Tag: Critical Theory

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

I spent my day at a conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Bensen Center for the Study of Western Civilization. It’s my hometown university and while I never studied there I was greatly enriched by its traditions of public and community programming. The land grant universities educated Americans like me even if we never attended them.

I suppose this is silly of me but I didn’t think an academic conference would actually be all that academic. I am used to financial forums and media shined up environments where doing the reading is sadly not a prerequisite. Academics very much do the reading. Or we said at my alma mater “that’s all very well in practice but how about in theory?”

I felt a little silly as the lone person on my panel who actually worked in industry and felt a little more acutely how absolutely unprepared our technical industry is for the task of running our elite institutions. We have on the ground knowledge and they have a very firm grasp of Hegel and Gransci. It’s a tension that has come to a head before.

And yet here our technical elite are gaining power and and a seat at the table and congratulations we’ve finished the long march through the institution. And somehow you still lost. We aren’t any closer to socialism or social justice. You know what happens in the dialect resolution next? Fascism. It’s like why pay the six figures for the degree if you don’t even read. Champagne socialists the lot of them.

But I’m also struck at just how divorced our academics are from the reality on the ground. We had an industrial class that founded private institutions that clashed with our empire elites before. How do you think we ended up with Stanford and the University of Chicago? Why do we continue this dance of institutional ownership?

And yet the cycle continues and we come up with new readings and new interpretations of how things should be optimally done. We have moral traditions and religious traditions and I’m sure this is an exhausting time to consider a new Pope so I’ll go light on my Catholic friends. Protestants just don’t understand. The future has arrived. You just didn’t notice it.

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Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

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Media Politics

Day 1512 and Thumbs Down

It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.

Icicles

As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.

Reading

The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe

Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.

Theodor W. Adorno giving a thumbs down

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Politics

Day 1422 and Dialectical Materialism

I am a capitalist. I like markets. I like people having the freedom and individual capacity to choose the course their life will take. We enable that freedom by letting people choose to improve their material conditions.

That might be where the Marxists and I agree. Humans live in a material reality that exists outside of our own condition whose boundaries have significant implications on how we live our lives. I don’t know if I care about the dialect but we are connected and how we change has contradictions.

So how do we include more people in those improvements? How does America continue to do that? I’ve been trying to get my head around what inclusion means in a pluralistic democracy of our size.

Who decides what material conditions matter? Do we agree that we improving our conditions? What are those material conditions? I think making life better does involving improving our material conditions.

I just don’t think we improve those conditions from the top down. I maintain a firm belief in the coordination value of free markets. We make improvements by making our own choices. How do we include more people in making choices where we all benefit?

Some take for granted that diversity improves material circumstances. Certainly empires benefited from breadth and scale in the past. But we’ve seen nationalism and homogeneity work quite well for some endeavors.

I’ve been so fatigued by organizing my life around my identity and not my choices. My choices are obviously enabled and constrained by my identity. I’ve dwelled on gender and disability quite enough.

I’d prefer my conditions be more enabling than constraining which is why I believe so firmly in technology. We enable coordination to individual benefit through building systems that connect each other.

I believe the choices that benefit me can also benefit others just as surely as I believe in the golden rule. Do unto others. Applying that from nation state to neighborhoods to companies and collectives is a process. I’d like more of us to have a say in improving it.

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Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1402 and Scape Squirrel Iconoclasts

I am a bit tired today. I’ve had a busy month of travel and the last week was particularly intense.

I have been in bed most of the day and the immobility coming with this day of fatigue has allowed me to thoroughly participate in a number of extremely online activities.

A squirrel named Peanut was euthanized

If you’ve not been following along the TLDR is that a squirrel named Peanut living in an animal sanctuary run by New Yorkers Mark and Daniela Longo was seized by the Department of Environmental Conservation and subsequently euthanized.

A raccoon was also taken and killed but Peanut was an Internet celebrity and we live in an age of viral contagion and within a few hours all Twitter could talk about was Peanut.

Why does this matter? Well, giant bureaucracies killing pets has an uncomfortable history in America. If you want to dig on the lesser known lore check out gun subreddits for ATF dog killer memes.

So potent is this history it has emerged as the ideal 11th hour election meme for the restless population that is uncomfortable about the power of the federal government.

I’ll quote my friend Anton’s tweet from a thread I’d recommend on Christian semiotics and Peanut.

actually you know what? the squirrel is an anti-christ. we are in the midst of a huge mimetic crisis and rather than scapegoating the squirrel to eliminate the conflict and avert violence, we instead elevate the squirrel’s death to heighten the conflict even further – @atroyn

Different political alignments experience the fear of governmental overreach, and in particular its monopoly on violence, in different ways. We occasionally make martyrs of those who experience that this violence to understand its horrors.

Squirrel martyrdom invokes an entirely BLM than the BLM who arose after the death of George Floyd. I say let us consider them both iconoclasts (in the religious sense) of the same fear of death through state means. They are symbols of idolatry who become sanctified.

Floyd’s death touched on frustration over systemic racism in the judicial system, Peanut’s death touches on frustration over government overreach – John Ennis

Leviathan wakes and we tremble.

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Culture

Day 1360 and Strange Days

Maybe it’s always been “strange days indeed” and it’s naivety to think otherwise. You’d think the children of American hippies and yuppies would be some of the most cynical people alive and I’m regularly shocked by the sincerity of normies.

And so while my hippie mother made sure I got all of the John Lennon, even the later years, I can’t say nobody told me they’d be days like these. I pretty much came into this skeptical of authority because America’s baby Boom liberals won the culture war.

A lot of propaganda has been slung for and against Uncle Sam. And we let people talk. Mostly. Media filtered a lot for us and now the internet has broken what little trust we had after Nixon. Not as if everyone remembers how we got here.

Americans barely handle the responsibility of our open information environments any better than your average culture. We let it mostly flow. And now it’s all strange days. If you pay attention it’s hard not to feel like it’s all falling apart at the seams. But maybe that’s normal.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1359 and Some Dirty Reading

It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.

I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.

Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.

The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.

The Tech Syllabus via Dirt

As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.

There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.

Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.

If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas

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Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1333 and Tagging Identity Algorithms

I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.

Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.

There are now reality dating shows about being autistic on Netflix so you too can be neurodivergent and accepted into a wider pop culture narrative of being part of normal living. Everyone wants love right?

Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning

I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.

Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.

It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.

Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1301 and Coming to America

The leadership of any powerful industry naturally has some vested interests. You assume this is obvious but to give Kamala Harris’s mother her due “”You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

That is actually a pretty conservative viewpoint to have. What if you can’t upend all the systems around you even if you’d like to apply something demonstrably better. Technology isn’t just gadgets. There are social technologies too. Media and money are both in that category. And it’s taken time to integrate both.

How we perceive each other and what we are owed relies a lot on both “what we’ve always done.” I think investors actually have reasonably good intuition that most “insane invention that breaks with all we’ve ever known” happens in spite of human nature and not because of it.

I am absolutely fascinated by how others read history in light of this fact. We highlight revolutions and change but as any good “nothing ever happens” nerd will tell you it takes forever.

So if you think something is going to change for good you need to make the case consistently over time. And one thing that just doesn’t change that fast is who is in charge.. Haves and have nots. The people who make the rules and the people who follow them. How you became a member of the class of people who make those decisions versus the class of person who accepts their decision is basically the TLDR of civilization. Classism appears to be incredibly hard to shake and we reorganize regularly to praise our betters.

America likes to tell itself a lot of stories about our rebellion against monarchy but it’s mostly a story about who gets to keep the wealth. Answering to your betters is enforced eventually with the pointy end of the stick and you can decide then how much you have to lose. If it’s enough (or very little) that’s when you get in trouble.

America being a break with British mercantilism has a pretty happy end of colonialism story. That isn’t true everywhere. Plenty of place kept their ruling classes with plenty of social benefits. Bread and circus is now healthcare and collegiate education. This expansion of prosperity has not gone evenly for everyone.

Socialism and classism in other countries really benefit America. Capitalism literally pulls people here despite our backwards immigration system that is actively hostile to bringing in this amazing talent. In America we’ve had a fantastically successful diaspora of India’s upper classes thanks to their history.

Welcoming in the everyone is one of America’s most cherished narratives but we we have done a lot to cherry pick other country’s the best and brightest who are otherwise stymied in political and social systems who don’t recognize them.

So when the markets crater I think it tells you something about how we all feel everyone else must feel. Some interests don’t feel good about Kamala Harris. Technology stocks cratered. Lockheed Martin on the other hand was up in the markets today.

Maybe that tells you something about who is and isn’t more established in the hierarchies of America. Maybe that should influence your actions. QQQ is not brat but the Styles section is very happy. Shondaland might have gotten the “we’d get rid of race but never class” thing right on Bridgerton after all. Anyways now is a great time to read your Thucydides.