tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156445592024-03-07T01:56:08.281-08:00OmniorthogonalThe god of abstraction subsumes all other gods.mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.comBlogger693125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-69120340316897732822020-11-01T18:03:00.007-08:002020-11-01T18:14:29.399-08:00Just bring enough for the ritual[a follow-up to <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2020/10/what-is-it-like-to-be-trump-supporter.html">What is it like to be batshit?</a>. See also <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2007/09/voting-as-ritual.html">Voting as Ritual</a> and <a href="https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/11/republic-of-heaven.html">Republic of Heaven</a>. ]<br />
<p>
So there is this election happening in mere days, and it feels like a crucial choice point for the country. If we re-elect Trump, that means something very definite for the story of the US and for the American character, to the extent there is such a thing. And if we don't, it means something else. The choice is stark, the outcome uncertain. It's a collective choice, made by this weird group mind constituted by the biannual mechanism/ritual of aggregation we call an election. To the extent there is an American character (or mind, or soul) this is a key part of how it works, how the whole is constituted out of its parts.<br />
</p>
<p>
In most past elections, I've had feeling of apathy (not always dominant, but always there). Neither of the major parties represented me or my thinking, such as it was, and I always felt like I was choosing the lesser of two evils. "If voting could change the system, it would be against the law" – that's a funny radical bumper sticker but also encodes an important truth. In a sense voting is supposed to be unimportant.<br />
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<p>
But during the same decades that I was growing older and thus more conservative (at some level this is inexorable, the interests of the old are not those of the young), the nature of the mainstream parties shifted, until Democrats are the true conservative party (in that they want to preserve the existing institutions of society) and Republicans are the radical wreckers.<br />
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<p>
So now I find myself in the position of supporting whole-heartedly the kind of mainstream Democrat I disdained in the past. I mean, with every fiber of my being! That feels really weird! But these are weird times.<br />
</p>
<p>
Maybe I'm kidding myself. It's just politics and politics is just theater, not where the actually important work of the world takes place. Maybe I've bought too far into the media narrative of good and evil. Besides, there is little I can do other than vote and give some financial support to key campaigns. I can of course flame on the internet, which is not exactly nothing, but I can't delude myself that it makes a ton of difference.<br />
</p>
<p>
Still, history is unfolding, and we are all drawn into the drama, like it or not.<br />
</p>
<p>
It's important to understand what Trump is, what his role is in the national drama. He's not an out-of-nowhere abberation, no matter how abberant his behavior. He didn't come from nowhere and if defeated, what he represents isn't going away; the 40% or so of the country who supports him isn't going away. Jamelle Bouie wrote <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/opinion/trump-presidents-history.html">a really good piece on this</a>:<br />
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<blockquote>
<p>
For many millions of Americans, the presidency of Donald Trump has been a kind of transgression, an endless assault on dignity, decency and decorum. They experience everything — the casual insults, the vulgar tweets, the open racism, the lying, the tacit support for dangerous extremists and admiration of foreign strongmen — as an attack on the fabric of American society itself. And they see the worst of this administration, like separating children from their families at the border, as an unparalleled offense against the values of American democracy.<br />
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<p>
… Trump is transgressive, yes. But his transgressions are less a novel assault on American institutions than they are a stark recapitulation of past failure and catastrophe.<br />
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<p>
…For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States.<br />
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<p>
So from that point of view, maybe the election is not that important, we are going to have the same history and character regardless (Bouie doesn't say this, but it's an obvious inference).<br />
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<p>
But it feels like something important is at stake here, that somehow we as a country are putting everything on the line here for a chance at redemption. If we elect Donald Trump twice, it's clear that he represents not merely an unpleasant facet of the American character, but a dominant one. The gross, boorish, bullying, and fraudulent part. The ignorant part, the shortsighted part, the jingoistic part, the cruel part. The part that cares only about strength and knows nothing of justice, love, honor, beauty or caring. The proudly stupid part. And of course the racist and patriarchal part.<br />
</p>
<p>
That is, of course, not <i>all</i> there is to the American character. There is the inventive side, the pragmatist side, the heroic side, the frontier side, the decent side, the helpful and compassionate and welcoming side, the creative side, the visionary side. The side that held out hope to refugees and immigrants like my parents. Those virtues are just as real as the vices that Trump has brought to the foreground.</p><p>It feels like this election is going to say whether those virtues are strong enough to defeat the forces that Trump represents, or whether we give into our worst version of ourself as a country.</p>
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<h2 id="org54d16b0">America 4.0</h2>
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<p>
Regardless of how the election goes this is going to be a different country than it was before. Same problems and resources, different collective narratives. We are either in an ongoing catastrophe, or we will have pulled back from the edge of one.<br />
</p>
<p>
My old friend John Redford (who has <a href="https://babelniche.com/">a fine blog of his own</a>) said the other day that we are in the early days of America 4.0. That is, there have been three fairly different versions of the US:<br />
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<ul class="org-ul">
<li>version 1.0 runs from the founding to the Civil War<br /></li>
<li>version 2.0 is from the Civil War until depression/World War era<br /></li>
<li>version 3.0 is from the end of WWII until just about now<br /></li>
</ul>
<p>
(Although on reconsideration maybe 3.0 ended in 1989 with the cold war and the years from then to now have been part of an ongoing transition)<br />
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<p>
In each of these transitions, the nation faced an existential crisis and managed to reinvent itself, often through violence. We may be going through that again, or we may be going through death throes. But it's pretty clear that the current version of America isn't working at all and something new had damn well better get put in place and soon.<br />
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<p>
What will America 4.0 look like? I really have no idea, although I sure hope that it at least uses technology well. The election won't decide that, but it will determine whether the tentative gropes toward a viable future can start now or we have to have another four years of destruction of the old order before the new one can be born.</p>
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[ title due to Warren Zevon:<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-5102471835609068412020-10-29T22:17:00.007-07:002020-10-30T19:26:47.130-07:00What is it like to be batshit?<p>
I asked this on Twitter the other day and got not much in the way of answer.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">What is it like to be a Trump supporter?</p>— mtraven (@mtraven) <a href="https://twitter.com/mtraven/status/1320084905527656448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 24, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>
Although I have studied the right, and even gone so far as to try to intellectually engage with them at times, I find I can't quite wrap my head around what it must be like to be a Donald Trump supporter. That is to say: I can to some extent understand the arguments and the emotional dynamics that lead someone into being, say, a libertarian or neoreactionary, or even a frothing racist. These ideologies may be wrong or loathsome, but it feels like I kind of understand them, in that I can imagine what it is like to hold to them. They may be rooted in bad emotions (anger, hate, fear), but I'm human, I have my share of that stuff, I can sort of understand how it can warp your beliefs.<br />
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<p>
But I can't quite put myself in the place of a Donald Trump supporter. Something in my imagination balks. He is such a viscerally repellent figure. How the hell can anybody look at him and say, that's who I want to follow, give me more of that? The man is such a constant display of the worst parts of human nature, and the worst parts of the American character. The constant bragging and whining. The proud ignorance. The tacky fraudulence of everything he's involved with. The utter contempt for truth or for any values other than "winning". Think of a good human quality: kindess, courage, strength, wisdom – Trump embodies the opposite of it.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIIba5sMiYP_TUI_QRbIdrkbYUB-Aa7meDxxTEsSLAU6YQfkxVLNOihnkOg0bj_r30y9cjuw3XijDD7n_2hue0h0vU881gSYc_mq2-l7CGqA1CD12-lMw0Q1KLsU16kOHHuRx7/s535/f331df0ab7fa0cf6f7c9ba1624961c84.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="535" data-original-width="421" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIIba5sMiYP_TUI_QRbIdrkbYUB-Aa7meDxxTEsSLAU6YQfkxVLNOihnkOg0bj_r30y9cjuw3XijDD7n_2hue0h0vU881gSYc_mq2-l7CGqA1CD12-lMw0Q1KLsU16kOHHuRx7/s320/f331df0ab7fa0cf6f7c9ba1624961c84.jpg" /></a></div><p></p>
<p>
So even if I was somehow on his side ideologically – say I hated Mexicans for some reason, or wanted to keep blacks out of my leafy suburbs, or felt like sticking it to China, whatever – I don't think I could get past the utter vileness of the man.<br />
</p>
<p>
There's something almost metaphysically disturbing about Trump; he emits a whiff of the abyss, his triumphs hint at the death of meaning itself, the end of virtue. The cultists attracted to him remind me of those that appear in Lovecraft stories: people who have utterly given over their humanity to something depraved and alien, and worship it with a savage inhuman joy. I'm in the position of a Lovecraft narrator watching helplessly as these inhuman powers manifest themselves in a slow but inexorable march towards madness.<br />
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<p>
But horror aside, what drives these people? Either they don't see what I see (but it's not like Trump's qualities are subtle or hard to detact), or they see it and just don't care. Other considerations are more important. For example: <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-only-middle-finger-available/">Here's the editor of the National Review</a> explaining that voting for Trump:</p><p></p><blockquote>
is the only way for his voters to say to the cultural Left, “No, sorry, you’ve gone too far.”…Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between….To put it in blunt terms, for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture.</blockquote><p></p><p>Which is basically saying that the hatred of "the cultural Left" is so salient to these people that it overrides every other consideration, such as basic decency, esthetics, or even life itself (since Trump is quite directly responsible for the massive US death rate from Covid). The author of that piece says in the very next sentence "This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration." But yeah, fuck the left. I guess that is not entirly beyond my ability to imagine – I know what hate is like. I hate Trump, Trump's supporters hate people like me. They think we have "the whip hand" and it is so important for them to seize this opportunity to say fuck you. There's a certain symmetry of feeling there.<br />
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<p>
But I can't quite make the symmetry work. The sides do not appear to be mirror reflections of the other; one side seems clearly <i>better</i>. No matter how hard I try, I can't take a neutral view of this conflict. There are <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.html">those who make a virtue of being above the ideological fray</a>, and maybe they are smarter than me, or more morally advanced, that's certainly a possibility. Maybe I am overly locked into my worldview, maybe I am deficient in the necessary empathic imagination. Maybe I am too bought into a constructed media narrative, and they just happen to be bought into a different one.<br />
</p>
<p>
However: this is not a matter of preference, it's literally a matter of life and death. Covid is a life and death issue; so is fascism. So much as I might like to go all abstract and above the fray, I think the situation demands choosing a side and fighting for it. One thing about Trump, he makes it really easy to see who the enemy is, even if he confounds understanding.<br />
</p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/50GvkAO0OIg" width="560"></iframe></div><p>The title of this post is a reference to philosopher Thomas Nagel's well-known paper <a href="http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/What-Is-It-Like-to-Be-a-Bat-1.pdf">What Is It Like To Be a Bat</a>? The point of that paper is that while bats are presumably conscious and it makes sense to talk of their <i>experience</i>, that experience has to be utterly unlike our own, given the vastly different world the bat lives in by virtue of its different senses and abilities. <br /><br />Trumpists are alien along a different but no less confounding dimension.</p><p><br /></p><div class="status" id="postamble">
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-19191997143958459712020-08-02T17:35:00.002-07:002020-08-02T17:48:15.072-07:00Lockdown Review of Books<p style="font-family: "gill sans";">This is the list of books I've read so far during the lockdown, although it includes a few entries from just before things got serious. In fact the first two I remember reading on my last BART commutes back in February, which seems like the distant past now.<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">It's kind of all over the place, for better or worse. I'd like to say it represents my wide-ranging intellect but it could also just be randomness. But if you think this list is random, you should look at my stacks of unread books and wishlists!<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">On second thought there's quite a bit of thematic unity to be teased out here. The literary novels (White Noise, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Blood Meridian) are all more or less obviously about nihilism, all are attempts to face nothingness, meaninglessness, and death head-on.<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">This bleak topic is counterbalanced by a whole slew of visionaries who are untroubled by the nihilistic disease and instead create elaborate, vast, and questionable systems of occult meaning (Blake, Moore, Woodring, Vimalakirti).<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">If that stuff is too far off into hippie woo, to contrast with it we include one book that has something to do with my day job in software (Brooks). He was the architect of IBM's System/360, and you can't get much more straight-mainstream-rationalist than that!<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">And interestingly, a couple of books play around on the border between rationality and the lands beyond. Though one is fiction (Crowley) and one nonfiction (Kripal) they both are about academics who lose their faith in hardnosed rationality and materialism and end up exploring more ethereal domains.<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">Wow, I am really impressed with my ability to come up with post-hoc structure and rationales! Swear to (the possibly dead) god that I didn't plan any of that out! I guess the influence of the <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2019/12/weird-tales-from-seventies.html">last book</a> I blogged about is pretty obvious (in fact Kripal was Erik Davis's thesis advisor).<br /></p><p style="font-family: "gill sans";">Here's the list. I hope to write more detailed reviews of at least some of these, and will expand or link here.<br /></p><ul class="org-ul" style="font-family: "gill sans";"><li>Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson, 2/11<br /></li><li>The Flip, Jeffrey Kripal, 2/16<br /></li><li>The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman, 2/23<br /></li><li>Promethea v2, Alan Moore / J. H. Williams, 3/11<br /></li><li>Distraction, Bruce Sterling 4/2<br /></li><li>Congress of the Animals / Fran / Weathercraft, Jim Woodring, 4/22<br /></li><li>White Noise, Don Delillo, 5/3<br /></li><li>Why William Blake Matters, John Higgs 5/20<br /></li><li>Black Sunday, Thomas Harris 5/25<br /></li><li>Ægypt, John Crowley 6/21<br /></li><li>The Vimalakirti Sutra, tr. Robert Thurman<br /></li><li>The Design of Design, Fred Brooks, 7/14<br /></li><li>Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye<br /></li><li>Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee, 7/16<br /></li><li>Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 8/2</li></ul>mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-54868728445070096152019-12-31T23:19:00.000-08:002019-12-31T23:19:21.285-08:00Blogyear 2019 in Review<br />
The blog is obviously close to death, but somehow refusing to die. Two posts this year, barely.<br />
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I՚m doing just as much thinking, and presumably have about the same level of somewhat-blogworthy ideas as I always did. But the shape of the media landscape has changed. It՚s weird because I never really thought of this blog as part of a trend or movement, but I started it when blogs got started and it died when blogging as a medium died. As someone who generally feels out of step with everything, it՚s kind of strangely pleasurable to find myself part of a wave, even if I only noticed it after the crash.<br />
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<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventive-minds">The Minsky book</a> came out with an introduction I wrote (I got the gig on the strength of this <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/01/firing-up-emotion-machine.html">earlier blog post</a>), which gave me some momentary kvelling opportunities. Then shortly thereafter his name got ensnared with the Epstein/MIT sex scandals. Eeesh. (I mostly resisted commenting on this sad situation, but <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-koch-and-monsters.html?showComment=1567574842250#c6948771682065064674">here՚s my thoughts</a>).<br />
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That was a blow, and it wasn't the worst of last year, not by a long shot. It՚s been a rough one.<br />
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I՚ll close it out with some thoughts from some of the weirder neighborhoods of Twitter:<br />
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Ego is the mind overfitting to its own history.</div>
— Sport of Brahma (@SportOfBrahma) <a href="https://twitter.com/SportOfBrahma/status/1209542783234531328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 24, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The year is 20XX. Crime is not just legal, it is mandatory. The only currency is photographs of water and the last remaining company, Capitalism Corp, is hoarding them all. Only one man can stop them, and his name is John Motorcycle. There’s just one problem: he’s a computer.</div>
— Emma (@emmadaboutlife) <a href="https://twitter.com/emmadaboutlife/status/1206560334850318338?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The body is the API of the soul.</div>
— Slope of Function (@SlopeOfFunction) <a href="https://twitter.com/SlopeOfFunction/status/1094400087244005376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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instead of a new year's resolution, consider articulating a new year's resignation; for example, I am resigned to the violent passage of time, the waste of my mind, the endless winter</div>
— neotenebre (@ctrlcreep) <a href="https://twitter.com/ctrlcreep/status/1212144404376342528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-29500193492827940342019-12-31T11:58:00.000-08:002019-12-31T11:58:01.019-08:00Weird Tales from the Seventies<div id="content" style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
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<a href="https://techgnosis.com/">Erik Davis</a>՚ recent book <a href="https://amzn.to/2QEwGzE"><i>High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies</i></a> is an engaging work of cultural history, focusing on the lives and works of three important countercultural intellectuals: the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, the writer Robert Anton Wilson, and SF writer and later visionary Philip K Dick. These three psychonauts all inhabited California in the seventies, a moment when the druggy revolutionary energy of the sixties was in the process of mutating into a wild variety of spiritual practices and strange belief systems.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZM66DJDVqb5YsW_SDKYuVItUiUGZ3wbxoxPCXrhpzUmBWp10NkmKnnBuurQQYHSOHMu3g85pof-d6r_Sm-qnTx3XhDSyMqQMV8Mpe8NNkHNVBfedpMHvOPXf6MR4nY-WY5U-Q/s1600/high-weirdness-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="711" data-original-width="550" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZM66DJDVqb5YsW_SDKYuVItUiUGZ3wbxoxPCXrhpzUmBWp10NkmKnnBuurQQYHSOHMu3g85pof-d6r_Sm-qnTx3XhDSyMqQMV8Mpe8NNkHNVBfedpMHvOPXf6MR4nY-WY5U-Q/s320/high-weirdness-cover.jpg" width="247" /></a>Davis draws a common thread through these pioneers and their stories. Aside from their obvious similarities (they shared a time and place, they were all writers, they all experimented with drugs and esoteric practices, they were all somewhat fringe figures who went on to have impacts on the mainstream culture) – they also all underwent strange experiences where fiction and reality start to bleed into each other, resulting in feelings of confusion, deep ontological crises, ambiguous spiritual revelations, and new writings that attempted to describe and understand their weird experiences. Their works began as fiction but looped back to intertwine with their real lives in unexpected and uncharacterizable ways.<br />
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This looping quality is a key aspect of the common thread that Davis identifies as <b>high weirdness</b> – defined variously as a textual genre, a subcultural mode; a realization of that mode at a particular time and place; a style of ironic self-reference; and a particular kind of personal quasi-religious experience. If it՚s a bit hard to pin down, that is another of its inherent qualities – it resists precise definition. But to me the most interesting aspect of it is how it starts to be a theory of how the relationship between text and reality breaks down at the extremes. As Davis puts it, they “pushed hard on the boundaries of reality – and got pushed around in return.”<br />
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Given the theme of strange loops and the structural strategy of viewing this deep and far-reaching idea through the lens of three different thinkers, it՚s hard not to think of <i>High Weirdness</i> as <i>Gödel Escher Bach</i> for acidheads. And while it isn՚t that obvious from its official presentation as a work of cultural criticism, it also shares Hofstadter՚s high ambition of capturing important but elusive glimpses of something fundamental to the structure of reality.<br />
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But where Hofstadter՚s metacircular loops tend to be orderly quasi-mathematical formal patterns, the loops of High Weirdness are subtler, stranger, and harder to pin down. They are viral and agent-like; they are darker, more personal, more like narratives than beautiful patterns. They begin as texts and but then leap off the page to enfold their authors. They take on aspects of a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180309212207/http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/">Landian hyperstition</a>, a myth that has independent agency and can somehow act to call itself into being. They pose a challenge to mainstream metaphysics in a way that Hofstadter՚s more purely cognitive loops do not.<br />
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If High Weirdness is a viral construct that has a tendency to infect authors and readers, and can transmit itself by way of texts, then <i>High Weirdness</i> itself is a carrier. Davis is quite explicit about this, at one point comparing his text to bubble gum on the shoe, something sticky that just won՚t go away and is passed on from one carrier to the next (of course making this review another potential carrier of the infection – sorry about that! But you can blame the weirdly irresistible agency of the idea).<br />
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In other words, the book is not just a breezy biography of some colorful cultural figures, but also a quite serious attempt to absorb, synthesize, and reflect on their actual ideas and works and their broader meaning for the culture and for the nature of existence. It՚s based on genuine academic work (originally <a href="https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/87763/DAVIS-DOCUMENT-2016.pdf">a dissertation in comparative religion</a>) but does not patronize its somewhat disreputable subjects. It enters into their world of “garage philosophy” and their quests and connects it to more institutionalized forms of discourse. (Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton are prominent touchstones). It is a highbrow view of the lowbrow, and quite self-aware of the contradictions that generates.<br />
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Davis՚s philosophical framework for encompassing the experiences he writes about he calls “weird naturalism”: basically the position that weird things (UFOs, spirit visions, machine elves, etc) are <i>real</i> but not <i>supernatural</i>. They are not spirits from another plane of existence, but irreducible features of the one reality that we actually inhabit. Certainly the experiences they engender are real enough. One might consider them, especially given the generative role drugs play in producing them, as tricks of the nervous systems – real like an optical illusion is a real phenomenon of vision. But it՚s key to Davis՚s story that they are somehow realer than that, that they aren՚t mere hallucinations, but instead glimpses of unseen aspects of reality:<br />
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The… most substantial sense of the word is <i>ontological</i>. In this view, weirdness is a mode of reality, of the way things are…Weirdness here is not simply an artifact of our bent minds but a feature of the art and manner of existence itself…More than a genre, more than a psychological mode, the weird inheres in the loopy, twisty, tricksy way whereby things come to be. (p 9)</blockquote>
That all sounds very abstract, but one of the strengths of <i>High Weirdness</i> is connecting up these metaphysical speculations with the concrete details of the lives of the particular individuals involved, and with the specific cultural context they lived in. I can՚t say much about the Terence McKenna parts since I just don՚t know his work that well, but I՚ve been a big RAW and PKD fan for decades and even so there was a lot of new detail and insight into the lives and works of these author/visionaries, as well as the connections between them. I can՚t readily summarize these sections, which are dense with personal history.</div>
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RAW Illumination</h3>
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But I can՚t resist saying a little bit about Robert Anton Wilson, who had an outsized influence on my own thinking. He՚s best known as co-author of the <i>Illuminatus!</i> trilogy, an underground classic that explored drugs, anarchism, cults and conspiracy theories at time when these topics were very much underground, rather than the stuff of pop culture cliche like they are today. While I was a big fan when I found these books, which would be late 70s at MIT, it՚s a little hard to read Wilson today, in part because this stuff has permeated the mainstream so thoroughly. Also, certain standards have shifted and both the sex and the epistemology, which seemed rather daring back then, are kind of dated. But that really means that he was in the vanguard of an important cultural shift.<br />
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Wilson՚s philosophy might best be encapsulated as <i>epistemological anarchism</i> – rather than cleaving to a single belief system, an enlightened mind had to treat belief lightly, recognizing that there are many possible conflicting belief systems that all offer something of possible value, and having a single vision is the death of thought “If one can only see things, according to one՚s own belief systems, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind”. Or in the words of the Discordian writer Malaclypse the Younger “convictions cause convicts”. Wilson himself was interested in occultism, drugs, fringe politics like anarchism and libertarianism, and fringe scientists like Timothy Leary and John Lilly. One of his minor causes was rehabilitating Wilhelm Reich and describing his “persecution” at the hands of the government for his orgone boxes.<br />
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When Wilson was writing, the idea that freakish alternative world views should be taken seriously was quite radical; today it՚s part of the cultural background assumptions. In the 60s and 70s, it might have seemed like a great idea to break free of the master narratives of mainstream culture and go seek your own truths. In the world of Trump and Fox News – well, like in so many revolutions, the outcome was not quite as liberatory as was hoped for. [I՚ve been warned all my life that I՚ll become conservative with age. It hasn՚t happened in politics for obvious reasons, but maybe I՚m becoming an epistemological conservative in my old age, looking back with a bit of embarrassment at the radical posturings of my youth.]<br />
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Davis dives into Wilson՚s career and writings, but the thematic focus is on a period in his life where he believed he was receiving transmissions from a higher intelligence from Sirius, an experience he detailed in the book <i>Cosmic Trigger</i>. He found himself in what he termed <b>Chapel Perilous</b> – a state of psychic confusion, where the synchronicities pile up and overwhelm rationality and skepticism:<br />
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Wilson awoke from a dream and scribbled down the following phrase: <i>Sirius is important</i>. This dream prompt, inserted like a virus into Wilson՚s already wacky <i>weltanschauung</i>, triggered a series of coincidences, paranormal experiences, and interlocking references that drew Wilson into what Lovecraft called “a structure of indefinite possibility and promise.” (p 246). … This “discursive network” produced for Wilson a wide variety of edifying teachings, prophecy, and gibberish.</blockquote>
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Wilson was fully convinced that contact with an alien Higher Intelligence had begun…Wilson often slipped into what cognitive psychologists would describe as delusions of reference, confirmation bias, and off-the-hook agency detection…[he] considered the possibility of madness, but rejected the idea…</blockquote>
As Wilson said later, you either come out of Chapel Perilous as a stone paranoid or an epistemological agnostic. Wilson was fortunate to find the later path, due in large part to his inherent humanism and good humor. After his experience, he was able to write about it with an attitude of bemused detachment, and no firm commitment to its ontological status.<br />
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For Wilson had in many ways scripted his own extraordinary experience. <i>Cosmic Trigger</i> describes what happens when the sort of mischievous mindfucks that Wilson had unleashed in <i>Illuminatus!</i> come home to roost…unlike the many naive example of such self-scripting, Wilson was perfectly aware of the elements of “fictionality” that were shaping the “four-dimensional coincidence-hologram” his life had become. The irony was that this critical awareness did not dissolve the entities who seemed to be pulling the strings. (p 253)</blockquote>
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Weirding the Wider World</h3>
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The final section of <i>High Weirdness</i> attempts to trace the consequences of these writers and their experiences up to the present age, in no small part due to their influence on the technology culture of Silicon Valley and the general rise of “network culture”, which means not only the Internet but various New Age beliefs (Marilyn Ferguson՚s famous <i>Aquarian Conspiracy</i> apparently heralded the rise of networks as an organizing principle) and the rhizomatic epistemology of Deleuze and Guattari. This part I had a bit of trouble with. If the world is indeed shifting to a more networked and less hierarchical organization, it՚s not clear to me what the visions of three spiritual seekers had to do with it. The drivers are largely technological, and if these writers sensed the changes and incorporated them into their work they were not that unique in doing so.<br />
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There՚s also some discussion of the unavoidable fact that these concerns which used to be fringe are now rapidly becoming mainstream. Psychedelics are the stuff of bestseller self-help books, conspiracy theories are the stuff of mainstream movies. The weirdness of the world seems to have caught up or lapped the visionary experiences of the 1970s, making their struggles seem a big quaint. But <i>High Weirdness</i> is quite openly a work of cultural history, trying to draw a picture of the state of things in the recent past, so that is expected.<br />
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More ominously, the mindfuck media hacking techniques pioneered by the early Discordians are now industrial-strength tools of political warfare and intelligence operations, to the point where they have damaged the fundamental trustworthiness of long-standing political institutions – and not for the liberatory purposes that drove them originally.<br />
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The lesson may be that epistemic revolutions run into the same problem that plagues political revolutions: destroy the existing institutions of power, and the wrong people will rush in to fill the ensuing vacuums. The consensus reality that Wilson and others challenged seems like it might have been worth saving, after all. But this book is about a time when we were all more innocent. If some of their explorations seem foolish and embarrassing in retrospect, well, it՚s hard to imagine a more nuanced, sympathetic, and relevant attempt to retrace their steps and link it to the broader struggle to understand and improve the world.<br />
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Related posts: <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/10/god-god.html">musings towards weird naturalism</a>; <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-kind-of-kafka-steeped-in-lsd-and-rage.html">my visit to a PKD festival</a>. And maybe relevant if a bit a field from High Weirdness: <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2017/08/moment-of-totality.html">my conflicted relationship with psychedelic culture</a>.</div>
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-66472437469730163412019-09-02T20:32:00.000-07:002019-09-02T20:32:04.458-07:00On Koch and Monsters<div id="content">
[ this blog is pretty much comatose, but every so often my pet mission of <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/05/three-forms-of-antipolitics.html">anti-anti-politics</a> comes up and I can't resist. ]<br />
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Some people are horrified and disgusted that people are celebrating the death of David Koch. It՚s distasteful – wasn՚t he a fellow human being, with a family and people who cared about him? And isn՚t reveling in the death of a political opponent rather extreme? Should one really wish death on people just because they hold different political views?<br />
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I think this betrays a fairly shallow view of politics. The people who say this think it՚s just some unimportant shouting game, or just a sort of intellectual disagreement. This is wrong. Politics is a cousin of war, war breeds enemies, and fuck if I don՚t want to see my enemies dead. They are, after all, trying to kill me.<br />
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This is obviously true of the Nazis, fascists, ethno-nationalists and all their enablers. These are obviously people who don՚t merely have a “difference of opinion”, they are devotees of ideologies that would murder me and my family in a heartbeat. This is not a hypothetical; their predecessors did in fact murder a huge swath of my ancestors, not that long ago.<br />
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David Koch was not a Nazi*, but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch-climate-change.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage">he put his enormous wealth in the service of climate denial</a>, which if you multiply everything out is probably going to do a lot more damage to humanity than the Nazis ever dreamed of. He supported a vast number of odious causes, but that one in particular seems like a direct threat to my own life and to everybody else՚s.<br />
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This is the stakes of politics in our era, and perhaps every era. Life and death. Existential struggle. It՚s not a debating society, it՚s not an intellectual game, it՚s not a club or identity, although it includes all of those as aspects.<br />
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And let՚s be clear – Koch is despised not merely for his “views”, but because he put his wealth and power into the service of promulgating those views, which conveniently were designed to help him maintain that wealth and power. He wasn՚t an intellectual; he <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/09/19/the-mercatus-center-is-a-part-of-george-mason-university-until-its-not/">bought the services of intellectuals by the truckload</a>.<br />
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Sometimes I wish I were more of a doctrinaire Marxist or Foucauldian or something like that, because in cases like this the links between class interest and ideology are so painfully clear and they at least have the language to talk about it. A Marxist would have no qualms about pissing on Koch's grave, but also would not be so prone to think of him as <i>evil</i> -- he's simply pursuing his narrow class interests, which just happen to be opposed to mine.<br />
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Politics can be very ugly and stupid. But it's also an inescapable fact of life, and when things get hot you have to figure out what side you are on. Koch had no qualms about promoting his side, and I don՚t have qualms about being opposed to him. He did enormous damage and now he՚s gone, leaving only his family, his institutions, his hangers-on, and untold quantities of money to continue his project of making the world a worse place.<br />
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On the other hand: I՚m currently in a situation where a recently dead person who I respected a lot is under attack by an enraged public mob. Fairly or unfairly, I can՚t say – I have very mixed feelings, the facts are still being hashed out, and I haven՚t yet been able to write about it directly. But it gives me a bit of empathy for the other side, for the people in David Koch՚s life who didn՚t see him as a monster but as a whole person. The cases aren՚t very parallel for dozens of different reasons, but in both cases you can see the machinery by which societies, or factions within society, deal with defining, judging, and punishing purportedly monstrous behavior.<br />
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There՚s something primal about this process; it seems both a necessary part of social cognition (that is, it is part of how a society constructs itself; how it establishes its rules for normalcy and deviancy) and also kind of ugly, scary, and anti-intellectual. And it doesn՚t even do a good job of suppressing monstrosity, which seems to get stronger the more it is rejected, repressed, and projected outwards.<br />
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*while he wasn՚t a Nazi, <a href="https://timeline.com/the-koch-family-s-nazi-ties-are-more-entrenched-than-you-think-37c645012da0%20">part of his fortune came from his father working for Nazi Germany</a> and he՚s got other Nazi-adjacent items in his history, so there՚s that.<br />
<br />mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-56476110986543206822018-12-31T11:29:00.000-08:002018-12-31T11:29:56.153-08:00Blogyear 2018 in review<div style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
A new record low number of posts, yet this blog isn՚t quite dead.<br />
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The past year obviously sucked politically but also sucked for me on a personal level. Details don՚t belong here, but in the good news department I started a new job in October which is infinitely better than the last one. I՚m once again hacking Lisp for science which seems to be my professional destiny, one I can live with.<br />
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I had a few postings about politics in the abstract, mostly drafting off of SlateStarCodex. I still think this is an important and interesting topic but I haven՚t found a good way to talk about it. I think this is what “attracted” me to NRx writers (to their writings, not to their beliefs) – they are raising fundamental questions about the processes of group formation, social cohesion, conflict and violence. They have the right questions but the wrong answers. SSC also raises deep questions, and comes up with answers that are not as obviously wrong but still, IMO, wrong and dangerous. But the times are too fraught; trying to pick arguments in blog comment threads, which always seemed kind of dumb, is more of waste of time now than ever.<br />
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This year I rediscovered Italo Calvino and read a bunch of his books, which I highly recommend. Good places to start: <a href="https://amzn.to/2AnRdRD">If on a Winter՚s Night a Traveler</a> (fiction and metafiction), or <a href="https://amzn.to/2RuSdNG">Six Memos for the Next Millenium</a> (personal esthetics and philosophy).<br />
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And just yesterday the Twitter group mind seems to have founded the new field of <a href="https://twitter.com/mtraven/status/1079473319814938625">patarationalism</a> which I find describes what I՚ve been doing for decades, more or less.</div>
mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-10387362685861265062018-11-05T10:21:00.000-08:002018-11-05T10:21:46.518-08:00The ConflictI՚ve recently composed a number of aborted posts relating to “conflict theory”, arguing for the importance of the political, or speculating on the nature of political conflict, etc. None of them made it past a few paragraphs, because we aren՚t in a time for high-minded meta-level thinking. Shit is getting real. So I՚m pointing to a couple of writers who are making that point.<br />
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First, by Jacob Bacharach, a Jewish writer who lives in Pittsburgh, which states as plainly as possible “<a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/they-are-coming-for-the-jews/">They are coming to kill us</a>”<br />
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Second, by Paul Campos, a law professor and <a href="http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/will-vote-american-fascism-tomorrow">blogger at Lawyers Guns & Money</a>:<br />
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<span style="text-align: start;">I don՚t know what else to add, except to exhort people like myself, who are prone to abstraction and meta-level thinking, that the time for chin-scratching about the relationship of speech and action or whether or not Nazis should get punched is long past. The guns and violence are coming out, and whether or not you are interested in politics, it is interested in you. Please vote against fascism tomorrow, it's the best thing we can do now to avoid having to fight it with stronger means in the future.</span><br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-25082886765165902582018-04-16T00:08:00.001-07:002018-04-16T00:08:24.137-07:00You know who else was a conflict theorist?<div style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
In my <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.html">last post</a> I declared that in the meta-conflict between conflict-theory and mistake-theory, I found myself on the side of the former. I had plenty of justification, but I also tried to acknowledge the best arguments of the mistake-theorists (steelmanning their position, in the rationalist lexicon). I tried to credit not only their arguments, but their motivations. They seem well-intentioned, striving towards peacefulness, whereas the motives of the conflict-oriented seem inherently less pure.<br />
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But ultimately I think SSC is making a confusion between meta- and object-levels. Conflict itself is rightly regarded as something generally kind of bad, something that most well-intentioned people try to avoid. But conflict-theory doesn՚t necessarily inherit that moral valence. It is not about promoting conflict, it is merely acknowledging the omnipresent and necessary reality of conflict, and trying to come up with better ways to understand it and deal with it.<br />
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That being said – if I am being honest about my own motivations, the different levels are not so clearly separable. I am, after all, seeking out conflict, not merely theorizing about it. I՚m starting to wonder if it is, in fact, obnoxious. Spoiling for a fight is OK only if you are among fighters; if you try to pick a fight among those who would rather not, it՚s just being a jerk.<br />
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But maybe conflict theory is even worse than obnoxious. For instance, it appears to be a foundational component of the worst, most dangerous political ideas known to mankind. From the introduction to <a href="http://amzn.to/2C6KI3q">Timothy Snyder՚s <i>Black Earth</i></a>, a recent new history of the Holocaust:</div>
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Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species…Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish and could also be starved and extinguished. </blockquote>
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In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.</blockquote>
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Snyder presents a rather shockingly coherent portrait of Hitler՚s world view, making him seem quite different from the inexplicable charismatic madman we are used to. Hitler՚s views made a certain internal sense. This shouldn՚t be that surprising, in that any ideology has to have enough internal logic so that people can understand and adopt it.<br />
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And what is most disturbing about it is that it is not, as a theory, obviously wrong. It՚s not hard to imagine its appeal, especially if you aren՚t aware of the historical consequences. Conflict and racial enmity are pretty powerful forces, after all. Hitler theorized them up to 11, and created an ideology in which they were able to override the seemingly weaker values, such as humanity, universality, generosity, caring.<br />
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Snyder continues:</div>
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[Hitler՚s opponents] were constrained, whether they realized it or not, by attachments to custom and institution; mental habits that grew from social experience that hindered them from reaching the most radical of conclusions. They were ethically committed to goods such as economic growth or social justice, and found it appealing or convenient to imagine that natural competition would deliver these goods. Hitler entitled his book <i>Mein Kampf — My Struggle</i> . From those two words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where others were not. The ceaseless strife of races was not an element of life, but its essence. …. Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. …. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.</blockquote>
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If this is what conflict theory is in the extreme, maybe we should be wary of it even in all forms. But I don՚t think all forms of conflict theory are equivalent.<br />
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For one thing: Hitler՚s notion of conflict was reductively brutal. His conflict was based on competition for the most basic things (reproduction, land, food) and necessarily fought through the most violent means, that is, war and mass murder.<br />
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I am against that sort of thing. The conflicts I՚m seeking are intellectual or political or moral in nature, things Hitler didn՚t really care about. And while my politics aren՚t terribly consistent these days, they are grounded in <i>opposition to war</i>, specifically opposition to the Vietnam War which is where I got my start. That was a conflict, but it was a conflict between a war machine that was killing both foreigners and Americans, and a generation of peaceniks who wanted to stop that.<br />
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For another: I don՚t think that races are necessarily the groups who are in conflict, or the most important dimension of conflict. This can be the case, of course, but groups can form around many other shared properties. The racist aspect of Nazism was obviously pretty fundamental to what it was doing, and reinforces its brutality.<br />
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In fact, didn՚t we have a war between the Hitler conflict theorists and his bitter enemies (the USSR and western powers) who were also most assuredly conflict theorists themselves? And to state the obvious: the good guys didn՚t win WWII by reasoning with Hitler, they won by pounding the shit out of him. Mistake theorists like Chamberlain didn՚t come out looking very good.<br />
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It՚s almost as if “conflict theorist” isn՚t a real thing or useful idea. It՚s an artificial category that includes everybody from Gandhi to Hitler in the same very large bucket – the bucket of people who believe conflict and struggle are fundamental.<br />
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While mistake theory includes, I don՚t know, a handful of seasteaders, technocrats, and rationalists? If 99.9% of the world is conflict theorists then I don՚t feel so bad about being in the same bucket as Hitler. On the other hand, maybe all believers in utilitarianism can be classed as mistake theorists, and there are a lot of those.<br />
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I am not sure what I am getting at with this post. Introducing Hitler into a discussion rarely helps clarify things. But it՚s the struggle against the really bad ideas he personified and that outlive him that gets me going. This blog doesn՚t exactly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_machine_kills_fascists">kill fascists</a>, but it certainly is obsessed with them and <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2017/01/punching-nazis.html">figuring out how to fight them</a>. If I՚m going to be in a conflict, I need enemies, and this stuff certainly fits the role.<br />
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The SSC crowd are not fascists, not in the slightest! But they also don՚t seem to see creeping fascism as very significant. They are much more concerned about the excesses of campus SJWs than, say, the rise of white supremacist groups. They are more concerned with <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/06/racist-lives-matter.html">overreaching charges of racism</a> than the underlying racism. And they think political conflict is merely regrettable, not an absolutely basic and inevitable part of social life, something which everybody is involved with whether they like it or not. And to the extent that their ideas are wrong and distract from the actual struggle at hand, I՚m against them as well.<br />
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But have no special standing to preach political responsibility to anyone. I՚m not some exemplar of engagement and don՚t want to be; and I՚m certainly not a recruiter for the Resistance. I'm arguing here, not to convert or accuse anybody, but because SSC has found a new approach to some very basic issues that I care a lot about, and I can't resist engaging with them. And as a conflict guy, engagement tends to look like a fight. It's a different sort of fight, since as far as values go, I think we're basically on the same side.</div>
mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-11839148845785130072018-03-08T00:02:00.002-08:002019-10-08T10:27:39.942-07:00Conflict Theory[Warning: This very long post was inspired by a <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/">SlateStarCodex</a> post, but from there goes rambling all over the place. I take more potshots at Scott Alexander than he deserves. For that I apologize, but I can only say that I find his writing extremely thought provoking, and I feel a need to provoke back.<br />
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I had to divide this into sections to make it even moderately navigable.] </div>
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Blind spot</h3>
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I՚ve been making <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/08/what-did-you-do-in-gender-wars-moppa.html">various</a> <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/07/ai-and-capitalism.html">criticisms</a> of Scott Alexander, mostly attacking his antipolitical stand, accusing him and people of his general ilk of not only disliking the conflict inherent in politics, but of denying its importance and <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/">occasionally even its very existence</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind… Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them…It doesn’t have to be this way. <b>Nobody has any real policy disagreements</b>. …</blockquote>
This quote seems to reveal an epic blindness – a dread of conflict so complete it has repressed the very possibility of disagreement. But like the good rationalist that he is, the author is both aware of his own biased tendencies, and pledged to fight against them.</div>
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The meta-conflict</h3>
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His newer post, <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/">Conflict vs Mistake,</a> seems like an effort to notice and correct for this epistemological blindness, to figure out a way to encompass conflict, to acknowledge its reality and power, and to theorize about its relationship to knowledge.<br />
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To this end, he sketches out a dichotomy between two separate forms of political theory, two opposing mindsets, two different kinds of people who prefer different kinds of explanations for social problems:<br />
<blockquote>
Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects. </blockquote>
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Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.</blockquote>
To reword it a bit: Mistake theorists treat politics as a technical problem and view political disagreements as being basically the same sort of thing as engineers disagreeing about a problem – that is, there may be better or worse solutions, but ultimately there is some objective notion of better and worse that everyone can agree to if they are smart enough.<br />
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Conflict theorists, on the other hand, treat politics as a struggle rather than an optimization problem. Individuals form coalitions to advance their own interests and these coalitions compete for resources, control. and dominance. Political conflicts are not about who is right and wrong, but about who has power and who doesn՚t. There՚s no possibility of a stable best solution because different factions have different goals, and no solution can satisfy all of them simultaneously.<br />
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First thing to note – does anybody really believe that politics and conflict don՚t enter into engineering or medical decisions? Certainly nobody with any actual experience in an organization.<br />
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Nevertheless it is true that engineering and medicine are grounded in a reality that is independent of human opinion or interest, a physical world that at minimum puts tight constraints around what is possible, what works and what doesn՚t. There is an objective ground truth, no matter how we slice it up or what values we want to impose on it. As a result, disagreements can at least in theory be settled by disinterested calculations.<br />
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Mistake theorists view social problems as being like that, or possibly they are people who <i>want</i> problems to be like that. Or perhaps feel that they <i>should</i> be like that. Or maybe they are afraid (not without reason) that if we <i>don՚t</i> approach social problems in a way that is a joint search for a best solution, then there is not even a possibility of peace. The world ends up being a hellscape of perpetual war, or maybe one side annihilates the other. This is such a horrifying and depressing prospect that they feel a visceral moral obligation to move towards a more mistake-theoretic worldview.<br />
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Conflict theorists, on the other hand, have evidence on their side. Whether or not conflict is bad, it is certainly a basic fixture of human reality, and inescapable if one is to do any remotely serious thinking about politics.</div>
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Taking a side against taking sides</h3>
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Nevertheless, while the SSC post as a whole earnestly strives to present both sides on an equal footing, it doesn՚t take much subtextural analysis to get the impression that the author himself is solidly a mistake theorist who thinks the conflict theorists are basically jerks (sometimes far worse), and maybe not all that bright. Perhaps as a consequence, he can՚t quite imagine what it would be like to be a conflict theorist, and his portrayals of the conflict theory stance always sounds kind of weak.<br />
For example, here he compares the two sides take on the specific issue of democracy:<br />
<blockquote>
When mistake theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it gives too much power to the average person – who isn’t very smart, and who tends to do things like vote against carbon taxes because they don’t believe in global warming. They fantasize about a technocracy in which informed experts can pursue policy insulated from the vagaries of the electorate. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<br />
When conflict theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it doesn’t give enough power to the average person – special interests can buy elections, or convince representatives to betray campaign promises in exchange for cash. They fantasize about a Revolution in which their side rises up, destroys the power of the other side, and wins once and for all.</blockquote>
Unpacking this, there are at least two serious distortions here. For one thing, it equates “conflict theorist” with leftism or a pro-democracy stance, which oddly ignores the entire neoreactionary movement, which is very much a conflict theory with an anti-democratic stance ( SSC has <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/">written extensively about neoreaction in the past, so this is a kind of weird omission</a>).<br />
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For the other thing, it also equates conflict theory with both millenarianist utopianism and manicheanism – a belief system of dreamers for whom politics is a utopian fantasy (“once and for all”) rather than an actual daily struggle. While I՚m sure there are people like that, it ignores 95% of the ordinarily politically active people, who are conflict theorists simply because it՚s a very ordinary aspect of life and a defining feature of political life.<br />
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So the attempt to describe conflict theory doesn՚t seem very convincing, even given the explicitly cartoonish aspect of what he՚s trying to do. You can really feel that an effort is being made to be generous to a foreign and distasteful worldview, and that the effort is not really that successful.</div>
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Wishing away conflict</h3>
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He՚s perfectly aware that conflict is a real feature of political life, of course – you՚d have to be kind of idiotic to think otherwise. But, he also seems to think it can be magicked away somehow. Here՚s a quote from a <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/29/highlights-from-the-comments-on-conflict-vs-mistake/">follow-up post</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
Politics is about having conflict. Mistake-theorists would love to become post-political, in the sense of circumventing all conflicts. Conflicts actually happening as conflicts is a failure, deadweight loss. This wouldn’t mean that nobody has different interests. It would mean that those different interests play out in some formalized way that doesn’t look conflict-y.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These ideas don’t deny the existence of conflict – they just represent a desire to avoid it rather than win it.</blockquote>
So mistake theorists do acknowledge conflicting interests, they just want those conflicts to be settled in “some formalized way that doesn՚t look conflict-y”. I am not sure what this means. We actually do have really existing formalized ways of dealing with conflict, such as the judicial system, but that is plenty “conflict-y”. To be sure, it՚s a better, less damaging kind of conflict than (eg) blood vendetta, but still fundamentally conflictual in its nature.<br />
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The idea of a non-conflict-y way of settling conflict doesn՚t actually make any conceptual sense, if you think about it for ten seconds. War, lawsuits, arguments, and coin tosses are all ways of settling conflict. Some are more <i>civilized</i> than others, but all are equally conflict-y, because a way of settling conflict sort of has to be.<br />
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What would a non-conflicty-y method even look like? The examples he gives are various libertarian utopian schemes where people who disagree simply sort and separate themselves geographically, so you end up with a bunch of different polities each coalesced around shared values. In other words it is a way of avoiding (as opposed to settling) a conflict, so I guess that is actually kind of non-confict-y (whether it realistic or desirable is another question).<br />
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Now, if the above quote was rephrased to say “different interests play out in some formalized way that is <b>nonviolent</b> or less violent”, then it would make far more sense. Lawsuits and war are both conflicts but one is far more violent and damaging than the other, and it would be good to try to get people to use the less harmful and costly methods. But I don՚t think Scott is making an argument for nonviolence, at least in the usual sense, given that the leading practitioners of nonviolence (Gandhi, King) were most assuredly not avoiding conflict, but actively engaging in it with nonviolent methods.</div>
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God must like conflict or he wouldn՚t have made so much of it</h3>
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There are plenty of good reasons to have a distaste for political conflict. It can be kind of brain-numbing, it encourages sloganeering rather than deep thinking, and in our present environment relies on a rather toxic process of demonizing opponents (and a correspondingly moral self-regard which might be even more corrosive). It seems to be part of a world grounded on brute force which is anathema to the higher values of civilized society, including morality and justice. Certainly the world would be a better place if we could stop fighting and solve our collective problems through the application of reason. Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (war, famine, disease, death), war is the only one that seems like it could be easily prevented by simply <i>not doing it</i>.<br />
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So yeah you can hate conflict for many different reasons – for the pain it causes, for the waste, for the ugliness of enmity when compared to the beauty of harmony, for its stupidity, for its privileging of strength over intelligence.<br />
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But, despite all that, conflict is not all bad, and in fact something to be sought out (I am seeking it right now, and don՚t really feel all that ashamed about it). Conflict is interesting, peace is boring. We love heroes, and you don՚t get them without battles for them to fight. If we feel we have been treated badly, we not only feel the right to fight for justice, we are almost compelled to do so.<br />
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So yeah I guess I am on the other side of the meta-conflict between conflict and mistake. It՚s not even that I like conflict so much, I just see it as an essential feature of reality, and for me, understanding the world requires integrating conflict at a fundamental level.<br />
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The metaphysics is probably for <a href="https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/02/war-is-father-and-king-of-all-things.html">another post</a>, but briefly: you can՚t understand the world without understanding purpose and teleology, and you can՚t have purpose and teleology without conflict. That՚s obviously how biology works; and despite our quite stunning cognitive abilities, we haven՚t leveraged ourselves that far from biology yet.</div>
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Why I fight</h3>
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The cultural and political wars are very real, and I feel compelled to take part in them, even though they often get stupid and ugly, as war does.<br />
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Digging into the nature of that compulsion might be <a href="https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/02/why-we-fight.html">another future post</a>, for now let՚s just say that those of us who have had political mass-murder directed at their families and communities are a little impatient with the why-can՚t-we-all-get-along stance. This isn՚t theoretical, there is something out there (well, it used to be out there, now it has in here, quite at home and public within the US) that actually wants to kill me. That gets my attention. There are no mistake theorists in foxholes.</div>
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Why is any of this interesting?</h3>
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Scott seems to have reconceptualized a very fundamental and basic (and not all that new) philosophical issue – the relationship between knowledge and power. At one level, we are both roughly on the same side. We are knowledge people, or we wouldn՚t be reading and writing amateur philosophy; we՚d be out gaining power and making money – doing politics, not arguing meta-politics. And we are both trying to grapple with the reality of how to live as knowledge people in a world ruled by power.<br />
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But beyond that similarity, there is a big difference: Scott and the rationalism he exemplifies thinks that pure, disinterested knowledge can and should supplant power. I don՚t think that is possible and I don՚t even think it is particularly desirable – or to put it another way, I can՚t imagine a realistic world that works that way.<br />
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And I also have to admit that amateur nerds like Scott and myself are late to this party. The nature of relationship between power and knowledge has been the subject of investigation by serious thinkers, like Nietzsche, Foucault, Latour. Pretty much the whole field of critical theory is about just this. But that kind of stuff does not penetrate very far into the rationalist community, almost by definition. I՚ve been trying for a few decades now to absorb it myself, with only limited success.<br />
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But I persist because understanding this particular dichotomy seems absolutely critical, not only for politics but for the development of computational technology (my day job). Computation is also a theory of how knowledge and power are related. Computer programs are symbolic structures that also have the ability to act on the world. AI in its various forms is founded on the idea that computers and human minds are alike, and the core of the similarity is that both computations and minds have this weird dual nature of being both symbol manipulators and embodied causal systems. And in both cases, the relationship between representation and action is more complicated than it seems at first glance.<br />
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Politics may be seen as how this process works at a social level. Politics too involves beliefs (in values, in particular leaders, in justice) and collective action. In politics, it's very clear that representations don't stand alone but are only as strong as the energy they can enlist in their cause.<br />
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I'm grateful to Scott for bringing this question up in a new form, at a good level of abstraction, even if I don't much care for his specific takes. </div>
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-13199885354214870612018-02-24T18:31:00.001-08:002018-02-24T18:34:20.911-08:00Have a Blessed Day<div style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
I just got phone spam from some health insurance seller (and who would be dumb enough to buy health insurance from a company that sleazily skirts the do-not-call list?). I didn՚t pick up, but they left a long voicemail that ended with “And You Have a Blessed Day”.</div>
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This really twinged my weirdness detectors. I don՚t think I՚d ever heard that locution used before. But apparently it՚s quite the thing, having started to take off in the seventies and getting huge usage growth in the last decade or so.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjld_AsVhbeUjnnG8r4b9CSCAUh9mniVcczPFG31OahlyTCjawj1cAw_GcgHH3JVncyOkb3hzng8Eda04my2f8LWayfXzqU3cMF67duAZBHIRdxh86OZy7wzxf900jc5indrVG/s1600/Screenshot+2018-02-19+14.42.35.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="1107" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjld_AsVhbeUjnnG8r4b9CSCAUh9mniVcczPFG31OahlyTCjawj1cAw_GcgHH3JVncyOkb3hzng8Eda04my2f8LWayfXzqU3cMF67duAZBHIRdxh86OZy7wzxf900jc5indrVG/s640/Screenshot+2018-02-19+14.42.35.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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I suppose I՚m overreacting but to me it sounds like some <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2017/07/05/blessed-be-fruit">Handmaid՚s Tale</a> shit. Apparently it՚s a minor social battle in the culture war, but one that probably take place in more conservative parts of the country than San Francisco.</div>
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<a href="https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/straight-out-handmaids-tale-insiders-claim-cia-director-pompeo-turning-agency-christian">Like the CIA</a>!</div>
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In a way it՚s a shame, it would be a perfectly innocuous and friendly thing to say, if there wasn՚t a culture war going on. But let՚s not kid ourselves.</div>
mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-77486897192661311752018-02-18T19:22:00.000-08:002018-02-19T09:41:17.464-08:00The Least We Can DoThis speaks for itself:<br />
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This was sent to me, a screenshot from Facebook. He deserves to have his post shared. It's literally the least we can do for him. <a href="https://t.co/wAIIjohGXs">pic.twitter.com/wAIIjohGXs</a></div>
— PebblesJ (@MadisonJourdan) <a href="https://twitter.com/MadisonJourdan/status/964302780839075840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2018</a></blockquote>
Except I fear that if Sandy Hook didn՚t get something to change, then nothing possibly can. Not to take anything away from the most recent tragedy (apparently we have to become god damn comparitive measurers of grief and pain, as if we were Olympic judges or something) but if 20 dead elementary school children didn՚t move the institutions of governance to action, what possibly could? <br />
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Oddly, 17 high school students maybe can – precisely because of their age and agency. Not the dead ones, of course, but their friends and peers can speak out, something that was not the case for Sandy Hook:<br />
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Watch this VERY powerful speech at the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NeverAgain?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NeverAgain</a> rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida by Stoneman Douglas High School Student Emma Gonzales. Just amazing! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Parkland?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Parkland</a> <a href="https://t.co/NAyxJj2hCe">https://t.co/NAyxJj2hCe</a></div>
— Shannon Fisher (@MsShannonFisher) <a href="https://twitter.com/MsShannonFisher/status/964936087582986240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
So yes I can see this playing out differently. Dead elementary school students produced a lot of hand-wringing and crocodile tears, dead adolescents might actually produce a force for change. I hope so. <br />
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[update: IOW:<br />
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It is stunning to me that we abdicated our responsibility to protect our children from guns for SO LONG, that those children are now growing into voters who are saying "Screw it. We'll fix it ourselves."</div>
— William Salyers (@wlsalyers) <a href="https://twitter.com/wlsalyers/status/965323961490857985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 18, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
]mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-34901202959412067422018-01-15T17:37:00.001-08:002018-01-15T17:37:10.407-08:00Social Justice and its EnemiesOn this Martin Luther King Jr day I am thinking (god knows why) of the various people I encounter around the net who are alt-right or just so alienated from the mainstream that they have decided to be on the side <b>opposed</b> to social justice. The mocking term SJW encodes the reality that there is a war going on. They feel attacked and are just fighting back, although what they are fighting <i>for</i> is difficult to pin down.<br />
<br />
Perhaps not in the cases of those who are fully given to ethnonationalism or white supremacy. Those types are unreachable and I don՚t care about them. They՚ll always be an enemy, hopefully a contained one.<br /><br />
But there seems to be large amorphous group of people who are somewhere on the alt.right spectrum for other reasons – maybe they are mad at the pious hypocrisies they can detect in liberalism, maybe they feel at a social disadvantage for some reason, maybe they feel that the real injustice is being done to them, that certain groups claim to be oppressed (women, blacks, gays) but really are the oppressor. Maybe they feel that they are <i>smarter</i> than most of those pious liberals, and so resent being told that certain of their behaviors and values are bad by people with no special standing to be superior. Or maybe they detect the Christian roots of the value of universal human equality, and thus hate it for Nietzschean reasons as an insidious form of <i>sklavenmoral</i>. Others take the very real atrocities done in the name of communism and use those to dismiss anything remotely leftist as leading inevitably to the Gulag.<br /><br />
Those are all somewhat valid reasons! But they are reasons to dislike the left, not reasons to be <i>for</i> anything in particular. As a result, these people inevitably drift into alliance with the Nazis, who definitely know what they are for. Or they veer off into pseudo-political ideologies like libertarianism (longing for a pure market that has never existed), or neoreaction (yearning for a monarch that has never existed).<br /><br />
Martin Luther King Jr is our culture՚s archetypal social justice warrior. His legacy is a bit confused because he՚s been raised up to a sort of secular sainthood, which tends to hide the fact that he was a <a href="http://bostonreview.net/race/brandon-m-terry-mlk-now">politically engaged activist</a> (you should really read this entire excellent essay):<br /><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The King now enshrined in popular sensibilities is not the King who spoke so powerfully and admiringly at Carnegie Hall about Du Bois. Instead, he is a mythic figure of consensus and conciliation, who sacrificed his life to defeat Jim Crow and place the United States on a path toward a “more perfect union.” … King deployed his rhetorical genius in the service of our country’s deepest ideals—the ostensible consensus at the heart of our civic culture—and dramatized how Jim Crow racism violated these commitments. Heroically, through both word and deed, he called us to be true to who we already are: “to live out the true meaning” of our founding creed. No surprise, then, that King is often draped in Christian symbolism redolent of these themes. He is a revered prophet of U.S. progress and redemption, Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, or a Christ who sacrificed his life to redeem our nation from its original sin.<br /><br />
Such poetic renderings lead our political and moral judgment astray. Along with the conservative gaslighting that claims King’s authority for “colorblind” jurisprudence, they obscure King’s persistent attempt to jar the United States out of its complacency and corruption. They ignore his indictment of the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” his critique of a Constitution unjustly inattentive to economic rights and racial redress, and his condemnation of municipal boundaries that foster unfairness in housing and schooling. It is no wonder then that King’s work is rarely on the reading lists of young activists. He has become an icon to quote, not a thinker and public philosopher to engage.<br /><br />
This is a tragedy, for King was a vital political thinker. Unadulterated, his ideas upset convention and pose radical challenges—perhaps especially today, amidst a gathering storm of authoritarianism, racial chauvinism, and nihilism that threatens the future of democracy and the ideal of equality.<br /><br />
</blockquote>
I try and take a very abstracted view of politics, when I can – that is, I am interested in the political as a phenomenon, above and beyond my own personal values and loyalties. Somehow, people form themselves into coalitions, these coalitions then contest with each other for power, with an ever-present threat of violence which threatens to emerge if and when peaceful (symbolic) conflict resolution fails. It՚s one of those fascinating things humans do. Economic self-interest, group interests, and abstract morality all play roles in this process.<br />
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And as it happens, there has been a long conflict in the US between the forces that King represents and the values he fought for, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trump-massive-resistance-history-mlk/550544/?utm_source=twb">and their opponents</a>. This is just a fact of political life. Another fact of political life is that one has to choose a side. Neutrality is not really an option for any intellectually engaged adult, sorry. .<br /><br />
King has come to stand for certain social values: inclusion, equality, freedom, justice, empathy, non-violence. So, dear alt.righters – do you really want to be on the side that is opposed to those? Do all the things you hate about the left really outweigh these ideals?<br /><br />
Of course politics, and King՚s legacy, isn՚t that simple – but you know, on some level, it <b>is</b> that simple. One of the few consolations to living in the era of Trump is that moral/political questions become very stark, and it becomes pretty damn obvious what the sides are and where decency lies.<br /><br />
mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-70682831895473394962017-12-29T20:52:00.000-08:002017-12-29T20:52:12.988-08:00Blogyear 2017 in review<div id="content" style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
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Well, this is hardly worth doing – only 9 posts this year, a new record low. The usual reasons – a new job, attention sucked away by Twitter and Facebook and family. Not to mention the truly ghastly state of political reality.<br />
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I had a number of clever posts that I started and couldn't quite finish, on political matters from a theoretical point of view. Like the finer points of agonizing about Nazi-punching, or the more general (and quite interesting) questions of how speech and ideas relate to action, violent and otherwise; and how politics and morality make use of one another. I think there were some good insights in there, but somehow they all felt inadequate to the historical moment. The worst aspects of politics -- the ones that get people killed -- are no longer matter of mere theory. That՚s not to say I've come up with any more effective tactics for fighting encroaching fascism than writing about it.<br />
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We live in an era where what was thought to be the solid foundations of a system of power are in fact crumbling. It might not have been a great system of power – god knows I spent a lot of energy hating it – but it seemed fairly permanent. The sixties generation was going to tear it down, but instead eased deftly into running it. There՚s a newer generation of radicals now, one that hates <i>them</i>, and managed to have in a very short time done far more damage to the existing power structure than Abbie Hoffman ever dreamed of. And their values are almost reflexively opposed to anything valued by the comfortable liberals that the hippies morphed into – eg, tolerance, equality, caring. These anodyne values (basically what՚s left after the revolutionary spirit settled down and opened up a card and candle shop) suddenly are controversial, oppressive, and under attack by an insurgent army who inexplicably are opposed to these seemingly-obviously good things.<br />
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That is to say, the relationship between politics and morality (and economy and technology and culture and values and basically everything) has never seemed more important than it is right now, when foundational questions are being raised. And since these are topics that I find intensely interesting and like to write about, you՚d think I՚d write more. But frankly it՚s hard to justify an interest in, say, the abstract dynamical laws of coalition formation, when there is an actual struggle going on and an actual coalition to be part of.<br />
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My own perspective on this stuff is colored by having encountered the alt.right long before most people, in <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com+mtraven">its embryonic intellectual phase</a>. I feel oddly proud of having picked up on this early, but in fact I had no idea it was going to be anything <i>important</i>. Did I know that this obscure, hyper-nerdy blogger would in short time be <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/7/14533876/mencius-moldbug-steve-bannon-neoreactionary-curtis-yarvin">two social links aways from the actual President of the Fucking United States</a>? No, of course not. Moldbug's stuff was interesting to me because it called into question things that most people take for granted -- let's call it cosmopolitan liberal civilization, the default ideology of intelligent people. I didn't realize that the questioning was the vanguard of an broader actual attack on the foundations of liberalism, just like the original fascism was. I certainly had no clue that the attack would get to this point.<br />
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Some of my better posts from last year:<br />
<ul class="org-ul">
<li>The <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/10/political-vertigo.html">last non-meta post of the year</a> sort of sums up my political state of mind.</li>
<li>My <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/08/moment-of-totality.html">trip to see the eclipse</a> and another attempt at getting my hippie on.</li>
<li>An <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2017/07/ai-and-capitalism.html">update</a> to my <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html">old post</a> that floated the notion that corporations were the real form of possibly-malevolent artificial intelligence. </li>
</ul>
This last idea seems part of the background now; being <a href="https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/llcs-are-slow-ais.html">promoted by Charlie Stross</a>, and <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/08/two-kinds-of-caution/">sniffed at by Scott Alexander</a>, among many others. This is good. I՚ll repeat my nut graf:<br />
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Why do I think that AI and capitalism are ideological cousins? Both are forms of systematized instrumental rationality. Both are human creations and thus imbued with human goals, but both seem to be capable of evolving autonomous system-level goals (and thus identities) that transcend their origin. Both promise to generate enormous wealth, while simultaneously threatening utter destruction. Both seem to induce strong but divergent emotional/intellectual reactions, both negative and positive. Both are in supposed to be rule-based (capitalism is bound by laws, AI is bound by the formal rules of computation) but constantly threaten to burst through their constraints. They both seem to inspire in some a kind of spiritual rapture, either of transcendence or eschaton.</blockquote>
And speaking of spiritual rapture, here՚s something that works for me.<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-9035503091531512602017-10-18T23:03:00.000-07:002017-10-19T17:52:12.942-07:00Political Vertigo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.xog59VN7BG#.ccZxwRl5g6">recent enormous Buzzfeed article</a> describing the links between the Breitbart, and the larger world of rightist extremism was notable in how unsurprising it was. Everybody knew about these linkages, getting documentary proof seemed almost redundant.<br />
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Yet it can՚t be repeated too often, because it doesn՚t seem to quite register: we are living in a world where there is almost no distance between the most powerful office on earth and the fever swamps of white nationalism. I have to keep reminding myself of this fact, which simply doesn՚t square with my preexisting ontology, in which these things are supposed to occupy entirely different strata of reality. <br />
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I can՚t really imagine what it was like to be in <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/01/flashing-for-refugees.html">my parent՚s generation</a>, growing up in a Europe that was slowly losing its political mind to an ideology of murder aimed squarely at them. There՚s a vertiginous quality to current events these days – the feeling that the world is careening along a course that seems like it can՚t quite be real, like a nightmare that one can՚t awaken from, that no amount of reason or good sense or good intentions can affect the course of events – maybe this quality reflects a little bit of what it might have been like in the 1930s.<br />
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Back then there were plenty of arguments between <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/08/what-did-you-do-in-gender-wars-moppa.html">those who thought it couldn՚t really get as bad as they feared</a> – that reason would prevail, that people should just calm down and get on with their lives. Those voices were wrong back then, but maybe they aren՚t wrong now – who knows? Not me, not anybody – that՚s kind of the point I՚m trying to make. We don՚t know where this is going, and we don՚t know how to effectively oppose it. Because whatever is happening, it isn't going to be <b>identical</b> to what happened in Weimar Germany. We aren՚t going to have massed formations of stormtroopers marching down the boulevards. Nobody then knew what was coming, and neither do we, because the historical precedent is only a loose one. Every insane country goes insane in its own way.<br />
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Yes, it՚s not just that Trump himself suffers from obvious mental pathology – you don՚t need to be a professional to see that, although <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/05/07/duty-to-warn-shrinks-cant-say-that-donald-trump-suffers-from-a-mental-disorder-but-we-can/">plenty of professionals have begun to go public with their diagnoses</a> – it՚s that he is both a symptom and a cause of a larger derangement of society, a radical malfunction in our of our ability to function as a collective. Whether it՚s temporary or the damage is permanent is impossible to know at this stage.<br />
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When I was a kid we had an ever-present threat of nuclear incineration to worry about, not to mention race riots burning out urban centers and the Vietnam War – nothing like the US wars of the 21st century – back then there was a draft, and any male teenager knew that his life was at the disposal of the government. And a thug like Nixon in the White House. Those were turbulent, vertiginous times too!<br />
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Yet I don՚t remember it feeling like this. Back then, it was more like there were bad people in charge and we had to replace them with better (younger) people. Now it feels like nobody is in charge, like the machinery is spinning out of control and nobody is capable of fixing it. This isn՚t just Trump – it՚s Trump plus climate change, plus the collapse of the international order, plus the replacement of rational discourse with Facebook memes and Russian botnets. There՚s very little in the way of stable institutions to hold onto, and the culture as a whole seems to be experiencing violent dizziness and nausea.mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-19738285784217920282017-09-05T00:08:00.002-07:002017-09-05T00:08:47.577-07:00Belaboring the obvious<div id="content" style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
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I find myself once again writing a L<a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.ca/search/label/labor%20day">abor Day post</a>, and it՚s basically the same one I write every year – not just on the date, but having almost the exact same thoughts. It՚s a little disconcerting, because it feels just like having original thoughts, yet they seem to run in these timeworn grooves. It՚s become a ritual in other words. Appreciating rituals is a probably a symptom of aging. In my youth they felt kind of meaningless but now they appear to be little islands of stability amidst the vast chaotic landscape of life.<br />
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It՚s not like it՚s a job or even a duty. Nobody asked me to do this, no monetary interest is contingent on me doing it. Nobody besides me defines the end product, or dictates the methods and tools. I don՚t expect anyone is waiting breathlessly for it. As a ritual it is its own justification.<br />
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For some reason labor fascinates me, or rather, the Marxist concept of labor fascinates me because it is such a topic of fascination for them; a powerful idea with quasi-religious overtones. To Marxists, labor is at the very core of human existence, but it has been corrupted, diverted, perverted by capitalism into its alienated form. Liberating humanity is basically identical to creating a world of unalienated labor.<br />
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What is it about labor that makes it so important? <a href="http://labor%20day%20post/">Here՚s what I came up with</a> 7 years back:<br />
<blockquote>
Work in the abstract is an intriguing and irreducible combination of the spontaneous and the disciplined, the autonomous and the externally imposed. I think that's why the concept of labor is so fetishized by Marxists; it is something that must be done and yet there are so many different ways it can be done and so appears to be a potential fulcrum for harnessing economic forces and transforming society. Buddhist meditation (in so far as I understand it, which is not far) treats breathing in much the same way; it's a bodily function that can be completely automatic or the object of focused conscious attention or both at the same time, and thus is a fulcrum for reconciling the willed and the inevitable.</blockquote>
But most of our labor is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#Alienation_of_the_worker_from_their_Gattungswesen_.28species-essence.29">alienated</a> – misdirected to interests that are not ours.<br />
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Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (Ger. Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen ("species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity. </blockquote>
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Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity, this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value… </blockquote>
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The Gattungswesen (species-essence), human nature of individuals is not discrete (separate and apart) from their activity as a worker; as such, species-essence also comprises all of innate human potential as a person. Conceptually, in the term "species-essence", the word "species" describes the intrinsic human mental essence that is characterized by a "plurality of interests" and "psychological dynamism", whereby every individual has the desire and the tendency to engage in the many activities that promote mutual human survival and psychological well-being, by means of emotional connections with other people, with society</blockquote>
If you leave off the creaky stuff about social class and substitute in the actual powers in our world, it makes sense – most people work for corporations (who own the means of production) and do tasks to serve the corporation, not themselves.<br />
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Except – the modern corporation, is adept at making employees feel and act as if their goals are identical to those of the organization. In tech this is rampant It seems almost comical to speak of a labor movement in Silicon Valley, where the workers are relatively well-paid and pampered, and most importantly don՚t think of themselves as a class with interests that differ from their bosses – after all, Mark Zuckerberg is just like everyone else, just smarter, and perhaps more ruthless or luckier. Occasionally this b<a href="about:invalid#zClosurez">ucolic image of cooperation is shattered</a>. But for the most part there is no class consciousness, everybody thinks of themselves as a potential owner.<br />
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And this state of affairs is definitely better in some ways than treating the capitalists as an alien class of predators – but it leaves the workers vulnerable to exploitation, with no tools to manage their interests. Because it is high-status to pretend to be doing your work for its own sake, rather than because you have been ordered to or for the sake of a paycheck, nobody wants to cop to having their labor alienated and their being exploited.<br />
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It՚s notable that the Bible envisions God himself as a worker, and one in need of rest or at least a pause:<br />
<blockquote>
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. (Gen 2:1-3)</blockquote>
But back to labor. True labor is not mere drudgery, it is the active application of mind -- the highest of human capabilities, the part that is godlike -- to the concrete tasks of creating a world and living in it. It is the essence of authentic human intelligence. Unalienated labor is done, not because of external compulsion or for external reward, but because some individual thinks it needs doing and does it.<br />
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It seems like an almost impossible dream -- as if the world could be run on hobby projects. But maybe it can, and maybe that is the only way to have a habitable world. The industrial model sure hasn't produced a world people actually like, although it sure does make tons of stuff available cheaply.<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-67244196506456272042017-08-29T00:40:00.001-07:002023-07-21T11:43:11.800-07:00Moment of Totality<h1 class="title"><br />
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<div class="outline-2" id="outline-container-orgheadline1"><h2 id="orgheadline1">Eclipse of the Heart</h2><div class="outline-text-2" id="text-orgheadline1">So I went to see the eclipse in central Oregon, in the company of 30000 or so hippies at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20171225082100/http://oregoneclipse2017.com/">a music festival</a>, kind of a lighter weight version of Burning Man (same esthetic, less extreme in weather and participation practices). Not sure how much I belonged there, of course – even more so than BM, the crowd is dominated by the young, the beautiful, and the partying. But for some reason I <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2016/08/the-pull-of-man.html">feel a pull</a> towards such things, and the conjunction of the eclipse and the festival was irresistible. I took my son along since he has inclinations along those lines -- here he is posing next to Ken Kesey's old bus which was on display:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyHIJ2Nnmk9qof3lULTtzAGfRdDFSH2GAKVN-czXxSpOP1SSa4IvoPega4sg-fMM7oxJ38-Uv1C_4MkOFZBSIXDQjiBpSN2AGmvN1jI7y_PvAmqCFC0jRcIL4r160_Vnll_M71/s1600/IMG_20170818_215954.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyHIJ2Nnmk9qof3lULTtzAGfRdDFSH2GAKVN-czXxSpOP1SSa4IvoPega4sg-fMM7oxJ38-Uv1C_4MkOFZBSIXDQjiBpSN2AGmvN1jI7y_PvAmqCFC0jRcIL4r160_Vnll_M71/s320/IMG_20170818_215954.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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The eclipse itself was as wondrous and magical as anything I've ever seen. It really made me viscerally aware of standing on a planet. There were tears in my eyes, and <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2017/08/total_solar_eclipse_brings_symbiosis_gathering_attendees_to_tears.html">the same was true of many others there</a>. I'm not even sure why – it's just astronomical bodies moving according to predictable physical laws, so what's the big deal? It's a rare event, but why should it be an <b>emotional</b> event? In my case I don't think they were tears of joy, or sadness – more like tears of connection, a feeling that despite the constant forces of isolation and alienation, by being part of this event I am hereby demonstrably connected to the heavens and to all the other watchers as well.<br />
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That is to say, it was a ritual. To <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2016/08/the-pull-of-man.html">quote myself</a>: " ritual, broadly speaking, exists any time humans come together around some shared focus of attention." An eclipse is perfect for this role, because it is rare, overwhelming, and universally accessible. The large-scale workings of the cosmos, usually taken for granted, produces a spectacular reminder of itself. For one brief moment everything is different and everyone's attention is shared and everybody knows everybody else is paying attention to the same thing as well. And because this event is a function of the mechanical workings of the universe rather than any human creation, it is mercifully free of political implications – all factions in the culture war will put down their weapons for at least two minutes. Not that we can't impose some cultural meanings on it – it's a metaphor of death and rebirth, most obviously, but I saw something else there.<br />
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</div></div><div class="outline-2" id="outline-container-orgheadline2"><h2 id="orgheadline2">Something Else</h2><div class="outline-text-2" id="text-orgheadline2">While waiting for the cosmos to do its thing, it occurred to me that a festival and an eclipse have some deep structural similarities or metaphorical resonances. A festival is a short-lived period in which the normal order of things (work, money, politics, etc) is replaced with Something Else. In a solar eclipse, the sun (identified in myth with authority, reason, and order) is temporarily obscured and replaced with something dark and strange. Both are soon over and people and universe go back to their regular lives, perhaps changed by the experience.<br />
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So what is this Something Else, this alternative order that festivals manifest? I don't think words (or at least, my words) are capable of characterizing it, because in its essence it resists characterization. Part of its nature is resistance. It is has definite religious qualities (<a href="http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rave-Culture-and-Religion-edited-by-Graham-St.-John.pdf">not a very original observation</a>). It's too easy for me to dismiss it as nonsense, a puerile mess of shitty new age and hippie thinking, but I am going to try to take it seriously, at least as seriously as I'd take any other religion that I don't practice but appears to provide a matrix for an interesting community and culture.<br />
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What are some of the foundations of this religion (which I guess I will call festivalism)?<br />
<ul class="org-ul"><li>monism (all is One, everything is connected)</li>
<li>love (whatever the One is, it is fundamentally benevolent and loving )</li>
<li>individualist self-expression (in theory at least, although actual self-expression seems to be within a fairly limited range as one would expect)</li>
<li>tribal (subcultural – they constitute a particular community that offers an alternative to mainstream culture)</li>
<li>anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian (mainstream culture is toxic; hence the need for oppositional culture)</li>
<li>shamanistic (in the sense of emphasizing journeys to spiritual realms; usually with the aid of drugs; in pursuit of healing)</li>
<li>indigenous (believes and tries to preserve and use (some would say appropriate) the knowledge of indigenous people)</li>
<li>physical skills (people devote themselves to "<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20161111194709/http://flowartsinstitute.com:80/about-us/what-is-flow-arts/">flow arts</a>" such as fire spinning or juggling, yoga, dance, or sheer acrobatics)</li>
<li>play:</li>
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<ul class="org-ul"><li>transformative (that is, all of this activity adds up to a revolution in human consciousness; that it constitutes a vanguard of a quiet revolution)</li>
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I also want to say that there is kind of an emphasis on visual and geometric thinking rather than symbolic/linguistic. There is a certain lack of critical thinking, and even a distrust of language and reason, perhaps because they are tools of the enemy.<br />
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And all of these qualities together compose a critique of mainstream culture and a proposition for an alternative. That last proposition seems quite overblown, but it is kind of essential to the whole package – all of this foolery is in pursuit of a better world, all this devotion to self is not merely for the self. It reminds me that there was a cultural revolution in the sixties, which had a great transformative impact on culture but almost none on the fundamental structures of social power. This crowd seems like they didn't get the memo that that revolution was a failure and are keeping the dream alive. And why not? It may be that the ideas are worthy but that actual change takes a long, long time.<br />
<br />
</div></div><div class="outline-2" id="outline-container-orgheadline3"><h2 id="orgheadline3">Brain-damaging ideas</h2><div class="outline-text-2" id="text-orgheadline3">A couple of ideas I encountered struck me as really bad, but I was in the right mood to consider that maybe they might actually be useful, when considered from a different angle.<br />
<br />
On our first night I wandered into a small performance tent and heard a duo playing a bunch of weird instruments including digeridoo and antler-bone flute. One of their songs was a paean to "radical self-love", which immediately set off my bad-meme detectors – could there be anything less radical than self-love, a quality which humanity does not seem to lack and which to me implies infantalism, passivism, and stasis (since if you love yourself you will feel no need to change or improve yourself)?<br />
<br />
On the other hand – I'd just been <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforbidden-Pleasures-Rethinking-Authority-Vitality/dp/0374278024">reading a book by a Freudian</a> so I was primed to believe that most of our misery is caused by our superegos, introjected bits of cultural machinery devoted to criticism, forbidding, and negativity. And if the Freudian solution to the problem is endless and unsatisfactory talk therapy, maybe a more radical solution was called for, one that simply overthrew all that stuff by declamation. Self-love is radical because the world tells you (makes you tell yourself) that you are unworthy of love, or that love is dependent upon adult currencies like status, money, and power. Challenging that, declaring yourself loved despite all the ways that you might seem to suck, is a radical act. I can sort of see it as the spiritual foundation needed for an actual radical rethinking of society – what could the world be like if we didn't hate ourselves most of the time?<br />
<br />
Unfortunately upon <a href="http://galadarling.com/getting-started-with-radical-self-love/">getting home and googling</a> it appears that radical self-love is (a) a mere self-help movement and (b) aimed exclusively at women, so doesn't seem to be too much there for me – not radical in the sense I'm interested in. Still there is something suggestive about the phrase. Anarchism (radical politics) is overly motivated by fear and hatred of authority, maybe if it was combined with radical self-love it could prove to be more robust. Also worth noting: the concept appears in Rousseau as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amour_de_soi"><i>amour de soi</i></a>, a sort of pre-civilizational self-love that is contrasted with <i>amour-propre</i>, a more relational kind of self-love that depends on the opinions of others.<br />
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On another occasion, I was getting water from a public spigot and a couple of old hippies started chatting me up and informed me that the past and future were illusions and only the present moment was real (spontaneous metaphysical conversations are a common thing at such gatherings). This seemed extra-dumb considering we were in the midst of a festival organized around a phenomenon that had been precisely predicted years before it actually was to happen. But – it's a fairly <a href="https://twitter.com/ecktollequotes/status/761250244482830336">common belief</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170408091435/http://blog.meditation-presence.com:80/meister-eckhart-there-is-no-yesterday-nor-any-tomorrow/">among mystics</a> and it was the topic of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNdOkN32AzQ">an early Grateful Dead song</a>, so there's that. As is my practice, I tried to find an interpretation or state of mind in which that statement would feel true .<br />
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There is indeed something special about the present moment. It is where the self is, the only part of the universe that can be directly apprehended. All those other moments are filtered through a haze of memory and representation, but the present is <i>present</i>. It may not be the only real moment, but it definitely has some quality that the other ones don't.<br />
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At least, that is how it appears to an embedded consciousness. From a physicist's point of view, all of spacetime is equally real, the flow of time and change is illusory, and there is nothing special about any particular moment. But I am not a physicist, certainly not in my daily life. The physicist's view of reality is in a certain sense incommensurable with or inimical to lived experience. These village elders were telling me in essence to ignore the learned rational scientific models of reality and pay attention to my actual experience. Which seems like a good thing to be able to do, at least temporarily.<br />
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Marvin Minsky used referred to these sorts of thoughts ("all is one" being canonical) as "mind-destroying ideas" – that is, ideas that were not necessarily wrong, but led nowhere, rather than to learning a better rational understanding of the universe. I think that's a bit overblown, these ideas don't quite <i>destroy</i> the mind, unless you take them too seriously, which I'm not about to do. Instead they seem to be aimed at subverting certain modes of rationality, creating spaces for the apprehension of the aspects of reality that are not well suited to language. That seems like it could be worthwhile.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180310172954/https://www.everfest.com/system/images/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMDgvMjQvMjEvNDQvMDAvNjE3L09yZWdvbl9FY2xpcHNlXzIwMTdfSmFjb2JfQXZhbnphdG9fMTUuanBnIl1d/Oregon_Eclipse_2017_Jacob_Avanzato_15.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="425" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20180310172954/https://www.everfest.com/system/images/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMDgvMjQvMjEvNDQvMDAvNjE3L09yZWdvbl9FY2xpcHNlXzIwMTdfSmFjb2JfQXZhbnphdG9fMTUuanBnIl1d/Oregon_Eclipse_2017_Jacob_Avanzato_15.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div></div><div class="outline-2" id="outline-container-orgheadline4"><h2 id="orgheadline4">Totality</h2><div class="outline-text-2" id="text-orgheadline4">As the events (eclipse and festival both) recede in memory, they don't become any less real, although my consciousness of them does, rather like a dream – it's a week later and I can feel myself struggling to recreate or at least remember the mental state I had at the time. It kind of works. But the point of a ritual is participation, not remembering. Everything is distinct from its representations; rituals especially so. So I can't very well describe what I was going through at the time, but from the current vantage it seemed like a point where everything – humanity, cosmos, time, timelessness, and my personal concerns – came briefly together. It may be that they are always together but it takes a special event to make that fact obvious.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20180310172959/https://www.everfest.com/system/images/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMDgvMjQvMjEvNDcvMjcvNTk4L09yZWdvbl9FY2xpcHNlXzIwMTdfSmFjb2JfQXZhbnphdG9fMjguanBnIl1d/Oregon_Eclipse_2017_Jacob_Avanzato_28.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="425" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20180310172959/https://www.everfest.com/system/images/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMDgvMjQvMjEvNDcvMjcvNTk4L09yZWdvbl9FY2xpcHNlXzIwMTdfSmFjb2JfQXZhbnphdG9fMjguanBnIl1d/Oregon_Eclipse_2017_Jacob_Avanzato_28.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
[Last two photos by Jacob Avanzato -- <a href="https://www.everfest.com/magazine/51-gorgeous-images-from-global-eclipse-gathering">many more here</a>]<br />
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[Addendum: really tempted to retitle this:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Civilization and its Disco Tents <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RuinABookTitleInOneLetter?src=hash">#RuinABookTitleInOneLetter</a></div> (@mtraven) <a href="https://twitter.com/mtraven/status/903449474462228480">September 1, 2017</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
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</div></div>mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-25096579702710370622017-08-10T08:35:00.000-07:002017-08-10T08:35:33.433-07:00What Did You Do In The Gender Wars, Moppa?The tech world is buzzing over the latest political/cultural/gender workplace skirmish, this time when a Google engineer published a long internal memo on his <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-fires-engineer-over-anti-diversity-memo">painfully obtuse</a> theories of gender. The memo was leaked to the public, causing a category-5 shitstorm. The guy was fired after a few days later, which only added energy to the vortex of moral posturing, a vortex that sucked in everybody՚s attention, from all sides of the political spectrum, everybody who works in an office and has to deal with gender issues. Whatever is going on here, it seems <b>very important</b>, although compared to the likelihood of, say, the consequences of climate change or Donald Trump starting a war in North Korea, it seems like a kind of silly thing to spend so much energy on.<br />
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Nonetheless I՚m just as vulnerable as anyone else to the forces that pull people՚s attentions into these intellectual black holes, and that obligate me to form an opinion. In my case I couldn՚t manage to gravitate to one side or another, for reasons I՚ve talked about here <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2017/01/punching-nazis.html">before</a>. On the one hand, I think the guy is a dolt, and talking like he did in a workplace was either stupid or deliberately provocative, and Google not only was right but had a <a href="https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/895071933666017280">possible legal obligation</a> to fire him. On the other hand, I think that people ought to be able to have some freedom to express even stupid opinions, and that intellectual is as important as gender/culture diversity, and I dislike enforced conformity of opinion.<br />
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One person who does not suffer this tornness is Scott Alexander of (SlateStarCodex), who is <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/">firmly on the side of the memo guy</a>. This is <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2017/06/racist-lives-matter.html">completely unsurprising</a>, although someone who makes a point of trying to see the merits of views he disagrees with seems oddly unsympathetic to the people at Google and elsewhere who were upset by the memo.<br />
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I am not very interested in the main point of his post, which is about the reality or not of gender-based differences in particular cognitive abilities. This issue may seem central to the controversy but is in fact entirely irrelevant. [Why? Well, that probably deserves a separate post, but briefly: The process of creating software or other technology is not like, say, weightlifting or running a marathon, where one՚s ability can be quantified by a single metric. It՚s a complex human creative activity and needs all kinds of different sets of cognitive skills, and badly needs a diversity for that very reason.]<br />
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Instead I wanted to focus on a passage at the end which jumped out at me, because it relates to the theme of <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/05/three-forms-of-antipolitics.html">antipolitics</a> that I keep harping on. In the course of bemoaning the fact that some people are rather too vigorous in their hatred of Nazis and fascism, he says:<br />
<blockquote>
Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind, where people who were interested in the mysteries of computation and cognition could get together and make the world better for everybody.</blockquote>
This is, um, a slightly idealized version of what Silicon Valley is. It՚s not even what it pretends to be (Stanford, the institutional parent of Google and much else, might plausibly pretend to be devoted to the life of the mind on its better days, but in fact it՚s <a href="http://otl.stanford.edu/about/about_why.html?headerbar=0">chasing dollars</a> like everybody else). Silicon Valley is a bunch of businesses, not a debating society. That՚s kind of a side issue, although it՚s very relevant to why Google may not be as dedicated to free speech as one might like.<br />
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Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them. Where if someone disagrees with the consensus, it’s just taken as a matter of course that we need to hunt them down, deny them of the cloak of anonymity, fire them, and blacklist them so they can never get a job again. Where the idea that we shouldn’t be a surveillance society where we carefully watch our coworkers for signs of sexism so we can report them to the authorities is exactly the sort of thing you get reported to the authorities if people see you saying.<br />
<br />
…It doesn’t have to be this way. <b>Nobody has any real policy disagreements</b>. Everyone can just agree that men and women are equal, that they both have the same rights, that nobody should face harassment or discrimination. We can relax the Permanent State Of Emergency around too few women in tech, and admit that women have the right to go into whatever field they want, and that if they want to go off and be 80% of veterinarians and 74% of forensic scientists, those careers seem good too. We can appreciate the contributions of existing women in tech, make sure the door is open for any new ones who want to join, and start treating each other as human beings again.</blockquote>
I don՚t even know where to begin with this, since it՚s such a raw and unvarnished specimen of what I have been hunting – the denial of politics. “Nobody has any real policy disagreements” – in what universe is this true? Does he think that all this conflict is over <b>nothing</b>, that it՚s just an excuse for egomania or something? If women and racial minorities do have equal rights today that they did not enjoy in the past, does he think those happened without conflict, that one day people just woke up and decided to start doing the right thing? Or does he think that those conflicts might have occurred in the past but now we are all comfortably settled on Correct Thought?<br />
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I՚m starting to question my own obsession with SSC, which I justify because he՚s smart and the rationalism he exemplifies attracts the devotion of a lot of other smart people. But, as I said in <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2017/06/racist-lives-matter.html?showComment=1502336202452#c5582215622115700795">a comment thread</a> on my earlier post, it may be that the epistemological gulf between me and that world is just too wide. We seem to inhabit different universes.<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-43401244624333026272017-07-16T16:29:00.001-07:002017-07-16T18:36:04.622-07:00The Machinery of Destruction<div style="font-family: "Gill Sans";">
Who are you more afraid of – psychopathic <i>individuals</i>, like Ted Bundy, or psychopathic <i>systems</i>, like communism or Nazism? Or capitalism, which while it may not be as inherently murderous as the others, seems to be <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/04/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism/">far more efficiently destroying us</a>? Which of these scare you most, and emotional reactions aside, which are <i>actually</i> the most likely to do harm? What if the entities in questions were endowed with superhuman intelligence, like the fictional but archetypal Hannibal Lecter, or capitalism with better technology?<br />
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This thought was prompted by <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/08/two-kinds-of-caution/">another SSC post</a>, which makes a case for putting more resources preventing possible catastrophic consequences of artificial intelligence. In the course of that, he dismissed some common counterarguments, including this:</div>
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For a hundred years, every scientist and science fiction writer who’s considered the problem has concluded that smarter-than-human AI could be dangerous for humans. And so we get these constant hot takes, “Oh, you’re afraid of superintelligent AI? What if the real superintelligent AI was <i>capitalism</i>?”</blockquote>
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Well: my <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.it/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html">number one most popular post ever</a> was exactly that hot take; I՚m dismayed to learn that it՚s a cliche. I posted that in 2013 so maybe I was ahead of the curve, but in any case I feel kind of deflated now.<br />
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But my deeper point was not that it՚s dumb to worry about the risks of AI since capitalism is much more dangerous – it՚s that AI and capitalism are not really all that different, that they are in fact one and the same, or at least descended from a common ancestor. And thus the dangers (both real and perceived) of one are going to be very similar to the dangers of the other, due to their shared conceptual heritage.<br />
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Why do I think that AI and capitalism are ideological cousins? Both are forms of systematized instrumental rationality. Both are human creations and thus imbued with human goals, but both seem to be capable of evolving autonomous system-level goals (and thus identities) that transcend their origin. Both promise to generate enormous wealth, while simultaneously threatening utter destruction. Both seem to induce strong but divergent emotional/intellectual reactions, both negative and positive. Both are in supposed to be rule-based (capitalism is bound by laws, AI is bound by the formal rules of computation) but constantly threaten to burst through their constraints. They both seem to inspire in some a kind of spiritual rapture, either of transcendence or eschaton.<br />
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And of course, today capitalism and AI are converged in way that was not really the case 40 years ago – not that there weren՚t people trying to make money out of AI back then, but it was very different AI and a very different order of magnitude of lucrativeness. Back then, almost every AI person was an academic or quasi-academic, and the working culture was grounded in war (Turing and Weiner՚s foundational work was done as part of the war effort) and the military-industrial-academic complex. The newer AI is conducted by immensely wealthy private companies like Google or Baidu. This is at least as huge a change for the field as the transition from symbolic to statistical techniques.<br />
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So AI and capitalism are merely two offshoots of something more basic, let՚s call it systematized instrumental rationality, and are now starting to reconverge. Maybe capitalism with AI is going to be far more powerful and dangerous than earlier forms – that՚s certainly a possibility. My only suggestion is that instead of viewing superempowered AIs as some new totally new thing that we can՚t possibly understand (which is what the term “AI singularity” implies), we view it as a next-level extension of processes that are already underway.<br />
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This may be getting too abstract and precious, so let me restate the point more bluntly: instead of worrying about hypothetical <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer">paperclip maximizers</a>, we should worry about the all too real money and power maximizers that already exist and are going to be the main forces behind further development of AI technologies. That's where the real risks lie, and so any hope of containing the risks will require grappling with real human institutions.<br />
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Note: the identification of AI with a narrow form of instrumental rationality is both recent and somewhat unfair – earlier generations of AI were more interested in cognitive modelling and were inspired by thinkers like Freud and Piaget, who were not primarily about goal-driven rationality. But it՚s the more constricted view of rationality that drives the AI-risk discussions.</div>
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-52268027596981627082017-06-24T20:09:00.000-07:002017-06-25T09:59:35.821-07:00Racist Lives MatterEvery time I read a Slate Star Codex post that touches on politics, I want to pick a fight with it. I՚m not sure why – Scott is such a bright and well-intentioned and witty guy that it makes me question my own motives. But I can՚t help it, something seems deeply wrong there, in a way that connects to various issues I tend to obsess about.<br />
<br />
The recent post entitled <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/">Against Murderism</a> attempts to make a case that we are too quick to be outraged at racism, or too quick to dismiss people for their racist tendencies. Racism, he says, denotes a large number of phenomena, some of them emergent from perfectly innocent behaviors and preferences. Very few people have a root motivation of pure racial hatred, and it՚s unfair and incorrect to tar people with more epiphenomenal discriminatory behaviors and attitudes with the sins of those few. We should be more forgiving of those we have labeled racists, or maybe not forgiving, but we should at least try to understand them rather then treating them as pure evil, to be shunned or exterminated rather than reasoned with.<br />
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And there՚s something to this – accusations of racism are flung around pretty freely these days, and they often serve to end an argument, or turn what should be an argument into an existential battle. Scott doesn՚t want an existential battle (a civil war, in his terms). Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil wars, and liberalism requires that we show maximum intellectual charity to all points of view, racism included.<br />
<br />
All of the above is valid and well-reasoned and supported. Nevertheless, it has the glaringly obvious property that it is far more worried about people being mean to racists than it is about racism itself. This is like a textbook illustration of the concept of privilege. That՚s not an accusation I throw out very often, in fact I՚ve probably more often been on the receiving end of it.<br />
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I՚m sure it doesn՚t feel like an exercise of privilege to Scott, who views himself as bending over backwards to extend empathy to a despised subgroup (racists) and encouraging others to do the same. From his standpoint, the fact that liberals and polite society is hostile and discriminatory to racists is more important, more salient, more worth crusading about, than actual racial discrimination.<br />
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Racist Lives Matter would be the slogan for this movement, if it was a movement. And indeed they do! Maybe Scott is simply being more courageous, more intellectually advanced, than the mainstream of civilized discourse, where of course racism is already taboo. So he argues that we dehumanize racists by accusing them of racism, and dehumanization is bad:<br />
<blockquote>
Racism-as-murderism is the opposite. It’s a powerful tool of dehumanization. It’s not that other people have a different culture than you. It’s not that other people have different values than you. It’s not that other people have reasoned their way to different conclusions from you…It’s that people who disagree with you are motivated by pure hatred, by an irrational mind-virus that causes them to reject every normal human value in favor of just wanting to hurt people who look different from them.</blockquote>
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This paragraph fascinates me in its rhetorical technique; specifically, in the way it attempts to enforce a conceptual separation between things that are in fact inseparable. On the one had we have “different cultures, different values, and different conclusions”; on the other, “an irrational mind-virus of hatred”. The former is to be respected and reasoned with, the latter can՚t be, so we better try hard to frame things in the former way.<br />
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But hatred, like every other human thought and emotion, is part of cultures and values. And tribal animosity specifically is a very common and ingrained part of many human cultures, not something external and alien to them. Fortunately, and here we agree, we have also developed a new kinds of culture that has liberal, cosmopolitan, and tolerant values. These values are irreducibly in <b>conflict</b> with the more traditional tribal cultural values. This conflict plays itself out in many forms, some peaceful, others less so, but it's never going away,<br />
<br />
In the extreme case, these conflicting values produce war. Nazi Germany had different culture and values, and we fought them. The slaveholding south had different cultures and values, and we fought a war over those as well. The good guys won those wars, but the underlying bad values were not permanently defeated and at this particular historical moment seem to be gaining strength. That would seem to be the thing to worry about, for those who are truly on the side of liberalism. Liberalism, in its actually existing form, is not a form of pacifist rationalism that can solve all problems by talking them out, as much as it would like to, Eventually, it has to pick up a gun, because it has enemies.<br />
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Scott seems to want us to stop fighting and instead deploy a lot of empathetic concern. And maybe that's not a bad idea in itself, certainly it behooves us to understand people better, even enemies. But his basic posture is that he wants to avoid civil war at all costs, and thus doesn't notice that the war is happening and has been for a very long time.<br />
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<br />mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-65748167443081665822017-04-23T10:29:00.002-07:002017-04-23T10:54:15.038-07:00The Opposite of ScienceI՚m as happy as anyone to see thousands of people in the street marching in support of science, but something about it feels kind of strange – like, should science really be a political cause?<br />
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"Geez" <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ScienceMarch?src=hash">#ScienceMarch</a> SF <a href="https://t.co/XXdKv7pi1c">pic.twitter.com/XXdKv7pi1c</a></div>
— Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) <a href="https://twitter.com/paldhous/status/855833147203698688">April 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
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The first answer that comes to mind: of course is no, it shouldn՚t be, but the right wing crazies have forced it to be one. The onus is on them.<br />
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The second (and a bit more sophisticated) one: yes, of course, science and rationality (and the modern cosmopolitan civilizations that make them possible) are as historical, and hence political, as anything else. Science didn՚t just blossom innocently into existence in the modern era, it was advanced by specific agencies and interests, and opposed by others. It՚s a bit sad and a bit annoying that this battle hasn՚t been won decisively, but not exactly surprising. So this is just a new stage of a long battle.<br />
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There weren՚t any visible counterprotestors at the Science Day march, although plenty of mention of Donald Trump, now the leader of the rightist forces of unreason.<br />
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The first obvious enemy of science was <b>religion</b>. While the Catholic Church has long made its peace with science, religious fundamentalism quite rightly sees science as undermining its metaphysics and has opposed it fairly continuously in the US for the past century..<br />
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<b>Big business</b> and its <b>libertarian</b> ideological handmaids, who turn against science because it interferes with their profit making. This is the most powerful of the anti-science forces because it has money behind it, and it՚s main effects have been to ensure that we continue to doom ourselves via the climate.<br />
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<b>Ethnonationalism</b> – Science by its nature is universalist – it is a machine for producing truths that ideally independent of specific context. This is a tricky and sensitive point, because it doesn՚t mean that science necessarily proves human universalism – “human biodiversity” may be real, although it՚s a suspicious and fringy area. But the practice of science has a very strong universalist bias, in that research results and practises from the US or Peru or Peking are expected to be fully compatible with each other. Trump՚s hamhanded attempts to block immigrants have had <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/trumps-immigration-ban-is-already-harming-americas-scientistsand-its-science/514859/">a very tangible negative</a> impact on scientific practice.<br />
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On the left (more or less), enemies of science are usually motivated by some form of conspiracism or health paranoia (eg anti-vaxxers). <a href="http://realitystudio.org/interviews/1961-interview-with-william-s-burroughs-by-gregory-corso-and-allen-ginsberg/">William Burroughs</a> made this point with characteristic clarity and extremism. way back in 1961:<br />
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The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control. Elimination of all natural sciences. If anybody ought to go to the extermination chambers definitely scientists, yes I’m definitely anti-scientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as, the real and only universe, the Universe of scientists themselves - they’re reality-addicts, they’ve got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it. We have a great elaborate machine which I feel has to be completely dismantled in order to do that we need people who understand how the machine works - the mass media - unparalleled opportunity.</blockquote>
Science has had a varied political career, as it makes its necessary alliances with political and worldly power. It՚s always been hand in glove with the military, for obvious reasons. And its served capitalism and corporations, perhaps too well. Doing science takes money, money comes from the powerful, so science has had to make all sorts of alliances with the powerful, including unfortunate relationships with both the Nazis and Stalin. And its enemies have also been scattered across the spectrum.<br />
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Who knows what the consequences of this mass politicizing of science will be? And while <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/05/three-forms-of-antipolitics.html">I am generally in favor of acknowledging political realities</a>, I have to admit that tearing down the walls between science and politics is also scary, even if those walls are thin and built of mere social convention. Science is about truth, politics is about power, and those forces don՚t always work well with each other. But there is no alternative to figuring out how to make that happen.mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-42823659695612622522017-01-27T22:27:00.000-08:002017-01-27T22:27:11.831-08:00Flashing for the refugeesMy parents both entered the US as refugees from Nazi Europe, My mother and her family were from Nuremberg and got out via the UK. Here՚s the passenger manifest from their trip from Liverpool to the US in 1940.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZqCAST38xrEQqLWAiBSv1-2xBXQ-1jnOJesnNNhoWmlXbir9NeVv7z9SDe5t_d8ZvrzD29zdtspvmJ6cl5wVsiUNnAiXJxHn-GrLx4ovMDotqzYX4RB7cm4WpS3Be4oQV8cxa/s1600/lowenthal-manifest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZqCAST38xrEQqLWAiBSv1-2xBXQ-1jnOJesnNNhoWmlXbir9NeVv7z9SDe5t_d8ZvrzD29zdtspvmJ6cl5wVsiUNnAiXJxHn-GrLx4ovMDotqzYX4RB7cm4WpS3Be4oQV8cxa/s640/lowenthal-manifest.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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And here՚s her passport from Nazi Germany:<br />
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Trump, because there's no level of cartoon villainy too farfetched for him to play to, chose International Holocaust Remembrance Day to announce <a href="http://www.vox.com/2017/1/27/14370854/trump-refugee-ban-order-muslim">a ban on admitting any refugees to the US</a>.<br />
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The calamity that is his presidency is starting to impact real, specific people, in addition to <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/trump-immigration-refugee-vetting-consequences-executive-order-214702">irreparably damaging the world standing of the US</a>. Sorry refugees, in addition to having your home destroyed, you now have your fate dangling at the whim of an ignorant and narcissistic sociopath, which the US – occasionally advertising itself as a beacon of freedom and hope for the world – decided to elect as its leader.<br />
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Oh well I never much believed in countries and governments anyway. The values of freedom and humanity are real enough, but I don՚t really expect states to embody them consistently. Now that we've decided to turn ours into complete shit, they will have to manifest themselves through other means. I support the <a href="https://www.rescue.org/">International Rescue Committee</a>, please consider doing the same.<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-75734182126371385322017-01-22T16:23:00.000-08:002017-01-22T16:28:12.159-08:00Punching NazisI am always fascinated by controversies around the border between speech and action – like the <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/06/moldbuggery.html">fracas about banning Moldbug from a conference</a>, and the more recent punching of alt.right leader Richard Spencer that has been both celebrated and deplored across the internet. It made the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/politics/richard-spencer-punched-attack.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news">front page of the freaking New York Times</a>.<br />
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As with the earlier controversy, there are <a href="https://twitter.com/RemingtonWild/status/823066749599780864">scads</a> of <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2ywLY1UQAEwoye.jpg">people</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/ClarkHat/status/823311607971401729">both sides</a> who are firmly convinced of their correctness. But to me, it՚s interesting precisely because I can՚t make up my mind about how to feel.<br />
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Alt-right (aka nazi) leader Richard Spencer getting punched in the face:</div>
— sɹǝʌɐɹʇ ǝʞıɯ (@mtraven) <a href="https://twitter.com/mtraven/status/822617633799499776">January 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Basically I have two conflicting reactions. The immediate and primal one is: these people are simply fucking evil, they advocate violence to others, most definitely including me and mine, and thus they deserve whatever shit rains down on them. Punch away. It helps that Spencer is practically the Platonic ideal of <a href="http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/__pr/GIC/TWIG__WoW/2014/23-Backpfeifengesicht.html">backpfeifengesicht</a>.<br />
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The second is: violence is bad, having a robust definition of free speech is good, and political speech should be defended even when it is vile. The paradigm case here is when <a href="http://www.jta.org/2013/06/20/news-opinion/the-telegraph/nazis-marching-through-skokie">the ACLU defended the rights of neonazis to march through Skokie</a> (next door to where I grew up as it happens). The organization՚s devotion to its principles impressed me a lot at the time, especially since it cost them a lot of members and funding.<br />
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There՚s a lot to be said for the second reaction. It seems more principled, and based on a more abstract idea of human behavior and thus influenced by what David Chapman calls the <a href="https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode">systemic mode</a>, whereas the first reaction is pretty visceral and tribal. In the more developed systemic way of thinking, we can recognize that the principle of free speech are more important than the particular uses, good or bad, to which it is put.<br />
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But I find myself unable to give myself wholeheartedly to this systemic stance. I can՚t bring myself to tell someone who wants to punch a Nazi that it՚s wrong, because of some abstraction. I wish I could, because the liberal model of political order and political discourse is very appealing. I wish I could be a free speech absolutist like the recently deceased <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-08-01/entertainment/9308010274_1_free-speech-speech-codes-nazis">Nat Hentoff</a>, exemplar of the old-school liberal tradition.<br />
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Something about that stance strikes me as an obsolete fiction, one that maybe used to work fairly well but is crumbling at the edges these days. It՚s fundamental flaw is that it is based on a the idea that speech can be rigorously separable from action. While a useful fiction, it was never actually the truth, and in our postmodern condition it seems even less true than before.<br />
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The systemic rationalism that grounds out the idea of freedom speech is being eaten from the left by Foucauldian critical theory and anticolonialism, which reveals that discourse is never really a neutral player in power dynamics. It՚s being eaten from the right by the rise of ethno-nationalism (Trump, Brexit, etc) and their skillful manipulations of social media. And it՚s being eaten from the inside by the failure of global neoliberalism to control and channel the enormous energies of capitalism in a way that preserves the planet and human livelihood, and by ongoing failure of our institutions of discourse, such as congress and the press.<br />
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All of these factors combine to make the old model, of a separate sphere of discourse where ideas are rationally considered and debated, simply irrelevant. It was a nice idea, but the world has moved on. Speech isn՚t about rational discourse, it՚s about whoever can craft the best memes and capture people՚s attention long enough to sell them something.<br />
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Both the Nazis and the Nazi-punchers live in this new world. As kind of an old-fashioned liberal myself, I don՚t much like it but I have to acknowledge it. Politics is everywhere, and politics is a contest of strength, and the rules of combat are weak or nonexistent. Violent ideologies generate violent responses -- to wring hands about this fact, to attempt to sit on the sidelines, is a moral cop-out.<br />
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And to assume that your own life is somehow outside of and immune to the violence of political struggle is to be unforgivably naive; the worst form of privilege,<br />
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<br />mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-3148468776729063212016-12-28T13:35:00.000-08:002016-12-28T13:35:44.268-08:00Blogyear 2016 in reviewThis was a sucky year for my blogging, in addition to all the other ways in which it sucked. Politics dominated of course. And loss and grief. My company went under at the end of October, which I haven՚t written about here, but it certainly contributed to the overall feeling of disaster.<br />
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This is also the year the rabid wingnut fringe of the internet went completely mainstream. I feel a touch of perverse pride in having been tracking it from years before, although I՚m not sure why – if I was a professional pundit or prognosticator, detecting important ideas early should raise my reputation. But to be honest I had no idea these maniacs would turn out to be <i>important</i>, rather than just amusingly weird in a repulsive sort of way.<br />
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As is my practice, here՚s an attempt to cobble together some thematic unity after the fact:<br />
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The departed</h2>
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<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/01/firing-up-emotion-machine.html">Marvin Minsky</a> and Seymour Papert both</li>
<li>So many beloved artists: <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2008/09/people-of-landthe-common-clay-of-new.html">Gene Wilder</a> and <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2011/10/everybody-knows.html">Leonard Cohen</a> have been linked to in the past, but I also felt Prince and Bowie and Carrie Fisher just yesterday.</li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/11/mismanagement-and-grief.html">Political hope</a></li>
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Politics and darkness</h2>
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<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-dark-side.html">The Dark Side</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/04/horrified-fascination.html">Horrified Fascination</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/11/election-day-narrative-special.html">Election Day Narrative Special</a></li>
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The sacred, work, play</h2>
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<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/09/holy-labor.html">Holy Labor</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-pull-of-man.html">Not going to Burning Man</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/05/yom-hashoah.html">Yom HaShoah</a></li>
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Technology and geek culture</h2>
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<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/10/in-soviet-russia-internet-invents-you.html">The Soviet Internet</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-end-of-argument.html">The End of Argument</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/06/stealing-future_18.html">Stealing the Future</a></li>
<li><a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-word.html">The A Word</a></li>
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I declared a goal of <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-resolution-of-resolution.html">writing about goals</a>, but didn՚t end up doing much about it, at least not publicly. Lots of half-written ideas, waiting for the proper framework or format or moment to be fully articulated.<br />
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Prince gets the last word:<br />
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Life is just a party and parties weren՚t meant to last.<br />
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mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15644559.post-51658610338145249322016-12-17T01:55:00.000-08:002016-12-17T01:55:27.539-08:00Who rules the cyber?In my <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/11/debugging-politics.html">last post</a> I wrote about some earnest, well-meaning, but kind of lame efforts of the San Francisco startup scene to do something to fix politics. This was formally nonpartisan, but obviously leaning towards the left.<br />
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Today, let՚s look at what the other side is doing:<br />
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<li>They <a href="http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/11/debugging-politics.html">conducted a masterful Facebook ad campaign</a><br /></li>
<li>They՚re <a href="https://twitter.com/carljackmiller/status/800709457797844992">using Mechanical Turk</a> to recruit an army of low-paid workers to churn out a torrent of bullshit<br /></li>
<li>They are building <a href="http://professorwatchlist.org/">a public black list</a> of supposedly left-wing academics, with a page where anyone can nominate a new victim.<br /></li>
<li>They are using <a href="https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com/">memes and chaos magick</a> in the service of Trump and alt.right shittery in general.</li>
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I am beginning to suspect that despite the overwhelming support of Clinton among hip people, smart people, tech people, and educated people, it is the other side that has the deeper appreciation of how the new computational media work and how to use them effectively.<br />
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Certainly the people involved seem to think so, and the fact that they won the election works in favor of that opinion.<br />
<br />mtravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.com0