ABBA New Year To You All!

A Handy Tech-Talk Translator:

"Acceleration" = Precarization

"Artificial Intelligence" = Denial of Responsibility

"Automation" = Dismantlement of Organized Labor

"Culturefit" = Bigotry

"Democratization" = Rules and Standards Are for the Little People

"Digitality" = Loathing and Denial of Material Bodies, Material Brains, Material Historical Struggle

"Disruption" = Deregulation

"Enhancement" = Eugenics

"Free" = Under Duress

"The Future" = The Status Quo, Amplified

"Gamification" = Let Us Assume Everyone Is A Sociopath

"Innovation" = PR-Repackaging

"Internet of Things" = People Being Treated As Things Via the Internet

"Let the market decide." = Let rich people decide.

"Maker" = Grifter

"Meritocracy" = White Male Mediocrity

"New" = Forgotten

"Open" = Empty

"Progress" = Wealth Concentration

"Resilience" = Exploitability

"Risk" = Privileged Upward Failure

"Roboticization" = Increasing Treatment of Workers As Robots

"Sharing" = Sharecropping

"Smart" = Not Smart

"Spontaneous Order" = Following Orders

"Strong Encryption" = Cyberspatial Gun-Nuttery

"Think Tank" = Spin Room

"Thought Leader" = Mouth of Sauron

Lies, Damn Lies, and Futurism

I think most of what passes for "Tech" design should be disregarded
and most of what is accepted as "Tech" promotion should be prosecuted.

Most "Tech" marketing & design peddles the truly terrible lie that we are approaching the Star Trek future rather than the feudal past.

We have grown so accustomed to being lied to by advertising that we now tend to imitate advertising even when we lie to ourselves.

Social media is the consummation of false advertising.

Hark, the Herald Fugelsang

As every year, the reminder:

And What Have You Done?

I am less hopeful than I have been in years, but, this year as every year...

Christmas Effects by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

As every year on this day, a remembrance for a scholar who mattered to me when it mattered quite a lot:

What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season -- isn’t it? -- is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question -- Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all -- religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy -- line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? -- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 5-6

I give grading an F.

No E for my efforts, doncha know...

Trump Tech Culturefit

Marketing hype ("innovation"), parochially profitable fraud ("meritocracy"), deregulatory privatization and looting ("disruption"), digi-utopianism ("financialization"), majority precarization ("acceleration"), singularity (New Economy, Long Boom, End of History, Make America Great Again, We're Gonna Win So Much You'll Get Tired of Winning)...

Tho' Silicon Valley has a notional affiliation with the Democratic left (based mostly, I daresay, in an utterly unreliable, sentimental, subcultural attachment arising out of proximity to the vestigially-liberal Bay Area, and in a rejection of Republican anti-science and Christianist evangelism that benefits Democrats who declare themselves "fact-based" in response, but who too often take that to endorse reductionist, quantificationist, eugenic, unaccountably technocratic, bourgeois-consumerist, corporate-militarist, and techno-triumphalist "Thought Leadership" qua "fact"), the truth is that Trump & "Tech" are a match made in Hell.

I expect full co-operation in no time at all -- Peter Thiel is not a counter-example but a reductio ad absurdum. Futurology has always been a genre of marketing deception and hyperbole amplified into techno-transcendental religiosity, what better ideological framework to rationalize Trump's otherwise unmoored authoritarian greedhead aggrieved-aggressive masculine impulses?

Nothing will save us.

We don't need saving. 

 

Educate, agitate, organize, march, struggle, vote.

Please Make A Note of It

Nobody loses jobs to robots. People lose jobs to the owners of robots.

Latest Potential Trump Nightmare Cabinet Pick Rex Tillerson, Geo-Engineer

1 Do those saying "at least Rex Tillerson admits climate change is real" know he advocates futurological greenwashing via geo-engineering?

For example, if you were wondering: 'I mean, at least Rex Tillerson knows that climate change is real. So there's that."— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 10, 2016

2 In 2012, Tillerson declared climate change is merely "an engineering problem" for which here will inevitably be "an engineering solution."

3 Tillerson, "The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future," transcript, CFR (2012, June 27).https://t.co/qCkPUFM9iO

4 Setting aside the deliberate generational deception of climate change denial Exxon-Mobile participated in for parochial profitability...

5 it is crucial to recognize that the displacement onto imaginary engineering of the shared political problems of climate change is in fact

6 another form of denialism -- the denial of collective responsibility and agency in climate politics -- a sequel denial not a correction.

7 Hope it is not necessary to spell out why more profitable industrialism may not be a solution to profitably ruinous industrial extraction?

Progress Via Repetition

1 When I think how much destruction and self-destruction is abetted simply by the GOP's disciplined repetition of false and facile slogans

2 (eg gov isn't the solution it's the problem; privatizing public services improves them; taxes are burdens rather than enablers of freedom)

3 I can't help but wonder how much the Dem left might accomplish if we endlessly repeated our own correct and clarifying messages

4 (eg, those who say government is bad never deliver good government; there is strength in diversity; freedom is made of public investments)

5 I fear Dems don't muster comparable discipline in an eagerness to perform cleverness hunting novelty rather than inculcating good sense,

6 and by performing unflappability (not surprised!) rather than justified outrage at the waste, corruption, crimes, and lies of the right.

7 Every right-wing slogan is a nail inviting the hammer of a comparably pithy dem-left rejoinder that everybody knows to deliver as a blow.

8 The point isn't always to convince entrenched foes but to generate immediate associations sustaining foundational progressive commonsense.

9 This is not the kind of rhetorical work that will garner you praise for your wit or originality. Actually, it's dull and annoying.

10 A world that works can only be built out of such rhetorical work. Don't be afraid or ashamed to repeat basic progressive truths.

Repeat Repeat Repeat Repeat Repeat

Those who declare themselves "socially liberal" but "fiscally conservative" either deceive or are deceived about the crucial fact that the public investments on which social liberality indispensably depends are the very ones fiscal conservatives inevitably refuse to fund.