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A shorter weblog for rambly things.
I recently finished a playthrough of Disco Elysium. Amazing writing. Heavy stuff. Strangely hopeful. Structurally, this makes sense. Your character is an absolute wreck, because after repeated attempts at self-destruction you've finally succeeded in temporarily purging your memory and your consciousness, only to be dragged back to the world and the wreck you left behind. The world is not much better, since you're in a decaying part of a city that used to be a world capital and is now an occupied ruin fifty years after a failed revolution. You've alienated everyone. Yet by the end of the game you show others -- and yourself -- that you still have it. You're still a broken man but you can still look upwards and piece yourself back together. And the promise of a second revolution waits somewhere just over the horizon.
Others who have played the game have commented on the writing and how it realistically portrays the experience of alcoholism and addiction, of emotional trauma, and of carrying around pain. I agree, and I love it all the more for it. I have never been an alcoholic, or an addict, but I've had my own heartbreaks in the past, and I feel seen and understood by some of the writing in the game.
I can see that this game is going to live rent-free in my head for a long time.
I received a tablet as a gift, something part of the family got under a package deal because they thought it was a reasonable top-up to get something extra they could give to me. But the tablet is locked-down, without admin rights; certain functions cannot be disabled, and even the wallpaper cannot be changed.
This made me remarkably angry. It wasn't just personal disappointment, or having to tell said family member that their well-intentioned gift was useless for my purposes; it was the idea of selling locked-down hardware as a "free gift", and hardware that could have been full of analytics packages (i.e. stalkerware) for all I know.
The frustrating part is that I doubt I'll ever be able to give the (presumably MBA-type) executive who had the idea to lock down devices like this a piece of my mind. I hate how bureaucracy and the corporate structure, among other things, means a great many people who deserve being told-off personally will never get what they richly deserve.
I came across this paragraph in an opinion piece someone shared on Mastodon:
> It is very difficult for most people used to the industrialised way of life, with its dream of infinite space and its insistence on emancipation and relentless growth and development, to suddenly sense that it is instead enveloped, confined, tucked inside a closed space where their concerns have to be shared with new entities: other people of course, but also viruses, soils, coal, oil, water, and, worst of all, this damned, constantly shifting climate.
This paragraph (and the entire short opinion piece) makes sense, but this also implicitly points to how solipsistic (or sociopathic) the modern, late-capitalist, worldview we've normalised is.
We have always been in a closed biosphere, living not just with other people but with other living things. If we must now adopt a more ecological perspective, and to become more aware of our interdependencies with everyone and everything around us, that in turn signals how we hadn't previously taken any of this seriously at all. We knew, on some level that we shared the world with others, but none of it mattered. Until, suddenly, it did.
It's Christmas again.
The week just ending now was largely spent socialising: unusual enough, that, given events over the past two years or so now. With things as they are I've become much more of a hermit without realising it, entire weeks passing with barely anything but the most limited and desultory interactions with other people outside of my immediate circle. To meet up with a friend or two for dinner basically each evening this week, save one - which in any case was spent with family, rather than alone - it was a sort of unexpected pleasure, but at the same time something that felt strange and unfamiliar, after so long.
Interacting even with old friends felt slightly awkward and stiff, without the same sense of ease that colours my memories; I suspect the long isolation has made me stranger in some way. Interaction smoothens out our rough edges, and so the lack of it has perhaps made me prickly and odd. We become like those we interact with the most; is it so surprising then that it's as though I've become unmoored, and that without realising it, I've drifted some long way away?
But then perhaps this is only the natural result of time. Time is change; as we grow older we continue to change, and so we shouldn't be surprised if we become different from who we were when we were younger - and in the course of doing so become different from those we used to have much in common with.
Apropos of nothing, I found out Starbucks now serves matcha lattes and while they're so-so when iced, they're great when hot.
In a completely different direction from yesterday's comment on breadpunk: I was looking through Benedict Evans' presentation "Three Steps to the Future" which explores "macro and strategic trends in the tech industry" and hoo boy was it depressing or what?
I mean, I do note that it's not "trends in technology", its "trends in the tech *industry*" so quite naturally it is an entirely capitalist endeavour. The words "macro and strategic trends" are, to use someone else's term, management-speak, so it's not like I was expecting anything else going into the presentation.
The discussion of Web3, blockchain/NFTs, the metaverse - all of these are fundamentally about ways to make money. I can understand the latter two, since I've not seen cryptocurrencies and the entire related field as anything other than a wild stonks ride since maybe 2014 or so... but Web3 is depressing. You want to marketise the Internet even further by building payments and artificial scarcity into the network itself?
Imagine if we built a Star Trek replicator - something that could bring us to a post-scarcity environment, even if it had limitations, like not being able to replicate certain types of things - even if a cornucopia could only produce food and not clothes or medicine, it would already be incredibly useful, albeit there would be radical upheaval along the way as a result to our existing food production systems. Now imagine that we collectively decided the best way to deal with post-scarcity abundance *is to enclose and artificially restrict it*.
That was "intellectual property" - this is Moglen's critique - and that's Web3.
> Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility - reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge - at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay.
At times it's difficult not to conclude that this species is well and truly cursed.
*Postscript.* There was a comment a while back in Lee Vinsel's essay, "95 Theses on Innovation", that suggested, among many other interesting things, that managers and executives are always highly keen on innovation, not because they see it as a positive thing, but because they fear being on the receiving end of disruption. Evans' slides on the Great Unbundling and the Internet's effect on sectors beyond the music and movie industry have that same innovation-as-fear, "get going or get eaten" vibe to them.
Capitalism is insecurity even for those at the top, even if their safety nets or buffers may be considerably greater than those available for the rest of us.
I love this paragraph at the end of the "About" page on breadpunk.club -
> Breadpunk rejects the commoditization of life by market capitalism. Breadpunk is an attitude that something our ancestors made largely for free is not something we should be spending money on. Breadpunk is the idea that we have time again, that industrialism gives us time to bake bread.
It can be found at the https link below, as sadly, the Gemini page for breadpunk.club does not have a copy of the manifesto, and instead mostly serves as a directory for its members' Gemini capsules.
My mind has connected this with a number of things. Once again, to Graeber's "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology", and specifically to his characterisation:
1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.
The connection in my mind being that it seems like a common tendency to get caught up in big picture theory and sometimes its refreshing to get back down to earth and ask something like: what's all this material progress for if we have to pay for bread, and badly-made bread made by others for profit (i.e. giving you the least they can for the most they can get) at that? (Not to say that breadpunk is anarchist, only that the one reminded me of the other - not too surprising given e.g. Kropotkin's *The Conquest of Bread*.)
The other connection in my mind is to Eben Moglen's suggestion in his essay, '"Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought', that hacker culture is concerned with proof of concept and running code.
> Practical revolution, the friends and colleagues with whom I have been working for the past 20 years have shown, practical revolution is based upon two things: proof of concept and running code. That is to say: do it first and allow the implications of what has been done to settle in. Technology, unlike the Hegelian or Marxian flow of history, technology itself is irreversible. That which we have is ours--not a dream--it belongs to us: it runs; we use it.
E. Gabriella Coleman points to this in her book, *Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacker Culture* and notes that the free software movement acts as a "politics of critique" of intellectual property laws by way of a living counterexample.
I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's *The Remains of the Day*. Despite being quite readable and quick to go through, I ended up taking longer to finish it than I would have expected, mostly because I put it down for a while before picking it back up to finish it. That happens for all sorts of reasons; in this case I think it was because the book affected me more than I thought it would.
Why it affects me as much as it does, though - that I'm still trying to figure out.
It's probably just because of the subtle pathos of the story, which I read as one of a man who has given the best years and the best efforts of his life in service to the wrong person and the wrong causes, in pursuit of noble but ultimately misguided ideals regarding dignity and service, and who has to face what he gave up on and lost.
On another level I wonder if I'm projecting, and seeing myself in the protagonist. The idea of bending one's shoulder to the wheel, in pursuit of an ideal, but realising afterwards that one has ignored the signs that one's loyalties and service have gone to the wrong person - I very briefly mentioned in end-Nov that I've been thinking about my work and career, and whether I really want to become (more) like the others I see at work - so I suppose seeing the aftermath of someone else, even fictional, who devoted their best efforts to the wrong cause, well, that scares me. Because I worry that could be me.
I was thinking that some of the readings that influenced me the most this year were Mumford's essay on authoritarian and democratic technics, Ivan Illich's *Tools for Conviviality*, and Graeber's "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology". (There may be some recency bias with the last one.)
Some of the other things I can recall reading offhand? John Hick's *Evil and the God of Love* (on theodicy, which I keep meaning to finish my draft essay on) and Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology". Bataille's *The Accursed Share*. Girard's *Violence and the Sacred*. I got through half of Timothy Morton's *Ecology Without Nature*, and to my surprise thought of it offhand the other day while discussing conservationists in my area with some friends. But these, while interesting, probably didn't have as much influence on my thought as the former.
When I think about the things I've read this year I sometimes wonder if it's possible for us to truly explain ourselves to someone else. During discussions I sometimes feel that when we discuss things it's always coming from not just personal experiences but also from the things we read. To have read the same things, and to have enjoyed and gotten something from the same books and essays, seems to me to be the same as sharing underlying context for how we view things. I feel like it's just easier to be understood when we don't have to re-explain our underlying premises and worldview.
I've been reading Graeber and Wengrow's *The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity* and it's been an enjoyable experience.
One of the strangely difficult things to do in conversation with people is to convince them that things can be otherwise than they are. There's a distinct and almost reflexive lack of imagination; even if alternatives do occur, its easy to shrug them off as impractical or unrealistic. The most valuable part of Graeber and Wengrow's book, to me, is how much it reopens the imagination as to possible social and political arrangements, simply because of how they bring in a great variety of examples to show how other societies across human history have organised things differently.
(This isn't even the main thrust of their book, which they explain is more about how people got "stuck" in a fixed way of thinking about social and political arrangements, but it's nice.)
There is a lurking objection, namely: examples of other arrangements don't transfer well to modern society, with our advanced manufacturing, our smartphones, our scale, etc. -- it's possible Graeber and Wengrow will turn to this objection later. But in any case this is better addressed by Graeber's separate essay, "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology", which deals with this and related questions much more directly. (And as I write this I realise I am definitely reading *The Dawn of Everything* in light of "Fragments".)
Over the past few weeks the thing I've been thinking most of is community, mostly because I don't feel I have the right one where I live right now, and my grudging acceptance of the local "normal" has corroded into contempt. I'd like to meet more people who share the same perspectives I do, a community I can belong to without reservation because I identify with them, and not just because I happened to be thrown amongst them by life.
It's the end of the year. I don't really feel like time has moved forward at all. It's been cyclical, not linear: we're back where we were this time last year. The colouring is different but the lines are the same, we're all still dealing with the ongoing global pandemic in the background, still struggling with the dead hand of the Boomer generation before we all boil alive in our own heat exhaust.
On the bright side, the sunsets the past few days have been lovely, clear blue skies through the blinds, the reflected light a warm, golden glow. A sign that there is still more beyond what we have built around ourselves, or perhaps just a pretty glow for a slow apocalypse.
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