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kinetic-elaboration · 4 years ago

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April 25: 2x16 The Gamesters of Triskelion

Finally watched some more Star Trek. I feel like it’s been forever...

Today’s ep is The Gamesters of Triskelion, which is... okay. It’s not terrible but I think its best aspects are the most familiar: the type of alien, the moral values at play; and its weakest are its most unique.

I think Spock likes it when Kirk says “mind the store.” What a folksy human thing to say!

Plus now that he’s Captain he gets to sit in the chair.

This conversation between Spock and Scotty is hilarious. “I’m assuming you mean they disappeared in an unusual way??�� “Uh, yeah?? Do you think I’m dumb?”

This alien looks like Lady Gaga c. 2010

Kirk is being very Dramatic today.

Come on, Spock, gotta get your man.

You know Spock is worried when he mentions hope. That is, as McCoy says, a human emotion.

“Collars of obedience.” Kinky.

Stylish pink jail.

I’m really feeling this Spock and Bones interaction today. That’s a great eyebrow lift.

If the random alien is leaving, Uhura must have been his ass down.

“Nourishment interval.” We need to bring this into our modern vocabulary.

Not one, but TWO ladies in command gold today (one at Communications, and one at Spock’s station).

Wild aquatic fowl.

I feel like this episode is another example of a writer putting her alien sex fantasy on television. Like, a hardcore alien sex fantasy. The obedience collars, the training harness, the whipping, the weird flirtation between Chekov and his “training thrall”--herself a very androgynous alien, just to throw some gender play in there.

Kirk turning up the charm again. I missed Charming!Kirk. I mean, picking up a silver platter to use as a mirror and saying “That’s beautiful”? This man has no shame.

I feel like this episode shows how Spock’s logic is actually a very effective life strategy. He’s facing a very mysterious situation with high stakes--literally his best friend/soulmate/captain lost, plus two more crewmen--but he isn’t defeatist like McCoy or defensive like Scotty. He just follows the evidence, even when the evidence seems wild. And he was right.

Detective Kirk time!

“Are they computers?” He’s hoping so, since he’s very good at defeating computerized enemies.

Could it be instead another example of aliens who have transcended their physical bodies?

He is really laying the charm offensive on thick here.

I get how people have vague memories of TOS and remember Kirk as slutty, because certainly there are lots of shots of him kissing ladies, but like... 90% of the time he's using charm as a weapon, like he doesn't like Lady Gaga, he just wants to get off this planet.

“Love, for one thing.” Time for Kirk to be a Romantic Nerd again. He sure does love love!!

See imo just as it’s ridiculous for him to limit love to being one of the most important things on Earth, since he barely even spends any time on Earth and his general thesis is about what all intelligent creatures can care about besides their basic needs being met by “Providers,” I think it’s silly to limit love to being between men and women. And just as he’s kinda lying about the Earth thing, I think he’s lying about the heterosexual thing.

People in love “live together, help each other, make each other happy.” I love his definitions of love!! Like with Edith, he center helping each other in the definition.

McCoy and Scotty think they can take on Spock lmao. The Captain’s life is at stake; he’s not fooling around. And he’s right too so y’all can shush!!

Honestly, that leaning down to talk quietly to them--I know it’s because he doesn’t want to say the word “mutiny” too loud where other people can hear him, but it really reads like he’s mocking them.

Shauhna is harassed at work.

Spock’s like ‘screw a landing party, I will retrieve my space husband by myself... and I guess McCoy can come too.’

McCoy’s voice was the one Kirk heard but he still calls out to Spock.

Mmm, yes, disembodied alien brains.

I like the painted background behind them, too. Which is apparently stolen from Devil in the Dark. S2 needs more painted backgrounds.

“You think YOU’RE competitive? A race that does nothing but gamble? Well you’ve never met humans lol.”

Since when has Kirk ever competed for a woman? Hardly a competition when he always wins.

“Fresh thrall” something so... ugh about that phrase.

Ah, yes, an Andorian.

I’m starting to feel like this is Spock’s Pre-Reform Vulcan Sex Fantasy.

I feel like Shauhna will eventually become the leader of the Triskellion people. My mom thinks it would be cool for Kirk to meet her again in the future. I feel like there’s a fanfic in there somewhere...

“I didn’t lie, I just...lied.”

Honestly, don’t bother leaving everything to these disembodied colorful brains, just take Shauhna with you and enlist her in Starfleet. Or at least, like, high school.

...And after all that she STILL has a crush on Kirk. The man is too powerful.

What, no return to the Enterprise? No Kirk appearing shirtless on the bridge? No everyone acknowledges that Spock was right the whole time? No awkward little joking time?

I guess perhaps Kirk is embarrassed.

So overall... again, B basically.

As far as commonly used tropes in Star Trek go, this one is actually one of my favorite ones. I like it more than “godlike man must be defeated” and probably even more than “computer runs society,” though not as much as “old Earth tech becomes sentient.” But generally speaking “aliens transcend corporeal bodies by becoming too smart” is a good trope and I like seeing the different spins on it: the Organians, who can choose corporeal bodies if they want and are incredibly peaceful; the aliens from Return to Tomorrow, who wish they still had bodies; the aliens from The Cage/The Menagerie, who do have bodies but can’t do much with them, who must rely on aliens they capture to do physical work on the planet’s surface for them; and these aliens, who are so bored they must rely on arbitrary wagers using enslaved aliens just to have something to do. There’s something sort of... sad but fitting about that fate. Understandable, awful, pathetic. Still, I wouldn’t call this my favorite take on the trope.

But the specifics of the story, outside the “brain-aliens trope,” I didn’t like so much. The BDSM kink stuff mixed in with like actual slavery made me super uncomfortable. I know it’s based on Ancient Rome but like... even though it was a clear bread and circuses situation, that was not what I was thinking of tbqh.

This is a good episode for showcasing Star Trek Values, which overall I would say are my values. I do see how some people today would criticize them for being a little... well. How to say it. Colonizer-savior. I completely disagree that this is the reading that should be given to them and in fact I think it’s a bad faith reading but people are the way they are and certain things are in vogue sometimes and not others, so. I just mean that when Kirk says that they (the Federation, one would assume) have helped other civilizations “progress” or whatever word he uses, it sounds a little like they came in and made alien societies better using their own values. But I would say that what we actually see, in specific examples throughout the series, is the Federation wanting the civilizations it interacts with to be free, in fact requiring members state to be free, and that is really the one value a free society can impose on others or require of others--choosing slavery or dominion is choosing to relinquish all future choices, and thus cannot be allowed by any society that values freedom. That catch-22 that we see so much now. So, my point is, I think the values Kirk epitomizes for the show are freedom, self-determination, and a certain conception of progress, too: the ability to grow and develop, the avoidance of stagnation. And certainly this episode shows a clear case: having everything provided for you in exchange for being the professional playthings of a bunch of disembodied brains is objectively bad! Surely we can all agree on that. But this obvious example is used as an excuse for Kirk to speechify on the topic of what a utopian future will look like, what the best of humans can be, and what the rest of the universe could be like if it learns from our best traits (and not our worst). Which is overall something I find very comforting.

I’d just been thinking, at the beginning of this episode, that I think S1 is a better Kirk season than S2. S2 has too many episodes that problematize his leadership or his heroism, or that barely even use him--even episodes like The Trouble With Tribbles that outright mischaracterize him imo. But this episode really was Classic Kirk and I appreciated that. We see him being charming, smart, selfless, strong, creative, romantic... coming in at the end to embody the utopian values of the series.

Spock was so well characterized and so smart and so heroic, too, that he kinda was the mvp for me, though... Don’t take away my Kirk stan card lol. Spock was just so In Command... You can see how he could become a captain later, even if being in command never really interested him much.

I don’t entirely get why Kirk bargained for the thralls to all stay and make their own government (or to be trained in self-governance by their enslavers... a whole different issue tbqh), given that it’s already been established that most/all of them have been kidnapped from other planets. Should they not be... returned?

And if most/all of them are 2nd or later generations, that’s a whole other complex issue that could perhaps use third party mediators or something...

I also wondered about Shahna's origins. Was she the descendant of another civilization that is native to the planet, or is it just that her people were kidnapped so much earlier that she herself, personally, has never lived anywhere else?

I think it both makes more sense and is a more fitting ending if it’s the first. It makes sense to me that the first peoples enslaved by the brains were natives of the planet: more convenient that way. Also, I think we need to see more alien planets with more than one humanoid or human-intelligence level species.

And, if her people are native to the planet, having them become leaders of their own right again and not just possessions of the glowing brains is more powerful. Otherwise it's kinda sad: yes, they can form their own government here, but they've still been robbed of their real history and their real homeland, which they don't even remember.

Also as my mom pointed out, it’s not clear the brains themselves are native to the planet. They could have been invaders--the last real thing they did before they started wagering fake money--and Shauhna’s people the natives.

I really did like Shahna a lot and I hope she becomes the leader of whatever government they set up and eventually does get to travel into space.

Imo this was one of those TOS eps where the potential back story and the hints of world building are more interesting than the actual story.

Also apparently the actor who played Galt was trying to walk in a gliding manner so it wouldn’t be clear what he was hiding under those robes and... I have to say, definitely wheels.

Next up is A Piece of the Action, one of my favorites. Great plot, great fun, great sci fi concept, great Kirk material!

#the year 2021 #2021: star trek #star trek tos #2021: fandom thoughts

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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mermaidsirennikita · 7 years ago

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September 2017 Book Roundup

Undoubtedly, I read two standout books this September: Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust, a sometimes-macabre retelling of Snow White (with a feminist spin) and Mari Lu’s Warcross, the story of a girl, a tech mogul, and a virtual reality game that can make or break your future. On to October--I’m going to try to read as much spooky stuff as possible.

This Is Not The End by Chandler Baker. 3/5. In the near future, a substance called “lifeblood” has made it possible for people to be resurrected even years after death, revitalized and fully healed. Laws restrict how many “resurrections” people are allowed and when they can resurrect someone--you can only resurrect one person, and you can only perform the resurrection on your eighteenth birthday. Following a terrible car accident, Lake has lost her best friend Penny and her beloved boyfriend Will. Not only is she--mere weeks from her eighteenth birthday--torn between which to resurrect; she also has already promised her resurrection to another person. This was a very quick read for me, and I found it compelling and at times moving. So many different issues are tackled--are resurrections ethical? Should people be held to promises they made--and in Lake’s case were pressured into--years ago? Hell, Baker even goes after the ethical arguments surrounding assisted suicide and the disabled. The problem is that while I understood the logic of why only one resurrection is allowed per person (population control) I couldn’t understand why someone could only have a resurrection done on their eighteenth birthday. Sure, I see why only legal adults can request resurrections, but why is the request time such a short window? More concerning was the fact that there is a romance in this. Yes, a romance between Lake--a girl who just lost the boyfriend who’d been her best friend before they dated, a guy she fantasized about marrying someday--and some other guy... weeks after said boyfriend died. I can understand having sex with someone while grieving, but this felt more like we were supposed to see Lake beginning to fall for someone else. I’m not saying that can’t happen, but it distracted from Lake’s story and the themes surrounding it.

Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney C. Stevens. 2/5. Billie is a preacher’s daughter in a small Kentucky town. She and her best friends--collectively known as the Hexagon--have been tightly-knit for years. But everything changes when Billie finds that Janie Lee and Woods, two of those friends, have feelings for each other. And Billie might just have feelings for both of them. “Dress Codes” is about figuring out gender and sexuality in a John Hughes sort of lens. Stevens does have a really distinct voice, and some turns of phrase were beautiful--while others were, in my opinion, a bit overwrought. A bit too forced. Billie and her friends just didn’t think or speak in a way that seemed recognizable to me as teenager-y. And while I was touched by the story, in a sense--it was also quite boring. I wish I’d loved this, but I just didn’t. I think many people would, it’s just not my cup of tea.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust. 5/5. This retelling of Snow White takes on the dual perspectives of Nina, the “wicked stepmother” and Lynet, the cossetted princess. Nina’s side of the story takes place from past to present, telling the story of a girl with a heart of glass--assured by her father, the alchemist that replaced Nina’s rotting heart to save her life, that she is incapable of love and being loved. Lynet is her stepdaughter, the spitting image of her mother, protected by her father, and made of literal snow. Fate has pitted these two women against one another, despite their love for each other. Time will tell if they will fulfill their destinies. Pitched as a feminist fairy tale retelling, this book will disappoint you if you’re looking for knife-wielding assassins and monologues about how women are meant to rule. I love that it didn’t have any of that. This story is made of subtler stuff, its beautiful, sad prose focusing on the relationship between Nina and Lynet, and how they’ve not only been forced into roles they don’t want to play by men--they’ve been turned into the antagonists in each other’s stories... by men. Poetic and beautiful and not without a dash of romance--one of them featuring wlw at that--this is a must-read if you love gently dark fairy tales that will hurt your heart. (Even if it’s made of glass.)

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart. 2/5. I’ll be honest, I skimmed this for the most part. As someone who hasn’t seen or read The Talented Mr. Ripley, I’m told that this is basically a gender-flipped version of that, following teen criminal Jule... or is she??? The thing is that this is a story told in reverse-chronological order, and even though I figured out the twist very early on, how we got there was so confusing that I didn’t even want to figure it out.

Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh. 4/5. In the near future, beautiful women who’ve died young are cryogenically frozen and temporarily “awoken” for five minute sessions for men who want to talk to them--typically, men who can afford the $9,000/5 minutes fee that comes with these “dates”. If chosen to be the brides of these men, these “bridecicles” are revived permanently--making them desperate to do whatever they can to be chosen. This story focuses on three people: Mira, a bridecicle who’s been frozen for decades and longs for her lover, Jeanette; Rob, a young man who falls in love with bridecicle Winter after accidentally killing her; and Veronika, a dating coach who can’t seem to find love in this connected world. This is a sad, occasionally funny story about the perils of a world in which we’re so connected through technology that actual human technology is difficult to find. It’s not super unique in that respect, but the bridecicle concept is both fascinating and grotesque. I couldn’t put it down. With that being said, the romances in the book were a bit lackluster for me, and I at times wasn’t sure about how Veronika’s perspective connected into things. Still a really good, thought-provoking read.

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. 2/5. Thanks to a service called Death-Cast, everyone is given 24 hours (or so) notice on the day of their death. Teenagers Mateo and Rufus have just found out that they are going to die, and though strangers, meet up through and app called Last Friend and decide to live out their last day together. Just... I don’t think Adam Silvera and I are going to be friends, y’all. First off, this world is pretty much ours aside from the weird death service, and there was really no explanation as to why everyone just took this service at face value. Sorry, I really feel like we’d fight that. Also, Rufus’s dialogue in particular was cringe as fuck. It was so uneven--he’d use slang and I got the impression that Silvera was going for “impoverished gang kid talk” with him but then he’d have a whole paragraph of dialogue in a manner totally inconsistent with “I’m in mad love with this dude” or whatever. And there were so many other points of view when Rufus and Mateo’s were the only ones that really mattered. Like, points for diversity, but nah on everything else.

Warcross by Marie Lu. 5/5. Hacker and bounty hunter Emika Chen is, like everyone else on Earth, a fan of the virtual reality game Warcross. As poor as she is, she hacks into the game--and in a desperate moment, steals an item that would fetch the money she needs on resale, using a glitch to do so. This catches the attention of Hideo Tanaka, Warcross’s billionaire creator, who flies her to Tokyo and offers her a job (that pays 10 mill, by the way): she needs to enter the Warcross Tournament--a major event--as a player and secretly act as his bounty hunter, searching for the unknown--and dangerous--Zero, a mystery to even Hideo. So this is hard to describe but damn is it good. Emi is a character who has an unlikely resume but it actually seems plausible in the context of her life and her world. Same goes for Hideo, who is probably one of my favorite characters to come out of YA this year. The stakes build as the novel does--and as Emi grows close to Hideo, which, like, obviously she was but fuckyeahI’mintoit. It’s super fast-paced, entertaining YA and I honestly enjoyed it more than Lu’s Young Elites series, which I loved in the beginning but was ultimately disappointed in. So. Hoping the rest of the series lives up to this book!

One Dark Throne by Kendare Blake. 4/5. The second in what is now a four-book series, One Dark Throne continues the story of triplet queens Mirabella, Katharine, and Arsinoe. Where Mirabella was once the clear frontrunner to be the next crowned queen, recent events have revealed that it could be anyone’s game--though the fact remains that the winner must kill her sisters. Arsinoe hides her true gift from almost everyone, pretending to be a naturalist still; Mirabella deals with having her world rocked, and questions her relationships with her sisters; and Katharine, called the “Undead Queen” grows increasingly unstable--and powerful--after her near-death experience. I can’t say that One Dark Throne was quite as compelling as Three Dark Crowns, as it was a very talky book. Furthermore, Mirabella, one of my favorites of the first book, was a shadow of her former self. Arsinoe is clearly poised as the protagonist of the sisters, but... I don’t dislike her, but I don’t find her compelling either, and I don’t care much for her friends Jules and Joseph either. They’re so typically good. Katharine is worth reading the whole book for--you never know if she’s mad or aware of some truth nobody else has caught onto. Furthermore, she has the best romance in the book--taking the form of her fraught relationship with Pietyr, a boy she loves and hates. While I still love the concept and the world and Katharine and all the poisoners really, and this was a good book, I think everyone else needs to get on my girl’s level.

There Is Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins. 3/5. New to the tiny town of Osborne, Nebraska--and hiding from a dark past--Makani lives with her grandmother, is trying to ingratiate herself her new friends, and pines for school outsider Ollie. Then kids start getting murdered, in shocking ways. As Makani struggles to avoid being next, she grows increasingly afraid of her secret being revealed. This book has been compared to Scream, and while there’s sex and blood, Scream it is not. I mean, it’s basically one of Perkins’s romance with some murder thrown in, and it disappointed me because I wanted so badly to be impressed with the genre shift. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but like... just that. It wasn’t the genre. Shit--I thought that at least the mystery of the killer would be good, but it wasn’t. It kind of shocked me to read the author’s note about Perkins spending six years researching this and workshopping the book, and--not to be mean, but while it was entertaining, that effort did not show.

The Merciless by Danielle Vega. 1/5. Girl goes to new school. Girl makes new friends. New friends suggest performing an exorcism on another friend. And so on. I thought this would be fun gore, and while it was gory, it was... not good. So bad, really. The book was incredibly basic and boring, and took the least interesting turn regarding the exorcism possible. I hated it.

#books #book recs

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samanthasroberts · 6 years ago

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So who put the cyber into cybersex?

Today we have cybercafes and cyberwars but cybernetics the term that launched a dozen prefixes has been lost. In a new book, Thomas Rid aims to reconnect cyber to its original idea of man-machine symbiosis

Where did the cyber in cyberspace come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer. It came to him while watching some kids play early video games. Searching for a name for the virtual space in which they seemed immersed, he wrote cyberspace in his notepad. As I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad, he later recalled, my whole delight was that it meant absolutely nothing.

How wrong can you be? Cyberspace turned out to be the space that somehow morphed into the networked world we now inhabit, and which might ultimately prove our undoing by making us totally dependent on a system that is both unfathomably complex and fundamentally insecure. But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson to the late 1940s and Norbert Wieners book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948.

Cybernetics was the term Wiener, an MIT mathematician and polymath, coined for the scientific study of feedback control and communication in animals and machines. As a transdiscipline that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: fewof the worlds universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rids absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day.

This is because at the heart of the cybernetic idea is the proposition that the gap between animals (especially humans) and machines is much narrower than humanists believe. Its argument is that if you ignore the physical processes that go on in the animal and the machine and focus only on the information loops that regulate these processes in both, you begin to see startling similarities. The feedback loops that enable our bodies to maintain an internal temperature of 37C, for example, are analogous to the way in which the cruise control in our cars operates.

Dr Rid is a reader in the war studies department of Kings College London, which means that he is primarily interested in conflict, and as the world has gone online he has naturally been drawn into the study of how conflict manifests itself in the virtual world. When states are involved in this, we tend to call it cyberwarfare, a term of which I suspect Rid disapproves on the grounds that warfare is intrinsically kinetic (like Assads barrel bombs) whereas whats going on in cyberspace is much more sinister, elusive and intractable.

In order to explain how weve got so far out of our depth, Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing. And whereas most such histories begin with Alan Turing and Claude Shannon and John von Neumann, Rid starts with Wiener and wartime research into gunnery control. For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s.

From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunners capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent but often overlooked theme in the evolution of computing.

A mechanical dog manufactured by robot maker Boston Dynamics. Cybernetics proposes that the gap between humans and their machines is much narrower than humanists believe. Photograph: Boston Dynamics

The standard narrative about the technologys history focuses mostly on technical progress processing power, bandwidth, storage, networking, etc. Its about machines and applications, companies and fortunes. The underlying assumption is that the technology is empowering which of course in principle it can be. What, after all, is the web but a memory aid for people? What the dominant narrative conveniently ignores, though, is that the motive force for most tech industry development is not human empowerment but profit. Which is why Facebook wants its 1.7 billion users to stay within its walled garden rather than simply being empowered by the open web.

The dream of computing as a way of augmenting human capabilities, however, takes empowerment seriously rather than using it as a cover story. It is, for example, what underpinned the lifes work of Douglas Engelbart, the man who came up with the computer mouse and the windowing interface that we use today. And it motivated JCR Licklider, the psychologist who was, in a way, the godfather of the internet and whose paper Man-Computer Symbiosis is one of the canonical texts in the augmentation tradition. Even today, a charitable interpretation of the Google Glass project would place it firmly in the same tradition. Ditto for virtual reality (VR).

Given that he starts from cybernetics, the trajectory of Rids narrative makes sense. It takes him into the origins of the concept of the cyborg the notion of adapting humans to their surroundings rather than the other way round an idea that was first explored by Nasa and the US military. Thence he moves into the early history of automation, and startling tales about ambitious early attempts to create robots that might be useful in combat. In 1964, for example, US army contractors built the Pedipulator, an 18ft tall mechanical figure that looked like a prototype of a Star Wars biped. The idea was to create some kind of intelligent full-body armour that would turn troops, in effect, into walking tanks.

From there, its just a short leap to virtual reality also, incidentally, first invented by the US military in the early 1980s. Rids account of the California counter-cultures obsession with VR is fascinating, and includes the revelation that Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, was an early evangelist. Leary and co thought that VR was better than LSD because it was inherently social whereas an LSD trip was just chemically induced isolation. Then Rid moves on to the arrival of public-key cryptography, which put military-grade encryption into the hands of citizens for the first time (and which had been secretly invented at GCHQ, so one can imagine its discombobulation when civilian geeks independently came up with it).

The final substantive chapter of Rise of the Machines is about conflict in cyberspace, and contains the first detailed account Ive seen of the Moonlight Maze attack on US networks. Rid describes this as the biggest and most sophisticated computer network attack made against the United States in history. It happened in 1996, which means that it belongs in prehistory by internet timescales. And it originated in Russia. The attack was breathtaking in its ambition and comprehensiveness. But it was probably small beer compared with what goes on now, especially given that China has entered the cyberfray.

In some ways, Rids chapter on conflict in cyberspace seems orthogonal to his main story, which is about how Wieners vision of cybernetics functioned as an inspirational myth for innovators who were interested in what Licklider and Engelbart thought of as man-machine symbiosis and human augmentation. If this absorbing, illuminating book needs a motto, it is an aphorism of Marshall McLuhans friend, John Culkin. We shape our tools, he wrote, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Thomas Rid Q&A: Politicians would say cyber and roll their eyes

Thomas Rid: Our temptation to improve ourselves through our own machines is hardwired into who we are as humans. Photograph: Flickr

How did you become interested in cybernetics? The short word cyber seemed everywhere, slapped in front of cafes, crime, bullying, war, punk, even sex. Journalists and politicians and academics would say cyber and roll their eyes at it. Sometimes they would ask where the funny phrase actually came from. So every time my boss introduced me as, Hey, this is Thomas, hes our cyber expert, I cringed. So I thought I should write a book. Nobody, after all, had properly connected todays cyber to its historic ancestor, cybernetics.

Initially I wanted to do a polemic. But then I presented some of the history at Royal Holloway, and to my surprise, some of the computer science students warmed to cyber after my talk, appreciating the ideas historical and philosophical depth. So I thought, yes, lets do this properly.

You teach in a department of war studies, so I can see that cyberwar might be your thing. But you decided that you needed to go way back not only to Norbert Wiener and the original ideas of cybernetics, but also to the counter-cultural background, to personal computing, virtual reality (VR) and computer conferencing. Why? War studies, my department, is an open tent. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and adding historical and conceptual depth is what we do. So machines fits right in. I think understanding our fascination with communication and control today requires going back to the origins, to Wieners cybernetic vision after the second world war. Our temptation to improve ourselves through our own machines big brains in the 50s, or artificial intelligence today is hardwired into who we are as humans. We dont just want to play God, we want to beat God, building artificial intelligence thats better than the non-artificial kind. This hubris will never go away. So one of our best insurance is to study the history of cybernetic myths, the promise of the perennially imminent rise of the machines.

How long did the book take to research and write? It took me about three years. It wasnt hard to stay focused the story throughout the decades was just too gripping: here was the US air force building touch-sensitive cybernetic manipulators to refuel nuclear-powered long-range bombers, and theres LSD guru Timothy Leary discovering the cybernetic space inside the machines as a mind-expansion device even better than psychedelic drugs better, by the way, because the machine high was more creative and more social than getting stoned on psilocybin.

One group thats missing from your account is the engineers who sought to implement old-style cybernetic ideas in real life. For example, the Cybersyn project that Stafford Beer led in Chile for Salvador Allende. Did you think of including stuff like that? If not, why not? The cybernetic story is expansive. I had to leave out so much, especially in the 50s and 60s, the heyday of cybernetics. For example, the rise of cybernetics in the Soviet Union is a story in itself, and almost entirely missing from my book, as is much of the sociological work that was inspired by Norbert Wieners vision (much of it either dated or impenetrable). Cybersyn has been admirably covered, in detail, by Eden Medinas Cybernetic Revolutionaries. I would also mention Ronald Klines recent book, The Cybernetics Moment.

Your account of the Moonlight Maze investigation (of a full-on state-sponsored cyberattack on the US) is fascinating and scary. It suggests that contrary to popular belief cyberwarfare is not just a distant possibility but a baffling and terrifying reality. It is also by your account intractable. Arent we (ie society) out of our depth here? Or, at the very least, arent we in a position analogous to where we were with nuclear weapons in, say, 1946? Cyberwar, if you want to call it that, has been going on since at least 1996 as I show without interruption. In fact state-sponsored espionage, sabotage, and subversion escalated drastically in the past two decades. But meanwhile weve been fooling ourselves, expecting blackouts and explosions and planes falling out of the sky as a result of cyberattacks. Physical effects happen, but have been a rare exception. What were seeing instead is even scarier: an escalation of cold war-style spy-versus-spy subversion and sabotage, covert and hidden and very political, not open and of military nature, like nuclear weapons. Over the last year we have observed several instances of intelligence agencies breaching victims, stealing files, and dumping sensitive information into the public domain: often through purpose-created leak forums, or indeed though Wikileaks.

Russian agencies have been leading this trend, most visibly by trying to influence the US election through hacking and dumping. Theyre doing very creative work there. Although the forensic evidence for this activity is solid and openly available, the tactic still works impressively well. Open societies arent well equipped to deal with covert spin-doctoring.

Were currently experiencing a virtual reality frenzy, with companies like Facebook and venture capitalists salivating over it as the Next Big Thing. One of the interesting parts of your story is the revelation that we have been here before except last time, enthusiasm for VR was inextricably bound up with psychedelic drugs. Then, it was tech plus LSD; now its tech plus money. The same cycle applies to artificial intelligence. So cybernetics isnt the only field to have waxed and waned. Absolutely not. I was often writing notes on the margins of my manuscript in Fernandez & Wells in Somerset House, where London fashion week used to happen. Technology is a bit like fashion: every few years a new craze or trend comes around, drawing much attention, money, and fresh talent. Right now, its automation and VR, a bit retro-60s and -90s respectively. Of course our fears and hopes arent just repeating the past, and the technical progress in both fields has been impressive. But well move on before long, and the next tech wave will probably have a retro feature again.

At a certain moment in the book you effectively detach the prefix cyber from its origins in wartime MIT and the work of Norbert Wiener and use it to build a narrative about our networked and computerised existence cyborgs, cyberspace, cyberwar etc. Your justification, as I see it, is that there was a cybernetic moment and it passed. But had you thought that a cybernetic analysis of our current plight in trying to manage cyberspace might be insightful? For example, one of the big ideas to come out of early cybernetics was Ross Ashbys Law of Requisite Variety which basically says that for a system to be viable it has to be able to cope with the complexity of its environment. Given what information technology has done to increase the complexity of our current environment, doesnt that mean that most of our contemporary systems (organisations, institutions) are actually no longer viable. Or is that pushing the idea too far? Youre raising a fascinating question here, one that I struggled with for a long time. First, I think cyber detached itself from its origins, and degenerated from a scientific concept to an ideology. That shift began in the early 1960s. My book is merely chronicling this larger history, not applying cybernetics to anything. It took me a while to resist the cybernetic temptation, if you like: the old theory still has charm and seductive force left in its bones but of course I never wanted to be a cyberneticist.

The Rise of the Machines is published by Scribe (20). Click here to order a copy for 16.40

Source: http://allofbeer.com/so-who-put-the-cyber-into-cybersex/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/so-who-put-the-cyber-into-cybersex/

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allofbeercom · 6 years ago

Text

So who put the cyber into cybersex?

A mechanical dog manufactured by robot maker Boston Dynamics. Cybernetics proposes that the gap between humans and their machines is much narrower than humanists believe. Photograph: Boston Dynamics

Thomas Rid Q&A: Politicians would say cyber and roll their eyes

Thomas Rid: Our temptation to improve ourselves through our own machines is hardwired into who we are as humans. Photograph: Flickr

The Rise of the Machines is published by Scribe (20). Click here to order a copy for 16.40

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/so-who-put-the-cyber-into-cybersex/

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cowgirluli-blog · 6 years ago

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Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

There is a common misconception that you can point to the same three issues to explain any divorce: infidelity, financial impropriety, or substance abuse. “That's pretty much what any divorce lawyer is going to tell you is the unholy trinity,” says James J. Sexton, author of the ominously titled If You're In My Office, It's Already Too Late. “But no single raindrop is responsible for the flood. Divorce, in fact, is like death by a thousand papercuts.”

In other words, while one of those big issues may represent an undercurrent of strain in a relationship, there will often be some more subtle red flags that pop up before everything goes boom. And if you can catch those red flags early on, it might be easier to change the tide and lead your marriage back to dry land. “Marriage tends to be between two people who start out with a lot of optimism and want to stay connected, but have a hard time maintaining that over time,” Sexton says. And after seeing countless couples come through his office having lost theirs, he has learned that maintaining that connection is the key to a happy partnership.

Ahead, Sexton breaks down the sneaky relationship-ruiners to keep an eye out for, and relationship expert Megan Stubbs has advice on exactly what to do when you see them cropping up. With any luck, you'll be able to defuse your problem areas, before, as Sexton diagnoses in his book, it's “too late.”

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

Do you find yourself jumping to your partner's defense, possibly out of the blue, in conversation with close friends or family? When you're on vacation with your partner, are you focused on posting photos to show what a good time you're having more than, you know, having a good time? Sexton says that you might need to check yourself and see why. “I always reference the phrase 'money talks, wealth whispers' when talking about this,” he says. “Legitimately happy people don't feel the need to advertise that connection to people.” All that oversharing can point to major relationship problem area, according to Sexton. “It spells insecurity.”

The fix: If you find yourself constantly humble bragging (or regular bragging), you need to figure out why you feel the urge to justify-or defend-your choice in partner to others. If any part of that is that your friends or family have some misgivings about your SO, then it's a good idea to listen to them. “Chances are, your closest friends know you best, and they also want the best for you,” Stubbs says. “If they're expressing some concerns, it's a good idea to listen to them. They may be able to see things you can't.”

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

Between sexy vacation snaps on Instagram and engagement announcements on Facebook, social media is a battleground of relationship milestones-and it doesn't care how ready you are to face them. If your relationship isn't on solid ground, it's so easy to fall into a stalking hole. Next thing you know, you're awake at 3 AM looking at your ex's new girlfriend and wondering why your boyfriend doesn't post loved-up selfies of the two of you to his wall. (Or is that just me?)

This problem behind this red flag isn't relationship-specific, but it can be a doozy if you're in one. “The danger is that social media is curated,” Sexton says. “You wind up comparing your everyday life to someone's highlight reel, so your real life will pale in comparison.” And since people rarely talk about the negative aspects of their relationship online, it can seem like you're the only one hitting the rocks. Your high school crush isn't going to write a Facebook status about how his wife of seven years has a crush on their dog-walker and they both know it. It's just gonna be “happy anniversary, babe!” year after year. Try to remember that you may be envying something that's not even real.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

“If there are attributes you see in other couples that you'd like to have in yours, have a conversation about it,” Stubbs says. But tread carefully. “Starting off with 'why can't you be more like so-and-so' isn't the best way.” Instead, frame it in a positive way. Saying something like, “Sara and Emily have a date night every Friday, and they seem to have so much fun doing it. I think we'd have a great time if we had a date night, too.” By framing it as a challenge you can overcome together, you're making it about your partnership-not your partner's shortcomings.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

“I can't tell you how many people I've seen who come in for what I call the 'Facebook Divorce,'” Sexton says, ominously. “It's definitely a trend that's on the rise.” What he means is that Facebook is the perfect storm of the last two red flags. There, you can while away the hours justifying how amazing your relationship is while also comparing the intensity of your love to that of everyone you've ever known. Helpful.

“You also tend to be on Facebook or Instagram when you're not enjoying or engaging with the situation around you,” he says. If you aren't having a good time, you're going to feel vulnerable-and you probably already know that social media is a terrible place to be in that moment. “The hits are going to hit harder when you're vulnerable,” Sexton says.

Say vulnerability is a gas leak; Facebook-and its ability to show you everything about your exes at all times-is like a match. “It's suggesting to you friends that you might want to add, specifically people from your past,” Sexton says. “And what do people tend to do on social media? You look up every ex-boyfriend or girlfriend you've ever had. That's normal and human, but it creates a situation where people can reach out to people they have no business talking to,” at the exact worst time to reignite those conversations. This, Sexton says, creates a colossal amount of infidelity in marriages.

The fix: “Everyone has their thing, and if social media is your partner's, then that's okay,” Stubbs says. “But if it's starting to become an issue in your relationship, talk about it.” She says to frame the conversation in a way that isn't accusatory, but understanding. Ask your partner what they like about social media and why they feel the need to spend so much time on it. It could uncover some rockiness in your relationship from their point of view.

“Social media is tricky, and I urge caution when equating likes outside of your relationship as a reflection of your own relationship happiness and status,” Stubbs says. A good compromise? One or two tech-free evenings a week. It will give you the ability to spend quality time together-without competing for each other's attention.

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

Now a lot of people would argue that the red flag gets thrown when you stop having regular sex with your partner. But Sexton says that's a misdirection. “People's sex lives change throughout their marriages,” he says. “Bodies change, desires change, people have kids, and so on.” So while you may have started out all hot and heavy, things tend to ebb and flow as your relationship progresses. That isn't a red flag-that's life.

What is a red flag, however, is when you stop talking about having sex. “Sex is the one conversation you absolutely must be able to have with your partner,” Sexton says. Changes to your sex life don't have to be a problem, if you're open and able to ride them out together. But if changes are afoot, and you and your partner haven't been able to face each other about it? That's a big deal.

The fix: You guessed it: communication. “It is key in all things,” Stubbs says. “Assumptions really do nothing for us, so it's always a good idea to bring up any issue you may have face-to-face with your partner.” That, it seems, is the absolute fix to all of these red flags. Discuss your problems instead of letting them fester. Give your partner a chance to share their feelings. Meet in the middle where possible. Talk things out until you figure out where that middle is.

Sexton agrees, and says he tends to see folks in his office who have bottled up feelings or concerns for far too long, only to have everything explode. “You'll hear of couples who go from having a conversation about the weather to screaming about how one of their mothers got too drunk at the wedding,” Sexton says. Relationships take work, and keeping them going for years upon years at a time can feel like a big task, especially when new technology comes out seemingly hell-bent on ruining anyone's chances. The good news-on which Sexton and Stubbs agree-is that there's almost no problem you can't unpack with a good talk.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

ungracefulswan-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

gayyogurt-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

fuckyeahslightlyamusing-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

typhoonprecious-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

inkundu1 · 6 years ago

Text

Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer

The hottest days of the year call for a Summer Fling. This week, we're deep-diving into sex, dating, and relationship drama, here.

Arno Images/Getty Images

Red flag: You feel the need to convince others of how amazing your relationship is.

alvarez/Getty Images

Red flag: You're comparing your relationship to other people's.

The fix: Stubbs says this damaging comparison game sets up unhealthy expectations that can exacerbate an already less-than-Zen situation in your relationship. But, it's not all bad.

Jesussanz/Getty Images

Red flag: You're spending a ton of time on social media (or your partner is).

Rawpixel/Getty Images

Red flag: You stop talking about sex.

This article originally appeared on Instyle.com

The post Sneaky relationship red flags you're missing, according to a divorce lawyer appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

viralhottopics · 8 years ago

Text

The Internet Made Fake News a ThingThen Made It Nothing

Ascourge is killing peoples minds, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the world needs a massive campaign to stop it. Across the nation, people lament its rise, and the threat it poses to America.Opioids? ISIS? Nope. “Fake news.” Even homicidal dictators agree things have gotten out of control. “Were living in a fake news era, as you know,” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said,dismissing an Amnesty International report that his government hanged as many as13,000 prisoners.

Factual falsehoods and straight-up lies started when the first first caveman claimed that, yes, that handprint on the wall is mine, and it is huge. Fast-forward a few millennia, and you’ll find hoaxes circulating online since Usenet was how people mainly communicated online. But “fake news” as anepithet, if not an accurate description of a story about, say, a child sex ring at a pizza joint, is something newa seemingly straightforward concept that has shattered into a kaleidoscope of easily manipulated meanings.

But how did the discourse around this so quickly spiralfrom “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump” (he didn’t) to Donald Trump shouting “fake news” at a CNN reporter during a press conference before his inauguration and incessantly tweeting about it after his inauguration? The origin story of “fake news” reflects the dizzying speed at which semantic shifts occur in the social media era. But it reveals farmore: What happens to factuality itself as algorithms replace humans, Facebook supplants traditional media, and the president declares war on the press. That perfect storm has made “fake news” as unstuck from factand as unstoppableas any viral hoax. Watching the meaning of “fake news” evolve shows just how easily even facts about facts can slip away.

1 – Fake Trends – May 9, 2016

On May 9, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Gizmodo publishes a story by Michael Nuez: “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” Nuez reports that editors in charge of Facebooks trending section would prevent conservative-friendly stories from showing up.

Backlash is swift. Talk, talk, talk on cable shows. Third-ranking Republican Senator John Thune calls on Facebook to investigate. Three days later, Zuckerberg says the company “found no evidence that this report is true.” Zuckerberg then hosts a listening session with conservative thinkers at Facebook headquarters. (In an email, Facebook tells WIRED it stands by its investigation into bias and pointed to its ongoing efforts to tweak Trending.)

On August 24, John Herrmans “Inside Facebooks (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine” runs in the New York Times Magazine. Herrman details the platforms plague of ideologically-themed pages that become a primary vector for sensationalized “news” and worse, though he doesn’t use the phrase “fake news.” Two days later, Facebook announces its automating Trending Topics, reportedly firing the sections editorial team and replacing them with engineers.

Three days pass, and a story falsely claiming Fox News fired anchor Megyn Kelly for supporting Hillary Clinton surges on Trending Topics. Facebook apologizes. The story, it turns out, originated on endingthefed.com, a site devoted to right-wing takes, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods. “We determined it was a hoax and it is no longer being shown in Trending,” Justin Osofsky, vice president of global operations at Facebook, says at the time. “Were working to make our detection of hoax and satirical stories quicker and more accurate.” For the bots, it seems, the facts were a slippery concept.

Eventually algorithms and computers are going to get smart enough to do our jobs, Adam Schrader, a former trending curator, says now. But I dont think that this robot was ready yet.

On September 9, Facebook removes a trending story that claims bombs felled the Twin Towers.

2 – Fake News Becomes Real – October 12, 2016

On October 12, the Washington Post publishes the results of its own experiment. “Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors,” the story reports. Monitoring four users’ accounts from August 31 to September 22, five “indisputably fake” and three “profoundly inaccurate” stories trended, the Post found.

Other media outlets pick up the newspaper’s story, from Fortune”Facebook Still Has a Fake News Problem”to Vanity Fair: “Facebook Is Still Grappling with Its Fake-News Problem”.

On October 20, Buzzfeed, which had regularly reported on fake news for years, unveils the results of its investigation: “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” Buzzfeed’s extensive analysis finds that hyperpartisan Facebook pages most likely to post inaccurate stories received far more shares, likes, and comments than mainstream news pages. The investigation describes stories and sites as “fake news,” which Buzzfeed media editor Craig Silverman describes as 100 percent-false stories knowingly created for financial gain.

Despite Buzzfeed’s alarming statistics, “fake news” as a term might have faded away. “The proliferation of fake news links on Facebook, in other words, is probably a problem that will be forgotten before it is fixedand that might have peaked just as Americans chose their next president,” Herrman writes in the New York Times on Election Day. Or not.

3 – Trump Rises – November 9, 2016

By the afternoon of November 9, Max Read of New York has come up with an answer to why the media missed the biggest story of the year. “The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news,” he writes in a story,”Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook.”