At his rally on Thursday night in Indiana, President Trump unleashed his usual attacks on the news media, but he also added a refrain that should set off loud, clanging alarm bells. Trump didn’t simply castigate “fake news.” He also suggested the media is allied with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe -- an alliance, he claimed, that is conspiring not just against Trump but also against his supporters. “Today’s Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake-news allies,” Trump railed. “Our biggest obstacle and their greatest ally actually is the media.” Robert D. Chain, who was arrested this week for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe while mimicking Trump’s language, also connected Mueller’s investigation to the media. “You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f–––ing one of you,” Chain snarled into one employee’s voicemail, according to FBI documents. “Why don’t you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out.” Trump surely knew about this arrest when he repeated his attacks on the news media Thursday night -- and when he connected the media to the Mueller investigation as part of a grand conspiracy against him and his voters. Periodically in this country, whenever there is violence with a political cast, or whenever political rhetoric strays into something more menacing than usual, we hold debates about the tone of our politics and their capacity for incitement... [M]ost of our elected leaders on both sides have used their prominence to calm passions in hopes of averting future horrors. This time, something different is happening. At this point, there is no longer any denying that Trump continues to direct incendiary attacks against working members of the free press even though his own language is being cited by clearly unhinged people making horrifying death threats against them... Previous presidents have tangled with the press, most notably Richard Nixon, who sicced his vice president on the TV networks. But... even these presidents maintained a grudging acceptance of the news media as an adversarial mechanism of accountability that legitimately informs the public debate and thus retains a vital institutional role in our democracy. Trump simply does not accept this at all. He is trying to destroy this foundational set of ideas in the minds of his supporters. And it seems to be working... The big political question of the moment is how far Trump will go in undermining our institutions and the rule of law as the walls of accountability close in around him.
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Friday, August 31, 2018
More On The Coming Crisis...
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
President Trump pushed through a #TaxScam that gave unprecedented handouts to billionaires and corporations – but believes it’s too expensive to pay hardworking federal workers a reasonable wage. What an insulting way to mark Labor Day. #WorkersDeserveMorehttps://t.co/QGiRaoZjpi
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 30, 2018
Thursday, August 30, 2018
A Day "Off"
The Always Almost Inevitable Constitutional Crisis Is Arriving...
... We’re heading toward a genuine constitutional crisis with the President. “Constitutional crisis” is sort of a meaningless word. But let me try to give it more specific meaning: a threat to the rule of law and adherence to the constitution which the constitution itself does not provide a ready to solution to, not under present political circumstances. The President is getting rid of staunch right-wing ideologues because they will not allow him – whatever their other faults -– to prevent the rule of law to applying to him and his family. To use a analogy, they’ll help him with his misdemeanors but so far at least not with his felonies. That’s what the laying the groundwork to fire Jeff Sessions is about. That’s what the firing of Don McGahn is about. When your boss announces you are leaving and you didn’t know you were leaving, that’s called being fired. Even the inability to state this obvious fact is a symptom of a larger problem: since there’s no apparent solution to the President’s push to make himself invulnerable to the law, we prefer not to say what is happening. We don’t know the precise order of events. But the President is apparently intent on pardoning Paul Manafort –- something that even by Trumpian standards has no real justification other than obstructing justice –- and either ending Robert Mueller’s investigation or putting it under the control of a loyalist who will defang it. This is happening before our eyes. There’s as yet no apparent path by which any of this will be prevented. The one partial path, which is political in nature as it should be, is if the House of Representatives moves to Democratic control in January... Trump appears to know he cannot let the Special Counsel’s investigation continue, not in its present form, not without risking his presidency, his wealth and perhaps his freedom. For now, there’s no reason to think anyone will stop him. Republicans are becoming more accommodating rather than less in helping him to do so. The check will be a Democratic congress which can not only investigate but conduct a largely public investigation.
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Only 3% of Judge Kavanaugh’s records, including his time doing partisan work for the Bush Administration, have been released. Yet Republicans are pushing to start his confirmation hearings in less than a week. Why the rush despite the lack of transparency? #StopKavanaugh
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 30, 2018
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
What an exciting night of big progressive victories in the primaries yesterday! Congrats to @AndrewGillum for becoming the Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida, way to #bringithome.https://t.co/1mREf5MCw5
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 29, 2018
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
NEW REPORT: Nearly 3,000 Americans - mostly the elderly & those in poverty - died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The Trump Admin’s response to this disaster was inadequate & shameful.
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 28, 2018
Puerto Rico still needs our help – Congress must help these communities rebuild & recover. https://t.co/LoE9adks0M
Monday, August 27, 2018
Long Teaching Day
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
My heart is with the entire Jacksonville community today. Not one more life should be lost to this senseless gun violence - Congress must stop catering to the NRA and act on gun control now.
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 27, 2018
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Sunday Walk
Saturday, August 25, 2018
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
The truth is, a clean energy future is not only necessary for curbing the worst impacts of climate change, but it’s relatively inexpensive. Pulling out from the Paris climate agreement was a huge step backwards for our health, environment, and economy.https://t.co/2TinY5xB5c
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 25, 2018
Friday, August 24, 2018
Older
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
President Trump is unhinged, blaming Cohen for “flipping” and declaring he should be leading the investigation into his own campaign, not the Special Counsel. It’s up to Congress to protect Robert Mueller at all costs: add your name and urge them to do so.https://t.co/zIquaKKaUr
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 24, 2018
While we fight the chaos and corruption of the Trump campaign, we can’t let ourselves forget about the GOP’s plans to:
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 24, 2018
❌ Repeal health care after the midterms
❌ Slash Medicare and Social Security
❌ Rush through an anti-choice SCOTUS nominee
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Last Prep
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Ammar Campa-Najjar is a bright, young progressive running to turn CA-50 blue, and his Republican opponent Rep. Duncan Hunter was just indicted for corruption. Chip in to help send Ammar to Washington:https://t.co/UM8QcpRNvM
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 23, 2018
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Pollution can have devastating effects on our nation’s public health. Trump’s plan would lead to an increase of up to 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 — while Obama’s Clean Power Plan would have reduced deaths. https://t.co/RPjpcLAWlX
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 22, 2018
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I’ve shared this story before, but given the news today, I think it’s worth repeating. I grew up in segregated El Paso, TX in the shadow of the Asarco copper smelter. I’ve seen the impact of unchecked pollution on public health. https://t.co/7FK3eOdsg7
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 21, 2018
But Her Emails...
Monday, August 20, 2018
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
America faces a clear choice: we can either move forward as a nation where everyone has the chance to get ahead or abandon the change we've fought so hard for. I say we move forward and fight for our progress.
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 20, 2018
Sunday, August 19, 2018
Sunday Walk
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Previews of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Graduate Seminar "Designs On Us" at SFAI This Fall
Course Blog: http://designsonus.blogspot.com/
Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com
Attendance/Participation, 15%; Reading Notebook, 10%; Presentation, 15%; Symposium Presentation, 10%; Final Paper, 50%
We find ourselves in a world we make, and find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice that is "the political"? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us? In this seminar we will think design as a site through which politics are done, but typically done by way of the gesture of a circumvention of the political. At the heart of this disavowed doing of politics we will contend with a perverse conjuration of "the future." The good life is a life with a future, and it is to the future that design devotes its anti-politics at the expense of the open futurity in the political present. Design as a site of "designation" is a gesture of naming as mastery, of reduction as revelation, of problems as provocations to instrumental technique and not stakeholder struggle, an aesthetic with its own paradoxical temporality, publicity, linearity, knowledge. Design as a site of the "designer label" is an indulgence in fetishism, of the commodity-form, an auratic posture, the psychic compensation of lack and its threat. To elaborate and pressure these propositions, we will spend quite a bit of time in the critique of three design discourses in particular: (one) "Green" design which would accomplish sustainability without history, (two) social software design which would accomplish democracy without participation, and (three) eugenic design which would accomplish life-enhancement without lifeway diversity. In your individual presentations I hope we will ramify our attentions to other design sites: comparative constitutions, fashion design, food styling, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, landscape design, "life coaching," and more.
Week One | August 28 -- Introductions
Week Two | September 4 -- Warnings, Maps, Keys
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Jenny Anderson, The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Race And/As Technology
Lee Vinsel, Design Thinking Is Sort of Like Syphilis: It's Contagious And Rots Your Brain
William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
Week Three | September 11 -- Biomimicy, Permaculture and Viridian Design
Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Janine Benyus, A Biomimicry Primer
Cradle to Cradle Design Principles
The Land Institute Vision and Mission and Our Work
David Holmgren, Permaculture Design Principles
Bruce Sterling, Manifesto of January 3, 2000
Viridian Design Principles
Bruce Sterling, Last Viridian Note
Week Four | September 18 -- Green Urbanity and City Planning
Robert Bullard, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism
Laura Pulido, Flint, Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism
Anthony Palette, Jane Jacobs Vs. Robert Moses
Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
Mike Davis, Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
Stewart Brand, How Slums Can Save the Planet
Deland Chan, What Counts As Real City Planning?
Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm, 10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future
Week Five | September 25 -- Geoengineering and Techno-Utopian Capitalism
Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism
Michael Albert, Natural Capitalism?
Marguerite Holloway: New York Squared: The Man Who Mapped Manhatten
Hannah Arendt, The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man
Time Magazine on Geoengineering
Scientific American, Has the Time Come to Try Geoengineering?
Naomi Klein, Geo-Engineering: Testing the Waters
General Motors, Futurama, 1939: New York World's Fair "To New Horizons"
Week Six | October 2 -- Internet Histories: p2p as Democracy, e2e as Liberty
John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War" (a snippet will be posted on our blog)
Tom Standage on his book The Victorian Internet
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Chapter Three: Commons on the Wires
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 12: Conclusion
Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism
Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless
Ian Bogost, Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
Emily Drabinski, Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race
Zeynap Tufekci, How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Week Seven | October 9 -- Cyberlibertarianism
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, California Ideology
Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish
John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Tim May, The Cryptoanarchist Manifesto
Shannon Mattern, Databodies in Codespace
David Golumbia, Zealots of the Blockchain
Katherine Hayles, Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Weiner and Cybernetic Anxiety
Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko
Week Eight | October 16 -- Privacy/Publicity; Or, Privation/Publication
David Golumbia and Chris Gilliard, There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
Flavia Dzoden, When White Fears Become Big Data
Digby (Heather Parton) The Netroots Revolution
Dan Gillmour, We The Media, Chapter One: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
Clay Shirky, Blogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Conspiracy to "Destroy the Invisible Government"
David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!
Tressie McMillan Cottom, The Real Threat to Campuses Isn't "PC Culture," It's Racism
Madeline Ashby, Domestic Violence
Week Nine | October 23 -- Revolution, Acceleration, Singularity, Seduction
Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto
Jason Sadowski, Potemkin AI
Jedediah Purdy, God of the Digirati
Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity Is Not Near
Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #ACCELERATE Manifesto
Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries
Marc Steigler, The Gentle Seduction
Week Ten | October 30 -- Regulation, Reform, Regret
Frank Pasquale, from The Black Box Society
K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Octopus
Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism
Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon
Audrey Watters, The Regrets Industry
L.M. Sacasas, The Tech Backlash We Really Need
Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism
Justin Reynolds, Designing the Future
Hal Foster, Design and Crime
Week Eleven | November 6 -- Posthumanisms and Neoliberal Eugenics
Peter Cohen, dir., Homo Sapiens 1900
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Critical Art Ensemble, Eugenics: The Second Wave
Slavoj Zizek, Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket
Eskow, RJ Homo Futurus: How Radically Should We Remake Ourselves -- Or Our Children?
Amy Goodman Interview with Harriet A. Washington, author of Medical Apartheid
Maggie Fox, Drug Giant Glaxo Teams Up With DNA Testing Company 23andMe
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Disablement and Inhumanist Biopolitics in Palestine
Octavia Butler, The Evening, the Morning, and the Night (handout)
Week Twelve | November 13 -- screening, dir. Pedro Almodovar, All About My Mother
Donna Haraway, Manifesto for Cyborgs
Week Thirteen | November 21 -- screening, dir., Hiroyuki Kitakubo, by Katsuhiro Otomo, Roujin Z
Alison Kafer, Imagined Futures from Feminist, Queer, Crip
Week Fourteen | November 28 -- Symposium I
Week Fifteen | December 5 -- Symposium II Hand in final papers and notebooks.
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
Secretary Ben Carson’s pushing to weaken rules that combat segregation in housing policy. Shameful. https://t.co/FmZNtZdp6N
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 17, 2018
Friday, August 17, 2018
A Public Option for Financial Services
via The Roosevelt Institute
NEW YORK, NY – In a new report, the Roosevelt Institute calls for the establishment of an alternative option to the currently privatized financial sector. The report, A Public Option as a Mode of Regulation for Household Financial Services in the United States, co-authored by Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mark Paul and Loyola Marymount University Assistant Professor Thomas Herndon, outlines why a new approach to household financial services is necessary and how it could be structured.
The report documents that a large segment of America today is badly served by the traditional financial sector, with 19.9 percent of households being under-banked. A household is deemed under-banked when it either has no access to a checking or savings account at an insured financial institution or has such unreliable access to these entities that it must rely on predatory, high-cost alternatives like payday lenders and pawnshop loans. With basic access to the financial sector a pre-requisite for full participation in the 21st century economy, these exclusions effectively leave nearly one in five households economically stranded. Communities of color are disproportionately harmed by these exclusions.
To ameliorate this economic divide, the report advocates the creation of a public option for finance in which the U.S. federal government would establish a public bank that provides basic transaction services and consumer credit. In addition to meeting the immediate needs of the under-banked, this approach would have the added benefit of setting a new baseline standard for conduct and practices of the entire financial sector. In effect, it would be a bottom-up regulatory tool based on a new and improved floor in how banks can operate and would thus encourage healthy competition in the market.
“In America, it is really expensive to be poor, and our current approach to banking reinforces this harmful dynamic,” said Mark Paul, Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and co-author of the report. “A public option for banking would empower millions of families by giving them a foothold of financial stability. It would also make it much harder for private-sector banks to continue getting away with abusive practices like excessive fees. In one major restructuring of finance, this public option would make our economy more inclusive and bring about a healthy, constructive dose of true competition.”
“Imagine a life with no direct deposit, no visits to the ATM, and no auto-pay on the monthly bills you’d rather forget,” said Thomas Herndon, co-author of the report. “These hardships are just a snapshot of what it’s like to be unbanked—a challenging reality for millions of people in the United States. During the New Deal, this country helped offset the failures of the private banking industry by creating a new set of regulations and public alternatives. By walking away from that progressive spirit and commitment, we ended up with the dysfunctional and exclusionary economy we see today. It’s past time for policymakers to act bold and meet this challenge head-on.”
For years, the Roosevelt Institute has been a leading voice calling for an overhaul of the U.S. banking industry and the need for these changes to bring about a more equitable, broadly prosperous economy. In 2016, the Institute released Untamed: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power. Paul has contributed to the Institute’s research on how new rules would bring about a better economy. His recent report Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the End of Work was covered in The New York Times and Politico. Last year, Herndon released Liar’s Loans, Mortgage Fraud, and the Great Recession, which documented fraud and consumer protection abuses in the securitized mortgage industry.
Previews of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Digital Democratization, Digital Anti-Democratization Course At SFAI This Fall
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://digitaldemocracydigitalantidemocracy.blogspot.com/2018/08/our-syllabus-digital-democratization.html
Meetings: Mondays, 4.15-7pm, August 27-December 3, 2018, 16A Chestnut Street Campus
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 | August 27 | Introductions
Week Two | September 3 | Labor Day Holiday
Week Three | September 10 | Declarations of Independence
John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War" (a snippet will be posted on our blog)
Tom Standage on his book The Victorian Internet
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Chapter Three: Commons on the Wires
Flavia Dzoden, When White Fears Become Big Data
Emily Drabinski, Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race
Maggie Fox, Drug Giant Glaxo Teams Up With DNA Testing Company 23andMe
Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless
Week Five | September 24 | Tech/Net "Neutrality"
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Race And/As Technology
John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer
Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism
Ian Bogost, Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
Zeynap Tufekci, How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Week Six | October 1 | Cyberlibertarianism
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 12: Conclusion
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, California Ideology
Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Tim May, The Cryptoanarchist Manifesto
Shannon Mattern, Databodies in Codespace
David Golumbia, Zealots of the Blockchain
Week Seven | October 8 | Privacy and Privation
David Golumbia and Chris Gilliard, There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!
James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement
Corey Doctorow, You Can't Own Knowledge
Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry
Week Eight | October 15 | Publicity and Publication
Dan Gillmour, We The Media, Chapter One: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
Clay Shirky, Blogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News
Week Nine | October 22 | Revolution, Acceleration, Singularity, Seduction
Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto
Jason Sadowski, Potemkin AI
Jedediah Purdy, God of the Digirati
Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity Is Not Near
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #ACCELERATE Manifesto
Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries
Marc Steigler, The Gentle Seduction
Week Ten | October 29 | Regulation, Reform, Regret
Frank Pasquale, from The Black Box Society
K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Octopus
The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules
Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism
Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon
Audrey Watters, The Regrets Industry
L.M. Sacasas, The Tech Backlash We Really Need
Week Eleven | November 5 | Final Paper In-Class Workshop
Week Twelve | November 12 | Meet Your Robot God
Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project
Week Fifteen | December 3 | The Language of the Future
Poetry Reading, Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final 10pp. Paper and Reading Notebooks)
Jenny Anderson, The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World
Laurie Anderson, "The Language of the Future"
Course Objectives:
One -- Introduce students to Science and Technology Studies, New Media Studies, Network Theory, Digital Humanities and situate these in respect to broader critical theoretical discourses: Marx on fetishized commodities, Benjamin on auratic media-artifacts, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Barthes on naturalizing myth, Debord on the Spectacle, Klein on the logo, and so on.
Two -- Discuss "science" as one among many forms of differently warranted belief (others: moral, legal, familial, instrumental, religious, ethical, political, subcultural, aesthetic); discuss "technoscience" as a particular and usually at once reductive and imperializing figuration and narrativization of the scientific; discuss "technology" as the collective elaboration of agency, not so much as a constellation of artifacts and techniques but as familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing investments in artifacts, techniques, and events with significance in the service of particular ends.
Three -- Discuss access-to-knowledge (a2k), end-to-end (e2e), many-to-many, peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, formations, ethoi as occasions for democratizing and anti-democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle; discuss "democracy" not as an eidos we approach but as ongoing interminable experimental implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them; discuss "democratization" as the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Four -- Discuss the connection of a2k/p2p-formations and media/network theories grappling with these to relational, social, participatory aesthetic and curatorial practices and theories.
Five -- This course takes as its point of departure the insight that the novelties and perplexities of our experience of emerging p2p-formations are, on the one hand, clarified when understood in light of the unique formulations of Hannah Arendt's political thinking but also that these novelties and perplexities provide, on the other hand, illustrations through which to better understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking in its own right: Discussions will include her delineation of the political (as a site other than the private, the social, the violent, the cultural), her notion of the peer (as someone other than the citizen, the intimate, the colleague, the subject, the celebrity), and her accounts of civitas, revolution, public happiness, futurological think-tanks and AI, and totalitarianism both as manifested historically in Nazism and potentially in neoliberalism.
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
With every primary election, we’re given more reason to hope. https://t.co/Lnu0sXekNi
— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 15, 2018
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Previews Of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Undergraduate Critical Theory Survey Course This Fall At SFAI
Mondays, 1-3.45pm, 8/27/18--12/7/18
"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx
This course is a chronological and thematic survey of key texts in critical and cultural theory. A skirmish in the long rivalry of philosophy and rhetoric yielded a turn in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into the post-philosophical discourse of critical theory. In the aftermath of world war, critical theory took a biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault -- a turn still reverberating in work on socially legible bodies by writers like Haraway, Spivak, Butler, and Puar. And with the rise of the global precariat and climate catastrophe, critical theory is now turning again in STS (science and technology studies) and EJC (environmental justice critique) to articulate the problems and promises of an emerging planetarity. Theories of the fetish define the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (commodity, sexuality, and ressentimentality) -- and fetishisms ramify thereafter in critical accounts from Benjamin (aura), Adorno (culture industry), Barthes (myth), Debord (spectacle), Klein (logo), and Harvey ("tech") to Mulvey and Mercer (the sexed and raced gaze). We think of facts as found not made, but facts are made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue the propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while facts are figures we have fetishized to yield paradoxical truths.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
Week One | August 27 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction
Week Two | September 3 (Drop/Add Deadline is September 7) -- Labor Day Holiday
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Nietasche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny
Week Five | September 24 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism
Excerpts from Freud's Case Study of Dr. Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2, Storytelling;
3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis.
Week Seven | October 8 (midterm grading period ends) | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Workshop: The Toulmin Schema
Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo
Week Ten | October 29 (Hand in Precis/Toulmin) | "I just knew it had to be something like this."
Week Eleven | November 5 | The Magical Universe
William Burroughs, Immortality
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto
Week Twelve | November 12 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze (last day to withdraw with a "W" is November 9)
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe
Week Thirteen | November 19 | Intersections
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs
Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto
Week Fourteen | November 26 | Technofetishisms
David Harvey Fetishism of Technology
Hannah Arendt, The Conquest of Space
CS Lewis Abolition of Man (you need only read Chapter Three)
--supplemental Hannah Arendt, Action and the Miracle of Forgiveness
Week Fifteen | December 3 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?
Course Objectives:
I. Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry, Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; the postwar biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault; and the emerging post-colonial, post-international, post-global planetarity of theory in an epoch of digital networked media formations, anthropogenic climate catastrophe, and intersectional associations.
II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Agency, Alienation, Aura, Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism, Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Performance, Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Queerness, Race, Recognition, Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, White Supremacy.
III. Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Marxism/Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Justice.
IV. Connecting theoria and poiesis: thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
I'm deeply saddened by the passing of the #QueenOfSoul, Aretha Franklin. As an African American woman, her voice inspired & empowered me. She was a phenomenal woman who reminded the world that everyone deserves RESPECT. Prayers to her family & the people of her beloved Detroit. https://t.co/1bo8lWlBrU
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 16, 2018
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Today's Random Wilde
Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily
“Mr. Trump isn’t a king; he doesn’t have the power to dispense with laws he dislikes. Put bluntly: Mr. Trump’s assault on Obamacare is illegal.”https://t.co/uq6E6YajBN
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 14, 2018