#but its a capitalism and labor exploitation thing as much as anything else

[lethalhoopla]

Hey so! I'm gonna take the above in good faith as best I can and respond genuinely, because I know a lot of people, especially artists, feel very strongly one way or the other about AI-generated images - making it all too easy to miss each other's core points. And I think a lot gets lost in translation between 'sides', as even though everyone's responding to one another the unstated 'question' they're trying to answer is actually different. Namely: people against the AI trend tend to be responding to "is AI bad for stealing art?" while people who are trying to argue AI isn't inherently bad are often responding to "can AI benefit artists?"

I think once people start feeling strongly on a topic, it's easily to accidentally fall into the eternal human problem (that's even easier on the internet) of "inventing a guy" - in this case, a guy that feels there's black and white morality here in either direction. Some people feel strongly enough that they think even in spite of the potential good that all AI generating attempts should be shut down, while others feel strongly that there's enough good to be had they think everyone should just try and make the best of it all.

It's not misinformation that the op said "CSP is including a feature for ai art so it's easier than ever to steal credit from artists" - I can't be sure of their intent, but hell, they even put the pic of the tweet itself where CSP said they weren't feeding Stable Diffusion user's art. They weren't hiding that fact. The stealing in question isn't necessarily about CSP users - but rather, that SD is built on stolen art. Anything SD generates is inherently built on incredibly shady and dubiously ethical practices of scraping art from the internet.

(Insert a thousand arguments here, I know. But it wasn't until SD 2.0 - released Nov 23 - that SD users were blocked from easily and explicitly generating images to mimic certain artists styles; say what you will about 'learning' and 'style mimicking' in flesh-and-blood artists, the fact that those artists will never have an option to fully remove their art 'data' fully once its been used is pretty fucked up.)

That said, I don't want to put words in people's mouths, so I'm going to focus on why people are pissed about CSP + Stable Diffusion.

See, plenty of us that aren't happy about this know that CSP isn't feeding user's art into Stable Diffusion! That's definitely a relief. The problem that a lot of us have - both with this 'collaboration' and with SD itself - is that Stable Diffusion is built on stolen art.

(And, to be clear: art includes photography. Stolen photography is also feeding these things, and that's just as messed up.)

In other words, no matter how good your intentions, even if you aren't making money off of - for example - using the 'AI' to generate a background - it's impossible to extricate a result that hasn't benefited from 'learning' from countless works from artists who did not consent to their work being used to train a machine.

Supposedly, future versions of Stable Diffusion will have ways for artists to opt-out of their work being used as training data. Still, that's a nebulous promise; and Stable Diffusion is open source. While I'm normally a fan of open source software, what that means is that people can and do simply make their own version and add back in the 'training sets' that they want their generated images to 'learn' from. In other words, it's extremely easy for people to just... add those opted-out artists right back in to their 'own' version of SD. (The discord for it is rife with advice on 'training' your own SD instance...)

There's a viewpoint I see from people who have less-to-no problem with programs like SD who say that well, other artists learn and get inspired from other artists too, and hell, working artists on creative teams often even get shown specific artists' work and are told to 'do something like that. This discussion gets even muddier than the rest fast, because frankly, it gets philosophical as hell - how is machine learning different from a person learning/training their art skills over time, etc etc? Seriously, dissertations can be written on that.

I think where I personally land is based more on the outcome of this machine learning.

Essentially: while in a perfect world this could just be a cool inspirational tool to boost artists, we live in a capitalist, corporate-profit-driven world that will use these tools in every worst way and leverage the technology to cut out the 'lower tier' artists on their teams. Entry-level artist positions, critical to even building up the experience and further skills necessary to make it to senior positions - or build up enough connections/portfolio to snag one of those spots. Will every art position be lost? Likely not - top tier artists in the field will still be kept to do the highest concept/proof work, or finesse whatever AI generators give, etc etc. But there's a great Kotaku article that interviews artists and creatives on all sides of the issue that puts it well, I think, and while interviewing one artist:

Jon Juárez, an artist who has worked with Square Enix and Microsoft, agrees that some companies and clients will only be too happy to make use of AI art. “Many authors see this as a great advantage, because this harvesting process offers the possibility of manipulating falsely copyright-free solutions immediately, otherwise they would take days to arrive at the same place, or simply would never arrive”, he says . “If a large company sees an image or an idea that can be useful to them, they just have to enter it into the system and obtain mimetic results in seconds, they will not need to pay the artist for that image. These platforms are washing machines of intellectual property.”

To be completely fair, this article also includes plenty of quotes from artists who have less of a problem with AI-generated art! And I understand where they're coming from. Some are just viewing it with mild resignation and 'well people steal my art anyways so what's the difference with a robot', and others as a cool potential tool for themselves. Some of the most optimistic - and I love their ideas, honestly, they genuinely helped me see the pros beyond the cons - are focusing on the ways they can broaden their own art horizons and grow even more as artists. I recommend reading that article for their PoV, too.

Honestly, I want to be excited about AI-training here. I love sci-fi shit. I love thinking about the future where we get robots who Are People.

'AI', however, is not artificial intelligence. Not even close. At best, virtual intelligence; and more blatantly, just a complicated machine with very well-tailored tag audits. What's undeniable in AI 'art' is that it is wholly built off of other people's time, sweat, and hard-earned skills. I could go on a tangent here about that whole difference-between-machine-and-people bit, how there's just inherently more effort in an artist that requires dedication and determination and ingenuity and developing your own eye and skills, but honestly, I'm mostly horrified by the lack of respect for artists, and the lack of choice.

I think one of the more notable examples of how this has really fucked over an artist that originally had a 'hey this'll be fine' stance is Greg Rutkowksi. He's a prolific and phenomenal artist, works a lot in concept art - and just so happens to be one of the top used 'prompts' in AI generators. I highly recommend giving this article about his case in particular a read.

Basically: by the time he realized AI-generated images with his work as tags were dominating search engine results rather than his own work when searching his own name, it was too late to try to get the AI art generators to stop using his work. Hell, they couldn't take it out if they tried.

Worse yet, even with efforts to reduce the ease with which prolific artist's styles can be copied, he's known as a 'shortcut' to a high-quality image generated.

Let's be clear: stealing art is stealing labor.

To feed an image-generating machine artworks that were not freely given is to feed someone else's labor into a machine they have no say, no gain, no return from. Artists spend years developing their skills. Years. Even if they're primarily inspired by one artist - big if - they are still developing their own style that is colored by their visual analysis, the quirks of their mind and taste, their experiences, hell even the fine motor control of their hands. No two artists are exactly alike - even if one's damn good at mimicking styles. That in itself is a skill to be valued.

Now, to be fair, as mentioned above: Stable Diffusion's latest release, 2.0, has severely curbed the ability to mimic exact artist's styles. And I do want to give credit for that- someone, somewhere in that team, listened to the anger and frustration of artists - or at least the ethical and possibly legal concerns. (Because yes, the generator used copyright protected artwork as much as 'art posted for fun'.) But to be just as clear: Stable Diffusion is open source, and the data needed to simply add unwilling artists' works back in is easy-access. There is a vocal and active community supporting this.

With all this in mind... I'm still against any art program collaborating with current major art generators. They have other reasons, and I get chasing the tech trends. I get why some people, artists included, are in favor of just using the tech now that it's there.

But I hope it can be understood why there is such a vocal opposition - and why it might come off as a 'moral black and white' matter; they're speaking strongly about it, often in short bursts. Pretty much no one's gonna read all this just because it's long - but it takes minimum this much to begin to address anything. And I left so much out of this. Point is, though: faced with everything as-is, it's hard for someone strongly against current models to see other options beyond starve out the current programs. Don't give them an inch. Do not support even tangentially with your money.

I'm not saying anyone above has to agree with that path. Just - give some more thought to where those of us against it are coming from.

I doubt I'm going to change anyone's mind. That's okay. I think a lot about this kind of stuff, as both a tech-minded nerd and an artist; and I think a lot about how so much is lost in translation when we're all inclined to respond in a handful of sentences. A lot is lost in translation.

I want there to be collaborative efforts to make art, and broaden what possibilities are out there! Honestly, I wish there were more efforts in this quickly expanding space to make opt-in-only, from scratch, AI generators. Hell, make one from public domain and free to use images! Give artists tools and resources to help - not push them out of their own damned field.

I'm not fool enough to think any of it's going away. But I'm also not fool enough to think that anything built on current generator models (Stable Diffusion, Dall-E's OpenAI, Midjourney...) can possibly be fully ethical. And that's the rub - that's what sucks about this new feature from CSP. It's built on inherently unethically sourced work. Labor. It's hard to pretend I'm anything but frustrated when the shoddy foundation of this whole AI-generated image business continues to be ignored.

... Also. Hey. Hey, everyone? Don't fucking pirate indie creator's projects. Toby Fox is one fucking guy making a game with only the help of a couple people for graphics and such. Don't steal shit from creators like that. Or from indie authors, indie comic creators, or indie musicians, or etc. What the fuck. That's not the same as pirating a movie from goddamn Gisney or fucking microsoft word or whatever. Being broke sucks, I get it, I've been there with fuckin $4 in my account before. I'm glad the above commenter bought it eventually, but for real. Please realize the difference between corporations and indie creators.

CSP is including a feature for ai art so it's easier than ever to steal credit from artists

[rametarin]

Thought experiment: Cashless Capitalism. And then, because that doesn't work, I speculate on national digital currency.

What if currency, either the worth of it or the material of it, didn't exist in a capitalist system? But it was still a capitalist system, where individuals could privately own land, property, business and their spoils.

Well... one might think that the idea would mean the medium by which to trade or bargain doesn't exist.

But what if a point value system existed, it just used to estimate the equality of trade in some means? You might say that's just money- and, you'd pretty much be right. But we're operating under the idea that the value of an item or service is merely the value of the service or item or good, not that it's expressed as cash. So if you went to trade an apple for an orange, somehow some mathematical system would exist to weight the differences in worth between an apple and an orange.

Maybe they measure it by the value of calories and nutrition. Maybe they measure it by mass. Maybe they measure it by color of the fruits by metrics of what makes a healthy fruit. I don't know. But the different fruits would have different values, and that'd factor into the imaginary worth system.

So by some means of measurement, having X-many apples means, if you managed to sell them within the window of time, you'd have enough points equal to a piece of property. Yes, almost exactly the same as cash, but not expressed as cash; the value would hinge entirely on the value of materials and goods.

I think that owning land as property and what that property was capable of based on soil quality, water quality and access, environment, temperature, elevation, would figure into how its point value was determined. Not just that it was land, but by what you could naturally do with it if you maximized its exploitation. For you may own land above a gold mine, but if you only ever use it to grow flowers above ground, the gold within not being exploited is useless to you. So, the known assessed value of that land would be determined by the state before its value was given to purchase. But, the idea of property rights being obligate and virtually sacred would maintain. For the purposes of exploiting the land or ecology in accordance with sustainable practices. The cost of sustaining by regulations, would figure into the cost of the property (the benefits AND drawbacks/responsibilities of owning the property.)

Said products and services produced and provided would be given that not-really-cash-but-yes-cash point value system to record produce and goods and provided services into ledgers, and how that played into the economy. Naturally trying to make a business that does nothing but manufacture buckets might be hard up for work after the available market is good on buckets, but well. that's business. The value of goods and services would go down in value based on how much the seller wants to sell them for and whether buyer feels it's worth it, guided by the suggested value of the material good or service.

Really. The idea of an economy not using money in its economy and service-goods-property-time-labor exchange system is just.. stupid. Whether that cash is based by precious metals possession or something else like FIAT currency, private property and private capital just makes sense. Anything else is just the state trying to literally micro manage based on ideals and moralism, whether it's vouchers for rations or what have you. That's all attempts to economically prevent people from being able to buy things that other people don't want them to buy and ensure there's a system there forcing them to contribute to buying things they may not want to finance, with more or less degrees of obligation and control the end user is not allowed to dissent to or function without doing.

When trying to "evolve passed money," you just reinvent money again. Whether it be in the form of notes with assigned value, or digital bits. If a service, a good, a labor, and time have value, then some way to express it as earned credit will exist. And that credit will always be money. in some form. And it will likely depreciate with time and entropy as bargains fade, owed solids wear out and inflation devours.

While I will never agree to giving up cash as it exists today, the problem of counterfeiting is.. a big problem. Tracing money is important to ensure someone isn't manufacturing bullshit and exploiting the monetary system for gains they did not contribute to society. Cash is fantastic, but counterfeitters should eat shit. Cash is important to be able to function during times when the state or the law can be potentially unjust, or you need to conduct business that isn't 100% above the board. It's as important in the micro as the macro, and you can't barter value and worth of everything with buckets and beer or bullets.

Suppose we had a digital form of currency, but it had nothing to do with bitcoin and the blockchain. Suppose we had a Digital Mint. The Digital Mint printed off individual Digital Dollars (or, your nation's currency here) which themselves were an incredibly sophisticated pattern of repeating numbers and symbols, with the kind of uniqueness that could not be substituted. A gensm where even random patterns could not match it. Every single dollar might be the equivalent of a few megabytes in size and known intimately by the ledgers of the digital mint.

As it's completely digital, that means the medium by which it's exchanged would hand-hold the transactions. Exactly what is being purchased would be entered in by the buyer, what is being sold by the seller, and the transaction recorded by the institution of the Digital Mint for purpose of file keeping. Every single digital dollar printed off would individually have its own log date of who exchanged it and on what, when, and any copies that do not match are audited for suspected compromization- knowing instantly where the counterfeit occurred, whom did it, where and for what, and what lesser distributors or institutions are engaging in questionable actions. If there's no log of the money jumping hands, then that dollar being used outside of that tracable pathway of above-the-board currency is flagged. Since every dollar amounts to a program that self-reports to home from a licensed and internet accessed dealer and that means every user can meticulously determine every digital dollar so exchanged, from buyer, to seller, to exchange notary medium, has a copy.

I could see the government offering some sort of tax break just by the sheer virtue of how instant, complete and without rounding errors this system would theoretically be. Knowing that every dollar is legitimate, where it has been, what it has been doing and how long it was until that specific dollar moved around. Being digital, being able to count and tally and check would be virtually instant, and problems discovered and identified in real time. That might be worth suspending sales tax over just from the sheer savings compared to regular cash, and incentive to use nationally minted digital currency.

Since it inherently would be linked to a digital bank for all transactions, between different accounts, the idea of losing the money in a mattress in a fire or in a USB stick when someone drives off a pier would disappear. The question of finding a duffel bag of money and if it's legitimate or not would go away, for digital.

It won't be bitcoin, but this is how I bet digital currency will work.

[flockofdoves]

when i was younger and working at my student workers cooperative and collective as my first "legit" job right from when i started college i used to get embarrassed sometimes about our instances of disorganization and worried about how that could be used to argue that because we were young and because we were a cooperative that we weren't as efficient or good at what we did as a more "normal" business

but now that i'm older and have had more experience both with working different jobs and with interacting with various institutions and systems that adults often have to interact with before coming back to this job

while certainly there's a lot to be said about the contradictions that can arise from trying to succeed in a cooperative while still living under capitalism, and the even more immediate struggles that come from not even actually being a cooperative because of the ways being within the university system restricts us, and how transfer of knowledge is essential in cooperatives but hard to build when people necessarily have to leave within like 4 years or less and at that are likely coming to the job without much knowledge theyve built elsewhere. not even to mention the added pressure on that that us closing during the beginning of the pandemic created

but also like. now more and more things will happen when i engage with a business or government institution or medical organization and i can kind of just picture the types of environments and attitudes and workplace structures and pressures that made stuff happen like that and i realize that like. not even whatever structure they use is entirely efficient on an outwards facing level even disregarding the given of labor exploitation. problems happen at similar levels even in these organizations, its just that a lot of times since they're institutions with authority, when problems do happen its all at the expense of whoevers considered most expendable (their lowest paid workers, tenants and medical patients and poor people interacting with their organizations, etc) so that maybe they're not even trying to remedy those problems at the same level as my tiny little coop because any problem that does happen because of their power (and for many of the examples i'm thinking of, because of how they're necessary to a lot of people in our world regardless of how they treat people) they can just offset any blame onto these people

and i guess thats maybe obvious but grasping it at another level nowadays is a very weird combination of reassuring and horrific and hopeless. and just like anything else makes me like. my god revolution Now

[parismemes]

SENTENCE STARTERS FROM AN ARGUMENT THAT GOT OUT OF HAND.

“windows are doors though just so we're clear” “windows are just mini doors if you really think about it” “the WORLD is against you, ___” “if you have to claim things that aren't doors are doors then you admit your argument is weak” “you were ABOUT to argue that rotating locks are wheels dont even deny it dont even try to deny it” “the waters have been chummed--” “YOU CANT JUDGE THE STRENGTH OF MY ARGUMENT WHEN YOURS IS BASED UPON FALSEHOODS” “look windows are basically like those doors cut in half where its separate and you can swing the top or bottom open independently” “ohhhh LOOK AT THAT, you’re using OUTSIDE SOURCES to win an argument. typical” “NOT THIS SHIT MY COWORKERS HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAY” “the bees are buzzin!” “also would you count a door twice since it goes two ways or just once” “Windows are doors because I can climb out one” “literally going to climb out my window tonight now” “literally opening and leaving through my window as we speak” “you all are horrible human beings“ “Because I climb out my window door? U can’t take my window door from me” “oh so we're horrible because we're correct” “there is no winning, only chaos!” “don't think you can exclude yourself, you're not an exception” “ok but fruits dont have blood, ___.” “i said fruit juice is the EQUIVALENT OF BLOOD. FOR THE FRUIT” “dont make me bring the kool aid man into this again ill do it ill go there” “hey guys in unrelated news do you think if you turned the kool aid man upside down it would look like a jellyfish a little bit” “fruit juice is NOT equivalent to blood because the fruit does not circulate it” “yeah his fruit juice is jiggling out of there” “KOOL-AID IS NOT FRUIT JUICE” “god i love it when the kool aid man looks like a jellyfish” “IT IS AN ARTIFICIAL BEVERAGE CREATED BY CAPITALISM IT IS NOT FRUIT JUICE” “what is capitalism if not the FRUITS of labor” “capitalism is the EXPLOITATION of labor, it is the exploitation of the fruits and therefore not the fruits itself” “fruit juice is literally also the exploitation of fruits” “the literal point of fruit is to be eaten so that the seeds can be shit out somewhere else” “youre exploiting the fruits for their juice. how does that make you any different than jeff bezos” “i will have a debate about that” “if power corrupts then is capitalism not inevitable, just like fruits?” “power isnt inevitable in and of its self its all a societal construct and therefore man-made” “dolphins don't practice capitalism.” “ok and? humans do and we've got so much history to prove giving someone too much power? is bad. just like. giving someone too much fruit juice. will kill them” “boom bitch eat my kool aid jellyfish” “no i think theyre pretty similar :)” “just because i could probably die from an insane amount of orange juice does not mean that everyone will die from any fruit juice.” “you can die from too much of literally anything that doesn't make it capitalism” “no those are the same thing” “Capitalism deez nuts” “thats like me saying "trees are kind of similar to broccoli" and you replying "OH SO TOMATOES ARENT FRUITS THEN THEYRE JUST SIMILAR TO FRUITS HUH"” “not all windows fit the criteria of doors. but when they do. they ARE doors”

[read-marx-and-lenin]

i love it when communists argue against small businesses as if they are the ones causing all the mass destruction

"Destruction" is not the only problem with capitalism. Exploitation, oppression, autocracy, these all exist independent of "destruction". An autocrat who only happens to exploit and oppress 10 people is still an autocrat exploiting and oppressing people.

to say that what we live under is capitalism as it has been envisioned in the 19th century (just like communism was) is false, what we have is some hybrid of post-capitalism where corporations are just as powerful as states and they are largely monopolies.

Corporations were just as powerful as states and largely monopolies in the 19th century. If anything, corporations have gotten less powerful since then, as governments have sought to rein in the excesses of capitalism.

when you argue against one "race" of people, this type the capitalists, its just as bad as any other discrimination. especially when you argue against small businesses.

Capitalists are not a race, they are an economic class. They choose to be capitalists. They choose to engage in profit-seeking behavior and exploit the labor of others. Anyone who chooses to be a capitalist deserves to be discriminated against and oppressed.

it seems that hardline communists forget the idea of the community in the process and are strong advocates for totalitarian revolutions similar to 1917. as smart as karl marx was, political theory has evolved since his time and just like nationalism/capitalism of the 19th century are now completely different, so should communism be

Nationalism and capitalism are not completely different, they are largely the same as they were in Marx's time. "Totalitarian" is a meaningless buzzword and the Russian Revolution was an objectively good thing to happen for both Russia and the rest of the world. If a capitalist wants to be part of the "community," they should stop exploiting and oppressing their fellow community members for their individual profit. It's not hard to share.

the whole world is part of one team, team human. corporations are not humans, they are artificial creations just like the stock market and credits. in order to have a better world, we dont need to eat the rich, we need to shift our perspective from wanting to change the other to just wanting as much good to persist in the world as possible

Corporations are artificial creations, just like small businesses. In order to have a better world, we need to change the economic structure of the world so that production is organized to satisfy the needs of every person rather than to generate profit for an exclusive class of property owners. The means of production must belong to the whole of society and operated for the benefit of the whole of society. The private ownership of the smallest part of it is antithetical to this principle. You cannot end the exploitation and subjugation of the working class without socialization.

whenever you have a top down hierarchy like hardliners preach, you run the risk of bad actors taking control

When the "top-down hierarchy" is the democratic organ of the working class above the bourgeoisie, I feel like that risk is pretty well-mitigated. But by all means, if you feel like you have a better way of ending the top-down hierarchical autocracy that is the privately owned workplace, feel free to implement it. Just because I think anarchism doesn't work doesn't mean I can't be proven wrong.

bloody revolutions can only end in more bloodshed. forgiveness is more powerful than any knife gun or sword.

I am not opposed to amnesty for any capitalist who is willing to admit they were wrong to exploit and oppress other people for profit. Even if all they're willing to do is admit defeat, then that's fine by me. But anyone who decides that they are going to fight for their right to exploit and oppress the working class should watch their back. Anyone else who decides to throw their lot in with the capitalists and the fascists and the reactionaries are the worst kind of opportunistic traitors.

we dont need to think the same. but we need to spread love, not hate

Pacifism gets the people you love killed when you refuse to defend against the relentless attacks of your oppressors in favor of turning the other cheek. I don't care whether someone thinks the same as me. I care what they choose to do. Someone who fights to protect a system built on exploitation and oppression is the enemy of anyone who fights against exploitation and oppression.

Communism is liberation from capitalism and imperialism, and the people who don't understand why someone would want to be free from these things are the people who, generally speaking, will either not benefit from the revolution or will fare poorly under the revolution. There are of course workers without class consciousness who might hold delusions about one day becoming a capitalist, but even they typically understand at some level that the capitalist system does not work for them. Those who genuinely believe that capitalism is good and beneficial for all are almost always not proletarian.

There are people who like to hype up a "fully automated luxury communism" post-revolutionary vision, acting like "everyone will benefit", and while there may be some point in the future once the revolution is finished and the bourgeoisie is no more where this vision could be achieved, none of that is our immediate goal.

The communist revolution will not benefit everyone. It will benefit the proletariat at the expense of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois types who currently benefit from capitalism and imperialism are rightfully afraid of a revolution because they would be oppressed classes under a revolutionary government. We don't need to sugarcoat it. They can choose to join the proletariat. They can choose to work for a living and participate in society as equals to the rest of us.

If you're talking to a fellow worker, then your role is to explain to them how they're being exploited and oppressed and what the path to liberation looks like. If you're talking to a capitalist, whether they're a small business owner or a multi-millionaire, then there's not much else to say to them besides "if you stand in our way you will be crushed." They should have no delusions about salvaging any remnant of their bourgeois status once the revolution arrives.

[pyroclastic727]

Luz’s love language and what it means for the season finale

Content warning: discussions of Luz’s depression and suicidal tendencies

The Owl House is back!--and it’s a lot more depressing than before. While the adventures are just as deadly as the last season, this time our lovely Luz Noceda is being affected by their trauma-inducing qualities, and now she has depression. 

This is largely reflected in the series itself. During Separate Tides, virtually every discussion is about the loss of powers. The townspeople deprive Eda of money and publicly humiliate her for her lack of magic. Luz goes bounty hunting for money to deal with magic. Luz literally tries to commit suicide in that cave, to get money that would somehow offset the debt of ruining Eda’s life.

Then we get to Escaping Expulsion, and things don’t brighten up. We meet the abusers--sorry I meant The Blights--and get a firsthand look at the source of Amity Blight’s fears. They spend the entire episode trying to kill Luz, because she doesn’t have any magic. Then Amity delivers a lovely speech about wanting to be a better person, while alienating her entire family and pretending to be crushed to death for an audience--yet another example of a character cutting ties and being publicly humiliated in order to express their love for Luz.

Overall the tone has become much darker--not in the way that there’s more eyeballs in places we shouldn’t have any, but in the way that Luz genuinely doesn’t believe she deserves to be loved, and the only way the message gets through to her is when other people copy her suicidal behaviors.

The issue, you see, is that she’s been showing signs of that for a while-- I just didn’t know how far Owl House was willing to take that. One of my analyses from last year points out that Luz demonstrates and understands love via acts of service--which is why she’s always throwing herself into dumb situations, and why she really appreciates when Amity ditches her friends to join her Grudgby team. 

Season Two takes it a step further. In the ultimate act of love, Eda lets the curse overtake her and basically gives her life in order to let Luz get out of there in one piece. Luz didn’t come out unscathed, though, because now she’s seen that the best way to show affection is by suicide. 

And she does this.

A lot.

You see, Luz doesn’t think she deserves love. She asserts this throughout the season. So these last two episodes have consisted of the people around her trying to piece her back together. Eda delivers the most amazing speech about self-worth--and while it’s the type of speech to frame on your wall and read every morning, it’s not quite sinking in for Luz. 

That’s part of why Amity’s heroic display of love hits Luz so hard. Amity isn’t doing what she usually does, and trying to hold Luz’s hand for a minute at a time. This time, she threw away her relations with her parents for Luz-- a much more dangerous version of cutting off Boscha for the grudgby team. That’s why Luz blushes, that’s why she stammers a reply. Amity put her life in great danger, signing herself up for a much worse fate from her parents (as they’re now fueled by revenge) and, for that moment, agreeing to get literally crushed by an abomination. 

You can also read all of this as a metaphor for how homosexuality is frowned upon by capitalist society and condemns you to public humiliation and ostracism in order to support the one you love, but that’s not what we’re discussing today. We’re discussing what this means for the finale.

Because here’s the thing. If Luz wants to show love, she has to do some grand and heroic gesture. If Luz wants to do something grand and heroic in the Boiling Isles, she has to have magic. That’s part of why she’s so damn suicidal lately: that’s literally the only thing she has power over. That’s the only thing she can do.

But there’s one thing that people haven’t taken into account yet. You see, magic is a force that’s shrouded in mystery, that’s granted to certain people via biological factors. It’s a privilege based on species. But at its core, magic is just a science that has yet to be understood by the people of the Boiling Isles. Luz, Eda, and Lilith have an ability that no one else on the entire island has: they know how to use glyphs.

Now, let’s say that everyone loses the ability to use bile sac magic, and glyphs are the only magic remaining. 

That would give Luz an edge, right?

If glyph magic is all that remains, that means Luz can be the one to save Amity, instead of the other way around. As the person who’s been practicing glyphs the longest, she’d be the most skilled and the most capable. 

She wouldn’t have to endanger herself to prove the lengths she’s willing to go. Not when she has an ability beyond what most others can do.

But that’s not reasonable, because why would everyone lose their magic? It’s not like there’s one person who is capable of restricting magic, and if he chose, he could take everyone’s magic for himself...right?

Oh, right. Emperor Belos.

You can check my post on covens as a capitalist metaphor for my full discussion. At the time, I read the capitalist metaphor as a statement on the world and nothing more. But now it has chilling implications.

You see, the point of capitalism is for one person to accrue all of the money for himself and force everyone else to work for him. Belos is this person, this monarch who takes the power of others. He’s building a portal for something, I don’t know what. That’s not the important piece here. 

What’s important is that, once he has that portal open, does he need the covens?

Does he need his exploited labor force? He’ll have an army of abominations, so there’s no point in having any skilled fighters. So anyone who wants to use war magic loses that ability. At the season 2 ending, if he wants, Emperor Belos can take every kind of magic in the Boiling Isles.

Which makes sense, right? He outlawed wild magic for a reason, and it’s like Eda said. If it’s wild, Belos can’t control it. 

But Luz, Eda, and Lilith have wild magic in their control. They’re the only ones who can. So if Belos takes all the power for himself, if he becomes a god among men, there will still be three people who can stop him.

And one of them is willing to do anything to justify her existence. Luz Noceda stop at nothing to take Emperor Belos down, and give wild magic to everyone.

[kapitaali]

The New Hippies

THE NEW HIPPIES: The work abolition movement, anarcho-primitivism and biodynamism as ways to combat climate change

Essay for the course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business by Teppo Saari

Introduction

The course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business had the students think about and discuss the various ethical dimensions in business, moral dilemmas and choices to be made that a decision maker in business world come across every day.

This essay is motivated by our case study with a headline ’Investors urge European companies to include climate risks in accounts’ (Financial Times 2020). In this essay I will explore values and ethical principles that I see as the solutions to our case study and climate change in general. This is not to say that I could stand up for them in business world. Ironically, my main thread and leitmotif here is the untransformational nature of capitalism and business world. Thus, standing up to the values I will discuss here means doing less business, not more.

This essay is divided in three parts: problem – reaction – solution. These three parts will talk about the chosen values and ethical principles. They are by no means new: pragmatism – The Golden Rule – parsimony & naturality. They just seem to be in conflict with our modern way of living.

Thinking pragmatically about the problem

As part of our course assignment, we got to read about a group of investors managing trillions of dollars worth of assets who urged European companies to include climate risks in their accounts (Financial Times 2020). Scientists have warned us for decades, that pumping extreme amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere will result in melting of the polar ice caps (Mitchell 1989; Jones & Henderson-Sellers 1990), which will raise the sea level and drown some of the coastal cities (Peters & Darling 1985). Finally, capitalists are acting responsibly!

It would seem that capitalists actually cared for the planet and not just their profits. Or would it? Maybe they are scared of losing their future profits, and this kind of media escapade would bring back public trust and confidence in the system. It would be a sign that capitalists can act transparently, openly, accountably, respecting others (O’Leary 1993). But is changing the allocation in your investment portfolio really a sign of empathy? Would there be other ways to better express empathy in business?

Shareholders are interested in the risk their assets are facing, not necessarily in the welfare of the people. Investors acting virtuously can be just virtue-signaling or pleasing other elements in the society to take off media pressure and negative PR from them in a conformist way (Collinson 2003). Maybe they are just greenwashing their own conscience. Why is George Soros’ climate buzz astroturfing industrial complex (Morningstar 2019a) financing Greta Thunberg to do public PR campaigns targeting the youth? Maybe there is money in it. It is unlikely that it would have been dubbed ”A 100 trillion dollar storytelling campaign” without some particularly good reasons (Morningstar 2019b).

But there is something else in it too than just money: power and control. The person who gets to limit choices gets to dictate what kind of choices remain. And if a person has that kind of foreknowledge, then that person can be two steps ahead of us. And being two steps ahead of us means securing future profits. Including climate risks in accounts will imply controls. Controls are imposed on accounts, but ultimately it will mean controls imposed on people and their daily activities. Workers are the ones who will naturally suffer the consequences of management decisions. In this case management decisions are ’urged’ externally, from the owners’ part. After all, it is the corporations that are producing most of the climate change effects, in terms of pollution and greenhouse gases (Griffin 2017). People doing their jobs, working everyday, producing things but also at the same time producing climate effects. I would still love to hear politicians use more terms such as ”pollution” when talking about these issues. For it is unclear how reducing carbon emissions will reduce overall pollution that is also a contributor in the destruction of our environment (see eg. Bodo & Gimah 2020; Oelofse et al. 2007). Issues like microplastics, holes in the ozone layer, biodiversity loss, acid rains and soil degradation need to be talked about just as much, if not more so.

The problem is simple: too much economic activity producing too much climate impact, mostly pollution and greenhouse gases. Solving the Grand Challenge (Konstantinou & Muller 2020) of our time is harder if we wish to keep the fabric of our society intact. There’s a clear need for dialogue among stakeholders (Gardiner 1996), but how is it a dialogue if people are not actually listened to and don’t get to say how things will progress in society? What I am proposing is a meme-like solution that has the greater impact the more people adopt it. My solution is: stop working. Produce less. Stop supporting systems and mechanisms that produce climate effects. Stop supporting the mechanisms that don’t listen to your voice. Disconnect from the Matrix. Working a dayjob is one of these mechanisms. Although many people have realized the benefits of working from home (Kost 2020), a lot more needs to be done. Remote work is not available to everyone. Not all jobs are remote work.

Bob Black (2021) in his texts has advocated for the total and complete abolition of work. Stopping working naturally does not mean stopping doing things, it will merely mean stopping working a job, a concept which itself is a social construct. Black’s theses are simple but powerful. Working is the source of all ills, it is not compatible with ludic life (allthemore so in 2021), it is forced labour and compulsory production, it is replete with indignities called ”discipline”: ”surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc”. Black does not only describe the negative ontological aspects of working, he goes deeper and invokes many familiar names of Greek philosophers:

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150–200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

Black notes that only ”a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages”. In similar vein, the late but great David Graeber saw the futility of most work. Calling this phenomenon ’bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018), Graeber sets out to describe what many of us are familiar with: we do useless things to make ourselves feel useful. Because modern society legitimizes itself with having people ’do’ stuff and not ’be’ a certain person. How can you (objectively) measure being? You can’t. But doing, that you can measure. This measurement then qualifies you as a member of society: productive, doing your part (an idiom that is a perfect example how you can’t escape the doing paradigm on a societal level). Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is: if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world. In many cases these types of jobs are found to be supporting some kind of buraucracy, reporting, assisting decision makers, etc. Our current Matrix has its ways of creating more of these with the clever marketing concept called ’value’ (Petrescu 2019). They don’t make a difference, they create value.

Why would you want to overload the world by doing things that you nor most everyone else see no point in? Why would you waste your time doing pointless things? The easy answer to these questions is ’subsistence’. But there are many other ways to live on this planet. If you keep doing what the society tells you is acceptable or convenient, you will shut your eyes from the problem at hand: climate change.

Legitimizing anarcho-naturism as a solution with The Golden Rule

Our responsibility is to ourselves. We can not properly be held responsible for anything else. Yet the system of representational democracy does just this, holds us collectively responsible for many things, borrows money from creditors with our names on the loan collectively and then makes us pay for the loans. The way this Matrix works is yet another reason to disconnect from it. Or at least stop supporting it as much as possible.

The Golden Rule states: ”Treat others as you want to be treated” (Gensler 2013). From the perspective of climate change, it can first seem curious why you would quit your job and head for the hills. After all, we are facing a global issue here. There are people in need for help and I am running away? But I would see it as a way to get around our predicament. The Golden Rule can be also interpreted in Kantian way as the categorical imperative, particularly its first formulation: ”Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This formulation is somewhat more proactive in nature. It talks about acting, doing things, and doing things is what is appreciated in our society, even when your goal is to exit the society.

Why exit the society? Is it enough to just quit your job and find something else to do, something that is more fulfilling and not bullshit? What an excellent question. Long before the advent of smart phones and 5G and DNA-vaccines, this question had been brought up to the table. In the 1800s, people were realizing the negative impact industrialization was having on society at large. People were rooted out from their family homes in the countryside, forced to move to a large city to look for a job, crammed into small apartments with dozens of other workers, coerced into working long and hard days at factories to make a living. The lowly misery of these people attracted the attention of a certain Friedrich Engels, who felt their situation was not adequate to make up for the suffering they had gone through. He meticulously described the working conditions of the English working class in his ”The Condition of the Working Class in England” (2003 [1845]), originally published in German. Sociology as a science was established by Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to study these changes. Slowly but surely, the influx of people into cities started to cause issues, something that mayors and other municipal representatives had to start taking care of. Planning and zoning were given a lot more attention, since the earlier modus operandi of old European cities had been rather laissez faire (Sutcliffe 1980).

Against this backdrop of massive societal change, people started to question the changes and their direction. Are we really nothing more than slaves, just working in a different environment? Slavery might not be the right word or context here. Many people believe to be free, govern themselves and their property, and yet their daily actions and options to choose from seem to be eerily limited. They have only so many choices, most of which seem somehow related to running their errands. A more appropriate term, with all its connotations, here would be the Greek word ananke, ”force, constraint, necessity”. Like a force of nature, progress towards modernity necessitates that people leave their family homes and go work in large factories, compulsively manufacturing endless amounts of products, some of which are necessary, others merely decorations, and some just pointless.

Many names in 19th century New England worked upon a vision for the future society at a time when unprecedented changes were taking place and the standard of living was rising faster than ever before. The Transcendental Club was a group of New England authors, philosophers, socialists, politicians and intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century which gave rise to Transcendentalism, the first notable American intellectual movement. Transcendentalist believe in the inherent goodness of people and nature, but that society and its institutions — particularly organized religion and political parties — corrupt the purity of the individual. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003; Sacks 2003.) Transcendentalism is a unique mix of European Romanticism, German (particularly Kantian) philosophy, and American Christianity. The impact of this movement can still be seen in the many flavours of American anarchist and radical Christian movements.

Out of the ranks of Transcendentalists rose a couple of names that can be viewed as the progenitors of modern anarcho-primitivism and natur(al)ist anarchy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the central figure of the Transcendental Club, who together with Henry David Thoreau critiqued the contemporary society for its ”unthinking conformity” and advocated for “an original relation to the universe” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003). Emerson’s Nature (2009 [1836]) poetically embellishes our view of the natural world, while Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1995 [1854]) is a call for civil disobedience and revolt against the modern world. Another influential natur(al)ist writer has been Leo Tolstoi whose name is frequently mentioned by anarchists. Tolstoi himself was a Christian and pacifist, and his writings have inspired Christian anarcho-pacifism that views the state as ���immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2017).

Before the Transcendentalist movement, Europe experienced similar trend in philosophy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural philosophy. Rousseau touched upon many subjects: freedom, free will, authority, nature, morality, societal inequality, representation and government. Like Transcendentalists, Rousseau held a belief that human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society. ”Rousseau clearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life, so in whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it is not the moral sense that the casual reader would ordinarily assume” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010). Rousseau’s work is relevant to many of the social movements that currently fight against COVID restrictions, vaccination agenda, building of 5G antenna towers next to where people live, polluting the environment, systemic poverty and general disconnection from the natural world. Rousseau, although regarded as a philosopher, saw philosophy itself negatively, and to him philosophers were ”the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010).

Rousseau’s days did not see capitalism as we see it now. It was later Marx (influenced by Hegel, who in turn was influenced by Rousseau) that put together a treatise that considers the societal change we have seen ever since from industrialism and circulation of capital. But Rousseau’s thoughts about the social contract (1968 [1762]), “child-centered” education (Rousseau 2010), and inequality (Graeber & Wengrow 2018; Rousseau 2008) are still relevant today. Especially when we are faced with many societal forces that are contradictory in nature, each of them pushing us into certain direction, demanding our attention, wanting us to change our beliefs about that one particular aspect that connects with other aspects and forms the Matrix of our reality.

We are once again facing a similar situation as the people did back in the days of the first industrial revolution. Now the industrial revolution has reached its fourth cycle, unimaginatively called ”Industry 4.0” (Marr 2018; WEF 2021), where machines are starting to become autonomous and talk to each other. I used to think technology was cool, and went to work for Google. But at Google I learned that technology is not cool, after all. Not until technology becomes completely open source, it will be used by massive conglomerates to build autonomous weapons systems (Cassella 2018; Johnson 2018) and the industry will keep paying ethics researchers to keep writing arguments for them (Charters 2020). Even though I could work for an industry that, given the current trajectory, will be among the biggest producers of CO 2 in the future Vidal 2017), the idea that I would work for an industry that sees weaponizing their products as the grandest idea of mankind’s future is still gnawing.

Because, it is all just business (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

One of the functions of critical science is to create awareness of the underlying values, and the political and financial interests which are currently determining the course of science and technology in industrialized society. This exposure of the value-laden character of science and technology is done with the goal of emancipating both people and the environment from domination and exploitation by powerful interests. The ultimate objective is to redirect science and technology to support both ordinary people and the environment, instead of causing suffering through oppression and exploitation by dominant elites. Furthermore, by exposing the myth of the value-neutrality of science and technology, critical science attempts to awaken working scientists and engineers to the social, political, and ethical implications of their work, making it impossible or, at the very least, uncomfortable for them to ignore the wider context and corresponding responsibilities of their professional activities.

It all seems to be connected with state imperialism and the military-industrial(-intelligence) complex. Lenin’s statement (2008 [1916]) equating capitalism with imperialism still prevails this day: ”imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists”. The conditions change, but the war machine keeps on churning (soon with autonomous weapons!), with wealthy but crooky investors financing projects that are even more dystopian (Byrne 2013). We may remember what president Dwight D. Eisenhower said about the military- industrial complex (NPR 2011):

”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

It is exactly these kinds of doomsday scenarios that inspire people like Theodore John ”The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Kaczynski, famous for sending mail bombs to various university professors around the US, holds a doctoral degree in mathematics. (Wikipedia 2021.) Kaczynski was bullied as a child, and it has been suggested that he was part of an MKULTRA experiment in college (The Week 2017). Kaczynski did not send his bombs haphazardly. He wrote long theoretical pieces to justify his actions, most of them being thematically anarcho-primitivist. In 1995, after sending several bombs to university personnel and business executives in 1978-1995, he said to ”desist from terrorism” if he got his text published in media outlets.

In his Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski 1995), a 35 thousand word essay published in The Washington Post, which the FBI gave the name ”Unabomber manifesto”, Kaczynski attributes many our societal ills to ”leftism”. In the manifesto Kaczynski details how two psychological tendencies, “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”, form the basis of ”the psychology of modern leftism”. Feelings of inferiority are taken to mean the whole spectrum of negative feelings about self: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred etc. Oversocialization is the process of socialization taken to extreme levels:

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.

25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

Kaczynski goes on to describe how this oversocialization causes a person to feel guilt and shame for their actions, especially in the context of performing as society expects them to perform. He writes how this concept of oversocialization is used to determine ”the direction of modern leftism”. Further on, Kaczynski describes how modern man needs goals to strive for, to not run the risk of developing serious psychological problems. This goalsetting activity he denotes ”power process”. But these goals can be real or artificial. Setting a goal is “surrogate activity” if the person devotes much time and energy to attaining it, does not attain it, and still feels seriously deprived. It is just a goal for goalsetting’s sake, the unfulfilled other side of the coin of power process. Kaczynski then connects these concepts to the many societal ills (excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe) by describing how modern society, with all its marketing and advertising creating artificial needs, disrupts the power process, mankind’s search for itself and meaning-making in life. He sees social hierarchies and the need to climb up them, the ”keeping up with the Joneses”, as surrogate activity.

”Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds”. This gradual increase, then, the system tries to ’solve’ by using propaganda, ”to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them”. In regards to technology, the ”bad” parts cannot be separated from the ”good”, and thus we are constantly facing the dilemma between technology and freedom, new technology being introduced all the time, and new regulations being introduced to curb the negative effects of the technology and at the same time stripping us of our freedoms. Kaczynski concludes, that revolution is easier than reforming the system.

Later, Kaczynski released another of his anti-technological theses. In Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015) Kaczynski presents a ”comprehensive historical analysis explaining the futility of social control and the catastrophic influence of technological growth on human social and planetary ecological systems.” This time Kaczynski talks more about how to start an anti-tech movement and how to keep it going. The text reads like a mathemathical proof of sorts, it presents ”rules”, ”propositions” and ”postulates” why the technological system will destroy itself (eg. Russell’s Paradox resulting in chaos in a highly complex, tightly coupled system) and why a successful anti-tech movement needs clear goals to avoid some of the errors revolutionary movements have made, which are elaborated in the book. Violence is not offered as a solution in the book, it is seen more like a mishap of sorts, a suboptimal outcome of a revolutionary movement. But it talks about power. Kaczynski got to learn the hard way how the feeling of powerlessness breeds desperate actions that would have been otherwise unnecessary. The book also talks about climate change and related issues, from a mathematic systems theoretical point of view.

Institutions that are in the business of social engineering and behavioral modification, such as the Tavistock Institute in the UK or the CIA in the US, would have us believe that Kaczynski’s actions were ”defences against anxiety” that can be seen as ”withdrawal, informal organization, reactive individualism and scapegoating” (Hills et al. 2020), and to some extent this is true. But Kaczynski interprets the actions of these institutions stemming from technological progress in our society Kaczynski 1995):

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people.

This uniformity of a large hierarchical modern society then forces its will on people (Kaczynski 1995):

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

We have once again encountered ananke, necessity. Now, if we consider ourselves as the lonely decision makers in this society, what could we do? We can try and fight fire with fire, but such fights end up producing only pain and casualties (Taylor 2013). Anarcho-naturists and anarcho-pacifists understand that (unnecessary) fighting in most cases does not work. Sometimes fighting is warranted, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine those cases. Sending bombs to people’s offices may get you some attention and even make somebody quote your manifesto in an essay, but it is not solving the issue, something which the Unabomber addressed in his later texts. If working a job indirectly supports the military-industrial complex NewScientist 2011), what good does it do? The military-industrial complex is the biggest source of pollution in the world (The Conversation 2019; Acedo 2015), detaching yourself from this complex is imperative. Even if they would manage to convince us with their psyops that they are willing to change and that climate change is an important issue (Ahmed 2014), it would still be the biggest polluter that is controlling the conversation. It has even been suggested that they are behind this climate buzz (Light 2014). Is your job doing that much good in society that it outweighs the cons? If I need to act responsibly, but cannot fight the system nor conform, while at the same time keeping in mind our looming climate disaster, the only reasonable and peaceful response is to exit the system altogether.

Biodynamism’s naturality and parsimony

Owning responsibility and transforming the world implies taking some kind of action. We have already seen how feelings of powerlessness and lack of self-worth can lead to destructive actions. But there are an unlimited amount of actions that can be taken, that are not based in feelings of powerlessness but empowerment.

Exiting society might sound like a lonely project, and some people might rightfully feel lonely when all their peers still want to live in the illusion. But it does not have to be so. A lot of soul-searching needs to be done, and that is usually done in privacy, focusing upon oneself, but beyond that there are ways how to go off-grid and drastically reduce your carbon emissions.

One of the key concepts that will be our guiding principle here is degrowth (Paulson 2017), which ties into values such as organicity, naturality and parsimony. We will want to have less production of artificial things, and more organic and natural things. By artificial we mean long supply chains and many phases of production with modern high technology that produce a large amount of climate effects. By natural we mean using primitive technology, mostly all-natural or recycled materials and something that can be produced even alone, given enough time. Primitive technology does not exclude electricity, it just means producing it differently.

Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and theosophist, the founder of Anthroposophy and a great reformer of science in matters of spirit, started the first intentional form of organic farming, known as biodynamic agriculture, after he had given a series of lectures on the topic in the last year of his life. (Paull 2011.) Steiner had many spiritual experiences during his life, which lead him to start the Anthroposophy movement. He wanted to apply the scientific process into spiritual realm, inquiring it as it would be as real as our material world. Inquiring this spiritual world helped him access knowledge he claims to not have been access otherwise (Steiner 2011 [1918]). Anthroposophist self-inquiry can be seen as Foucauldian ”technology of the self” that ”provide an intervention mechanism on the part of active subjects, injecting an element of contingency to everyday encounters and alleviating the determinist effect that technologies of power would have otherwise” (Skinner 2012).

Steiner’s thoughts about agriculture are still relevant (Paull 2011):

In 1924 Steiner commented that, “Nowadays people simply think that a certain amount of nitrogen is needed for plant growth, and they imagine it makes no difference how it’s prepared or where it comes from” Steiner, 1924b, pp.9-10). He made the point that, “In the course of this materialistic age of ours, we’ve lost the knowledge of what it takes to continue to care for the natural world” (Steiner, 1924b, p.10).

Our current system seems to think exactly in this way, that if we just compensate our wreaked havoc by investing in ’green’ technology (Elegant 2019), it will all be ok and rainbows in the sky. But it will not. No one is even double checking if the companies that say that they are now carbon neutral actually proactively try to make our world greener. They can just buy a renewable energy company and say now we are green and do nothing else. Some would argue that going ’carbon neutral’ like these massive corporations are doing it is not the way to do it: “’green’ infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe” (Dunlap 2020).

Steinerian biodynamism ”encompasses practices of composting, mixed farming systems with use of animal manures, crop rotations, care for animal welfare, looking at the farm as an organism/entity and local distribution systems, all of which contribute toward the protection of the environment, safeguard biodiversity and improve livelihoods of farmers” (Turinek et al. 2009). While modern biodynamic studies focus on agroecological factors such as nutrient cycles, soil characteristics, and nutritional quality (Reganold 1995; Droogers & Bouma 1996), Steiner himself was quite metaphysical in his lectures and paid attention to details such as kingdoms of nature, planetary influences, biorhythms, incarnated and environmental ethers, and the Zodiac (Steiner 2004 [1958]; Nastati 2009).

By shifting to more natural ways of living, we may help Gaia (Lovelock 1991; Singh 2007) heal in many other ways than just reduce our climate emissions. By realizing that we are actually living on the skin of a fairly large and complex organism, we will stop treating it as a plain source of material resources, and start bonding with it, tune into its consciousness and establish two-way communication, just like the natives have done in America.

The way of the natives ought to be our current way, since there is no reason why the natives could not guard the lands they have before. One of the greatest fears of people speaking for private property rights is that managing resources collectively would mean exhausting them. There is no Tragedy of Commons. Just because you are materially poor does not mean that you are any less competent steward of land and wealth, as proposed by Elinor Oström (2009). Acting for climate is not an investment allocation problem. The natives need their land back so that they could do their best to fight the destruction of our ecosystem. The Outokumpu supply chain in Brazilian rainforests, Elon Musk and Bolivian lithium mines, Papua New Guinea indigenous conflict, mining in Lapland in traditional Sami herding areas, Australian uranium mining in indigenous lands… these are all pointless conflicts.

There are also many other ways of staying grounded and in touch with nature, while at the same time cultivating sovereignty. Many of these things revolve around feeding the most immediate community next to you. They reflect ideas such as mutuality, solidarity, organicity, and naturality. Permaculture is a term coined by David Holmgren to describe ”an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience” (Wikipedia: Permaculture 2021). Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems (Holmgren Desing Services 2007).

Earthships are 100% sustainable homes that are both energy efficient and modern. Earthsips are built with natural and repurposed (recycled) materials, they heat and cool themselves without electric heat, they use solar energy to power electric appliances, they collect all of their water from rain and snowmelt, they re-use their sewage water to fertilize plants, and there’s an indoor garden that grows food in vertical growing spaces (Reynolds 2021). Ecovillages are a ”human-scale, full-featured settlement, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future” (Gilman & Gilman 1991).

Clifford Harper had a set of drawings imagining an alternative in his book Radical Technology (Harper & Boyle 1976). In them, he shows many of the ideas that were themes in the German garden city movement in the beginning of 20th century (Bollerey & Hartmann 1980), such as collectivised gardens, autonomous housing estates, and community workshops. The book introduces us ’radical technology’, which spans basically all of the concepts we have discussed up to this point: organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, vegetarianism, hydroponics, soft energy, insulation, low-cost housing, tree houses, shanty houses, ’folk-built’ houses using traditional methods, houses built from subsoil, self-built houses, housing associations, solar dwellings, domestic paper-making, carpentry, scrap reclamation, printing, community & pirate radio, collectivised gardens, collective workshops for clothesmaking, shoe repair, pottery, household decoration and repairs, autonomous housing estates, autonomous rural villages, etc.

These concepts, while they seem simple, are still empowering, they are meant to let people enjoy they fruits of their labour. Last but certainly not least is the concept that all of these things fall under, alternative (or, appropriate) technology. Alternative technologies are those ”which offer genuine alternatives to the large-scale, complex, centralized, high-energy life forms which dominate the modern age” (Winner 1979). Alternative technologies seek to solve the problems technocentric thinking has caused in society: technical scale and economic concentration, level of complexity or simplicity best suited to technical operations of various kinds, division of labor and its alleged necessity, social and technical hierarchy as it relates to the design of technological systems, and self-sufficiency and interdependence regarding the lives of individuals and communities. Many of these solutions have been developed in Africa, where problems have had to be solved, but resources have been scarce in actuality.

Appropriate technology holds great promise in ways that are currently underappreciated in our society (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

As has been mentioned repeatedly throughout this book, the primary goal of technology in our current economic system is to increase material affluence and to generate profits for the wealthy by controlling and exploiting both people and the environment. In view of the reality of interconnectedness, this is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially desirable. In this chapter we discuss how to design technologies which reflect the values of environmental sustainability and social appropriateness. We also emphasize the importance of heeding the precautionary principle in order to prevent unintended consequences, as well as the need for participatory design in order to ensure greater democratic control of technology. Finally, as a specific example of an environmentally sustainable and socially appropriate technology, we discuss the positive contribution of local, organic, small-scale agriculture.

Conclusion

This essay has presented the reader with ramblings of a person who is familiar with Critical Theory, who would like to build a stronger connection to nature, and who is having a major identity crisis in life. I have expressed, albeit feebly, my will to emancipate myself, to exit the Matrix. In Finnish they would say ”Sota ei yhtä miestä kaipaa”, and in George S. Patton’s words this expression would be ”Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.”

In this essay I seem to have extensively quoted the Unabomber manifesto. This is not to say that Kaczynski had exceptionally good motives or justifications for his actions. He killed many people and is in prison now. Kaczynski’s ideas are not unique. Quoting his manifesto serves merely to prove one point: he is the product of his environment. Mental illness is no longer a taboo and things have progressed somewhat since Kaczynski’s days. It could be argued that Kaczynski’s writings were just projection of his own feelings of shame and guilt he had gone through. But his mental condition, should he be diagnosed with one (Amador & Reshmi 2000), does not invalidate the things he’s written. In many ways his writings are now more relevant than ever. When we have tech billionaires talking about inserting neuralinks into your brain and downloading thoughts straight from the headquarters, we can really see the manifesto dots connecting.

I wish it would have been just the mental load caused by a ’surrogate activity’ of keeping up with the Joneses that was the cause of all this, but no, it’s the real deal now. When we have corporate executives and federal commissions defending autonomous weapons systems and saying building such systems is a ’moral imperative’ (Gershgorn 2021), you know we have reached peak civilization. It’s all downhill from now on. All participation in society will support this moral imperative, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. While many would get back to nature for reasons of convenience, such as better health, Rousseau himself would have gotten back to nature ”to feel God in nature” (LaFreniere 1990). It is this kind of humanist transcendentalism (not transhumanism) that we will need again, to realize what we have done to our planet, to realize what needs to be done to abolish the war machine consuming it, and to make ourselves whole again.

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https://kapitaali.com/the-new-hippies/

[sithhoplite]

Why Capitalism Needs to go

So many people around the world think Capitalism is the only system that should be used because “it works.” No it doesn’t work, well if you are a rich person who relies on the labor of others, it sure does. If you are a worker, no it doesn’t. Capitalism uses resources and people until they are used up and then throws them away without a second thought. Think about the times you have called into work sick and they try to guilt trip you for not coming in, or not staffed a shift properly then got on your ass for not doing everything you were supposed to do like it was your fault, or firing you because you were not efficient enough, didn’t work enough, wouldn’t come in on your day off. You were no longer something they could exploit so you were cast aside as a second thought. 

The rich do not care where or how their money is made, as long as its made. Exploit a kid in Africa, no biggie, clear cut the Amazon who cares, pack workers into a plant and some die of Covid, well cost of business we can find someone else to exploit. Amazon is a perfect example, though not by far the only one, of how they treat the employees like robots. Crap wages, horrid working conditions, quotas not met you are fired, absurd quotas to meet as well. Trying everything to prevent a Union from forming among others. Walmart is another example of pay workers so low wages that a majority working in the company have to get some kind of aid to make ends meet. So tell me what is so great about this system?

Capitalism only widens the gulf between rich and poor, does the Gilded age ring a bell, does what is happening right now not open your eyes. Workers, do you see the profit from your labor? No you do not, you are asked to do more, make more, work faster, come in when called no matter what. Is that a great system to work in when you are seen as a mere dollar sign to people and nothing more? This idea that the American dream that anyone can pull themselves up and make it out of poverty is crap. If anything capitalism keeps people in poverty, desperate they will take any job just to TRY and keep their head above water. 

Consumerism is yet another problem in capitalism, make more for people to buy, convince them to buy more, make more, need more resources and people to exploit to make the things people think they need. Water and food become a commodity, look at how much produce is discarded by farmers because it didn't look right for stores to put on their shelves. How much bread is thrown away because it is one day over the expiration date, how much pre-made food is thrown away at places to eat at the end of the day which is still perfectly good to eat. People have gotten fired for taking that food that would have been thrown away to give to their kids instead of wasting it. This is the type of system you feel is the best one to live in? 

Capitalism is killing this planet, killing people all so the rich can get richer while those of us who are poor die off making profits for them. We deserve better than this, should want better than this. Until you realize this system wouldn’t hesitate to exploit you as well you are fighting for a system that cares nothing for you. This top down hierarchy needs to be broken, we need to take care of each other, start mutual aid groups so we don’t rely on the government to help us. We see how well that is happening during the pandemic and in Texas.

[scruffyssketchbook]

To that one/those anon(s)...

Are you intentionally ignorant or just misled?

The history of the US (which is where I live) is mired in slavery. And despite people coming up with a thousand different, pseudo-scientific explanations for why black people were inferior to white people, the cold hard truth was that slavery was simply good for business.

Even after the Industrial Revolution, things in the US didn't improve much. Factory work was incredibly dangerous. Companies didn't want to have to pay the money it would take for safety. Children were even used in factories.

Do you know how much the average wage is in places with no worker rights laws, such as the Global South? Pennies, if even that.

If a person...

1. Lives in a place without worker rights laws.

2. Isn't protected by the worker rights laws of the place they are currently living.

...Then companies will exploit that fact by paying close to nothing. It doesn't matter if they can't pay for the things they make, because someone else can. Is that extremely short sighted? Yes, but all of capitalism is short sighted.

Why do you think companies are moving into using automation? It isn't just because robots make less mistakes, it is because robots don't have to be paid.

It is the nature of business under capitalism to make profit, and the only two ways you can do that is by:

1. Getting workers to work for longer while being paid less.

2. Increasing consumer prices.

This is obviously oversimplified, but all business can be boiled down to this. Due to how much easier it is to hide worker exploitation than it is to hide a big price tag, companies go for the former.

"But if you don't pay the workers well, then how do you make money on products?" The million dollar question. Maybe in the 1950s this mattered, but despite how the minimum wage in the US looks stagnant, due to inflation, it has actually been steadily decreasing.

So, how do people pay for things now-a-days? Government welfare, or you work two or three jobs at once. It really is an ingenious idea. Pay people so little that they have to work multiple jobs. That way, you can squeeze out as much time from them as possible.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I really don't like to shove politics into things like this. Often because you can't talk about politics without pissing off 10+ people for hundreds of different reasons. I brought this upon myself though by bringing up politics, but I just can't keep my mouth shut with things like those last two anon asks.

I'm going to end this by saying that I am not the best person to talk about this kind of stuff. Still hold me accountable if some of the info here is wrong, but if I have to I may post links to better info than this. People will still scoff at said info, but better than what I can provide.

Author chan: Hmm. To simplify even further, It takes money to run a business. Lots of money. The more money someone could save for their business, the better. A chunk of money is paid to workers, but slaves wont get anything because they are essentially working for free. Meaning, it would be in companies best interest to keep slaves around specifically because if they do, they wouldn't have to pay people to do the jobs for them.

And to turn this topic back around to pokemon, THAT is why Pokemon labor is so sought after. Its essentially free, non human labor. Why pay construction workers when you can catch a few Machamp? Why hire seamstresses when you can catch Leavanny? Because pokemon are not human and can be easily controlled, humans use that to their advantage. And due to this being the case throughout this whole time, most people in the public are ignorant or complicit to the bad things that pokemon have to go through due to them. That's why they can so easily support people who take pokemon and make them beat each other up till they are Knocked out, among other things.

[bigskydreaming]

Biden does not have the nomination yet. It is not yet a matter of “a vote for Biden is a vote against Trump, anything else is a vote for Trump.”

And until it is, until either Sanders or Biden has all the delegates they need, peoples’ criticisms of Biden are absolutely relevant. And even should Biden GET the nomination, c’mon guys, there is STILL room to be aware of everything Biden IS and everything about him that needs OPPOSING, even WHILE still opposing Trump. This is not counter-intuitive....if you are against most of what Trump has done, because it is WRONG rather than it is just Trump who did it, and did it in obvious ways, then this is vital, I’d argue, because Biden isn’t going to address a lot of it once in the White House unless people DO keep in mind what is and isn’t likely to still be an issue in a Biden presidency.

This isn’t divisive, this is NECESSARY. If you can’t find a way to hold both truths in your mind: “Trump absolutely needs to be ousted, and opposed, and his works undone,” as well as “Biden has a long history of doing harm in his various seats, and he is the lesser of two evils ONLY in some respects and its important to know what those are because evil is still evil”....that’s something to WORK on, not just “Biden or bust.”

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for “Bernie or bust” either. I’m simply saying: This is all more complicated than accusing people of having brain worms for thinking “Guy who won’t expand health care as much” is the same as “Guy who is killing people.”

Let me be perfectly, 100% clear: If Biden gets the nomination, if it comes down to him or Trump, I am voting for Biden, hands down. But I will be doing so not thinking that Biden is in any way a more moral choice, but because I think the true danger of Trump is in him serving these past years as a rallying point for all the most vocal white supremacist and homophobic and misogynistic elements within our society, allowing them to feel emboldened and having no shame about expressing their hate openly. I think the true danger of Trump’s presidency is how little of it is actually Trump doing anything other than acting as a magnet that draws all focus and trains all eyes on him, even as his cabinet stocked to over-flowing with white-supremacists, antisemitic, homophobic and transphobic and eugenics-advocating assholes go about ACTIVELY advancing agendas of hate behind him while he serves as the catch-all for all opposition.

That absolutely needs to be opposed, and defeated, but fuck this self-defeating nonsense that this means the work will be OVER the second Trump is gone, whenever and however that happens. And I think for as much as people accuse some of us of doing the enemy’s work for them by sowing division and dividing our efforts and how this is doomed to be self-sabotaging and backfire on all of us, I think the same is true of saying things like the only real drawback to Biden is ‘doesn’t want to expand Health Care as much as Sanders whereas he’s otherwise not remotely comparable to Guy Who Is Killing People.”

Because BOTH ARE SELF-DEFEATING. Both set up only ONE THING as a goal or a focus that needs tackling and carries the implicit “and then we can rest” instead of holding up as a goal or focus that both need defeating or plenty of people are still going to die, as they’ve been dying all along.

If you’re going to go with the Devil You Know because he’s also the Lesser Evil of the two Devils You Know....

You still need to know who he is, and who he is is not just guy who won’t expand health care as much and claiming him to be such and nothing more is DANGEROUS.

Vote for Biden if it comes down to him and Trump, yes! But do so in a way that will let you get right back to work opposing all the shit HE prioritizes and stands for, every bit as much as you claim to oppose all the same with Trump!

Stop treating this as an impossible ask. It is not as simple as evil or not evil. It is as simple as making the choice that ensures most people survive....and then from there, actually ensuring that means that the most people survive. 

Which can only happen when you keep in mind how Biden will still be dangerous even once Trump is gone, and who will still need protection from him and his administration and policies, even once Trump’s are gone....and especially because there are a number of those policies that Biden, based on his own policies of the past, is not likely to prioritize or even be helpful in getting dismantled.

Any posts responding to this with anything remotely on the lines of “you’re encouraging people not to vote for Biden and thus helping Trump win” will be ignored the same way they ignore that THAT IS NOT WHAT THIS POST IS, OR SAYS, OR WANTS. I am not responsible for your inability to read what this post actually says, or your unwillingness to hold two not actually opposing viewpoints and priorities in your head at the same time. I am being as clear as I possibly can be on what I will be doing if Biden is the nominee, and why, and how none of that makes Biden’s worst flaws or history irrelevant or a distraction from Trump.

First off:

“Won’t expand healthcare that much” IS actively letting people die. GoFundMe’s biggest usage is trying to raise money for people whose health care isn’t keeping them alive and most of those goals are never actually met, and that’s literally killing people. 

Please be cognizant of what kind of people are most being killed this way. Ones who have the most trouble MEETING (often) impossible goals. The most marginalized members of society. 

If anyone is still framing the health care issue in their own heads as a matter of whether or not they can always pay for their own medical expenses, or will always be able to, please understand this disregards the many people who flat out can’t, and die every day as a result. Homeless people, people kicked out of their homes for being gay or trans or neurodivergent, not having access to quality health care for those reasons or turned away by the specialists they desperately need because the specialists’ only concerns are they can’t afford to pay. Ex-cons who are largely barred access to jobs with good medical benefits, and are largely barred access to the goodwill of random internet strangers willing to shell out some money of their own for their gofundme campaigns. And so on, and so on.

Absolutely the camps and detention facilities are a huge ongoing issue, but its a huge ongoing issue MOST being talked about throughout these entire past four years by a lot of the exact same leftists being accused of taking focus away from the very issues they are doing the most to highlight.

Now onto Biden specifically:

Are Biden’s positions on everything identical to Trump? No, but for starters, Biden wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, responsible for building more prisons, increasing prison sentences, deploying more cops, and increasing and furthering the exploitation of prison labor, etc.

He’s long been a major proponent of capital punishment, directly leading to the creation of over 60 new capital offenses including murder of federal law enforcement officers. And oh yeah, Biden also voted against limiting appeals and rejecting racial statistics in death penalty appeals.....which would be great if the vast majority of the new death penalty offenses he had a hand in creating - like the murder of police - haven’t been massively disproportionate in who they end up targeting and who ends up charged with and convicted of them: 

Like carjackings, acts of terrorism (just hardly ever acts of domestic terrorism aka the mass shootings of white supremacists, antisemites and disgruntled white guys), and the many drug-related offenses that stem from him being known for decades as a ‘drug warrior’ behind many leading efforts in the war on drugs.

Such as how in the 80s he was the head of the Senate Committee responsible for passing most of the most punitive measures against drug users, during the crack epidemic that was largely created to target and make scapegoats of lower class drug users and PoC, whom were at the time denoted as statistically more likely to use crack cocaine than powder cocaine....

And given that Biden himself sponsored and co-wrote the Anti-Drug Abuse Act which specifically and deliberately laid out hugely harsher penalties for crack cocaine use than were received for being convicted of using power cocaine.....aka a particular favorite past-time of rich white guys (including politicians and political staffers)....all during and throughout the crack epidemic Biden and his cohorts happily whipped up public moral outrage about....

This directly makes him and his political career an inciting element in the huge disparities in prison populations, all stemming from this drug warrior’s leading role in a war on drugs he helped get underway and become what it eventually became in the first place. (Please keep in mind he was famously critical of REAGAN for not being strongly enough anti-drug, as well as George H. W. Bush.)

Granted, Biden admitted his role in crafting and enforcing legislation that led to such huge disparities, at least by the time he was asked about such things in the debates of the 2007 Democratic primaries.

But to my knowledge, to this day he has yet to ever similarly walk back his role in things like oh, the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act in 1983. Which directly empowered and has steadily more and more further increased the power of drug enforcement agencies to seize assets of even just those charged with anything from drug possession to intent to distribute. Which in turn, almost always directly affects the ability of defendants to pay for their own defense instead of being limited to the representation of overworked and underpaid public defenders. Not to mention limits their ability to repeatedly avail themselves to the unlimited appeals Biden nominally has always been in favor for. 

Or there’s the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Bill which was a bit of shady shitmanship that squeezed through thanks to being attached to an unvetted, unrelated and super fucking vague child protection bill that has often been criticized as overreaching in scope. And this IDAP Bill, despite its superficially stated intentions, has historically most often been used by DEA agents as an intimidation tactic wielded against drug-reform protestors at rallies and other such events.

Biden might never have openly had his support base chanting Build the Wall, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t vote for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which partially funded the construction of 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border. 

And his stance for over ten years about whether he’d allow sanctuary cities to ignore federal law has been a clear and concise NO, which y’know, given that’s kinda the whole point of sanctuary cities....and given that sanctuary cities have been absolutely CRUCIAL to even attempting to stave off the worst of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, travel bans, etc.....this may not make him worse than Trump, but I fail to see that particular stance helping all that much even after Trump is gone. 

Because Biden might not have put the same efforts into motion as Trump has, had he been the one in office, but I do not for a second believe he will in ANY way make reversing or undoing some of them his priority. All of that is just as likely to be an uphill battle in a Biden presidency. His track record speaks to itself as to how much he’s likely to make anything like abolishing ICE or getting rid of the detention facilities his first order of business - or even second, third, or even tenth....UNLESS PEOPLE FORCE HIM TO MAKE IT THAT, INSTEAD OF JUST TRUSTING THAT HE WILL BECAUSE HE’S NOT TRUMP.

The caveat I have here is that Biden and his inner circle and support base are unlikely to ever be that visibly resistant to repealing Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, or that visibly in favor of what’s happened there, and he isn’t going to campaign on a platform of overt racism.....but that’s kinda the point. He’s never needed to, in order to still do a huge amount of damage to an untold number of lives over the decades, all while being able to claim to be nominally or superficially progressive and use that to advance his own career. 

Trump doesn’t care about hiding his racism....and Biden doesn’t try all that hard to either. But he’s always known he doesn’t really have to try all that hard....just to hide it just enough to claim it isn’t there and its nothing worth anyone worrying about or pushing back against. Plausible deniability - made all the easier and all the more plausible by having someone like Trump to point to and know just by doing so people will breathe a sigh of relief because whew, at least he’s not Trump. Not that this is likely a huge comfort to the people killed long before now, due to his prison policies, capital offense expansion, and war on drugs that happen to not be the right kind of drugs, or being snorted in the right form of those drugs, or snorted by the right people.

And putting a face and a claim to things that absolutely none of his actual efforts back up or are even aimed in the same direction as....this is something that extends to pretty much everything else about him. 

Yeah, he reversed his stance on voting for DADT and DOMA in years prior, when as Vice President he said he was totally fine with the idea of men marrying men and women marrying women and each enjoying all the same benefits and civil rights and liberties as anyone else. Course, that doesn’t actually reverse how he voted, nor did he actually have anything to do with striking down the results of his and others’ votes as unconstitutional.

And yeah, Biden drafted the Violence Against Women Act, which he’s famously called the most significant piece of legislation he’s crafted throughout his political career and the one he’s most proud of, citing it as the beginning of a ‘historic commitment to women and children victimized by domestic violence and sexual assault.’ Not that it helped Anita Hill that much, nor that he ever seemed all that interested in helping, believing or supporting her, despite whatever he may have claimed a couple years ago at the start of the #MeToo movement or around the Kavanaugh proceedings, when he stated he’d always believed Anita Hill and voted against Clarence Thomas.

(With Thomas of course still a member of the Supreme Court, alongside Kavanaugh now, thanks to Trump. And Thomas still being famously considered one of its most conservative justices. And still someone whose appointment to the Court might not ever have happened had not Biden - the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing Thomas’ nomination to the court -  made the choice to never call forward four female witnesses who’d been waiting in the wings the whole time to testify on Hill’s behalf and speak to her credibility. With this decision of Biden’s only ever being described as the result of a ‘private, compromise deal between Republicans and then-Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden,’ after which all four other women’s testimony was deemed irrelevant, and thus a waste of the court’s time.

And sure, Biden as of just last year supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, that he’s only supported since as far back as ‘76. The Hyde Amendment, of course, blocks federal funding from being used to pay for an abortion except in the specific provision of an abortion being needed to save the woman’s life, or when the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape. Of course, even through all those decades that Biden did support the Hyde Amendment, he pretty famously never felt it went far enough, and thought it shouldn’t include a provision allowing for federal funds to be used to pay for an abortion that stemmed from incest or rape. But that doesn’t speak to his personality or priorities either, obviously, since he took it back (while preparing to hopefully run against pussy-grabbing Trump).

And Biden’s not as interested in giving billionaires tax cuts as Trump is, for instance, since he was always against even George W. Bush’s tax cuts for Americans who made more than one million dollars a year. He was always of the belief that this money should then be put in a dedicated Homeland Security and Public Safety Trust Fund, to invest specifically in increased law enforcement. Joey does love him some cops.

And Biden’s not quite as likely to go to war compared to how often Trump seems to have us poised on the brink of it. Biden only favored sending American troops to Darfur, is a self-described Zionist who has defended various acts of aggression by the Israeli army against Palestinians, and was of the opinion that the biggest problem with our involvement in the Syrian Civil War was that Europe didn’t trust we had a plan there.  

Of course, much like with numerous other stances, its not like there’s not plenty to point to as proof Biden’s invested in keeping us out of any international conflicts. For instance, he’s been a longterm advocate for ‘hard-headed diplomacy’ against Iran that included pushing for coordinated international sanctions against them...except then he voted against a measure to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, said war with Iran wouldn’t just be a mistake, it’d be a disaster, and threatened to personally begin impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush if he attempted to start a war with Iran. This was in December of 2007. Course, then in September 2008, he said that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was a terrorist organization and that the Bush administration already had the power and right to declare them as such, soooo......hmm.

And Biden did vote against the first Gulf War in 1990. Then supported the use of force against Iraq in 1998 and expressed a commitment to taking down Hussein, even if it meant being in it for the long haul....which as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, he ratified by voting to authorize war against Iraq, going on record as firmly believing that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nuclear weapons. 

Then again, in 2006, Biden did go on to say that the original authorization for going to war with Iraq had been a mistake that was due to Bush “using his congressional authority unwisely” (and that Biden had no role in unwisely helping him obtain), and that there were no stockpiled weapons in Iraq and likely never had been. 

Which Biden then followed up in 2008 by saying in his opinion the real mistake had been in labeling Iraq the focus of the War on Terror, instead of Afghanistan, which he believed was really the focus all along, and that we should leave Iraq....and shift our focus fully back there. Because see, the problem was the war in Iraq was a war of choice, whereas the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity.

And he did have this to say in 2011 about getting involved in the conflict in Libya: "NATO got it right. In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past."

Course, five years later in 2016, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Biden stated he was "strongly against going to Libya" due to the instability it would cause within the country. He said, "My question was, 'OK, tell me what happens.' He's gone. What happens? Doesn't the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn't it become a place where it becomes a petri dish for the growth of extremism? And it has."

And then there’s his stances on North Korea...and Russia...and Central America....and Cuba.....all of which can be summed up as “that’s Joe Biden’s hot take on this issue, tune back in next week where he plays devil’s advocate with himself and argues the exact opposite.”

So yeah, all of that and more is who Biden is and always has been. Do not buy into him being someone who has grown and changed, because he’s more recently said the right things - especially as opposed to Trump. Biden has ALWAYS said the right things for the time he’s saying them at.....and history has always shown him willing to say the exact opposite, as soon as its more to his advantage to change his tune to that instead.

He is not the lesser of two evils, IMO, he is just the less overt of two evils. But make no mistake.....I can not tell anyone what to do, nor am I trying to, ultimately, beyond just asking people to BE AWARE of things like this. I can only really tell you what I’m going to do, and if Biden gets the nomination, I AM going to vote for him, not just to get rid of Trump....but everyone Trump brought with him, and the way Trump’s spent four years assuring every hateful piece of shit in America that they are not alone in their hate, and they have presidential approval.

I am simply ALSO saying, at the same time, that I do believe that even a Biden presidency can help push back against this, by virtue of at least being the American people saying We Do Not Support Trump or Want Him Back in enough quantities as to shame at least some of the more hateful and cowardly elements of our society back into silence.....

But that even while doing so, it IMO will remain MORE CRUCIAL THAN EVER to keep in mind.....none of those people or their hate simply sprang into being when Trump took office. They were here all along, and just because BEFORE Trump many of them weren’t brave enough to be seen out of the shadows, doesn’t mean that politicians like Joe Biden haven’t seen them and been fine with them and even agreeing with them and catering to them in various ways all along. Its just, unlike Trump, Biden cares too much about being seen as doing and saying the right things, the progressive things, to do any of those dealings openly, speak to any of those elements directly. But that’s never meant he’s above dealing with them, or profiting from their support.

So elect Biden if that’s what we have to do, even if only because his desire to be seen as progressive is at least a lever to ply between him and such elements of our society, where no such lever exists between Trump and them at all.

But it needs to be remembered that such a lever is only as effective as WE MAKE USE OF IT, AND FORCE HIM TO CATER MORE TO ACTUAL PROGRESSIVE PUBLIC OPINION RATHER THAN ALLOW HIM THE TIME AND ENERGY TO BE TWO-FACED THE MOMENTS OUR BACKS ARE TURNED.

And that if we do not keep this in mind, the latter is very much something Biden will do, just as he has done it countless times before.

AND ALSO PLEASE KEEP IN MIND:

HE STILL IS NOT THE NOMINEE YET, AND UNTIL HE IS STOP TAKING IT FOR GRANTED.

There is a marked difference between preparing for less than your preferred scenarios, and taking for granted that you might as well go ahead and settle for them already.

Too much of the latter has too much to do with the current state of our country, SO WHAT IF WE STOPPED DOING IT.

[rametarin]

tempting.

Reflecting on my health issues, since age 17. And my living situation.

So since around the age of 16, I’ve been plagued with unpredictable bowel problems and digestive ills. Like, everybody gets constipated every now and then, but I mean I’d get just, excruciatingly backed up and my family wouldn’t help me get seen or anything.

Basically from the time I was 18 onwards I was told my medical bills were mine. But oh by the way [Ram. Not my real name, but the name fam calls me], you gotta pay us every dollar that isn’t devoted to keeping yourself alive :^)

I’d be like, family, I cannot afford this, it’d be in your best interests to invest in my health so I can figure out what’s fucky about my bowels and stomach so this can stop happening, I can live a normal life, and we can all continue on our merry way.

Basically I was told, “tough shit, do it yourself, also pay your fair share to The Family” (aka, give mom all your money.)

It was never just fear of homelessness, but fear of homelessness while my GI tract was fucky and my teeth were rotting out of my head that made escape from here impossible. It’s why I didn’t just climb into a hole in the wall and escape this garbage fire of a mother and do that bootstrap shit. Because it sincerely made  me wonder sometimes if I was being poisoned by my mother to keep me powerless and in need of help, but perpetually weakened to where the best I could do is move towards help but just be put on a treadmill for someone elses financial benefit.

Perhaps my bitterness makes just a touch more sense now, right? Because Maine is a long-drive state. You need a car. You absolutely need a car to get anywhere. Not having one means you walk everywhere, you ride a bike everywhere and are FUCKED during the winter, or you go nowhere because you don’t have anywhere you need to be and don’t drive.

Now that said, imagine having bowel and ass problems so bad just the idea of driving makes you question if it’s safe for you to even be on the road.

That has been my existence for twenty years now, because my family wants me just close enough to extract what mom things “she’s owed,” but absolutely will not help me with anything. There’s no security in staying here because the whole fucking POINT of putting up with a family’s infantilizing “everything has its place” mentality, is you’re able to wisely squirrel away your income without paying a landlord anything and your income going up in smoke

If your mother is just the worst sort of landlord, you’re basically just paying a narcissistic bitch of a mother to be a narcissistic bitch of a mother. There’s absolutely no upside.

So I’ve been stuck in this virtual tutorial of an existence because my own digestive system was torturing me and seriously deleting my ability to operate independently. And mom, whom has always wanted absolute control over my finances and my future, saw it as a holistic way of penning me up and making be desperate. Never a wasted opportunity with this fucking monster.

Well. I eliminated cottonseed oil and chicken proteins from my diet and, while not perfect, the amount of excruciating pain and pressure and weird cold-acidic burning in my back and bowels has subsided a lot. As well as my stomach issues receded considerably.

The truth is I was loathe to even try and escape without figuring out these problems, but I couldn’t figure them out because I never had the money. I tried to get a barium enema x-ray when I was 17 and suffering a massive, excruciating flareup. I missed prom (I didn’t have anyone to go with anyway) because of what felt like it could’ve been anything from gall stones to bowel cancer.

Had a big useless cleanse that was excruciating, then had the guys that give the barium enema tell me, “lube is expensive” when I screamed about how much it hurt to have the thing shoved up my ass. My already inflamed, tender ass.

Absolutely nothing was found in my bowels. Which did absolutely nothing to explain why they felt inflamed and miserable. But it did give me a $1,700 bill, which proved.. absolutely nothing except they couldn’t find tumors or any object lodged in my butt. Given how it took me two summers to acquire almost that much working a shit job for my shithead father’s girlfriend, maybe you can appreciate how heartbreaking that is. Spending all that money and you don’t even learn WHY you’re suffering, you just learn why you aren’t.

And today I still fume with rage over being told, “ass lube is expensive so we’re skimping on it” and then be charged almost two thousand god damned dollars.

Absolutely could not get my family to help me pursue any other avenue. They just kept insisting, “it’s all anxiety, it’s all in your head. You just need to get off the computer and do more manual labor/make us money and your problems will go away. :^)”

But then they would not help me do it. They wanted me to take on all the risk while they got the guaranteed income from my needing to be around them.

My need to grow step by step was their opportunity to mitigate my life, every step of the way, so non-compliance with their exploitation would result in homelessness and complete uprooting. If I wasn’t going to voluntarily follow draconian rules, then I’d be governed by those rules anyway in the absence of them being verbally stated. Just, using poverty and immobility as a way to impose it.

But I refused to comply. I wasn’t going to suffer every day unendingly AND get my income snatched away, BY MY OWN GOD DAMNED FAMILY. A family that didn’t even pay RENT to live in the house we were living in at the time, and a family that made 65-70K a year, with another house they owned in a less convenient location worth $350K. My mother had ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS other than fun and profit as an excuse as to why I needed to buy, “the family,” a car. Other than making it the “family” car giving her defacto control over it but my obligation to pay for it. Just another indirect way to give her absolute control over my options and alternatives.

So I didn’t work. I sat at home and dealt with her abusive bullshit, because it was the only card I had left in my deck. She didn’t want the stigma of throwing out a sick man without a license, a car or any savings. I didn’t want to voluntarily throw myself out and die in the street.

So I dealt with my health problems as best as I could. There were a good many times living in this house, that we’ve lived in and she’s owned since 2006, that I questioned whether I should phone an ambulance and just say fuck it, go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt just goosechasing this problem, thanks to the backdoor socialized medical system that exploits the profit motive but uses government assured payment fixed to taxes in order to afford it.

That’s probably what pisses me off the most about my situation. Our medical system has been turned into a farce by socialists deliberately making medicine as toxic as they fucking can in order to then bat their eyes and go, “Bet you just want single payer and to basically make medicine another ring of the government NOW, don’t youuuuuu? It’d make all those woes go awayyyyy!” while turning the screws to our bodies by denying us affordable medicine. All while blaming capitalism for shit that’s assured to work at any cost by the government.

Other people pine for a more socialized system to make the disgusting exploitation and abuse stop. But the truth is, that’s just like wanting to marry a pirate so they’ll stop lobbing cannonballs and demanding tolls at sea from you. Yes, the actual literal war on you and your community and your personal sovereignty will be over, but you’ll also be institutionalizing pirates in order to make them stop taking complete advantage of you on their terms instead of taking complete advantage of you on mostly-their terms but you get to act like you’re consenting to it.

I digressed. Anyway...

Well. I’m curious about pursuing a shit job just to see if I can KEEP some income, but I know, and have always known, my mother will not allow me to do anything with that money but barely keep myself alive. While she uses it to just buy enormous bulk loads of garbage and hoards them in the corners, or throws hundreds of dollars at friends-of-the-family/neighbors and extracts that money from me to do it.

I know going into it that the job would be otherwise worthless. She wants her ten pounds of flesh a year from me, and if I worked, there’d be no getting around it. She isn’t going to allow me to profit living with her, in any way. Everything has to revolve around her, or I get made homeless.

But trying to hold a job would mean possible (there’s that ‘potential vs. guarantee dichotomy again) feelers out to couches to surf on. Or credit building.

It’d still be a sexless existence dictated by someone so fucking petty that they can’t help you fix a broken tooth but do miraculously have the money to buy you a cell phone and a plan, “if you want it,” purely to always have you at their beck and call and/or have control over your phone plan. And it’d mean committing to something that runs a minimum of a year while being able to have a foot crushing my neck and destroying whatever I’m trying to do in an instant.

but it’d also mean being able to financially pursue what’s wrong with me and fixing it.

But I will hold this grudge against women and the actual, objective privilege they have from the legal system and our social system in the US for the rest of my life. Everybody around me saw what she was doing to me and my life, and they’ve done and said absolutely nothing. An abusive woman in this society is basically on par with the richest barons in a young adult novel, and all you have to do to get that kind of institutional power, rich or poor, is have a vagina and be a mom.

Then other women will sympathize with the mother, whom can never be totally wrong about anything, and at best you might get silence and indifference about the way you’re treated.

You can be cornered, debased and neglected until you’re a greasy shoggoth of a person, and if it’s a woman doing this to you, it’s your fault for not escaping. After having every escape route made as torturous and unsustainable an option as possible, you’ll be held accountable for yourself.

I’ll be relieved and pleased when this disgusting pig of a woman dies of natural causes. She’ll have gotten away with grabbing my life and thrashing around with it for 20 years while the world passed me by, just to keep control, just for fun, just for profit.

But in the meantime, maybe there’s a local niche I can fill. Just enough of something to find somewhere else to live. Without conditions making it more damning to pursue than nothing at all.

But I’m not hoping too hard.

[shanastoryteller]

okay some of you are like. really missing the point here, so we're just going get real basic.

I changed the house elf system to give it nuance. on purpose.

the canon system is just straight up "house elves love working for no pay, who cares if they're beaten for it, let's all mock Hermione for trying to change it"

that's not nuanced, or complicated, or interesting. if anything is slavery apologism, it's that. the thing about canon is that it's terrible. I've said this before, but if you're going to address house elves and not just hand wave their plight away, your options are just straight up revolution because slavery is uh fucking terrible and intolerable at every level, or you have to change it to make canon slightly less awful. so that's what I did.

house elves now directly benefit from the servant bond when they didnt before. magic is their equivalent to money, and they can use it to get anything they desire except clothes, and the only reason that clothes restriction exists is because I'm working somewhat within the confines of the rules jkr has set up. they used to be forest keepers, but less forest meant more house elves who needed somewhere else to go and some other source of magic.

but it's not all sunshine and puppies. it's not designed to be. because house elves can hurt the people they're bound to and those people are powerless to stop them, they resort to physical punishments. because firing a house elf for being disloyal is a death sentence, it's not done lightly, and it's illegal to do so if theres no family to take their bond specifically for that reason. and people abuse their power over house elves, just like bosses abuse their power over their employees, employees who's just can't quit because they live paycheck to paycheck and without money theyll starve. just like a house elf who doesnt have access to magic.

wizards don't like being bound to house elves. it's a servant in return for being extremely vulnerable and literally having them feed off your energy. the ultra rich are usually the only ones with house elves, and i think they'd really rather just pay a few gallons a week than be vulnerable.

what do you do then? what's the solution? it's a flawed, exploitative system, but it's not the black and white easy "this is terrible" of slavery. its modeled after capitalism. terrible, of course, but not so terrible that most of us just dont carry on living with it, and hey. it's really working out to the benefit of some of us, even if a lot of other people are a pay cut away from death.

characters realizing that the house elf system and flawed and needs to change is a journey, because part of growing up is realizing that complicated things are more messed up than you thought.

this isn't me, a white person, wringing my hands and clutching my pearls because how dare someone accuse me, a liberal, of slavery apologism

this is me, an author, saying that by calling the house elf system slavery, you take all that nuance and complications and grey area that I put in so much effort to include, and you throw it away. slavery isnt nuanced or complicated or justifiable in any way. it's just terrible. you turn characters growing up and realizing things arent as easy and straightforward as they seemed when they were younger, and turn it into "they approve of slavery, actually"

this most recent chapter we have draco apologizing to dobby, saying the system is wrong, and going "Hermione was right about house elves, I should talk to her about the research shes been doing to help and offer to help her"

I put a lot of set up into that. it took us a long time to get there. and by calling an exploitive system where creatures are compensated for their labor and not considered property and calling it slavery, all that effort and character growth and nuance is just ... destroyed

and i, unsurprisingly, take issue with that

[lysergicdialectic]

Matt Christman on his satori moment and prestige TV

Excerpted from “Better Call Saul? More Like Worse Write, Paul,” April 26, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Hello friends. So yesterday—I don’t know if anyone watched the stream I did yesterday—I was kind of tripping balls. And at the end of it, after I finished recording, I sat in my little back area, my little fenced-in area, and I looked up at the sky for a while. And wouldn’t you know it, I ended up having one of those legitimate, full-blown satori moments. Actual enlightenment, actual transcendence, like bloop. One second, one with the universe. Whatever you want to call it—ego death, blah-blah-blah—I was there.

I had a moment of complete identification and oneness with the universe, and then of course, the second it was over, I came back into my body and became reincarnated, reembodied as me. And of course, I started falling away from that moment as the rock started rolling back down the hill. I was Sisyphus, and I got to walk down it. And the thing about Sisyphus is, Camus says you must imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s one of those things that just sounds like a zen koan

I understand it now, because happy Sisyphus is the one who gets to the top of the hill as often as possible because being on the top of the hill is fun, and walking down the hill—it's not as fun as being on the top of the hill but it's a lot more fun than pushing the goddamn rock up the hill. So you just gotta increase the circuits. You can't keep pushing the boulder up one long gradient, which is what most people do and what we're cursed to do because of our material realities that constrain us and chain us . . . . As I was coming back to my body and I was going down the hill and falling away, the first word that came into my mind after—because obviously in that time and space there's no words because language is obliterated. It's not needed because you are one; there's no need to translate. As soon as I came back to my body, the first word, it was an image in the sky of a crashing wave and the word Yes. And I realized that a lot of the stuff I've been trying to get my head around, in terms of spirituality ad theology and questions of body and mind and all these things that I've been working on in my head, and I feel I've been making progress but I've been struggling with—the word Yes cut through a lot of it and it created a symbolic order that allowed me to make sense of everything I've been trying to get my head around. And since my specific orientation as age, race, gender, class background, language, culture, all that stuff—when I heard Yes, the first thing I thought was the end of Ulysses. And all of a sudden, I had one moment of thinking "Oh, that's what it's like to have read Ulysses," and then I was like, "Oh wait a minute," and then I thought, "Oh great, now I don't have to read Ulysses." But then I realized: I have to read Ulysses now, even if it's bad, even if it's a slog, even if it's whatever, because it will remind me of that moment, and doing it every day will remind me of that moment and keep me living in a way that gets me there, or gets me closer to it. It will inform my actions and it will inform my behavior toward the people around me, and it will make them turn toward that sound. So I'm going to start reading Ulysses.

Like I said, it doesn't matter if it's good or not. It doesn't matter if it's worth it. What matters is reading it. The reason that I'm thinking within these terms is, I did a tweet that got a lot of people mad about Better Call Saul, because I said that Better Call Saul, in my opinion, suffers from trying to be a prestige TV show, given the ingredients it has. You've got Saul Goodman here, played by Bob Odenkirk, a great character we all love, and we've got these great people behind the casts, great cinematography. And it ended up being the show it is, with its basically copying the rhythms of Breaking Bad and becoming a Breaking Bad explicit prequel filling in all these gaps of Where'd Hector get his bell? and things like that. That's inevitable as soon as it had to fit the format of a prestige show. As a prestige show, it probably is great. I've watched enough of it. Yes, it fits all the terms that we discuss when we talk about prestige television. Yes. I would say it's as good as Mad Men, it's as good as Breaking Bad or even better, it's as good as The Sopranos, whatever you want to say. Fine. It's good. But it's good in the context of a television show. I've written about prestige TV and I've talked a lot about it, and I was trying to articulate something that I've never actually been able to explicitly say in a way that I felt like I was saying what I meant, let alone if other people understood it. What I realized with this mental Ginsu now to chop everything up that I encounter is, my problem with Better Call Saul is that it is a product of the demiurge. Better Call Saul, like all prestige TV, is a product of the demiurge. Art is an attempt to reach the etheric plane. Art is always an attempt to strike at the heart of the universe, to strike God and become God. Everything attempt at art is that, in some small way, the way that the person making it can do or try to do. It's the urge to do it. But then, there's the reality, the embodied reality of being a person, being a body that has needs. Those material needs that shape the world and limit us, that's what the Gnostics talked about. That's what the demiurge, the evil god who creates the material world that is illusion below the spiritual realm. In this case, if we're talking about art, in an objective sense, television is a more degraded form of art than literature by the very simple fact that it is more commercial. And you might say, "Well, Stephen King makes a lot of money." No. What I mean by that is, the writing of a book and the publication of a book are relatively capital unintensive. Making a television show is much more, by exponential numbers, more capitally intensive than a book, which means that whatever art is in it has been constrained by being a product of a commercial enterprise. That means that television can be good. Every show could be fun. You should enjoy every program you watch. Either stop watching it if you can't find yourself enjoying it, or find something about it that speaks to you. Everything should be enjoyable, artistically. And if it isn't, find something that will, something that you can work it. Some things aren't going to work because the talent of the people involved, the amount of resources put to it, the amount of commercialism leavened within it, it's going to hit you and make it hard. That is why I see Better Call Saul, and I go egh because it just reminds me that we're all praying to this degraded version of art. And the reason we are is because we have been immiserated culturally. Capitalism has done that to us. That's not something you can argue. Our tastes are more broad, and poptimists like to say, "You're being a snob." But I'm recognizing a goddamn reality here, which is that there's a structural difference between art depending on how much they are required to make money, the degree to which a piece of art needs to make money to be worth the endeavor leavens its individual artistic expression because it has to be translatable to the largest possible group. The art, in translation, gets lost. And that's fine. You can find the sparks. You can find the things you like in anything, including Breaking Bad. But because we have lost free time, we've lost energy, we've lost the ability to take a small moment and treasure something and really dig into it, that we need our entertainments to go down easier. They have to be absorbable because we don't have the energy, the mental or spiritual energy to sit with anything because of where we are, because of how degraded our conditions are, because of our bodies essentially. All these institutions—capitalism, feudalism before it, slave labor—every class order created was created to manage the issue of keeping bodies alive, basically. That creates our structures. It creates our economic structures, it creates our art, it creates our culture, it creates our personalities, it creates our religions, it creates our ideologies, it creates everything. It creates this computer, it creates this phone. It creates this shirt, and it creates the systems that create the hyperexploitation that goes into making this shirt, the gunpoint slave coltan mining that makes this phone. Those things are all necessary to the degree to which they allow for the human bodies to be restored.

Then there is the temptation to seek pleasure, and pleasure always comes at the expense of someone else. Pleasure always comes at the expense of us—always. All pleasure is at the expense of others and at the expense of ourselves—karma. And so these institutions get warped. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." What that means is, the crookedness is the fact that we have bodies. That's not a sin, it's not bad—the Christian thing is another mistranslation from the initial true divining of reality. The material world gets in the way, and it gets baffled, and so Christianity gets muddled up with all this stuff. When you say, "The body creates this world," it's not bad—it's inevitable. It's inherent. We have to deal with it. We have to create a society that minimizes suffering by spreading pleasure out as broadly as possible, not concentrating on any individual because doing so creates a situation where you cause misery to all the people whose exploitation goes into the pleasure of that one person, and that one person's pleasure is fleeting. It's going away. They're going to face the flames of judgment, which is the coming of death, with the terror of hell in their heart. There's no stopping it. And so no one has gotten any sort of benefit out of that arrangement.

We have to have some suffering and pleasure just to keep the bodies going, but it should be spread out. That's where the dialectic comes in. Somebody said, "Go back to Marxism." I'm sorry, but this moment made me realize that these are nesting series of thoughts, ideologies, and structures, and guess what? Nesting in here is dialectical materialism. Maybe Gnosticism or Buddhism or something or The Dark Tower or I was talking about Infinite Jest the other day and maybe Ulysses, those things help structure your thoughts and make it easier for you to behave in a way that reduces suffering. But then you need structures within other people, amongst people in the social realm of economic production and political economy, that need to serve those ends as well. Dialectical materialism is the drive toward that. It is the drive toward a world where everyone is free of the bodily temptations and distractions to reach full enlightenment. When people talk about "fully automated luxury space communism," there's a lot wrong with that notion. But the truth thing that's reckoning with is that the only way for universal human enlightenment—which, if enlightenment is the individual goal, as it well should be, then presumably it is the universal goal for all humans—then you need some sort of taming and instrumentalizing of technology toward the goal of human enlightenment as opposed to the dark singularity we're moving toward, where the machine takes over and totally annihilates human spirituality and turns us into machines. We don't want that. It requires a lack until you get to the top, and you don't get there and stay there. It's a process. You go back, and you come back. And you go back and you come back. It's pushing the fucking boulder up the hill. That's why it's compatible. If we want that version, universal enlightenment, then it requires, in my view (and I am wrong, at some point in time in the future I am wrong. I think I'm right now. I have enough history around me and I think I'm smart enough and compassionate enough together to figure out broadly what's right. More specifically, as it gets drilled down, I don't have the information or the intelligence to specifically answer technological questions, social questions, whatever. Broadly, I think I'm right, but I'm not right forever. At some point in the future, at some point in space time, everything I think is going to be wrong. Every single thing, and that's true of you too. Every human being. Every single thing you have ever thought, every decision you've ever made, has been wrong. We are all, in fact, the sum total of our wrong choices. This is all a way of saying you can enjoy Better Caul Saul. To enjoy Better Call Saul, of course, it doesn't make sense to watch it if you're not going to enjoy it. Watching it to get made at it, you're getting pleasure somewhere else. And at the end of the day, the pleasure's at others' expense because what are you going to do? You're going to go online like I have a million times and kick people in the dick and say, "Ha! Fuck you. This show is stupid, and you're dumb for liking it." That's the pleasure I get out of it, and that's at someone else's expense as all pleasure is.

What makes a decision right or wrong? It's not defined until afterwards. It's only retrospectively known because all time has already happened. Everything has already happened. Everything has already happened. And when I say everything, I mean not just in your life, I mean the lives of all beings to exist or ever will exist. So you can enjoy Better Call Saul, but you see the way people are defensive about the show and see the way they get mad about it—and even if they're not mad, the way they insist on its greatness. It's because they have decided that instead of acknowledging the lack at the heart of prestige as a concept, instead of saying, "Aw, this is sad that now we have to get our real artistic nourishment from something this banalized"—It's banalized! It has to be, because it's commercial. It has to be banalized—"I have to try so hard to squeeze meaning out of it not for my enjoyment of the show but to convince other people and myself that watching this is actually good." It's not necessarily bad. It's not going to doom you to like it in that way. But it implies attachment to something that is degraded without acknowledging and recognizing the degradation. And without the ability to recognize the degradation, you cannot act in a way in your life to move away from degradation in your interpersonal relationships, in your preferences, what you do with your time, and what you think politics should be and how you should act on political beliefs. If prestige TV is good enough, then why do you need to change anything?

So commercial art is bad?

No. No art is bad. Every individual's relationship to a piece of art is completely individualized, and it's a result of translations. All art is translation. All existence is translation—your brain literally translating to you through language what is happening to it, first in senses, then in symbols, then in words: words to yourself and then words to others. At every level, the translation breaks down. There is loss between every level of translation. By the time you're trying to express an idea through art, you're way down here. You're so degraded. But if you're talented enough and enough people see it and you're collaborating with others and you make something together, because collaboration, depending on the art form and the project, helps signal boost and bring together individual insights and individual talents, and it creates something.

There's something to it. There's a spark to all art. It's just either the talent was not there to express it fully, or it was a piece of cynical dogshit. But even the cynical dogshit will have things in it that might be enjoyable. You can watch a piece of cynical dogshit with the right frame of mind and enjoy it. The danger is when you mistake the shadows for the figures, and that is what prestige television does. If we just accepted, "Yeah, TV, it's the idiot box," the shows could be the same, have the same stuff, and it would be fine. But a culture that requires television to be good is one that has not acknowledged its barriers . . . .

Plato's stuff, I never really got until now. Now I get it. Gnosticism, I never really got. I feel like I get it. And of course I get it less now than I did yesterday, and I will get it less tomorrow than I do today. My task is to get back, to remember that moment, remember what I knew then, and try to find it again. The way to do that is by daily acts by the Eightfold Path, by the Path of the Beam. What that really means is not just I'm going to say, "Epic path of the beam," when I see a fucking Stephen King reference. It means my every action informed by the knowledge of what is there—the imminence behind reality, the real universe beyond the demiurgical one—and then trying to get there. That means these reading projects are not about learning something. It's about re-learning something, because you don't know anything. You only have echoing, clanging notions in your head. A lot of them contradict each other. The only way to thread them together in a way to make them useful is to sit with them. And that is not something that anything we do encourages. Not something anything in our culture encourages, is sitting with these questions. Existential materialism, whatever you want to call it. Gnosticism, whatever you guys want to say . . . .

Gnosticism says this is a degraded shadow realm. It is. It's a degraded shadow realm of material reality, but we have to work with it. How do we work with it? How do we thread it? How do we push it in a direction that leads toward the chance for as many people as possible to achieve transcendence and direct it back to themselves in the future and to everyone else who can hear them in their lives and people around them? It's by resolving contradiction, because contradiction is at the heart of existence. No and yes. The universe is yes, and it's always there. It is outside of space and time. The world is no, and we are all—every person, every being in the universe, every photon, every chain of chemicals, anything—those things are all no's. Those are different levels of rejecting. And the thing is, there aren't that many of them. But there doesn't need to be, because yes exists outside of space and time. It is the accumulation of no's over this endless expanse, they are accumulated in actual reality, this world. And you've gotta get back to yes.

I say that and you hear it, and it's like, "What does that mean?" And for me, these words, "getting back to yes," they're freighted with my memory of this experience. You are only hearing my words retell it, which is fraudulence, as Nietzsche points out. All language is a lie. All I can do is use my talents—to such extent that they exist—and my will, my morality, my intellect, to try to push in the direction of the good.

So that's Better Call Saul.

[jlf23tumble]

I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on different ways they interact with fans in light of their personalities and teams and so on, if you’d like to!

God, I’m so sorry that this has taken me so long to answer! I *do* talk some shit in interviews have some thoughts about their current management teams and how they *do* seem to reflect each artist’s myriad goals and constraints, how they aren’t sabotaging things (given what we know is going on), how they have to walk such a fine line with fan involvement, but lordt, that is not a popular opinion. 

Probably because 1Dhq actually *did* know what they were doing: they wanted to exploit five young guys for immediate fame and short-term gain, and they did it primarily through constant fan access and overly publicized private lives (real and fake). Turning that spigot off or trying to change its course isn’t exactly easy because a lot of fans struggle to a) absorb the post-1D landscape in general and their role in it in particular, let alone b) understand how much the music industry has changed from even one year ago (spoiler: it requires following other artists closely, and I just don’t see that here). Add to that the fact that these men themselves (yes, they’re all in their mid-20s now, they’re men) seem to encourage intense fan engagement when it serves a specific purpose (looking at you in anger, recent tweet from Niall), and the waters just get muddier, le sigh.

I keep writing and rewriting my thoughts, and they keep spiraling out of control because this is a topic that fires me UP, especially because it mixes in some things that I could spend hours venting about:

the amateur marketing experts and business analysts who feel qualified to make sweeping statements in spite of having no clue about the goals, budgets, constraints, personal life issues, conflicting schedules, or anything else happening bts

the baffling assumption that any of these guys is a struggling indie artist aged 19 who desperately requires any of our unpaid labor and angst, 24/7 (OR TO CALL UP RADIO STATIONS, NIALL)…they are male millionaires at this very moment in time

the policing of anyone enjoying anything because they just don’t get how terrible it is that a magazine with the characters from “Frozen” on the cover “leaked” an album title

the underlying misogyny in so much of allll of this (and this one ALONE I could go on about for days)

the use of words like, “I’m so confused about why xx is or isn’t happening”…because, yeah, makes sense, YOU DON’T WORK THERE, IT ISN’T YOUR JOB TO BE UNCONFUSED ABOUT IT

Deep breath, yes, I know, “not all fans”: lots of people like me focus on loving them, supporting them, buying songs, buying an album, going to a show, buying some merch, screaming about bullshit on tumblr. But a small but extremely vocal minority screams about how I’m not doing “enough,” and newsflash, I’m not paid to stream songs all night or call radio stations or make presents or absorb the levels of anxiety I see in some inboxes, and more to the point, I’m not paid to feel guilty about it from a fellow fan or deal with a bunch of misguided anonymous bullshit. I get tired just thinking about it, tbqh. Teams of people literally DO get paid to handle the majority of that, in fact.

That’s my hot take on the fan side, anyway (I wrote up a full breakdown per man in the D—how each team is actually honoring each man’s various goals, how fans are involved in that process because it’s literally part of the promo process, you are a commodity, etc.—but it’s winter, and I’m tired, so I’ll save that for some other time). The bigger issue is what these teams actually manage, and why I feel some sympathy for them (NOTE THAT I’M NOT A DUMBASS, THE FOLLOWING IS GIVEN: the music industry is fucking awful, mgmt teams get paid handsomely, most of them are monsters, artists get screwed no matter what, I don’t lose sleep over a mgmt team’s pain, deep breath, calm down). 

As Kim said waaaay more eloquently than I ever could when I was in full vent mode with her yesterday (??? feels like years ago, lmao), people don’t give their teams enough credit for the impossibly complicated situations they’re managing. This was her overall point, and I completely agree: these guys are all closeted, but it’s so much more complicated than “some fans cling to their het fantasies so their teams (have to) keep up the closet and cater to them but end up alienating fans who think they aren’t straight”, because what about the contracts (not just Simon’s, but the ones with Sony, Capital, Columbia, the Azoffs, any other powerful person who’s treated them like shit and/or handcrafted their image for at least six years)? 

Their teams don’t just have to deal with a fandom that’s split into different factions that are basically at war over opposing images of who these guys are and what their lives look like, they ALSO have to deal with it in a way that doesn’t breach ANY of these old contracts or tells any subsection of fans that they’ve been lied to by their idol for a decade or plays into any of the (pretty arbitrary) things that either fans or the guys themselves have come to hate being associated with over the years, while ALSO crafting an image that’s distinct and individual enough to distance them from 1D enough to have a solo career, while ALSO being recognizable enough for existing fans to still stan. All that, PLUS they have to listen to their client’s wishes and help them navigate whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish as artists. It’s not an easy task even for the best team, so mistakes will be made, miscalculations will happen, big news will pop up in a throwaway article in a magazine that’s promoting the vocal talents of the “Frozen” cast. And it doesn’t mean that the team is BAD, let alone sabotaging anyone on purpose: it most likely just means that they’re trying to handle a very difficult situation and are doing it in real time. They’re building a plane as they’re flying it. On top of that, they know information we simply don’t–much of it highly personal and volatile.

Ugh, I”m getting fired up again, so I’ll sign off. Those are my thoughts, I really should shut down my inbox…enjoy!!! 

[crimethinc]

Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill An Interview

Since 1997, when it ceased to be the last major colonial holding of Great Britain, Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China, while maintaining a distinct political and legal system. In February, an unpopular bill was introduced that would make it possible to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to countries that the Hong Kong government has no existing extradition agreements with—including mainland China. On June 9, over a million people took the streets in protest; on June12, protesters engaged in pitched confrontations with police; on June 16, two million people participated in one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The following interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong explores the context of this wave of unrest. Our correspondents draw on over a decade of experience in the previous social movements in an effort to come to terms with the motivations that drive the participants, and elaborate upon the new forms of organization and subjectivation that define this new sequence of struggle.

In the United States, the most recent popular struggles have cohered around resisting Donald Trump and the extreme right. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement drew anarchists, leftists, and far-right nationalists into the streets against Macron’s centrist government and each other. In Hong Kong, we see a social movement against a state governed by the authoritarian left. What challenges do opponents of capitalism and the state face in this context? How can we outflank nationalists, neoliberals, and pacifists who seek to control and exploit our movements?

As China extends its reach, competing with the United States and European Union for global hegemony, it is important to experiment with models of resistance against the political model it represents, while taking care to prevent neoliberals and reactionaries from capitalizing on popular opposition to the authoritarian left. Anarchists in Hong Kong are uniquely positioned to comment on this.

The front façade of the Hong Kong Police headquarters in Wan Chai, covered in egg yolks on the evening of June 21. Hundreds of protesters sealed the entrance, demanding the unconditional release of every person that has been arrested in relation to the struggle thus far. The banner below reads “Never Surrender.” Photo by KWBB from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

“The left” is institutionalized and ineffectual in Hong Kong. Generally, the “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers have a chokehold over the narrative whenever protests break out, especially when mainland China is involved.

In the struggle against the extradition bill, has the escalation in tactics made it difficult for those factions to represent or manage “the movement”? Has the revolt exceeded or undermined their capacity to shape the discourse? Do the events of the past month herald similar developments in the future, or has this been a common subterranean theme in popular unrest in Hong Kong already?

We think it’s important for everyone to understand that—thus far—what has happened cannot be properly understood to be “a movement.” It’s far too inchoate for that. What I mean is that, unlike the so-called “Umbrella Movement,” which escaped the control of its founding architects (the intellectuals who announced “Occupy Central With Love And Peace” a year in advance) very early on while adhering for the most part to the pacifistic, citizenist principles that they outlined, there is no real guiding narrative uniting the events that have transpired so far, no foundational credo that authorizes—or sanctifies—certain forms of action while proscribing others in order to cultivate a spectacular, exemplary façade that can be photographed and broadcast to screens around the world.

The short answer to your question, then, is… yes, thus far, nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of the movement. Everybody is scrambling to come to terms with a nascent form of subjectivity that is taking shape before us, now that the formal figureheads of the tendencies you referenced have been crushed and largely marginalized. That includes the “scholarist” fraction of the students, now known as “Demosisto,” and the right-wing “nativists,” both of which were disqualified from participating in the legislative council after being voted in.

Throughout this interview, we will attempt to describe our own intuitions about what this embryonic form of subjectivity looks like and the conditions from which it originates. But these are only tentative. Whatever is going on, we can say that it emerges from within a field from which the visible, recognized protagonists of previous sequences, including political parties, student bodies, and right-wing and populist groups, have all been vanquished or discredited. It is a field populated with shadows, haunted by shades, echoes, and murmurs. As of now, center stage remains empty.

This means that the more prevalent “default” modes of understanding are invoked to fill the gaps. Often, it appears that we are set for an unfortunate reprisal of the sequence that played itself out in the Umbrella Movement:

appalling show of police force

public outrage manifests itself in huge marches and subsequent occupations, organized and understood as sanctimonious displays of civil virtue

these occupations ossify into tense, puritanical, and paranoid encampments obsessed with policing behavior to keep it in line with the prescribed script

the movement collapses, leading to five years of disenchantment among young people who do not have the means to understand their failure to achieve universal suffrage as anything less than abject defeat.

Of course, this is just a cursory description of the Umbrella Movement of five years ago—and even then, there was a considerable amount of “excess”: novel and emancipatory practices and encounters that the official narrative could not account for. These experiences should be retrieved and recovered, though this is not the time or place for that. What we face now is another exercise in mystification, in which the protocols that come into operation every time the social fabric enters a crisis may foreclose the possibilities that are opening up. It would be premature to suggest that this is about to happen, however.

In our cursory and often extremely unpleasant perusals of Western far-left social media, we have noticed that all too often, the intelligence falls victim to our penchant to run the rule over this or that struggle. So much of what passes for “commentary” tends to fall on either side of two poles—impassioned acclamation of the power of the proletarian intelligence or cynical denunciation of its populist recuperation. None of us can bear the suspense of having to suspend our judgment on something outside our ken, and we hasten to find someone who can formalize this unwieldy mass of information into a rubric that we can comprehend and digest, in order that we can express our support or apprehension.

We have no real answers for anybody who wants to know whether they should care about what’s going on in Hong Kong as opposed to, say, France, Algeria, Sudan. But we can plead with those who are interested in understanding what’s happening to take the time to develop an understanding of this city. Though we don’t entirely share their politics and have some quibbles with the facts presented therein, we endorse any coverage of events in Hong Kong that Ultra, Nao, and Chuang have offered over the years to the English-speaking world. Ultra’s piece on the Umbrella Movement is likely the best account of the events currently available.

Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

If we understand “the left” as a political subject that situates questions of class struggle and labor at the center of its politics, it’s not entirely certain that such a thing even properly exists in Hong Kong. Of course, friends of ours run excellent blogs, and there are small grouplets and the like. Certainly, everybody talks about the wealth gap, rampant poverty, the capitalist class, the fact that we are all “打工仔” (jobbers, working folk) struggling to survive. But, as almost anywhere else, the primary form of subjectivity and identification that everyone subscribes to is the idea of citizenship in a national community. It follows that this imagined belonging is founded on negation, exclusion, and demarcation from the Mainland. You can only imagine the torture of seeing the tiresome “I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese!” t-shirts on the subway, or hearing “Hong Kongers add oil!” (essentially, “way to go!”) chanted ad nauseam for an entire afternoon during recent marches.

It should interest readers from abroad to know that the word “left” in Hong Kong has two connotations. Obviously, for the generation of our parents and their parents before them, “Left” means Communist. Which is why “Left” could refer to a businessman who is a Party member, or a pro-establishment politician who is notoriously pro-China. For younger people, the word “Left” is a stigma (often conjugated with “plastic,” a word in Cantonese that sounds like “dickhead”) attached to a previous generation of activists who were involved in a prior sequence of social struggle—including struggles to prevent the demolition of Queen’s Ferry Pier in Central, against the construction of the high-speed Railway going through the northeast of Hong Kong into China, and against the destruction of vast tracts of farmland in the North East territories, all of which ended in demoralizing defeat. These movements were often led by articulate spokespeople—artists or NGO representatives who forged tactical alliances with progressives in the pan-democratic movement. The defeat of these movements, attributed to their apprehensions about endorsing direct action and their pleas for patience and for negotiations with authority, is now blamed on that generation of activists. All the rage and frustration of the young people who came of age in that period, heeding the direction of these figureheads who commanded them to disperse as they witnessed yet another defeat, yet another exhibition of orchestrated passivity, has progressively taken a rightward turn. Even secondary and university student bodies that have traditionally been staunchly center-left and progressive have become explicitly nationalist.

One crucial tenet among this generation, emerging from a welter of disappointments and failures, is a focus on direct action, and a consequent refusal of “small group discussions,” “consensus,” and the like. This was a theme that first appeared in the umbrella movement—most prominently in the Mong Kok encampment, where the possibilities were richest, but where the right was also, unfortunately, able to establish a firm foothold. The distrust of the previous generation remains prevalent. For example, on the afternoon of June 12, in the midst of the street fights between police and protesters, several members of a longstanding social-democratic party tasked themselves with relaying information via microphone to those on the front lines, telling them where to withdraw to if they needed to escape, what holes in the fronts to fill, and similar information. Because of this distrust of parties, politicians, professional activists and their agendas, many ignored these instructions and instead relied on word of mouth information or information circulating in online messaging groups.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological “wealth” that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.

In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.

In light of this, it would be naïve to suggest that anything significant has happened yet to suggest that to escaping the “chokehold” that you describe “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers maintaining on the narrative here. Both of these factions are simply symptoms of an underlying condition, aspects of an ideology that has to be attacked and taken apart in practice. Perhaps we should approach what is happening right now as a sort of psychoanalysis in public, with the psychopathology of our city exposed in full view, and see the actions we engage in collectively as a chance to work through traumas, manias, and obsessive complexes together. While it is undoubtedly dismaying that the momentum and morale of this struggle is sustained, across the social spectrum, by a constant invocation of the “Hong Kong people,” who are incited to protect their home at all costs, and while this deeply troubling unanimity covers over many problems,1 we accept the turmoil and the calamity of our time, the need to intervene in circumstances that are never of our own choosing. However bleak things may appear, this struggle offers a chance for new encounters, for the elaboration of new grammars.

Graffiti seen in the road occupation in Admiralty near the government quarters, reading “Carry a can of paint with you, it’s a remedy for canine rabies.” Cops are popularly referred to as “dogs” here. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

What has happened to the discourse of civility in the interlude between the umbrella movement and now? Did it contract, expand, decay, transform?

That’s an interesting question to ask. Perhaps the most significant thing that we can report about the current sequence that, astonishingly, when a small fringe of protesters attempted to break into the legislative council on June 9 following a day-long march, it was not universally criticized as an act of lunacy or, worse, the work of China or police provocateurs. Bear in mind that on June 9 and 12, the two attempts to break into the legislative council building thus far, the legislative assembly was not in session; people were effectively attempting to break into an empty building.

Now, much as we have our reservations about the effectiveness of doing such a thing in the first place,2 this is extraordinary, considering the fact that the last attempt to do so, which occurred in a protest against development in the North East territories shortly before the umbrella movement, took place while deliberations were in session and was broadly condemned or ignored.3 Some might suggest that the legacy of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan remains a big inspiration for many here; others might say that the looming threat of Chinese annexation is spurring the public to endorse desperate measures that they would otherwise chastise.

On the afternoon of June 12, when tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves assaulted by riot police, scrambling to escape from barrages of plastic bullets and tear gas, nobody condemned the masked squads in the front fighting back against the advancing lines of police and putting out the tear gas canisters as they landed. A longstanding, seemingly insuperable gulf has always existed between the “peaceful” protesters (pejoratively referred to as “peaceful rational non-violent dickheads” by most of us on the other side) and the “bellicose” protesters who believe in direct action. Each side tends to view the other with contempt.

Protesters transporting materials to build barricades. The graffiti on the wall can be roughly (and liberally) translated as “Hong Kongers ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’.” Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

The online forum lihkg has functioned as a central place for young people to organize, exchange political banter, and circulate information relating to this struggle. For the first time, a whole host of threads on this site have been dedicated to healing this breach or at least cultivating respect for those who do nothing but show up for the marches every Sunday—if only because marches that number in the millions and bring parts of the city to a temporary standstill are a pretty big deal, however mind-numbingly boring they may be in actuality. The last time the marches were anywhere close to this huge, a Chief Executive stepped down and the amending of a law regarding freedom of speech was moved to the back burner. All manner of groups are attempting to invent a way to contribute to the struggle, the most notable of which is the congregation of Christians that have assembled in front of police lines at the legislative council, chanting the same hymn without reprieve for a week and a half. That hymn has become a refrain that will likely reverberate through struggles in the future, for better or worse.

Are there clear openings or lines of flight in this movement that would allow for interventions that undermine the power of the police, of the law, of the commodity, without producing a militant subject that can be identified and excised?

It is difficult to answer this question. Despite the fact that proletarians compose the vast majority of people waging this struggle—proletarians whose lives are stolen from them by soulless jobs, who are compelled to spend more and more of their wages paying rents that continue to skyrocket because of comprehensive gentrification projects undertaken by state officials and private developers (who are often one and the same)—you must remember that “free market capitalism” is taken by many to be a defining trait of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, distinguishing it from the “red” capitalism managed by the Communist Party. What currently exists in Hong Kong, for some people, is far from ideal; when one says “the rich,” it invokes images of tycoon monopolies—cartels and communist toadies who have formed a dark pact with the Party to feed on the blood of the poor.

So, just as people are ardent for a government and institutions that we can properly call “our own”—yes, including the police—they desire a capitalism that we can finally call “our own,” a capitalism free from corruption, political chicanery, and the like. It’s easy to chuckle at this, but like any community gathered around a founding myth of pioneers fleeing persecution and building a land of freedom and plenty from sacrifice and hard work… it’s easy to understand why this fixation exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination.

This is a city that fiercely defends the initiative of the entrepreneur, of private enterprise, and understands every sort of hustle as a way of making a living, a tactic in the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival. This grim sense of life as survival is omnipresent in our speech; when we speak of “working,” we use the term “搵食,” which literally means looking for our next meal. That explains why protesters have traditionally been very careful to avoid alienating the working masses by actions such as blockading a road used by busses transporting working stiffs back home.

While we understand that much of our lives are preoccupied with and consumed by work, nobody dares to propose the refusal of work, to oppose the indignity of being treated as producer-consumers under the dominion of the commodity. The police are chastised for being “running dogs” of an evil totalitarian empire, rather than being what they actually are: the foot soldiers of the regime of property.

What is novel in the current situation is that many people now accept that acts of solidarity with the struggle, however minute,4 can lead to arrest, and are prepared to tread this shifting line between legality and illegality. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the appearance of a generation that is prepared for imprisonment, something that was formerly restricted to “professional activists” at the forefront of social movements. At the same time, there is no existing discussion regarding what the force of law is, how it operates, or the legitimacy of the police and prisons as institutions. People simply feel they need to employ measures that transgress the law in order the preserve the sanctity of the Law, which has been violated and dishonored by the cowboys of communist corruption.

However, it is important to note that this is the first time that proposals for strikes in various sectors and general strikes have been put forward regarding an issue that is, on the surface of it, unrelated to labor.

Our friends in the “Housewives Against Extradition” section of the march on September 9. The picture shows a group of housewives and aunties, many of whom were on the streets for the first time. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

How do barricades and occupations like the one from a few days ago reproduce themselves in the context of Hong Kong?

Barricades are simply customary now. Whenever people gather en masse and intend to occupy a certain territory to establish a front, barricades are built quickly and effectively. There is a creeping sense now that occupations are becoming routine and futile, physically taxing and ultimately inefficient. What’s interesting in this struggle is that people are really spending a lot of time thinking about what “works,” what requires the least expenditure of effort and achieves the maximum effect in paralyzing parts of the city or interrupting circulation, rather than what holds the greatest moral appeal to an imagined “public” watching everything from the safety of the living room—or even, conversely, what “feels” the most militant.

There have been many popular proposals for “non-cooperative” quotidian actions such as jamming up an entire subway train by coordinating groups of friends to pack the cars with people and luggage for a whole afternoon, or cancelling bank accounts and withdrawing savings from savings accounts in order to create inflation. Some have spread suggestions regarding how to dodge paying taxes for the rest of your life. These might not seem like much, but what’s interesting is the relentless circulation of suggestions from all manner of quarters, from people with varying kinds of expertise, about how people can act on their own initiative where they live or work and in their everyday lives, rather than imagining “the struggle” as something that is waged exclusively on the streets by masked, able-bodied youth.

Whatever criticisms anybody might have about what has happened thus far, this formidable exercise in collective intelligence is really incredibly impressive—an action can be proposed in a message group or on an anonymous message board thread, a few people organize to do it, and it’s done without any fuss or fanfare. Forms circulate and multiply as different groups try them out and modify them.

In the West, Leninists and Maoists have been screaming bloody murder about “CIA Psyop” or “Western backed color revolution.” Have hegemonic forces in Hong Kong invoked the “outside agitator” theme on the ground at a narrative level?

Actually, that is the official line of the Chief Executive, who has repeatedly said that she regards the events of the past week as riotous behavior incited by foreign interests that are interested in conducting a “color revolution” in the city. I’m not sure if she would repeat that line now that she has apologized publicly for “creating contradictions” and discord with her decisions, but all the same—it’s hilarious that tankies share the exact same opinion as our formal head of state.

It’s an open secret that various pro-democracy NGOs, parties, and thinktanks receive American funding. It’s not some kind of occult conspiracy theory that only tankies know about. But these tankies are suggesting that the platform that coordinates the marches—a broad alliance of political parties, NGOs, and the like—is also the ideological spearhead and architect of the “movement,” which is simply a colossal misunderstanding. That platform has been widely denounced, discredited, and mocked by the “direct action” tendencies that are forming all around us, and it is only recently that, as we said above, there are slightly begrudging threads on the Internet offering them indirect praise for being able to coordinate marches that actually achieve something. If only tankies would stop treating everybody like mindless neo-colonial sheep acting at the cryptic behest of Western imperialist intelligence.

That said, it would be dishonest if we failed to mention that, alongside threads on message boards discussing the niceties of direct action tactics abroad, there are also threads alerting everyone to the fact that voices in the White House have expressed their disapproval for the law. Some have even celebrated this. Also, there is a really wacky petition circulating on Facebook to get people to appeal to the White House for foreign intervention. I’m sure one would see these sorts of things in any struggle of this scale in any non-Western city. They aren’t smoking guns confirming imperialist manipulation; they are fringe phenomena that are not the driving force behind events thus far.

Have any slogans, neologisms, new slang, popular talking points, or funny phrases emerged that are unique to the situation?

Yes, lots, though we’re not sure how we would go about translating them. But the force that is generating these memes, that is inspiring all these Whatsapp and Telegram stickers and catchphrases, is actually the police force.

Between shooting people in the eye with plastic bullets, flailing their batons about, and indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at peoples’ heads and groins, they also found the time to utter some truly classic pearls that have made their way on to t-shirts. One of these bons mots is the rather unfortunate and politically incorrect “liberal cunt.” In the heat of a skirmish between police and protesters, a policeman called someone at the frontlines by that epithet. All our swear words in Cantonese revolve around male and female genitalia, unfortunately; we have quite a few words for private parts. In Cantonese, this formulation doesn’t sound as sensible as it does in English. Said together in Cantonese, “liberal” and “cunt” sounds positively hilarious.

Does this upheaval bear any connections to the fishball riots or Hong Kong autonomy from a few years ago?

A: The “fishball riots” were a demonstrative lesson in many ways, especially for people like us, who found ourselves spectators situated at some remove from the people involved. It was a paroxysmic explosion of rage against the police, a completely unexpected aftershock from the collapse of the umbrella movement. An entire party, the erstwhile darlings of right-wing youth everywhere, “Hong Kong Indigenous,” owes its whole career to this riot. They made absolutely sure that everyone knew they were attending, showing up in uniform and waving their royal blue flags at the scene. They were voted into office, disqualified, and incarcerated—one of the central members is now seeking asylum in Germany, where his views on Hong Kong independence have apparently softened considerably in the course of hanging out with German Greens. That is fresh in the memory of folks who know that invisibility is now paramount.

What effect has Joshua Wong’s release had?

A: We are not sure how surprised readers from overseas will be to discover, after perhaps watching that awful documentary about Joshua Wong on Netflix, that his release has not inspired much fanfare at all. Demosisto are now effectively the “Left Plastic” among a new batch of secondary students.

Are populist factions functioning as a real force of recuperation?

A: All that we have written above illustrates how, while the struggle currently escapes the grasp of every established group, party, and organization, its content is populist by default. The struggle has attained a sprawling scale and drawn in a wide breadth of actors; right now, it is expanding by the minute. But there is little thought given to the fact that many of those who are most obviously and immediately affected by the law will be people whose work takes place across the border—working with and providing aid to workers in Shenzhen, for instance.

Nobody is entirely sure what the actual implications of the law are. Even accounts written by professional lawyers vary quite widely, and this gives press outlets that brand themselves as “voices of the people”5 ample space to frame the entire issue as simply a matter of Hong Kong’s constitutional autonomy being compromised, with an entire city in revolt against the imposition of an all-encompassing surveillance state.

Perusing message boards and conversing with people around the government complex, you would think that the introduction of this law means that expressions of dissent online or objectionable text messages to friends on the Mainland could lead to extradition. This is far from being the case, as far as the letter of the law goes. But the events of the last few years, during which booksellers in Hong Kong have been disappeared for selling publications banned on the Mainland and activists in Hong Kong have been detained and deprived of contact upon crossing the border, offer little cause to trust a party that is already notorious for cooking up charges and contravening the letter of the law whenever convenient. Who knows what it will do once official authorization is granted.

Paranoia invariably sets in whenever the subject of China comes up. On the evening of June 12, when the clouds of tear gas were beginning to clear up, the founder of a Telegram message group with 10,000+ active members was arrested by the police, who commanded him to unlock his phone. His testimony revealed that he was told that even if he refused, they would hack his phone anyway. Later, the news reported that he was using a Xiaomi phone at the time. This news went viral, with many commenting that his choice of phone was both bold and idiotic, since urban legend has it that Xiaomi phones not only have a “backdoor” that permits Xiaomi to access the information on every one of its phones and assume control of the information therein, but that Xiaomi—by virtue of having its servers in China—uploads all information stored on its cloud to the database of party overlords. It is futile to try to suggest that users who are anxious about such things can take measures to seal backdoors, or that background information leeching can be detected by simply checking the data usage on your phone. Xiaomi is effectively regarded as an expertly engineered Communist tracking device, and arguments about it are no longer technical, but ideological to the point of superstition.

This “post-truth” dimension of this struggle, compounded with all the psychopathological factors that we enumerated above, makes everything that is happening that much more perplexing, that much more overwhelming. For so long, fantasy has been the impetus for social struggle in this city—the fantasy of a national community, urbane, free-thinking, civilized and each sharing in the negative freedoms that the law provides, the fantasy of electoral democracy… Whenever these affirmative fantasies are put at risk, they are defended and enacted in public, en masse, and the sales for “I Am Hong Konger” [sic] go through the roof.

This is what gives the proceedings a distinctly conservative, reactionary flavor, despite how radical and decentralized the new forms of action are. All we can do as a collective is seek ways to subvert this fantasy, to expose and demonstrate its vacuity in form and content.

At this time, it feels surreal that everybody around us is so certain, so clear about what they need to do—oppose this law with every means that they have available to them—while the reasons for doing so remain hopelessly obscure. It could very well be the case that this suffocating opacity is our lot for the time being, in this phase premised upon more action, less talk, on the relentless need to keep abreast of and act on the flow of information that is constantly accelerating around us.

In so many ways, what we see happening around us is a fulfillment of what we have dreamt of for years. So many bemoan the “lack of political leadership,” which they see as a noxious habit developed over years of failed movements, but the truth is that those who are accustomed to being protagonists of struggles, including ourselves as a collective, have been overtaken by events. It is no longer a matter of a tiny scene of activists concocting a set of tactics and programs and attempting to market them to the public. “The public” is taking action all around us, exchanging techniques on forums, devising ways to evade surveillance, to avoid being arrested at all costs. It is now possible to learn more about fighting the police in one afternoon than we did in a few years.

In the midst of this breathless acceleration, is it possible to introduce another rhythm, in which we can engage in a collective contemplation of what has become of us, and what we are becoming as we rush headlong into the tumult?

As ever, we stand here, fighting alongside our neighbors, ardently looking for friends.

Hand-written statements by protesters, weathered after an afternoon of heavy rain. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

In reflecting on the problems concealed by the apparent unanimity of the “Hong Kong people,” we might start by asking who that framework suggests that this city is for, who comprises this imaginary subject. We have seen Nepalese and Pakistani brothers and sisters on the streets, but they hesitate to make their presence known for fear of being accused of being thugs employed by the police. ↩

“The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.” –The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends ↩

Incidentally, that attempt was a good deal more spontaneous and successful. The police had hardly imagined that crowds of people who had sat peacefully with their heads in their hands feeling helpless while the developments were authorized would suddenly start attempting to rush the council doors by force, breaking some of the windows. ↩

On the night of June 11, young customers in a McDonald’s in Admiralty were all searched and had their identity cards recorded. On June 12, a video went viral showing a young man transporting a box of bottled water to protesters who were being brutalized by a squad of policemen with batons. ↩

To give two rather different examples, this includes the populist, xenophobic, and vehemently anti-Communist Apple Daily, and the “Hong Kong Free Press,” an independent English online rag of the “angry liberal” stripe run by expatriates that has an affinity for young localist/nativist leaders. ↩

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#3yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

•  The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

•  The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

•  The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html