Is the Right to the City Just Fordist Urbanism?

David Harvey:

I’ve tried to think in very simple terms, which is that those people who build and sustain a city should have a right to residency and to all the advantages they’ve spent their time building and sustaining: simple as that.

Harvey also makes the point that the developmental displacement of the "infrahuman" precariat to suburbs to cater to the 1% exacerbates catastrophic climate change by demanding petrochemical subsurbanization -- so much for futurological "green cities"! I find myself strongly agreeing with Harvey's observations and his recommendations here, but also find myself wondering if he should so glibly identify his critique with "anticapitalism."

As with so much resistance to the neoliberal model of financialization and precarization and network-mediation it seems to me "anti-capitalism" takes the form more of a pining for older formations of capitalism over the latest one, rather than a transcendence of capital altogether. Doesn't Harvey's initial insight simply reproduce Fordist commonsense? Isn't the sustainability criterion he depends on in his second insight a notion introduced to protect capitalist progress ideology from the critique of deep ecology?

By the way, I am far from exempting myself from this tendency, as when I write, say, "LXXIV. Mine is an anti-capitalism that will be quite content with an environmentally sustainable social democracy in which universal healthcare, education, income, expression, recourse to law and franchise is funded by steeply progressive taxes even if everybody decides to call that outcome 'capitalism' for whatever reasons perversely appeal to them."

Debord's point that the Spectacle is very good at deluding combatants into imagining internecine skirmishing feeding plutocracy is revolutionary resistance to plutocracy is a good point, but the force of the point itself implies that it is not an Iron Law. The fandom of peer-to-peer democratization may enable ubiquitous corporate-military surveillance and advertorial harassment and the "participation" of zero comments, but that is not the whole story (it risks becoming the whole story only when the first observation is denied). The fight for commons may be -- as Zizek, Negri, and the like are prone to declare these days -- the contemporary face of communism, but that is not the whole story either (look what happens when what is championed is the "innovation commons" or "commonwealth" or "common law" with their not-communist communitarianisms).

I do think those of us who are struggling for democratization, sustainability, and equity-in-diversity should take greater care about what exactly we are resisting when we make glib recourse to terms like "anti-capitalism." There are and have been many capitalisms, and it is better to try to know which ones are we resisting, when and how?

Preferences

I like my art revolutionary, my administration liberal, and my engineering conservative.

Not All Ridicule Is Hate Speech

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot to this post, in response to the whining of a Robot Cultist who has been sniping at me for years and really should know better by now:

You were not born a Robot Cultist, let alone an indefatigable proselytizer for the ridiculous views of the Robot Cult for which I ridicule you. I don't know you as a person, and I presume there is more to you than transhumanoid, digital-utopian, and techno-immortalist positions for which you advocate so nonsensically in public places and in ways that solicit scrutiny.

Critique, satire, parody, even ridicule of views and fallacious reasoning is not hate speech, however discomfiting it may be. You actively seek out attention for your views -- indeed, no small share of the ridicule you suffer from me is prompted by comments YOU publish on MY blog -- nor do I occupy a position of privilege over you from which I attack you in some disadvantage or vulnerability over which you have no control and so neither is this properly conceived as a matter even of bullying.

You are simply seeking to insulate some of your dangerous and nonsensical views from criticism through the pathetic charge that such criticism is hate speech unless it is superficial enough to concede the essential seriousness of your discourse or the validity of its most basic premises as I do not.

Debates about political questions, or moral differences, or matters of taste really are contentious and should be. They are contentious because they arise from differences that are really different, and they should be contentious because there are real stakes in play. As someone who actually was traumatically bullied as a kid for being effeminate I do not approve at all the ease with which the seriousness of that issue is evacuated of its substance and treated as an occasion for mostly privileged people to express their distaste at the fact that they are questioned in ways that make them uncomfortable in their enjoyment of their privileges, which is what a lot (obviously not all) of the "incivility" and "negativity" and "online bullying" discussions really finally amount to in my opinion.

Ethics Is Not Politics

The lesser of two evils is still evil, but the difference between them can still make a difference.

A Comment on Artificial Imbecillence

Also published at the World Future Society.

Nobody thinks that pouring more sand onto a pile of sand -- or even pouring more abacuses onto a pile of abacuses -- is the least bit likely eventually to prompt the pile to "wake up" and become intelligent, even though the pile grows incomparably more complex the larger it grows. I suspect the reason why some people think that computers, networks, or software might eventually "wake up" and become intelligent if they keep making them more and more complex is often just because they are already using computational, networked, and coding metaphors to think about intelligence in the first place.

I fear it is not so much that computers are liable to wake up any time soon, as that we are falling asleep to the distinctiveness of actually incarnated intelligence through a fashionable computational figuration of intelligence.

It should not be difficult to grasp that while such metaphors may capture some of the qualities of intelligence as it is incarnated in the material dispositions of brains, it is also obviously true that brains are finally much less like what we think of when we think of computers than they are like what we think of when we think of glands and hence that we probably have plenty of reasons to think metaphors proposing otherwise may be misleading us at least as often as they are enlightening us.

That advocates of artificial intelligence have been confidently predicting the arrival of artificial intelligence more or less since the inaugural moments the disciplines of cybernetics and computer science and robotics emerged on the scene with an incessance undiminished by the absolute relentlessness of their failures to be right on this and other key questions is just one of the ways in which these metaphors might be said to be misleading those who make recourse to them. But I think the more damaging and dangerous consequence of this inapt metaphorization of intelligence is that it is now leading so many of us in our everyday lives to attribute intelligence to bleakly unintelligent artifacts like automobiles and media devices with the consequence that we are rendered less capable of grasping and honoring what is so vitally different and indispensable to the dignity and destiny of actually intelligent beings in the world and owning up to our responsibilities to that intelligence in its lived differences.