by Jackson Arn

Slurs have a way of mellowing into labels. History is full of Yankees and Cockneys, Methodists and Jesuits, Whigs and Tories, who steal a term of abuse and apply it to themselves as an act of sardonic revenge. Sometimes the tactic works too well, and people forget that the word was ever tainted. And sometimes the definition changes so many times people lose count, and the word is left to drag a muddle of meanings behind it.

“System” is such a word. Its DNA is full of recessive genes ready to reappear in the next generation. It suggests the banal and the sinister equally, a low, humming scientism and a hiss of danger. Politicians use it with both connotations in mind, sometimes both at once. Immigrants, trans activists, thwarted unionists are advised to have faith in the system, even as other politicians mock them for gaming it—can the two systems really be the same? Political science majors, not yet disillusioned, dream about the day they’ll change the system from within. In 1969, Bill Clinton, 23 years old and already impatiently waiting to be president, wrote, “I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.” Today, everyone seems to agree that the system, whatever it might be, is rigged. The word’s ambiguity is its longevity.

From the Greek: sun, meaning “with,” and histanal, meaning “set up, stand”—thus, a whole made out of parts, standing together. Which parts, and why they stand together, is left unclear—an ambiguity the rest of the sentence is supposed to correct but rarely does. This ambiguity is a part of the modern condition, since modernity depends on systems. Systems, rather than deities or monarchs, keep us safe: systems, for which individual parts are important but never all-important; systems, whose purpose, by definition, cannot be found in any single one of these parts.

Modernity is supposed to be an age of science, and the recent history of science is largely a history of systems. The word is already there, waiting for someone to connect the pieces: 1543, the solar system; 1628, the circulatory system; 1900, the nervous system; 1902, the endocrine system; 1956, the earliest mention of computer systems. In 1962, a NASA technician became the first person to say, “All systems go,” which isn’t a bad description of modernity itself. Read more »

Anab Jain & Superflux. The Madison Flying Billboard Drone, 2015.

” … So there are five drones, and each of these drones is designed to embody specific tasks and functions that are already gaining popularity. We are not trying to imagine new roles for drones; we are trying to build them as consumer products. The aesthetic we’ve chosen is not a hacked DIY aesthetic, but instead a carefully designed consumer product aesthetic.

Madison, the flying billboard or the advertising drone, is a hovering display platform; it uses sophisticated facial recognition to cater advertising to the interests of those that it’s around. And companies could probably hire it, and have it beam its advertisements out to people, by farming all potential data from all these potential consumers.”

More here, here, and here.

by Eric Miller

1.

A robin in the floating height of a pine warbled its fat phrases of three and, with its chest matching the tint of twilight clouds and light on leaves and houses—a lucent, resinous colour such as collected at the lower tip of every cone—, it seemed at once the motivation and the record of the fall of night.

Cartwheeling girls were to be expected. I knew, as one of the few boys in the neighbourhood, girls are more athletic than boys. They spun across the thick grass, not all grass, not meticulously kept; they spun beneath the widow’s white pine, she did not mind all the kids on her grass or depending like apes from her tree. A scent of crushed stems (in equal parts acrid and balmy), the clover-like odour of sweat in hair, made the affinity of plants and us amenable of olfactory proof.

The hill behind the widow’s house, pressing a slow muzzle to its foundation, distorted the building’s shape amiably—amiably, that is, to outward inspection. There must have been interior cracks and derangements. I have no evidence. I never went into it, only looking at it from the porch, or aslant from a higher elevation than the wrested roof. The widow had red hair, redder at dusk.

One girl especially was a virtuoso of jumping rope. She sang out the lyric that helped coordinate her steps; she might have been a sword-dancer, she was so agile; I listened for how her confident rendition of the rhyme became intermitted with gasps as, her pace not slacking, her smile brightening while she held it, her eyes contemptuous of any downward glance, her exertion made her fetch air harder into her lungs. The lyric went, Or-di-na-ry sec-re-ta-ry. Here was nothing ordinary, I would be happy to be its secretary: which has the word “secret” bosomed in it. Besides, I knew that secretaries were among the kindest people in the world. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

If you’ve any familiarity with the history of economic theory, you’ll no doubt have heard of the idea of the “Invisible Hand”. The image was introduced by Adam Smith in his masterwork The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Smith suggests that, even though each individual participant in a market may be pursuing their own individual benefit, by doing so they are in fact maximizing the benefit for society as a whole:

[Each] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

The willingness of many on the Right to embrace the notion of the Invisible Hand strikes me as odd, given the unwillingness of many of those same thinkers to countenance the possibility of, to take one salient recent example, systemic racism.

In other words, thinkers on the Right often have a quasi-religious faith in positive market outcomes that transcend the self-serving intentions of the individuals making open those markets. This faith, however seems inconsistent with the flat rejection, by those on the Right, of other systemic effects in which individual agents might give rise to negative outcomes — again, not through any intentions of theirs on an individual level, but rather through the unintended consequences of their group-level interactions.

At the same time, on the Left, there at least at times seems to be a parallel unwillingness to recognize that, if the negative consequences of a certain institution are in fact systemic, then moralizing about the individuals involved in those institutions is likely misplaced. Furthermore, such moralizing will also likely be counterproductive, as it is difficult to change the mind of someone that you’re busy demonizing. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

Last month’s most popular movie on Netflix is a horror show in the guise of a documentary.  In 2020, reality has turned scarier than fiction, and The Social Dilemma expends more dread per minute than any episode of Black Mirror. It’s a timely, manipulative film, built for one purpose: to scare the f*ck out of everyday Americans.

Directed by Jeff Orlowski, The Social Dilemma draws authority from an impressive group of Big Tech apostates—ex-employees of Google and Facebook ilk—who, in a series of pull-back-the-curtain interviews, lay bare the evils of social media and its attendant technologies. The fact that services like Facebook and Tik Tok are addictive by design will surprise few viewers. What’s unique to the film is its interweaving of a fictional morality tale, a gloomy mini drama about a suburban every-family caught in the throes of social media addiction.

The teenage son can’t resist looking at his ex-girlfriend’s Instagram. The youngest daughter, a middle-schooler, obsesses over the perfect selfie while the oldest daughter, a college-aged know-it-all, criticizes the rest of the family for succumbing to “surveillance capitalism.” The watchful mother does what little she can to connect with her eternally distracted children. These are cardboard characters, but the fictional scenes counterbalance the Ted Talk feel of the interviews and allow for a nimble back-and-forth between explanation and illustration, telling and showing. It’s an effective formula. Read more »

This photo reminded me of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (see image in first comment) and appropriately, it was taken yesterday (Sunday) afternoon at the Lido in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Alexander C. Kafka

David Byrne’s artistry has always had a living-room intimacy, reflected in the delightful cover photos of the 1982 double-live album The Name of This Band Is the Talking Heads. In the midst of a pandemic, inviting him into our space — or being invited into his — is exactly the therapy the world needs.

American Utopia is Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, which was itself derived from a concert tour off his 2018 album. That included 10 tracks lasting shy of 40 minutes. The Broadway show has 21 tracks at 90 minutes, wrapping in decades of hits and lesser-known tunes from Talking Heads and solo projects. 

The work is political without stridency, with Byrne celebrating the cast’s immigrant origins, urging the audience to vote, and pulling in “Hell You Talmbout,” Janelle Monae’s protest song against racist and police violence. Like the upside-down poster lettering of the word “Utopia,” the production is tensely, tentatively optimistic — the implicit message being that America remains deeply, spasmodically screwed up, but that its better nature, its innocence, still pulses. 

Byrne begins Spalding Gray-ishly, sitting behind a desk and holding the model of a brain. He explains that we lose cerebral synapses after infancy and wonders whether we just plateau into stupidity or if the connections that start within us extend outward between us. For an artist who has speculated that he is on the mild end of the autism spectrum, this preoccupation with connection has both personal and ideological resonance. Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

Whether a data-driven nudge diminishes my agency turns on more than just its algorithmic origin.

With the US Presidential Election and other national contests a mere weeks away, voter persuasion efforts of all stripes are at a peak. While traditional methods of pressing the flesh (but not too literally these days — COVID and all) and handwritten postcard appeals abound, bespoke data-driven means of reaching voters have surged. And although some platforms have banned political advertising since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, not all have. 

The targeted ads aren’t restricted to politics, of course. Our social media feeds are cultivated to show the best balance and order of posts for us as individuals, those of our connections peppered with well-placed content to pique our clicking interests and keep us scrolling, all to increase platform profits. Meanwhile your watch has reminded you to stand up. But, it’s not all bad, you say. Sure I may have wasted a regrettable amount of time checking out house renovation reveals. But I also found those cute burgundy Oxford shoes and that algorithm-promoted post by a friend on algorithmic bias was deliciously ironically useful. 

So when does influence undermine my choice? What makes some choices my own and other choices problematically of outside origination?  Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Today in the United States is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a time to bear witness and remember the savagery of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers when they first encountered indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. It’s also a day to recognize and celebrate the courage, knowledges, and cultures of indigenous peoples throughout the world. It coincides with Columbus Day, a national holiday that triggers a day of protests and celebratory parades, rekindles debates about removing statues of Christopher Columbus from parks, squares and circles throughout the United States, and provokes critical discussions about the kind of stories we should be teaching the Nation’s children about his earliest encounters with indigenous communities.

The controversies surrounding Columbus Day should be seen as part of a larger struggle for the integrity of history education, historical research, national identity, and collective memory. Historians and American history teachers are the official guardians of the Nation’s collective historical memory; they are the defenders of historical facts and truths regardless of how ugly, embarrassing, or in contradiction they might be to the Nation’s distorted ideological view of itself. They are the essential workers of any free society and must be allowed to remain beyond the influence of state and corporate power. If Trumpists get their way, the struggle over the integrity of the “official” American history curriculum as well as how it is taught will get harder, more urgent, and dangerous.

Although American history curriculum has always been a site of ideological struggle, historians, history teachers, and curriculum designers have done a good job over the past several decades to revise many historical inaccuracies, distortions, and lies that helped whitewash the historical record in the service of white, male, imperialistic, and neoliberal interests. But with Trump’s latest decree to create a “1776 Commission” charged to design a “pro-American” curriculum of American history coupled with his promise to defund schools that use the 1619 Project as well as other curricular platforms that bring attention to historical facts and truths that counter the “official” curriculum, the Nation’s collective historical memory is under siege with public schools at the center of the assault. Whether Trump and the GOP actually care about how American history is represented and taught in schools or whether they are just cynically using the issue to create a political wedge between people who may otherwise be allied to vote against Trump in November is irrelevant. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the fourth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Tabea Bakeua lives in Kiribati, a North Pacific atoll nation. Her country is likely to be the first to disappear completely under the rising seas within a few decades. Asked by foreign documentary filmmakers if she “believes” in climate change, Bakeua considers and tells them, “I have seen climate change, the consequences of climate change. But I don’t believe it as a religious person. There’s a thing in the Bible, where they say that god sends this person to tell all the people that there will be no more floods. So I am still believing in that.” She smiles, self-consciously, as she continues. “And the reason why I am still believing in that is because I’m afraid. And I don’t know how to get all my fifty or sixty family members away from here.” She’s still smiling as tears fill her eyes. “That’s why I’m afraid. But I’m putting it behind me because I just don’t know what to do.” She turns, apologetically, to wipe away her tears. [from “The Tropical Paradise Being Swallowed By The Pacific” by Journeyman Pictures]

***

Bakeua’s response is one of many that people now have about anthropogenic climate change. Grasping for magic or miracles in the face of destruction and helplessness, her narrative is common among her hundred thousand fellow citizens. Having remained self-sufficient and sustainably prosperous in their way of life for thousands of years—while contributing effectively zero carbon emissions—they will abruptly be left with nothing as the encroaching tides sweep their lands out from under them, sacrificing their islands for the greater prosperity of other countries. The people of Kiribati played no part in triggering this annihilation and have no way of withstanding it. Nor is the international community throwing them a life raft—through compensatory rights to lands, housing, livelihoods, and autonomy, elsewhere, as would be just—nor even expressing any meaningful concern for their plight.

How did we get to this tragic moment? Read more »

by David Oates

We live in The Year Of Overlapping Catastrophes. Oh 2020, we know ye all too well. The pandemic, our very own plague. Economic depression. A quasi-fascistic con man at the head of government. The discovery that perhaps forty percent of our fellow Americans are truth-hating dupes and low-information racists. (Brits too. Decline of the Anglophone empire?)

Oh, and behind all that: The overheating of the entire planet. Collapse of ecosystems. That slow-motion master-problem that too many of us have tried to keep from facing.

Reader, it’s too much to bear. So I’m going to sound one frail note  – offer one flutelike moment of optimistic maybe-ing. I’m going to nominate our plague for a noble prize: The Plague That Saved The World.

* * *

Sometimes things are moving in the opposite direction than they seem to be.

Ancient astronomers knew that the planets sometimes appeared to be traveling  backwards against the starry background. This “retrograde motion” caused no end of head-scratching and the invention of ingenious explanations and visualizations – little wheels within big ones, and so forth.

In the crazymaking experience of actually living through our moment of history, one of the reasons we never know for sure what’s happening is that outcomes are sometimes perversely ironic: i.e., the opposite of what one might have expected. Retrograde. Of course most of the time, awfulness follows awfulness, predictable suffering hard on the heels of ignorance and greed. Most of the time.

The exceptions are what drive us mad with maybeing, with hoping against hope. History is studded with oddly salubrious side-effects to truly awful happenings. For instance, The Renaissance (worthy of a cap on the article surely), seems to have entirely ironic parentage. The fall of Constantinople in 1453? Terrible. But… to escape the Ottomans, classical scholars scurried off to Italy carrying armloads of ancient Greek and Latin texts. And suddenly Italy is rereading its past. . . and producing the present. Our present. Read more »

Getting Sealegs

topside sun’s brilliant
as it’ll almost ever be
on ship’s steel
on deep see

I never knew
that things could (at once)
still & moving be

motion’s feel out here
is constant news to me

sound of sea-slaps-hull
within sheer three sixty hoop
that hems hull and me
all new
………….unconsciously
whatever’s ever beyond horizon’s crease
is null unknown,
but may be key
.

Jim Culleny
3/23/18

by Michael Liss

There are times where we are simply unable to surpass our elders.

“Corrupt” doesn’t capture it. Neither does any other epithet or adjective or modifier you care to couple with corrupt. When it came to ballot stuffing, voter suppression, intimidation, bribes, and just garden variety mendacity, the Election of 1876 had it all.

In some respects, this all makes perfect sense. In 1876, America is seething. It is the last year of the (impressively corrupt) Grant Administration, early in the Gilded Age, where the buying and selling of virtually everything is more a question of price than right or wrong. Reconstruction has been a mess: eight of the former Confederate States have thrown off their “Carpetbagger” governments and are now controlled by “Redeemers,” the same old folks that seceded from the Union after Lincoln was elected. The substantive meaning of the 14th and 15th Amendments as they relate to former slaves has evaporated in most places. There is xenophobia and anti-Catholic agitation and the continued threat of violence. And there is a dawning realization that the two-party system no longer sorts itself out with consistency when addressing the growing divide between the rich and poor, labor and capital, industrialized vs. agrarian, hard money vs. soft, lavish spending on internal improvements vs. frugality, and so on.

It is still possible for Republicans to ”wave the bloody shirt” and recall the Civil War, but a surprising number of former adversaries are finding common interests that seem to supersede allegiance to whatever uniforms they previously wore. Democrats have been shut out of the Presidency since James Buchanan, but, in 1874, at the height of the recession caused by the Panic of 1873, they rode a Blue Wave to control of the House. Is 1876 the year they can break the Republicans’ iron lock, especially with federal troops still propping up Reconstructionist governments in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana? Read more »

by R. Passov

“In … economics we are faced with … a need for accurate forecasts, yet our ability to predict the future has been found wanting”

—Systems Economics: D. Orrell and P. McSharry, International Journal of Forecasting, Vol 25 (2009)

*          *          *          *

The Stanford Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Economics (2018) stabs at a definition of the science:

… At first glance, the difficulties in defining economics may not appear serious. Economics is, after all, concerned with aspects of the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of commodities and services. But this claim and the terms it contains are vague…

Stanford [] portrays economics as a new science only coming into its own under Adam Smith, whose work “… offers a systematic Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

In Smith’s economics, an actor led by an “…Invisible Hand…intending only his own gain … gives rise to regularities …”

These “…regularities…” – the unintended consequences of individual choices – “…give rise to an object of scientific investigation.”

The individual choices, it can be argued, are the domain of contemporary Microeconomics while the regularities to which they give rise, might in some sense be our Macroeconomics.

*          *          *          *

Smith, a jocular, bulbous-nosed Scotsman, after graduating from Oxford in 1748 parlayed a penchant for soap-box speeches into a professor-ship at the University of Glasgow. There he rose to Chair of Philosophy. Economics would wait until 1903 when, finally, Cambridge set it apart from the moral sciences.

In 1759 Smith produced a work entitled “A Theory of Moral Sentiments” in which he mused on “… how a man who is interested chiefly in himself [can] make moral judgements that satisfy other people.”

His answer: “When people confront moral choices they imagine an Impartial Spectator who … advises them…Instead of following their self-interest, they take the imaginary observer’s advice,” and in so doing, “…decide on the basis of sympathy, not selfishness.”

After publishing Moral Sentiments, Smith followed the money. For two years, he wandered through France tutoring the son of a gentlemen who, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, devised the tax policies that sparked the Boston Tea Party.

During his wanderings Smith sought, among others, Hume, Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. After exhausting his stipend, he spent a decade socializing at the Literary Club of London, turning his notebooks into The Wealth of Nations. The Impartial Spectator morphed into the Invisible Hand. Empathy turned into self-interest. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

A system update recently downloaded to my cellphone included artificial intelligence capable of facial recognition. I know this because, when I subsequently opened the “Gallery” function to send a photograph, I discovered that the refurbished app had taken it upon itself to create a new “album” (alongside “Camera”, “Downloads” and “Screenshots”) called “Stories”, within which I found assemblages of my own pictures, culled from all of those other albums and assorted thematically, evidently because they depicted identical, or similar, figures.

These AI-authored visual narratives had been given names, for the most part simply the date on which the visual elements had been created or sourced. In one case, where that date was associated on the template calendar with a particular observance, the “story” had been given that name: “Father’s Day,” for instance, had more or less accurately assembled photographs of me and my brother at an eponymous event; in another, a collection of snaps of my kids at various ages, the algorithm had wanly suggested “Memories” as an appropriate title, while, perplexingly, pictures taken during a family holiday in Riga had been collected under the inscription “The Royal St. John’s Regatta”, presumably because an event by that name had also taken place somewhere on the day date-stamped on my rainy Baltic souvenirs.

The “story” that bemused me most, however, had been given the title “Dog Days” (or “Hundetage”, since I have yet to change the operating-system language on the apparatus I purchased here in Zurich). “Dog Days” contained a collection of all of the pictures of dogs to be found on my phone: of which there is a surprisingly large number, given my own deficient ability to form an affective connection to animals, house pets included.

I had apparently taken and stored photographs of my mother-in-law’s dogs, past and present, as well as of a friend’s tiny Bolonka, which had pantingly accompanied us on a recent hike in the Emmental hills, although she was for the most part transported up to alpine meadows in a brocade bag. There was also an assortment of humorous dog “memes” for the robot to select from, which I had screenshotted for the ephemeral amusement of various correspondents.

Now, among the items from which this canine fumetto had been composed, one stood out: in part because it was in black and white, a rare effect these days; and in part because its subject was manifestly human. In fact it was a close-up of me, age 14, which I had re-photographed from an analogue snapshot in my father’s collection for a purpose now forgotten. Read more »

by Philip Graham

FRONT PORCH

Tucked away in my mind is a secret neighborhood, with a winding street plan that arranges all the music that I have come to love. It’s a sprawling, noisy place, block after block of obscure or popular songs, odd genres or unusual instruments that I have listened to over a lifetime. Back in 1968, though, when I was beginning to develop my musical tastes, I spent most of my time in the House of Psychedelia, absorbing the trippy music that was so popular at the time, in a house that resembled a cross between a Buckminster Fuller dome and a Silly Putty dream of Frank Gehry.

My secret neighborhood also included the House of Pedal Steel Guitar—a ramshackle affair, its front porch empty except for a single rocking chair—which I walked past without regret. Why would I enter? Though the instrument’s sliding notes might soar as fluidly as a human voice, as far as I was concerned it was little better than the handmaiden of a musical genre beloved by love-it-or-leave-it racist conservatives.

But one day I took a few tentative steps from the sidewalk to the edge of the front porch.

Why?

Sweetheart of the Rodeo, by the Byrds.

I had faithfully followed the band’s invention of folk rock to their birthing of psychedelic rock, so when they decided to audaciously fuse rock and country, I was willing to follow, though not without some hemming and hawing. Read more »

by Brooks Riley