Without Sarah

My mood, captured in a snippet from private correspondence: The passage of time is very strange. It happened Wednesday and yet here it is Wednesday again. Has this week happened, really? What happened this week? Sarah died this week, that is what happened. A stone week, a week without sun to warm the stone.

Sarah, 2001-2017

Our beloved cat Sarah died yesterday in my lap, her little face cradled in my hand. She was never a large cat, even when she fluffed out for the winter months, and she seemed especially tiny at the end. We used to call her babykins, adorababy, permakitten. She was quite talkative, and would chirp and bleep at us incessantly, to get our attention or whenever one of us made eye contact. Strands of her gray fur coat every surface, every corner, every item of clothing, but she is gone, gone. The apartment feels like it's been replaced by a stage set of itself, and we're rattling around wondering what our lines are supposed to be. We also called her our little nurse: she had an unerring knack for sensing when either of us was the least bit distressed for whatever reason and coming up and chirping and cozying up to us and purring into our bodies until we felt better. Friends, guests, apartment managers, anybody sent her into hiding under the bed, she had no trust and no time for anybody but us. There is nobody on earth who can ever know how special she was but us. Her claws were slightly too long and extended a little past her paw pads so that she ticked around the wood floors of the apartment, we called her tick tick baby as she made her restless circuit of the place at night. Her tail was foreshortened and bent, perhaps the result of a tussle as a kitten -- we got her from the SFSPCA sixteen years ago, they had found her in a feral cat colony in Golden Gate Park, she had a gouge in her neck when we got her and appeared to have had a narrow escape from some kind of predatory bird there. She played like a kitten right up to last months of her life -- one of her favorite games was to lie on her back with her legs crazily splayed as Eric would tap her on the left side and then on the right, and she would swipe crazily and belatedly in the direction of the tap, toppling from side to side, missing his hand time and time again, she could literally continue gyrating like that until Eric was too tired to keep at it. We called her caper kitty when she played her wiggle game. She had terrible eyesight and a thousand mile blank stare out the windows as she enjoyed the afternoon breezes roughling the fuzz on her face and whiskers. When she glazed out through the windows, we called that "Sarah watching her stories." Sarah was gray with a fluffy white belly and little white booties. She had an asymmetrical mustache and a tiny bald spot just beneath one of her big flappy bat ears. She was simply perfect. There has scarcely been a day in the last sixteen years when she has not spent hours and hours at a stretch nuzzled up against me, in my lap, rubbing noses with me, sleeping with her chin over my arm as I tapped away at the keyboard, sleeping between Eric's legs all night long (I toss and turn too much), eating from a saucer in my hand as we watched some silly baking competition marathon on tee vee... How I love her. How desolate everything seems without her.   

Taylor Mac Sings Amazing Grace Through the Streets of San Francisco

The Lie of the Tech Sector

The lie of the tech sector is that it is up to much of anything new at all.

"Technology" discourse has always mostly been the repackaging stale products and reactionary politics.

The truth of the tech sector is the same old story of assholes wanting all the money and power but no responsibility or accountability.

Tech disruption is mostly deregulation.

Tech "sharing" is mostly wealth concentration.

Tech innovation is mostly PR for the rich.

Digitization is mostly precarization.

What Has Changed Here

Adapted and Upgraded from a comment in the Moot:

Robot Gods, genetic enhancement and longevity, artificial meat, immersive virtuality, techno-abundance nano robo digi bio blah blah blah blah, the terms never changing, the greedhead promises and skeery sfnal threats never happening, but always oh so very important to talk about, year after year after year after year, as privileged mediocrities game the economy and political system in the most boring serially failed utterly predictably idiotic ways (the very real threats being the social ones mediated by and distracted from via tech, natch). You know, I could re-run the first ten years of this blog, just changing the names of the latest tech soopergeniuses as they make exactly identically stupid claims I railed against before and I would presumably resume my place as go-to incendiary tech critic. I definitely hear you when you say you'll choke the latest Very Serious AI-qua-existential-threat drivel down. My righteous rage, and the pleasure I once took in ridiculing tech hucksters, has long since been eclipsed by demoralization. Trump's America is the futurological future we've been waiting for, a shriveled white dick with a megaphone peddling late-nite infomercials promising easy cash and sexy youth to ignorant rubes over a stinking landfill under a gray snowfall of cremated ashes.

Touched By An Angel

Pro-tip: Don't let the toxic mixture of fear and laziness fuck with your goals, ambition and productivity. — Katya (@katya_zamo) July 14, 2015

@katya_zamo What if your goals, ambition, and productivity depend on a toxic mixture of fear and laziness? — Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 14, 2015

Then YOU GO GIRL! You got this girl! — Katya (@katya_zamo) September 6, 2017

There Is No AI

Nothing that is being called "AI" these days is actual AI -- which is not to deny how dangerous what passes for AI these days happens to be. The threat of "AI" today is entirely the threat of intelligent designers, owners, and users abusing computers in predictably unscrupulous and reckless ways. Elon Musk and his ilk are not so much warning us of the dangers of AI as they are profitably indulging in them while distracting the marks with shiny sfnal objects. It may be useful to recall "AI" discourse has its (1) robocultic True Believers and ideologues for whom AI cannot fail, only be failed; its (2) opportunistic evangelical hucksters/VC tech-types out to rationalize parochial tech profits with hyped promises and threats; and its (3) many ignorant, opportunistic tech-infotainment fluffers in the advertorial press and in various consumer fandoms. These constituencies overlap, supplement, complement one another, provide wiggle room and contexts for one another (most discourses and organized movements exhibit this sort of complexity and dynamism, AI discourse is no different).

"I see no point in celebrating the fact that she's lived so BLOODY LONG."

Fifty-two today.

Syllabus for Peace In Pieces This Fall at SFAI

HUMN-237-01 | Fall 2017

Peace in Pieces: Histories, Theories, and Practices of Nonviolent Politics

Instructor: Dale Carrico; e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu

Thursdays, 4:15-7pm Room: MCR; August 30-December 6, 2017

Course Blog: https://peaceinpiecessfai.blogspot.com/

Rough Basis for Grade: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Co-Facilitation, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%, Midterm Precis/Toulmin, 3-4pp., 20%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 35% (subject to contingencies)

Course Description:

The arc of the moral universe is a longing... and it bends from just us. In this course we will read canonical texts in the theory, history, and practice of nonviolent resistance and world-making. This course is provoked and inspired by stories and strategies of reconciliation connected to traditions of nonviolent politics. But is this "non-violence" simply an alternative, at hand, or another fraught artifact we are making under duress? We will take seriously and look critically at the subtle and structural violences that ineradicably shape everyday life. We will consider legible testimonies to violation, in a variety of textual forms, while simultaneously considering the cultural ideals of persuasion which often accompany definitions of violence and its limits. We will both take up and take on the many paradoxes of nonviolent activism and violent order that complicate the teaching of what passes for peace. The State as site of violence and alter-violence. Nonviolence, interfaith dialogue, and freethinking. Spontaneity and training. Assembly, occupation, Black Bloc. Prerequisite: ENGL-101 Satisfies: 3-Units of Humanities; Critical Studies Elective, Liberal Arts Elective

Week One | Thursday, August 31

Introductions

Week Two | Thursday, September 7

Buddha, Let A Man Overcome Anger by Love

Howard Zinn, Introduction to Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown

Week Three | Thursday, September 14

Karuna Mantena, The Power of Nonviolence

Correspondence of Count Leo Tolstoy with M. K. Gandhi

M. K. Gandhi, TheDoctrine of the Sword

M.K. Gandhi, My Faith in Nonviolence

Week Four | Thursday, September 21

Screen film, "Iron-Jawed Angels,"dir. Katja von Garnier

Ken Butigan, Alice Paul's Enduring Legacy of Nonviolent Action

Jane Addams, New Ideals of Peace: Passing of the War Virtues

Week Five | Thursday, September 28

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Ella J. Baker, Bigger Than A Hamburger 

William C. Anderson, A Call for Self Defense in the Face of White Supremacy

Week Six | Thursday, October 5

A simplified Toulmin Schema

Also: Karl Rogers and Rogerian Synthesis

Week Seven | Thursday, October 12

Gene Sharp, selections From Dictatorship to Democracy

Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace

George Ciccariello-Maher, Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

[Midterm grading]

Week Eight | Thursday, October 19

Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, A Third Reconstruction

Week Nine | Thursday, October 26

Arendt, Reflections On Violence

Must Eichmann Hang? [In-class Handout]

Week Ten | Thursday, November 2

Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? Chapters 1, 2, 6

Nick Estes, Fighting For Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context

Week Eleven | Thursday, November 9

Carol Adams, An Animal Manifesto

Carol Adams, Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Week Twelve | Thursday, November 16

Final Paper Workshop

Week Thirteen | Thursday, November 23

Thanksgiving Holiday

Week Fourteen | Thursday, November 30

Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, chapters 1-3 [purchase the book]

Week Fifteen | Thursday, December 7

Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, chapters 4-6

Thinking What We Are Doing

The following is excerpted from a history of teaching and statement of teaching philosophy requested as part of a dossier summarizing my position at SFAI as I'm assessed for the new union contract. The creation of the dossier was mostly a tedious and time-consuming slog, but I did find clarifying and useful the opportunity to think more explicitly about what it means to be trained in rhetoric teaching critical theory to art students in California in the time of Trump's GOP... 

The title of my version of the Critical Theory A survey course -- no doubt the single course I have taught the most often over the years here at the San Francisco Art Institute -- has usually been "The Point Is To Change It." The title is drawn, of course, from the last of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach": "The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Since I go on to read Marx on the fetishism of commodities as the recommendation of a kind of radical reading practice -- changing the world BY interpreting it, as it were -- things get sticky pretty quickly here. But I first read this quotation simply as marking a re-orientation of western philosophical thinking in critical theory, especially under the pressure of the technoscientific transformations of late modernity and neoliberal postmodernity, away from the otherworldly consolations of the contemplative life to the provocations and promises (and betrayals) of the active life of worldly concern.

On this understanding, critical theory is (or at any rate was definitively shaped by) a return to the classical rhetorical tradition, a return the terms of which set the scene for the postwar biopolitical turn and the present turns of planetarity. Although I do not imagine it is particularly surprising to hear that someone trained in rhetoric would bring a rhetoricized conception to the teaching of critical theory here, what I would emphasize is the possibly more surprising fact that it has been my teaching of critical theory to art students here at SFAI that has been by far the most definitive encounter shaping my understanding of my subject and my work. At the heart of a rhetorical elaboration of critical theory will be an insistence on the distinction of literal from figurative language and an emphasis on the constitutive and resignifying force of the latter. For me, an understanding of the work of figurative language in the ongoing reconstitution of persuasion and meaning connects all theoria to poiesis, that is to say all analysis to art-making.

This is an observation that sits very well with my sense that Nietzsche is as indispensable a figure for teaching critical theory as both Marx and Freud are, as it does also with congenial historical and intersectional critiques pitched from poststructural/ posthumanist/ queer precincts in the present. I would now go so far as to say that what Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud have in common as the three threshold figures who take us from philosophical orthodoxy into the post-philosophical discourses of critical theory is the proposal of (anti-)fetishistic models of reading to re-write the world and ourselves in the image of our contingent values -- where ressentiment, commodification, and sexuality offer up their fetishistic Keys to History -- and in which the fetish functions as a quasi-figure generating false-facts.

My understanding of the rhetorical constitution of society and figurative work of collectivity derives as much from my collaboration with students applying the theoretical language of textual criticism to their own life experience and art practice as from taking up Arendt's understanding of the political, Fanon's posthumanism, King's "revolution of conscience," Davis's abolition democracy, and Butler's performative theory of assembly.

Over the years, in teaching critical theory to art students the work of figurativity in the construction of collective agencies, resistances, meanings has loomed ever larger in my understanding and emancipatory hopes. I have been stunned by the formal experimentation students at SFAI will bring to my assignments for mapping conceptual spaces or crafting new definitions, introducing temporal, visual, tactile interventions into textual argumentation for example. In coming slowly to understand better how my students come to understand the place of critical theory in their own lives my sense of the work of critical theory and rhetoric in everyday life and in my own life has utterly expanded and transformed.

For me, education was never primarily a process of professionalization but of self-creation: It is through my years of education that I was politicized, came out and into my queerness, discovered my vocation for teaching -- and that work of self-creation and politicization and queer expressivity is ongoing. I teach my students that we are all of us incarnated poems -- and that our freedom requires both the legibility of literality before the "Eye of the Law" but also the provocation of a figurativity questioning that legibility to open up legibilities otherwise. As students testify to their hopes and to their histories in the classroom, critical theory becomes a site through which to connect reading practices, writing practices, artmaking practices, and worldbuilding practices more generally. In this work I am not only a guide but, gratefully, a collaborator with my students every term.

Digi Demos This Summer at Berkeley

Summer 2017 

Rhet 166: DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION & ANTIDEMOCRATIZATION UNDER THE LAW

Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: https://digidemosunderlaw.blogspot.com/2017/06/our-syllabus.html
Meetings: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2-4.30pm, 140 Barrows Hall
 

Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies -- Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 6-8pp. 40%. 

                Course Description

How did the promise of peer-to-peer participatory democracy devolve into twitter harassment, doxxing, toxic comment sections, and zero comments? Is techno-progressive "disruption" merely reactionary deregulation, venture capitalist "innovation" merely marketing hyperbole, futurological "acceleration" merely social precarization, tech's vaunted "sharing economy" merely a digital sharecropping society, its "openness" vacuity, its "participation" another form of television? How did early legal and political squabbles over privacy and property online set the stage for our current distress? How might the "end-to-end principle" defining internet architecture across its many layers comport with the ideologically reactionary figure of "negative liberty" playing out in generations of anarchic, spontaneist, populist online activism? What are the politics of a digitality figured as an immaterial spirit realm, when digital networks abet financial fraud and military surveillance via an "internet" powered by coal smoke, accessed on toxic landfill-destined devices manufactured by wage slaves in overexploited regions of the real world? Setting aside the logical possibility and engineering plausibility of "artificial intelligence" does AI as a rhetorical trope in legal and cultural discourse facilitate and rationalize unaccountable algorithmic mediation and muddy our thinking about "autonomous" weapons systems? How does social media facilitate the transformation of factual disputes over climate change, harm reduction, and the macroeconomics of public investment into polarizing culture wars? Are there appropriate and appropriable techniques at hand through which democratizations might resist these degradations? Might "The Future" still be more evenly distributed? Can we still count on the street finding its own uses for things?

                Week One                                                                                                            

Tuesday, July 4 Holiday

Wednesday, July 5 Introductions

Thursday, July 6 

-- The Declaration of Independence.

-- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence ofCyberspace

-- Nancy Scola, Defining the "We" in the Declaration of Internet Freedom

                Week Two            

Tuesday, July 11 

-- John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War"

-- Tom Standage, on his book The Victorian Internet

-- Lawrence Lessig, from Code, Chapter 1, "Code Is Law," pp. 1-8; and Chapter 7, "What Things Regulate" pp. 120-137.

-- Lawrence Lessig, from The Future of Ideas, Freedom on the Wires, Chapters 2-3, Building Blocks and Commons on the Wires, pp. 19-48.

-- Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social

-- John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer

-- Gigi Sohn, Breaking Down the FCC's Proposal to DestroyNet Neutrality

-- Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism

-- Mike Ludwig, People on the Margins Have Everything to Losein the Next Net Neutrality Fight

Wednesday, July 12
-- Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish

-- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology

-- David Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism's Digital Deletion ofthe Left

-- Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation

-- Audrey Watters, The Best Way To Predict the Future Is ToIssue A Press Release

Thursday, July 13

-- Jessica Littman, Sharing and Stealing

-- James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement

-- Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry

-- Katherine Hayles, Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Weiner and Cybernetic Anxiety

                Week Three         

Tuesday, July 18

-- Tim May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

-- Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

-- Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko

-- Aaron Bady, Assange and the Computer Conspiracy "ToDestroy This Invisible Government"

-- David Golumbia, Bitcoin Will Eat Itself

-- David Golumbia, Bitcoinsanity, Part I and Part II

Wednesday, July 19

-- David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society

-- Amelia Abreu, Quantify Everything: A Dream of a FeministData Future

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism

-- Yochai Benkler, from The Wealth of Networks, Conclusion

-- Frank Pasquale, Towards An Intelligible Society

Thursday, July 20 (Precis/Toulmin due following Tuesday)

-- Dan Gillmor, From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

-- Geert Lovinc, Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

-- Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Who Do You Think YouAre?": When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity
-- Alicia Garza, A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

-- Noah Berlatsky Interviews DeRay Mckesson, Hashtag Activism Isn't A Cop-Out

-- Zeynep Tufekci, No, Nate, Brogrammer May Not Be Macho,But That's Not All There Is To It

                Week Four

Tuesday, July 25

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion

-- Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, How Social MediaChanged Protest Forever

-- Michel Bauwens, Political Economy of Peer Production

-- Matthew Yglesias, Silicon Valley's Basic Income FansShould Defend the Actual Safety Net

-- Indivisible

Wednesday, July 26

-- Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation andDisinformation Online

-- Zeynap Tufekci, Mark Zuckerberg Is In Denial

-- Zeynep Tufekci, The World Is Getting Hacked, Why Don't We Do More To Stop It?

-- Zeynep Tufecki, ISIS Has A Strategy To Create A MediaFrenzy And News Outlets Are Struggling To Disrupt It

-- Sam Levin, Pay to Sway

-- Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News

Thursday, July 27

-- Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller, Introduction to Algorithmic Governance

-- Frank Pasquale, Duped by the Automated Public Sphere

-- Frank Pasquale, From Holocaust Denial to Hitler Admiration, Google's Algorithm Is Dangerous

-- The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules

-- Tom Nichols, It's Time to Reboot the Relationship Between Expertise and Democracy

                Week Five

Tuesday, August 1 Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project

-- Frank Pasquale, Bittersweet Memories of Machine Learning, A Provocation

Wednesday, August 2

-- Trebor Sholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy

-- Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon

-- Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity

-- Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity IsNot Near

-- Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek #ACCELERATE Manifesto

-- Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries

Thursday, August 3 Final Paper Workshop

                Week Six

Tuesday, August 8 Poetry Reading/Individual Meetings

Wednesday, August 9
-- Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet (novel to purchase): We Heard You Like Books (2016). 
ISBN-10: 0996421807 ISBN-13: 978-0996421805/Individual Meetings

Thursday, August 10 Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final Paper, 6-8pp.)

Queer Resistances and Abolition Democracy

"[T]he point is to call for an equally livable life that is also enacted by those who make the call, and that requires the egalitarian distribution of public goods. The opposite of precarity is not security, but, rather, the struggle for an egalitarian social and political order in which a livable interdependency becomes possible -- it would be at once the condition of our self-governing as a democracy, and its sustained form would be one of the obligatory aims of that very governance." -- Judith Butler

Final Thoughts From My Class This Term: For Futurity

1 NO MONOLITH

There is no such thing as technology in general. There are a plurality of artifacts, techniques, performances, research programs, events both real and imagined, things used and reused and misused, efforts supported and criticized, knowledges discovered, funded, regulated, made, maintained, marketed, appropriated, everything changing. Technological impacts are always specific and so, they should be specified. As CS Lewis insisted, when we say technology gives people power over nature what this really always means is technology gives some people some power over some other people.

2 PLURALIZE, POLITICIZE, HISTORICIZE!

There is no such thing as progress-in-general, either. Progress is always progress toward ends, and ends are as plural as the people who have them. The facilitation of one end will typically frustrate others, "optimization" always constrains as much as it enables. What technologies are capable of is not determined so much by their engineering specs but by the ways they are taken up by the diversity of their stakeholders. The costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change will all differ according to the positions of its stakeholders. And so, whenever anyone makes a claim in the name of "technology-in-general" or "progress for all" or "human enhancement as such" (as if we all agree already what life is about and what count as enhancements) you should always start translating that into a claim about a moment or conjuncture in an ongoing social struggle over the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change to the diversity of its stakeholders.

3 NATURE AS ARTIFACT AND THE POLITICS OF APOLITICISM.

Not all artifacts and techniques are recognized as technology at all, indeed most are not, and many are treated instead as "nature." When the political work of the natural is to treat that which is open to contestation as if it were instead inevitable or necessary or assumed to be optimal, it tends to defend the status quo and anti-democracy. But when technology discourse treats extreme and even transcendent outcomes as technologically determined, autonomous, or the result of sheer momentum, then that which is least natural of all, that which is the result of the most fraught fragile painstaking effort of all -- political progress itself -- can be "naturalized" into reactionary (Manifest) Destiny, the space of Barthes's alienated Jet Man. Even techno-transcendental declarations which seem to repudiate natural finitude and insist there are "No Limits!" ultimately translate to the customary conviction of the privileged that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them. Again, after all, what would seem more natural to the powerful than the smooth ongoing function of power?

4 INSTRUMENTALITY AND POLITICS.

In this course we have often called on an Arendtian distinction between political power understood as the experience of possibility or potential (power from the L potens) as opposed to instrumental power understood as an amplification of given strengths and capacities. One understanding of power invokes a political or rhetorical rationality which takes plurality and therefore the possibility of resistance for granted, another understanding of power invokes an instrumental rationality translating causes into effects, means into ends. One sees history as a radically contingent, interminable, interpersonal struggle, the other sees history as playing out causal material forces, often superhuman ones. One is prone to social constructions and intersectional analyses grounded in plural histories, the other is prone to technological determinisms and natural progressivisms that recast differences as atavisms. Both understandings or inhabitations of power yield insights and uses on their own terms, but for Arendt it was crucial we grasp the essentially political character of concepts like freedom and progress, and understand the risk of re-casting these values in merely instrumental terms. What Arendt failed to elaborate was the extent to which the theoretical understanding of the political she championed itself depends on deeper instrumentalizations still, most crucially the infra-humanizing work of white supremacy.

5 FOR FUTURITY:

For our purposes together, we have understood "The Future" as a site of imaginative investment, framed metaphorically as a Destiny/Destination, but one at which no one ever arrives.The Futurisms we have observed clashing are discourses, movements, subcultures that have formed around particular narratives and visions of "The Future." Futurology is one such discourse -- with its own archive, figures, frames, canon, and conceits -- and it is becoming one of the prevalent vocabularies through which global elites rationalize the costs and risks of their policies today (even as we raised substantial questions about its logical and empirical standards and historical assumptions: every extrapolation eventually fails, trends are more retroactive than predictive, making bets isn't the same thing as making arguments, etc.). In the last weeks of this course I have emphasized the role of futurology in corporate-military think tanks and commercial imagery and sfnal narratives in contemporary technology discourse that has been marketing deregulatory disruption, privatization of common goods and public services as if these are democratizing and emancipatory developments. Finally, I have used the term "Futurity" to describe the quality of openness inhering in and arising out of the diversity of stakeholders to the present. It is to recognize, preserve, and enlarge this critical and creative space of pleasure, problem-solving, and resistance that I have dedicate this class. The subtitle of our course may have been "A Clash of Futurisms," but the title is: "For Futurity." Remember this: The work of building sustainable, equitable, consensual, convivial futures happens in the present world, in the contests and collaborations of people figuring out ways of living together and reconciling their ends, here and now, not through retreats into transcendent futures, essentialist parochialisms, separatist enclaves, or segregated spaces.

Contract Ratified!

Our first union negotiated contract was overwhelmingly ratified by the membership yesterday.

Come what may, I have acquired a host of benefits and guarantees at school that really turn things around for me. I will now get paid to perform professional functions, like advisement and committee work. I have gained the right to a week's paid bereavement should a loved one die. If the school cancels a class at the last minute, there is now a few hundred dollars' fee I would get to defray all the costs of designing the course (not to mention the cost of turning down possible alternate courses elsewhere). I have gained good faith consideration to re-teach successful classes if they are offered again later. Perhaps you will be shocked to discover that I have not had these benefits before.

Speaking of such little shocks, since I have been teaching at SFAI as a member of the "Visiting Faculty" full time since 2004 and since past service is being respected or "grandfathered" in the calculation of new positions and salaries it is actually conceivable that the result of our labor struggle for me personally will be a shift from thirteen years of single-semester appointments with at-will contracts (that is a "contract" you can be fired from at any time, for any reason, and even without a reason) at the bottom of the school's pay scale, I could now suddenly find myself re-designated a "Senior Lecturer" with a three-year renewable contract, a 20% raise or more, grievance procedures and representatives securing my job position, and a host of new protections and supports.

These days of Trump Republicanism have been deranging and demoralizing, but this labor struggle at SFAI has been years ongoing and it bears remembering that there is always so much more than one thing going on at once in politics.

I was one of the "founders" of SFAI's Visiting Faculty Association in (I think it was) 2012, back when we had to pretend to be a social club to find a space to air grievances and organize under the eyes of a suspicious administration (we're on our third President since then!) that was obsessed about keeping us from ever assembling, organizing, even communicating... You know, not a single colleague with whom I participated in those very first few Visiting Club Association events is still at SFAI with me -- one found a marginally better adjunct job for which she uprooted her whole life, another left adjunct teaching altogether as a no-win situation. They were not wrong to leave, we are not wrong to long to live better lives. It's just that these struggles take forever. They have vicissitudes -- there are many false victories and also false dead-ends. Everything feels like it is going to hell, and then something you've been fighting forever for suddenly goes well. This is true of all politics, but I must say that the lesson of the political struggles I have not simply followed but in which I put my ass out there in the world in a real way for a real length of time (union stuff in middle age, say, Queer Nation stuff in my youth) is that eventually you win much more than seems possible when things seem worst.

No computer has ever won a game of chess.

No computer has ever even played a game of chess.

No computer has ever played anything.

No computer has ever played.

Memories

This is the first CD I ever bought. I still own it -- and listen to it! Something magical happens during her rendition of "Fascinating Rhythm" and Sassy is seized by her genius and the concert just never lets up after that. I got this on the the same day I got my first CD player back in 1983 as a first-year undergraduate at IU Bloomington. I bought it at a record store called The Glass Harmonica, where a jolly couple like two gray acorns in thick gray sweaters sold mostly classical music and Broadway cast albums. My best friend Kathleen and I got a second musical education sampling music at Glass Harmonica Saturday afternoons, Sondheim, Shostokovich, and so on, and then to Mother Bear's pizza and then to the movies... Good gods, this was thirty four years ago!

McCarthy --> Nixon --> Reagan --> Quayle --> Gingrich --> W --> Palin --> Trump -->

Never doubt for a second these guys can ALWAYS get worse -->

LOGO NO EGO

Being on brand is not the same as being a person.

...And We're Back! Last Time I Posted This Tune Here Was In The Last Year of the Administration of the Incompetent War Criminal George W. Bush

When will it end with the "so it begins" tweets?

We lost an election we shouldn't have lost -- that was the beginning -- and now we confront a series of increasingly terrible battles we have to win, almost every single one of which is harder than and in part harder because we lost the election we shouldn't have lost.

I agree it is important to highlight white-nationalist and authoritarian tendencies in Trump Republicanism -- if only to draw on the available archive of effective resistance to such tendencies for those who are most vulnerable and those who are our allies -- but it is also important to recognize historical disanalogies in the American situation (the richness of US physical resources, the advantage of US geopolitical and historical positioning, the diversity of US stakeholders, the affordances shaped by legal, infrastructural, and professional norms, forms and legacies, and so on) to other fascist and authoritarian formations in which we might lodge equally necessary hopes and fears in our present circumstances.

But another thing that bugs me about the hundred or so daily "and so it begins" posts that scroll by me these days is that they seem to be written from a weirdly high orbit, as if surveying the historical scene from an Olympian cloudlet perch while munching popcorn. And yet every tweet seems to be accompanied by the same portentous sigh, in each the same diagnosis is being offered up for our appreciation. Not doing much of anything is not the new doing something... there is nothing new about well-educated armchair quarterbacking (not above this myself) and all-protest-no-policies fauxvolutionaries and purity cabaret among privileged Beautiful Losers. As always, it seems, many lefties and liberals online are falling over themselves to signal to one another how very cool and not surprised they are by all this, how very nonplussed they are as Trump's dangerous ineptitudes and dizzying corruptions and demonstrable crimes multiply. But who cares if you are surprised or not?

We Democrats (and this includes many people to the left of most Democrats, like me, who nonetheless recognize the Democratic Party as the nationally-viable party organization and diverse stakeholder coalition to which we must all of us in the US indispensably turn as the available pragmatic and reformist tool to implement policies in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity, even if we know that educational, agitational, organizational work to transform the terrain of the possible and the important in which parties function is also indispensable and sometimes pressures the party to its annoyance even while mostly it enables the party to remain relevant and effective, such as it is) must do the following:   
[one] identify what is actually happening, we must not overestimate the nature or extent of our failure (we won the popular vote by millions, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, living wage and drug legalization and other liberal policies won support across the country, eg) nor underestimate the unprecedented violations of the Trump administration (it is still early days, but Trump's violation of the emoluments clause is grounds for impeachment, as may be his incitement of executive officials to carry out policies Courts have stayed, but his attacks on citizens, legal residents, people seeking asylum, American families with undocumented members, the press, whole agencies and departments of government and the life-long dedicated public service professionals who undertake their work, eg), since both overestimating our defeat and underestimating their victories leads us to mis-assess the realities at hand;
[two] put a face on those who suffer from urgent problems and bad policies, and provide narrative(s) (some carefully targeted regionally and demographically, some evoking a more general democratic and social justice ethos) that will solicit identification with the sufferer and blame Republicans as the villains prolonging this suffering against the efforts of Democrats;
[three] provide (and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat) concise catchphrases that provide a Democratic vision of good accountable government of a people made happier and stronger by their diversity, a government that provides public investments, social welfare and equal recourse to law as preconditions for freedom as an alternative to the failed and unfair Republican vision that divides, isolates, and neglects individuals ("individualism") the better for incumbent-elite minorities to conquer, exploit, concentrate, and accumulate wealth and authority;
[four] give majorities something to root for: no, this doesn't mean pissing on Democrats singly or as a party every chance you get, but celebrating our good ideas (read the Democratic Party platform) and accomplishments at least as much as we criticize their compromises and before we relentlessly, thanklessly move on to the next problem the solution to which we disdain as imperfect to useless before cracking the whip yet again;
[five] while it is good for Democratic elected representatives to be as progressive as is compatible with their actually-existing constituency, it is never good for a moderate Democrat in a moderate district to be replaced by a Republican (whether you want to call him moderate for a Republican or not in this epoch of Republican extremity) who threatens Democratic majorities in Local or State or Federal and so undermine the effectiveness of the best Democrats in those bodies who are empowered when they are part of a governing majority -- so, if a Democrat is doing something wrong or not doing enough good, pitch your righteous criticisms in a way that strengthens, never weakens, the candidate or the Party, find a Democrat who is doing the right thing or doing better and spotlight the alternative they represent and find out how that Democrat might use your support, connect you to networks and resources to make a difference on the issue more than you realized possible, help to educate the erring Democrat, strive to craft the arguments to make the issue more a Party priority or change platform language or craft specific policy language.
 .
"And so it begins..." Trump the Killer Clown is a very old story -- to the extent that it isn't a completely idiosyncratic and unprecedented one. Politics is always happening, history is already underway. It cannot be politics that "so... begins," for politics doesn't "begin" or "end." Politics is the ongoing, and indeed interminable, reconciliation of the diversity of aspirations of the diversity of sharers of our place and time, including reconciling our sense of which shared problems are the most urgent ones we face. Trump isn't a re-run on cable you already know the story to. Although Trump is in many ways an unprecedented figure (Jacksonian, Nixonian, Reaganomic, Gingrichian, W-esque resonances notwithstanding), it is also true that his rhetoric is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of movement conservative themes, especially as these were ground down to their rhetoric essences in the crucible of a quarter-century of Hate Radio and now circulating virally on social media ("virality" like "AI" or "robotic" or "automated" is a metaphor, much of the work of which seems to me to disavow personal responsibility for decisions made by authors, coders, curators, designers, owners, executives of the techs, apps, platforms invested with figurative agency).

Anyway, we don't know what is going to happen. Many truly terrible things that did not have to happen are going to happen -- beautiful and encouraging things will also happen. We don't know how many vulnerable people we can save from harm, we don't how much damage we can prevent to the unsung compromised fragile indispensable social welfare programs and public investments on which we depend to survive and flourish. To win we are going to have to count on the work of a lot of people who tend to get disdained as "Establishment" types -- lawyers, social workers, teachers, administrators, members of venerable civil rights and social support organizations -- and in less than two years' time we need above all else to do that most Establishment sort of thing of all: to try to get Democrats elected in greater numbers to the House of Representatives, in State legislatures, in Governors' mansions, in Mayors' offices and School Boards and City Councils.

I am a snowflake.

I can be an avalanche.

How "AI" Doesn't Matter

Thinking about the world is the world mattering to the thinker. So long as nothing matters to robots and algorithms, to speak of "AI" is always to lie. There are no, nor have there ever been, nor can we be sure there ever will be any AIs in the world. Indeed, as it is presently constituted the very idea of "AI" is simply a kind of error. The closest "AI" comes to material reality is as a discourse, that is to say, as an ideological framework. It is apt, that so much of the reactionary work of this ideology is a matter of not-mattering, of denial and disavowal: "AI" is the denial, without evidence but with reasons, of the indispensability of biological brains and also lived struggles in which intelligence as a personal and historical force is incarnated in the world, denials at once facilitating the disavowal of our collective responsibilities to support the lives and dignity of our intelligent companions as a general matter as well as the disavowal by owners, users, coders of machines of specific responsibilities for the costs, risks, disruptions and inequities mediated by their machines.

Trek Prefs

Given how much I loved Next Generation when it came out and hated Enterprise when it came out I must say, in retrospect, with a longer run I'm pretty sure Enterprise would have accumulated as many tolerable and even good episodes as Next Generation. Enterprise seemed at first a craven capitulation of Trek to a W. ethos profoundly antithetical to it and I couldn't forgive it that -- it was only the Battlestar Galactica reboot that seemed to read what American science fiction needed to be doing in W.'s America.

Anyway, now that Bush isn't the raw wound he remained for six years or so I find I can enjoy Enterprise the way I would Dark Matter or Killjoys now, as an entertaining show with occasionally interesting conceits and engaging character developments. Definitely Enterprise was a show that got better with each season. Although I will admit the casting for the show endlessly annoyed me (I essentially only really liked Phlox, T'Pol, and Hoshi in an abiding way), the early temporal war and  terrorism plots were clumsy, the dramatic story of the supplanting of an earlier human spacer culture was neglected, and the show deferred for no good reason the much more gripping story (especially to diehard fans) filling in details and dwelling in the dramatic politics of the birth of the Federation from the perspective of a comparatively backward eventually indispensable bit player, Earth, in that tale.

Of course, a new and different hopelessness has now gripped the land... Time for another Trek series: Here's hoping Discovery sticks to the Trek ethos and acts as resistance and alternative to Trumpism as it should. (Or must we rely on The Expanse?) My wish for a non-Star Fleet human-minority series on a Federation cruise ship (to Risa?) sfnal-melodrama-sexfarce directed by Pedro Almodovar will probably not be fulfilled. 

Take what I say with a grain of salt, of course. Voyager and Deep Space Nine are my favorite Star Treks, which I understand is an unpopular opinion, and I for one find the original series still compulsively watchable but Next Generation mostly unwatchable now. Essentially if it's Will episode I am grossed out, if it's a Barclay episode I am creeped out, if it's a Data episode I am rolling my eyes already, and if it's a Wesley episode I want to slap somebody. If it weren't for Picard, Guinin, Q, Beverly, and Ensign Ro, Next Generation would be a near complete bust for me, with a handful of standout episodes. As it is, Next Generation is the only Trek I don't have on DVD.

The original series actually seems more interesting from an sfnal point of view, it is an aesthetically unmatched show (none of the subsequent series has come close to the beauty and iconicity of its art direction, all the more astonishing given the limitations the first series was working with), and nothing comes close to the camp pleasures of the original series when it... goes there.

All that said, love the original series though I do, I must say the boy-man "badassery" of Captain Kirk the fanboys claim to love so much has been replaced in my own DVDs of the series with a diplomatic and rather sensitive if emotionally dramatic Kirk who avoids stupid fights and illiberal opinions. It's funny, Kirk seems far more like Picard than like Janeway, who in the stress of being torn from the Federation often finds she must actually behave rather more as the fanboys pretend Kirk behaved in order to fulfill her responsibilities as Captain. Of course, the fanboys who love Kirk for who he wasn't don't always also seem to love Janeway for who she was. And be all that as it may, Sisko is the craziest badass in the Federation.

Me, Included

Doing your politics on twitter is as hilarious as bringing a mirror to a knife fight.

From Philosophy to Futurology

Philosophy, originating in bad-faith denials of its rhetoricity, has always been an alientaed pseudo-science. But philosophy pressured by the norms and forms of promotion and marketing becomes something even more alienated and pseudo-scientific: futurology.

Wringing In The New Year (My Best Posts and Tweets of 2016, I Guess)

The following are the posts from 2016 that people liked most and which, for the most part, I liked as well:

Politics Is, November 16, 2016
William Burroughs on Peter Thiel, August 2, 2016
Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy, January 1, 2016
Reactionary Futurology in the Democratic Party, August 27, 2016
Did Democrats Lose the Election Because the Left Won the Culture Wars? November 12, 2016
Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies, April 24, 2016
Star Trek Suspicions, June 4, 2016

You know I'm a queergeek and so you may be unsurprised to know that Star Trek comes up fairly regularly here. I must say I think these two pithy less-read Star Trek posts deserved as much or more attention as that one throwaway post did, so I'm including them as well.
Now That's What I Call Techno-Color!
Next Trek Wish List

Futurist Authority and the Toppling of the Ivory Tower, August 7, 2016
Anti-Partisan Party People, May 28, 2016
Tech Destiny! December 22, 2016
Look, Ma, I'm A Capitalist! January 8, 2016
The Usual Suspects: Ben from Ben & Jerry's, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and Tim Robbins for Nader in 2000, May 22, 2016
Bre-Entry, June 25, 2016
Trump Talk Future Talk, October 14, 2016
A Lesson Learned, November 9, 2016

A truly terrible year has ended and a truly terrifying year now begins. I know that this is the year we elected the worst president in our history and destroyed the world and also this is the year your favorite popstar died -- but for me this year is also the worst because I spent two weeks in the hospital after nearly bleeding to death from the eyes ears nose and mouth for reasons that nobody could explain even after I returned home. The diagnosis on which the doctors finally settled was "idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura," which means nobody knows exactly why you may just start bleeding to death from every orifice at any moment (preferably while stuck on a super crowded train in a long tunnel under the Bay during rush-hour, which is my new regularly recurring living nightmare as I commute to teach), a diagnosis that is not in fact any more reassuring when it is described by the acronym "ITP" delivered in highly confident tones by a doctor about to tell you, yet again, that, my my these blood levels just want to stay at the bottom range of normal don't they every time you go back in for monitoring. Yes, a terrible, terrible year.

Now then, selecting "best of" posts has been especially daunting this time around, and I will admit that I simply ignored the dozen or so posts from last year that actually got the most hits (something I have never done before), because thousands of people clicked on posts in which I simply re-posted Clinton campaign ad content under a catchy headline or re-posted a tweet or posted information about poll-closing times that were readily available elsewhere -- and in these posts I honestly didn't do or say anything myself that merits note, let alone a second note now. For years now I have been grappling with the interaction of this longform blog -- a labor of love now in its thirteenth year -- and my (marginally) more popular microblogging... On my twitter profile I used to describe my practice there as "I mostly just tweet my blog," but for a long time now the reverse has been the case, I have been blogging my tweets. As a general matter I think this has made my writing more concise but less thoughtful, which is to say less useful and satisfying for me. And so I mean to return to more traditional essaylets in the coming year and to eschew pseudo-storified tweetstorms or at any rate translate these into essaylets as well. I think I have promised this before.