This Is Penny!

Penny!

After brunch at our usual greasy spoon on Piedmont Avenue and then a walk to the Morcome Amphitheater of Roses (one of my favorite places on earth), Eric and I went by Hopalong's pet rescue on the walk back home and ended up taking home a beautiful two and a half month old gray tabby kitten with an orange spot on her head. Hence, we have named her Penny. She is an adorababy and has already suffused this quiet apartment with avid life and joy. 

Pants, Panting, Pantomine

Had to order new trousers for work for the fourth time in less than a year -- the first purchase, last February, replaced a 42-inch waist pair of khakis I'd been wearing for four years with a 38-inch waist pair. In May, I replaced those with a 36-inch pair. In July, I replaced those with a 34-inch pair. It's January, and a 32-inch pair of trousers is on its way. My body since my hospitalization back in 2016 has been in a tumult. Insomnia's vice-grip on my nights is now, thankfully, it seems, lightening back a bit into a somewhat more manageable state, two and a half hours of strobing sleeplessness for weeks on end is giving way to nights in which I sleep five or even six hours a night instead.

But in the midst of this distress, how easy it has been to retreat into my body, the living of it in minutes of time, breathing through butterflies while doing dishes in a sink, clearing my mind in something like a savasana posture at three in the morning in hopes drowsiness will cool my burning brain, a long stretch through soreness in my back after an errand, attending to little pleasures in Eric's soft hand or smile at a joke, the avid life of trees around the apartment, the gentle sardonic diversions of British detective shows.

I have little interest anymore in the broader topics that so long obsessed me here. The lies of the futurists are on everybody's tongues these days now that the singularity turns out to have been the stupid refeudalization of the postwar economy while we were distracted by the spectacle of Jeff Bezos re-inventing the Sears catalogue and google/facebook turning cyberspace, "Home of Mind," back into broadcast television. I said all that for years, and now that it may well be too late to make much difference there are plenty of folks publishing shelves of books pointing it all out again anyway.

And, then, who needs the subtle gorgeous models and methods of critical theory to grasp the idiotic awfulness and obvious lies and ugly bigotry of Trump Republicans? I have nothing smart to say about any of that, there is nothing smart to say about any of it, and I don't think finding smart things to say about it is much help to anyone anyway. It's obvious what people have to do -- vote for Democrats, the better they are the better, but vote for them all whoever they are until the Republicans are diverted from their current conspicuously authoritarian path.

As a democratic eco-socialist-feminist queer devoted to the demolition of the rancid knot of white-supremacy, eugenic-ablism, cisheternormative patriarchy, and the present planet-destroying soul-destroying capitalism of possessive-individualist-consumerism and promotional deceptions (of which the lies of the tech boosters I spent decades decrying are just one especially conspicuous and dangerous form), needless to say I think there is much more for artists, activists, thinkers, organizers to do beyond what the diverse continent-scaled coalition of the Democratic Party is devoted to, for now, even at its best.

I don't know if the Democrats can be -- or can eventually be made to be through the pressure of a new generation of organizing -- the instrument for the implementation of the ideals to which I am most devoted in my secret heart (prison abolition and community policing, fully subsidized public education and healthcare and basic income, nationalized public goods, including sustainable transportation, energy, and media infrastructure, and planetary campaigns for soil, water, and atmosphere restoration), but I daresay they are now as they have been all my life the inadequate, compromised, enraging but best actually-available tool on offer to stave off the utter ruin and war I most fear in my secret heart. This year I continue to tread water, attend to the wisdom of my body that wants to live whatever my brittle spirit declares to the contrary, struggle to reconnect with the poetry and practical usefulness of the theory I teach when I can, and see what history brings.

I'd like to think I will be inspired to delve into close readings of events once more once I see my fellow citizens manage to do the bare minimum and vote Republicans and their disgusting outrageous grotesquely unfit idiot bigot into comparative harmlessness in the mid-terms. Electing Clinton would have been the bare minimum back a year ago, and I have no faith that this country can manage even that level of self-preservation, heartening though the Resistance may occasionally have managed to be here and there, and so, for now, my focus is inward, my voice is quiet, and my duty is clear.

Without Sarah

My mood, captured in a snippet from private correspondence: The passage of time is very strange. It happened Wednesday and yet here it is Wednesday again. Has this week happened, really? What happened this week? Sarah died this week, that is what happened. A stone week, a week without sun to warm the stone.

Sarah, 2001-2017

Our beloved cat Sarah died yesterday in my lap, her little face cradled in my hand. She was never a large cat, even when she fluffed out for the winter months, and she seemed especially tiny at the end. We used to call her babykins, adorababy, permakitten. She was quite talkative, and would chirp and bleep at us incessantly, to get our attention or whenever one of us made eye contact. Strands of her gray fur coat every surface, every corner, every item of clothing, but she is gone, gone. The apartment feels like it's been replaced by a stage set of itself, and we're rattling around wondering what our lines are supposed to be. We also called her our little nurse: she had an unerring knack for sensing when either of us was the least bit distressed for whatever reason and coming up and chirping and cozying up to us and purring into our bodies until we felt better. Friends, guests, apartment managers, anybody sent her into hiding under the bed, she had no trust and no time for anybody but us. There is nobody on earth who can ever know how special she was but us. Her claws were slightly too long and extended a little past her paw pads so that she ticked around the wood floors of the apartment, we called her tick tick baby as she made her restless circuit of the place at night. Her tail was foreshortened and bent, perhaps the result of a tussle as a kitten -- we got her from the SFSPCA sixteen years ago, they had found her in a feral cat colony in Golden Gate Park, she had a gouge in her neck when we got her and appeared to have had a narrow escape from some kind of predatory bird there. She played like a kitten right up to last months of her life -- one of her favorite games was to lie on her back with her legs crazily splayed as Eric would tap her on the left side and then on the right, and she would swipe crazily and belatedly in the direction of the tap, toppling from side to side, missing his hand time and time again, she could literally continue gyrating like that until Eric was too tired to keep at it. We called her caper kitty when she played her wiggle game. She had terrible eyesight and a thousand mile blank stare out the windows as she enjoyed the afternoon breezes roughling the fuzz on her face and whiskers. When she glazed out through the windows, we called that "Sarah watching her stories." Sarah was gray with a fluffy white belly and little white booties. She had an asymmetrical mustache and a tiny bald spot just beneath one of her big flappy bat ears. She was simply perfect. There has scarcely been a day in the last sixteen years when she has not spent hours and hours at a stretch nuzzled up against me, in my lap, rubbing noses with me, sleeping with her chin over my arm as I tapped away at the keyboard, sleeping between Eric's legs all night long (I toss and turn too much), eating from a saucer in my hand as we watched some silly baking competition marathon on tee vee... How I love her. How desolate everything seems without her.   

Taylor Mac Sings Amazing Grace Through the Streets of San Francisco

The Lie of the Tech Sector

The lie of the tech sector is that it is up to much of anything new at all.

"Technology" discourse has always mostly been the repackaging stale products and reactionary politics.

The truth of the tech sector is the same old story of assholes wanting all the money and power but no responsibility or accountability.

Tech disruption is mostly deregulation.

Tech "sharing" is mostly wealth concentration.

Tech innovation is mostly PR for the rich.

Digitization is mostly precarization.

What Has Changed Here

Adapted and Upgraded from a comment in the Moot:

Robot Gods, genetic enhancement and longevity, artificial meat, immersive virtuality, techno-abundance nano robo digi bio blah blah blah blah, the terms never changing, the greedhead promises and skeery sfnal threats never happening, but always oh so very important to talk about, year after year after year after year, as privileged mediocrities game the economy and political system in the most boring serially failed utterly predictably idiotic ways (the very real threats being the social ones mediated by and distracted from via tech, natch). You know, I could re-run the first ten years of this blog, just changing the names of the latest tech soopergeniuses as they make exactly identically stupid claims I railed against before and I would presumably resume my place as go-to incendiary tech critic. I definitely hear you when you say you'll choke the latest Very Serious AI-qua-existential-threat drivel down. My righteous rage, and the pleasure I once took in ridiculing tech hucksters, has long since been eclipsed by demoralization. Trump's America is the futurological future we've been waiting for, a shriveled white dick with a megaphone peddling late-nite infomercials promising easy cash and sexy youth to ignorant rubes over a stinking landfill under a gray snowfall of cremated ashes.

Touched By An Angel

Pro-tip: Don't let the toxic mixture of fear and laziness fuck with your goals, ambition and productivity. — Katya (@katya_zamo) July 14, 2015

@katya_zamo What if your goals, ambition, and productivity depend on a toxic mixture of fear and laziness? — Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 14, 2015

Then YOU GO GIRL! You got this girl! — Katya (@katya_zamo) September 6, 2017

There Is No AI

Nothing that is being called "AI" these days is actual AI -- which is not to deny how dangerous what passes for AI these days happens to be. The threat of "AI" today is entirely the threat of intelligent designers, owners, and users abusing computers in predictably unscrupulous and reckless ways. Elon Musk and his ilk are not so much warning us of the dangers of AI as they are profitably indulging in them while distracting the marks with shiny sfnal objects. It may be useful to recall "AI" discourse has its (1) robocultic True Believers and ideologues for whom AI cannot fail, only be failed; its (2) opportunistic evangelical hucksters/VC tech-types out to rationalize parochial tech profits with hyped promises and threats; and its (3) many ignorant, opportunistic tech-infotainment fluffers in the advertorial press and in various consumer fandoms. These constituencies overlap, supplement, complement one another, provide wiggle room and contexts for one another (most discourses and organized movements exhibit this sort of complexity and dynamism, AI discourse is no different).

"I see no point in celebrating the fact that she's lived so BLOODY LONG."

Fifty-two today.

Syllabus for Peace In Pieces This Fall at SFAI

HUMN-237-01 | Fall 2017

Peace in Pieces: Histories, Theories, and Practices of Nonviolent Politics

Instructor: Dale Carrico; e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu

Thursdays, 4:15-7pm Room: MCR; August 30-December 6, 2017

Course Blog: https://peaceinpiecessfai.blogspot.com/

Rough Basis for Grade: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Co-Facilitation, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%, Midterm Precis/Toulmin, 3-4pp., 20%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 35% (subject to contingencies)

Course Description:

The arc of the moral universe is a longing... and it bends from just us. In this course we will read canonical texts in the theory, history, and practice of nonviolent resistance and world-making. This course is provoked and inspired by stories and strategies of reconciliation connected to traditions of nonviolent politics. But is this "non-violence" simply an alternative, at hand, or another fraught artifact we are making under duress? We will take seriously and look critically at the subtle and structural violences that ineradicably shape everyday life. We will consider legible testimonies to violation, in a variety of textual forms, while simultaneously considering the cultural ideals of persuasion which often accompany definitions of violence and its limits. We will both take up and take on the many paradoxes of nonviolent activism and violent order that complicate the teaching of what passes for peace. The State as site of violence and alter-violence. Nonviolence, interfaith dialogue, and freethinking. Spontaneity and training. Assembly, occupation, Black Bloc. Prerequisite: ENGL-101 Satisfies: 3-Units of Humanities; Critical Studies Elective, Liberal Arts Elective

Week One | Thursday, August 31

Introductions

Week Two | Thursday, September 7

Buddha, Let A Man Overcome Anger by Love

Howard Zinn, Introduction to Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown

Week Three | Thursday, September 14

Karuna Mantena, The Power of Nonviolence

Correspondence of Count Leo Tolstoy with M. K. Gandhi

M. K. Gandhi, TheDoctrine of the Sword

M.K. Gandhi, My Faith in Nonviolence

Week Four | Thursday, September 21

Screen film, "Iron-Jawed Angels,"dir. Katja von Garnier

Ken Butigan, Alice Paul's Enduring Legacy of Nonviolent Action

Jane Addams, New Ideals of Peace: Passing of the War Virtues

Week Five | Thursday, September 28

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Ella J. Baker, Bigger Than A Hamburger 

William C. Anderson, A Call for Self Defense in the Face of White Supremacy

Week Six | Thursday, October 5

A simplified Toulmin Schema

Also: Karl Rogers and Rogerian Synthesis

Week Seven | Thursday, October 12

Gene Sharp, selections From Dictatorship to Democracy

Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace

George Ciccariello-Maher, Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

[Midterm grading]

Week Eight | Thursday, October 19

Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, A Third Reconstruction

Week Nine | Thursday, October 26

Arendt, Reflections On Violence

Must Eichmann Hang? [In-class Handout]

Week Ten | Thursday, November 2

Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? Chapters 1, 2, 6

Nick Estes, Fighting For Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context

Week Eleven | Thursday, November 9

Carol Adams, An Animal Manifesto

Carol Adams, Beastliness and a Politics of Solidarity

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Week Twelve | Thursday, November 16

Final Paper Workshop

Week Thirteen | Thursday, November 23

Thanksgiving Holiday

Week Fourteen | Thursday, November 30

Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, chapters 1-3 [purchase the book]

Week Fifteen | Thursday, December 7

Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, chapters 4-6

Thinking What We Are Doing

The following is excerpted from a history of teaching and statement of teaching philosophy requested as part of a dossier summarizing my position at SFAI as I'm assessed for the new union contract. The creation of the dossier was mostly a tedious and time-consuming slog, but I did find clarifying and useful the opportunity to think more explicitly about what it means to be trained in rhetoric teaching critical theory to art students in California in the time of Trump's GOP... 

The title of my version of the Critical Theory A survey course -- no doubt the single course I have taught the most often over the years here at the San Francisco Art Institute -- has usually been "The Point Is To Change It." The title is drawn, of course, from the last of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach": "The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Since I go on to read Marx on the fetishism of commodities as the recommendation of a kind of radical reading practice -- changing the world BY interpreting it, as it were -- things get sticky pretty quickly here. But I first read this quotation simply as marking a re-orientation of western philosophical thinking in critical theory, especially under the pressure of the technoscientific transformations of late modernity and neoliberal postmodernity, away from the otherworldly consolations of the contemplative life to the provocations and promises (and betrayals) of the active life of worldly concern.

On this understanding, critical theory is (or at any rate was definitively shaped by) a return to the classical rhetorical tradition, a return the terms of which set the scene for the postwar biopolitical turn and the present turns of planetarity. Although I do not imagine it is particularly surprising to hear that someone trained in rhetoric would bring a rhetoricized conception to the teaching of critical theory here, what I would emphasize is the possibly more surprising fact that it has been my teaching of critical theory to art students here at SFAI that has been by far the most definitive encounter shaping my understanding of my subject and my work. At the heart of a rhetorical elaboration of critical theory will be an insistence on the distinction of literal from figurative language and an emphasis on the constitutive and resignifying force of the latter. For me, an understanding of the work of figurative language in the ongoing reconstitution of persuasion and meaning connects all theoria to poiesis, that is to say all analysis to art-making.

This is an observation that sits very well with my sense that Nietzsche is as indispensable a figure for teaching critical theory as both Marx and Freud are, as it does also with congenial historical and intersectional critiques pitched from poststructural/ posthumanist/ queer precincts in the present. I would now go so far as to say that what Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud have in common as the three threshold figures who take us from philosophical orthodoxy into the post-philosophical discourses of critical theory is the proposal of (anti-)fetishistic models of reading to re-write the world and ourselves in the image of our contingent values -- where ressentiment, commodification, and sexuality offer up their fetishistic Keys to History -- and in which the fetish functions as a quasi-figure generating false-facts.

My understanding of the rhetorical constitution of society and figurative work of collectivity derives as much from my collaboration with students applying the theoretical language of textual criticism to their own life experience and art practice as from taking up Arendt's understanding of the political, Fanon's posthumanism, King's "revolution of conscience," Davis's abolition democracy, and Butler's performative theory of assembly.

Over the years, in teaching critical theory to art students the work of figurativity in the construction of collective agencies, resistances, meanings has loomed ever larger in my understanding and emancipatory hopes. I have been stunned by the formal experimentation students at SFAI will bring to my assignments for mapping conceptual spaces or crafting new definitions, introducing temporal, visual, tactile interventions into textual argumentation for example. In coming slowly to understand better how my students come to understand the place of critical theory in their own lives my sense of the work of critical theory and rhetoric in everyday life and in my own life has utterly expanded and transformed.

For me, education was never primarily a process of professionalization but of self-creation: It is through my years of education that I was politicized, came out and into my queerness, discovered my vocation for teaching -- and that work of self-creation and politicization and queer expressivity is ongoing. I teach my students that we are all of us incarnated poems -- and that our freedom requires both the legibility of literality before the "Eye of the Law" but also the provocation of a figurativity questioning that legibility to open up legibilities otherwise. As students testify to their hopes and to their histories in the classroom, critical theory becomes a site through which to connect reading practices, writing practices, artmaking practices, and worldbuilding practices more generally. In this work I am not only a guide but, gratefully, a collaborator with my students every term.

Digi Demos This Summer at Berkeley

Summer 2017 

Rhet 166: DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION & ANTIDEMOCRATIZATION UNDER THE LAW

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

Course Blog: https://digidemosunderlaw.blogspot.com/2017/06/our-syllabus.html
Meetings: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2-4.30pm, 140 Barrows Hall
 

Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies -- Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 6-8pp. 40%. 

                Course Description

How did the promise of peer-to-peer participatory democracy devolve into twitter harassment, doxxing, toxic comment sections, and zero comments? Is techno-progressive "disruption" merely reactionary deregulation, venture capitalist "innovation" merely marketing hyperbole, futurological "acceleration" merely social precarization, tech's vaunted "sharing economy" merely a digital sharecropping society, its "openness" vacuity, its "participation" another form of television? How did early legal and political squabbles over privacy and property online set the stage for our current distress? How might the "end-to-end principle" defining internet architecture across its many layers comport with the ideologically reactionary figure of "negative liberty" playing out in generations of anarchic, spontaneist, populist online activism? What are the politics of a digitality figured as an immaterial spirit realm, when digital networks abet financial fraud and military surveillance via an "internet" powered by coal smoke, accessed on toxic landfill-destined devices manufactured by wage slaves in overexploited regions of the real world? Setting aside the logical possibility and engineering plausibility of "artificial intelligence" does AI as a rhetorical trope in legal and cultural discourse facilitate and rationalize unaccountable algorithmic mediation and muddy our thinking about "autonomous" weapons systems? How does social media facilitate the transformation of factual disputes over climate change, harm reduction, and the macroeconomics of public investment into polarizing culture wars? Are there appropriate and appropriable techniques at hand through which democratizations might resist these degradations? Might "The Future" still be more evenly distributed? Can we still count on the street finding its own uses for things?

                Week One                                                                                                            

Tuesday, July 4 Holiday

Wednesday, July 5 Introductions

Thursday, July 6 

-- The Declaration of Independence.

-- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence ofCyberspace

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

                Week Two            

Tuesday, July 11 

-- John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War"

-- Tom Standage, on his book The Victorian Internet

-- Lawrence Lessig, from Code, Chapter 1, "Code Is Law," pp. 1-8; and Chapter 7, "What Things Regulate" pp. 120-137.

-- Lawrence Lessig, from The Future of Ideas, Freedom on the Wires, Chapters 2-3, Building Blocks and Commons on the Wires, pp. 19-48.

-- Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social

-- John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer

-- Gigi Sohn, Breaking Down the FCC's Proposal to DestroyNet Neutrality

-- Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism

-- Mike Ludwig, People on the Margins Have Everything to Losein the Next Net Neutrality Fight

Wednesday, July 12
-- Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish

-- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology

-- David Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism's Digital Deletion ofthe Left

-- Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation

-- Audrey Watters, The Best Way To Predict the Future Is ToIssue A Press Release

Thursday, July 13

-- Jessica Littman, Sharing and Stealing

-- James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement

-- Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry

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

                Week Three         

Tuesday, July 18

-- Tim May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

-- Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

-- Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko

-- Aaron Bady, Assange and the Computer Conspiracy "ToDestroy This Invisible Government"

-- David Golumbia, Bitcoin Will Eat Itself

-- David Golumbia, Bitcoinsanity, Part I and Part II

Wednesday, July 19

-- David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society

-- Amelia Abreu, Quantify Everything: A Dream of a FeministData Future

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism

-- Yochai Benkler, from The Wealth of Networks, Conclusion

-- Frank Pasquale, Towards An Intelligible Society

Thursday, July 20 (Precis/Toulmin due following Tuesday)

-- Dan Gillmor, From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

-- Geert Lovinc, Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

-- Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Who Do You Think YouAre?": When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity
-- Alicia Garza, A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

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

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

                Week Four

Tuesday, July 25

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion

-- Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, How Social MediaChanged Protest Forever

-- Michel Bauwens, Political Economy of Peer Production

-- Matthew Yglesias, Silicon Valley's Basic Income FansShould Defend the Actual Safety Net

-- Indivisible

Wednesday, July 26

-- Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation andDisinformation Online

-- Zeynap Tufekci, Mark Zuckerberg Is In Denial

-- Zeynep Tufekci, The World Is Getting Hacked, Why Don't We Do More To Stop It?

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

-- Sam Levin, Pay to Sway

-- Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News

Thursday, July 27

-- Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller, Introduction to Algorithmic Governance

-- Frank Pasquale, Duped by the Automated Public Sphere

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

-- The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules

-- Tom Nichols, It's Time to Reboot the Relationship Between Expertise and Democracy

                Week Five

Tuesday, August 1 Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project

-- Frank Pasquale, Bittersweet Memories of Machine Learning, A Provocation

Wednesday, August 2

-- Trebor Sholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy

-- Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon

-- Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity

-- Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity IsNot Near

-- Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek #ACCELERATE Manifesto

-- Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries

Thursday, August 3 Final Paper Workshop

                Week Six

Tuesday, August 8 Poetry Reading/Individual Meetings

Wednesday, August 9
-- Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet (novel to purchase): We Heard You Like Books (2016). 
ISBN-10: 0996421807 ISBN-13: 978-0996421805/Individual Meetings

Thursday, August 10 Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final Paper, 6-8pp.)

Queer Resistances and Abolition Democracy

"[T]he point is to call for an equally livable life that is also enacted by those who make the call, and that requires the egalitarian distribution of public goods. The opposite of precarity is not security, but, rather, the struggle for an egalitarian social and political order in which a livable interdependency becomes possible -- it would be at once the condition of our self-governing as a democracy, and its sustained form would be one of the obligatory aims of that very governance." -- Judith Butler

Final Thoughts From My Class This Term: For Futurity

1 NO MONOLITH

There is no such thing as technology in general. There are a plurality of artifacts, techniques, performances, research programs, events both real and imagined, things used and reused and misused, efforts supported and criticized, knowledges discovered, funded, regulated, made, maintained, marketed, appropriated, everything changing. Technological impacts are always specific and so, they should be specified. As CS Lewis insisted, when we say technology gives people power over nature what this really always means is technology gives some people some power over some other people.

2 PLURALIZE, POLITICIZE, HISTORICIZE!

There is no such thing as progress-in-general, either. Progress is always progress toward ends, and ends are as plural as the people who have them. The facilitation of one end will typically frustrate others, "optimization" always constrains as much as it enables. What technologies are capable of is not determined so much by their engineering specs but by the ways they are taken up by the diversity of their stakeholders. The costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change will all differ according to the positions of its stakeholders. And so, whenever anyone makes a claim in the name of "technology-in-general" or "progress for all" or "human enhancement as such" (as if we all agree already what life is about and what count as enhancements) you should always start translating that into a claim about a moment or conjuncture in an ongoing social struggle over the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change to the diversity of its stakeholders.

3 NATURE AS ARTIFACT AND THE POLITICS OF APOLITICISM.

Not all artifacts and techniques are recognized as technology at all, indeed most are not, and many are treated instead as "nature." When the political work of the natural is to treat that which is open to contestation as if it were instead inevitable or necessary or assumed to be optimal, it tends to defend the status quo and anti-democracy. But when technology discourse treats extreme and even transcendent outcomes as technologically determined, autonomous, or the result of sheer momentum, then that which is least natural of all, that which is the result of the most fraught fragile painstaking effort of all -- political progress itself -- can be "naturalized" into reactionary (Manifest) Destiny, the space of Barthes's alienated Jet Man. Even techno-transcendental declarations which seem to repudiate natural finitude and insist there are "No Limits!" ultimately translate to the customary conviction of the privileged that there will always be other folks on hand to clean up their messes for them. Again, after all, what would seem more natural to the powerful than the smooth ongoing function of power?

4 INSTRUMENTALITY AND POLITICS.

In this course we have often called on an Arendtian distinction between political power understood as the experience of possibility or potential (power from the L potens) as opposed to instrumental power understood as an amplification of given strengths and capacities. One understanding of power invokes a political or rhetorical rationality which takes plurality and therefore the possibility of resistance for granted, another understanding of power invokes an instrumental rationality translating causes into effects, means into ends. One sees history as a radically contingent, interminable, interpersonal struggle, the other sees history as playing out causal material forces, often superhuman ones. One is prone to social constructions and intersectional analyses grounded in plural histories, the other is prone to technological determinisms and natural progressivisms that recast differences as atavisms. Both understandings or inhabitations of power yield insights and uses on their own terms, but for Arendt it was crucial we grasp the essentially political character of concepts like freedom and progress, and understand the risk of re-casting these values in merely instrumental terms. What Arendt failed to elaborate was the extent to which the theoretical understanding of the political she championed itself depends on deeper instrumentalizations still, most crucially the infra-humanizing work of white supremacy.

5 FOR FUTURITY:

For our purposes together, we have understood "The Future" as a site of imaginative investment, framed metaphorically as a Destiny/Destination, but one at which no one ever arrives.The Futurisms we have observed clashing are discourses, movements, subcultures that have formed around particular narratives and visions of "The Future." Futurology is one such discourse -- with its own archive, figures, frames, canon, and conceits -- and it is becoming one of the prevalent vocabularies through which global elites rationalize the costs and risks of their policies today (even as we raised substantial questions about its logical and empirical standards and historical assumptions: every extrapolation eventually fails, trends are more retroactive than predictive, making bets isn't the same thing as making arguments, etc.). In the last weeks of this course I have emphasized the role of futurology in corporate-military think tanks and commercial imagery and sfnal narratives in contemporary technology discourse that has been marketing deregulatory disruption, privatization of common goods and public services as if these are democratizing and emancipatory developments. Finally, I have used the term "Futurity" to describe the quality of openness inhering in and arising out of the diversity of stakeholders to the present. It is to recognize, preserve, and enlarge this critical and creative space of pleasure, problem-solving, and resistance that I have dedicate this class. The subtitle of our course may have been "A Clash of Futurisms," but the title is: "For Futurity." Remember this: The work of building sustainable, equitable, consensual, convivial futures happens in the present world, in the contests and collaborations of people figuring out ways of living together and reconciling their ends, here and now, not through retreats into transcendent futures, essentialist parochialisms, separatist enclaves, or segregated spaces.

Contract Ratified!

Our first union negotiated contract was overwhelmingly ratified by the membership yesterday.

Come what may, I have acquired a host of benefits and guarantees at school that really turn things around for me. I will now get paid to perform professional functions, like advisement and committee work. I have gained the right to a week's paid bereavement should a loved one die. If the school cancels a class at the last minute, there is now a few hundred dollars' fee I would get to defray all the costs of designing the course (not to mention the cost of turning down possible alternate courses elsewhere). I have gained good faith consideration to re-teach successful classes if they are offered again later. Perhaps you will be shocked to discover that I have not had these benefits before.

Speaking of such little shocks, since I have been teaching at SFAI as a member of the "Visiting Faculty" full time since 2004 and since past service is being respected or "grandfathered" in the calculation of new positions and salaries it is actually conceivable that the result of our labor struggle for me personally will be a shift from thirteen years of single-semester appointments with at-will contracts (that is a "contract" you can be fired from at any time, for any reason, and even without a reason) at the bottom of the school's pay scale, I could now suddenly find myself re-designated a "Senior Lecturer" with a three-year renewable contract, a 20% raise or more, grievance procedures and representatives securing my job position, and a host of new protections and supports.

These days of Trump Republicanism have been deranging and demoralizing, but this labor struggle at SFAI has been years ongoing and it bears remembering that there is always so much more than one thing going on at once in politics.

I was one of the "founders" of SFAI's Visiting Faculty Association in (I think it was) 2012, back when we had to pretend to be a social club to find a space to air grievances and organize under the eyes of a suspicious administration (we're on our third President since then!) that was obsessed about keeping us from ever assembling, organizing, even communicating... You know, not a single colleague with whom I participated in those very first few Visiting Club Association events is still at SFAI with me -- one found a marginally better adjunct job for which she uprooted her whole life, another left adjunct teaching altogether as a no-win situation. They were not wrong to leave, we are not wrong to long to live better lives. It's just that these struggles take forever. They have vicissitudes -- there are many false victories and also false dead-ends. Everything feels like it is going to hell, and then something you've been fighting forever for suddenly goes well. This is true of all politics, but I must say that the lesson of the political struggles I have not simply followed but in which I put my ass out there in the world in a real way for a real length of time (union stuff in middle age, say, Queer Nation stuff in my youth) is that eventually you win much more than seems possible when things seem worst.

No computer has ever won a game of chess.

No computer has ever even played a game of chess.

No computer has ever played anything.

No computer has ever played.

Memories

This is the first CD I ever bought. I still own it -- and listen to it! Something magical happens during her rendition of "Fascinating Rhythm" and Sassy is seized by her genius and the concert just never lets up after that. I got this on the the same day I got my first CD player back in 1983 as a first-year undergraduate at IU Bloomington. I bought it at a record store called The Glass Harmonica, where a jolly couple like two gray acorns in thick gray sweaters sold mostly classical music and Broadway cast albums. My best friend Kathleen and I got a second musical education sampling music at Glass Harmonica Saturday afternoons, Sondheim, Shostokovich, and so on, and then to Mother Bear's pizza and then to the movies... Good gods, this was thirty four years ago!

McCarthy --> Nixon --> Reagan --> Quayle --> Gingrich --> W --> Palin --> Trump -->

Never doubt for a second these guys can ALWAYS get worse -->