MrTeacup.org

Critique of User Interface Illusions

2013-05-15T07:00:00Z

Alexis Madrigal spent some time with Facebook’s UX designers and content strategists and wrote a profile and a critique of what he takes to be the company’s design philosophy. There’s a lot to like about this essay in terms of its focus and the questions it raises, but one flaw is that most of the principles he gleans from the UX designers are in fact broadly accepted and practiced across the industry.

It’s hard to know if Madrigal really believes that they are unique to Facebook, or if this impression is an artifact of the journalistic tendency to avoid talking about ideas in the abstract, and presenting them as quotes from interviews with particular people instead. Maybe this is more reader-friendly (for some definition of “reader”), but it has the side effect of downplaying the broader significance of those ideas. So the flaw is that the essay could have been a book, or at least four or fives times longer, and is more broadly applicable than only in debates about Facebook.

His main topic is the vanishing act—when UX designers design something, the goal is to make the tool disappear from view, so that the user experiences it as natural and intuitive, transparently augmenting the user’s capabilities so that they may focus on achieving their goal rather than operating the tool. As much as possible, software should be frictionless and easy to use rather than antagonizing the user by demanding that she learn and master its arcane logic.

An Amazon television commercial says, “We’re the re-inventors of normal. We dream of making things that change your life, then disappear into your everyday.” What better way of disappearing that not existing? Partly as a reaction to the recent proliferation of inappropriately Twitter-ready devices like car dashboards and refrigerators, the prominent design agency Cooper published their No UI manifesto, a restatement of the ideas of Donald Norman, the godfather of user-centered design. In an article published in 1990, Norman said:

The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job.

In his 1998 book The Invisible Computer, Norman claims that “Tools should be noticed only when they break,” an idea that reappears in Madrigal’s article, in a conversation with Facebook content strategist Alicia Dougherty-Wold:

[Dougherty-Wold:] “When you call your mom on the phone, are you thinking, ‘I am talking on a device’?”

“That’s an interesting question,” I said. “I would say yes. But I can understand why people say no.”

“I would say, I’m talking to my mom. The only time I would say I’m talking to a device is when my cell carrier drops.”

The tendency to privilege the disappearance of the device can be traced back to Heidegger’s well-known opposition between the two modes of phenomenological encounter with technologies. Presence-at-hand is an experience of looking directly at a tool, examining it in a detached, theoretical way as an object of inquiry. We have this kind of experience when a tool malfunctions and we look at it wondering what’s wrong with it. Opposed to it is readiness-at-hand, which refers to the experience of being absorbed directly in the activity with the tool. Heidegger’s example is the hammer: when it is ready-at-hand, we are simply pounding the nails, engaged in the project of whatever we are building without focusing on the tool.

For Heidegger, it is not simply nicer and more convenient to use a hammer in this transparent way. Our immersion in our projects that is enabled by readiness-at-hand is one way we can experience being-in-the-world, the authentic mode of existence that’s distinctive of humans. He says:

The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically.

The UX design ideal that designed objects should be withdrawn, and design should be invisible to the audience and only appear when it fails means that software interface design largely escapes a Bourdieusian critique that can be made against other kinds of visual design that succeed or fail on their ability to transmit the requisite forms of cultural capital demanded by advertising and marketing clients. Here the point is obvious: to draw attention to the design, to stand out from the crowd by expressing unique brand traits, to associate the client with a style, a particular meaning and a set of values, and so on.

The dominant strain of user-centered design often ignore these goals, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by designers in other traditions who often complain about the subordination of aesthetics that is implied by the disappearance of the designed object.

Madrigal interviews Dylan Fareed, a designer and founder of the online art magazine Artlog, who says, “You don’t improve the experience of nailing things by pretending the hammer doesn’t exist.” And in A taste for practices: Unrepressing style in design thinking, Cameron Tonkinwise argues that the role of aesthetic judgment has been repressed in the genre of management literature known as design thinking. Although not quite the same as user-centered design, the insight seems to hold here as well.

But the best example of how UX design discourse subordinates aesthetics may be found in precisely the ways that it tries to account. A topic that returns with some regularity is the idea that we should be going beyond mere usability, and designing for user delight, engagement, pleasure and surprise, which means playful, cute, humorous and beautiful interfaces. It should not surprise us to discover that these ideas are often implemented in error conditions, like 404 pages and input validation error messages. One oft-used example is the Mac OS login dialog, which shakes back and forth quickly when you enter an incorrect password, as if the dialog is shaking its head to say, “No.”

In the prologue to his 2005 book Emotional Design, Don Norman himself explains that the impetus for writing it was a criticism he heard from designers: “If we were to follow Norman’s prescription, our designs would all be usable, but they would also be ugly.” He makes up for this shortcoming by drawing on the concept of affect, reducing art to beauty and beauty to pleasure so that he can remain within the paradigm of cognitive psychology. More importantly, the interface can continue to be evaluated empirically, in terms of its impact on the user, who now takes center stage over and above the designed object that would normally evaluated in terms of its qualities.

One way that designers cause the object itself to withdraw is by exploiting pre-attentive properties of the human vision system, i.e., visual perception tasks that can be performed in under 250 ms. For example, given an image containing many small blue circles and a single red circle, we are able to instantly and effortlessly detect which one is red.

There are a number of properties of objects which are processed preattentively, and designers often use the property of color on form submission buttons and call-to-action buttons to draw the user’s attention without seeming to draw the user’s attention. When my attention is captured preattentively, I don’t experience it as an intrusion from outside, of something getting in my face and dragging my attention away from whatever else I was looking at. My eye is drawn in before I am consciously aware, so in my naive subjective experience, I experience myself as wanting to look at it. That is to say, preattentive processing captures and directs my desire as well as my attention.

A “fact” processed preattentively manifests as an objective truth that we can observe and verify for ourselves, seeming to preserve our autonomy to make our own decisions. In contrast, a verbal statement like “This circle stands out from all the other circles” is a claim, an argument, a belief, another’s attempt to persuade me, and so opens up the possibility of doubting it. We know that others can wield power over us and compromise our autonomy when we rely on second-hand information, so we learn to be skeptical, even cynical. What if we’re being duped? The only way to know for sure is to see it for ourselves.

In Freud as Philosopher, Richard Boothby draws on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology to rehabilitate Freud’s much maligned theory of the unconscious through the notion of what he calls the dispositional field. In the visual field, an object can only be held in consciousness by ignoring the background against which it appears. The figure depends on the repression of the ground, and everything that is posited, held as true, depends on what is disposited, or denied. Boothby illustrates this principle via Monet’s Haystacks. Monet painted twenty-five similar versions of the same haystacks in a field, differing only by varying weather and light conditions. His purpose was to render visible what he called the enveloppe, variations in light and atmosphere that mediate our perception of the object, without which the object could not be seen at all, and yet are themselves invisible.

All of this is to say that Madrigal is right to call attention to Facebook’s attempts at self-effacement, asking if by putting the user first, the service conceals its own ideological presuppositions. But exactly how we critique Facebook’s ideology matters. Madrigal wonders:

what responsibility do the system makers have in helping us think about the system? Can we wave away the structure of our tools so easily? And are we comfortable with doing so around the highway system or the way food is produced in this country or gun ownership?

Here the focus is on the user interface illusion and how it conceals the truth of how the system functions, and in other parts of the essay, he quotes others with similar concerns. One is concerned with Facebook’s alleged dishonesty; another wants Facebook to be more open about what happens “under the surface.”

The problem with this analysis is that it tends to devolve into the classic and ineffectual “Wake up, sheeple!” style of critique that seeks to expose the repressed truth. For Facebook, this truth would be something like: when we use Facebook, we believe we’re freely connecting with other people in a transparent, unmediated way, but this is an illusion. In reality, Facebook is a profit-driven company that tightly manages what goes on to maximize advertising revenue. We think we can do and say what we want, but certain choices are foreclosed.

Although this is undoubtedly true, why does anyone today continue to think that waking the sheeple out of their false consciousness would be an effective form of activism? To Madrigal’s list of mediating technological infrastructures encompassing social media, transportation and food production, we might also add our energy system which brings the prospect of ecological catastrophe in the form of climate change.

The wake-up-sheeple procedure is a now favorite tactic of right-wing Glenn Beck who maintain that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by communists and environmental extremists, and conspiracy theorists who claim that the Sandy Hook shooting and Boston Marathon bombing were false flag operations staged by the government as an excuse to impose martial law. These examples, while extreme, point to a general tendency in today’s political discourse: skepticism and cynicism towards all truth, an a priori assumption that every claim is nothing more than a mask for power. We are all Nietzscheans now.

There’s huge demand for journalistic exposés: eleven myths about X, the truth behind Y, what your doctor isn’t telling you about Z, investigating the coverups and unmasking the lies. But for all this truth-telling, the facts have never been less meaningful. When Al Gore tries to tell the inconvenient truth about climate change—truth we are allegedly not ready to hear—his opponents instantly announce an inconvenient truth of their own, that climate change is a hoax. The same investigative strategy of debunking George W. Bush’s military credentials is used to debunk the investigation itself. And so it is with the birther movement, the idea that childhood immunizations cause autism, the entire organic food movement that is premised on distrust of what regulatory agencies are telling us about pesticide safety, etc., etc.

Against this background of paranoia, Žižek is justified in claiming “If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.” The lesson here is definitely not that we should simply drop the whole project of telling the truth and taking a critical attitude towards lies, myths and misunderstandings. The lesson is that what is missing is not objective facts, but the very conditions that would make us accept them as true. These conditions are themselves not objective—to some extent, they are arbitrary beliefs.

Among a certain segment of the population that is decreasing in relevance, telling the truth still works. But why does it work? (In proper Lacanian terms, what stops the slippage of the signified under the signifier, stabilizing meaning and the symbolic order?) Because at a certain point, we stop demanding evidence and simply accept a proposition as true. We take it on faith that a person making a claim is speaking in good faith, that they are accurately representing their sources, that they aren’t concealing a hidden agenda, and that we have enough information to form a judgment. This is not the case for the radical skeptics that dominate popular culture today, who are caught in an infinite regress of debunking the debunkers.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with debunking—it can be necessary and important step towards a better, clearer understanding—but it only works inside of a relatively small community. Madrigal wonders if system makers have a responsibility to help users think about the system instead of making it transparent to them. The problem is that most people don’t know how to evaluate this transparency, and don’t trust, or have been taught not to trust anyone who claims to do so on their behalf.

He also seems to believe that it is generally helpful to be skeptical of intermediaries like Facebook who act on our behalf. I want to argue against this commonsense wisdom—a general policy of trusting intermediaries is a stronger, and might be a more critical standpoint than skepticism. Madrigal even points to why this might be so:

People get so used to Facebook disappearing that when the company or the technology inevitable rears its head, they are appalled to find that they’ve been communicating on a tightly managed, for-profit system all along. Which is why, oddly, it might help Facebook to design in more signs of mediation, a little more chrome, a little less perfection.

Like all great scams, ideology relies on the mark feeling like they know the game, that they’ve got an edge. We’re not dupes, not like all the other sheep. Facebook introduces signs of profit-making to give us a sense of having figured out their game, not so that we can be critical of it, although we may also do that to some extent, but more to reassure us that we’re clever enough to have figured out the game. We might believe that we are successfully managing our individual usage of social media and this can be completely valid. But it blinds us to the fact that it doesn’t matter too much, and Facebook is acting on social life on a much broader level where we are powerless. Having the technical option to delete your account and manage your privacy preferences means very little if not using those tools is a condition of getting a job, an apartment or car insurance.

It’s possible that naivety is the stronger position here. Trusting Facebook, or at least feigning to trust might be a more critical stance. Monet did not reveal the enveloppe of light and air that distorts our perception by exposing the illusion as a fraud and trying to paint the true picture. It was by repeating the distorted picture over and over again. By painting the image of the haystacks “too literally,” reproducing the scene faithfully in different light conditions, we begin to see the operation of the distortion on our perception more clearly than simply denouncing it and trying to directly represent the truth.

A similar approach might be used to show the mediating effects of Facebook. Perhaps Heidegger was right to say paradoxically that something is unveiled in the withdrawal of medium.

Compassionate Violence in Buddhism

2013-04-03T07:00:00Z

Caution: 3,000 words ahead

Many writers have argued that we live in an era of unprecedented narcissism, particularly when we’re talking about Millenials—the most notable example is of course Jean Twenge. To me it’s self-evidently true, but many disagree and write aggrieved and slightly pathetic articles contesting these points and praising the angelic virtues of Millennials: idealism, civic-mindedness and the desire to make a difference¹.

These debates trade dry facts and statistics, but when you move past the academics talking about the issue, talk of narcissism becomes increasingly stained with vitriol and the facts become more like accusations. We certainly get a more than a hint of that in commentators like Andrew Keen, and some seem to take offense at this. But what is it about the moral condemnation of narcissism that is so offensive? Isn’t it that the accuser wants us to feel shame? Shame clearly has no place in contemporary life, and if someone is shaming you, this is an unambiguously bad thing—perhaps the one thing that you should feel justifiably ashamed about.

Our world today is pervaded by the language of psychotherapy, and the variants of Buddhism that have become predominant in the West seem to be in complete agreement with our aspirations of self-love and self-acceptance. Some popular Buddhist authors contrast the teachings of loving-kindness, unconditional compassion and the doctrine of primordial goodness of human nature with the Christian conception of original sin to explain why low self-esteem and poor self-image are unique problems for us, and why adhering to Buddhist principles can liberate us from them.

It would be perfectly understandable if you came away from reading many of these introductory books with the impression that there’s no place for the concepts of shame, sin, evil, hell, etc. in Buddhism. But this turns out to not be true.

I discovered this several years ago reading No Time to Lose by the American nun Pema Chodron, a commentary on the 7th century Buddhist text Bodhisattvacaryavatara, the classic epic poem of Mahayana Buddhism—in English, often translated as The Way of the Bodhisattva.

The text recounts the author, Shantideva’s process of becoming a bodhisattva—a being who devotes their life to helping others attain enlightenment—and if you’re used to the gentleness and equanimity that’s characteristic of Western Buddhism, his style is quite surprising, making frequent reference to sin and evil in the most melodramatic terms. For example:

Thus behold the utter frailty of goodness!
Except for perfect bodhicitta
There is nothing able to withstand
The great and overwhelming strength of evil

On the fate of those who fail to respect Buddhist teachings:

And those who harbor evil in their minds
Against such lords of generosity, the Buddha’s heirs
Will stay in hell, the Mighty One has said,
For ages equal to the moments of their malice

In a prayer to buddhas and bodhisattvas, Shantideva confesses his sins:

“In this and all my other lifetimes,
Wandering in the round without beginning,
Blindly I have brought forth wickedness
Inciting others to commit the same.
I have taken pleasure in such evil,
Tricked and overmastered by my ignorance
Now I see the blame of it, and in my heart,
O great protectors, I declare it!
Whatever I have done against the Triple Gem
Against my parents, teachers and the rest
Through force of my defilements
By the faculties of body, speech and mind;
All the evil I, a sinner, have committed,
The sin that clings to me through many evil deeds
All frightful things that I have caused to be,
I openly declare to you, the teachers of the world.”

Later he imagines himself after death, thinking of the idle time where he failed to cultivate virtue:

And when my body burns so long
In fires of hell so unendurable,
My mind likewise will also be tormented—
Burned in flames of infinite regret.

And expresses his commitment to avoiding evil deeds:

Better if I perish in the fire,
Better that my head be severed from my body
Than ever I should serve or reverence
My mortal foes, defiled emotions

Other Buddhist texts speak highly of two qualities, hiri (shame) and ottappa (fear of negative consequences) that we should feel at the prospect of wrongdoing—Buddha praised these as the two bright guardians of the world. Buddhaghosa, one of the most important Theravadin commentators, uses the following vivid metaphor to help us understand these concepts: first imagine an iron ball smeared with excrement — this disgust is hiri; now imagine an iron ball glowing hot — this fear is ottappa. These strong expressions of moral conscience are an important in traditional Buddhist teachings, but almost entirely absent in the most popular American interpretations that stress self-esteem and and self-love.

Chodron’s commentary of Shantideva’s poem frequently devotes itself to explaining why we shouldn’t take all his dramatic pronouncements of sin and evil at face value. Buddhism doesn’t believe in the fixed identities implied by the concept of sin; Westerners carry a great deal of guilt and shame; some of these words don’t have perfect translations and have slightly different shades of meaning around them; the concept of hell is to be understood metaphorically; and so on.

The total effect is of an excitable fire-and-brimstone preacher expounding at length, with an interpreter by his side telling us not to worry, he didn’t really mean what you heard him say. But there’s something circular about her claims. We’re told that Buddhism does not preach damnation like the old puritans, but when we find teachings to the contrary, this must be a misunderstanding because Buddhism does not teach that. But in fact, many ancient Buddhist texts include quite graphic descriptions of horrifying torture and suffering at the lowest levels of Hell. In this respect, it is not so different from many other religions.

Buddhist doctrines about sin and evil are of course, not simply equivalent to Christian ones—there are differences in the underlying belief systems. Christianity elevates good and evil into essential metaphysical principles, which is a mistake for Pema Chodron. She stresses again and again that good and bad, worthy and unworthy, virtue and vice are merely dualistic concepts which the enlightenment mind is able to transcend, realizing their fundamental emptiness rather than clinging dogmatically to them. For her, fundamentalism is also the root of low self-esteem:

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that.

So yes, there are differences between Buddhism and Christianity, but many Western interpreters believe that this means Buddhism is a non-judgmental religion where sin is not subject to rebuke, which is clearly not true, at least not universally. These same authors emphasize that Buddhist compassion is a more ethical and psychologically healthy alternative to condemnation, but fail to inform their readers that in Buddhism, compassion is not always what it seems. Many are surprised to learn that some traditions advance the concept of compassionate violence, even murder.

The Upayakausalya Sutra tells the story of one of the Buddha’s former lives, where he is captaining a ship carrying five hundred merchants. One night, ocean deities come to him in a dream and identify one of the passengers as a bandit who is planning on killing the merchants. Buddha evaluates three possible actions: do nothing and allow the bandit to kill everyone; inform the merchants, who would kill the bandit and incur evil karma for murder; or kill the bandit himself.

The Buddha dwells on this ethical dilemma for seven days, trying to decide who should be murdered—apparently just locking up the bandit was not an option—and eventually decides to murder the bandit himself. In keeping with the principle of compassion, this is framed not as retribution for evil, but as compassionately sparing the bandit the horrible karmic consequences of mass murder, and allowing him to be subsequently reborn in paradise.

Even more troubling is the way this sutra distinguishes between allowing the merchants to kill the bandit in anger, and the Buddha’s murder with “great compassion” and “skillful means.” The explicit lesson here is that a truly enlightened bodhisattva is willing to do something evil in the name of a good that only he knows, but we shouldn’t be confused by this! The very fact that it is evil is a sign of his great compassion—the Buddha is generous enough to murder the bandit and endure the karmic consequences of an additional one hundred thousand aeons² before he can become fully awakened, sparing the bandits and the merchants from evil karma.

This is not some dusty, long-forgotten sutra of little relevance to modern Buddhism. By now, many are familiar with the books Zen at War and Zen War Stories by the historian, Zen priest and former anti-war activist Brian Victoria who chronicles the Japanese Buddhist establishment’s complicity with the militaristic ambitions of imperial Japan from the mid-1800s to the end of WWII, providing religious support and justification for Japanese nationalism, war, domination of neighboring countries and total submission to the emperor.

Prominent Zen leaders claimed that Japan was fighting a war of compassion, its soldiers were bodhisattvas who were defeating the enemies of Buddha, and blind obedience to the emperor was a practice of selflessness. In the words of a renowned Soto Zen patriarch: “Whether one kills or does not kill, the precept forbidding killing [is preserved]. It is the precept forbidding killing that wields the sword. It is the precept that throws the bomb.”

To their credit, many American Zen priests have embraced these books, often by characterizing Zen’s involvement in militarism as a distortion or perversion of the authentic dharma teachings. This is undoubtably true, and the Zen community which resisted the Japanese war effort attests to it. But these distortions weren’t simply a local Japanese corruption of the original pure teachings. We can find the spiritual justification for compassionate killing already in the Upayakausalya Sutra, one of the early Mahayana sutras dating to the 1st century BCE.

When American Buddhists hear of the Japanese Zen establishment’s vigorous promotion of war, they often dismiss it as phony Buddhism. Of course it’s trivial to point to the first of the Buddhist precepts, which enjoins killing of any living creature including even insects much less human beings, to prove that advocating violence of any kind goes against the fundamental teachings. The problem is that many Buddhists are unaware that these precepts aren’t necessarily absolute. Major Mahayana and Tantric schools have taught that bodhisattvas may break precepts if they have compassionate intentions, including the precept against killing, and this is justified under the concept of upaya, a word that is translated as “expedience”.

In a paper published in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics entitled Compassionate Violence?: On the Ethical Implications of Tantric Buddhist Ritual, Buddhist scholar David Gray writes:

Tantric Buddhist thinkers advanced the proposal that Bodhisattvas, on account of their underlying compassionate orientation, are exempt from ordinary ethical norms. An extended defense of the seemingly unethical behavior of Bodhisattvas was undertaken in a work attributed to the eighth century Buddhist philosopher Śāntarakṣita, the Tattvasiddhi. In this work, he quotes from a number of sources to support the view that Bodhisattvas transcend conventional rules of morality. He claims that “As it is stated in all of the Yogatantras such as the Guhyendutilaka, ’for the mind endowed with wisdom and expedience, there is nothing which should not be done’.”

What’s surprising is the way some Buddhists want to have their cake and eat it. When confronted with the evidence of a Zen holy war, they say that this must be a distortion of Buddhism because of the precept against killing. In other words, true Buddhist adheres dogmatically to this principle. At the same time, Buddhism is widely advertised in the West as non-dogmatic, non-judgmental and morally flexible. But the same principles that support the claim that Buddhism transcends dogmatic, dualistic concepts of good and evil also supports the principle of compassionate killing by bodhisattvas.

Pema Chodron writes that true happiness and self-esteem can only be achieved by going beyond fixed concepts:

No matter how much we long for joy, it will elude us if we continue buying into concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, acceptance and rejection. What ultimately frees us from these constricting patters is to stop reifying our experience, and to connect with the ineffable, groundless nature of all phenomena. This nature cannot be said to exist or not exist—or anything in between.

Maybe it is going too far to interpret these words as an implicit endorsement of compassionate killing of Zen in imperial Japan, but what about much more recent abuses by Pema Chodron’s controversial teacher, Chogyam Trungpa? A highly unconventional teacher, Trungpa was Tibetan Buddhist master who was one of the first to introduce the Vajrayana tradition in the West. He founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, several retreat centers and abbeys and hundreds of meditation centers throughout the world, and was hailed by students as a genius and a brilliant teacher. He is also infamous for his abuse of alcohol and drugs, sexual relationships with his students and unorthodox, arguably abusive teaching methods.

In his book Stripping the Gurus, Geoffrey Falk recounts events at one of Trungpa’s retreats in 1975. The poet William Merwin and his wife Dana were perceived as aloof and egotistical for not mixing with the other attendees at a party, and were violently dragged from their locked room and stripped naked at Trungpa’s behest:

“Guards dragged me off and pinned me to the floor,” [Dana] wrote in her account of the incident…. “I fought and called to friends, men and women whose faces I saw in the crowd, to call the police. No one did…. [One devotee] was stripping me while others held me down. Trungpa was punching [him] in the head, urging him to do it faster. The rest of my clothes were torn off.” “See?” said Trungpa. “It’s not so bad, is it?” Merwin and Dana stood naked, holding each other, Dana sobbing.

The next day, Trungpa distributed a letter to the attendees explaining that this was part of a teaching, and a former student confirmed that violent confrontations like this were typical.

He was clearly an ethically-compromised man, as was the successor he appointed, Ozel Tendzin, who slept with hundreds of students while concealing the fact that he was HIV positive—at least one student died of AIDS. But individual corruption doesn’t fully explain these scandals. To justify his actions, Trungpa relied on the centuries-old Buddhist doctrines discussed earlier:

[I]f a bodhisattva is completely selfless, a completely open person, then he will act according to openness, will not have to follow rules; he will simply fall into patterns. It is impossible for the bodhisattva to destroy or harm other people, because he embodies transcendental generosity. He has opened himself completely and so does not discriminate between this and that. He just acts in accordance with what is…. [H]is mind is so precise, so accurate that he never makes mistakes. He never runs into unexpected problems, never creates chaos in a destructive way.

And when asked by a student “What if you feel the necessity for a violent act in order to ultimately do good for a person?” Trungpa simply responds, “You just do it.”

In an interview with Tricycle Magazine, Pema Chodron is unwilling to criticize her former teacher:

My undying devotion to Trungpa Rinpoche comes from his teaching me in every way he could that you can never make things right or wrong. I consider it my good fortune that somehow I was thrown into a way of understanding Buddhism which in the Zen tradition is called “don’t know mind”: Don’t know. Don’t know right. Don’t know wrong. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re going to make things right and wrong you can never even talk about fulfilling your bodhisattva vows… My sense of what it means to be a bodhisattva on the path, a student-warrior-bodhisattva, is that you are constantly caught with “don’t know.” Can’t say yes, can’t say no. Can’t say right, can’t say wrong.

She’s asked about an open letter that was written and circulated by several prominent Western Buddhist teachers that attempted to set standards for ethical conduct, asking very reasonably that proven unethical behavior be made public, but she rejects this as “McCarthyism.” The interviewer follows up by asking “You can’t support the idea of ethical norms as suggested in the letter?” but she replies “My personal teacher did not keep ethical norms and my devotion to him is unshakable. So I’m left with a big koan.”

Maybe a better koan for our time: a touch of shame and moral fear might not be such a terrible thing.

I appreciate how efficiently Twenge has dismantled these assumptions, since to me, the common refrain “I want to make a difference” while often geniune, sometimes also seems to reverberate with hidden self-importance. If you have the arrogance to believe that you’re that special someone who can make the difference, at least have the decency to be openly arrogant instead of cloaking it in some great social purpose. Maybe what observers take to be enthusiasm for public service is nothing deeper than believing they’re God’s gift to the world. ↩
Buddhist scholar Steven Jenkins argues that compassionate violence was actually believed to be auspicious—it relieves rather than adds to the enlightened murderer’s karma due to their willingness to sacrifice their spiritual progress. Quoting Shantideva: “the very action which sends others to hell sends a bodhisattva with skill inmeans to the Brahmaloka [heaven realms].” ↩

She's Watching the Faces Watching Her

2013-04-02T07:00:00Z

Carrying some lipstick for the
The boyfriend blonde between the rolls of sheets
She’s professionally poised
The faces are watching her
She’s watching the faces watching her

— Underworld, Push Upstairs

Andrew Keen is best known for his criticism of internet culture’s celebration of amateurs and rejection of expertise in The Cult of the Amateur¹, but in Digital Vertigo, his most recent book, he has expands his critique beyond our institutions, turning to the harmful effects of social media on our social life and culture. Or so I am told—I haven’t read either of his books. But from the reviews I’ve read of both books, it sounds like he is more or less on the right track.

I did listen to a radio segment on CBC.ca on the topic of Selfies: Narcissistic, Empowering, or Just Fun? where Keen and Sarah Nicole Prickett, a writer with New Inquiry, had an exchange of views over whether taking pictures of yourself and posting them on Facebook is empowering or narcissistic. (If we really live in a culture of narcissism, then isn’t the whole point that it’s both?)

Keen lambasted narcissism in the most conventional terms, and Prickett largely fell back on the usual boring bromides of hermeneutic phenomenology that affirm the right of the individual to narrate their lived experience. It would be a much better use of your time would be to read an essay by Meghan Murphy, founder of the blog Feminist Current, that she wrote in reaction to the interview. Referencing the claim that selfies are taken for yourself, she says:

Self-centred as we are, we like to believe that everything we do is ‘for ourselves’, even it’s clearly for others. It’s comforting, yes. But it’s also bullshit. It’s simply not possible that, if we put images of ourselves, or really, if we put anything at all online, that it’s ‘for ourselves’. If it were just ‘for ourselves’ we wouldn’t put it on the Internet.

What is it about the selfie that disturbs us? It’s not that it’s an image of a woman—those are obviously common. It is the presence of the camera in the shot, either represented directly, where the subject is taking a picture of her mirror reflection, or strongly implied by the angle of the shot or presence of the forearm which gives away the fact that the subject of the photo is also the photographer. For Murphy, this is disturbing because it implies that the woman in the photo is objectifying herself.

Just because you grow up in a culture that turns you into an object against your will, it does not mean that, somehow, if you ‘choose’ to further objectify yourself it is somehow subverting the enforced objectification.

The Reddit community, infamous for its hostility towards feminism and outbursts of misogyny, has a few long-standing objections about how women manage their appearance. A frequent theme on the site is men who claim to prefer women who don’t wear make-up. In the comic strip Lady Problems, illustrator Alexandra Dal skillfully deflates these naive opinions, showing how men mistake “natural” make-up for a woman’s natural appearance, and her true natural face appears to us as weird, like she is sick².

Beyond the issue of “too much make-up,” another problem that the men of Reddit have with female self-presentation is the “duck face,” a facial expression created by pursing your lips together so as to emphasize your jaw line and create a more flattering portrait. Ever-vigilant on issues that affect women, many redditors denounce these phenomena as evidence of female insecurity. Yes, it’s true—a site with a reputation as a safe-harbor for the most vulgar forms of misogyny perceives itself as deeply concerned with the self-esteem issues of young women!

It’s possible that this apparent hypocrisy is simply due to the fact that Reddit isn’t a homogenous community—some redditors are sexist, others are genuinely concerned with women’s issues. Perhaps there is some truth to this, and it would be incorrect to stereotype a community which is probably at least slightly diverse than is suggested by their reputation. Nonetheless, some hypocrisy must also be at work.

Between hand-wringing over selfie (also a theme on Reddit), the duck face and women who wear too much make-up, the common theme behind all these issues is that they threaten to foreground the beauty labor that our culture demands from women. On one hand, we demand the commodification of the female body in image form, but on the other, deplore those who follow the incentives created by those forces, those who deploy their image in a way that’s too cynical and calculating.

It’s like insisting on Walmart prices but bemoaning the factory conditions and loss of authentic artisanal production that such an expectation creates. Or on Reddit, heavily trafficking in commodified images of women while lamenting how terribly insecure and needy women are these days!

Returning to the debate between Prickett and Keen: there was a moment that I thought was quite interesting, where Prickett pointed out that contemporary narcissism in young people might be due to the precarious economic situation that they find themselves in. Narcissism is a product of the demand for freelance rather than permanent work, where workers are forced to rely on personal branding in order to advance their careers. It signals that you are a “dynamic employee” (or more likely, a contractor) who is well-adapted to “today’s fast-paced dynamic global economy” and so on, as if submitting to the demand to produce new, ever more pleasing expressions and images of yourself online is a kind of personal portfolio of your willingness to produce for the boss.

Keen reacted to this first by dismissing, and then later claiming that even if personal branding is a more important part of the economy, we should still show some restraint, effectively saying that by practicing personal virtue, we should resist totally giving ourselves over to today’s forms of capitalism. Much like redditors who believe that women should avoid wearing too much make-up (but just enough!), Keen insists that we’re personally and morally responsible for resisting the havoc on social life that’s brought about by this logic.

But it’s expected, considering where Keen is coming from politically and philosophically—he is, at least, not confused about what he believes. It is far more surprising that Prickett adopts a neoliberal stance by effectively celebrating precarity as a form self-determination.

Keen must be deeply relieved that The Cult of the Amateur was panned by Amazon’s customer reviews, achieving an average score of only 2.6 out of 5. What would have happened if the very crowd he denounces as idiots praised him as a genius? He would have been in a very difficult position, but it apparently did not occur to the reviewers to do this, which probably demonstrates the limits of the creativity and wisdom of the crowd. ↩
Readers of Less Than Nothing may notice a homology here to Žižek’s discussion of the quantum Higgs field. In order to maintain a pure vacuum in space, a certain amount of energy must be expended. But when the Higgs field is added, the total energy is lowered. Higgs particles are added into the space, but instead of raising the energy as you would expect, they reduce the energy. It’s as if they are negative entities, like an object that when added to several objects resting on a scale, strangely lowers the total weight. Something like this is at work in the comic. Without make-up (the vacuum), you become noticeable as strange looking, but with the addition of “natural” make-up, you simply becomes oneself, receding into the background. We might ponder the mysteries of concealer, a substance that is added to the face for the purposes of subtracting blemishes, imperfections and so on, so that nothing is there. Žižek identifies this “something which sustains the nothing” as the Lacanian objet a, the object cause of desire. ↩

To Critique Everything, Click Here

2013-03-18T07:00:00Z

I have a few weeks where I am slightly less busy than usual, and I have chosen to spend some of that time reading Evgeny Morozov’s latest book To Save Everything, Click Here rather than do other things which I probably should be doing. But I’m unrepentant.

The book moves quickly, skimming over a lot of material in almost a Žižekian manner, but returning often to the two big concepts of the book, solutionism and Internet-centrism. There are several excellent reviews where they are explained and examined: Tom Slee’s is worth reading for the summary, but even more interesting is his reading of solutionism as a type of “central planning by another name,” where a given product enforces Silicon Valley ideas even while they claim they are coming from the bottom up.

This is Slee’s reading of the term, I think, but it is not quite clear, since his review can also be read as attributing it to Morozov, which would be strange since I seem to remember that he often expresses skepticism towards the fetish for “bottom-up” organizing and their potential to replace traditional institutions. Regardless of where it came from, I found myself disagreeing with the claim that solutionists have co-opted a genuine democratic vision for their own top-down ends.

The point that I take from some of the examples in the book, like the way that the design of Twitter Trends embeds a certain vision of how civic discourse should function, is that it is not really possible to create a bottom-up structure which neutrally and perfectly reflects the public’s feelings, thoughts and wishes. The idea that we can do this is part of the ideology of solutionism, and it should be noted, of the free market as well.

Another useful commentary on the book is Alexis Madrigal’s review in The Atlantic. I was particularly struck by this concern about the politics of the book:

my main worry is that solutionism, even accepting Morozov’s framing, contains some elements worth preserving. Indeed, there is a reading of this book (an unkind one, for sure) that finds it deeply anti-progressive and almost frighteningly supportive of the status quo in politics and elsewhere.

It’s not totally clear what this means—does Madrigal believe that solutionism is the only progressive or reform-minded political vision, and becoming skeptical of it is tantamount to defending the status quo? Hard to say. We can find some clues when he argues that encouraging the public to doubt the authority of Silicon Valley software developers might have some harmful effects. When we doubt the authority of scientists, we get climate change skepticism—might there be some other forms of public resistance to taking action if we lose faith in solutionism?

It’s an interesting question and in general it’s worth asking what would happen without solutionism. But the logic is also a bit confused, because Silicon Valley’s false populist rhetoric is the one worst offenders when it comes to spreading fear and mistrust of all public institutions and forms of authority, including science. If we lost faith in solutionism’s promise of individual empowerment through technologically-mediated personal choices, we might go back to trying to solve our collective problems collectively, perhaps through political means.

Madrigal repeats his worry in the conclusion of the review, wondering how Morozov’s book will be used to support social and political injustice, and asking us to imagine how these words would be misused:

That so much of our cultural life is inefficient or that our politicians are hypocrites or that bipartisanship slows down the political process or that crime rates are not yet zero—all of these issues might be problematic in some limited sense, but they do not necessarily add up to a problem worth solving.

What he means is a mystery to me. How would regarding these as false problems be used to support injustice? This might sound like a boring, grading-your-paper critique (“Your essay would be stronger if you went into more detail here…”) but this isn’t the point. I think many people buy into solutionism not necessarily out of a rational assessment that it would be effective, where they would be amenable to the factual counter-arguments of Morozov and others. They believe in solutionism perhaps for negative reasons, because it offers an alternative to the perceived futility of politics. The task then is to argue for why we should believe in politics again.

Nonbelief in politics may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Usually we think that institutional ineffectiveness and failure leads to public skepticism, but what if causation works the other way? Widespread doubts about the legitimacy of institutions as such may be what causes them to fail. One of the most harmful myths spread by anti-institutional thinkers is that institutions are completely isolated from public opinion, they are simply self-sustaining bureaucracies that care nothing for popular legitimacy.

This belief is perversely self-fulfilling. If the public is trained to think that supporting an institution is unthinkable, then of course institutions become immune to public opinion. Why should they waste their time pursuing something which we insist that we will never give? Why should institutions adapt to the needs of a public that claims it will accept nothing short of their destruction?

Anti-institutionalists love to exploit the gap between the institution and the public, implying some kind of authoritarianism because they are “closed”, meaning that we as members of the public cannot directly participate in the decision-making process. Openness eliminates this gap, allowing us to participate directly, usually through some kind of algorithmic process: Yelp computes the quality of a restaurant with our ratings, Google calculates the quality of web pages by counting links to them, and so on.

We’re told that directly representing the public to itself and overcoming the gap between public and institution is a great victory for democracy, but I think it comes disturbingly close to fascism. In a democracy, we are able to dissent from the decisions that are made on our behalf because our institutions do not directly represent our desires and beliefs. Politicians and administrators do not know exactly what “the People” want, so they are forced to guess. This makes any decision provisional, and amenable to re-evaluation if it turns out that the politicians guessed incorrectly or it was just a bad idea. Because of the gap, the public can always object and say “But that’s not what we wanted!”

The solutionist goal is to represent public will as empirical knowledge, eliminating the ambiguity that makes dissent possible. Yelp’s restaurant reviews are unassailable, Google’s search results cannot be doubted. There is nothing provisional about this representation of public will, they remove our chance to say “We didn’t mean that.”

(We can make a connection here to the Lacanian topic of the decline of the Symbolic order, an order which is operative only insofar as it remains virtual. Any concrete policy that could be said to have broad public support is implicitly founded on the authority of the Public Will which is assumed to exist, but is never actual, never quite represented directly—it is a fiction that we believe in, not something we know. Solutionists want to eliminate this fiction, and put it place a new, improved version of the voice of the people that is grounded in hard data—the empirical people rather than the merely Symbolic people—but this may have the unexpected effect of destroying “the People” as such.

Morozov makes a related point when he cites Canadian legal scholar Ian Kerr to argue that situational crime prevention methods—those that try to make crime simply impossible rather than a matter of observing ethical and legal prohibitions—attempt to automate human virtue and thus run the risk of eliminating the possibility of cultivating a moral conscience. Although seemingly unrelated to the previous example, it has the same pattern of undermining the Symbolic (law, authority, ethical duty) in favor of physical/empirical reality.)

Solutionist technologies register our choices when we aren’t thinking about their broader impact. If I review a restaurant on Yelp, they want me to think about one experience I had and shared it to help someone else decide where to go to dinner, but what if that restaurant goes out of business partly as a result of my negative review? Is that what I wanted? In the worldview of technologically-mediated openness and participation, the answer is yes.

We didn’t know it at the time, but I and a few dozen other diners apparently “decided” to shut them down, and there is no possibility of objecting—it’s what “the People” wanted, after all, and Yelp is neutrally representing it. There is no chance of revisiting that decision later, maybe while thinking of a broader set of issues than whether the entrée was served hot.

The problem is not unique to Yelp—any wisdom-of-the-crowds solutionist approach suffers from a similar deficit. We generate data that’s fed into an algorithm whose inner workings and outcomes are not transparent to us or in our control, and this is celebrated as ‘peer progressivism’ or other nonsense. We are definitely not asked to give opinions about the outcome, and to justify those opinions with reasons.

Silicon Valley culture is famously averse to deliberation, preferring efficient meetings with a standardized, preset agenda and participants who stand rather than sit—the seductive comforts of a chair encourage too much blabbing and take time away from the truly important work of writing code.

To Save Everything makes a similar observation about how solutionism downgrades the importance of debate in favor of problem-solving:

So many geeks are impatient with politics because they think that it involves nothing but talk. For them, deliberation is the cancer in the body of modern democracy, and it would be so much more productive to replace talk with action, with doing things, for all this chatter is of little to no use. After all, no great apps have ever come out of a committee meeting.

Morozov’s book does an excellent job of laying out its assumptions and beliefs, summarizing academic literature to argue that those assumptions may be badly mistaken, and then concluding that the geeks are trying to solve problems that they don’t really understand and show an appalling lack of interest in learning more. So it’s tempting to see solutionism as a worldview forged in Silicon Valley that has insinuated itself in our social and political life.

But I don’t think that the geeks necessarily have a genuine interest in this worldview. Silicon Valley has many apologists—Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Anderson, and so on—but from what I can tell, none have a background as a software developer or founder of any startups, much less successful ones¹. Stewart Brand, founder of the WELL, stands out as an exception.

These authors are certainly influential in Silicon Valley, but we should be careful to understand that their function is not only about promoting the geek solutionist manifesto to a broader audience. It is also to explain to geeks how to design and market successful products that fit into the ideological assumptions of American culture.

It has probably always been this way. Silicon Valley was influenced by 60s counterculture partly because some prominent hackers were involved in both scenes, but also because the computer industry was widely viewed as a tool of the military-industrial complex and that was an impediment to their business goals. Associating with the hippie movement was more of a strategic marketing move than legitimate interest in psychedelic drugs and opposing the Vietnam War.

Then as now, they could see which way the wind was blowing, today with the aid of Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky and all others. The geeks see politics as nothing but talk, reject institutions of all kinds, propose solutions that “cut through partisan gridlock” and use frames like “Washington” vs. “average voters” because those are compelling message to large parts of the American public. It can’t be an accident that solutionists extol the wonders of peer production and the forgotten voluntary sector supposedly solving problems that are beyond the reach of both Big Government and Big Business in the same period when Western governments are using the same logic to cut social spending and farm out those responsibilities to charities and volunteers.

I don’t want to overstate the case, and say that solutionism only passively reflects American culture as a whole, because there are some aspects that are unique to geek subculture, like the impulse towards technocracy, self-quantification and others. And of course Silicon Valley promoters do influence the culture by amplifying ideas that advance the industry’s economic interests over the ones that don’t.

But one fact that favors the idea that solutionism isn’t quite the geek worldview is that—apologies to Evgeny—his book will probably not be widely read in Silicon Valley. If the geeks were sincerely committed to the premises of solutionism, we would expect them to engage with a prominent critic, if only to try to debunk him. But so far I haven’t seen too much of that, and I think that’s because showing the absurdity of solutionism as an idea doesn’t necessarily change its efficacy as a marketing tool.

It might sound as if I’m downplaying the significance of solutionism by saying that it is merely marketing, but in fact it’s the opposite. The fact that solutionism is a type of marketing suggests that Morozov’s critique touches on a set of beliefs that are more deeply entrenched than just in Silicon Valley.

To put it in theoretical terms, is solutionism an ideology in the conventional sense of a doctrine or a belief system? Or is it ideology in the Marxist sense, a set of widely accepted beliefs which appear as commonsense and obviously true, as “non-ideological” in the first sense? I claim it is more importantly the latter.

On Twitter, Evgeny told me that in fact, many technology pundits are involved in startups. This is true. For example, Steven Berlin Johnson founded Outside.in, a hyperlocal news startup. However, I don’t think it disproves my point, which is that these pundits did not emerge out of Silicon Valley, i.e. they didn’t begin as successful entrepreneurs who later turned to advocacy—SBJ had already published four books before he founded Outside.in. At any rate, I can make the point in a slightly different way. Here are the Top 200 Twitter users most followed by Hacker News members, a list that’s dominated by famous developers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who now have an intellectual function. Of the pundits I mentioned, only Clay Shirky and Lawrence Lessig appear on the list at all, at #93 and #176 respectively. It’s interesting to note that most of the prominent open source software advocates did start out as software developers. ↩

Descartes, Substrate Independence and Other Matters

2013-03-05T08:00:00Z

I waded into the digital dualism debate over a year ago and regretted it. The term is vague, it’s applied more or less indiscriminately, and my sense is that no one is really learning anything by continuing to debate it. It’s true that digital technologies are often spoken and written about using a metaphor that incorrectly implies that they are part of a separate universe, but I remain unconvinced that such a framing is anything more than a rhetorical trope.

This way of talking about technology is shared by people who’ve adopted a huge range of positions and beliefs, from Singularitarians to unrepentant Luddites. Maybe there’s something that we’re all missing by using this kind of language? Great! What is it then? Augmented reality is proposed as a more correct metaphor for framing humanity’s relationship with technologies, which may well (or may not) be true, but accepting it seems to have no impact on the discourse beyond forcing everyone to update their metaphors.

Almost every existing substantive opinion can be articulated without resorting to dualistic metaphors, and maybe we’d have a touch less bombast and a few more caveats and qualifications in our debates about technology. That might be a modest improvement, but I’m not exactly losing sleep over it.

Having said that, I very much appreciated Nicholas Carr’s contribution to the topic and Michael Sacasas’s response. Carr made some excellent points that I liked, and a few that I didn’t, like this one: “Wilderness existed before society gave us the idea of wilderness. Offline existed before online gave us the idea of offline.” (This reminded me of Latour, who has claimed that Ramses II couldn’t have died of tuberculosis because it hadn’t been invented yet. Latour is probably trolling us, saying something not so controversial but phrasing it to cause maximum outrage—I have no problem with this.)

Denying that offline precedes online is only to draw attention to how new technologies have retroactive effects, changing our perception of what has always been. And this goes as well for the dictum “We have always been cyborgs.” Possibly true, but even so we became always-cyborgs quite recently. Steve Jobs said “The future isn’t what it used to be.” But neither is the past.

On Carr’s blog, one comment in particular stood out to me as brilliant and hilarious. Replying to the idea that there’s no difference between letters, telegrams or facebook letters, Josh Wimmer says:

This old chestnut is one of my favorite arguments. “There’s no fundamental difference between walking and driving a car, except for how much more quickly and easily you can move things with a car, but it’s not like that changed the way we live at all.” A little like the guy who told me that “Information is just information,” but grew evasive when I asked if it would upset him to be notified of his girlfriend’s death by text message or singing telegram.

I remembered this point when Carr posted yesterday on Singularitarians and their apparent belief in Cartesian mind-body dualism. Some of the following points are paraphrased from what I originally wrote in the comments:

A key tenet of the Singularity is the theory of substrate independence. This is the view that the mind is not specifically dependent on the body, so that in principle, the mind is a program that could be run on other hardware—another substrate. The theory is perhaps the clearest expression of Cartesian dualism in Singularitarianism, and since adherents hope to one day upload themselves to a computer, it is obviously crucial.

Josh Wimmer’s joke about choosing to be notified of a death by text message or singing telegram came to my mind, and I realized that this is just another version of the same idea of substrate independence, where information is believed to be independent of the specific medium that carries it.

What’s most interesting to me is how the proponents of augmented reality traffic in this same Cartesianism even while they make vague gestures in the direction of rejecting it. They continually claim that a given aspect of humanity can’t be fundamentally affected by changes in the underlying technologies which mediate it — for example, that there can be no differences in moving from face-to-face interaction to Facebook interaction because these are essentially equivalent substrates. Paper is equivalent to e-ink; MOOCs are equivalent to in-person lectures; and on and on.

Although this is presented as destabilizing the tired Cartesian cliche, something much more subtle is going on. Our augmentists deny any deep differences among technologies or modes of communication, allegedly to avoid falling into the dualist trap. But in denying the differences between technologies, they implicitly support a kind of Cartesian substrate independence of the technology from whatever effect or purpose it has. Social life is independent of the specific substrate of telephone or social media; information is independent of the medium; and ultimately, mind is independent of the body.

To me, this is a much more compelling example of implied theoretical Cartesianism than observing that someone relies on common metaphors. Augmentists allege that critics who dismiss “online” interactions as inferior to “offline” interactions are guilty of Cartesianism. Let’s grant this, and then ask: of the two terms, which corresponds to “mind” and which to “body”? It is clear that cyberspace refers to the mind, while its opposite—”meatspace”— is the realm of the body. Then the hated critics reject the mind in favor of the body, which is a very strange kind of Cartesianism indeed.

One augmentist invoked Derrida’s concept of logocentrism to claim “Just as speech was privileged over the written word in ancient Greece, we tend to privilege the physical over the digital”—a pure example of postmodern bluffing if there ever was one. In all likelihood, this is total nonsense. In at least the first step towards deconstruction, Derrida would be much more likely to reverse the traditional hierarchy and instead prioritize the body over mind and the physical over the mental/digital.

The anti-digital dualists have a habit of writing this way, throwing around references to Descartes and Derrida without very much knowledge or concern for what they actually mean. It appears that at least one goal is to cynically link critics of digital media to privilege, racism, homophobia, patriarchy, etc., by making spurious and wrong-headed connections to the postmodern critique of logocentrism.

This is not serious work, and in my opinion, not worth engaging with. I hope to not have to come back to it.

The Psychological End of History

2013-02-28T08:00:00Z

When asked to reflect on their past, people of all ages believe they have changed significantly over their lives, and yet systematically underestimate the likelihood that they will change in the future. This effect has been studied by Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, coining it the end-of-history illusion. “People,” he says, “regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.”

It appears to be yet another confirmation of Buddhist principles from the domain of psychology—in this case, the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering and non-self. Buddhism teaches that clinging or attachment leads to suffering. We are attached to things, people and situations, hoping that they will stay as they are, but all things are impermanent, and subject to change and death. This is because all phenomena are conditioned by impermanence (in Sanskrit: anatman), so they lack any permanent, unchanging essence, or a fixed “self”.

This connection was noted by Soto Zen priest Dosho Port, who suggests that the end of history illusion is precisely the fixed idea of self—the atman that is negated in anatman—that Buddha rejected.

The end of history illusion has a second connection, obvious from its name: Francis Fukuyama’s notorious and premature announcement that with the end of the Cold War and the failure of Soviet communism, humanity had chosen the final form of political organization in Western liberal democracy and capitalism. In a blog post about Gilbert’s research, Jerome Roos attempts to link the psychological and political ideas. After extoling the ideals of Occupy Wall Street (“direct democracy, mutual aid, leaderless self-organization, and voluntary association”), Roos wonders why society hasn’t adopted them:

Rather than facing the inevitability of future change, conservatives cling onto the past while liberals forever praise the immortal wonders of the present… Why are we so incapable of imagining the type of changes — both individual and social — that still lie ahead?… [T]he predictability of the future seems to provide us with a sense of security. While past changes have helped us made us who we are today, future changes are by their very definition unknowable, and therefore threaten our painstakingly constructed notion of Self. For most people, there is something profoundly troubling about the idea that we may not be able to recognize our own values and preferences a decade from now. A similar fear appears to bedevil prospects of social change.

Roos takes for granted that the psychological and political versions of the end of history are the same, implying that by accepting a more fluid definition of the self we will be more accepting of social change. Putting a Buddhist spin on the same idea, we might say that the classic meditation on the impermanence of the self lessens both aversion to change and attachment to the way your ego is presently constituted. Dosho Roshi effectively makes this point, notably departing from the more common Buddhist (or perhaps simply New Age) injunction to stay in the present, accepting things as they are, and to give up aversion to suffering and attachment to the desire for things to be different.

Most often, non-attachment is applied as accepting things as they are, but here it means not resisting change. Although maybe this is a less conservative idea, there remains a problem: the two versions of the end of history may not be the same at all. Gilbert’s research does not suggest that people are unable to change because of the psychological illusion—indeed, the whole point is that people change despite believing that they won’t. The scenario he has in mind is getting a tattoo when you are twenty only to regret it decades later when you’ve changed your mind. In contrast, the political idea of the end of history really does prevent political change because political change doesn’t happen without the belief that it should and it must.

Can we take it a step further? What if the two versions are not only different, but on some level actually opposed to each other? Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history goes hand in hand with the end of political ideologies, which are regarded as illusions in much the same way that contemporary neuropsychology and Buddhist doctrine views the fixed self.

Jerome Roos’ arguments for the fluid sense of self are compelling insofar as we accept a very specific theory of the relationship between the self and policial change. Under this view, change occurs because we as individuals are able to accept change, when our identities are flexible, free-floating and unmoored to any specific societal organization. The first problem here is that simply being amenable to change doesn’t mean we will change in the specific direction of a more just, less oppressive and exploitative society. We might float gently down the river towards fascism, or feudalism or theocracy.

There are a few other connections that can be made. In a previous post, I wrote about the American dream of self-reinvention and the way that social media is often represented and idealized as helping us to realize it. The neophilic logic of consumer capitalism often demands fluidity and self-reinvention, operating in an endless cycle of novelty and obsolescence which forces us to relinquish whatever existing attachments we’ve formed in favor of embracing the new. Finally, the most recent models of labor downplay the value of secure, stable jobs while praising the new flexible, entrepreneurial worker who floats between temporary positions. It is hard to maintain the thesis that we live in an age that prizes the fixed self.

A politics that aims at radical change seems to me to benefit more from a fixed self than a fluid one. Change is not, as Roos argues, by any means inevitable, it is not brought about by simply being open to change. It is more likely to be brought about by fixing oneself to a political vision, being bound to its principles and ideals, and advancing its cause—in other words, in having a fixed self.

Or as G.K. Chesterton put it, “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

It may well be true that we are not naturally in possession of a fixed self, as both Buddhism and neuropsychology confirm. It may equally be true that the best route to a happier, more tranquil life is through contemplating the impermanence of all things, including the self. Still, we may yet find other benefits in deviating from this sound advice.

In Defense of Not Giving a Fuck

2013-02-03T08:00:00Z

Whenever we hear about an ethical catastrophe—the Sandusky scandal, Catholic sex abuse cases, or any number of corporate scandals—the typical reaction is the demand to know how it could have happened. There are always bad people who do bad things, and it seems safe to assume that if they’re capable of more extreme types of abuse, they’ll certainly have no qualms about lesser crimes: deception, manipulation, lusting for the power that they need to hide their deeds, and so forth. We like to think of them as fully aware of what they’re doing, probably cackling with glee—every evildoer appears in our imaginations possessed of an obscene enjoyment.

A story like this might be overly simplistic, maybe even flatly false, but at least it’s plausible. It’s far less clear how to account for the people caught up in the scandal who are more passively responsible, having contributed to the abuse by looking the other way. The main problem is that it is hard to understand passivity a kind of enjoyment, and without this, the guilty seem less evil and more sympathetic. We can imagine them sobbing on the witness stand, wracked with guilt and as much at a loss to understand their actions as we are.

They are like us, having only the best intentions at heart but imperfect and sometimes failing to live up to their ethical commitments. If we want to reject this easy conclusion, there are two possibilities. We could say that failing to enjoy your sins doesn’t get you off the hook. Perhaps passive responsibility is just as bad as active reponsibility? Or we could try the opposite strategy: maybe they did nothing wrong at all. More precisely, what if the problem isn’t that they failed to live up to ethical standards, but that they succeeded?

How could this be so? Žižek gives us some answers in this passage from For They Know Not What They Do:

“At the beginning” of the law, there is a certain “outlaw”, a certain Real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law: the ultimate truth about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act of foundation. The illegitimate violence by which the law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of the law

In her own commentary, Jodi Dean expands the point:

Law begins in trauma. From the standpoint of the old law, the violent establishing of something new is crime. The old law is disobeyed, overthrown, transgressed, usurped. From the standpoint of the new law, this crime is self-negating. It vanishes (or is concealed) as a crime once the new order is constituted. Put somewhat differently, the establishment of law overthrows law, for example, the law of custom, the law of nature, or even law as an ideal that only existed at the very moment of its loss. And, because establishing is overthrowing, there is a risk–the negation of law as such. Establishing manifests a disregard for law as it perversely (or criminally) turns crime into law. This paradox, this traumatic identity of law and crime, is the repressed origin of law.

In the context of corporate scandals, there’s the figure of the whistle-blower, a term coined by Ralph Nader in the 1960s and obviously derived from sports referrees who blow the whistle to signal a foul or the end of the game. Although referrees are the law within the bounds of the game and technically have a type of sovereignty over it, actually blowing the whistle still appears as an at least minimally traumatic intrusion. Blowing the whistle, literally or metaphorically, is therefore not simply the exercise of the law over lawless chaos. On the field, there is another order that’s established among the players that the law of the referree intervenes in to overthrow.

Going back to the problem of looking the other way, it is now clear what it means to say that looking the other way is a way of conforming to an ethical standard. When misconduct has been normalized in an organization, it is the dominant (un)ethical order. From inside this moral universe, someone who blows the whistle is guilty of the worst crimes: treason, betrayal and attacking the very foundations of the order itself.

Watching the exposure of misconduct from the oustide, it’s very easy for us to celebrate whistleblowers and their moral courage. It’s obvious that they did the right thing, we’re outraged at those who stayed quiet while feeling secure in the belief that we would have stood up for what was right if we were in that position. But these impressions can only appear retrospectively. Once the whistleblower has been vindicated, the abuses hit the media and all of society is expressing its collective dismay, we can feel confident that we’d have done the same. In those conditions, we probably would. But the whistleblower wasn’t in those conditions—indeed, their actions are what brought them about. Somewhat like the crime which is concealed to found the new law, the “criminal” aspect of standing up for what’s right is erased.

But would you be just as virtuous if you didn’t feel that all of society was behind you? If you were instead branded a troublemaker, an agitator, a provocateur, a troll, a shit-stirrer and a malcontent? And if you risked being ignored, isolated, undermined, blacklisted and ruined? Most people wouldn’t, and not because they are bad, but because they are good. Most people are basically well-meaning, polite and loyal; they like to help others and try to avoid upsetting people. It is exactly these qualities that make them complicit in abuse. In their goodness, they lack the courage to be regarded by friends and coworkers as evil for opposing the abuse.

In many parts of society, the dominant ethics is relational and prosocial. We should always be kind, respectful, tolerant, open-minded, non-judgmental, and concerned that those we come into contact with feel good about us and themselves. In many cases, perhaps even most, these really are virtues, and it is difficult to imagine how society would function if we did not expect these behaviors of each other. However, it is a different matter altogether to think that the royal road to society’s moral perfection lies in stamping out any deviation from these principles, a idea that often manifests as a deep discomfort with deeply flawed film characters and anti-heroes.

We can find numerous blog posts and articles denouncing Don Draper’s or Walter White’s insensitivity and lack of concern about the impact of their actions on others, and these evince a belief that we can progress morally by adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards these outlaws. Rooting for the bad guys is taken as a sign of corruption. Even though we adhere to these ethical rules in our lives, our enjoyment of fictional sociopathy exposes our secret enjoyment of transgressing them.

This idea finds its roots in Christian morality, where sinning in the heart is a prelude to sinful action. The New Testament teaches that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man…” Or to paraphrase the Gospel, anyone who watches Don Draper committing adultery has already committed adultery in his heart.

One problem with this view is that it misunderstands the relationship between fantasy and reality. Although fantasy works as a stage for realizing transgressive desires, it renders them impossible. We are only able to enjoy them because we know they are dreams, and when there is the potential for them to become real, the consequences can be terrifying, even causing the catastrophic breakdown of reality itself. A dream come true is a nightmare.

I’ve already mentioned the second problem, that prosociality is not the beginning and end of morality. The ethos of being nice to people does not encompass the full breadth of ethical behavior. In the case of whistleblowers, they must violate those rules. Here, the injunction to always be nice is not simply insufficient, it is actively on the side of evil.

But the worst problem is the way that the quest for ethical purity means that a community holds up certain individuals as exemplars, making it almost impossible to hold them accountable for ethical lapses. When we look up to others as the perfect embodiment of our values, the collapse of this illusion can be deeply shattering, so their misconduct must be covered up to protect us.

There are those who demand ethical purity from politicians, celebrities and other public figures, and feel that fame and power should be withheld from them unless they can function as role models. But this is misguided; we should do the opposite. Fame and power should be given to those who are already corrupt, who cannot be protected from accountability by their status as role models. Ethical purity invites abuse.

Aaron Swartz's Non-Martyrdom

2013-01-23T08:00:00Z

I refrained from saying much on Aaron Swartz’s death because it felt disrespectful to use the occassion of his suicide to point out the flaws of his activism. Now I wonder if this isn’t another version of the injunction to not politicize a tragedy. Under this view, politics is a separate arena, merely a game compared with the really fundamental, pre-political world of life and death—as if politics does not already deal in life and death. Swartz life and death was certainly political, so maybe it is not disrespectful to engage with his politics at this time.

There can be no doubt that the movements Swartz was a part of—the free culture movement, copyleft, the open source movement, peer production, information freedom, etc.—confront some of the problems of capitalism. But that is a long way from saying that the movements themselves are ultimately motivated out of anti-capitalist sentiments, even reformist ones. As their activists are fond of saying, these movements are “beyond” Left and Right, which only really means that they are coalitions that cross the traditional political spectrum. They are able to do so because they successfully obscure the antagonisms that cut through the social field, bringing opposite sides of the political spectrum together in a false harmony.

It is hardly necessary to point out that they represent ideology par excellence. The divisions between the pro- and anti-capitalist sides of the movement are systematically concealed in the name of unity and solidarity. Who will win when the tension comes to the fore? If events progress as they have in the free software/open source movements, we already know the answer. Today, Richard Stallman is a laughing stock and a pariah because he took the idea of free software too far. What was “too far”? His agenda began to deviate too much from the commercial interests of technology companies who are really directing the movement.

We should expect the same betrayal to happen with today’s latest iterations of that movement. Corporate backing will drive the movement forward as long as it serves their purposes and with the job done, they will turn on anyone with even slightly more radical plans. Victory will be declared and those who continue to fight will be denounced as unrealistic, utopian dreamers. What can be done? Expose the antagonism in advance, on your own terms: gain the upper hand by splintering the movement, which would force the pro-capitalist faction to compromise to bring the movement back together for pragmatic reasons of advancing concrete agendas of mutual agreement.

A second lesson to be drawn from Swartz’s death is about political activism. The free software movement of the 1990s (before open source companies really became successful) rarely concerned itself much with politics except for relatively obscure disputes over governments mandating proprietary document formats and advocating for making all taxpayer funded code open source. The post-Napster free culture movement is much more explicitly political, taking aim at policy relating to copyright term extensions and enforcement.

The most recent and successful example is the protests against SOPA, where it seemed as if the movement was starting to take off and achieve broader appeal. With that in the background, Aaron Swartz’s death should galvanize the movement even further, and there have been clear attempts to elevate him as a martyr for the cause. One example is Lawrence Lessig, who tries to draw a comparison between Swartz and Martin Luther King:

Yet here’s the thing to remember on MLK weekend (even though my saying this violates a rule I believe in firmly, a kind of inverse to Godwin’s law, because though I believe these two great souls were motivated by exactly the same kind of justice, King’s cause was greater): How many felonies was Martin Luther King, Jr., convicted of?

(Italics are mine—it would be best for everyone if we excused the unique outrageousness of this claim as the ravings of man driven mad by grief.) What surprised me about this attempt (and others) to frame Swartz’s death as a martyring was how it seems to have failed. In the first few days after an event like this, chaos reigns. Everyone is casting around searching for the meaning of the event before clear narratives take shape. I’d expect something along the lines of “Prosecuting kids and grannies for innocent filesharing isn’t enough for the government, now they’re harrassing us to the point of suicide!”

A meme like that would certainly turn his suicide into a powerful, motivating symbol for the movement, but at least in my reading of the reaction, it has largely been rejected. Some writers have advanced this line, like this Guardian editorial: Aaron Swartz: cannon fodder in the war against internet freedom.

Instead, the dominant meme of prosecutorial misconduct and overreach has emerged, which is a completely new issue that has had no connection with the free culture movement until now. This idea has two variants: the first, that Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor, was uniquely corrupt - she used extreme methods because she was politically ambitious and wanted another notch on her belt; the second, that Ortiz is not especially brutal, the US criminal justice system as whole lacks proportionality, it regularly bullies and intimidates defendants in an attempt to be “tough on crime.”

The second claim is certainly true, and I don’t know enough about Ortiz to know if those allegations are true. But that’s not really relevant. What matters is that the movement could have had its martyr, but they rejected him. Rather than claiming his death was a consequence of the government’s opposition to an open internet, they insist that the cause was prosecutorial overreach, a problem completely unrelated to the movement’s agenda.

To continue Lessig’s already absurd analogy, it’s as if civil rights leaders reacted to MLK’s death by mobilizing the movement against the availability of sniper rifles like the one used by in his assassination. That’s basically what’s happening as the free culture movement backs Rep. Lofgren’s proposal bearing his name—Aaron’s Law—which would modify the specific law that allowed the prosecutor to charge him with felonies.

Few people seem to accept the Guardian’s line that this is how governments crush hackers who oppose them and their agenda to control the internet. The reaction has been relatively muted, where we should be seeing crazy conspiracy theories claiming that the MPAA orchestrated his suicide as payback for his involvement in SOPA.

But why isn’t Swartz accepted as a martyr? It’s because as a martyr, his death could only be avenged by a proportionate political victory won in his name—something like a momentous, historic change in copyright law. But he will not be the movement’s martyr because the leaders of the movement have no plans for a historic change.

Lawrence Lessig is an unrepentant enthusiast of third-wayism, presenting conservative arguments for campaign finance reform apparently under the illusion that significant public problems can be solved by convincing Democrats and Republicans that they secretly agree with each other. Here he is again, advancing the argument that conservatives really do support free culture, oppose the spread of markets in every corner of life and why can’t we just all come together since everyone so obviously agrees with everyone else?

For Lessig, change comes when we realize that we always supported it, we just didn’t know it. Rather than breaking—even modestly—with today’s ideological coordinates to open up space for the new, Lessig proposes to extend them. Under such a view, a death elevated into a martyrdom which demands a historic break has no place.

Lessig’s comparison of Aaron Swartz with MLK is therefore not what it first appears, as a politicization of his death. It is only personal grief over the loss of an idealist friend driven to suicide. But the way that Lessig has taken the lead in reframing the issue as prosecutorial bullying also suggests that he is acting to ensure that the free culture movement remains in his control, strictly to advance his “sensible” technocratic policy proposals.

Christmas is the Season of Joy and Cultural Criticism

2012-12-27T08:00:00Z

No one has anything interesting to say about Christmas, neither in favor nor against it. Is that interesting? It’s all I can manage. There are a series of traditional criticisms, but all of them seem hackneyed and exhausted. Consumerism? Greed? Forced jolliness? Christianity? What else needs to be said on these topics?

I know several families who consciously buck the tide of consumerism by emphasizing to their children that the Christmas is really about giving to others, so they have them volunteer at homeless shelters and donate to charity. This is all very nice, but I don’t find anything wrong with children’s innocent greed during the holidays.

These critiques have become clichés, almost becoming integrated into the rituals of the holiday. We gather around the fireplace to sing holiday favorites like Silent Night, Jingle Bells, Christmas Has Become Too Commercialized and Did You Know It Was Originally a Pagan Solistice Festival?. Maybe the holiday attracts so much critique because it is the closest thing to a universal cultural event in the United States, with an estimated 96% of the population celebrating it. Whatever comment we make about Christmas is implicitly relevant to and addressed to everyone in society, and certainly some people seem to feel a sense of connection or collective solidarity with even strangers, especially with the ritual of exchanging holiday greetings, symbolic of the exchange of gifts.

Adam Kotsko critiqued the ideal of warm family bonds during the holidays via the 1996 film Jingle All the Way, where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a workaholic father who chooses work over his son’s karate event, and presumably learns the important lesson that Family Is What Matters before the movie ends. Kotsko calls this a totalitarian demand and says

“Surely there are people for whom the demands of family and home are so suffocating that they can’t imagine submitting to them. Surely there are people who, left to themselves, would never have had kids and would never have been filled with regret at their failure to reproduce…”

I can definitely relate to the feeling of oppressive family obligations, but as a cultural criticism, it’s a little boring. Not to say that Kotsko is doing this, but as a rule, the genre tends to be tainted with the typical bad faith whining that adult children indulge in with their parents, where they complain, but dutifully show up for all the events anyway. Lots of critiques are based in personal experience, but these critiques tend to be extremely specific to the author’s circumstances and tend to veer towards “My mother’s guilt trips are society’s predominant ideological apparatus!”

Rejecting the totalitarian demand of the season, Kotsko proposes a more subversive message for a holiday movie, one that could never be made:

What I’d like to see is a movie in which workaholic dad sits his son down and says, “You know what? I’m not really interested in your karate thing or what specific toy you’ve decided you want for Christmas. What I am interested in is my work, and coincidentally my work finances all that crap for you. I am giving you enough money that you can do basically whatever you want — so just go do it already and stop trying to force me into a role I’m obviously never going to fulfill. It may be physically impossible for such a movie to be made in America, though. ”

I wrote a comment on his blog in response—what follows is based on that.

This exact scene could never be made, but there is the standard cliche of the hero who rejects his duty to go into the family business, and chooses to follow his passion instead. One example: Kung Fu Panda, where the protagonist Po dreams of becoming a kung fu master rather than inheriting his father’s noodle restaurant.

In this genre, it’s usually the son talking to his dad rather than the other way around, but Kotsko has only repeated the cliche for a contemporary context. The father begs the son to stop forcing him into a role he can’t live up to. Although the father’s lack of interest is a little subversive, it still treats the child as a kind of pseudo-authority. This is perfect for today’s post-oedipal, post-ideological times where traditional authority is under seige, and Left and Right compete with each other to be on the margins. Making the child into the authority so that the father can rebel fits in here quite well. It’s a shocking scene, but also cheap and lurid, definitely a perverse gesture.

Maybe the real purpose of these “workaholic dad learns that family is what really matters” is to reframe fatherhood and family so it is on the side of enjoyment rather than duty. These dads always have boring jobs - Arnold plays a mattress salesman. It’s as if the movies are rehearsing the 1950s-era critique of alienation and meaninglessness of the business world, offering the family as the warm alternative. One non-Christmas variation is Stranger than Fiction, where Will Ferrell plays a bureaucratic IRS agent who learns to loosen up and enjoy himself with the aid of his love interest Maggie Gyllenhall, a free-spirited small business owner who owns a bakery.

Feel-good family values films exist more as lip service to the ideal than any real attachment to them. They are popular, but compared to other countries and cultures, middle class white Americans are not known for their tight-knit families. And in my personal experience, liberal childless-and-proud people often have surprisingly conservative attitudes about how to raise children. They are turn out to be very judgmental about parents who deviate from standard expectations, and it seems almost fetishistic.

They are very cynical about family and children and how they ruin your life, but then they are scandalized by parents who don’t fit the contemporary mold of showing up for every soccer practice, i.e. whose lives are not ruined by having children. So you tend to find outward cynicism, but with a disavowed belief, and this has two purposes. First, in order to be cynical about family values, they secretly retain a fetish that someone else sincerely believes in them. Second, the idea that parents’ lives are ruined by children sustains their enjoyment of their child-free lives, believing that they are enjoying transgressively where parents are conforming and only able to dream. What I am describing here is the Lacanian structure of perversion, which is the dominant mode of subjectivity today.

This was all made very clear to me when I went to Burning Man with my wife and daughter a few years ago. A small daily newspaper is published and distributed throughout Black Rock City, and in one issue, there was a lengthy editorial arguing that children shouldn’t be allowed on the playa because seeing children makes people feel inhibited, want to censor themselves and put their pants back on and so on. This was of course not in response to parents complaining and demanding censorship, and if I remember it correctly, the writer was not feeling inhibited himself so much as worried that other people would feel inhibited.

Here again the child is the authority, and the demand is for a space where the child doesn’t see what naughty things we adults are getting up to, as if the child is the parent and the adults are the children.

Left Self-Sabotage

2012-12-18T08:00:00Z

Caution: 3,100 words and too many generalizations.

The Left is losing. Not everyone believes this of course, and admittedly there are reasons for optimism: gay marriage is slowly being legalized, we elected a black president twice, and our society is making modest gains in gender parity. But it’s a bit like Peak Oil: not every drop is gone, and there are still some years where we extract more oil than the previous year, but overall the trend is downwards. This is the state of the Left today.

We don’t generally say this out loud, probably because it’s demoralizing and everyone knows it anyway. It also impels the question “Why?” for which we already have a widely accepted answer: because of the Right. But as an explanation, it has the interesting characteristic of being both factually true and completely meaningless. It’s like saying that the reason your team loses all the basketball game is because the other teams play better — really, it’s an expression of total resignation. The point is to ask what are we going to do about that?

We have a ready made explanations for every defeat: it’s corporations; it’s religious fundamentalists; the patriarchy; lobbying groups; white supremacists; and so on. On one hand, we anticipate defeat, but on the other we are committed to our political beliefs and remain strong even when things look bleak. This creates an occupational hazard for the Left, where there’s no real expectation of winning, so we continue doing what we’ve always been doing. Failure is assumed, so there’s no real reason to try to change tactics.

Protests are like rituals, and exist more for the community to express its devotion to a set of principles than to actually get them implemented. With dwindling membership, the community turns toward itself, alternately cleaning out the insufficiently pure and ministering to the remaining members to keep morale high while lobbing the occasional critical hand grenade in the direction of the other side. The glimmer of hope that remains is grounded in a belief that change will occur once the older generation has died off, an illusory faith that progress is a nice straight line and Right and Left are just synonyms for Past and Future.

On cultural issues, the Left consistently sabotages itself whenever there is a risk of winning. Two case studies come to mind:

In the wake of Obama’s election in 2008, some commentators apparently claimed that we had entered a new “post-racial” era in American culture. It is difficult to find out who first made this claim because the overwhelming majority of writing on the issue denounces the idea, and there’s something deeply symptomatic about that. Typically, the myth of a post-racial society is dismantled by pointing out the really existing racism that still exists and affects the lives of millions of people.

Empirically, this is obviously true, and the purpose of pointing out these facts is to dispute any claims from the right along the lines of: “We live in a post-racial society, racism isn’t a problem and doesn’t need to be addressed.” That sounds like a reasonable fear, except that it would mean that the right has embraced the symbolism Obama’s victory. There is little danger of that happening. Instead, conservatives justify their absurd claims that Obama has a deep-seated hatred of white people by fully agreeing with anti-racist activists that Obama is not a post-racial figure and does not signal a new post-racial era in America.

What is missed in the concrete empiricism of real people’s everyday experience of racism is the symbolism of Obama’s presidency? A symbol is never only a symbol, it can have real effects, as in formal meetings where the chair bangs on the gavel and announces, “The meeting is adjourned.” Empirically, nothing has changed between the time immediately before and after hitting the gavel. Everyone is still in the room sitting exactly where they were during the meeting. One might object to the chair and say, “How can you say the meeting is adjourned when everyone is still here!” This misses how the announcement isn’t descriptive, it doesn’t merely reflect on the conditions in the room, it actually alters the conditions of the room. Before the announcement, we were in a meeting; afterwards, we’re just a bunch of people milling around who know we are about to leave.

Obama’s election could have functioned as this kind of symbol—not as an empirical statement that racism does not exist, but as a symbol that the debate on race is over. “We are a post-racial society” was interpreted as a statement of fact, when it could have been interpreted along the lines of “We are a free society.” It doesn’t express an empirical truth, but a belief and a norm about who we are and who we ought to be, which would actually make it easier to address concrete examples of racism as “That’s not who we are.” The failure to take advantage of that opportunity demonstrates Left resignation to the permanence of what it fights. Ultimately, the Left takes pleasure in its marginal position, comfortable being on the outside resisting and critiquing the faults of mainstream society.

The Right constantly claims that Left cultural values are dominant, even to the point of oppressing the small minority of traditional, religious, conservative-minded people. They exaggerate a bit, but in a way it’s true. And why not? Why can’t we admit this? The Left are infected with hipsterism, desperately afraid of becoming mainstream. Here is the insane world we live in today: the Right concedes that the Left has won, and achieved cultural hegemony, and this is a devastating to the Left. Somehow, winning arguments is a bad thing. They say we’ve persuaded the vast majority of Americans? Calumny! What an accusation!

It’s such a strange reaction. To claim that opposition to racism, sexism, bigotry is the dominant values of society provokes howls of outrage, as if it was intrinsically bigoted to say such a thing. This is because the Left only knows how to be marginalized, it only knows resistance, opposition, transgression, counter-power and counter-culture, and is therefore not only resigned to the permanence of its opposite, it is actually complicit in it. The Left needs the dominant culture to be bigoted so that it can cohere as a counter-discourse challenging its legitimacy, so it can adopt a purely negative gesture of critique.

This may explain some of the unspoken reasons why the idea of a post-racial society was greeted with unusual opposition.

The second example of this tendency comes out of feminist activist blogs, where the critique of privilege is a frequent topic. Privilege is often defined as the various advantages that society confers on some groups at the expense of other groups. Peggy McIntosh, by far the most well-known proponent of the concept, writing in her essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack describes it metaphorically as:

an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

It’s often tedious to resort to etymology, but sometimes it can be useful. The first part of the word, prive-, has the same root as the word private; the last part of the word, -lege, also appears in words like legal and implies laws and rights. Then privilege refers to a private right, a right enjoyed only by a small group, which raises the question of which part of the word is addressed by the critique of privilege. Is it the private part? Or the right part?

In other words, does the critique of privilege claim that a certain right is unfair because only whites (men, heterosexuals, etc.) are allowed to enjoy it, that it’s a private right when it should be available to all? Or does the critique seek to undermine the legitimacy of holding that right by anyone? I claim that today, it is overwhelmingly the latter, it is almost always a negative critique, in the sense that privilege is conceived as something that ought to be subtracted because it’s holders don’t deserve it.

The ambiguous meaning of the term is present in McIntosh’s essay. In numerous places, she talks about male privilege as something to be removed.

I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged… These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended… one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

The point of the article is to draw an equivalence between men’s denial of male privilege and white feminist denial of race privilege. She gives a list of 26 white privileges, which include a wide variety of things such as not having to deal with racial profiling by the police, the availability of affordable housing, having individuals of your race represented in the media, and so on. Crucially, none of her examples would be subject to a negative critique of privilege. (She says not all on her list are damaging — in fact, it’s hard to find even one.) The problem of racial profiling is not that whites are unfairly exempt from it, it’s that anyone is subject to it at all. Ideally, we want everyone to enjoy this white privilege.

McIntosh is aware of this ambiguity:

Some [privileges], like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society… We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement.

Hearing this 20 years later, the last distinction seems almost to not make sense: not a privilege, but an unearned entitlement. Today, privilege and entitlement sound basically synonymous, meaning something that you don’t deserve. Entitlement has come to mean something that someone believes illegitimately they are entitled to. The word illegitimate is implied in every use of the word, suggesting that today we believe that no one could ever be entitled to anything.

Writing in 1998, McIntosh means entitlement as legitimate entitlement, in contrast to privilege, so that entitlement is good, and privilege is bad. But this puts her at odds with herself. Where earlier she says, “Not all privileges on my list are inevitably damaging,” now she implies that in fact, privilege is always damaging, illegitimate, etc, even as she attempts to say that some privileges are good and should be the norm.

Whenever I read a critique of privilege, I always ask myself whether a negative or a positive sense is implied. In most cases, it is negative — the word has effectively become a pejorative. I would like to be able to say that this goes against McIntosh’s vision, but a close reading of her text reveals that things are mixed, particularly in the first part of the essay, where you find this sentence:

As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

In any case, her effort to open up rhetorical space for privilege to be expanded seems to have been unsuccessful, since today we are almost exclusively focused on removing it. In academic settings, there will always be stipulations to the contrary, but it is almost as if there is an invisible magnetic force that systematically distorts activist discourse towards the negative.

What is this magnetic force? The negative critique of privilege deployed in activist circles represents a capitulation to neoliberal rhetoric which has undermined labor rights, social entitlements and the broad concept that citizens deserve certain privileges: food, housing, education, equality, civil and political rights, etc. Neoliberals were successful in arguing that a citizen’s rights in society are purely negative, you are allowed freedom from coercion, restrictions and government control, but you do not have any positive freedom, no right or privilege to anything because this is the first step towards totalitarianism.

Early in the essay, McIntosh makes a similar rhetoric move, saying:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

Formerly, racism was seen in terms of what non-whites were legitimately entitled to but lacked, which is implicitly dependent on a positive right. McIntosh’s innovation is to focus on the contents of the knapsack that whites are not entitled to have, implicitly a critique of the “positive right” of white supremacy. The enduring appeal of McIntosh’s essay is that it can be used to reframe anti-racist and anti-sexist politics in a way that does not run afoul of the neoliberal prohibition on demanding positive rights.

It’s hard to say for sure if this was her intention. But the essay was written in the late 80s, when Reagan and Thatcher were leaving office, neoliberal ideology was ascendant and social entitlements of all kinds were in the process of being dismantled. The media were preoccupied with figures of welfare queens, greedy union thugs and public employees, advancing the right wing version of the critique of overprivilege. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that anti-racist and anti-sexist ideas had to be modified to fit the dominant mood of the day to remain relevant.

The negative critique of privilege is popular among activists, most likely because they feel it wins arguments. But it wins because its underlying logic is also endorsed by the right in pursuit of their goals, so it has a kind of universal immunity. Our pre-political doxa today is that we are beset about on all sides by the iniquities of the entitled and the tyranny of the privileged, and the right and the left just compete with other to fill in the picture.

There are three problems here. First, it may be effective in the short term, but shared assumptions like these are ultimately ideological, and we should contest them rather than simply accommodating them. Second, this particular frame excludes class politics. Although people often add class to the regular checklist of left struggles, in a way, this is invalid. These struggles are often approached using a logic where class has already been discarded, and you can’t bring it back just by dutifully tacking it on the end of a list.

The third has already been mentioned, which is left self-marginalization, a problem which is especially evident in the fallout of Gawker’s outing of the Reddit troll Michael Brutsch, known as Violentacrez and notorious for creating and moderating a huge number of highly vulgar and offensive subreddits which, among other things, encouraged the posting of sexually suggestive photos of children, and of women taken in public places. The fact that Reddit permits subreddits like this to exist at all is shocking enough, to say nothing of their huge popularity: one of his more vile subreddits was voted subreddit of the year in 2008, and Brutsch himself was ranked 7th most popular user on the site.

Several commentators adopted the theoretical frame of white male privilege to explain this phenomenon, a strange notion that implies that our society endorses pedophilia and allows white men this privilege. It hardly needs to be said this is simply not true. Pedophilia is one of the most strongly and universally stigmatized crimes, and Brutsch created many other subreddits devoted extremely taboo topics, like images of dead children, necrophilia, Nazism and incest. Doesn’t this establish that he is not occupying a traditional position of social dominance? The final proof comes from the fact that Gawker was fully aware that publishing his real name would cause him to be fired from his job—effectively, using a method of enforcing social norms that was once used to destroy the lives of gay people. (There is, of course, nothing hypocritical about this.)

Despite all evidence to the contrary, many social activists represent these events as attacking socially dominant value of white male privilege, denying that they are the social authorities acting as enforcers of broadly accepted norms and agents of prohibition. Why this denial? Because the Left jealously guards its marginal position, opting for defeat rather than risk being in a position to take power. This is no more evident than in the weird similarity of Brutsch’s and Gawker’s preferred subject matter. Gawker routinely publishes obscene, salacious material at varying degrees, from minor celebrity gossip and general nastiness to more shocking things like celebrity sex tapes and the Gawker Stalker, a site for real-time tracking of celebrity sightings in New York. The name itself has a thematic connection to some of Brutsch’s subreddits, like the infamous creepshots.

Once again, the point is not that Gawker is hypocritical, that they publish articles attacking creepy behavior while secretly they are just as bad. This would imply that they only pretend to be morally upright, but behind the mask they are also guilty. In fact, it is just the opposite. Gawker tries to be creepy, positing itself as sarcastic, irreverent, transgressive and profane—this is the mask. The obscene secret concealed behind the mask is that it is an enforcer of social norms. In a 2007 profile of the website’s rise for n+1, Carla Blumenkranz writes:

Gawker retained the stance of a scrappy start-up and an attitude of populist resentment toward celebrities and insiders, even as it became the flagship publication of an online media empire.

The essence of this statement could equally apply to some of the most vocal parts of the Left. Overwhelmingly, anti-racist and anti-sexist values are the dominant ones in society (which is not by any means the same as saying that they are universally followed), and this is confirmed by conservative pundits, who tirelessly invoke to justify their own sense of marginality and persecution.

But rather than exploiting the Right’s concession, consolidating this victory and institutionalizing it, the Left suppresses it, hiding behind the anti-establishment mask and refusing to take power.

Technological Determinism and the Myth of Self-Reinvention

2012-12-06T08:00:00Z

Twitter is a machine for continual self-reinvention, says Jason Kottke, in a kind of mashup argument of the work of different authors. First, MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey’s post Why I Love Twitter and Barely Tolerate Facebook:

Twitter put simply is fun, fantastic, and all about the here and now. The fact that I can’t even search my own feed for past things I’ve said makes it exist almost entirely in the present tense… There’s no memory at Twitter: everything is fleeting… Facebook is mired in the past.

Second, a link to Scott Schuman’s post on The Sartorialist, a popular fashion photography blog. Schuman runs into a woman, Kara, who he photographed several months earlier, but her look has changed so dramatically that he takes her for a stranger. He emails her later to find out how this happened:

Actually the line that I think was the most telling but that she said like a throw-away qualifier was “I didn’t know anyone in New York when I moved here…” I think that is such a huge factor. To move to a city where you are not afraid to try something new because all the people that labeled who THEY think you are (parents, childhood friends) are not their to say “that’s not you” or “you’ve changed”. Well, maybe that person didn’t change but finally became who they really are. I totally relate to this as a fellow Midwesterner even though my changes were not as quick or as dramatic. I bet if you ask most people what keeps them from being who they really want to be (at least stylistically or maybe even more), the answer would not be money but the fear of peer pressure – fear of embarrassing themselves in front of a group of people that they might not actually even like anyway.

Finally, the concluding synthesis from Kottke:

[I]n the social media world, Twitter feels like continually moving to NYC without knowing anyone whereas Facebook feels like you’re living in your hometown and hanging with everyone you went to high school with. Twitter’s we’re-all-here-in-the-moment thing that Matt talks about is what makes it possible for people to continually reinvent themselves on Twitter. You don’t have any of that Facebook baggage, the peer pressure from a lifetime of friends, holding you back.

Schuman theorizes that excessive concern for how you appear to others is holding you back from changing into who you want to be, and of course this has a certain appealing logic to it, but it has its limits, which are easily detected in the very same example. It is true that Kara has changed her outward appearance, to the point that Schuman no longer recognized her on the street as the same woman, but at another level, he did recognize her again.

He approaches fashionable people on the street and asks for their photo, and for this woman he approached her twice, identifying her as fashionable and worthy of a photo in both cases. The original photo was taken because they happened to meet at the grand opening of a clothes store. So in what sense then has she really changed? She is now, as she was then, a person of fashionable taste, so in the sense of “What kind of a person am I?” she hasn’t changed at all. It is only change as judged from the perspective of an outside observer.

So there’s a profound ambiguity in the gaze of the Other, and perhaps something like the Derridean condition of possibility which is paradoxically also the condition of impossibility. The Other appears at first as the obstacle to becoming who you want to be – they stop you by saying “You’ve changed! That’s not you!” At the same time, it is precisely this reaction that’s sought after when we dramatically change our appearance. While it may be frustrating to have friends and family refuse to let you change, imagine the disappointment of putting together a whole new look and finding that everyone barely notices. The shocked reaction of the Other “You’ve changed!” now has a different meaning, signaling that the desired effect has been achieved, and in a way, making change possible in the first place.

Identity is caught up in the mirror-gaze of the Other, and flips between recognition and misrecognition. Although we might object to restrictive recognition by others, in the exact moment when we feel most free of it, we are secretly dependent on it.

It can’t be denied that friends and family who object to identity changes are reacting to the way such changes provoke a feeling of loss or separation. If you adopt a look, or a mode of consumption, that sharply diverges from theirs, they may experience that as a rejection. But that is because they are already caught in narcissistic imaginary identification with you (and of course, you with them). The groundwork has already been laid: the sense of similarity which forms the basis of a relationship also undoes it by generating aggressivity and envy.

Kottke implies that moving to New York allows you to erase your history, a possibility that Schuman seems to reject, saying of Kara:

All the big smile and Midwestern charm (she is from Oakbrook, Chicago) from the first picture are still there but now they are wrapped in a more sophisticated, urbane exterior.

It’s interesting that Schuman seems to back away from this possibilty of erasing one’s history while celebrating the possibilities of self reinvention. He marvels at the “New York effect” that transformed Kara, feeling that something similar happened to him. And yet he calls himself a fellow Midwesterner. For him they’ve changed, but at the same time remain rooted in their pasts. She is both dramatically different and yet fundamentally the same, only wrapped in a different exterior.

Recognition and unrecognition overlap. It’s not so strange that Schuman moved from Indiana to New York and reinvented himself as a Midwesterner, partly because you can’t really be one in Indiana—everyone in Indiana is a Midwesterner, so you simply disappear into the background. But mostly because leaving town to reinventing yourself can end up being a highly conservative move. Away from the disapproving gaze of your friends and family, you are seemingly free to try on an endless variety of guises to find what’s most comfortable for you, but you also find that certain things don’t change, and these are reinscribed as the hard kernel of who you are.

The American cultural narrative of self-reinvention is a powerful one. The phrase “self-made man” carries connotations of wealth and entrepreneurial spirit, but when the phrase was first popularized in the 19th century, it had a less business-oriented meaning. It stood for the ideal of the autonomous individual with a voluntarily chosen identity, free of the symbolic bonds and debts of one’s historical identity. In a country of immigrants founded on rejecting the traditions of Old Europe, this has obvious appeal and is often repeated in the popular trope of the hero who leaves the family farm and strikes out on his own, often to the big city. But with the rise of consumerism in the 20th century, the American Dream is reimagined as the endless production and reproduction of self-identity through consumer products.

In his paper Film Noir and the American Dream, Ken Hillis says:

The post-war period witnesses the emergence of an economic model connecting identity with consumption. The act of consumption increasingly is linked to the production of one’s individual identity as a shiny commodity without a past. The past, whether tainted by fated indiscretion or polished by nostalgia, occupies a less and less central role in the new consumer economy than in an earlier pre-war economy predicated on an understanding of personal identity as productive, responsible, and continuous in time. An identity too firmly linked to a past, like an outmoded commodity, becomes superfluous…

The ideal of a history-less self is clearly at work in Matt Haughey’s embrace of Twitter and by Kottke, who explicitly draws the analogy of Twitter as leaving your hometown for the city. In a way, the self-invention dream is radicalized even further: Twitter is not merely the city where we can reinvent ourselves, it is an experience of continually moving to the city.

“You are who your last dozen tweets say you are,” says Kottke, but I don’t really buy this. I think Matt Haughey’s essay makes clear that the primary problem, the obstacle to self-reinvention on Facebook, is the people who are on Facebook: your family, your high school or college friends, colleagues from old jobs and so on. Facebook collects history mostly as a side effect of its position as the dominant medium of online social connection, not because of any special effort to constrain users’ freedom to reinvent themselves.

If it did, it might even be a positive thing.

Film noir sometimes functions as a kind of critique of the claims of ahistoricity of the consumer subject. Noir protagonists are often on the run from their pasts, and we are there to witness the moment when it finally catches up to them, often ending in their death. So the genre stages the failure of individual self-reinvention, and implicitly offers a critique of consumer capitalism and the American Dream. Could this tradition of critique be advanced in the context of today’s subjectivities? What history is repressed by social media?

Matt Haughey’s complaints that Facebook exposes his history seems almost like this, as the classic noir protagonist whose history has finally caught up to him. The erasure of history (or other kinds of contexts) comes up frequently for techno-fetishists. John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace might be its original expression, both as a recapitulation of the American declaration of independence and even more explicitly in its opening lines: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”

What could that possibly mean? Can you just ask the past to leave you alone? In practice, it means an optimistic belief that everything is different on the internet because it has no contexts: no history, no politics, no law, no economy, no social antagonisms, no race, class or gender. We are who our last dozen tweets say we are, and what a feeling of freedom that is. Unless it isn’t really true.

The internet is no longer marginal phenomenon, and the social context you thought you left behind is back with a vengance. The internet turns out to be a wonderful surveillance device, which certainly doesn’t help those who really need to get away from their families or evade authoritarian governments. Silicon Valley startups like Airbnb and Uber operate like web startups, existing only in the supposed void of cyberspace, until it turns out that you actually need licenses from city governments to run a taxi service, and maybe asking people to run illegal boarding houses could result in large fines for them. Others, like Khan Academy make fatuous claims that their simple websites solve problems that have vexed educators for decades, if not centuries.

This arrogance comes from the belief that they have liberated themselves from their contexts. Only they have the courage to break with the old-fashioned ways of doing things. If any problems arise with using their inventions, the source is almost always located in society, as a failure to adapt. They believe in the premise of technological determinism, that technology is ethically neutral – it lacks yet another context.

In the abstract, the supposition of technology as context-less and the American myth of self-reinvention seem to have little in common. One comes from science and technology studies, the other an American cultural ethos. They have a kind of structural similarity, but is the connection spurious? To me, the overlap is so strong and it is hard for me to just dismiss it. There are no doubt other points of connection that I haven’t even mentioned, like how startups adopt the philosophy of continuous innovation, a version of the same injunction to reinvent oneself that we hear constantly from advertising agencies. This allows Linkedin founders to write the Thomas-Friendman-approved career advice book The Start-Up of You which advises white collar workers to think of themselves as in permanent beta, implicitly as forms of technology that undergoes non-stop innovation and development.

It’s strange and fascinating to think that technological determinism might have a strong connection to the ideal of self-reinvention. Hillis understands identity as on the consumer side, like a commodity which can become outmoded. But modeling identity as technology puts a different, complementary spin on it. Identity innovation becomes an economically exploitable activity just like technology.

Previous generations believed that the problem with technology was that it was homogenizing and inhospitable to individuality. In fact, the problem turns out to be the opposite: technology reaches deep into our souls, and we form libidinal investments and ground our being in private, for-profit entities.

A Review of Wreck-It Ralph

2012-11-25T08:00:00Z

Note: this is a long read, ~3000 words. For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the film, I’ve outlined the plot in detail, including spoilers.

Wreck-It Ralph is the story of an arcade game character and his dissatisfaction with the role that he was programmed to play. During the day, Ralph is the villain in Fix-it Felix Jr., a simple 80s-style arcade game reminiscent of Donkey Kong. Each level of game begins with Ralph climbing up the side of an apartment building and smashing windows with his enormous hands. He’s followed by the cheerful, player-controlled handyman Felix, who must try to repair the damage while Ralph tries to hinder his progress by throwing objects at him. Once Felix has succeeded, the apartment dwellers (the Nicelanders) come out to reward Felix with a medal and cast Ralph off the top of the building and into a mud puddle below.

In Wreck-It Ralph as in Toy Story, during the night when the arcade is closed, the arcade game characters are conscious, living beings who are aware of their position in the world as game characters. They are able to leave their games and visit others by traveling through the machines’ electrical cords which are connected through a power strip.

But despite this knowledge of the real world, the staged antipathy between Wreck-It Ralph and the Nicelanders continues even once the lights in the arcade have been turned off. In a nice example of Žižek’s theory that ideology continues to function even when you don’t believe it, the Nicelanders adore Felix as a hero and despise Ralph even though they see through the game’s “official ideology”. They know it is only a game, and although this is never really stated, logically we have to conclude that the Nicelanders know that Ralph is not really a bad guy.

They treat him as if he was a villain not because they believe he is, but because they suppose an Other who really believes. Or as Michel De Certeau puts it in his essay What We Do When We Believe, “it is a belief in the belief of the Other, or in what one makes believe that he believes”, a version of the Lacanian subject supposed to believe. For the Nicelanders, this Other is clearly the children who come into the arcade every day with their quarters. “Children are in a way the basis for the belief of adults,” says De Certeau. The innocence of this Big Other is assumed, and it must be maintained if the system is to function.

Notably, Ralph’s exclusion is economic as well as social. When he’s not playing the game, he lives in a garbage dump with a tree stump as a pillow and covers himself with bricks when he goes to sleep. His hair is untamed and he dresses in overalls, evoking the stereotypical hillbilly in contrast to the polite, middle-class Nicelanders.

This is the background that motivates Ralph to reluctantly attend Bad-Anon, a “bad guy” support group modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous and attended by villains from other video games who face similar challenges. They give him therapeutic advice on how to accommodate himself to the reality of his world, to accept what he cannot change. “You can’t mess with the program, Ralph,” says one. They close with the Bad Guy Affirmation: “I am bad, and that’s good. I will never be good and that’s not bad. There is no one I’d rather be than me.”

Ralph seems to feel ambivalent about this advice, and his condition is made even more painfully apparent when the Nicelanders organize a party for the game’s 30-year anniversary and fail to invite him. He shows up anyway and disrupts the celebration by asking questions about his position in the game: why is he always despised? why doesn’t he ever get the chance to be celebrated like Felix? why doesn’t he ever get a medal? why does he have to live in a garbage dump? The Nicelanders respond with withering scorn, one sarcastically responding that if he ever got a medal, he could live in the penthouse, but he’s nothing but a bad guy and always will be. He leaves in frustration, determined to prove himself to the Nicelanders and win a medal.

Economically disadvantaged and on the receiving end of social stigmas, it’s not hard to view this character as the embodiment of the working class, and his game Fix-It Felix, Jr. a metaphor for capitalism. Taken from this perspective, the film begins rather promisingly, by having Ralph make a radical critique that cuts to the heart of the social order he lives in. In the end, he is treated like a bad guy not because the middle class Nicelanders hate and fear him, but because the system requires it. The familiar video game tropes would be inconceivable without a despised villain, so someone has to do the job, a parallel to the economic exploitation of the working class that’s a necessary component of capitalism. Although they know he is not really a villain, they continue to treat him like he is one even when they are off the clock. To do otherwise would be to call into question the entire economy of good guys vs. bad guys that all games require.

To truly address Ralph’s complaints would require a total overhaul of the social order; or, a revolution, a re-programming of the ideological code that generates their reality. Even though the characters are aware of themselves as characters determined by the game’s code (and as is revealed later, they actually have the power to modify it), this is unthinkable. And yet for them it is also an ever-present threat. As the film progresses, and Ralph transgresses some of these limits, the game characters react with horror, invoking the phrase “gone Turbo”. The definition of this phrase isn’t revealed right away, and it turns out to refer to a traumatic event in the arcade: a racing game called Turbo Time lost its place as the most popular arcade game to a new racing game. Feeling envious, the main character Turbo game-jumps, invading the new game to disrupt it, trying to convince players to go back to his game, resulting in the ultimate horror: the arcade owner finds that both games are faulty, unplugs them and wheels them out of the arcade.

This event has numerous parallels to contemporary politics. The arrival of the new game that makes Turbo Time obsolete refers to capitalist creative destruction, the arcade floor as a market and the players making choices among competing games for how to spend their quarters. Turbo violates the arcade’s hegemonic order by refusing to accept this, reflecting the capitalist slander that any changes to the social order are motivated by the losers’ pathological jealousy of the winners. His transgressions precipitate a tragedy and serve as a warning against trying to make any changes, in exactly the same way that liberals admit that although capitalism is not perfect, they warn that the inevitable result of change is totalitarianism.

Finally, the way the characters invoke the phrase “going Turbo” as an ever-present, threatening possibility reminds me of Jodi Dean’s thesis that while the left seems resigned to defeat and the impossibility of really changing things, the right betrays their belief in the necessity and imminent possibility of radical change in their frantic paranoia that everyone and everything is communist:

In the US, we are reminded daily that radical change is possible, and we are incited to fear it. The threat, or specter, is communism, right-wing radio and blogs scream, and if we don’t do something, we will be under the communist yoke. The right, even the center, regularly invokes the possibility of radical change and it names that change communism. Why does it name the change communism? Because extreme inequality is visible and undeniable.

The right believes in communism as the solution to capitalism because of how frequently they invoke it to silence even talk of reform. In the same way, the characters in Wreck-It Ralph invoke the specter of going Turbo in response to the antagonisms and contradictions in their universe of which they are well aware.

Ralph’s quest to win a medal and prove his worth to the Nicelanders takes him to a high-octane robot bug shooter with a dubstep soundtrack called Hero’s Duty. He sneaks to the end of the game and is awarded a medal as if he had completed it, accidentally awakens the sleeping cybugs and finds his way to a small escape pod. In the chaos, the pod exits Hero’s Duty and finally crash lands in Sugar Rush, a Mario Kart-style racing game set in a cute, childlike candy world. There, Ralph runs into a local, Vanellope von Schweetz, the second major character in the film, who promptly makes off with his prized medal.

Despite this initial antagonism, Vanellope and Ralph will form a bond because they share a similar condition. Where Ralph is dissatisfied with being forced to play the villain in his game, he at least has a proper placeÑhis absence throws his game into chaos as it faces the risk of being unplugged. Vanellope is also a social pariah—in the candy children’s world, she is subject to bullying and taunts at the hands of the game’s racers because, as she puts it, she is a glitch, a mistake. The other racers have a place in the game, but Vanellope is presented to the audience as an unneeded, incomplete leftover that the programmers forgot about. Every few minutes, she glitches out, her body briefly destabilizes into pixels, a condition that she calls pixelexia. She lives underground, beneath Diet Cola Mountain, a half-finished bonus race track that was never used.

If Ralph stands for the traditional working class, Vanellope has, at least at this point, all the features of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer. They are people who are outside the normal legal and social order and prohibited from participating in it, existing in no-man’s lands, spaces where the state has withdrawn. They include homeless people, illegal immigrants, refugees, the millions who live in slums and favelas around the world, and even impoverished, semi-lawless areas of major American cities like Detroit. There is no possibility of them becoming normal, productive members of society, they are simply written off as our unavoidable mistakes and either forgotten about or made into the target of humanitarian interventions.

Unlike Ralph, who abandons his position, effectively going on strike, Vanellope’s goal is to enter the nightly race presided over by King Candy, the ruler of Sugar Rush. This competition decides who gets to be the player’s character for the following day. If Vanellope wins, she will become a real part of the game, but to enter the race, the characters pay a gold coin from their winnings. Having never raced, Vanellope has no winnings, so she steals Ralph’s gold medal, violating King Candy’s rules and enters the race. Ralph catches up with her, but it’s too late, his medal is gone, but they soon find common cause together. The winner of the race will get all the coins, and Vanellope tells Ralph that if he helps her win, she will give back the medal. Ralph agrees, and they spend time together bonding while they evade King Candy’s security, build a new kart and teach Vanellope how to drive.

But their new friendship is shattered when King Candy finds Ralph alone. He returns his medal, and explains the reason why Vanellope is not allowed to race: if she were to be a part of the game, the players would see her glitching and assume the game is broken. They would be unplugged, and because Vanellope is a glitch, she isn’t able to leave, so she would die along with the game. He convinces Ralph to prevent this, which he does by smashing the kart, to Vanellope’s shock. He returns to his game, only to find it almost deserted. The last remaining Nicelander tells him the game will be unplugged. In despair, Ralph throws the medal into the screen which disturbs the out-of-order sign so that he can see out into the arcade floor. He looks out, seeing the Sugar Rush cabinet from the outside and Vanellope’s picture painted on it.

Now realizing that she was originally a legitimate part of the game, he rushes back and discovers that King Candy reprogrammed the game to remove her. She isn’t allowed to race because if she were to win, the game would reset back to its original programming, reverting everything King Candy has done. On learning this, Ralph enlists Fix-It Felix to repair the kart, putting Vanellope back into the race.

Now we’re at the climax of the film. King Candy attacks Vanellope during the race, where he finally reveals his true identity. He is Turbo, the first character to who game-jumped. His great transgression was refusing to take his assigned place in the order of his universe, and he has compounded this. He explains that by going into Sugar Rush’s game code, he was able to reprogram it to make himself king. Ralph intervenes to kill Turbo/King Candy and Vanellope crosses the finish line, resetting the game and revealing that she is in fact Princess Vanellope, the rightful ruler of Sugar Rush.

With this revelation, the film shifts away from Vanellope as the excluded homo sacer. At first, her existence was evidence of the programmers’ mistake, an unexpected failure that exposes the faults of the system. But the film now contradicts itself. She is excluded because of Turbo, who refused to submit to the rules of the system and even believed that he, an ordinary game character, is allowed to participate in the programming of his world rather than leaving this to the invisible, god-like programmers. The message of the film is that the social order is good, just and fair, and people who refuse to know their proper place will only ruin it.

If the film backtracks on making Vanellope into homo sacer, then who does she turn out to be? King Candy initially appears as ruler of Sugar Rush, but he is revealed to be not only illegitimate, he’s the avatar of the ultimate transgression of going Turbo; metaphorically, of trying to overthrow capitalism. In today’s politics, this could be seen as the Tea Party’s paranoid view of Obama: ostensibly the legitimately elected president, but secretly a communist. In this reading, Vanellope’s condition stands for the conservative feeling of victimhood at the hands of liberal, politically-correct bullies, and her restoration stands for their hope that once they eliminate the foreign, destabilizing threat and restoring the proper order.

This double reading of her character points to a profound ambiguity with anti-authority underdog characters. They are very relatable and solicit audience sympathy, but are most often deeply conservative fantasy figures of the “rightful heir to the throne,” the restoration of the true king who will return the world back the way it was before the progressive intrusion.

We can detect the precise moment when the film moved to the conservative side: when Ralph looked out and say that Vanellope’s face was on the cabinet, proving that she was legitimately part of the game. We can imagine the film ending differently, where Vanellope, Ralph and Turbo join together to reprogram the games so that no one needs to be excluded and no one needs to be the bad guy. What if they freed themselves from the game and build their own world instead of submitting, day after day, to the demands of the players?

Ignoring the right-wing implications of Vanellope’s final triumph and judging it just as a story, at least she gets a conclusion. But there isn’t really a happy ending for Ralph. And maybe the strength of this film is that you walk out of the theater completely depressed by where it leaves him.

The film takes us forward, showing us how all the original tension is resolved: everything in Ralph’s game is back to normal. He managed to built himself a barely-standing shack out of the bricks from his garbage dump, as if he has capitulated to the absurd self-improvement injunctions that tells you things like: Stop complaining and do something positive! Take advantage of what you have! And so on.

Ralph achieved almost nothing. Yes, the Nicelanders are a little nicer to him. But the bleakest moment is when Ralph explains in a resigned tone how he has come to terms with reality, what really helps him through his day: at the end of every level, the Nicelanders pick him up and throw him off the roof as they always did, but now, just as he reaches the top of his arc, he is able to catch a glimpse of Sugar Rush across the arcade floor. He sees how happy Vanellope is now, and that makes it all worth it. Formerly, being thrown off the roof was the very symbol of his dissatisfaction, but now he is able to see it in a new, more positive light. The Nicelanders aren’t throwing him down into the mud! They are now lifting him up to see the smile of the one for whom he was once a hero.

One way to read Wreck-It Ralph is as a film that refers obliquely to Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? The working class are recruited to depose the crypto-communist liberal imposter and restore the throne to its rightful heir. Having done that, they are returned from whence he came, daily thrown off the roof of global capitalism, only this time catching the smile of the wealthy Republican-voting elite assuring them that they’re the real Americans.

Intrusion of the Real

2012-10-21T07:00:00Z

Recently I was at a meeting where the report from a contextual inquiry was presented, and observing the researchers talk about their interactions with the participants was interesting to me, especially because for most of them, this was their first experience with user research.

One of the researchers talked about a retired man they interviewed, and one detail she mentioned was that this man explained that he has a precise procedure for buying something online: he would find exactly six options for what he wanted to buy, and write down their names, the price and where he found them in a notepad that he keeps near his computer before choosing one.

As the researcher mentioned this, an unsettled look passed briefly across her face, a clear reaction to the arbitrariness of this man’s ritual. Why the need for exactly six options? Why have a special notepad just for writing them down? Strange details like this emerge when you watch someone use a computer, which is perfectly ordinary and unremarkable except when you actually watch the precise hand movements on the mouse or trackpad, the way they reach for a key with the “wrong” finger, or perform some task using an unexpected sequence of clicks.

Two personal examples: I constantly click on, highlight and move my mouse over the paragraph I’m reading when I’m reading on a computer; and when I’m writing, I often start a sentence by rapidly and repeatedly writing and immediately deleting the first few words as I try different ways of wording what I’m trying to say. Both of these compulsive tics have been remarked upon as strange by people watching me typing and reading, and I wasn’t even fully aware that I do these things until they had been pointed out to me.

Everyone has their own distinctive, private ways of interacting with a computer that we may not even notice ourselves, but they strongly stand out as odd or even irritating to an observer. Experiences like this are captured in the rage comic The pain of watching non-geeks use a computer…, where the observer’s agony steadily escalates as he watches a “non-geek” inefficiently use Google, and brings this passage to my mind, which is from Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies and frequently reused in his other books:

when do I effectively encounter the Other “beyond the wall of language,” in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, etc., but, only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail - a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic - which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter of the real is always traumatic, there is something at least minimally obscene about it. I cannot simply integrate it into my universe; there is always a gap separating me from it.

All these odd interactions with the computer are disturbing because they are deeply intimate and personal, and yet totally meaningless. We cannot really account for a man’s ritual of finding six items and writing them down in a special notebook by claiming that this is just a pragmatic means for achieving a goal of comparison shopping and then buying something, a goal that we can understand and relate to. The impractical nature of the ritual forces us into an encounter with the man at his most uncanny, at the level of his enjoyment. In the end, we know that the ultimate purpose of his ritual is the libidinal satisfaction of completing all six items, and in this realization, we are traumatically confronted with the Other’s jouissance.

For Žižek, our primary ethical duty is toward this unbearable Real dimension of the Other, the excessive, awkward, inhuman part of another human that sticks out and makes us uncomfortable, almost as if it intrudes into our personal space. This is in marked contrast to today’s ethical norms, where the primary goal is to avoid exposure to the inhuman Other at all costs and intersubjective violence is considered justified to achieve it.

These rules are often complemented with another ethical rule, of tolerance, non-judgment and open-mindedness towards other, but we should not be deceived. Although seeming to be open to and even celebrate difference, enabling us to mix with many different kinds of people, tolerance towards the Other requires the total negation of their disturbing jouissance. The ideal of tolerance extends ethics towards the Other insofar as they remain within their Imaginary identity: their lifestyle choices, goals for the future, beliefs, personal choices about music, movies and books and so on.

We have a minimal social duty to construct an identity because it makes us comprehensible and relateable to others. Although identity seems to bring people together, this only works because it creates a buffer zone of understandability – we are only able to meet each other on condition that we never encounter each other in the Real. We must maintain an identity so that all of our actions, even at the level of physical movement, can be accounted for, that they all make sense and are oriented towards a set of desires that also make sense.

Identity is a process of accounting for our desire by fictionalizing it for others, it creates the illusion that although you may not know me, at least I know me. You can ask me, and I will tell you the whole story of who I am, and why I do what I do. We can imagine the man with the shopping notepad accounting for his process in some understandable way, about how it serves a practical goal of organizing things. Or I might explain how constantly clicking on every paragraph I read has a functional purpose — it keeps me focused, or something. But there’s always an element of post hoc rationalization to these explanations.

The idea is that you might find it weird, but once you get to know me, you’ll understand and it won’t seem weird anymore, so in this scheme, your weird initial first impression is framed as an error that is corrected by further information about me. It’s a way of bridging the divide between people, and of course this does work, up to a point. We can accept and tolerate different forms of enjoyment so long as they are captured, normalized and codified in identities and lifestyles—effectively, turned into forms of consumerism.

But where it fails is in the confrontation with the Other in the Real of their jouissance, which we experience as uncomfortable, intrusive and even traumatizing. No wonder that one of the primary ethical guidelines today is the idea of self-awareness, a state of heightened sensitivity to how others perceive us and taking measures to ensure that every intersubjective interaction is perfectly smooth and frictionless. Openness and tolerance to difference is sustained by its obverse, hyperregulation and surveillance of all social interaction.

All forms of desire are tolerated so long as they are well-integrated into the subject’s ego and represented as a personal lifestyle choice, making their actions and decisions legible to us. As long as the Other is self-aware and knows their desire, everything is OK, but it’s traumatic to be exposed to someone’s unconscious desire, manifest in various strange, compulsive gestures that they are not even fully aware of and are not part of their internal self-portrait, their self-understanding that they can express to others.

Here, we are exposed to the Other’s desire at its most radical: not merely a desire which is foreign to us but should be respected because it is meaningful to someone else. The Other’s desire is even alien to them! The truth of who they are isn’t some inner intimate secret that they reveal to you in confidence. In our experience of their fundamental weirdness, we know them better than they even know themselves.

Thus, real self-awareness is awareness of my unawareness of my self, awareness that there is a dimension of myself which is alien to me. When I express myself through speech, I always say more than I intend, so that when I express myself, it is not a matter of simply giving you access to what I already know about myself. Who I turn out to be may surprise you, but don’t worry, I will be just as surprised as you!

So it is impossible for me to fully account for this excess through identity construction. Although many people celebrate the freedom that we have today to explore all kinds of new identities beyond the ones that have been externally imposed by social authorities, this perspective fails to take into account how identity construction, irrespective of its specific content, is deeply normalizing, a prohibition on the excessive Real dimension outside of identity.

The Future Original

2012-10-18T07:00:00Z

In my last post, I mentioned the metonymic character of remix culture, the way it conceives of culture as an endless sliding of meaning from one remix to another with no original. The concept of the original is like Lacan’s point de capiton, the signifier which is elevated to the master signifier, introducing a castrating cut into the signifying chain and defining all the other signifiers. Because remix culture disavows such a cut, it is a perverse discourse.

But this is not to say that wanting to be original, unique and different is any less perverse, any less a product of the Imaginary order where I am deeply jealous of my mirror double who copies me, or maybe even makes me feel that I am a copy of him. There is nothing so destabilizing as encountering the one who looks just like me, because in the Imaginary order, identity is founded on my image of myself. If this can be duplicated, then my identity washes away. Imaginary identity is tragically self-undermining because it is, in a way, too successful. In order to protect my identity, I project an impossible image that no-one can mimic, but in process, I also become alienated to myself, experiencing my own identity as external to me, as an Other.

And yet the quest for Imaginary identity seems to anticipate and in a way, play out in Imaginary form the castration of the Symbolic order. The Imaginary desire to be unique, to be distinct from my mirror image, to be separated from it, but it can only articulate this separation as an Imaginary difference, a difference of having a unique personal brand, as it were. What it cannot grasp is the essentially arbitrary nature of the Symbolic, an empty gesture that confers identity on something simply by naming it.

My name is meaningless, given to me through the accident of history and lacking any connection to my imagined inner essence, my unique personality or any special qualities I have. The difference between imaginary and symbolic identity can be compared to two neighboring houses on a street - at the level of the imaginary, the two are distinguished by their outward appearance: their differences in size, which lawn is more carefully manicured, how expensive is the car out front and so on.

Symbolic identity is not the conventional wisdom of “It’s what’s inside that really matters.” On the contrary, it is represented by the street number, a purely formal difference which is used as an arbitrary marker of difference without making a comparison between the two neighbors. In the Symbolic order, I am made unique, my identity is stabilized, via a purely formal gesture, the assignment of a arbitrary name or number. The difference between me and my neighbor is an absolute difference, and I am made unique and separate by fully submitting to and identifying with the empty signifier.

This schema turns around the commonsense idea that being original means being first, which turns originality into a competition. Remix culture correctly realizes that every original work has its influences, but what it misses is how the Original can arrive late, retroactively turning everything that came before it into harbingers announcing its impending arrival.

Simon Reynolds makes the following point about about remix culture, what he calls recreativity:

As much as it is propaganda in favor of underachievement, recreativity is also, I suspect, a form of solace: reassuring balm for the anxiety of overinfluence, the creeping fear that one might not have anything of one’s own to offer… Part of the appeal of standing on the shoulders of giants is that it makes the giants seem smaller.

I’m sure that this is true, that there are those who have nothing to say and steal from others to cover this up. But I wonder if recreativity may also serve the opposite kind of solace, that we adopt it to disavow the possibility of really doing anything new. It might seem strange to call that a solace. Isn’t originality held up as the ultimate good, the key to success for anyone engaged in cultural production? Obviously it is, but this is exactly the point. Recreativity does not only deny the originality and genius of the past, it also cancels out the future original, the traumatic arrival of the new that retroactively transforms its own past.

The solace of remix culture, then, is the comforting illusion that we are in no danger of doing anything new. Although originality is sought after everywhere, it is a bit like Lacan’s objet a, the object-cause of desire. Although we chase after it, our worst fear is actually catching up to it, so we unconsciously sabotage ourselves to ensure that this never happens.

Authenticity, Remix Culture and Rousseau

2012-10-14T07:00:00Z

As a younger man, I was fiercely critical of the inauthentic. We all were; by “we,” I mean certain of us who expressed our pessimism and general moodiness about the society we were forced to face everyday in these terms. Not that I knew anyone like that, but somehow I believed that there were others out there, and I was like them.

For me, the problem was not so much with the falseness of inauthenticity, but the way it is accepted as a substitute. At the time, it seemed clear that the two concepts were linked, that a fake is accepted as the real thing because it has the capacity to deceive. The fake masquerades as the real, and we are all taken in by it, so it follows that exposing the lie is what will liberate us.

But it didn’t really work out that way. Generally people roll their eyes and say something cynical at the moment of the great unveiling, when the Lie Is Exposed. And then keep doing whatever they were planning on doing anyway. If you critique Disneyland by pointing out how Cinderella Castle is a fake, theatrical copy of the authentic Neuschwanstein Castle, you will soon find out that the original was designed by a German theatre set painter. OK, but wasn’t he at least copying something authentic? No! Even those originals have theatrical elements, as they were partly intended to awe and inspire visitors just as Disneyland is today. Therefore authenticity is a hoax, there never was an original.

As this example shows, the critique of authenticity has unexpected connections with the critique of originality advanced by partisans of remix culture. Disneyland’s castle turns out to be a remix of Neuschwanstein Castle, which is itself constructed out of sampled ideas from earlier designs. The problem of plagiarism is very much like the problem I mentioned, of the copy incorrectly substituting for the original.

There are other examples of how the notion of authenticity is deployed that strengthen this relationship: authentic ethnic food opposed to the weaker imitations that appeal to Western tastes; authentic blues music opposed to it’s co-optation by white performers; the authentic self as opposed to artificial façade. The common feature here is a distinction that’s drawn between a good original, and a bad imitation that resembles it.

But other critiques of authenticity address themselves to a totally different model – Andrew Potter’s Authenticity Hoax is the best example. In this model of authenticity, the opposition is between the artificial and the natural, two concepts understood not to resemble each other at all. Rousseau’s distinction between nature and society has nothing to do with thinking of society as a poor copy of authentic, original nature. If we take this as our model of authenticity, then inauthenticity is much closer to alienation than plagiarism.

There are cases where these two ideas are collapsed and used together, especially in regards to food, as in the difference between apple juice that’s made out of only apples and nothing else, and imitation apple juice that contains high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavorings. Here, the artificial juice is inauthentic in both senses.

The challenge of talking about authenticity as a cultural phenomenon is to figure out whether you are dealing with one or the other meaning, or both. It’s true that Rousseau was very influential in mapping the two concepts together, by coupling nature with genuine amour-de-soi, and society with the imitation amour propre, but it’s not enough to assume, as many do, that the ideal of authenticity is Rousseauian, always and forever.

Separating these two meanings makes it easier to analyze the concept in Lacanian terms.

First, Lacan views alienation as constitutive of subjectivity. It is impossible to overcome this and achieve wholeness, because we are fundamentally alienated from ourselves. This process is associated with the famous mirror stage that marks the subjects entry into the Imaginary order, and occurs because of the division between the fragmentation of the individual’s body and the illusory wholeness of its reflection, generating a feeling of jealous rivalry between myself and my more perfect mirror image. Alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order, says Lacan.

The rivalry that exemplifies the Imaginary is perfectly captured in Rousseau’s description of amour propre — pride, envy, social comparison, insincerity, status-seeking, etc. — which means Rousseau should be regarded as a Lacanian critic of the Imaginary order, a reading which can be supported with Sally Howard Campbell’s book Rousseau and the Paradox of Alienation. Here is the central thesis, which is not intended as a critique: “Rousseau’s solution is the same as the problem he seeks to solve — alienation.” Or as Žižek puts it: “We need more alienation from our life-world, from our spontaneous nature. We should become more artificial.”

Lacan uses the term separation to refer to this second alienation, the transition of the subject into the Symbolic order, or what Rousseau calls the Social Contract and posits as the unification of individual and collective interests. Rousseau is frequently and mistakenly read as a naive Romantic anti-modern philosopher who wants us to return to an imagined state of Edenic bliss prior to the advent of civilization — the 60s counterculture is particularly prone to this mistake, as are its critics.

In Lacanian theory, alienation marks the transition out of psychosis and into perversion, so some have argued that the countercultural rejection of alienation should create a psychotic society, but this strikes me as alarmist. I think that the countercultural critique was a perverse discourse, a disavowal of castration — the second alienation — which means that ironically, Rousseau was appropriated in a way that made him into an advocate for what he criticized, and producing or perhaps accelerating the production of today’s society of generalized perversion.

In my essay Data Transgression, I argued that internet culture overwhelmingly conforms to the contemporary hegemonic discourse, and rather than producing new forms of subjectivity that are capable of instigating social change, is even more effective as sustaining perversion. So I greatly appreciated Campbell sketching out a Rousseauian critique of social media buried in a footnote, which is worth quoting in full:

One has to suspect that Rousseau would be particularly horrified by the impact of current technology and social media on our sense of ourselves and our relationships with others. Is a Facebook status or a Twitter message really an expression of our inner self, or are we caught up in a now-constant need to create clever reflections of ourselves for widespread consumption by people that we barely know? The “false veil of civility” that so concerned Rousseau in his own day has now been extended to include being “friended” by people that we have met once and may never see again. Surely Rousseau would argue that the hyperreflective, hyperconnected society we now inhabit is only driving us further from ourselves and from others. That from which we seem to draw the sentiment of our modern existence (how many “likes” our last Facebook post garnered or how many followers we have on Twitter) is becoming decreasingly meaningful.

To return to a prior point, it is not difficult to imagine the response to such a critique from partisans of internet culture: there is no falseness in social media because there is no primordial authentic self. We’re not fakers, we’re remixing our personality!

Recall the Lacanian idea of the deferral of meaning along the signifying chain, one signifier endlessly referring to another and resisting our attempts to define it. A metonymic relationship like this can be found in the example of Disney’s Cinderella Castle “remixing” Neuschwanstein Castle “remixing” its predecessors, a vision of cultural production which denies the existence of an original or authentic work that’s being copied. The Original is what Lacan calls the master signifier, the point de capiton which stops the endless sliding and fixes meaning. Since this is a form of castration which is disavowed, remix culture is a paradigmatic example of perversion.

Although superficially anti-authoritarian — against the authority of the author — remix culture is deeply conformist, as is evident in Simon Reynolds’ recent critical essay You Are Not a Switch.

You don’t have to be an antiquated Romantic or old-fashioned early 20th-century-style Modernist to find this input/output version of creativity unappealing. Surely the artist or writer is more than just a switch for the relay of information flows, the cross-referencing of sources and coordinates?… [Remix culture] tends to reduce us to the textual: a receiver/transmitter of data, a node in the network.

Reynolds claims that the desire to stand out and be original is inegalitarian, but in reality, it is the proponents of remix culture who relish their submission and conformity to the demand of the Other. The pervert takes pleasure in being the instrument of the Other’s enjoyment, which is why remix culture endlessly varies the metaphor of humans as technological apparatus: we are switches, nodes, receivers, modulators, transmitters, relays, filters or search engines. This is only egalitarian in the truly twisted sense that in such a scheme, we are all equally dominated.

Empathy, an Empty Signifier

2012-09-26T07:00:00Z

Most of the reaction to my Kickstarter post focused on the first half, where I argued that the service takes a large cut of the donations while providing surprisingly little value to the projects it claims to serve. I intended this as an example of what I think is the more important issue of Kickstarter’s marketing, which has seduced the progressive left into supporting them and ignoring their exploitative business model.

Several commenters strongly disagreed, and felt that any criticism of Kickstarter is so outlandish, it cries out for a psychoanalytic explanation. They propose that this essay is the return of a repressed trauma of failed Kickstarter project. What my would-be analysts miss is that in the essay, my libidinal energy is obviously cathected in what I call Good™ values – the feel-good, pro-social change-the-world capitalism that surrounds Kickstarter – rather than the service itself.

To me, the real question is why this style of marketing is so compelling to so many. Re-reading the essay, I feel like it is inadequate to answering that question in many ways, because it tempts the reader to see the problem as an example of greenwashing – or, I suppose, Good™-washing. The issue is framed partly as a problem of corporate deception, that we, the good people who hold these values, have been dazzled by capitalists falsely claiming to represent them.

But it’s wrong to imply that pro-social values that have merely been co-opted – I think those bad ideas, and capitalist in their original, uncorrupted form. The Good™ value system is a constellation of ideals like organic food, lifestyle minimalism, conscious capitalism, life-long learning – the list is long and tediously inspirational – but maybe the most important is the ideal of empathy.

“What could possibly be wrong with empathy?!” you ask. Yes, it’s hard to find fault with empathy. How would you even begin? You’d start by making the case that the very impossibility of finding fault with empathy is the whole problem. A concept that registers as indisputably good and true is ideological in the Althusserian sense of ideology. This suggests that our political order is not so much constituted by political “ideologies” (in the common sense meaning of a set of explicit political beliefs), but rather by beliefs that register to our ears, regardless of voting tendencies, as mere statements about reality. It’s a counter-intuitive notion.

Some writers think that empathy can be mobilized in support of traditionally left wing goals. Ideals like equality and shared prosperity are practically dead, but who can dispute the reality of suffering? We can all agree that suffering is bad, that we ought to alleviate suffering wherever possible, and from that we can create a political coalition to address social problems! This is roughly the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Empathic Civilization.

Although it’s a compelling idea, I think there are serious flaws. Empathy is often claimed to be non-ideological, transcending left nor right, and yet Republicans are considered to be definitely not empathetic. This isn’t exactly an inconsistency. It is possible to believe that Republican policies and beliefs lack empathy, while also believing that (almost) everyone is able to empathize with suffering, and the discrepancy is often explained by framing it as a difference between ideology and reality.

In a recent Daily Show appearance after the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton explained his critique of ideology in similar terms:

[T]he problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence. So you have to mold the evidence to get the answer that you’ve already decided you’ve got to have. It doesn’t work that way. Building an economy; rebuilding an economy is hard, practical nuts and bolts work.

The contrast between ideology and reality is an important part of Rifkin’s thesis. A large part of the book is devoted to the neuroscience and psychology of empathy, and this provides a way for Rifkin to justify liberal-progressive political goals seemingly without making normative arguments. Empathy is wired into your brain and your nervous system, so a society organized according to empathy is grounded in objective, scientific truths, not unproven and unprovable political claims about how society ought to be.

Rifkin relies on science to try to prove that empathy is pre-theoretical, pre-ideological and pre-political. He tells us that babies cry when they hear other babies, but lack the broader awareness to understand why. But this claim falls apart if you try to apply the concept of empathy to resolve recent political debates. Out of empathy for the Iraqi people, we might refrain from invading their country; or empathetically liberate them from an oppressive dictator. We might empathetically give gays the right to marry, or empathetically ban homosexuality to protect the children from sexual deviancy. Abortion is either legal or criminal depending on whether you think we should empathize with the mother or the unborn child, and social spending can be cut for the sincerely compassionate reason of rescuing the poor from a culture of dependency.

Just like the word “freedom”, practically any political position could be condensed in the word “empathy” – politics is partly a debate about what those words really mean and whose definition is the true definition. So political divisions are not resolved by putting aside our ideologies and agreeing that empathy is really what matters in the end. Far from being pre-theoretical or pre-political, in practice, every affective experience of empathy depends on an invisible theoretical background that tells us who is and isn’t entitled to empathy and whose suffering really matters and should be paid attention to.

Social change doesn’t come about by listening to all sides and coming to a consensus about we can all agree on. It happens by taking a side.

Anything You Get is More Than You Deserve

2012-09-15T07:00:00Z

Last week the advertising agency Iris was the target of internet outrage over the design of their employee benefits booklet Iris on Benefits, which plays on the British chav stereotype for laughs.

The figure of the chav is a common, derogatory caricature of poor British working class whites that represents them as crude, loud, lazy, violent, materialistic, racist track-suit-wearing drunks who commit crime and take advantage of the welfare system, enjoying unemployment and housing benefits without contributing anything back to society.

Anti-chav sentiment seems to have risen. Chavs are the butt of jokes on British television shows and there are websites like ChavScum and ChavTowns (“Britain’s worst places to live!”) which endlessly rehearse middle class grievances against this group. More recently, there’s a growing anti-anti-chav backlash by leftists who criticize the label for promoting class prejudice and dehumanizing the poor — for example, the book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.

Most, if not all of the controversy was along these lines, and ultimately the CEO of the agency was forced to issue a public apology. This is all well and good, and this kind of critique is certainly important. At the same time, prejudice against those receiving government benefits isn’t new. What I found most striking about the booklet is the way that middle class employees who have worked for their benefits are basically represented as freeloaders.

We’re iris, and we’re family. We’re a tight-knit bunch holding our own on the mean streets of Southwark. We look out for each other, ‘cause what’s more important than family? Benefits, that’s what. Free stuff. Cheap stuff. Serious stuff. Fun stuff. As one of us, you’re entitled to it. Have you earned it? Probably not. But listen, if there’s free stuff going begging, then you’d be a fool not to grab it, right? We’re just saying.

What’s interesting here is that even the ostensibly “productive” middle class can be represented as freeloading scum, a possibility that is missed by the predominant, often moralizing framework that levels a critique solely in terms of middle class prejudice and hard-hearted mockery of the less fortunate. The more interesting ideological implications of this booklet is the way it proletarianizes the middle class, effectively claiming that all workers, even white collar, creative-class workers, are parasitic on the true wealth-creators: the capitalist class.

It’s not difficult to imagine this booklet extending its bizarre logic beyond employee benefits and including wages as something to be counted as “free stuff” that we parasites somehow haven’t earned but are shamelessly helping ourselves to. This is a vision of society where you deserve nothing, you are entitled to nothing, you are basically the property of your employer and you should be grateful for what you do get because it is always more than you deserve. Everyone is dragging down society, except for the 1%.

It may seem like this is an isolated example, but the framing of union workers as greedy parasites because they are striking for small pay increases is an absolutely normal and accepted part of political discourse, at least in the United States. Iris employee booklet is only a modest, but vivid variation on this theme.

On this blog I’ve written about the concept of the decline of symbolic efficiency, a description of contemporary society that has several facets, but for the purposes of this post, the important one is that there are no more widely agreed-upon social norms and roles, prohibitions, big ideals and unwritten rules governing everyday life. It means that the ideal of work ethic is no longer operative.

But doesn’t this contradict my earlier point that we are entering a society where anything you get is more than you deserve? Doesn’t all the paranoia over welfare queens, chavs, Mexican immigrants living off our tax dollars and so on suggest that the work ethic is alive and well?

These facts only confirm its death. How can this be true? It’s very easy to make the mistake of thinking that the decline of symbolic efficiency is a problem of laxity and too much freedom — both conservatives and liberals apparently agree on this point. The disagreement is over whether this is a good thing or not. But in the absence of symbolic norms and roles, we do not get freedom, instead we get the opposite: the irrational, excessive terror of the superego.

The work ethic meant that if you worked hard and sacrificed, you were promised a middle class lifestyle. But the undermining of the work ethic does not translate into an end to the demand to work. Instead it means the opposite, that we can never stop working because we never feel like we’ve met whatever standard would entitle us to a decent standard of living.

The shifting meaning of these words – entitled, entitlement – is deeply connected to the decline of symbolic efficiency. The verb form has two meanings: to give something a name or title; and, to assign a legal right or claim. The symbolic order, as the domain of both law and language, must function for this to occur, so to be en-titled is to be installed in the symbolic order.

Today it is much more common to use the term “entitled” in a negative way, often to describe someone who has a false or inflated beliefs about how other people should treat them. But notice that when you say something like “She’s so entitled,” it’s never necessary to specify that her sense of entitlement is illegitimate! That part is now taken for granted, because every entitlement is assumed from the outset to be false. So then to call someone entitled is almost to say that they are deluded, thinking that there still is a symbolic order to back them up.

The phrase can also mean that a person falsely believes they have a right, some permission to do something. To call that belief entitled is to say that really nothing is permitted, and to believe otherwise is a delusion. This returns us to the earlier point that the decline of the symbolic order producing excessive regulation. An expression like this, of generalized skepticism about someone’s entitlements, doesn’t liberate us from the Law. Just the opposite, it means total prohibition. Or as Lacan put it, if God (that is, the symbolic order) is dead, everything is prohibited.

In politics, designating a government benefit as an entitlement is a rhetorical move used by conservatives to undermine it, but isn’t it strange that this works at all? Implying that something is a right seems counterproductive for conservative goals, and yet it works in their favor. The word is used as an epithet, as if believing that you have any rights at all is evidence in itself of some kind of personal corruption, like arrogance, narcissism or laziness.

Democrats concede to this perverse logic when they claim, bizarrely, that social security is not an entitlement program. You pay into it, so you have a right to the benefits. In other words, social security is not an entitlement because you’re… entitled to it? The word has been reversed into its opposite. Although it seems that this is an assertion of a right, it grounds itself in pre-political “objective” foundations of capitalism rather than the symbolic political fiction of citizenship.

It was once possible for union workers to agitate for higher wages because they could claim that they had met the requirements of the work ethic, so were entitled to a middle class standard of living. Although today’s workers are widely believed to be lazy, this belief is absolutely immune to any facts showing how hard they work or how little they are paid. How can the work ethic really function as a social norm if it is impossible to adhere to, if everyone is already guilty of violating it no matter what they do?

The more you obey the irrational, contradictory demands of the superego, the more you are guilty. First you’re made to feel guilty and feel like a freeloader for not working hard enough, so you double your efforts. But this doesn’t exonerate you. Being a hard worker implies that you believe you’ve met a certain social expectation, that deserve more than what the market will pay for your labor. This means you are a greedy and entitled freeloader! The only people who escape this logic are the so-called job creators, who don’t work at all, but profit off the labor of others.

A Field Guide to Textareas of the Internet

2012-08-26T07:00:00Z

The textarea form field is an essential feature of many web applications, and is obviously crucial in social media and other sites that rely on user-generated content. Textareas are simple, mostly consisting of a bordered rectangle filled with white that users can click into and enter text, but for such a straightforward feature, many different implementations are possible, each one reflecting the designers’ assumptions about what users can and should be doing on the site.

The first decision is whether to use a textarea at all. A general rule of form design says that input fields should be designed in a way that reflects how they are intended to be used. For example, a field for entering a U.S. phone number should be wide enough that a complete phone number is visible, but not so long that users could be confused about what is supposed to be entered. A phone number field should be phone-number sized, reiterating its meanings and purposes at the level of its appearance.

Applying this principle to textareas, we can say that they ought to be used in forms when the designer expects or desires any free-form text input that may extend beyond a single line, such as a multi-paragraph blog comment. From the perspective of the server that processes the input, textareas are indistinguishable from single-line text input fields. A textarea is advantageous solely because of its improved usability and user experience characteristics — when writing, editing or proof-reading a lengthy comment, it’s highly desirable to be able to see what you’ve already written without having to scroll.

Ideally, users would be able to see their complete entry. From this, we may reasonably conclude that textarea design expresses the designer’s sense of the optimal length of a comment. On social media sites, this often translates into site-wide norms about the appropriate length of user-contributed content. Here are some popular social media sites, and the size of their textareas in lines and characters:

Facebook
- Status update field: 3 lines, ~250 characters
- Comment field: 1 line, ~70 characters wide.
Reddit: 5 lines, ~450 characters
Disqus: 2 lines, ~95 characters
Hacker News: 6 lines, ~370 characters
MetaFilter: 16 lines, ~1,696 characters
Wordpress: 3 lines, ~280 characters
YouTube: 4 lines, ~400 characters

Other than YouTube, every site on this list technically allows for longer entries, sometimes over 60,000 characters, so there are no technical constraints in place that prevent these sites from being filled with long essays. Although this does happen on occasion, in general, the length of user contributions on social media sites seem to be shaped by the soft limit of the size of the textarea.

I don’t really have good data to back this up, I’m basing it on my own experience with these sites. I have found data showing that the average Reddit comment has steadily declined from over 450 in 2005 to 150 characters in 2011. This may be a broader trend. For example, in the Silicon Valley startup community, the desire to reinvent email is a minor topic that returns with persistence. The idea recently appeared in Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s list of ambitious, billionaire-level problems, where he says:

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.

The notion that ”email is broken” is supported in large part, from the perception that there is too much of it, which makes it a close relative of the movement to reduce email overload and “reclaim your inbox.” Graham points out that email has changed: originally imagined as electronic letter-writing, it has been distilled down to a medium for coordinating tasks between people. Seen this way, email is no longer (or was it ever?) a writer’s medium, a carrier of expression or thought. Yes, in the narrow sense of the word, we still write, but it is more signaling than writing — a reduction of the word to the minimum.

In this mode of communication, our concerns resemble those of signal processing: speed, efficiency, error correction, noise, protocol negotiation, latency. We don’t ask if someone has time, we ask if they have bandwidth; a person requesting an update may send reply to an email with a single word — ”Ping”; and lengthy messages become a sign of rudeness.

Some messages are compressed to where they can fit in the subject line, and the sequence EOM (end of message) appended to it, a reference to the special control character EOT that’s used in telecommunication transmissions to mark the end of a transmission.

On message boards, after writing a long message, it’s polite to add a one sentence summary and prefixing it with the sequence “tl;dr” — too long; didn’t read. Perhaps the brevity of this statement is intended as a model for the original author to follow, a sign of an emerging social norm that communication should be reduced to the minimum number of characters.

It shouldn’t come as surprise that some of the new email clients that position themselves as “solving email” aim to reduce the size of the reply window to tl;dr size. Two examples come to mind: Fluent.io and Sparrow, both essentially suggesting to users that replies need not be longer than a sentence or two. Of course, it’s possible to display a more traditional email composition window, but the default behavior attests to a design conversation that began with “In most cases, our users don’t need to write more than a few hundred characters…”

Fluent.io takes an even more radical step by reimagining the inbox as something more like a Twitter feed, and instituting an automatic tl;dr mechanism by abbreviating received messages that transgress the boundary, hiding the excess behind a “More” link. This is similar to how Facebook displays only the first 240 characters of a comment. Why only 240? Presumably there is someone at Facebook who said something like, “What could they possibly have to say that they can’t say in a few sentences?”

But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the designers at Facebook believe users don’t really have anything to say, they won’t build tools that make that very easy, which will in turn discourage users from posting longer comments. Social media sites and forums often have economic reasons for this: a site-wide norm of short messages means more page views and more ad impressions, and creates the appearance of a healthy, active community that everyone wants to be part of. It also lowers the barriers for new users to join the site, because short messages don’t demand a lot of work or commitment.

For some partisans of Silicon Valley, the expectation that users should think about and value what they write online is criticized as elitist, racist and technophobic, belonging to an era where white men wrote with quills dipped in inkwells. We’re told that the triviality of online communication signals the liberation of the people from these ancient standards, and should find tweets reporting on today’s breakfast menu deeply significant.

This is persuasive only if you believe that the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road are servants of the people and simply deliver to us the products that we have demanded, a view that too credulously regards the free market as a neutral delivery mechanism of social preferences. In reality, social media sites have significant ability to shape the communication of its users in ways that maximize profitability, and for the most part, this means as demanding as much participation as possible—after all, venture capitalists like graphs that go up and to the right.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. Designers are well aware that not all participation is good participation. Aside from trolls, flamewars and spam, the sheer volume of user-generated comments can overwhelm a site and make it impossible to find anything worth reading. The short-term goal of increasing user engagement by whatever means has to be balanced against a long-range goal of ensuring that visitors find worthwhile content. So in reality, the game of revenue maximization involves a trade-off between quantity and quality.

How far can you increase quantity before the attendant decrease in quality starts to hurt page views? One widely-used method of addressing this problem is building filtering and ranking mechanisms so that high-quality content is easy to access and low quality content is relatively invisible. On Facebook, heavily liked and commented status updates are more likely to show up on your news feed. Twitter’s search feature defaults to filtering by “Top,” showing highly retweeted and favorited tweets. Many social bookmarking sites like Reddit encourage users to vote on comments, which translate into points called karma accruing to the authors. Karma has two functions: first, to increase or decrease the visibility of a comment to viewers; and second, because karma is publicly visible, it also signifies the reputation or status of the author.

So the desire to increase one’s social media status is encouraged on many social media sites. Democratic-egalitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, the inability for those with low karma scores to make their voices heard is believed to be a feature of a healthy community, not a problem to be overcome.

Last year, Facebook released a commenting plugin that would allow third-party websites to restrict comments to users who were logged in to Facebook, so that their comment could be tied to their real name and Facebook identity. To address the problem of quality, comments are sorted by “Social ranking.” The algorithm that calculates this index are not public, but is described in the following way: “Comments are ordered to show users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads…” Anecdotally, it seems to heavily favor users with many friends, in addition to activity that generates lots of likes and comments. In other words, your social rank is approximates the economic benefit you bring to Facebook.

Disqus, a blog commenting plugin used on this website and many others, offers spam controls and administrator and community moderation tools, and bills itself as “elevating the discussion.” This is a positive spin on the now widely-accepted view that comments are a cesspool filled with spam, trolls, flamewars, bigotry, violence and so on, an observation made famous by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

As social media has gone mainstream, some quarters of the hacker community have reacted with disgust. In their minds, they build—with the best intentions!—nice, democratic social media sites that are going to destroy the gatekeepers and empower us all to express ourselves and unlock our creativity. But some bad apples have befouled this beautiful nest that they’ve carefully designed, by exploiting the anonymity of the internet, an explanation that became widely known after being coined the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory in the web comic strip Penny Arcade.

But the hacker community has to reinvent its own history and present to blame mainstream users for the decline of online standards. Peer moderation systems to eliminate bad behavior were developed in the mid-90s, a time when the web was dominated by technology enthusiasts. One well-known implementation was on the influential “news for nerds” website Slashdot.org. And the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory was originally formulated to explain the behavior of hardcore online gamers, a group that was and is dominated by white male geeks. Recent events have shown that they continue to be among the worst offenders.

The sense that this behavior comes from outside, not from “people like us” is entirely a false one. If anything, the internet is a cesspool because its social software transmits the values and norms of the people who built it. While we should be careful to avoid lumping in every individual that identifies with this group, at the same time it cannot be denied that it does have a dark, repellent streak. The business models that they profit from only accelerate these problems.

The hacker community, unable to face its own inner demons and the problems of capitalism, has externalized them, and turned on the masses they once pretended to liberate.

Tolkien and the Machine

2012-07-30T07:00:00Z

Last week The Atlantic published a blog post by Alan Jacobs called Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology that concerns Tolkien’s hostility to technology, and closes with these questions:

Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in unnecessary ways? What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like?

There’s something rhetorically sneaky about collapsing all kinds of technologies, irrespective of how or why they are produced, for and by whom, or what their impact is or under what economic conditions, into a single thing called Technology that you are either in favor of or not. This sets up a popular move where someone who criticizes a particular technology is supposedly shown to be inconsistent because they implicitly endorse some state of affairs that requires a different set of technologies. So for example, critics of ebooks are regarded as hypocritical because they endorse the printing press.

A completely illogical forced choice is presented that is designed to silence criticism: either endorse all of Technology, or none of it. Criticizing the nuclear bomb means we must hate penicillin, washing machines and the wheel. This is the discourse of self-described inventors who believes themselves to be the heirs of Gutenberg, Franklin and Edison.

Allan Kay says, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born,” which is regarded as a clever retort to critics of new technologies, implying that they are only critical because they hate Change. Supposedly we don’t criticize old technologies because we’re used to them now, an observation that is blind to the vast reservoirs of ink spilled on opposing decades-old technologies like industrial chemicals, pesticides, fossil fuels, suburban sprawl, non-biodegradable waste, tobacco, high-fructose corn syrup and on and on. This is the wounded bleating of narcissistic technology entrepreneurs who only read what is written about them and feel unfairly singled out for criticism because they are ignorant of the on-going public debate about the technologies in our world.

(At a company Christmas party, we exchanged Secret Santa gifts drawn from each other’s Amazon wish lists. I received Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, and was asked by the Ivy-League educated hacker founder what the book was about. I explained that the book’s lost cause was Enlightenment values, and he was totally shocked by this because he had never heard that they were even in doubt – a typical example of hackers’ ignorance of intellectual trends outside their narrow fields of engineering expertise. But this naivety may explain why some parts of the public finds Silicon Valley’s pseudo-revolutionary marketing message so compelling – their hostility to the humanities has, for good or ill, spared them the influence of postmodernity, so that they are the only segment of society that unselfconsciously adopts universal-emancipatory rhetoric. Admittedly, this rhetoric is misleading and conceals a primarily capitalist agenda. Nonetheless, the public’s misrecognition of Silicon Valley’s potential to liberate also contains a moment of truth.)

Getting back to Jacob’s blog post, he quotes Tolkien’s definition of what he, Tolkien, called “the Machine”:

all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.

The obvious reading is that Tolkien is repeating the now-classic view that technology is essentially dehumanizing, and this can be disarmed through a cyborg theory that says that humans are always-already enhanced by technological mediation, the Human is not to be opposed to the Technological and so on. This is an easy critique to make, but only by first making Tolkien say what you want him to say. A more accurate interpretation would say that Tolkien’s notion of “inner powers or talents” does not exclude technological mediation. What he refers to as the Machine is technology-as-coercion, not Technology as such.

This reveals the general problem with deconstructing the human-technology binary: it frequently undermines legitimate grievances about the coercive uses of technology. People are not that stupid, they don’t oppose technology because they don’t realize they are always-already technologically mediated. They oppose technology because they do realize it – this is what makes it a crucial site of political resistance.

The idea of Luddism haunts the thinking of pro-technology writers, figured as a movement that rejects technology for fairly superficial reasons, like hating change or just plain hating technology. This Luddite is an illusion created by inverting the author’s own technophilia, a far more widespread affliction. As a rule, Luddism nearly always has some kind of political, economic or social motivation beyond hatred of technology. Only the tech-centric community takes these as mere pretexts for outsiders bent on destroying what they love.

Fantasy literature often gets associated with conservatism, probably because magic frequently refers to some ancient social order, while science fiction is connected to progress. But it’s not clear that these stereotypes map very well on to actual political positions. The ideal of progress, technological or otherwise, sounds like an undeniably positive thing, but putting it in a colonial context changes everything – it begins to take on ugly connotations of civilizing the savages. Just as we collapse all technologies into a single thing called Technology, we also have a bad habit of doing the same to the concept of Changes, as if all change is good, no matter what’s being changed or who is changing things.

Technology critics are frequently derided as nostalgists, as if it is absurd on its face to ever believe the past was better than the present. If that’s always a fantasy, then we’re committing to an extremely naive proposition: the present is always better than the past, the future will always be better than the present, and change can only ever be good. But like everything that happens in society, those in power always have the ability to direct change in a way that guarantees their continued power. Shouldn’t we be more skeptical about how society is changing and whose interests it serves?

Another favorite strategy of apologists of technological change is to simultaneously claim that everything is changing and nothing is changing. To give just one recent example, here is another Atlantic blog post by Megan Garber, who reads A Defense of Poetry, an essay by nineteeth century Romantic poet Percy Shelley, as a complaint about information overload. But in the passage that she cites, Shelley is clearly complaining that the excess of one kind of information, about the external world, conceals the real problem, a lack of information about the internal world, something that he believes poetry can remedy.

Shelley points to this lack so that he can ask for more information – poetry “creates new materials of knowledge,” he says. But Garber converts this into the opposite so that she can claim “our complaints [about information overload] have their plus ça change quality.”

But let’s leave aside this problematic reading and accept that people in the past have complained about information overload. Garber puts this fact to a disturbing use: to dismiss it as a problem. We’ve always had this problem, which is evidence that it is not a problem. What other social ills can we dismiss by breezily pointing out that they have been with us for quite some time? Poverty? Ah yes, Dickens’s social commentaries, plus ça change… War? But there was vigorous opposition in New England to the war of 1812. Plus ça change, amirite? Ecological collapse? But humanity has always worried about famine… Plus ça change!

Evidently Garber lives in a world where enduring problems are treated the way jaded teenagers watch summer reruns, dismissed because they are boring. OK sure, maybe there are problems, she says. But you’ll get used to it. The apathy and complacency towards potential harms is the reverse side of enthusiastic, uncritical technophilia, and its purpose is to smooth the path for technological change by disarming critique and eliminating public participation in the development of technologies. Any problems we encounter will be simply, magically overcome, because they always have.

Partly this is an effort to domesticate technology and technological change, a rhetorical assault on technophobia, always posited as pathological. We’re told that we should embrace change, because fearing change is the mark of a conservative mind. Is it really? Maybe technophobes also have their moment of truth. For them, change is difficult, even devastating. Maybe they’re right.

Those who domesticate social change are telling us that nothing is going to happen: “Yes, things will change, but don’t worry about it! Society will adjust and everything will go back to normal.” This is true conservatism. But some are afraid, because they believe change can really happen. (For example, the Tea Party is the only political group that believes in socialism, while progressives continually deny that it is a possibility.)

What if the converse is also true: those who believe in change are afraid, and this is not the same as opposing it. The technophobic nightmare scenarios of machines spinning out of control is not a delusional fantasy. On the contrary, it gives us an extremely accurate psychological representation of what genuine social change entails. The radical step is to simply endorse it. From the standpoint of the old ways, the birth of the New must be subjectively experienced as an apocalyptic event.

A Review of Pixar's Brave

2012-07-15T07:00:00Z

Pixar is incredibly well-regarded, particularly among white middle class progressive voters, and deservedly so. They produce work that has everything that we want in popular entertainment – smart, compelling, meaningful films with artistic merit that can be enjoyed by adults as well as children – and their enormous success gives us a little hope that popular culture can be more than just empty, superficial pleasures that pander to our basest instincts.

But I’m not a Pixar fan. Although I enjoy watching the films and I guess I’m glad they’re making pop culture a little more meaningful, I’m troubled by what those meanings are. When they’re not promoting Objectivism and turning equality into a villian (The Incredibles), they’re subtly stigmatizing the working class (Toy Story) or overtly blaming them for environmental problems (Wall-E). They have a tendency to provide ideological support for inequality, a fact that has apparently gone unnoticed by a large number of ostensibly liberal progressive viewers.

So as a cultural phenomenon, Pixar is uniquely interesting. When talking about how inequality is justified, we almost always focus on right-wing bromides, like how poor people are supposedly lazy or stupid. But the myths that well-meaning, Obama-voting progressives believe are more far-reaching and pernicious because they are universally accepted, rising to the level of ideology in the Althusserian definition of the word of common-sense, unquestioned givens (which is, in a way, the opposite of how it is normally used.)

This is what I was thinking walking into the theatre to see Brave today. Expectations on the internet have been running high: it’s Pixar’s first real female lead, and their (to me, baffling) reputation as a progressive film studio created a lot of excitement. Now, even if I put aside my general skepticism, this seems unrealistic to me. Precisely because they are telling a story with a strong female lead and want it to have wide appeal, they will almost certainly approach the possibility that it would be read as a partisan, political, feminist film with great caution – ironic, considering the title.

And this is what they did. The story centers on the wild, energetic teenage princess, Merida, who chafes under the tutelage of her prim and elegant mother Queen Elinor, who is attempting to train her to become a lady. The tension explodes when Merida’s father informs her that she is to be betrothed to the first-born son of one of the three clans ruled by her father chosen by feats of skill in the Highland Games.

The main difficulty with reading the film as a feminist allegory is that Queen Elinor, represents civilization and the social order, while the father, Fergus is a simple, good-natured, innocently-violent man-child, who just loves telling stories and carousing with his war buddies. Arranged marriage stands for the burden of the patriarchy on women, but the film makes a point of showing how awkwardly and reluctantly he announces the plan, casting glances at his wife as if to say “Do we really have to do this to her?” while she eggs him on.

Later we see Fergus stammer his way through a speech before the assembled clans, and Elinor quietly saves him by giving him the words to say. Both of these scenes reveal that she is ultimately the woman behind the throne. The film hints that Fergus, like Merida, also endures Elinor’s civilizing lessons. The connections between father and daughter don’t stop there. Both have fiery red hair and a wild, fun-loving, independent spirit. Merida’s beloved bow is a gift from Fergus that Elinor feels is inappropriate for a princess. Her skill at archery enables her to symbolically reject her arranged marriage by winning the archery contest among her suitors that is intended to determine her future husband. This is the result of Fergus’ influence and training.

The message is that Father is the avatar of unlimited freedom and fun, and Mother represents duty, oppressive restrictions and limitation. If we read Merida as a younger, female extension of Fergus, then Elinor is the regressive, anti-feminist figure of the emasculating, castrating woman, a connection that the film mystifies by making her target a girl. In a way, the film is structurally anti-feminist, and superficially covers this up by having a girl play the “victim.” This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Elinor is portrayed as well-intentioned but misguided who needs to learn balance, rather than an outright villian.

Elinor does not accept Merida winning her own hand in marriage, and continues to insist that an arranged marriage will go ahead. Merida, furious, runs into the forest and discovers a witch’s hut, who she asks for a spell that would change her mother and her fate. The spell turns Elinor into a bear, an event which has several functions. It serves as an ironic punishment for her excesses and inflexibility, a prim lady being reduced to an animal. Elinor becomes an object of audience amusement and ridicule, as she is shown flailing around the castle as a bear destroying everything in her wake, and later in the forest, attempting to have breakfast with proper table manners.

But there is a deeper, but also ambiguous and confusing symbolism around the transformation of a human into a bear. In trying to persuade Merida to accept the arranged marriage, Elinor recounts the story of a prince who refused his fate of sharing his kingdom with his three brothers, but tried to rule over them. As a result, the whole kingdom was destroyed. After Elinor’s transformation, the witch explains that it had happened before: the spell was also given to the prince in the story, and transformed him into the bear Mor’du.

So the transformation into a bear symbolizes the dangers of hubris and of wanting to change your fate. This raises a question: if it is Merida who wants to change her fate and choose her own husband, why is Elinor punished by becoming a bear? Merida obviously feels remorseful about having done this to her mother, and restoring her to human form is a catalyst for repairing their frayed relationship.

But one can’t help noting the similarity between the prince trying to rule over his three brothers and Elinor’s project of making her husband into a king over the other three clans. We can conclude that Elinor is ultimately punished for her political ambition which has turned her into a figure of castration to her husband and daughter.

Since this is a children’s movie, she gets away with a light slap on the wrist and no permanent harm is done. The spell is broken, and in the final scenes, she gallops ecstatically through the woods alongside her daughter, cured of her chronic uptightness.

In this interpretation, Elinor is the central character of this story, where she is torn between her political amibition and her relationship with her daughter, and punished for making what is supposed to be the wrong choice. This goes against the obvious reading of the story with Merida as the main character, but she never really encounters any difficult choices. The film certainly sets up a seemingly classic tension: Merida faced with the impossible choice between her freedom and her social obligations.

The problem is that for Merida, this isn’t a problem at all. She just refuses her social obligations without so much as batting an eyelash. Ordinarily, a situation like that puts her between a rock and a hard place, where either choice is catastrophic. This is not her situation. The king himself is not enthusiastic about the arranged marriage—he’s reluctant to even bring it up, and during the competition, he and Merida make jokes together at the expense of the pathetic first-born sons.

One would think that the princess refusing to marry one of her suitors would throw the kingdom into crisis, but in Brave, this is not the case. Just the opposite, in fact. Elinor’s plan to have the clans compete for Merida’s hand in marriage sets them against each other, and threatens to tear their fragile alliance apart, and Merida’s announcement that she will choose her husband out of love unifies them again. The problem of an arranged marriage is supposed to create a tension between what the individual wants and what society wants, but this is all sidestepped. Merida’s preferences conveniently and perfectly align with the political problem of keeping the clans together.

The only person who doesn’t see this is Elinor, and the story of Brave is her coming to realize it. The whole point of all that princess training was to force Merida to continue her mother’s political goals, but as Merida’s impassioned speech before the clan leaders reveals, it was unnecessary because she’s already committed to her mother’s goals. On hearing the speech, Elinor immediately abandons her plans for an arranged marriage and allows Merida to announce that she will choose a husband out of love.

The original tension between mother and daughter turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding, and the tension between Merida and her society is also fleeting. This is a cheap way out. Maybe that’s acceptable for a children’s movie, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what to do when those problems are real.

For Elinor, the lesson is profoundly conservative: don’t play too much in the male world of politics and forget your role as mother, or you will be turned into a bear. There are several scenes in the film where Elinor the bear briefly loses touch with her humanity. Her eyes change from human-like colored irises surrounded by white, to the total blackness of a bear’s eyes. In these moments, she suddenly forgets who she is, and attacks her daughter as an enemy. These are powerful scenes, but also deeply manipulative, playing upon a nightmare scenario for any parent, that they would no longer recognize their own child and cause them harm. This is the warning that Brave tries to send to mothers.

To further understand the political meaning of this film, we should note the differences between Elinor and Fergus. Elinor is a figure of discipline, restraint and prohibition, while Fergus revels in enjoyment of all kinds. As Elinor walks into a room, the clansmen are awed by her regal presence. Fergus, although he is the king, is also one of the guys, and thinks nothing of diving into a melee with everyone else. Between these two figures, we have what Lacanians call the society of prohibition, the old world of duty and sacrifice, and the new neoliberal consumer society of mandatory enjoyment that bombards us with demands to express ourselves, seek our own enjoyment, throw off all inhibitions and so on.

Brave makes clear that a critique of the society of prohibition can quite easily be made extremely anti-feminist. But one redeeming feature of the film is that it is set in a time period that is transitioning out of what metaphorically stands for today’s capitalist society, and doesn’t completely reject this change. Even while it resists it, it seems to concede that it is inevitable.