More Than Mere Images, Composing, 11/07/2018

Over the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about different ways I’ve seen philosophical writers push themselves into more ambitious expressions. The results are beautiful and inspiring. The quality of the results are mixed, but that’s true of any attempt to overcome limits.

You’d be right to ask what limits I’m talking about, for a start. Well, these limits are based in the norms of academic writing, which tend to the self-destructive. Let me take a paragraph or six to explain how.

Academic training in the university sector tends to cause a lot of impostor syndrome. There are many causes for this, but I want to focus today on two causes.

One cause is that there’s no generally acceptable upper limit on how comprehensive a paper must be to appear credible. A writer must always prepare to face someone who calls their work inadequate because it doesn’t refer to a particular writer that critic is familiar with.

A powerful mystical experience can be had here, but only if you're
already open to it. If you aren't open to that phenomenological
communion, you might just see some potentially valuable
minerals that this damn National Parks act prevents you from
accessing, for the economic good of the people.
Image by Jorge Lascar via Flickr / Creative Commons

But research overproduction has made this impossible, especially combined with how long peer review takes. In the sometimes two years or longer between submission and publication, a study might become obsolete or out of date. If an article for a research journal was written in 2015, it won’t be able to include references to relevant stuff published in 2017, even though it didn’t come out until 2018.

So academic writers are brutally scrutinized by journal authorities through a process that makes their submissions irrelevant because publication takes so long.

Another, related cause, is how the training and publication peer review processes are so rigorous about the form of academic research writing. An essay must use a particularly narrow range of writing styles, tones, and ways of explaining ideas, if it’s going to pass the muster of a peer review process for a publication whose credits count toward tenure and job security.

Little to no experimentation is allowed, until you’re so deep into your career that you’ve likely lost your zeal for experimentation in writing at all.

So I have a lot of respect for writers like Jussi Parikka, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Jane Bennett, who base so much of their philosophical positions on imagery as a starting point. It’s a method that breaks with the dry prose style where bloodless argumentation and obsolete rationalist attitudes dominate.

Now the question is, like I said a few days ago – Can you open up the evocation of the image to find something philosophically experimental and innovative?

When I was researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of academically-written environmentalist philosophy that depended on the power of the image alone for the strength of their argument. I did read one author, Scott Aikin, who dismissed the style of this argument in an insightful, if cruel way – He called it seeing a big rock and having an experience.

The lands where the different nations of the Nishnaabeg lived before
they were driven from their lands by the violent dispossession of
Canadian and American state institutions.
Map by DarrenBaker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27884645

Thinking about this more mystical philosophical method now, I think the point was well-made, but without giving credit to a failed attempt to write philosophy differently than the academy typically trains you.

The naive environmentalist argument is that these experiences – farming, hiking, naturalistic observation, among others – is that there’s only one correct response to them in thought. But they made no argument as to why that one response is the correct one.

A few days ago, I started reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done. She produces a strong argument for why a reverent, respectful attitude to the ecological networks in which we live is the proper response to experiences of Indigenous ways of life.

That argument is rooted in the philosophical concept of grounded normativity, a central framework principle of many Indigenous North American philosophical traditions, particularly in her own culture, the Nishnaabeg of what is now called the Great Lakes region.

Simpson is building a remarkable philosophical edifice. It’s one of the most conceptually ambitious works I’ve come across in a long time. I don’t want to talk much more about this book right now, because I only just started reading it, and there’s already enough philosophical density to sustain centuries of commentary and uptake. It deserves such devotion.

As for Parikka, his reliance on images to express philosophical concepts is still vulnerable to the Aikin critique. More respectfully, it means that an image underdetermines its meaning. The Geology of Media does interesting things with media theory, and along with allied works like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, pushes against the tired restrictions of academic style. Reading Parikka, I want his next book to try even harder.

Data Thieves Seed Clouds to Rain Then Get Big Buckets, Jamming, 10/07/2018

That title is ridiculous. But it reflects how ridiculous a lot of popular imagery of the internet unfortunately is.

Virtual Reality!

Even worse is that I don’t just mean popular imagery. It’d be a lot more sane, frankly if we were only talking about how Tron and similar stories across many films, television shows, books, and other media popularized this silly conception of “cyberspace.”

It was another plane of reality, where we could live inside the computer and an entire world of energy opened up before us. The world of . . . Virtual Reality!

The leaders of the business sector really do talk about using VR technology to create parallel planes of existence – technologies that bring direct physical presence to distance. Palmer Luckey genuinely refers to the imagery of fanciful science-fiction to describe what virtual reality does.

Nothing about the internet exists on any other plane of reality. The same goes for the hard drives. The data of the entire internet is all coded onto physical disks somewhere. They are massive server farms.

Virtual Reality!

There’s nothing that distinguishes a VR interface communicating between Toronto and Shanghai from this reality. We’re learning how to communicate more aspects of our own presence to others without actually being in the same room, until there’s no real difference from our being in the same room.

Reading Jussi Parikka, I was chuckling at the passages where he tries to knock some sense back into us. Let’s not think any of this is really virtual in an ontological sense. Only our presence to each other is simulated – the physical things that we run our communication through still sits around us.

Wires. Wires everywhere. Where there aren’t wires, there are wifi and cellular data projectors. But it really is mostly all wires. The wires all thread together and connect into massive cables. The massive cables all connect to massive server farms. The server farms need electricity all the time – enormous amounts of electricity.

Virtual Reality!

Even more if you start earning money from Bitcoin and other blockchain-based currencies. Because cryptocurrency mining is probably the dumbest lucrative business in the world. You build a massive server farm, and dedicate its processing power to verifying cryptocurrency transactions. Your human workers sit around maintaining the server farm. Your company collects commissions on each transaction.

Providing you can afford the massive power bills it takes to run and cool a server farm huge enough to verify as many cryptocurrency transactions to make this profitable, you can make thousands of dollars a day by sitting around and making sure a computer doesn’t break.

Why aren’t I doing this right now?

My burgeoning entrepreneurial career aside, I want to make one last ontological point about virtual reality and the internet. We’ve become accustomed to thinking of cyberspace as a realm apart. Parikka’s point is that cyberspace is just as massive, heavy, smoky, and grimy as the old steam engines and coal-fired boot factories are.

Its by-products poison us differently, but they still poison us. There’s just not as much smog as there was a century ago. More pollution of water and soil, as lead, barium, and all those rare earth metals leak into the ground and rivers.

Waste never truly goes away.

Fearing for Our Lives / Reaped by Robot Scythes, Research Time, 27/06/2018

I told you I was switching gears. Quite literally to metal gears. Some of the analyses in Utopias will include some concepts from media theory, but the research discipline of media theory comes with some limitations.

In short form, it gets a bit idealist, ontologically speaking. Here’s what I mean. Mainstream media theory concentrates on the structure of media communications. You study the structures, conventions, and techniques of how media products are assembled.

Above: a metaphor.

So you come to think in terms of a multi-form semiotics – language, meaning, and how the structure of communication shapes language and meaning.

Quick illustration. You watch a video on someone’s phone. It’s shaky, clearly a phone held in the hand. Clear yet distant. The form of the video itself tells you what it is, displays its genuineness. Understanding the form helps you understand the message. Sounds familiar for some reason.

This is a pivotal aspect of media studies, theory, and the general means we use to understand our enormous ecology of communication. But we need to understand the literally ecological aspects of communication, and the geological too.

Information is conditioned by the physical media that carries it, but the process of manufacturing that media conditions the structure of our world. Some of the most destructive pollution generated in the mining sector is in the rare earth mines.

We dig complex minerals and intensively filter and treat them to separate all the different metals like yttrium, dysprosium, thulium, neodymium, and all the rest of the lanthanides. The result of those industrial mining procedures is rampant and horrifying pollution.

Above: a referent.

I picked up Jussi Parikka’s book The Geology of Media because I’d heard it was a solid continuation of many of the geological and ecological concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed. Damn right it was.

Semiotics – the study of meaning and how communication infrastructure conditions the information it carries – is vital to understanding contemporary media and globalized communication. But Parikka’s work is essential in understanding the brute physicality of our media – a hurricane of metals swirling into an assemblage of mines, factories electricity, and language that is simultaneously liberating and disastrous.

You can’t have contemporary media – computer and smartphone technology, including all the accessories as small and seemingly inconsequential as headphones – without these massive machines of metal extraction and manufacture.

The environmentalist movement makes a big deal about fossil fuel extraction, industry, burning, pollution, and impact on climate change. But quite often, activists will post their critical messages using smartphones and computers built with another horrifically destructive industrial process – lanthanide mining.

Is there any way out for us? I honestly don’t know.

If I want to start a blog post with Judas Priest lyrics, then I will. It’s the closest I have to an answer.

Whither Capital III: Troubles With Apu, Research Time, 01/06/2018

What were you going to do about it? What were you going to do to resist the socially and ecologically destructive forces of globalizing industry and finance?

Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.

* That is, the easiest and laziest.

Fighting the cultural and ethnic stereotyping you face in a mainstream
is an important element of revolutionizing a people's morality. And
the academics of Cultural Studies developed a lot of important
concepts for that critique. But is it sufficient to transform an entire
culture's morality to the necessary degree? That I don't think so.

Then the USSR collapsed. This was no End of History™, no matter how much liberal political tastemakers tried to demonstrate it. The Soviet Union, economically speaking, was the most thoroughly Fordist state that ever existed – the most complete standardization a government had ever attempted. It was a fully state-controlled economy whose purpose was primarily production within its borders.

The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.

Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.

Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.

No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.

Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.

Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.

Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.

So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?

“You Control Information!” II: What Must Be Said, Research Time, 08/03/2018

Yesterday, I talked about what distinguishes dictatorship from authoritarian government. You can have authoritarian institutions in a democratic government, which I know can seem intuitively weird.

But I came of age through the W Bush Presidency, so I saw this paradox in full force. Elections continued, different old and new media companies warred on each other, congressional majorities were toppled.

One of the (many, many) reasons why Americans don't seem to
understand the complexity and mess of the world today is that
there has been no cultural reckoning with the most uncomfortable
fact of the years between the World Trade Centre attacks and
Hurricane Katrina. Literally millions of Americans were in a
patriotic frenzy of paranoia and fear. Media outlets that today
are dismissed as disloyal fake news, like CNN, were little more
than shills for the Iraq invasion 15 years ago.

At the same time, Bush’s government built massive federal police and surveillance apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security, invaded Iraq and committed massacres and war crimes there. President Bush the Elder began over-arming local police forces with surplus military vehicles and weapons.

So authoritarianism is more than dictatorship. Yet the two share so much in common. Trying to parse the differences that count can be confusing. And in today’s political climate, your opponents often exploit your confusion on some points to delegitimize everything you say. So let’s be careful.

Félix Guattari’s concepts from his philosophical inquiries into politics, communication, and political economy can help us here. It starts with how he developed his concept of semio-capitalism.

It's an annoying word, but it does describe an important current of the global economy today. Individual acts of communication are directly monetized. Because money can be made from acts of communication, we’re encouraged to communicate constantly.

As more information flows through our networks, it generates more capital for the companies that control those networks – the hardware like cables and servers, the software like social networking sites and messaging apps.

A lot of the capital communication generates remains pretty concentrated – compare the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg or Microsoft to the income of even a pretty top-of-the-heap YouTube celebrity. But this media environment can be a very democratic field. If we understand democracy in its sense of (generally) productive social conflict and chaos.

As most of us know by now, radically anti-democratic forces have had remarkable political success by organizing through high-intensity, decentralized communication networks.

But their success was contingent – a very complicated history that required a lot of luck to unfold as it did. There were some elements in the movement – like the anarchist ideologies of many Anonymous hackers – that could have harnessed themselves in radical democratic fashion.

One depressing story of the 21st century West has been
the increasing nihilism and hopelessness of so many
people. It's a dangerous temptation to give in, and I know
how close I've come, as well as how deep I could have
fallen if it weren't for a few contingent factors. Some
people messaged me at what turned out to be pivotal
times in my life, and some didn't. I held on to my
skepticism of some ideas a little longer than I could
have. If everyone can fall, then everyone can be saved.

Instead, we’re stuck with the irony of the most successful scale-free networked political movement putting its weight behind an authoritarian state.

What makes it ironic? Return to the nature of communication in dictatorial governments. In straight-up dictatorships, as I said yesterday, the directives of the Leader are translated into orders for the relevant institutions, corporations, and citizens. The primary mode of communication is the order.

That’s what brings straightforward dictatorship into the same category as the more insidious form of authoritarian government that can happen in democratically-run institutions. Police and military institutions also issue directives that are to be followed as orders.

The only difference between a dictator and an authoritarian institution is that the orders of a dictator come from a person, and the orders of an institution come from an office. Legitimacy of directives in dictatorship depends on who speaks. Legitimacy of directives in authoritarian institutions depends on what speaks.

Authoritarian communication is inherently about transmitting and following orders. What are the conditions for this kind of political communication to work properly? The most important one is clarity. The directives need to be understood comprehensively, never misunderstood, if the authority of a dictator or an authoritarian institution is to be followed properly.

But the communication networks of semio-capital – of monetized, scale-free, decentralized networks – are purposely chaotic. Control, uniformity, and clarity of messages is damn near impossible in such an environment. Just ask any corporate public relations worker whose branded promotional tweets provoke a firestorm of insults, jokes, and brand failures.

The problems of modern capitalism – at heart – flow from the problems of oligarchy. The concentration of wealth, material power, riches, property of all sorts, and prestige among a small group of people, while the vast majority have to struggle and suffer for ever-more-meagre earnings.

But the capitalization of communications did result in an inoculation against state or corporate authoritarianism. In the productive chaos of modern communication networks, people themselves produce so much noise around authorities’ directives that clarity – and so following orders – becomes practically impossible.

Third Format’s a Charm, Composing, 25/02/2018

I’ve had a super-stressful week, and I’ve dealt with it as best I can in a few ways. Most of those involve writing about Félix Guattari, getting some research work done where I can, and lots of coffee.

I’ve also taken another artistic decision. I’ve laid my project of Doctor Who essays to the side – I still want to write philosophical reviews of the new series on the blog as episodes come out later this year, but I don’t think my energies will work best on major statements about the show.

Reasonably accurate depiction of myself. Once I get into a groove
anyway.

On Saturday, I outlined how the novel version of You Were My Friend will go. And I made a symbolic gesture for myself – I wrote its first sentence.

She wasn't doing much of anything at all when the knocking came from the door.

I’ve been trying to do justice to this story since I first developed it – it’s been about four years since I first pitched the idea. I hoped that You Were My Friend could be the ground of work as a theatre writer.

But we had virtually no box office – we were swamped by audiences flocking to see Billy Bishop Goes to War at the higher-budget theatre down the road from our production in Hamilton. They had a higher promotional budget – and more experience marketing theatre. Hamilton was consumed by mournful patriotism after Nathan Cirillo’s murder – which happened less than two weeks before our debut.

The director and crew I worked with on the play You Were My Friend returned to the more sure bets of bigger-budget productions of established content. It suited them well – I approached Mel and Jeannette because I’d seen their brilliant production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal the year before, and she was already a friend.

Beyond the poor luck of our debut, I also think the story was still incomplete. Its presentation was powerful, but having to stick to one set and two actors may have been too much constraint. When I adapted You Were My Friend into a film script, I expanded its world.

You saw key background events that were only described in the theatre. You met other characters at the supporting or bit level who I could flesh out in more detail than I could when their only existence was as a name in someone else’s dialogue.

You can only do so much on a stage. I mean, you can do so much on
a stage, but not all stories are suited to it – at least not without some
serious changes in expression. Could you do a stage adaptation of,
for example, War and Peace on minimal budget and with only four
or five actors? Maybe. But a lot would have to change.

I hoped to ground the abstract quality of the play in the material reality of Toronto as a city. You Were My Friend began with a single set that became surreal nightclubs and Albertan mountains.

But I wanted to shoot in Trinity-Bellwoods, the streets of Kensington Market and Chinatown, surreptitiously in the back of city buses. It never worked out, though.

In nearly three years, I could never get the damn thing shot. Shooting a film takes equipment, crew, and actors. Acquiring all those takes money and time. I didn’t have the money, so I didn’t have the time as I was too busy trying to make sure I had enough money.

I first started working on the project with Sam, the lead actress from the first version in the theatre. We had a few conversations, but eventually we decided to part ways on the project. I think it was largely down to me – Looking back, I think I appeared dismissive and argumentative when we would critique each other’s work and ideas. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

Oddly, it's the lowest-investment and most isolating form of art that I think lets me create the most expansive world. You Were My Friend the novel can let me fill out the characters’ minds and memories as well as the world they move in. The labyrinths of the narrative can wind deeper into time, space, and thought.

All thanks to being able to string the whole world together with words alone. As for publishing, I’ll soon start reaching out to small publishers in Toronto, but may ultimately publish and promote independently.

This story began as an artistic inspiration from some of the struggles the GF went through earlier in her life, when she was underemployed and had little to no family support – just like my lead character Vicki.

I want You Were My Friend to be reasonably successful not just to honour her in this powerful figurative way, but also to share that struggle with other people who’ve experienced it in my society. It's a work of artistic and ethical solidarity. I want it to breathe and live beyond those nine forgotten performances in a Hamilton indie theatre.

Let the pages fly.

Returning to Pages in a Dank Tunnel, Composing, 14/02/2018

Taking a break from philosophy today, because I came home last night after a long day at work. I want to make a legitimately short post today, to talk about some of my artistic work.

Some good news on the artistic front. I have an audio-play coming out in The Twelfth Doctor Adventures, an independently produced series in Britain. Quite a fun fan production that explores a trans companion character.

The series producer JR sent me her script for the first episode, which portrayed their companion, Toni Perkins.* It made a good guide for the character when I was writing my episode, “The Walls Are Alive.” At her best, Toni has a strength with two foundations – her empathy and knowledge of her own fragility.

Books are my home.

* JR tells me the name Antonia Perkins was not an intentional reference. I will never be capable of believing this.

As you can probably tell from the title, I took a crack at another Lovecraftian horror story of the underground spaces that defy human comprehension. I even had some input on the sound design, so JR knows how I want the creepiness of the story to flow from the setting.

Most importantly for the sound, we talked about different ways to make the normal spaces of human existence become disturbing, weird, shocking. The territory that you think is safe actually startles and destabilizes you as a listener. It’ll be a subtle aspect of the story that messes with listeners.

“The Walls Are Alive” is set in a country estate on a human colony world in the far future. Underneath the mansion is a network of tunnels curving through spaces that are typically impossible for humans to traverse.

It was a good use of the Digger aliens I developed for Under the Trees, Eaten a few years ago. I wasn't done exploring the potential of those creatures for fiction, so I was happy to get another opportunity to set a story with them.

The opportunity to contribute to the project came along at a time when I was feeling stressed in my life. My old teaching job was getting tough – I was beginning to suffer from what I realized was improper training and a workplace culture that encouraged instructors to let each other fail as small errors snowballed into serious problems.

Some of my favourite spaces in the Doctor Who fan community
are the queer ones. Not necessarily the gay ones, which have
their own unavoidable problems at the moment. But the queer.

So I was glad to get an offer – even if it was for free – to contribute to a project built in making explicit the values of liberation and queerness that so many fans saw in Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

I think it’s time I focussed more on smaller projects like this for my writing. The last couple of years, I’ve been trying to produce a film version of my play from four years ago, You Were My Friend. But I’ve frankly had a lot of trouble raising the money for it and getting a crew together before I had the money to make it.

Now that I’m working full-time as Anderson College’s Director of Education, I have more money and don’t have to hustle all the time. But I’m also no longer in a position to devote three or four weeks of my life to eight hours of shooting a film on no notice.

But I do have time to devote every week to writing another short-ish novel. Which the latest version of You Were My Friend can be. It’s the kind of work where my talents can work best. And developing connections in the Toronto art and publishing world over the next year can make for a respectable indie author career.

So I’ll be getting back to pages. It’s where I belong.

Scattered Thoughts on Cultural Paranoia, Jamming, 30/08/2017

Call this the epilogue to “Hey! Cultural Marxism!” Just a few reflections on how we got into this mess as a society. No claim to completeness or even an escape from my partiality.

I do suspect that there may have been a little systematic causation between the old moral panic movies of the 1930s and the hysteric paranoia of anti-communism from McCarthy to John Birch to Goldwater to Breitbart. But since this is an idea that literally came to me over the last few days, I don’t exactly have a huge pile of pre-existing scholarship backing me up.

The paranoia of modern American culture is one of the strangest
social phenomena I've ever thought about. Such fear of all aliens is
only possible through profound and thorough solipsism.
My thanks to the source.

That said, there is a common tone – a paranoid fear bordering on ecstasy, expressed in the aesthetics of a live-action cartoon.

Anyway, this one is for fun. A set of reflections.

Thought One. The dominant mode of Cold War anti-communism was paranoia. This was the engine of Joseph McCarthy’s hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC had existed for decades, but McCarthy’s leadership brought it into legend.

Those hearings and the cultural atmosphere they created basically burned the socialist left out of American consciousness as a society.

Thought Two. That paranoia was a reactive fear. Obviously – its name is ‘anti-communism.’ But the wildest delusions of the anti-communist paranoid was precisely that of McCarthy. They could be anywhere; It’s possible they’ve infiltrated everywhere; Won converts who keep their actions secret; A demoniacal cabal.

I never saw this in action in my own lifetime until it became about Islamist terrorists, not communists. Terrorism paranoia differed quite a bit from anti-communist paranoia. Mostly, the paranoia I experienced in 21st century Canada (watching America on TV) had an extra racializing flavour.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the expression of McCarthy's
paranoia in techno-horror cinema.

The Arabs and South/Central Asians who faced that stigma had distinct ethnic differences that were pretty quickly racialized into a vector to marginalize them. It’s sad, because Salafists would have a lot in common with radical American Evangelicals.

Thought Three. Lots of Americans were anti-communist in the 1930s, the same time those moral panic films first exploded. But that was actually the United States catching up with Europe’s anti-communism – it was oligarchical and right-wing opposition to the trade union movement.

This first American anti-communism strikes me as very much like the European version. Communism at the time was the farthest left wing of the trade union movement. Radical communists as fellow travellers with Eugene Debs, Woody Guthrie, and Jimmy Hoffa. Mostly, it was a vehicle for America’s money’s WASP class to remix their traditional anti-Semitism.

Thought Four. The hysterical lunacy of it all. That’s the only way I can think to describe the tone of that paranoia. I’m talking about McCarthyism, but it shared the same tone, the same deranged outlook on the world as those moral panic films.

Reefer Madness and all those others. It could be weed, cocaine, sex. Eventually, it was motorcycle gangs. Above all, those films were about fear. Fear that ordinary looking people could turn their whole lives upside-down – one act of deviancy was all it took to send your life to hell.

The Puritan bides his time through eras of liberalism until at last, the
more moderate among them reaches a breaking point of even their
disgust. Public acceptance of homosexuality is too much for them.
A group of Evangelical extremists published The Nashville Statement
standing against LGBTQ rights yesterday, and I saw one social media
exchange. "How could you condemn Christians praying for gays
when Muslims kill gays all the time?" Well, Christians kill and
persecute LGBTQ people all the time. The American money goes
to Africa so their sensitive domestic audience doesn't see the blood.

The 1930s wasn’t just the era of the Great Depression – it was also Prohibition, the greatest triumph of the temperance movement. Temperance was the most powerful expression of Puritan Christian popular asceticism since the foundation of the United States.

The Puritan was the most extreme ascetic ideology. Beyond the traditional asceticism of an elite, powerful holy one’s path. No, Puritanism and the temperance movement was devoted to mass asceticism. The denial of all deviancy was necessary to save the soul.

Electric fear of total destruction – death, murder, the surrender of your own identity to a deterritorializing desire. “Play faster! Faster!”

They were education-exploitation films. Reefer Madness was itself first financed by a church organization. Did that Puritan energy somehow mutate through McCarthy and John Birch to become hysteric anti-communism?

Thought Five. I don’t actually know. But the possibility intrigues me.

Hey! Cultural Marxism IV: Strange Loops, Research Time, 29/08/2017

Looking at the extremism of modern right-wing politics in the United States should demonstrate something that I think a lot of folks in my generation don’t quite get. Rabidly intense anti-communism never went away – its popularity was just waning for a while.

The years from the Great Depression to the end of the McCarthy era were the formative years of anti-communist extremism in the United States. I have a philosophical hypothesis that the sustained hysteria of Breitbart anti-communists was rooted in a very peculiar style of communication.

If I can be appropriately transparent for the average media literacy of
the 1930s: It's almost as if the ordinary social conservatives of
America who lost their minds in moral panics over drugs, sex, comics,
violence in movies, violence in video games, and all the rest had
the reefer madness. The rest of us who could smoke a little on Friday
nights out in our early 20s usually inoculated ourselves against this
kind of paranoia pretty well.

Remember Reefer Madness? That was just the most famous of a whole wave of moral panic movies. They had titles like Assassin of Youth, Sex Madness, and The Cocaine Fiends. They all had that same deranged, cartoonish depiction of how some critical impropriety will destroy your life.

Yet people believed them! An entire generation of Americans grew up in a culture that hadn’t developed the media literacy to understand how ridiculous these hysteria films really are. The same hysteria was adapted to the anti-communist messaging of the early Cold War.

That hysterically paranoid conservatism was the mainstream right wing of political thinking, which saw even the most congenial trade union activist as a devious Stalinist sleeper cell. The least hint of collectivist politics, especially in the name of helping poor people, was a sign that the billy clubs were needed.

Friedrich Hayek and his network of think tanks kept its ideas alive during the social revolutions of the 1950s through 1970s. The John Birch Society kept the flames of deranged hysteria burning.

Those social revolutions were liberation movements – feminism, environmentalism, Indigenous awakening, black liberation, LGBTQ openness. The moralities of those liberation movements were very communitarian – informed by the moral importance of supporting each other.

These communitarian values are incompatible with one of the fundamental freedoms of classical liberal thinking – the freedom to tell everyone around you to fuck off. Call it the freedom of solitude, the sanctity of private property. That’s what it is.

The reason Reefer Madness worked was that people's media literacy
was still pretty simple. If you were an adult in 1936, you'd think that
a movie saying it depicted the real world was honest with you. Then
Marlon Brando acted like a real person all the way through The Wild
One, and his naturalistic, psychological acting technique
demonstrated in 80 minutes that all these moral panic movies are
bullshit. His realism made everyone else look like the cartoons
they always were. In 1936, Reefer Madness was a serious film.

Follow to the most intense degree the conclusion of Robert Nozick’s “Radio Show argument.” It ends with Milo and every jerk who learned to speak in Reddit and 4Chan threads. My inviolable liberty includes the freedom to be a total jerk to everyone around me, breaking all my promises, and turning away from my community.

Moral obligation as oppression. This is a popular belief I have seen more and more in everyday behaviour. People even directly said this to me. r/libertarian. Yet the idea is obscene. Imagine how hysterical, how intense your paranoia would have to be, for you to believe a philosophy to hostile to simply living as neighbours. It would literally be the end of society.

Yet in the Breitbart set, the communitarian values that strengthen promises and friendships in society are the bedrock of communism. As philosophy, this makes no sense. It mistakes the most abstract similarity – building and strengthening community is important – for the acorn whose greatest oak was Josef Stalin!

Conspiracy thinking as popular ideology. This is how having been one of literally thousands of students passing through a classroom over the years is seen as a nefarious mentorship in radical communism. Millions having been made – in their everyday thinking about politics – as deranged as McCarthy.

That was Andrew Breitbart’s original vision. We think of it as crazily white supremacist because that’s what Steve Bannon turned it into. So now, it's even more crazy. This is a popular way to think about marxism today. And even though I'm no marxist, I at least want to give the tradition's best thinkers their credit where my work is due.

Kill Your Idols X: Manufactured Obsolescence, Jamming, 22/08/2017

When I first thought of this post before the weekend, I figured I’d spend more time talking about Noam Chomsky. But I think now that too many have already spent too much.

Manufacturing Consent did a great job of analyzing the methods that modern power centres – um – manufacture our consent. Chomsky walks you through the material structure of the institutions and social networks that keep this self-destructive morality popular.

A thinker should always be careful that they don't
end up on a t-shirt, because then they start writing
for the t-shirt alone. You should always be able to
write for the t-shirt, but never let it become your
primary focus. The world is at least as complicated
as a good book.

We’re in an age where more than just states control and inform these powerful institutions. Our society is more complex. There are more channels and platforms to spread ideas, more social networks to build alliances than ever before. This is true for revolutionaries as well as those deeply invested in the status quo.

That’s the lesson of the Russian Revolution, as Gramsci saw. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party succeeded because Russia’s social order was held together by so few threads. The capitalist democracies were more complex. Now much more so than then.

Chomsky’s analysis is simple but insightful. The for-profit motives of private media companies encourage them to build mutually beneficial relationships with their wealthy investors and shareholders. Same goes for the regular advertisers that bring a platform most of its daily revenue. All groups with interests in the current way of things to protect.

Large media companies respond by letting the ideas and beliefs of these groups pervade their productions. Chomsky focussed almost entirely on news media at the time, but it’s true for more metaphorical cultural producers too. Threats like catastrophic lawsuits can keep rebel organizations in line.

Fearmongering with boogeymen like terrorists (Asians, Muslims) or communists (Jews) or criminal gangs (blacks, Latin Americans) keeps people from concentrating on more fundamental questions.

Those are the five specific techniques and sets of broad messaging ideas Chomsky identifies in the contemporary media ecology end up – um – fabricating our agreement with the current way of the world.

It was a worthwhile insight that set up the basic guidebook that critical activists have used ever since to analyze ideological pressures in our media and culture. I’m glad Chomsky did this. But he hasn’t followed up this work with any political or media analysis of similar worth, originality, and power.

I do consider Chomsky's analysis of how the American oligarchy has
fairly direct control of news media channels through financial
pressure and direct ownership incomplete. There are plenty of less-
intentional, less-directional vectors for ideological influence. But I
should also be honest that I understand perfectly well why the
Washington Post didn't run a giant exposé on Amazon. Not that
it was anything so crude as direct pressure. It would have been a
presumption shared by pretty much everyone around the staff that
you take a pass on looking too much into the boss' other company.

Most of his career since Manufacturing Consent is a continued media blitz of interviews and books repeating that same message in different contexts. But he’s always drifted toward the direction of criticism for the US government’s role in that media ecology.

Now, that’s important. Chomsky is an American, and so has a responsibility to make his primary target as a critic his own country. It’s a patriotic duty.

The problem I have with Chomsky is that his anti-Americanism has consumed his entire perspective. I discussed in a photo caption yesterday how Chomsky so easily blinded himself to Russia’s petty military imperialism. Putin seeks a strutting prestige for himself and his country, as if Crimea, Trans-Dniester, Donetsk, or Abkhazia were jewels on a charm bracelet.

Yet Chomsky gives Putin a pass. Interfering in other country’s elections, peddling a radical Russian Orthodox nationalist ideology across Europe and Asia? The DNC hack was America getting a taste of its own medicine, he said.

Fair enough, since America has overthrown the governments of countries all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That doesn’t give ecclesiastic-ethnic nationalism a pass. Nobody is supposed to get a pass. The essential concept of being a critical activist is that nobody gets a pass.

So there’s the hypocrisy. But there’s also his obsolescence. Chomsky hasn’t ever really updated this model of corporate media as ideological propaganda for the scale-free media networks of the internet era.

Frankly, I’m not sure that he can, because Chomsky’s model depends on editorial control of media organizations directed from a single, small set of oligarchical social networks. It lends itself a little too much to conspiracy theory, frankly. The internet is about platforms for diverse interactions, not broadcasters of uniform and universal channels.

Ultimately, Chomsky today is little more than a professional talking head taking up space that could otherwise go to more innovative and energetic critical theorists.

This feels like very directionless reflection now. I’m going to wrap this up tomorrow.

What’s Another Word for Getting Big? Research Time, 20/06/2017

A curious idea came to me as I was reading through some of James Madison’s Federalist Papers. If I were to think about them historically – and this is just a riff, really – I’d see them as a forerunner of the pragmatists.

I don't just mean this in the ordinary sense of the term, that they’ll adapt their thinking to changing situations and generally apply their thought to problems in immediate political and social problems. Of course, they did. But that’s not all that was going on.

Sometimes, I think the only -ism I could ever adopt as a thinker is pragmatist.* Our thinking is rooted in understanding the changeable, contingent, material world. So we strive for our thinking to be as flexible as reality. Not conform to some perfect imagined symmetry.

Just because you wrote more of the papers, that doesn't mean you have
to be the star of the show.

* I just wish academics would stop assuming that all the name means, is that I write commentary on William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey.

The world is as it is, and philosophy develops different ways of thinking to deal with that. Philosophy is the craftsmanship of concepts, our mind’s tools. I see that idea in the work of Hamilton and Madison. But it’s especially at the forefront for Madison. If Hamilton is the Federalists’ political scientist and sociologist, Madison is the book’s philosopher.

Hamilton argues for his conclusions through very insightful and philosophically productive analysis of ongoing and oncoming political problems of the post-independence Thirteen Colonies.

Madison will argue for the same conclusions, but through analyzing the possibilities for the structures of communities themselves.

He attacks an argument against large-scale federal government. It has nothing to do with immediate political and military consequences. It’s that the only functional free societies in human history have been the size of small cities. So only small cities can govern themselves democratically.

Madison’s argument was that democratic possibility doesn’t depend on size, but on communication. To deliberate as a public in ancient Greece or medieval Germany and Italy, you had to show up in the same town square and talk to each other.

By the time of revolutionary North America, they’d developed the technology for detailed communication across entire continents. The same public deliberation could carry on through the first continental-scale mass media – printed newspaper and an educated society.**

** Educated among the whole people, at their time; less so among the three-fifths people.

The same media effectively carried out democratic governance in the same way. Election machinery and fast channels of communication between a town and a capital city connected South Carolina to New York, Vermont, and Maryland within a few days.

The mechanisms for representatives to reach a general assembly and communicate with the people for whom they were responsible in government could reach longer than the walk down the road. Detailed communication across continents was possible by the American Revolution.

You could create a public of millions with trains and the postal service. What’s important isn’t size, but the speed and density of communication. Find the difference that makes the difference. You may need new ideas to do it – a butcher can always make a better knife. That’s philosophy.

The Slow Outreach of Respect in the Troll Era, Advocate, 16/01/2017

A fortunate follow-up to my analysis of troll politics this weekend. It’s a small example of a conversation that I think demonstrates how real social change happens. A story about getting people with opposing political views to sit down respectfully and work out ideas about the future of society together.

That kind of coalition-building used to be done in most state politics and governance, but not anymore in this era of demonizing the opposition and priming people for one-party rule.

A graphic representation of people's typical attitude when discussing
politics on the internet.

Qualifications first. I don’t intend this story to imply anything about how to win elections or referendums. Because this is about how to build bridges with opposition to humanize each other and restore values of friendship and brotherhood to political organizing.

So do you win elections? Present a set of genuine policy alternatives driven by a genuinely alternative political and moral philosophy that critiques and makes up for the blind spots in the current government’s approach. Then promote the hell out of that vision and drive turnout as high as you can.

But how do we end this impasse of polarization? What kind of conversation spaces can we start with our opponents that won’t immediately become cesspools of abuse?

Twitter will not be that space. Political organizing on Twitter is for peacock posturing and rallying your own troops with news, photos, and live video.

Facebook can be that space, but not the typical kind of Facebook space that’s gotten all the press this year – It won’t be partisan news pages like Eagle Rising or Addicting Info. I’m talking about interactions of personal pages and profiles.

My old friend D the Miner got into it when I posted a link to my post about troll politics, throwing some right-wing perspective into the mix. And though I cheekily confronted him about it at first, we ended up in a fairly detailed back-and-forth about how people perceive and associate political and social values, and what the future of Canadian energy should be.

Do not let the monsters determine how you live, only how you fight
monsters.

Facebook comments allow people to have public conversations where each statement can carry a lot of detail. You can explain what you want to say in a comment or reply field where you can go on for a paragraph or two.

What’s more, the context of those threads are clear from their layout – if a thread is a conversation between two people, you don’t have to jump in on that exact thread if you have something different to say. You can start your own comment thread and conversation on the post.

It’s a slow process – literally just detailed conversations among friends scattered around the country and the world. But it can create a more relaxed space where people can talk in a respectful way about the different ways they experience life and society.

Because while we may be in a time of extremism now, we’ll also need to lay down the foundations of a more peaceful politics to emerge if democratic culture survives this upheaval. Those foundations are those calm spaces of conversation and fellowship between different people.

Not always appropriate for every political context. But definitely needed.

Troll Politics, Advocate, 14/01/2017

It’s not exactly news to call Donald Trump America’s most prominent troll. But it’s not just an insult. Trolling is often discussed (and dismissed) as the immature snarking of self-entitled jackasses. And it is.

But it’s also become a politically powerful weapon – the discourse of mocking, dismissal, and the marginalization of critique and conscience. It turns every piece of sincere communication against itself. The crystallization of nihilistic postmodernism.

Troll discourse is the most powerful political speech weapon of our time. And if progressive forces don’t master it and learn to destroy it, anti-racist and anti-fascist politics will be crushed in the West.

If progressive activists can grow their own trolling skills – both on
social media and in real life – to Shkreli's and Milo's levels, those
movements will have a chance of surviving the Trump years. If not,
we'll be ripped to shreds.

So how does troll discourse work? It’s essentially the subversion of political language. Look at the most recent example.

For the last month, the progressive mainstream Western press has led major discussions of “fake news.”

The term originally refers to the websites and Facebook groups that concoct lies and hoaxes – usually about left-wing political figures and the Hillary Clinton campaign. These hoaxes are so purposefully inflammatory that they’ll drive a huge number of clickthroughs (and the attendant ad revenues).

It’s a little blunt, but basically accurate. Since the US election, there’s been a flurry of panicked articles floating around the progressive and liberal online literati denouncing fake news and trying to figure out how to stem it.

Now look what Donald Trump did in his press conference last week. During the presidential campaign, CNN was widely seen as kowtowing to the Trump campaign for the sake of ratings. But the network also employs many Trump-skeptical journalists.

When faced with critical questions about his Russian connections from CNN’s Jim Acosta, Trump refused to answer them. He instead denounced the whole network. But look at the language – “You’re fake news!”

He smeared any reporting of Trump’s personal and business connections with Vladimir Putin and the Russian billionaire nationalist community as the irresponsible spreading of fake news.

Yeah, well you're a fake President.

A term that’s been defined in popular discourse as Trump-critical is now used by Trump himself to denounce any criticism of him and his government. Classic trolling – take a term whose popular meaning is most often used against you and use it against your enemies, claiming it’s for the same reasons.

In just the same way, chief trolls like Milo Yiannopolous and protege Martin Shkreli are brilliant practitioners of trolling. They’ve taken the narrative concepts from people and groups who’ve historically suffered from systematic institutional marginalization, and let wealthy white men of various levels of jockishness and dorkitude claim to be victims of systematic discrimination.

Because someone who makes video games they don’t like broke up with a stalkerish asshole. Or a Trump-critical journalist who works for a typically “women’s” magazine objected to harassing, stalking behaviour to get a millionaire hedge fund trader banned from a social media platform.

Shrkeli’s defenders have called his removal from Twitter his victimization at the hands of SJW fascists and an attack on his free speech rights.

Verbal and graphic harassment in a public forum has been defended as an untouchable act of free speech. When Shkreli was to appear as a guest of honour at the UC Davis stop of Milo’s Dangerous Faggot Tour, protests of the two grew so intense and violent that the appearance was cancelled.

Millions of people take this notion seriously. We have a lot of work to do.

And people called the cancellation of a high-budget campus tour stop an attack on Milo and Martin’s free speech.

All the concept that progressive activists develop to articulate their claims, their programs, and their rights are co-opted by reactionary enemies within months, weeks, possibly even days. Not just intent, but linguistic meaning itself has been politically destabilized.

Unless progressively-minded activists and organizers confront this form of reactionary subversion, we will be crushed. Progressives need to master the subversive and moving language that reactionaries already use with expert skill – This is the most difficult political battle of my generation, and we need to perfect our weapons.

I’ll be posting this on my Facebook author page, and tagging all my activist friends – I hope we can have the first of some productive discussions to turn the tide against reaction and in favour of real freedom.

Who Is the Public You Broadcast? Advocate, 28/11/2016

Or: How the CBC Fights White Nationalism by Existing

Just a few paragraphs of riffing on the politics of Canada. In part, it’s to escape to a world of news not dominated by Trump and Trumpism. But I can also see the embrace of extremity that he’s inspired. Which is depressing to me as a person.

Late last week, the complete dismantling of Canada’s public broadcaster the CBC has become an ordinary mainstream discussion. Because two leading candidates for our Conservative Party leadership, Kellie Leitch and Maxime Bernier, announced that a part of their platform is radically changing that institution.

CBC on Front Street in Toronto. For Canada's Conservatives, it's the heart
of the country's liberalism, despite its institutional corruption and the
politically conservative bias in much of its coverage.

Right now, the CBC is a public broadcaster – it’s wholly owned by the government, which provides about a billion dollars each year to run it. And the CBC sells advertising too, to supplement that funding.

It has a regional network providing local programming – for news and entertainment – from all over the country. A bureau for every province and every major population centre in that province. It runs television, radio, and internet services for each of those regions.

CBC’s television service gets less than 5% audience share for the entire country. We aren’t exactly dealing with a powerhouse of television production like the BBC. But it essentially provides a media production house and budget to every significant region of Canada.

It’s especially important for more isolated regions of the country, throughout the north and rural regions. These are lands so vast that it’s difficult to get any viable local media production happening there. Places where a private network, with its incentives to focus only on the largest, richest markets, would never have an incentive to send anyone.

Leitch and Bernier both say that the CBC is a government intrusion into the media market. A monopoly whose removal from the commercial television game would spur competition that’s now stagnant.

Kellie Leitch has become Canada's leading standard-bearer for the global
white nationalist political movement.

How the disappearance of a television network that barely gets 5% audience share would spur competition is anyone’s guess.

Bernier would prefer that the CBC become an equivalent to PBS in the United States. There’d be a little government funding, but most of its production would come through private donations. It could probably only afford one or two studios and produce only a few, very low-budget, productions.

Leitch wants to dismantle and sell the entire network. The CBC would provide some rural radio coverage for local concerns at most.

Under all this talk of the CBC as a government “monopoly” on a media market, is a voice in mainstream discussion of long-simmering right-wing populist hatred of the CBC. A government-built network that constantly opposes conservatism, a mouthpiece for liberal and Liberal Canada.

The radical conservatives of my country have a long and colourful history of hating the CBC for its supposed liberal bias. And quite a few on the left found the network hopelessly corrupt and kowtowing to the Conservative Party line during the Harper years.

The drive to dismantle the CBC is to destroy what radical conservatives consider an ideological opponent.

Local production houses like CBC Iqaluit, for example.

And there’s an even deeper, more disgusting idea at the heart of radical conservative hatred for the CBC. Remember that regional network of local studios I mentioned? Those low-budget production houses scattered all over the country provide a channel for voices in the very rural north and wild areas of the country to speak.

The ongoing Indigenous Cultural Renaissance of Canada exploded in artistic and political vectors across the country through those channels. Indigenous voices today demand material reparations for acts of genocide. They demand control over their lands – constitutionally speaking, sovereignty within the Canadian state.

They demand recognition as equal participants in Canadian culture – not just as individuals, but as individuals whose singular character was shaped by their Indigenous culture. The Indigenous want in.

Indigenous voices reach the hearts of Canada’s biggest cities and smallest, whitest towns through the communication networks of all those CBC studios. They’re being carried by private channels now, having built these relationships with their newfound cultural power. But the CBC was the first conduit, and it remains one of the most important.

The radical conservative line on the CBC is that it’s a home for urbane, alienated, socially progressive (and Liberal sellout) elites. And there are a lot of hipster journalists working for the CBC today. Dismantling CBC will likely shut many left-wing voices out of mainstream media.

Aesthetically, my favourite expression of Canada's Indigenous Cultural
Renaissance is the music of Tanya Tagaq. Not only is it beautiful,
remarkable music unlike anything else most Westerners (and probably
most other cultures on Earth) have ever heard. It expresses the same
social and political ideas that threaten all the traditional relations of
cultural dominance of the Canadian state over Indigenous life.

But if the CBC is dismantled, it will also significantly diminish the Indigenous voices reaching the rest of Canada. It will be easier for Indigenous people to be kept silent, confined in the wilderness where proper Canadians never go. To the silent, dark, and cold.

One of the advantages Trump’s moving the Overton Window is that the enemies of racism can return to calling what we fight what it really is. Racists aren’t the only ones who dog-whistle. If you were speak in code to disguise white nationalism, we have to speak in code to call you out on it. Otherwise, we’d look extreme and lose credibility.

So thank you Donald Trump, for letting me say what seems to be the real motivations of Kellie Leitch, Maxime Bernier, and quite a few (though not all) of the folks who support exactly the sorts of proposals they now say openly.

If you dismantle the CBC, you’ll know that the Indigenous voices of Canada will lose a lot of their local media production outlets, and media communication between your world and the mainstream of Canada. It will be easier to remind Canada’s Indigenous of their proper place in Canadian society.

Absent from it.