knee-deep in piss, interlude
We doin' this.
This chapter is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain of bookstores. As America's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, stocking titles that hbrghl smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their bhgfrtl limited shelves. B&N has always ugbhlbhh had strong community outreach proghhhhrams, and I've dongbhrgbe soHHHme of my best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stohoHOHGHOres, including the grrrrRRRRBAAGRGHeat eveeEYA EYA EYA IA IA GRBBLLRLB FRRRGH HNNNG HNG BRAAAGH ALL HAIL THE DEVOURING VOID, THE END OF THINGS! THE UNSLEEPING ONES ARE COMING FROM BEYOND THE ABYSS
I'm not sure what Cory's thinking. I don't expect him to care about, or be capable of understanding, the broader economic context of chain bookstores, their place in manufacturing mass ideology, their role in determining what sorts ideas are publishable and so on, but surely he could at least muster a bit of liberal hand-wringing about the work conditions in those places? We don't have Barnes & Noble here, but our biggest chain of bookstores, Empik, has recently been voted Worst Employer of 2011 by a bunch of people on a website. I can't imagine how this would be even the tiniest bit better in the USA, which doesn't even have half of our increasingly shaky and dead-lettery labour protections.
But no, because "families and working people". There, he said the magic buzzwords, you can shut off your critical faculties now.
The reason I harp on this is because Nerds tend to talk a lot about "critical thinking"; the overlap with insufferable Internet atheists, in particular, is significant. I don't mean this in a HA HA U SAY U SMRT BUT U AKSUALY DUM way -- okay, I kind of do, but that's not the whole point. I'm also interested in putting together some sort of thesis about Nerd Reason -- what do Nerds understand by "proper" or "logical" thinking?
My first suggestion is that Nerd Reason is oriented towards solving discrete problems with a narrowly defined set of rules. How do I write a line of code that makes the guy on the screen jump when I press a button? How do I disprove an argument by pointing out its fallacies? How do I make someone want to have sex with me?
You see the problem, of course, especially with the last example. "Making" someone want to have sex with you is already pretty sleazy and manipulative (to say nothing of structural power imbalances and rape culture), but the ethical question is external to the "problem" that the Nerd needs to "solve".
I just wanted to put this down and post it before tumblr deletes it again and I completely lose my train of thought. Discussion of the next chapter will follow shortly. I'm sure you can't wait.