Tag: neoliberalism

The Monkey’s Paw: Markets And Misaligned Proxies

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Illustration for W. W. Jacobs’ short story The Monkeys Paw, by Maurice Greiffenhagen. Image Credit: Public domain.

It was while watching the unveiling video of 1X Technologies’ home robot assistant Neo that I was hit with a revelation of a fundamental truth of our current moment in time: the world is a lot as if my ten year old sci-fi nerd self had had many of his wishes fulfilled, but by a cursed monkey’s paw. You want robots? You got it, but they’re creepy, kind of useless, probably spying on you and nevertheless will displace human workers from their jobs. You want AI? You got it, but it frequently makes stuff up, traps people in parasocial relationships while isolating them from the real world, floods the social sphere with misinformation and bad art, threatens the environment and funnels power to the people least fit to wield it.

A widespread narrative is that today, we have it better than at any previous time in human history: we live longer, are healthier and wealthier, better educated, have access to more and better nutrition, and are less likely to die from war or through homicide than ever. At the same time, however, we are faced with widespread ecosystem collapse, having just blown past the first catastrophic climate tipping point leading to near-certain die-off of coral reefs around the planet, the 1.5°C-goal may already have been eclipsed with global warming hitting a possible inflection point, depression and other mental health issues are on the rise even in the richest countries, income inequality is increasing as the richest snatch up an ever bigger piece of the pie, and wildlife populations have declined by a staggering 73% in the past 50 years. As a result, we seem to have very wildly divergent perceptions of our current reality: in one, we’re essentially living better than kings in the past; while in the other, we’re about to drive off a cliff with the wholesale destruction of our living environment.

So what gives? Who’s right—the Pinkerish peddlers of Panglossian optimism or the Monbiotesque negative Nancies decrying the despoliations of the neoliberal order? And how can there be two so vastly contradictory narratives, each of which claims a mountain of charts, data, and analysis in its favor? Read more »

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

What Was So Great About America Again?

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »

Friday, November 22, 2024

Make Art Dangerous Again

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »

Monday, March 23, 2020

Morbid Symptoms: COVID-19 and Pathologies in the Body Politic

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Gramsci

Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)

Does a crisis show us what we are ‘really like’? Whether it does or not, it has already been instructive to experience this one, in which our institutions are being stress tested, perhaps to destruction. As many have noted, COVID-19 is a political and economic crisis as well as a medical one. Its size and complexity can leave us groping around for the right interpretive and predictive tools. There are a number of models that we can turn to to help us understand how we react, or might react, and these often rest on assumptions about ‘human nature’. The problem is that they don’t agree on some basics, and thus can’t all be right. So which is the best one to turn to in a crisis?

Two Views of Human Nature

The view of humans and their social arrangements associated with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is a bleak one: the human animal in the ‘state of nature’ – that is, without government or law – is in a state of constant war, or preparation for war, since no one can be sure of their own security. In the state of nature, life is ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, chapter XIII, 1651).  Only a strong sovereign power can ensure peace by imposing it through force, or the threat of force. If the civil and political bonds of such a peace are broken, we can expect people to revert to type as self interested individuals, with “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes ): a return to the state of nature triggered by the breakdown of the central authority, driven by fear of the other and only restored by force or the threat of force. Read more »

Monday, May 30, 2016

The Banality Of Neoliberalism (As Exemplified By The Clintons) And Why Americans Never Saw Its Evil (Until Occupy, Bernie Sanders And Donald Trump Alerted Us)

Posted on by Evert Cilliers

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam AshHillarybillflirt

If it hadn't been for the disaster that was George W. Bush, the worst president of our time would be that arch-neoliberal serial philanderer Bill Clinton.

Clinton was almost as crappy an a-hole as W.

George W killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children in a monstrous war crime. Bill Clinton merely made the lives of millions of Americans utterly miserable.

1. How Bad Was Bill Clinton?

Breath in the stench from the pile of crap that Slick Willy stuffed up our nostrils.

He destroyed thousands of good American jobs by exporting them with NAFTA.

He created the 2008 Wall Street crash and the Great Recession when he signed the two laws that repealed Glass-Steagall and removed financial derivatives from all oversight — the two worst laws signed by any president ever.

Internationally, he refused to intervene in Rwanda, and allowed 800,000 Tutsis to be brutally genocided.

He exploded the size of our Black and Latino prison population with his harsh 1994 crime bill and the building of many privatized prisons.

He doubled the number of our poor with his welfare reforms (today 47 million Americans live in poverty, and over 20% of our kids are poor, a higher rate than any other developed nation).

Clinton's presidency left Americans jailed, poorer, and brutally screwed in every sensitive orifice. He forced many of us to eat an eternal shit sandwich, a record of destruction topped by George W. only because W committed the satanic war crime of the Iraq War.

Read more »