on it, because they don’t care. They are all in the pockets of the big technofeudal lords, as I call them.

So if you believe no one in government is doing anything, how do you move forward from that?

That’s a very good question. I have no idea. But this is why—against my spirit, against my preferences and my desires—I’m still in politics, because there is no alternative to politics.

Click here for WIRED’s site, where this interview was published

The post Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism – interviewed by WIRED magazine appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Naomi Klein is the award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician, author and the former finance minister of Greece. Raoul Martinez is a philosopher, author and filmmaker. This podcast is released alongside the acclaimed new docuseries ‘In The Eye Of The Storm — The Political Odyssey Of Yanis Varoufakis‘. 

The post Naomi Klein & Yanis Varoufakis on Gaza, Fascism & the Wrong Lesson from History appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project. But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle, and now the invasion has facilitated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier.

ATHENS – Europe has become unrecognizable. Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project pitting a splendid cosmopolitanism against nationalism – which, as French President François Mitterrand dramatically put it in 1995, “equals war.” But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Europeanist vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle. Russia’s invasion merely accelerated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, gave us a whiff of the shift from cosmopolitanism to ethno-regionalism when he described the EU as a beautiful “garden” threatened by the non-European “jungle” lurking outside its borders. More recently, French President Emmanuel Macron and Charles Michel, the European Council’s president, asked Europeans not only to prepare for war but, crucially, to rely on its arms industry for the EU’s economic growth and technological advancement. Having failed to convince Germany, and the so-called frugal nation-states, of the need for a proper fiscal union, their desperate fallback position is now to argue for a war union.

This is a pivotal moment in the EU’s checkered history. Setting aside a vociferous minority of Euroskeptics, the main difference of opinion between pro-EU political forces concerned whether Europe’s continental consolidation ought to proceed by Hamiltonian means (debt mutualization precipitating the emergence of a proper federation) or in the original intergovernmental way (gradual market integration). The governments presiding over surplus economies favored the latter, whereas the deficit economies’ representatives, understandably, leaned toward a Hamiltonian solution, which was thus placed permanently on the backburner.

The euro crisis exposed the impossibility of continuing the pretense that debts, banks, and taxes can be national while the currency is transnational and markets are integrated. Alas, the EU chose to do the minimum necessary to save the euro and ended up with the worst of both worlds: a grossly ineffective quasi-fiscal union (lacking a proper sovereign debt instrument, like US Treasuries), and a European Central Bank forced to violate its charter time and again (hiding behind increasingly creative justifications). Perhaps most damagingly, the rickety political process that distributes common monies and joint burdens lacks even an iota of a smidgeon of democratic legitimacy.

For decades, some of us campaigned for a European Green New Deal. With federation infeasible in the near term, we proposed ways to simulate federal debt instruments (such as an ECB-issued eurobond) with which to generate, via the European Investment Bank, a minimum of €500 billion ($539 billion) annually for a Green Energy-Tech-Transition investment fund. Instead, EU decision-makers adopted smoke-and-mirrors alternatives, like the designed-to-fail Juncker Plan and, during the pandemic, a Recovery Fund that created common debt for no good common purpose.

This is why the EU’s economy is now broken, with the German business model that used to be its beating heart in a state of rapid decline. By choosing a half-a-loaf strategy (neither a fiscal union nor separate debts and central-bank assets), the EU condemned itself to two decades of minimal investment, thus failing to develop the technologies Europe needs: green tech (which would allow Europe to decouple from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cheap gas on its terms) and cloud capital. The United States and China, which now monopolize cloud capital, the new instrument for wealth accumulation, also have imposed a new cold war on Europe, with catastrophic repercussions for German industry’s access to Chinese export markets.

Europeans in authority are, regrettably, refusing to recognize how broken the EU’s business model is, or how irrelevant old remedies in new packages will prove. Germany, for example, is back to considering tax-funded energy subsidies and new rounds of wage restraint to aid competitiveness.

This debate is a dangerous distraction from Europe’s real problem: German industrial capital no longer accumulates the surpluses from which to fund energy subsidies for declining industries. In this context, no wage restraint (of the sort that then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once pulled off) will boost the competitiveness of a car industry incapable of producing the battery technologies or the algorithms that add substantial new value to manufacturers of modern electric vehicles.

Now what? Michel seems to have retrieved from the dustbin of recent European history our proposals for a eurobond and for invigorating the EIB. But he is not proposing to use the new credits to fund green tech or cloud capital, but for a new arms industry that will, he says, “be a powerful means to strengthen our technological, innovation, and industrial base.”

Can Michel be serious? How will the EIB recoup its loans to the defense industry, which by definition is unproductive? What will happen when our warehouses are full of ammunition and missiles? Either the investment drive Michel envisages will dry up or Europe will need to find ways – in other words, new wars – to deplete the stocks.

Sensible Europeanists should, therefore, pray that Michel’s plan goes the way of the Juncker Plan. The EU’s incompetence suddenly has become the peace-loving Europeanist’s last hope.

I miss the times when pro-Europeans celebrated the EU, however hypocritically, as a project to pull borders down and to sponsor openness, difference, and tolerance. That Europe is finished, broken, in full retreat. A new ideology has taken hold. Instead of a diverse democratic federation that appeals to the peoples beyond its borders, it envisages a white Christian realm ringed by expensive missile launchers and tall electrified fences. This is a Europe that the young cannot feel proud of and that the rest of the world will not take seriously.

For the Project Syndicate site, click here.

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