September 2011
1 post
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...
August 2011
6 posts
“Objecting to 400 people controlling half the wealth in America doesn’t make you...”
– No, it kinda does make you a socialist…
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...
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...
“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...
Watch
July 2011
12 posts
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...
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...
The Consultant in an Open Relationship Who Plays...
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...
The Consultant in an Open Relationship Who Has...
Day One
11:45 a.m.: In a daze after yesterday’s cheese-party yacht cruise off the Jersey shore. My girlfriend and I weren’t into most of the cheeses, but we ran into a few familiar favorites … and ate them. Plus we brought our own cheese, a beautiful Pont-l’Évêque from Europe, which was offered, spread on crackers, to a group of strangers.
4:30 p.m.: GF and I...
Reading Network Culture
I’ve started a small online discussion group with some friends from Twitter. Over the next few weeks, will be reading and discussing Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age by Italian Marxist theorist Tiziana Terranova.
In an age of email lists and discussion groups, e-zines and weblogs, bringing together users, consumers, workers and activists from around the globe, what kinds...
“A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination”
Capitalist Futures
You can learn a lot from the future of capitalism by asking capitalists. It sounds obvious, but many radical European media studies types who embrace the disruptive force of the internet in roughly the same terms as the average Silicon Valley venture capitalist haven’t thought about it.
For example, this series of videos of an interview with John Hagel (author of The Power of Pull,...
An excerpt from Zizek’s essay From objet a to Subtraction:
Is objet a, insofar as it lacks its mirror image, the vampiric object (vampires, as we know, do not generate their image in a mirror)? It may seem so: are vampires not versions of undead partial objects? However, perhaps, the exact opposite is more appropriate as an image of objet a: when we look at a thing directly, in...
Antinomies of Liberalism
After the fall of the South African apartheid regime, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee gained access to official records documenting the individuals who presided over the censorship of his work and was surprised that they did not fit the stereotype we have of professional censors, which he describes in the following way:
some nondescript male bureaucrat who comes to work punctually at 8:30 in the...
Pixar's Class Problem
In a blog post for the magazine Discover, Kyle Munkittrick is optimistic about the hidden messages in Pixar films — perhaps so optimistic as to border on pronoia. The cause of his optimism is that he reads the hidden message of Pixar films as “humanity does not have a monopoly on personhood.” The basic operation in the films is “strange entities become unmistakably...
Inauthentic Man
The puzzle of Mad Men is why many liberal-minded men and women are so fascinated by the character of Don Draper when he appears to be an avatar of patriarchal privilege that left politics traditionally opposes. Does this signal some kind of regression? Or a sign of vestiges of undiscovered elements of sexist ideology hidden in our unconscious liberal minds?
But the problem with interpreting Mad...
Upper Class Chavs
In period dramas like Downton Abbey and Gosford Park, it’s the servants, not the wealthy aristocrats who embody aristocratic “snobbish” virtues like social grace, good manners and wit most authentically. According to one common critique, these ideals have no intrinsic value, they are arbitrary markers of class. It’s a coded language that the wealthy learn at home and at...
June 2011
16 posts
“SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME…”: A SERIES
Google+:
I don’t think people have changed that much in thousands of years, and I think that they’re still fundamentally driven by the same internal needs…
“SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME…”: A SERIES
Hipster Runoff
I love HRO. For Carles, nothing exists in the world but memes, lifestyles, self-expression and cultivating a ‘relevant’ personal brand. He takes these imperatives to the extreme in a grotesque display of the futility and nihilism of late capitalist consumer culture.
Carles overidentifies with it, self-immolating in it in protest. The rest of us maintain a false inner distance from...
All True Thought Contains a moment of Paranoia
[Horkheimer and Adorno] argued that… paranoia was not simply a delusion. In its denial of the merely given, its mediation of immediacy, paranoia transcended a naive positivist understanding of the world. Thus, all true thought contained what might be called a moment of paranoia. In fact, in projecting its internal fears and desires onto an external object, paranoid thought expressed a...
In “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” Horkheimer and Adorno went beyond the reactions of anti-Semites to a discussion of the function of the Jew himself in Western civilization. Like Marx, in his essays on the Jewish question, they rejected the liberal assumption that Jews were different from other men only in their religion. Jewishness, they argued, was also a socio-economic category,...
My workers love work. They say, “Work us! Please work us! We’ll work and we’ll work up so many surprises you’d never see half if you had forty eyeses!”
— Dr. Seuss, If I Ran the Circus
What is Appearance at its Most Radical?
From the Lacanian perspective, what then is appearance at its most radical? Imagine a man having an affair about which his wife doesn’t know, so when he is meeting his lover, he pretends to be on a business trip or something similar; after some time, he gathers the courage and tells the wife the truth that, when he is away, he is staying with his lover. However, at this point, when the...
In the organization and legitimization of power, the electoral system is increasingly understood on the model of market competition. Elections are themselves like a supermarket where the voters “buy” the option that offers to do the most efficient the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, and so on. Guided by the same formula of “lower costs, higher...
Open Wallets, Open Minds
From the David Report’s Closed Wallets, Closed Minds:
Our consumption is slowly but surely destroying us – psychologically, spiritually, maybe even morally – and, more literally, the world we live in. Our desire for novelty has not taken this into account – nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of our quest for new stuff, while credit and cheap labour has facilitated it.
...
Feedback Systems are Counterrevolutionary
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and Citizendium, wrote a blog post that levels the charge of anti-intellectualism against the geek community. I think this is manifestly true, and one of the most obvious indicators is the proliferation of services based on a cybernetic model of feedback that they build and promote.
Why do these indicate anti-intellectualism? An example of one of these...
On construit des maisons de fous pour faire croire à ceux qui n’y sont pas enfermés qu’ils ont encore la raison
They made madhouses in order to make those who were not yet shut up in them believe they were still sane
— Michel de Montaigne
Fascists have learned something from pragmatism. Even their sentences no longer have meaning, only a purpose
— Max Horkheimer
“Since the dawn of time…”
Many products and services are created in the world these days. Almost all of them are so profound and revolutionary that they can only truly be understood when viewed against their proper time scale: the history of humanity, or perhaps the universe itself. As a humble chronicler of these world-historic events, I offer only two examples. I hope they will suffice.
Google Wallet:
In the past few...
We will be landing shortly in Minneapolis. I ask him what, precisely, he thinks is the proper role of government as it relates to business.
“Invisible,” he says. “I know there are things the government has to do. But they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.” He reflects for a moment, then finds the analogy he...
Socialism and Fear of Socialism
Kevin Drum questions the theory that businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t know what the costs of new regulations will be:
But the simple fact is that regulatory uncertainty is no greater today than it’s ever been. Financial uncertainty is high, but the Obama adminstration just hasn’t been overhauling regs that affect the cost of new workers any more than usual.
...
May 2011
14 posts
Infidelity & The Ethics of Personal Happiness
In this episode of This American Life from 2009, Ira Glass interviews Jessica Pressler about a blog post she wrote about the New York Times Vows column, which is used by newly-weds to announce (and, it seems, to conspicuously display) their marital bliss. Pressler notes that couples have to lobby to be included in the column, which implies that there’s a certain amount of status that comes...
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace...
Adam Curtis on Self-organizing systems
What the anti-cuts movement has done without realising is adopt an idea of how to order the world without hierarchies, a machine theory that leads to a static managerialism. It may be very good for organising creative and self-expressive demonstrations, but it will never change the world.
At the end of Biosphere 2 the ants destroyed the cockroaches. They then proceeded to eat through the...
Adam Kotsko, on ideology in Rocko’s Modern Life:
Even when they get together into an “unruly mob” that Rocko tries to pass off as a concerned citizens’ group, all they can do is repeat the pious lines about recycling and conservation in the setting of the corporate board room — and their continued submission to the power structure is reflected in the very fact that they’re entreating...
Freedom as the censorship of unfreedom
In a lengthy post on Wikipedia, Maria Bustillos writes:
But it’s already clear that Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of “authority,” “authorship,” and even “knowledge.”
This is true, but only in a shallow sense. It’s based on an account of authority...
“The first time I saw an app, I felt very much like the first time I went to one of those carpeted McMansions,” Heffernan said. “The incredible relief of the climate control and the stability of this and how I paid to get here and how expensive things seem and, ‘Really, there’s 12 bathrooms in here?’ That’s what an app feels like to me. It just feels like there’s so much space,...
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Unfreedom in wants
In this comic, the artist objects to the cancellation of Stargate Universe by suggesting that the method that networks use to measure the popularity of TV shows is flawed because it relies on sampling rather than direct measurement. The implication is that this is old-fashioned, not an internet-age methodology where all views can be tracked and recorded.
What’s stunning is that here,...
Crowdsourcing Mobile Application Development
Here’s a paper called Crowdsourcing and ICT work: A study of Apple and Google mobile phone application developers (PDF). From the abstract:
…developers’ experiences are analysed to illustrate how they cope with increasingly precarious and insecure working conditions and adapt to shifting labour market requirements.
It may seem counter-intuitive to think about Android and iOS apps...
Crowding out of intrinsic motivations
Luis Villa (lawyer, formerly the “geek-in-residence” of The Berkman Center For Internet and Society at Harvard) reviewed the psychological literature on the impact of paying people for work that they once did as volunteers to determine whether its a good idea for the GNOME Project to offer cash prizes (“bounties”) for some code contributions instead of just relying on free...
Disobedience affirms the order it ostensibly...
In this setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency, what can we make of democratic disobedience? It’s not simply that the bad guys occupy the transgressive position, breaking the law, it’s that there is no difference between obedience and disobedience. A recent book exemplifies this point with respect to the last decades of financial malfeasance in the US: ‘the best way to rob a bank is to...
I was raised up believin’ I was somehow unique Like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes Unique in each way you can see And now after some thinkin’ I’d say I’d rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery Serving something beyond me. But I don’t I don’t know what that will be. I’ll get back to you someday Soon you will see.
Fleet Foxes,...
How would ethical philosophers redesign Soccer?
Aristotle: regardless of the final score, the team that practiced the hardest wins.
Bentham: each team’s players stand directly in front of the opposing goal, kicking in balls as fast as possible for 90 minutes. Add up both scores at the end.
Kant: a goal is worth zero points, and 1 point is subtracted for each rule violation.
Rand: 1 person on each team. Every game ends because they both...
Zizek in the Cloud
A few days ago on Inside Higher Ed, Zizek published a piece on cloud computing, a topic that he has begun drawing attention to in his lectures recently. I think there are a number of problems here, which I will try to draw out. Zizek describes the “Cloud era” where computers use network connections to access vast processing power that’s geographically remote, an architecture...
April 2011
9 posts
The Surprising Truth of How We're Being Motivated
In The Management Myth, Matthew Stewart recounts the slightly sordid history of management, beginning at the turn of the last century with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efforts to improve the efficiency of steel workers. Taylor was an advocate of what he called scientific management, a doctrine that claimed to rely on empirical observation and rational calculation and rejected the traditions...