by Misha Lepetic

“The secret of my influence has always been
that it remained secret.”
~ Salvador Dalí

Last month I looked at the short and ignominious career of @TayandYou, Microsoft's attempt to introduce an artificial intelligence agent to the spider's parlor otherwise known as Twitter. Hovering over this event is the larger question of how best to think about human-computer interaction. Drawing on the suggestion of computer scientist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram, I put forward the concept of 'purpose' as such a framework. So what was Tay's purpose? Ostensibly, it was to 'learn from humans'. But releasing an AI into the wild leads to unexpected consequences. In Tay's case, interacting with humans was so debilitating that not only could it not achieve its stated purpose, but neither could it achieve its real, unstated goal, which was to create a massive database of marketing preferences of the 18-24 demographic. (As a brief update, Microsoft relaunched Tay and it promptly went into a tailspin of spamming everyone, replying to itself, and other spasmodic behaviors more appropriate to a less-interesting version of Max Headroom).

People have been releasing programs into the digital wild for decades now. The most famous example of the earlier, pre-World Wide Web internet was the so-called Morris worm. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell University, was trying to estimate the size of the Internet (it's more likely that he was bored). Morris's program would write itself into the operating system of a target computer using known vulnerabilities. It didn't do anything malicious but it did take up valuable memory and processing power. Morris's code also included instructions for replication: specifically, every seventh copy of the worm would instantiate a new copy. More importantly, there was no command-and-control system in place. Once launched, the worm was completely autonomous, with no way to change its behavior. Within hours, the fledgling network of about 100,000 machines had nearly crashed, and it took several days of work for the affected institutions – mostly universities and research institutes – to figure out how to expunge the worm and undo the damage.

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by Maarten Boudry

Maarten Boudry

A man walking in the forest at night arrives at a house with lights burning inside. Looking through the window, he sees people jumping frantically and flailing about. Poor fellows, thinks the man: they are having seizures, or they must be terribly ill, or they have become insane. What the man doesn't hear is the music playing inside. The people are dancing and singing for a wedding. Gershom Gorenberg recounts this Jewish-Chassidic parable in his splendid book The End of Days on the danger of apocalyptic belief systems. Its morale? If you don't hear the music of faith, you will conclude that the dancers are out of their mind.

In our secular age, many have grown estranged from religion and turned a deaf ear to faith. All we hear is its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”, in the words of Matthew Arnold. Religion seemed like a distant echo of times gone by.

Now, alas, we can no longer ignore the ear-shattering blasts of suicide belts, the rattle of machine rifles, and the shouting of “Allahu Akbar” invariably preceding it. Terrorist attacks dedicated to the greater glory of a Supreme Being are being carried out across the world almost on a daily basis. The religious motivation of ISIS and numerous kindred groups is blatantly obvious for anyone who cares to listen to their faith-imbued songs. The atrocities are justified on the basis of religious scripture and tradition. They are intended as punishment for our decadent and sinful ways, for our refusal to accept the final revelation of Islam, and for our resistance against the divinely sanctioned caliphate.

Godless westerners, however, for whom God's name mainly evokes sweet childhood memories, find it exceedingly difficult to understand the mental universe of religious fanatics. Religion, in the eyes of these people, cannot be more than a convenient pretext for violence, a façade disguising true motivations. Besides, does anyone reallybelieve in those juvenile fantasies about a heavenly brothel with 72 dark-eyed virgins and wine that doesn't give you hangovers?

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by Yohan J. John

Ridiculing the intellectual backwardness of our forebears is a popular pastime. How silly our ancestors were! They thought the earth was flat! They believed in dragons and fairies! And even when they started to emerge from humanity's childhood, they came up with ideas like phlogiston! And luminiferous aether! Among neuroscientists, one of the most well-known cautionary tales is that of phrenology: the 19th century “science” that claimed to be able to peer into your soul by measuring bumps and dents on your head. The idea was that these hills and valleys were signs of size differences in areas dedicated to mental faculties such as “amativeness”, “concentrativeness”, “aquisitiveness”, “wit” and “conscientiousness”. So a bump near your zone of “amativeness” would mean that your brain has allocated additional resources towards the pursuit of love and sex. It all sounds quaint and Victorian — I imagine steampunk authors have taken the idea and run with it.

But if we strip away the old-fashioned terminology, how different is the concept of a brain area for “wit” from the concept of a “cognitive area” in the brain? How different is the idea of a center of “amativeness” from the idea that oxytocin is a love molecule? And is the idea that conscientiousness is baked into the brain any different from the idea that morality or altruism is baked into the genome?

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Search a Little Longer

A version by Rafiq Kathwari
After Sir Mohammad Iqbal

Lift the veil from your face
The stars are witness

Stop teasing
Reveal yourself

Passion is in your heart
Become a healer

Stop begging on the mountain like Moses
The flame is within you

Create a new Mecca with every breath
Rid yourself of idolatry

Observe the limits of this garden
Even if you want to boast

First create the confidence of Alexander
To lust after the glory of Darius

Rafiq Kathwari’s debut collection of poems is available here.

By Namit Arora

On being transgender in India and glimpses from The Truth About Me, a powerful memoir by A. Revathi. It aims to introduce readers ‘to the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires.’

Most Indians encounter hijras at some point in their lives. Hijras are the most visible subset of transgender people in South Asia, usually biological men who identify more closely as being female or feminine. They often appear in groups, and most Indians associate them with singing and dancing, flashy women’s attire and makeup, aggressive begging styles, acts and manners that are like burlesques of femininity, a distinctive hand-clap, and the blessing of newlyweds and newborn males in exchange for gifts.

Most modern societies embrace a binary idea of gender. To the biologically salient binary division of humans into male/female, they attach binary social-behavioral norms. They presume two discrete ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identities to which all biological males and females are expected to conform. These two gender identities are imbued with ideal, essential, and distinct social roles and traits. In other words, the binary schema assumes a default alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality. In reality, however, gender identities and sexual orientations are not binary and exist on a spectrum, including for people who identify as transgender—an umbrella term for those whose inner sense of their gender conflicts with the presumed norms for their assigned sex (unlike for cisgender people). Transgender people often feel they’re neither ‘men’ nor ‘women’.

According to biologist Robert Sapolsky, ‘Gender in humans is on a continuum, coming in scads of variants, where genes, organs, hormones, external appearance, and psychosexual identification can vary independently, and where many people have categories of gender identification going on in their heads (and brains) that bear no resemblance to yours’. Many cultures have granted a distinct identity to various types of transgender people, including South Asian, Native American, Indonesian, Polynesian, and Omanese cultures. A landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2014 legalized a third gender in India, including hijras and other transgender people.

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by Saurabh Jha

The conventional wisdom in the circles I hang out in – pro-Hillary, morally conscious, happy bunnies who pretend to specially enjoy French wine, and opera – is that the greatest scourge visited upon humanity after the plague is inequality of wealth. These people worship Pope St. John Paul Piketty and canonize Bishop Paul Krugman. Not only is inequality bad for its own sake, they say, it actually makes people ill, like medically ill.

Their premise always struck me as being specious. I once took them through a thought experiment. Imagine, I said, you travel in time to the Bengal famine. There was a lot of equality then – people were equally malnourished. The muscle wasting from marasmus made sure that everyone’s ribs protruded equally. The loss of protein from kwashiorkor made sure everyone’s belly popped out without prejudice. Starvation because of poverty is a great leveler. It cares not about gender, caste or religion. It is non-judgmental.

You say to a starving Bengali: “I have a solution. It’ll give you food, occasional shelter, internet and a mobile phone. But here’s the catch. An ostentatious man called Mukesh Ambani will own the most expensive house in the world, and because you’ll always be reminded of his house, you might feel like crap. You’ll live longer, be well fed, but will feel like crap when you see someone driving a Mercedes. Want it? It’s called capitalism.” I suspect the starving Bengali might say “hell yes, please bring on this inequality. I want food. I don’t give a damn about this Ambani fellow.”

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by Elise Hempel

It took about a week to sell my house. The real estate agent came in and took a look around, we arrived at a price, there were a handful of showings, a few offers were made, and counter-offers, and it was done. If you list at a low enough price and use a few euphemisms (my house had “good bones,” for example, and my spider-webbed back porch with no door – ripped from its hinges in a storm – was a “sunroom”), it's a piece of cake.

Then came afterward. My daughter had already started clearing out her things back in July, as she prepared to join her boyfriend in Texas, and I'd begun my own, more severe clearing out in November (dining-room table, a bed? – who needs those?). But now I had to do the “deep cleaning,” the hands-and-knees phase where you discover that your house had all along been merely a roofed dumpster. Now I had to scrape from the kitchen junk drawer an amazing number of somehow-glued-down pennies. And figure out what to do with a thousand Aeropostle and Abercrombie bags my daughter had accumulated over the years and I'd stuffed into the closet, removing them in a compact “closet shape” like can-shaped cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. I had to sift through boxes of tossed photographs, and all of my daughter's artwork I'd saved since her birth, some of it bearing her crayoned command SAVE, KEEP, like an official government stamp, which I'd obviously obeyed. Most of it I'd meticulously dated and labeled myself (“first drawing of a smile,” “first drawing of a smile with cheek marks,” etc., etc.). It took a long time. But I savored my tunneling journey into the time-capsule, the little “treasures” I kept finding, like my daughter's black and shriveled pacifier at the back of a kitchen cupboard, or a dusty dog-chew that had rolled under my dresser out of a snout's reach.

I should have done it as my brother had with his own house several years ago – toss it all into a pod, some storage lockers, and call it a day. But I had time, at least a month, until closing. Each day, I'd leave my boyfriend's house around 10 a.m. and linger at my own house until 4 p.m. I'd eat lunch at my house, take my dog, Groucho, for a walk on our usual routes, wander through the widening rooms and gaze out the windows, sit and write my melancholy poems.

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by Aasem Bakhshi

This letter was written in 2013 as a self-reflection exercise in response to Karen Armstrong's letter which she wrote in 2011 to the people of Pakistan to discover compassion in their daily lives ¹.

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Earlier this week, I was visiting a small roadside bookstall when I discovered your letter. I picked it up, almost offhand, as if it was dropped in my mailbox. It proved to be a page-turner and unable to resist, I skimmed it standing right there in next half an hour. Needless to say that your earnest and sincere demand to rediscover compassion was not only compelling but also based on universal values of reason and harmony.

While driving back, I kept reflecting on some finer nuances of your discourse from various angles, as well as your 'charter of compassion' and found it necessary to engage with you at a more intimate level.

I should perhaps mention, right from the start, that I am cognizant of all your work. I do not claim to have read each word of it, but I have at least read each and every word you wrote about Muslim tradition and of course, about God. I mention this so you must not misconstrue me for a biased and misplaced prattler; rather, contrary to that, I am so overwhelmed by your desire to see a harmonious world that I thought it necessary to convey to you that you must know a little more about it.

Should I tell you about my favorite work of yours? No, it's not about histories of God or fundamentalism, or genesis of faith-based traditions; rather, it's the one about your own climb out of so-called darkness through that proverbial spiral staircase ². On a lighter note, I do understand that you love to tell the world about yourself, since it's your third autobiography. However, I found it amazing to find in you a person who has opted for religious truth, found it uncongenial, learnt ways to handle that uncongeniality and finally ended up being empathetic to it; that too, despite your ultimate disregard of its metaphysical truth value.

But I tend to digress, since this missive is not about you, but me and the world I live in. I am neither a critic nor a scholar, and not even a formal student of any religion or tradition. I do not claim to have any solutions, neither short-term nor long-term. My motivation is merely to open up and reveal more of my true self and underlying societal being, that in my humble opinion, you do not seem to know too well.

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by Maniza Naqvi

There is a part of Karachi called Golimar—‘Shooter'. This used to be the place where lame horses were brought by the military to be shot, back in the days of the British Empire. And the word Golibaz—means liar—or a fraud. Nowadays Golimar and Golibaz seem to pretty much sum up things. The horses have been replaced by people, especially those that are seen as a threat or as no longer worthwhile and the lies well they've never been replaced. I wonder what a historian would make of it.

Because that's a twitter-worthy bit of history right there: a place called Golimar and a condition called Golibaz. And what ties them together? Defense. The word Defense in Pakistan mean posh real estate developments. These are the places where the concept of equity and transparency and integrity go to die. These are the acres and acres of lands the Pakistan Military establishment awarded itself for its service to the country. The word military, in Pakistan, means absolute power, like the feudals of yesteryears–only more so, it is therefore the largest land owner in Pakistan. And the leasing off of these awarded lands from the military to civilians at fabulous prices for housing developments has been a profitable business. And that there is a bit of political economy—well the whole thing actually.

Professor Ayesha Jalal, the most excellent historian says ‘Pakistan's domestic dilemmas were inextricably linked to international conflicts (here). Besides the bullets and the blasts and the lies or because of them—business is booming for a few in Pakistan. Real estate–never better. Golf courses, fancy mosques, Yacht clubs, swimming pools, high rise apartments for the wealthy and shopping malls are expanding and flourishing. Residential developments for the rich are big business. Exports are off the charts for our textiles. Look at our IT sector. Could be even better if the fuel and electricity issues could be resolved. There are air-conditioned shopping malls and women work there as sales girls and even as security guards. Many of the sales girls and the security women working there wear hijabs. There's piped in music and azaan in the Malls along with the cheesy French fries and pizza. There are fast food courts. All classes of people mingle together in a clean air conditioned safe environment. Just like Dubai.

So what's the problem? Perween Rahman got shot and killed–murdered–for documenting land grabbing and trying to get legal rights documented for villagers who were in danger of being forcibly removed by land developers. The Supreme Court has ordered that her murderers be found by April 20, 2016. And there's Sabeen Mahmud shot and killed–murderd– for most probably talking about land grabbing too. In her murder case, a key witness and a key investigator in the case have both been killed since.

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by Chris Bacas

Z was a generous and kind man. Still, in a diner, he could embarrass me to death. Last off the bus, joining us at a crowded table, he rubbed bleary eyes, grabbed utensils in his fists and banged them loudly. We lowered our heads while sugar packets and jelly cups scattered. Sometimes, we scattered. “Hungry bear….hung-gree bear…. HUNGRY BEAR!”

On a Mississippi river boat cruise, the widow of our namesake showed up. It was her right to join us, gratis, anytime. She treated her “employee” like an incompetent peon. Z bit his tongue, hard. On the last night, drunk and thoroughly addled, the widow felt emboldened to make a speech. Taking the microphone, she rambled about the greatness of her late husband (an undisputed fact) and his kindness (pure fantasy). Teary-eyed, she ended with: “..and…wherever he is, I know ALL the Angels are playing trombones” A devilish grin on his face, Z looked straight down, toward the River Lethe, and stomped his foot twice, saying loudly “you hear that,_______, you hear that?” Despite his indentured servitude, our leader was a colleague more than a boss. For that alone, I grew to love him.

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by Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse

Under the pseudonym 'Benedetta Tripodi', Anouk Barberousse, Professor of Philosophy at the Université Paris Sorbonne, and Philippe Huneman, Research Director at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS), submitted to the on-line journal Badiou Studies a paper entitled “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non)Being-Queer”[1]. It was in answer to a call for papers on the topic “Towards a Badiousian Queer Feminism.” The paper was accepted after a process of peer-review, and published in the December 2015 issue of the journal. Yet the paper was written with the specific the aim of absolute meaninglessness. Neither of the true authors could begin to explain what it meant. In a text published on April 1 on the Carnet Zilsel, the authors of the hoax told their story, and explained their project and the goal of the exercise. After this revelation, Badiou Studies withdrew the paper from its website. However, the website Retraction Watch recorded this episode, with comments by both the journal as well as the authors of the fake paper. Here, we provide the context and the meaning of this hoax according to their authors.

The Benedetta Tripodi hoax aims at unravelling the legitimating strategy that consists in presenting Alain Badiou’s philosophy as the central current in metaphysics and political theory in France. Our analysis does not intend to refute Badiou’s theory once and for all, though it does aim, by unravelling some of its weaknesses, to call into question the consistency of the overall construction. By casting a doubt on the philosophical seriousness of Badiou's writings and of the commentaries of his admirers all over the world, it defeats the argument that would establish the eminency of its metaphysical value simply from its current intellectual fame.

If indeed the journal devoted to Badiou allows for the publication of a wholly meaningless paper –for whatever reasons: obliviousness, lack of critical sense, etc.– this reveals a genuine problem within the club of Badiou’s readers. On these grounds, it is clear that Badiou’s international reputation cannot justify his objective supremacy as a philosopher. On the contrary one has to question the nature of this reputation as well as its sociological grounds.

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Segue
.

in shifts from bright to dim
there is no edge, no interim,
as also none exists from wide to slim
.
the sun comes up in orange blaze
night evaporates in such displays
lines are indiscernible in nights to days
.
when life from bud to apple goes
and succulence and color grows
earth is smoothly changing pose
.
breath segues in respiration
in which we find no separations
as intervals might mean cessation
.
birth moves on to what comes next
years tick off from more to less,
what follows then we have to guess
.

Jim Culleny
4/8/16

by Carl Pierer

“(…) [M]y own body is the primordial habit, the one that conditions all others and by which they can be understood. Its near presence and its invariable perspective are not a factual necessity, since factual necessity presupposes them. (…) I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, inspect them, and walk around them. But when it comes to my body, I never observe it itself. I would need a second body to be able to do so, which would itself be unobservable.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 93)

Having criticised the two dominant, opposing camps – one, broadly speaking, Humean, one Kantian – in the introduction, Merleau-Ponty tries to understand in the present section the role of our body in perception. He argues that the commitment to certain notions as fundamental shared by the two camps is mistaken; most relevant here are those of ‘subject' and ‘object'. In contrast to the inherited view that the subject-object distinction is fundamental, he argues there exists something more primordial: the body. For Merleau-Ponty, because of the body's priority, the accepted distinctions make sense only against the background of the body. To establish this, Merleau-Ponty first shows that our relation to our body is different from our relation to any other object. Then, he demonstrates that the former relation prefigures the latter.

In this quotation, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body cannot be thought as an object among others. If it could, then it would need to be given to us as an object of perception. But, unlike genuine objects of perception:

1. The body as an object of perception is not the same as the body that perceives.
2. Even as an ‘object' of perception, our relation to it is different from the one we have to any other object of perception. In particular, it features:
   1. ‘Near presence', and
   2. ‘Inevitable perspective'.

This essay will focus on (2.) to illustrate how thinking about its ‘near presence' and ‘inevitable perspective' reveals the inherited view to render our relation to the body ambiguous, one that fits neither that of a subject nor that of an object. This ambiguity will lead to the idea of the ‘primordial habit'. It would then be but a small step to show that the distinction is based on this primordial relation, yet to do so is beyond this essay.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Welcome to April. It is already the fourth month of the year, and I meditate as I write, on the simultaneous passage and non-passage of time. Everyday the newspaper tells me of a number of unbidden catastrophes, accidents of fate, so many lives snuffed out as if life were not, as I think it to be, certain and plan-worthy. The rude interruption of children, men, and women, to and fro in the business of life, and the visitation of deep and unthinking sorrow upon all those whose lives they touch.

Those lists I peruse a couple of times a week, “Ten Ways to be more Productive”, “Fifty Tips to Happiness”, and “The One Secret to finding your Purpose in Life”, all tell me to stop reading the newspaper. But this I cannot do. Long years ago, I was taught by well-meaning, upstanding, middle-class family members, that to be engaged in the business of the world, one must read the newspaper. And after all, if I am not nationalist enough to yell out praises at the nation morning, noon, and night, I can, at least, in good old Benedict Anderson fashion, read the damn newspaper.

Why, pray, you ask, are you so melancholic? This isn't on me, I plead. I am in the throes of PMS. Now the thing, of course, is that I may or may not be. Not that PMS is not real. But its symptoms, ranging across 200 or more possible sensations, and consequences, provide a wide ambit of possibilities. And within this ambit of possibilities, it feels as though my body gives me the permission to feel all those things that I keep tightly suppressed for worry of work, schedules, time, and money. So for a couple of days a month, I feel free. To not be cheerful, or happy, or certain, or plant my feet on the ground. I feel the freedom to be burdened, and uncomfortable. And this of course, is a gendered function; not a function of the female gender mind you, but a gendered function. For both, the inability and ability to show emotion, are deeply gendered propositions. The one that gives in to deeply felt traumas, and hysteria, and dislocations is weak, and not in control. But the one that is otherwise controlled, but feels compelled at key moments to give in to emotion is primal. And I'm in the throes of a primal PMS.

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