#reactionaries

[creature-wizard]

it makes me laugh when they say "its basic biology" its not advanced biology however??? 😭😭 lmao

"It's basic biology" is a thought-terminating cliche for transphobes. Plus, reactionaries want to believe that the truth is always simple and easily understood and never require advanced education to comprehend. This is because reactionaries are profoundly anti-intellectual and fear what they don't already know.

[hmmiamnotsure]

Strange Reactionaries #1

Post by @velvetvexations · 14 images

💬 5  🔁 14  ❤️ 48 · I'm almost certain that if Israel had branded itself as a communist state tankie tumblr would be openly supporting the ge

This post is just really strange because they cut out any context of who could have written it (for all we know, they could have written it themself and posted it as a post from a "tankie"), but it also shows a bunch of out-of-context photos of people reblogging, which is not proven to be tied to the photo above at all. All in all, this just seems like a Tumblr equivalent of a false flag with all the cut context, but please do tell me if I am misunderstanding something. The framing of Zionism as being in line with the claimed Uyghur genocide is also really weird, because I am pretty sure that principled Marxist-Leninists would support Palestine and would also see that the claim of a Uyghur genocide is unfounded (please correct me if I am wrong).

Even if it did come from an actual "tankie", what I have seen is that the vast majority of people that they would designate as tankie support Palestine (one of them being me), so I have no idea where they get this idea that tankies are Zionists while also denying the Uyghur genocide (they never tell you that the PRC's currency has several minority languages: one being Uyghur).

I do not get this weird hypotheticalization that some anti-communists perform. They say "if X was communist, communists would support them" but them being communist would completely change what X would be (I genuinely saw someone say "if Hitler was a communist, communists would support him" ... seriously.) In this specific example, saying "if Israel was communist" makes no logical sense because communists generally do not support Israel, so it would never be communist in the first place. For my final diagnosis of this strange reactionary, I would say that they are some flavor of liberal (because they are against the Palestinian genocide, but they support the Uyghur Genocide myth; by extension, they support the terrorism the CIA is funding in Xinjiang because that myth helps the CIA hide that). Free Palestine (from a tankie).

[lonely-space-egg]

The rhetoric of the recent Bluesky harrassment campaign has had me thinking about this old Big Joel video. Disclaimer that I don't agree with everything he says here [I think his arguments on animal abuse are really poor], but it is still really damning of the current Breadtube dogpile that supposed leftists are making the exact same "it's inherently suspect and deviant to question accepted moral norms" argument that Shoeonhead and her fans were making four years ago.

[mbharestuff]

talking with friends on BlueSky has reminded me that no, it's not just in my head, this site really is in the middle of a huge anti-trans reactionary swing that especially targets transfem users. it's noticeable. it's getting steadily worse.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

[space-lorde]

Banning trans people from sports will not improve your quality of life.

Banning drag will not improve your quality of life.

Banning books from schools will not improve your quality of life.

Banning abortion will not improve your quality of life.

Your material conditions will not improve. Your rent will still be too damn high. Your car bill, your light bill, your insurance, all of it will continue to be too damn high.

You gain nothing. Instead, you lose integrity.

[matt0044]

”Go Woke, Go Broke.”

So… “Become more informed about the world still being in dire straits in society’s treaty of minorities, become financially destitute.”

They DO know this is how they sound, right?

[hasellia]

Engaging in YouTube comments can be a great way to lose your paragraphs of thought, so here is my YT comment on here for preservation. On the topic of Media Literacy: "This video is so fascinating, well done! I'm only up to 31:18, and I've already spent an hour writing several paragraphs on what has been presented so far. I know I'm contributing to the problem by not finishing the video. But I had a lot to say on the topic. It has already changed a lot by watching this far, so I'm going to see this as a "learning diary".

Media literacy has been dead before there was writing. I think of the stories of Anthropologist hiring Native Americans to interpret stone placements, only to learn the such placements were how modern folk mark where to park their car. Or when I was watching a documentary with a friend. Scientist were confused to see a lizard hand stencil in a Saharan cave. Because it looked human-esque the anthropologist concluded the lizard may have had spiritual significance. My friend, studying Aboriginal Australian culture, suggested that such a stencil would interpret as directions for hunting said lizard. "This is a place of plenty for goanna (monitor lizard)". The literacy to interpret these cultural signifiers was gone. Not because the consumers or the writers were gone, but because the control of the delivery of that media was.

Reductive Media lit is the result of reactionary culture making the jump from Murdoch newspapers and newsrooms to the digital space. The pervasiveness of online (or perhaps, as a whole, media) reactionary culture. If you say the wrong thing, you get dunked on. You see the wrong thing, you must dunk it for fake internet points, thus acclaim & thus a sense of achievement with a sense of community; a combination akin to sugar & fat. Necessary for the body, but can be addicting when combined & thus is often served in unhealthily exaggerated amount by those with financial incentive.

I'd describe reactionary culture as a culture that views discussions as a competitive intrinsic-communal action rather than an extrensic-extracommunal action. If your take on immigrants, Batman The Dark Knight or the validity of a spherical earth isn't good enough, it gets thrown in the trash & is used as example of such a waste product: (why are USAmericans so offended at the very concept of waste products)?

As a functionally post 9/11 baby, react culture has always kind of been the norm. Heck, I remember watching South Park when I was actually 8. But, the newfound prevalence of this isn't just from the digital jump, but like with newsrooms and newspapers, who owns the platforms of media that perpetuate their own interest. Of course, capitalist and reactionaries would love twitter! You have a numerical value percentage as incentive for the validity of your decisive words & actions! How often have you heard "Figure W has made a statement with over X and X, Y, Z retweets saying…" For reactionaries, fake Internet points are literal social currency. If there is a number, there is a value to interpret, a percentage to be taken and a statistic to misalign in your favour.

A lot of my views in this paragraph is based on a documentary series that looked into the rise of Rupert Murdoch's media empire (I think it's called "The Murdoch Empire? It may also be region locked to Australia as it was a government funded doco, but IDK). It was downright enlightening to hear how Murdoch would purposely pit his children against each other, believing that competition would make them more capable, and how this was EXACTLY how he ran his businesses too. His family wasn't a business, though, and his business partners weren't seen as children. To Murdoch, competition is how a community is run.

My takeaway was this; reactionaries believe that competition is progress itself, is how a community is run, and is present in all things as a universal language.

My family recently had both me, my sister and my mother attend university for the first time. We all noticed the same thing. None of the students wanted to answer the lecturer's questions. I think at first, we all just assumed that it was because a lot of them just got out of high school were talking back to the teacher got you in detention. Maybe there is some of that, that's what I thought I was feeling when I was quiet. But as I entered units that were my fields of interest, and I became eager to be corrected, I realised something. Everyone was afraid of being incorrect, not because they'll look silly or get yelled at by the authoritative figure. But because they'd get "dunked" on by the lecturers. Some of the sweetest people I've ever met! Because being incorrect is how you "lose" the competition of discourse and receive social sanctions on Twitter.

So when you see a bad political opinion or a plot hole in a movie, that's when you can receive a sense of communal accomplishment by "dunking" on the movie and receiving internet points. The same is true if the "dunk" is incorrect. Same if the "dunk of the dunk" is incorrect. And so on ad nauseam."