"The Rich Are Different From You and Me"

Brian Alexander:

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish…. “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.” … There is one interesting piece of evidence showing that many rich people may not be selfish as much as willfully clueless, and therefore unable to make the cognitive link between need and resources. Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal. The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was.

This can hardly be more a surprise than the results of the Milgram Experiment, revealing most human beings are conformist even when it makes them cruel, or Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, revealing the proneness of human beings to abusive and authoritarian behavior should institutional conditions conduce to it.

That human beings in the main are parochial, hierarchical, and prone to rationalize their errors and bad behavior has been well attested since at least Aristotle's Rhetoric recommended ways these frailties might be exploited and circumvented by politicians. Indeed, the whole of politics from an ethical vantage is the creation of a space of conviction and consent -- identified with the state -- the aspiration toward which ameliorates these tendencies, just as the whole of ethics from a political vantage is the creation of space of liberty and open futurity -- enabled by the state -- the experience of which makes sociality a blessing rather than a curse despite these tendencies.

Riot, Try It: A Pragmatics of Urban Disruption in a Planet of Slums

A political scientist at Drexel University, George Ciccariello-Maher, provides an insightful preliminary analytic sketch of recent rioting (hereafter, usually scare-quoted) as a pragmatic political tactic and ethos as well as of the prevailing media narratives through which such disruptions tend to be pathologized here and now in the service of incumbent-elite interests and hence profoundly misconstrued. (Although I will not pursue the point in this essay, I do want to mention at the outset that the Stonewall Riots in 1969 in New York City offer an interesting counter-example, in which an unambiguous insurrection inassimilable to compulsory non-violence narratives about efficacious historical change seems nonetheless to be canonized in liberal progressive discourse. Sure, there's also that whole pesky American Revolution against British Occupation to consider too, but Stonewall still seems to me an especially surprising and encouraging resistance to be getting the liberal postage stamp treatment.)

Ciccariello-Maher emphasizes the emerging pragmatics of rebellious "rioters" in urban settings stratified by economic and police violence. This pragmatism has a number of dimensions. For one thing, it puts a kind of pressure on otherwise unresponsive authorities to address real problems. A case in point, Ciccariello-Maher recalls that in 2009 here in Oakland (where I live) "it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant." The emphasis that it was "only riots" that compelled a response is his, but I certainly agree with it.

In his now canonized -- and hence largely domesticated -- Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes that

law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and... when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress…. [T]he present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

I am not exactly proposing that King would approve contemporary "riots in the streets" but I may be proposing views that seem tantalizingly or scandalizingly close to that. If the very idea seems scandalous I would remind you that just weeks before his assassination King explicitly refused blanket condemnations of riots, insisting on more contextually sensitive critiques:

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

More than that, it bears remembering that although King did not "endorse" "rioting" (whatever saying that is supposed to good for), he was quite happy to raise the specter of "blood in the streets" should the powerful choose to ignore the terms of non-violent struggle. The force of this contrast actually depends on the lived experience of violent insurrection and protest, and hence assumes a curious and substantiating role within non-violent rhetoric. But I would propose a deeper continuity still between the provocation of tension in nonviolent social struggle and some of the unrest that will tend to be condemned as rioting from the perspective of beneficiaries of an unjust status quo.

It is important to see the ways in which King's radicalism complicates the proper location of violence in analyses both of it and responses to it. King is insisting that the exposure of violence is never properly identified as the commission of that violence (which is not to justify violence when it occurs but to attribute responsibility for violence more realistically). King subversively proposes both that when disruption leads to negotiation (or, say, to the proper conviction of a wrongdoer) that would not have taken place otherwise the end of negotiation to which that disruption has contributed should articulate our sense of the substance of that disruption itself, just as when an unjust and exploitative status quo leads to a disruptive response among those who suffer in silence and without recourse in the midst of its superficial peaceableness the resulting disruption should articulate our sense of the substance of that peaceableness. A superficial peace that yields a disruptive reaction may not be the peace it seems but can be an insidious enactment of violence, while an apparent tension that yields a negotiated settlement may not be the violence it seems but can be a promising enactment of reconciliation.

Again, this is not the facile insinuation that King would have approved what are being called "riots" in London or in Athens or in Oakland, but I very deliberately do indeed mean to annoy those whose smug identification with a thoroughly domesticated and nonthreatening fantasy of King would fancy his rebukes would address only the "rioters" while championing the authors of violation and injustice against whom these "rioters" are so conspicuously responding. King properly assigns blame and locates irrationality and recognizes the source of violence not with the suffering but with the failure of constituted authorities when he reacts to his comfortable establishment critics, saying that while they

deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham… your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

There are real questions whether King would still have proposed in our present circumstances the same alternatives he championed in the face of the segregated South (any more than he would have confined himself to the alternatives Gandhi championed in colonial India). Ciccariello-Maher quotes one young rebel who puts the point succinctly:

You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?... Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

A failure of what might be deemed conventional Kingian nonviolence forms an inextricable part of the story of "no alternative" to which many so-called "rioters" are responding in London.Part of the reason this is an especially complicated assessment to make is that so many of the tactics we have come to identify with non-violence were once regarded unambiguously as violent. The violence notoriously advocated by Sorel turns out to be the General Strike -- no longer regarded as violent at all. The occupation of privately owned lunch counters was once regarded as violent, rather than as iconic non-violence. What clearly emerges is that the politics of non-violence is never only, or even primarily, a matter of applying already-established tactics of non-violence to political struggle, but a political struggle to establish-anew the matter of non-violence.

[Added! Wow, the recent Occupations of both public and "private"/owned open spaces but also transport passages, bridges, streets and docks (sometimes rendering them inoperable to expose the complicity of everyday people in the smooth function of systems of oppression) would seem to be pressuring our intuitions about the non-violent still more. Especially provocative are contemporary critiques of policing in which acts of vandalism "provoke" disproportionate tactics of racial profiling, harassment, brutality, and murder by police in the communities they are meant to serve -- suggesting an intriguing (and I would say promising) elaboration and insistence that property crimes are comparatively non-violent in contexts of systemic police violence may also be consolidating.]

It is impossible to deny the force of the London rebel's intelligent assessment of the scene. And once it is grasped that something like "the riot" has often functioned historically both as an effective threat pressuring otherwise unresponsive authorities to solve real problems and also as an effective way to attract otherwise unresponsive media to attend to real problems, and effective where other strategies fail, it becomes necessary to deny the prevailing proposal that "the rioter" is (always-only) unreasoning, ill-considered, self-destructive.

When Ciccariello-Maher goes on to document some of the ways in which contemporary "rioters" more easily evade the sophisticated measures developed in recent years by police to marginalize resistance, arrest demonstrators, and control crowds one realizes that "activists" may have easily as much to learn from "rioters" in this historical moment as "rioters" might learn from "activists" trained in non-violent civil disobedience (that would-be rebels do still have something to learn from civil resistance is one of the lessons of the Egyptian Revolution, as I have discussed already here).

As it happens, there is a profound symmetry to discern in the phenomena of "rioting" and "looting" in the face of the neoliberal mode of profit-taking in an epoch of planetary precarity, financial fraud, skimming schemes, and taxpayer-funded bailouts: gang warfare against gangsters and looting looters has about it a ring of justice that is unquestionably on to something. And, again, Ciccariello-Maher provides quite a lot of evidence that this symmetry is one of which the "rioters" themselves are absolutely aware:

One onlooker to the London riots puts it precisely: "This is about youth not having a future… a lot of these people are unemployed, a lot of these people have their youth center closed down for years, and they’re basically seeing the normal things: the bankers getting away with what they’re getting away with… this is the youth actually saying to themselves, guess what? These people can get away with that, then how come we can’t tell people what we feel?" As one young female looter told The Sun, “We’re getting our taxes back,” and as another told The Guardian, “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters.”

One inevitably hears an echo of Fanon here, and the argument in Concerning Violence in which he describes the "manichean world" of colonial administration, an absolute opposition of colonist/colonized constructed by means of the making and policing of parallel (and inter-dependent) conceptual boundaries and geographical boundaries. Fanon focuses on the "irrational rationality" of race which rationalized colonial exploitation and violence, but one could speak just as well of the demarcation of the so-called "investor class" or "creative class" from illegal, informal, or precarious labor, an "irrational rationality" still resonating with pseudo-scientific racial stratifications as often as not.

Fanon also directs our attention to physical boundaries, borders, walls, infrastructure, the vivid contrast of the separate quarters and settlements of colonizer and colonized, and while Fanon points himself to the example of the conceptual and architectural circumscription of race via norms as well as papers as well as walls in Apartheid South Africa, one could speak just as well of contemporary Palestine, one could point to the recent and still ongoing history of zoning practices and highway construction through which "white flight" of capital from cities to suburbs was facilitated through the destruction of traditionally thriving neighborhoods of color, one could take a hard look at "gated communities" filled with McMansions subsidized by fraudulent finance and maintained by illegal and informal labor.

For Fanon the characteristic violence of anti-colonial struggle is perfectly symmetrical to the violence of colonial administration, the "argument" of civilization under colonialism is relentless violation, exploitation, humiliation, and the violence of de-colonization is in fact the proper "answer" to it, the answer precisely proper to and determined by the context.

The question raised by Ciccariello-Maher's initial sketching of a political economy of "rioting" and "looting" in the context of neoliberal corporate "developmentalism" and neoconservative military "democratization" is whether or not the planetary precarization of structural over-urbanization and over-exploitation produces the kind of "manichean opposition" to which Fanon so ruefully but righteously speaks in The Wretched of the Earth.

I have read Ciccariello-Maher's piece as a sort of preliminary critique of contemporary disruptive "dis-organized" social protest in urban settings under conditions defined by neoliberal-neoconservative ideology, institutions, and public practices. But he described his own aims much more modestly:

I want to address directly the idea that the riots are fundamentally irrational, as the smear of “the mob” would symbolically insist. Let’s listen closely, let’s block out the torrent of media denunciation and hear what the rebels are saying themselves.

When prevailing explanatory narratives and frames in the media and elsewhere infantilize, bestialize, and pathologize these disruptive "dis-organized" urban protestors as "rioting" and "looting" they are re-activating the reassuring platitudes of incumbent-elites confronting what they take to be utterly and essentially irrational "mobs" and one fears they are preparing the way for the usual exterminism in response. To "listen" to the ones who have the guns pointed at them at a time like this is immediately to hear a voice rather than an infantile wail, a bestial cry, a pathological shriek, to confront reason and reasons rather than an unreasonable unreasoning force. To propose to hear anything at all is inevitably to embark on a more ambitious project of analysis it seems to me.

It is not only because I find relevance in both King and Fanon to the social disruption about which Ciccariello-Maher is writing that I found myself turning to them the moment I started reading his piece, but also because I find in the tendency to canonize King while demonizing Fanon the same discursive forces that would insist we see in Oakland, in Athens, in London nothing but a kind of madness rather than a predictable and explicable and even pragmatic response to madness. The conditions of colonization in French North Africa differed from those of colonial India and again from those of Jim Crow, and I would argue that these normative and institutional differences better account for the differences in Gandhi's, King's, and Fanon's radicalisms than does some Fanonian ethos of celebration of violence as an end in itself (about which I begin to say a little more here).

Ciccariello-Maher proposes we understand these disruptions (which isn't the same thing as justifying them in any blanket sense, so I hope I don't get too much of that line of anti-intellectual bullshit in the Moot) and also that we learn something of their actual organization and from their actual practice as they play out. This seems to me an indispensable intervention on its own, but it also seems to me to be an intervention that provokes so much more in the way of analysis and elaboration. These off-the-cuff reactions of mine certainly don't offer the kind of analysis and elaboration I'm talking about, but they do attest to the provocation and I'd like to think they might even amplify it a bit.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk Are the Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurology

That last post was rather long and covered lots of topical ground, but I do want to make sure this late link-rich paragraph doesn't get overlooked:

Anyone who knows the history of Movement Republicanism and the role of a handful of impassioned ideologues backed by a handful of super-rich donors in the creation of an institutional archipelago that disseminated a deranging anti-governmental discourse and organized a legislative program that turned the tide of New Deal to Great Society civilization into Reagan era through Bush and Teavangelical anti-civilizationism (about which I've said more here), should pay close attention to PayPal billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and their coziness with transhumanoid and singularitarian and futurological would-be gurus, from Kurzweil to Brand to Brockman, their support of the rhetoric of "spontaneous order" and hence the practice of privatization of public investment and culture (for example, of public education, security, infrastructure, the space program), their inevitable hypocritical reliance on government coupled with anti-government rhetoric, their peddling of reactionary geo-engineering and Web 2.0 superficialization schemes as though these are in some way "green" or progressive (aided and abetted by many progressive-identified folks whose fetishization of "technology" renders them, as so often happens, particularly susceptible to reactionary authoritarian politics).

Sins of the Transhumanoids: More on "Animal Uplift" and Reactionary Futurology More Generally

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot, regular reader Martin responded to my recent critiques of the so-called "animal uplift" arguments Robot Cultists have been making lately to cash in on the hype surrounding the latest Planet of the Apes movie, but his response raised some larger issues, too. He wrote:

You criticize them a lot, but within the transhumanist community, George [Dvorsky] (and Michael [Anissimov, presumably?]) are not your enemies. George put forward a moral argument for enhancing the lives of nonhuman animals. I personally think the technology is so distant, if it's ever possible at all, that it's not worth speculating about. More to the point, after reading George's article, I can't seem to make myself care about that issue. After all, there are human animals who are suffering right now, and who could use a little uplift. The same moral imperative applies to them…. I don't know if George would agree with me, but that's what I take away from it.

Dvorsky advocates the forcible re-writing of nonhuman animal cognition and morphology into forms more congenial and familiar to human animals. I explained at length in the response to Dvorsky I linked to why it is wrong to use "enhance" as though it were a neutral designation in such arguments.

It is one thing to work to eliminate the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of human ones in the present world, it is actually quite another thing -- and a far more profoundly questionable one at that -- to propose that nonhuman animals suffer simply in being different from human animals in their way of being in the world, let alone to propose that we can simply assume in advance that it is neutral to claim it is so much better to live and think in a human way (a construction that already fancifully and possibly perniciously presumes human beings themselves have only one way of living and thinking that is proper to them) that we can just pretend in advance that nonhuman animals would consent to their forcible policing into conformity with more human ways of living and thinking.

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and I happen to believe that most nonhuman animals do have a voice already in which they communicate their dissatisfaction with violation and exploitation quite well -- I hardly regard it as democratic to treat nonhuman animals instead as ventriloquist dummies congratulating humanity for the inherent superiority of our manner of cognition to justify whatever parochial preferences we happen to hold at the moment for how we want to treat them as raw material for our megalomaniacal project of the day.

The outrageous episode of futurological immodesty represented by their "animal uplift" arguments is, by the way, just one of many symptoms of the same parochial hubris that plays out time after time in the neoliberal eugenicism of the transhumanoid bioethical stances.

To frame as neutrally desirable "enhancement" what always amount to actually parochially preferred values is to render sensible deliberation on matters of prosthetic intervention in an era of non-normativizing therapy considerably less clear. I have argued for years that non-normativing medicine brings quandaries of consent to the fore -- that the politics of prosthetic self-determination demand a scene of consent that is legibly informed and non-duressed in ways that demand considerably greater entitlements than most notionally democratic states are willing to contemplate at the moment.

Certainly, the vacuous pro forma consent that satisfies market ideologues is profoundly inadequate here, given how stratified such scenes of "consent" happen to be by the inherent threat of precarity and informality and by the misinformation and fraud of marketing norms and profit-taking scams.

I would say that most futurological discussion of "enhancement medicine" with their activation of wish-fulfillment fantasies of eternal youth, marketable attractiveness, invulnerability to dis-ease, comic book super-capacities, body loathing, and all the rest are really best regarded as simply the extreme end of the marketing and promotional culture that already hyperbolically and fraudulently suffuses medical development discourse in North Atlantic societies.

Martin may be right to say that "enemy" is a rather overdramatic word to describe my relation to these transhumanoids, but certainly, to say the least, our disagreements are very strong and very deep. Now, if the actual plausibility of the "tech" they talk about was a precondition for critiquing transhumanoids and singularitarians and nanocornucopiasts and techno-immortalists I daresay I wouldn't ever talk about those assorted nuts at all, "ape uplift" handwaving certainly not excepted.

Again, their futurological discourse strikes me as interesting these days almost entirely as a symptomatic matter -- in the "animal uplift" stuff, for example, replaying tropes and moves from colonialist discourse in clumsy labcoat drag. Usually futurology is little more than a kind of fun house mirror and clarifying amplification of the pathologies and deceptions of mainstream advertizing culture, neoliberal developmental discourse, and techno-hype, it seems to me.

In practical terms, here and now, I still think futurology deranges technoscientific deliberation with hyperbole and terror and fraud in profoundly pernicious ways, and I also do indeed think its organizational life bears watching in the way comparably nutty celebrity cults but also, say, neocon think-tanks do.

Anyone who knows the history of Movement Republicanism and the role of a handful of impassioned ideologues backed by a handful of super-rich donors in the creation of an institutional archipelago that disseminated a deranging anti-governmental discourse and organized a legislative program that turned the tide of New Deal to Great Society civilization into Reagan era through Bush and Teavangelical anti-civilizationism (about which I've said more here), should pay close attention to PayPal billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and their coziness with transhumanoid and singularitarian and futurological would-be gurus, from Kurzweil to Brand to Brockman, their support of the rhetoric of "spontaneous order" and hence the practice of privatization of public investment and culture (for example, of public education, security, infrastructure, the space program), their inevitable hypocritical reliance on government coupled with anti-government rhetoric, their peddling of reactionary geo-engineering and Web 2.0 superficialization schemes as though these are in some way "green" or progressive (aided and abetted by many progressive-identified folks whose fetishization of "technology" renders them, as so often happens, particularly susceptible to reactionary authoritarian politics).

Be all that as it may, however, these days I really do think the various superlative futurologists are mostly worthy of attention for what they expose, clarify, and illustrate about more mainstream technoscientific hyperbole, reductionism, denialism, and anti-democracy. Also, of course, they are usually good for a few laughs.

Reagan, PATCO, and the Turning of the Tide (With a Prelude on Pelerin and the Rising of the Tide)

Michael Moore reminds us of the PATCO Strike thirty years ago today and the moment when Reagan turned the tide in the long-ongoing Republican War against Americans who work for a living. Follow the link to read the whole thing, from which I will be excerpting a few choice morsels in a moment. Before you do, though, I also think it is important to remember as well some of the pre-history that brought Reagan to that terrible moment and gave him the power to do the terrible things Moore documents in his piece.

As it happens, the organization and dissemination of the right-wing resistance to macroeconomic literacy, North Atlantic social democracy, and Roosevelt's New Deal, the moment when both Movement Republicanism and the Randroidal-Friedmanian libertopian pseudo-intellectual strain that fuels Movement Republicanism to this day was born can be dated just as confidently as Moore dates the turning of the tide. The date is April 8, 1947, and the signing by its members of the "Statement of Aims" of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Mont Pelerin was spearheaded by market fundamentalist icons Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises (members George Stigler, Karl Popper, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read all loom large in the reactionary-libertopian organizational and rhetorical universe), and members of the Society included countless figures who would be prominent in conservative administrations in Europe and the United States (a third of Reagan's economic advisors were members, as were some key figures in his cabinet) as well as in enormously influential right-wing publishing and media formations.

No less pernicious was Mont Pelerin's role as the fountainhead of the right-wing think-tank movement which sought, and has largely succeeded in, creating a fraudulent funhouse mirror of the world of the legitimate academy. So much of the anti-democratic and anti-governmental rhetoric yoking freedom with so-called free markets and championing "open societies" -- where "openness" designates the deregulatory clear-cutting of general welfare, the privatizing looting of public goods, the libertarian exposure of the vulnerable to limitless predation and violence -- arises out of Mont Pelerin.

Karl Polanyi saw the threat clearly even as it emerged, and wrote the still indispensable book The Great Transformation as a call to arms that was never heeded as it should, but inspired readers generation after generation to this day (it is always a big hit with my students). Both David Harvey's excellent A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan provide glimpses of this story of Mont Pelerin and post-war anti-civilizationism, which I think is even less well-known than the recent history Moore brings to the attention of a new generation in his piece. It is from Moore's piece, though, that I am quoting here:

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated. Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981." …

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days…. Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started -- a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person. The rich hated paying better wages and providing benefits. They hated paying taxes even more. And they despised unions. The right-wing Christians hated anything that sounded like socialism or holding out a helping hand to minorities or women.

Reagan promised to end all that. So when the air traffic controllers went on strike, he seized the moment. In getting rid of every single last one of them and outlawing their union, he sent a clear and strong message: The days of everyone having a comfortable middle class life were over. America, from now on, would be run this way: The super-rich will make more, much much more, and the rest of you will scramble for the crumbs that are left. -- Everyone must work! Mom, Dad, the teenagers in the house! Dad, you work a second job! Kids, here's your latch-key! Your parents might be home in time to put you to bed. -- 50 million of you must go without health insurance… -- Unions are evil! You will not belong to a union! You do not need an advocate! Shut up and get back to work! No, you can't leave now, we're not done. Your kids can make their own dinner. -- You want to go to college? No problem -- just sign here and be in hock to a bank for the next 20 years! -- What's "a raise"? Get back to work and shut up!

And so it went. But Reagan could not have pulled this off by himself in 1981. He had some big help: The AFL-CIO. The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that's just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers -- they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly. Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America. And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything -- and they did. They slashed taxes on the rich. They made it harder for you to start a union at your workplace. They eliminated safety regulations on the job. They ignored the monopoly laws and allowed thousands of companies to merge or be bought out and closed down. Corporations froze wages and threatened to move overseas if the workers didn't accept lower pay and less benefits. And when the workers agreed to work for less, they moved the jobs overseas anyway.

And at every step along the way, the majority of Americans went along with this. There was little opposition or fight-back. The "masses" did not rise up and protect their jobs, their homes, their schools (which used to be the best in the world). They just accepted their fate and took the beating. I have often wondered what would have happened had we all just stopped flying, period, back in 1981. What if all the unions had said to Reagan, "Give those controllers their jobs back or we're shutting the country down!"? You know what would have happened. The corporate elite and their boy Reagan would have buckled. But we didn't do it. And so, bit by bit, piece by piece, in the ensuing 30 years, those in power have destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people. Wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. Take a look at the statistics and you can see that every decline we're now suffering with had its beginning in 1981… It all began on this day, 30 years ago. One of the darkest days in American history. And we let it happen to us.

Follow the link for more, including organizations and movements Moore recommends you might want to connect with if you are concerned about the issues he is talking about and want to do something about them. And as I always say: more, and better, Democrats! Perhaps you should get more involved with your local Democratic party or think about running for office yourself?

"The Future" on the Planet of the Apes

George Dvorsky, one of the White Guys of The Future over at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET has written a piece explaining why "we" (a pronoun he calls into question but uses uncritically anyway) have an "obligation" to forcibly re-write the brains and bodies of nonhuman animals in forms more congenial to us. This notion is floated over in the futurological transhumanoid-singularitarian online precincts fairly regularly -- they have a pet term for it, "animal uplift," a phrase with all sorts of perfectly appropriate paternalistic and colonial associations in tow -- and I have written an extensive response to a similar proposal offered up at IEET last year by James Hughes.

The online futurological sects of transhumanism-singularitarianism-technoimmortalism-nanocornucopism function more or less as subcultural sf-fandoms do, with the difference that their devotion is to that form of corporate-military marketing discourse called futurology rather than sf proper, and like futurology itself their enthusiasm for this rather inept sf-subgenre (inept because it amounts to science fiction without the demands of plausible plots, engaging characters, subtle interplays of setting and theme and so on) depends on the deliberate confusion of science fiction either with science proper or science/development public policy.

Very much true to form, then, you will observe that Dvorsky has been moved to speculate on "animal uplift" right now, not because there is any actual breakthrough in biology or medicine or cognitive interface technology or even in the politics of animal rights activists striving to protect chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans from abuse at the hands of their human cousins (campaigns like the Great Ape Project with which Dvorsky absolutely inappropriately, indeed grotesquely, identifies his own fancifully intolerant project). No, George Dvorsky is writing about "uplifting" apes because a re-make of a Planet of the Apes movie is being widely advertized prior to its release, and transhumanists find it more difficult than other people to distinguish the circulation of hype about Hollywood action pictures from serious deliberation of technoscience policy questions. (To emphasize the point, Dvorsky's article is illustrated with a still from the upcoming film.)

It is important to point out that although Dvorsky sprinkles his article with the usual futurological handwaving -- "humans are poised to discard their often fragile and susceptible biological forms," he writes (oh, poised are we? but beyond the poses of Robot Cultists how is the science looking on the immortality pill and soul-uploading business, George? yeah, exactly like it always does) -- the fact is that there is exactly zero chance that any of the sooper-immortalizing sooper-geniusizing sooper-strongifying sooper-humanizing soup futurological sub(cult)ures pine for are in the pipeline. As always, the reason one takes superlative futurological discourses and sub(cult)ures seriously is because they symptomize in particularly clarifying and extreme forms the problems and pathologies in more prevalent mainstream forms of technoscience and developmental policy discourse, advertizing imagery and popular culture.

Dvorsky's article contains sweeping rather wikipediesque general surveys of the animal rights movement in a Peter Singer-centric frame and social contract theory in a John Rawlsian sort of way. The result, as is usual in this sort of discourse, I'm afraid, is rather a lot of loose talk and very little engaged understanding. My own reading of Dvorsky will be a closer one. The first note I would direct your attention to is the recurrence throughout his article of phrases like "Humanity’s relationship with animals" … "our relationship with animals is still changing" …and so on. What I want to point out is the obvious fact that human beings are also animals and hence that our relations with other humans are already relations of animals with animals. This matters, because we are so attentive to differences that make a difference among human animals that we take great care (or should) in generalizing about how we should behave in respect to one another.

The fact is that there are endlessly many differences that make a difference among the varieties of nonhuman animals, not only differences of species but among individual members of species (go ahead, think of all the endlessly many ways the cats in your life have differed from one another, I'll wait here for you). To begin a piece about "humans" as "us" intervening profoundly in the lives of "animals" -- in a way both denying the continuity of that "human us" with the nonhuman animals it targets for transformation but also lumping all animals other than the human ones into an undifferentiated mass of raw material available for transformation -- is a profoundly prejudicial opening conceptual gambit.

This denial of an already existing continuity of human with nonhuman animals prepares the ground for Dvorsky's proposal that a society of sentient beings must be engineering by futurological sooper-science while disavowing the endlessly many ways in which that society already profoundly exists, the ways in which our human lives are already made more meaningful through our connection with nonhuman animals (and I certainly do not mean only the ways in which we brutalize and exploit nonhuman animals, though those stories are also enormously complicated ones as well).

"Enhancement biotechnologies will profoundly impact on the nature of this co-existence" between humans and animals [sic], writes Dvorsky. Try to set aside the perfectly ridiculous but absolutely typical overconfidence of Dvorsky's use of "will" here, as if all the usual robo-magicks futurologists interminably handwave about were bulldozing down the hill toward us in plain sight, what matters here is the conceptual sleight of hand afoot:

Today, efforts are placed on simply protecting animals. Tomorrow, humanity will likely strive to take this further -- to endow nonhuman animals with the requisite faculties that will enable individual and group self-determination, and more broadly, to give them the cognitive and social skills that will allow them to participate in the larger social politic that includes all sentient life.

I would say that many nonhuman animals are already endowed with faculties that enable individual and, in a certain sense, group determination. Certainly, many nonhuman animals already have "cognitive and social skills" and already "participate in the larger social politic that includes all sentient life."

It seems to me that vegetarian and animal rights activists are better regarded not as proposing that we "gift" nonhuman animals, as it were in indiscriminate bulk, with sociality but as insisting to their fellow human animals that we are brutalized ourselves in the greedy insensitive parochialism of our denial of the sociality of so many nonhuman animals with whom we share the world and the ongoing making of the public world already.

From such a perspective it becomes clear that Dvorsky's proposal we shift from paternalistic protection of nonhuman animals to the cognitive imperialism of rewriting their capacities in the image of our desires is indeed a matter of "tak[ing]… further" an existing project, amplifying its terms, exposing its underlying assumptions through their reduction to absurdity.

Dvorsky's flabbergasting chauvinism is palpable when he simply assumes the outcome of deliberation in that fantastical fetal theatricum philosophicum of the Rawlsian Original Position that no sentient in its right mind would prefer to be incarnated as a dolphin or a Great Ape (though I must say that dolphins and Great Apes seem to me often to be having a high time, so long as human animals aren't behaving too badly in their near vicinity):

The prospect of coming into the world as a great ape, elephant or dolphin in the midst of an advanced human civilization can be reasonably construed as a worst outcome. Therefore, humanity can assume that it has the consent of sapient nonhumans to biologically uplift.

Of course, his "therefore" is a foregone conclusion, since it is already preceded by the declaration that entertaining any other possibility than that being a dolphin or an elephant is a "worst outcome" is "unreasonable." Hell, George, if it's really so bad to be an ape or elephant why doesn't your "ethics" require they be genocidally put out of their misery here and now? For my part, so long as I can evade their fishing nets and petting zoos, I daresay it might be quite a bit more fun to frolic in the seas as a promiscuous dolphin than to live as a human in a world run by Republicans, at any rate far from the "worst case" I can imagine entertaining from the Original Position.

Dvorsky's initial insensitivity to the richness of lives different from his own has mobilized his perfectly typical techno-utopian fantasy to impose a radical homogeneity upon the planetary commonwealth of sentients. Near the end of his piece, Dvorsky fancies that a "future world in which humans co-exist with uplifted whales, elephants and apes certainly sounds bizarre." I must say, that I honestly think such a world would be considerably less bizarre, less profuse, less provocative, less promising than the one in which we already live, the one Dvorsky disdains in the usual futurological manner for the amplified parochialism of "The Future" he pines for.

There is, after all, no more typical futurological gesture than for some futurological guru to handwave some mega-engineering day-dream or sooper-capacited body which essentially offers up a fun-house mirror of the present, in which all our present wishes as shaped by our present problems and wants are fulfilled a thousandfold, and then declares this utterly impoverished closure of the open-future for an amplified present satisfaction as some kind of wild and cra-a-a-a-azy imaginative exercise.

Just as futurologists like to cheerlead the profound instability and insecurity of neoliberal networked financialization of the global economy as "an acceleration of acceleration" when it really is nothing but planet-scaled fraud and exploitation, so too they love to peddle corporate-military triumphalist scenarios in which elite incumbents have nothing to fear but the endless upward-rocketing of their profits as if these dreary visions were the most fabulous utopianism. As I have put the point elsewhere: To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms.

"Ultimately, the goal of uplift is to foster better lives," writes Dvorsky.

By increasing the rational faculties of animals, and by giving them the tools to better manage themselves and their environment, they stand to gain everything that we have come to value as a species.

What should go without saying here is that there are profound differences of opinion and value as to what actually constitutes "better lives" among the members of the human "species" for whom Dvorsky feels so eminently capable of speaking as "our" spokesman -- by the way, thanks, but no thanks, George!

It is only by assuming that his own parochial values are neutral when they are in fact conspicuously under contest that Dvorsky can make the flabbergasting declaration that re-writing nonhuman intelligence in the image of human intelligence is always only a matter of "increasing the[ir] rational faculties."

One can only respond with morbid mirth to the proposal that making nonhuman animals more like human ones would "give them the tools to better manage… their environment" when it is only human animals and human intelligence and human culture that has managed to bring the biosphere to the brink of destruction, while whales, dolphins, apes, and pigs make their way in the world quite sustainably and contentedly as far as I can tell, at any rate so long as human beings aren't making their lives a misery.

"[I]t would be unethical, negligent and even hypocritical of humans to enhance only themselves and ignore the larger community of sapient nonhuman animals," wrties Dvorsky.

The idea of humanity entering into an advanced state of biological and/or postbiological existence while the rest of nature is left behind to fend for itself is distasteful.

Again, there is of course zero chance that the Robot God is going to arrive any time soon to end history in a Singularity whereupon she/it/they will minister to the faithful post-parentally, allowing them to wallow in shiny immortal robot bodies in nanobotic treasure caves amongst the sexbots or to "upload" into cyberspatial heaven virtualities and so on and so forth.

What is interesting in Dvorsky's delusion is the confidence of his attachment to it of the innocuous adjective "advanced." What would be lost were humanity to gain what the Robot Cultists are hyperventilating about? How much of the context in which meaning, significance, value, intelligibility presently emerges can be transformed before it becomes problematic to speak of meaning, significance, value, intelligibility attaching to some profoundly altered state?

Enhancement is a word that actually indispensably always implies "enhancement" according to whom? "enhancement" in the service of what end at the cost of what other ends?

I actually need not indulge the transhumanoids in a debate about their parochial preferences in matters of brains might be more edifying arranged in the abstract, any more than I need indulge monastics in a debate about the number of angels that can dance on a pin-head, since I can simply point out that there are contentious debates afoot concerning the capacities and values about which they fancy their own judgments are neutrally denotative of "increase" "advance" and "enhancement."

To use these terms as Dvorsky and the transhumanoids do, is simply to reveal one is unwilling to participate in the relevant discussion, not to offer up a position in it (the attitude is a familiar one among the energetically faithful, with whom, after all, Robot Cultists have more than their fair share in common, upsetting though it usually is to them to point out the fact).

What actually substantially matters in Dvorsky's parochialism is how it is of a piece with already prevailing bioethical discourses, which shape the present contours of our catastrophically failed racist War on (some) Drugs, for example, encouraging the early release and public marketing of unsafe drugs that presumably make people more "functional" consumers and workers while prohibiting drugs that provide harmless pleasures or unconventional states of consciousness, discourses that encourage the therapization of neuro-atypical or simply demanding children into obedient conformity with their classmates, discourses that justify surgeries to police intersex morphologies into apparent conformity to the normative sexual-dimorphism in the name of "well-being" of the child, discourses that stigmatize deaf parents who would select for deaf offspring to celebrate a community of the differently-sentient as though they were child abusers, and so on. As happens so often in futurological discourses that pretend to engage in a policy-discourse of foresight in a developmental frame, what tends to matter in the futurological is the way it symptomizes and illuminates present prejudices and pathologies.

Paul Raven has already responded to Dvorsky's piece, a marvelously acerbic bit of which I cannot resist quoting:

To assume that we know what is good for an ape better than an ape itself is an act of spectacular arrogance, and no amount of dressing it up in noble colonial bullshit about civilising the natives will conceal that arrogance. Furthermore, that said dressing-up can be done by people who frequently wring their hands over the ethical implications of the marginal possibility of sentient artificial intelligences getting upset about how they came to be made doesn’t go a long way toward defending the accusations of myopic technofetish, body-loathing and silicon-cultism that transhumanism’s more vocal detractors are fond of using.

It is probably too much to hope that the writer of this eminently sensible and properly aggravated response actually literally had me in mind when he refers to "vocal detractors" making accusations of "myopic technofetish[ism], body-loathing, and silicon-cultism," but one will indeed find all these and many more accusations of that kind made by me, among other places collected here. Be that as it may, I cheerfully endorse Raven's critique here.

In a fit of pique, Dvorsky responded to Raven thusly:

I'm going to issue a challenge to the opponents of animal uplift: Go back and live in the forest. I mean it. Reject all the technological gadgetry in your possession and all the institutions and specialists you've come to depend on. Throw away your phones, your shoes, your glasses and your watches. Denounce your education.

Inasmuch as vanishingly few of the people who make gedgets, phones, shoes, glasses, and watches are now or ever were self-identified members of Dvorsky's little Robot Cult or have explicitly espoused Dvorsky's highly idiosyncratic viewpoint on the non-issue of "animal uplift" I do hope if Dvorsky will forgive my refusal for now of his very generous offer of standing as the Official Representative of artifactual civilization.

As someone who earns his daily bread in the profession of education -- among other things I teach courses on science and technology, not to mention, occasionally, vegetarian and animal rights theory, to university students at Berkeley and art students at the San Francisco Art Institute -- I really must protest that disagreement with Dvorsky's rather odd views hardly demands that I renounce my education, quite the contrary in fact.

To the extent that our attire, our language, our posture, our affect is constituted socioculturally I would gently suggest to Dvorsky that his wished for expulsion of non-believers from the technological Eden of which he fancies himself uniquely representative (without ever doing much in the way of actually making or maintaining it, I really must add) involves the imagination of a primordial original "State of Nature" that really no more exists than "The Future" does, or more precisely, both exert their substantial justificatory force in the present in the political positioning they organize and rationalize.

As Raven suggests, I would propose that Dvorsky's "futurological" framing here on questions of the worldly relations of human and nonhuman animals plays out in the service of mostly reactionary political positions. In this, I would say that Dvorsky's article is fairly typically futurological.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?)

Another post upgraded and adapted from the Moot. Upon discovering that I am trained in nonviolence and teach courses at Cal on violence and nonviolence, libertopian Kent has declared me possibly "halfway to libertarianism" because of my commitment to the "non-initiation of force" which he presumes he shares with me and which he fancies is somehow expressed in his own devotion to the exploitation, violence, fraud, and environmental destruction of "free market" orders.

This is what I had to say to him about that:

If by "libertarian," Kent, you mean "anarcho-capitalist," you couldn't be more wrong. If you mean by it something more like Ian -- who raised the first objections in this thread -- you probably wouldn't be too far wrong.

I'm a sort of democratic socialist, I guess.

The fact is I have no problem with private ownership or well-regulated market exchange, especially the more this ownership and enterprise occurs [1] in the context of equitable access to institutions for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes, [2] in the context of a scene of consent rendered legible by general welfare affording actually informed actually non-duressed consent, and [3] in the context of the socialization of commons and public goods to ameliorate tendencies to the externalization of cost and risk arising from industrial modes of production. Given all that, frankly, it seems to me I might rightly be called an advocate of a democratic organization of capitalist economy, an advocate of a capitalism made to express the non-violence libertopians incredibly claim to discern in it already in its present plutocratic vestigially feudal form.

Be that as it may, I have no doubt my advocacy of single payer healthcare, public education, and basic income in the service of the scene of consent and socialization of key modes of production prone to externalization amounts to democratic socialism in most construals of it, which is also perfectly fine with me.

I do think radical forms of commitments to democracy and non-violence (and I hold both of these myself) end up meaning something close to what many self-identified anarchists mean by "anarchism." Sometimes the words really do seem to get in the way. Given the plasticity of these terms I can easily think of people who would properly see their own politics in mine but think of themselves as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, or as radical democrats, or social democrats, democratic socialists, secular democrats, pluralists, multiculturalists, anti-militarists, non-violent activists for social justice, market socialists, environmental justice advocates, Greens, queers, punks, civil libertarians, or, yes, sure, anarchists, too.

And yet I really do think there are problems with too many anarchisms -- and your own, Kent, most of all. Market fundamentalists, market libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, neoliberals too readily disavow the artifice of the so-called natural market as well as the duress, fraud and exploitation that stratifies market transactions you are apt to declare "non-initiation of force" through the facile expedient of pretending "initiation" begins several steps beyond when much of the nasty action actually is taking place.

More generally, I think much that gets declaimed about under the heading of anarchic state-smashing would much better be articulated in more specific and situated ways that end up sounding more like resistance to violence and inequity and unaccountability in existing institutions and practices, and so look to me more as efforts at tinkering, reform, democratization of governance than, you know, Smashing The State.

To be honest, I suspect that in the monolithic characterization conjured up by that very term -- The State -- it may be there is no The State to exist for us to smash any more than there is The God to exist for us to kill. Given regular elections, general enfranchisement, and wide eligibility for office-holding, the separation of powers, the subsidiarity of the federalization of governance, the shifting, competing, co-operating patchwork of jurisdictions, the interplay of private/public/social/cultural/media apparatuses subsumed under and against that heading in any case, it seems a bit of a mystification to pretend a singular concentrated overbearing substance is in play, one to which a monopoly on violence is attributed, a violence that is presumably unaccountable however answerable it actually may turn out to be, however convoluted and ramifying its pathways, a violence which is taken exhaustively to characterize it even if its edicts are backed only in the last instance by such force, and even then hardly always efficaciously and usually only accountably.

If I might be a bit more theoretical about it, I would say, more or less with Arendt, that politics (the encounter with difference) is prior to sociality (sustained association in difference), and that the plurality out of which the political arises is as much about the ineradicable problems of disputation and structural violence as about the real promises of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation, and that this takes us to concerns with the institutionalizations of order before it takes us to the wholesome democratization of government.

And so, all in all, even if it offends my left-anarchist friends sometimes, I still must insist that I do not want to smash the state, but to democratize it.

Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist (Or Am I?) -- Continued

I am not appending to this post, a copy of a second one from a couple days later consisting of reflections continuing on from the first.

I have sometimes thought that my "political orientation" would be better captured with the neologism consensualist, given the centrality of the provision of a substantial scene of consent to my understanding of a democratic and non-violent politics. In our historical moment, however, philosophical neologisms like that render one all too susceptible to the distortions of marketing and self-promotional discourse (advertizing, with all its devastating deception and hyperbole, has come quite close to colonizing public deliberation entirely by now, to the ruin of all), recasting one as another wannabe guru circus-barker with a movement and a manifesto soliciting tax-deductible contributions in exchange for promises of offering a meaning of life package re-conceived as something like the promise of more regular bowel movements and a whiter smile.

Since it is not a substance but a scene, not a faculty but a ritual, there will always be concerns about the profound gameability of consent. The libertopian anarcho-capitalist's whole schtick essentially derives from his pretense that transactions are perfectly consensual and social orders sublimely peaceable even when they are stratified by unequal knowledge and misinformation and driven by what amount in the context of informal and precarious labor to permanent threats of force.

In the typical neoliberal instance, then, I would declare the scene of consent largely vacuous as often as not. But of course there are vulnerabilities on the flip-side as well. I describe a legible scene of consent as one that is both informed and non-duressed, but since "informed" can never arrive at omniscience and since "non-duressed" can never arrive at omnipotence, there will always be a slippage between actual scenes of consent and the ideals at which they might be said logically to aspire, the legibility of the scene will always be a comparative matter. Part of that legibility would have to derive from the susceptibility of the scene of consent itself to interminable re-elaboration by critique. Part of what might be named by "anarchism" is this interminable constitutive dimension of critique to the scene of legible consent, it seems to me.

To the extent that democracy is less an eidos to approximate in our institutions (culminating, presumably, in The Ideal of "direct" democracy, "perfect" consensus, or what have you) than it is an ideal that might wholesomely articulate endlessly many different institutions in endlessly many variations and measures (the notion that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, as I would put it, probably does not have one best institutional materialization, given the many contexts in which it might make public life better), then another part of what is named by "anarchism" might be this interminable experimentation with and proliferation of institutionalizations of the democratic notion.

Inasmuch as I believe the key values of democracy are equity and diversity, and these values both depend on one another but are in tension with one another (I refer to equity-in-diversity as a single value, but the hyphens denote a dynamism not a stability), their institutionalization again looks to demand an endless re-elaboration through critique, and again "anarchism" seems to me a good name for this interminable constitutive dimension of critique.

Part of the trouble with a commitment to non-violence is that there is always some measure of dispute as to what violence consists of in the first place, and to circumscribe this dispute is itself to do violence. So, too, the constitution of a vocabulary in which it becomes possible legibly to testify to a violence will often (perhaps always) render testimony to another violence illegible. Brecht's question and quip, which violence is worse, to rob a bank or to found one? is provocative not only because one can easily assume a perspective from which either violence can seem worse, but because there is something about assuming the perspective from which either violence becomes clear that renders the other nearly invisible. Again, "anarchism" might name the interminable critique that permits a traffic among perspectives rendering testimonies to violation provisionally legible (even at the cost of rendering others provisionally illegible) to resist a stabilization that amounts to a violent circumscription of the discourse enabling attention and testament to and hence the institutional address of violences in the first place.

Part of what I would insist on, however, is that whether order names the provisional universalization of equity-in-diversity, whether it names the comparative accomplishment of the scene of informed nonduressed consent, whether it names the provision of ever more people with ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect, whether it names the commitment to nonviolence, this order is always institutionalized, and the work of critique is to expose the measure of slippage between the actual and the aspirational not to rationalize renunciation of the institution but to enable its interminable re-elaboration.

There is a tendency and possibly a permanent temptation in the anarchic imaginary that indulges an exposure that yields so all embracing a transparency it amounts finally to indifference rather than insight, that indulges a rebellion that yields so all embracing a rejection it amounts finally to resignation rather than to resistance. It goes without saying that any more pragmatic commitment to resistance, re-elaboration, and reform is no less prone to complacency, parochialism, exhaustion -- and the restlessness and rigor that might be named by "anarchism" can provide an indispensable re-invigoration to those of us whose pragmatism is directed to the service of the ethics of consent, democracy, non-violence, equity-in-diversity. Any anarchist who helps democratize the institutional terrain that besets us is a friend to me. To me, that comrade is democratizing the state, not smashing it -- but I am content to keep quiet on that quibble if that is all that stands in the way of our mutual education, agitation, and organization to materialize liberty and justice for all.

Postscript: More Anarchy from the Moot

Another amendment arising from the conversation occasioned by the first two.

A regular reader asks:

How can there be such a thing as a "left anarchist"? Isn't anarchy just extreme libertarianism? I've never been able to figure them out. Just what exactly is it that they want? And why do they always appear at ANY progressive protest & behave like meth-crazed agent provocateurs? Their over-the-top violence ALWAYS ends up undermining & discrediting these protests. It's a mystery why they get so much sympathy from the left. I find them to be a pointless nuisance, and I just wish they would just fuck off for good.

Definitely anarchism has a richer pedigree on the left than the right, though perhaps not a longer one. Actually, the right-wing libertopians are (depending on your perspective on them) either exposing a deep problem always already inhering in any left-anarchic positioning or are simply misreading and distorting the left-anarchic ethos in their rather facile fashion. I'd say there was some truth in both of those perspectives, actually, but I incline to the second. (I'm giving you a little latitude in your declaration about anarchists always being disruptive and extreme -- I know where you are coming from, since this whole discussion arises from exchanges some of which are of the kind you are responding to, still I don't doubt you know that your statement is an overgeneralization, and that the many sympathetic anarchists in your company at demonstrations and discussions who are not disruptive have likely not attracted your notice precisely because they have not behaved the way you disapprove.)

You know, one of the pre-eminent figures of left-anarchy in the world today is the great Noam Chomsky, and he has said:

[I]t only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life and to challenge them. Unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate and should be dismantled to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership, management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations... I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism[,] the conviction that the burden of proof has to be on authority and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

I find it very easy to affirm all of this, but since I think many who would not think of themselves as anarchists at all (and with good reasons) but as liberals, democrats, peace workers, and so on would affirm what Chomsky is saying here as much as I would, I can't say that I see why approval of Chomsky's attitude here, then, makes me someone who wants to "Smash The State" in the least, rather than, say, to liberalize it, or to democratize it, or to deploy it in the service of non-violence (through the institutionalization of successions of leadership via regular election, through the maintenance of alternatives for the non-violent adjudication of disputes like courts, through the re-distribution of plutocratic concentrations of wealth via progressive taxation, through the amelioration of susceptibilities to corruption and abuse via separation of powers, subsidiarity of federalization, accountability to a free press, enumerated rights, elections and juries, through the maintenance of a legible scene of informed nonduressed consent via the provision of general welfare, public education, basic healthcare, basic income guarantees -- at the very least minimum wage guarantees -- paid for by means of taxes and fees, through the circumvention of abusive and fraudulent externalization of costs and risks inhering in mass-industrial production via socialization of commons and public goods, and so on).

It is all very well to say assertions of authority bear a burden of proof -- but what standards define that burden? who agrees to them? what about those who do not? just what is the scene in which this justification is offered up and adjudicated? Surely far too many of the questions that would presumably distinguish the anarchist-left from much of the rest of the left (plenty of it quite as radical as the anarchists are) are circumvented rather than addressed in Chomsky's enormously attractive declaration of anti-authoritarian principle.

Given this, how useful is Chomsky's formulation as a specifically anarchist proposal after all? -- I'm afraid I must say I think it is not very helpful finally at all. And, given this, is it typical in this weakness of other efforts at general anarchist formulations in this vein? -- I'm afraid I must say I think it is indeed rather typical of the problem (and, frankly, Chomsky's formulation is among the clearer ones available). Still, I'm far from denying my sympathy with what Chomsky says -- I daresay I am closely allied to Chomsky in this as in many other political positions -- hence the title of the post (Why I Am Still Not An Anarchist -- Or Am I? Part One and Part Two) and the reflections that accompany it.

Indebtedness As A Lifelong Condition of Existential Precarity

David Graeber:

It is simply assumed, nowadays, that we will be born to indebted, mortgage-paying parents, go deep into debt for our educations, and never, quite, completely, get out -- and, therefore, that we will both live our lives with a constant feeling of at least slight attendant fear and humiliation, and that a significant portion of our life income will end up being paid out in interest and financial service payments.

It is enormously interesting to contrast the anxious relation of subjects to owner-elites sustained throughout life by means of ongoing indebtedness, to the empowering relation of citizen-peers to one another through their collaboration and contestation by means of the democratic state.

It is also interesting to ponder the different work of a massive state indebtedness shoring up owner-elites through the maintenance of the tyrannical state qua war machine (whether directing its energies toward foreign foes in wars of conquest of toward domestic foes in class warfare) as against the deployment of the democratic state qua investment engine to provide institutions for the nonviolent adjudicate of disputes, for the provision of general welfare to maintain the scene of informed nonduressed consent on which nonviolent enterprise depends, and to socialize public and common goods whose production otherwise demands the violent externalization of costs and risks or the violent expropriation of the common heritage of humanity.

I find myself thinking of Foucault's Discipline and Punish in which he proposes that the permanent failure of modern prisons to function as institutions of rehabilitation may suggest that their function instead is to create a permanent population of delinquent subjects at once susceptible to exploitation and conspicuous abuse in ways that are indispensable to the privileged but would otherwise undermine the self-image of polities defined by ideals of general welfare and legal equity, while at once bearing permanently in their bodies the conspicuous stigma and in their lives the costly marginality of illegality not so subtly warning majorities always to behave even if they are "free" not so to do.

Foucault's point is not, by the way, to propose that the production of delinquency is a secret or conspiratorial project undertaken under cover of rehabilitation but that the disciplinary assumptions and supervisory mechanisms through which normal(izing) rehabilitation is undertaken are functionally indistinguishable from the production of delinquency as such, with the implication that prisons are a representative disciplinary institution rather than an exceptional one, just one islet in what he describes as a "carceral archipelago" which includes armies, broadcast media, companies, courts, factories, and schools producing "capable selves" rationalized in reference to the normalizing administration of general welfare.

What is especially provocative about Discipline and Punish, of course, is its exposure and critique of what might be described as anti-democratizing forces at the very heart of the democratic ethos, arising out of democratizing assumptions and ends themselves, and while this can be useful it can also be rather demoralizing (as it was not for Foucault himself, who was devoted to all sorts of liberal and radical political campaigns in his public life of precisely the sort some might think he had fatally problematized).

Recalling that pieties about rehabilitation are infrequent compared to the discourse in which prisoners are said to be "paying their debt to society" I find myself wondering if Graeber's discussion of indebtedness as a generalizing existential condition reminiscent to me of Foucault's delinquency might provide an analytic tool helping those of us Marxists/Postmarxists who have made the biopolitical turn (usually via Arendt, Fanon, Foucault) and who would still make distinctions between democratizing universalisms and anti-democratizing neoliberal/neoconservative universalisms that are often intertwined historically, discursively (through the language of humanism, rights, nonviolence, consent, markets, and, yes, democracy itself).

Making this move through the figure of debt is especially attractive given the ongoing neoliberal(/neoconservative) "progressive" developmentalism that polices planetary hierarchy, installing a planetary precariat (the rewriting of the vast majority of humanity in the image of informal insecure radically precarious labor, the postmarxist proletariat) especially in the context of global digitizing-financialization-logoization and international debt through "structural adjustment protocols."

Strife and Debt

It is in this context that I think it is interesting to read this comment on the ways contemporary society compels young people into comparative acquiescence by Bruce Levine. (The excerpt is about student loan debt, but I also agree with him about the impacts of mind-numbing superficiality of "participation" in now ubiquitous social media formations and the pharmacological-therapeutic imposition of mediocrity-conformity among school age students, follow the link to read more):

Large debt -- and the fear it creates -- is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

More Graeber: Debt and Magical Thinking

David Graeber:

The peculiar willingness of American families to accept, at a time of 9.2 percent unemployment, that our real problem is the need to cut government spending to balance the budget can only be explained as a classic example of magical thinking (I’m an anthropologist, I know magical thinking when I see it): perhaps if we can balance our collective budget, I will be able balance my family’s budget too.

Obviously this is enormously relevant at the present time, given the facile rhetoric circulating especially among the anti-tax anti-government ante-constitutional Movement Republicans to justify their eagerness to crash the economy (you know, for kids!), endlessly analogizing budgetary decisions families make with those governments make -- even though family budgets are minute pieces of national budgets and not vice versa, although governments have tools available to them that no family has at its disposal, thus rendering the analogy instantly, obviously, utterly false.

It is interesting that Graeber is making the same sort of point from a different angle of view: Rather than imposing an inapt domestic set of budgetary standards on a national budget in an understandable effort to make comprehensible something unfathomably enormous through something modestly quotidian, something altogether alien through something more familiar, Graeber is proposing that another part of what might be afoot here is the desire to exert control on what seems volatile at the local level by uncritically demanding the control of the wider context in which that local threat is lodged, a desperate desire to wrangle the wider world into stability on familiar terms in the hope that one's own pocket of the world will thereby resume its own stability.

Still More Graeber: Debt, Money, History

David Graeber:

As long as there has been money, there’s been debt… For one thing, what we now call “virtual money” is nothing new. In fact it’s the original form of money. Credit systems predate coinage by at least two thousand years. Human history has alternated back and forth between eras of virtual credit money, and eras dominated by gold and silver -- which have also, invariably, been times of great empire, standing armies (coins were invented to pay soldiers), and slavery. [A]rguments over credit, debt, virtual and physical money have [always] been at the very center of political life… [W]hen money is imagined as gold… simply one commodity among others, attitudes toward debt tend… to harden, often creating dramatic social unrest (pretty much every popular insurrection in the ancient world was over issues of debt). In periods dominated by credit money, such as the Middle Ages, money was seen essentially as an IOU, a social arrangement. The result was, almost invariably, the creation of some sort of great institution designed to protect debtors, so as to ensure the system didn’t fly completely out of hand: periodic clean slates in the ancient Near East, bans on the charging of interest and debt peonage in Medieval Christianity and Islam, and so on… We already learned in 2008 that debts -- even trillions in debts -- can be made to go away if the debtor is sufficiently rich and influential. It is only a matter of time before people draw the obvious conclusions: that if money is just a social arrangement, so many IOUs that can be renegotiated by mutual agreement, then if democracy is to mean anything, that has to be true for everyone, not just the few. And the implications of that, could be epochal.

Marvelous stuff, definitely I will have to read Graeber's book now. The identification of money with debt has, of course, an enormous pedigree, but Ellen Hodgson Brown has been attracting a lot of populist attention lately flogging the point, I know.

The deeper point about money as a social compact rather than as a commodity -- the point which yields the "epochal implications" concerning democracy of his conclusion -- reminds me of the great Karl Polanyi's insistence in The Great Transformation (the first, immediate, and still best repudiation of Hayekian neoliberalism) that money -- like labor and land -- cannot properly be regarded as commodities.

Polanyi's point about labor is actually at the root of my own insistence on the maintenance of a scene of legible informed nonduressed consent, his point about land -- where "land" has the same sort of resonance it does in Leopold's "land ethic" -- is also at the root of my insistence on the socialization of public and common goods -- both of which I elaborated in a companion post occasioned by Graeber's editorial today.

Fool Me Tee Vee -- A Clip Show

An anthology once updated daily but nowadays only occasionally...

1. In museums the world over you will find clay jugs centuries old that already feature the New and Improved E-Z Pour Spout.

2. Babies wearing denim diapers while sexy music plays in the background? Not cute, actually. Not cool, actually. Not anything at all but creepy and sick, actually.

3. Ladies, if he's looking at your lashes, he's gay.

4. "Real Americans" hate San Francisco so much that all commercials are filmed in our beautiful city so they can stare longingly at it all year between their vacations here.

5. The sixteen year old model looks young because she is young, not because of the cream they are lying about her slathering on her sixteen year old face.

6. Seeing the same commercial four or more times over the course of an hour, even for a product that seemed mildly desirable the first time around, comes to provoke in any sane self-respecting person, I find, a kind of spiritual crisis, calling forth the urgent desire to obliterate every single instance of the damned thing and every single person associated with it in a screaming bloody sledghammering rain of vengeance.

7. I realize it's already round, Mr. Dyson, but don't you think the doorknob, too, is just crying out for a radical re-think?

8. Yeah, thanks, Febreze, when I think of "air freshener" what I really have in mind is a smell like a rotting florist refrigerator in a retirement community for incontinent prostitutes.

9. It's a good thing BBC America is turning into the SciFi Channel now that the SciFi Channel is turning into TBN…

10. And after all, who needs feminism when the tee vee assures us women want nothing at all in the whole wide world but a constant supply of yogurt and chocolate?

11. Your new car looks exactly like everybody else's new car.

12. He's a tough talkin' rule breakin' lawman, he's a loose cannon, he's an infantile belligerent bully, he's a white racist asshole, he's a patriarchal prick, but he gets results!

13. Who needs sit-coms when there is obviously nothing in the whole world more laugh out funny than the subject of goddamn insurance?

14. In 1967, in the Summer of Love, all the hippies were in the park and on the street singing about peace, love, and understanding, but in 2011, in the Summer of Shove, all the hippies and all their guitars are peddling soft drinks and luxury cars and adult diapers like they should be.

15. Using an android phone is just like being sucked into a virtual world and you are flying on an exhilarating adrenaline wave through space and exploding space stations and insectivorous robot swarms and models in cat suits and oiled athletes and they are all brushing white hot against your skin while dance beats throb and guitars wail and you are those space stations, you are those robots, you are those models, you are those muscles, you are those explosions, you are those guitars, except you are really checking your work e-mail on a postage stamp screen because you're on a cellphone and it's not anything like any of that at all you moron.

16. If you were a real man, you'd be driving a big truck. Also, your dick should be bigger.

17. To those who say, "Free, just pay!" I say, "Live, just die!"

18. The proportion of the public relations budgets of major petroleum companies devoted to images of renewable energy stands in a revealing relation to the proportion of the operating budgets of major petroleum companies devoted to producing renewable energy.

19. I'm so old I can remember when they still said you were subscribing to a cable provider so you wouldn't have to watch so many commercials.

20. Chances are, it's neither new, nor improved.

21. Designer pillows? Designer? Pillows? Really?

22. Shouting is not the same thing as acting, there, Whitey McPlainwrap.

23. If Public Broadcasting really wants to thank "Viewers Like Me" they can start by getting rid of the goddamn petrochemical and car commercials already.

24. Homophobia is so gay!

25. It is enormously helpful that they run ads about the show I am watching during the show itself, since by now so many commercials interrupt it to play in a row I am prone to forget what goddamn show I am watching in the first place.

26. You can tell Chris Matthews is a very smart and very serious person by the way he barks like a dog at those with whom he is conversing at regular intervals like all very smart and very serious people do.

27. Note to the Faithful: I'm pretty sure god wouldn't give two shits how you are faring in your little game show appearance.

28. An empty swing-set, a discarded doll, a blond wig, a gavel coming down, dong-dong! and eleven hours later you're saucer eyed in a ruin of blankets and pizza crusts with the phone off the hook as you realize you're re-watching episodes in a Law and Order Marathon that's been repeating itself for at least a couple of episodes now wondering if it's still Sunday or if you accidentally missed work Monday already. In case you were wondering, this is the freedom they hate us for. Well, that and all our, you know, murdering and marauding and stuff.

29. Well, no, since I think actual whores tend to be considerably more professional, ethical, and attractive than the personalities featured on Fox News.

30. When MTV came out, we started watching record company promotional content in between the ads. When Facebook came out, we started surfing promotional content we produced ourselves promoting ourselves in between the ads. In this way, here in America, progress is made.

31. Has it never occurred to you that if you really want your bedroom to look like a hotel suite and your living room to look like a hotel lobby and your kitchen to look like a food court that maybe what you need to do is change your life and not redecorate your house?

32. When you finally toss your crappy Kindle in the trash because it cracked, or because of the expense, or because of the censorship, or because you grasp renting isn't owning a book, or because of all the ads you can't skip (and believe me, it's coming), don't pretend there wasn't somebody warning you and there isn't somebody laughing at you.

33. It really is too bad John Lennon didn't live long enough to see the fulfillment of his dream that one day his music would be used to sell breakfast cereal and long-distance phone service.

34. Watching cooking competitions on television you're given the impression that no woman has a place in the kitchen, while watching the commercials during cooking competitions you're given the impression that women have no place except in the kitchen.

35. It bears remembering that none of the actually safe, actually effective, actually best prescription medicines are advertized on television because they don't have to be.

36. Can somebody please tell me what the fuck Julia Roberts is cackling about all the time?

37. Sorry, but your crappy kitchen isn't Tuscany.

38. Only celebrities are real, and no celebrities are real.

39. Pundits, it might be worthwhile occasionally to point out that Nixon's "Silent Majority" was a minority, that Reagan's "Moral Majority" was a minority, that Bush's "Values Voters" were a minority voting for a minority of the values people vote for, that Red State "Real Americans" are a minority of real Americans, that only a minority of "Independent Voters" have ever had an independent thought let alone voted on the basis of one, and that a majority of those who call themselves "pro-life" also happen to support civilian casualties in wars of choice, lethal back-alley abortions, poisonous material environments, accidental executions of the wrongly convicted, ever more guns and bullets in the streets, and billions of people dying unnecessarily of starvation, from unclean water and treatable diseases around the world so that a miniscule minority can roll in dough for life.

40. Could there actually be more suburban housewives on television than there are in the suburbs?

41. Modern advertising began a century ago by deceiving us that there were substantial differences between mass-produced consumer goods according to the brands they bear, and has succeeded by now, a century later, in deceiving us that there are substantial differences between mass-produced consumers according to the brands we buy.

42. You probably aren't depressed at all, but just fucked over. If there's a pill for that it's not on sale, and chances are there's a War On It.

43. To win a cooking competition on reality television it usually pays to be an asshole, while to be a successful chef in reality it usually pays not to be an asshole.

44. I hate to break it to you, HGTV, but every room has a sense of space, every door brings the outside in, every window lets in the light, every surface has texture and you haven't actually said anything of the least use to anybody yet.

45. It is a little disturbing to grasp how many disclaimer-stuffed pharmaceutical ads on television today could aptly be summed up with the slogan, "Perish Sooner Than You Have To, But Leave A Better Looking Corpse."

46. It really is amazing how much more interesting an utterly undistinguished new automobile can look when we are confined to half second glimpses filmed two inches from its surface in strobe lighting.

47. Surely, there is really no such thing as a "fitness celebrity"?

48. Could all these wives in all these commercials possibly not realize their husbands are gay?

49. It is high time America's corporations waged war on that fetid field you call a body.

50. Can anybody who enjoys prime time game shows pretend incomprehension to the draw for the Romans of the Colosseum?

51. 4G? 3D? All still entirely yet 2B.

52. If remote control units were invented today do you really think they would allow them to feature a mute button?

53. You really should be worrying about the devastating humiliation of toilet paper fragments clinging, despite your best efforts, all the livelong day, possibly even right now, to your buttocks.

54. Kids screaming at the top of their lungs and destroying everything in sight: cute or ugly? Apparently, unaccountably, cute.

55. Given the atrocities Rachel Maddow is documenting, I'm a bit surprised she doesn't begin every show with a "Cocktail Moment."

56. You know, I was just watching this ad on my tee vee, and I think those nice earnest kids over at Exxon Mobile really might do something about the environment if only we'd give them some real money to work with!

57. What with their endless obsession with germs menacing every apparently pristine surface in their fortress homes and unpleasant odors emanating subtly, ceaselessly from every fold and pore in their bodies you get the feeling sometimes it's almost as if Americans collectively feel nervous or guilty about something...

58. Even with your logo slapped on it everybody knows that egg you're selling is just a goddamn egg, you jackass.

59. Comparing the number of robots you see in commercials with the number of robots one encounters in actual life, you almost get the feeling the guys running the show must think a lot of us are just robots…

60. A cream isn't a clinic.

61. Chinese tech company announces development of an even SMARTER abacus!

62. Now that Americans can't put a man on the Moon anymore it would probably be a good idea to stop listing all the other things we should be able to do if we can put a man on the Moon.

63. This quip has received "Four Stars!" from a premier quip rating agency.

64. Unfortunately, even a soundtrack of hysterical dance beats is rarely enough to make gluing pieces of a broken plate to a lamp base for ten minutes exciting to watch.

65. Four out of five dentists will not laugh at this joke, despite the stunning manufactured beauty of their smiles.

66. Yeah, that's right, assholes, we do all get up and pee whenever your commercial comes on, so there.

67. Since the switch-over to the digital television future I am most grateful for new features like off-synch audio, blackouts, and shadowy pixellation waves sweeping and distorting the images on the screen, all of which have, I must say, "enhanced" my television experience in ways I never expected but probably should have.

68. Thanks to the capitalists at General Motors, OnStar now dials the socialists at 911 so you don't have to and even when you don't want to.

69. It'll take more than "Mr. Blue Sky" in the background of your commercial to make me smile as you bastards try to steal another minute from my life.

70. You aren't educated just because the circus came to town.

71. Today's observation is both specially formulated and clinically proven.

72. You really don't have to smell that way, capitalism wants to help.

73. Honestly, all the ads front-loaded onto my new DVD were so absolutely captivating I didn't even notice that I couldn't fast forward through them anymore, I was just drinking in every second of sparkling advertizing content in a kind rapture spoiled only by a slow-growing dread that all too soon the commercials would end and I would be left with nothing to watch but the actual goddamn film I actually paid my goddamn money to watch in my goddamn home on my own goddamn time in the goddamn first place, goddamn it!

74. Hamlet holding the remote: Press play or a trigger, what is the difference?

75. Today's quip is working on the molecular level.

76. Nothing in all the world says youthful fun, really, like some dead-eyed choad barking at the top of his lungs in an Australian accent.

77. Not only should you not be waxing rhapsodic about it, but every person of the meanest sense should run screaming for their lives from that toxic petrochemical bouquet that is New Car Smell.

78. Funny how many couples on television actually consist of fabulous gay men with women they wouldn't be caught dead with or fabulous straight women with schlubs they wouldn't be caught dead with.

79. The wholesome tasty dairy products in your refrigerator did not arrive from a sunny bucolic family farm from a daydream of the fifties but from a sprawling seething industrial nightmare of screaming metal and pain and fear and feces and mob-violence.

80. Choosy Moms choose dangerous anesthetizing drugs and big screen televisions exploding with violence and crap commercials to raise their kids!

81. Today's observation is brought to you by Acerbix.

82. Apparently, heterosexual males are distinguishable from homosexual ones primarily by their erotic relations to backyard grilling apparatus.

83. If it bleeds, the News cedes.

84. The differences between a Honda and a Jaguar and a Chrysler and a BMW scarcely amount to more than different hood ornaments, different price tags, and different rubes.

85. I prefer my tap water free from public fountains rather than from your crappy bacterially-infested landfill-destined toxic-plastic bottles at a dollar a pop, thanks.

86. You have to wonder whether the imbeciles who buy gourmet dog food have ever noticed the bliss with which their little darlings lick their own assholes for hours at a time.

87. So, we're calling episodes "experiences" and re-runs "encore presentations" now, are we? What are the commercials, then, "liaisons"?

88. My working theory is that advertizing executives are not human beings but a reptile-brained humanoid species distinguishable from humans by the emission of blue fluids from various bodily orifices.

89. It is truly perverse the number of commercials which indulge the fantasy of food endowed with speech… and with nothing to talk about except how desperately it wants to be eaten for lunch.

90. Our gadgets are not alive and they are not intelligent. This matters, because we happen to be both alive and intelligent ourselves and when we say the same of things that are neither we risk being rendered less alive and less intelligent in compensation.

91. Nothing succeeds like less.

92. We are all unpaid unwitting uninformed subjects in a profoundly dangerous experiment examining the effects of long-term exposure to complex combinations of toxic and medicinal substances nobody understands. Since we cannot opt out of our experimental subjecthood, I propose we demand substantial payment for our service from those who are disproportionately profiting from it.

93. I strongly suspect it is watching your commercial that has given me this burning sensation.

94. One thing sure to improve this quip for next time would be to slap some bacon on it.

95. Between all the heartfelt talk shows and all the heart burn commercials, who really has the heart to watch day time television?

96. It really is too bad the way car exhaust is destroying so many lovely wilderness settings car commercials might otherwise be filmed in.

97. Broadcast television is so righteous you can show your hero putting his fist in somebody's mouth every single episode and win awards but if you show your hero putting his penis in his lover's mouth just once you'll never work again till the day you die.

98. How strange to observe that as tee vee screens keep getting bigger the fine print for the legal disclaimers on tee vee commercials is still getting smaller.

99. Why listen to your doctor when instead you could be directing your doctor's attention to things actors on television who don't know you and can't see you are talking about so that the pharmaceutical companies that hired them to say these things can make more money?

100. The image of an infant nursing at her mother's breast? Unacceptable! The image of an obese shirtless man nursing a beer in a stadium crowd? Ubiquitous! It's called standards, people.

101. There is nothing the least bit romantic about instant coffee.

102. Today's observation possesses a gravelly voice, a slight twang, and also, one may safely assume, a hemi.

103. The ugly, middlebrow, radioactive monument in granite to this dreary deadly decade is a million gruesome kitchen countertops.

104. Be Young! Have Fun! A skeleton? Have None! Drink more carbonated beverages!

105. It's funny because the woman character doesn't want to do anything but shop all the time, because women don't want to do anything but shop all the time, you know what women are like, they don't want to do anything but shop all the time, isn't it funny how women are like that, shopping all the time!

106. Essentially, every TED Talk sells you something, while incidentally pretending to teach you something.

107. Rather than wait in line at the Apple store for their latest must-have gew-gaw, why not just shellac any old dysfunctional decade old crap in white nail polish yourself and call it a day?

108. USA Network -- Characters Welcome (but neither required nor expected)

109. Nowadays, "innovation" is almost exclusively a word denoting a promotional rather than technical accomplishment, the benefits of which tend in turn almost exclusively to be distributed preferentially to usurers over users.

110. It's the feel-bored film of the season!

111. Of course she's crazy, listening to that discordant piano in the background all the time like that…

112. "At the end of the day" is the favored cliché of the pundit with nothing convincing to say.

113. What's her anti-aging secret? …she's fourteen years old!

114. Thank heavens after the Republicans dismantle our medical system, we'll still have celebrities hawking tee-shirts to support cutting edge research and universal healthcare coverage.

115. Won't somebody please think of the children? Except, you know, when they're gyrating around to dance beats in diaper commercials or made up like street walkers on reality shows about the pageant circuit...

116. Having new sneakers doesn't mean having a new soul.

117. Every time I watch a pharmaceutical ad today all I can hear is the ad tomorrow soliciting plaintiffs in a class action suit.

118. There's something about the endorsement of a cartoon character that just inspires immediate and absolute confidence in the quality of a product or service.

119. Given the curious prevalence in them of unappealing protagonists placed in pointlessly unpleasant situations, one gets the impression that car companies have not yet given their whole hearts to the selling of hybrid or electric vehicles.

120. Every reviewer of books who uses the word "unputdownable" should be put down immediately for it.

121. Don't mess with Texas. You might make it cry.

122. Just think how recently we all settled for the radical impoverishment of our viewing experience of not having a logo announcing the network we are watching at the moment filling a corner of the screen at all times.

123. We urge you to call and order within the next five minutes! Your supplies of credulity are limited.

124. Loan sharks and mail-order pawn shops are advertizing on prime time television now. Things are going well.

125. Rather than resigning ourselves to the endless ramification and amplification of advertizing in our lives what if instead we tried suing for harassment?

126. However much money she made in the exchange, it is not finally to the advantage of anyone that the name Jaime Lee Curtis once reminded us of movies but now of bowel movements.

127. How apt that the vast tragedy of for-profit insurance peddles its wasteful skimming and lethal scamming in the form of little comedy sketches.

128. Only the decorative deceptions of the advertizing agency deserve the label "artisan" whenever this term attaches in their commercials to mass packaged productions and fast food extrusions.

129. I wasn't interested in what you were selling before, but now that you are shouting at the top of your lungs about the damn thing I must say it is becoming more alluring by the second.

130. Your results will vary.

131. If your home isn't as sterile as an operating theater you are a failure as a human being. Also, you are in terrible danger.

132. Where everyone is quirky, no one is.

133. You are only as real as the envy your purchases inspire in others.

134. For Heaven's sake, shouldn't you be tweeting or scrapbooking or something?

135. In commerce, supplies are limited but the lies unlimited.

136. It's corn syrup! Soylent Green is made out of corn syrup!

137. The televangelist's path to Heaven involves preying one's way to the top of a gold-plated pile of poop before perishing and praying the peak pierces Paradise.

138. Whatever candidate or party prevails, it is only the television networks that are assured absolute victory in every American election.

139. It's beginning to look a lot like Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!

140. Watching drug commercials may cause annoyance related death.

141. Iron Law of Televised Cooking Show Judging: When in doubt, kick the woman out.

142. You have to be pretty undistinguished to seek to distinguish yourself through the purchase of an automobile that is indistinguishable from every other.

143. It is truly a marvelous thing to observe, rather like watching water turned to wine, the way companies turn whine into fodder, when, after being fought tooth and nail for as long as possible and in every possible way, supposedly onerous, supposedly ruinous, supposedly outrageous regulatory demands are instantly transformed the moment they are implemented into immensely desirable safety and energy efficiency features about which the companies go on to crow in the most self-congratulatory fashion imaginable and on the basis of which they go on most energetically to outcompete their rivals.

144. When a Republican tells you government is good for nothing in his campaign ad you really should pay attention because he is admitting his attraction and announcing his plans.

145. If Los Angeles were as dedicated to recycling as it is to remakes you could eat the buildings for dinner by now and they would grow back in time for breakfast.

146. The bigger the box, the more air inside.

147. Has any manufactured good remained either alluring or even functional for nearly as long as the packaging it comes in lingers on as toxic landfill?

148. Today's observation is made with 100% real fruit juice.

149. When you're painting with cosmetics the blank canvas is inevitably more beautiful than the resulting painting.

150. The world isn't a better place just because you got off.

151. If she isn't careful Jane Lynch may soon discover that literally the only thing people won't buy if she is selling it is that she is an actress.

152. Also, I hear, every jiss begins with Jay.

153. You may think it's clean but let's see what is revealed by this black light… oh, look at that, vile bacteria still clinging to your gums even after brushing… germs seething around the base of your toilet bowl… and, oh dear, your soul appears to be irredeemably stained with complicity in the wasteful destruction of the planet and the exploitation of billions of the world's poor…

154. The Soap Opera is a languishing narrative form, its vestiges now living on primarily in prime-time televised singing competitions.

155. When they turn the cameras off, you do realize the models spit that garbage back out, right?

156. Beyond the thanks, think: Beyond the feast, famine.

157. Never once has making a good purchase made a person good.

158. The pill, powder, or potion promising you weight loss or to lower your cholesterol level when accompanied by a sensible diet and exercise never points out that a sensible diet and exercise need no accompaniment by pill, powder, or potion to promise you weight loss or to lower your cholesterol level.

159. The only thing more exaggerated in prime time crime dramas than the incidence of crime is the competence of criminologists.

160. You have to lie to a whole lot of people before the rotten liar becomes the respectable professional, just as you have to owe a whole lot of money before the serf becomes the King.

161. The difference between a used car salesman and a televangelist is that one steals from you by lying about the vehicle while the other steals from you by lying about the road.

162. While watching sports on television doesn't make you a real athlete, masturbating to online porn does at least give you a real sex life.

163. Today's observation is part of this complete breakfast.

164. Is there anything more nostalgic than a product said to look futuristic?

165. The number of characters in a sit-com living in places they could actually afford is roughly equal to the number of jokes per episode that actually get a laugh.

166. Moms in Malls are the scariest clowns in the world.

167. No matter what they promise to the contrary, your garbage bag will still tear on a corner, your paper towel will still shred in a puddle, your wineglass will still speckle in the machine, and no matter what they imply to the contrary, you will still be fine.

168. Straight marriage is more like prostitution than anybody cares to admit and gay marriage is more like dating than anybody cares to admit.

169. When it comes to climate change, one gets the impression most people on television won't realize until curtain that the big show wasn't a dress rehearsal.

170. It is distressing how often "Made in the USA" is a label displayed in the USA on commodities mislaid in the USA made by slaves for the USA.

171. This observation is vitamin fortified.

172. Is there anything in the world that makes a food product more alluring than seeing it smeared all over some snot-nosed spoon-shaking maniacally-grinning infantile face? America unanimously declares apparently that, no, there is not.

173. So, let me get this straight, you're charging the same money for a chocolate bar you've blown a million tiny holes in as for a solid chocolate bar because what really matters about the holes, you say, is the enhancement of my chocolate eating experience presumably afforded by the holes compared to which the fact that there is now half as much chocolate you are selling me is merely incidental?

174. If you would understand a stock market graph, whenever the arrow goes up simply imagine it piercing the heart of a small child like a fondue fork and popping the heartbroken morsel into the slobbering gob of a rich man who has no heart.

175. If mortality makes you queasy and aging more diseasy,
Still, youth-peddlers are so sleazy disregarding them should be easy.

176. Your online education isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.

177. What is that even supposed to mean, "A Family Company"? The phrase reeks of nepotism, dogmatism, and incest.

178. 'Tis the Season for all the white patriotic consumers to celebrate the birth of the brown pacifist communist they would kill.

179. The revolution was televised but I only caught it in syndication.

180. More fast food should arrive in a bucket. It's handy to vomit in when you're done.

181. I adore flavored coffees. I mean, they are talking about booze aren't they?

182. IT'S JUST YOUR IMAGINATION THAT COMMERCIALS ARE LOUDER THAN THE REGULAR PROGRAMMING!

183. When I was a kid every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it. Now, every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it. Progress under consumer capitalism is, we all know so well, marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?

184. "So crazy" is inevitably what boring people call being boring.

185. Anybody can become famous, but only monsters remain famous.

186. No celebrity who calls himself a dork, a nerd, or a geek in the expectation that this will be regarded as charming is a dork, a nerd, a geek, or charming.

187. Bury Crass Mess!

188. Now that their norms for male beauty have become as unattainable as those that have so long prevailed for female beauty, mass media have made as their single concession to feminism the eager encouragement of equal self-loathing.

189. If you enjoy time travel narratives, might I suggest watching C-SPAN?

190. On crime shows, the most famous guest star did it. It's the law.

191. Actually, no, your cleaning product isn't in any available sense revolutionary.

192. Tee Vee young is not real young, Tee Vee ugly is not real ugly, Tee Vee intelligent is not real intelligent.

193. Freedom has nothing to do with buying things.

194. Television commercials are forever implying their chocolate will deliver shattering orgasms, but I can assure them that the average candy bar is hardly impressive enough even remotely to manage the trick.

195. You'd think an "original series" would be less unoriginal.

196. I mean, what reasonable person wouldn't invite radically increased infection risk, suicidal thoughts, and occasional homicidal sleepwalking for a slim chance at clearer skin?

197. Online University is now offering advanced degrees in "technology"! "numbers"! "words"! Also, mopping and filing!

198. Worried about computer viruses? Go to novirussexydad39800trustmenoreally.com!

199. "I'm a lying reactionary asshole and I approve this message full of lies."

200. Claims made in this advertisement were not evaluated by the FDA, a meddling fascist conspiracy agency that should be abolished anyway, MegaPharmaAgriChemiCorp, a Family Company

201. I'm sticking to the handheld I came with.

202. The web is an embarrassment of riches when it isn't being just an embarrassment.

203. The wireless future is the rabbit ears past.

204. Nothing stamps out a radical like putting them on a stamp.

205. Sure to be Dumb: Anything marketed as "Smart."

206. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to the HBO logo.

207. Any change in services that increases corporate profits will be peddled to consumers as "convenience," however inconvenient it may be. Indeed, that is what convenience means.

208. When you're hammered everything sounds like a nail.

209. A haircut may be a claim, but it isn't an argument.

210. Live tweeting is dead.

211. Watching Chris Matthews is like watching Mars Attacks! dubbed entirely into Martian.

212. Every Apple product is a funhouse mirror, an iMe killing time.

213. Distractions don't add up to a life and won't subtract you from death.

214. Every selfie plucks a self from the shelf.

215. When you are flying under the radar you are still flying.

216. First being is degraded by consumer capitalism into having, then having is degraded by spectacular media into appearing, and now appearing is being degraded by data collection into being framed.

217. Capitalism exploits everyone and destroys the planet and can't even provide me with Deep Space 9 on blu ray.

218. Be the droids you're looking for in the world.

219. Use of the smoking gun analogy is the smoking gun for ineptitude in the use of analogies.

220. I don't follow politics for inspiration, entertainment, or a dream date. That is what porn is for.