Posted on

Irrational gadgeteering

For reasons too dumb to reveal here, soi-disant AI has been coming up in my proximity. Yes, sure, we’re all hearing about it and maybe you are even using it – whatever you think that means. And yet when feeding [whatever it is] into an computer model to get some version of [wii] back is proffered as an acceptable work solution, it opens up to a much broader question: What is even work?

If parts or all of what you think you do can be so ‘taskicized’, what ever was work to begin with – to you?

And here I’ll yield the floor to Theodor Adorno:

Labor-saving devices … are invested with a halo of their own. This may be indicative of a fixation to a phase of adolescent activities in which people try to adapt themselves to modern technology by making it, as it were, their own cause… It seems that the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel they are the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them. The more they are gradually being transformed into things, the more they invest things with a human aura. At the same time, the libidinization of gadgets is indirectly narcissistic in as much as it feeds on the ego’s control of nature: gadgets provide the subject with some memories of early feelings of omnipotence.

From the essay Work and Pleasure in THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2015–17, oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sediment of an electrolysis on canvas, 110¼ × 149⅝ × 3⅝ inches.

Posted on

Eco Hustle – poverty

Again, I hoist one of these columns from the Flagpole archives and I’m aghast at how little nothing has changed:

let-us-now-praise-famous-menLike corporate green advertising, our policies against the poor get lost in a shuffle of righteous sounding reforms, intended to move people from “welfare to work” in order to usher in a new era of “personal responsibility.” The two strategies have much in common as we whitewash our consciences with high morals and the appearance of genuine, public-spirited problem solving. But there’s a dark side to this shell game every bit as dastardly as Exxon-Mobile working to build your energy future: Where do the poor go once they leave a statistical column?

In the land of perverse incentives, Georgia happens to be the shining city on a hill. A nice, depending on your orientation, compendium of our state of affairs appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The experience of several young mothers on welfare is profiled for all and sundry and it’s not a pretty sight. What we do to ourselves in regard to getting people off of welfare rolls is nothing less than a full abrogation of human, economic and civil rights. We lie, mislead and otherwise confuse those among us who need help the most. The connections to other, similar atrocities to which we subject ourselves and our environment bear no further case to be made; if we can do this to the so-called least of our brethren here, there are no limits to what we might do to people, earth and sky we nominally care about and depend upon.

The whole thing, plus a few more columns. 2009, people.

Image: by Walker Evans, from Let us Now Praise fampus men, by James Agee and Walker Evans

Posted on

Eco Hustle

New Flagpole column up in all its glory. Sometimes we lose the flavor of the hustle, wrapped up as it is with so many financial, economic, and fiscal amulets. Watching how we behave toward (against, really) the least fortunate is one of the very few, truly reliable indicators of our capacity as humans. It doesn’t matter how much you might try to wind a political hustle philosophy around ‘personal responsibility’, that indicator reveals most of what we need to know, including though hardly limited to a fundamental misunderstanding of those two words.

Posted on

Who gives a $#%&?

Via mefi, a great two year old essay from the philosopher Peter Singer on what a human life is worth and what the richest of the rich should be giving to the poorest of the poor. There are some stunning ratios he dug up, trying to calculate what percentage of their income the richest .001, .1, .5 and top 10 per cent of the American population should give. To wit.

You could spend a long time debating whether the fractions of income I have suggested for donation constitute the fairest possible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should be steeper, so that the superrich give more and the merely comfortable give less. And it could be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of American families, so that everyone able to afford more than the basic necessities of life gives something, even if it is as little as 1 percent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these calculations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion — from just 10 percent of American families.

Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have suggested worldwide would provide $808 billion annually for development aid. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

6X… 12X. Take the excess capacity by which Singer calculates the Millennium Develop Goals could be surpassed and then devote this to sustainable development practices. My point is not that we can create new columns on the balance sheet, which we can. It’s just to note the way all of the chatter about our financial straits is talked about, reported on, filmed and scripted is incredibly skewed toward… doing as little as possible. What is going to detract from our way of life? We can’t imagine how tenuous life can be, and we get all the best books and movies!

Americans think our government provides more foreign aid than all other countries combined; even when you factor this as tracking with our geo-strategic priorities, it’s just not true, proportionately speaking – which is what matters. If we decided to do as Singer suggests and began making sure – as we are capable of doing – that virtually no people went without basic necessities, we would also begin changing most of the ways in which our own society is insupportable, in the strictist sense.