#( i hate the capitalist world we live in </3 will try to find a fix asap )

[byluna]

i'm about to get billed 70$ a month to keep up the (previously free) text editor i use for the space generator :) :) :) so if i can't find a free alternative within the next 2 weeks pls bear with me if i have to disable it for a small while

[jyndor]

so I was talking to my friend @timelordthirteen about some shit and I decided to just share with you all about the importance of actually explaining shit instead of just saying it. the Left, I am looking at you bitch (ily bitch but)

lol would put a read more but tumblr's being a petty little bitch today ❤

shitposting is fun. dunking on asshat right wingers is fun. you know what is not fun? seeing people not understand the basic terminology that we use in the ~discourse*

but. if we are going to use terminology, if we are going to inject regular old laypeople conversations with (imo) unneccessary amounts of academic terms, then we should try to use them correctly** because in many cases misusing them means we as leftists do not have a full understanding of what the fuck we're on about. this dilutes both the meanings of these terms and their purposes. I know I am wordy as fuck and can be hard to understand sometimes (thanks adhd) so what I am about to say is a little ironic, but clarity is fucking important when it comes to strategy and organizing.

so I am going to examine some commonly misused concepts and terms today. yay.

1. THEORY, PRAXIS AND FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSIS weeee yes I am fun at parties tyvm

what is a framework? a structure, in this case, for analyzing some bullshit we deal with irl. that's it lol but I use it a lot so I figured I'd define it here. examples of frameworks are: intersectionality, marxism, queer theory. seriously, if you can think it, it has already been analyzed through the queer lens.

what is theory? ideas, knowledge in the abstract based on looking at shit happen and analyzing that shit. it is useful because it can help us articulate what we are going through in our shitty lives. this is why I often recommend people learn about chomsky's manufacturing consent (theory of why we get the info we get from the media tl;dr), not because I think chomsky is the ultimate leftist grandpa but because this site needs some media literacy lmao. and btw, this clip narrated by amy goodman is a great, trippy little 4:30 min long video that explains the basics of manufacturing consent so you don't have to open a book or use drugs!

theory can help serve as a framework to understand what the fuck is happening to us irl, but imo is kind of an incomplete understanding of shit without lived experience (aka - theory v praxis). this is one reason why we should listen to marginalized groups on their own shit and not talk over them - because all of the research and theory in the world does not make me a Black woman living in Flint (aka - ground up organizing v technocracy). it is not about being nice, or politically correct, although we should be nice and we should care about people just because they're people. if you understand the why of listening to marginalized groups, you understand that it is mainly about communities knowing their own problems best and therefore having the best solutions for those problems.

2. MARXISM, CAPITALISM AND OTHER BUZZWORDS (and leftists need hobbies)

so marxism is a framework for socioeconomic analysis observed by mr kpop himself, karl marx (and his sugar daddy friedrich engels). because leftists love to argue, there are so many kinds of marxism, and if you ever feel like you are shouting into the void too much, just look up some arguments between stalinists and trotskyists. it's just... magical. no, I am not defining tankie here.

as many people smarter than I am have said (read: kwame ture seriously watch this video it's iconic), karl marx did not discover socialism or invent it or whatever, he observed capitalism and saw how shitty it is, like any other sane person would do. the point of marxism is not karl marx (which he would say) or tankies or fuckin guillotines***

things that marxism is:

- an analytical tool for looking at the world

- a theory which was used to develop the basis of different kinds of post-capitalist economic systems like communism and socialism

things that marxism is not:

- a system of economics or government lmao marx did not govern dick

- scary

marx looked at capitalism and said "this is definitely gonna fail someday because it's clearly unsustainable, I mean the proletariat is bigger than the bourgeoisie who owns everything uh yeah so I can do basic fucking math. if I have one capitalist and fifteen hundred workers, eventually that capitalist is gonna lose his damn head because he is gonna hoard all that wealth and his workers are gonna get pissed that they don't have their basic fucking needs met. lmao now put on some kpop, freddy" or something. idk that might not be a direct quote.

what is capitalism? (besides horseshit) a system of economics where industry is privately owned. and yes, this includes publically traded corporations because they are still owned by individuals (shareholders) even if they aren't privately owned by one person or a group of partners. truly a nightmare to live in, and we hate to see it.

what is the proletariat? well, the working class. and the bourgeoisie is the owner class, the capitalist class. the rich.

and this is something else that we need to discuss, tumblr. if you are going to say "eat the rich" please understand who you are talking about. we're not talking about random actors or musicians, or doctors or lawyers, even if they make better than a liveable wage. even if they often have zero class consciousness, meaning they don't ~see class, like colorblind racism for classism.

anyone who has to sell their labor for wages and is not part of the owner class is working class. this includes people who cannot work for any multitude of reasons (disability, can't find work, caretaker, etc) and also white collar workers who might be well off in relatively high paying jobs because they don't own the means of production, or capital that is used to produce shit. so yes, that rich actor who is a part of a union is actually part of the working class in marxist theory. when we say eat the rich, we mean jeff bezos, not john boyega. jeff bezos owns the means of production. john boyega is a working actor who is in a union.

this is important not because we shouldn't get pissed off when actors and celebrities do tone deaf shit like singing about imagining no possessions in their mansions while people starve during a pandemic. they need to put their money to good use, have some class consciousness, instead of asking fans to donate to causes that they could fund. but they are not the bourgeoisie until they start owning the means of production. and there is no doubt that many of them do, which is why we might eat gwyneth paltrow but we won't eat john boyega.

and by the way, eating the rich is metaphorical, a reference to french revolution-era philosopher jean-jacques rousseau's quote: "when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." obviously I don't even need to explain it but I will anyway. basically, the people will forcibly redistribute the wealth of the rich if they have nothing else. this is why there are some very smart capitalists who are in favor of reforms and raising taxes, because they recognize the danger to their necks in not providing for basic needs of the working class. no, "eat the rich" does not mean be pro-cannibalism. but there are many capitalists who would prefer to die than lose their hoard so

oh, and one last thing. "no ethical consumption in capitalism" is tossed around a lot and it's a million percent true, but I need all of us to understand that it is not an excuse to support harmful practices but it is also not meant to shame consumers. it is rather an understanding that we as consumers are not responsible for the monstrous impact of capitalism. we live in it, we have no choice but to consume, and sometimes (most of the time) that means we have to buy shit that was produced in unethical ways. unfortunately supply chains being what they are, all consumption causes harm in some way.

it is a reminder that individual actions are not going to have the impact of collection actions. this is why plastic bag bans, though well-meaning, are not going to have the same impact on climate catastrophe as, say, banning fossil fuels would.

I am a vegetarian and I can recognize that I am doing a whole lot of nothing by not supporting factory farms, and when I was a vegan I wasn't doing much either. boycotts without mass support don't have much evidence of working. this is why bds exists - boycott divestment and sanctions. boycott, meaning don't support goods from various conpanies connected to something, divestment, meaning get companies/countries/institutions to remove their money from something, and sanctions, meaning getting countries to penalize a country for their bad behavior until they comply.

this is what the anti-apartheid south africa movement did and what palestinian rights organizers support for israeli apartheid.

do not allow legislators to put the burden of fixing the ills of society that capitalism created on consumers' shoulders.

3. INTERSECTIONALITY (because it deserves its own section)

I don't have as much to say on this as I did the last bit because holy shit capitalism, man.

intersectionality, a term that was coined by law professor kimberlé crenshaw in the late 80s to serve as a framework for people to critically assess how legal structures impact Black women differently due to class, race and gender. it is not incompatible with marxism (in fact marxism has been argued to be a form of intersectionality).

intersectionality can and should be used to examine why the Black queer experience is unique, for example. I also want to acknowledge that professor crenshaw isn't the only person to come up with intersectionality; sojourner truth spoke about it even if she didn't coin the term, for example. patricia hill collins, another influential af Black feminist academic****, created frameworks for viewing intersectionality. also you can read her book black feminist thought here for free.

intersectionality has been used - improperly - by liberal feminists***** to excuse bad behavior from leaders who pretend to care about women while creating and enforcing legislation that harms women. anyone who stans politicians at all needs help. it has also been misrepresented as essentialism, which it is also not (essentialism is the idea that everything has some assets that are necessary to its identity) because intersectionality isn't saying that every Black queer woman has the same experience, just that Black queer women might experience similar issues because of a system that negatively views them as Black and queer and women.

intersectionality does not excuse kamala harris for prosecuting poor moms of truant kids.

okay if you guys have things to add please do because I want us to educate each other instead of always talking shit. both is good.

* I am not calling out people for not being academic enough or not speaking english or not reading enough theory because LOL I am a 2x neurodivergent college dropout who radicalized by working retail and not by hearing karl marx talk dirty to me. also, not everyone speaks english like, I am truly not shitting on people.

** I recognize that language is fluid and ever changing, and that is a good thing. But diluting terms that serve specific purposes is not ever going to be good.

*** and I don't want to dismiss intra-leftist theory discourse (🤢) because I know how annoying it is to hear bernie sanders lumped in with liz warren, or bernie sanders lumping himself in with post-capitalists lmao of course I get it. but twitter discourse is not dismantling capitalism so ANYWAY

**** actually crenshaw built on collins' work (black feminist thought) and the collins built on crenshaw' work we love to see it.

***** I should go ahead and define liberal feminism as well as rad fem and terf and shit because people use them all very very loosely, especially terf (not every transphobe is a terf but every terf is a transphobe, it's like the rectangle/square thing). but I am exhausted with this so next time.

[wcoastboy]

overachieving

its very common to see threads on twitter critizing this culture of productivity, overachieving and workaholism created by our capitalist society. I agree in several aspects to be honest, many times one main example you get is miranda priestly and andy sachs. people often debate whether nate was just a toxic boyfriend stompinig in the middle of a promising career, others say miranda was indeed the devil and nate was just opening her eyes to the situation, and a third groups thinks miranda, like andy, was just another pawn of the system - given that she didnt actually own the means of production, she merely influenced them and set trends. I am very confused about all that, and this example often influences my whole view of the subject. I see myself demanding productivity a lot, and I dont really think its as bad as it sounds? like, obivously it can get unhealthy, but the moments im truly shining is getting things done (and as a good cancer, getting praised by it). its been a few semesters that im an A only student, and I will say it has been very gratifying, so when I think of the devil wears prada I cant help but idolize miranda. yes, I would hate working with her but I’d kill for that job (got it? haha). I cant help but find it amazing when I see those people who play several instruments, swim, speak many languages and rule the world, and I aspire to be like that, to partner with someone like that. I used to idolize miranda even more, but as we learn and learn, it is very obvious that this whole system is indeed not ideal for the human condition. I mean, thats why people are getting used to adderall by the thousands, its the constant need and demand for productivtiy. its inhuman, specially in the U.S. anyways, im just saying all that to say, I do think its the systems fault and that andy’s work was extremely unbalanced, but I am already inserted into the system in a way where I enjoy the competivity, the long study hours and now that Im in an internship I see myself more like an andy sachs, who kinda liks a boss like miranda. I will try to continue to write as much as I can, study languages, work and maintain my gpa, because I truly feel like I fit this modus operandi situation, but my issue begins when I am not producing shit. I need to try and fix this honeslty. I set myself a couple things to do during quarantine + summer, and im not even 1/3 done and I realized it this night that these past weeks have been youtube, documentaries, TV shows and social media and I feel so damn guilty about it, obviously many of this things have added to my pool of knowledge but still....I cant help but have this crushing feeling inside my heart.

this feeling - you probably felt it - became very intense when I was first applying to a couple universities in the U.S. I remember going to take the SATs and on the line I was talking to people, one of them spoke 11 languages, lived in 4 countries and was applying to yale. another one created an app (at 16 for god’s sake) who won a google contest and she got like 10.000USD for it. a third one was quiet, I expected her to be more ordinary like me, but she was a straight A student, spoke 3 languages, studied ballet in bolshoi and occasionally wrote to a column in a newspaper (the biggest in the state lol). we were all 16 y/o and its crazy that if I summed up all my shit it wouldnt add up to half of the impressive things they’ve done (I will say that tho, they were impressively weatlhy). the following years were all about trying to fix that - which I wont ever catch up with because I started way later, plus two of them are in yale and one in columbia lol. anyways, just a rant. 

[thedreideldiaries]

Hey, friends! I thought I’d take this opportunity to expound in my political choices a bit - specifically to give some context for my choice of Sanders over Warren. Note for a few of my followers who know me elsewhere: this is copied over from other social media, so if it sounds familiar that is why.

First, I want to reiterate that I like Warren. So, if anyone reading this is torn between her and any of the other clowns who have thrown their sorry hats into the ring, then please: do me and the rest of the world a favor, stop reading this right now, and go ahead and give Warren your vote. I won’t be mad. Promise. If you’re on the fence between Warren and Sanders, though, then I implore you to read on.

Okay, is it just us in here? Cool.

For my friends torn between Warren and Sanders (like I was at the beginning of the primary), I’ve tried to distill my reasoning. As you know, a lot of the discourse surrounding Warren’s campaign constructs her as a younger, female version of Sanders. If I believed that, I’d be solidly in her corner, but a few differences between them make this simply not the case. Here are the ones I find most salient:

1. Let’s look at Bernie’s base. As much as we love to talk about representation in politics, a candidate’s demographic background tells us nothing about who they’re going to fight for. Their voting base, on the other hand, tells you who has placed their confidence in that candidate’s promises.

A good proportion of Warren’s supporters are white college graduates (young and old).

By contrast Bernie’s base is overwhelmingly working class, non-white, urban, and, perhaps most tellingly, young. You could attribute that to naivete, but I think something else is going on here: the demographic group with the most to win or lose from this election are people under 30. We’re the ones who will have to live with the most devastating effects of climate change, and we’re tired of the so-called adults in our lives not taking that rather pressing concern seriously. We don’t care if our candidate is old or young - we care if they listen. Which brings me to:

2. The Youth. Young people in America are disillusioned with democracy - not because we’ve decided it’s not a good idea, but because we’ve literally never seen it in action. We live in a corporate plutocracy where the financial barriers to running for office have rendered most politicians ridiculously out of touch. And Sanders, more than any other candidate in the primary, knows how to talk to young people.

And look - I’m planning to vote for whoever wins the primary. But if 2016 is anything to go by, if the youth demographic doesn’t get a candidate they can get behind, they won’t vote strategically for the lesser of two evils. They’ll stay home, and given what the Democratic party has done for them over the past 20 or so years, I can���t say I blame them.

3. The same goes for his endorsements. I’d be out of my lane if I spent too much time talking about what Sanders wants to do for people of color, but I think it’s telling that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar - three politicians showing real determination to shake things up in Washington - all chose Bernie over Warren. I think it’s telling that AOC cited his campaign, not Warren’s, as her inspiration for running for office (if anyone’s a female Sanders, it’s not Warren - it’s AOC).

4. Sanders is, quite simply, the genuine article. He’s fought for important causes (climate justice, healthcare, workers’ rights) since long before they were cool. He’s *not* perfect, but criticisms of him rarely touch his political history.

Warren’s record of activism is, by contrast, unimpressive. She used to be a Republican corporate lawyer, and while I absolutely respect that someone can change their mind about politics, and I applaud her for doing so, it worries me that what changed her mind wasn’t the Iran-Contra scandal, or the AIDS crisis, or the brutal crushing of the labor movement. It was the realization that Republicans were doing capitalism wrong. I can’t exactly argue with that (show me a Republican politician who truly supports a free market and I’ll eat my beret*), but it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

*This is a joke. I do not have a beret.

5. Warren’s a capitalist; Sanders is a democratic socialist, and I think the difference is important. Warren supports a wealth tax, and she wants everyone to have healthcare, and I appreciate that she has the guts to talk about those things on national television, but at the end of the day, she’s a proud capitalist who believes the system needs to be corrected, not overhauled.

Sanders is a self-professed democratic socialist, and has built a popular movement around that label. And honestly, I’m not too worried about redbaiting. Yes, it’s a common Republican tactic, but the sentiment of “yes I would vote for Democrats but not for Socialist democrats” is a rare one, if it exists at all. And if it works against any of the primary candidates, it’ll work against all of them. They used anti-Commmunist rhetoric against Obama, for goodness’ sake. Look how much of an advocate for the working class he turned out to be.

Courting the centrist vote is a waste of time. Tiptoeing around conservatives alienates left-wingers and doesn’t actually sway Republicans. It’s a bad move strategically, in that it makes us look like cowards, and morally, because it means not getting very important things done.

Sanders doesn’t want to play the game better. He wants to start a whole new game. Warren’s economics platform seems to boil down to “50s but less racist,” and while that sounds nice, it’s just not possible. We can’t go back there - we have automation now, not to mention a global economy the likes of which we barely dreamed of in the 1950s, and it’s not realistic to try to make that happen again. We need something new.

6. People over party. In a lot of ways, Warren reminds me of the best parts of The West Wing. I like that show, but it was a comforting fantasy - a vision of what the Democratic Party could have been like with a little more gumption and a lot more luck. It never happened because the Democratic party and politics aren’t like that in real life. I have confidence in Sanders because his loyalty isn’t to the Democratic Party. It’s to the American people. He’s proved that over and over again over the course of his political career.

7. Bernie is an organizer. The “not me - us” slogan is very telling. Democracy is participatory. We don’t just need a candidate with a plan to fix everything. We need a candidate with a plan who acknowledges that the people hold the real power. We need a candidate who respects the will of the people and inspires them to get involved. We can’t win this election and stop thinking about politics. We never get to stop thinking about politics. We need someone who can inspire people to keep fighting.

The heart attack was a big deal, but the truth is, it’s never been about Bernie as an individual. His immediate reaction after getting out of the hospital was “I’m lucky to have healthcare; everyone should have healthcare; let’s get back to work.” That, more than anything, has given me the confidence that Bernie wants his policies to last long after he’s gone.

Also, people regularly have heart attacks and live another several decades. This is *literally* why we have vice presidents. If Sanders can get elected and pick a good VP and a cabinet (plus, you know, fill any Supreme Court vacancies that happen to arise over his tenure), his health won’t matter as much, because we don’t need a messiah right now. We need a resurgence of participatory democracy. We need more AOCs to take the stage. We need young people at the polls, not just in 2020, but beyond that.

8. I don’t like to talk about electability for a couple of reasons. One: centrists love to bring it up, usually in the service of talking about how policies they have zero stake in will never work. Two: Trump was supposed to be unelectable, and we all saw how that turned out.

That said: Warren’s currently polling third, which is not a great place to be. And while I don’t share some people’s cynicism about Warren, I have to agree that her response to Trump’s attacks has not impressed me. I’m confident that if Trump attacks Sanders, Bernie won’t take the bait, because he’s so on-message you can’t get him off-message. Like I said: he had a heart attack and immediately spun it back into the healthcare conversation.

And the polls are clear: head to head, Sanders beats Trump. Warren’s chances are far dicier.

9. And the most important issue, without which nothing else really matters: the climate crisis. I’d love it if we could wait for the country’s ideas to catch up to Sanders’ socialist rhetoric, but the truth is we are running out of time. I’m voting for Sanders because I have two nieces under 5 years old and a nephew who was just born, and I want them to grow up on a habitable planet, and they won’t get a chance to vote on that. I’m doing it because I want to have kids of my own someday, and while I absolutely respect the choice of anyone deciding to reproduce right now, I don’t have the emotional energy to raise a family during an apocalypse. And while I like Warren, and she’s expressed support for a Green New Deal, Sanders is the only candidate I trust to both beat Trump in the general and put his foot down to the DNC and their ilk.

10. Foreign policy!

First of all: guess who else hates American Imperialism? That’s right; it’s Bernie Sanders. Significantly, he has the guts to bring up America’s habit of meddling in Latin America’s democratically elected governments, which is something you pretty much never hear about from pretty much any other candidate.

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/25/18744458/bernie-sanders-endless-wars-foreign-affairs-op-ed

Foreign policy came up a lot during 2016 primary, with Clinton’s supporters trotting out the bizarre argument that a long history of hawkish policies is better than no policies at all. What with all that, I was surprised to learn that Sanders is actually quite well-traveled and has a long history of trying to mend fences between the U.S. and other world powers: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy/470019/

When it comes to climate change and foreign policy, Sanders acknowledges not only that it requires innovation (let’s not forget his early and vehement support for the Green New Deal), but also international cooperation. From the link below:

“To both Sanders and his supporters around the world, it is impossible to fight climate change without international cooperation. To that end, a group called the Progressive International was announced at a convention last year held by the Sanders Institute, a think tank founded by the presidential contender’s wife and son.

“The network of left-wing politicians and activists hopes to fight against "the global war being waged against workers, against our environment, against democracy, against decency,” according to its website.”

He’s also popular with left-wing leaders around the world, and it’s those kinds of politicians who we need to get us out of the climate crisis.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/04/bernie-sanders-global-popularity-1254929

And finally, to stray briefly into comparison: again, I like Warren, but even so, I like her better domestically than internationally. The progressivism she touts at home comes up short abroad. I’m sure you’ve heard about it already, but I think it’s worth remembering that Warren voted for Trump’s military budget in 2017; Sanders didn’t. She talks a lot about peace, but her history on foreign issues looks pretty similar to that of other centrist democrats. This is a problem not only in terms of American Imperialism, but also because the U.S. military is one of the world’s leading causes of climate change. Her voting history and her cozy relationship with defense contractors have me pretty worried. This article goes into more detail about her history with various foreign powers as well as her general attitudes on American imperialism:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/elizabeth-warren-foreign-policy

We all pretty much knew what we were getting with Clinton. Warren worries me not only because she seems to align with the rest of the party on our endless foreign wars, but because she keeps her support for the military-industrial complex behind a facade of progressive rhetoric that reminds me of the early Obama years. We can’t be let down like that again. Even if we ignore the devastating human cost, the planet doesn’t have time.

Further Reading - obviously I don’t agree with everything in every one of these pieces, but they offer a leftist critique that often goes missing from other, more superficial problems people bring up about Warren.

The polling bases of the primary candidates: https://www.people-press.org/2019/08/16/most-democrats-are-excited-by-several-2020-candidates-not-just-their-top-choice/pp_2019-08-16_2020-democratic-candidates_0-06/?fbclid=IwAR2G8np2q9N4P6DArdI-gPhA5Wp_SYDZPKQDpDhxVZ4YbwnAEmFd65swMOA

An interesting take on Warren’s policies vs Bernie’s movement: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-policy-bernie-sanders-presidential-primary?fbclid=IwAR14wWjYDNuNMrXN7YjVFFFHXmoMWKpDVqBcbPBlQUUrA354iIyRAbKXG30

An opinion piece on the contrast between them:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-democratic-party-elite-2020-presidential-race?fbclid=IwAR3vA54QveM2cCTxQ2BbVXh_IICgTxweKVBLMRjhSFyyAdspnibJ50seDjY

Another one:

https://forward.com/opinion/432561/the-case-for-bernie-sanders-the-only-real-progressive-in-the-race-sorry/?fbclid=IwAR1vwONZ7azJQcoeo_KYNYiJ8ekzHhJsZ4Ms0UzDHI59j7Q6oio-5uJOGcI

Warren’s political history:

More about that from a different source:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/why-criticize-warren?fbclid=IwAR0NTP0cRbSnr-a6HCuxE-4SCJZEqU2EAL1Gnx70FME-9UMBg-xYE5t7g7Y

A prequel to the former (beware - this one’s scathing as heck):

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/the-prospect-of-an-elizabeth-warren-nomination-should-be-very-worrying?fbclid=IwAR03d5I5j72s4kQC9wgRSrXnbmWsp_9HUvRWBZwzcfsT9RsZP-lSAX4aPz0

[dulma]

On the circle jerk of the art world

Tom Wolfe, author & journalist, is good at being scathing. Case in point: The Painted Word a brief diatribe against what he perceives to be the falseness and pretension of an elitist art world in a capitalist society.

I don’t know enough about art or the art world to agree or disagree with what Mr. Wolfe claims, but I do care deeply about art and its role in civilization. How it can help us, fix us, express us, or how it can’t. 

His ideas, though, strike me as useful departures for my own future research, especially w/r/t Abstract Expressionism, my new obsession. Also—God knows I love a good contrarian, so here are some key points I’ve synthesized from his spirited lambast. For my own reference, mostly. Thanks, Tom.

Art must have its theory, i.e. the dictum du jour. “modern art has become completely literary” 

Realistic 19th century painting dubbed “literary” thereby spawning its rebellious successor movements, i.e. l’art pour l’art

Braque: aim of art is not to reconstitute but constitute “a pictorial fact” 

Artists left the royal courts & salons and by 1900 aimed to shock and subvert the bourgeois 

Now the artists had to be boho & avant garde (sincerely) but also in le monde

“Public? The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited” 

(This question is of importance to me. Art as public artifact vs. art as private commodity/investment—note to self: explore the ethics and utility of these roles, and whether they are conflicting or mutually generative)

The art world is a mere 10,000 souls 

“a mere hamlet!” restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities 

Modern art enjoyed a huge boom in the States in the 1920s because that’s when the cultured bourgeoisie began to love it 

Imported from Europe to the US not in a bohemian rebellious spirit but institutionalized by the Rockefellers via the establishment of the MoMA in late 1920s 

Art theory used to be something that enriched conversation 100 years prior but now it was “ an essential hormone in the mating ritual” 

(Touché, Tom Wolfe.)

The bourgeois art world needed theory to understand the direction of modern art 

Why did theory blow up? 

1. the art world is tiny

2. le monde always looks to the bohemian artists for the next thing

3. the artists are made up of “cénacles” where if one dominates art and has one core theory, that theory comes to dominate all of the art world during that period 

This is what happened post WWII during Abstract Expressionism & when NY replaced Paris as center of the art world 

Greenberg’s theory of flatness and Rosenberg’s Action Painting became big theories picked up by le monde. Peggy Guggenheim then discovered Pollock, beloved of Greenberg, and gave him a place and money and set him off 

“First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect — and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of see-what-I-mean outrage: “Look, they don’t even buy our products!””

Pop Art was then a reaction against Abstract Exp. 

It was even flatter. Jasper Johns chose flat real life objects and made them look super flat. Like the flag. 

“Wasn’t there something just the least bit incestuous about this tendency of contemporary art to use previous styles of art as its points of reference?” 

(What else would you use? All major art forms are institutionalized in some way—literature, film, etc.—and draw upon its predecessors, are in conversation with lineage and history. I don’t see this as inherently “incestuous” but in practice in the art world perhaps it’s extreme or problematic... explore further)

Pop Art succeeded not because it rejected Abst. Exp’s premises of moving away from realism, but because it did AE one better: even higher level of not realism. Somewhere that was not abstract nor realistic but based on signs 

Abstract Expressionists were too grim and antibourgeois, too bohemian. The Pop artists were right at home in the cultured world of the bourgeois 

Steinberg: Modern art always “'projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed'” and “'it is always born in anxiety'” and its function is to “'transmit this anxiety to the spectator'” to provoke “'genuine existential predicament'” 

“If you hated it — it was probably great." 

Pop Art was full of cultural and literary ironic commentary and allusions. Op Art, which came after, was also very literary in that it was heavily grounded in theory. Theory was taking idea of painting as real object and turning it into object of pure perception 

Greenberg made a comeback with a new theory/style: against the brushstroke. 

All of these movements were a movement towards reduction, stripping away - first of 19th century realism, then representational objects, then the third dimension towards flatness, then brushstrokes. 

Is that enough? Hardly. 

Minimalists came and stripped away the “sentimental” colors and used gritty or ugly ones 

Got rid of the frame, the hanging up of pictures, the square canvas 

Rosenberg & Greenberg (though sort of rivals) and others were against this - new style was “‘too much a feat of ideation.. something deduced instead of felt and discovered.’” 

Then we got rid of the very idea of wall. 

Moved into installations. Then museums (Earth Art). 

What about idea of a permanent or even visible work of art? so next came Conceptual Art where they said it wasn’t about permanence and materials but the process 

And then they took away idea of visual imagination altogether - piece called Vacant by David R Smith 

My thoughts on this (provisional):

Art movements destroy to create. This is also true in literature, in everything. I find this a natural human impulse. We are meaning-making animals, and art is our way of exploring/expressing this process, and meaning is made inevitably by a destructive-creative process. Learning—and thus growth—is by necessity an act that displaces the dictums of yesterday to make room for the new. So I question Wolfe’s implicit resistance to the deconstruction of every assumption inherent to “art,” but I’m willing to challenge the “destroy for destruction’s sake” imperative, insofar as it is what drives the movements of art today. It sure seems that way, but I assume there’s more there, and the “more” is perhaps as varied as the people who further it.

To ask a naive question that probably Real Art has long since abandoned or mocked until it breathed its last, what about beauty???? As a layperson who wants to believe that art has a public role and some inherent value where beholding it can do something good, even by disturbing us, I often find myself lamenting the un-beauty of contemporary art. That this is probably because I don’t “get it” only further entrenches my sense of alienation from this world of art. Is there respite to be sought in, for example, outsider art? 

Perhaps the answer is as simple as a simple comparison: take music. There is no possibility of defining “beautiful” music; we like what we like, and different people like different things. There are ways to get into a piece and understand what it’s trying to be and to judge it on that basis (also like a book) but no absolute criteria are possible because of the infinite variety of creative possibility. But even so, music and literature seem to me more accessible, somehow, than art. Less conceptual in the way art can be, more inclusive in terms of the gap between what the gatekeepers would deem worth canonizing and what we would claim to enjoy as outsiders.

To what extent do artists themselves (as if it’s a homogeny) want the “public” to “get” or “like” their art? A lot rides on this question I guess.

The beauty of the disturbing and the disturbing of beauty. Would this summarize where we find ourselves today?

(I suppose you could say beauty is taken out of the equation, but you could also reframe that as the expansion of the territory of the beautiful to encompass all, exclude nothing. Ironically. The murder of beauty and the expansion of it to include everything is the same thing, conceptually speaking.)

What I wish existed and whose absence consumes me to no end every time I enter a museum: a summary (impossible) of the timeline of the canon and what/who gets included and what/who gets excluded and why. Note that I’m not issuing the ignorant layperson’s tired old challenge of “My 5-year-old could do that.” I don’t mistake technical skill involved or duration of labor for the Good, but I do want the implicit curatorial values to be made legible, because I’m in a capitalist system that more often than not exacts a price from us to view or own art but I am then paying to engage with something whose value I don’t understand and am expected to receive fully by merely looking at something without the language or conceptual framework to understand its value, all while contributing to that value, reinforcing it. That seems like a scam to me (forgivable) but also like intellectual hypocrisy (unforgivable).

All of this is a rambling record of first impressions re: the art world and my access to an understanding of its values & criteria. Obviously a way to answer my own questions is to examine the world itself, anthropologically, and dissect its political/cultural/social/financial underpinnings. To learn the common answers, debates addressing these small questions of mine. Which I intend to.

But that these are the questions begged when one confronts the whole system as an ignorant layperson is worth noting in itself, I think, because it draws out some assumptions that are contradictory. Assumptions that imply that art is good and we should look at it and pay to look at it. Assumptions that also imply that beauty is not art and skill is not art and accessibility is not art. 

So then what is art? And who gets to decide? We spend our lives taking for granted the fact of a museum, of an art history curriculum, of a canon of famous men and (sometimes) women who have made what we consider “Great Art” without ever being satisfied with a good explanation of why, how come, who says? Especially today?

[violetsystems]

#personal

I woke up to a bag of purple wandering jew clippings on my doorstep from my neighbor.  I assume it’s the older lady next store who only speaks Spanish.  I was given some green clippings years ago that finally died off last spring.  I spent the whole winter maintaining those clippings in a haphazardly way.  On my block a lot of people have outdoor gardens.  My neighbors across the way has an entire plot in their back yard.  I was walking home from the bus at three thirty in the morning.  The bus was delayed thirty minutes because of an SQL error.  It was dead quiet and peaceful.  Coming back from New York on these trips has become sort of automatic.  I’ve stuck to the same schedule for predictability’s sake.  This is mostly because I travel alone.  I travelled out there on my birthday this year during fashion week back in February.  I guess this marks my fifth time out there this year traveling alone.  I started thinking about the rhythm of it and why I even continue to go.  If anything five trips later things are still a little bumpy.  Traveling by nature is turbulent at best.  Which is why when you come home to your neighborhood it is nice to feel rooted.  Even if it’s the literal feeling of potting plants on three hours of sleep at eight in the morning.  When I think of being alone it is mostly because I feel exhausted by other people’s demands.  Some of these demands can be almost subliminal and others can be a little more manipulative than that.  We all live on a planet with shrinking resources and space.  Planting and gardening is a pretty stark reminder of that.  We are also not on this planet forever.  The TSA agent reminded me that when he commented on my passport photo.  I thought he was telling me I looked older in my photo than I did in real life.  Everybody on here knows I’m old as fuck.  Old enough to travel alone and write about it.  Not well respected enough to be paid or reimbursed for my time.  But still I look like a Swedish gang member in that photo with a shaved head and a swollen jawline.  I don’t know that traveling is all about monetizing for me.  These days people smile at me more often when I travel.  That’s a payoff in confidence.  Like I’m a pleasant person to encounter in all this mess or something.  I do work very hard on it.  I pretty much was contacted every single day on my vacation about job related stuff.  I am also on call and on salary.  How you define all of that is easier to do when you are alone.  For me it simply means I can take off to New York on a moment’s notice if need be.  I’d find a way.  I’ve been wandering for ages at this point.  Wandering out of the country alone isn’t quite safe for me anymore.  Which must say quite a lot about my place in New York and Chicago if I jump back and forth without blinking.  Regardless of how much gets in the way.

I take the Ashland bus a little before four am to the airport.  Sometimes my neighbors are on that bus going to work.  Riding the bus for me is a package deal when it comes to my love for public transit.  It can be an adventure.  Some people pay forty times the bus fare to get to the airport.  Some people don’t feel safe walking alone.  It certainly varies when you come from a position of privilege I agree.  But logistically speaking I walk with Chicago in some pretty rough spots.  My reputation does follow me around a lot.  I don’t quite understand what my reputation is with certain people.  There’s quite of a lot of assumptions I’ve experienced in my days on Earth.  This particular cycle I feel much more connected to the real world than what I see on the news.  Gun violence is a reality in Chicago.  If you don’t know someone affected by it you are probably ignoring large portions of the city.  We’ve had shootings on our block.  In certain communities, guns are the only protection you have when you can’t trust the police.  I’m a conscientious objector on file.  This extends from war to guns.  I hate guns.  I hate war.  In footwork music over the years I’ve seen a lot of great people die from guns.  You don’t give people an outlet to settle their differences and a chance for fairness and these things will happen.  Chicago has a horrible history of police brutality and systemic racism in the justice system as recent as Laquan McDonald.  If you drill down deep enough into Chicago the politics are far more of a vortex on a local level than internationally.  We’re all tired of the talk from the people who do absolutely nothing to fix the problem other than talk.  What ends up getting us by is a progressive identity as a city.  We have the first woman of color mayor who also identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community.  This is to say that some of us allies out here know our place.  I support this kind of movement forward and all the tolerance that comes therein.  The theme of 2019 in Chicago is power and how we share it.  These days it is quite evident that money trumps everything.  It seems like if you have enough money you can operate on your own rules.  Corporations often act like people swirling around you like a hive mind.  This is what I get for living in a capitalist country.  For the record, I am nowhere near communist.  There is a socialist center on our block.  These days I can fully admit to being the worst kind of anarchist out there.  One that knows better than to fuck with the flow especially when it’s out of my own checking accounts.  There’s two now officially.  I can pay my rent with checks from NASA.  There’s a different little space motif on each one.  If there’s one thing I know a lot about it’s space.  How to give it.  How to take it.  How mosh within it.  And how to hurt somebody’s feelings if they get too close for comfort.

If you ask me what I’m doing with my life these days you probably wouldn’t ask.  Nobody ever does.  Nobody texts me to see if I’m in New York.  I call my parents and let them know I’m safe.  Safe away from people’s outrageous expectations for me.  I flew out to New York on my birthday alone.  I was trying to prove a point to myself.  Who cares and who doesn’t.  It’s great intel if you want to live your life in a space where you are appreciated.  I meet a lot of friendly people while traveling.  People who just smile and accept you for who you are if you are nice and polite.  My block is a lot like that too.  A lot of people are fake nice in the real world when they want something out of you.  Expecting something out of someone is not love.  Like when I go to New York what do I expect out of it?  To breathe for one.  Air is free in America for the time being.  Breathing lately has been very important to me.  I came back to my hotel room Friday evening to find out it was bought out by another company.  I had this huge mess where I had to rekey my room.  There was beefcake security posted outside that was handling crowd control for the concierge.  I took a deep breath and sorted out the situation as best as I could.  Finally got back upstairs at eight and watched American Dad and Family Guy and fell asleep.  Two shows for the record I absolutely fucking hate but enjoy often when I’ve hit the wall lying on my bed in a hotel room alone.  Breathing and pacing is always important for growth.  I’ve run for so many years this much I know.  Plants breathe in reverse or at least improve the air quality.  Plants also need somebody to plant them.  All these things require mindfulness.  I don’t often sit in a yoga pose three hours a day and come up with these witticisms.  Simple effort has taught me most people don’t even try.  They don’t stop and analyze the situation.  They don’t even know where to begin.  They freak out.  They have too may things in their life to deal with.  Ironically my only baggage this trip was a pikachu bag from 7-11.  Since nobody really cares about me on the surface level I just up and leave every two months.  I fall into a different rhythm and become a different sort of person.  None of that would have been possible without the freedom to roam, the freedom to think and the freedom to speak.  Everybody needs their space and room to grow.  And sometimes people grow into each other over time.  You can’t really expect that to happen.  It just does.  There’s probably a deeper reason for it.  There’s far more to it with me than meets the eye.  I promise I will never name a child Megatron.  I promise I’ll be back in New York in October.  I promise a lot of things.  They deliver in the strangest ways.  You can walk any where with love in your heart.  But love takes work if you want it to last.  It’s been a year exactly since it took root in my mind.  I like the space it’s given me to grow.  Sometimes all it takes is taking the time to make room to grow.  However long that takes.  Flight delays and all.  <3 Tim

[jonboudposts]

A Christmas Carol in a Time of Moral Bankruptcy

2018 marked the 175th year since the publication of A Christmas Carol. 2019 sees among other things a new BBC television adaptation and stage version at The Old Vic. Even if you have never read the book, chances are you are familiar with Charles Dickens’ story, or at least parts of it. The storytelling and the moral core are woven into the culture in Britain and America; the story of a man who lives to make money and dominate others finding out, during the course of one Christmas Eve, that his eternal soul will be damned if he does not changed his ways.

There are literally more versions than I can (be bothered) to count. From TV adaptations to classic films to stage productions to school plays; modern-day updates and cartoons; Alistair Sim, Albert Finney, Jim Carrey, Patrick Stewart and Scrooge McDuck have all played Ebenezer Scrooge.

But the reason I am writing this is to discuss the love and hate that this story brings out in me every year; there is nothing I am saying that as not been said before. Yet I feel compelled to say it still.

The story itself is easy to admire, built like so many stories by great writers on simple yet deep story-telling traits and character arcs. It is inventive, with the use of fantasy to push real life struggles into sharper contrast, promoting sympathy; empathy and sadness.

We have our favourite versions; I love the Muppets with Michael Cane giving genuinely I think one of his best performances (singing aside) and the TV version with Patrick Stewart; an underrated one that dials down the schmaltz and shows the hardness of poverty, with a tough performance by Stewart to match. His is a genuine transformation from vicious capitalist to caring human and a very physical one; as he goes from looking like a piece of flint to slowly softening his features as he grows into a better man.

Such performances are celebrated and cherished, making many of those lazy pointless lists every year of favourite past cultural thing you relive because we are incapable of making anything new.

But all of this is perhaps part of the problem I have with the story too. The way we can watch, cry even, at how someone can change their ways and then fail to do anything ourselves for the very people that Dickens wishes us to care about. The story was inspired when Dickens read an 1843 report describing terrible living and working conditions in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. He could read the same thing today and find a callous population sifting through piles of shit to find the pile that does not smell as bad, so they feel superior to each other.

In this world, we can clearly see real Scrooges, except unlike their fictional counterparts, they never learn nor change. They do not need to. Our society and the way culture is organised worships the rich and punish the poor for their perceived failure.

The rich are in fact totally cut off from humanity.

So why should these greedy bastards change? We are never going to make them. The real Scrooges utterly destroy our lives all year long; then expect every Christmas to put that aside and wish each other meaningless platitudes of good will.

The biggest enemy in the story is the carelessness fundamental to ignorance and the damaging power of want. It makes the most vulnerable what they are; victims.

While I do not think the original story of A Christmas Carol is meaningless sentimentality, I think too many experience it exactly that way; feeling elated at the goodwill at Christmastime vibe and stepping over the people in the street on your way out the theatre or cinema. In London for instance, you could attend a performance at a theatre like the King’s Head (formally in Islington) and step out to a modern London as lacking in human warmth as Dickens dreamt of. Up the road is the Union Chapel church, who run a winter shelter, providing food and shelter for those in need. Every year the church has a screening of that other hope-filled story for the season, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Modern Britain still likes to present A Christmas Carol every year despite it teaching us less and less and the years roll by. The world this story is now told in looks like this:

One and a half million people use foodbanks each year

More foodbanks across Britain than MacDonalds

1-in-3 children in poverty; that is 14 million Britons living in relative poverty

Growing benefit claimants in work

Reduction in life expectancy for the poorest

120,000 deaths of people thrown off benefits, including the disabled

The richest 1000 families resident in Britain, which includes bankers and financiers, have doubled their net worth during the austerity era.

Non-British children being charged for citizenship (since defeated in the court, no thanks to the British people).

To top it all, this information being widely known before the 2019 General Election and still the population gave the Conservatives a majority despite them causing all this misery.

Councils in some parts of the UK have embarked on clean up (or you might argue cleansing) campaigns targeting the homelessness in town centres with Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO); homeless people are routinely fined hundreds of pounds and in some cases sent to prison for the ‘repeat offence’ of asking for money. Local authorities in England and Wales have issued hundreds of fixed-penalty notices and pursued criminal convictions for “begging”, “persistent and aggressive begging” and “loitering” since gaining strengthened powers to combat antisocial behaviour in 2014, by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Rough sleepers are harassed and landlords (as Mr Scrooge was) have gained far greater powers to evict tenants sooner and with less reason.

Charities and solidarity organisations give the option to buy a coat or hat or gloves for a refugee or homeless person; they however are in no doubt this is a sticking plaster; the purchasers I am not so sure about. It reminds me of something Naomi Klein said about the present order insisting on finding some way to buy our way out of the problem; be it poverty or climate change or a bunch of other shit.

The party that our present Prime Minister leads contains MPs who openly admire the Victorian era and all the social wankery of top-hatted toffs passing the peasantry in the streets. Plus we have sociopathic self-haters like Priti Patel hovering over the Human Rights Act with a metaphorical knife.

Refugees are another group not afforded decency; we deny people their rights, violate those we pretend to give them; punish them for the crime of crossing a boarder and even threaten communities that protect them. The Conservative Party manifesto for 2019 targeted traveller communities with attacks on their rights, including increased powers to take their property.

A child will become homeless 'every eight minutes' in the UK (Shelter, Dec 2019) or suffer insecure accommodation; meanwhile schools have an average of five homeless children.

Ignorance for sure; want for the same people as ever; dire need for change not answered.

Our societies do not embrace those less fortunate than us; we blame them for their own predicament and indulge in poor hate. There seems no bracket of people we can rely on, as even children's writers like JH Rowling indulge in one of modern society's most vile vices, trans-hate.

The empathetic are a dying breed.

Around Christmas people will often give more to charity, commonly Crisis as they run their huge shelters over the festive period in various cities to feed and shelter the increasing numbers of homeless people across Britain. Keeping up with the state of poverty in general and homelessness in particular is no easy task. One reason is we forget about the needs of people the rest of the year and only the magic of Christmas makes them give a shit for a week. This is just liberal conscience-wash if you do not back it up with demands for change in the system, which the British public have just shown they are unwilling to do.

Yet the system – capitalism in the only form it really exists – is embodied by Ebenezer Scrooge. The end of the story is pretty clear; Scrooge stops being cold and heartless; he will no longer allow the market to run without interference. He rejects capitalism for something wholly more humane.

Much of the problem in A Christmas Carol, like It’s a Wonderful Life later on, is the dehumanising effects of capitalism. The individual change required in Ebenezer Scrooge is a rejection of his hardcore individualism and embracing the needs of others, to the point of saving the life of Tiny Tim; his banker counterpart Mr Potter must be defeated by George Bailey and his supporters (although like in the real world, Potter is never jailed). At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is a miserable man beset by loneliness and isolation. His nephew refuses to give up on him though, always inviting him from Christmas in his warm, happy home despite constant rejection by his uncle.

The rampant free market gave us Ebenezer Scrooge as an everyday occurrence, year round with no ghosts to haunt them into decency. In the real world, Ebenezer Scrooge does not change his character no matter what happens. He is Philip Green, who dodges taxes, sells off a business knowing it will collapse soon, tries to abandon paying staff their pensions and pours scorn on the elected officials trying to hold him to account for the way they look at him. Green in particular managed the near-impossible in 2018 of seeming even more repulsive, with revelations of abuse accusations from many former BHS staff; from bulling to sexual harassment along with homophobia and a general staggering lack of respect for his staff. He is scum and will never reform.

In the 1980s we had Scrooged, a non-traditional adaptation starring Bill Murray as Frank Cross, a ruthless TV executive whose every cruelty was rather too enjoyable, along with his abusive Ghost of Christmas Present giving him much-needed kicking.

At the end of the film, Cross invades the set of the live adaptation of A Christmas Carol that his over-worked staff are producing, proclaiming that the meaning or power of Christmas is how for one night a year ‘we become the people we always hoped we would be’; that is, we smile more and are nicer to each other. This sums up the 1980s very well and why progressive and socially just forces lost that particular war so badly. This piss-weak response to be a little nicer to each other is why people die in the street. The film is also an example of the age; doing all this good for one night a year (how 1980s).

In Michael Moore’s first film Roger and Me, we witness the General Motors chairman of the title Roger Smith at the GM Christmas party, giving a speech that includes extracts from A Christmas Carol. This is inter-cut with footage from Flint Michigan, the town devastated by GM when they outsourced their workforce to cheaper parts of the world. While this pompous twit quotes Dickens and the wonder of Christmas, a mother and her children are evicted. That scene says more about our culture than any other I can think of in any film.

It is well told but worth remembering that in 2008, when the perfect economic system crashed, the people were responsible were bailed out and did it all over again, with the consequences being completely directed toward the least responsible yet again. The horror this unleashed has never relented.

From a consumer perspective, Christmas never ends. As a postman, I deliver to people massive amounts every day and it is never enough. They answer the door, perfectly politely, take the packet(s) and discard them as they sign and/or shut the door. These wonderful items are given that much thought; just the latest play thing or dress up. Literally discarded before opening because this in one of many deliveries probably that day. I am nothing to them; just a cypher to bring their life a meaning it never gains; I used to like being part of a public service, keeping people connected and possibly educated; now I just feed an addiction. This hyper-consumption will bring the system down again and whose fault will it be this time?

A Christmas Carol’s message is one that every Christmas we seem to get further away from. It is used to stroke the egos of the guilty and make them think nothing else needs to be done. Just be a bit nicer to the people you ignore the rest of the year, maybe even slip them a fiver (although not your postman or other service provider anymore it seems). You do not challenge poverty and homelessness by simply not liking it or giving a bit of pocket change, just like you cannot challenge racism and sexism simply by existing in a certain position socially or economically. However you feel, someone is still sleeping on the concrete tonight.

A Christmas Carol is less a morality tale and more a fantasy; but for the consumer not the writer. In the Britain of 2019, we have no moral right to tell this story. No version should be staged; no adaptation on TV; no school play. It should not entertain, nor pander to the desires of selfish consumer-obsessed grown-babies to make them feel a little better. This country has just voted to make the poor suffer more; to keep the status of 1-in-3 children suffering poverty – which will grow – and destroy the National Health Service. Tiny Tim is just a failure and when he dies, we just move on.

You have no right to a Merry Christmas, nor to discuss god as anything other than a punchline. The fix is in and no one cares. Misery for all is the name of the game today and if you want better, you are a fantasist.

Britain is a horrible little shithole of a country. Mean and worthless, in love with a horrific dream of decrepit empire in a world becoming dangerously hot.

Merry Christmas? Fuck you and your family.

[politics-and-philosophy]

Ok, so I know that I'm supposed to be weirded out by the fact that this person clearly created a random brand-new tumblr just to message me anonymously, but honestly, I'm honored.

Look, this tumblr is straight-up blank, aside from the header photo. Is that a homemade handgun btw? It looks like it. Honestly though, I just feel kinda honored. Because this person is either scared enough of me to want anonymity (I can't see why) or scared enough of the reprisal they would face on their main blog (this one makes more sense).

So, again, let's go point-by-point.

I don't think the government should have control over who owns a gun in the same way I don't think the government should have control over who lives and dies. I think that gun ownership should be restricted constitutionally, by removing and replacing the second amendment. In this new amendment, I want only three types of individuals to be allowed to own guns:

1. Those in remote areas who require guns for survival.

2. Collectors of historic guns who can only load and fire them on shooting ranges.

3. Active duty military personnel deployed in foreign soil, and domestic soil only during a foreign invasion.

This list notably excludes cops, active duty military on domestic soil, security details, sport hunters, and everyone else. I have said all this before though.

This would not give a monopoly on power to the government, in fact, it would significantly stymie the power the government already has over people by removing the threat of firearms.

Personally, I think this would stop almost all gun violence, not just mass shootings. The majority of gun killings are committed with guns which were once legally owned (the US is a net exporter of illegal firearms, mostly to Mexico, due to our lax gun laws). Furthermore, while 4 in 5 gun homicides are committed with a gun not owned by the perpetrator, that's not the end of the story. 30% of those guns are stolen, but of those 30%, over 4 in 10 are not reported stolen until after a crime is committed, and 44% of gun owners whose guns were stolen did not respond to attempts to be contacted by police. Of the other 70%, reported lost, in 62% of instances, the legal owner of the gun was unaware of where or when the gun was lost. That is a staggering number of people who are reckless with firearm safety.

A large part of this is due to shoestring purchases, where someone who passes a legal background check will go and buy a gun for someone who wouldn't, or to then go and sell it at an upcharge on the black market, only to claim it lost or stolen when it shows up at a crime scene. The legal gun market directly supports and enables both gun crime and the illegal gun market. Making it more difficult to legally get a gun will make it exponentially more difficult to illegally acquire a gun. More on this later.

Mass shootings are a small percentage of total deaths, but these deaths are unique in how horrible, violent, and early in a person's life they come. They are always the direct result of hate, and are a uniquely American problem within the developed world. Unlike robbery murders or even homicides motivated by passion, mass shootings don't target a specific individual. They seek to kill a group of people indiscriminately. Essentially, they're a violent hate crime, almost always motivated by a right-wing view of society and a belief that violence solves problems.

It's also laughable that the ownership of a gun somehow puts you on even footing with the government. Do you know how much firepower the government has? Even military grade weapons are useless against an actual military.

Ok, here's Oxford's definition of a civil right:

Please go read this. Civil rights are rights of society and politics. They are things such as voting rights, marriage rights, freedom from religious infringement in your life, right to exist in society and politics. Gun ownership is no more a civil right than is the right to smoke crack.

America has a gun violence epidemic, compared to the rest of the world, and even compared among the states.

Here's a fun graph comparing gun violence and gun ownership among first world countries.

Here's a graph comparing gun violence and gun regulation within the United States:

Ok, finally, on to fascism. So, let's start from the top and work our way to different outcomes. We have our first decision at "Is the current gun violence rate and mass shooting epidemic within the US worth fixing?" Personally, I think yes. If you think no, I invite you to tell that to anyone who lost a family member in a mass shooting and see if you don't get punched.

Having resolved yes, we move onto what to do. There are three real solutions.

1. Increase of law enforcement

2. Increase of surveillance

3. Regulation of firearms

Notably, mental health reforms is left off this list. I've addressed that several times in other posts. In summary, mass shooters don't seek mental services and the majority of perpetrators aren't mentally ill, they're disillusioned with society.

Now, as a liberal and specifically a social liberal, I hate fascism and think that among the political ideologies out there fascism and authoritarianism are a special kind of evil. In general, I see it as better to have a large government which serves the people instead of a small government which oppresses the people. A lot of conservatives, especially anarco-capitalists, think that a small government is necessarily less oppressive, but that is not true. Governments can be large, but if they are beholden to a citizenship, they'll obey said citizens. Small governments who are isolated from the populace easily turn towards oppression.

But I digress. Let's start with the first choice, and see where it takes us. For this exercise, we'll be assuming that when the government is given control over a certain aspect of our lives, they'll want to increase that control. So, we increase the law enforcement in all major metropolitan areas, meaning armed guards at malls, churches, movie theaters, schools, etc. And even though mass shootings still occur when armed guards are present (Parkland) or when police arrive on scene within the minute (El Paso), it's okay because we get to keep our guns, everybody has a gun so everyone is safe. This is basically a police state. The scary thing is conservatives have actually proposed this. Sean Hannity said on live TV that we need to place armed guards at every public area. And if you don't trust the government, how the hell could you trust the armed guards they have stationed outside the grocery store.

Next solution is increased surveillance. If access to guns is to remain unrestricted, then we need to be able to find the killers before they kill. What do all of the mass shooters have in common? An internet history rife with extremism and alt-right views. So, screen everyone. And go ahead and start censoring people who have those views too, just to be safe. But once we have a suspected shooter, how can we know when they're about to commit murder? You can't arrest someone for fitting a profile. So, you start tracking them, looking through their purchases, making sure they aren't trying to get someone to buy them a firearm, following them, watching them. Even if all they did is post on the internet with no intent, now the government knows their every move. And suddenly, the small minor infractions that everyone commits daily start to add up. So, one agent decides to hell with it, let's just bust him early for something, anything we can make stick. This isn't a hypothetical, either. There are countless stories of cops falsifying evidence just to make the arrest because they believe an innocent person is guilty.

Finally, firearm regulation. Now here you might think that if you lose your firearm, you lose your safety. Ignoring for a moment that I specifically advocated for law enforcement to not have firearms, if you genuinely think you are safer with a gun than without it, you are wrong. The mindset that, without your gun, there's nothing to stop the government from trampling your rights ignores the fact that even with your gun, there's nothing really stopping the government from trampling your rights, because the government has a lot more guns than you and they're a lot bigger. Now, perhaps you think that having an armed populace means a resistance or insurgency is possible. Ignoring that the government could squash any insurgency within the US, who even says the insurgents are on your side politically? What's stopping them from rising up right now? The same thing that's stopping the government from killing any dissidents: the fact that we live in a society and without it the government would collapse. Often times people speak as though the government is some separate entity when in reality in America every single person who us eligible to vote or pays taxes is a member of the government. We are the power base of the government, and to distinguish between the citizens of the US and the government if the US is a real gray area, because the government can't exist without the economic base that is our society. You called us sheep but we aren't sheep, we're the golden goose and you never ever kill the golden goose. The government won't come to put us all in camps because they'd wake up broke the next day. And even if they did, your gun wouldn't stop them, it just means they'd kill you.

When you arm everyone, you arm EVERYONE. Not just the lawful responsible owner, but the mass shooter, the murderer, the rapist, the insurgents on both the right and the left, the domestic terrorists, the gang bangers, the government sympathizers, the government itself, everyone. And while obviously it's not every gun owner, it could be any gun owner. And any realistic way to distinguish the difference between a responsible individual looking to own a gun and a mass shooter arming up is with a level of invasiveness that should make you incredibly uncomfortable. This is what I mean when I talk about surveillance.

Let's come to a conclusion here, because this post has gotten quite long.

The idea that you could amass enough firepower to resist the government is not reasonable. What protects you from the government is not weaponry but anonymity. Currently, our system has both, but having both allows criminals and murderers to readily access firearms and kill people. So, since the weaponry isn't protecting us anyway, might as well get rid of it and save some lives.

EDIT: The blog that sent these messages no longer exists, and I don't have access to them anymore, so I'm glad I screenshoted when I did. Kinda confirms my suspicion that they just wanted to anonymously harass me. Oh well, nothing as predictable as a coward.

[barb31clem]

The Silicon Valley Mindset

Facebook publicity photo

The tech industry is one of the most powerful entities affecting our world. But who are these people? And what do they believe and how do they think about the world? A couple of recent articles provide a window into this.

Rationalist Demographics

The first is a set of demographics from the reader survey (unscientific, but with 5500 respondents) of the popular blog Slate Star Codex.  SSC is the web site of Scott Alexander, pen name of a Midwest psychiatrist. It’s explicitly associated with the Rationalist movement and especially the Less Wrong community.  If you’d like to get a feel for the Rationalist way of life, see the New York Times Magazine profile of them.  One site says of them:

…typical rationalist philosophical positions include reductionism, materialism, moral non-realism, utilitarianism, anti-deathism and transhumanism. Rationalists across all three groups tend to have high opinions of the Sequences and Slate Star Codex and cite both in arguments; rationalist discourse norms were shaped by How To Actually Change Your Mind and 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong, among others.

They analyze the world in terms of Bayesianism, game theory, trying to become aware of personal biases, etc. They are trying to improve themselves and the world through a clearer sense of reality as informed by their philosophical worldview above. Their heartland is Silicon Valley, though there’s a group of them NYC too of course.

Alexander is a psychiatrist, but this community, and the Rationalists generally, is highly tech centric. Alexander himself is a defender of Silicon Valley. His readership is predominantly in computer science and other related tech professions, and overlaps heavily with Silicon Valley.

His readers are 90% male, 89% white (Asians under-represented vs the Valley), and 81% atheist or agnostic. They skew significantly left in their politics. 55% of them are explicitly politically left, with another 24% libertarian. A higher percentage actually describe themselves as neoreactionary or alt-right (6.3%) than conservative (5.7%).

The following table shows their responses on various topics:

ItemLeft/Globalist PositionRight/Populist PositionsImmigration55.8% more permissive20.3% more restrictiveFeminism48.1% favorable28.4% unfavorableDonald Trump82.3% unfavorable6.6% favorableBasic Income60.1% favor18.6% opposeGlobal Warming72.8% requires action13.7% does not require actionWeightlifting64.4% no/rarely22.5% yes/often

Silicon Valley Founders Survey

A second source comes from a recent City Journal article by former Tech Crunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein. He used the Crunchbase database to survey 147 tech founders, including a few billionaires and other influentials, to get a sense of their belief system.

One of his core findings is that Silicon Valley founder are strong believers in income inequality.

The most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

The founders he surveyed (a tiny subset so beware of error margins) 2/3 believed that the top 10% of people would collect 50% or more of all the income in a meritocracy (the system they endorse).

Y Combinator Paul Graham got in trouble for openly talking about inequality as inevitable. Not because other Valley execs thought he was wrong, but because the optics are bad. It’s similar to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. His real crime was being so gauche as to put a picture of Ayn Rand as his Twitter avatar. He should have known that he was supposed to spout politically palatable bromides while running his company in a Rand-like mode, which seems to be how many of these firms in fact operate.

Speaking of which, the politics of Silicon Valley are an odd mix of leftism and hyper-market economics. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley donates money to the Democrats and to progressive causes. (They also largely hate Donald Trump with a passion). What’s more, they have a communitarian streak and don’t think of themselves as hard core individualists:

Indeed, in my survey, founders displayed a strong orientation toward collectivism. Fifty-nine percent believed in a health-care mandate, compared with just 21 percent of self-identified libertarians. They also believed that the government should coerce people into making wise personal decisions, such as whether to eat healthier foods. Sixty-two percent said that individual decisions had an impact on many other people, justifying government intervention.

But they also support a neoliberal vision of the economy.

Silicon Valley’s reputation as a haven for small-government activists isn’t entirely off base: the Valley does support some staunchly libertarian ideas, and the tech elite are not typical Democrats. They don’t like regulations or labor unions. For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have both given hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools and supported policies that would allow public schools to fire teachers more readily and dodge union membership. Big tech lobbyists are also strong supporters of free trade. According to Maplight, several telecommunications companies have lobbied for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that union groups and many Democrats oppose.

…

Theirs is a move to make public schools more like charters—a different focus from a libertarian vision of simply privatizing the education system. The tech elite want to bring the essence of free markets to all things public and private. Using traditional American political categories, this would land them in the Republican camp.

This is most evident in their techno-utopianism and belief that unbridled creative destruction always brings long run benefits:

On the capitalistic side, tech founders were extraordinarily optimistic about the nature of change, especially the kind of unpredictable “creative destruction” associated with free markets. Philosophically, most tech founders believe that “change over the long run is inherently positive.” Or, as Hillary Clinton supporter and billionaire Reid Hoffman told me: “I tend to believe that most Silicon Valley people are very much long-term optimists. . . . Could we have a bad 20 years? Absolutely. But if you’re working toward progress, your future will be better than your present.”

They in part reconcile all these through a belief in high taxation and redistribution, especially in the form of a basic income. This policy idea, nowhere fully implemented, is probably completely unknown to most Americans, yet has strong majority support in Silicon Valley (60% of SSC’s readers).

The Silicon Valley State of Mind

Combining these, what we see is that Silicon Valley is made up overwhelmingly of men, who are highly intelligent and with extreme faith in their intelligence and rationality, largely atheist, and largely leftist in their thinking, but who believe in an aristocracy of talent.

They exhibit extreme faith in the goodness of technical progress and seem to believe that human problems can be resolved almost entirely through the realm of technology and engineering. They believe in policy, but a technocratic vision of it in which their rationalist designs, powered by technology, inform government decisions.

One might say they are naive, but their track record of success gives them reasons for confidence. Consider Uber. Uber is effectively a technological workaround to dysfunctional politics and regulation. It has revolutionized transportation in many cities were taxis were before almost not available. Where almost all other reform efforts failed, Uber was a spectacular success. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely successful at what they do. And in any case, Silicon Valley’s “fail false” mentality means that they don’t necessarily see their failures – say, Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million schools fiasco in Newark – as a reflection on their capabilities. Many failures and a handful of grand slams is how their system is designed to function.

What’s more, it’s not just them who thinks they can fix things. Much of the rest of society seems to believe it too. For example, Alon Levy just put up a post examining the composition of NY Gov. Cuomo’s “MTA Genius Grant” panel, and how it is heavily slanted towards tech people vs. transportation people. Of course, the politicians and transport people have failed with the MTA to date. So they lose credibility by failures as Silicon Valley gains it with successes.

However, their techno-optimistic view perhaps leads them to underestimate second and third order consequences and overestimate their ability to deal with them. For example, perhaps more than anyone else, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey made Donald Trump’s presidency possible. Without his social media impact, and the ability of his troll army to drive news cycles, I very much doubt he would have gotten over the top.  That’s a second order effect they never anticipated.

Also, Trump himself is a classic example of creative destruction. He disrupted the politics business in the same way Netflix disrupted the video rental one. Yet they despise him and don’t think this is a positive change. It seems that they only like disruption when they are the ones controlling it, and don’t really believe in creative destruction per se. Instead it’s just another term of art for their taking over one industry after another.

They themselves have no problem at all radically reordering society with unproven policies at levels far beyond what almost any political figure would do. Their blasé acceptance of massive job destruction and embrace of a speculative basic income scheme to compensate illustrate that. It’s no surprise to me that Mencius Moldbug, the founder of neoreaction (one of the sub-tribes commonly grouped with the alt-right that believes in absolute monarchy or the state as a publicly traded sovereign corporation), is a Silicon Valley techie and startup founder who reportedly started out in the Rationalist movement.

They are also comfortable with an almost feudal distribution of wealth, so long as it’s based on an aristocracy of talent rather than heredity. And it’s an aristocracy that believes it should rule as well as profit. When they talk about a communitarian ethos in which the government needs to compel people to act properly, it’s pretty clear who the determinant of that is. It will of course be intelligent “rationalists” like them, who know what is right, have the technology to bring it into being, and whose motivations are beyond question (at least in their own mind).

It’s a stunningly grandiose vision. Much like the EU, I suspect the public’s tolerance for it will be directly proportional to benefits continuously delivered. To the extent that Silicon Valley is able to deliver benefits to the common good, few will stand in their way. If the benefits slow, or the costs (including second and third order costs) start exceeding the benefits, we’ll see how it turns out for them.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/06/01/the-silicon-valley-mindset/

[kim26chiu]

The Silicon Valley Mindset

Facebook publicity photo

The tech industry is one of the most powerful entities affecting our world. But who are these people? And what do they believe and how do they think about the world? A couple of recent articles provide a window into this.

Rationalist Demographics

The first is a set of demographics from the reader survey (unscientific, but with 5500 respondents) of the popular blog Slate Star Codex.  SSC is the web site of Scott Alexander, pen name of a Midwest psychiatrist. It’s explicitly associated with the Rationalist movement and especially the Less Wrong community.  If you’d like to get a feel for the Rationalist way of life, see the New York Times Magazine profile of them.  One site says of them:

…typical rationalist philosophical positions include reductionism, materialism, moral non-realism, utilitarianism, anti-deathism and transhumanism. Rationalists across all three groups tend to have high opinions of the Sequences and Slate Star Codex and cite both in arguments; rationalist discourse norms were shaped by How To Actually Change Your Mind and 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong, among others.

They analyze the world in terms of Bayesianism, game theory, trying to become aware of personal biases, etc. They are trying to improve themselves and the world through a clearer sense of reality as informed by their philosophical worldview above. Their heartland is Silicon Valley, though there’s a group of them NYC too of course.

Alexander is a psychiatrist, but this community, and the Rationalists generally, is highly tech centric. Alexander himself is a defender of Silicon Valley. His readership is predominantly in computer science and other related tech professions, and overlaps heavily with Silicon Valley.

His readers are 90% male, 89% white (Asians under-represented vs the Valley), and 81% atheist or agnostic. They skew significantly left in their politics. 55% of them are explicitly politically left, with another 24% libertarian. A higher percentage actually describe themselves as neoreactionary or alt-right (6.3%) than conservative (5.7%).

The following table shows their responses on various topics:

ItemLeft/Globalist PositionRight/Populist PositionsImmigration55.8% more permissive20.3% more restrictiveFeminism48.1% favorable28.4% unfavorableDonald Trump82.3% unfavorable6.6% favorableBasic Income60.1% favor18.6% opposeGlobal Warming72.8% requires action13.7% does not require actionWeightlifting64.4% no/rarely22.5% yes/often

Silicon Valley Founders Survey

A second source comes from a recent City Journal article by former Tech Crunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein. He used the Crunchbase database to survey 147 tech founders, including a few billionaires and other influentials, to get a sense of their belief system.

One of his core findings is that Silicon Valley founder are strong believers in income inequality.

The most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

The founders he surveyed (a tiny subset so beware of error margins) 2/3 believed that the top 10% of people would collect 50% or more of all the income in a meritocracy (the system they endorse).

Y Combinator Paul Graham got in trouble for openly talking about inequality as inevitable. Not because other Valley execs thought he was wrong, but because the optics are bad. It’s similar to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. His real crime was being so gauche as to put a picture of Ayn Rand as his Twitter avatar. He should have known that he was supposed to spout politically palatable bromides while running his company in a Rand-like mode, which seems to be how many of these firms in fact operate.

Speaking of which, the politics of Silicon Valley are an odd mix of leftism and hyper-market economics. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley donates money to the Democrats and to progressive causes. (They also largely hate Donald Trump with a passion). What’s more, they have a communitarian streak and don’t think of themselves as hard core individualists:

Indeed, in my survey, founders displayed a strong orientation toward collectivism. Fifty-nine percent believed in a health-care mandate, compared with just 21 percent of self-identified libertarians. They also believed that the government should coerce people into making wise personal decisions, such as whether to eat healthier foods. Sixty-two percent said that individual decisions had an impact on many other people, justifying government intervention.

But they also support a neoliberal vision of the economy.

Silicon Valley’s reputation as a haven for small-government activists isn’t entirely off base: the Valley does support some staunchly libertarian ideas, and the tech elite are not typical Democrats. They don’t like regulations or labor unions. For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have both given hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools and supported policies that would allow public schools to fire teachers more readily and dodge union membership. Big tech lobbyists are also strong supporters of free trade. According to Maplight, several telecommunications companies have lobbied for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that union groups and many Democrats oppose.

…

Theirs is a move to make public schools more like charters—a different focus from a libertarian vision of simply privatizing the education system. The tech elite want to bring the essence of free markets to all things public and private. Using traditional American political categories, this would land them in the Republican camp.

This is most evident in their techno-utopianism and belief that unbridled creative destruction always brings long run benefits:

On the capitalistic side, tech founders were extraordinarily optimistic about the nature of change, especially the kind of unpredictable “creative destruction” associated with free markets. Philosophically, most tech founders believe that “change over the long run is inherently positive.” Or, as Hillary Clinton supporter and billionaire Reid Hoffman told me: “I tend to believe that most Silicon Valley people are very much long-term optimists. . . . Could we have a bad 20 years? Absolutely. But if you’re working toward progress, your future will be better than your present.”

They in part reconcile all these through a belief in high taxation and redistribution, especially in the form of a basic income. This policy idea, nowhere fully implemented, is probably completely unknown to most Americans, yet has strong majority support in Silicon Valley (60% of SSC’s readers).

The Silicon Valley State of Mind

Combining these, what we see is that Silicon Valley is made up overwhelmingly of men, who are highly intelligent and with extreme faith in their intelligence and rationality, largely atheist, and largely leftist in their thinking, but who believe in an aristocracy of talent.

They exhibit extreme faith in the goodness of technical progress and seem to believe that human problems can be resolved almost entirely through the realm of technology and engineering. They believe in policy, but a technocratic vision of it in which their rationalist designs, powered by technology, inform government decisions.

One might say they are naive, but their track record of success gives them reasons for confidence. Consider Uber. Uber is effectively a technological workaround to dysfunctional politics and regulation. It has revolutionized transportation in many cities were taxis were before almost not available. Where almost all other reform efforts failed, Uber was a spectacular success. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. have all been extremely successful at what they do. And in any case, Silicon Valley’s “fail false” mentality means that they don’t necessarily see their failures – say, Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million schools fiasco in Newark – as a reflection on their capabilities. Many failures and a handful of grand slams is how their system is designed to function.

What’s more, it’s not just them who thinks they can fix things. Much of the rest of society seems to believe it too. For example, Alon Levy just put up a post examining the composition of NY Gov. Cuomo’s “MTA Genius Grant” panel, and how it is heavily slanted towards tech people vs. transportation people. Of course, the politicians and transport people have failed with the MTA to date. So they lose credibility by failures as Silicon Valley gains it with successes.

However, their techno-optimistic view perhaps leads them to underestimate second and third order consequences and overestimate their ability to deal with them. For example, perhaps more than anyone else, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey made Donald Trump’s presidency possible. Without his social media impact, and the ability of his troll army to drive news cycles, I very much doubt he would have gotten over the top.  That’s a second order effect they never anticipated.

Also, Trump himself is a classic example of creative destruction. He disrupted the politics business in the same way Netflix disrupted the video rental one. Yet they despise him and don’t think this is a positive change. It seems that they only like disruption when they are the ones controlling it, and don’t really believe in creative destruction per se. Instead it’s just another term of art for their taking over one industry after another.

They themselves have no problem at all radically reordering society with unproven policies at levels far beyond what almost any political figure would do. Their blasé acceptance of massive job destruction and embrace of a speculative basic income scheme to compensate illustrate that. It’s no surprise to me that Mencius Moldbug, the founder of neoreaction (one of the sub-tribes commonly grouped with the alt-right that believes in absolute monarchy or the state as a publicly traded sovereign corporation), is a Silicon Valley techie and startup founder who reportedly started out in the Rationalist movement.

They are also comfortable with an almost feudal distribution of wealth, so long as it’s based on an aristocracy of talent rather than heredity. And it’s an aristocracy that believes it should rule as well as profit. When they talk about a communitarian ethos in which the government needs to compel people to act properly, it’s pretty clear who the determinant of that is. It will of course be intelligent “rationalists” like them, who know what is right, have the technology to bring it into being, and whose motivations are beyond question (at least in their own mind).

It’s a stunningly grandiose vision. Much like the EU, I suspect the public’s tolerance for it will be directly proportional to benefits continuously delivered. To the extent that Silicon Valley is able to deliver benefits to the common good, few will stand in their way. If the benefits slow, or the costs (including second and third order costs) start exceeding the benefits, we’ll see how it turns out for them.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/06/01/the-silicon-valley-mindset/