Month: December 2010

“

Science fiction is the first human literature

”

That’s Ken MacLeod attempting the most extreme claim possible in defence of SF. I don’t buy his rosy view of SF as humanist, or that “

mainstream [literature] is mostly about things we share with other animals – love and hate, war and peace, dominance hierarchies, sex and violence

“. But I don’t have to: he’s just turning the contrast right up to clarify the picture.

Also makes me realise how twisted it is that my ideas of ‘being human’ are all in opposition to being cold-hearted, calculating, machine-like, etc. i.e. to me, ‘being human’ generally means ‘being animal’.

—

I’ve never read Heinrich Böll, but this interview makes me want to for the first time.

I also guiltily enjoy the grumbling about mainstream American literature. It’s an easy bogeyman, and hardly a new one: male, middle-class, academic, urban, dull. The most common hate figure is Jonathan Franzen, or at least his critical canonization. It’s striking how many writers whose (online) work I enjoy come out with similar criticism. But I don’t read enough novels to judge if it’s accurate, and I don’t have enough historical perspective to know if it is more than the perpetual siege of the centre by the periphery.

Much the same with indie music. Take Sasha Frere-Jones:

“

I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness….Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? I can’t imagine [James Brown or the Meters] retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.

That isn’t the most interesting version of this critique, just the one I have to hand. IMO the race angle is more a symptom than a cause — the fundamental problem involves social and economic power, geographical centralization of the chattering classes, critics facing practical incentives to discuss the cultures they know and understand. In short, it’s The System. Or it’s The Kyriarchy, to use this decade’s terminology — the idea is the same.

ETA: less convinced by both these arguments the more I think about them.

Tagged


books

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music

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power

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science fiction

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unjustified rants

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whining about the mainstream

Ken MacLeod:

I was on a panel with Charlie Stross, and he did a very impressive Charlie-style riff on how SF is actually the agitprop department of an early 20th-century totalitarian movement that never made the big time with the flags and uniforms and revolvers and never got a mound of skulls to call its own. Technocracy, the movement in question, has dwindled to a handful of old men in Oregon, busy putting the

Northwest Technocrat

on the Web after decades of cyclostyling, but SF soldiers on. It’s as if collectivization and the Five-Year Plan had never happened but there was this genre, socialist realism – SR – that kept going on and on and

on

about tractors.

What is Anonymous

What does anything have to do with the other? People are dead. Other people are rich. Some people’s day was ruined. Other people were embarrassed. Some people laughed. What is the end result? Human history. The world, every damn day. Welcome to the never-ending old sick twisted mostly unfunny joke that is life. The human mob, again and again and again. Until there are none of us left.

So what is Anonymous? Whatever you want. In my definition, the closest that a boring and trite platitude can get to summing up human existence while still missing it completely. Sorry. Add your own politics/doom/disappointment/enthusiasm/distrust/anger/fear/love. It’s jokes, all the way down.

In other words, it’s the mob. we got a little less used to the mob in the era of Fordism, when people were more regulated and had to get up at 9am. Now, the internet is in many ways bringing us back towards the pre-industrial. And 4-chan is the new mob.

Someone wrote to me about Ödön von Horváth, a Weimar-era playwright and novelist who wrote these wonderful absurdist pieces about how nuts fascism was — the point being that its inherent craziness hid how evil it was. His work is laugh-out-loud funny while being shiver-down-your-spine chilling. But he was a Hungarian living in Berlin and eventually had to flee the Nazis. An epically difficult thing in itself, and he must have felt a unfathomably-deep sense of relief when he finally got to Paris… where he was promptly struck by lightening and killed while taking a victory stroll down the Champs Elysee. How can we not champion this guy? He must not be forgotten.

Bookslut | Heinrich Böll and the Literature of Aftermath: A Correspondence

Now that fee-paying is part of the culture, government has taken the opportunity to expand the principle. Whereas we might once have hoped that, as society became wealthier, ever wider access to the goods of higher education (and many other cultural goods) would be possible, now it seems that “we can’t afford it”. What was once an essential component of the good society—remember Harold Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Open University?—becomes an expensive luxury whose only acceptable public justification is economic benefit. So much for John Stuart Mill.

Post mainly to see if ScribeFire is going to help me at all. Probably not

[

The Goggles Do Nothing — Crooked Timber

The ancestry of modern SF lies as much in the 19th century “condition of England” novel as it does in more obvious ancestors like

Frankenstein.

That is to say – one of the skeins one can trace back through modern SF is a vein of sociological rather than scientific speculation, in which events happening to individual characters serve as a means to capture arguments about what is happening to society as a whole. In the nineteenth century, there was clearly a tension between the novel-as-fleshing-out-of-individual-experience and the novel-as-depiction-of-our-social-state (

Middlemarch

is one of the few novels I’ve read from this period that really manages these tensions successfully). Science fiction took one of these routes (an awful lot of early

SF

– e.g. H.G. Wells

is

primarily sociological speculation). Returning to the long nineteenth century is nothing more and nothing less than SF coming back to its roots.

This is a pretty impressive success for Anonymous, taking down a

very

prominent site.

In an attack it is calling “Operation: Payback”, a group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous appear to have orchestrated a DDOS (“distributed denial of service”) attack on the site, bringing its service to a halt for many users. Attempts to load www.mastercard.com are currently unsuccessful.

Interestingly, this is sandwiched half-way between being a mass action, and being merely the work of a small, elite group of hackers. I’m not sure what system they’re using, but the ‘distributed’ element of the DDoS almost certainly comes from thousands of /b/tards running some code on their own machines. For that matter, it could well be that a bunch of them are sitting on mastercard.com and hitting refresh.

Mastercard statement: “

MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service

“

This is the key question for the long-term impact of wikileaks:

Assange’s hypothesis may or may not be true, but his belief that WikiLeaks will lead to greater government transparency is blinkered in the extreme. Governments do not respond to security breaches by surrendering themselves to the fates. American foreign-policy bureaucracies have and will continue to respond to WikiLeaks by clamping down on the dissemination of information.

The effect of wikileaks is to clamp down on all

partially-secret

information. If you want to act, you now must make a choice: either you act entirely in the open, or you keep it all locked down*. Keep things partialy secret, but not entirely, and you’re going to experience the worst of both worlds.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s how political groups must act under threat from a repressive government. Choose transparency, act like Aung San Suu Kyi. Depend for your survival on public support domestic and international, on the efficiency of open communication, on having a morally-defensible public face. Or act as cells. Be small, be secretive. Renounce the possibility of building a mass movement. Be a small group of committed citizens, maybe not even knowing the names of one another.

But don’t choose a path in the middle. To adapt Mr. Miyagi:

Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later,

[makes squish gesture]

get squish just like grape. Here,

karate

secrecy, same thing. Either you

karate

secrecy do “yes”, or

karate

secrecy do “no”. You

karate

secrecy do “guess so”,

[makes squish gesture]

just like grape. Understand?

The same applies to governments, lobbyists, firms worried about leaking secrets to one another. The latest leaks were visible to 3 million Americans. It’s a reasonable bet that Russia and China had already gained access to them. Similarly I wouldn’t be at all surprised if big corporations already knew about some of what the State Department were secretly saying about them. You can easily imagine somebody in Bradley Manning’s position going on to work for Halliburton, bringing with him any documents discussing the corporation.

The bulk of the leaks consists of political analysis, gossip, pen-portraits of powerful figures. It’s the kind of commentary that circulates pretty freely among journalists, lobbyists, activists, civil servants and other politics nerds. People in power already had it, albeit not in written form. What’s new is letting the public into it, warts and all.

* The effect isn’t total, but it’s heading in that direction. In the specific case of the Bradley Maning leaks, some half-competent database management would have cut them off at the pass.

Gah! I’m frustrated trying to figure out how to back up all the data I have splurged across the web.

Is there a service that will do it for me? That is, a backup system set up to work with the backup options of all the big sites I use (LJ, blogger, facebook, delicious, etc). Let me just click an ‘export LJ’ button, have them slurp out the data using whatever half-baked interface is available, and either let me download the data or store it online for me.

I’d pay a fair amount for such a service, and I’m sure many others would too. It’s an obvious idea. So where is it?

by the way, the Facebook ‘export my data’ option is excellent, once you find it. Gives you all, for instance, all your wall posts since you joined the site — so you can search through and find what it was you said to somebody a year ago, should you need to.

Charles Stross on the utopia shortage:

we badly need more utopian speculation. The consensus future we read about in the media and that we’re driving towards is a roiling, turbulent fogbank beset by half-glimpsed demons: climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, mass extinction, collapse of the oceanic food chain, overpopulation, terrorism, foreigners who want to come here and steal our women jobs. It’s not a nice place to be; if the past is another country, the consensus view of the future currently looks like a favela with raw sewage running in the streets. Conservativism — standing on the brake pedal — is a natural reaction to this vision; but it’s a maladaptive one, because it makes it harder to respond effectively to new and unprecedented problems.

Or in the words of Zizek (who is a reliable source of one-liners, if nothing else): “

it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system

“.

Not that utopias

need

to be anticapitalist, mind. My own daydreams mostly involve capitalism withering slightly, as some areas currently market-driven are replaced by more satisfying forms of interaction. Same with the other utopia I find most appealing: the amorphous vision implicit in pirate/transparency/open-data circles, slowly coming into focus as those groups become aware of themselves. You can construct non-market versions of those ideals, but they pretty much degrade into communism, anarchism or (rarely, but IMO very plausibly) slavery. Otherwise, you’re left with the market/state/kindness for physical goods, sharing for intellectual goods, and probably some kind of permanent fudge in the middle.

Anyway, utopias: let’s have more of them, regardless of plausibility. What’s yours?

ETA: Although maybe there are a lot of utopian ideas floating around — just not ones I find remotely appealing. Religious fundamentalism is going strong. Pure no-holds-barred capitalism is a utopian ideal for some, and still a long way from being put into practice.

Tagged


idealism

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politics

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utopia