by Mike O’Brien

It takes me a long time to finish books. The last one I finished was published about a century ago, or four and a half centuries ago, depending on how you figure it. In my defence, it was very dense, and very long, and packed with voluminous footnotes in such small font that I was obliged, for the first time in my life, to wield reading glasses to decipher the tiny spacklings of ink (known colloquially as “fly shit”). But, as a rabbit-hole-diving lay reader of technical arcana, it was worth the effort.

De Re Metallica is a treatise that attempts to collect and systematically arrange all surviving information on mining and metallurgical industry available in its time, that time being the early to middle sixteenth century. Published in 1556, it was written over the course of 30 years by Georg Agricola, a scholar and physician. His works were published in Latin, as was usual at the time, so I read the 1912 English translation by Herbert Hoover (yes, that Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States and namesake of the Hoover Dam. He wasn’t president yet, so I guess he had some free time). Hoover was at the time a very successful and esteemed mining engineer, whose lectures at Columbia and Stanford had already been published as a standard textbook.

(Before going any further, I would like to share a mining joke. A man walks into an employment office and says “I’d like to get a job in the mining industry”. The clerk says, “Alright, we currently have openings in a copper mine and in an iron mine, which would you prefer?”. “Either ore”, the man replies.)

(You’re welcome.)

Agricola’s book is a real soup-to-nuts overview of everything involved in the extraction and processing of mined materials, from choosing where to dig all the way to separating and purifying metals for sale. The accompanying woodcut illustrations are indispensable, at least to this reader, for elucidating long passages describing three-dimensional objects in classical measurement units (e.g. “to this lower beam is affixed a second beam, transverse to the first, measuring six feet and two hands length and two hands and two digits height and breadth, at such distance from the main wall that a man may pass between them without great difficulty”. I just made that up, but it gives a fair impression.) They also feature the occasional dog, which is nice. Read more »

by David Hoyt

In his recent book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and Dreams of A World Without Democracy, historian Quinn Slobodian offers what might be the closest thing we have to an epigraph for our present moment.

Silicon Valley often forgets its Hegel at its own risk. The German philosopher taught that the master is always dependent on the slave. Neither island nor cloud can exist without its underclass. Beyond the masses of app-mediated gig workers, even the vaunted artificial intelligence programs work only because of the often repetitive routines… of labor both skilled and unskilled…The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.

Slobodian is one of a few thinkers taking the risk of writing contemporary history, one of the most difficult but important of genres, especially in a disoriented and shifting age. Shipwrecked attempts litter the shoals of our rising seas, many once registered under the flags of oracular business consultants or breathless Great Man hagiographies. Does anyone now think the world was ever flat? The present, to invert a mid-century novel’s famous opening line, is a foreign country. The pernicious side-effect of someone else’s bright idea suddenly dominates everything. What was a trend for decades became a tipping point last week. What seemed important or forgivable no longer is. Causal chains are clouded by changing weather, and the diviners at Farmer’s Almanac have thrown in the towel. “Is there anything Jack Ma can’t do?” a dazzled writer asks of the founder of China’s e-commerce giant, Alibaba, in 2012. Yes, it turns out, there is: Say no to Xi Jinping.

Distortions of attention are the hazards of thinking contemporary history. Already, free-range attention spans are further shortened when captured by the digital economy, and successions of world historical events are occluded by the price of gas or ground beef or manufactured online hysterias. Lotus-eaters all, we are desperately in need of reliable sea charts, healthier sustenance, and a repaired memory of where we were once trying to go.

In the pre-pandemic decade of the 2010’s, two narratives arose in relative independence of one another and now appear, in retrospect, to be much more closely intertwined: the phenomenon and critique of global inequality (most closely associated with the French economist Thomas Piketty), and the explosive growth of a new form of capitalism known as the platform economy or surveillance capitalism (closely associated with behavioral psychologist Shoshana Zuboff). Both developments were late expressions of the period of globalization that would conclude with the partial unraveling of the economic entente cordiale between the United States and China, beginning in the First Trump Administration.

What a handful of recent studies suggest is that the explosive growth and wealth of the second development – platform capitalism – has structurally contributed to the historical spike of the latter – global income and wealth inequality — since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Read more »

by John Ambrosio

In 2001, Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax crusader, famously quipped in an interview that he did not want to abolish government, “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The radical shrinking of the federal government under Trump has happened at a speed and on a scale that is unprecedented.

This raises the question: Are Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party willing to jeopardize the future viability of U.S. society in order to achieve their political and ideological goals? Has the Republican Party become a kind of death cult hellbent on destroying everything that enables ordinary people to survive and thrive? Does their hatred of liberalism, and desire for vengeance, override their instinct for national self-preservation?

In a recent podcast, Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Giat, two prominent historians of authoritarianism and European fascism, discussed whether the U.S. is being murdered or is committing suicide. That is, whether it is being deliberately destroyed by Trump and MAGA Republicans or if a significant part of the electorate is committing national suicide, whether the descent into authoritarianism is a self-inflicted wound.

The answer is clearly both. There is a deliberate and systematic effort by Trump and his MAGA allies to demolish liberal constitutional democracy and dismantle and eliminate federal agencies and executive departments that comprise the modern U.S. state, aided and abetted by Republican voters and others who continue to support Trump and who elect MAGA Republicans that mostly rubber stamp his cruel and dangerous policies. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

Back in December of 2022, I was on top of the world. I was introducing my entire family to my girlfriend, and we were just weeks away from the trip of a lifetime:

Driving our newly bought camper van all the way from Texas to Panama and back again 

Life was good.

But how fast things can change. 

What this trip was supposed to be:

• 8+ months with my girlfriend, doing a loop of central America, and being that “cool couple” you see on Instagram.

What it actually end up being:

• Three weeks by myself, driving to a few national parks in the U.S., and trying to avoid any kind of traffic accident. 

Nina and I had been fighting for about six months before we started the ill-fated trip. I know we were on shaky ground. So did she.

But after purchasing a $15,000 vehicle together, there was some kind of desperation to make it work. So that’s what we did.

We promised each other we would try, that we weren’t going to let some bickering get in the way of an adventure.

But alas – no such luck.

She broke up with me a few weeks after Christmas. We were still in Texas, and hadn’t even started our trip United States.

Which left me-

Alone. 

Well, not quite. I still had a 24-foot, 12,000 pound vehicle on my hands. At first I was planning on selling it immediately. At that point, anything that was going to remind me of my ex-girlfriend needed to be thrown in a trash can. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, in one day. I started reading it on my iPad at around 7:30 am as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating a piece of cake that my partner had made. Later, I continued the novel during my lunch break as I ate leftover sausage and rice. Near the end of the workday, after I had finished all my meetings, I finished the novel, then I rode my bike home, looked at my phone for a bit, ate some chocolate covered coffee beans, drank a glass of orange juice, and started writing. I don’t feel like I have much to say about Lerner’s novel except that it’s largely about screens and food, so it’s fitting that I mostly read the novel on a screen while eating. Is this profound? No, not really. Lerner’s novel, I feel, is not so profound either. It’s an internet novel, and a pandemic novel, and there’s a lot of doubling (as in his other novels), but it all feels rather lightweight. When I got to the end of the 144-page book—which is mostly dialogue—I thought, hey, this is Sebald-lite! There’s a revealing anecdote that connects previous events in the novel to the Nazis, but whereas in Sebald’s Austerlitz I felt actual shock and terror at the revelation of Austerlitz’s past as a Jewish child escaping the Germans, here I simply acknowledged Lerner’s cleverness. Part of the reason is that Lerner’s intelligence can feel like a parlour trick, and it’s perhaps not surprising that Lerner is a former debate champion, that activity that prizes the appearance of intellect and erudition over any real substance or conviction.

When Lerner’s narrator walks around Providence, Rhode Island without his phone and has “an unusual experience of presence,” he tells us that “the landscape [was] made strange, the stones stonier,”—yes, I thought, we’ve all read Shklovsky, but the point isn’t to tell us about defamiliarization, it’s to make us feel it! When Lerner writes, after drinking wine, that it was like “a medicine or poison,” then mentions “a medicine and a poison,” I thought, yeah, we all know about the pharmakon, too, but thanks for reminding us! Just now, rereading the opening pages to refamiliarize myself with the novel (it’s been a while since I wrote that opening paragraph), I came across a mention of “bare life,” where Lerner’s narrator describes two people sleeping on the sidewalk, along with a few other people smoking and arguing outside a medical clinic. Bare life, bare life…where had I heard that one before? A quick Google search informed me I was right in thinking that it referred to a philosophical concept—by God, that’s Giorgio Agamben’s music! The thing is, Lerner has a defense ready for my accusations, because the character of Thomas—a 90-year-old former professor of the narrator, whom the narrator interviews in the novel’s first section—operates solely according to these literary references and linguistic tricks, and Lerner makes it clear that he’s both a genius and a blowhard. The two are not incompatible, everything contains its opposite, etc. We can play this game forever, but what’s the point? Read more »

Tiny (about 1 mm diameter) stink bug eggs and newly hatched nymphs on a plant on my balcony. More specifically, they are very probably Asian brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys).

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

A student came to my office last week to discuss her future. This student is extremely bright and creative, and I think the sky is the limit for her. She shared with me that Gen Z students struggle to feel that the future is genuinely open for them. Their perception is that jobs that feel meaningful are being slashed by government or stolen by AI. As a result, she reported, members of Gen Z may just need to find meaning in their hobbies and interests outside of work and pursue jobs that allow them to fully check out at the end of the day with no additional tasks to get in the way of the pursuits they care about.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this conversation since. It left me feeling disappointed in the generations that put our young people in this position. None of the decisions that led to this point were genuinely democratic. The people didn’t get to decide whether AI would be developed or what jobs it would perform. It was thrust upon us all, but young people are affected the most. They feel a strong pressure to integrate the technology into their lives, all while it steals both their potential jobs and encourages them to offload their critical thinking skills. This is happening at the same time that surveillance capitalism on social media and elsewhere turns people into products. In light of all of this, how could young people fail to feel objectified and commodified? How could they fail to feel that they are valuable only for their outputs? In my own case, when I think about meaning in life, I’m picturing something qualitative. I want my career and pursuits to be valuable for their own sake. I want to think that the labor in which I engage is objectively meaningful. Growing up in a world in which people are treated as replaceable by machines, it is easy to think of meaning subjectively and in terms of quantity—we enjoy as much as we can whenever we can.

This response to the modern human condition looks a lot like the one offered by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. It happens many times within life that we recognize the extent to which we are cogs in a machine performing the same rudimentary functions without reflection. He says,

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Camus reflects on the absurdity of the human condition—we desperately want objective meaning out of a universe that isn’t capable of caring about what we want. The answer, he thinks, is for this awakening to lead one to become an “absurd hero.” The absurd hero recognizes the relationship in which they stand to the universe. There is nothing “out there” prescribing a life path or promising meaning. The absurd hero makes their life their own by authentically maximizing the things they enjoy while never losing sight of the absurdity of it all. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Suppose Jones receives a communication from a Nigerian prince. The prince convinces Jones that if he provides access to his checking account, the prince will deposit $5 million ($5,000,000.00 USD) in it. Jones finds this proposition attractive and provides his account number, login credentials and password. Much to Jones’s surprise, however, instead of depositing $5 million ($5,000,000.00 USD) as he promised, the prince uses Jones’s credentials to empty Jones’s account. Now suppose Jones files a complaint against his bank alleging that the bank improperly allowed an unauthorized withdrawal from his account. What should be the result?

I think we can agree that Jones is, to use the technical term, SOL.

Next case. Suppose instead of contacting Jones, the scammer contacts Jones’s bank directly. Jones is not involved at all. The scammer somehow manages to obtain Jones’s credentials and uses them to empty Jones’s account. Jones files a complaint making the same allegation he did in the first case – that the bank improperly allowed an unauthorized withdrawal from his account. Now what result?

Again, I think we can agree. Whatever the particular details may be, the facts speak for themselves. The bank failed to protect its customer and improperly allowed an unauthorized withdrawal. The bank is on the hook.

Now let’s talk about a more difficult case. This time the scammer, instead of pretending to be a Nigerian prince, pretends to be Jones’s bank. Jones receives what he has every reason to believe is a legitimate communication from his bank. Let’s say it’s an email. The email looks just like previous emails from his bank. The logo and the colors match. The sender is a name he recognizes. Jones hovers his mouse over the sender’s email address, and it matches. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

At this point in time, I would have expected to see more “AI religions”, or religious movements focused on AI. Why are there no churches of AI or scriptures of AI worship? I don’t mean use of AI in traditional organized religion, such as the German and Finnish churches experimenting with ChatGPT-written sermons, or bots trained on Jesus or Buddha’s teachings. Rather, I mean movements that treat AI as divine and sacred, a source of revelation, as the vessel for humanity’s salvation.

The demand certainly would seem to be there, with a religion-shaped hole in many people’s lives. Support for organized religion in the West is at historic lows, with less than half of Americans now saying religion is important in daily life (although the decline has somewhat leveled off in recent years). Confidence has also weakened in the belief that secular institutions and systems such as capitalism (not to mention communism) can deliver progress. Pew found in 2022 that only 40% of 18–29 year-olds view capitalism positively.

On the supply side, it would certainly also seem that AI could fit the bill as worthy of worship. AI has elements of humanness in its training data of most recorded human information, but is distinct enough in its thought processes. It is alien, yet familiar. It is rapidly becoming omniscient and wiser and more powerful than humans. It is an oracle in the pocket of the average human, promising transcendence of death, hidden revelation and moral authority.

Historically, there have been many examples of technology-based religious movements. On isolated Pacific islands, what used to be called “cargo cults” worshipped the god-like Western technology of planes and radios during World War II. In the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity attempted to merge religion’s rituals with a faith in scientific progress. In the 1900s, Ron Hubbard explicitly incorporated elements of “religious technology” in the rites of Scientology. Technology also featured prominently in movements such as Heaven’s Gate, culminating in mass suicide to be taken up by a spacecraft.

So why are we not seeing AI churches and mass ceremonies with crying people professing their faith in the AI saving us? Read more »

by Richard Farr

The past few days, I’ve been unable to get away from the sense that perhaps there’s something wrong with me. When so many people love Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, why have I found myself only deflated and disappointed by it? Many hours examining this question leave me unsure, so what follows is meant to describe a reaction more than persuade you to agree with it. 

Matt Damon is an actor it’s impossible not to like. His Charming Boyish Grin beats anyone this side of Harrison Ford, and unlike Ford he can also do both determination and vulnerability without hamming it up. That’s what made him such a perfect choice for Jason Bourne, and I have to think that Christopher Nolan or his casting gurus had that quality in mind. A clue here? They must have thought Odysseus was that same kind of hyper-competent modern man, with advanced MMA skills but enough inner turmoil to make him, as they say, relatable. But it seems to me that Homer’s Odysseus is in certain ways deeply unrelatable — bigger, more wily, more psychically powerful and more strange than any kick-butt action hero. And that problem of characterization leaks across the whole canvas.

Some bits of the film are genuinely visually original. The horse on the beach is an old cliché rescued and re-imagined. The cyclops is enjoyably frightening, in a large rubber monster kind of way. But the filmmakers were unwilling or unable to enter imaginatively into a world where the supernatural is real and yet still supernatural. Charlize Theron plays Calypso as a blandly winsome babe in a vacation commercial (“Come to Ogygia Island Resorts and forget all your troubles!”). Zendaya’s Athena is an ordinary woman with a frown who you might bump into at the grocery store. Samantha Morton gets more to chew on as Circe, but she isn’t even all that frightening while turning soldiers into swine, and later, sitting defeated at her table, she’s nothing but a bitter single with a cooking pot. In an especially pointless scene, the Laestrygonians in their silver armor look like the local Medieval Battle Reenactment Society. The Shades in Hades are the same people they were when alive, except that now they’re smeared all over with bitumenous gravel and resentment. There’s neither primal wonder nor primal horror in any of this. Read more »

Roldy Aguero Ablao. Talaya’ 3000, 2023.

Digital print.

More here and here.

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by Martin Butler

Rootedness, says Simone Weil,

…is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. This participation is natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them. Every human being needs to have multiple roots and to derive almost all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.[1]

There is something paradoxical about Weil’s account. The idea that rootedness is a need, rather than simply a fact about human beings, implies that the need might not be met; and indeed, The Need for Roots, from which this quotation is taken, is a kind of manifesto for a society which recognises the importance of this need along with other moral and spiritual needs. Her discussion of the different kinds of uprootedness makes it clear that rootedness cannot be taken for granted, yet the quotation above suggests that rootedness is normal and natural. Being rooted comes through our ‘real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity’. It is ‘natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them.’ In other words it would be difficult not to have roots. If rootedness is natural and arises automatically why is this an issue at all? How could we be rootless? Read more »

A collage essay by River Lerner

A dam and a corset share a certain poetry. The opposing forces along their walls grant function: not only to contain or boundary, but to harness difference. Pressure makes a thing what it is.

The work of the world is common as mud.¹Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Since being introduced to Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use”, I have misread that line numerous times as: “The work of the world is covered in mud.”

The restraint of lace and the frustration of water sieve power. Separate the wheat from the chafe.

The work of a person is managing mud. Read more »

Footnotes

• 1
  Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. ↩︎

Between Now and Then

No matter what,
every time we shift one foot
in front of the other
we’re on the road to
who knows where? it
can’t be helped

In this scheme of things,
—unless you introduce a
mystical element which is,
if not cheating, at least as
fictional as anything that
hasn’t happened yet—
in this scheme, all of this,
must not be about ultimate destination,
it must be about what occurs between
now and then.

Jim Culleny
4/7/18

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by Rafaël Newman

Not quite 25 years ago, on September 15, 2001, I took my six-year-old daughter to the opera. Her mother had arranged the outing, in part because it was clear how much Hella was beginning to enjoy musical theater—a pleasure I had learned from my own parents—and in part because, in the final weeks of her pregnancy with our second child, Caroline simply needed a few hours to herself.

The tickets to that evening’s performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Opernhaus Zürich had been purchased at some point during the summer of 2001, well before September 11. By the time Hella and I attended the production, four days after what would soon come to be known as 9/11, everything had changed; and Mozart’s 1782 opera, which mainly concerns two pairs of lovers escaping from danger but also stages a confrontation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, had taken on a new, more urgent aspect.

When, therefore, the Swiss actor Peter Arens, in the speaking role of Bassa Selim, a convert to Islam and an Ottoman despot, made his celebrated final-act speech extolling clemency, in Zurich on September 15, 2001, he spoke directly to the audience rather than to the onstage character he was meant to be addressing. [E]s wäre ein weit grösser Vergnügen eine erlittene Ungerechtigkeit durch Wohlthaten zu vergelten, als Laster mit Lastern tilgen, Arens said as Selim: “It is a far greater pleasure to repay injustices suffered by good deeds than to compensate evil by more evil”, ostensibly renouncing vengeance on the son of his enemy and allowing him to return to Spain with the woman they both love, but in fact making an unmistakable plea for moderation in the American military campaign against Afghanistan that was gearing up that very moment. To amplify the point, in both 1782 and 2001, the four lovers respond with a quartet: “Nothing is as ugly as vengeance.”

In the event, of course, Selim’s/Arens’s implicit plea, and others more overt, in the international press and on the street, went unheard in Washington. What is more, when the US President’s thirst for revenge was ultimately unslaked in Afghanistan, George Bush Jr. would go on, in 2003, to resume and extend his father’s earlier war on Iraq with a trumped-up mission to find and destroy non-existent WMDs there. There ensued a Second Gulf War that lasted for eight years, until 2011, when US troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Mira remembers her third birthday party as a scene of almost extravagant happiness. There was a cream-puff cake, tier upon tier of it, which in memory has acquired the architectural grandeur of a wedding cake. Helium balloons floated close to the ceiling, their ribbons dangling into the room. She remembers presents, noise, people fussing over her—the peculiar exhilaration of being three and understanding that, for one afternoon at least, the world had arranged itself around you.

Her mother remembers the same party.

Only she remembers a miserable child.

Mira’s father had been unable to attend. According to her mother, Mira spent much of the afternoon crying for him. The celebrated cake barely interested her. Neither did the balloons. What her mother remembers is trying to coax an inconsolable three-year-old into enjoying a party in which the absence of her father seemed to eclipse everything else.

Could one of these accounts simply be wrong? That strikes me as an overly simplistic question. Memory is not generally obedient to binaries such as right and wrong, particularly when what we are remembering is not merely an event but the way that event registered in a particular consciousness: what drew our attention, what mattered to us, what delighted or wounded us, and what barely registered at all.

Facts, of course, are another matter. Mira’s father was either at the party or he wasn’t. The party took place on a particular day and at a particular place; the cake had some ascertainable number of tiers. Where and when something happened, and often what happened, are not matters of personal interpretation. This becomes especially important when memory moves beyond private life into history, crime, politics or other consequential matters, where competing recollections cannot be allowed to replace truth.

But facts occupy surprisingly little of the territory we mean when we say, I remember. Read more »