Despite huge strides being made in technology, communication, access to unlimited knowledge banks, smart gadgets, and unlimited choices in consumerism, we find ourselves at a point in history where human well-being and happiness are sharply disconnected from ourselves more than ever before. We are surrounded by corporations that have no regard for the environment, communities, and the impact their products may have on us. Product policies and community standards are often vague, designed to protect from possible liability through censorship and viewership algorithm management. Consumerism without accountability and conscious choice making have enabled organisations to wage wars to justify their economic means to the ends.

Thus active terrorism, genocide, and criminal policies continue to haunt us. However, those who seem to have all luxuries in life are often found engaging in self-destructive behaviours and are gradually becoming desensitised to the sufferings that they may be causing to others. Both the economically privileged and the underprivileged live under immense stress and are generally unhappy. Our proposition is that the disconnect between desirable objects and their promised happiness is due to the exponentially increasing lack of true autonomy.

The array of options, endless information, and systems that seem to offer autonomy, are ironically, deceivingly taking away our capacities for self-determination. By inundating us with knowledge that can be rarely verified, and using systems of governance that require your consent without informing you what you are consenting to, we are left feeling empowered with our choices for a very brief moment of time. In the longer run we feel hopeless and powerless.

This theory of having our time perspectives warped into “Present Fatalism” is best described by Dr Philip Zimbardo. Trends that seem compulsory or are subliminally designed seem to remove us from our real selves, our communities, and most importantly from a healthy sense of time, need to be questioned urgently. ERA aims to educate the community about factors that disable our autonomy i.e. lack of knowledge about technology, global and local policy, and misinformation and media. Being unaware of the geopolitical laws being implemented, and being inundated with too much unverified information in too little time, slowly corrodes our ability to focus and think clearly.

Once we can grasp the nuances of information control we will be able to not only achieve a better standard of autonomy but more importantly extend our solutions to war-ridden parts of the world. The wars against humanity have highlighted how we have been robbed of our right to decide on the content we consume on social media, how algorithms do that for us, how we have been robbed of our right to consent to participation in a virtual world, how the devices make those choices for us, and dictate the costs of using them—most often covertly and sometimes overtly.

Knowledge and education are our strongest tools. We at ERA are attempting to create a network of learning that is beyond man-made boundaries, enables decompartmentalized learning, allow autonomous thinking, and the agency to bypass all insidious influences from mainstream media and trends.

The process of decolonialising ourselves, owning our shortcomings as a community, and re-educating ourselves about the technologies we use every day are long overdue. In the last decade we have encountered a tremendous surge in technological services. However, the dialogue for how these affect our perception and thinking capabilities is rarely open for discussion. Our main aim is to map international legal policies and laws from across the globe, which we believe have conspired aid and abet global conflict and displacements around the world. These same policies covertly affect people across the globe, including ourselves to varying degrees.

We believe we have been denied transparency about events that directly and disastrously affect us today. We wish to identify actions that create militarism ideologically and logistically, and tie the repercussions to the very real tangible people they continue to affect.

Collaboration and empathy are the cornerstones of ERA. The challenge is to first substitute ourselves within the shoes of those with lesser autonomy—experience and understand their plight as an extension of ourselves and build a network of individuals ready to unlearn and relearn the meaning of autonomy as a thinking capacity contingent on knowledge.

In order to understand the flow of information we want to first connect the policies to the real people that they affect. Once we have mapped the structure of the problems, solutions, and the means to connect the two, we will be able to start ensuring true autonomous decision-making. To enable autonomy through knowledge, we have identified 5 areas of work.

• Documenting legislation around the world
• Studying digital literacy, data privacy, and data harvesting issues
• Decolonialising narratives, language, and culture
• Designing sustainable architectural interventions for the internally displaced
• Collaborating with the diaspora migrants to find solutions for mental health and healing

To achieve this network we need to find experts from various fields and connect them to those who are living without autonomy. Self-education, a verified information database against myths, and a means for information sharing and dissemination without fear of illegal censorship is our main model.