Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, December 11, 2020

Friday, December 04, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, November 07, 2020

Brand New Day

Tomorrow I'll remember Biden was close to my least favorite candidate, tomorrow I'll remember how our indispensable efforts to slow climate catastrophe and right-wing violence and feudal exploitation will die in the Republican controlled Senate, tomorrow I'll remember I'm unemployed with few prospects in a world seething in plague, tomorrow I'll remember how many millions of people who look like me fought for a white-supremacist anti-queer authoritarian regime to gain power, but today I feel great relief, and even a little joy, a last-ditch reprieve and soul-restoration before the next battles... Maybe this long low five year season of losses, in which my health, my cat, my Dad, my Mom, and my school all died as the prospect of decency and sense in my country were dying, too, day by day by day, one after the other, and my voice with them, maybe this long desolation begins its ending today, maybe I can find I still have something to do with myself and say for myself in the world in the days to come...

Friday, November 06, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, October 12, 2020

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Turntables



As always: So inspiring and gorgeous!

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, September 09, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Friday, August 07, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, August 06, 2020

Grading

Grading papers this week, with a couple of stragglers making things interesting as usual as my own deadline looms. After I hand in final grades tomorrow it looks like I'm really off the cliff -- no prospects for teaching in the fall, and contemplating a job search in the midst of a pandemic in a failed state like millions and millions of other folks. Yikes!

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Teaching

Last discussion session of the term tonight -- next week, the last week of this summer intensive, is given over to an office hour marathon, followed by an online Symposium in which they will present their final projects. I've appreciated the mild distraction from Nazis and plaguetime afforded by teaching, but I will not deny the demands of an intensive taught remotely have made the last weeks rather fraught. Having an income through all this so far has been appealing, to say the least. Confronting the existential oblivion of unemployment upon the conclusion of the course is really weighing on me, as I know millions of others are also suffering the same. SFAI has turned a corner, it would seem, thank the billion billion goddesses, but there seems little prospect for adjuncts like me. Let's see what happens.   

Monday, July 20, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, July 18, 2020

John Lewis and Good Trouble

“My philosophy is very simple: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up and just say something. You have to do something. I got into good trouble, necessary trouble. Even today, I tell people, ‘We need to get in good trouble.’” -- Rep. John Lewis, 1940-2020

About John Lewis: “He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise. And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.” -- Barack Obama

Monday, July 13, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, July 06, 2020

Teaching

Grading mid-terms, listening to Sibelius symphonies, feels like old times.

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, June 29, 2020

Teaching

I've spent the last three days crafting a lecture while pushing through writer's block... I've managed about sixteen pages and have another six or eight to go to finish the transcript I'm recording to distribute tomorrow. I've been doing this every week for months now, crafting these polished longform transcripts of lectures I podcast for online learning. The transcriptions of my recorded lectures have given me book-length manuscripts on patriarchy in Greek and Roman antiquity, on queer theory and avant-garde art movements, on the history of critical theory to the present, and on reactionary futurology and "design" culture. Who knows what I think I'm going to do with all these piles of pages -- they number in the hundreds already. But, just on a day to day basis, sometimes generating all this theory to deadline, on issues that matter to me and for which clarity therefore also matters enormously to me can be a real drag... Today, I'm burned out and feeling blocked and I don't feel like I've got the juice to do justice to the topic I'm elaborating. But I'm just going to bang it out, and edit as best I can, and hope for the best.

Friday, June 26, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Teaching

Still don't like teaching online, but I'm not liking it less now than I was not liking it before. Highly engaged students are still engaging as they were, tho' I need to figure out new strategies to keep everybody on board... assuming this is something I'll get a chance to do more of anytime soon. However alienating online teaching can be, I do find utterly chilling the university plans for Fall re-openings without a vaccine or a viable system of contact testing or even a robust set of masking norms being enforced (even informally!) in this country, even in comparatively saner California. It seems to me administrators are typically prioritizing what they see as "institutional" survival over student and staff survival (no, it doesn't make sense) and major bailouts of the public school sector are going to have to be forthcoming in the aftermath of all this... I say this as someone whose school closed and who has been laid off from my teaching jobs (the Rona was at least the context if not the pretext for these decisions) and has no real sense of what comes next for me personally, but I do feel pretty sure, come what may, that schools will NOT really be re-opening or hybrid-opening or whatever they are telling themselves they're planning for now. Cases and deaths are rising, the US failed to contain its first wave, let alone the beginnings of the second wave coming in the fall. Teaching is still happening for now, but it really feels as if... school's out.

Friday, June 19, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, June 15, 2020

Rona Is Real, Re-Open With Care...

The number of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States today will pass the total number of American deaths from World War I, which was 116,516. That means, in four months, the disease is now officially more deadly than almost two whole years of World War I, including both deaths of soldiers killed by enemy fire and deaths of soldiers in Europe from influenza in the 1918 pandemic. The Rona is still real, people, and Republicans don't care if you die -- stay masked, stay distanced, support emergency workers, if you are protesting (and white racism is also a public health emergency, protesting it is righteous and necessary, just try to stay outdoors, masked, distanced, and as safe as may be), and then vote these death-dealing Nazi-collaborating Republican flim-flam traitors and bigots out in November. As always, the real work happens between elections, the work of education, agitation, organization, but the work of elections itself is also real and necessary, frustrating tho' it always also is.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Teaching

...is, I fear, going to be a terrible slog this summer. Online learning is being a terrible headache. It is alienating at best (which is not to deny the usefulness of accessibility it makes available as a supplement and certain creative possibilities worthy of exploration around the edges). But to have it happening in the midst of a school closure, pandemic, righteous uprising, rising authoritarian tyranny, and what sometimes feels like a slow-rolling multi-year nervous breakdown at this point is really, truly, ugh.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Teaching

Teaching an eight-week summer intensive, this time entirely online, and everything feels very much by the seat of the pants. Definitely I appreciate the distraction and welcome the occasion to talk about the politics of equitable sustainable technological change at a time like this. It still looks like I'm jumping off a cliff at summer's end, however, with no fall teaching in sight, and prospects beyond remaining dim and bare...

Monday, June 08, 2020

Trumpproval

PoliticalWire:
[E]very high-quality national poll with proper education weighting had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump two months ago by an average of 6.2%. And nearly every one of them have him leading by more today, by an average of 10.2%... Biden’s lead is not only larger than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, “it’s more secure.”
Pointing out this sort of thing isn't about counting chickens before they hatch (tho' Oscar Wilde insisted that that's the only sensible time to count chickens, since they move around so much after they hatch), this is, for me at least, about resisting despair and trying to be sensible. It is awfully encouraging to think that the Trump epoch might soon really end. It is also encouraging to think the present righteous uprisings against white supremacy and police violence are instilling well the lesson that it isn't enough to vote for Democrats like Biden but necessary to push even the best Democrats (of whom Biden is far from one) from across the democratic left where we are to ensure they do what we elect them to do after the election is done.

Sunday, June 07, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, June 04, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, June 02, 2020

Syllabus for My Upcoming Summer Intensive


CS 301AK-01 (3759) Critical Theory B: For Futurity: A Clash of Futurisms

When/Where: Tuesdays/Thursdays, 4.15-7pm. Online (ONL-CS3) 
Summer Session, 2020, June 9-July 30 at the San Francisco Art Institute
Course Blog: aclashoffuturisms.blogspot.com
Instructor: Dale Carrico dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Description: Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands. This course will stage a contest of futures: Italian Futurism, corporate-military think-tank futurologies, Afro-Futurists, punks, crips, queers, and some competing versions of posthumanism for good measure. Both ranting and raving will be involved. In the end, I will send you out on stage yourselves... and Into! The! Future!

In this class we will distinguish (while also pressuring these distinctions):

1). Futurity: The quality of openness inhering in the diversity of stakeholders to any political present.
2). The Future: Sites of imaginative investment, a Destiny/Destination at which "We" never arrive.
3). Futurisms: imagined and intentional communities, subcultures, memberships, and fandoms organized and sustained through identification with particular visions or narratives of The Future.
4). Futurology: A parochially profitable pseudo-scientific discipline confusing marketing with understanding, and the quintessential justificatory discourse for white-racist patriarchal extractive-industrial corporate-militarism (ie, global financialized "neoliberal" capitalism).

Grade Provisionally Based on the Following: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Reading Notebook (3 Quotes/3 Questions/3 works), 15%; Mid-term Precis (2-3pp.), 15%; In-Class Presentation, 15%; Final Symposium Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 25%. (This is a rough basis for your final grade, which is also subject to contingencies, improvement, and so on.) 

Schedule of Meetings (Subject to Change, Check Online Version for Updates)

June

Week One: Futurity 

Readings:

Jenny Anderson, "The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World"
Ted Goertzel, "
Methods and Approaches of Future Studies"
Roland Barthes, from
Mythologies, "The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat," “Jet-Man," "Plastic" (for the relevant passages scroll to pp. 65-67, 88-90, 97-99.)
Audrey Watters:
The Best Way to Predict the Future Is To Issue A Press Release  
William Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum" (short story)

Discussion, Tuesday, June 9
Workshopping: Syllabus
PRESENTATION(S):  Personal Introductions

Lecture, Thursday, June 11

Week Two: Singularity

Readings:

Shannon Mattern, Databodies in Codespace
Marc Steigler, "The Gentle Seduction" (short story)

Lecture, June 16

Discussion, Thursday, June 18
Workshopping: Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Audience and Intentions.
PRESENTATION(S):  

Week Three: Ecology

Readings:

Laurie Anderson, “The Language of the Future” (performance)

Lecture, Tuesday, June 23

Discussion, Thursday, June 25
Workshopping: The Toulmin Schema
PRESENTATION(S):  

Week Four: Eugenics

Readings:

Peter Cohen (dir.), Homo Sapiens 1900 (a documentary about 20C eugenics)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,
Race And/As Technology
Critical Arts Ensemble,
Eugenics: The Second Wave
Alison Kafer, Imagined Futures from Feminist, Queer, Crip
Amy Goodman interviews Harriet Washington about her book Medical Apartheid: Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Octavia Butler, The Evening, the Morning, and the Night (short story)

Lecture, Tuesday, June 30

July

Discussion, Thursday, July 2
Workshopping: Aims of Argument: Interrogation – Convinction – Persuasion – Reconciliation
PRESENTATION(S):
Precis due by end of scheduled class session.

Week Five: No Future!                                

Readings/Screenings:

Alfonso Cuaron (dir.), Children of Men (film)
Lee Edelman, The Future Is Kid Stuff

Lecture, Tuesday, July 7

Discussion, Thursday, July 9
Workshopping: Critical Film Terms
PRESENTATION(S):

Week Six: The Italian Futurists

Readings:

FT Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
FT Marinetti,
War, The World's Only Hygiene
Valentine de Saint-Point, Manifesto of Futurist Women
Valentine de Saint-Point,
Futurist Manifesto of Lust
Luigi Russolo,
The Art of Noises
Toxic Titties, Mamaist Manifesto
Karen Pinkus,
Futurism: Proto Punk

Lecture, Tuesday, July 14

Discussion, Thursday, July 16
Workshopping: Final Papers
PRESENTATION(S):

Week Seven: Afro-Futurists

“Africa Is The Future”
Mark Dery interviews Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose
Tananarive Due,
Afrofuturism: Dreams to Banish Nightmares
Nnedi Okorafor,
The Magical Negro (this one page story is the first in Okorafor's wonderful collection Kabu Kabu, and the easiest way to read it free is just to preview the book at Amazon, and scroll to the story)
Nnedi Okorafor:
On Stephen King's Super-Duper Magical Negroes
Lanre Bakare, Afrofuturism Takes Flight: From Sun Ra to Janelle Monae
Janelle Monae: “Dirty Computer” (short “emotion picture”) and selected other videos (linked on the blog).

Lecture, Tuesday, July 21

Discussion, Thursday, July 23
Workshopping:
PRESENTATION(S):

Week Eight: Symposium

Symposium, Day One, Tuesday, July 28 (program will appear online)

Symposium, Day Two, Thursday, July 30 (program online, followed by housekeeping, last chance Presentations, and concluding remarks).
Final Paper due by end of final scheduled class session.

Monday, June 01, 2020

Vote Out Hate


His own words are all you need to hear. That's been true for years by now, but there it is. Vote against the Nazis or you are one yourself. That's where we are.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Commencement

Watched so many of my beautiful students graduating today via broadcast on YouTube. So much loss.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Mother's Daily

Thursday, May 07, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks for Me Daily

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Things I Have Learned

During quarantine, a bag of York Peppermint patties of either the “Family” or “Sharing” size will not last the week, but “Party” size is usually just about enough.

Things I Have Learned

Eight weeks: the amount of time after a haircut beyond which my hair begins to recur to my early 90s Rockabilly hair and I start looking like an evangelical preacher in the Kentucky of my birth.

Monday, May 04, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Sick Sad World

Eric and I are re-watching Daria evenings, and finding it a highly congenial coronaviral companion. Along with AbFab, Bewitched, Strangers With Candy, Golden Girls, Red Dwarf, Archer, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, and Monty Python, our usual binge comedy go-tos (I suppose Schitts Creek and At Home with Amy Sedaris will belong on that go-to list in the fullness of time).

A New Politics of Care

Seen via The Appeal:
Global health scholars propose a jobs program to ‘put millions of Americans to work caring for one another’: Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, directors of the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale, write that “the coronavirus pandemic illuminates the need “for a new politics of care, one organized around a commitment to universal provision for human needs; countervailing power for workers, people of color, and the vulnerable; and a rejection of carceral approaches to social problems.” The challenge is “to aim at ‘non-reformist reforms’-- reforms that embody a vision of the different world we want, and that work from a theory of power-building that recognizes that real change requires changing who has a say in our political process.” Gonsalves and Kapczynski argue for the launch of a “massive new jobs program,” a community health corps that “would put millions of Americans to work caring for one another, and with far more sweeping goals than just turning around the sky-rocketing unemployment figures we see today. It would serve our needs for a vast force that can track and trace the virus, but add to it workers who can support those in need, all while securing our health and building real solidarity among us.”

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks for Me Daily

Friday, April 17, 2020

Teaching

Working on next week's lecture on Petronius and satire in the shadow of imperial power. One more final review for an MA thesis student. SFAI is shuttering and I am shuddering: nothing like hard work to distract you from the fact that the work is all over...

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Trumpproval

Gallup: “As President Trump works to contain the damage from the novel coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., the rally in support he enjoyed as the nation entered a virtual lockdown has faded. His job approval rating, now 43%, has slipped six percentage points since mid-March when he earned 49% approval, which tied his personal best... The six-point decline in the president’s approval rating is the sharpest drop Gallup has recorded for the Trump presidency so far, largely because Trump’s ratings have been highly stable and have yet to reach the historical average for presidents (back to 1945) of 53%.”
It's always mattered before, here's hoping Trump's ongoing unprecedented unpopularity will topple the tyrant and his toadies, whereupon the diversifying, secularizing, socializing, planetizing rising generations will put this country and the world on a more equitable and sustainable path. Of course, it's hard to feel hopeful after the events of the last few years -- especially knowing just how eagerly and brazenly garbage Republicans will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to prevail -- and coming hard on the heels of a life-long generational slide into this stupid ugly evil morass, but with a hard fight we might just beat back the Nazis and clear a breathing space for something better to be born in. It's hard to imagine a more dreary vehicle than Joe Biden to invest with our hopes, but my own choice Elizabeth Warren didn't seem to fire the imagination or earn the trust of the Democratic base, and the Democratic party is the imperfect but available instrument through which we best defeat the worst and enact the better for now, so, here we go, I suppose, here we go.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Prepping

I've made and posted podcast recordings for short lectures on Frantz Fanon, Laura Mulvey, Kobena Mercer, Michel Foucault, and Angela Davis. I just finished a podcast recording for short lectures on Seneca's satire the "Pumpkinification" of Claudius and Suetonius' satire-inflected account of Caligula as well. Next up, I still need to craft and record a lecture about Juvenal's satires as well. That's my job for tomorrow. Everybody wants to zoom zoom zoom all the livelong day -- who cares about the shitty privacy politics and shitty security and shitty reduction of academics let alone sociality -- but I'm just plowing ahead with work as best I can. I need only make it through three more weeks of this deranging demoralizing demand and distress... And then we'll really see how bad things might get.

Saturday, April 11, 2020

MundiMuster! Support SFAI

You can sign this petition here if you are faculty, staff, alumni, or otherwise affiliated with the San Francisco Art Institute. Please circulate this statement as widely as possible. Everybody interested is welcome to try to help. Here is the statement:
To the Board of Trustees and Administration of SFAI:

The faculty, students, staff and alumni have been dismayed to hear of the board making critical decisions about the future of the school during closed meetings, without enlisting the community, and apparently without due diligence.

SFAI is eligible to receive millions of dollars in assistance from the federal government’s CARES act, COVID-19 response. Yet decisions about the future of the school -- including layoffs and potential closure -- are set to take place without exhaustive efforts to receive this assistance. Furthermore, even after continued pleas, communication from the board remains inadequate.

In order to establish trust, and ensure an inclusive process, we demand the following:

𝟭. 𝗡𝗼 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀. ALL board deliberations must be open and accessible to all school constituents, regardless of attendees’ voting privileges. (NOTE: Section 8.07 of the Trustees bylaws provides language on making necessary amendments).

𝟮. 𝗡𝗼 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗳𝗳𝘀 of any staff or faculty, including adjuncts, shall take place until such time as all available federal, state, and local aid has been thoroughly and exhaustively sought, and these efforts have been transparently communicated to the school. 


𝟯. 𝗡𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 shall take place without the full consultation of all stakeholders, and again without fully seeking all available aid. We expect the board to provide full accounting and reporting of efforts to receive federal money to the school community and/or our representatives.

We are here to help SFAI and the community, and we need to prevent the repetition of past mistakes. Should the board fail to agree to these crucial needs for accountability and community inclusion, we will assume the board believes itself fit to continue running the school in much the same manner that got us into this situation.