post-nihilism blogging about blogging

This video by Errol Morris is the story of ‘The Umbrella Man’, a conspicuous figure present at the assassination of JFK. It’s  told by the author of one of the many books on the assassination, but Josiah Thompson seems to be a class above the average conspiracy nut. He talks about the process of spotting this man in the film – holding an incongruous black umbrella open on a beautiful sunny day – and after a process of investigation he appealed to the man to come forward and explain himself to the senate committee investigating JFK’s assassination. The explanation was so “wacky” and so bizarrely out-of-left field that one could, quite literally, never invent it – so it must have been true. From this Thompson concluded something very important about the limits of our knowledge of historical events:

“…if you have any fact which you think is really sinister… is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinning – hey, forget it man. Because you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister perfectly valid explanations for that fact.”

Which is a fantastic point, and which Thompson calls a “cautionary tale”. If only it were heeded more often.

In response to ‘The Umbrella Man’ John Updike, in a piece for the New Yorker, allegedly came to the following conclusions about history and historical research:

“We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth.”

Go watch the video – it’s only 6 minutes long, and well worth watching if only for how bizarrely tangential the Umbrella Man’s reasons are.

Some excerpts of a recent piece ‘The Bulldog and the Pegasus‘ on Zynga/Nimblebits and the accusations of copycat behaviour by the Big Z. Best thing I’ve read this week.

It’s easy to hate Zynga, but neither moral turpitude nor mythic hubris sufficiently explains our present situation. Folklore and modernity alike condition us to desire a lucid answer, a simple take with a clear moral: don’t steal game designs, don’t abuse players, don’t exploit workers. Those are decent principles. But they are also stories, and stories are lies whose deception we forgive in exchange for their grace.

…

If games ever can do good for the world, this is perhaps all they have to offer. To remind us of contingency, to give every move an orthogonal weakness. To impose a doubt for every certainty, while still admitting the need to carry on, out of vanity and shame as much as ambition and hope, to ride higher like Bellerophon on Pegasus to touch Olympus, all the while secretly knowing that we are not gods, that we will be toppled. And to hope that when we do someone will take us in, and that we won’t die alone.

And a great point from one ‘Nicholas Bollerophon’ in the comments:

…when you attempt to make something with a bit of originality to it – even just a little – your effort shows and is in and of itself a political expression. You are asserting that you can step out of the path of collapse; culture has grown instead of just turned over.

I’m reading little bits of Oliver Marchart’s stuff on the difference between ‘Politics’ and ‘The Political’. According to a journal article, “Marchart has elaborated an extended definition of minimal politics, the minimal criteria required for an action to be considered political… To this end, he proposes five criteria of minimal politics.”

The five criteria are 1. “the aim of becoming a majority” (i.e. “…it aims to transform the contemporary social order.“), 2. “Strategy”, (“Strategies contesting traditional ways of doing and saying are also linked to the aim of establishing new institutions and practices.“), 3. Some sense of organisation, 4. “Collectivity” (“As with the aim of becoming a majority, the collective dimension of political action need not be understood as an empirical collection of individuals, but as a symbolic collective; as the symbol of a collective actor.“) and 5 & 6 are “conflictuality and positionality” (“Since politics therefore always includes a dimension of conflict, actors will need to take up a position within this conflict.“).

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that making “something with a bit of originality to it” could be made to squeeze within this set of criteria.

I also really like Ian’s phrase “orthogonal weakness” and emphasis on contingency.

The first, from Graham Harman’s ‘Circus Philosophicus’, from the final chapter ‘The Sleeping Zebra’, pp.65-66:

“Latour was in a listening mood, and politely allowed me to expound on the recent mutation of the critic into the full-fledged troll: that despicable stock character of the unmonitored salt flats of the internet. My thesis was that the troll is the new successor to past figures of anti-philosophy: the sophist, the pedant, and the Inquisitor, among others. I argued that the troll is the degenerate form of the critic, untethered from any commitment of his own, and unleashed on the world to doubt and critique whatever one might doubt and critique rather than what truly deserves refutation.”

And the second, remarkably close to Harman et al.’s project in OOO and Speculative Realism, is the following quote from the introduction to Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Great Derangement’, pp.12:

“When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.”

‘Why women don’t like appearing on TV‘ by Suzanne Moore at The Guardian.

Women, if I have to generalise, are very good at faking some things but not always the things that matter. We want to be liked and are fearful of being judged on our looks. There is a freedom in ageing, trust me, but the media needs fresh meat.

Why, though, are we so afraid of being unlovable and ignorant when every day men ooze these qualities in serious discussions? When I was editing, I would often ask women who I knew had expertise to write for me but they would need so much encouragement that often, yes, I would use a less good man simply to meet a deadline. A man who was prepared to fake it.

We say “no” when we should say “yes” because we don’t feel worth it, we don’t feel we can cover every base. This is a problem of political discourse. You can’t go on Question Time and say, “I am not really sure about the euro”, even though no one is really sure about the euro. Or “Actually, NHS funding is not my area” when you are up against politicians who have had teams briefing them. Your job, as I was told aeons ago when booked to appear on Question Time, is to “represent the average mum”, which I screwed up badly by asking that Myra Hindley be released and all drugs be legalised, while sitting next to David Trimble.

‘10 Things I Hate About Skyrim‘ by Tim Rogers at Kotaku.com.

Skyrim begins most of its proverbial sentences with the names of characters in its made-up dialects. The loading-screen flavor text often catches my eye. The above example is particularly fantastic. It reads:

“Kodlak Whitemane is the Harbinger of the Companions. He does not give orders, [yet] his word is highly respected both inside Jorrvaskr and through all the nine Holds.”

First of all—what? Second of all: okay.

“Kodlak”: a made-up first name in some made-up dialect that is trying to sound Nordic.

“Whitemane”: two familiar words to English speakers, combined into one word. We immediately have the impression of this man having a full head of white hair. Maybe he does. Or . . . maybe he’s a she? (With a name like “Kodlak”?)

“Harbinger of the Companions”: the two capitalized words in this phrase are words we may have encountered before if we’ve ever read a book or leafed through one. A “Harbinger” is something that signals something is coming. A “Companion” is a person or thing that one enjoys being with and escorts or chaperones from place to place. However, as these words are capitalized, a little switch flips in the first-timer’s brain, prompting him to expect these words, in this imaginary world, to represent foreign concepts. Maybe a “Harbinger” is what they call a “Master Elite Warrior”, and the “Companions” are a group of Really Tough Dudes who kill anyone that looks at their shoes. It could be possible that a Harbinger is what citizens of the land of Skyrim call a messenger or an oracle, and the Companions are people who like hanging out with people, though the unfamiliarity of a name like “Kodlak” coupled with a pseudo-familiar name like “Whitemane” persuades us to expect the extraordinary. So it is that writing begins to trick us.

‘In which I don’t try to write like a man‘ by Margaret Robertson at Lookspring.

 General internet rough-and-tumble doesn’t phase me. I’m secretly delighted that the 4th Google result for my name is ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’. It amuses me enough that I’ve bought www.margaretrobertsonisfullofshit.com, even if I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. I think, on the whole, I can make my peace with being called a cunt for what I write, but I find it more daunting to be called a cunt for just having one.

‘History Repeats – Facebook is the new AOL‘ by Jay Baer at ConvinceandConvert.com.

People kvetch about Google and it’s online hegemony. But Google is Urkel compared to Facebook in terms of possession of data. And data = power because data = relevancy.

Imagine if when you went to Google to do a search, you saw a pop-up box that said “To search, first please enter your name; high school; relationship status; favorite movies; birthday; lists all your friends and relatives; and upload some photos of that time you were drunk and did something stupid.”

That’s essentially how Facebook works. Except we GAVE them all that information. They didn’t even have to ask.

‘We Are All Human Microphones Now‘ by Richard Kim at The Nation.

There’s something inherently pluralistic about the human mic too; it’s almost impossible to demagogue, to interrupt and shout someone down or to hijack the General Assembly for your own sectarian purposes. That’s clearly been a saving grace of this occupation, as the internecine fights over identity and ideology that usually characterize left formations haven’t corrosively bubbled over into blood feuds there—yet. The human mic is also, of course, an egalitarian instrument, and it exudes solidarity over ego. No doubt, a great frenzy erupts when left gods like Michael Moore or Cornel West descend to speak, but many people only hear their words through the human mic, in the horizontal acoustics of the crowd instead of the electrified intimacy of “amplified sound.” Celebrity, charisma, status, even public-speaking ability—they all just matter less over the human microphone.

‘Australian Political Blog Roll – A Call for Help‘ by Greg Jericho at Grog’s Gamut.

As some of you would know, I am writing a book for Scribe publishers on social media and politics, policy and journalism. As part of the project I thought it worthwhile trying to come up with a list of all Australian political blogs. Such a thing is actually rather difficult to accomplish. The fleeting and fluid nature of the blogosphere means that many blogs come and go, some will will about politics but then drop it as a topic.

‘Stories and Games (1): Art‘ by Chris Bateman at iHobo.

Can games be art, and should we care either way? Every culture respects some activities and objects as ‘art’, and grants to these a certain esteem that is entirely apart from their practical uses. Art, as Oscar Wilde suggested, is quite useless, but nonetheless great art, good art, and even interesting art attracts a lot of attention, a lot of praise and criticism, and a lot of money. The question of whether games can be art is usually treated in one of two ways – often by presuming either they must be art (Santiago) or they can’t be art (Ebert). In my book Imaginary Games I take another path: the question of whether games can be art is misguided, because all art is a kind of game. To understand why this is so, there’s no better place to start than looking at the relationship between games and stories.

‘Morozov probes internet’s role in new democracies’ by Marwa Farag for The Stanford Daily.

Morozov began by introducing two perspectives on technology and social change: instrumentalist and ecological.

He summarized the “not particularly intellectually exciting” instrumentalist argument saying, “It all depends on the people. Technology has no impact in itself and it all depends on the human actors.”

In this perspective, the Internet is a neutral tool, an instrument and an amplifier. Morozov used the examples of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, journalist Malcolm Gladwell and New York University professor Clay Shirky to illustrate this position, posing theoretical questions arguing against the instrumentalist position.

Morozov then moved to describe the ecological position, a position he feels is more accurate.

“I’m much closer towards the ecological camp,” he said. “I think of technology tools as having impact and effects that transcend simple usage.”

“The idea is that [the Internet] is more than a tool: It transforms both the environment where politics is made, those who participate in politics and many other keywords in the vocabulary that we use to think about protest and political change,” he added.

…

He also cited a FirstPost article on a hashtag that trended on Twitter following the detainment of Egyptian-American journalist Mona El Tahawy in the Egyptian Interior Ministry. The article’s headline claimed that #FreeMona resulted in El Tahawy’s release, but Morozov quoted a line from his book to raise concerns with this view.

“If a tree falls in the forest and everyone tweets about it, it may not be the tweets that moved it,” he joked, going on to explain. “The fact that everyone tweets about it does not mean it was Twitter or a hashtag that resulted in that particular outcome. Certainly it was part of the story; but how important it was is something to be studied, not something to be assumed.”

‘Full Cost Accounting & the B53‘ by Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk.

It turns out that the nuclear weapons complex simply doesn’t do “full cost accounting.”  If you build a municipal solid waste facility, for example, the “back end” costs are part of the consideration.  After all, part of the cost of any activity is cleaning up after one’s self (or one’s generation).  That’s not, apparently, true for nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons facilities.  The cost estimates for RNEP and RRW, for instance, only described what it might cost to make the weapons.  Not what it might cost to take them apart someday.  The same goes for all the big ticket infrastructure items in the Obama Administration’s modernization of the nuclear weapons complex like the Uranium Processing Facility. The clean-up costs get passed along to the future, quite possibly including individuals born after the weapons or facilities were retired.

Of course, that’s bad management and, from a generational perspective, a little selfish. It is irresponsible for policymakers to simply pay for the construction of nuclear weapons and related facilities, while leaving dismantlement and clean-up costs to future generations.

‘A rough, sprawling take on digital rhetoric and writing‘ by James Schirmer.

These differences are even more apparent in digital and online forms as we write for some kind of audience beyond ourselves, thereby revealing acts of performance. This can be more pronounced when others get involved as not only an audience but also as contributors and even co-authors on a text, which is a term still seeing change in the moves toward online compositions. In moving online, we find other people placing demands, but the technologies we use do, too. Just as page in my Field Notes memo book invites me to write, various and sundry social media tools ask me to create, discuss, promote, and measure.

…

Part of what’s revealed in certain research in digital rhetoric, too, is the impermanence of our discourse. With changes and subsequent questions swirling about the nature of academic and literary publishing, we see plenty of consternation and worry about the future. The recent inclusion of Twitter hashtags in my memo books for archival organizing purposes marks another change, perhaps potential fuel for the fires burning down the English language. Still, I think much of what we have online now is what Sirc hopes for: “writing as assemblage, with a structure based on association and implication; piling stuff on to create a spellbinding, mesmerizing surface” (284).

‘I’m Tired of Being a “Woman in Games.” I’m a Person.‘ by Leigh Alexander at Kotaku.

Sexism in games remains an unsolved problem, it’s clear. Some of you will be nodding along, and some of you will hear the s-word and roll your eyes and go, “oh, this again?” You guys can piss off-–go click on some new screenshots or a trailer consisting of a release date slowly fading into view. You’re hopeless.

So it’s Ada Lovelace day again, and I thought I’d talk briefly about the impact that Ms Morrison, my year 11 & 12 maths teacher had on me.

She was the first (and only) maths teacher to succeed at making me face up to the importance of laying down foundations for higher order mathematical thinking. In my case, it was learning the times tables properly, which I’d never done in all my years of prior schooling. Amazing, I know – I got through about 10 years of school and high school without properly memorising my times tables.

Somehow, from the ages of about seven to seventeen I’d gotten through by relying on my ability to recollect some easy ones, and extrapolating from those I knew (5×5=25!) by doing some quick arithmetic to get the ones I couldn’t ever remember for the life of me. The unappealing practice of classical ‘rote learning’ was something I tried my very hardest to avoid, both in and outside of school, preferring to rely on the rule that the interesting things are more memorable anyway.

It’s an approach that’s held me in reasonable stead, as it comes with an uncanny ability to recall contextual memories. Hey, remember that time we carried a railway sleeper all the way up a 500m escarpment track in 40degree heat because you wanted to build a tree-house in your backyard and I got sticky sap on my transformers t-shirt? Then we could barely fit the huge thing into the tiny Suzuki swift and I had to sit in the front seat with it half crushing me, all the way home! Yeah, good times.

There’s something about the essence of the fact floating unconnected from the reasons why it’s a fact that seems to make it particularly hard for me to remember. Why, after all, do seven bunches of six total forty two? What rhyme or reason is there for it, it just purely is. It’s a product of the base-10 system, but that really doesn’t explain all that much.

So Ms Morrison helped me realise that times tables were worth the trouble of rote learning. But she didn’t just make me do it (no teacher can make any student do anything) she convinced me. How? Through a number of things that add up to her being a god damn amazing high school teacher: she treated her class as adults, she was brilliant and creative in her explanations and demonstrations, and she was a real human being. When she was annoyed with the highly authoritarian, aspirational waffle our principal like to recite at assembly (“Teachers teach! Learners learn!” was a favourite) she’d agree with us when we grumbled about it in class afterwards. When we couldn’t understand how exactly calculus worked, she’d come up with another demonstration of how the semantic language of maths performs the crazy conceptual work of slicing the area under a curve into infinitely small sections and measuring them. And when we didn’t come to class she’d hassle us for missing actual things we had learnt rather than for being simply “missing classes”.

See that’s the thing – when you’re teaching your students important and useful things, you actually get the right to harass them for not coming and learning. That’s the key point that many of the stricter teachers missed: you have to have something worth learning to get the right to be annoyed, angry, upset, &tc. when students skip your classes to go to the shops and get some lunch from The Professors’ Charcoal Chicken. Ms Morrison quite reasonably got that.

And the devotion she showed to her work, while supremely evident each day, didn’t just end at 3:30. She is literally the only teacher that ever gave out her email address to us with the offer of answering questions we didn’t understand so we wouldn’t have to wait a full week to get the answers in class. And ask we did! In her answers she’d scan whole pages of working out to show us where we were going wrong, what we should be doing and explain why, sending them to us via email.

She was savvy too. She didn’t just teach us the interesting or worthwhile parts – she taught us what we needed to know for the exams, and made reasonably prescient predictions as to what, generally, would be in them based on past papers, trends, and what kinds of questions the papers have asked lately. She played the examination game, essentially, and played it on our behalf.

Our diminishing cadre of 3-unit maths students went from being a full class, to about 8 students as the two years went on, and several people dropped out. Ms Morrison never took it personally or viewed it as a failure though – she was quite tactical about it. If changing to 2unit even the month before the exams is going to get you your best results, with scaling taken into account, and if you’re going to use those two months to get marks elsewhere, then go for it.

She encouraged our class’ sense of camaraderie, celebrating birthdays with cakes and other occasional rewards and encouragements, and she stirred our competitive sides to our collective benefit. After occasional topic tests a list of the ‘Top 5’ students would be placed in a prominent position in the room, and I still remember fondly the one time I beat my friend Lachlan at a test – such victory! Such a sense of achievement! Fuck badges and points and all the rest of that shit; the payoff from working your ass off at something and finally beating your friends, beating someone who has in the past always been better than you, is worth more than money.

Ms Morrison of Blaxland High invested in her students. We felt like we let her down when we didn’t find the time (or make the time) to do the exercises and homework she knew we needed to really comprehend a mathematical approach. When we did well in exams, I felt like she did well too. We were, after all, the culmination of two years of her hard mental and emotional work – it took far more than just opening the book and explaining it to ‘teach’ our class, and it was just our luck that we had a teacher as brilliant and dedicates as her to do it.

Addendum: An interesting point of note – 3 of the 7 or 8 students of Ms Morrison’s who went on to finish 3unit maths in 2004 have gone on to PhD level study. Not a bad success rate.

In our era of the Internet – an era in which memes and chain emails alike cross from screen to the world and back again  - has the encroachment of snark from the internet undermined our ability to properly mock those deserving of mockery in so-called meatspace?

Compare and contrast two entirely unrelated pieces – the first by John Birmingham at The Sydney Morning Herald suggesting the correct punishment for (convicted racist) Andrew Bolt should not be the imposition of legal punitives, but rather mockery:

People like Bolt do not need to be suppressed. They need – they desperately need – to be mocked. Mocked for their ignorance. Mocked for their paranoia. Mocked for their delusions of adequacy.

And I think there’s something very right and true about it – the law does not persuade opinion, powerful opinion persuades opinion. And so I was left wondering, why isn’t the mockery more forthcoming? I doubt it’s for fear of defamation and reprisals – there’s always a way around such laws in any case, viz. satire, legitimate criticism, etc.

And so it wasn’t until I read the next piece that I began to wonder if our resistance to mockery is actually a cultural one. See how Mel Campbell  reviewing this week’s Q&A episode  for Crikey describes the twitter ‘snark’ culture arrayed around that program:

The Twitter commentariat is possibly the worst thing about Q&A. What began as a well-meant gesture of inclusiveness has deteriorated into a scramble to be zingy enough for one’s tweet to be displayed onscreen. Snark is the enemy of intellectual rigour because it refuses to engage with an idea, preferring to reject it through mockery. It’s quite possible to watch Q&A without properly listening to it, concentrating instead on collecting retweets for your asinine gags about the panellists and questioners.

Which is a relatively common sentiment to see expressed about anything of the internet. When we consider that the net is getting more ‘real’ with every passing day, and that the barrier between ‘the internet’ and ‘the real’ is an increasing permeable one, we’re left with some pretty significant questions about the internet’s cultural effects. When “haters gonna hate” becomes a truth universally acknowledged, whither the ability to mock those like Andrew Bolt? How do we make the mockery stick to those that truly deserve it? Or is the answer that only the truly deserving, accurate criticism and mockery will endure in the wash? But if that’s the case then we might as well throw around whatever we like and see what sticks, which is clearly only going to lead us back into the “haters gonna hate” meme.

So is there a place for tactical mockery? Political mockery? The judicious application of scorn? Does the “haters gonna hate” meme need retiring? We’re steering remarkably close to something like a rhetoric of memes.

Post-script: Look!!!

I’m reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, as a re-tweet from my diligent twitter friend Sam_Crisp alerted me to the fact that the University of Adelaide is periodically releasing out-of-copyright e-books (and Orwell, having been dead 50 years  is now out of copyright in Australia. I think he’d be pleased with that, actually).

Wigan Pier, which was written in and around a number of mining towns and heavy industrial cities in Northern England, has got a number of fantastic passages and I thought I’d just highlight a few of them. The opening chapter describes his time lodging with a couple who ran a boarding house/store type establishment and it is a pure and unmitigated horror. Bugs, horrible food, cold and smelly, five men to a room coming and going at different times; it’s a kind of unimaginably Dickensian existence that you wouldn’t believe unless it were described to you by someone who actually lived it, as Orwell did. He was something of an investigative novelist, a slower counterpart of the investigative journalist and it allowed him to get a real sense of (what Latour would call) the whole State of Affairs. There something in his perfect descriptions that is very much an ancestor of Latour’s own methodological approach. There is no ‘expanation’ lacking after one has read an Orwellian description; everything is entirely laid bare.

In chapter 2 he outlines in captivating prose just how tough it is being a miner – how much your whole body is moulded into the task of mining, no doubt coming to define your very existence:

Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal  a few yards away. I had not realized that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as the seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal face, that it probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal one; there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But these distances bear no relation to distance above ground. For in all that mile or three miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places even there, where a man can stand upright… what I want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal person is a hard days work in itself; and it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don’t think necessarily of those miles of creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner’s working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and sometimes three. Of course, the ‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to say that miners don’t mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a startling and rather horrible agility… But it is quite a mistake to think they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a pit among themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they discuss. It is said that a shift always returns faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the coming away after a hard day’s work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work.

And yet such tiring work often leaves them barely above the poverty line, to say nothing of the precarity of the nature of miners work. They were quite often at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of work and supply/demand (in other words, at the mercy of capital) and what did they get for it? Mostly, poverty. More than that though, as members of the working-class they were kept perpetually down. If they were injured or out of work, to collect their allowance, they had to spend interminable hours waiting around at the mercy of the disburser. Orwell describes the effects of this treatment in the closing of Chapter 3:

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man don into a passive role. he does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of the mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other.

The last passage I wanted to reporoduce here has to do with unemployment, as a great number of people in the 30′s (and today) were out of work or did not get enough work to support themselves fully. Having spent all of one year in a state of chronic underemployment, living off my parents essentially, I totally and completely empathise with the out-of-work and the underemployed. Here’s Orwell describing the effects of it, and countering the myth that unemployment is a time for productive self-directed work or leisure. Keep in mind this is pre-WWII:

But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven’t met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude — and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home — you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

A magnificent summary.

So an unexpected thing happened recently: my Facebook-ing practice rather drastically changed. Primarily I used to use Facebook as a place to post interesting links to things worth reading – new research and reports on social trends for good or ill; or a particularly insightful piece of political analysis; or something about a new bit of technology that has interesting implications for living. Whatever it was, the implicit understanding was that I wanted my friends to read it and see what I saw of value in the story.

But for some reason I’ve almost entirely stopped doing that now. Why?

The thing I spend most of my time doing on Facebook now is, perhaps unsurprisingly, arguing. The number of “serious” conversations I’ve gotten into on FB over the past few months is a bit embarrassing. Almost always they’re about religion, or religious attitudes and behaviours towards women, gays, minorities, etcetera and occasionally they are with strangers, but usually they’re with ‘friends’ or at least acquaintances. Why this sudden change? I’m begging to think that perhaps it’s because, for all my linking and leaving the ‘evidence’ out there for people to find, many people just haven’t been noticing or have not taken it on board. My ‘links’ don’t seem to be having the desired effect.

At the same time as this, I’ve shifted away from using actual pictures of myself as profile pictures to alternatively using baby photos, memes and photos of famous individuals – Fidel Castro, in particular. I’ve also changed my display name to ‘Comrade Ben Abraham’, a thing that started as a joke but which seems to fit within this same pattern.

So am I a Facebook activist? Not quite. Rather than activism I’d like to connect my practice with a different (and newer) tradition addressing Bruno Latour’s matters-of-concern. A practical demonstration is in order. The comments thread at the bottom of the piece I wrote for Gamasutra responding to the ongoing conditions of inequality in game development (and criticism) is a fantastic example of where the new battles are being fought.

Presented with incontrovertible evidence that sexism is produced through unequal wages (just one powerful example, and one with much ‘hard evidence’ – or so I thought!) many commenters decided not to accept my matters-of-fact that ‘sexism exists’ and that ‘it’s a really big deal’ and instead attempted to debunk my position. Reading through these comments I began to deeply empathise with and understand Latour when he expressed his doubt and fears in his excellent paper, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’, saying:

Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived very late, after the facts had been thoroughly established, decades after bodies of evidence had accumulated? Now we have the benefit of what I call instant revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke.

To see that in action, one needs only glance over the comments. The very first commenter, one Robert Ferris, says:

Alison Croggon’s claim that “It’s just a fact…you can just take it as read that if there’s a woman’s name attached to something it will attract less notice” makes no sense. You can’t simply take judicial notice in a societal discussion. You must back it up with something, because (as with the wage study above) you will either gain a weapon to bludgeon people into action, or (and, yes, this is a real possibility) you will learn that your premise is wrong.

Oh dear. Apparently Croggon’s ‘facts’ aren’t really facts at all – they need revising. Curiously enough, he goes on later to state some of his own facts, but we’ll ignore that. After all, the point of all this analysis is to come to the realisation that it’s never about the facts themselves as it’s all rhetorical anyway. It’s about winning the argument and (in the process) feeling okay about the way women, or gays and lesbians and transgendered persons are treated. Because the facts are on my side and blow the rest of it.

Latour again, expresses the frustration with this new form of strategic critique, saying:

What has become of critique when my neighbour in the little Bournabbais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe the United States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when University professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naively believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible….

He goes on to connect the same action with the long and storied history of paranoia that is conspiracy theories, and says that the same explanatory action is at work behind the debunking:

…after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly.

After my ‘naïve’ believe in sexism is exposed, the explanation is offered: I am out to destroy the very foundation of western democracy!  Mr Cheng Ling explains it all:

This article is incredibly flawed, but more than that, it’s hilarious. The arms-behind-the-head coolness of Mr. Sensitive Pony Tail Man, telling us all how horrible we are and how we can all be great like him. All we have to do is everything he says. Ben, thank you for epitomizing everything wrong with Western society.

What a stunningly powerful critique, even if it is utterly inaccurate (I haven’t worn a pony-tail by choice since I was 16!) but the point is that my sinister motivation is all the explanation this commenter needs for why I am so ruthlessly attacking his privilege. So he turns my own tools – critique! – back upon me.

So what’s our next move in this arms race of critical weaponry? We can hardly move back to naïve facts, indeed as Latour says, “The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them” by showing how constructed so-called-facts really are. A lot of effort has gone into the production of even something as simple and plainly matter-of-fact as 1+1=2. Think of the great history of mathematical proof, of mathematical teaching institutionalising this most basic piece of knowledge and disseminating it around the world to children and adults alike…

So how do we win this argument for the side of good? Latour again:

Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs.

And how do we reach these matters-of-concern? How do we uncover (if that’s the appropriate term, as it has about it the whiff of the sceptical debunker) states of affairs? Perhaps we shouldn’t talk in terms of ‘uncoverings’ at all, and instead in terms of aesthetics, or commitments, or of imperatives, or even ethics? Latour recognises this:

My question is thus: can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Harraway would put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality?

To return to my Facebook practice as an example – I think this is something that I am trying to do with my new habits. My use of memes and pictures of Castro and all my strenuous efforts at arguing (politically, tactically and rhetorically!) with friends is some attempt at getting to a place where I can deal in matters of concern (or states of affairs). Christian McCrea has been doing this since at least 2009, when he was banned for Faceholing. What does it mean to find abandoned groups with no admins left, and rename them counter to their original purposes? It’s dealing with matters of concern. It’s more aesthetic than it is science; more ‘play’ than it is ‘fun’; it’s serious but at the same time… it’s hard for people to take you at your most polemical when your display picture is a cat.