White Hot Harlots

Automation and effort

I’m starting to worry that I’ve completely lost touch with youth culture.  Which is to be expected at some point, I guess, but I always figured I’d be the kind of guy who continued to appreciate new, good things well into his middle ages. 

Not trend chasing or anything like that.  Not wearing a backward baseball cap or one of those shirts that has a bad tattoo printed on it.  More like, “hey, even though I’m 55 I still realize that LCD Soundsystem is really good."  Or, "sure, Vampire Weekend ripoff Paul Simon’s Graceland, but they do a nice job of expanding upon that sound."  Keeping an open mind like that.  Not resisting change.

Now—god help me, now it is all literally pops and whistles.  Atari games sounded better than this shit. The old Stockhausen records, were he’s just holding a microphone up to an arc light, have a stronger sense of purpose and cohesion. 

The worst is that the new weird stuff isn’t weird.  Weirdness requires cultivation.  This shit just sounds different because it’s lazy. 

Discordant music used to be impressive because there was difficulty associated with making it, and because it was only consumed by people who knew enough about it to be able to discern from it some kind of meaning or statement, if not a kind of sublime coherence beyond coherence:

That’s a Terry Riley piece.  It’s beautiful, built upon jazz pattern music but composed entirely of overdubs consisting mostly of the electric organ and harpsichord.   Playing each of those instruments required years of training, obviously, and so did the act of analogue recording. There were no computers that let a producer drag and drop sounds upon one another, nor to even provide auto-generated visualizations for the different aural patterns.  It had to be engineered, mapped out beforehand, poured over, tinkered with.  

I don’t mean to stress the difficulty of the composing process as a way of apologizing for the piece’s opacity.  It’s not opaque, is the thing.  It’s weird and dense but also immediately, manifestly beautiful—the product of hundreds of hours of deliberation and toil and love.

Compare that with Crystal Castles, a hugely lauded band popular among today’s "artsy” kids:

The denseness is a simulacrum.  This is as shallow as a mud puddle.  The complication is prefabricated, the loops and repetitions tossed together haphazard and thoughtless.  Sure, there’s a discord.  It’s disquieting.  But so is having a stranger spit on you.  That’s not art.  That’s not craft.  It’s cheap bullshit.

And it’s not that I dislike this sound.  Here’s a record that came out just ten years before the Crystal Castles song:

Similar sonic landscape, similar evocations of anthemic, foggy sirens.  But—wait for it—There’s also a song in there!  Someone wrote it, as opposed to just throwing a bunch of shit together.  It reflects effort and thought.

The new “rock” is even worse.  Savages are a very, very mediocre band who got a shitload of good press just because they are young and play guitars.  Seriously: guitars are a gimmick now.  Japandroids fall into the same category.  And every few years Jack White shits out a new pile of beige wallpaper and everyone fawns over it because rock is physically dead and he’s the closet thing we have to its corpse.

Automation need not beget laziness.  It can, when adopted conscientiously, lead to amazing gains in complexity and productivity.  But it can also turn techne into paint-by-numbers.  Combine that with a recording industry that has shrunk so much that only the most cynical of money-grubbing whores remain viable, along with advances in “data science” that algorithmically recognizing what kinds of cheap bullshit morons enjoy, and you get the shitshow that is contemporary music.  Even the “indie” stuff.

But it can’t be the music, right?  That’s what everyone always says: “it’s not me, it’s the music."  Or maybe it is.  Or it’s both.  Who cares.

More precisely, probably, is that it’s not me, nor even the music, but the structures that publicize and popularize music.  There’s still tons of great stuff out there, even tons of great guitar bands–I’m just too lazy to seek them out on my own, just like most other people. But as almost every last aspect of the music press has adopted a viral content model of publication, there’s been a press to make music more rapidly transient.  There are no longer any broad stylistic movements, certain genres don’t get more popular while others fade away.  Instead, we blink from shrill extreme to the next, unmoored and incoherent and defined only by the pride it takes in its own meaninglessness.

Being a young music geek-type person in the early 21st century was something of a luxury.  The rise of new media allowed for relatively independent music writing that didn’t have to rely on big label support to survive, and they amassed a large presence before getting co-opted by media hyperconglomerates and people with BAs in marketing. Contemporary music still has its charms, still has its vibrant underground scenes, but I really do wish it was still as easy to access as it used to be. 

spacetwinks:

right now i’m thinking about like environmentalism in 90s cartoons cuz i just watched the jetsons movie and the entire agonizingly slow plot hinges on spacely sprockets building this plant on some other species’ home and george jetson eventually having to force him to stop and it just makes me think about fucking captain planet. now that was the real shit. the fucking half assed “you should sort your recycling and maybe compost, also cut plastic rings” was saved for the PSAs at the end but the episodes of themselves were just “this dickhead greedy fuck is destroying the ozone layer, let’s go beat the shit out of them with our magic rings and our superpowered man we summon from them”

In my twenties, I worried that people my age wouldn’t recognize actual environmental harm because they’d be looking for a smirking guy in a suit pouring glowing green ooze into a river.  That was unrealistic, I thought.  But then Flint happened and oh my god that’s actually how it works. 

(via kontextmaschine)

British Royalty

Tanya Gold wrote a wonderful essay for Harper’s about the British Monarchy.  Check it out.  (Also check out her piece about eating at very expensive restaurants, which was the funniest thing I read all of last year).  I read the new essay last week and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, which is odd.

I’ve never cared about the British royal family. Caring about them seems like a waste.  I can’t even call myself a little-r republican, even though doing as much as is practically my duty as a socialist, because the royals seem so far beyond concern, beyond hatred.  Depose them, jail them, keep them in place—what’s the difference, to me or to anyone?  The only time they’ve ever mattered is when Diana selfishly died on a Saturday evening and so SNL was pre-empted.

And yet their continued existence, I’m just now realizing, is incredible. They make sense in other circumstances, but the contemporary UK? England seems so much more progressive than the United States, so much more secular and less superstitious.  I’ve personally known only 4 Britons in my whole life, and they were all dour, cynical realists—attractive yet very sad people who had zero patience for the sort of myth-worshiping I associate with those who would embrace monarchy.

Likewise the British culture to which I’ve been exposed.  Granted, I’m lucky enough to not exist within British culture, so I selectively digest the relatively good stuff: Monty Python, Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, Peter Cook, Young Ones, Jennifer Saunders, pre-weight loss Ricky Gervais.  Say what you will about their comic sensibilities, you have to admit that they are the opposite of sentimentalists.  Even the kids stuff lacks sentimentality!  Inside Out looks positively maudlin and manipulative next to Shaun the Sheep.

How can these people—these bitter, progressive, self-aware drunkards—how could they stand a monarchy?  Or, more precisely, how does my image of them clash with my understanding of the kinds of people who fall in line behind royalists?

Now, obviously, I don’t mean Royalists in the classical sense, back when making accidental eye contact with the queen could lead to execution, or when being a Republican was a genuinely subversive and dangerous act one undertook out of commitment to democracy.  That’s the thing: the royal family is so flittering now, so phantasmal.  Like a ghost or a memory; if they didn’t exist, nothing material would change.

The immaterial would change, though. Dreams and fantasies, especially, would change.  Aspirations would be altered, ideals offset slightly. We’d have to talk about other, different people who we didn’t know.

The royals are like sports or soap operas, planes of exaggerated reality that exist even though reasonably they should not.  They are a stage upon which stories unfold and meaning is created. They have good guys and bad guys who simply exist, in a realm beyond our full comprehension yet close enough to us that we can watch them, sometimes observe them obsessively, forming our own narratives of their import that transcend their actual actions, narratives we turn into metaphor that guide our understandings of our lives and our selves. They’re not perfect fantasies, and that’s the point—their flaws are what them make appealing, allow devotees to explore their intricacies. The reason the queen persists and is beloved is precisely because she no longer claims to be immortal, even though she is.

Exaggerated reality forms the bonds that form culture.  The Greeks and Romans used myth because they didn’t have television or tabloid newspapers. Post-mass media, the purpose of religion has morphed; it now brings communities together, acts somewhat as a set of shared moral guideposts, but it doesn’t constrain perception as much it used to. Empiricism influences us in the abstract—we all think we’re rational, after all, fully dedicated to science and whatfor—but its effects are limited to direct value judgments, to times when we consciously defer to one form of authority over another. The phantasmal is real influencer, the lines the hold in the colors, the aura surrounding our motifs and mundanities that gives our existence the illusion of shape.

Asking what makes Britons suckers for monarchy, then, is akin to asking why Americans love football so much.  You can’t answer the question without dismantling Britain as a concept, and if you were to do that then you’d never be able to even ask the question, let alone answer it.  Britain and monarchy cannot be decoupled.  They only exist because of one another.

The mid two-thousand-and-teens: a very special sort of badness

Anyone who believes that history marches inevitably toward progress should be forced to watch the last two Die Hard pictures.  And, no, I’m not talking about Die Harder and Die Hard: With A Vengeance.  I’m talking about the recent, nominal Die Hards, the ones where Bruce Willis fights Muslims with the aid of his hunky son.

These movies aren’t just bad.  They’re very particularly bad, bad in a way unique to the second decade of the 2000s.  Their color is needlessly saturated.  The camera is always moving and shaky.  A minute-long scene might feature 15 to 20 cuts, compared to 3-5 in the old films, in order to keep the viewer’s attention away from his cellphone.  American film audiences have become like a fat kid on a merry-go-round with chocolate smeared all over his face, yelling “faster faster faster” and crying either because there aren’t enough colors or because there are too many colors. 

The badness goes beyond filmmaking technique, as well. In the first three movies, McClaine’s catchphrase was, of course, “Yippee kay yeah, motherfucker.”  You can think it’s corny or badass, or both (it’s actually both), but you can’t deny its profanity.  That got cut from the last two movies.  In the first, he says “Yippee kay yeah,” but then the bad words are de facto bleeped due to an explosion (resulting in many a knowing “h’yuk h’yuk h’yuks”).  In the second, it was omitted entirely.  Why?  Because it’s all about making everyone happy, all the time, absolutely, in every way, every second, and because failing to satiate every desire of every viewer is akin to oppression or assault, and because there are parents and kids here, man, and we can’t have you swearing.

Also, there’s the emptiness of Die Hard as a title—the title now acts more as a brand signifier, or a logo, than as a statement regarding the content of the artifact.  Like when Pizza Hut became a flavor of Dorritos, or when they started releasing variants of Mountain Dew that tasted nothing like Mountain Dew.  This was absurd when it only applied to junkfood.  When applied to cultural products, the emptiness of branding is worrisome, a signal of just how little any of us care about anything beyond logos.

The point is, you take some bad with the good, and whether the end result constitutes progress or simply movement is a matter of interpretation.  Cell phones make it so we’re never bored anymore, but now traditional media has had to compensate by turning into a strobe light.  You ever try to read under a strobe light?  You can’t, even with practice. Sustained perception is blotted out. 

Society has also decided to be nicer to some newly protected minority groups—including gays and comic book nerds—but this degree of niceness has rendered the public face of those groups humorless, incapable of self-awareness, and exempt from all criticism.  In most cases, particularly with the acceptance of gays, we certainly appear to have made progress.  Rhetorically, we certainly have.  The vibes are kinder, and kindness is good.  But I’m not convinced it’s anything less than superficial.  I don’t think we as a people are any less spiteful than we were in 2002, or even 1952.  We just learned to mask it better, and we’ve accepted masking in lieu of actual change.

We’re nominally more connected but also more disengaged.  We’re rhetorically more respectful but in a way that precludes empathy and understanding.  Everything is nicer looking, everything seems more inclusive, but it’s not, at least not really, at least not in the sense that leads to meaningful change or actual respect.

Where are we headed?  That scares me.  These protests against routine police brutality should be energizing, kicking up all sorts of latent hope regarding our capacity to be decent to one another.  But they’re not.  I’m scared of them.  I’m scared because a backlash is coming.  I’m scared because we have no infrastructure capable of actualizing this discontent into reform, but we have a gigantic and quite literally murderous infrastructure capable of responding to it with fire and bullets and drones.  Our technological advances have given us a way of communicating and organizing, but they’ve taken away our ability to engage beyond physical proximity, to encourage people to understand one another and gather around a shared vision of society.  The left is atomized.  Deeply, completely atomized. Our ethics and values are centered around respect-via-separation, the irreducibility of ethnic and gender differences, the supposed fact that working toward shared goals amounts always to oppression and hatred. The right, on the other hand, has remained unified, has not based its ethics upon eschewing coalition building.  And they are pissed.  They are going to nominate a literal klansman to run against Hillary and stock congress with even more people who believe the earth is 4000 years old and that toddlers should be given guns. 

Things are going to get worse, probably.  Soon, probably. 

I got a twitter

If you feel like following it or whatever: 

https://twitter.com/whitehotharlots

Stephen Merche is the Zodiac Killer

Strange news today… police codebreakers have finally cracked the 3 unsolved cryptograms left behind by the notorious Zodiac Killer.  The killer’s identity has been confirmed as one Stephen Merche, a puffy and self-satisfied file clerk who hailed originally from Toronto.  His deranged messages, published today on The Guardian’s website, take the oblique form of a contemporary political op-ed. 

Merche’s prose presents all the classic signs of violent schizophrenia: his similes stretch beyond the bounds of typical human association, his sentences appear at times as tangled nests of tautology and immediate self-contradiction.  Disturbingly, he fixates on aspects of the human body, spending three separate paragraphs describing his grotesque conceptions of men’s hair. Flesh is another key motif: the corruption of flesh, and the unbreakable immorality he associates with certain skin tones.  Dermatitis in particular is imbued with fantastical meaning; the killer complains of a discoloration on his thigh, seeing in it a sign of his or his victims’ impending doom. 

The whole manifesto makes for chilling reading, and I while I encourage you check it out, I also caution against doing so if you are easily disturbed.

And yet, even in spite of its manifest, dangerous lunacy, I can’t help but wonder if we might find some moral or meaning within his deranged essay.  I approach this subject not out of some sort of perverted fascination with madness, but as one who wishes to understand it clinically, in the hopes of preventing its reoccurrence.

Merche’s essay is a self-ethnography, a genre of writing preferred by lazy humanities majors in which petty criticism is masked as confessional self-searching.  Serial killers gravitate toward this form of communication, as it allows them to express a sort of secondary remorse for their crimes; as opposed to admitting guilt associated with specific misdeeds, the self-ethnographer indicts inescapable features inherent in his very being.  The ostensible focus of the self-ethnography is the writer, but the meaning and importance of the work comes from the writer acting as an avatar of an entire, befouled population.

The self-ethnography therefore acts as a performative ablution—the killer admits to his flaws by making a show of the mental and physical anguish associated with them, but he absolves himself by asserting that they are inborn and unchangeable.  Don’t blame me, he says.  Blame this skin of mine.

Indeed, the very rage associated with this type of serial killer can be understood as a product of their unshakeable guilt. The killer is but one of the befouled, and he considers himself as somehow having rose above the fray by virtue of his awareness of his own guilt. This is why killers often claim to have received divine or demonic messages, or otherwise to be “woke” to a guilt-based consciousness supposedly unachievable by others. This performative awareness generates a snowball effect of rage and violence, as the killer’s sense of inescapable guilt mutates periodically into a euphoria of righteousness and self-certainty.  In confirming his evil, he becomes pure.  In his purity, he is permitted to kill.

Thankfully, Merche’s essay is light on the gory details of his murderous exploits.  (One can only wonder about what horrible fate awaited those poor souls whose hair he so terrifyingly examined).  While his writings are difficult to stomach, we must nonetheless attempt to draw from them some insights into the pit derangement.  Experts will continue to disagree as to the exact causes of pathological violence, but texts such as this at least give us a diagnostic tool to recognize, and hopefully stop, future Zodiacs.   

Incoherence is ineffective

I try not to write about what others are writing about because the others always write better than me.  This makes it hard to write, though, since all I’m reading about is what others are writing about.  So I guess it’s time for me to write about Trump.  Sorry.

As I’ve gone over time and time again, my main complaint about academic liberalism is that it concerns itself almost exclusively with matters of affect, like mood and feeling, while diminishing more material concerns. And this sounds dismissive, I realize, like a caricature of academic discourse.  But it’s not.  

Let’s take a quick look at maybe the most execrable book I have ever read: Good White People by Sharon Sullivan. If you ever wondered what would happen if an anti-gluten bumper sticker became sentient and began writing social justice theory, this is the book for you. Sullivan’s basic point is that anti-black racism has nothing to do with outright racists, historical or otherwise: even slave owners weren’t that bad, she says.  Racism is instead the product of well-meaning but misinformed white liberals, the negative energy of whom contaminates society as a whole (she never uses the word “Orgone,” but, man, she should). 

According to Sullivan and her ilk, racism is not definable according to specific policies or effect, even when those are really fucking racist (like, seriously, literal slavery doesn’t really count, she says).  Instead, racism is entirely a matter of mindsets. Racism will stop as soon as liberal whites stop trying to fix it and embrace spirituality and self-love.

This sounds like a caricature, but it’s not.  This is the most generous reading I could possibly give the book.

And, okay, that seems like dumb nonsense, but so what?  There’s dumb nonsense everywhere.  But this has spilled over, man.  People seem to actually believe it.

Let’s see what happened when some Black Lives Matter activists were granted a private audience with Hillary Clinton.  That should have been a tremendous opportunity, as Douglas Williams points out at The South Lawn.  When Hillary asked them what policy changes they would like to see enacted, however, the response was pointed refusal:

‘I stand here in your space and I say this as respectfully as I can, “If you don’t tell black people what we need to do, then we won’t tell you all what to do.”‘ Jones said. ‘What I mean to say is, this is and has always been a white problem of violence. There’s not much that we can do to stop the violence against us.’

‘Respectfully,’ Clinton answered, ‘if that is your position, then I will only talk to white people about how we are going to deal with these very real problems.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Jones said. He added, ‘But what you just said was a form of victim-blaming. You were saying what the Black Lives Matter movement needs to do to change white hearts is to …’

Clinton told them that she isn’t interested in changing hearts, but rather policy.

As Douglas Williams notes, the activist’s response was “stupefying.”  There’s tons of worthwhile policy changes that could be implemented, many of them are fairly obvious (body cams, maybe?  Or else working to take away the monetary incentives cops get for terrorizing black communities?)  And yet when asked point blank by the presumptive 45th president what reforms should be enacted, all the activist could muster was some empty nonsense about changing hearts.  

The activist’s semi-coherence was not accidental, and it certainly wasn’t a sign of a lack of intelligence or seriousness.  The incoherence came from training, from exposure to an academic body of thought that mistrusts and rejects all inroads toward collective action.  Collective action is bad, they say, because it presumes to speak for the needs of the many in just one (white, cis, male, etc.) voice.  It blots out polyvocality, which is what Hitler and Stalin did. 

In short, action is premised on judgement, which is always bad since judgement from a place of authority always seeks to diminish things that aren’t in a place of authority.  Appealing to non-human mediators, be they obviously craven constructs like “the market” or even well-tested but flawed structures such as empiricism, is equally bad, as those mediators were constructed by authority and their results are always selectively interpreted by authority. Therefore, we cannot pass judgment.  We cannot agitate for action.  We can, at best, be mad, and then implore others to simply listen to our anger.  We can try to smile more and regard one another more kindly, attempt to displace the blockages caused by negative affect with flows comprised of positivity.  

This sounds like vague, poorly wrought mysticism because that’s precisely what it is.

The stated intent of this school of thought is to prevent actionable analysis from taking place.  Naturally, this leads to us accepting the prevailing neoliberal economic dictates without criticism, as they are hereby thought to exist outside the purview of social justice analysis.  This approach is ironic, seeing as it’s born of the realization that supposedly objective interpretive systems are rigged, but whatever.  Acting upon realizations will always and without exception lead to further disempowerment, so our best course of action is to try and paint a smiley face upon the steel girders of our neoliberal oppressors.

As a consequence of this mindset we accept–and sometimes even champion–neoliberal nostrums.  We praise charter schools that accomplish nothing other than the further dehumanization of students and economic devastation of teachers, for example.  On the economic front, we assert that shipping jobs to China benefitted the American middle class, that NAFTA was something other than a pillaging, and that immigration has no effect on the economic standing of most Americans.  The thing is, though, that these statements are all incorrect.  They are lies.  Obviously.  Very, very obvious lies.  And even people who aren’t that horribly informed can see that.

How does this connect to Trump’s appeal?  Well, contrary to the prevailing theories, racism is not entirely a matter of feelings and affect.  Racism often has a logic, however flawed.  And even a person who’s blinded by hate can tell when he’s being lied to. That’s Trump’s appeal, in a nutshell: people are tired of being lied to, and all the fancy equivocations humanists and social scientists can muster ain’t gonna change that fact.  

Trump’s rhetoric is obviously racist, but that racism still gives his supporters an economic narrative that is more plausible–and, sadly, more truthful–than the lies being offered by neoliberal shitheels like Jeb! and Hillary.  (Two powerful and wealthy people who insist on being referred to by their first names, primarily as a means of obscuring the obviousness of the political dynasties they represent, but also as a quite savvy, quite liberal attempt to negate the horrors inherent in their politics by painting a smiley face upon their facades).

Again this isn’t to say that Trump’s logic isn’t hateful, because it is.  It’s also incorrect in many important ways; most notably, immigrants are not the cause of the destruction of the American middle class.  But the general basis of Trump’s schtick, the realization that economic globalization has harmed most Americans in seemingly irreparable ways, is true.  And don’t trust me on this point: Paul Krugman and Liz Warren both agree. 

Politics worldwide is now marked by an outright hatred and rejection of popular democracy.  We moved over to a nominally democratic system of governance whose main order of business is to prop up finance (what Angela Merkel refers to as “Market-Conform Democracy”).  In concept and in execution, the will of voters has been subordinated to the will of the “market,” broadly defined, resulting in widespread deleveraging and disenfranchisement and the destruction of all avenues of empowerment once enjoyed by a relatively broad spectrum of the population.  The effects of this shift include the privatization of once-public services, the socialization of corporate and financial losses (even as the gains reaped by these entities are shared by fewer and fewer people), the erosion of privacy and free expression protections, hyper-aggressive policing, and the accelerated destruction of the earth. 

Different groups are affected differently by each of these effects, and racism (affective or material) certainly worsens most of them for non-white people, but none of them harm non-whites exclusively. Almost everybody is getting fucked over, and almost everyone is aware of being fucked over, and many of these fucked over people seem to prefer politicians who base their message around plausible, hateful lies over those who spew implausible, slightly less hateful lies.

There are important social policy distinctions between the Democrats and Republicans.  There are also less important, but still meaningful, economic distinctions between the two parties, and these splits are mirrored by left-right parties throughout the industrialized world. The larger context, however, is neoliberalism. Jeb! and Hillary are neoliberal champions, and semi-coherent academic theorizing has abetted the ascent of neoliberal policies since day one, be it through the Economist’s celebration of globalization, the Techno-Utopianist’s embrace of a “disruptive” economy, or the Humanist’s stalwart rejection of collective action.  The clear message to academics of all stripes is that the old set of lies ain’t selling anymore.  The people have begun to realize that we are full of shit.

Social justice will not win if it attaches itself to mealy mouthed new age posturing.  That’s not nearly as appealing as outright fascism. Love is almost never as appealing as hate. And that’s doubly, triply true when the love-mongers tell you your problems can be overcome by, like, thinking positive and cutting gluten out of your life, while the hatemongers at least kinda sorta seem to have a plan of action that isn’t founded on obvious bullshit.

Taste the future

Okay,

It’s taken me a while to get this done because every time I sit down to write about it—it being my description of where I think things are going in general—I get about 3 paragraphs into a very bleak diagnosis and then lose the will to pursue the line of thought any further.  Contemplating the future means necessarily contemplating mortality, both my own and that of the world in which I live.  And who wants to do that, right?

So this isn’t going to be scholarly by any means. It will hardly be passable as a blog post.  There are gaps in the logic and nearly every point I raise will require further elaboration. I am going to take a very macro-level approach, as well, and while I will attempt to avoid unclear generalities, some generalizing is necessary both for brevity and sanity.

Alright.  It’s fair to say that the drift generally has been the disempowering of the non-elite classes in economically well-off countries, a concomitant but in no way relative creation/empowerment of second-tier classes in second-tier countries, and the unabated devastation of non-elite peoples in third-tier countries.  I don’t think that anyone would disagree with that broad diagnosis; leftists and nationalists complain about it, while neo-con/neo-liberal NAFTA apologists are now claiming that was the intent all along, we totally meant to destroy the American working class so as to help create a gigantic class of barely viable Chinese industrial workers.

The questions, then, concern the viability of these new economic conditions in light of their broader effects.  These effects intersect in the environmental devastation caused by vastly accelerated production and consumption and the economic inability of nearly every single one of the world’s residents to deal with this devastation.  Existence is already precarious for almost everyone, even relatively rich people in relatively rich nations.  How bad is it going to get when Hurricane Irene-level storms become commonplace, or when lake Winnipeg is North America’s last reserve of potable water?

M-maybe, alright, let’s pause. “Existence” isn’t precarious.  "Freedom" is.  There will be room for us (white and able-bodied) proles in the water mines.  Freedom can be roughly conceived as the ability of a person born into a condition above destitution to live life free of harassment, having at least some opportunities to make choices regarding sex, friendships, and employment.  It’s not so limited as freedom of choice (which we’ll always have, even the bastards who run the water mines won’t force you to drink R/C when you truly desire Pepsi), but it can be understood as a lack of undue compulsion or proscription enjoyed people who can cross a relatively accessible threshold for economic empowerment.

It’s fair to say that the non-elite classes of wealthy countries have since WWII enjoyed an unprecedented amount of freedom. There were plenty of groups who did not enjoy it—it sure as hell was unevenly distributed—but overall, most people were more free than they ever were before and might ever be again.

Freedom is an historical anomaly.  It is/was caused by a confluence of political, practical, technological, scientific, and philosophical factors that bore favorably upon economic conditions.  Focusing too strongly on any one of these leads to a path of cultural, biological, or even technological determinism.  Saying that white Europeans became the most economically empowered people because of cultural or biological superiority is obviously stupid and offensive, but it’s nearly as dumb as taking a Jared Diamond-style, Guns, Germs, and Steel approach and ascribing economic empowerment only material factors.  Freedom is a relationally determined product born primarily of economic conditions, which are shaped by myriad other factors.  And, as Charles Bergquist argues extensively, exploitative domestic labor practices are historically the greatest hindrance to its development.  The erosion of labor power in industrialized nations has already greatly weakened the relations allowing for widespread freedom, notwithstanding certain nominal affordances recently won by women and LGTBQ peoples limiting conspicuous harassment in public and professional settings.  When the shit hits the fan–which will probably happen within my lifetime–these affordances will be erased. 

But what shit will hit what fan?  The accelerating destruction of the environment has, in the words of the freakin’ pope, caused our earth “to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”  In response, the elite have begun to hoard power and resources, as freedom is about to become exponentially more expensive.   I think it’s foolish to consider the widening gap between rich and poor as only incidental to our impending climate catastrophe.  The elite are hoarding resources because they realize, even only subconsciously, that freedom is soon going to cost much more than it currently does.

So… overall, I think things are bad.  I think they will get gradually worse for another 5-20 years.  I don’t know exactly what this will look like, but generally non-elite US citizens should look forward to water restrictions, lower wages, more limited access to higher education and eventually even secondary education, even poorer-quality healthcare at ever more expensive prices, privatization of social security and outright theft of pensions, continued expansion of the police and prison state, more total and absolute surveillance monitoring our consumption and sleep patterns, greater hurdles to property ownership, continued consolidation of media and politics, and further legal de-leveraging in property and employment disputes (i.e., more unpaid overtime, fewer recourses when your landlord baselessly charges you 20k after you move out).  

After that 5-20 years, there will be a legitimacy crash of some sort.  Unrest will be quelled even more viciously than is the present norm.  The advanced state of military, surveillance, and prison systems, combined with ecological precarity, will allow formal caste systems to solidify fairly quickly.  

Obviously, these predictions are pessimistic and in no way inevitable.  It’s just what I think is the most likely scenario. In the next few days, I’ll try and sketch out some potential, but unlikely, responses. 

One more thing

A lot of people complained that I don’t talk enough about the economic and political conditions that led to the adjunct crisis.  I did talk about them, but not enough apparently.

Obviously, that’s huge.  The shift to a customer service model of education is not merely coincidental to massive cuts in state and federal education funding, or to the bizarre expectation that it is the job of higher ed to somehow solve the problems caused by the past 35 years of conservative/neoliberal leadership.  I didn’t go into huge detail about these points mostly because they’ve already been discussed to death, but also because I want us–liberal (leaning) instructors, grad students, and faculty members–to begin taking more ownership over the current fucked state of higher ed.  

Yes, we’ve had unreasonable demands placed upon us.  Yes, this country is run cyclically either by idiot cultists who think the earth is 5000 years old or third way financio-utopianist technocrats who believe that the problems inherent to capitalism can be fixed only by giving more unbridled leverage to business and finance.  The world is shit.  Obviously.

But we have done a horrible job of keeping up with it.  Humanists, especially, have almost made it a point of pride to refuse to explain the importance or efficacy of our work in a manner that will carry any water outside of our departments. I am sometimes astounded that people can be so hyper-aware of their own ideological marginalization yet so utterly blind to the implications thereof.  If the country/world really is run by suit-and-tie Immorten Joes, freemarket cultists who actively despise marginalized peoples and would think nothing of literally starting a war if it means they can buy their daugther a nicer SUV, then what do you gain by adopting a politics that does nothing but assert its alterity to evil?  You make yourself conspicuously vulnerable, is all. Which leads necessarily to disenfranchisement.  Which leads to further cuts and a calcification of a hideous, market-based understanding of what education is and should be.

Instead of taking on the privatization and ed reform movements, we’ve thrown our hands up and refused to engage, figuring that since we’re so damn sure of ourselves and our positions that we don’t have any obligation to argue for them outside of our narrow corridors of influence.  And, oops, that hasn’t worked.  

We live in the world we build. We have some control over our institutions and our society.  We need to develop behaviors that go beyond kvetching and asserting victimization.  We can’t do that if we reject all matter of engagement as being de facto oppressive.