I received this email because one of my ebooks has “explicit content”, though it doesn’t need to be censored. Still, this is very concerning that a financial transactions company is telling a publisher what they may offer.
Email is published in full.
Re: Your Smashwords account at
Dear Smashwords Authors, Publishers and Literary Agents,
This email is being sent to all authors, publishers and agents who have published
erotica at Smashwords. We will also post this message to Site Updates and the
Press Room.
According to our records, you pubish 1 erotica-categorized title(s) out of 2
title(s) now live in the Smashwords system. This message may or may not pertain
to you.
Today we are modifying our Terms of Service to clarify our policies regarding
erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest. If you write in any
of these categories, please carefully read the instructions below and remove
such content from Smashwords. If you don’t write in these categories, you can
disregard this message.
PayPal is requiring Smashwords to immediately begin removing the above-mentioned
categories of books. Please review your title(s) and proactively remove and
archive such works if you are affected.
I apologize for the short notice, and I’m especially sorry for any financial
or emotional hardship this may cause the authors and publishers affected by this
change.
As you may have heard, in the last couple weeks PayPal began aggressively enforcing
a prohibition against online retailers selling certain types of “obscene” content.
For good background on the issue, see this Selena Kitt post here – http://selenakitt.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/19/slippery-slope-erotica-censorship/
or here – http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2012/02/slippery-slope-erotica-censorship.html#comment-form
or this Kindleboards thread here – http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,104604.0.html
On Saturday, February 18, PayPal’s enforcement division contacted Smashwords
with an ultimatum. As with the other ebook retailers affected by this enforcement,
PayPal gave us only a few days to achieve compliance otherwise they threatened
to deactivate our PayPal services. I’ve had multiple conversations with PayPal
over the last several days to better understand their requirements. Their team
has been helpful, forthcoming and supportive of the Smashwords mission. I appreciate
their willingness to engage in dialogue. Although they have tried their best
to delineate their policies, gray areas remain.
Their hot buttons are bestiality, rape-for-titillation, incest and underage erotica.
The underage erotica is not a problem for us. We already have some of the industry’s
strictest policies prohibiting underage characters (we don’t even allow non-participating
minors to appear in erotica), and our vetting team is always on the lookout for
“barely legal” content where supposed adults are placed in underage situations.
The other three areas of bestiality, rape and incest were less well-defined in
our Terms of Service (https://www.smashwords.com/about/tos) before today. I’ll
tackle these one-by-one below, and I’ll provide you a summary of the changes
that will go into effect immediately.
*Incest:* Until now, we didn’t have a policy prohibiting incest between consenting
adults, or its non-biological variation commonly known as “Pseudo-incest.” Neither
did our retailer partners. We’ve noticed a surge of PI books over the last few
months, and many of them have “Daddy” in the title. I wouldn’t be surprised
if the surge in “Daddy” titles prompted PayPal to pursue this purge (I don’t
know). PI usually explores sexual relations between consenting adult stepchildren
with their step parents, or between step-siblings. Effectively immediately,
we no longer allow incest of any variety in erotica.
Like many writers, censorship of any form greatly concerns me. It is with some
reluctance that I have made the decision to prohibit incest-themed erotica at
Smashwords. Regardless of your opinion on incest, it’s a slippery slope when
we allow others to control what we think and write. Fiction is fantasy. It’s
not real. It unfolds in our imagination. I’ve always believed fiction writers
and readers should have the freedom to explore diverse topics and situations
in the privacy of their own mind. From an imagination perspective, erotica is
little different from a literary novel that puts us inside the mind of farm animals
(1984), or a thriller novel that puts us inside the mind of a terrorist, or a
horror novel that puts us inside the mind of an axe-murderer or their victim.
All fiction takes us somewhere. We read fiction to be moved, and to feel.
Sometimes we want to feel touched, moved, or disturbed. A reader should have
the right to feel moved however they desire to be moved.
Incest, however, carries thorny baggage. The legality of incest is murky. It
creates a potential legal liability for Smashwords as our business and our books
become more present in more jurisdictions around the world. Anything that threatens
Smashwords directly threatens our ability to serve the greater interests of all
Smashwords authors, publishers, retailers and customers who rely upon us as the
world’s leading distributor of indie ebooks. The business considerations compel
me to not fall on the sword for incest. I realize this is an imperfect decision.
The slippery slope is dangerous, but I believe this imperfect decision is in
the best interest of the community we serve.
*Bestiality:* Until now, we didn’t have a stated policy regarding bestiality.
I like animals. Call me old fashioned or hypocritical (I’m not a vegetarian),
but I don’t want to be a party to anyone enjoying animals for sexual gratification,
for the same reason we’ve never allowed pedophilia books. I don’t want to publish
it, sell it, or distribute it. The TOS is now modified to reflect this. Note
this does not apply to shape-shifters common in paranormal romance provided the
were-creature characters are getting it on in their human form. Sorry I need
to clarify it that way, but we don’t want to see bestiality erotica masquerading
as paranormal romance.
*Rape:* Although our Terms of Service prohibits books that advocate violence
against others, we did not specifically identify rape. This was an oversight
on our part. Now we have clarified the policy. We do not want books that contain
rape for the purpose of titillation. At Smashwords, rape has no longer has a
place in erotica. It has no place anywhere else if the purpose is to titillate.
Non-consensual BDSM – or any other form of non-consensual violence against another
person – is prohibited.
*NEXT STEPS:* If you have titles at Smashwords that are now expressly forbidden,
by the end of day Monday (Feb 27), please click to your Dashboard at https://www.smashwords.com/dashboard
and click UNPUBLISH then click ARCHIVE. This will also cause our automated systems
to remove the titles from retail distribution.
DO NOT try to hide or obfuscate violating content by changing book titles, book
descriptions and tags. If we discover such shenanigans, said authors/publishers
will risk account deletion and forfeiture of any accrued earnings, per our Terms
of Service.
We take violations of the TOS seriously, because such violations jeopardize the
opportunities for your fellow authors.
We do not want to see PayPal clamp down further against erotica. We think our
authors should be allowed to publish erotica. Erotica, despite the attacks it
faces from moralists, is a category worthy of protection. Erotica allows readers
to safely explore aspects of sexuality that they might never want to explore
in the real world.
The moralists forget that we humans are all sexual creatures, and the biggest
sex organ is the brain. If it were not the case, none of us would be here.
Erotica authors are facing discrimination, plain and simple. Topics that are
perfectly acceptable in mainstream fiction are verboten in erotica. That’s not
fair. Our decisions today are imperfect. Please, act responsibly, don’t try
to game the system or publish content that pushes the limits of legality. Help
us continue to help indie authors around the world to continue to publish and
distribute with freedom.
*THINGS TO AVOID:* Avoid using words such as ‘bestiality,’ ‘rape,’ ‘incest,’
‘underage,’ or ‘barely legal’ in book titles, book descriptions or keyword tags,
otherwise Smashwords may conclude you’re violating the Terms of Service, or trying
to push the limits. If you’re writing non-erotic works, and any of these words
are necessary, then you’re okay.
On Tuesday (Feb 28) we will begin removing content that we deem in violation.
When we remove a title, you will receive an email notifying you of such, and
that email will append this letter along with instructions on how to notify us
if we made an error. I promise you, we will make mistakes, so please work with
us, take a deep breath and honor us with your patience.
If you believe we removed something in error, please click “Comments/questions,”
mention the title we removed, provide the hyperlink to said title, and provide
your *calm* reasoning for why we should reconsider.
Our support team is backlogged, so it may take several days for them to respond.
As we mention in the Terms of Service, we reserve the right to remove anything
for any reason. That said, we will also try to make our decisions with care
and prudence.
You might wonder if Smashwords should simply switch to a different payment provider.
It’s not so easy. PayPal is designed into the wiring of the Smashwords platform.
They run the credit card processing for our retail store, and they’re how we
pay our authors and publishers. PayPal is also an extremely popular, trusted
payment option for our customers. It is not feasible for us to simply switch
to another provider, should such a suitable provider even exist, especially with
so few days notice.
Please note our Terms of Service is subject to additional modifications as we
work to bring Smashwords into compliance with PayPal requirements. Let’s hope
today’s actions mark the limit of the slippery slope.
Significant gray area remain. Erotica is still permitted, though if authors
try to push the limits of what’s permitted, we risk further clamping down. Please
be responsible. Don’t go there. If you’re going to push the limits, push the
limits of great writing, not the limits of legality.
Thank you for assisting our compliance efforts on such short notice. We know
these decisions will be upsetting to some of our authors and publishers, and
for that we apologize. We do believe, however, that these decisions will place
us on a stronger footing to represent the best interests all indie authors and
publishers from here forward.
Best wishes,
Mark Coker
Founder
Smashwords
P.S. Please contact our support team for inquiries regarding this change in
our Terms of Service by clicking the “comments/questions” link at the top of
any page at Smashwords. If your inquiry regards a specific title, please include
the hyperlink to the book page of that specific title.
unknown flame-effect vehicle or building or bicycle or something
A dis-jointed meditation on things learned at Burning Man
The night after we got back from Burning Man, I had a waking playa-dream.
I woke, dazed and disoriented, in the orange street light that filtered in around the curtains. The sound of the light rail going past was a non-potable water truck to my ears, spraying down the dust street outside of the enclosure of our apartment. I reached my heavy arm up from the bed, tossing covers off of me in the heat, and touched the drywall. “Odd,” I thought. “Drywall would be such a mess on the playa. But it does have a nice finish.” Who built this structure? It has a very regular cubic shape. Have they pre-made dry wall panels, and then hung them from the inside of a geodesic dome? How have they sealed the edges? There is very little dust in here. I want to meet the person who designed this structure and chat with him or her. I got off the mattress, sitting on the playa floor, and only when starting down the hallway towards the bathroom to look for a water tank did I realize I was back in our apartment in Portland, and was not in a city of 50,000 built for a week on an alkaline lake bed.
2011 was my first Burning Man, an event I’ve wanted to attend since I was about 15 and read about it in BoingBoing. 13 years later, it’s a completely different event, of course. And apparently, it is also many different events at the same time. The week of Burning Man is a tripartite collusion of drunk revelers, hardcore makers, and hippie consciousness-expansion. But outside of that week, it is something else again.
I was lucky enough, through a convoluted series of events that was never fully explained to me, to get an early access pass. These are handed out to volunteers, artists, and theme camp builders so they can get a jump start on construction before the event officially opens. The unofficial theme camp I was camping with managed to get a few of these, and having nothing else to do except drive rebar into the earth, I went along with our small build team to erect shade structures for 30 people from PVC, aluminum conduit, tarps, and silk parachute. Easy enough.
Black Rock City, pre-city
The best part of this, which I never imagined in all my visions of the event, was being there for the week immediately prior to the actual week of Burning Man. Before all the “tourists” and party-goers get there, there is a hardcore contingent of people there with one goal. Build shit. Also, I suppose, drink beer and make sexual innuendo, but that kind of goes hammer-in-hand with build shit.
So you’ve been to a Maker Faire. You’ve read about the DIY revolution in countless publications. You have a network of enthusiastic artists you know who are all involved in crazy projects to put Arduinos on Roombas or something, and have a couple Kickstarter campaigns under their belt a piece. All of this is awesome, and I don’t mean to imply it is anything less than so. But none of this really compares to the building environment pre-Burning Man.
It’s possible that I was extraordinarily lucky to be with such a particularly awesome group of people on our own build team, and I have no doubt that I was. But the feeling extended beyond our group, to the entire community. It was an notion of collectivism and altruism that I’ve only dreamed about in my most blue-sky moments. There was an overall sense that everyone was there for a single purpose, and every project and camp was an extension of that process. Resources, tools, and hands were all part of the overall effort, and were lent and asked for freely. Every task was praised and supported with helpful suggestion with a single voice. Rivalries existed, but only insofar as it improved the overall experience. There was a sense of cooperative challenge that paled team-building activities in comparison, and completely flattened the lip-service of collectivity espoused by sports.
I have no doubt that the harsh conditions of the playa contributed to this. If we were in a meadow somewhere, near air-conditioned homes and bars, disputes would result in people “stepping out for a moment”, and divisions would result. However, in the desert there is no place to go. Furthermore, the daily effect of the desert on the body means that collectivity is a survival strategy. It is a saw on the playa, that if someone is getting pissy and annoyed, the proper thing to do is to tell them to “drink some water”. It’s irritating, because people say it all the time, but after you drink water you immediately feel better because you were actually dehydrated. A “fuck you, buddy” turns into a “drink some water”, and everyone is reminded that we are in the desert together, and we are nothing but evaporative meat sacks a few liters of water from death at all times.
Camp Spinaesthesia - PVC, aluminum, canvas, silk.
This sort of hydration ethic is found in other forms. During the pre-week, there was a ubiquitous imperative to thank people for just about everything, and to be obsessively polite. Someone gives you a hand, you thank them by name. Someone gives you a piece of cheese, you look them in the eye and say thanks. If a tarp is about to be ripped away by a 50 mph gust of wind, you still take the time so say, “hey, would it be possible for you to give me a hand with this?” or “do you have a minute to help?” At first, I thought this was simply hippie sentiment, and I found it a bit obnoxious. But then I realized that the overall imperative to speak this way had the same effect as the emphasis on hydration. By reminding yourself to speak like this, it is a sub-conscious reminder that we’re all in this together, and the help you ask for is the help you will give five minutes from now. Yelling, “somebody help me now!” might be literally true, but it won’t get you the help any faster, and promotes division and aggression as opposed to collectivity. The tarp blowing away is not actually the most important thing. The fact that the tarp will continue to be an inch from blowing away for an entire week is the important thing, and that everyone works together to make it secure is the real goal.
As the event began, this sort of ethic was still present, but as the “tourists” showed up, it faded. Perhaps it was simply the number of people, or the heightened vocality of people just there to consume and not to build. But by the end of Burning Man, people in general had stopped saying thank you, and were much more interested in what they could get from people.
As the Man burned on Saturday night of the event, I remember in particular a couple of girls yelling at everyone in front of them to “sit down” so they could see. A number of people had heeded their call, and so they had the feeling that their request was valid, rather than questioning it. We did not want to sit; this was the Man burning, and a culmination of everything that we had built and lived for two weeks. But even though we were on the edge of the standing mass, and it was clear we were not going to sit, they continued to yell at us to sit down throughout the entirety of the burn. Not a single please was uttered, just a constant braying of the will they wanted to impart upon others. If there was ever an example of the “selling out” of Burning Man, this was it. It isn’t a selling out at all, actually–it is a socio-emotional mind state. It is the transferring from a state of mind of collectivity, in which each person is a functional component of the whole, to a state of mind of ego-actualization, in which each person must fight to harness others to their own particular vector. Would I ever have sat? Perhaps. But suddenly, facing this person who was negating the positive culture I had experienced up to this point, my own will turned to stone.
Trojan horse, under construction. It was burned 5 days later.
I tell this anecdote to impart the seriousness of the community, and the strength of collectivity when done right, and how quickly all of that can be negated by thoughtless violation of that network.
The point of Burning Man to me is the way in which the stark reality of the intersection between art and infrastructure is made apparent, and becomes lived experience for those who choose to take part in it. Okay, sure: dancing all night in the middle of the desert is fun too. But that was what I expected, whereas the lessons about building collectivity were a complete surprise. The purpose of Burning Man is to entertain. The art is low on poignant meaning, high on effort converted into wow-factor. But through that expression of entertainment is channeled an incredible amount of material, human resource, and hard work. The end effect is in itself a cause, because it stimulates the drive to make such an incredible human infrastructure come together. It isn’t profit, or a pay check, or even something as pedestrian and necessary as security, safety, sustainability or stability. In fact, it is mostly antithetical to all of that, and perhaps that is why what happens at Burning Man is able to ignore those everyday drives, and really step outside the standard channels work normally forms itself to, and all the petty problems therein. But as much as an outlier this experience might be, it is a hell of a model to aspire towards. Perhaps there is some sort of synthesis to be made.
Why is it that hexayurts and geodesic domes, two structures billed as fabulous advances to architecture in the real world, have taken off much more strongly at Burning Man than in the real world? Why is it that in a place practically devoid of Internet and networked devices, and stronger and more resilient social network has developed? Why is it that people spend a year’s worth of time developing projects that will last a single week? I don’t really know the answer to these questions in words, but I could kind of feel the answer happening at Burning Man. The answer itself wasn’t important. If someone had tried to answer this question, the answer might be, “I don’t know. Let’s drink some water, and then put together this hexayurt before lunch.” A pretty good answer, I guess.
Grey-B-Gone greywater evaporation rig.
“Radical self-reliance” is a term that is thrown around a lot in regard to Burning Man. I don’t know that it’s necessarily accurate, because Burning Man seems to be much more about relying on other people: the people in your build team, the people in your camp, the neighbors on your street, the Department of Public Works folks and the rest of the volunteer infrastructure, and everyone who attends the Burning Man even. I suppose though, the term kind of works if you factor in the fact that Burning Man is a radical deformation of your sense of “self”. Call it collectivity, call it an ecosystem, call it a team, or call it intentional anarchism. It is about a state of constant reminder that your self is actually pretty frail and insignificant, and if you try to do anything on your own or only for yourself, you will end up with a sloppy pile of bricks, working for forty years all alone, or simply be dead. The human is a resolutely social animal. And while we build things for all sorts of reasons, the thing we are really building at all times is our culture, with those other humans around us, whether we are close to them or not.
Some thoughts on the ongoing London riots, in no particular order. They kind of descend from open question, to class-war-screed, back to open question, but I think I’ll leave it just with the lack of form that it has. These sorts of thoughts shouldn’t be set in stone, because no one is really an expert on this. We’re all just trying to deal.
I’m following the Guardian’s live blogs, which are as usual, pleasantly diverse in their coverage. (Here’s the current one–they retire the url and start anew every 12 hours or so.) Also Twitter, of course.
- Geography – An on-going question of mine. I’m unfamiliar with London geography, and I wonder what relation the riot areas have with each other. I read an article recently (offline, sorry no link) about how public transit can dramatically decrease crime and increase civic-togetherness in quantifiable ways by connecting slum neighborhoods to the rest of the city. It seems these London neighborhoods are not slums or favelas by any means. I wonder how that thesis relates to this situation. Reading about the areas, it seems there is a large amount of gang activity based around post codes, or “ends” (Americanized as ‘hoods, perhaps), which is standard for places where people are unable to connect to the rest of the city. I wonder about the particulars of why these areas might have been cut off from the rest of London. One sense of London I have, though based on almost nothing, is that it is perfectly easy to be “lost” in the sprawl. When I lived in Harlem a couple of years ago, I noticed that one reason it was a perfectly excellent place to live was that it was very much ‘synced’ with the rest of Manhattan, and did not seem cut off by the park, as perhaps it had been at one time. Unlike the South Bronx, which although was only a few blocks and a subway stop from where I lived in Harlem, seemed miles away due to the river, and the overpass highway systems on the north side of the river. A similar thing is evident in South Central LA, where the highway loops and concentrates poorer neighborhoods, and the only public transit linking it to the rest of the city is a long, slow bus ride. And yet, perhaps because London doesn’t have the history of red-lining the way the US does, the riot areas are spread out, and all over. Maybe it has something to do with low-income areas that are near shopping areas? i.e. Potential rioters, with access to riot targets, but not much else? All speculation, because I don’t know.
- Riot vs. Protest – I hope, perhaps with a bit of guilty schadenfreude, that this puts the difference between riot and protest in perspective, and next time there are protests at least in the UK, the language used to describe the black bloc is different. The black bloc may to some degree made from “kids who just want to break stuff”, and yet they do not steal merchandise, burn down buildings, smash smaller businesses, or destroy private vehicles. On the other hand, we may see a new form of provacateuring on the part of the police, or, potential looters may try and join the bloc, now that they have a taste for how easy it can be.
- Anarchism – Relatedly, hoping for a language shift surrounding “anarchy”. But more than that, I’ve been waiting and hoping for an anarchist response to these riots. Solfed, a North London Anarchist Organization, released a statement, but I’m (still) hoping for more. Since this is the Internet, and posting utopian reality-design-fiction from half a world away is completely acceptable, let me draw you a pen-portrait of the anarchist response I’d like to see:
First and foremost, black shirts on the streets. Properly marked as anarchists, perhaps with circle-A insignia, if not something else. This is to make it apparent that any person with a mask and a hood is not necessarily an Anarchist, and to mark the difference. Now, the activity would depend on the numbers and the resources available. Taking as a pattern Common Ground rebuilding efforts, Black Cross street medics, organizing consensus groups of people in the community to defend their block or communicate anger towards the government, or simply Food Not Bombs if nothing else, an effort to build solidarity and community between people in the street, and an effort to break the categories of “Rioter”, “Police”, and “Vigilante”. The bloc pushes protests towards radical anger, but the riots are an opportunity for the other side of anarchism, organization, community, and building (which we all know and love) to show its face. Take that bravery in the streets that faces down cop riots, and show how it can help people. Show how a gang doesn’t just point aggression outwards, but works together for mutual benefit.
Anyway, or so I wish. I try to think how I would do this in my own city, were this to happen here. I have some ideas, but I don’t know if they would work or not until I try it. I have the feeling though, that we must begin to try things like this, because these won’t be the last riots, and things we not return to the status quo where anarchists just mobilize for protests and society runs on in an uneasy truce “as normal”. It’s time for those who believe in a self-determining society to step up. Easy for me to say, but I’m going to keep saying it.
- Racism/Bigotry – Race is certainly a factor here, from the original shooting to the often repeated anger about the police’s right to stop and search in the UK. And, we’re seeing it become a HUGE deal in the backlash to these riots. Race riots normally start as racial anger (justified or not), and then a backlash. It doesn’t matter who starts it, but what happens is people are getting killed in the streets because of their race. The reaction to these riots seems to be heavily pushing things in this direction. There’s news of nationalist groups getting together, drunken vigilantism, and many, many characterizations of who is rioting that are based on race. Furthermore, calling the rioters “thugs”, “yobs”, “criminals” or other things like this is in fact a bigoted statement. They may be committing crimes, but from the people put in court so far, I’ve seen school teachers, counselors, and children. You would not call these people criminals if you met them on the street. To assume to use such a term to refer to a large group of people is a categorical judgment, and worse, a sentence of social death. It is not in terms of innocence/guilt that they are called thugs, but in terms of being reduced to a stereotype that always leads back to race. This is much like the phrase “crackhead”, at least here in the United States. Calling someone a “crackhead” because they look weird or act oddly may in fact be an accurate statement. That person might smoke crack, or some other drug. However, one does not actually know this, and is using the epithet based on a characterization of how a person looks, and is a stand in for “n—–.” It doesn’t matter the person’s color: what is implied is that the speaker has judged this person on the basis of categorical appearance and decided they are a worthless undesirable. I saw a twitter comment (sorry no source, it got lost in the flood) saying, “you KNOW what people wearing masks on the streets are up to”. Actually, NO. Most definitively, you DO NOT KNOW what they are up to. You are judging them, based on what you assume they are up to; and what you assume is that from the way they look and the way that they are dressed (mask or not) that they are a worthless undesirable. Leaders at the highest levels, to the media, to the people on the street are reifying this categorical depiction of “thugs”, which is at heart the expression of a skin-deep, racial judgment. Listen to 911 calls here in the States: “he looked like a thug”, “they were a couple of gangsters”. It is clear what this means (and sometimes they use the actual word, because this is America). You better believe that when the vigilante groups form, they are going to go after people they KNOW are thugs. And you know whom those people are. This linguistic racism MUST BE STOPPED, and now. Not only is it wrong, it’s going to get innocent people killed.
- Class War & Fascism – Seguing from the above, we can see that under stress, the lower segments of Western society oscillate between two opposing urges. The first, to riot in anger, to take things, to burn and smash. The second, to hurt people, to shoot people, to put boots on faces in order to support a paradigm of “order”. And of course, these are not far apart at all, leading “violence” to be the category we use to describe them inclusively. But they are not the same thing. It is one thing to act destructively towards physical objects, an entirely different thing to act that way towards people. Between these two, we see what Class War actually looks like, and it isn’t pretty.
There are other forces at play here besides what we might point out as solely “class” issues. Race, police, geography, etc. But if we look at those in this rioting society, we see the uninsured, the un-secure, the unemployed, and the undersupported. They are the ones with the most to gain by rioting, and the most to lose in the fires and at the hands of the police who are supposed to be “protecting” society. For the first time in at least a couple decades, we are seeing what a major “first-world” city looks like without the supposed continual protection of the police. In other words, what many of the lower classes see every day. What is “violent”, “anarchy”, and “thuggish” is a lower class world, and now it is on the television and the Internet. The way people react in this situation is according to two models: they hit the streets in gangs to take what they want, or they hit the streets in mobs to blame whom they want. This is the purest, uncontrolled, undisciplined form of class war. When the authority that held the class in its position (“under control”, or “peaceful” is what it is typically called, even though it is normally nothing like “peace”) is released, the class agonism boils over in these directions. We might call it “uncontrolled” class war, but we certainly shouldn’t call it unexpected. Again, this will not be the last riot in the history of the world.
As one who has on occasion acted as a proponent for “class war” in a rhetorical sense, I think it’s my responsibility to identify this as what it is, and to try and identify strategies to prepare for this literal, street class war, that is far more brutal and horrifying than any proletarian uprising as proposed in words. To try and simply clean this up, and go back to “normal” is a fallacy. To “regain control” is only to bottle up this urge again, until the next time it boils over. The class controls that keep areas impoverished, and susceptible to the urge to destroy, to blame, and to mob and kill are always insufficient; and in fact, they are the cause of the build up of agonism. This sort of agonistic tension needs to be released, and not simply by sports matches, video games, and bar brawls. Rather than placating the lower classes, they need to be elevated. The infrastructure that needs to be set up must be akin to hydroelectric power. The floods of intensity can be harnessed to build, rather than destroy. But the upper classes have no interest in this, as if very clearly goes against their interest. It is in the interest of the upper classes that riots occur, so that stronger police forces can be built, so that racial tension explode, and so that the lower classes rise up and fight each other, and burn down their own neighborhoods. Look for new police budgets, new racial organizations, new gentrification after these riots.
Lastly, when I say “they” to refer to the lower classes, be aware this is an attempt at objectivity. Because, it is really “We”. If you are not one of the upper classes, you are in the lower classes. There is no bourgeois anymore: the shopkeepers and employees who will clean up this mess are from the same neighborhoods where the destruction originated. Rents will still be collected. The sneakers and TVs that were stolen are teardrops in an ocean of consumerism. Profits have never been higher, and you and I are not seeing any of it.
- The Future – To try and turn away from the preachy-anarchist angle, let’s look to the future. The future is undoubtedly uncertain. No one could have predicted this, and no one will predict the next one. However, what we can say is that there will be a next one. There is something incredibly zeitgeisty about these riots. It sends a shutter down the back, and makes one’s eye look to the bookshelf, to the SF paperbacks that have described similar things at “some time in the near future”. That near future is now, even if we don’t know why.
The key of it is, that there was indeed a time when our culture as a whole stopped worrying about “this”. There was a moment of comfort, sometime in the 80s and 90s. Not to say that there weren’t riots and conflicts and crashes and wars, but they were such that a perspective was enabled. It became possible to “look the other way”, whatever direction that was. Now things are back in view, which is probably for the best. It’s hard to say whether we’ll be able to make these things better by preparing for them, but we can’t say they’d get better if we ignored them.
But, I think it’s our duty to try. Besides “radical politics” things we can do, (see anarchist reality-design-fiction above) and standard liberal politics things (reinstate and build support structures), it behooves us to think like futurists about this. If we are feeling a pull towards science fiction, maybe we should consult science fiction. And not just by planning for utopia/dystopia, but by doing the grunt work of SF: look at the aspects of one particular technological element, and then imagine how things would be different if one-little-thing were different. Examples? Hmm, let’s see: well, what if rather than using Blackberry Messenger to coordinate riots, what if the youth used it for X? I don’t know for what. But what sort of payoff would there have to be to make people freely organize for X, rather than riot? What is the payoff of rioting, and how could that be supplanted by something positive? SMS and QR codes are used to advertise and sell products, and with arguable results. What is between a riot and a sales pitch? A flash mob? A meme? I don’t know, but these are questions we should be asking, because these are things we’ll likely be dealing with in the future. Think of Graffiti-Markup-Language. Graffiti used to be purely a nuisance, and a sign of urban blight. Now it is merged with programming language to make an art form. Who could have predicted that? Maybe no one. But somebody made it.
I think we all should probably be thinking about making things, as hard as we can. That might be the purest advice for dealing with destruction that I can think of.
In a post on G+, Tim Carmody proposed the notion of a full disclosure for tech journalists including what particular devices/systems they owned and used. For example, if one was writing about Windows, and didn’t actually have a Windows machine, should that be acknowledged?
The brief consensus in the comments was that this information is certainly helpful. I noted that when on a tech forum discussing problems with one’s tech, the first thing you’re asked to do is state the system you’re using to set the context. So shouldn’t this be standard for tech praise or tech criticism as well as tech support?
Justin Pickard brought up the site UsesThis at which influential tech folks are interviewed about their setups for particular tasks. Certainly this counts as an endorsement of some sort. And yet, obviously the reader interested in a particular graphics engine box will be taking these personal choices with a grain of salt. People still have preferences, and no one person’s choice can be said to be the canonical best of all. Every choice has pros and cons, and that what a reviewer hopefully seeks to identify in reviewing a product–saying “this is not simply the best for me, but here are the sorts of tasks it does well or poorly, by which you might make your own decision.” The declaration of one’s own setup is quite subjective, while reviewing intends a sort of objectivity.
And yet, there is more to these alternate points of view. When hearing about someone else’s gear, one doesn’t just take it as a personal endorsement. There is something more dynamic than that. You aren’t just reading someone else’s shopping list, or their wish list in a catalog. You are hearing a narrative about how they’ve solved a particular problem. The choices they’ve made speak to their workflow, and their way of confronting a regular, complex task. It doesn’t represent the best way, or the cheapest way, or the newest way: it speaks to the actual way that something is done.
This is not a narrative of qualitative or quantitative indicators, it is a narrative of praxis. It’s like looking into your grandfather’s tool box, or watching a friend drive. By listing one’s central tools or gear, you are learning about the person as much as their objects, because you are learning about the network of the person, extending outward to their objects.
I’m not a tech reviewer, but I take my gear seriously, and while I don’t fetishize it I select it carefully. So I came up with my own toolbox list, which is now a standard page here on the website, which I’ll update as it changes.
I didn’t list everything I use or own for everything, but I listed the things for which I had a choice, and after some thinking, made that choice carefully. I’m a writer, and a part of my daily work is reading, so I’ve also listed some standard reading sources. This is a potential place for the list to turn into the fetish catalog–it would not be completely inaccurate to list every book I’ve read, or basically add a blog roll or even my Twitter follow list, as these all affect my daily work considerably. But this would be veering towards the Minimalist Lifestyle Design Fetish, which is to make everything one associates with a personal accessory and endorsement. Brand is not an element of praxis. Brand is the total picture–the holistic aesthetic that commodity merchants attempt to sell, because once the brand is sold, accessory products can be shilled with the ease of action-figure play sets. Brand washes over the actual praxis, erasing use-value and replacing it with aesthetic. Aesthetic can be part of praxis, but it is the use of each particular object that defines its part in the network, not the overall image, or the construction of a total lifestyle list. Think of it this way: it would make sense for tool box to contain screwdrivers. And, a person might choose a particular sort of screwdriver, with ratchet grip and selectable tips, if that provides them more utility from time to time. However, it does not make sense for every toolbox to have this particular screwdriver, simply because it is more functional. And furthermore, although one might be able to order this particular screwdriver in custom colors, that is not relevant at all. Praxis extends and networks a certain amount of usage and features in particular devices, in a contingent framework that is developed individually, and uniquely at each occurrence of use. On the other hand, attempting to bind every feature or object together as a single continuum is where the brand develops. The difference between a real life toolbox and the Sharper Image catalog is the difference of steel, grease, plastic, and scuff marks, versus glossy paper, photos, and artful descriptions. It’s the difference between the things you use, and the things someone thinks you should use.
And in the end, this comes back to Tim’s originally raised question. In listing the items in our toolbox, we aren’t only rattling off a list in the effort of full disclosure, description, or identification. We are picking up each of our items individually, and thinking about why and how we use them. Is this a “toolbox” item? How carefully did we consider this object when we brought it into our possession? Would we accept a different tool in its place, or is there something about it that is unique to our relationship with the objects around us? These are questions of praxis, whereas an itemized list is a catalog, or a collector’s checklist. Perhaps reviewing technology as products should be more personal, more practical. But certainly our relationship with our own tools should be.
There is an article going around about Chinese prisoners working as World of Warcraft gold farmers. It has the hallmarks of a hot Twitter link: World of Warcraft, new virtual economies, China, and social outrage. But surprise of surprises, this retweet fever is… well, xenophobic. As it turns out, when viewed from a perspective of profit-taking off the backs of the workers, US prison labor is far more exploitative.
by Flickr user adactio
First of all, the claim in the Guardian piece is that the guards make £470-570 a day off the mining. I’m not sure if this is supposedly per prisoner, or for all the prisoners, but either way, it appears to be a disingenuous way of presenting the figure. This article claims that the average monthly wages of a “free” gold farmer are about 145 USD a month, working 12 hours shifts, or 40 cents an hour. This source claims the average Chinese gold farmer makes 0.30 USD an hour, while management makes about $1 an hour gross off that worker’s labor. So, with 300 prisoners (as cited in the Guardian article) working 12 hour shifts, we could imagine the prison bosses are pulling in $3600 a day gross if they are the top of the management structure, and $1080 per day if they are merely reselling the prisoners’ labor. Either way, we see the £470-570 sum is closer to the combined profitability of all the prisoners, (subtracting subscription and computer costs), and not the work done by the individual prisoner.
But even now that we’ve straightened that out, how much money is that, really? Gold farming only exists because there are economies in the world in which 30 cents an hour is a wage that someone is willing to work for. It is widespread in China, because of the size of the population and what that money will buy. In the United States, even working as a illegal farm laborer for half minimum wage is more than ten times that rate.
But don’t trust me: let’s look at some statistics. Federal minimum wage (the absolute minimum, as some states mandate a higher wage) is $7.25 an hour. The lowest minimum wage in China (China’s minimum wage is set regionally, not nationally) works out to 33 cents an hour, figured with 12-hour days. So gold farming in China is actually almost as lucrative for a worker as a minimum wage job, whereas in the US, it doesn’t even come close. This is why the Chinese bother to do it, whereas in the US, we hope for jobs in food service. Keeping in mind, of course, that “minimum wage” is an abstract figure in itself.
One: the Chinese gold farmers are probably (the article is not clear) paid NOTHING for their farming. The prison bosses pocket 100% of the gross after equipment, with zero labor costs. The workers are making 0% on their labor, and 100% of what would be their minimum wage is being stolen from them on account of their incarceration. Whereas, US prisoners keep at worst (figuring 92 cents an hour) 12.6% of what would be their minimum wage, 87.4% of their due as workers being taken from them on account of their incarceration. In other words, it is better to earn something rather than nothing, and the American prisoners are doing better than the Chinese.
On the other hand…
Two: The surplus value is what matters. It is not so much the percentage that those workers could have earned at a “real” job farming, gold farming, or whatever. It is the work that their bosses are getting out of them, and in this case, the money they save by using prisoners. It is the comparison between the money the bosses might have spent to pay free workers, versus money that those bosses save at the expense of their workers’ incarceration. In this case, per working hour, the Chinese prison bosses are earning $1 off each worker per hour, because this is the largest price they can get from the farmed gold, even when paying their workers absolutely nothing. While the American boss who out-sources prison labor is earning a full $5.25 extra per working hour in pure profit by skirting minimum wage requirements. That is on top of the profit that boss would already collect, from phone orders of products, or harvested produce. In avoiding the necessity to pay workers a minimum wage, US bosses pocket 525% more surplus value per prison-work-hour than their Chinese colleagues with the gold farming scheme. The Chinese prisoner may get the shaft when it comes to being paid. But as far as saving money on labor, the US prison boss is doing much better than the Chinese prison boss.
While our first instinct might be to compare the two instances as in approach One, it is crucial that we compare them by approach Two. A prisoner is a prisoner, but the value of that prisoner to the economic system of industrialized prison labor, shows exactly what stake that system has in keeping that laborer a prisoner. A US worker in prison is worth 525% more to the economy than a Chinese worker farming gold in prison. The Chinese prison bosses would make a little less if they couldn’t steal free labor from their prisoners. But that is small potatoes, compared to what US corporations make off their prisoners. My instinct is that the Chinese gold farming bosses are working on their own, just trying to extort a little bit of labor from their charges (the prisoners also officially work make products for export, which I expect are far more lucrative). To compare gold farming, a little bit of exploitative pocket money gathering, to the worldwide system of prison labor, is merely to make an internet-ready article, and not to even begin to comprehend the injustice done to incarcerated workers by surplus-value economies.
The real story, therefore, is not that it is so crazy that in a Chinese prison, prisoners are made to do some meaningless task for their bosses’ benefit. When measuring the profitability of the prison-industrial complex within the working economy, the US is still #1, baby.
Oh, and the story is also that we love to imagine China is the great economic Satan. But the US has been outsourcing exploitation since there was a trade deficit, and extracting surplus value from workers since time immemorial, so don’t think we’ve forgotten how to fuck over the lower classes.
There has been a drama of mis-attributions on the Internet lately, which, if you recall the anti-Wikipedia-style hysteria of years back, would seem forewarned. But the dramatic element is that the loose, crowd-sourced, volunteer aspect of the Network has been exposing and solving mis-attribution errors, not causing them.
And then yesterday, in consideration of these events, I decided to repost a quotation mystery that has baffled me for years: that in the University of Minnesota edition of Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, there is a endnote left absolutely blank, with the quote unattributed. William Ball jumped on it, and solved the mystery by figuring out that the quote was oddly translated, the citation left blank, the punctuation misprinted so as to obscure the context, and perhaps the passage creatively-recalled to begin with. Like that, my mystery fell away, like scales from the eyes.
by Flickr user hans s
Perhaps it is apt that we can watch these little sessions unfold over Storify, because it is not really the work of one person that uncovered the puzzles of these mistakes. One person could perhaps fix a mistake, not unlike editing, if he or she had the knowledge to rectify an obviously perceived error. But it was because these were mistakes echoed wide and far throughout the network, or because one person’s doubt could be shared and extended by other interested parties, that there was a conclusion to these, and a narrative of the puzzle could be established. They are dialogs. One person has a doubt, and expresses it outwardly. From the topology of their Network, no doubt established by a previous acknowledgement of similar interests, comes the response: yes, I share your doubt. Then the synthesis: let’s see if we can’t manipulate the Networks to find our solution.
As I mentioned to @exstasis, who pretty much solved my mystery single-handedly as I watched in awe, it was amazing that he solved the issue using only online sources that were readily available. Search engines, scans of books uploaded (perhaps with dubious copyright conformity), and the various versioning that the wide duplication of resources on the Network can provide. While the puzzle could no doubt have been solvable with standard academic resources at hand, such as a good academic library, he didn’t need any of this. And considering the fact that we found no mention of the existence of the puzzle at all, it is entirely possible that no one has ever bothered to track down the solution. Therefore, the Network allowed a couple of “amateur” scholars satisfy their curiosity, without needed to avail themselves of the resources of the standard fact-checking institutions. Those institutions that through their mistake, created the puzzle to begin with; but we won’t blame them for that, as what all these cases make clear is that the Network is in fact equal to “higher” academia when it comes to creating these intellectual puzzles, as well as solving them. One wonders if in fact, the Network has further merit in that not only does it allow access to anyone with the basic ability to connect and the will to participate, but the pace of both mistake and correction is incredibly rapid (perhaps related to the scale of participation as compared to academia).
All of this being fairly apparent to anyone who is more than a casual user of Twitter, or some other tight-knit soft-network.
by Flickr user Randy Son of Robert
by Adam
But here’s what I wonder, and what I’d like to suggest. The theory of gamification states (my own generalization here) that a motivation strategy for behavior could be an assigning of points and reward structure so that a person can more easily visualize their progress towards a goal. But perhaps rather than gamification, we should be considering puzzlification as a strategy for utilizing these sorts of soft-networks.
The difference is this: a game is designed to structure goals via a definition of quantified points and winning conditions. A puzzle, on the other hand, is itself a structure of a qualitative and logical quandary. A game can be cheated when the points structure is manipulated to achieve the winning conditions without necessarily achieving the goal. But a puzzle can only be solved, or not. However, a proposed solution to a puzzle can be at first accepted as seemingly correct, and then later found to be incorrect. A puzzle can be be the goal, structured into part of game. And in a sense, the strategy for winning (or cheating) a game can be thought of as a puzzle. But the difference is quantitative/qualitative.
To more directly contrapose the two: the game structuring numerous small problems together via a generalized quantitative network, the puzzle an isolated network structure of specific logical quandary. Both are ways of structuring our assessment of reality, and so neither is more “real” than the other. The facts of gamification are not about the ability to cheat, so much as what that ability entails. A poorly-described puzzle is in no way superior to a well-designed game. Nor is a properly-apportioned game necessarily worse than a clever puzzle. They are merely alternate ways of describing a goal, so that the mind can attempt to guess what its move should be to satisfy that goal, so defined.
Furthermore, I would venture to say that in addition to simply quantifying the issue, a game’s rules are more generic and abstract from the actual tasks at hand, bridging beyond one issue to a whole set of issues, wired in series as it were. While a puzzle, in addition to quantifying the situation, is specific and concrete to the issue, considering everything holistically. Once the puzzle is solved, that is it. It may be intricate in its layout, but a puzzle is entirely self-contained.
Because these are similar ways of assessing problems, both have merits which are no doubt applicable to different situations. But to a soft-network such as Twitter, I think we should look towards the puzzle. I am calling it a soft-network because Twitter is not meant to organize any particular process or activity. Sure, it is based around 140 character messages, but clearly the point of Twitter is not simply to create 140 messages. Twitter represents language itself, in a way. Language is for communicating, but that’s not all we do with it. We also grunt, express emotion, think, act, commune, organize, and many other things through language. With Twitter we send messages, but also network (in the verb sense), share, express, link, and a bunch of other things. It is that there is a very basic framework without explicit purpose that we are able to do so much with it, extending it outward from its premise. On the other hand, a hard-network is defined by specific tasks. The html structure of a website, for example, is designed to render information via a browser, and provide programmed functionality. There are different ways of doing this, and one can do an incredible number of things with such a structure. But it is a specifically-defined system and outside of its core task, has no other function.
And this difference is ironic, when it comes to interacting with these structures. Problems with hard-networks, those structures that are very specific, are perhaps best solved by quantified assessment. HTML ought to render fast and error-free, and be coded simply and quickly. With a specific structure to act upon, we can take an abstract and generic method of assessing those actions and still assess very effectively. On the other hand, with a soft network like Twitter, it is very difficult to generically assess a “winner”. Rather, with such an open-ended structure, it is better to assess our actions within it logically, only according to a concrete and specific set of qualitative parameters. Do you “win” Twitter by tweeting the most, or fastest, or having the furthest reach? It all depends on the specifics of the particular puzzle you are trying to solve. You can see with the traits I’ve identified above, that a puzzle has certain attributes of a hard-network, which a game has attributes of a soft-network, and yet I suggest they should be oppositionally aligned.
These interaction pairings are antithetical to how we might think of them. Wouldn’t a well-defined hard-network structure benefit from an assessment system specific and concrete to its limited definition? And wouldn’t a more flexible soft-network require a general, far-reaching assessment? The answer is no–because assessment is not about mimicking what is being assessed. It is about control through overlap. Reality and our conceptual schema are always, in a sense, in opposition. We can’t think that our mental conceptions of the world will ever catch up with the detail of the mechanisms of the world. Instead, we need to model and simplify. The best model is one that overlaps the boundaries of what it attempts to model, rather than mimicking the subject. It looks at the difference between the object and field, rather than the undifferentiatedness of the middle of the object or the edge of the field. If a system is limited, a generic model will cover more of the extent of the system. If a system is more fluid, specific samples will gain a better sense of what needs to be observed. The model is part of the system it observes and assesses, and therefore it ought to fit in as component, rather than attempt to draw a map of each grain of sand.
by Adam
Consider again, these checks of attribution error conducted via soft-networks. Should we award each of these people who succeeded in correcting an error “points”? Why? What would these points mean tomorrow? What do they mean in terms of the errors themselves? The game, as it were, is not “winning the Internet”, as the joke often states. The puzzle was identifying and correcting an error that no one knew existed. These puzzles were each solved in their entirety, and no doubt many more lie out there waiting to be discovered. If we awarded these players a number of points, how would these points help them prepare for the next puzzle? On the other hand, if we congratulate them for solving a puzzle, we can trace the steps that went into the solution. We read back through the dialogic steps of the Storify, and see the moves they made. We don’t attempt to replicate these moves exactly, but we recall the strategy they imply: collect a network of intelligent, like-minded individuals; keep a sense of what search tools are more helpful; locate resources for finding illicit copies of otherwise un-retrievable texts; and when you think something is amiss, why not say so out loud, and see who responds? “TRY TO GET MORE POINTS” is not a helpful tactic here.
Streaming Netflix to the Wii, thanks to a generous gift from my parents of a subscription. I’m behind the times on this, because most people who are interested in streaming Netflix are already doing so.
The interesting thing about it for me, is how this new burst of functionality actually creates a feeling of frustration for me. I’m frustrated for all the ways the Wii is not like Chrome.
Netflix is probably the first useful thing I’ve used on the Wii’s network connection. The browser is near pointless, the weather and news apps are useless in comparison to my cell phone, I don’t play multiplayer games online. I have downloaded a couple of games from the Wii Store (Secret of Mana and Zelda: Link to the Past, suckas!) but other than that, it just sits. But now that Netflix is pulling gigs of hot entertainment off of the cloud, I realize just how useless that pretty white box is.
Where is my Pandora app? A usable YouTube app? Free, pointless web games? Audiovox? Al Jazeera, or other news networks? I don’t know very much about the Wii programming front, but as wonderful and easy as navigating the Netflix native app with the Wiimote, I can’t believe I can’t stream music, news, or do any of the other easy web app tasks I do on all of my computers.
This isn’t the only inherent limitation in the setup. I can’t play DVDs in the Wii, so I’m constantly switching the RCA cables back and forth to my crappy single input TV. I can’t access network shares of any format. I’m expected to use a SD card to transfer pictures, for goodness sakes. And when I point my Wiimote at the toaster or the toilet, nothing happens!
Well, I might need some additional black market… hardware modifications… to make my waste elimination controllable via bluetooth. And I know that my Wii is several years old, so I shouldn’t expect cutting edge technology to be on it. But this is a common gadget problem, gadget problems being the localized “serious first world issues” that they are.
Everything electronic device I have seems to be limited by something. And not by being a few years old, or by having no interface to my spinal cord. I have devices running iOS, Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and whatever it is that is going on inside the Wii. Certain things will work with others and the larger network, via TCI/IP, CIFS, USB cable, or native app programming. But they don’t all work. Certain functionalities occur on certain devices, but not on others. I feel like I have a tool box filled with magnetized tools. The hammer is perfectly useful on its own, but bring it near my cold chisel, and the chisel flies across the room.
I know it is too much to hope that there ever be one OS to unite them all. But then, my good systems make me wish for what could be. There’s Roku, there’s Boxee, there’s XBMC. I could buy one of the pre-made systems, or I could hack together my own using free software and a small PC. These all get a little closer, but it still isn’t perfect. It will never be perfect.
What is perfect? Shouldn’t we at least have something to shoot for? What are people shooting for? I have some guesses as to what Apple and Nintendo are shooting for. It rhymes with “shmonetization”. Open-source developers like those working on XBMC might be shooting for perfect, one step at a time. But they are constrained by the pay services, and their own goals. Netflix won’t work on XBMC running on a Linux box, for example, because of the Silverlight DRM. Of course, Netflix is constrained in turn by their content providers, and I have no problem with this really. Their service is totally worth the money they charge. It provides real value, if you are into entertainment value. But it could provide more value, and yet is not. There are always limitations.
Limitations are a part of life. They only become frustrating when they seem arbitrary, and what is desired is just out of reach. I can listen to Pandora and Last.fm on Chrome OS, but I can’t watch Netflix. I can watch Netflix on the Wii, but can’t listen to Pandora. I feel like if I want it hard enough, I should be able to figure out a way past this impasse, but alas, technology is much more complex than wishing.
I could put this aside as just a silly little entertainment issue, and go back to doing something important. But, this desire to sync is not just a TV problem. It’s an information problem. We, the consumers, think of our technology in terms of features, not in terms of company motivation, operating system, or app availability. We want to DO functions, not understand the complex paths of compatibility. This problem engages all technology from car cabin controls, to social networking, to kitchen appliances.
Some of us (like myself, or so I like to think) can see past our desires and understand the reasons why things don’t work, and wait patiently hoping that some day they will work. But why is there a disconnect? Can’t we meet somewhere in the middle, with more easily component technological connections that more closely adhere to our schemas of functional understanding?
via Flickr user Mac User's Guide
Take RCA cables, for instance. In some scenarios, I’m the “tech geek”, simply because I understand the difference between red, white, and yellow, and between input and output. I don’t know anything about how a DVD player functions, but I can understand making a simple component connection between media source and display. I can figure out how best to organize the stereo receiver, the DVD player, the game system, and any other inputs and outputs to cobble together a home theater system from whatever is lying around. Just with some colorful little cables.
Everyone tries for this sort of component ease. Debian packages. iOS apps. Chrome apps. Web stores. Plug and play. But this component ease is always designed within a particular system, either an operating system, a gadget industry, or a particular company’s product offerings. Why isn’t the system the “consumer’s logical understanding environment”? Probably because consumer user experience only goes so far as to increase that consumer’s surface area as a customer. Why would anyone spend time and money working on R&D for improving UI purposefully outside of the scope of a product? Why would anyone want to potentially improve someone else’s product, outside of doing so as a way of improving their own product? Everyone is trying to use everyone else, be it the OS using its third-party developers, the developers using the interface, the interface using the customers. Except for the customers, who aren’t using anyone, and only getting used. It’s consumer capitalism, and this isn’t any revelation.
What would happen, if cell phone manufacturers actually wanted you to have better health care? Or if app developers really wanted a more directly representative democracy? If the world was made to help enable the synchronized functions we desire, rather than the functions that will earn someone money? First of all, we’d be living in a utopia. We’d be living in a world in which the human species was not self-interested and individualistic, and in which the consolidation of power in the form of money and resources didn’t beget the accumulation of more power and resources. All of which is not the case. No need to get weepy about it; we are whom we are.
But we could get much closer than we are now. I’d wait on my Wii apps, if it would help.
And like a shot, the Aufhebung Klaxon goes off, the Marx signal is shining in the sky (it is the full of the Theses of Feuerbach, blurrily illuminated on a cloud), and I’m off and running to the Use-Value Mobile (okay, it’s my website)… all because someone needs some learning about the true worth of labor.
Okay, so I don’t know how much this guy actually knows about Marx or not. According to his bio he’s studied economics, so I would hope that means he at least he thinks he gets it. At any rate, all of that was just my intro to my rebuttal of this stupid piece, which is the real point, and doesn’t involve Marx at all. Except where it does.
Look–I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just am. But even so, I don’t like utterly condemning the thoughts of someone I’ve never met. That person could be a pretty good person, all things considered. And yet sometimes, the nature of the argument requires it. If we’re going to make and strong definitions, sooner or later, they are going to have to be definitions in opposition to something. And considering that this guy pretty much just shit all over everything that I and many of my acquaintances do, I’m not going to pull any punches on this trash essay in my effort to show just how wrong this conception really is. Be forewarned.
Fella’s point is this:
Why won’t hipsterism ever go away? Consider that technology (facilitated by capitalism’s emphasis on efficiency; i.e., consider the assembly line a technology as well as the internet) is stripping people of what has been traditionally defined as “useful” or “legitimate” or “meaningful” work, and thus stripping meaning from their lives. “Nothing productive left to do since the robots came; better make my consumption more flamboyant and self-announcing!”
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Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful. (And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not “real” production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to “connect” to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.
Considering that the guy leaves out most of the connections between his data points, let me try and reconstruct his argument a little bit more direction.
1) Technology is more efficient; thus there is less “meaningful” work to do.
2) Consumption takes the place of meaningful work, in our understanding of what “meaningful” is.
3) “Meaningfulness” is related to social recognition, and so consumption becomes a social activity, furthered in social arena.
4) The things that we make, if they are at all social, are akin to consumption, because we only think they are meaningful, in our attempts to replace actually “meaningful” production.
Interesting, but completely, utterly wrong. There are a couple of syllogisms here I think, but I’m going to focus on the biggest, overwhelming lacuna.
Exactly what in the hell does he mean by “meaningful”? It seems to be key to the argument, because the lack of meaning is what causes production to be replaced by consumption, as a way of countering this lack of meaning. But if we don’t know what we are supposed to be replacing, how can we tell if we are indeed attempting to replace it?
He never actually says what this “meaningfulness” is. I’m not going to even attempt to try and flesh out what he thinks “meaningfulness” is, because if I did, I would be grasping at such thin connections in the attempt to half-create a distinguishable sense of his concept, that I wouldn’t even have a straw man, so much as a scattered bit of hay with a carrot nose sitting on top.
But along with “meaning”, our guy here places “useful” and “legitimate” at the head of the table. “Useful” is a pretty good one, because many people have attempted to theorize what “usefulness” is. “Legitimate” is much more problematic, so I’m going to set it aside for now, and then we’ll come back to it.
So starting from here, let me tell you what I think meaningfulness is. In a sense, it is hard for me to do so, because I’m an artist/anarchist not really willing to make general statements about what things mean, let alone what they mean to other people. But, in the effort to work this out, let’s table aesthetic value as a different category than this “meaningfulness” he is trying to get at. Aesthetics are neither here nor there, I suppose: eye of the beholder, and all that. So let’s continue to suggest that beyond the relativism of aesthetics, there are actions in the world that do indeed have meaning.
Usefulness… usefulness… let’s see what I have in my philosophy bag here… oh look, Marx! Without digging too deep in Marx, let’s simply remember use-value: the use an object or labor has for a person, based upon its use. i.e. The satisfaction of a want.
Use-value goes hand in hand with exchange-value, which is itself based upon the equivalence of two different use-values via a fair and equitable exchange of these objects/labors. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, as the old example reads. Linen has a certain use-value, a coat another, but in these proportions their use-value is equivalent. The exchange is typically phrased in the form of currency. X number of $ is equivalent to both use values, and so the exchange takes place. This is like the Newtonian physics of markets. Many other complicated things happen from here on out, but this is the basics of where it all begins.
But, the author of the aforementioned article specifically states, “meaningfulness” does not occur just because someone will pay money for labor. So he says. It might be exchanged, but does it doesn’t necessarily have a use. This is the “meaningless” labor that so-called hipsters do–moving social signifiers around, trying to up their follower counts, even occasionally building things just to get on BoingBoing, Reddit, etc, the bourses of hype-exchanging. To him, all of this labor is “meaningless”. Through these social exchanges, this is all no more than continuous consumption of whuffie: some sort of hipster bullshit.
But what about use-value? How can there just be none, simply because there might be other systems of social exchange-value applied over top? As I said, I’m totally going to bracket the aesthetic value of Steampunk cell phones, just because that is not even necessary to discuss. Guess what: even if you only make a single call on your Steampunk cell phone, it has use-value. If you do not buy another phone, because you are totally happy with your retro-cycled Nokia with gears glued to the outside, it has use-value. If you do not exchange anything, money or otherwise, for another phone because you have a Steampunk cell phone, then its use-value is greater than anything else that could be exchanged for it.
See, the question is not about efficiency–which, if I had my guess, would be what this irritating author meant to say instead of “meaningfulness”. The power of use-value is not about efficiency. It is true that the vast field of technology and exchanges supporting the development and distribution of technology have trended towards efficiency. Certainly, a Capitalist will look towards efficiency as a quantitative means for increasing surplus value via technology. But efficiency does not define use-value.
What this idiot so dismissively refers to as “hobbies”, and not “real production” is less-than-totally efficient production. It isn’t nostalgia that causes me to pick up my grandfather’s screwdriver to fix my 35MM camera. It is pure use-value. It would be more efficient if I used an electric screwdriver, outsourced the repair to a professional, or junked the whole thing and picked up a new digital camera as small as my thumbnail with a zillion megapixels. That would be most efficient. But the reason I “hobby” around, is because it just works. I don’t need that other shit. This screwdriver works fine, just as it has for the last sixty years. Maybe I would get more use-value out of a digital camera. In fact, I own several digital cameras, which means that I totally understand the use-value they provide. But I also understand the use-value of film cameras, and that is why I use them. Are we expected to believe that the instant I put down the digital camera and pick up the film camera, suddenly what I produce with that camera is meaningless? All of a sudden, my production switches to consumption? Is that the definition of “meaning” that we are really supposed to be using?
You know what carpentry and gardening does? It keeps me out of the mall and the supermarket. My partner knits–not just because it is quaint and because the textile life is so hip–but because we get high quality, repairable, custom-made clothing out of it that keeps us warm in the winter so we don’t have to turn up the heat. I run my own websites, rather than outsourcing it to pros, because it is cheaper, and it is fun. We cook too, even though Domino’s is like, totally more efficient. All of these things have real use-value, and that is why we do them. Maybe our personal household economy isn’t exactly the wonderful world of Monsanto and Dow Chemical… but you know what? I am totally okay with that.
This comes back to the issue of “legitimate”, which this guy equated with his notion of “meaningfulness”. Legitimacy, otherwise known as authenticity, is one of the big battles of the human race. It is the motive force for a thousand actions, for horrible crimes, and for great triumphs. It is the reason to try, and the reason we deem things failures. Largely, authenticity is completely relative. But the way that we do orient our own sense of direction in this crazy, relative world, is by looking to the people around us. We ask our social scene, which we largely compose from folks whom we believe share and supplement our values and views. Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Should I keep trying on this, or should I give up and try something else? From the responses to these questions, we form an understanding of what it is we are doing in the world.
And yes, we sometimes get too wrapped up in it. Our little egos get inflated, and we care too much about what a large number of people think, than what the really important people think. What others think, rather than what we, ourselves think. This happens. But we typically come back to earth. We use our social scene to discover the true meaning of life–the great arbitrator of exchange-values for all of the disparate human actions we call existence.
Whether or not we are heading in the right direction is impossible to say for sure. We can only do our best. At one time, and still for many people, “best” seeking efficiency, profit, and power to go with all that use-value, to supplement it, and even to establish these things as their own tools for achieving useful action. Lately, doing our best has meant, for a large number of different people, that we are ignoring or even becoming disgusted with that way of thinking. Instead, we are doing are carpentry at home, sewing rather than shopping, making crappy amateur art and music rather than buying whatever is on TV. I can tell you this: I am reasonably sure that this is a better course for human life than working in a Lowell mill, or a Chicago slaughterhouse. It is better than achieving someone else’s notion of “success” working for a health insurance company. I don’t know if what I’m doing is “meaningful”, but it sure as hell has more meaning than the common Capitalist lifestyle, and I can say that definitively, without even checking my Twitter feed’s opinion. And know what else? I’m still alive. My current use-value wins out, until the day I die.
So is my life fraught with consumption? Of course. But I’m also consuming less things than I have at any other time in my life. If that is “meaningful”, or even if it isn’t. Judging my level of production is a much more delicate procedure, and I’m sure there are those that could say I could be producing much more. But if production means slamming other people’s life-systems because they refuse to participate in mine, then whatever sort of “meaning” that is, I don’t want any part in it. And I’m not the only one.
So cry about it. Play the real estate market. Write an essay about it, if that justifies your existence. (Works for me.) But I have better things to do than satisfy someone else’s notion of Capitalist legitimacy. And people who agree with me are not just theorizing this world. We’re out there, living it, not buying into that legitimacy. That’s our personal brand. Rather than worrying about it, I suggest that that idiot develop his own a little bit more. ‘Cause as is, it kinda looks like crap.
It irritates me when people say something along the lines of, “Unions in America are good in principle, but…”
The “but” is followed by some sort of criticism about how the institutions of unions are corrupt, or inefficient, or outdated, or not applicable to all industries. This is then followed by most often by an anecdote about a cousin’s friend’s father in New York who was a union member who was really lazy and overpaid and was then cheated out of his inheritance by his union that was supposed to protect him. Or something of the kind.
It irritates me because people who say this are wrong. People who espouse this sort of caveat are hurting us–all of us. They are tools of our society’s downfall, whether they wish to be or not, and every time they open their mouths to rehash this sort of argument, they should be shouted down and told to shut up.
I’m going to tell you why.
My argument is not about the 40 hour workweek, or about the weekends, or anything else you might see on a bumper sticker or a protest sign. My argument is about what a union is, not about what any particular union has done. In the realm of ideas, where we are now and where these statements are made, it is important to begin from the general, and move towards the specific. Anecdotal evidence may sound good, but holding general statements to be true based on only specific evidence is a logical fallacy.
A Union is, in principle, the sum of its parts. There are many different kinds of unions, ranging from civil unions to the Soviet Union. We are interested in labor unions specifically, but it is important to remember that in essence, it is a union, and should be considered thusly before any other sort of analysis.
There is nothing wrong with a union in this general sense. As an organizing body meant to represent its parts, there would be no cause to deny those parts the ability to organize themselves for any reason they chose, whether it be for love, for diplomacy, for collective bargaining, or to usher in the future communist order, if that’s what those parts so desired. Self-determination is generally considered a right of all humans, before any particular reason to deny that right might adjudicated. And so, if any person declares him or herself in unified allegiance with another person, who could raise an argument to deny that union?
Except, of course, that the right to unify is denied all the time, for various reasons. Certain love unions are denied, to allegedly protect a certain ideal notion of that union. Public gatherings are often disallowed, for reasons of safety, hygiene, or other effects of that gathering that might infringe upon others’ rights. Even national sovereignty can be questioned, if that nation acts as a threat to other nations, or to itself. But these denials of the right to unify are all considered after the fact, once the union in question has presented itself as a threat (at least in the eyes of those in charge of making such decisions).
A labor union is made of workers. A labor union separates itself from other kinds of unions by fact of its membership. Sure, union members could marry each other. And unions could combine to form bowling leagues, international organizations, and various other things. But the labor union is a union of workers. And so any judgment of a labor union must be constructed on that basis.
What is a worker, anyway? It’s a person with a job, of course. Having a job is still, despite the unemployment rate, a common occurrence in the United States. But what does it really mean? Perhaps because it is so common, and because it is such an indicative part of every day life, we tend to forget what it really is. Having a job is working, and receiving pay in return. Nothing more, nothing less. Among all the jobs that exist, we can say that all qualify in this distinction by being work for pay.
Now, when we are discussing the general in this way, it is important not to be taken in by our understanding of the ideal. The ideal job is not necessarily the general job. In the general, a job is the common traits of all jobs. In the ideal, a job is what we most commonly think about when we think about all jobs. In this way, the ideal is no more than another anecdote. It is a particular job, that we think of in place of all the other particular jobs.
I’m not sure what your ideal notion of a job is, but I can tell you mine. I think of a particular locally-owned grocery store I know, in a small town in Iowa. They hire stock boys from the local high school. Yes, “stock boys”, because they hire exclusively males. Females worked the registers. (Ah, small town Iowa.) The stock boys also wore identical green aprons, and they pushed around identical wide, shop brooms. They were paid every week with identical checks, drawn on the local bank around the corner, for identical wages. This isn’t what job I would do, given the choice. And this isn’t what I think jobs should be like, necessarily. This is simply the common example I think of, when I think of a “job”.
There is nothing wrong with this ideal job. Ideally. A young man without any experience starts at the bottom in a locally-owned business, doing the grunt work. He is paid for his time, and if he works hard and learns, he eventually moves up the meat counter, or to manager, or whatever might be next in line. Then he receives a pay raise, and he starts doing his darnedest at these new increased responsibilities. And so on and so forth, all the way to the American Dream.
The only thing wrong with this ideal job is that it is not the general form of employment in the United States, and to act as if it is, demeans all of the people out there working in less-than ideal conditions. There is nothing general we can say about employment conditions in America. How do we describe in common hedge fund managers with seven digit bonuses, smart creative people “living the dream” earning money doing exactly what they want, workaday folks feeding their families month to month, people without education or experience unable to find any job but manual labor, and the underpaid and exploited who are put in dangerous situations or straight-up robbed because they are criminals or immigrants or threatened or simply not very clever? All of these things exist. And there is no general state to describe them, other than “work for pay”. They are workers, all. And this is all we can say.
Luckily for them, these workers are able to form unions. A labor union gives definition to the dynamics of everything entailed within “work”. Because the ideal does not exist, unions instead provide a commonality, and a general status by which we can address the problems and benefits of certain trades. Labor unions form their membership from those who can ally together, to form a single entity from disparate individuals. Workers self-determine themselves by identifying that generality, and expressing it via their membership.
From this commonality develops the notion of collective bargaining. If an organization exists that counts similar workers in its membership, the workers can use that organization to bargain to change aspects of their employment. No one would argue that an individual isn’t free to bargain the specifics of his or her employment. That is what “work for pay” is. Somehow the work and the pay must be agreed upon between the employer and the employee. And so, the idea that workers would unite into one body for the purpose of more expediently bargaining together at the same time with the same employer isn’t too far of a leap.
Except, that collective bargaining is much more effective. Unions have higher salaries and better benefits because they are able to bargain with the employers on equal terms. An employer is already unified. If a worker loses a job, s/he doesn’t have other jobs to fall back on. Whereas, an employer can lose one, two, or more workers easily, depending on the size of the operation. An employer holds all the cards. S/he knows all the salaries of all the workers in the operation, knows the value of all the positions in terms of the profit generated. When workers are unified, that dynamic changes. The workers know each others’ salaries, know how much labor charges affect the employer. The employer can no longer select and drop workers at a whim, like produce at the supermarket. Grievances aren’t ignored, and they are factored into the bargaining process. Hence, collective bargaining bargains a much better deal than any employee individually.
Collective bargaining is so effective, it can, in fact, take advantage of the employer. It can put in place rules that hardly seem “fair” in a general perspective. It can organize extortion and crimes, in addition to legitimate bargaining. Nothing that an individual couldn’t do, and nothing that the unified organization of an employer couldn’t do, either. But it can do this, and if it does, it does so more effectively than it would without that unified force.
It is the effectiveness of collective bargaining that spurs the attempt to deny the right of union to form. No one would dispute the right of individuals to enter the street, until the individuals do so in such numbers that the union of people in the street has effects not recognized as caused by a single individual; no one would deny the right of two people to engage in a love union, until the genders of the members of that union contradicted a closed and ideal notion of what love is; no country would dispute a sovereign nation unless its sovereign disputed their own; and no one would oppose workers coming together to organize, until they were organizing for collective bargaining. One cannot argue with the general definition of a union, because it is no more than individuals, together–one seeks to ban the general by nature of its effect.
This effectiveness is the basis by which people try to make unions illegal. When we look at it in terms of what unions are in a general sense, the idea of illegalizing unions on this basis seems ridiculous. There is nothing about a union that is illegal. It is what any particular unified group of individuals chooses to do with that unity. What a labor union decides to do with its unity is to counter the unity of the employers, and this is what is despised about them. The ability to collectively bargain makes a union dangerous, not necessarily to law and order, but to employers who are trying to extract every bit of value they can from workers. It reduces employers unified power to manage workers, by balancing that power and leveling the playing field, and so they dispute it. Workers’ exploitable value to employers is diminished when employees know and demand their worth, and so it contradicts their notion of what the ideal employee ought to be.
Let me summarize:
1a – Unions are, in general, a constituent organization of individuals
1b – Unions do not have any abilities outside of the unified power of these individuals
1c – Therefore, to deny the ability to form a union, it must be justified by the effect of this unified, and not by nature of any other ideals or anecdotal evidence.
2a – A Labor Union is a constituent organization of workers
2b – A Labor Union’s ability is collective bargaining
2c – To deny the ability to form a union is to deny workers the power of collective bargaining, for good or ill, lawfulness or lawlessness.
Now that I’ve stated these general ideas more or less clearly, let me talk about you. Yes, you: you who would perhaps agree to these points, but still disparage unions for all the ways that their collective bargaining does not fulfill your personal definition of justice, rights, or productivity.
You are on the side of those who seek to exploit, those who seek to silence, those who seek to malign humanity and take advance of individuals in their faults. You may be against crime, against graft, against extortion, and against laziness. All of those are noble beliefs. But to take specific wrongdoings and lay them at the feet of organized labor in principle is to follow the urge of the employer, who would find any excuse, sensible or baseless, to destroy opposition to his/her own cause. And because they cannot find general, logical reasons to deny unions the right to exist, they use these specifics to further their partisan cause. The enemies of the labor union, of the general concept of collective bargaining, of organization for the betterment of the individuals involved–they take specific wrongs and blow them up as evidence against the general. They lie, steal, and extort in addition to this. But we could even set that aside for the moment. What they are doing here, and what they have convinced you to do as well, is to reject the reasonableness of the concept because it threatens them. They deny the right of forming a union because it contradicts their notion of what they can get away with, and of what ought, in their opinion, to be the status quo. They deny that workers are capable of forming their own law-abiding constituent organizations, because to them, worker organization is as dangerous as a blood-thirsty mob. They have reduced reason and logic to a tool, that they deploy only when it benefits themselves.
I’m not saying the ends justifies the means, or to support the power of the movement means we should not question its actions. Never would I stoop to that utilitarian logic, which is the exact thing I am arguing against. There is nothing more important than the specifics. There is no fight other than the day to day aspects of organization, where abuse and exploitation ought to be settled on every side. But in order to fight abuses, one must have an organization with which to do it. Humans naturally form organizational structure, whether it be government, labor union, or abstract social relations. We cannot question the fact of this organization, and still seek to fix its problems and weaknesses. One can’t fight crime by dissolving society, improve the institution of marriage by excluding individuals from it, or solve international conflicts by denying countries’ right to exist. One can’t improve employee and employer relationships by removing organization. We need organization. If you think the organization should look and function differently, then join it, or start your own. The last thing we should be doing is denying to principle of organization. It is a general fact of the human species, and one of our best attributes.
When you defend unions, but with these caveats, you do not help humans to organize. You help those who would dis-organize us all, and then feed on the chaos.
And here is where we put our money in our mouths. In exchange of course. The market-substitution metaphor takes the money from your possession and substitutes physical food. You paid for the food, you are not literally eating the money. Let’s not play verbal games here. Except, that you are indeed putting your money in your mouth. You are taking it out of your wallet, so that you might satisfy the eternal hunger, and then putting sustenance directly in your mouth. If you were shopping for your weekly groceries, or perhaps, investing in corn oil and pork belly futures on the Chicago Exchange, you might be doing something so complicated as buying food. But to satisfy the hunger, we are just going to stop and grab something quick, we are going to swipe our debit cards without even getting out of the car, take the bag, put at least a little bit in our mouths before we step on the gas, maybe take a little sip of water and corn syrup, the hydrocarbon of humanity, and then zip off to rejoin the rest of the species on the freeway, moving in the same direction, encased inside similar assemblages of metal and plastic, each of us slowly but surely getting hungry again at the same rate.
A grocery store, or a farmer’s market, or a stocked pantry shelf, or even the freshly slaughtered carcass of an animal, those strips of flesh only recently converted by symbolic knife stroke into cuts of meat: these are places where we go to find food. These are the components of nutrition. The brick and mortar of the proverbial food pyramid. These are the ingredients we combine with alchemical precision, with the mystic-mechanical sculpting of thermodynamic processes, acid-base reactions, and even the harnessed life-cycle of animate life-forms that are equally the radical form of our life and an element in its continued sustenance and evolution. This is not to refute the restaurant process—the social experience of dining aside, there are plenty of restaurants who catalyze the elements of food as well or better than any of us could, and the item descriptions on menus alone may be educational pamphlets to those of us whom, for whatever reason, never learned the magical art of cookery ourselves.
But there are other places where sustenance can be had, and yet the mechanics are quite different. Here food is only symbolized, in Technicolor images of synthetic food stand-ins, meant to semiotically stimulate your desire-for-appetite more than to advertise any actual product for sale. The process revolves around the orderly exchange of money for a reduction in appetite, and maybe if you are lucky, a saturation of the gustatory organs at the same time. Colloquially, we call this “fast food”, and yet the process is not so much about reducing time as about removing a stage in the process. The preparation, the cookery, the reaction, the production: all of it is removed. In other words, excising everything that makes a food really a food. The exchange is expedited, so the connection between the food-labor and the product is alienated. The money is paid, the hunger is satiated. Did you eat? Does it matter, as long as the void that stimulated the desire to eat is removed? Hunger is the negative, food is the positive. If you remove the negative, who is to say that the positive was ever needed at all? Unable to provide Jetson-esque “cube meals”, technology, instead, replaces whole foods with a most apt and fluid metaphor. This is the “feeding tube”. A feeding tube sustains life; but it does not provide food. The act of feeding it provides is to remove the need to actually eat. The term “fast food” finds its metaphorical connection to technology through routed speed. From the manipulation of actual objects, to a mere regulation of a tube’s flow. A shortening of the production, a reduction of desire. Minimization, and therefore, maximalization.
This is all very interesting. As you move across the country, you begin to see entire districts set up for this sort of procedure. It’s as if there are giant, stationary herds of people sucking on the fast food feeding tube, and you are merely migrating through them. They call it the commercial district, or the strip mall strip, or the Business Route x (the x replaced by the designation number of whatever lonely freeway the main artery of the tube snakes out from before looping back dutifully to return your automobile to its forelorned interstate road). It’s a rural thing, and yet it isn’t, because they are everywhere. They are themselves an urbanization by proxy, a built up-ness of areas that would not city-ify themselves. It is capitalist irrigation. Without these asphalt conduits, the cash and people flowing out over the parched earth, and the single level buildings on major intersections serving as the ionic pump houses driving the intake of sodium, corn sugar, and saturated fat, why, this would be just another open piece of the country.
The most excellent of all feed tubes is not so much a tube as a giant rectangular prism, reminiscent in their own way of the cuboid meals produced by Rosie the Robot (you burnt the toast, Rosie), but from an alternate and more realistically unpredicted futurism. A future in which the food size inflated rather than concentrated. to such an extent that this American staple gave birth, or at least synthetically incubated, the term “big box store”. This tube among tubes, is Walmart. The logic that would remove the entire production process from nutrition and turn it into a infantile negation of desire finds its home on those hallowed, endless shelves.
Nothing makes sense in a Walmart. Or it does, but it does so on terms of its own devising; it is a Wonderland or an Oz-logic, where both the resident mythos and meta-satire subject is America. Already re-branded countless times in that confusing eternal renewal of Newspeak permanency that a brand image is supposed to provide (we have always been at war with high prices/those bourgeois city folk/terrorism), the current incarnation of our formerly smiley-faced god is now a silent asterisk footnote, a sibylline future-echo of what we will be some other time’s history; the super-novaed remnants of the pre-black hole, what was once the solar light of the American Dream; and the cartoon diagram of an asshole (cf. Breakfast of Champions)–nothing more profane than this orifice, through which we encourage ourselves to forget is the root of all of these illusions, the fundamental concept of the store, the management strategy of its employees, and that pocket-full-of-naughty-holes that is us. The asterisk marks the eclipsing of the Luke Helder emoticon (look him up), and the dawning of a new star not only in the East, but over nearly any city with a population of over ten thousand. In short: Walmart puts the “*” in “What the fu*k”.
All of these explicit invocations you have probably heard in one form or another, or could have readily assemble yourself if you are the sort of person who would be reading this essay. But here is something you might not have known: you can camp in a Walmart parking lot. Did you know this? The folk-beliefs behind this fact vary. One story said that Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was an avid RVer, and wanted to spread the love. The more materialist explanation is that inviting RVs to their parking lot is a clear attempt to sell more barbecue briquettes, hamburger patties, ice, bottled soda, etc. After sleeping the night away, you can enter the store to stock up. And there are moral explanations as well. These don’t necessarily explain how this fact occurred, but this particular strain of Uncle-Samism gets very worried that there are a growing list of Walmarts that don’t allow camping, and blame this decline on the poor behavior of certain “lot rats” that overstay their welcome, and promote a sort of karmic list of best-practices for “guests” in order to help the gift of free Walmart camping to continue and grow, and in this way justifying its existence. It’s a kind of “freedom isn’t free”, negative theology of corporate alms-giving.
As one who has actually confirmed the belief by camping in a Walmart parking lot, I can tell you a certain number of things. The “allowance” of camping stems directly from the fact that nearly every Walmart is open twenty-four hours a day, and thus, there is no period of the day-night cycle at which it is not permitted to park there. Employees cars are there for about eight hours at a stretch, so if you were there for a similar length of time, no one would even be able to tell the difference. You do see a number of RVs staying over night in Walmart parking lots. As all that is really required for an RV occupant to camp is the ability to stay parked for awhile, and therefore, Walmart camping is easy enough. When I was a guest at Chez Sam Walton, we slept in the back of a station wagon, and thus our camping footprint was a similar four stopped tires. I have no idea of Walmart’s policy or individual locations’ attitudes towards the stringing of clothes lines, the pitching of tents, or say, camp fires. My guest is that this would be pushing the envelope of this un-official camping site pretty far. On one morning, we had a wake up call from a local police officer, who seemed friendly enough as we noticed his obviously watchful presence nearby as he ran the license plates from our car. We proceeded to excuse ourselves at a reasonable pace. In other locations, we had a bit of attention from private security that was patrolling the parking lot, but other than that sort of uncomfortable “hard glance” which I normally get in places that are not coastal cities, we were never specifically rousted. Another common rumor I have heard is that while Walmart does not stop campers, certain towns have passed ordinances against various technical aspects of sleeping in cars or parking in one spot for too long, and earn a certain amount of revenue from transient Walmart campers unwittingly unaware of these local statutes. So, let me say and in doing so excuse myself from any sort of culpability for the potential variances or vagrancy citations of your future camping experience; dear reader: I found sleeping in the parking lot of various Walmart’s across the country to be a doable endeavor, but you should obviously only do whatever your own will and reason prescribes for you.
But let me tell you something else: there is something deeply uncanny, and even more disturbingly oracular about the experience of sleeping in Walmart parking lots than the uncomfortable godly-erotic implications of Walmart’s logo. In addition to the experience of going to sleep in a parking lot and waking up in a parking lot. In excess of what it is like to open your eyes in a succession of departures from sleep, the segmentations separating them being of unknown length, and see the blurry sky beyond the fogged windows gradually lightening and changing in color from the all-night glow of white floodlights to the white-cloudy sunlight of an apocalyptically wintered Great Lakes city sky, like the spectrum steps of a paint chip in the home improvement section. Beyond the sensation of your glass, steel, and plastic bubble enclosing you from a vacuum of continental vastness, each early morning shopper’s car that sizzles past on wet pavement sounding like more and more spaceships stretched out in an endless convoy of interstellar trade, passing by our society’s closest excuse for hyper-sleep, easing the pain of aging during travel. Besides all of this: you are sleeping in a Walmart despite what misgivings you might have about its capitalistic position in society, because it is free. It is the easiest way of reducing that desire for rest and for sleep–not exactly being well-rested, but staving off the need to close the eyes, that heavy weight that is so willing to let your car drift from the lanes of the late interstate night, and end your life in a flipped coffin of metal and flame. Sleeping an a Walmart parking lot is the easiest and quickest. It is the feeding tube of rest, the little death drive of tiredness pushing off and at the same time pulling towards the single, endless, infinite death at the end. You are glad to see Walmart. That mystic asterisk becomes the symbol of your release and relief.
You wake up, and you find your shoes, and you roll out of your vehicle. You pad across the macadam, wrapping your coat against the cold in a way not at all like a bathrobe or piece of sleepware. You enter the Walmart, blink at the light. The greeter says hello, never good morning or good evening. The bathroom is always in the same place. There are only ever hand dryers, and not the paper towels you need to wipe the secreted oils from your face, eyes, and ears. You look like shit in the mirror. So does everyone else. And you start to realize, as you try to remember what state you are in, that this could go on forever. The ruins of America are yours today, and they look like the Walmart in Maumelle, Arkansas. Or the one in Fairfield, California. Or the one in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I can’t remember which.
Once the feeding tube is inserted, it is hard to pull it away. Our relationship to our desires, both the presence of desires and the temporary resolution thereof, is one a hairsbreadth away from the unhealthy condition of behaviors known as addiction. Feedback loops are of the essence, in today’s world. Every action perpetuates something. The rut becomes everything, a smooth plateau as wide as the parking lot. As all encompassing as the triple-wide big box of the modern, re-branded Supercenter. And as the hunger and tiredness fades once again, you can see a glimpse of our future, spread out in front of us. From no bigger a point than the human act of eating and sleeping, we see a portion of the exhibited evidence of our species on display. I envision a future in which squatters camps surround Supercenters. This gray asphalt area gathers, as all cities do, around the centers of economic activity. Armed greeter guards check your remaining credit limit before you are allowed into the temple proper. Teenagers with hacked RFID credit tokens shoplift organic produce, buying only the cheapest of gift cards (I imagine the amount equally about 50 cents in 2011 dollars) as a cover for their crime. At night the lights shine on, and everyone sleeps, eats if they can. Whatever it was we used to do when we “went shopping” will seem as foreign as “cooking”. And we all get a little older. Why not? It could be our present some day. It’s not less possible than nuclear war. The mushroom cloud has only been re-branded. We’ll have to see. The mechanics of what we will in the future systematically streamline, efficiently reduce, and eventually lose are the mundane tasks of the present. Who is to say in what orifice they will plug the feeding tubes into tomorrow. And where we will line up to receive this treatment.
On Wednesday I will plug the feeding tube into our crotches, and thread it all the way into our genome. Follow my instructions to enter the Museum of Cultural Speciation, and don’t forget to clean your orifice port well before hand.
If there is an idiot born every minute, every five minutes one of them says, “Let’s go to Cozumel!” And then s/he does. There is something about awful tourist attractions and awful tourists causing them to fly together like rare earth magnets, perhaps even lacerating your fingers if each object is of a great enough mass, and you happen to carelessly put your hand between them. Of course, there must be some place in the world for the itinerant masses to go, when they decide it is indeed time to go somewhere. And hell, who am I to judge? We would all like to go some place warm in the winter (all of us in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). The water in Cozumel is insanely beautiful.
And yet, there reaches a critical mass of massy masses—so many overweight Americans bringing their vacation dollars to a particular place—that either through unwitting clodmanship or through straight-up rudeness they end up pushing other people off the crowded jewelry-salesperson strewn sidewalk directly into raw, Mexican traffic. This is not hyperbole; this actually happened. The fat, sunburnt, sunglassed, cruise ship of a woman who threw an elbow into my father’s chest did not even look back to see who or what she hit. She motored off on her flip-flops, just like any other hit-and-run, BMW-driving, American businessman after he knocks over an unmanned motor scooter in downtown Portland, Oregon (I just seem to witness the nicest people all the time, just in the act of living their lives).
How did we get to this point? Not to the point at which I have a thousand and one sob stories about the callousness of others; but to the point at which vacation destinations, through their own advertising and industry, become so beyond over-capacity with customers that they become less vacation factories than the Stanford Prison Experience™? Do we really not have enough third-world beaches we can harvest for the color of their water and sand? Why do they all seem to go to Cozumel? Do the red, white, and blue flip-flops, swim suits, and sun visors really have some sort of strong-attraction force, magnetically collecting into these conglomerated asteroid super-fields of holiday makers?
I admit that I am biased, being not one for crowds and certainly not one for large groups of fun-seekers. I don’t have to seek fun, and don’t always care for those who do. This is not to say that I am somehow more able to find fun than most people; rather, I have fun doing boring, mundane things. I’m always having fun. Exploring the nether regions of an underpass might as well be taking a hike, for me. Taking a hike, well, that’s a trip to the beach. And a trip to the beach… that’s my own personal roller coaster on the roof of a casino.
But I do like to see new places. And some places that are new to me, unfortunately, are old to the tourist trade. Key West, for example. Beautiful reef waters, within sight of the uninhabited Key West Wildlife Sanctuaries. The beautiful island architecture inspired and housed some famous American artists; best-known, of course, are Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. You can still visit Hemingway’s house, which is… right between the bar-strewn novelty T-shirt district of Duval Street and the cruise ship pier. I guess you can go if you want. Maybe I will not.
At some point, the aesthetic qualities of a place that attract artistry and travelers like myself—traveling for the sake of traveling rather than the destination—shrink in comparison to the mainstream economic-based motivators that draw the masses. New York is famously going through this problem now, as the artistic climate that has made New York what it is in the art world conspires to raise rents even in an economic downturn, chasing the artists themselves away. Until there are no artists left. It’s all part of the same cycle: attraction, and repulsion. And then what? I believe that gentrification is not a new phenomenon. It has been a problem ever since it because commonplace for people to move within a city. Times change, neighborhoods change, and people on the short end of the real estate stick end up moving to less than desirable places out of necessity. The cycle continues, life begets life, and the hipster chorus hits the high note as the credits roll. But, what perhaps seem un-cyclical is the extent to which these re-culturalizing forces are now becoming mono-cultural forces.
Certain places become miserable, all to their economic gain. While they rake in the dollars, I have a hard time believing that anyone really has a good time. They get drunk, yes. Spend money on stuff they don’t need. They buy antibiotics and painkillers over the counter; all of these are things we normally enjoy. But it is just so concentrated, so canned, and so monetized that it is really no more than a shadow of these fun things, now at twice the price. Will there be a tipping point at which Cozumel is no longer desirable, because it is notorious for being lousy with tourists and the hyenas who thrive upon their steaky wallets? I would have thought we reached that point long ago, but for some reason, people are still showing up. The mono-culture keeps paving, and people keep coming to park.
What is that we are trying to escape through travel, anyway? I mean “we” in the most populist sense—me, and those sorts of tourists and people whom I spend my life trying to avoid. I like to think there is a bit of capital-C Culture going on in where I choose to “tour”. A little bit of my high-falutin’ taste. But I like a dual-culture, if not more multiple than that. I like my small art galleries, but I like bars, too. Aren’t we all just trying to have fun? To see something different. To get drunk and stumble back to hotel. To eat some different food. And maybe take advantage of a beneficial currency exchange. A little warm weather. Maybe a sugar-coated moment of historical significance. Is this balance so much to ask? Is it so hard to find?
Cozumel, in trying to attract tourist dollars by promising just this sort of experience to so many people that it could never deliver on the promise, is really no different than any town in America. The mono-culture of economic expediency would extend itself everywhere, if it could Proof is in the billboards and signs on the sides of the Interstate. Thousands of towns, called out for their uniqueness. Redding. Amarillo. Lawrence. Elk Hart. Drink specials. Kids eat free. Free Wifi. The lowest prices on 1-40. The brithplace of a former Miss America. Memphis might not have the azure waters of Cozumel, but they get the scam. They know the hustle. People are passing by, thousands per day. They are going to spend money somewhere. Why not here? If you put up one sign, you might as well put up twenty. You tell a few tall tales. Then they might start to believe. Give it a couple years, hand out some bumper stickers, and before you know it, you have Wall-Drug—the Cozumel of the middle of nowhere. You get people to believe they’re having fun even though they’re not, and you have just created a tourist economy out of nowhere. And the mono-culture that is the mindless pursuit of capital flows.
The carnival of it all—that is, whatever that unnameable “fun” is that is sold to us for dollars on the penny—is not just in exotic destinations. Although some exotic destinations have some pretty great carnivals. But there are exotic destinations without carnivals, just as there are many carnivals in non-exotic locations. The carnival is everywhere. And so, it becomes that the carnival is only where someone has set up a sign. Wherever anyone sets up the economic tent. Some tents are bigger than others. Doesn’t mean the small ones aren’t tents. And all of a sudden, you aren’t having fun unless there’s a sign, a tent, and someone to take your money.
I wouldn’t suggest stopping at most of these tents any more than I would suggest going to Cozumel. The carnival ugliness is only so interesting in an academic sense, before it is just another freak show. And you have to watch out for those whom you’re gawking at. The anecdote about getting pushed into traffic wasn’t fiction. There are other ways they get at you, too. There’s evil in those crowds, just lingering underneath. A real mob is just below the skin of every good party. The truth about humanity is, that the distance separating a busy street and an orgy of beasts ripping each others’ limbs off and eating them, is about as long as the distance between a noun and a verb. Look into the eyes of a man who has had four daiquiris, and is about to buy jewelry for his wife. That is the seat of evil, my friends. As cold as a frozen drink, and the color of investment grade Tanzanite. Just before I went fully “small town Americana kitsch” on you, I thought I’d leave you with that.
But this is where we are, and this is how I somehow ended up in America, no different than other beasts of my species. More or less. The secret of vacationing, in my opinion, is to read all the billboards, but look for certain ones. You can’t avoid the tents, but you can choose. Don’t go for the biggest, the brightest, or the best deal. The signs you want are smaller, and probably a little broken, because the advertisers don’t have much money. For whatever reason they haven’t grasped the idea that to really make money you have to sell booze. Instead of foot-long daiquiris they’re selling culture, of all foolish commodities. And yet, their doors are still open. They are collecting nickels, but they’re collecting enough of them. That says something. And the something that it says is both what we’re looking for, and the subject of the next museum.
If you’ll follow me and try not to get separated from the group, Wednesday I’ll take you on a tour of the Museum of Small American Museums.
When a reader of Marx is laid off from another crappy job at a poorly run business, we might expect him not to be surprised. It’s just one more aufhebung of the old alienation. Another kick in the pants from the capitalists. Yet again, the pain of surplus value being extracted, like a sambok to his special spaces. We passed tragedy, and then left the farce behind, long ago. After the farce came the parody; after that, the fart joke; surpassing that, history was an email forward; and I’m not sure what’s came next, but I believe we’re now somewhere in between novelty T-shirt and minstrel show.
But no matter how much he (or as the reader might be aware, I) might be fully conscious of class relations, being laid off is still, apart from being a monetary problem, a big old ideological mind fuck. I had agreed. I was working an hourly wage. I was doing the work my bosses didn’t do, because they were lazy, stupid, or simply not there. I wasn’t happy with it, and even though I might have written a thick volume on all the materialist contradictions of history at play, I showed up every day on time. I worked hard. I didn’t steal. Didn’t complain. I didn’t even unionize. I agreed to the capitalist mindset, in order to earn a buck. And it all fell through. Some sell-out.
Of course, maybe because I did all this, was the reason I lost. If I had joined a union trade, I could have kept my job (even though I might have lost my pension). Or on the other hand, maybe I didn’t buy into capitalism enough. My mini-American dream of slaving for a low-stress hourly wage without health care (my health is already fully secured by my partner’s union membership) so I could spend my real efforts on my own projects was still, just a dream. If I had tried to make my buck on the backs of other people, then I might have had a chance. I should have worked on commission. I should have been banking a percentage, rather than making things with my hands, of all bodily organs to exploit. I should have been a capitalist, not just a capitalist whore. It may be the oldest profession. But for all of that history, whoring has always revolved around getting fucked.
So what am I, the good, capitulated Marxist, to take from my second trip to the Oregon Department of Unemployment website? A good dose of shame. You were right, Marx! And you too Engels, to a lesser, more sociological extent! I never should have put down Das Kapital, and picked up my resume! I should have been punching scabs, not the clock!
Well, I suppose that is shame, and anger. But in addition: simple horror. It really is that bad. Playing by the rules gets you nowhere. It’s no longer a decision between liberal arts and hard science. Between the career path, and the artsy hike-through-Europe path. If I had accumulated the amount of credit card debt I collected in the process of finding and losing two jobs instead in the process of traveling and having fun, I’d be in the same more place but with much better stories. Let’s face it. Debt is looking like a pair of twins I accidentally fathered in college (I name them BA and MA), that I will be stuck with for a good thirty years, because they sure as shit aren’t going to find jobs right after college either.
There is one more thing that I have taken from this experiment. It is a nice, thick scar. Do you have a good flesh wound scar? I’m not talking about a neat surgery incision; I’m talking about a wound on the surface, that you can see, and you watch every day as it heals. There’s something about the process of a scar forming. At first, it is a wound, and it hurts. Just touching the swollen, red skin around your inadvertent orifice reminds you of the horror of looking down as the accident happened, and seeing your own blood, and maybe even some raw muscle exposed. But little by little, the pain fades, and it closes. You can touch it. Skin grows over top, and it is tender, white and puffy. It still hurts when you press on it. And yet, it is a pain you begin to relish. Like a loose tooth reversing its course, growing back into your jaw, you pick and twist at it, unable to leave it alone, feeling the steadily numbing pain fade back into the asymptotic reflex arc as the scar rejoins the rest of your flesh. You press harder, taunting it, willing it to hurt you more. Really? You’re healing? That’s all you’ve got?
In the end, you have a thin line, tracing the path of where your skin was cleaved. It is hard, like gristle, but made of you. It is part of you forever, even as it continues to fade. Whatever it was that cut you has made its mark. But that mark isn’t part of that damaging knife, edge, point, or flame. It is you, and now always will be.
As far as scars given at the end of capitalism’s danger go, mine is pretty light. I didn’t have my child’s leukemia treatment revoked by an insurance company. I wasn’t murdered by scabs and dropped down a West Virginian coal mine shaft. I wasn’t even conscripted to fight in a war. But I feel it all the same. It’s really nothing less than everything my college counselors, teachers, TV, and America ever taught me about working for a living, either implicitly or explicitly, being proved wrong. Sure, I was unlucky. I could have just as easily had jobs where I didn’t get laid off. But I didn’t. And I’ll tell you, it has nothing to do with luck; both times I was laid off, it was done by actual people, who made actual decisions. Or perhaps, didn’t make any decisions. Not out of random chance, but because they didn’t give a shit. They were idiots. And they were in charge. And I suffered for it. And this is the scar I will remember.
Yes, I am pissed, emotional, and angry. I don’t want to make this all about me, and we will get to the more interesting museums soon enough. But I must make this clear. I must show you these exhibits here, and tell you what they mean. I blame certain, specific people for doing this, and I believe I should. I could spell out the whole narrative (both of them) and then appeal for your judgment, to tell me I am either correct or I am not. But I won’t do this. It won’t change the results. If this was just an attempt to placate my sense of moral outrage, then I would. But the point is this: different people, in different situations, twice allowed their own personal laziness, and their own pursuit of short-term overhead reduction, and their own unwillingness to listen to advice or observations, and their own complete inability to make any sort of concrete plan, not only ruin their own businesses (both are in tatters currently), but destroy the livelihood of their hardest working employees. We worked hard, we took extra weight upon ourselves, and we listened to their idiotic speeches about “hard-times”, and “belt-tightening” and “urgency”. And for what? So they could hide from their problems for an extra few months. The surplus value they earned from our labor, in this case, was their freedom from everything: work, responsibility, planning, and care. I’m carrying all of that now. All the way to the unemployment line.
The alienation, in the end, was not so much the distance between the worker and the product of his labor. I cared about the product. I might have been the only one. My real disconnect was from the job. The commodity I had bought into, the hourly wage job, something so simple as obtaining a regular income, is now a lost dream, flitting away. I have seen the historical contradiction here, and it is the whole damn thing.
Why bother anymore? Really? I defy you to give me a good reason. Why wake up in the morning, and sleep at night? I like being awake at night, and sleeping through the morning. These are the hours of the unemployed. Why should I spent hours trying to find a job, when I can spend hours working on my own projects? Every hour spent fruitlessly is another hour closer to death. What is the benefit of pursuing “adulthood”? As far as I can tell, the only benefit of being “grown up” is I own more tools, and there are fewer people I feel obligated to be looking up towards as role models. I still don’t have any money, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, and I still feel like I’ve failed some test I didn’t know I was taking. This is adult. This is maturity.
I’m not selling everything and moving to the Yukon (yet). Nor are we going to live in the car and mooch the library’s Wifi (at least not for more than a week or two every so often). What I’m trying to say, is that it’s not so much as I lost the job, as the job has lost me. The big, Titanic luxury ship of gainful employment has left me standing at the pier, as it steams into the sunset, no doubt on what will be a successful trip across the Atlantic Ocean. The idea of a job has alienated me so far, that I fell off. I sat in the dust, watching it keep going without me. And all I have left is the scar.
The compromise is over. Capitalism broke the agreement. From now on, I’m on my own. I’ll pay the bills, I just don’t know how. I’m going to work, but on what I need to work on, not for what some ass who just so happens to have bumbled his/her way into owning a failing company thinks is important. I’m going to have a really hard time of it, probably. But hey, as I’m finding out, that’s what “real life” is all about. It’s about getting angry, but about waking up the next morning, walking outside, and looking at the condition of the lawn. For the same reasons we climb mountains and go to the moon. Because it is there.
My fellow Americans: we have a good many things to do. We have to quit our jobs. We have to feed our families after we have quit our jobs. We have to put our pride in our fists, so that prevents against calluses as we begin to work. We have to work. The only question is, what are we going to work on? For this one, I have no answers. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that they know, either. Because they are just guessing, or trying to sell you something. I can only recommend one thing. Get really confused, and then go for a walk. You might not find what it is your are going to work on, but at least you’ll get some fucking exercise. We could all use it. Especially me.
But, before all of that: because I’m an American, the first thing I’m going to do when I’m disoriented, confused, and perhaps struggling with hand-eye coordination tasks and basic judgment, is get behind the wheel.
Tune in Wednesday for the “Museum of the Destruction of all Beat Poets.”
The widespread lockout of Wikileaks causes a proliferation of third-party “Pirate Party” services for financial, information, and other infrastructure. In the course of 3-4 weeks, an entire shadow internet, banking, media, and even certain physical logistics network is set up. Run by… who?
Clearly a total fiction, because even if there was enough public ire to demand these “diaspora” services, they could not just spring from nowhere. Money, servers, time, skill, etc. All necessary, and highly doubtful that these could be put together quickly enough to take advantage of the outrage of pro-Wikileakers willing to migrate right now.
But infrastructure is very important. Wikileaks is forced to hang on as it can, finding sanctuary where possible, and hiding its infrastructure that is still solid.
But all of these lockouts is making me think, mostly because I can’t think of anything similar in recent history where so many companies have turned against a (somewhat) public group like this. Feel free to chime in if you can think of a comparison, but meanwhile, let me run down this list of facts and presumed facts.
- Wikileaks publishes documents that are marked secret by the US government, in active disregard of their request, though it seems highly dubious that doing so is actually illegal. They are not the first group to do something like this, though the scale and press regarding the leak are seemingly unprecedented.
- The direct infrastructure by which they publicize these documents is attacked both by DDoS “groups”, and by commerical ISPs. Note: what was attacked was not the infrastructure by which they published the documents, which were released to media, and are no doubt safe in many repositories all over the world. Their web presence, which channels their publicity, was attacked. Their public “power to the people” face was attacked, not their actual existence. Also, their main page for channeling donations: which was the beginning of the attack on their financial infrastructure.
- The second level of infrastructure to be attacked is the finance. The details of Wikileaks finances are not known, maintained with a good deal of secrecy and front-groups. The reason for this is that, undoubtedly, this infrastructure would be extremely vulnerable to attack, either by governments or lawsuits by those Wikileaks has confronted. Julian Assange admits as much in this WSJ article, that also gives some background into what parts of this infrastructure are known.
- The criminal allegations against Julian Assange in Sweden notwithstanding, there are no criminal allegations against Wikileaks the organization, nor any companies or entities that are part of their infrastructure. Plenty of talk, but no warrants, charges, etc.
- Wikileaks claims it is holding information from inside Bank of America.
Now: let’s look at the hits on the publicity infrastructure. Companies involved are Tableau Software, Amazon, and everyDNS. Financial Infrastructure? PayPal, PostFinance, MasterCard, and Visa.
I’m going to suggest that these hits are not “politically” motivated. Tableau Software admits to being pressured by the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, but there is no other evidence that the US government or any other government pressured any of the other groups. Naturally, they could be lying. But they could also have motivation of their own. And a company’s biggest motivation is money.
Amazon could have faced a potential Christmas season boycott in America from anti-Wikileaks ideologues. That argument seems logical, but how many Christmas shoppers would forgo their gifts in order to make a point about a website isn’t clear. But would any of the others have faced boycott? Would Americans really boycott MasterCard or Visa for refusing to dump Wikileaks, when most of us owe a significant amount of money to these companies already? Even PayPal, the credit card of the internet, suffering much of a reaction seems implausible. Or a Swiss bank? Maybe everyDNS could have been susceptible to boycott, but it still seems doubtful.
What about the link to Bank of America? All of the financial institutions that have pulled moves on Wikileaks’ infrastructure have close ties to Bank of America, with the exception of Tableau and everyDNS. “Close ties” doesn’t even cover it. They are part of a mutual system that generates billions of dollars in revenue a year for all of them.
This is pure speculation. This is just looking at information I found in 15 minutes of Internet research. But it seems like a judgment one would have to at least propose. What could the US government or an irate public really do to any of these institutions? But what could Bank of America do? Or what could Wikileaks potentially do against any of these entities? It seems quite likely that this is not just a rebuttal to the Embassy Cables leak. It seems like a financial offensive in its own right. A lawsuit is premature–there would have to be an actual case made, and an assumption of guilt on the part of the suing party like in the case of Bank Julian Baers or Kaupthing. But how easy is it to call a fellow member on a board of directors, and get some strings pulled? All too easy. So easy, that it would be surprising if they didn’t.
This recent link is big news, and really catapults Wikileaks into a spotlight. Also, the delayed release of these cables means that we are going to be hearing the word “Wikileaks” every day for over a year, at least. Wikileaks is a threat, not in an ideological free-speech hacker-anarchism sort of way, but in a very real way to people might be exposed, and potentially lose millions if not billions of dollars.
I don’t know which would make me more paranoid and suspicious: if the US government was after me, or if the Bank of America was after me.
And also, think of this: if the US government isn’t as interested in going after Wikileaks or isn’t as able to through its channels as financial entities are, what does this say for the future of you and me? At what point will be need a shadow infrastructure to escape from the reach of these instutitons?
The interesting part of that article, is the proposition that using such technology will be a “dominant strategy equilibrium.” The term comes from game theory, and denotes the condition when all players choose the outcome that will dominate regardless of other’s choices. In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, the result of both players consistently defecting is this sort of equilibrium–they both choose to screw over the other player, in order to save themselves being screwed in an unmitigated fashion. (There is a phrase to quote!) There are other sorts of dominant strategy equilibriums, depending on the game–it is whatever works out best for everyone so that they don’t need to worry about everyone else. Hedging your bets, in a way.
Which makes sense. When everyone has Google Maps in their pocket, you will be at a disadvantage if you don’t. Not only in the simple competition of finding the way to the nearest coffee shop the fastest, but also the generalized act of “finding your way”. Try this experiment: ask someone with an iPhone how to get somewhere a fair distance away. Watch their face squint up, as they attempt not to suggest, “can’t you just look at your iPhone?” Indeed, once you see someone with a smart phone, it’s pretty difficult not to want one yourself. It appeals to all kinds–those who tweet or text constantly, those who rely on business email or other network connection, those whose appetite for trivia necessitates a Wikipedia implant, those who like the interface for games, or those who simply like music and video wherever they go. And yes, those who want to find coffee shops.
But we are only in the first “mini-game” of the smart phone world. In game theory application, any theorized game is only part of the bigger picture. You solve the small games, and then those equilibriums become the rules for a larger game. For the game, “who wants a smart phone?” we get “Everyone wants a smart phone”. Equilibrium created. Now, on to the next game.
Another game could be “what smart phone do I buy?” From the choices of features, phones in existence, and your desired usage, you could find yourself another equilibrium. An “when do I update my phone with the next version?” could be another, with factors such as feature change, plan cost, and local availability. Either of these could be analyzed according to game theory, or some other method of diagramming rational choice.
But here’s one that is a little more complicated, of which we are only seeing the beginnings. What happens when the original dominant strategy equilibrium is an equilibrium, but is not a balanced equilibrium? What happens when access to game choices are not distributed equally? This is called an asymmetric game. Equilibrium does not necessarily mean fairness, or balance between players.
Picture this: two players have established the dominant strategy equilibrium, and decided they both need smart phones. To make it simple, we’ll just say they are both business people, that need smart phones for business. Player A’s company is doing well, so they play the “What smart phone game?” and spring for an iPhone 4–top of the line. Equilibrium established, smart phone in hand. Player B owns his/her own company, and is barely making it through the recession. His/her equilibrium lands a [insert smart phone you feel is less capable than the iPhone 4 so I don't have to go there.] Both are fulfilling their dominant strategy, but Player A ends up better than Player B. His/her phone is faster, so s/he arrives to appointments on time. It has more value as a status symbol. S/he has access to numerous productivity apps, and so on and so forth.
Maybe the difference isn’t really pronounced between Player A and B. There are plenty of other variables. Maybe B’s business acumen totally makes up for less than cutting edge technology. But because we are talking about game theory, let’s extend the pattern to infinity. Let’s look at two entire classes of people, divided by whether they have the best phone, or the second best. Let’s imagine that this differentiation also falls across an app compatibility divide, so class A has access to different apps than B. The new social network develops their apps for class A first–better press that way, and that class has a bit more disposable income for premium apps. Now their phones are, for the moment of that app divide, even more different than before. Take a look at the difference in app availability between Sybian OS and iOS. That is probably the furtherest extreme of this app divide–for now. Both are very popular, and yet iOS has many, many more apps than Sybian.
And this leads us to the example of a more historical technological divide, between first and third world. Sybian is widely used because it is the OS for many Nokia phones, the most popular mobile handset manufacturer in the world. But Apple is the most popular handset manufacturer in the FIRST world. This is, in a sense, no different than any other technological divide between first and third world. I hear Internet is faster in the first world too (just not in the US). But this is divide that is going to appear in the first world, as the slope of asymmetric equilibriums in personal technology increase.
I’m finding this out now, as my iPhone 3G slowly expires. I bought it in 2008 when it first came out. I coughed up the dough because not only did I have an extra $200 bucks, but because it was “the future”. I even named my phone “The Future”. Now, as I am short on cash after being unemployed for a while last year (thanks, recession! Debt is the gift that keeps on giving!) my choice in name is providing me with a delightful bit of retro-future irony as compensation for low battery life, crashing apps, and intermittent antenna problems. Not only is my phone less than status quo compared to the new iPhone 4, it is decidedly less useful that it was originally, as evidenced by comparison to my partner’s iPhone 3G, purchased in 2009. She did not upgrade to iOS 4, and uses her phone (and battery) far less than I do. It’s like a breath of fresh air when I use her phone for a moment, as opposed to the sluggishness of “The Future”.
Although it is certainly what they call a “first world problem” that my mobile phone’s web browser crashes, it is also by this distinction that the problem becomes apparent. If the first and the third world is divided by the rational choice equilibriums represented in Nokia vs Apple, then the division between the iPhone 4 and the 3G is class difference. The astute sociological observer would note that this class boundary, if it amounts to anything much, would be the difference between middle class and and lower-upper-middle class, if that is such a thing. And it might also be explained by other divisions such as geeky tech hobbies, and what I choose to spent my money on. The strategies of this game are complicated, and many. But compare this division, which I am sure I am not the only one to feel, to when the iPhone 3G was first released. As the first widely adopted full-powered smart phone (an odd differentiation of categories in itself), everyone who bought one was instantly a member of the “iPhone club”. But it was a single level club. In a way, smart phones were the beginning of a new utopia–in which we will all be wirelessly integrated into the network, constantly on, and all equal members of the social network and the meritocracy of the commons. But in only two years, and in two yearly iPhone model iterations, new strategic games have been introduced. A rift is opening. How far can I let myself fall from the cutting edge? How far can you? Where is the equilibrium for anyone, in a constantly accelerating terrain of technology? How far can you drift to the back of the pack before you can never make up the ground that is lost?
The identifiable rules of a game are in themselves, a certain equilibrium of the folded strata of choices. They are a pattern, denoting a landscape–a plane of existence defined by certain variables. Option points, and choice vectors that move between them. Smart phone technology is only a recent surface for this landscape. Class differences have been around longer. Class is nothing more than a “family structure”: a strategic alignment whose constituent interests are best served by an allegiance to this abstract concept. It behooves a certain portion of the population to identify as middle class, and defend those “values”, because in the end as self-ascribed members, they will benefit as part of the whole. The family was once the primary structure to defend, from a evolutionary perspective. It was the basic pattern of human productive relations. As society and its productions get more complicated, we get other structures, that will either defend themselves, or fade away. They will create strategies of existence–the choice to adhere to said equilibrium and promote its strategy becomes an identifying factor for group membership.
Take fan-based, or “hobby” industries. The Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer from 1982-86. It introduced the home computer to thousands of homes (the “family” computer, as it were) before being discontinued in 1994. But, it still is around today. For archive purposes perhaps, for nostalgia–not necessarily out of a sense of computer conservatism. But regardless of the reason, it has achieved a certain equilibrium among its fanbase. There are people who make the choice to write and collect software for this system, rather than any number of other systems. As a structure within the history of technological development, it is no longer an avant-garde player. But it exists as a class unto itself, and perpetuates on that basis.
If we are to believe that dominant strategy equilibrium will eventually put computers into our bodies and interfaced to our brain, isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that we will see classes of technological generation develop in those venues as well? Tim Maly, in an piece published while I’ve been writing this, perhaps stimulated in part by the same original article, envisions a world in which early adopters of implant technology are left to suffer on their own, without upgrades:
We can envision drone pilots getting these implants as part of the march of progress. Once the tech is friendly enough, it gets sold out to consumers. Meanwhile, you have all these down and out veterans, their brains stuck wired up with old half-working interfaces, begging on the streets for change to pay for a firmware upgrade or a tune-up for their barely-functioning bluetooth legs.
It is easy to envision these uncanny lapses between classes occurring when we start fusing bodies with machines, because to imply that our bodies can easily be obsolete machines threatens a certain humanist concept of our bodies as a unifying quality to our species. But we don’t have to start invading the body to find differences that affect our ability to stratify ourselves into classes. If the equilibriums of the relations of production can develop a rift between first and third world without personal technology, between upper class and lower class both before, and as we start to use computers to identify ourselves as class member, why would one not also occur between “cutting-edge” and “deprecated” classes as technology becomes more “personal”–magnetizing that one kernel social structure not yet susceptible to fracture and evolution? At what point will our devices themselves reinforce the equilibriums of choice they themselves provide, by being the motive force for separating individuals into groups? If not by lasting only as long as their minimal service contracts in a planned obsolesce that intensifies the slope of device turnover, then by active means? An app only for the iPhone 8, that can detect models of the iPhone 5 and below–letting you know that you’ve wandered into an area with a “less than savory technological element?” When will emergency services only guarantee that they can respond to data transponder calls, and not voice requests? The local watchman has been phased out, in favor of centrally dispatched patrols that require phones to access. Isn’t it only a matter of time before central dispatch is phased out for distributed drone network policing? The ability to use a computer is a requirement for many jobs. When will the ability to data uplink hands-free be a requirement?
We don’t want anyone to fall behind. But we have to think rationally. Why should the state pay exorbitant amounts to service old deprecated implants under the national health care plan? People born in this country receive Bluetooth 14.0 transmitters at birth. But to provide one to every migrant worker would be an extraordinary burden on the taxpayer. If you live in this country, upgrade yourself to a compatible firmware. It’s not that I’m prejudiced against people with your OS, it’s just that we both will never be as compatible together as among our own systems. That isn’t systemicism–it’s just the way plug n play protocols work. Look–I’d love for you to join in network allocated processing with my daughter. But she is quad-core x86, and you are single chip ARM. I’m sure you’re great for certain applications, but you would just slow my daughter down. If you love her, wouldn’t you want her to have all the giga-flops she’s entitled to?
Society governs itself by rational choice. Rational choice dictates that a strategy must be chosen, and an equilibrium based on the best strategy established. But despite the improvements to our technology, the patterns of human structural organization and the anti-distributional, magnetic plateaus inherent in our equilibriums will continue to repeat themselves. The more things change, the more we try and keep the terrain the same–divided abstractly in aid of maintained abstraction. All the better for us to navigate by. Google Maps, it seems, comes pre-loaded with a certain human quality for class consciousness.
A man’s house burns down because he didn’t pay 75 dollars. In one sense, there’s nothing to unpack here. You don’t pay for a service, you don’t get a service. But in several other senses, this means a lot more to a lot of people, to the tune of over 15,000 comments and climbing on the Yahoo News article about it, and so the band wagons are filling up, and they’re calling for band trains, band barges, and there is some guy in the street with a broken bottle yelling about pulling the Spruce Goose out of retirement.
As my partner M pointed out, this seems to be a perfect opportunity, in a tense political commentary climate, for everyone who is anti- anything to blame these anti’s for what is generally agreed to be shitty situation. Anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Tennessee, anti-gay, anti-firefighter (seriously, that comment feed is like a State Fair One-Off World-Record Largest Ever Salted Nut Roll of American popular opinion). A house burned down, with all their stuff, and pets. SOMEBODY should be to blame.
My own personal anti-, of course, is anti- people who need to blame everyone else for their problems, or hijack an unfortunate situation to claim that no one should blame anyone for their own problems, thereby blaming everyone else for their own everyone else’s problems. I’m anti-15000+ comments on a Yahoo News site. If everyone who commented saved their spit and mailed it to Western Tennessee, there would be floods, not fires.
But what I really want to write about is taxes.
Because that is what this is really about. Everybody wants government services, nobody wants to pay. There’s disagreements over what the proper amount of each of these are, and about what happens between the time they pay and when they get the service. In the end, government is a unilateral business for something know generally as “Public Good”. This nebulous industry is also the company mission statement and managing strategy, and nebulously, it is always up for debate. Meanwhile, houses continue to burn down.
M works in government services. She is the union worker with an expensive government contract that you always hear about, living the high life on your tax dollars. For example, we ordered a pizza by phone last night… at 10pm! Ah, the sweet life. But you know what is sweeter than that? Telling anyone who complains that they could live like us. All they’d have to do is join a union. And live near a pizza place with free delivery.
The reason we felt we deserved pizza, is because not only does she work in government services, she works in emergency services. And not only does she work in emergency services, she works for the part of emergency services that takes phone calls from people about their emergencies, and therefore she is in a unique position to hear the customers’ points of view about their emergency services. Oh, and me? I just deserve pizza because I have the good sense to live with her.
In addition to pizza I don’t deserve, I also get a view into what goes on in this high-rolling, nebulous world of government emergency services. I get a peek at what it is like to allocate only twelve officers to a downtown district full of noise complaints and drunken fights on a Saturday night, when all of a sudden, there is also a shooting. I get to hear about the citizens who call in from the Washington side of the Columbia River to report people having campfires on the Oregon beach, necessitating calling out the police boat. I get to listen to the actual ire in human beings’ voices as they call over and over to complain that children are playing basketball in the park at 9pm. You know, rather than selling drugs or stealing beer or drag racing. Because basketball is a public problem. And I don’t even need to get into the racism, the neglect, the selfishness, the childishness, the violence, and the other horrible things this modern first-world society does to itself all day and night.
What I conclude is this: managing this lovely, peaceful society we have, or at least maintaining this facade for most people, costs money. It needs cars, and radios, and computer systems. Expensive trucks that can pump hundreds of gallons of water that run on diesel fuel. Many well-trained human beings to operate all this equipment, and the organizational structure to improve this training, and figure out what went wrong when they fuck up. Which they will do occasionally, when humanity throws them a curve ball, or someone decides to do something absolutely horrible without warning, or when the responders themselves are humans.
And these are just the emergency services themselves, not to mention the roads needed for the trucks to get where they are going, the electricity to power the computers, and the educational system to try and subdue the horrible violence lurking within humanity. I mean, to train people to put out fires. Actually, both please.
Therefore, “cutting spending” is about as sensible “cutting population”, or at least until the sea levels rise and then some maniacs actually start suggesting that. You can’t just pay less, and expect to get the same service. Or better service. Which is what people apparently claim–that the problem is that everyone else is lazy, and so if you fired all the lazy people with big salaries, then the people who work really hard for low wages will make everything awesome. Because there are lots of million-dollar bonus executives in government. Any of these people are welcome to come and see how we live, fat on a union salary. But they can’t have any of our pizza.
What is needed is to spend the right amount of money in the right places. Everyone seems to have ideas about this as well. That is, everyone except for the Republican Party, that did not suggest ONE, not ONE place they would cut spending in their Pledge to America plan to cut spending. With all the discussion about spending and deficits and taxes recently, it’s been mentioned that there is a gap between the actual distribution of government budgets, versus the public conception of what the state is spending priorities are. As it turns out, the state largely spends money the way people want it spent. People just think that it isn’t.
To fix this problem, there is the suggestion of an itemized receipt for tax payers, to help them understand exactly where their money is going. We could see that our expenditures on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is more than triple the federal highway budget. Or almost five times the federal health research through NIH. Or that five percent of our taxes go towards paying interest on the national debt. This sort of information might cause problems, because it encourages taxpayers to apply their home budget micro-economic knowledge against macro issues. For example, the national debt is actually more of an investment in the US currency and the open-market ability of the Fed to control the economy. Not just a gigantic credit card. But more information is good, right? So first we’ll give people the data, and then start to hand out primers on macro-economics and the FOMC.
But this, combined with a Twitter comment I read suggesting not paying taxes to protest a war, got me thinking. What if after seeing this receipt, taxpayers were allowed to shift where their taxes went? Say, less Pell grants, and more to the war in Afghanistan, if that was their priority. Or less war, and more highways. Of course this would affect their service. The service only gets what the individual public thinks it deserves from their contribution to the tax coffers. It would be easier to go all Henry Thoreau on a war a hemisphere away then it would on, say, your local fire service, because there are fewer people contributing to your local fire bureau than paying national taxes, and you’d see the effect of the latter right away, the former only later. But hey, open it up. Let people pay their share of what they think it important. Let’s think about what would happen, if people could actually control where the money was going.
Other than finally letting individuals control their tax dollars, what this would eventually create is a massive, cybernetic feedback loop. Let’s say you opened up a website with UI controls, so you could adjust your proportional tax payment anytime you wanted, adjustable down to hourly segments of your fiscal year total. (I am assuming you must still pay your full total, you can just allocate the percentages. Otherwise, everyone would obviously opt to pay nothing at all.) And this site updates. So after it first launches, we see (and I am just guessing here) payment for education and arts decrease, and military spending increases. After a few hours of people allocating their own taxes, education and arts are almost at zero. But then what happens as people see these changes? Maybe someone who originally allocated 75% military/25% education, on seeing education spending slide nationally to nothing, decides to allocate 100% education to make up for the difference. How many people do this? Enough to counter the childless militants? What sort of equilibrium is reached? Is an equilibrium reached?
Now imagine, after they open up the API of this system (naturally), third-party algorithms are introduced. Want to help the budget reach 25% for education nationally? Install this add-on, and it will auto-adjust you and everyone else using the add-on in a unified front to make this goal a reality (while protecting your personal data, of course). Or maybe you set it to automatically devote up to 100% of your individual taxes to education, unless highways dip below 5%, and then it re-figures your totals according to your preference. Or, download the Democratic Party algorithm, which will automatically adjust your percentages to match the national tax distribution platform of the party. Download the Support our Troops algorithm, which helps the Veterans and Military budgets maintain a certain consistent ratio to the overall budget depending on how many troops are currently on active duty. Pledge to Support the Dollar, by downloading the FOMC algorithm that will adjust internal infrastructure spending and national debt spending in such a way as to drive the strength of the dollar world-wide. How about an algorithm that scans the news for stories of political scandal, reducing the money allocated to congressional salaries every time there is another ethics violation? Too many fires in your district last month? The Google Map Fire Layer-aware algorithm will automatically up your fire services percentage by an appropriate amount.
Now what would be REALLY REALLY interesting: what sort of equilibrium is achieved, and how far off is it the current balance as it now, without this sci-fi direct democracy scheme? After all the algorithms are factored in, and all the feedback to the results of the algorithms are calculated and re-factored… are we actually any different than where we are now? Is our national desired budget, summed from all the diverse opinion about where we ought to be spending money, really any different from reality? If we let one person tweak the budget, they’d do all sorts of different things. But if everyone’s opinion and rate of pay were weighted together, I’d say it’s a fair bet that we’d end up exactly where we are.
Which brings us back to Thoreau. If Thoreau decides not to pay any taxes towards an unjust war, and convinces 100,000 of his friends and Twitter followers to do likewise, who is to say that if they are allowed to adjust their tax distribution, William Randolph Hearst and all of his Twitter followers won’t decide to up their tax distribution in favor of war to make up the difference? Wouldn’t we then see that those who pay the most taxes control the distribution of the budget by their weight? How would this “voting with your tax” be any different than the world today, in which people with a lot of money, and hoards of people with a little bit of money, filtered through regimes of power and ideology and opinion, are the only influences to the political system?
Is it possible that as bankrupt and backwards as our democracy is, that it actually functions perfectly at doing what it is supposed to do? This function: to obfuscate and abstract our own lack of knowledge and ability, to direct our attention away from our responsibility for our own egos. And is it possible that the government, by echoing the non-sensical desires and demands of a populace that is as fickle as a television programming schedule, is already the representative compass of a society that is ready and willing to sprint directly towards oblivion? This society that would rather wage war across the globe than put out the fires in our neighbors homes, and fix the gas lines underneath our own feet.
I don’t actually know. But somebody should run a mock-up study to see. I’d really like to participate, and see the results.
It’s good to know that the more things change, the more red-baiting stays the same. Really–as the mental environment and the logical terrain begins shifting underneath my feet, it makes me happy to know that certain idiots can latch on to the same old rhetorical techniques, the rehashed tired responses, the boring syllogisms. Every time I begin to think that I can’t cope with the world, someone accuses someone else of being, of all things, a “Trotskyite”, and immediately I know that up is up, the world is round, and we’re all better dead than Red. Hearing the soft, familiar shriek of “go back to Cuba!” is like returning to one’s hometown and realizing, yes, the air is sweeter here!
To Cory Doctorow, capitalism is something that other people are conspiring to do to him, and DRM is the weapon they’re doing it with.
His antipathy to kapitalizm is understandable in view of his Trotskyite upbringing, but history has demonstrated that beneath every socialist’s flesh beats the heart of a capitalist.
God, this is good. Let’s count the tropes. 1) Communism is a paranoid fantasy, 2) Communists are all red-diaper babies 3) Communists are actually more capitalist than capitalists 4) communists are socialists (are capitalists are Trotskyites?)
It’s always funny how the worst thing you can call someone in the Communist universe is a Trotskyite. Even Maoists have more street cred than Trotskyites. “Not only are you a Communist, you’re a… Trotskyite!” Ooooh! “Not only are you bad with women, you’re gay!” Does the latter come from the former, or… are we in a middle school locker room? “Wait, are you trying to psychoanalyze me? Psychoanalysts are gay!”
But this article is actually about ebooks (I think), and that’s what I really wanted to get at. Because Cory Doctorow is a liberal, and not a communist in any sense of the term. (At least, not in relation to his well-known stances on DRM, copyright, ebooks, etc. Who KNOWS what sort of books he has stashed away his ENGLISH “flat”! You know what the English are, right? Gay!)
I’ve written about Cory’s stance on DRM before, from a dialectical perspective, actually (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And this would be, in the same sense, a continuation of this dialectic; two sides are eagerly falling into opposing sides of the same argument and verifying that yes, they do disagree, and so the world must be isometrically diametric. Free-market privateers on one side, high-minded Robin Hoods on the other hand. The third side of the coin being me, shaking my head and wondering when I will get a computer/ebook/mp3 player with the functions that I actually want to use (and violently condemning any form of state control. Wait, did I say that out loud?) This particular article is just a little more stark than it usually is. A little more, shall we say, cliche? But as I said, I can appreciate that, because if there wasn’t anyone going around and ruining perfectly good debates with McCarthyism, generations of teenagers wouldn’t read Marx as a form of rebellion.
Within the ebook discourse, the writers of this article are not entirely wrong for making allegations that Doctorow and his ilk are in some ways idealistic, and high-minded, and somewhat willfully ignorant of “the cold logic of market forces”. While Doctorow is successful in self-publishing, it clearly is not a model for everyone. He is an example, and to a certain degree a proof of concept, in that he can give away his ebooks for free and still make money, and can demand with this still-make-money that publishers bend to his will. He is our Paris Commune, which I have cited more times than I care to remember (both Cory and the literal Commune) as an example of intentional communism, err, self-publishing working, until the hegemony of the state (read: trade paperbacks) overcomes the experiment with bloody force. I hope that Cory does not come to the same end as the Commune, and I imagine he will not, because as bloody as this battle is, it’s between people who actually care about the future of reading, which means they have probably never thrown a punch in their lives.
This idealism and the according suspicion of it is not new. As I said, it is familiar of the old dialectic, the scarred hands of the right and the left, and in this way, calming to this old Marxist of twenty-eight years. But what IS new is the whining. What is up with these defenders of the “publishers’ interests?” You are supposed to be the cold-hearted capitalists!
Doctorow writes that he is “more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, publishers have terms too, and if you listen to them long enough you come to understand why they need to impose them.
“Well, Mr. Bomb-throwing anarchist, we oligarchs have our beliefs, and if you would just come to my study, I’ll have my servant pull you up a wooden chair so you don’t stain my embroidered sofa, and I’ll kindly read to you from a selection of Adam Smith, who was a logical fellow, and I think if you try, you’ll see a lot of wisdom in his words to which we can all relate.” What is this shit? Call out the scabs, man! Get the Pinkertons to go burn down Cory’s Nexus One! “This ain’t a union town, Doctorow!” Or at the very least, can we PLEASE have a House Committee on Un-American e-Activities? I thought this was a Trotskyite you were dealing with? A TROTSKYITE! If you’re afraid to fight a Trotskyite, what does that make you?
The reason I know that Doctorow actually does have a bead drawn on the publishers (other than the glaringly obvious fact of THE INTERNET) is because the publishers are running scared. If in the 70s, someone had said to the music industry, “you know it’s kind of bullshit that you make us pay for stuff”, no one would have heard a thing. It would have been silence. More tumbleweeds than a 21st century picket line. But Doctorow IS the Paris Commune. A minor historical example, barely a piece of physical evidence at all in the face of the entire world market, but what he represents is so much of a danger to publishers, that they react this way. He can’t be allowed to get a pass on this, otherwise it will be clear that communism is not a bat shit theory, but an alternative with pros and cons of its own. And yet rather than call out the troops, the publishers are so weak that all they can do is make the market-theory equivalent of slanders to his sexuality.
Another piece I read recently that had a similar tone was this mild rebuke to the Wylie Agency by Michael Bahskar. Although caged in the language of “this is not taking sides”, the article does try to present an alternate logic to the agency-turned-publisher who decided it could form its own ebook economy without the publishers.
The main argument for why royalties [paid by publishers to agents and writers] should be higher in digital seems to be that, given we don’t have a physical book, the costs to the publisher must be so much lower. This is very easy to answer. The per unit cost of printing a book is, in most cases, not where the majority of a publishers’ costs are directed. They are directed at overheads, at editorial and editorial management, at sales, marketing and publicity. Regardless of whether you have a print book or not, these costs are absolutely consistent. So really the only difference we can talk about is the marginal print cost difference, only a fraction of a book’s total cost. [...]
For books to thrive they need good publishers; this is equally true of ebooks, and if publishers are making a loss on digital products then it will increasingly undermine not only their ebook business but ultimately their print books, and beyond that the whole ecosystem of reading and writing.
We could take trade guild rebelling against the nobles as our historical example in this one, to better abut it to our use of Communism previously. In this epoch, new capital rebells against old capital. But really, it is the same thing. Doctorow, as talent-publisher, is no different than the Wylie Agency here. Both are lucky enough to have the talent, and feel they’d be better off on their own terms, so they are going forward without the feet-dragging publishing nobility. Clearly, both Doctorow and Wylie, who have some experience selling books, know what it is that publishers do. And they couldn’t give a shit. All of this supposed work that publishers do is left to Bahskar to explain on a website, to the only people who care. If Doctorow and Wylie NEED publishers so bad, I would imagine they will be finding out that reality shortly when their grand experiments come crashing down. Right? Otherwise, off they go into the glorious communist future.
And so, note: the only thing that publisher are able to do is plead with them.
Please, talent! You NEED us! You are making a historical error! Like communism, you think you can survive without someone from above directing your markets, but you’ll just end up like Russia! You’ll still put people in space, but you’ll have to degrade yourself to space tourism to do it. If you think that is a “successful experiment”, you’re wrong! Plus, Stalin! I mean, come on, Stalin! You don’t want to be that. PLEASE LET US TOUCH YOUR BOOKS!
If these clowns really believed in the free market (secret: no one does) then they would let Doctorow and Wylie try their hand. They’d let them build their own railroad, and then crush them by cornering the market in steel. But the publishers can’t do that, because they don’t have a steel market. If anyone has the steel market, it’s Apple, and Apple is on the side of Henry Ford and the automobile, which… hold on, I think I lost my metaphor.
But the point is, if publishers are having to explain how important they are, then they’re not. Otherwise, we’d all know. Any person who tries to whine to you, liberal or conservative, communist or capitalist, about how you are making a mistake “against history” by opposing them, knows desperately that history is not on their side. History is on the side of complexity, and complexity is a pattern that will stymie any attempt to understand it in dialectical terms. The dialectic will always come around and bite you in the ass, whatever side you’re on. This is why the point is not to have an ideology, or to be “historically and theoretically correct”. The point is the adapt and build, even as everything is falling down. But publishers would rather sit around and whine, sit around and bitch, sit around and call Cory Doctorow a fake communist. I’m sure Cory could give a damn about what they call him, as long as he’s selling books.
And this, children, is the story about how the big baseball jock grew up calling the nerdy kids communist, and then became a wage slave working at the filling station. Luckily, he was straight. But his marriage was not very fulfilling. For the rest of his days, he cursed the dialectic, and always wondered what life would have been like had he actually worked to innovate the publishing industry, rather than defending market entities that were having to lower themselves to ad hominem attacks to replace their lack of economical understanding. His cheap gravestone would read:
“At least I wasn’t a Trotskyite.”
And he’d be right.
But don’t listen to me. Let this guy try and sell you something:
This guy is continuously blowing my mind. His essays are a little dense and unpolished, but hey, this is the Internet, and it could easily be the other way around. Remember, first of all, that he is actually writing about video games here. Now, try and slice his discussion of social media games along any of the typical genre veins of communication, social theory, economics, or game theory–the places where this type of language has typically come to rest. You can’t. Because its everything. This is where the Prisoner’s Dilemma has come to: to the Farmville Dilemma.
The Farmville Dilemma is a probabilistic choice theory designed to model the current state human interaction with the world, but human interaction with the world being has become such a complicated problem that its motion is not just summed in a theoretical description of a game, but an actual game, played for fun, and designed for money, by people who are actually thinking this way, in a combination of not taking humanity seriously in a B.F. Skinner sort of way, and taking humanity so seriously that they are actually making money on simulated click-farming by creating bizarre pleasure-center-kicking alternate facsimile economies, and while we sit here talking about it its actually happening to millions of people, and no matter what we theoretically conclude, nothing will change that radical fact.
And this is basically what he is writing about. I really don’t know what to do about it in these terms, except cry, and go back to my click-farming, because I am the indentured servant of a Farmville plantation, and my thoughts are no longer my own property.
Oh… I’m not? I could have sworn… so is this the video game? Please–somebody tell me what is not real, so I can know when to relax.
There is a temptation when working with these games to fall into the trap and start optimizing towards a dehumanizing abstraction of people, one where indivuals are homogenous and fitted along a normal distribution. The temptation is so strong because it actually works… until it doesn’t. For instance, to my eye the income ratios of stone and wood are skewed in Treetopia and this skew is intentional, but needs to be toned down a bit. If you made the wood price of quests a bit cheaper, you can calculate that the number of quests achievable per day increase by a certain amount and hypothesize that you’ll see higher engagement per session as people click through more quests, because players’ dopamine receptors are wired for it and the math works out. This was even more true back when fixed reward schedules were all you had to worry about, if you make the XP per dish X then the mean level gained per day will be Y, ect. Seductively deterministic, but play always intervenes. The most successful interactive properties took off because of the heterogenaity of uses that people found for them, there is no monolithic audience scaling from casual to hardcore, there are tribes of strategy, splinters of interface.
Social game developers run a risk – and this is more true the larger a company is – they run a risk of falling into the trap and optimizing their particular designs into perfect adaptation while neglecting the big demand inefficiency endemic to those designs. Just like free-to-play grew out of subscription MMOs neglecting the market demand for virtual goods bought as substitute for time spent, so too are social games neglecting market demand for social interactions. There is hubris of thinking of one’s customers as “users”, rather than players, that they are idiots wasting time and money because one can only masturbate to porn so many times in a day, this is the same kind of mentality that day traders get when they double their account through 10 good trades in a row just buying high Beta stocks and selling them at the end of the day; such conditions can only persist until they don’t and when they stop the dip-buyers give back all those gains. Same deal in this market. There’s no sustainable business in not respecting one’s customers and mistaking an early ease of distribution for a blank check. Ultimately, we must create value.
Remember: this is all about video games. Isn’t it?
[I recommend that women unionize now, to preemptively seize the means of production. Of course, this has been a problem for a long time now. But perhaps the introduction of foreign competition will be the stimulus to making this a worker's issue? Unless racial tensions are manipulated by men looking off-shore to propagate their genes, and directing properly proletarian gender outrage at these "foreign scabs". Naturally, we've seen it before.]
“So much of America’s economic activity takes place on faraway shores, from call centers in Mumbai to sweatshops in Shanghai. Still, you’d think that making a baby would be one job that’s hard to offshore. But today, for a fee, a woman in another country can serve as a “gestational surrogate,” carrying a fertilized egg to term and then delivering the baby straight to your door, halfway around the world. We’re not used to talking about that kind of labor as an outsourced job. But farmed-out childbirth has become a full-fledged industry in India, turning the rural poor into wombs for hire.”
[I always feel caught between people predicting a augmented reality brain-installed iPad future, and people telling me I'd better learn how to fabricate solar cells in my bathtub. Can't I just split the difference, and like, buy a lot of guns?]
“Produce everything you can locally. Virtualize everything else. The value of your home will be based on the ability of your community to offer energy independence, food security, economic vitality, and
protection. Survivalist stockpiles and zero footprint frugality are pathways to failure. Think in terms of vibrant local economic ecosystems that are exceedingly efficient, productive, and bountiful.”
