burtchblog

[criticaltheoryoftechnology]

three paragraphs on place

“The little Leninist study groups won’t do it. We need to use video, audio, the Internet. We also need to work on the basics of rebuilding community. How are you going to organized or liberate your community if you don’t have one? I live in Cuba, right? We get U.S. movies here, and I am sick of the monsters; it’s the tyranny of the monsters. Every other movie is fear and monsters. They’ve even got monster babies. People are expected to live in this world of alienation and fear. I hear that in the States people are even afraid to make eye contact in the streets. No social change can happen if people are that isolated. So we need to rebuild a sense of community and that means knocking on doors and reconnecting.” - Assata Shakur, interview with Christian Parenti, 1997

“A decade later, globalisation’s progress was tracked in “New Circuits of Imperialism.” In the advanced capitalist world, deindustrialisation and automation had ravaged working class communities and enervated trade unions. Capital, he controversially pronounced, had freed itself of labour. In the dependent capitalist world where manufacturing had relocated, and where some Latin American and Southeast Asian countries were newly-industrialising, economic growth had not removed the mass of people from poverty, hunger and hopelessness. Humanity possessed the technological means to increase productivity with less labour, to distribute work more equitably, to increase time for creative leisure, and to provide a basic income to all. However, this won’t and can’t happen under capitalism, he insisted.” - “At the Interstices of Race, Class and Imperialism: A. Sivanandan (1923-2018)”

“Can you imagine a pair of noise-canceling headphones for geography? That’s how I started to think of Roam. When you want to, you can block out your sense of place entirely and exist in a hazy, calm, featureless space that could be anywhere. This nomadic bubble goes beyond a hotel in that it stretches around the world and is built to encompass your entire life; it promises to become your post-geographical home. Yet I found there to also be an anxiety to this hermetic placelessness, no matter how beautifully unburdened or minimalist it appears. Living anywhere is a lot like living nowhere.” - Kyle Chakya, “When You’re a ‘Digital Nomad,’ the World Is Your Office”

[nevver]

Planetary objects, Hilma Af Klint

[allisonburtch]

i saw these at the guggenheim last weekend. Hilma af Klint's explanation for these paintings was that everything came to her through a spiritual transmission -- it wasn't she who made this but it was the spirits, the gods, etc. Part of my difficulty in so much of my life is not having a self to ground myself in and to make things from. When you deal with attachment issues, or if you were parentified as a child, so much of one's identity is in pleasing others. And compounding that, I was religious, so there was this added component of 'if you do the right thing then you'll be ok.' Af Klimt was also the oldest daughter (though she had older brothers), and cared for her mother for a decade.

I find it interesting that Af Klint managed to get around the difficulty of the artist-as-egoist, especially as a woman artist of her time, by saying that none of this was actually hers. She didn't make it, she didn't imagine it, she was just the vessel to transmist the message. It's brilliant but mostly sad.

[niktipolos]

Unlearning is extremely painful, because you’re giving up your object. And I believe in pedagogy—I’m fundamentally a teacher. But I think teaching is really difficult, because the things you’re trying to get people to unlearn are things they hold close, and that are forms of life for them that structure their sense of continuity. Because learning and unlearning happen at the same time, there ought to be a lot of grace in the space of pedagogy. Cruel Optimism is about how people will stay in relation to their object even if it destroys them, because they can’t bear giving up the pleasure of knowing the world in a particular way. So yes, unlearning is very painful because it means you have to experience a kind of complexity about moving through the world that you didn’t have before. And that’s very abstract, but it’s not abstract when you’re losing something.

Lauren Berlant in conversation with Bea Malsky, “Pleasure Won: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” The Point Magazine (x) (via bemusedbibliophile)

[biseksuwal]

[soultobeloved]

Wow

[her-moth]

‘In Those Years’ by Adrienne Rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

The world is abundant. You are abundant. Abundant in what? That’s your journey.

[allisonburtch]

<3 <3 <3

[allisonburtch]

“It all comes from the unconscious. I just sit down and write. I have no anxiety about writing.”

Sarah Schulman, at the Maggie Terry book opening at Bluestockings. (Quote from memory, so somewhat paraphrased)

[lazz]

[allisonburtch]

Moor Mother

[allisonburtch]

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster

Ten years ago, Justin Rosenstein was coding what was going to be the 'like' button; he claims now that he didn't understand what he was doing. And yet: ten years ago, when he worked there, Facebook had funding from Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg had dropped out of Harvard. Addiction psychology was a not a new thing. How can he get away with saying - now- that he didn't know what he was doing?

The one thing about this well-meaning article that I find particularly egregious is the aura of ignorance from the people who made the very things that take up over 50,000 YEARS of collective humanity each and every day. I almost think that these white guys have really not been listening to the people who have been fighting the powerful for a long time. It's almost cute that they think that these companies will voluntarily decide to be less powerful because they were asked to be nicer? Looking at capitalism as a design problem misunderstands the nature of capitalism. The fact is is that if you try to reduce corporate profits you run into a political problem. One of the developers inexplicably says in this: "It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product. It’s capitalism." Caring for others is not a capitalist value.

The end message of almost all of these men (after they cashed out, of course): oops.

I think we really don't know how to talk about technology because we don't know how to talk about society. Social media is so engrained in our relationships, in our desires, in our deeply-addicted habits, we have limited resources to imagine our lives separate from the demands of capital. As the famous Thatcherism of "there is no society" resounds in our tapping thumbs, we find there is no real solidarity, there is only 'likes.'

In general, I've seen little discussion on the 'left' about what the future of technology holds and what we are building. Who has the hegemony on imagining the future? What is the left's vision for science and technology? Our vision for social solidarity is very much a technical problem.

[allisonburtch]

i found a first edition of Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm in Boston this past weekend. in it, she describes living alone, overlooking the pacific ocean and puget sound, on a mountain, without electricity. she asks her students if they're willing to give up their lives to become writers. if candles lit all i saw i might see more.

when i was 22 i took a road trip in a stick-shift jetta from california to maine and back navigating from a stack of AAA paper maps. i spent a lot of time alone. i don't hate the internet i just want to remember what it felt like before.

[allisonburtch]

back in 2011 i was friends with different girls, different not in their difference but in that we're no longer friends. we went to see the shivers in greenpoint and that night is still one of my favorite new york memories. this turn of phrase may not cut it but Keith Zarriello was larger than life. he sang in a way that argued directly with the inner voice that tells you what is possible. he came in late, sang completely, and disappeared, but what do i remember about one night six years ago.

larger than life, is that not what love is? Love, a creation bigger than one and one. Love that imagines a future worth living in. Love that anticipates a lovers need for a future she hasn't thought of. we need a new future right now bb.

[fifidunks]

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[allisonburtch]

annie dillard was my first favorite writer

[allisonburtch]

The narcissism of good intentions leads to serious self-misrecognition.

Lauren Berlant, "Affect is the new trauma"

[allisonburtch]

Right now love is a prisoner of that money form’s pedagogy of possessiveness, as Marx would say, but it could be released into the world when no longer copying property, so that we, through our senses, would belong to the world, rather than it belonging to us. I have also loved that in Marx. I also like the pastoral of self-loss on behalf of a nonrepetition of the world as it presents itself. It is a leap of faith to seek the end of a world on behalf of a fantasy.

Lauren Berlant, "A Properly Political Concept of Love"

Relates to love as an event a la Badiou

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

Friendly reminder. Go find it in real life!

[allisonburtch]

the absolute boy.

[allisonburtch]

i'm used to ending sentences with whatever. something blah blah blah but whatever. i can't sleep at all and it sucks but whatever. a complex story ended by but i don't know. this crazy thing happened and i want so much more but i don't know. he said that doesn't feel like an ending. i'd conclude. he wanted to hear me. turns out a story isn't a list of bullet points. i think i used to be scared no one was listening so i just wanted to get to the point. there is pleasure in the journey, though. we too began and ended.