Saturday, February 04, 2017
Sunday, January 29, 2017
When will it end with the "so it begins" tweets?
We lost an election we shouldn't have lost -- that was the beginning -- and now we confront a series of increasingly terrible battles we have to win, almost every single one of which is harder than and in part harder because we lost the election we shouldn't have lost.
I agree it is important to highlight white-nationalist and authoritarian tendencies in Trump Republicanism -- if only to draw on the available archive of effective resistance to such tendencies for those who are most vulnerable and those who are our allies -- but it is also important to recognize historical disanalogies in the American situation (the richness of US physical resources, the advantage of US geopolitical and historical positioning, the diversity of US stakeholders, the affordances shaped by legal, infrastructural, and professional norms, forms and legacies, and so on) to other fascist and authoritarian formations in which we might lodge equally necessary hopes and fears in our present circumstances.
But another thing that bugs me about the hundred or so daily "and so it begins" posts that scroll by me these days is that they seem to be written from a weirdly high orbit, as if surveying the historical scene from an Olympian cloudlet perch while munching popcorn. And yet every tweet seems to be accompanied by the same portentous sigh, in each the same diagnosis is being offered up for our appreciation. Not doing much of anything is not the new doing something... there is nothing new about well-educated armchair quarterbacking (not above this myself) and all-protest-no-policies fauxvolutionaries and purity cabaret among privileged Beautiful Losers. As always, it seems, many lefties and liberals online are falling over themselves to signal to one another how very cool and not surprised they are by all this, how very nonplussed they are as Trump's dangerous ineptitudes and dizzying corruptions and demonstrable crimes multiply. But who cares if you are surprised or not?
We Democrats (and this includes many people to the left of most Democrats, like me, who nonetheless recognize the Democratic Party as the nationally-viable party organization and diverse stakeholder coalition to which we must all of us in the US indispensably turn as the available pragmatic and reformist tool to implement policies in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity, even if we know that educational, agitational, organizational work to transform the terrain of the possible and the important in which parties function is also indispensable and sometimes pressures the party to its annoyance even while mostly it enables the party to remain relevant and effective, such as it is) must do the following:
[one] identify what is actually happening, we must not overestimate the nature or extent of our failure (we won the popular vote by millions, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, living wage and drug legalization and other liberal policies won support across the country, eg) nor underestimate the unprecedented violations of the Trump administration (it is still early days, but Trump's violation of the emoluments clause is grounds for impeachment, as may be his incitement of executive officials to carry out policies Courts have stayed, but his attacks on citizens, legal residents, people seeking asylum, American families with undocumented members, the press, whole agencies and departments of government and the life-long dedicated public service professionals who undertake their work, eg), since both overestimating our defeat and underestimating their victories leads us to mis-assess the realities at hand;
[two] put a face on those who suffer from urgent problems and bad policies, and provide narrative(s) (some carefully targeted regionally and demographically, some evoking a more general democratic and social justice ethos) that will solicit identification with the sufferer and blame Republicans as the villains prolonging this suffering against the efforts of Democrats;
[three] provide (and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat) concise catchphrases that provide a Democratic vision of good accountable government of a people made happier and stronger by their diversity, a government that provides public investments, social welfare and equal recourse to law as preconditions for freedom as an alternative to the failed and unfair Republican vision that divides, isolates, and neglects individuals ("individualism") the better for incumbent-elite minorities to conquer, exploit, concentrate, and accumulate wealth and authority;
[four] give majorities something to root for: no, this doesn't mean pissing on Democrats singly or as a party every chance you get, but celebrating our good ideas (read the Democratic Party platform) and accomplishments at least as much as we criticize their compromises and before we relentlessly, thanklessly move on to the next problem the solution to which we disdain as imperfect to useless before cracking the whip yet again;
[five] while it is good for Democratic elected representatives to be as progressive as is compatible with their actually-existing constituency, it is never good for a moderate Democrat in a moderate district to be replaced by a Republican (whether you want to call him moderate for a Republican or not in this epoch of Republican extremity) who threatens Democratic majorities in Local or State or Federal and so undermine the effectiveness of the best Democrats in those bodies who are empowered when they are part of a governing majority -- so, if a Democrat is doing something wrong or not doing enough good, pitch your righteous criticisms in a way that strengthens, never weakens, the candidate or the Party, find a Democrat who is doing the right thing or doing better and spotlight the alternative they represent and find out how that Democrat might use your support, connect you to networks and resources to make a difference on the issue more than you realized possible, help to educate the erring Democrat, strive to craft the arguments to make the issue more a Party priority or change platform language or craft specific policy language.
.
"And so it begins..." Trump the Killer Clown is a very old story -- to the extent that it isn't a completely idiosyncratic and unprecedented one. Politics is always happening, history is already underway. It cannot be politics that "so... begins," for politics doesn't "begin" or "end." Politics is the ongoing, and indeed interminable, reconciliation of the diversity of aspirations of the diversity of sharers of our place and time, including reconciling our sense of which shared problems are the most urgent ones we face. Trump isn't a re-run on cable you already know the story to. Although Trump is in many ways an unprecedented figure (Jacksonian, Nixonian, Reaganomic, Gingrichian, W-esque resonances notwithstanding), it is also true that his rhetoric is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of movement conservative themes, especially as these were ground down to their rhetoric essences in the crucible of a quarter-century of Hate Radio and now circulating virally on social media ("virality" like "AI" or "robotic" or "automated" is a metaphor, much of the work of which seems to me to disavow personal responsibility for decisions made by authors, coders, curators, designers, owners, executives of the techs, apps, platforms invested with figurative agency).
Anyway, we don't know what is going to happen. Many truly terrible things that did not have to happen are going to happen -- beautiful and encouraging things will also happen. We don't know how many vulnerable people we can save from harm, we don't how much damage we can prevent to the unsung compromised fragile indispensable social welfare programs and public investments on which we depend to survive and flourish. To win we are going to have to count on the work of a lot of people who tend to get disdained as "Establishment" types -- lawyers, social workers, teachers, administrators, members of venerable civil rights and social support organizations -- and in less than two years' time we need above all else to do that most Establishment sort of thing of all: to try to get Democrats elected in greater numbers to the House of Representatives, in State legislatures, in Governors' mansions, in Mayors' offices and School Boards and City Councils.
I agree it is important to highlight white-nationalist and authoritarian tendencies in Trump Republicanism -- if only to draw on the available archive of effective resistance to such tendencies for those who are most vulnerable and those who are our allies -- but it is also important to recognize historical disanalogies in the American situation (the richness of US physical resources, the advantage of US geopolitical and historical positioning, the diversity of US stakeholders, the affordances shaped by legal, infrastructural, and professional norms, forms and legacies, and so on) to other fascist and authoritarian formations in which we might lodge equally necessary hopes and fears in our present circumstances.
But another thing that bugs me about the hundred or so daily "and so it begins" posts that scroll by me these days is that they seem to be written from a weirdly high orbit, as if surveying the historical scene from an Olympian cloudlet perch while munching popcorn. And yet every tweet seems to be accompanied by the same portentous sigh, in each the same diagnosis is being offered up for our appreciation. Not doing much of anything is not the new doing something... there is nothing new about well-educated armchair quarterbacking (not above this myself) and all-protest-no-policies fauxvolutionaries and purity cabaret among privileged Beautiful Losers. As always, it seems, many lefties and liberals online are falling over themselves to signal to one another how very cool and not surprised they are by all this, how very nonplussed they are as Trump's dangerous ineptitudes and dizzying corruptions and demonstrable crimes multiply. But who cares if you are surprised or not?
We Democrats (and this includes many people to the left of most Democrats, like me, who nonetheless recognize the Democratic Party as the nationally-viable party organization and diverse stakeholder coalition to which we must all of us in the US indispensably turn as the available pragmatic and reformist tool to implement policies in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity, even if we know that educational, agitational, organizational work to transform the terrain of the possible and the important in which parties function is also indispensable and sometimes pressures the party to its annoyance even while mostly it enables the party to remain relevant and effective, such as it is) must do the following:
[one] identify what is actually happening, we must not overestimate the nature or extent of our failure (we won the popular vote by millions, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, living wage and drug legalization and other liberal policies won support across the country, eg) nor underestimate the unprecedented violations of the Trump administration (it is still early days, but Trump's violation of the emoluments clause is grounds for impeachment, as may be his incitement of executive officials to carry out policies Courts have stayed, but his attacks on citizens, legal residents, people seeking asylum, American families with undocumented members, the press, whole agencies and departments of government and the life-long dedicated public service professionals who undertake their work, eg), since both overestimating our defeat and underestimating their victories leads us to mis-assess the realities at hand;
[two] put a face on those who suffer from urgent problems and bad policies, and provide narrative(s) (some carefully targeted regionally and demographically, some evoking a more general democratic and social justice ethos) that will solicit identification with the sufferer and blame Republicans as the villains prolonging this suffering against the efforts of Democrats;
[three] provide (and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat) concise catchphrases that provide a Democratic vision of good accountable government of a people made happier and stronger by their diversity, a government that provides public investments, social welfare and equal recourse to law as preconditions for freedom as an alternative to the failed and unfair Republican vision that divides, isolates, and neglects individuals ("individualism") the better for incumbent-elite minorities to conquer, exploit, concentrate, and accumulate wealth and authority;
[four] give majorities something to root for: no, this doesn't mean pissing on Democrats singly or as a party every chance you get, but celebrating our good ideas (read the Democratic Party platform) and accomplishments at least as much as we criticize their compromises and before we relentlessly, thanklessly move on to the next problem the solution to which we disdain as imperfect to useless before cracking the whip yet again;
[five] while it is good for Democratic elected representatives to be as progressive as is compatible with their actually-existing constituency, it is never good for a moderate Democrat in a moderate district to be replaced by a Republican (whether you want to call him moderate for a Republican or not in this epoch of Republican extremity) who threatens Democratic majorities in Local or State or Federal and so undermine the effectiveness of the best Democrats in those bodies who are empowered when they are part of a governing majority -- so, if a Democrat is doing something wrong or not doing enough good, pitch your righteous criticisms in a way that strengthens, never weakens, the candidate or the Party, find a Democrat who is doing the right thing or doing better and spotlight the alternative they represent and find out how that Democrat might use your support, connect you to networks and resources to make a difference on the issue more than you realized possible, help to educate the erring Democrat, strive to craft the arguments to make the issue more a Party priority or change platform language or craft specific policy language.
.
"And so it begins..." Trump the Killer Clown is a very old story -- to the extent that it isn't a completely idiosyncratic and unprecedented one. Politics is always happening, history is already underway. It cannot be politics that "so... begins," for politics doesn't "begin" or "end." Politics is the ongoing, and indeed interminable, reconciliation of the diversity of aspirations of the diversity of sharers of our place and time, including reconciling our sense of which shared problems are the most urgent ones we face. Trump isn't a re-run on cable you already know the story to. Although Trump is in many ways an unprecedented figure (Jacksonian, Nixonian, Reaganomic, Gingrichian, W-esque resonances notwithstanding), it is also true that his rhetoric is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of movement conservative themes, especially as these were ground down to their rhetoric essences in the crucible of a quarter-century of Hate Radio and now circulating virally on social media ("virality" like "AI" or "robotic" or "automated" is a metaphor, much of the work of which seems to me to disavow personal responsibility for decisions made by authors, coders, curators, designers, owners, executives of the techs, apps, platforms invested with figurative agency).
Anyway, we don't know what is going to happen. Many truly terrible things that did not have to happen are going to happen -- beautiful and encouraging things will also happen. We don't know how many vulnerable people we can save from harm, we don't how much damage we can prevent to the unsung compromised fragile indispensable social welfare programs and public investments on which we depend to survive and flourish. To win we are going to have to count on the work of a lot of people who tend to get disdained as "Establishment" types -- lawyers, social workers, teachers, administrators, members of venerable civil rights and social support organizations -- and in less than two years' time we need above all else to do that most Establishment sort of thing of all: to try to get Democrats elected in greater numbers to the House of Representatives, in State legislatures, in Governors' mansions, in Mayors' offices and School Boards and City Councils.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Saturday, January 21, 2017
How "AI" Doesn't Matter
Thinking about the world is the world mattering to the thinker. So long as nothing matters to robots and algorithms, to speak of "AI" is
always to lie. There are no, nor have there ever been, nor can we be sure there ever will be any AIs in the world. Indeed, as it is presently constituted the very idea of "AI" is simply a kind of error. The closest "AI" comes to material reality is as a discourse, that is to say, as an
ideological framework. It is apt, that so much of the reactionary work of this ideology is a matter of not-mattering, of denial and disavowal: "AI" is the denial, without evidence but with reasons, of the indispensability of biological brains and also lived struggles in which
intelligence as a personal and historical force is incarnated in the
world, denials at once facilitating the disavowal of our collective responsibilities to support
the lives and dignity of our intelligent companions as a general matter as well as the disavowal by owners, users, coders of machines of specific responsibilities for the costs, risks, disruptions and inequities mediated by their machines.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Trek Prefs
Given how much I loved Next Generation when it came out and hated Enterprise when it came out I must say, in retrospect, with a longer run I'm pretty sure Enterprise
would have accumulated as many tolerable and even good episodes as Next
Generation. Enterprise seemed at first a craven capitulation of Trek to a W. ethos profoundly antithetical to it and I couldn't forgive it that -- it was only the Battlestar Galactica reboot that seemed to read what American science fiction needed to be doing in W.'s America.
Anyway, now that Bush isn't the raw wound he remained for six years or so I find I can enjoy Enterprise the way I would Dark Matter or Killjoys now, as an entertaining show with occasionally interesting conceits and engaging character developments. Definitely Enterprise was a show that got better with each season. Although I will admit the casting for the show endlessly annoyed me (I essentially only really liked Phlox, T'Pol, and Hoshi in an abiding way), the early temporal war and terrorism plots were clumsy, the dramatic story of the supplanting of an earlier human spacer culture was neglected, and the show deferred for no good reason the much more gripping story (especially to diehard fans) filling in details and dwelling in the dramatic politics of the birth of the Federation from the perspective of a comparatively backward eventually indispensable bit player, Earth, in that tale.
Of course, a new and different hopelessness has now gripped the land... Time for another Trek series: Here's hoping Discovery sticks to the Trek ethos and acts as resistance and alternative to Trumpism as it should. (Or must we rely on The Expanse?) My wish for a non-Star Fleet human-minority series on a Federation cruise ship (to Risa?) sfnal-melodrama-sexfarce directed by Pedro Almodovar will probably not be fulfilled.
Take what I say with a grain of salt, of course. Voyager and Deep Space Nine are my favorite Star Treks, which I understand is an unpopular opinion, and I for one find the original series still compulsively watchable but Next Generation mostly unwatchable now. Essentially if it's Will episode I am grossed out, if it's a Barclay episode I am creeped out, if it's a Data episode I am rolling my eyes already, and if it's a Wesley episode I want to slap somebody. If it weren't for Picard, Guinin, Q, Beverly, and Ensign Ro, Next Generation would be a near complete bust for me, with a handful of standout episodes. As it is, Next Generation is the only Trek I don't have on DVD.
The original series actually seems more interesting from an sfnal point of view, it is an aesthetically unmatched show (none of the subsequent series has come close to the beauty and iconicity of its art direction, all the more astonishing given the limitations the first series was working with), and nothing comes close to the camp pleasures of the original series when it... goes there.
All that said, love the original series though I do, I must say the boy-man "badassery" of Captain Kirk the fanboys claim to love so much has been replaced in my own DVDs of the series with a diplomatic and rather sensitive if emotionally dramatic Kirk who avoids stupid fights and illiberal opinions. It's funny, Kirk seems far more like Picard than like Janeway, who in the stress of being torn from the Federation often finds she must actually behave rather more as the fanboys pretend Kirk behaved in order to fulfill her responsibilities as Captain. Of course, the fanboys who love Kirk for who he wasn't don't always also seem to love Janeway for who she was. And be all that as it may, Sisko is the craziest badass in the Federation.
Anyway, now that Bush isn't the raw wound he remained for six years or so I find I can enjoy Enterprise the way I would Dark Matter or Killjoys now, as an entertaining show with occasionally interesting conceits and engaging character developments. Definitely Enterprise was a show that got better with each season. Although I will admit the casting for the show endlessly annoyed me (I essentially only really liked Phlox, T'Pol, and Hoshi in an abiding way), the early temporal war and terrorism plots were clumsy, the dramatic story of the supplanting of an earlier human spacer culture was neglected, and the show deferred for no good reason the much more gripping story (especially to diehard fans) filling in details and dwelling in the dramatic politics of the birth of the Federation from the perspective of a comparatively backward eventually indispensable bit player, Earth, in that tale.
Of course, a new and different hopelessness has now gripped the land... Time for another Trek series: Here's hoping Discovery sticks to the Trek ethos and acts as resistance and alternative to Trumpism as it should. (Or must we rely on The Expanse?) My wish for a non-Star Fleet human-minority series on a Federation cruise ship (to Risa?) sfnal-melodrama-sexfarce directed by Pedro Almodovar will probably not be fulfilled.
Take what I say with a grain of salt, of course. Voyager and Deep Space Nine are my favorite Star Treks, which I understand is an unpopular opinion, and I for one find the original series still compulsively watchable but Next Generation mostly unwatchable now. Essentially if it's Will episode I am grossed out, if it's a Barclay episode I am creeped out, if it's a Data episode I am rolling my eyes already, and if it's a Wesley episode I want to slap somebody. If it weren't for Picard, Guinin, Q, Beverly, and Ensign Ro, Next Generation would be a near complete bust for me, with a handful of standout episodes. As it is, Next Generation is the only Trek I don't have on DVD.
The original series actually seems more interesting from an sfnal point of view, it is an aesthetically unmatched show (none of the subsequent series has come close to the beauty and iconicity of its art direction, all the more astonishing given the limitations the first series was working with), and nothing comes close to the camp pleasures of the original series when it... goes there.
All that said, love the original series though I do, I must say the boy-man "badassery" of Captain Kirk the fanboys claim to love so much has been replaced in my own DVDs of the series with a diplomatic and rather sensitive if emotionally dramatic Kirk who avoids stupid fights and illiberal opinions. It's funny, Kirk seems far more like Picard than like Janeway, who in the stress of being torn from the Federation often finds she must actually behave rather more as the fanboys pretend Kirk behaved in order to fulfill her responsibilities as Captain. Of course, the fanboys who love Kirk for who he wasn't don't always also seem to love Janeway for who she was. And be all that as it may, Sisko is the craziest badass in the Federation.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Monday, January 09, 2017
From Philosophy to Futurology
Philosophy, originating in bad-faith denials of its rhetoricity, has always
been an alientaed pseudo-science. But philosophy pressured by the norms and forms of promotion and marketing becomes something even more alienated and pseudo-scientific: futurology.
Monday, January 02, 2017
Wringing In The New Year (My Best Posts and Tweets of 2016, I Guess)
The following are the posts from 2016 that people liked most and which, for the most part, I liked as well:
Politics Is, November 16, 2016
William Burroughs on Peter Thiel, August 2, 2016
Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy, January 1, 2016
Reactionary Futurology in the Democratic Party, August 27, 2016
Did Democrats Lose the Election Because the Left Won the Culture Wars? November 12, 2016
Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies, April 24, 2016
Star Trek Suspicions, June 4, 2016
Anti-Partisan Party People, May 28, 2016
Tech Destiny! December 22, 2016
Look, Ma, I'm A Capitalist! January 8, 2016
The Usual Suspects: Ben from Ben & Jerry's, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and Tim Robbins for Nader in 2000, May 22, 2016
Bre-Entry, June 25, 2016
Trump Talk Future Talk, October 14, 2016
A Lesson Learned, November 9, 2016
A truly terrible year has ended and a truly terrifying year now begins. I know that this is the year we elected the worst president in our history and destroyed the world and also this is the year your favorite popstar died -- but for me this year is also the worst because I spent two weeks in the hospital after nearly bleeding to death from the eyes ears nose and mouth for reasons that nobody could explain even after I returned home. The diagnosis on which the doctors finally settled was "idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura," which means nobody knows exactly why you may just start bleeding to death from every orifice at any moment (preferably while stuck on a super crowded train in a long tunnel under the Bay during rush-hour, which is my new regularly recurring living nightmare as I commute to teach), a diagnosis that is not in fact any more reassuring when it is described by the acronym "ITP" delivered in highly confident tones by a doctor about to tell you, yet again, that, my my these blood levels just want to stay at the bottom range of normal don't they every time you go back in for monitoring. Yes, a terrible, terrible year.
Now then, selecting "best of" posts has been especially daunting this time around, and I will admit that I simply ignored the dozen or so posts from last year that actually got the most hits (something I have never done before), because thousands of people clicked on posts in which I simply re-posted Clinton campaign ad content under a catchy headline or re-posted a tweet or posted information about poll-closing times that were readily available elsewhere -- and in these posts I honestly didn't do or say anything myself that merits note, let alone a second note now. For years now I have been grappling with the interaction of this longform blog -- a labor of love now in its thirteenth year -- and my (marginally) more popular microblogging... On my twitter profile I used to describe my practice there as "I mostly just tweet my blog," but for a long time now the reverse has been the case, I have been blogging my tweets. As a general matter I think this has made my writing more concise but less thoughtful, which is to say less useful and satisfying for me. And so I mean to return to more traditional essaylets in the coming year and to eschew pseudo-storified tweetstorms or at any rate translate these into essaylets as well. I think I have promised this before.
Politics Is, November 16, 2016
William Burroughs on Peter Thiel, August 2, 2016
Robot Cultist Eliezer Yudkowsky's Ugly Celebration of Plutocracy, January 1, 2016
Reactionary Futurology in the Democratic Party, August 27, 2016
Did Democrats Lose the Election Because the Left Won the Culture Wars? November 12, 2016
Techniques of Futurity Against "Future" Technologies, April 24, 2016
Star Trek Suspicions, June 4, 2016
You know I'm a queergeek and so you may be unsurprised to know that Star Trek comes up fairly regularly here. I must say I think these two pithy less-read Star Trek posts deserved as much or more attention as that one throwaway post did, so I'm including them as well.Futurist Authority and the Toppling of the Ivory Tower, August 7, 2016
Now That's What I Call Techno-Color!
Next Trek Wish List
Anti-Partisan Party People, May 28, 2016
Tech Destiny! December 22, 2016
Look, Ma, I'm A Capitalist! January 8, 2016
The Usual Suspects: Ben from Ben & Jerry's, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and Tim Robbins for Nader in 2000, May 22, 2016
Bre-Entry, June 25, 2016
Trump Talk Future Talk, October 14, 2016
A Lesson Learned, November 9, 2016
A truly terrible year has ended and a truly terrifying year now begins. I know that this is the year we elected the worst president in our history and destroyed the world and also this is the year your favorite popstar died -- but for me this year is also the worst because I spent two weeks in the hospital after nearly bleeding to death from the eyes ears nose and mouth for reasons that nobody could explain even after I returned home. The diagnosis on which the doctors finally settled was "idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura," which means nobody knows exactly why you may just start bleeding to death from every orifice at any moment (preferably while stuck on a super crowded train in a long tunnel under the Bay during rush-hour, which is my new regularly recurring living nightmare as I commute to teach), a diagnosis that is not in fact any more reassuring when it is described by the acronym "ITP" delivered in highly confident tones by a doctor about to tell you, yet again, that, my my these blood levels just want to stay at the bottom range of normal don't they every time you go back in for monitoring. Yes, a terrible, terrible year.
Now then, selecting "best of" posts has been especially daunting this time around, and I will admit that I simply ignored the dozen or so posts from last year that actually got the most hits (something I have never done before), because thousands of people clicked on posts in which I simply re-posted Clinton campaign ad content under a catchy headline or re-posted a tweet or posted information about poll-closing times that were readily available elsewhere -- and in these posts I honestly didn't do or say anything myself that merits note, let alone a second note now. For years now I have been grappling with the interaction of this longform blog -- a labor of love now in its thirteenth year -- and my (marginally) more popular microblogging... On my twitter profile I used to describe my practice there as "I mostly just tweet my blog," but for a long time now the reverse has been the case, I have been blogging my tweets. As a general matter I think this has made my writing more concise but less thoughtful, which is to say less useful and satisfying for me. And so I mean to return to more traditional essaylets in the coming year and to eschew pseudo-storified tweetstorms or at any rate translate these into essaylets as well. I think I have promised this before.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Thursday, December 29, 2016
A Handy Tech-Talk Translator:
"Acceleration" = Precarization
"Artificial Intelligence" = Denial of Responsibility
"Automation" = Dismantlement of Organized Labor
"Culturefit" = Bigotry
"Democratization" = Rules and Standards Are for the Little People
"Digitality" = Loathing and Denial of Material Bodies, Material Brains, Material Historical Struggle
"Disruption" = Deregulation
"Enhancement" = Eugenics
"Free" = Under Duress
"The Future" = The Status Quo, Amplified
"Gamification" = Let Us Assume Everyone Is A Sociopath
"Innovation" = PR-Repackaging
"Internet of Things" = People Being Treated As Things Via the Internet
"Let the market decide." = Let rich people decide.
"Maker" = Grifter
"Meritocracy" = White Male Mediocrity
"New" = Forgotten
"Open" = Empty
"Progress" = Wealth Concentration
"Resilience" = Exploitability
"Risk" = Privileged Upward Failure
"Roboticization" = Increasing Treatment of Workers As Robots
"Sharing" = Sharecropping
"Smart" = Not Smart
"Spontaneous Order" = Following Orders
"Strong Encryption" = Cyberspatial Gun-Nuttery
"Think Tank" = Spin Room
"Thought Leader" = Mouth of Sauron
Monday, December 26, 2016
Lies, Damn Lies, and Futurism
I think most of what passes for "Tech" design should be disregarded
and most of what is accepted as "Tech" promotion should be prosecuted.
Most "Tech" marketing & design peddles the truly terrible lie that we are approaching the Star Trek future rather than the feudal past.
We have grown so accustomed to being lied to by advertising that we now tend to imitate advertising even when we lie to ourselves.
Social media is the consummation of false advertising.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
And What Have You Done?
I am less hopeful than I have been in years, but, this year as every year...
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Christmas Effects by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
As every year on this day, a remembrance for a scholar who mattered to me when it mattered quite a lot:
What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season -- isn’t it? -- is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question -- Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.
The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all -- religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy -- line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? -- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 5-6
Friday, December 16, 2016
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Trump Tech Culturefit
Marketing hype ("innovation"), parochially profitable fraud ("meritocracy"), deregulatory privatization
and looting ("disruption"), digi-utopianism ("financialization"), majority precarization ("acceleration"), singularity (New Economy, Long Boom, End of History, Make America Great Again, We're Gonna Win So Much You'll Get Tired of Winning)...
Tho' Silicon Valley has a notional affiliation with the Democratic left (based mostly, I daresay, in an utterly unreliable, sentimental, subcultural attachment arising out of proximity to the vestigially-liberal Bay Area, and in a rejection of Republican anti-science and Christianist evangelism that benefits Democrats who declare themselves "fact-based" in response, but who too often take that to endorse reductionist, quantificationist, eugenic, unaccountably technocratic, bourgeois-consumerist, corporate-militarist, and techno-triumphalist "Thought Leadership" qua "fact"), the truth is that Trump & "Tech" are a match made in Hell.
I expect full co-operation in no time at all -- Peter Thiel is not a counter-example but a reductio ad absurdum. Futurology has always been a genre of marketing deception and hyperbole amplified into techno-transcendental religiosity, what better ideological framework to rationalize Trump's otherwise unmoored authoritarian greedhead aggrieved-aggressive masculine impulses?
Tho' Silicon Valley has a notional affiliation with the Democratic left (based mostly, I daresay, in an utterly unreliable, sentimental, subcultural attachment arising out of proximity to the vestigially-liberal Bay Area, and in a rejection of Republican anti-science and Christianist evangelism that benefits Democrats who declare themselves "fact-based" in response, but who too often take that to endorse reductionist, quantificationist, eugenic, unaccountably technocratic, bourgeois-consumerist, corporate-militarist, and techno-triumphalist "Thought Leadership" qua "fact"), the truth is that Trump & "Tech" are a match made in Hell.
I expect full co-operation in no time at all -- Peter Thiel is not a counter-example but a reductio ad absurdum. Futurology has always been a genre of marketing deception and hyperbole amplified into techno-transcendental religiosity, what better ideological framework to rationalize Trump's otherwise unmoored authoritarian greedhead aggrieved-aggressive masculine impulses?
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Latest Potential Trump Nightmare Cabinet Pick Rex Tillerson, Geo-Engineer
For example, if you were wondering: 'I mean, at least Rex Tillerson knows that climate change is real. So there's that."— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 10, 20161 Do those saying "at least Rex Tillerson admits climate change is real" know he advocates futurological greenwashing via geo-engineering?
2 In 2012, Tillerson declared climate change is merely "an engineering problem" for which here will inevitably be "an engineering solution."
3 Tillerson, "The New North American Energy Paradigm: Reshaping the Future," transcript, CFR (2012, June 27).https://t.co/qCkPUFM9iO
4 Setting aside the deliberate generational deception of climate change denial Exxon-Mobile participated in for parochial profitability...
5 it is crucial to recognize that the displacement onto imaginary engineering of the shared political problems of climate change is in fact
6 another form of denialism -- the denial of collective responsibility and agency in climate politics -- a sequel denial not a correction.
7 Hope it is not necessary to spell out why more profitable industrialism may not be a solution to profitably ruinous industrial extraction?
Saturday, December 03, 2016
Progress Via Repetition
1 When I think how much destruction and self-destruction is abetted simply by the GOP's disciplined repetition of false and facile slogans
2 (eg gov isn't the solution it's the problem; privatizing public services improves them; taxes are burdens rather than enablers of freedom)
3 I can't help but wonder how much the Dem left might accomplish if we endlessly repeated our own correct and clarifying messages
4 (eg, those who say government is bad never deliver good government; there is strength in diversity; freedom is made of public investments)
5 I fear Dems don't muster comparable discipline in an eagerness to perform cleverness hunting novelty rather than inculcating good sense,
6 and by performing unflappability (not surprised!) rather than justified outrage at the waste, corruption, crimes, and lies of the right.
7 Every right-wing slogan is a nail inviting the hammer of a comparably pithy dem-left rejoinder that everybody knows to deliver as a blow.
8 The point isn't always to convince entrenched foes but to generate immediate associations sustaining foundational progressive commonsense.
9 This is not the kind of rhetorical work that will garner you praise for your wit or originality. Actually, it's dull and annoying.
10 A world that works can only be built out of such rhetorical work. Don't be afraid or ashamed to repeat basic progressive truths.
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