Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Monday, August 31, 2015
Syllabus for This Fall's "Homo Economicus: Modern Political Economy and the English Comedy of Manners"
September 1-December 8, 2015, Seminar Room 18, Tuesdays, 1.00-3.45
Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu
Course Web-Site: http://homoecoonstage.blogspot.com/
Rough Grade Breakdown (subject to contingencies): Attendance/Participation 12%; Notebook 12%; Precis 16%; Essay 1 30%; Essay 2 30%
Course Description
Capitalism is so funny we forgot to laugh. In this course we will be reading plays drawn from over three hundred years of mannered comedy, some of the most coarse, witty, perverse, lively, and stylish works in English literature. From Early Modern Restoration comedies modeling the libertine rebel Rochester like The Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, and the Beggar's Opera, to High Modern high camp fascinated by the figure of Oscar Wilde from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience to The Importance of Being Earnest to Noel Coward, up to Late Modern work from Joe Orton and Jennifer Saunders resonating with the space oddities of David Bowie: we will not only be reading these hilarious and hellraising plays, but staging their key scenes in class for one another in an effort to inhabit them more viscerally. The premise of the course is that these plays stage efforts to satirize and cope with definitive contradictions of modern capitalism but also with paradoxes of corporate-militarist societies and cultures more generally, especially what I will call the plutocratic paradox (a meritocratic rationalization and enactment of aristocracy), the patriarchal paradox (a sexist, heterosexist, cissexist homosocial order that must disavow its queer possibilities), and the planetary paradox (a nationalist project impossibly comprehending ramifying multicultures in "the cultural" while embedded in a global nation-state system in which it impossibly competes via the racist war-machine of "the social"). Readings from political economy and cultural theory from Hobbes, Smith, Marx, and Mill, Pateman, Berlant, and Edelman, Williams, Sontag, and Bruce LaBruce will help us grapple with the plays and the spectacle they make of themselves. Consider the course a contribution to Urbane Studies.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings:
Week One (September)
1 Administrative and Course Introductions.
Week Two
8 Lawrence Dunmore, dir. "The Libertine"
Week Three
15 Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and Moderns. Hobbes on Equality, on Power, on Laughter. A selection of poems by Rochester.
Week Four
22 Etherege, The Man of Mode. Raymond Williams, on Culture, Society, Urbanity
Week Five
29. Aphra Behn, The Rover. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
Week Six (October)
6 Wycherley, The Country Wife. Texts in the Jeremy Collier controversy.
Week Seven
13 Congreve, The Way of the World, including the Preface. Paul Parnell, "The Sentimental Mask"
Week Eight
20 Sheridan, Rivals. Adam Smith. Kant, History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather.
Week Nine
27 Gay, The Beggars Opera. (The Threepenny Opera) Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Week Ten (November)
3 Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience. Oscar Wilde, Preface to Dorian Gray and Phrases and Philosophies for the Young; Wilde on the witness stand.
Week Eleven
10 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Sontag, Notes on Camp; Bruce LaBruce Camp/Anti-Camp
Week Twelve
17 Noel Coward, Private Lives; Hands Across the Sea (screening a performance starring Joan Collins).
Week Thirteen
24 Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant. Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism" and Lee Edelman, "No Future."
Week Fourteen (December)
2 Todd Haynes, dir. "Velvet Goldmine." From Dick Hebdige: Style: The Meaning of Subculture.
Week Fifteen
8 Bacchanal: Jennifer Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous, "Death," "Doorhandle." Videos: Sun Ra, Bowie, Glam, Disco, Jarman, New Romantics, Ga Ga, Janelle Monae, Hi Fashion, so much more…
Costs To The Left of Me, Costs to the Right
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Hole/Whole
Resilient Precariat
Incuriouser And Incuriouser
Saturday, August 29, 2015
The Vienna Circle Was A Gerbil Wheel And Techbros Are Still On It
1 Today's techies and nerd pundits rather remind me of logical positivists and Anglo-American analytic philosophers...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
2 They too fancied themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room and after superficial readings of rich archives rolled up their shirtsleeves...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
3 They declared themselves eager and able to circumvent or dismiss philosophical quandaries and topple moral/political Business As Usual...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
4 They confidently declared themselves masters of topics they largely missed the point of, re-invented a lot of wheels to run around on...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
5 They established lots of marginal fandoms devoted to official puzzle-solving and ignored everybody while everybody else ignored them...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
6 Now our nerd pundits offer up reductive superficial pie-charted "explainers" as our techies breathlessly re-invent laissez-faire pieties.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
7 Our nerds are so "smart" they think appliances are intelligent and our tech-talkers peddle "progress" while denying commonwealth.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
8 Our anti-intellectual "Thought Leaders" are so uneducated they don't even know their facile errors are a stale re-run of earlier errors.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
9 I know that nerds and geeks Rule now (at least the dim white reactionary reductionist ones) but nobody cares about logical positivists.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
10 I don't expect people outside the clubhouse to care much for long for our innovative Thought Leaders "getting to the bottom of things."
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
11 Sure, the coterie of super-rich techies can do some damage with their market fundamentalist pieties but that's just because they're rich.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
12 But the anti-historical sociopathic reductionist nerds and geeks are mostly just dumb, another American anti-intellectual boy's club.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
13 By way of conclusion I'll add that I don't think geekdom had or has to play out in this cramped uncritical fashion http://t.co/1HvsNweAa0
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 28, 2015
Friday, August 28, 2015
Periodic Reminder
Trump Stumped
Thursday, August 27, 2015
"Rise of the Robots"
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Futurological Tech-Issues With Techno-Fixes As Stealth-Reactionary Rhetoric Twitterrant
1 Apart from its serial predictive failure, sf/science confusion, lack of standards, promotional hype, futurology is about deranging frames:
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
2 So, problem caused by attacks on/abandonment of organized labor, deregulation, regressive taxes futurologically framed TECH STEALING JOBS.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
3 Then Basic Income (shorn of entitlements to ensure equity, indeed dismantlement is SELLING POINT) futurologically framed as its technofix.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
4 The Basic Income futurological technofix is, of course, a recipe for feudalism masquerading as emancipation.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
5 (recall how futurology peddled precarity of temp work as "liberty/flexibility" and exploitation of outsourcing as "free participation")
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
Slippage of outsourcing into crowdsourcing isn't merely figurative: outsourcing also labor exploitation framed as "tech," software enabled.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
6 Basic Income in futurological discourse "guarantees" subsistence without rights or entitlements to secure consent or equity-in-diversity.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
7 Inevitable failure of freedom and stealthed right-wing deception of futurological technofix here is symptom not substance of the trouble:
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
8 Before offering its false SOLUTION futurology frames PROBLEMS in a way that renders stakes and historicity unavailable to deliberation.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
Techno-fixation: before the proposal of a facile techno-fix, always first a facile framing of problems in ahistorical "tech"-fixated terms.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
Every "DriverlessCar" has a techbro in the driver's seat. This is the appeal to those who prefer it to real mass public transport proposals.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 24, 2015
MOOCs another instance in which reactionary politics are futurologically framed into "tech progress," support of public good into "luddism."
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
To grasp "life extension" take medicine (to which futurists contribute nothing) then add neologisms & wish-fulfillment fantasies. That's it.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 24, 2015
So long as you're fixated on daydreams of nanobotic super-immunity & glossy brochure genetic fixes you aren't working for healthcare access.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
Never forget Mike Davis's anti-futurological quip that the world's greatest miracle medicine is access to clean water.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
Again, futurology deranges political/infrastructural realities of healthcare via superlative "tech," in scam informercial miracle cadences.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 25, 2015
9 The work of futurology is to deny historical struggle, stakeholder specificity, material affordance in service of status quo amplification
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
10 Futurology remains the quintessential neoliberal discourse, a reductio of marketing norms and forms suffusing the neoliberal imaginary.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 23, 2015
Monday, August 24, 2015
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Hands Off
Soap Squish
Saturday, August 22, 2015
More Signs of The Singularity!
Last year, HP announced it was building The Machine -- a computer meant to leap as far above conventional modern systems as a high-end Xeon workstation is above an IBM mainframe from the 1960s. The entire system was designed to work with special-purpose cores and to use memristors as a universal memory architecture. The entire system would be tied together through extensive use of silicon photonics. It was bold, ambitious, and cutting-edge. And now, it’s pretty much dead... Instead of a special-purpose OS (dubbed Linux++ last year and meant to help mimic memristor and photonic design of the platform in software), it’ll simply run a version of Linux. The problem, apparently, was memristors, which HP hasn’t found a way to produce in commercial volume or at a reasonable price.Given the hard work the futurologists did coming up with all those spiffy neologisms, I daresay The Machine may still find its way to credulous consumers and eventual profitability in the late-nite technommercial arena. The way, after all, has been paved already:
The Confection of Con-Fictions
Friday, August 21, 2015
The Real Hyperloop
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Have Republicans Already Lost the 2016 Election?
It may not seem like it, but this week has seen the most significant development yet in the immigration debate’s role in the 2016 election. I’d go even farther -- it’s possible that the entire presidential election just got decided... [O]n immigration... [Republicans] need to talk tough to appeal to their base in the primaries, but doing so risks alienating the Hispanic voters they’ll need in the general election... After Donald Trump released his immigration plan, which includes an end to birthright citizenship -- stating that if you were born in the United States but your parents were undocumented, you don’t get to be a citizen -- some of his competitors jumped up to say that they agreed... Remember all the agonizing Republicans did about how they had to reach out to Hispanic voters? They never figured out how to do it, and now they’re running in the opposite direction... Here is the list of Republican candidates who have at least suggested openness to ending birthright citizenship, which would mean repealing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution: Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Santorum. That’s nearly half the GOP field, and more may be added to the list... [N]o matter who gets elected in 2016, birthright citizenship is not going to be eliminated. The bar is so high for amending the Constitution that it’s impossible to imagine any amendment this controversial getting ratified, which is as it should be. But the political impact is going to be very real, whether or not the idea goes anywhere in practical terms. The simple fact is that if Republicans don’t improve their performance among Hispanic voters, they cannot win the White House. Period. This discussion about birthright citizenship sends an incredibly clear message to Hispanic voters, a message of naked hostility to them and people like them. I promise you that next fall, there are going to be ads like this running all over the country, and especially on Spanish-language media:I said much the same thing about Romney nearly a year before that election, and then as now the real worry I had was that Democrats win the White House in a way that gives them coattails to have some purchase on Congress, without which Republican obstructionism will amount to neo-nullification whatever mandate American majorities offer the Democrats to fight austerity, climate-change, racism, gun-violence, forced-pregnancy zealotry, and neocon warmongering.“My name is Lisa Hernandez. I was born in California, grew up there. I was valedictorian of my high school class, graduated from Yale, and now I’m in medical school; I’m going to be a pediatrician. But now Scott Walker and the Republicans say that because my mom is undocumented, that I’m not a real American and I shouldn’t be a citizen. I’m living the American Dream, but they want to take it away from me and people like me. Well I’ve got a message for you, Governor Walker. I’m every bit as American as your children. This country isn’t about who your parents were, it’s about everybody having a chance to work hard, achieve, and contribute to our future. It seems like some people forgot that.”When a hundred ads like that one are blanketing the airwaves, the Republicans can say, “Wait, I support legal immigration!” all they want, but it won’t matter. Hispanic voters will have heard once again -- and louder than ever before -- that the GOP doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them... [A]ccording to exit polls Mitt Romney got 27 percent of Hispanic votes in 2012, while John McCain got 31 percent in 2008. Under a more likely scenario, with an electorate that votes something like in 2012 but with African-American turnout reduced, the Republican would need 47 percent of the Hispanic vote. In their worst-case scenario for Republicans -- an electorate that votes identically to the way it did in 2012, but adjusted for changes in population -- the Republican would need a stunning 52 percent of Hispanic votes. So to sum up: even in the best possible situation when it comes to turnout and the vote choices of the rest of the electorate, the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 is going to have to pull off an absolutely heroic performance among Hispanic voters if he’s going to win. That seemed awfully unlikely a week ago. How likely does it seem today?
Assumptions That May Not Apply In Social Media Contexts
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
The Ammosexual Agenda Twitterrant
Expose the Ammosexual Agenda: The crisis of gun violence is very much a crisis of American-style paranoid-aggressive masculinity.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
American gun-nuttery is sexist male impersonation as rugged individualist drag via the prosthetic penis/cyborg shell of an open-carried gun.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
Ammosexuals are a menace to America's children. Fight the ammosexual agenda. #GunnutteryIsFamilyUnfriendly @revpaperboy @JC_Christian @TLW3
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
End Open Carry: Send sick shameful ammosexuals back to their closets.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
Gunnuttery is a psychological disorder. Fight the Ammosexual Agenda. #ShoveWontWin
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
Lose the gun and risk some love in your life. #AmmosexualityCanBeCured
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
A gun doesn't make your penis bigger. Some people dig little penises. You'll be okay. #AmmosexualityCanBeCured
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
Your gun isn't being strong, your gun isn't being secure, your gun isn't being brave, your gun isn't being right, your gun isn't being you.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 19, 2015
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Humans Playing Computers Playing Humans
"The World's Most Dangerous Idea"
ConBIG = Big Con
Monday, August 17, 2015
Like Magic, Only Crappy.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Will HBO's Westworld Be A "Film of Ideas"?
On the surface, [the new Westworld] hardly has a perfect pedigree: The show is based on a 1973 movie, directed by Michael Crichton, about “the ultimate resort... where you can live out your every fantasy” including “lawless violence on the American frontier of the 1880s.” Starring James Brolin and a scarily robotic Yul Brenner, it’s a world -- as a robotic voiceover tells us -- “where nothing can possibly go wrong.” (Until it suddenly, spectacularly does.) Our guess is that HBO’s show will feel less like the 1973 film and a bit more like “Ex Machina” and “The Matrix.” (Something about the upcoming show’s catchprase -- “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” -- also makes me think of Philip K. Dick and Keanu Reeves in a trench coat.) We don’t know a whole lot of details yet, but here are a few things I like about this “dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” It’s executive produced by J.J. Abrams and co-created by Jonathan Nolan (who has co-written several screenplays with brother Christopher and wrote the story on which the film “Memento” was based.) It stars heavy hitters including Anthony Hopkins (who appears to be playing the sinister Yul Brenner role in this one), Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, and Jeffrey Wright.I quite like Hopkins, Newton, and Wright, and tend to agree that better actors are better than worse actors if one is hoping to be entertained by acting, but the hopeful genuflection to dudebro guru Christopher Nolan and his parade of prosthetic peen makes my own heart sink a bit. Bring on the gravelly voice and the gritty stage set, lets get some whining white guys in here, there are existential crises that need wrestling with!
And you will forgive a little eye-rolling of my own at Timberg's tidy conceit which would contrast the superficial charms ["On the surface..."] of the robotic Fantasy Island premise of the classic with the presumed "depths" of yet another sfnal invitation to "question the nature of your reality" via AI and virtuality. When Timberg insinuates that "something" in all this is making him think of Philip K. Dick and "The Matrix" I would propose it might be the sledgehammer pounding away with visual and verbal and atmospheric Dickian Matrixian cues just short of having characters literally facing the camera and screaming "Philip K. Dick!" and "The Matrix!" throughout the trailer. All of which is fine: All genres have their recurring motifs and signature moves, after all. But I really must protest the implication that the question every pale male undergraduate in Philosophy 101 who has ever smoked a joint inevitably asks himself -- namely: "dood! like what IS reality?" -- is hardly the tell-tale indication that we have stumbled into a film of ideas. To wit, what IS hamburger? Let's ask this A1 philosopher:
Frankly, there is very little substance to distinguish that gaudy 70s boilerplate about "liv[ing] out your every fantasy" and "lawless violence" and the 21st century conjuration of "the future of sin." It is only, I believe, in the framing of this promise of scenic sinning (the promise of film promotion since the birth of film) by reference to "the dawn of artificial consciousness" that we find the excuse for the pretense that with "Westworld" we find ourselves in the province of deep philosophical speculation and urgently timely political debate. Did I mention timely?
"And did I mention how timely [Westworld] is?" asks Timberg, breathlessly, at this point. "[T]he impact of advanced technology on the post-industrial world is one of the most crucial topics of our time," he intones piously, just the way the futurists have taught us to do by now. Of course, what makes technology "advanced" would presumably be the way it solves hitherto intractable shared problems rather than facilitating our exploitation, making us unhappy or unhealthy, poisoning our planet beyond healing, or, you know, threatening to kill us. Shorn of explicit norms and stakeholders references to "technological advance" really amount to facile retreats into complacent technological determinism and self-congratulatory manifest destiny, reactionary narratives of technoscientific change and historical struggle that have long been the specialty of futurological discourse. Their pernicious politics aside, though, here I just want to remind us all how reductive, how insensitive, how inattentive, how uncritical, how lacking in memory, how -- in a word -- stupid such narratives frankly turn out to be, however useful and consoling they may be to incumbent elites. Remember, this is a piece extolling the high-voltage Ideas we may expect from the new "Westworld."
Timberg declares himself to be "still smarting from [a] recent Barbara Ehrenreich [piece] which argued that "the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated... Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams." To this he appends the exclamation: "There’s never been a better time to look at this stuff." By which he means, let us be clear, there's never been a better time to watch the new Westworld! "Smarting" is not the same thing as being in any way made smarter, to put the point bluntly. What Barbara Ehrenreich knows that Scott Timberg has failed to grasp or feel is worthy of our attention is that "technology" is not a "job-eating maw" by any means. Behind the cloudbank of that overgeneralization are all the pesky details that make sense of the problem Ehrenreich is exposing here and without which we cannot gain the collective purchase actually to solve that problem. The productivity gains that have accompanied automation over the last two generations have not lead to higher compensation and shorter work-weeks only because that process of automation coincided historically with the right-wing demolition of organized labor and the retreat of the Democratic party from its New Deal and Great Society ideals ad constitutencies. Majorities supported by secure entitlements and bargaining power would not be threatened by "technology" (the monolithic construal of which in any case makes intelligent discussion of the stakeholder struggles and dynamisms of technoscientific change almost impossible in any case), and in a world that responded to shared needs and problems rather than the demands of minute plutocratic minorities for ever more wealth and profit we would not be bedeviled by the "assign[ment] to algorithms... [of] tasks... requir[ing] a distinctively human capacity for nuance" because the plain fact is that these algorithms fail to perform well at anything other than making the rich richer. That is to say, the glib framing of these Big Ideas as matters of "the dawn of artificial intelligence" and "the impact of advanced technology" is a distraction not an engagement with the actual matter at hand, the evocation of a comic-book terrain of villains and superheroes behind which real stakeholders with very recognizable and utterly familiar stakes and positions vanish from our contemplation, the displacement of the fraught but promising terrain of political struggles onto a spectacle of mythological destinies playing out for our mute witness and acquiescence. Feeling smarter yet?
Not to pick on the fellow, but Scott Timberg's on a roll here. If you think de-contextualized a-political loose talk of the threat of "automation" makes the new Westworld must-see tee vee for techbros, well, let's raise the pitch to even higher heights, and I'm talking TED-talk heights, I'm talking Thought-Leader heights! "Even closer to the show’s premise: Just a few weeks ago, more than 1,000 scientists signed an open letter arguing for the banning of AI-driven weaponry. 'Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is -- practically if not legally -- feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high,' reads the letter signed by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak..." Not to put too fine a point on it, this statement is either a vacuity or a lie. Expert systems and user-friendly software interfaces that get called "AI" are indeed both practically and legally feasible and have been for as long as most of Scott Timberg's readers have been living. These systems always have and will continue to cause problems -- security problems, problems of inscrutability, errors, brittleness, cruft, and so on. Not one of these real problems is or ever has been remotely illuminated by the conventional recourse to metaphors of computer intelligence, personhood, paradise, apocalypse, villainy, rapture or godhood made by alienated True Believing GOFAI coders or filthy-rich drama-diva venture capitalists who like to fancy themselves indispensable protagonists of historically revolutionary and transcendent dramas. Steven Hawking has spent the last decade trying to recapture former glory by casting himself in the mode of one time inventor now impresario and guru-wannabe Ray Kurzweil, Steve Wozniak in failing to get his head on Mount Rushmore with consummate used car salesman Steve Jobs is happy for the attention of an open letter or a stint on Kathy Griffin's reality show, anything, while Elon Musk knows there is as much money to be made from government contracts to deal with public hazards whomped up from techno-alarmism as there is to be made from the consumer rubes with false promises of techno-paradise incarnated in whatever landfill destined gizmo or low-earth-orbit amusement park ride he is peddling at the moment.
It seems strange to me, to say the least, to identify this sort of talk with "philosophy" or even, really, ideas at all, but I blame the ascendancy of futurological discourse with this general dumbing down of what passes for public deliberation into promotional and self-promotional activities among venture capitalists and those who serve them. I mean, if you're going to pretend robot cultist Nick Bostrom's handwaving about the existential threat of killer robots and satanic AIs (as opposed to the, he says, overblown non-threat of ongoing and upcoming anthropogenic climate catastrophe) is "philosophy," -- as Salon has also been quite happy to countenance already, as I have criticized, among other places, here -- then hell, why NOT say "Westworld" or is a Film of Ideas?
How's this for a conventional futurological confusion of science fiction for science fact? What we have here must another Film of Ideas, right guys?
Given that the confident promise of artificially intelligent computers and slavebots has been part of the furniture of the filmic future pretty much since legibly sfnal films have found their way to our screens and given that the conceit of artificial intelligence gone wrong and slavebots run amok has been a go-to hairball sfnal scriptwriters have coughed up to propel their narratives pretty much just as long, one really has to wonder just how it can be that otherwise perfectly sane and sensitive adults can continue to pretend that there is anything the least bit original or provocative about this premise. I would be hard-pressed to find a single year in my post-adolescent life in which there has not been at least one major motion picture or television series playing out this incessant scenario. As I have written endlessly often here and elsewhere, completely cocksure champions of good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) keep on predicting that their AI is just around the corner, generation after generation, year after year, day after day, without fail, er, that is to say, with nothing but fail, failure after failure, a faith in the force of the AI promise driving vast corporate-military R&D and advertizing budgets and matching the faith in the demonic AI premise driving vast attentional resources of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
I realize that the GOFAI dead-enders will pout and stamp that the fact that AI keeps on not panning out doesn't mean that it never will (a pretty frail hook to hang one's hat on I must say), but it really does surprise me a bit that the GOFAI crowd rarely seems to qualify the ferocious confidence of their expectation given all this serial failure, or take a pause in which to consider how the reductively calculating disembodied sociopathic models of intelligence that inevitably freight their conceptions may have something to do with all this failure. I imagine that the fantasies of AI for those who devote so much of their intelligent lives and affect to their contemplation are providing psychic compensations and satisfactions (stereotypes of body-loathing, narcissistic, sociopathic theory-heads trembling in denial of the contingency, rejection, error, mortality in human life are there for a reason), just as I imagine the hoary conceits of robocalypse remain provocative in their dreary staleness because they speak to the perennial alienation and anomie of everyday people coping with the head-breaking complexities and heart-breaking complicities of late-industrial consumer societies.
"What are the chances of a TV series capturing all of this?" Timberg ponders withh curious wistfulness. "Not terribly good, even on HBO," he concludes. Why so desolate, Scott? Box-office flop Transcendence managed to say all that crap and much more in a couple of hours, after all! TV series "capturing all of this" futurological wonder and genius are, believe me, a dime a dozen. That "Westworld" can regurgitate all the usual Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, Matrix conceits seems to me quite good, even terribly good, if I may say so. Hell, sleepwalkers could write that stuff at this point -- "even on HBO"!
A spectacle of "Future" scenery isn't a film of ideas, just as a futurological scenario isn't really a form of analysis or critique. (For a more elaborated account of this position read my Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains.) As I have said, I'm as much a fanboy as the next queergeek. I'll be watching "Watchworld." Explosions and blinking consoles and Holodeck adventures and talking robots and catsuits and floating monorail tracks between Deco ziggurats (well, you know what I mean), what's not to like? But it isn't actually true in my view that a cliche-soaked action movie becomes a "Film of Ideas" just because it is also notionally science fictional and has cellos playing drawn-out low notes in the theme music. It's not that science fiction can't be genuinely philosophical (Tarkovsky, anyone?) or politically relevant or thought provoking or emotionally engaging. It's just that you cannot expect me to take philosophically seriously anyone who confuses marketing for thinking, who confuses the stale for the original, who confuses denial with inquiry. When science fiction is rich and provocative and affecting it is so for the same reasons that other literary works are: the ideas are wedded to plots in unexpected ways, the conjured worlds are authentically complicated and multivalent, the characters solicit our empathy and understanding in their differences. It remains to be seen if the new HBO "Westworld" will be entertaining, let alone, more than that. I'm hoping for something fun, and will be quite pleasantly surprised if something more than fun is on offer, but you can be sure I know enough to actually know what I'm seeing whatever that may be. If you are losing the capacity to make the relevant distinctions to know as much, I fear neoliberal futurology deserves much of the blame for it.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Spell Cheek
Fatal
Friday, August 14, 2015
Welcome to the Greenhouse
Pot. Kettle. White.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Controlling Black Women
"Well, maybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood, [but] one of the reasons you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find ways to control that population.”Needless to say, forced pregnancy zealots like Ben Carson want to destroy Planned Parenthood precisely to undermine the autonomy and control the bodies of women of color.
The "Trojan Horse" of Right-Wing and Libertopian Basic Income Advocacy
The whole idea that minimum wage can or should be eliminated rests on marginalist assumptions such as the mythical "zero marginal productivity" worker. The freshwater economists and their allies who promote these concepts are overtly hostile toward wage-earning people of both high and low income levels and any income support programs whose parameters are acceptable to them should most certainly be regarded as Trojan Horses.We share a suspicion of those who pretend indifference to the differences between basic income advocates of the left (who see it as part of a program for social justice, what I call equity-in-diversity) against those of the right (who see it as part of a program of "efficient" deregulation, privatization, and eventual precarization).
So, it will be no surprise that I strongly agree with your choice of the rhetoric of the "Trojan Horse" here.
It is nothing short of a tell when someone claims to want BIG not to supplement but to replace minimum wage laws.
Coupling "basic" guaranteed income to demolition of standards guaranteeing equity -- and this goes too for those who claim healthcare, education, legal representation and so on would no longer be a right for those "unworthies" who mis-manage their BIG so as to no longer have recourse to these privatized services -- ensures that what a "basic" income would amount to is the provision of subsistence, as understood no doubt by incumbent elites.
What this means in substance is that right-wing as well as market libertarian (who are also right-wing, of course, despite their incessant protestations that they are "beyond left and right") advocates of BIG are commandeering the emancipatory aspirations of left advocates of BIG in the service of a re-establishment of feudalism.
This is the same old story it is always is with the likes of them, and exactly what anyone would expect who wasn't distracted/deluded in the usual manner by the neoliberal/futurological shiny object of a new-fangled policy technofix.
Their Beautiful Minds
Jeb Bush, August 13, 2015, on Iraq: "[T]aking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal."
Barbara Bush, September 5, 2005, on Katrina refugees: "[S]o many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them."
Choices
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Listen to Black Women!
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Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Interesting Twitterscrum on Ideological Differences in Basic Income Guarantee Advocacy
"Minimum Wages vs Universal Basic Income" my latest on @HuffPostBlog http://t.co/FoqsILUDo4 via @HuffPostPol pic.twitter.com/eA4F0dtPcM
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Basic Income AND a minimum wage pegged to inflation. Left BIG adds, right BIG dismantles.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol the biggest selling point of a #basicincome is the ending of minimum wage laws
— Gene Hosey (@artofclasswar) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol A person of the left should be skeptical of ANYONE for whom that is true.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol why if the #basicincome equals what a full time worker would on minimum wage?
— Gene Hosey (@artofclasswar) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Now? Always? Pegged to inflation? Withorwithout health/ed/welfare guarantees?
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar That's all important and part of the process of sitting down and all agreeing on the way forward.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar It will take struggle to accomplish this as it always does. I fear "the process" is bigger and harder than you say.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar It will definitely be a struggle & a very important one. But it's a struggle that needs to happen on both sides.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Democratization has ***always*** been a struggle against incumbent elites & anti-democratizing forces.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @dalecarrico @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Ending min wage laws is more 1% austerity. No good. #basicincome
— Ben Griffin (@bcwestmind) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @dalecarrico @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Ending min wage laws is the pt of Uber, not of a #basicincome
— Ben Griffin (@bcwestmind) August 11, 2015
@bcwestmind @artofclasswar @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol The uberite/libertopian BIG venn diagrams overlap for a reason.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Rightwing deregulatory BIG can amount to serfdom wo upward pressure on wages.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @2noame Yes! many conservatives like UBI because they think it will be cheaper than welfare. If it is, it will be insufficient
— Sander Philipse (@Sanderrp) August 11, 2015
@Sanderrp @2noame This is exactly right. And they think not just cheaper, but with deregulatory "streamlining" easier to abuse and game.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol #basicincome provides upward pressure on wages by making work voluntary
— Gene Hosey (@artofclasswar) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar @2noame @basicincome @HuffPostBlog @HuffPostPol Watch plutocrats define BASIC income as bare subsistence enforcing feudalism.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
the bad news for plutocrats is by definition we out number them https://t.co/pL2uLYveWO
— Gene Hosey (@artofclasswar) August 11, 2015
@artofclasswar The bad news for that bad news is that ideology works.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar There are plutocrats on both left & right. We need anti-plutocrat coalition who care more about people over gov.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Democracies are governments of, by, and for the people. I reject gov vs. people: I fight to democratize governments.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar Anyone, be they "right" or "left", should care most about actual outcomes. Our entire system is flawed w/o UBI.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Outcomes are shaped by intentions. Pretend to be beyond left and right and you become a tool of/shill for the right.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Those for whom BIG advocacy is about deregulation want fundamentally different things than those who want equality.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar In politics contingent coalitions on specific campaigns always possible & those win who know clearly what they want.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar Pretend one's only choice is being left or right and we divide ourselves into two incapable opposing factions.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar They won't mean the same thing, and this will matter whether you pretend it does or not.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar And both sides will increasingly call for basic income as automation's clock marches on. That is most important.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar BIG in your comment distracts us from plutocratic wealth-capture through attacks on organized labor NOT "automation."
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar "Automation" isn't one thing, "it" isn't inherently anti-democratizing. Politics distributes costs/risks/benefits.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Strong organized labor, nationalization of public goods, lifelong education, many ways to democratize "automation."
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar BIG can be a part of democratizing struggles, but one-size-fits-all technofixes are futurological cons; not serious.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar To sit and pretend basic income would not be superior to welfare is absurd. Means-testing doesn't work and harms
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar To say dismantling welfare and replacing it with BIG can always only be superior to welfare for majorities is absurd.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar Oh? Why? How so? And I'm also not defending the elimination of disability if that's a concern.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Obviously the superiority would depend on what is being called BIG and how it is implemented.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar Also, nothing is superior in equal measure to every stakeholder.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico @artofclasswar Right and a UBI needs to be above the poverty level to accomplish what we want it to accomplish.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar You assume "we" want to accomplish the same thing with BIG -- the very question in dispute between us.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar I disagree the role of BIG in democratic equity-in-diversity for me is the same as for BIG in deregulatory schemes.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar There are ideological disputes over what gets CALLED poverty you name as a neutral standard arbitrating BIG disputes.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico And making sure everyone has enough money to never starve can somehow be a bad thing because "not enough"?
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame If Basic Income guarantees just not starving in a deregulatory/privatized libertopian hellscape, no, indeed; "not enough."
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@dalecarrico @2noame There is no requirement that BI be the only public policy.
— USBIG (@USBIG) August 12, 2015
@USBIG @2noame I should think not! My point is that left and right ideological commitments will shape the other policies advocated with BIG.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@USBIG @2noame What BIG means, how it's implemented, how its costs/risks/benefits will be distributed are shaped ideologically/structurally.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@USBIG @2noame When BIG is framed as a post-political overcoming or technocratic circumvention of ideology this is always wrong & deceptive.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@USBIG @2noame I could be wrong but suspect/fear such disavowals are coming esp from techbro&libertopian precincts recently advocating BIG.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@2noame @artofclasswar For me BIG together with healthcare/education/civilrights secures scene of consent to everyday commerce in democracy.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico Great, so let's do that.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame I've written quite a lot about what that scene of consent demands. Nobody on the ideological right would agree with half of it.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame For instance: http://t.co/44kX6myFkp Ten Propositions on Taxes
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame Or, Left and Right: Back to Basics, http://t.co/AWbxCaoPQL
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 12, 2015
@dalecarrico I hear this so much it's ridiculous. "They won't agree to this." So much pointing to the other side & saying they're the fools.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@2noame I hear so much false equivalence/moderate middle from privileged folks denying differences that make a difference it's ridiculous.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame Again, you try to deride a call for clarity about actual assumptions as finger pointing and playground bullying.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame Look, I don't think you are a fool or some bad guy. I'm tweeting you because I assume you're reachable. That should be obvious.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
It seems to me you mistake denial of ideological differences as a way to get above them rather than just a blindness to their force. @2noame
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
This is pretty commonplace among those in positions of privilege (eg, white educated guys like me) who soak in invisible ideology. @2noame
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico I don't perceive you as taking issue with me personally. I do perceive you as taking issue with about 1/3 the population though
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico Again, not denying differences. I'm saying both sides are right and wrong about things. Each hold pieces of the puzzle.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
Care to specify the puzzle pieces you think the right-wing has that the left lacks for BIG advocacy in service of social justice? @2noame
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@2noame Democratization is a long struggle. Lots of victories along the path toward it. I think I'm with majorities on much that matters.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
@dalecarrico Fully realized democracy is a great goal to struggle for, and I think we both know UBI will be another big step towards it.
— Scott Santens (@2noame) August 11, 2015
Again our dispute demonstrates we don't both "know" that! I am skeptical that BIG as deregulatory scheme is a step toward democracy. @2noame
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
New followers because of my comments on basic income? Read my: A Neoliberalization of Basic Income Discourse? http://t.co/ePzZlZx6Sk
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
New followers because of my comments on basic income? Read my: p2p Is Either Pay-to-Peer or Peers to Precarity: http://t.co/kMkv3rmLNp
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 11, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
Republicans and "Limited Government" Twitterrant
1 Never forget that Republicans advocate "limited government" ...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
2. government "limited" to segregating, fleecing, surveilling, incarcerating, violating people of color in white-racist police state;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
3. government "limited" to forced pregnancies, harassment, neglect, and enforced rape culture in a never ending war on women;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
4. government "limited" to the humiliation, bullying, isolation, subordination, prohibition of queer folks, families, desires, and lifeways;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
5. government "limited" to the protection of plutocratic treasure-piles accumulated through deception, fraud, exploitation and violence;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
6. government "limited" to an economy shaped by the Defense Department, devoted to war, guns, prisons, pollution, and paramilitary police.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
7. Oh, yes, never forget that Republicans advocate "Limited Government"!
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
Ferguson Police Have Learned Nothing
Sunday, August 09, 2015
Indispensable Ijeoma Oluo on Yesterday's Black Lives Matter Protest at Seattle Bernie Sanders Event
Meet the Real Disruptors
Before the Love
Saturday, August 08, 2015
The Assholery Exemption
Pro-Choice, No Apologies, Twitterrant
When pro-choice folks concede "ick factor" to abortion procedure or fetal tissue research they're enabling forced pregnancy zealot politics.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
Abortion procedures are no more, but no less, icky than most healthcare procedures if you dwell on them.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
Do you genuflect toward the obvious ickyness of open heart surgery in making the case for its obvious health benefits to those who need it?
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
Would you describe as "pro-life" someone who wants to prohibit life-saving heart surgery because thinking of the procedure creeps them out?
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
There are women who weren't traumatized by having an abortion procedure.
There are people who don't find fetal tissue research disturbing. 1
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
"Pro-choice" arguments framed by assumption abortion is icky attack reasonable healthy people most opposed to forced pregnancy zealots. 2
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
I don't think she exists but if there was a woman having the recreational abortions forced pregnancy zealots blather about I'd support her.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
I know it doesn't exist but if the abortion mall or amusement park forced pregnancy zealots blather about existed I'd be all for it.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015
We'll never succeed against forced pregnancy zealots by pre-emptively conceding abortion or fetal tissue research are "disturbing" somehow.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 8, 2015