Your Data is Political

Your presence rises from scavenging: ages and words
and webs and signs. You’ve become a target but without
the old spy store gadgets. I’d like to know what you know,
not just your count. I click on you, then you click back,
precious darling surface. We add, poke, text.
On my iPhone, you’re called The Outlier.
Your profile pic of a yellow vase
is so allusory, so art, or your skirt flips up and you’re viral,
or someone else outs you as a double-crossing wife
because it’s Old West open season on Facebook.
Pages ripple with alacrity, with betrayal and Outlook keeps
the other engine purring and sneaky. Two presences.
The real and the fable vanish before you and to them
within barcode, a cornucopia of insight
(a family’s fleecing, caravans of product, blurry pirated video).
I’ll play Sarah McLachlan over your visage, elegiac, or someone
will paste your face onto the porno performance artist
baptized with secretion. I’ll be the cultural anxiety,
and you can be the Luddite. We’ll be a perfect pairing
of antediluvian (the wine) and digital (the host).

by Carmen Giménez Smith
from: Milk & Filth
University of Arizona Press, 2013

Cat Lachowskyj in Lens Culture:

Standing in the middle of a room previously inhabited by a now-absent figure can conjure an eerily potent atmosphere, traceable through sensations rather than words. Perhaps it’s because so much of what shapes the edges of any individual’s persona resides within the colors they prefer, their cooking and cleaning smells, or the sounds they regularly hear emanating from the pipes in their walls or a creak in their floorboards. When a person’s body exits their habitat, all the things that previously swirled in and around their tangible body remain, suspended in the air in a thick, viscous hum. These remnants permeate the objects the person leaves behind, too, charged with energy, appearing as sentient creatures rather than a lifeless pile of stuff.

When photographer Hannah Altman’s grandmother passed away in 2017, she left an interesting collection of objects in her home, some detailing her life, some used for Jewish ritual, and some broken and incomplete. The objects felt like a composite of her grandmother’s life, and as a photographer, Altman decided to document them with her camera. “I started photographing the Judaica in her collection, thinking about how objects are used and what stories they tell,” she explains. After establishing familiarity with the remnants, Altman shifted into world-making beyond the isolated documentation of trinkets, initiating a ripple effect in her own understanding of her new visual world. She reflects, “I photographed the Jewish objects, and then Jewish rituals, and then Jewish folklore, and it became clear to me that this idea of storytelling through Judaica extended beyond my immediate bloodline, into the collective Jewish community, which is deeply shaped by customs that are retold and retranslated over time.”

More here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker:

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate—tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares; this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. Perhaps what readers like Gates find valuable in these books has less to do with the purported shape and direction of history than with the broad assurance that history has a shape and a direction.

Both stories, after all, adhere to a model of history that’s at once teleological (driven by specific forces to arrive at the foreordained present) and discontinuous (such magical things as farming and rationality emerged from the woodwork, unlocking successive stages of developmental maturity). They generally agree that the crucial rupture divided some original state of nature from the grand accession of civilization. Their arcs of irrevocable decline or compulsory progress are variations on themes that were given their most recognizable modern elaborations by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pinker takes up the Hobbesian notion that early human existence was a brutish war of all against all. Harari takes rather literally Rousseau’s thought experiment that we were born free and rushed headlong into our chains. (“There is no way out of the imagined order,” Harari writes. “When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”) In both accounts, guilelessness and egalitarianism are exchanged for knowledge and subordination; the only real difference lies in the cost-benefit assessments of that trade.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few.

More here.

Katy Guest at The Guardian:

The first page of Howard Markel’s comprehensive history The Secret of Life reads like the opening scene of a movie. “On February 28, 1953, shortly after the chapel bells struck noon, two men hurtled down a stairwell of Cambridge University’s Cavendish Physics Laboratory. Bursting with exhilaration, they had just made the scientific discovery of a lifetime … ” Delving into the human lives and relationships behind “the race to unravel DNA’s structure”, the book frequently zooms in on such visual details, from the “crusty yellow remains” of fried egg at Francis Crick’s breakfast table to the “clickety clack” of Rosalind Franklin’s heels echoing “on the slick, wet marble floor” of King’s College London.

A movie needs a hero and a villain, and in this story they are Franklin – brilliant, female, Jewish, misunderstood – and James Watson, whose “mean-spirited” 1968 memoir “commandeered the historical record with boundless guile and cunning”.

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Merchant and Ivory, normally working with the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, were one of the most dominant cinematic forces of the late 20th century, rolling out luxuriously appointed adaptations of E.M. Forster and Henry James novels, with the occasional more contemporary anomaly like Tama Janowitz’s “Slaves of New York.” Merchant died in 2005; Jhabvala in 2013. After decades conjuring the Anglo-American aristocracy clinking cups in gardens and drawing rooms, Ivory, the survivor, is ready to spill the tea.

He spills it not in the typical big autobiographical splash but in dribs and drabs: letters, diary entries, tumbling sense-memories of fashion, food and furniture (and the other F-word), with scores of appealingly casual photographs sprinkled throughout.

more here.

Benjamin Braun and Adrienne Buller also in Phenomenal World (image: Joëlle Tuerlinckx, ‘the biggest-surface-on-earth scale 1:1’ (‘la-plus-grande-surface-au-monde scale 1:1’), 2006)

In mid October 2021, when BlackRock revealed its third quarter results, the asset management behemoth announced it was just shy of $10 trillion in assets under management. It’s a vast sum, “roughly equivalent to the entire global hedge fund, private equity and venture capital industries combined,” and a nearly ten-fold increase in only a handful of years for a firm that first broke the $1 trillion mark as recently as 2009. Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, we’ve witnessed in BlackRock the rise of an undisputed shareholder superpower, but the firm, while exceptional, is not alone. Alongside its closest rival Vanguard, these two firms control nearly $20 trillion in assets and a combined market share of more than 50 percent in the booming market for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). And they’re not just big—they’re “universal,” controlling major stakes in every firm, asset class, industry, and geography of the global economy. It’s an unprecedented conjuncture of concentration and distribution, one which has prompted fierce debate over what this new era of common, universal, and increasingly passively allocated ownership means. For some, the new regime contains the seeds of a socialist-utopian economic vision; for others, it’s an anticompetitive, “worse than Marxism” nightmare.

At the heart of the debate is the theory of universal ownership, which contends that because today’s asset management giants are universal owners with fully diversified portfolios, they should be structurally motivated to internalize the negative externalities that arise from the conduct of individual corporations or sectors. Whether social inequality or the climate crisis, proponents of universal ownership contend that the enormous externalities of corporate capitalism will, eventually, diminish shareholder returns, and therefore universal owners should and will act to minimize them. It’s an elegant theory, but is it true? Ultimately, the answer to this question hinges on how we understand ownership.

More here.

Over at Behind the News, Doug Henwood moderates a debate between Peter Victor and Robert Pollin 0n whether economic growth is compatible with solving the climate crisis, starting at 24:00. (Also in the podcast, Sheryll Cashin, author of White Space, Black Hood, on the origins, mechanisms, and effects of residential segregation, mostly by race but also by class.)

Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Baffler (image © Jul Quanouai):

THE MACHINERY—THE ACTUAL FORM AND FUNCTION—of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by fossil fuels; telecommunications;  and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South with regimes of hyperwork in the Global North; rare earth “sacrifice zones” with refugees; migrant labor with social reproduction; ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon with profitable opportunity. It has required the transformation of states; it has ripped through biomes and through flesh. Capital often appears and is treated as a historical abstraction; this is doubly true of globalized, financialized capital. The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain. Its realities underscore the generalization of a colonial social relation in socioecological terms, even as older modes of imperialism and neocolonialism are hardly swept aside. Its speed, frenzy, coercion, and brutality reach into the very heart of the imperial metropole, far beyond where such relations were already present. Feelings of exhaustion—depression, desperation, fatigue, exasperation—course through its wirings, neurons, biochemicals, and sinews.

At every “node” along such a circuit, “inputs”—ecological, political, social, individual—are extracted and “exhausted.”

More here.

Herman Mark Schwartz in Phenomenal World:

$5.3 trillion of US federal government stimulus and relief spending have returned the economy to its pre-Covid growth trajectory. But that growth trajectory was hardly robust—either before or after the 2008 financial crisis. Nor was the slow decay of GDP growth rates unique to America. In the aggregate, the seven largest rich economies—the G7, composed of the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada—saw growth in real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) slip by more than half from the 1980s to the 2010s.

Economists have called this slowdown “secular stagnation.” Secular stagnation is a seemingly permanent era of slower growth in productivity, investment, and output, and therefore also in per capita income. The Great Depression of the 1930s provoked the first debate about secular stagnation, which pitted John Maynard Keynes and Michał Kalecki against Joseph Schumpeter. The former saw idle workers and idle industrial capacity and called for aggressive fiscal policy and state-directed investment to restore growth. The latter saw idle capacity as evidence of over-investment and too high wages and called for liquidation of struggling firms and cuts in nominal wages.

More here.

A New Bapu

Would take to Twitter like fish to water
But grow out of it
And use it as a protest tool.
Once in a while, he would take breaks with vows of silence.
He would use the extra time
To sort out, ends and means
The broken strings.
He would be wise to know
Greed remains greed and power is now
Like electricity, everywhere,
From the clerk to the high heavens.
He would look for a place to start—
And it would be with himself.
Cleaning the toilet on a weekday,
Making plants grow with bare hands.
Not using a sensor to figure it out.
He would be wary of AI, robots, anything that takes the mind away.
They take the soul out, he would say.
But he would take to planes more easily, for the utility.
He would still write letters, with a fountain pen
And send postcards, to children.
He would recycle paper and look inside, for answers.
He would be worried about
Climate change.
He would pass the street and you wouldn’t even know.
He would travel incognito.

by Amlanjvoti Goswami
from Rattle Magazine, #73, Fall 2021

Ed. Note- Bapu: Spiritual father

Ayad Akhtar in The Atlantic:

Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.

That we are subject to the dominion of endless digital surveillance is not news. And yet, the sheer scale of the domination continues to defy our imaginative embrace. Virtually everything we do, everything we are, is transmuted now into digital information. Our movements in space, our breathing at night, our expenditures and viewing habits, our internet searches, our conversations in the kitchen and in the bedroom—all of it observed by no one in particular, all of it reduced to data parsed for the patterns that will predict our purchases.

But the model isn’t simply predictive. It influences us. Daniel Kahneman’s seminal work in behavioral psychology has demonstrated the effectiveness of unconscious priming. Whether or not you are aware that you’ve seen a word, that word affects your decision making. This is the reason the technology works so well. The regime of screens that now comprises much of the surface area of our daily cognition operates as a delivery system for unconscious priming. Otherwise known as advertising technology, this is the system behind the website banners, the promotions tab in your Gmail, the Instagram Story you swipe through, the brand names glanced at in email headings, the words and images insinuated between posts in feeds of various sorts. The ads we don’t particularly pay attention to shape us more than we know, part of the array of the platforms’ sensory stimuli, all working in concert to adhere us more completely.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

To be a literary biographer is to court the extravagant ridicule of the very people you write about. For all of the salutary services a writer’s biography can offer — the tracing of the life, the contextualizing of the work, the resuscitation of a reputation and the deliverance from neglect — the biographer has been derided as a “post-mortem exploiter” (Henry James) and a “professional burglar” (Janet Malcolm).

The critic Elizabeth Hardwick called biography “a scrofulous cottage industry,” adding that it was rarely redeemed by “some equity between the subject and the author.” One biographer of Ernest Hemingway, Hardwick wrote, seemed so enamored of “his access to the raw materials” that he produced “only an accumulation, a heap.” Similarly, a book about Katherine Anne Porter was larded with “an accumulation of the facts,” which had “the effect of a crushing army.”

A warning, then, was probably in order for Cathy Curtis, the author of “A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick.”

…The ’70s turned out to be an extraordinarily productive time for Hardwick — a decade when she wrote the essays on women and literature that were collected in “Seduction and Betrayal,” and when she polished the scenes that she collaged into “Sleepless Nights.” Curtis assiduously chronicles the literary panels, the gossip and the ailments of Hardwick’s later years, before she died in 2007, observing the rhythms of Hardwick’s work while never quite falling into sync with them. But then a march is different from a dance, even if each has its own choreography. When Hardwick was in her late 80s and still writing, she was asked why writers stop. “Writing is so hard,” she said. “It’s the only time in your life when you have to think.”

More here.

Emily M. Kern in the Boston Review:

The standard history of humanity goes something like this. Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first evolved somewhere on the African continent. Over the next 100,000 to 150,000 years, this sturdy, adaptable species moved into new regions, first on its home continent and then into other parts of the globe. These early humans shaped flint and other stones into cutting blades of increasing complexity and used their tools to hunt the mega-fauna of the Pleistocene era. Sometimes, they immortalized these hunts—carved on rock faces or painted in glorious murals across the walls and ceilings of caves in places like Sulawesi, Chauvet, and Lascaux.

Then, some 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm, exchanging their gathering and hunting for domestication and permanent settlement. Communities grew denser and more complex, requiring strong leadership to manage resources effectively, and systems of writing to keep track of who produced what. This was a bad deal for farmers, who now had to work much longer hours in the fields than they had as hunters and foragers, but also produced a surplus of food that allowed other members of the community to specialize in new work, as craftspeople, priests, scribes, and accountants. Eventually, the first states emerged to coordinate the complex social arrangements that ensued and to defend their populations against other competitors. Ultimately those states became incorporated into the early empires of the ancient world, establishing humankind on the path towards the present day. From humanization, we get agriculture; from agriculture, we get science; through science, we get the modern world.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Plastic is everywhere.
It’s in the food you eat.
It’s in the water you drink.
It’s in the air you breathe.
And not just a bit.
You eat a credit card’s worth of plastic a week.
Your body is replete with it.
How does it affect you? We know nothing.
It might make you sterile or accelerate puberty.
It might give you cancer or make you obese.
And a lot of it comes from plastic at sea.
Millions of tons of it, killing millions of birds and fish.

Here’s a rundown of where it comes from and where it goes, how it kills animals, how it ends up in your gut, and what you can do about it.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

It’s easy to mock the Corporation Formerly Known As Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook would henceforth be Meta, and his attempt to swerve the intensifying assault on his company’s sordid activities with a nifty bit of rebranding, is worthy of all the ridicule that’s been heaped on it.

And yet, when the laughter has faded, we might also reflect on the fact that the Zuckerberg manoeuvre is a feature not of a particular company but of our age. Rebranding has become the norm, not just in business but in politics and social activism too. And, as with Facebook (or Meta), we live in a world in which form is often seen as more important than content and the symbolic is elevated over the material.

In 1995, the political philosopher Nancy Fraser warned that too often “cultural recognition displaces socio-economic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle”. Quarter of a century on and struggles for equality and social justice have become even more centred around the cultural and the symbolic, whether tussles over identities or controversies over statues, rather than on wages, housing or material deprivation.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6VIcUEn9CM

Mathew Glesson at the LARB:

A LITTLE OVER halfway through his 1943 novel El luto humano (Human Mourning), the Mexican writer José Revueltas inserts himself as a character so unobtrusively that it’s easy to miss. A government go-between, when hiring an assassin to kill the leader of an agricultural strike, complains, “First there was the agitation sown by José de Arcos, Revueltas, Salazar, García, and the other Communists. […] And now all over again…” It’s a sly wink at the fact that the novel’s scenario overlaps with the author’s life; it also foreshadows the way that Revueltas’s place in Mexican letters today is inextricably entwined with his dramatic biography.

Revueltas is a contradictory figure: titanic, maybe even canonical, yet at the same time obscure, underground, and seemingly impossible for literary society to fully assimilate without indigestion.

more here.

Charles Darwent at Literary Review:

The instant recognisability of Magritte’s work has its roots not in his training at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918 but in his postwar work as a draughtsman in the city from 1922 to 1926. During this time he made artworks for advertising companies and designed wallpaper and posters. The skills garnered from the first two of these are immediately evident in Golconda, now in the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The bowler-hatted men, part Thomson and Thompson, part Gilbert and George, are as obviously Magritte’s logo as the part-eaten apple is that of a certain American computer giant. His eye for pattern was also acute. Golconda would make lovely wallpaper, and no doubt has.

The Menil’s Golconda is an anomaly in being unique, hand-made and identifiable – an autograph work. It is the millions of mass-printed posters of the picture that are arguably the real Golconda, banal and yet everywhere, like the little grey men they depict.

more here.