Back in the Saddle

Back in the Saddle
Covid, Blogs, and the Future more Generally

On the other side of a year back at Uni, now, which goes some way in explaining why this blog has been idle since last summer. Pleased to say that I didn’t find it overwhelmingly difficult at any stage, but I was still reticent to divide my efforts – I was already trying to keep up with music and physical activity, so writing with any regularity would have been maybe a bit much.

However, as everyone is no doubt aware, things have changed up since then, and I find myself with a profusion of free time. These last weeks have been spent tying things off with the academic year – my situation is somewhat unusual as I’m sat between two universities, and, at the moment, between two degrees, but that is shaping up as the days pass. Also, alongside just about everyone else, I’ve been coming to grips with our new, COVID-19 reality. We’ve moved back to Canada, which has not been hit as heavily as many other industrialised nations yet, and our particular slice of it has fared even better than average, but the change to schedules, the psychic space, expectations for the future all take time to adjust oneself to. But, even as provinces and states move to re-open (grossly prematurely, to my estimation), get our feet under ourselves we do.

More than just growing acclimatised to the new weirdness and searching for semi-productive ways to spend my time, though, it was a recent read by way of Cory Doctorow’s blog that has me coming back here.
If you’re a long-time reader, my enjoyment of weblog extraordinaire BoingBoing shouldn’t be news to you. Unfortunately, over the past half-year or so, I’ve had the niggling feeling that quality has been dropping off: unlike most spaces on the internet, I’ve elected to turn off the adBlock when I visit there, under a likely-misguided belief that they deserve my clicks more than other sites, but, between the rapacity of the ads and the growing use of auto-play and pop-up videos, the viewing experience is falling off a cliff. Likewise, though more difficult to track, it feels like the quality of content has decreased – less interesting posts, and those that do make it through lacking the previous character and nuance.
As it turns out, Doctorow – one of the key figures over the site’s multi-decadal history and a large impact on its left-wing, tech-philic anarchic flavour – has been disaffiliated since at least some point in February, if not earlier. It’s unclear whether this was due to the direction the site was taking, monetising more deliberately with advertorials often in direct contraposition to other content, or if it was down to a disagreement amongst editing staff (though, as I said, nothing is clearly laid out insofar as I can tell, it seems that he and other core-BB member Xeni Jardin may stand on opposing sides when it comes to the conduct of Glenn Greenwald and the Intercept’s handling of whistleblowers), but in the end it doesn’t much matter: no longer is he there and it seems the worse for his departure.

All this to say, I’ve started frequenting the personal blog he keeps at pluralistic.net, a stripped-back, almost retro-internet space that is dedicated to making good on what Doctorow espouses –

Does what it says on the tin

One recent piece discussed the end of another blog space, that of ‘Beyond the Beyond,’ the regular column hosted by Wired where cyberpunk giant Bruce Sterling would regularly dump his brain. Apparently Condé Nast have been hit so heavily by the economic results of COVID that they are jettisoning even unpaid blog spaces to stay afloat (get a year’s subscription to Wired, 88% off!), and so it must go. I’d not been a frequenter of Beyond the Beyond before its demise, only ever really have a passing interest in cyberpunk and its luminaries, but the eulogy prepared by Sterling was interesting in-and-of itself, and a portion in particular stuck out for me, on the nature of blogs more generally:

Unlike most WIRED blogs, my blog never had any “beat” — it didn’t cover any subject matter in particular. It wasn’t even “journalism,” but more of a novelist’s “commonplace book,” sometimes almost a designer mood board…It’s the writerly act of organizing and assembling inchoate thought that seems to helps me. That’s what I did with this blog; if I blogged something for “Beyond the Beyond,” then I had tightened it, I had brightened it. I had summarized it in some medium outside my own head. Posting on the blog was a form of psychic relief, a stream of consciousness that had moved from my eyes to my fingertips; by blogging, I removed things from the fog of vague interest and I oriented them toward possible creative use.

I’ve a few of my own, physical zibaldones kicking around, but they seldom require of one the sustained attention that a proper blog does, and certainly don’t have the flexibility underlined by Sterling – no ctrl+f, no hyperlinks, certainly no possibility of any interaction with a public. I don’t assume a large readership here – in fact, if you do find your way here, I’ll assume you made a wrong turn at some point. I don’t actively advertise the site, haven’t optimised the URL or the content for search-friendly traction, and, honestly, never really intended it to be otherwise. As such, I’ll continue to use this spot in the spirit Sterling outlined above – a clearing-house for my thoughts, where I can mull things over in long-form that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do with such ease.

If you’re still along for the ride, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve finally completed Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness, and should have something on that in the next few days after chewing on it a bit. I haven’t yet finished Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, which should make for interesting reading following the evisceration Purser subjects him to. Otherwise, I’m nearly through Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and I feel like my understanding of that novel almost necessitates digestion and regurgitation, cud-like, just to try and make sense of it. Lastly, I’ve recently come into possession of a fresh collection of essays on Erich Fromm, and I suspect that will, in one way or another, make its way here eventually.

Fresh. Exciting.

There may, heavens forfend, even be a return to fiction at some point.

A Story of Cognitive Bias, or simple Delusion?

There has been a growing amount of coverage on the fringe group of people claiming the Earth is, in fact, flat.
bOINGbOING have been having fun at their expense for a while, and Neil deGrasse Tyson rather infamously clashed with the rapper B.o.B. on the subject, leading to…whatever this is. Following the first Flat Earth International Conference, the BBC have gotten in on the act.

Don’t let Big Science lead you astray! We know the truth of the (Disc)World!

What with the current state of international politics and some of the more choice world-leaders at the moment, it’s clear that mass-delusion is the flavour of the day, but, really? Following the lead of Feyerabend and Kuhn, I’m no big fan of Scientism, but even I draw the line at some point. What is going on with these folks?

I came across an article recently, which may have been courtesy of 3QuarksDaily, which could shed some light. Unfortunately, my google-fu is proving unusually weak, and I can’t for the life of me find the piece in question. What I recall of it was roughly thus – Religion, so the argument went, is not really an irrational position to take for those who are born into it. There seems to be foible of our cognitive architecture that makes it difficult for us to question the coherent narrative we are provided with – e.g., if we are raised in a community where everyone we know, everyone we trust, says that a) the sun will rise tomorrow b) water is wet and c) the son of an obstreperous sky-god was born human and resurrected himself from death for our sins 2000-odd years ago, it all sort of hangs together. Each premise, the way we’ve come to them and the authority with which they’ve been invested provides mutual support for the next.  While, consciously, we might realise that some of these things don’t sync up, the fact that we exist in a community that is at peace with the contradictions prevents us from feeling the fractious nature ourselves. Or so the argument goes.

Now, something like faith in Science(tm) can be a bit of an ask – as most of the arguments from your mates in the Flat Earth crowd go, the idea that the Earth is an oblate spheroid of immense proportion is, well, contrary to common sense. Shit looks flat, right? But then, what about the fact that we’ve all been raised in a society that is steeped in truSt and respect for the our good priests the Scientists? Shouldn’t that, according to the argument, bridge the gap?

That’s aside from one of the more redeemable aspects of science, that, assuming you have the materials and finances, you should be able to replicate any experiments under your own steam (putting aside the cascading issue of non-reproducibility amongst all streams of science…). And oh the experiments you can do. I’m not exactly “overly-proficient” when it comes to maths, but I can appreciate that the proof of the world’s roundness is pretty standard geometry – which is why it was figured out 2500 years ago.

That Peter Goras, not just good with the Triangles!

Beyond the fairly basic maths, there’s also the various other proofs – satellites, circumnavigation going back hundreds of years, literal photos of the planet from space. GRAVITY. How do you look at all these and deny them? What alternative story do you tell?

A story of epicycles within epicycles, that’s what. The assumption of a world-wide conspiracy which would require the involvement of millions for generations beggars rational belief. The alternative idea, a disc ringed by walls of ice preventing everything dropping off the edge, has just got be beyond anyone’s willing preference. Also, in case you were curious, the sun has a diameter of 32 miles and is located – approximately – 3000 miles above the surface of Earth. So that’s a thing.

Gee willickers, look at the distance between Britain and Australia! No wonder that flight took so long!

As much fun as it is to poke fun at these people, I do have to reiterate my complete confusion behind the whole thing. I suspect there are a fair few people involved simply for the lolz, but it can’t be the whole of them, can it? What’s the appeal? How do you sustain the contradictions?

Hopefully the intrepid explorer that is Mad Mike Hughes will be able to provide answers on these questions and more, using nothing but his home-made, steam powered rocket. To fly. To space. To see the Flat Earth. This Saturday.

Blade Runner 2049: Luke-Warm Take

Luke-Warm Take

These days, seems like there’s a check-list whenever a new sci-fi flick comes out, a formula for articles, think-pieces, and commentary to be made, ritualistically whipping up the internet into a self-righteous froth. These last few days have been more-or-less the same.

Caught the new Blade Runner earlier this week, at the local Vue. Not our usual cinéma de choix, but they’ve implemented a pretty hefty reduction on Monday ticket prices – perhaps they’re feeling the financial pinch.
I’m not a Dickhead (though I’m certainly guilty of being a dickhead…), so I didn’t go into this overly invested. Well, that’s not precisely true – I was concerned by the cutting of some of the early trailers, which seemed to be action-heavy in a way that didn’t sync with my memories of the original film (it’s been about a decade since I saw it last – couldn’t tell you which version, though I recall overdubs – and I’ve not read any Philip K. of novel length) which seemed a shame. I allayed my fears remembering that it was Villeneuve directing (which was a leap of faith in itself – I’ve not yet seen Arrival) and was reassured that the atmos, at least, would be on point. I wasn’t disappointed.

“Blade Runner: Amber and Teal”

More on the ritualistic criticisms, though – as per usual, there have been accusations of vacuousness (untrue) misogyny (kinda true) and racial insensitivity (pretty accurate). Maybe it’s because I’m not paying as close attention, but I don’t really get the sense that other genres, outside of the speculative like sci-fi or fantasy, get the same sort of treatment. This is not to say there are no criticisms lobbed at your latest Disney effort, or the most recent Scandi-noir police procedural or what have you – when these films are egregiously out of step they are rightly upbraided – but they don’t seem to have the same rubric of criticism applied. Perhaps it’s because, as speculative fiction, sci fi looks at the possibilities for the future, and a future that leaves out large chunks of the present is both morally and structurally myopic. Perhaps it’s because the audience of this genre overlaps significantly with the Tumblr crowd of rambunctious moral arbiters. Who’s to say?

I, white cis het male that I am, feel that the film for the most part avoids accusations of misogyny. It certainly portrays many of its female characters in an overtly-sexualised manner, but, insofar as I can tell, this does not a misogynistic film make—the portrayal of misogyny is not misogyny tout court. Importantly, and this is where the film stumbles on other criticisms, the portrayal of women in Blade Runner 2049 is in keeping with that of the original Blade Runner, insofar as the society’s approach to gender is concerned. The world of the original was a grossly sexist place, and so too is that of the sequel. As much as the Blade Runner-verse happens in a time-line adjacent to our own real-world one, it’s probably a faithful representation of what would happen to our society in a hyper-commercialised future – hell, it’s probably what we’re headed towards at the moment. It’s not as if the multi-story holographic adverts that dance above the street-level replicant manifestations of the product don’t have real-world analogues. This is just a dialled-up version of what we already have, with the pop-princess du jour filling our various media with a commodified sexuality, reinforcing and guiding the trends of society’s actual sex workers, the logics of pornography stamped into us day-in, day-out.

Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t revel in its portrayal of misogyny. It’s not lurid, it’s not exploitative. It definitely has characters that use women, or woman-analogues, in a less-than-positive light (the protagonist foremost amongst them), and shows a society that, much like our own, is pervaded by the otiose relish of the female form, but to do otherwise would be dishonest to the story it is telling. A protagonist who possesses all the right views on women, whilst also on the arc that the story requires of him, would jar. A society that is as steeped in a runaway capitalism as that of Blade Runner but also respects women is a contradiction in terms – sexism, just as racism, is concomitant with capitalism; they can’t be pulled apart. Hell, this is a society that is literally built on slaves – it’s the whole thrust of the story – why would you expect it to have anything but trash gender politics? But, even in showing all this, the film doesn’t become complicit in it. While it doesn’t go so far as to damn what it shows – it’s more harsh on the hollowness of these relationships than the power imbalance inherent – it doesn’t actively enjoy it, either. It has ample opportunity to: the “love scene” between the protagonist and his “partner” could have been much more sordid, aimed entirely at titillation. Instead, it is used to underline the core concerns of the series, that of the nature of personhood and the ambiguities, the uncanniness, of possible human-adjacent realities.

Otiose Relish – still more tasteful than real-world Vegas

The more accurate complaint revolves around non-white people in the film, or, rather, the lack-thereof. The setting of Blade Runner 2049, much like its predecessor, is Los Angeles and its environs. Picking up on some of the now-standard cyberpunk tropes, this Los Angeles is doused in Asian culture, from signage to the sartorial to gustatory. However, there are few, if any, actual Asian people in evidence. I’ve seen some clever epicycles deployed to explain this, the best yet being a comparison with the diffusion of American culture in our own world. In many countries around the world, so the argument goes, be they European, Asian, or, increasingly, African, you will find American businesses and products, replete with English signage, despite the absence of Americans, on the ground, perpetuating and guiding the effort. This is a product of the success of American cultural imperialism, the victory of American propaganda world-wide, as it portrays itself as something desirable, as synonymous with “success.” It was just this that led to the cyberpunk trope in the first place – during the Eighties, when so much of this stuff was codified, Japan was economically bullish, and the future, so it seemed, belonged to them. Thus, anything set in the near future looked like a fusion of Anglo and Japanese culture, with the hegemony of Japan redesigning the way American streets looked, the language that was spoken there, the food that was consumed.

All good, but the original Blade Runner, unlike its sequel, had plenty of Asian people on the streets themselves, as well as the signage and culture and what all. Where have they gone in the intervening 30 years? There’s been speculation that the Asian countries could have “gotten their shit together” and gone off-world – the existence of the extra-terrestrial colonies is a feature that looms large over both the original and the present Blade Runner – but this can’t account for every individual, and certainly doesn’t make sense of the real-world demographics of LA. The original film had a key character in Gaff, played by Edward James Olmos, who drew from his own mixed background to try and give a poly-racial feel to the film. Gaff is relegated to a few lines in a single scene in 2049, and I can’t recall any other Hispanic character – with dialogue or without – throughout the film. Evidently, much of the shooting was done in Hungary, so I can understand the logistical difficulties in importing the right mix of extras simply for atmosphere. Even so, the absence of nearly any brown or black faces in such a melting pot as Los Angeles is a bit stark.

All in all, I think Blade Runner 2049 comes through bruised but whole. Not a perfect film, but this isn’t a Bergman we’re talking about. The cinematography is beautiful, with very tasteful CGI. The pacing is, contrary to my original concerns, true to the original, and this, coupled with the seemingly-trademark Villeneuve soundscape, allows for a sustained meditation on what it means to be human. Performances were neither stilted nor overdrawn to camp. Could the story have been more nuanced? Were all angles satisfactorily explored? No. Does the plethora of criticism find purchase? Yes. As ever with these things, your best bet is to take a look yourself, and make your own opinions. Especially if you can grab some steeply-discounted Monday night tix.

 

White Supremacy at Western, Cultural Chauvinism at Ottawa: Against Identity Politics and Multiculturalism

Against Identity Politics and Multiculturalism

Over the past week or so, we’ve seen some frankly bizarre things coming out of Canadian Universities. I’m talking, of course, of the rash of “White Student Unions” opening en masse throughout Canada and to a much greater extent in the States, and the banning of a <free> yoga class, for students with disabilities, at the University of Ottawa. The two look dissimilar on the surface, but you don’t have to scratch very hard to see that they’re sourced from the same ugly place.

The student union shenanigans came to my attention by way of my alma mater, the University of Western Ontario – or as it calls itself now, “Western” (West of what, you may ask? It’s a mystery to me, situated as it is in decidedly the East of the country). It didn’t take long before the truth came to light, that this was a semi-elaborate hoax by a number of people via the more vile sections of the Internet. Initially, I didn’t think it worth writing on. With the second situation, though, it became worthwhile to at least highlight their mutual basis.

And you thought the rep couldn’t get worse, didn’t you?

My initial reaction to news of the White Student Union – similar, I assumed, to the original example coming out of Maryland – was one of disappointment, and a bit of surprise. Don’t get me wrong, Canada is a deeply racist place, and somewhere like Western, with an incredible amount of privilege in stark contrast to the city it dominates (a city that is statistically above the national average, by every metric, when it comes to poverty), breeds a very particular kind of racism. But Canada’s history, and, flowing from that, its race relations are different than the United States’. We don’t have nearly as much organised white supremacy, certainly none so forthright as the KKK or an equivalent. While we certainly have our fare share of racial animus, particularly in the wake of the recent Paris attacks, racists in Canada seem much more secure in their societally-structured superiority than their American cousins. Content to continue their oppression behind the veil of the dominant culture, they are less strident, less vitriolic. So, why, all the sudden, this decidedly American turn? What threat did they feel that drove them out into the light?

Of course, the fact that this whole thing seemed so weird showed it up for what it was – a hoax. My feelings on this are mixed. First, and mostly, I’m glad that it is a hoax, as it’s not especially good to have an organised hate group with free reign on a campus, let alone a society. Make no mistake, White Student Unions are hate groups, and it’s only a fool or provocateur that says otherwise. My second, lesser, reaction is one of regret – while, as I said, it’s not beneficial for these groups to be able to present their misinformation under the assumed imprimatur of a University, it would at least be useful to know who they are, and to have their existence underlined in the eyes of the public. It’s too easy for groups like this to remain in the background, out of sight, and for the rest of society to carry on in ignorance. If this were a legitimate front, at least it couldn’t be ignored, swept away like a bogey-man. At least then Canadian society would be forced to look in the mirror and reckon with its reflection.

Before wrapping up the first issue, I’ll turn to the second. Seemingly on grounds of cultural appropriation, a free yoga class has been cancelled at the University of Ottawa. This has come to light only in the last week or so, as it has been under discussion since September, the start of the semester. The ridiculousness of this has been picked up internationally, it’s so preposterous. It’s been a while since I read anything in-depth on Indian culture or history and I’m hesitant to tread without the requisite research, but as others have pointed out, the appropriation of Yoga in particular is a pretty absurd target for moral outrage. Yoga, as we know it today, was developed specifically for export and cultural miscegenation centuries ago. To turn around now and blame white practitioners for its uptake? It’s this kind of bleeding-heart, shoot-from-the-hip, ill-educated foolishness that deserves mockery of all and sundry.

This calls to mind the recent flare-up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where kimonos were provided during a Monet exhibition for visitor photo-ops. People, mostly uni-aged students, protested this as racist appropriation. In a turn of the surreal, a counter-demo was held, mostly comprised of elderly Japanese immigrants, in defence of the kimono use. Hilarity ensued. Once again, the group protesting was incredibly ill-informed on the subject they were inveighing over. Kimonos, much like the practice of Yoga, were and continue to the reserve of the upper echelon of their respective societies. Throughout their history, the vast majority of Japanese people were unlikely to see a kimono in their lives, let alone wear one. All those mystics and swamis that so typify the Orientalist conception of India? A slice of a strata in a horribly oppressive caste system. Find me the suicidally debt-burdened farmer in Uttar Pradesh that opens his day with a salute to the sun, and I’ll let you have your little (mis)appropriation lockout.

Reality: consistently stranger than Fiction.

 

To wrap up, I’ll try to show how, while ostensibly distinct, the two originate from the same place. Both of these events, very clearly, come by way of Identity politics. The White Student Union in Maryland was initiated using the same rhetoric and motivations as other sectarian student groups. The difference being, rather glaringly, that the majority of American society is a White Student Union, whereas minority groups to a degree require and benefit from clear delineations of intent and representation. The recent hoax, the mushrooming of fake White Student Unions, served a dual purpose – both to stir up anger and distress within the progressive portion of society, and to disseminate the ideas of white supremacy. The yoga class debacle too comes from Identity politics, which often sees the policing of dialogue, of space, and of conduct to the point of choking all discourse. This, and the kimono case, are just single passages in an incredibly tawdry book. Racism needs to be opposed, and past wrongs redressed, but to do this by way of cultural chauvinism or dilettantish victim pageantry is a gross misstep.

Identity politics, whether employed by white racists or misguided social justice warriors, even multiculturalism itself, they are products of divisive, obscurantist ideology. Writing in the wake of Zizek’s racist remarks on the Euro migrant crisis, Sam Kriss sums up the failings of multiculturalism:

“Multiculturalism is a profoundly antihumanist discourse: its basic unit is not the distinct and individual subject but the distinct and individual culture. And while there’s a case to be made for antihumanism…any discourse that takes culture rather than class (or even race, sexuality, or any of the other axes of oppression) as its basic unit strays into murky, fascoid territory.”

As Kriss says, multiculturalism flattens out the terrain of relations. Abstracting from the realities, the complex, contradictory, nuanced facts that make up individuals, multiculturalism instead looks at people, every person, as no more than a token carrier of their larger culture, itself divined by some mystical, spurious process. It should be little wonder that Canada is split into so many little enclaves, gated communities and self-imposed ghettos following this dogma. Merkel was right – the experiment of multiculturalism has utterly failed. She was wrong about the reasons, though. It was always doomed to failure.

Adolph Reed Jr. goes further than Kriss, arguing against any of the alternate options provided above. Reed has expounded on this multiple times, arguing that Identity politics is nothing more than Neoliberalism. Picking out the hypocrises involved in the acceptance of Caitlyn Jenner and the castigation of Rachel Dolezal, Reed writes

“…race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.”

Reed goes on to point out that the society that shifted ever so slightly, where the infamous 1% that own and direct the wealth of our world, when changed to reflect the “racial” and “gender” makeup of the greater body politic, would have to be found just by the arguments of the Identitarians. The obvious error of this underscores the failings of the position, the failure to both aim at the goals they espouse and the failure of the strategy to get them there.

At the end of it all, there are very few things that are fixed in our lives, really fundamentally stable, I mean. So much of what we are – our race, our gender, our culture, to a degree, even our sex – is socially determined. What cuts across all of those, though, is class and the power relations that determine it. All those that live and struggle under the banner of the progressive, we’re nominally on the same side. It’s time we start acting like it. We can’t let stupid, misinformed, impassioned bullshit, puerile Identitarian nonsense, continue to divide us. We have too much to lose.

If you’re actually interested in change, in winning the fight, stop and think for a minute about your tactics. Are they really aimed at victory, or are they just there to carve up your pile of the shit-heap, making you feel good in your safe corner of the midden?

 

Reflections on Aurora

Reflections on Aurora

I concede, I may have been a bit over-zealous in my recommendation of Robinson’s Aurora in weeks previous. I think I ought to get a pass due to the dazed, sleep-deprived state I was in, though.

I actually first heard about the book via a review over on BoingBoing, one that I didn’t finish reading until I was through the book itself (I noticed it at my library, and picked it up on name recognition). They, BoingBoing, actually hosted a bit of commentary by Robinson, where he details some of the thought processes and research that went into Aurora, further developing on the major theme of the book.

Generally, unlike most places on the ‘net, BoingBoing is pretty good when it comes to their comment threads – people are generally civil and on-topic. It helps that they have a Don’t-Press-Your-Luck Dragon that swallows anyone who strays too far from the acceptable. As of writing this, the thread for Robinson’s article is clocking in at 203 comments. I read through them a couple days back, so I’m not sure exactly where the tenor of the conversation has gone since then. The parts I did see went about as anticipated – plenty of folks coming out to denounce Robinson for being a Luddite and a downer, someone who has fallen into Deep Ecology and won’t pull himself out again. Quite a few of the comments seem to be misreading the gist of the argument completely, focussing on the hard problems of physics which Robinson explicitly says are really the easier set of issues. Not unexpected, as there is a large portion of SciFi fans who are that way inclined, all crunch and no fluff.

Does this look like a man who *hates Science*?

Two of the points in particular gave me pause for thought. There were valid criticisms spliced in amongst the hand-wringing – the reliance on bog-standard agriculture when there are other, well-advanced technologies available, especially that this becomes a major issue in the narrative, seemed a bit weird. Also that we’d not apply a skill-set acquired from generations of space-life within the Solar System to interstellar travel – the idea that we’d be coming at this operation with an Earth-centric perspective – seems like a justifiable criticism. Again and again, though, people harped on about how tech was going to save us in every way. They generally accepted that Faster-than-Light travel is not an option, in that, you know, everything we know says it’s impossible, but then proposed folding space as an alternative. While not precluded by our current models, the amount of energy need to do that is literally astronomical. Larger than the amount in the Solar System. So that seems to me to be impracticable. Another response was that we can stick to sub-relativistic speeds, but we’ll just turn ourselves into robots.

I know the sums involved here are so small as to be microscopic, but there is that adage regarding amount of anger as inverse to relative pay-out, so, I’ll stick with venting my frustration. This whole “we’ll upload ourselves to computers and live forever” thing – ain’t gonna happen. Any – honest – person working in cognitive science, that unlikely combination of neuroscience, comp-sci, philosophy and anthro, would tell you straight up that we barely have an understanding of the human mind, let alone any way of replicating it. Sure, we have our models and approximations, we have neuroscience doing a good job at categorising, and fiddling with, the wetware – but an understanding of how it all hangs together? What motivates and energises it? No clue. We’re as far away from that as was Descartes with his pineal gland-theory.

Furthermore, if we haven’t got it by now, with all the wealth we’ve amassed and the relative stability we’ve enjoyed these past 70 years, we’re not going to get it any time soon. Future’s not looking especially conducive to long-term, multi-national research projects. Unless something major changes up, our societies are about to fragment, and we’re all about to be living in a much more austere place. You can already see it playing out – the response to migrants and refugees in the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, the referendum on EU membership here in England set for 2017, the nativist, xenophobic government recently elected in Poland (and not so recently in Hungary). We’ve needed the cooperation of almost every “leading” country to keep the ISS running, and that’s child’s play to something like setting up a colony on Mars, or, more to the point, figuring out how that three-pound block of soap we all carry in our heads actually works. Despite what some Americans would like to tell you, scientific research has always been a multi-national effort. Even during the Cold War, there were cross-bloc exchanges. If this liberal social-order breaks down amidst mutual recrimination and suspicion, you can kiss that goodbye.

Stop trying to make AI happen. It’s not going to happen.

Aside from those considerations, would we even want to call like that, a conscious machine, human? Even if that consciousness was original housed in a meat-suit? Assuming that the thought processes of a person could be replicated by machine – and there are absolutely no reasons to do so, mind – what we define as human goes beyond the mere intelligence or personality. Every society I know of, throughout all of history, has defined humanity in terms of its excellence, its bodily perfection. We are inextricably embodied individuals. We exist in the world embodied, our minds are (as best we can tell) emergent properties of that body – there is no person without the body. Not by definition, not by material fact. So, no, you transhumanist dorks, there’s never going to be a Singularity. Also, for you ‘Effective Altruists’ out there, take off the blinders and cut it out with the self-congratulatory, STEM focussed wank. Stop trying to make AI happen. It’s not going to happen.

Anyways, enough tilting at windmills. I mentioned above that there were two concepts that got under my skin. The second, more an off-hand number than the above, was that Robinson set up the elements of his story to arrive at a pre-determined result, and that this was in someway reprehensible. Already, this is pretty rich, given that, even with the above detailed faults, Aurora is a much more comprehensively “hard” SciFi than the usual fare. But, really, what the hell is that even supposed to mean? Of course the author set the premise up to arrive at a pre-determined result! What the hell else was he supposed to do? What does every author do? How else do you tell a story? What a ridiculous position to take.

Sure, the fiction is meant to be speculative in character – it’s in the name, after all. But the very nature of the work is seeing where things go from pre-set circumstances. A sub-set of that, welcome and acceptable, is seeing what particular spread of circumstances get us to particular results. Why would it ever be different? Sure, Aurora is a set-up. But, as Corey Doctorow’s review states,

…what Robinson’s furtive scenery-arranging points out is that the easy times all our other science fiction stories have given to their colonists were every bit as contrived.

All our stories are contrived. They have to be. Robinson makes no claim that his story is the way things must run, even in the supporting article. What he does do, however, is present a plausible tale within the parameters of what we know to be hard fact. That’s the goal of speculative fiction – to get people to look at, to think, about the options and choices in front of us. Part of that is showing what happens when things go wrong. If that means you can’t have your interstellar empire and your sex ‘bots, soz.

The Inadequacy of SJWs and the Harm of Intersectionality

I came across this article by Laurie Penny late last night, and, at first blush, it was largely agreeable. Every right-minded person likes to see misogynists dragged through the mud every once in a while. However, one of the comments was rather apt. In response to the idea that we make progress by targeting our enemies where they are weakest, a commenter pointed out that the whole thing, gamer gate, the phenomenon of Social Justice Warriors in general, it’s all bunk. As the commenter in question pointed out, all the work being done here is only to secure a small portion of society, that, after this is achieved, SJWs and their allies:

“passively acquiesce to a society of massive inequality and injustice, continue to enjoy the perks of that unequal society (video games, fandom, technology), and yet persuade ourselves that we are after all very good and moral people, because we fight the good fight online as regards scrubbing video games of dumb representations of women, so we can enjoy those video games even more.”

 It’s unlikely to come as much of a surprise to anyone who has thought on it, but it deserves re-stating nonetheless. Penny likens this effort to a ‘culture war,” high esteem, to be sure. At least with regards to the American situation, the last 30 odd years have seen a collected effort towards a “culture war” because the real stakes for the Left had been lost. People gravitated towards fighting for a Liberal sense of equality because the real fight, the fight for economic equality, for social security, for real, unfettered emancipation for peoples of all sexes and genders, that was lost. The Left has been smashed, and remains largely directionless.

All the more reason to see this tempest in a teapot for the waste of effort it is. We need to take the fight to where our enemies are strongest, if ever we are to break them. We need to confront authoritarian, fundamentalist religions of all stripes, we need to dismantle the political class that sits on our societies like a hydra-headed parasite, we need to renew the connection between theorists and a vibrant labour movement. What we don’t need is self-congratulatory carving-out of meager Liberal fiefdoms, while our societies are made less and less feasible for the non-upper-middle class who can’t participate in our vapid “safe-zones.”

If you’re current with the North Star, and you should be, you’ll likely remember the flurry of discussion surrounding Intersectionality that erupted last winter. I thought that Rectenwald‘s article was a good summation of my own position on the matter, stating that, identity politics, rather than being an emancipatory project aimed at freeing individuals from static identities that are imposed on them by a classed society, merely entrenches the supposed-differences. Furthermore, because the idea of Identity reigns supreme, even criticism aimed at examining the theory itself is disspelled as language from a privileged position. All discussion ends, and we all sit tight in our self-imposed camps. Meanwhile, while we worry about stepping on each others’ toes, our enemies run wild, tearing apart any gains our predecessors made and ushering in a new Gilded Age. It’s bad politics. It doesn’t work, and it burns up energy direly needed elsewhere.

So, yes. I think that it’s a good thing that middle-class women are finally finding their voice, and that, despite very real and noxious set-backs, progress is being made. However, we cannot stop there. The progress being made is largely ephemeral. Targeting the symptoms of Patriarchy, the vile, immature attitudes expressed in gaming culture, on 4Chan, in society-at-large, isn’t going to root out the disease itself. Less self-congratulation, more, better-oriented work.

On Sport and Human Excellence

On Sport and Human Excellence

So, suffice it to say, I’ll be doing my best to boycott the Sochi Olympics (though I realise that this sort of post is a tacit engagement). This will include avoiding coverage of the Games themselves, and avoiding products and companies that have paid the princely sum to advertise for the Games (once again, the general list of offenders doesn’t play a large role in my life, and I am more than wealthy enough for their absence in it to cause no real harm, so this isn’t really all that grande a stance). There has been quite a flurry of posts on social media with people pledging to do the same thing, and, while I’m happy to see this, I’m concerned that the usual motivation might be a bit flawed.

The main issue seems to be the nascent explosion of homophobia in Russia, both supported and pushed by the “Putin Regime,” and what sort of message it sends for supposedly democratic and just societies to engage with such a nest of Evil. How can it be that an event, purportedly aimed at fostering fraternity among nations, could so wantonly turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses occurring in the host country? While this is an appropriate question to be asked, at least of the current situation, it is one that seems to turn a blind eye itself to the pedigree of the Games. Let’s not forget that the ’36 Summer Games, though awarded before the Nazis came to power, were allowed to continue in full view of noxious character of that government. More recently, in both ’72 and ’76, the games tacitly endorsed the apartheid regime of South Africa and Rhodesia, despite growing internal and external boycotts and embargoes. So, it’s not as if this is the first time the IOC has done something morally questionable.

However, to focus on the more egregious examples of the IOC’s oversights is to miss the point. When all costs are considered, the number of games that have been beneficent for the hosting city are diminishingly low. I say all costs, because the host cities are renowned for juking the stats to make it seem as if they’ve come out on top. This http://boingboing.net/2012/07/26/olympics-the-alien-invaders-t.html provides a pretty succinct breakdown of what I mean. More close to home, geographically, the ’76 Summer Games, hosted by Montreal, ended up costing some 1.61 billion dollars, taking nearly 30 years to pay off, only for the stadiums built to ultimately end up unused. And who shoulders the burden of those costs? Well, it’s not the IOC, that’s for sure.

As referenced in that breakdown of the 2012 London Games, another large concern is the appropriation of previously public land, which is then forevermore converted to private holdings. There is a wealth of documentation on the abuses of this sort regarding the last Winter Games, those of Vancouver in 2010, which is, supposedly, one of the few economically beneficial events. As if it weren’t bad enough that some several millions of dollars were diverted from much needed social programs to support Vancouver’s Olympic bid, the efforts to open up transportation between Vancouver and the Whistler location had also been surreptitiously aimed at increasing the ease at which environmentally destructive industry could be applied in the aftermath. To add insult to injury, while rail-roading over the deplorable human rights concerns in the country, the Vancouver Olympics Committee were so brash as to appropriate Native symbols and culture, all the while either buying off the Native elders or stealing the necessary land outright (see here for a not unbiased, but still useful, collection of figures: http://noii-van.resist.ca/?page_id=30).

So, while I whole-heartedly support raising concern over gay-rights issues in this latest Olympics, let’s not give the “good guys” (ie, the West) carte blanche, when they continue to be just as bad, if somewhat better at keeping it under wraps.

Something I haven’t seen a great deal of yet – though I haven’t gone out expressly looking for it, either – is the usual concern raised against boycotting an event like this. “Aren’t the real victims of a boycott the athletes? Those young people who have sacrificed countless hours of their lives to compete there, at a once-in-a-life-time opportunity, only to have it snatched away from them to appease some bleeding-heart liberals’ nebulous idea of human rights?” While this is definitely expressed as a straw-man, I’ve seen it rendered as such, and it does hold a kernel of truth. So, who wins out when these positions clash?

Across most of the West, we endorse that most Hellenic idea of personal perfection, especially when it comes to athletics. Let me be frank, it’s one I support myself, despite my rather homely intelligent-esque physique. Our bodies are capable of doing incredible things, and it seems a crime not to take advantage of that in our all-too-short lives. Those, then, who have the gumption to pursue the heights of physicality should be lauded. It seems to be one of those few things, like art, knowledge, or love, that is a good-in-itself.

That being said, like all human activities, it is necessarily a political one. Thus, whatever the IOC might say to the contrary, sport is always about politics, just as everything else we do is. There is nothing removed from politics, whether it be Avery Brundage or Paul Simon saying otherwise. So, to whom should win out in the competition, my answer is categorically human rights.

More disturbing, and I suspect that this is an uncommon and, at first blush, unpopular, opinion, is the professionalisation of sports across all strata. I recall reading an article on the Onion a few years back (which is likely hiding behind a paywall now), which purported to be a conversation with Noam Chomsky on the state of University-level sport in the United States. While it was satire, I think I remember Chomsky coming out and supporting the words spoken by his caricature: that all professional sport, but particularly that which has risen to such heights in the university, is harmful for the appropriate maintenance of civil society. People only have so much energy, and the pervasiveness of sport in our societies provides them with a catharsis that siphons off the passion to engage with problems in their own lives, and spins it into economic gain for the ruling classes. So, while I’m certainly not against sport or athletics, I am steadfastly against such things as the NHL, the NBA, the CFL, or what-have-you. While these corporations exist as a mixed blessing (the NBA and the NFL are often touted as a leg-up for the otherwise hopelessly oppressed African-American population in the States, disregarding, of course, the base security and wealth that act as barriers-of-entry in either case), I suspect that they are, at base, more harmful, and certainly more offensive, towards athletes than any boycott could be. At heart, they reduce the achievements of these individuals to a mere commodity, to be consumed by a great wad of humanity who ought to bettering themselves.

It’s fairly obvious I would endorse a removal of corporate concerns from the Olympics, as they are, fundamentally, exploitative. I also desire a return to pure amateurism, as was envisioned when the Olympics were first re-imagined by de Coubertin. How that would be maintained in light of breadth of the competition and complication of nationalist pride is, invariably, a thorny issue. At the very least, however, the IOC should be made to realise the political nature of the Games, and be held to stand by their claims regarding the defence of human rights. Their spotty history and the continual engagement with societies who gladly conduct LGBT rights offences, Aboriginal rights offences, and Women’s rights offences, shames us all.