Wildthyme

Reading Paul Magrs's Phoenix Court quartet as I fall deeper down this literally lifesaving Whovian fanhole that has sustained me and re-invigorated me since last summer, at this point extending to every Doctor, across the Sarah Jane Adventures, through Elizabeth Sandifer's Tardis Eruditorum essays (I've bought three of the books and await re-issues of the later ones) and still chewing through volume after volume of About Time. It's an old and familiar strategy, when I was bullied and battered as a kid I retreated into Tolkein and Herbert and Heinlein and Star Trek, and now coming out of the panic and depression and rage of my health-scare and then this whole Trumpmerican fiasco I find the insanely rich ramifying worlds of Whovian fandom to roll around in and fall in love with falling in love with again. Thank the billion billion goddesses for sfnality.

Married, Unburied

After seventeen years together, Eric and I got married this Wednesday afternoon at the Alameda County Clerk Recorder's Office. I still regard heterosexual marriage as a vestige of human trafficking and I still disapprove the commercial romance industry and its indoctrination of people through fantasies of dysfunctional completion via matrimonial control, etc etc etc. But I'm in my early-50s now, Eric's in his mid-40s and cobbling together taxes and scattered savings accounts and insurance policies and so on in the time of Trumpublican shenanigans seemed practically useful, more or less for the same reasons getting our domestic partnership made sense fifteen years ago when we did that. This was just a supplementation and clarification and expansion of that earlier status. That is what we have been telling each other. And yet. And yet.

And yet... Okay, so Eric and I have been together for nearly twenty years now (our 18th anniversary is just a few weeks away), we've been through a lot together, Eric matters to me in a way nobody else or anything else does. I don't even make sense as a person apart from the story of Eric and I and our years together at this point... And, okay, yes, there was indeed something more than administrivially and pragmatically useful in the marriage license and ceremony as it actually happened... It's hardly something I can recommend as a universally useful or relevant experience, certainly, there are lots of ways of making a sexual, romantic, social, personal life that makes every kind of sense than getting married (not to mention many ways of being married), but just being there with my best friend and holding his hands and saying the words in front of a judge, having my friend (and teaching colleague) Carolyn there as our witness -- she took the great photo you see at the end of the post! -- all the wonderful clerks and volunteer judges who walked us through the forms and ceremonies with their beaming smiles and professionalism, even just the very idea of this public affirmation of the reality of our shared love and our shared lives as a force the community is built of and building of was unexpectedly powerful... Eric and I both got misty-eyed holding hands and promising we'd support one another, it was hard not to think of recent illnesses, and breakdowns, and political fears, and economic struggles, and how strong we are together now, and just feeling that being recognized in an institutional way was weird and odd and powerful and moving...

Again, there are lots of reasons to be suspicious of marriage as an institution. Its history is patriarchal, the intergenerational transmission of power over the world by men through their possession of the world as property via their possession of women as property. To this day, marriage is suffused with reprosexual, cisheteronormative, possessive, paranoid, reductive, sentimental norms and forms that have done far more harm than good, been far more falsifying than truth-enabling. Maybe queering the institution renders it less harmful, more capacious. I don't know. Be all that as it may, however, it turns out marrying Eric was not just a handy lifehack. It was a wonderfully validating recognition of what matters most to us in a world we didn't expect that to matter to, a world that is, in this respect at least, a better world than the one we were born in and grew up in. It was bolstering. It was lovely. It was a good day. I love Eric. I got married to him this week. I love Oakland, California. That's where we live together and where we are loved together. Take that, all y'all Trumpmerican bullybigot greedhead knownothing motherfuckers!

State of the Blog, State of the Blogger

In years past, I followed the usual custom of offering up in the first days of the new year a list of posts from the prior year that had either attracted the most attention or which I thought deserved more attention. But, again this year like last year, I haven't really used the blog to post longform reflections or polemical critiques as I once did here, so there seemed little point in all that.

While I still teach histories and philosophies of "technology" and devote quite a lot of my pedagogy to critiquing the bigotry and fraud of reactionary tech-talk, design-talk, innovation-talk, cyborg rugged-individualization, and all that, it is also true that I haven't felt like sparring with stoopid transhumanoids and futurologists hereabouts for a few years. As I already testified last year, the lies of the futurists are exposed in mainstream media publications on an hourly basis these days now that "the singularity" turns out to have been little more than 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. Also, too, there are Nazis and racists and evangelicals and patriarchal pricks online. You may have noticed this. Books like Pasquale's Black Box Society and Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression are the sorts of serious scholarship called for by this moment, not the sorts of jeremiads of satirical demolition and conceptual engagement I liked to specialize in.

Maybe the EU's GDPR is indeed a starting point rather than an end-point after all... maybe regulations, rights protections, nationalizations/public options, platform monopoly breakups, perhaps in no small part through California code of regs strong-arming, can turn the generational reactionary tech-tide of the venture-capitalists and austerian technocrats and bigot code that has driven me to distraction for a quarter century. But I don't know that symptomatic readings of futurological follies in their techno-transcendalizing and counter-revolutionary screeds of the kind I used to revel in here are really as useful as they might have been in that earlier moment -- certainly that sort of thing feels less enjoyable to me these days. The ideology of individualism, articulated in the context of white supremacy and patriarchy, expressed in a culture suffused by the deceptive, hyperbolic, toxic norms and forms of PR and advertising discourse seems to me the Big Bad at the root of so much that I used to rail against. A fatal tendency to scientism and reductionism misrecognizing instrumental rationality as political rationality, technological capacitation as political freedom is also a part of that story. Perhaps there is more for me to say elaborating these connections...

Meanwhile, twitter finds its way to all the obvious snark about the idiotic awfulness and obvious lies and ugly bigotry of Trump Republicans within seconds: As I have already said many times these long last couple of ugly awful frightful years through, I have nothing smart to say about any of it, and further, there is nothing smart to say about any of it, nor do I think finding one more smart thing to say about any of it is much help to anyone anyway when everybody capable of seeing anything already always sees everything anyway. It's obvious what people have to do -- just 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.

The midterm elections confirmed that this is as well understood as it is likely going to be in this country. It remains to be seen if Trump responds with the ruinous authoritarian instincts we have come to expect from him, exhorting his Base to further violence in his rallies and tweets, seeking illegal remedies through firings and firesales, erratic declarations, states of emergency, whether the whole GOP will continue to enable him in this criminal nonsense, and whether the "Resistance" will remain in force with sufficient coherence and energy to respond to all this in the streets if it comes to that, even with the distractions of a divisive presidential race and lots of newly elected Democratic scapegoats to pillory via the usual fauxvolutionary vs. mushymiddle cabaret. You don't need to read critical theory like I do to grasp these dangers and dynamics. If anything, my kind of theory is as distracting as clarifying of the stakes of partisan struggles on the ground, honestly.

Now, last year when I posted my year-end summary I was suffering from a crippling couple of months of insomnia in which I was sleeping less than three hours most nights and beginning to think I wasn't going to survive that. The crisis eventually sent me into a few months of therapy early last year, and though I remain a fitful sleeper to this day I am no longer struggling as I once was with insomnia. Last year when I posted that New Year's report I had lost ninety pounds since my hospitalization the year before, and now this year I weigh fifteen pounds fewer still, and have maintained that weight without difficulty most of the year, sticking to my diet and yoga and exercise and long weekend walks with Eric. I'd go so far as to describe myself these days as fit, after a decade of... not. Last year at this time I was still reeling from the raw recent loss of our beloved cat Sarah -- and yet in a few month's we'll be celebrating the first year of Penny's life with us here. Watching our bold and brilliant little gray and orange-spotted kitten grow into a full cookie-jar bellied adult cat has been a delight all this year. Teaching in the City with the comparative security of a hard-won better-paying three-year union contract has been an improvement in so many ways as well. We paid off the last of my student loans this year. Having few assets feels way better with no debts, I must say.

Although 2018 was a terrible year, full of terrible and terrorizing events, kids in cages, endless mass shootings, Brexit and Trumpian chaos, authoritarianism globally ascendant, gross crowing bigots, accelerating Greenhouse Earth derangements, I am heartened by the results of the election, the radicalism of proposals coming from elected Democrats and the discursive traction they are managing to receive in the face of so much awfulness. The language of raising the social security cap, a federal jobs guarantee at a livable wage, a Green New Deal, post office banking as a financial public option, a new and improved voting rights act, renewed antitrust applied to platform monopolies as well as financial institutions, all ideas I have pitched as ideals in essays and classes for years and years are becoming a chorus at last, especially among the rising generations, and are suddenly getting wide and respectful hearings from high-profile elected politicians. Again, this is a terrifying time, climate catastrophe is upon us and the planetary 1% are quite prepared to go full fascist to re-install their feudalist fantasies. But they're outnumbered and we're out-organizing them for now, even as time's up and there are no guarantees. So, 2018 was a bit better politically and a lot better personally. I'll take it.

All that said, I did post to Amor Mundi more this year than last year, hundreds more posts in fact, and I'm hoping to amplify that re-engagement this year still more. Maybe I'll manage to do more than re-post Barbara Lee tweets on the news of the day amidst a sprinkling of Wildean quotations, though the first couple of years of Amor Mundi weren't so very different from that, come to think of it. I enjoyed writing more here when I was -- I'd like to find my way back to that enjoyment in the coming year. Let's see.

Take Octavia Butler into the Voting Booth

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

One Hundred Companies Are Killing Us All

The Guardian:

Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report. The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) “pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions,” says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute... Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change. The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks...

A Public Option for Financial Services

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

via The Roosevelt Institute

NEW YORK, NY – In a new report, the Roosevelt Institute calls for the establishment of an alternative option to the currently privatized financial sector. The report, A Public Option as a Mode of Regulation for Household Financial Services in the United States, co-authored by Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mark Paul and Loyola Marymount University Assistant Professor Thomas Herndon, outlines why a new approach to household financial services is necessary and how it could be structured.

The report documents that a large segment of America today is badly served by the traditional financial sector, with 19.9 percent of households being under-banked. A household is deemed under-banked when it either has no access to a checking or savings account at an insured financial institution or has such unreliable access to these entities that it must rely on predatory, high-cost alternatives like payday lenders and pawnshop loans. With basic access to the financial sector a pre-requisite for full participation in the 21st century economy, these exclusions effectively leave nearly one in five households economically stranded. Communities of color are disproportionately harmed by these exclusions.

To ameliorate this economic divide, the report advocates the creation of a public option for finance in which the U.S. federal government would establish a public bank that provides basic transaction services and consumer credit. In addition to meeting the immediate needs of the under-banked, this approach would have the added benefit of setting a new baseline standard for conduct and practices of the entire financial sector. In effect, it would be a bottom-up regulatory tool based on a new and improved floor in how banks can operate and would thus encourage healthy competition in the market.

“In America, it is really expensive to be poor, and our current approach to banking reinforces this harmful dynamic,” said Mark Paul, Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and co-author of the report. “A public option for banking would empower millions of families by giving them a foothold of financial stability. It would also make it much harder for private-sector banks to continue getting away with abusive practices like excessive fees. In one major restructuring of finance, this public option would make our economy more inclusive and bring about a healthy, constructive dose of true competition.”

“Imagine a life with no direct deposit, no visits to the ATM, and no auto-pay on the monthly bills you’d rather forget,” said Thomas Herndon, co-author of the report. “These hardships are just a snapshot of what it’s like to be unbanked—a challenging reality for millions of people in the United States. During the New Deal, this country helped offset the failures of the private banking industry by creating a new set of regulations and public alternatives. By walking away from that progressive spirit and commitment, we ended up with the dysfunctional and exclusionary economy we see today. It’s past time for policymakers to act bold and meet this challenge head-on.”

For years, the Roosevelt Institute has been a leading voice calling for an overhaul of the U.S. banking industry and the need for these changes to bring about a more equitable, broadly prosperous economy. In 2016, the Institute released Untamed: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power. Paul has contributed to the Institute’s research on how new rules would bring about a better economy. His recent report Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the End of Work was covered in The New York Times and Politico. Last year, Herndon released Liar’s Loans, Mortgage Fraud, and the Great Recession, which documented fraud and consumer protection abuses in the securitized mortgage industry.

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.)