A TUMBLE-LOG of various
PHILOSOPHICKAL REFLECTIONS
& SPECULATIONS

Has it been only 2.633 years?

Yes, it has.

And now I’m moving to my own blog at www.mrteacup.org. How did this happen? Not long ago I noticed that some Tumblr blogs have their own domains. Envy took root in my heart and I thought, “I too should have a domain for my blog!” I almost bought it and pointed it here, but why have a domain only to point it here? It seems a waste, when it could be put to better use. Couldn’t I just host it myself, along side my Other Website?

But my Other Host does not allow multiple domains! And it is expensive! I signed up for Another Host — or 3 Others and cancelled the first 2 for different reasons. My Other Host subscription is up for renewal next month, so this all works out well. Migrating my Tumblr posts turned out to be an ordeal, but the sooner the better. I like the new set up for the following reasons:

• It’s faster - pages come up almost instantly because they are static files, there is no database to slow things down
• More control over the theme - Tumblr’s theme editor is painfully, demotivatingly slow to update.
• I keep my own work - I don’t like Tumblr having it, and the difficulty of getting it out and into a format that can be used elsewhere confirms that this is a bad idea.

The main disadvantage is losing the ease of engagement - Tumblr makes it very easy to like, reblog and follow — I’ve unexpectedly collected 81 followers and been reblogged a fair bit, which I appreciate. Hopefully some of those followers will stay with me, but I suspect many won’t. Tumblr is partly about recycling — reblogging interesting things and following people who tend to post interesting things. Introducing a small amount of friction by not appearing in someone’s dashboard, and not being rebloggable with two clicks is enough to discourage quite a bit of engagement.

Sometimes I’m in a cafe, talking to a friend about the kind of think I post here. People overhear us, look over from their laptops and smile to themselves. They get some kind of satisfaction knowing that they go to the kind of coffee shop where other people sit and talk about these things, but they don’t come over and join the conversation. OK, that’s not something people do, but still. I feel a bit like a decoration, adding a “philosophical vibe” to the place. Or maybe an entertainer, like a singer-songwriter in the corner that everyone is half-listening to. Maybe that’s a good thing, if it makes philosophy seem more ordinary instead of rarefied.

A lot of the engagement on Tumblr seems to register that kind of achievement, of having successfully created a philosophical vibe, and the ease with which you can reproduce that vibe on your own tumblr makes it seem like that’s all it is.

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our homes from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

—Paul Valery

On Buddhism, Happiness and Pessimism

The question of how to be happier is sort of boring to me, a bit like “How can I save over 50% on my car insurance?” It’s probably worth knowing what the answer is, and especially useful for people who are paying too much for car insurance. But the knowledge is not, in itself, very interesting. I already know that certain things will make me happy or unhappy, and having positive psychologists tell me what those things are with greater specificity is a minor discovery in the scheme of things. We learn very little about the human condition that we didn’t already know by finding out that social connections are important to happiness, for example.

A more interesting question is why people relive unhappy events long after they’ve passed, and continue to suffer from things that aren’t happening to them despite immediate conditions that are quite pleasant and comfortable. If humans are hedonistic machines looking for happiness and avoiding pain, why do we endlessly return to painful memories when we could easily choose to think happy thoughts instead? Those who claim to only think happy thoughts are almost always suffering from either repression or disavowal - why is this necessary, if not for the fact that the past has the same deadly fascination for them that it does for everyone else? There are good reasons to doubt the claims of self-styled optimists who can’t deal with their own memories.

Pessimists are less troubled by the past. They expected the future to be bad, that belief is confirmed in the present, and they aren’t especially worried about it once it’s over. An optimist is surprised when things turn out badly, so they feel robbed, which is a much worse feeling. If Buddhism offers anything, it’s not practical steps that we could take to improve our day-to-day happiness - how would a 2500 year-old how-to manual be relevant to today’s world? Instead, it’s the “pessimistic” recognition that dissatisfaction and disappointment are part of life, not things that in themselves require going into crisis mode. Lacan and Buddha agree on this point. We can’t get over negative experiences in the past because there’s something beyond the actual negative feeling: the belief that something profoundly exceptional happened to us. We can easily weather hardship, but can’t deal with the feeling of having been robbed.

This is obvious in the literal situation of having something stolen. People are generally more upset by having their property stolen than losing it, partly because its more painful to know that someone is enjoying in your place, a tendency that leads to the common feeling, “If I can’t have it, no-one can!”

Final points to avoid misunderstanding: First, I don’t think that believing in the inevitability of disappointment leads to being politically passive. If I believe my suffering is unique, how could I be motivated to make radical changes to the system? It’s a belief that the status quo functions, with a few minor exceptions. Second, pessimism is a flexible term that’s used to cover a variety of beliefs and attitudes, and everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means. Terms of abuse have a tendency towards semantic expansion as more meanings are added - “narcissist” and “troll” are two examples. If you want to stigmatize something, it’s easier to expand the definition of something that people already hate than to invent a new one. There may be people who are considered pessimists who are resentful about the past - I’m not defending that kind of pessimism.

London riots: the limits of Left and Right

Marxists need to remember the Hegelian distinction between ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’. In themselves, these riots may indeed be about inequality: the concentration of wealth and power may simply have become too unwieldy, regardless of what the rioters think is going on. But for themselves, they are about power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the ego. Anyone who disagrees with that is simply not crediting the participants with being able to make sense of what they’re doing.

As David Harvey argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, combine neo-classical economics with the 1960s rhetoric of emancipation, and you have a heady ideological cocktail, that draws people into conceiving of themselves as autonomous sovereign selves. Ask today’s rioter what he is doing, and he will reply using the language of self, pleasure, economic freedom and individual recognition. This borders on the concerns of the Left, when it enters into identity politics, but for the most part it is entirely neoliberal. He didn’t write this script, but he did choose to read from it.

As any student of the philosophy of social science knows, there is some interplay between the concepts used to explain another’s action, and how that actor understands what they are doing. Often explanatory frameworks become adopted by the actors being analysed. This has a political dimension too. The Brixton and Toxteth riots of the 1980s were quite manifestly political. They had political spokespersons, grievances and shared demands, lending themselves to sociological analysis. In themselves and for themselves, they were about police brutality, racism and the devastation of urban economies. And for all these reasons, it became all the more important for Conservative politicians to describe them using the language of individual morality, self-control, blame and criminality. The more collectivist the phenomenon (both in itself and for itself), the more urgently the Right will mobilise its individualist explanatory frameworks.

Strangely, other than the repeated mantra that there is “no excuse” for looting, I’ve been surprised by how guarded the political classes have been on this occasion. I assumed that moralistic rhetoric would be raining down by now, focused on absent fathers, bringing back the birch, national service and banning computer games. But no. Could it be that the absence of politics, of sociological rationale, and of socialist ambition in these events means that they are, from a Rightwing perspective, comparatively safe? While they are, at least ‘for themselves’, acts of egoistic, hedonistic, moral transgressions, there is no need for Tory MPs to take to the airwaves and describe them as such. By acting as if there is ‘no such thing as society’, the rioters are already doing this for them.

— London riots: the limits of Left and Right

“Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

— MLK, jr.

You can’t check out of the Peer-to-Peer Motel

The startup blogosphere is abuzz with news of “EJ”, a San Francisco woman who rented out her apartment on Airbnb and returned to find it ransacked and robbed. This comes just a few days after closing a round of funding that valued the company at $1.3 billion. Part of the controversy is over Airbnb’s response to the event: did they respond quickly enough? Are they falsely claiming that a suspect has been apprehended because they need a a happy ending for PR purposes? Are they being as helpful to the victim as their press releases say?

One reason these questions are important because Airbnb bills itself as a different kind of company - more human, more caring, less profit-seeking - purusing a socially-responsible form of capitalism. Skeptics wonder if these aren’t just feel-good marketing slogans and scrutinize companies like Airbnb to ensure that they’re truly living up to them. This evinces a belief that the pro-social values they claim to represent really are desireable, the question is only whether their committment to them is authentic or not.

Airbnb’s precursor is CouchSurfing, a social network that draws its members from the global backpacker scene and seeks to connect travelers with people who are willing to share their spare rooms and couches with them. Their mission statement is “A world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter,” and it’s run as a non-profit that gets all of its funding from member donations and guided by principles like:

• Our efforts to achieve CouchSurfing’s vision begins with ourselves
• We practice teamwork with respect for personal freedom.
• We seek to unify people through honest and empathetic communication
• We conscientiously preserve diversity, within and without the organization
• We practice gratitude towards everyone

CouchSurfing is an exemplar of progressive values, and the motivating force behind conscious capitalism is the idea that a corporation could have these values too. With an authentic committment, capitalism could be reformed and become a force for good in the world.

In Airbnb’s case, these values are an important part of their brand, but it’s not just superficial marketing slogans — it creates a form of peer-to-peer resource sharing, they really do connect individual travelers with individual owners, and that makes their cheerful global-village-of-sharing brand very compelling. Their tag line is “Travel like a human” and “Rent nightly from real people,” an implicitly “anti-corporate” message that asks us to reject the aesthetics of the faceless, impersonal budget hotel chain to form real connections between people.

How does this anti-corporate corporation work? It outsources the traditional costs of running a hotel — reception, housekeeping, facilities management, risk management, security — to a very large, global network of individual owners. Airbnb takes their cut because they run the booking website. And from that perspective, it’s difficult to see how they are legally liable for crimes committed by guests, any more than Expedia would be liable if someone trashed a hotel room that was booked through them.

But still, it feels like Airbnb should be liable. And this is largely an effect of their marketing, which convinces individual owners to think of the risks and costs of renting out their house as prosocial behaviors that you wouldn’t think of being compensated for — trusting your guests, sharing your home with them, welcoming them to your city, making sure they have clean sheets, little human touches like a bottle of wine or flowers, etc. All of those things add to the value of booking through Airbnb, but they’re free so the company ends up with a unique value proposition that’s price-competitive with hotels.

Airbnb wants its hosts to act out of generosity, not greed. With absolute sincerity, it wants hosts to think of their relationship with guests as pro-social and interpersonal; not market-based, profit-seeking and transactional. And in some weird alignment of the stars, it’s actually profitable! Everything that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey have been saying, that conscious capitalism can be profitable capitalism, is true.

But this is because individual will work harder for less pay, and take on more risk that should be born by the corporation because they believe in those values. Taking on personal risk for Airbnb becomes a sign of your commitment to generosity, diversity and cultural exchange, in exactly the same way that taking out thousands of student loans so that corporations don’t have to invest in training you is a sign of your committment to life-long education.

The real danger is not that corporations will whitewash their image with ideals they only pretend to believe in while continuing to act like psychopaths. It’s that they don’t do that, that they really commit to those values and it lets them push risk and costs on to workers.

The final perverse twist in this story: various proposals have been circulating on the internet on how to redesign Airbnb to reduce the chances of a guest vandalizing a host’s home. The solutions have not generally centered on Airbnb’s profits coming at the expense of hosts taking on risk, which would imply that Airbnb ought to purchase insurance for them. Instead, the problem is perceived to be a failure of information - hosts can’t properly evaluate the risk of a guest without knowing personal details about them. Effectively, in order to ensure that Airbnb’s peer-to-peer crowdsourced hotel revolution is successful, we must all give up anonymity and submit to increased surveillance.

McLuhan’s Ideology

Nicholas Carr uncovers some of Marshall McLuhan’s disturbing views, from a 1969 interview in Playboy:

The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways… The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programmed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world’s competing economies.

Plenty of LOLs to be had on that last point, of course. Carr says there’s brilliance along with his craziness, but I have to say that to me, McLuhan comes across as incredibly vapid. The interviewer raises a political question: what about the “Pavlovian brainwashing” potential of a policy of programming society according to what a few cybernetic technocrats decide we need to think or do. McLuhan replies with something we hear quite a lot of still today: “Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies.”

But it’s not the technology that’s the problem here, it’s the politics of what McLuhan is trying to achieve with it.

The type of panic that McLuhan refers to is the desire to avoid developing technology for fear of some unknown harm that could arise. But here, McLuhan proposes a technology application that’s terrifying and harmful on it’s face, and blithely waves away any objections with a ridiculous analogy that compares programming social beliefs and attitudes with the municipal provision of electricity.

But it gets worse. McLuhan says “I’m not advocating anything; I’m merely probing and predicting trends.” Absolute bullshit. In a Borg-like moment, he claims his future is inevitable, resistance is futile and we should accept it with pseudo-Zen equanimity: “I accept the Universe.” It’s easy to see the application of Zizek’s sometimes-contentious views of Western Buddhism.

He makes two points — first, political questions about the use of technology by those with power are reframed as panicked technophobia; second, the progress of technology is naturalized as a movement of the Universe that has been going on since the prehistoric era — both ways of dissipating critical questions about whose goals are being served when technology used that put the lie to his pretensions of neutrality.

McLuhan popularized the idea that “We change our tools and then our tools change us,” and this is implicit in the interview when he describes the relationship between humans and technology as symbiotic. Agency is attributed to technology in a way that deflects attention from the ideological purposes it is built for. As builders of tools, we are not serving our own interests, the interests of the state or of private capital — instead, we are mere servomechanisms. To use them, says McLuhan, “we must serve them as we do gods.” An immense, omnipotent, prehistoric god who was born millions of years, yet is simultaneously in intimate symbiosis with all of us.

Like all religions, techno-mystification props up the social order, making the choices of those with power seem inevitable and natural.

The Consultant in an Open Relationship Who Plays Settlers of Catan Nearly Twice a Day

Day One 11:45 a.m.: In a daze after yesterday’s board game party yacht cruise off the Jersey shore. My girlfriend and I weren’t into most of the games, but we ran into a few friends on the boat … and played with them. Plus we brought our own game, a beautiful tile-based strategy game from Europe, which was offered, still unopened, to a group of strangers…

4:30 p.m.: GF and I can’t keep our hands off each other’s resource cards. I steal her card, flip it over on its back and stare at it while she buzzes herself by trading in for a development card and winning the game. She comes like a steam whistle. I can hear the upstairs neighbors laughing when she’s done. They must get a huge kick from living above us. Funny, but I’ve heard board game playing from upstairs only once in two years. I think we have the better part of that arrangement.

9:30 p.m.: We decide to get to bed early. We start reminiscing about the boat party, which leads to us talking about me building a huge city wall in Carcasonne. GF starts playing on her iPhone, and soon enough, I’m ready to play. I set the game up in her favorite position: on the living room with her on the couch and me on my knees across the coffee table. She builds into another screaming win. As is usually the case, I don’t win, but the intensity of the game fills my head with a dizzy energy. I don’t care if I win or not, frankly. We fall asleep in each other’s arms.

Continued…