More On The Coming Crisis...

Greg Sargent:

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.

Today's Random Wilde

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man [sic] who resists authority.

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

A Day "Off"

...spent corresponding with colleagues on administrative issues, union organizing, fiddling with enrollment lists, adjusting syllabi with new information from sign-up sheets for presentations and discussion co-facilitations, printing texts for next week's lecture. A whole day given over to administrivia... if Eric and I hadn't taken a break in the afternoon for exercise and yoga I'd have felt the day was mostly a wash, yet I spent the whole day working. Those who envy a teacher's extensive "free time" should see what we do in between lectures!

The Always Almost Inevitable Constitutional Crisis Is Arriving...

I remember saying well over a year ago that one of the things making intelligent people feel quite insane is trying to hold in your head at the same time the sense that it is at once impossible to imagine a President being and doing what Trump is and does not getting impeached for it as well as impossible to imagine President Trump actually getting impeached for any of it. This is more or less just a version of what the whole election campaign running up to this horror show always already felt like. The rolling approach to a Constitutional crisis over Trump's lawlessness (I'm not even referring to the moral and legal crises represented by Trump's ongoing war against queer folks and brown folks, or his international catastrophes in North Korea, Iran, the Paris Agreement, among so many others) has always had the fraught drumbeat of inevitability about it... Each day after day we brace for the worst as the drip drip drip of firings and indictments tit for tat between the Administration and Mueller and the rest. Josh Marshall warns -- there are of course lots of comparable warnings coming from various quarters these days, this one is at once nicely concise and representative -- that the peril is pitching upward, that various dangerous end-games are being jockeyed for, that it is clear that Trump will gladly take down the country to preserve his skin (as if anyone ever doubted it) and that the hollowed out remains of the GOP, with almost nothing left now but stupid grifters and cynical opportunists and ugly bigots and scarcely-stealthed fascists, are gladly enabling his demolitions:

... 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.

Today's Random Wilde

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

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

Today's Random Wilde

I delight in talking politics. I talk them all day long. But I can't bear listening to them.

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

Today's Random Wilde

The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.

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.
Puerto Rico still needs our help – Congress must help these communities rebuild & recover. https://t.co/LoE9adks0M

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 28, 2018

Long Teaching Day

Mondays are my longest teaching day this term, lecturing in two undergraduate courses back to back from one to seven. Seem terribly daunting and exhausting and raw with exposure -- fifteen years ago I did this all the time, but it's hard to pour out all that sharpness and focus and enthusiasm into such a long and sustained performance nowadays in my fifties. How am I still supposed to be doing this ten years from now? Here's hoping I've got enthusiastic students to engage with to keep things interesting and lively. On the one hand, opening lectures seem comparatively low-pressure, just a matter of going over the syllabus and course policies and introducing ourselves, but these opening moves and impressions set quite a tone, and I always tend to downplay just how many initial frames and formulations get trotted out in these first lectures, often in the form of comparatively off the cuff and informal statements...

Today's Random Wilde

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

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 Walk

Cold and gray this morning, air quality a bit poor from the wildfires in the surrounding areas. Eric and I went to our greasy spoon for lunch and then for a short stroll around the neighborhood, but I'm on pins and needles as Fall term begins tomorrow and I have two courses back to back, teaching from one to seven from afternoon through evening. Mondays are going to be long (and my Tuesdays are given over to my third course, a graduate seminar on design discourse), by the end of term I expect it will be dark as midnight coming home evenings after nine first from MUNI then from BART. We'll see what this term has in store. No doubt I'll settle into a new groove soon enough. For now, I feel scarcely recovered from summer intensives at Berkeley and would like another week to clear my head. But here we go!

Today's Random Wilde

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

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

Older

Fifty-three years old today, somehow... How keenly I still remember, throughout my twenties, not expecting to live to see thirty in the shocking early years of the AIDS pandemic and the height of my activism, then feeling much the same thing about living to see forty after moving to San Francisco from Atlanta to go to grad school and study with my heroes. The last few years have been quite a personal and professional struggle, with serious scary health crises and an ugly protracted union fight and the whole Trumpmerican catastrophe to contend with on top of my usual insomnia, introversion, pervasive anxiety, and relentless self-recrimination... And yet here I am at fifty-three, fitter than I was a decade ago, knock on wood, and somehow this fraught itinerant adjunct teaching life has provided an ongoing living and passion, whatever its exactions and precarity. Hell, this year I paid off my student loan debt and got a three-year contract at one of my schools for the first time! Amazing. To have found and maintained love, friendship, conviction, and vocation in the face of the relentless cruelty and selfishness and stupidity of the world is something to celebrate. To my friends, here and elsewhere, I love you and thank you all for making life better...

Today's Random Wilde

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

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:
❌ Repeal health care after the midterms
❌ Slash Medicare and Social Security
❌ Rush through an anti-choice SCOTUS nominee

— Barbara Lee (@BLeeForCongress) August 24, 2018

Last Prep

Looks like I've got about sixty students this upcoming term, in three courses, an undergraduate survey and two seminars, one undergraduate and one graduate. Spent the day finalizing and printing up syllabi, starting to sketch notes for introductory lectures, reading material from the MA student theses I'm directing (two so far). Usually Fall feels like a bit of a relief, a return to a more normal pace after the sustained frenzy of summer intensives, but it feels as though the load and pace this academic year may match the intensity of summer teaching, at any rate this Fall. Well, it's better to be busy than not, I suppose. 

Today's Random Wilde

Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.

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

Today's Random Wilde

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

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

Today's Random Wilde

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

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...

Never gets old, never gets funny. Even on the day when, within minutes of one another, a Federal jury finds Paul Manafort guilty on eight counts while Michael Cohen pleads guilty to his own eight counts, directly implicating Trump in campaign finance violations. It's gonna be a hot time at Trump's Nazi/GOP rally tonight in West Virginia, I fear. Have your barf bags handy.

Today's Random Wilde

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

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 Walk

Late summer the Morcome Amphitheatre of Roses gets a second wind, and the beds bloom with fragrant vibrant roses second only to the miraculous frenzies of early spring -- today more than twenty folks, mostly older couples, but a pretty diverse lot all told, shared the sunlight space with us this afternoon. That's rare, usually the Rose Garden feels like it's ours alone, Eric and I settle on some private perch here or there near the fan of back garden beds, or near the long waterfall, or past the potted colonnade, or near the redwood glade, and feel we have the place more or less to ourselves. Today, the fountains conversed with the bell-like laughter of kids. A lovely afternoon. It's vacation time for me, my syllabi pruned and polished for fall (I posted them to the blog already this week for those who are interested), my grades for the summer all in, various events and orientations and meetings already gathering steam for the new term. This time next week I'll be a-flutter with stage fright on the verge of two opening lectures, but for now I can breathe easy... We have had our long walk and brunch at our favorite cafe on Piedmont Avenue. I plan to play with the cat, put a jigsaw puzzle together, read Mary Beard on the Roman Triumph, then get high tonight with Eric and Dr. Who. Perfectly lovely.  

Previews of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Graduate Seminar "Designs On Us" at SFAI This Fall

Designs On Us: The Politics and Anti-Politics of Design

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

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

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 Feeling

A Public Option for Financial Services

This is a great idea, to which I will append the two added notions that branches of the public bank should be located, among other places, in United States Post Offices (further embedding in the social fabric and hence better insulating these vital public services from incessant reactionary right attacks) and that a system for public financing of elections could eventually be facilitated through the dispersal of a set, equal amount of public funds to every citizen through their public banking account earmarked for expenditure on their preferred candidates...

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

Critical Theory B | Fall 2018

DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION, DIGITAL ANTI-DEMOCRATIZATION

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
 

Rough Basis for Final Grade (subject to contingencies): Participation/Attendance, 10%; Reading Notebook, 10%; Co-Facilitation, 10%; Toulmin/Precis, 10%; Symposium Presentation, 10%; Final Paper, 10pp. 50%

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

The Declaration of Independence.

John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

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

-- Short Trip to the Library
            

Week Four | September 17 | Histories of the Internet

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

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

Ian Bogost, Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
Zeynap Tufekci, How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

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

Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation

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

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!

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

James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement
Corey Doctorow, You Can't Own Knowledge

Alicia Garza, A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry

Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism

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

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

Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Conspiracy to "Destroy the Invisible Government"
Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News

Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Who Do You Think You Are?": When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity

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

Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko

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

Frank Pasquale, Bittersweet Memories of Machine Learning, A Provocation

Week Thirteen | November 19 | Symposium (First Sessions)

  

Week Fourteen | November 26 | Symposium (Second Sessions)

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

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

Previews Of Coming Attractions: Syllabus for My Undergraduate Critical Theory Survey Course This Fall At SFAI

CS-300-01:

The Point Is To Change It 

Spring, 2018, San Francisco Art Institute

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

Course Blog: http://thepointistochangeit.blogspot.com/
Mondays, 1-3.45pm, 8/27/18--12/7/18
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 15%, Reading Notebook, 15%; Co-facilitation, 10%; Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema, 20%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 40%.

Course Description:

"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx

"Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a 'fact' into a 'contradiction.'" -- Sandra Lee Bartky

"Artists inhabit the magical universe." -- William Burroughs

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
 

                Week Three | September 10 | Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism  

                Week Four | September 17 | Nietzsche and the Fetishism of ressentiment

Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
Nietasche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny

--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science 

                Week Five | September 24 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital

--supplemental Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach and Marx on Idealism and Materialism

                Week Six | October 1 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism

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

Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility 
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry 

--supplemental Benjamin, A Short History of Photography and Adorno, The Culture Industry Reconsidered

                Week Eight | October 15 | Nature As Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies 
Workshop: The Toulmin Schema 

--supplemental Daniel Harris, The Futuristic

                Week Nine | October 22 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo

--supplemental Naomi Klein, Patriarchy Gets Funky
 

                Week Ten | October 29 (Hand in Precis/Toulmin) | "I just knew it had to be something like this."

Screen and discuss, "They Live," dir. John Carpenter

                 Week Eleven | November 5 | The Magical Universe
William Burroughs, Immortality 
Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto

--supplemental William Burroughs, On Coincidence

                Week Twelve | November 12 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze (last day to withdraw with a "W" is November 9)

Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 

               Week Thirteen | November 19 | Intersections

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

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?

Gayatri Spivak, Theses on Planetarity

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

Music makes one feel so romantic -- at least it always gets on one's nerves. -- It's the same thing, nowadays.

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

Today's Random Wilde

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

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

Vacation?

I've handed in grades for the last of my summer intensives and mean to take a few days off before I begin prep for Fall in earnest. My father (from whom I have been long estranged as he Fox Newsified in his retirement during the W. years and from whom I was then even more resolutely estranged when he succumbed rather tragically and utterly shockingly to rapid early onset Alzheimer's a few year's back) has had a serious and possibly mortal fall in his treatment facility back in Atlanta and I am much preoccupied with questions of the frailty of our bodies and our bonds with one another at the moment. Students are complaining of B+s in the usual manner as all this is going on, which feels a bit comically surreal as usual, but who knows what pressures the latest highly put-upon generation must be feeling beneath their mountains of debt and with so few prospects left by the ravages of the psychotic Boomers and undereffectual (largely coming down to a matter of inadequate numbers of us, I fear, as simple as that) GenXers like me. The endlessly revolting and stupid and ugly crimes and treasons of Trumpublicans continue on as we rail, and teach, and march, and simply wait out these few months ahead to see whether or not our fellow-citizens will turn the tide in November, as we're biding our time pretending we have time to bide as the land burns and the seas poison and the skies choke with soot as the diversifying secularizing rising generation gathers its rage and its love to build a diverse, equitable, sustainable democratic polity from the ruins of the cruel scared greedhead bigots of the straight white right. I'm feeling a bit better these days, sleeping better, still comparatively fit, less depressed and panicked, but, man, man, oh man, the shit sandwich that is the present world is doing my sanity no favors at all...