Change Is Why We Exist, Composing a History, 06/08/2018

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting quite as frequently lately. This is because I’m in the process of amping my philosophical social media beyond a new threshold. Can’t say anything at the moment because all the infrastructure isn’t yet in place, but it’ll be a pretty radical project.

The blog itself will keep going. I’m not sure if I’ll port all the entries over to the new main home of my online philosophy and activism. For one thing, I kind of like the retro feel of continuing to publish first-draft versions of some content that will appear in a more high profile place.

For another thing, there are nearly 1300 posts in the entire history of this blog and I suspect porting all that content to the new site will be fucking hard.

Yes, I know. Even lower overhead than this. Have you seen my apartment?

I started this blog with a specific purpose of simply motivating me to write something creative every day. At the time, I really needed that motivation. The conventional paths of a university career were shutting down for me, and what I thought was decent preparation to find decent work outside that sector turned out to be incredibly inadequate. I had no idea what to do.

Short version – I was mad depressed. There was a period of three days in May 2013 where I literally didn’t leave my bed except to go to the bathroom. I hardly ate. All I knew was that I still loved creative work, I still loved philosophy. Philosophical thinking, writing. Same with narrative storytelling. So I needed something to focus my mind and keep me feeling like I was doing something more than treading water.

Since then, Adam Writes Everything has been an essential centre of gravity that my creative life could orbit. It was a machine that kept me thinking, that kept my brain active. It became a tool that helped transform my own thinking and research process, and make it a lot better.

Blogging introduced a kind of recursiveness to my thinking, encouraging me to experiment with how concepts and techniques could fit together. It helped me refine my writing style into something less burdened by academicians’ conventions. It helped me figure out what kind of writing I could do that I hadn’t tried before. It helped me learn how to write for the internet.

It’s taken a long time, and there have been a lot of setbacks along the way. But I’m now at last in a situation where I can centre myself, feel confident in what I’m doing, and have enough financial security that I can put a small investment into a business like the media project you’re about to see by – I hope – Labour Day weekend.

I’m not the first with an idea like this, and I won’t be the last. But it’ll be good listening, and a strong model. My overhead is lower than my predecessors, and we can reach more people than ever before.

Under the Paving Stones I: Sadly High Probability, A History Boy, 12/03/2018

I’m Canadian, not French. So Utopias isn’t going to wade into all the different interpretations, causes, conditions, effects, and affects of the Paris revolutionary riots of May 1968. But I have to bring in a little history.

Because my own political thinking uses a lot of the concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in the 1970s, May ’68 is a touchstone, a material condition. Anti-Œdipus was a product of the Paris popular uprising, so the social dynamics that brought it about conditioned the creation of the book and its concepts.

Paris’ May uprising was a unique event. Its uniqueness was in how remarkably unlikely the movement’s coalition was – not only the radical communist activists, but also business management students and all the factory workers in the city.

Growing up in Canada, the American narrative of 1960s protests
dominated cultural discussion of that era. The cultures of Europe
were so different that they didn't get much airtime.

That massive improbability was a product of unique and complex conditions that are practically unrepeatable in their exact form. Activists – a primer in two parts on how to learn from history.
• • •
I first learned about May ’68 in an undergraduate political science course – specifically about political behaviour, an introduction to how political scientists investigate how people vote, protest, and get involved with government. It was introduced to me entirely in its dimension as a student movement.

At the time, I worked for a campus newspaper. So part of my job was to report on the activities of the university student union. I found the whole institution* a mess of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

* Yes, that is seriously still their website. It's really sad.

I couldn’t take seriously the idea that a student movement could organize anything sanely, let alone offer up a genuinely inspirational new form of politics. Here was the environment where I was building my first fully self-conscious political conscience, at least regarding student movements.

It’s 2003, 2004. The Iraq War has mobilized a lot of people to fight the myopic imperialism of the W Bush Administration. Among my student union is a sizeable plurality of folks who are dedicated social activists, for whom the campus activists of the 1960s – Abbie Hoffmann, Angela Davis, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – were role models.

Unfortunately, the sudden end of the oil boom three years ago returned
austerity politics to the governance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuition rose again, as rural Newfoundland returned to mass
unemployment, making those CFS messages about increasingly
inaccessible education or unsustainable student debt levels
finally relevant to people's real concerns there. Not exactly how
I would have liked to see the CFS and Newfoundland harmonize.

They worked to put the student union on the progressive side of a revolution against empire and militarism. They did organize some quality anti-war activism. But most of their economic activism was hamstrung by having to stick to a strict script provided by the Canadian Federation of Students – “Students are hurting from high tuition rates! Grants, not loans! Lower tuition!”

Fine for Ontario, reeling from public service cuts after a decade of Mike Harris’ austerity policies. Ridiculous in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland was kicking into an oil-driven economic boom, and Roger Grimes’ governing Liberal Party was reversing its own austerity policies from the Brian Tobin years. My tuition rates went down 25% in the first three years of the century and stayed frozen for a decade.

Social conditions like this couldn’t even unify a students’ union. The dedicated revolutionaries were a vocal minority in a union dominated by residence hall party planners, and middle-of-the-road nerds who wanted to make sure the food court and convenience store kept running smoothly. Plus a couple of man-children and one or two hyper-conservative extremists.

This taught me that there was nothing special about the student movement. So I thought that the paradigm Student Movements™ – France’s May ’68 and the USA’s protests against the Vietnam War – were similar chaotic messes and failures.

The idea of “the student movement” in popular culture is that universities are inherently subversive spaces originates from the Paris Uprising and Antiwar Movement’s model example in Western culture today.

But in real life, the circumstances that made those remarkable movements possible were unique and improbable processes.

The Paris Uprisings of 1968, for example, were made possible by the Algerian War. Ian Buchanan taught me that.

A Continuous World of So Many, A History Boy, 13/02/2018

One of the most important insights a person should have in the 21st century if you want to settle yourself, and give yourself come perspective, is this – Accept the continuity between humanity and other species.

Now, I’m not just talking about human-ape proximity. Though I am. All too often we forget how close we are to primates, how similar they are to us. All too often, we know how close we are to primates, and acknowledge it in the worst way. All too typical of us, I should say.

Seeing the continuity of your own life with that of an orangutan
isn't all that hard – they're laughing, silly, joyful, and quietly
experience such an enlightened wisdom of knowing that a loving,
silly, joyful life is the best one for creatures like us.
They're what we aspire to be.

The continuity I’m talking about today has much earlier roots, and much deeper in our bodies. Literally and figuratively.

I spent quite a few years studying philosophy of mind, and one reason I walked away from that as a major research focus was frustration – Frustration that so many researchers ignored the obvious answer to so many of their problems.

So many discussions I had and papers I read about the “hard problem” of consciousness fell to dust to me as I accepted that the human mind is a perceptual field. Our thoughts aren’t just in our heads. Our brains and nervous system develop through environmental interaction. They continue to function through complex feedback loops that we’ve been refining for our entire lives.

Henri Bergson was on to a similar way of thinking. He just expressed it in a totally different way.

The tragedy of Bergson is that he so radically misapplied true and valid philosophical principles of becoming. In the most notorious* example from his work – No Henri, the cause of life getting more complicated isn’t a force of life energy constantly struggling against the inertia of matter’s torpor.

* And simplest to explain.

But yes, large amounts of matter interacting in complex systems that constantly generate energy – say, from giant balls of gas falling in on themselves until they become nuclear fusion furnaces that can be stable for billions of years – tend to become more complex over time.

Here's the life story behind that set of links. At 21, mystified why Chalmers
thought consciousness was a hard problem at all. At 22, puzzled why Putnam
even had to argue that meaning was more than thoughts or neuronal flickers.
At 23, Merleau-Ponty gave me a wonderful vocabulary to let me walk away
from Chalmers’ limited point of view. At 24, learning the biological ground
of that wonderful vocab from Varela. At 25, learning the power and ubiquity
of life and memory to grow, refine, and develop a creature thanks to Allen
and Hofstatder. If you let the problems be your guide, you’ll figure them
out. Don’t specialize too early.

Bergson’s ideas are much more useful today – better applicable to the current state of human science, where we understand that complexity really is everywhere. And his concepts of what consciousness is, and what its roots are, matter today too.

Think about Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness – that a scientific understanding of consciousness will never help us understand the experience of consciousness. An essential premise of that concept is unspoken, but necessary for someone to arrive at that concept at all.

Consciousness is exclusively human, and only humans experience the world as a phenomenal sensory field. Absolutely untrue.

Everything that is capable of action in response to external stimuli – whose reaction to fields of force and affects in its environment – is conscious. That covers every organism. Humans have peculiarly complicated and complex perceptual fields, because we’ve refined our powers of communication and memory with language and technology.

But all those actions are mechanisms. They aren’t deterministic in the most strict sense, because organic responses are based on feedback loops – previous responses condition future responses. The feedback loop is the most rudimentary form of memory.

Even the simplest organisms perceive because their responses are actions – the movement of response itself originates internally and kicks off a feedback loop of the organism with its environment which couples them into a single dynamic field.

Add Bergson to the history I’ve strung together. Even if he might not have realized he’d become a member.

Can a Philosopher Let Herself Trust? A History Boy, 07/02/2018

After a very intense post yesterday, I want to relax a little bit. So I’m going to talk about the philosophical implications or mutual expressions of Riemannian geometry.

That's a serious joke. See, I’ve studied mathematics as someone learning about mathematics. So I know how to follow and read equations, I can see what a given operation is doing in a particular step, I can look back at the whole thing and have a decent idea of how you got from the beginning to end.

Here's how Deleuze described how Riemann changed the way people
did geometry. How he shook it to its core. Geometry had traditionally
been about the construction of different shapes. But Riemann figured
out a way to study mathematically space itself, how to construct
different spaces as well as different shapes, to see how different
shapes would behave in different spaces. A whole new axis of
complexity in geometrical possibility.

If I read the history or philosophy of mathematics, I can understand all the concepts fairly easily. I have to think a bit about it, but as long as the writer is reasonably competent, I can understand what they’re talking about.

It’s like being able to read a language, but not speak it.

I know enough mathematics to know that I’d be a terrible mathematician. When it comes to mathematics, I rely on colleagues I can trust. I run an idea by them – sometimes on a space like this blog. I ask them to comment, give a few thoughts. Tell me if I’m on the right track – definitely if I’m missing something.

I feel like university-trained researchers – I’m talking especially about the humanities and social sciences – get trapped in some paradoxes. Quite a lot of them. This one is mistaking a need to build expertise for your job, for expertise being the necessary condition of saying anything at all.

For instance, my case. If I were at a research conference, and there was a talk on some really interesting ideas in philosophy of mathematics in an otherwise lacklustre timeslot, I’d probably go. I’m pretty sure I have gone.

Sometimes – not all the time – folks would react with astonishment that I’d go see a talk in a field in which I wasn’t some level of expert. I do political theory, ethics, European thought, philosophy of ecology and biology.* Why would I go to a math theory talk?

* The people who know philosophy of ecology and biology would know that you have to understand mathematics at least as well as I do. But anyway.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity

My best friends in the university sector would, if that slot was lacklustre for them too, consider coming to the math theory talk with me. But others have been incredulous. As if the only thing you were allowed to be curious about anymore was what you were already an expert in.

Gilles Deleuze was a much better mathematician than I am. He studied mathematics well enough to teach it at the secondary level in France, which is more than I ever managed.

Study of Gottfried Leibniz’s work on differential calculus and Bernhard Riemann’s heterogeneous geometry helped Deleuze develop concepts of change and variety as fundamental principles of existence.

So when I read an article by someone who’s themselves become an expert in philosophy of mathematics and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I’ll learn from what they say. Same way I learn from anyone who’s become an expert in what I want to learn about.

I read about how Deleuze interpreted Riemann’s work as tracing the mathematical structures of heterogeneous spaces – spaces that have entirely different properties, but are contiguous, that flow into each other. Objects can travel casually among all these spaces – ordinary as a walk between neighbourhoods – and be unaltered.

They just tumble differently. Into a valley, up a hill, around a bend, around several bends that seem like straight paths when you walk through them. Whatever. Doo bee doo.

Reality seen topologically. Perfectly legitimate – simply not quite what most of us are accustomed to. Let’s explore what makes us uncomfortable. And rely on people we trust – in their expertise and their character – to be our guides so we don’t lose ourselves.

Creative Energy I: The Problem With Philosophy, A History Boy, 06/12/2017

I’m getting back on my wander through What Is Philosophy? with a few of his difficult ideas. Gilles Deleuze’s approach to philosophical thinking showed me what I thought was the best way to deal with the whole tradition.*

Like looking for pictures in the clouds. I can see a pattern of light
that suggests Deleuze's face, as water flows over two rocks at the
centre of the frame, by the bottom edge.

* Traditions. Only one thing bugs me about Deleuze, that he makes philosophy itself a Western creation. Western philosophy is one tradition of a general feature of human society that develops anything you could call a tradition of wisdom. Creating frameworks for understanding the world is much more fundamental to human thought than this one contingent Hellenic vector.
• • •
I felt like I had to get that note out of the way. It was bugging me all the way through reading this book. That was the biggest difference between when I first read What Is Philosophy? and when I read it again this Fall. 

A man develops a way of thinking about philosophy that makes it central to some peculiar essence in humanity itself – the wisdom that separates us from the animals. That makes us an order above the other animals.

One man, steeped in the left-wing politics and intellectual environment of a country coming to grips with the loss of its empire – the spectre of radical equality. He’s also a keen mathematician, a careful student of sciences that depend on calculus – he understood intimately how fundamental dynamic differentials were to reality. 

A pure materialist who understood how profoundly stupid that metaphor of the clockwork mechanism really was. One of the very few. So he roots humanity’s remarkable nature in our ability to develop frameworks of thinking self-consciously – we can build intellectual machines to change our instincts. That’s the power of philosophy!

One man, steeped in profound ethnic national
culture, with deep feelings of connection to land
and soil, as if it were in his blood, understands
his chosen field of thought, philosophy, in the
same way – mystic wisdom of a people who
speak with the voice of being itself, revealing
its nature through the prophecies of a sage. A
sage we now call philosophers. This, he
thought, it what makes us an order above the
animals.
Deleuze's dark and terrifying mirror.

Yet it begins in Hellenic Greece. Like we wouldn’t have been doing that for the hundreds of thousands of years it took us to diverge from all the other hominids. 
• • •
There’s such a strange paradox that I see in philosophy. Maybe it’s just from my own experience, which is unlike anyone else’s. Maybe my experience is more typical. I’d like to know whether I’m on to something when I say this.

Side A. Here’s my experience of philosophy as it tends to be taught. You analyze texts to understand their arguments, you critique that argument using the different rules of reasoning. Has Descartes made a good argument that we cannot trust our senses?

Side B. The key works in the history of any tradition in philosophy are not always all that concerned with point by point rebuttals back and forth. But it’s very tough to get to the intensity of thought where you’ve built such a profound conceptual mechanism that you influence the character of your whole culture’s thought for centuries after.

Too many higher education programs teach philosophy as if it were training in argumentation. Now, that’s important, but it shouldn’t be taught as the primary skill, as the essence of the discipline.

The problem is that when you hear the professionals talking philosophy – the professors, grad students, nerdy upper-levels – they’re all arguing. It’s professional, it’s clinical, it’s sometimes a little too cold, it’s expert, it’s insightful. But it’s all the back and forth of argument, critique, counter-argument.

We’re not doing what the people we talk about did. Next couple of posts this week, I want to work out some ideas about what we should do to fix that.

To Be Free and Natural, A History Boy, 14/11/2017

I started this blog when I’d already developed quite a lot as a writer – especially in philosophy. A good chunk of that development came from reading Gilles Deleuze and using a bunch of his concepts and ideas in my own projects, particularly in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

That book isn’t a book about Deleuze – the book is about what the title says. But I use Deleuze’s concepts often in how I research and explore problems in environmental ethics and activism. Even – especially – when I’m not quoting or referring directly to any of his work.

If you’re going to give me a label based on any legendary philosopher’s name turned into an adjective, you could plausibly call me only a Deleuzian.

Influence is an agony.

Of course, given how most folks in academia use adjectival names, I’d prefer that you didn’t. Because when you’re in an academic context with philosophers and you call yourself a Deleuzian, they think that all your writing is commentary on Deleuze. And that your professional communication is advocating for a single interpretation of Deleuze that you hold to be the true, right one.

Replace the name Deleuze and its adjectives with the name and adjective of any primary material philosopher and you have a significant chunk of the entire field.

This is the closest thing possible to the opposite of what Deleuze would have wanted his follower philosophers to do. The man wrote it himself. If you want to follow in the footsteps of your heroes, don’t just repeat what they said, but do what they did.

What does a philosopher do? In the broadest possible and most essential sense, a philosopher creates concepts. What is a concept? That can take a while to answer. Answering and exploring that question is the major point of Deleuze’s last big book, What Is Philosophy? So you can go into plenty of detail, and discussion too.

But you can also say it very simply, and let the details do the work that details do – get technical, intricate, profound, meaningful in a professional sense. You can understand how a computer works without being a computer scientist. In the same way, you can understand what a philosophical concept is without being a professional philosopher.

Something else that too many academic philosophers tend to forget.

You can make a strong case that we're quite a lot
dumber than some of our ancestors. They lived at
least long enough to become us, and it's become a
conceivable possibility that humanity will end up
cockroach food.

I can give you a really quick and easy-to-remember account of what a concept is. It’s the one I see when I read What Is Philosophy? A concept is a framework for us to understand the world – how we order our thoughts and perceptions from our daily lives to the cosmos.

Here’s what I think is the most important part of how Deleuze understands this – the most important lesson he has for us. It’s why I realized his ideas were so important to building a genuinely progressive environmentalist ethics.

Frameworks to order our thoughts and perceptions is more than just a human thing. All organisms have to make sense of a chaotic world of perception – moving so that they stay alive. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution has produced some pretty complex ways to perceive and act. We’re one of those ways.

We can build a tradition – many traditions, actually – of conceptual craftspeople. We develop new abstract frameworks of making sense out of chaos that are much more complex and have many different powers than those of an australopithecus.

Any tradition centred on developing new concepts is properly called philosophical. Plural all the way down. That’s what I love about thinking in a way you could – if you really must – call Deleuzian.

It’s a wonderful framework for environmentalist thinking – a vision of humanity as an expression of nature. No essence. No immutability. No hierarchies. Contingency, change, and diversity. Environmentalist, ecological, and democrat to the core.

Cinema From the Edge of the World, A History Boy, 10/11/2017

Giving the blog a break from philosophy for a little while. I was basically wandering through some highlights of how Hannah Arendt has been informing my philosophical thinking and research for nearly a month. It’s time to move on.

Right now, I’m moving on to the Third Syria Film Festival. I’m proud to have worked on this one – I’m proud to have worked on all of them, but especially this. This year is the festival I’ve felt most in control of my tasks in marketing and promotion.

In the first year, I was freshly graduated from my communications program and didn’t have enough confidence in myself. We ended up doing a fantastic job, attracted a lot of media attention, and I did solid work coordinating reporters from several different outlets – Toronto Star, Metro News, a few local publications, and the English-language services of the two big Arab networks Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera.

The crew of volunteers and organizers for SYFF 2016. Some of them
aren't really with us anymore, but I'll never forget them.
Don't worry, they're not dead. They just moved on to other things.
Only one of them was stuck moving to America, poor bastard.

We even did a segment for Al-Jazeera English walking around at the Distillery District talking about the festival with Jay Abdo.

All credit to me when it came to keeping everything straight and making all the media folks happy. But I didn’t really work much magic of my own attracting all those people. The First Syria Film Festival was in November 2015. The world discovered Aylan Kurdi two months before.

The Syrian war(s) and their refugees were at the top of the news cycle for months. It captivated Canada. More than 40,000 Syrians have come to Canada as refugees – many, but not exactly a whole lot in a country of 36-million people. Why haven’t we taken in more? There’s no reason why not.

As for the film festival, we never got the same intensity of media coverage in that first year. It was a perfect storm that let us build a strong fanbase that’s been steadily growing ever since.

At the same time, I feel like I let SYFF down a little bit in its second year. I was working a pretty hectic, low-paying job and it took a lot of my energy and attention away from the public relations work for good causes that I actually enjoy doing.

This year, I could put a little more effort into our outreach and branding strategy. We haven't gotten the most media attention, but I think we’ve built our fandom deeply enough that we can get folks out during the snow tonight.

We have some beautiful stories on the screen this weekend. Get some tickets. Come down to Hot Docs and say hello. You’ll never see another set of nights quite like them.

The Unexpectedness of Editorships, A History Boy, 02/11/2017

A short post today. I took the first of this month off, because instead of composing Wednesday’s post Tuesday evening, as I usually do, I was tired. A few things in my professional life are unexpectedly in flux at the moment, and I needed to take Halloween night to relax watching Cult of Chucky with my fiancée.

One of the nice changes happening in my professional life is that I’m taking over editorship of the Reply Collective. I’ve been part of this group pretty much from its inception, and I was pretty surprised when I got the offer to be the Patrick Troughton to Jim Collier’s William Hartnell.

I ended up as an early member of SERRC – I was talking with Jim in 2011 about coming to Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology Studies department for a post-doc. When I didn’t get the funding, I thought that would be the end of it.

But at the same time, Jim was rolling out this open-access companion website to the journal Social Epistemology. It seemed like a really cool thing to be part of, especially because I wasn’t within spitting distance of a teaching or research job on my own.

Since then, SERRC has been my intellectual home more than any other institution. I’ve regularly published there, contributing original essays and reviews, replies, conversations, collaborations. They’ve been better than any regular old journal would have been when it comes to my more experimental pieces.

Knowledge can't just stay in university desks and archives anymore.
We have work to do.

Here’s a story about how much SERRC means to me. When I attended the Canadian Philosophical Association conference in Victoria a few years ago, I did so to present a panel on my book Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. At the time, I wasn’t working in a university or a college.

Honestly, I was working at IKEA. $13/hour. Booking and processing furniture deliveries for people. Had a couple of contingent communications contracts, but that was actually my main source of income at the time.

But I’d seen how people are ostracized when they write “Independent Scholar” on their nametags at academic conferences. I wasn’t about to do that. So I put on my nametag the name of the institution my name was most associated with.

“Adam Riggio. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.”

I got a few “What the hell is that?” comments. But I’ve always loved breaking people’s brains, much more than I could ever enjoy being treated like shit on the bottom of a tenured professor’s boot.

Let me take an institutional view. SERRC is open access. It’s free for everyone to read. Sometimes, our articles can get really technical. But for the most part, we encourage contributors to write in a style that any half-intelligent person will be able to follow. Platforms like SERRC are, if you ask me,* is the future of research.

* And it’s my blog, so I’m just going to tell you.

The heavily paywalled model is dying. The academic publishing companies may still be profitable, but that’s only because their massive subscription prices practically hold university libraries hostage.

More and more libraries are turning down journal subscriptions – there are too many journals, and universities face too many funding cuts to maintain subscriptions. As a researcher, I always wanted to have my work read by the general public as well as colleagues in my fields.

So it never suited me to spend hundreds of hours of work on article submissions to elite journals that few people could even access. Today, higher education is under threat from politicians and revanchist social movements who consider their research either useless or actively hostile.

We aren’t going to defend critical knowledge production institutions and networks from radical reactionary politicians and governments by publishing technical papers in journals no one can access. That makes us elitists, and everyone hates those people.

I’m not going to say in detail what I plan to do with the SERRC once I take over the editorship. That’s going to be one very contentious email thread.** But we live in very difficult, dangerous, contentious times.

** Mind you, first thing I have to do is get updated emails from everyone. The number of bouncebacks I got tonight kind of ruined my emotionally-loaded tribute to my William Hartnell.

Through a platform like SERRC, it’s possible for intellectuals who believe in freedom of knowledge to take a public stand. So necessary.

Contradictory Heritage, A History Boy, 08/09/2017

I have a pretty stand-offish relationship with Theodor Adorno. I think it’s a result of my first exposure to him. That came through an older university librarian I knew by the philosophy department circles back in my undergrad years at Memorial.

He was the philosophy specialist in the library’s procurement, and his own PhD research focussed on Adorno. CD was a smart guy, and although I found him a little pretentious, he was a good person to hang out with. I have to say, though, he wasn’t very good at selling Adorno to me.

I reconsidered his work as I got older, but never really made the jump to studying his philosophy in full. Mostly, it was because I was working on a totally different tradition and approach in Western philosophy during my doctorate – informing environmentalist ethics through philosophy of biology and ecology, with a leg up from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the conceptual framework.

Remember, freshmen, there is no art without suffering.
No education without folly.
No philosophy class without a surly smart-ass.

But I think it was also because of his reputation. I’m not usually one to cower in front of a reputation, but with Adorno, I did. His work wasn’t just philosophy to me – it was an edifice. I came to that image through the Adorno specialists and students I knew – they treated him like a figure of awe.

Nein broke that image for me. He injected some levity into Adorno for me, and made him and his work more approachable. I don’t want to read some unapproachable edifice. I want to read a thinker.

So I’ll probably hit up some Adorno soon. I’ll soon be transitioning away from looking at left-wing philosophy as it’s more traditionally defined. But after a walk along the path that I’m heading for, I think I’ll go back to some Adorno, no matter how strange his work might be.

How strange might that work be? Well, here’s Perry Anderson’s take on it. This is probably what I admire most about Anderson’s writing and thought. He’s a historian of ideas who can genuinely grapple with the real strangeness of some ideas and still find witty and concise ways of explaining it.

Maybe it helped that I was already familiar with the context. I mean, I haven’t read much Adorno myself, but I’ve read almost everything else that influenced him. So it’s not like I have no idea what kind of concepts are flying around there.

Here are the concepts that Anderson throws down to explain the underlying ontology of Adorno’s philosophical writing. Same goes for the rest of the Frankfurt School more generally.

He describes Frankfurt School thinking as on the same plane as these following two philosophical frameworks. One is the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. Anderson describes this as adapting the metaphysics of Christian salvation to the human relationship with the material Earth. So the path to humanity’s redemption from our fundamental corruption is a kind of devotion to harmonious material nature.

Schelling is another German philosopher who I
could just never get into. Everything I heard about
his ideas, even from people who loved his work,
made me think I would hate it all. I haven't heard
anything much different yet.

The City of God becomes the City of Man when it’s no longer a city, but a forest. And we must treat it as such.

Two is Heidegger’s critique of technology, his account of the technological attitude as the rupture of man from nature. This rupture is the ongoing social, cultural, and philosophical goal of dominating the Earth – we dominate Earth to make commodities from it, and we define our lives through our commodities, our stuff.

In the words of the Frankfurt School’s marxist heritage, capitalism is the rupture of humanity from Earth, from nature. So a liberated society, in Adorno’s thinking* is a reconciliation of humanity and Earth.

* According to Perry Anderson.

It’s a beautiful vision. As someone who holds environmentalist political and ethics values, I definitely like it. Despite the way Anderson’s account tends to reify nature. Actually, that’s a serious problem for me. By pulling Schelling’s Christian salvation narrative into an immanent material relationship – humanity and Earth – you turn the planet into God.

Earth isn’t God. It’s Earth. If you believe it’s God, you’re making a serious mistake. God as a Christian concept was designed as the ultimate Other – the Fall means that humanity’s nature is utterly and totally anathema to the Divine. That we’re virtually like poison to divinity.

If this is really the underlying metaphysics of the Frankfurt School, I can’t even say they’re radical left anymore. To make a Christian God of Nature is making an idol out of a word that shouldn’t even be capitalized.

There’s an even deeper conservatism underneath the ideas of what the radical right today call the communist conspiracy of the modern era.

Kill Your Idols I: Followers, A History Boy, 07/08/2017

When I first started blogging my early research for Utopias, I was concerned to stay away from conventional marxism. I was going to write a very left-wing book, but it wasn’t going to stick to the typical answers of the left.

Yes, I was concerned about oligarchy, just as I am now. I’ve since developed a more communitarian side to my political thinking – the strength and resilience of social networks and bonds of brotherhood throughout a community are the foundation of a healthy culture.

All the typical nationalist idols – religion, ethnicity, language, beliefs in national myths – don't mean shit, if I can put it in technical terms. Solidarity is built from actual friendships among people – from working, playing, clubs, school, partying, volunteering, whatever. The resilience of a society’s networks are its strength.

The basic idea of this series of posts is: If you want to
progress your society, and how you understand the
world, you need to kill your idols.

When I started this blogging project four years ago, I was still sorting out my more political ideas. At the time, I often said I very much wasn’t marxist, for a variety of reasons.

Here’s one anecdote from the time. When I got my proposal reviewer’s notes from Palgrave on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, he kept on talking about marxism, and telling me I should include more marx in a book about environmental philosophy.

He did that because the word ‘alienation’ is really important in a lot of environmental ethics approaches. They’re talking about the different ideologies and concepts humanity has used to separate our self-image from nature. We literally make ourselves alien to the Earth.

But this reviewer kept thinking I was a marxist. All he knew of the idea was Marx’s conception of alienated labour.

At first I was nervous that my book would be rejected because of this misunderstanding. But I got some good advice from my colleague who’d connected me with Palgrave. So I gave my usual response to reviewers who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about. I told the book series editor that the reviewer had no idea what he was talking about.

The bigger question is: What does it mean to be a marxist anyway? I don’t think I’m one, but most folks on the right wing of politics today would call me a cultural marxist.

See, I’ve met some self-identified communists and marxists over the years who are kind of genuine in their very doctrinaire belief in the very basic processes Marx himself was describing. Some see the economy as continuing to cleave into producers and proletariat. Some believe that they can affect a revolution of the working class from an academic’s office.

But people in the communist movement believed all this in Antonio Gramsci’s own time, nearly 100 years ago. They thought that all of Europe was going in the direction of the Russian revolution because they believed in a very doctrinaire marxist theory of the totally deterministic nature of human history.

They ended up being horribly wrong, and a lot of them – including Gramsci – paid the price with their freedom and their lives. Why would someone believe something just because it’s in a theoretical, scientific book?*

* That’s a very complex, multifaceted book that’s open to many interpretations. Most of these folks were following a blueprint from Capital, and Capital was never meant to be a straight blueprint in any universal sense. Yet it still became one.

Here’s the truth about social change. Revolutionary change can come from anywhere in society, if the particular conditions are right to enable some class or community to understand that it can act, then actually act.

Civilization is dynamic, always open to change, never clockwork in that too-simple sense of how people used to think about reality. Am I giving people too much credit by not presuming them to believe in a clockwork reality? . . . To Be Continued

The Faint Odour of Sorrow in the Alleys, A History Boy, 06/08/2017

It's been a few years since I last did a pleasure-reading challenge that I’d been doing for myself since about 2006 or so. I call it my big ridiculous book challenge. Around winter, shortly after the New Year, I’d start a novel that had a reputation for being big, difficult, or a little bit insane.

When I read Mahfouz, I feel like he's always been
an old man. He didn't even start publishing his
fiction until he was well into middle age.

I’d been reading crazy difficult books since my teens. But I decided, mostly for self-indulgence really, to put some conscious effort into it. I only recently finished the book I’d started this winter. But here are some other examples to show you want I typically pick.

A couple of weeks before my 26th birthday in 2009, I bought myself all of In Search of Lost Time. It took me six months to read that thing, and I took breaks. Beautiful writing, dense with ideas. But that narrator was such a little prick that I had to get away from him for a while now and then.

I think I took breaks to read other literature after the second and third books. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way saw that narrator becoming truly insufferable. His snobbery, classism, and ego were unforgivably intense.

I mean, his behaviour was worse and way more immoral and malignant in The Captive. But at least it was shorter and was followed up by The Fugitive, the beginning of the narrator’s path of contrition that would last for the rest of the series. Marcel Proust was brilliant, but his amazing prose sometimes feels tortuous when it renders such a misogynist pig too faithfully for me to keep my lunch down.

A couple of years later, it was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. That was just plain fun. It didn’t even feel that hard. Two reasons. I’ve been reading parodic, over-the-top postmodern novels all my life already. This was just the model. The year before, it was Don Quixote, which I’m pretty sure is the model for all of them.

The other reason is that I’d already read Against The Day a few years ago after I got it in a campus bookstore for $6. 1100 pages for $6. And I laughed through most of it. Similar situation the year after Gravity’s Rainbow when I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons. I’d read some of his other epic novels, and Demons was just the most intense.

The entire trilogy covers about 35 years in the life of this family, as they
live through the social and political transformations of Egypt's
independence from the British Empire, the violence of the Second
World War, and finally the first years of the nationalist government.

This winter, it was The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, which I got for one dollar each in a United Way book sale fundraiser at the liquor store. It’s one of those stories that isn’t really about anything other than ordinary life. It’s a detailed depiction of the men (and occasionally the women) of one family, the Jawads.

Patriarch Ahmad rules his family with iron authority, harshly disciplining all his children. He’s a strictly conservative religious household head – he doesn’t even allow his wife Amina or his daughters to leave the house beyond going to the roof. He’s one hell of a patriarch.

He’s also a huge hypocrite. When he’s out in the community running his general store, he’s a gregarious, charming businessman. Then when he’s out partying with his friends – and he parties almost every night – he gets drunk, sings, dances, plays music, bangs musicians. Luckily, he’s a charismatic hypocrite.

Even more luckily, he’s not the only point of view character. He’s a major one, but Mahfouz has a Dickensian touch in being able to draw a nuanced personality through detailed descriptions of the ongoing thoughts and actions of a character.

In fact, I’d say he’s better than Dickens, because Mahfouz relies on none of the cheap sentimentality the English writer would use to build sympathy with a character. As well, he had none of the transparent moralizing of purity and corruption in Dickens’ stories. He never got over that until his last book, Our Mutual Friend.

The Cairo Trilogy also shows the aspirations and hypocrisies of
Egyptian politics. One of Ahmad's teenage children spends the
first book Palace Walk as an activist with the Wafd Party,
demonstrating for Egyptian independence. By the end of Sugar
Street, two of Ahmad's grandsons are arrested for their own
dissident activity against an autocratic nationalist regime.

Mahfouz doesn’t seem to have that moralizing attitude at all. He lets the actions and personalities of his characters to speak on their own terms, and you understand their goodness and moralities on your own as a reader.

The nice thing about the huge canvas of this 1200 page trilogy – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, all named after streets in Cairo's Al Husayn district – is that we have the time for every major character to get some measure of comeuppance for their hypocrisy. Mostly just through the time it takes for age to make a mockery of our egos.

It happens to everyone if they live long enough. Sometimes, there’s justice to it. Like when Ahmad ends his last affair with the knowledge that he’s just too old to keep up with the energy and demands of younger courtesans.

Sometimes, there’s no justice at all. Like when Ahmad’s egotistical, knows-she’s-that-hot daughter Naima marries a wealthy heir for his money and eventually loses her husband and children to disease and medical conditions.

Time gives us what we deserve. It's a terrifying prospect. Beautiful books, though.

Lights at the End at Last, A History Boy, 04/05/2017

I think, feel, and sincerely hope that the direction of this blog will change over the next little while. Permanently.

I mean this in an optimistic sense. And I’m very happy that I can say this optimistically. You might have noticed that I added a new link under my professional links, Cestar College. This is a career college in northern Toronto where I’ll be teaching Business Communications and Leadership Ethics for the next however-long-I-decide-to-stay-there.

And I may stay there for quite a long time. After all, I trained for years to be a teacher and researcher. I’m still a damn good researcher, and writing this blog over the last nearly four years has improved my writing tremendously. Both for argumentative, casual, and fiction.

I started this blog not just to build a small online profile for myself as an independent writer, but also to keep myself going as a person. The call centre job I’d had since late 2012 spent the winter and spring working me for sometimes 50 hour weeks. I quit around the same time my disastrous round of university sector job hunting exploded. I was acutely depressed and barely left my bed for three days.

My own experience with severe anxiety over the last four years has
made me realize how inappropriate it is to medicalize anxiety as if it
were a disorder entirely in thought and individual neurochemistry. Yes,
it can be treated with medications and therapies. But its causes most
often are social and environmental. Anxiety is a body and personality
reaching its breaking point in being able to handle chronic insecurity.
It's the mental expression of a social and economic disorder. Go read
Anti-Oedipus and see the basics of the dynamic.

I spent the following year working for an online editing farm, where my piecework wages amounted to less than minimum wage. I trained in communications because I thought that was the best business certificate I could get where my talents as a qualitative analyst the writer would be put to the best use.

But I was so out of place as a personality with the culture of the Toronto PR agency that I could never find steady entry level work. I was a bookish nerd in a world of aging frat bros, Lean In archetypes, and a kind of amoral approach to client acquisition and services that I never felt comfortable.

My first paying job after graduating – writing work for the Business Owners’ Council, a spinoff of Inc. Magazine – only ever gave me work on such short notice, I was practically on unpaid call 16 hours per day. And they never even paid me. Nor did they ever send me a non-disclosure agreement, so I can describe their human resources practices without restraint.

I’ve never been able to make a living wage from my business training in corporate communications – only picking up occasional contracts that got me a few hundred each month at best.

For four years, I’ve lived under constant stress from financial insecurity and anxiety over whether I’d ever be able to find a decent job. It hammered my personal and professional confidence so much that I thought my only path to a secure future was working my IKEA job at $13/hour.

I loved the people I worked with, but the job itself was so stressful and draining that I broke down after a year. It didn’t help that I had a therapist who I trusted to help me, but who seemed more intent on condescendingly ordering me not to feel stressed or agitated instead of helping me deal with these states of mind.

The GF and I have been watching Thirteen Reasons Why, since it seems
to be one of those generational touchstones in progress. It's a powerful
narrative, and I deeply admire how camera and lighting blends time
periods and memories into a single flow of imagery. Also how
intricately and precisely the show reveals its labyrinth of relationships.
It's the best mystery show I think I've ever seen.
But I think it's giving me nightmares. And as a 34 year old professional
teacher and writer, I'm decidedly not its demographic. My anxiety
and depression issues make the storyline hit me very profoundly. I can
believe that people whose current experience is closer to the social
media embedded hell of modern high school go through far
worse sympathetic depression.

I actually think my brain has been affected somewhat by the years of continual worrying. I’m now one of the many people who has to take mild anti-depressants to stay focussed. I’m probably not even the only one at my new job who does.

Cestar is the first time since 2013 that I’m actually being paid a good middle-class salary. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid a decent living salary at all. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid at all for the type of work I spent my 20s training for. The type of work that I’m good at.

I mean, administration stuff is going to be a pain in the ass. But that’s true universally. The point is, I’m a teacher at last. And I’ll be a teacher with a pre-tax salary of around $35,000. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.

Four years. I had to go through four years of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and worthlessness before getting started. Yeah, a lot of people have it way worse. I see them begging on street corners and in subway stations pretty much every day. But it’s far from fun.

Yeah, those were the years when I met the GF. She’s the love of my life, and I shouldn’t regret anything about that time with her. Without her help, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have made it through at all. But I do have one regret.

I regret that it’s taken me so long to be in a position where my situation won’t stress us both out. I regret all the pain I caused with every career setback, every anxiety attack, every opportunity that turned into a kick to the balls. I regret that I’ve never been able to show her what I can do, only how I can manage.

For the last four years, I’ve been a failure. Not anymore. But all I’ve been able to show her is failure until pretty much the last month. That still hurts me.

Now I have a good-paying teaching job and I’m making my first film. I'm getting married in a couple of years to a woman I love more than I thought I could love anyone. That’s fantastic.

But the scars and pain of the last four years feel like they’re never going to leave me.

The blog, however, will probably take a new direction. I'll be talking about teaching techniques here sometimes, and continuing to work through ideas in my research and writing for different projects. Also, writing about more experiences in my artistic work.

My blog started as a means to keep myself alive and motivated through a depression that I didn't see a way out of. Now, it seems I'm in shape for it to become a chronicle of growing success and happiness.

Come Together VI: Live While You Live, A History Boy, 23/03/2017

Read the Come Together series of posts on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract from the beginning.
• • •
Continued from previous . . . I ended yesterday with a question. If even the most virtuous will inevitably fall, why should we even hope?

The question underlies the whole point of writing about utopias and political or ethical ideals at all. Well, no, it underlies rather more than that. Taken rhetorically, it’s the sigh of despair for every aspect of life. It’s the possibility that death nullifies the value of life.

It’s the challenge of mortality. Everything ends eventually. Realizing this thought is sobering, and sometimes terrifying. Funny thing is, it’s actually defined my work since I started publishing philosophy.

My first published essay in an official philosophy venue was an essay in the first Doctor Who and Philosophy collection. Because of course it was. It grappled with that existential question, of what the value of life could be if death negated all its achievements.

The answer to the question is to deny its validity. Just because the effects and knowledge of your actions won’t last forever doesn’t rob them of their value. The value of our actions are in the actions themselves, and the immediate time frame of their effects.

The city rises and will fall one day. Its dignity is in its life.

If I help one old poor woman get a good lunch one day, it doesn’t matter that she died that very evening of a catastrophic coronary in her sleep.* If you go to any figure in the general canon of Western philosophy, you’ll find this concept most clearly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

* I sometimes feel like I don’t do enough to help people who need it.

But I see it asked in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and I’m left wondering about its status in that very ambiguous text. Before I picked up Rousseau’s books again for this string of classical research, I hadn’t really touched his writing since I was an undergraduate.

I learned a very simple Rousseau back then, one that doesn’t quite jive with the ambiguous thinker I see here. My education in political philosophy suffered from the unfortunate trend of undergraduate teaching – making the ideas clear, too clear.

Rousseau’s work is remembered because of his ambiguity. He’s a genius at describing the hidden potentials of humanity – freedom, happiness, social harmony, all the aspects of our perfection. But he’s also a genius at explaining what it is about human society that keeps us from realizing that potential.

We can conceive of this potential and approach it, even though we might only inch toward living a more perfect existence in our own lifetimes. Circumstances might conspire against us completely in trying to become more perfect creatures.

I’m reading Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy right now. He, most stereotypically of anyone else in the tradition, is a thinker of contingency and crap circumstances. You can tell, when you read these two books one after the other, how scholars are on target when they discuss the deep influence Machiavelli had on Rousseau.

Scholarship aside, it’s not as though Machiavelli’s pragmatic sensibility survives in Rousseau. The Social Contract and all his major works are aporetic – they leave you hanging. There are no certainties, no comforting paths forward.

You understand the human condition better than before you read it – our possibilities for social harmony and perfection along with our tendencies to corruption, greed, violence, and ruin. Understanding leads to wiser action.

Wisdom is not a correct answer on an exam. Never confuse the two.

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

Just One Guy, A History Boy, 06/01/2017

Now and then, I have doubts about myself and my artistic work. Everyone has moments of self-doubt. Different things bring them on for everyone. Sometimes, I feel really proud of what I write here, for instance. And sometimes, it can feel futile.

Blogging is a weird thing. As it unfolds day to day, it’s basically the musings of one person. These one-person blogs aren’t even really the currency of the internet the way they used to be. In a lot of ways, I’m years late to this party.

But I was too young and immature to have anything to say in those early days when folks like Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were getting their careers started.

I started a blog with a title that was one of my favourite lines from Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor Who, filled it with whatever opinions I had, and deleted the whole thing years later because it just wasn't really all that noteworthy and a little humiliating for all its emptiness.

Now, at least, I’ve achieved at least a few small things, and I have a general mission for the blog based on my published writing. A book of philosophy, a short novel, a produced play, and a series of articles and opinion pieces across several research and popular platforms. It’s a small profile, but it exists.

The blogging platform that’s the home of the ordinary person now is Twitter. It’s a wonderful medium in many ways – I’ve had wonderful conversations with people all over the world. I’ve met folks in communities I otherwise never would have, and been exposed to ideas that originate far beyond my immediate physical social world.

But I don’t have to tell you that Twitter’s empowerment of individual voices also empowers verbally and graphically violent mobs. I’ve been harassed, and even done my share of harassing.

Gamer and animé nerds have never been my people, even though I’m quite a nerd myself. A friend of a close university friend was prominent in our school’s community of gamer enthusiasts. And every time he’d see me, he’d scream insults and threats at me because of some minor slight from when I was 18.

I wasn’t surprised when these people became the backbone of Gamergate and popularized the hatred and harassment of women.

If that dude is on Twitter, he’s probably encouraged quite a few games of “Beat Up Anita,” and probably a lot worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s doxxed and swatted a few folks.

So I’m maintaining my blog, my online presence, slowly figuring out how I can get a film crew together, working on different writing projects to justify the little financial support (and emotional support) I get from my few friends on Patreon.

Keep working away. It may not all work out, but it definitely won’t if you give up.

The Ontology of Swarm, A History Boy, 23/11/2016

About Two or Three Months Ago

I took some pictures of a creepy-looking guy on the subway with a bunch of anime and gaming pins on his bag. I didn’t show his face, but I tweeted it with some commentary about how he was probably a fascist.

Over the Weekend

So a few days ago, somebody found this old tweet thread and posted a screencap on a 9gag ripoff forum. And the swarm began.

Well, they finally saw me.

Starting from about Sunday, I’ve gotten a steady stream of insults from the greater anime-avatar commentariat. It’s been a pretty diverse stream. And as of Tuesday night when I hit “publish,” it’s been chugging along steadily. It’s been 500 mentions and retweets of mentions, and probably a little over 100 original insults.

A lot of sanctimonious call-outs. How dare I call the members of this three-day (and counting) pile-on bullies when I photographed a guy’s bag and made presumptions about his character. I’ve also been called a psychopath, a retard, a jabroni, and a cuck from the global capitol city of cucks.

I’ve never been on the receiving end of this kind of swarm social media attack. I’ve seen them, of course, and read about them and their consequences. But this is the first time I’ve faced a swarm myself. It’s quite fascinating, really.

For one thing – and this is probably a consequence of my long-term exposure to this online culture, its relatively low intensity against me, and my own relative whiteness – the visceral effect of the insults died out pretty fast.

Now, the insults continue. But they became monotonous remarkably quickly, petering out into a steady stream of repetitive noise. The form of the attack is more intriguing to me.

Social media swarms are similar to DDoS attacks, except carried out through the intentional actions of humans. It’s a distributed attack without a central director. The director isn’t human, at least. It's the screencap itself that directs their activity – a signal that points the way to a particular action.

A swarm is an attack where each individual movement has little
consequence or power in itself, but because it consists of thousands or
millions of such movements, their combined power is immense, even
though each movement is autonomous. Swarm's power is in mass
and simultaneity.

In this case, it’s calling me a sociopath projecting his own racism on innocent JRPG fans.

No one in this swarm has done anything other than send a single insult or retweet one or two tweets in the conversation. Then they go away. But there are enough that a steady stream of activity has continued.

Yet while the swarm is composed of complex, intelligent human agents, its action itself isn’t very complicated – a steady stream of repetitive 4chan-stewed insults. Its power is in its brute force – the sheer number of signals cluttering my mentions with acidic contempt.

A Decade or So Ago

I’ve been a nerd all my life. Dorky, socially awkward sometimes, smart, wearing glasses, into weird art like Werner Herzog films and big difficult books. I had a go for a career as a professional academic with a PhD and everything.

And I was bullied a lot as a kid and a teenager – mostly by sports jocks and a few school hoodlums, as well as a couple of classmates who were in treatment for severely violent impulses.

Even after I developed a personality and persona that could get along with pretty much everyone, I saw some pretty awful stuff. When I was 17, my high school’s basketball team put money up among each other for a bet – the winner was whoever could fuck a friend of mine. They thought it was worth a payout because they called her a horse-face.

So when nerd culture took over the culture in the early 21st century with superhero movies, popular sci-fi culture like The Matrix and Doctor Who, Silicon Valley’s prestige, and Dan Harmon’s celebration of misfits Community? I felt proud to have been a nerd. I thought those values – pride in intelligence, love of dorky things, the esteem of misfits and freaks – were good for society.

A recent place where I read about the ontology of
swarm attacks was Multitude by Antonio Negri. He
was mostly talking about DDoS attacks, but social
media harassment mobs move by the same
principle.

About Two or Three Months Ago

But geek culture has a dark side. A weirdly racialized, gender-focussed malevolent side. I’ve written about this before, and I’m not the only one. I need only say the words and expect at minimum some googling to refresh your memory – GamerGate, the Quinnspiracy, Hijack the Hugos, the Alt-Right, Mencius Moldbug.

As I saw more and more nerds giving in to the rage and resentment of pick-up culture, misogyny, right-wing libertarian culture, and white nationalism, I’ve lost my ability to identify as a nerd. I mean, objectively, I’m pretty nerdy. I write about philosophy, literature, and sci-fi on a blog constantly.

But the values of so many nerd communities have diverged so much from my own that I can’t really consider myself part of that group anymore. That's why I thought what I thought when I saw that dude sitting next to me on the subway – the new signifiers of an insular, resentful bastard who hates women are anime and sci-fi fandom.

So I’m left digging my Twitter mentions out from under thousands of locust husks, wondering how many people who’ll be in the theatre with me at Rogue One this Xmas sent ape photos to Leslie Jones or rape threats to Anita Sarkeesian.

Of course, the answer will be “Nobody” because all the alt-right nerds will boycott Rogue One for having a woman in the lead role, and my GF and I will be surrounded by hipster geek women enjoying a fine film together.