tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26181102068191626302024-03-13T06:52:28.266-07:00Jo Lindsay WaltonJo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.comBlogger430125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-76046431451576173902024-02-21T05:53:00.000-08:002024-02-21T06:00:22.808-08:00Science fiction, police and prison abolition<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Prison and police abolition aim to replace the current criminal justice system with alternative solutions to violence and harm. These movements are international, but their heartland is in the USA, where rates of incarceration are much higher than in most countries, and with prisons filled with disproportionately many Black and Hispanic people. Police in the USA also carry firearms as standard, and the rates of people killed by the police are among the highest in the world.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The broader ambit of the abolition movement opposes many other forms of surveillance, control, and punishment. This includes the carceral infrastructures that sustain national borders in their current forms. There are also substantial overlaps with anti-carceral feminism. Anti-carceral feminism recognises how the criminal justice system frequently fails to provide effective and just solutions for gender-based violence, especially for people of colour and trans and gender non-conforming people.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In 'Two Ideas of Justice' (2022), Gautum Bhatia writes:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">It is my impression [...]</span></span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> that as a genre, SF still remains overwhelmingly </span><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">focused on issues around corrective justice. That is not to </span></span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">suggest that these issues are unimportant or uninterest</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">ing; however, as we enter a time in which the climate crisis </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">reveals to a greater and greater degree the unsustainable </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">bases of our current society and political economy, it </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">will therefore be interesting to see if science fiction will </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">respond with a greater, sharper focus on questions of </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">distributive justice.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Is there much science fiction which engages seriously with prison and police abolitionism? Which imagines futures in which carceral infrastructure has been dismantled? Or has particularly intriguing ideas about justice, either corrective, or distributive, or both, or neither? In truth, I have not been able to find all that much. And what I have found (and my own short story, '<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xe0Le1tShDeEDnO8fEapXiUkMPAULUHjn3uxDyfvdXQ/edit?usp=sharing">Seven Non-Abolitions</a>', published in <i>Phase Change</i>) often seems quite preoccupied with science fiction about science fiction: what stories, rituals, games might exist in a world without police and prisons? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But what am I missing? Let me know.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I am especially interested in the relationship of police and prison abolition with capitalism. </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Some prison and police abolitionists are explicitly anti-capitalist; Bettina Aptheker describes the need to ‘mount a struggle to abolish the present functions and foundations of the prison system, an effort which can finally succeed only with the abolition of capitalism.’ Even when this is not the case, however, there are powerful resonances between abolitionism and postcapitalist thought. In particular, many abolitionists are interested in understanding the Prison-Industrial Complex as an underlying system which makes reforms to the criminal justice system ineffective. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">One way of looking at the Prison-Industrial Complex is as 'the interweaving of private business and governmental interests, serving to increase the profitability of private corporations and at the same time expand social control, while the pronounced rationale lies with crime fighting' (Papageorgiou and Papanicolaou, 74). Private companies have economic interests in profiting from construction, utilities, catering, and healthcare for prisons. Private investors buy bonds to finance prison construction. Prison populations may form literally captive markets, forced to pay high prices for services like e-messaging, to stay in touch with loved ones outside prison. Prisoners themselves are often exploited as a source of cheap labour. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But more broadly, the Prison-Industrial Complex can be seen as a set of mechanisms which filter and contain potential threats against the smooth functioning of capitalist accumulation. By and large, the more you are harmed by capitalism, the more you are likely to also be punished for it: your lived experience of the hypocrisy of the capitalist dream makes you dangerous. These mechanisms are the more painful and punitive counterparts to the disciplinary aspects of the welfare state. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">At the same time, some fierce critics of the criminal justice system are unpersuaded by the usefulness of the concept of the Prison-Industrial Complex. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant dislikes (among other things) how the concept tends to emphasise an economic logic at the expense of a political logic:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote>namely, the construction of a post-Keynesian, “liberal-paternalistic” state suited to institute desocialized wage labor and propagate the renewed ethic of work and “individual responsibility” that buttress it. Profiteering from corrections is not a primary cause but an incidental and secondary consequence of the hypertrophic development of the penal apparatus [...]</blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Abolitionism is also crucially about building alternatives. Mariame Kaba writes:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney point out, building those alternatives would likely also shift our perceptions and understandings about exactly what it is we are abolishing.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be, to return to Spivak, uncanny. </span></span></blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Alternative forms of safety and justice take time to build. Prison abolitionists are not against incremental changes. But they support incremental changes that are not reforms. Instead, such incremental changes need to be real steps toward post-carceral futures, which also accomplish concrete benefits in the present. For example, abolitionists work to raise consciousness and strengthen solidarity among prisoners. In <i>Blood in My Eye</i>, George Jackson writes, ‘The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential’ (108). Abolitionists also campaign to halt or reverse the growth in numbers of prisons and police officers, and to invest instead in social welfare, healthcare, education, and other public services. This goes hand-in-hand with cultivating community-based transformative justice. Transformative justice seeks to keep people safe, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to resolve conflicts without involving the state. Mariame Kaba, for example, envisions ‘a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?’ </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Clearly prison and police abolitionism are closely entwined. ‘Who you gonna call?’ asks Ray Parker Jr. in the <i>Ghostbusters </i>theme song. Abolitionism is also an invitation to reimagine how labour is divided in society, especially who does what when it comes to safety, care, and truth-seeking. For instance, Roge Karma points out how police officers are ‘trained in military-style academies’, are ‘equipped with lethal weapons at all times’, and ‘operate within a culture that takes pride in warriorship, combat, and violence’. They are then ‘mainly called upon to be social workers, conflict mediators, traffic directors, mental health counselors, detailed report writers, neighborhood patrollers, and low-level law enforcers’.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Abolitionism and postcapitalism also involve shared concern for what is imaginable. It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Jackie Wang adds, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without prisons.’ Kaba writes, ‘when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change.’ Police and prison abolitionism draw on a powerful history to demonstrate how what may seem unimaginable (or unimaginable to some) can quickly become real. As Angela Davies writes:</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. (<i>Are Prisons Obsolete?</i>, 24)</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">However, when science fiction explores alternative justice, it is often more fascinated with gruesome and bizarre punishments, than with police and prison abolitionism, or with restorative or transformative (or distributive) justice. In Franz Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914), a machine tortures the accused to death by carving the relevant law into their flesh. In James Tiptree Jr.'s ‘Fault’ (1968), the protagonist Mitch is sentenced to be ‘slipped’ for having torn off the ‘feelers’ of an alien. His movement through time gradually de-syncs with everybody else’s, an agonizing form of social death. The <i>Quantum Thief</i> (2010) by Hannu Rajaniemi features a virtual prison called the Dilemma Prison, where Jean le Flameur forced to play out endless variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Science fiction is also interested in speculative forms of rehabilitation — or transformations that go well beyond mere rehabilitation. Anthony Burgess’s <i>A Clockwork Orange</i> (1962) follows the story of Alex, a violent youth who undergoes an experimental psychological conditioning. In Iain M. Banks’s <i>Walking on Glass</i> (1985), Quiss and Ajayi are war criminals from opposing sides, imprisoned in a purgatorial castle of puzzles and games until they can solve the riddle, ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Prisons may also enact more ambiguous and ambivalent transformations. A character Adrian Tchaikonvsky’s Dying Earth novel <i>Cage of Souls</i> (2019) features a penal colony, the Island, where the protagonist encounters the monstrous and marvellous sentience of the more-than-human world.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I have a vision of the world in several centuries’ time. There are no human beings in my vision but there are the web-children who evolved, or were evolved, in our image, and they have prospered. They have made a civilisation that does not rest on energies and weapons. Instead they use the powers of their minds to build and create, and they work together.</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A related theme is the grotesque exploitation of prisoners’ bodies. Cordwainer Smith's ‘A Planet Named Shayol’ (1961) portrays a penal world where prisoners are used to grow transplantable organs. In Larry Niven’s <i>A Patchwork Girl</i> (1980), convicted felons are broken up for organ transplants.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As medical techniques improved and spread to the have-not nations, demands on the public organ banks had grown. The death penalty was imposed for armed robbery, rape, burglary. A plea of insanity became worthless. Eventually felons died for income tax evasion or driving while high on funny chemicals.</span></blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Some science fiction has envisioned the unbundling and distribution of criminal justice across space. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a “slap-drone” is a robotic escort assigned to somebody who has committed a violent crime, to make sure they don’t do it again. Larry Niven’s ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ (1972) is set in the Free Park where no law exists save a technologically-enforced injunction against direct bodily violence. Intriguingly, the ‘copseyes’ don’t really bother with who started it:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hand against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. </span></blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Such thought experiments explore how the unjust justice system might be shrunk to some useful minimum — perhaps in line with the harm principle set out by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay <i>On Liberty</i>. However, today they also resonate with reactionary, techno-carceral appropriations of police and prison abolitionism. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Some science fiction explores technology from the perspective of restitution rather than deterrence or disciplinarity. In Tochi Onyebuchi's ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’ (2020) an algorithm is developed to deploy reparations for slavery. It doesn’t quite work out — the story offers a critique of a techno-solutionist approach to reparations, one that is unaccompanied by true collective deliberation and reflection. Yet it does not entirely dismiss the idea that algorithmic governmentality might be mobilised for purposes of social justice and liberation.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Science fiction and other speculative fiction sometimes gestures toward the role of the criminal justice system in bringing forth the very behaviours which it polices and punishes. In the old story, told by Rumi among others, the protagonist glimpses the Angel of Death giving him a look of wrath, and flees to India to escape his fate. But the Angel was not angry, it is revealed, merely surprised to see the man here in Jerusalem — when he had an appointment with him very soon in India. Philip K. Dick's 'The Minority Report' (1956), the vocalisations of prophetic ‘precog idiots’ are analysed to arrest would-be criminals before they commit their crimes. Peter Watts' ‘The Eyes of God’ (2008) features an airport security system that uses neural scanners to detect potentially harmful thoughts or intentions in passengers, also raising questions about privacy, pre-emptive justice, and the nature of crime. The cyberpunk anime series <i>Psycho-Pass</i> (2012-) imagines a surveillance dystopia, where citizens are constantly scanned and evaluated for supposed latent criminality. <i>Psycho-Pass</i> also features Enforcers, individuals whose latent criminality metrics have crossed critical thresholds, but who are permitted to work on the side of the law. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">These science fiction works about pre-crime resonate with recent developments in predictive policing and its critiques, including racist and classist bias, and the risk of predictive policing creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Such works also tend to explore the relationship between harms and crimes. How can someone be punished for something they have not done, even if they were (supposedly) definitely going to do it? At the same time, while the distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘crime’ is undoubtedly useful for abolitionist thought and practice, the two concepts may be more entangled than is sometimes recognised. A crime may legally codify an alleged harm that has no real basis in experience, or whose basis is wildly disproportionate. But abolishing crime and organising society around harm instead is far from straightforward. How should society equalise access to the means of expressing and redressing harms? Is every claim to have experienced a harm equally legitimate? If not, what factors should legitimate or de-legitimate a claim to have experienced harm? If certain harms become conventionally recognised and associated with certain forms of address, is there a risk of the emergence of a new taxonomy of informal crimes?</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Some science fiction may shed light on transformative justice in oblique ways. In 2017, Alexandra Rowland coined the term ‘hopepunk,’ contrasting it with the nihilism and pessimism of grimdark fantasy. The term quickly became cluttered and incoherent, and drew criticism especially from outside the US and from left-wing commentators. ‘Part of the problem of hopepunk is its class blindness,’ writes Adam Turl. However, one potentially positive aspect of some hopepunk writing might be its intermittent interest in groups figuring out minor conflicts among themselves, and preempting major ones. This is also of course a preoccupation of a great deal of literary fiction. But in the work of science fiction writers such as Becky Chambers, the wholesomely optimistic futuristic setting can leach in interesting ways into these stories about emotions, expectations, compromise and communication.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">Other science fiction does touch on futures beyond prisons and the police more directly. Ursula K. Le Guin’s <i>The Dispossessed</i> (1974) features a group of children from a post-carceral society discovering the concept of ‘prison’ and, fascinated, turning it into a game. What they eventually discover horrifies them. Marge Piercy’s <i>Woman on the Edge of Time</i> (1976) imagines a post-carceral society that also has a kind of death penalty:</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Assault, murder we still have. Not as common as they say it was in your time. But it happens. People still get angry and strike out.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“So what do you do? Do you put them in jail?” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“First off, we ask if person acted intentionally or not—if person wants to take responsibility for the act.” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Suppose I say, ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing, judge.’” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Then we work on healing. We try to help so that never again will person do a thing person doesn’t mean to do.” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Suppose I say I’m not sick. I punched him in the face because he had it coming, and I’m glad.” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Then you work out a sentence. Maybe exile, remote labor. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard. Space service. Sometimes crossers cook good ideas about how to atone. You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous.” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">She stared. “You’re telling me that when I smashed Geraldo’s face, I’d tell you what I should do to . . . atone?” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“How not?” Parra stared back. “You, your victim, and your judge work it out. If you killed, then the family of your victim would choose a mem to negotiate.” </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">“If I killed a bunch of people, then I’d just sign on as a sailor or herd sheep?” “You mean a second time? No. Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them.”</span></span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Abolition Science Fiction</i><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> (2022), edited by Phil Crockett Thomas, is a collection of stories by activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice in the UK. Three short vignettes in particular offer glimpses of worlds without prisons. Ren Wednesday's 'Walk Out' imagines a mixture of revolutionary excitement and conservative moral panic, as prisoners all over the world start to learn simply to walk through walls. In Chris Rossdale's 'The Parc,' the protagonist Alex braves the People’s Activity and Recreation Centre, a place physically completely transformed from the prison it once was, yet haunted by a traumatic carceral aura. 'The Monument' by Dave gives us a glimpse of Christopher, a Municipal Heritage Warden, getting ready for work at a new location. It is intriguingly ambiguous, as Christopher feels uneasy with his own somewhat police-ish behaviours, “scanning for damage or dereliction, spotting dangers to public safety, and keeping an eye on all the people that came and went.” Christopher also happens to be policing a monument which seems to simultaneously celebrate the abolition of the police, and the police officers themselves:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote>This lavish recognition, like the generous severance packages and comprehensive retraining schemes negotiated by the Police Federation in the final months of its existence, before it was forced to transform into a retirees’ social club, is by way of a compromise. It indicates, very clearly, that no personal condemnation of the police, or of those who took their side, was implied by the success of the Abolitionists.</blockquote><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In anthropology, the term ‘leveling mechanism’ refers to cultural practices that seem to work to prevent the emergence of power hierarchies. Science fiction imagining post-carceral futures seem to often be interested in leveling mechanisms in a broad sense. In this way it becomes, strangely, a kind of science fiction about science fiction. The prison game which the children play in <i>The Dispossessed</i>, like the strange monument in ‘The Monument’ which seems to both celebrate and condemn the police, imagine the kind of cultural memory that might be necessary to ensure that an understanding of carceral violence is not lost in a post-carceral world. In <i>Woman on the Edge of Time,</i> the inhabitants of the future utopia Mattapoisett engage in similar rituals and games:</span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“How is Bee?” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“He’s teaching a class?” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games. . . . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger—oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”</span></p></blockquote><p><br /></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-90925753029939972222024-01-18T07:43:00.000-08:002024-01-18T07:43:36.911-08:00I'm Just Tilting Off The Face Of The Planet With This Bullshit<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V_iHghGWb58" width="320" youtube-src-id="V_iHghGWb58"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://youtu.be/V_iHghGWb58?si=SRiFYdTjsrSVKz0D&t=2896">https://youtu.be/V_iHghGWb58?si=SRiFYdTjsrSVKz0D&t=2896</a></div><p></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-86113240840966504032024-01-12T06:52:00.000-08:002024-01-12T06:52:57.261-08:00Substack<p>Here we go:</p><p><a href="http://jonlyfans.substack.com">jonlyfans.substack.com</a></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-32627770047090803942023-09-27T14:35:00.011-07:002023-10-24T08:49:49.323-07:00From The Iliad<p><b><i>Vaunt Lament</i></b></p><p><i>To the man I have mortally wounded, as I strip him naked</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p>Never mind your pride. Forget how you never grow too tired to fight. </p><p>Even so. You show how you Torys shall quit the ships of the Achæans, </p><p>by every disgrace with which you’ve ever tried to tar us described. </p><p>Wolfbitch cowards yet you wouldn't cringe and follow Zeus, would you?</p><p>Not Zeus who punishes bad guests and one day's going to butcher your city.</p><p>When you stayed with me you took my wife, you stole such a lot of treasures,</p><p>after all she did to make you feel at home,</p><p>now you want our ships on fire and to kill us all.</p><p>Still there will come a day on which, despite your zeal for Ares,</p><p>you’ll be stopped. Oh father Zeus, you are the wisest</p><p>of every god and human, this is all your fault.</p><p>You favor them I kill, why, so boastful and bloodthirsty?</p><p>After a long spell, a person can tire of anything at all.</p><p>Of sleep, love, song, dancing, still these are things whereof </p><p>you’d always want more than you’d want of war.</p><p>Yet they never tire of wanting more war.</p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-66667389709832220432023-08-19T08:26:00.003-07:002023-08-19T08:26:28.614-07:00Kampala Yénkya<p><a href="https://imagine-alternatives.com/tag/dilman-dila/">Five short stories</a> by Dilman Dila, which served as inspiration for the <i><a href="https://imagine-alternatives.com/#get-it">Kampala Yénkya</a></i> climate futures TTRPG we worked on together.</p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-10192155703438350102023-07-04T10:15:00.005-07:002023-07-04T10:16:08.103-07:00AI Literacies and Media Education<p> A sort of mini-roundtable, thrown together quickly in response to ChatGPT and other generative AIs: <a href="https://www.themea.org.uk/post/ai-literacies-and-media-education">AI Literacies and Media Education.</a></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-82631467773481247642023-06-20T11:07:00.009-07:002023-06-21T15:06:01.501-07:00Utopian Heists<i>From a glossary-in-progress.</i><div><br /></div><div>Utopia may conjure up the notion of a perfect society, or perhaps an apparently perfect society with a dark secret (so actually a dystopia, or anti-utopia). Within utopian thinking and practice, however, <i>utopia </i>is a much more flexible term. Sometimes it refers to communities that attempt a better way of life, or plans for such communities, or stories about such communities. But often it refers to something more like a method, a way of thinking about the world around us, and perhaps about how we live within its constraints, and what we can change in the short term as well as the long term.<br /><br /><b>Heist scenarios</b> in TTRPGs involve players working together to plan and execute a high-stakes theft or robbery. Players will typically gather information, develop strategies to overcome obstacles, execute their plans, and then (when nothing goes according to plan) improvise. Typically each member of the caper crew is both exceptionally skilled in their field, and also a kind of eccentric and maverick; for Fredric Jameson, this is how the heist plot becomes a ‘distorted expression of the utopian impulse insofar as it realizes a fantasy of non-alienated collective work.’
<br /><br />There are plenty of <b>variations </b>on the heist model, including smuggling, spying, scouting, seige-breaking, hijacking, sabotage, kidnaps, rescues, jailbreaks and exfiltrations. A ‘reverse-heist’ scenario involves sneaking something <i>into </i>a secure location. Often, as in Christopher Nolan’s film <i>Inception </i>(2010), it’s not enough to get in and out again safely, since the reverse-heist will fail if anyone finds out that the package has been planted. A red / blue team exercise is a sort of officially sanctioned fake heist (see Red / Blue Team Exercise). We might think of critical utopias, in the tradition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel <i>The Dispossessed </i>(1974), as a kind of prefigurative red-teaming, seeking to improve the robustness of a system that has not yet even been built (see Critical Utopia).<br /><br />One influential TTRPG centred on heists is John Harper’s <i>Blades in the Dark </i>(2015), where players are a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortune in a gritty, industrial-fantasy city. Many other heist-ready games spring from the shadows of its Forged in the Dark system; examples include John Leboeuf-Little and Stras Acimovic’s <i>Scum and Villiany </i>(2018), Kienna Shaw and Jamila R. Nedjadi's <i>Songs for the Dusk</i> (2021),<i> </i>and Andrew Gillis’s <i>Girl by Moonlight </i>(2024). Grant Howett’s <i>Honey Heist </i>(2017), at just one page, is another influential heist TTRPG, in which the players portray bears. Howett is fond of capers: in <i>Royal Blood </i>(2020), you effectively play a living Tarot card on a heist-like mission; <i>One Last Job </i>(2014) assembles a crew of washed-up criminals (or “WW2 commandos, ageing punk rockers, zombie apocalypse survivors, Wild West cowboys, and so on” (p. 3)), with character creation embedded in gameplay through improvised reminisces and banter. Jason Morningstar's<i> Fiasco </i>(2009)<i> </i>is another fiction-first game that lends itself to bungled capers of all kinds, and some of its playbooks are specifically heist-themed. Beyond the TTRPGs that revolve around heists, a heist episode may turn up in any campaign. San Jenaro Co-Op’s <i>The Roleplayer’s Guide to Heists </i>(2019), for example, an anthology of system-agnostic heist scenarios.<br /><br />In fact, heists have a lot in common with a classic staple: the <b>dungeoncrawl</b>. Both dungeoncrawls and heists are a kind of breaking-and-entering. Both revolve around the central theme of embarking on a mission filled with mystery and peril, where the primary goal is to obtain something of value. They often feature complex environments with many opportunities for players to work as a multidisciplinary team of specialists, formulating and enacting cunning strategies. We might even imagine a kind of spectrum, or some other visualisation, of these two primary modes of tabletop thieving.<br /><br /><b>So what <i>is </i>the difference? </b>Well, we might say that crawls place more emphasis on combat, and that heists are about stealing something in specific, rather than accumulating whatever treasure is lying around. Then again, heists frequently include or degenerate into bloodshed; moreover, dungeoncrawlers may well have a final treasure in mind (the Amulet of Yendor in the digital game <i>Nethack</i>, for example).<br /><br />Perhaps crawls have some affinity with epic fantasy settings, and heists with modern urban settings. Heists may involve a ticking clock, whereas crawls are more relaxed — ‘relaxed’ in the sense of dragging your bloodied bodies back to town for a long rest before attempting the next raid. Heist crews are often assembled by a mastermind, and might not have previously known each other (let alone trusted each other) — dungeon adventurers are often drinking buddies. Perhaps the dungeoncrawl also has a certain ideological tie with colonial conquest, which the heist does not: some dungeoncrawls are genocidal. But none of these are hard-and-fast distinctions either.<br /><br />One difference is between the intricately interlinked challenges predicted in the heist plan, vs. the diverse and unknown dangers of the dungeon. This is reflected in subtly different kinds of <b>division of labour.</b> The heist and the crawl both demand a mix of specialists, of course. But the trope that <i>only so-and-so can perform vital task x</i> is more characteristic of the heist. Heist crews are made up of supremely respected workers. Should any one of them withdraw their labour (perhaps even for a few seconds), it could send out shockwaves like a general strike. In ‘A Global Neuromancer’ (2015), Fredric Jameson contrasts the familiar picture of the division of labour (à la Adam Smith) with heist-divided labour:<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">[...] specializations are certainly present—we need someone to open safes, someone acrobatic enough to get through windows, someone capable of neutralizing the alarm system, someone to drive the car, someone to secure the plans on what is probably going to be an inside job, and finally the brains or the mastermind, who is also the political leader so to speak. But each of these characters will be idiosyncratic: it is a collection of interesting oddballs and misfits, all of them different, and many of them in serious personality conflict with each other. The technological features of the object have thus been humanized and personified if not altogether sublimated [...]</blockquote><br />Jameson suggests that heist plots are therefore allegories of production (and he adds, a little mysteriously, that they are allegories of the inner divisions of the psyche too). Why then are there not more heist-like narratives about <i>making </i>things? Perhaps because it would be too on-the-nose. Jameson also offers another reason.
<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Here I think we face the dilemma of any literary or artistic representation of labor: it is very rare indeed that the content of the industrial product can have any necessity. The production process itself is always interesting: but [...] the nature of the object cannot have any real aesthetic necessity without turning into a symbol of some kind.</blockquote><br />Why can’t the nature of the object have any real aesthetic necessity, except by turning it into a symbol of some kind? Because whether the fictional characters are creating chamber pots, or machine parts, or sausages, we know that “[a]nything that can produce a profit is equivalent when it comes to generating surplus value,” i.e. what they are really making is <i>money</i>.
<br /><br />This is a very Jamesonian preoccupation with large-scale material conditions constraining, and being reflected in, what artworks can and can’t do. Jameson does think that the heist plot gives it to us straight. It does this either by making the macguffin <i>very</i> macguffiny, or by simply making it a large sum of money. The score needs to be divisible, after all — the heist team wouldn’t <i>share</i>. In this way, for Jameson, the heist genre “short-circuits the search for a meaningful object by simply positing the cash, the gold, the bearer bonds, or whatever else. So this is, as it were, the negative or critical, the demystifying side of the caper form.”
<br /><br />There is a related factor that also distinguishes the heist from the crawl. It’s a controversial word within utopian discourse: <i><b>planning</b></i>. A heist is all about meticulous planning. The thrill of a may can come from improvisation as these flawless plans fall apart. But it can also come from things going off without a hitch. By contrast, the dungeoncrawlers just equip themselves as best they can, and venture into the unknown. They may even invent some mini-heists when they’re down there, but they haven’t spent weeks trapped in a planning montage.
<br /><br />It’s worth dwelling on planning for a bit. The word means a lot of things. In architecture, “planning” pertains to designing physical spaces to meet both functional and aesthetic requirements. With respect to political economy, “planning” might mean defining clear parameters for the production and distribution of goods and services. Broadly speaking, in a market economy, the interaction of economic supply and demand determines what goods and services are produced, and who gets to benefit from them; in a planned economy, these decisions are made by the government (if you want to make it sound sinister) or by the people (if you want to make it sound optimistic). The socialist calculation debate, which emerged in the 1920s, stemmed in essence from the attempts of various neoliberals (such as Friedrich Hayek) to prove from first principles that a complex modern economy is unplannable, and that any planned economy is a contradiction in terms and a catastrophe waiting to happen. Of course, the crude distinction between “market economies” and “planned economies” does not reflect the complexities of real-world economies, and is also heavily shaped by the ideological presuppositions of mainstream economics. Taking a more nuanced and interdisciplinary perspective, market economies also include plenty of planning, and planned economies have many elements of distributed decision-making.
<br /><br />For example, governments play a fundamental role in creating, maintaining, and shaping market mechanisms and forces. They establish the legal and regulatory frameworks that define the ‘rules of the game’ within which markets operate. These cover areas such as banking and finance, employment law, property law, contract law, competition policy, and sector-specific regulations. Governments also maintain markets through regulatory oversight and interventions to ‘correct market failures,’ such as monopolies, information asymmetries. They run themselves ragged trying to internalise externalities, including the greenhouse gas pollution driving climate change. Furthermore, governments shape market forces through their policy decisions, e.g. fiscal policy (taxing and spending) and monetary policy (e.g. interest rate adjustments by central banks).<br /><br />Likewise, even if we take the example of the “material balances” planning of the early Soviet Union — as close as you’ll get to a textbook planned economy — what the central agency Gosplan <i>did</i>, strictly speaking, was to calculate interactions of supply and demand in order to produce and distribute goods and services. It is not normally described in these terms, but it should be. Yes, these determinations of supply and demand via demographic data, statistical calculations, political priorising, and other non-monetary means, were often wildly out of touch with people’s real needs, desires, capacities, risks, and so on. But the same can absolutely be said of supply and demand determined by financial allocations in a market economy.
<br /><br />Then there is “planning” at the organisational level, which will typically be differentiated from “strategy,” “governance,” “management,” “risk management,” as well as future-oriented processes like “horizon-scanning,” “anticipatory governance,” “Research & Development,” “stakeholder engagement,” “investor relations,” “cost-benefit analysis,” and so on. It will also be differentiated from vaguer terms like “commitments,” “promises,” “vision,” “ambitions,” “scoping,” and so on, whose meanings tend to be less specified by legal and regulatory practices. Planning tends to imply relatively detailed thinking about implementation of pre-given goals; it might be thought to sit “below” strategy and governance but “above” more day-to-day management. Nonetheless, despite effort at differentiation, planning overlaps with all of these. Perhaps what is most striking, at the organisational level, is the <i>the division of anticipatory labour</i>. Does this fragmentation of anticipation imply that, just like a party of adventurers can achieve more than the sum of its parts, an organisation is able to imagine possible futures <i>more </i>boldly and precisely than it otherwise would? Or, in line with the old adage “never split the party,” is such fragmented anticipation more <i>restricted </i>in the futures it can envision and steer towards? Probably both things are true, in different ways. There are also intriguing questions around what a different division of antcipatory labour might accomplish.<br /><br />Then there is urban planning, which is particularly entwined with utopian discourse (along with architecture). Urban planning is inherently transdisciplinary, drawing on many strands within public policy and social science, and in this sense may have some affinity with the sometimes totalising aspirations of utopian thinking. Urban planners may consider issues of sustainability, development, health, economic growth, quality of life, crime and policing, social cohesion, and so on. But these are clearly all contentious terms — and some contemporary planners may well be interested in postgrowth rather than growth, or postdevelopment rather than sustainability, or police abolition rather than crime and policing. The history of urban planning is also the history of a variety of practical utopian experiments. For example, in the postwar period in the United Kingdom, the ‘new town’ movement embodied a similar mix of energies to the emerging welfare state. According to Rosemary Wakeman, these new towns, garden cities, cities of science, etc., were<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">both a reflection on and a critique of mid- to late twentieth-century society. A steadfast belief in physical determinism was shared across the architectural and planning professions. An ideal social atmosphere could be achieved by carefully planning all the physical elements of the city. Designing the physical fabric would change individual behavior, social relations, civic life, and community. The assumption was that the ideal city could be mass-produced for a mass cultural age. Life would be balanced and harmonious.
</blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">(5)</blockquote><br />To this rudimentary survey of planning discourse — planned economies, planning within organisations, urban planning — we can add heists and dungeoncrawls. Heists and dungeoncrawls make implicit claims about <b>what can legitimately be planned for and what cannot</b>, about how to do so, and about how and why the best-laid plans often go awry.<br /><br />The degree and type of <b>organisation within the target stronghold</b> is also worth mentioning. Heist and caper crews, despite their superlative skills, are often framed as underdogs. The players’ power comes from stealth, deception, and cunning: they are unlikely to succeed at blasting or hacking their way into that stronghold. But a party at the dark mouth of the dungeon stands on another kind of threshold. True, they are also underdogs, in the sense that the army of monsters massed down there could probably easily overwhelm them. Except that it is not really an army. Unlike the guards in the stronghold, the dungeon denizens are typically fragmented. They may be antagonistic or indifferent to one-another, and their interests and activities do not constitute a joined-up defense of the territory. Perhaps to the extent that the dungeon does mount a dynamic, coordinated defense, the crawl becomes less like a crawl and more like a heist, raid, or siege.
<br /><br />Occasionally the desire to serve up the dungeon in digestible chunks may become an absurdity, something we are expected to suspend our disbelief about, as a convention of the genre. Monsters may <i>even </i>chivalrously attack one at a time (“It’s called class, Rick, it’s called class,” as one self-aware comic puts it. TTRPGs in which dungeon dwellers acquire a kind of <i>class consciousness</i> could be interesting to explore). Many TTRPGs, such as Grant Howitt’s TTRPG <i>Goblin Quest </i>(2015), as well as <i>Grunts!</i> (1992) by Mary Gentle, <i>Dungeon Crawl Inc.</i> (2021) by Dakota Krout, <i>Dungeon Keeper Ami</i> (2005-ongoing) by Pusakuronu, <i>Ralph Breaks the Internet</i> (2018), <i>The Order of the Stick</i> (2003-ongoing) by Rich Burlew, <i>Henchgirl</i> (2015-2017) by Kristen Gudsnuk, etc., explore the inner lives of mooks and minions, sometimes highlighting these convention.<br /><br />A few other distinguishing features are worth considering. Heists often involve an <i><b>insider</b></i>; a less frequent trope for a dungeoncrawl, although one with considerable potential.
<br /><br />Another common feature of heist narratives is the <i><b>twist</b></i>: the double-cross, the mole, the apparent slip-up that was actually part of the plan all along. Maybe the thing we thought we were stealing is really something else, or <i>never </i>existed in the first place. The improvisational nature of TTRPGs might present challenges for such storytelling, insofar as a truly impressive twist is typically carefully prefigured. Of course, the significance of past events can always be retrospectively altered, in service of a twist. Moreover, a <i>Blades in the Dark </i>mechanic allows most of the heist planning to take place ‘off screen’, and to be revealed when it is narratively salient via a flashback:
<br /><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">A flashback isn’t time travel. It can’t “undo” something that just occurred in the present moment. For instance, if an Inspector confronts you about recent thefts of occult artifacts when you’re at the Lady’s party, you can’t call for a flashback to assassinate the Inspector the night before. She’s here now, questioning you—that’s established in the fiction. You can call for a flashback to show that you intentionally tipped off the inspector so she would confront you at the party—so you could use that opportunity to impress the Lady with your aplomb and daring.
</div></blockquote><div><br />The <i>Rick and Morty </i>episode ‘One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty’ (2019) satirises contemporary Hollywood heist cinema with a Heistcon, a heist-off, and the trivial automation of the supposed novelty and surprise of heist-style twists and turns. It plays with various ways of extrapolating heist norms beyond their usual scope. One scene imagines what might happen if <i>everyone </i>(hundreds or thousands of people) were part of a heist crew. Another scene is a long back-and-forth between the Rick and the Heistotron machine devised to automate heist design and delivery. This scene lampoons the imaginative poverty of at least one kind of heist ‘twist’: <i>I knew that you would do A, so I did B, except you knew that I would do B, so you did C, except I knew that you knew that I would do B and you would do C, so I did D, and so on</i>. There is a certain psychological unbelievability to this kind of twist. It takes a style of thinking characteristic of ruminative, anxious obsession, and imagines it having purchase on social reality. We also might detect a kind of neoclassical economic logic, one which emphasises the utility-maximising behaviours of individuals given the the information available to them, behaviours conceived of as relatively independent of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and so on. The messiness and uncertainty of how others desire and act is removed, and all it takes to understand what someone will do is to have enough information about the information <i>they </i>have access to. Yet <i>I knew that you knew that I knew</i> is also a kind of quasi-erotic fantasy of cognitive intimacy, albeit antagonistic, which resonates with utopian themes, and stands in some tension with such neoclassical logic.<br /><br />Dystopian societies, including fake utopias, are obvious targets for heists. But what about other types? <b>Is utopia ripe for a heist? What is there to steal?</b> Clearly it depends on the utopia. Many utopias have abolished money, or perceive value according to some novel scheme. In Voltaire’s <i>Candide </i>(1759), Candide leaves El Dorado with a hundred pack-sheep, fifty of them laden with gold and jewels, materials which are not prized in El Dorado. It might be considered an extremely easy heist. Unless it is an extremely difficult one: did Candide fail the heist by deciding to leave this blessed place, partly motivated by love of arbitrage? Was Candide a victim of a kind of switcheroo?
<br /><br />Many classic utopias have a quasi-heist-like structure, in that <b>utopia is very difficult to get into, and contains something very precious</b> (a set of marvellous institutions and norms) which the visitor takes away with them … or <i>do </i>they? In a twist, the priceless haul of Bellamy’s <i>Looking Backward: 2000-1887 </i>(1888), or of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s <i>Herland </i>(1915), may evaporate when you try to unpack it back at the den. There is plenty of narrative potential in the notion that the same thing might have a very different significance within a utopia or outside of utopia (see Doug Geisler’s interview in this volume).<br /><br />A crew of daring scoundrels might attempt to steal the source or secret of a utopian society’s flourishing and happiness. But norms and institutions are nonrivalrous, that is, taking them from utopia does not mean depriving the utopians of them — right? Perhaps this is not always the case; the functioning of norms and institutions may sometimes depend, in subtle ways, on their material scope, on their borders, their neighbours, their rivals, their others. Or imagine if the task of the players were to ‘steal’ their entire worldview and mode of societal organization, requiring the group to fully immerse themselves in another way of life to understand and to embody its functioning … and yet somehow <i>not </i>stay there forever.<br /><br />There is also the theme of <b>contamination </b>of utopia, e.g. as explored in N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Ones Who Stay and Fight’ (<i>Lightspeed</i>, 2020). There is perhaps resonance here with the reverse-heist or inception: the visitor who brings a catalyst of catastrophe, usually in an anti-utopian fable about the supposed frailty and perhaps futility of building a society substantially better than whatever the author is using as a baseline.<br /><br />The emphasis on stealth in Doug Geisler’s union organizing game <i>Beat the Boss </i>(2020) gives it a somewhat heist-like aspect. More broadly, TTRPGs offer a space for creating dialogue between heists, crawls and a range of politically-inflected models of <i>taking what you want</i>: enclosure, expropriation, seizure, occupations, squats, appropriation, liberation, recuperation, arrest and de-arrest, incarceration and decarceration, wage theft, rights erosion, extraction of surplus value, mass trespass, or leaving the country you live to go set up a new country. What would it mean to crawl the means of production? To claim the right to roam within the framework of a heist narrative?<br />
</div>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-52537931110296401082023-06-09T05:21:00.007-07:002023-08-19T10:14:49.768-07:00After Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo<p>ay you</p><p>stood there nude</p><p>you’re mud </p><p>& you won’t forget</p><p>only really</p><p>you’re a foetus</p><p>of labouring dark,</p><p>on lunar milk</p><p>binging </p><p>by this low wall</p><p>inch by inch</p><p>into full bole life</p><p><br /></p><p>crossed over</p><p>by flowers’ dreams</p><p>& summer sleeps’</p><p>perfumes, just</p><p>to feel, believe that</p><p>from your feet</p><p>push out, race & </p><p>worm roots,</p><p>& snakelike </p><p>seek your deep </p><p>& wet </p><p>source to slake, &</p><p>& already </p><p><br /></p><p>bind you to it, you,</p><p>O tree alive unknown</p><p>untaxonomized</p><p>who forms the fruit</p><p>you will yourself forage</p><p>the bone of your crown</p><p>within your hair</p><p>that the wind plays with</p><p>hides a nest</p><p>of immaterial birds</p><p>and when you come to bed</p><p>and I acknowledge you</p><p>my errant brother</p><p>your touch, your breath</p><p>will awaken the flutter</p><p>of mysterious wings</p><p>right up to the edge of death</p><p> </p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-47163877554919931152023-05-30T14:12:00.009-07:002023-05-30T14:36:26.791-07:00Why isn't science fiction interested in AI?<div>Since the century began, there has been a remarkable surge in AI research and application. This has mostly involved AI of a particular kind: <b>Machine Learning</b> (ML), especially Deep Learning. In brief, ML tends to place much less emphasis on carefully curated knowledge bases and hand-crafted rules of inference. Instead, ML usually uses a kind of automated trial-and-error approach, based on a little statistics, a lot of data, and a lot of computing power. When we hear of AI transforming journalism, healthcare, policing, defence, finance, agriculture, law, conservation, energy, development, disaster preparedness, supply chain logistics, software development, and many other domains, the AI in question is typically some form of ML. </div><div><br /></div><div>Despite the click-bait title to this post, AI is <i>extremely </i>prevalent theme of recent science fiction. Isn't it? Well, that depends <i>which </i>AI. Science fiction has been curiously slow, even reluctant, to reflect the ML renaissance. Until quite recently, ML research has tended to de-emphasise anthropomorphic Artificial General Intelligence. Instead it has emphasised domain-specific AI applications. Examples include Snapchat’s AR filters, Google Translate, Amazon Alexa, Tesla Autopilot, ChatGPT, MidJourney, platformized markets like Uber and Airbnb, the recommendation engines that drive Netflix and YouTube, and the curation of social media feeds. </div><div><br /></div><div>As a comparison, in May 2023, Science Fiction Encyclopaedia entry for AI still tellingly states: “Most writers would agree that for a computer or other machine of some sort to qualify as an AI it must be self-aware.” Over the past decade, science fiction about AI has continued to coalesce around questions such as: <i>Is it possible for a machine to be sentient, to experience emotions, or to exercise free will? Between humans and machines, can there be sex, love, and romance? Will our own creations rise up against us, perhaps by departing from the rules we set them, perhaps by applying them all too literally? Could an AI grow beyond our powers of comprehension, and become god-like? And what might the oppression of sentient AIs teach us about colonialism, racism, misogyny, ableism, queerphobia, and the systemic treatment of some lives as morally more valuable than others? </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Whether or not these questions make for good stories, or are interesting questions in their own right, they are not tightly integrated into the realities of AI research. This disconnect between science fictional AI and real AI is also reflected in science fiction scholarship. <i>AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines</i> (2020) is a recent collection of critical essays on AI and literature. While frequently compelling and insightful within its chosen scope, it barely mentions Machine Learning. Terms such as bias, black box, explainability, alignment, label, classifier, parameter, loss function, architecture, or supervised vs. unsupervised learning, appear seldom or never. (I think there are two, maybe two-and-a-half chapters that are clear exceptions). </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, there are <i>some </i>stories that engage deeply with Machine Learning as it is actually practiced. My impression is that <b>these stories remain rare overall</b>, and that they have yet to coalesce into their own richly intertextual conversation about Machine Learning. Some promising counterexamples emphasise 'the algorithm' or 'the platform,' rather than AI as such. They find some storytelling space where a new discourse intersects with an old one: where Critical Data Studies meets the old science fictional delight in robots rigorously following rules, and the humans that might get ground up in those unstoppable cogs. However, even in their more critical moments, <b>many such stories are prone to reinforce the political and ethical framings preferred by tech companies</b>. We can speculate why this might be the case. The economic conditions of their production are worth noting — is there a preponderance of storytelling funded by think tanks, academia, tech companies and tech media, perhaps? Or perhaps there is a sort of discursive predisposition at play, related to the amount of energy it takes to speak outside of the established science fiction tropes. Having laboriously disentangled themselves from questions like, “Please may I have an AI girlfriend?” and “Crikey will I get an AI God?”, are these stories too exhausted to escape from questions like, “How can we balance the need for training data at scale with the privacy rights of individuals?” and “How will the widespread adoption of AI and automation impact jobs and the economy”? Such questions may need to be posed in some contexts, certainly. But they also carry deep techno-solutionist and techno-determinist assumptions. Science fiction could do better!</div><div><br /></div><div>Writing in mid-2023, <b>there are signs that some aspects of this situation may soon shift</b>. A more recent critical collection, <i>Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines </i>(2023), which does solid and timely work in challenging Eurocentrism in literary and cultural AI, does pay a little more attention to Machine Learning. Even if writers have been ignoring Machine Learning, Machine Learning has not been ignoring writers. And now OpenAI’s ChatGPT is creating an unprecedented level of conversation in online writing communities around Machine Learning. Very recently, Science Fiction Writers of America collated on its website over fifty articles and posts written by its members on the topic of using AI in creative work. Prominent science fiction magazine <i>Clarkesworld </i>recently closed to submissions after getting inundated with ChatGPT-generated stories. The window for limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees, agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is more-or-less closing now, and questions are being asked about the carbon cost of computationally intensive Machine Learning (<a href="https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/">Vicuna</a> is being touted as a lightweight ChatGPT alternative). Hollywood writers are on strike about, among other things, AI. And in the midst of a messy public rivalry between Google and Microsoft, we are witnessing a sort of convergence of discourse about (the social implications of) Machine Learning with older sci-fi tropes: AGI, Singularity, superintelligence, x-risk. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whether or not we are at a turning point, it is certainly a moment to take stock of the last decade of science fiction about AI and ask: Is it possible that the few narratives that engage fruitfully with Machine Learning do so <i>despite</i>, rather than <i>because of</i>, the distinctive affordances of the genre? Compared with most other discourses, has science fiction been <i>good</i> at thinking about Machine Learning, <i>okay </i>at it, or maybe especially <i>bad </i>at it?</div>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-39296863985885374972023-04-14T12:49:00.001-07:002023-04-14T12:49:08.824-07:00Sean Bonney, Baudelaire in English<p> Can't remember when this was from, 2007? <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pa-2RI_NqUkIKk7o-o2EJfugcDKUoZS7/view?usp=sharing">Sean Bonney reading Baudelaire poems</a>.</p><p><br /></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-17914537436249932932023-04-11T11:43:00.014-07:002023-04-16T14:13:08.993-07:00Utopian Crunch<p><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From a glossary-in-progress.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Crunch </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has at least two meanings in gaming. In<b> game development</b>, it refers to an intense, focused, and often exploitative work period that occurs near the end of a project. Workers are racing against the clock, working long hours with great intensity. This could be the time when everything comes together and final adjustments are applied. It might also be the time when all pretence of polish is forsaken. Workarounds are rushed through, risky compromises are gambled on. The product ships with glitches and bugs still twitching, half-squashed, under quick fixes. To the extent that crunch time is also a period of stress and exhaustion, it may also be a time of unusually unreliable judgment: workers may hallucinate that they are applying the final polish, when actually they are inadequately papering over the cracks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; text-align: justify; white-space: pre-wrap;">Game development crunch is, in this sense, emblematic of capitalist accumulation: linked to the capitalist drive for profit maximization, the relentless pursuit of narrowly defined economic efficiency which comes at the expense of workers’ physical and mental wellbeing. As John Vanderhoef and Michael Curtin write:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-60b90fb3-7fff-3f2e-141d-f89961b60bd5"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 28.346456692913378pt; margin-right: 42.803149606299286pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 42.8031pt 12pt 28.3465pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[...] labor exploitation has if anything increased since the early 2000s, as game workers continue to toil under difficult conditions systematically orchestrated by major publishers that have agilely expanded their production networks and political connections around the globe. Although in some places conditions have improved and in others new opportunities have arisen, most shops are governed by wages, practices, and prejudices that undermine common assumptions about game development as an elite creative or IT career. Moreover, the possibility of reversing this overall trend is profoundly uncertain, given the challenges of building a reform movement in an industry where most workers are isolated in cubicles, anxious about job security, skeptical about organized labor, and susceptible to illusions that the indie sector might offer their best hope for deliverance.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yet this crunch also evokes the logic of the exception. In game development, crunch time represents a state of emergency, where workers must put aside their regular lives and dedicate themselves to the project’s completion. It may have been planned for months, but it is still treated as a crisis. Giorgio Agamben’s 2005 </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">State of Exception</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> argues that the state of exception is a critical aspect of modern politics, enabling governments to suspend everyday laws and deny legal rights during times of crisis. However, the state of exception for Agamben is not really a discrete event that ‘interrupts’ everyday life, but a pervasive condition that governs modern society. Agamben argues that to find the paradigmatic example of modern power over life, you need to look at the camp. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 28.346456692913378pt; margin-right: 42.803149606299286pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 42.8031pt 12pt 28.3465pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[T]he state of exception separates the norm from its application in order to make its application possible. It introduces a zone of anomie into the law in order to make the effective regulation [</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">normazione</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">] of the real possible [...] the norm [is] able to refer to the normal situation through the suspension of its application in the state of exception.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Achille Mbembe also develops the concept of the state of exception in <i>Necropolitics </i>(2019 [2016]) and other works. For Mbembe, as for Agamben, the state of exception is not really an exception, but rather an enduring and widespread dynamic of contemporary governance. He offers the plantation and the colony as quintessential manifestations of the state of exception, a form of power which goes beyond Foucault's <i>droit de glaive</i> and biopower, and which racialises and instrumentalises human life to the point that those that suffer it are poised between life and death: the walking dead.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what about game development crunch? Is it an exception to the way things are normally done, or an expression of the way they are normally done here? There are some obvious themes we might touch on here, such as games companies who have a continuous 'crunch culture'. There are also perhaps less obvious ones, such as the ideological role of military-themed games; or the rivalry for control of minerals and other resources for device manufacture. These might illuminate </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 17.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">crunch time as an exception that is not really an exception, but rather the very visible part of something semi-invisibly pervasive. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While acknowledging these connections, we might also consider whether crunch times may gesture towards genuine alternatives to capitalist extraction, insofar as they may be times when the standard extractive apparatus of capitalism (money and bureaucratic authority) cannot meet capital's needs, and the more-than-capitalist world must be appealed to. That is, you cannot <i>just </i>pay someone to do that to themselves, so other motives for making things come into play, in however a distorted and corrupted form.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let's return to that idea in a moment. In the context of tabletop roleplaying games, </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crunch </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has another meaning. It describes a design style focused on complex and detailed mechanics. A <b>crunchy tabletop roleplaying game</b> may involve a lot of arithmetic</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It may also involve large menus of options with fine-grained mechanical differentiation, and therefore a lot to memorise or to look up. It may also suggest the existence of many subsystems to handle different sorts of narrative situations (see <b>Subsystem</b>). Examples of games with a reputation for crunch include </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shadowrun</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rolemaster</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Phoenix Command</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This second sense of crunch may contain some implied claim to realism, comprehensiveness, or abundant variety. It is also a kind of aesthetic category. Crunch offers an appealing depth to players who love to tinker with intricate systems. In this sense, the term has faintly positive associations. True, a player </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">say, “I don't like crunchy games.” However, generally crunch is a way of describing something that, if you didn’t like it, you probably wouldn’t call crunch. Instead you would probably describe the rules as too long or complicated — or you wouldn’t describe them at all, because you decided not to invest time in learning them, and so wouldn’t have any particular views about them. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While games might be ranked as more or less crunchy, there is also an understanding that the experience of crunch is something that might diminish with familiarity: to someone who has only ever played John Harper’s </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lasers & Feelings</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which features two stats and one resolution mechanic for every situation, a game like </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">D&D 5e </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lancer </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might at first feel very crunchy. The crunchiness of some games, perhaps, is more resilient than the crunchiness of others: the experience of crunchiness does not always diminish, or at least not at the same rate.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the utopian, crunch might arouse curiosity because it does not look fun, yet it </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fun. This speaks to the utopian critiques of scarcity thinking, and the utopian concern with hidden plenitudes, with the possibility of vast pleasures tucked invisibly inside paltry resources, just awaiting the right reconfiguration. Things that don't look edible, but are delicious. Sources of wellbeing and wonder that are less than obvious, because they are being hogged by tiny elites. In a similar vein, activities associated with crunch — poring over customisation options, carrying out calculations, meticulous bookkeeping — have a reputation for being boring, a reputation which is not entirely unfair, but also not the full story. Utopian writing and even utopian society itself has likewise been denigrated as dull (see </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Boring</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More subtly, perhaps there is some affinity between crunch aficionados and leftist culture warriors who hold that developing a systemic understanding of something need not necessarily spoil engagement with and enjoyment of that something: that it is possible to be at once immersed in a world </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">immersed in the rules that produce that world (and to think critically about how each of these emerge from and relate to the real world). This might be described as a ‘culture of systemic analysis,’ often conspicuous, for example, in contemporary culture war clashes around the right’s cherished belief in the possibility of apolitical games, narratives, and art.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What then is the relationship between </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crunch </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">immersion</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? It seems it is not straightforward. Crunchy games are sometimes contrasted with rules-lite or narrative-heavy games, which prioritise storytelling and player agency over complex mechanics. Perhaps players who gravitate towards crunchy games enjoy the strategic challenges, the problem-solving opportunities, and the chance to explore combinatorial wildernesses for local optima and other emergent phenomena. And perhaps players who are averse to crunchy games feel that clearing away a dense fog of numbers frees them to shape story and character. And both groups may well invoke the term </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">immersion </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to explain their relationship with crunchiness. Are they describing different kinds of immersion? Are the crunch devotees immersed in the narrative and the system, whereas the crunch skeptics are immersed in the narrative alone? Some crunch devotees may argue that crunchiness does not displace narrative, but supports it (or perhaps supports particular kinds of narrative experience). Others may contest that there is any necessary or strong connection between crunch and narrative: instead, we might imagine a quadrant matrix, with an x-axis from <i>crunchy </i>to <i>rules lite</i>, and a y-axis from <i>narrative</i> to <i>non-narrative</i> (some might say, <i>traditional </i>or <i>OSR</i>). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such questions could be interesting in themselves, and they also suggest another interesting line of enquiry: is crunch something that transcends games? Is utopia crunchy? Charles Fourier’s utopian designs, for instance, might be described as ‘crunchier’ than Edward Bellamy’s, and Edward Bellamy’s as crunchier than William Morris’s. Ursula K. Le Guin’s </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Dispossessed </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might be considered a meditation not only on creeping centralisation, but also on creeping crunchiness (proliferating committees with proliferating conventions), within a syndicate anarchist society that is ostensibly without laws.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">How crunchy, for that matter, are the societies we live in today? Social theorists including Niklas Luhmann have in effect explored this question. </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">In Luhmann's framework, modernity has seen subsystems within society becoming increasingly distinct and specialised. This division of labour allows each subsystem to develop its own unique logic, rules, and communication codes. These subsystems can include areas such as politics, law, economy, education, and religion, among others. Subsystems can institutionalise symbolically generalised communication media, making it more difficult for uncomfortable communications to be rejected -- money is perhaps the clearest example (money tells us "do your job" in a way that is harder to refuse than mere promises).
In modernity, according to Luhmann, society has transitioned from a simpler, more homogeneous structure to a highly complex, differentiated one. This shift has led to the emergence of a multitude of interdependent but autonomous subsystems. Each subsystem operates with its own internal logic, and is functionally differentiated from other subsystems, meaning they each serve a specific purpose and contribute to the overall functioning of society.
Luhmann saw this differentiation as both a strength and a challenge. On one hand, it allows modern society to address complex problems with specialised expertise, enhancing overall efficiency and adaptability. On the other hand, it can lead to difficulties in communication and coordination between subsystems, as they may have different goals, values, and perspectives. There is potential for fruitful dialogue between the theory and practice of tabletop game design and social theory about differentiation and specialisation. Such dialogues might even explore the paradoxical notion of law-without-state, of utopian law.
</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">*</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">A game designer who is adding crunch may occasionally feel, paradoxically, that their game grows <i>less</i> crunchy: the more one attempts to model the universe in detail, the more the game feels like a model, filled with abstractions and simplifications.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">A game with little crunch, we might say, will have a mechanic to determine who wins a fight; a game with a lot of crunch will have a mechanic that allows you to target head, heart, hand etc. separately, to factor in the weapon used and the level of proficiency, the proximity to the target, the wind speed, the sun in your eyes or in theirs as they duck or dodge, and so on. Again, it is all quite relative: to a table of pianists, it may be absurd that a hand is not differentiated into at least five distinct targets. To a table of hand surgeons, all familiar with a range of hand traumas and their treatments and prognoses, it might make sense </span></span><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">to separate damage rolls to the <i>flexor digitorum produndus</i> and the <i>flexor digitorum superficialis</i>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">Jorge Luis Borges imagined a </span></span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 17.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge</i> in which animals are divided into </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">those belonging to the Emperor, embalmed ones, trained ones, suckling pigs, mermaids, innumerable ones, etc., high level classifications which feel perfectly natural and self-evident to the authors of the taxonomy. What might a TTRPG manifesting such Borgeian crunch be like? Where should one subsystem end and the next begin? What ought to be considered a special case of what else?</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; text-align: left; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Bookman Old Style, serif;">*</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">What about crunchiness as an aesthetic experience: might this too be experienced outside of games? For example, might the office worker who is entranced in spreadsheet construction be experiencing something crunchy? And if so, could there be ways in which these two senses of crunch — (a) game developers burning the candle at both ends, (b) players losing themselves in intricate rule-sets — are connected? </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Crunch, crunch</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: certainly, each sense of crunch seems to embody a notion of intense commitment to the task at hand and a desire for immersion within it. Immersion in each case is also figured as something quite intricate and textured. In other words, we are not really talking about immersion in some oceanic realm of primordial unity, where boundaries are fluid and ever-vanishing. We are probably not talking about what the poet Lisa Robinson describes as ‘a luxuriously distributed lubricant, an enticingly shimmering and moving fabric, a shared yet contested décor.’</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Rather, the realm in which crunch immerses you is filled with precise relational details, details that are at once trivial and all-consuming — concern with correctness of syntax, conformity with procedure, with how this line of code relates to the next, with how the scattered dice add up or subtract. If there is a loss of self here, perhaps it is more Apollonian in nature than Dionysian; drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s dichotomy of Greek tragedy:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 28.346456692913378pt; margin-right: 42.803149606299286pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 42.8031pt 12pt 28.3465pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious movements. The language of the Sophoclean heroes, for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian precision and clearness, so that we at once imagine we see into the innermost recesses of their being, and marvel not a little that the way to these recesses is so short. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The notion of </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jouissance</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, associated with Freud, Lacan, Barthes and others, may also help to illuminate crunchy immersion.</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Roland Barthes’s distinction between </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plaisir </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jouissance</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> turns on conformity or nonconformity with norms: for Barthes, </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plaisir </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or pleasure arises from engagement within established codes and reinforces established subjectivity, whereas </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jouissance </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or bliss comes from exploding those codes, and tends to disrupt and transform subjectivity. Crunch might then suggest a third option, or at least confirms the interconnection of </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plaisir </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jouissance</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: it is scrupulous obedience to the constraints of coding syntax that opens up vast vistas of representational possibilities. Jacques Lacan’s </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">jouissance </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">defies any brief summary, but there are certainly resonant themes to do with ‘forbidden’ or inexpressible modes of enjoyment, and pain-as-pleasure, pleasure-as-pain. Is there an erotics of submission to game mechanics, with an immersion or flow-state comparable to entry to BDSM subspace? It may be a fruitful analogy, insofar as bottoming is more a transformation of agency than it is a relinquishing of agency.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Each kind of crunch is also associated with time behaving strangely. For example, during game development crunch, there is not enough time to do everything that must be done, and yet it </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be done (and sometimes even </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be done). Likewise, crunchy mechanics in TTRPGs may slow down gameplay as players consult rulebooks and perform calculations. A crunchy game might therefore be one that has more “time per time,” one in which a few moments of narrative stretch out into minutes or hours of gameplay due to all the extradiegetic intricacies involved. Alternatively, we might not think of this ratio as </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">time to time</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as such, but rather </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">story to mechanics</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as though these were quantifiable: as though there could be a lot of mechanics per unit of story, producing a sense of crunchiness. Whether temporal or something else, such ratios might interest the utopian: the little hidden in a lot, or the lot devoted to the care and elaboration of the little. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a 2021 article, Amanda C. Cote and Brandon C. Harris explore how a discursive distinction between ‘good’ crunch and ‘bad’ crunch has been used to undermine the demands of game industry workers and to perpetuate exploitative working practices. Cote and Harris reject the reality of this distinction. They argue for an urgent need for greater unionisation within the games industry, while also cautioning that even well-organised workforces with robust employment rights may remain vulnerable to exploitation via so-called ‘good’ crunch. Analysing articles and talks from </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Game Developer </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">magazine and the Game Developers Conference, Cote and Harris point out: ‘Numerous articles and talks positioned self-imposed crunch emerging out of developers’ passion as a good thing, giving specific examples of times when developers’ voluntary overtime improved the resulting game.’</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The construction of ‘good’ crunch is a weaponised utopianism, which can draw both on neoliberal individualism (personal passion, hustle culture, being driven and ambitious, having what it takes) as well as a more collectivist ethos (the company figured as a family or as a community of mutual care, the worker encouraged to work hard and solve problems on behalf of everybody, workers and gamers as part of a wider community with a passion for making and playing games). Cote and Harris invoke Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 28.346456692913378pt; margin-right: 42.803149606299286pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 42.8031pt 12pt 28.3465pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea that employee passion drives them to engage in ‘good’ crunch acts as a form of cruel optimism, sustaining crunch practices even in situations where there are organized efforts to improve working conditions. Fully reimagining games’ labor systems will likely require developers both to engage in tactics such as collective organizing and to forgo problematic understandings about crunch.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cote and Harris’s analysis might be further strengthened by acknowledging the grain of truth within ‘good’ crunch discourse. Like much discourse used to legitimate oppressive practices, ‘good’ crunch discourse reflects, in a distorted form, lived realities. An intense period of work to get a game just right, without financial or professional motives, is something that many hobbyist game-makers experience. It is an experience that they share with, for example, a poet tinkering to perfect a poem or a musician with a song. It is a kind of concluding inspiration, the counterpart to the early stage inspiration in which a creative work begins to coalesce within an apparent void. This is not to say that these periods of delighted productive mania are ‘true good crunch,’ entirely protected from capitalist imperatives — leisure-time subjectivity is still shaped by living under capitalism. But when we do experience them, we are not wrong to wonder: Why shouldn’t most or all work be like this? In other words, these experiences point toward the more free, pleasant, interesting, and less alienated labour explored by postwork theory. They might also be suggestive of the many different ways of working that have existed and still exist in the more-than-capitalist world. The anthropologist James C. Scott, for example, contrasts the tempo of life of hunter-gatherers, “punctuated by bursts of activity over short periods of time,”</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> with that of agriculturalists:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 28.346456692913378pt; margin-right: 42.803149606299286pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 42.8031pt 12pt 28.3465pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, and mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the center of any comprehensive account of the 'civilizing process.' They strap agriculturalists to a minutely choreographed routine of dance steps; they shape their physical bodies, they share the architecture and layout of the domus; they insist, as it were, on a certain pattern of cooperation and coordination. In that sense, to pursue the metaphor, they are the background musical beat of the domus. Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants and, in Mesopotamia particularly, wheat or barley.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As crunch is an aesthetic category, it's perhaps finally worth considering yet another sense of crunch: crunch as an auditory and haptic phenomenon. The sudden breaking or fracturing of a hard, brittle material makes a resonant, sharp-ish sound, a </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crunch</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Crunching is similar to, but not quite the same as, crumpling, snapping, crushing, squelching. Nuts are crunched. Bones crunch, sickeningly. Popcorn is too soft to crunch, apart from the unpopped kernels or kernel fragments. Something which crunches has not collapsed with enough force to fly apart, as something that shatters often does. It may well still be in one piece, connected by fragile new hinges. In fact, gravel crunches underfoot, and here the implication is not something brittle bursting, but rather hard material being tilted, rearranged, and ground together. Pine needles, fresh crisp snow. Perhaps </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crunch </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is actually ambiguous between a catastrophic collapse and a survivable deformation.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 13pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The aesthetics of the auditory and haptic crunch may also carry utopian charge: concerned as utopians are with pressure from outside, and how an enclosed system might respond to that pressure. When utopias, utopianisms, and utopian sparks and seeds are forced (however temporarily) into narrow margins and small nooks, what survives and what does not? ‘Crunch’ in TTRPG contexts probably derives from ‘number crunching.’ Numbers might be thought of as some of the least crunchable things ever: immutable and abstract, they resist deformation and fracture; you can divide one integer by another, and then combine the result with yet another integer, and nothing really ‘crunches’ — or does it?</span></p></span>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-7600662992089080242022-09-15T16:06:00.004-07:002022-10-09T13:52:16.834-07:00Queuetopia: Notes on Queues<span id="docs-internal-guid-55a4f304-7fff-a0b9-15eb-db0f1564ee03"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you had a group of people and a pile of treasure, and had to improvise a mechanism to distribute it, you might seize upon something like this. ‘We’ll sit in a circle. We will take turns. Each may choose one object from the pile. We’ll go round and round till there is nothing left.’ </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then, thinking about it some more, you might add something like this. ‘Who gets to go first? We will seat ourselves and choose someone at random. And then, we’ll go round and round the circle, clockwise, until every last precious item is claimed.’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Real randomness is hard to come by. Cryptographers know this. Sometimes randomness is even sold, it’s so scarce. But good enough randomness is easy enough to generate. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Who goes first? I’ll sing a song we all know, and with every beat I’ll point to one of you, until the final word of the song, when the person I’m pointing to will begin.’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duck Soup</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1933) Chico Marx chants a counting-rhyme apparently of his own devising, ‘Rrringspot, vonza, twoza, zig-zag-zav, popti, vinaga, tin-lie, tav, harem, scarem, merchan, tarem, teir, tore.’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The circle is a kind of curved queue, where once you’ve been served at the front, you automatically rejoin again at the back.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What kind of legitimacy does it confer, being ‘there first’? Is there something in common between pushing to the front, and dispossessing indigenous peoples? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A line of people can serve as an economic mechanism. It can regulate the distribution of resources and/or tasks, and coordinate a milling throng into a system of meaningfully interacting agents. As an economic mechanism, however, queueing is somewhat incomplete: you’d really want know what is permitted at the </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">front </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before you can assess its dynamics. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does the same thing happen to each person? For example, does each person draw close enough to the deceased queen that their respects can penetrate her lead-lined coffin? Does Ottessa Moshfegh sign her name in each person’s copy of </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lapvona</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? For example, does a cardamom bun happen to each person?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or do events at the front vary? When you are ‘processed’ (as queueing theory calls whatever happens at the front of the line), can you alter the conditions for the person behind you? By eating the last cardamom bun, for example? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A queue is, conspicuously, even smugly, a non-crowd. It is a rejection of the potential for collective agency. That is why liberals love it: it is the emergent order which insists on the lonely sovereignty of individuals, strung out like paper dollies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queueing can serve as an economic mechanism. What if we were to think of queueing as money? Does it function as a ‘unit of account’? There is no </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unit</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, exactly, unless the queue itself be considered a unit. But there is a crude ordinal accounting going on, an ordering from first to last. These values adjust to reflect the evolution of the system. Furthermore, you do have something to lose if you leave the line, so perhaps there is something resembling a ‘store of value,’ the second touchstone of the textbook definition of money. It’s the last criterion — a ‘means of exchange’ — where the comparison really breaks down. Yet exchange sometimes occurs, in the sense that people do sometimes exchange places. And there are excitingly different opinions about the propriety of saving a spot in the queue, or briefly leaving and rejoining.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ask yourself, just as an experiment in culture and psychology, how you feel about two people behind you in a queue swapping places. Is it any of your business? Does it feel different if they are ahead of you? Does it feel different if one is behind you and one ahead of you? Depending on what the processing rules are, either of the last two might have some bearing on what you encounter when you reach the front.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The value of queue positionality is ordinal. It is tantalisingly ambiguous between the qualitative and the quantitative. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cory Doctorow writes, “Who gets to do what and when at a themepark may sound like a trivial question, but I think it's a perfect little microcosm for the distributional problems that are at the heart of all political economy.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Imagine a queue that follows this rule: when you reach the front, you can set any processing condition you would like for the person behind you. That person must fulfil your processing condition or go to the back of the queue. If the entire queue cycles without anyone fulfilling the condition, the condition is nullified. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This structure needs a good name.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">people queue in the UK more than in other countries?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. I have been trying to find some kind of league table on the internet, so I can confirm that UK is in the top ten queueiest countries, and be surprised and delighted at the quiet queuers, the countries that queue even more avidly but don’t pretend it is their national pasttime.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How is delay imagined, interpreted, instrumentalized? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps what is more interesting is precisely how queueing is celebrated, and what is celebrated along with it. It is a mixture of faux self-deprecatory and self-deprecatory. Aren’t we silly, for being so well-behaved? We are pussycats, though ha ha ha, we’ll show our claws if our little rituals are disrupted! Luckily, these little rituals are also resonant with a deep and irresistible moral drive, just as using the correct cutlery keeps the cosmos from crumbling. That is, principled fairness and egalitarianism to the queue, and a sort of elegant commonsense efficiency. Of course this is all bollocks: the formal consistency of first-come-first-served is not worth dignifying as ‘fairness,’ as you would feel keenly if you were bleeding out in an ER waiting room without a system of triage. Queueing is so </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">civilized</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and who was it who </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">civilized </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">half the world?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘The most British thing ever’ says the most British thing ever, </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Guardian. The Guardian </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Royal mourner: of course not in the sense that the mourners are royal. They are common. Ennobled, perhaps, by their grief and gaiety.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Liberals (not in the American sense, although maybe that too) also love more complex emergent order: the price mechanism, supply and demand, the market. You could imagine a different kind queue, with more ambitious equillibria. You exchange information with the person in front and behind, perhaps you gradually adjust your positions until the queue is optimized. But this is anathema. Perhaps because it is too embedded in the interpersonal, the social? It is in the nature of the queue that you cannot shop around for queue buddies.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Edward Bellamy’s </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Looking Backward</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, money is abolished in favor of a sort of system of coupons that directly links labor and consumption. The idea is to correlate what you contribute to society with what you are allowed to take out from the common wealth, while avoiding all that catastrophic usury and exploitation. It does turn out to be easier said than done, and Bellamy’s system has a somewhat ungainly feel. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Dispossessed</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, nobody cares if you take out more than you put in. Or more precisely, they </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">care, they care a lot, but the caring is the </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">mechanism that regulates what economists might call ‘free riders’ and the tabloid press might call ‘scroungers.’ Shame disincentivises such behaviors, but if you can endure the shame, there is no law against it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You just go to the common storehouses and take what you need. If a lot of people arrive all at once, do they start a queue? A conversation? Both? Something else?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why should a book about the end of money be interested in the internal quasi-currencies of game shows? Why should a book about the end of money care about alternative and complementary moneys, about Indigenous moneys, about the accounting practices of Net Zero transitions and the biometric practices of wellbeing interventions, about the speculative currencies of science fiction, and in the avant-garde financial experiments of artists and activists? Doesn’t all this imply </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">money, not less?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: medium; text-align: left; white-space: normal;" /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We can draw parallels both with police abolitionism and family abolitionism. Money abolition means unsettling our ideas of what money is in the first place. Money abolition must be understood not as subtracting something from society, but as multiplying and transforming relationships already latent in society. Just as abolishing the police must mean greater safety, not less, and abolishing the family must mean greater care, so abolishing money must mean more of whatever it is money is supposed, by its most fervent proponents, to be doing for us.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Making economic mechanisms work well often is framed as a matter of internalising the externalities. The producers do not naturally bear the cost of the carbon they emit, so a carbon tax must be applied to correct the market failure. But then . . . things get more complicated. </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wisps of carbon are only so deadly because they join the vast clouds emitted by Western colonial powers since the nineteenth century. Can the externalities of the past be addressed in this way, by some kind of time travelling tax?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway, the queue: the key is that some people won’t join at all. It looks too long. It elicits valuation. </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wow, look at that queue! Let’s not bother. It isn’t worth it</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queuing theory calls this </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">balking</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the beloved Queen Elizabeth lay in state, a great queue formed. It was predictable that many people would wish to pay their respects. A queue visible from space! Not really. But visible, through media devotion, across the country. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">London excels at processing thousands of people through boutique experiences, in intimate spaces, in batches of five or twenty or a hundred at a time. This is done via online booking. You get a slot. You get a QR code or something.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course a deliberate decision was made, instead, to eschew digital queueing. Instead allow people to wait in line for eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours. Participate in the spectacle.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queues and quasi-queues. Conveyor belts. Queuing at the lights. Traffic jams. Emergency Room, with or without triage. An instruction sent to a CPU. A bucket bridage. A line of succession. <i>Snowpiercer</i>.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A protest march is sort of a queue. But of course you can skip backwards and forwards, so not really.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Disneyland and abbatoirs both have insights in queue-space architecture.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The BBC has become MournHub.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The queue is queuetopia.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Queen, lying in state. A queue visible across the country. Not joining a queue is part of how a queue operates: a queue invites valuation. This particular queue, there is really no way not to participate. You join, or you wish you could join, or you decide it’s not worth it, or you create hot take memes about the Queue Dystopia. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If it were more convenient, probably fewer people would do it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One Twitter user (Curious Iguana): I have no interest in seeing the queen! I just want to join the queue!</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In terms of big crowd events, it’s not </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">big. If you did it at Wembley, the stands would look empty. If you did the Euro Cup Final that way, perhaps with spectators filing past a table football table, that would be a very long queue.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queue abandonment. According to the classic Erlang-A model introduced by Palm (1943), each participant has a maximum time they are willing to wait. If they reach their max, they quit, no matter where they are in the queue. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a deliberate simplification for analytic purposes, but can you imagine? How funny, all those internal timers pinging the queuers out at apparent random. My favorite would be the person who got to the very front just as their internal timer elapsed.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Can I help you sir?’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘I’m not waiting any longer!’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That might be Curious Iguana, to be fair.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘Queue’ sounds a bit like ‘queen.’ In fact, if you just heave the ‘n’ over the ‘e’ so it lands up-side-down, there it is. A queen is just a queue with a queue-jumping letter, or vice-versa.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In German, a queue is a ‘snake.’ </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘The British love to queue!’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The British also love to lambast the queue as a symbol of incompetent, lazy and corrupt public services.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the celebration of queueing might be read as a characteristic centrist response to the right: yes, you are absolutely right about the way the world works, but you haven’t counted on one thing: </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">some of us don’t mind</span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead of a market with supply and demand for two commodities, imagine two queues.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Each individual is constantly weighing the utility at the end of the queue against the disutility of joining the queue.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A longer queue may imply </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">both </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a greater reward (what lies at the end must be more desirable) </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a greater penalty (the wait is longer).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queue width. A queue can fatten, and turn effectively into a stack of small lateral queues. Or sometimes the internal organisation of the lateral units may be heterogenous: the five of us are behind the five of you, but when your unit reaches the front, you will use one method to order yourselves, and then we will use another. You will draw straws, we will fight to the death.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consider that the queue for the toilets may actually be a ‘fat’ queue disguised as a ‘thin’ one. Each person is an assembly of two or three or four or five or more entities, each with its own principle for determining which will go first.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Following the passing of the monarch, as a mark of respect, a number of medical appointments have been postponed.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do you still keep your place in the queue? Maybe not. It would be complicated to bump everyone along. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queueing is, supposedly, a very British thing. People in the UK are supposed more likely to form a queue, in situations where other nations would select some other resolution mechanism, such as an undignified scrum. Unless maybe there are just more things worth queueing for in the UK?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am interested in queueing because I am interested in postcapitalism. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I interested in all the everyday distributive mechanisms we already use that are non-capitalist or not-quite-capitalist. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyday, or ‘queue-tidian’ life. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bread queues: a favorite image of anti-communist propaganda. Winston Churchill claimed in 1946 that ‘Socialism meant queueing,’ after the postwar Labour government rationed bread.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deliberation is another such mechanism: talking about it. Who should have what? Who should do what?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Largesse is another. The king or queen, the warrior hero, the big man, dispensing treasure. You shall have this ring.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Game shows are another. Game shows distribute resources, resourcefully.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">AI is another. Instead of two queues, imagine two neural networks.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely the British don’t love prefiguring postcapitalist distributive mechanisms?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A very British thing. Or, occasionally, a very English thing. George Orwell writes about the orderly behavior of the English crowds, and how striking foreign observers might find it, in ‘The English People’ (1944).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But then, Britishness is so very quintessentially English, isn’t it?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">King Charles has been queueing for some time.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">George Mikes memorably describes the lone Englishman as an orderly queue of one in </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How to be an Alien </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(1946).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Can there be a queue to join a queue? Maybe. There certainly can be </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">queues </span><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to join a queue: for example, following the principle ‘one from this queue queue, then one from that queue queue.’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Queues with a variety of transformative gates scattered along the way, so that who you are when you complete the queue is not who you were when you joined.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is it ever?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The historian Joe Moran proposes a more nuanced and mercurial construction of queueing and Britishness. ‘‘The notion of queues as the embodiment of fairness and equality has also existed alongside other discourses which have seen them as tedious, unfair, and inefficient. [...] The celebration of the orderly British queue began not in a more decorous time of courtesy and consideration in public place, but a period of national crisis.’ In the postwar years, as Labour built the welfare state, Tory quips associated long queues with drab egalitarianism, inefficiency and red tape. No one’s time could possibly be more valuable than anyone else’s. Labour were the party of the queue, Churchill once claimed, and the Conservatives, the party of the ladder. This trope would be adapted and reinforced throughout the Cold War era, to assert the inferiority of command economies and communism generally. A partly overlapping discourse associated queues with national decline. Long queues for post offices and banks during the economic turbulence of the 1970s brought back memories of wartime austerity. Satchi and Satchi’s famed ‘Britain isn’t working’ Conservative Party poster made political capital from the image of the dole queue. </span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A sense of queuemmunity. The legacy of queuelonialism.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social mobility is often figured, implicitly, as a queue. The myth runs: you are poor now, but if you wait long enough (working hard while you wait) your turn will come. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘I got mine’: as though yours always existed, was always waiting for you, just as you were waiting for it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Age is often used as a euphemism for economic class. As though all young people were poor, all elders ‘comfortable’ or ‘well off.’</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">*</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am tempted to join the big queue to see the queen. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I am in France. </span></p><div><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.68; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="display: inline-block; position: relative; width: 100px;"></span></span></p></span>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-11166954755210749332022-09-04T16:55:00.008-07:002022-09-06T18:01:45.308-07:00Banking and Money in C19th American Anarchist and Libertarian Thought<p>Just another notes / quotes post.</p><p>Josiah Warren operated a very popular and successful 'Time Store' between 1827 and 1830, with other stores set up elsewhere later. As he describes in the <i>Plan for the Cincinnati Labour for Labour Store</i>:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>All Labour is valued by the Time employed in it. Much might be said to show that, as Time is above all things most Valuable, that Time is the real and natural standard of value. But we will not now undertake to prove, that which upon reflection no one will undertake to deny. We will rather proceed to, give the arrangements which have been made to carry this principle into effect.</p><p>PRESENT ARRANGEMENT OF THE MAGAZINE.</p><p>Here upon this single and simple principle, any exchanges of articles and personal services are made, so that he who employs five or ten hours of his time, in the service of another, receives five or ten hours labour of the other in return. The estimates of the time cost, of articles having been obtained from those whose business it is to produce them, are always exposed to view, so that it may be readily ascertained, at what rate any article will be given and received. He who deposits an article which by our estimate costs ten hours labour, receives any other articles, which, together with the labour of the keeper in receiving and delivering them, costs ten hours, or if the person making the deposit does not wish at that time, to draw out any article, he receives a Labour Note for the amount; with this note he will draw out articles, or obtain the labour of the keeper, whenever he may wish to do so.</p></blockquote><p>Some snippets from Ezra Heywood's essay 'Hard Cash' in <i>Old and New</i>, which proposes 'free' money with an unlimited commodity basis. Living in an era of derivative markets, we might imagine unregulated finance as a space where exchange value and use value drift apart, where their relationships become more complex and multiple and opaque. Heywood had the opposite instinct: if unregulated, those two things would converge. The problem was government, acting in the interest of usurers, artificially preventing the full range and variety of really valuable stuff from being used to issue money ... </p><p>On money as a unit of account:</p><p></p><blockquote>You are actually much better acquainted with the mental dollar, than you are with the material dollar. If a merchant reviews his business, for a single year he will find that he uses the mental conception a million times where he employs its concrete expression once. </blockquote><blockquote>(16)</blockquote><p></p><p>Heywood comparing the production of money (and its regulation) to the production of shoes:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Enterprise and self-reliance, liberty to create values and unrestricted exchanges are the conditions of success in "other trades." Government does not say to a set of men "You shall make the shoes and all restrictions upon your monopoly, through competiton, are forbidden by sufficient penalties." Nor does it say to the people, "In order that you may be protected against fraud we have appointed these men to shoe you at their own-price; and efforts of other parties to contract with you, on more favorable terms, are hereby pronounced penal offences." [...] industry prospers in proportion as men are left to manage their own affairs.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">(20)</p></blockquote><p> For Heywood, all government regulation is bound up with usury. Zingers:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>Labor-reform asks only that the recognized principles of property and trade which are the life of business, may be applied to money. If we want "protection" we will contract for it. Abhorring favoritism we think that one privilege only should be guaranteed to usurers equally with other classes -- the beneficent privilege of earning their own living. Rich people have been subjects of charity long enough. Money covers a multitute of sins in which too many take stock.</p><p>(20)</p></blockquote><p>A production theory of value underlies his conviction that money is not inherently usurious (against the suggestion that it will not circulate unless it steals value). What does it mean for enterprise to be unrestricted? Could we imagine it differently to how Heywood does, yet guided by that idea that it is whatever set of circumstances that would allow a production theory of value to become more-or-less true?</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>If enterprise is unrestricted the price of money, as of other commodities, must ultimately be regulated by the cost of production. Usury like chattel bondage is upheld by local statute law; and, as the best way to protect slaves was to destroy mastership, so now we need only to repeal all laws which restrict the natural right of people to provide their own medium of exchange. The usurer is a legal thief whose occupation will be gone when his victims cease to furnish courts and constables to enforce his unrighteous claims.</p><p>(21)</p></blockquote><p>Heywood on money as credit-debt:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">But there is another species of property, in much greater demand, more easily portable and, if it can be obtained, always chosen in preference to coin -- negotiable debt,-- which is already the medium of exchange in 95 per cent. of the world's business. [...] If the means of payment were restricted to specie, interested parties could monopolize it, hoard it, send it broad and deprive us of currency, thus compelling working people to pay them tribute. The specie-basis scheme is an effort to lock the laboring classes of all nations into one chain-gang, and hold them perpetually obedient to the merciless scourge of usury. But, fortunately, the laws of trade rebel against these narrow-minded extortionists; for, since whatever is salable discharges debt, all property can be drawn upon as means of payment. (18)</p></blockquote><p>On the failures of wildcat banks, which fall short of entirely unregulated free money:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The genuineness of debts is assured only by the soundness of debtors, by unquestionable evidence of their ability and willingness to pay. Those who create more value than they consume are the most reliable debtors; for if one begs, or steals, or subsists on what comes of friendship or kinship he is a negative factor. The legerdemain of government currencies, the high sounding platitudes of financiers who preach the specie basis delusion create no value, and therefore lack the essential element of reliableness. It was this effort to substitute political jugglery, and speculative deception, for useful industry, which afflicted our people with what were called "wild-cat banks". In 1838 the legislature of the State of New York passed "An act to authorize the business of banking" which provided 1st., that it should be free under the provisions of a general statue; 2nd., that nine-tenths of a bank's capital ( consisting of approved bonds and stocks ) should be deposited with the State Superintendent of Banks to remain in pledge for the redemption of its notes; 3rd, that these notes should bear upon their face the nature and amount of stock pledged, together with the usual signatures. These plausable provisions ( which were proposed in 1821 by John McVickar Professor in Columbia College ) furnished important suggestions to Sir Robert Peel which were incorporated into the English Bank Act of 1844, and formed the basis of the present National Banking Law of the United States.* Prof. McVickar claimed that his methods to secure liberty and safety in banking were “not untried novelties, but already established by the experience of other trades.” It was undoubtedly one ofthe best schemes for state banking ever devised, for monopoly never took a fairer form. But that it made money free and reliable in the sense in which those words apply to “other trades” is not true. It did not honestly demand free banking, (that is liberty for individuals or associations to exercise their natural right to manufacture and issue currency on their own responsibility and at their own cost ) but, leaving all of the old statutes which prohibit free competition in the production of money in full force, it undertook to provide new conditions under which people were to be “permitted” to do what they have a natural right to do ! Precisely in this way did not the Pope permit Protestants to be free under conditions prescribed by his infallible self ? Was not George III, willing the Colonies should be governed as he thought best ? What slave is not free within the circle described by his driver’s lash ? The Act did indeed provide freedom for usurers, but subjection and extortion for their victims, the producers. Under the fair seeming pretense of protecting the people from fraud it robbed them of their natural right to protect themselves, at once arming the banks with power to enforce usury, and leaving them abundant opportunities to escape from the just obligations to redeem their notes. Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania can tell how fortunes were “made” by “wild-cat banking;” for he is reported to be one of many “friends of the people” who acquired large wealth through the stately imposition. Under the legal forms prescribed it was very easy to start a bank, issue bills and send them far away, West or South; because apparently “secured by the state” people would take them in exchange for property, thus enabling the bankers to get possession of real value when they had no intention of redeeming their false promises to pay. Defenders of the national bank monopoly now bring it as an objection, to the old state-banks, that their bills came back for redemption with inconvenient frequency, and in embarrassing quantities ! A banking system whose notes are rarely returned for payment, the issuers of which, while drawing semi-annual interest on their bonds, also receive interest constantly on their notes in circulation, thus getting a double rate of usury without ever being called upon to redeem their promises to pay, is especially “perfect” ! Who would not undertake to “protect” the people on these lucrative terms ! The epithet “wild-cat” was invented by usurers to scare their profit yielding victims into consenting to be “protected;” but the feline animal in their employ is noted for ferocity as well as irresponsibleness, and people are beginning to learn that systematic extortion, in comparison with which the instincts of savage beasts are merciful, is a kind of “protection” a little too expensive to be much longer desirable. Liberty may be perilous to victims of traditional subjection, but the “wild-cat” warnings of our usurious masters will be worth heeding when we have some evidence that their solicitude is disinterested. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">(19-20)</p></blockquote><p>Heywood on fiat money:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The scheme [of Edward Kellogg / endorsed by the National Labor Union], as now before the public, is at once a denial of liberty and of equity; for while it proposes to make usury perpetual, through political monopoly and dictation, it sees no better basis of financial values than the treacherous quicksands of "national faith."</p></blockquote><p>Next, some snippets from William Greene's <i><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-batchelder-greene-mutual-banking">Mutual Banking</a></i> (1850).</p><p>From the intro:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>The object of the mutualist bank is to advance money on sound personal guarantee on their future earning or production, even without the mortgage of property at the rate of one percent interest per annum. This amount of interest covers the whole expenditure of the establishment and leaves something to be carried forward to reserve funds. Besides, loans on low interest would give impetus to honest industry and it will also help to increase employment by creating efficient demand. It is very difficult in these days to borrow money from banks on high interest for honest and enterprising concerns; even on pawning the securities or estates and so what to talk of owners of small workshops and craftsmen, who have very little of fluid capital and hardly sufficient capital to pledge securities.</blockquote><p></p><p>Capital:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Money is disengaged capital, and disengaged capital is money.</p></blockquote><p>Labour, capital, money, happiness (and a bit more implicitly, justice):</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The community is happy and prosperous when all professions of men easily exchange with each other the products of their labor; that is, the community is happy and prosperous when money circulates freely, and each man is able with facility to transform his product into disengaged capital, for with disengaged capital, or money, men may command such of the products of labor as they desire, to the extent, at least, of the purchasing power of their money.</p></blockquote><p>Liquidity, demand, something similar to what was later called the [double] coincidence of wants:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The community is unhappy, unprosperous, miserable, when money is scarce, when exchanges are effected with difficulty. For notice, that, in the present state of the world, there is never real over-production to any appreciable extent; for, whenever the baker has too much bread, there are always laborers who could produce that of which the baker has too little, and who are themselves in want of bread. It is when the tailor and baker cannot exchange, that there is want and over-production on both sides.</p></blockquote><p>Types of money:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">But all money is not the same money. There is one money of gold, another of silver, another of brass, another of leather, and another of paper: and there is a difference in the glory of these different kinds of money. There is one money that is a commodity, having its exchangeable value determined by the law of supply and demand, which money may be called (though somewhat barbarously) merchandise-money; as for instance, gold, silver, brass, bank-bills, etc.; there is another money, which is not a commodity, whose exchangeable value is altogether independent of the law of supply and demand, and which may be called mutual money.</p></blockquote>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-78906357546745935192022-08-17T15:51:00.001-07:002022-08-22T15:52:45.229-07:00New Genre Wednesdays: Polarspunk<p> From Kim Stanley Robinson's <i>Ministry for the Future:</i></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGsI9UutTm1DESHJcWqTrPHk80BC8pQGs8Ms_tflbOgCIOmA-tAk7c5qS-aZW3KzkSoqcQ_Iwq00RO05Iq2-Lw8GfjM4NWWJVIoO5yCyplHilVeSpJoTS-1FjHh32JP7iG6EgJFy9y0yHCQ1gjbIqbP5k0ULsWT-D441-aPu5cxnF3nEEG-yFjHNDk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="756" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGsI9UutTm1DESHJcWqTrPHk80BC8pQGs8Ms_tflbOgCIOmA-tAk7c5qS-aZW3KzkSoqcQ_Iwq00RO05Iq2-Lw8GfjM4NWWJVIoO5yCyplHilVeSpJoTS-1FjHh32JP7iG6EgJFy9y0yHCQ1gjbIqbP5k0ULsWT-D441-aPu5cxnF3nEEG-yFjHNDk=w400-h290" width="400" /></a></i></div><i><br /><br /></i><p></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-52909865924761154172022-08-16T08:26:00.001-07:002022-08-16T08:26:45.947-07:00"I'll give it to you, if you want"Van Lear was a coal town in Johnson County, Kentucky in the early part of the 20th century, belonging to the Consolidation Coal Company (now Consol Energy). James Ward's family moved to Van Lear in 1925 when he was four. He later became a miner himself.<div><br /></div><div>James C. Ward interviewed by Glenna Graves, 1988, November 18. <i>Interview by G. Graves. Appalachia: Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project</i>. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. <br /><p><b>Did you hear any of the women complaining about prices at the company store? Do you think they were fair?</b></p><p>I never did hear anything said about the prices. The thing is, they just didn't hardly have any money to buy it with. They'd go to the store, and if their husband that day had loaded some cars, some coal, and they'd been weighed, then he'd have some credit in the store. They'd send that word down. They'd come in. They had what you called scrip, you know, company money. And they'd go up to the window. 'Could I get two dollars?' 'I'll let you have one dollar, maybe.'</p><p><b>Are you saying a woman would go to the store, to buy bacon for instance, or coffee. To buy coffee. They couldn't just figure on getting coffee. They'd have to check to see that very day how much --</b></p><p>See if there was any credit in the store that day.</p><p><b>That seems so ... I would hate to go to Kroger's store, and before I start shopping, ask somebody how much my husband worked that day to see if I could get two boxes of Cheerios or one box of Cheerios. </b></p><p>Well, that's what you did at the company store.</p><p><b>Day by day.</b></p><p>They'd go to the scrip office, and find out if they -- there's plenty of times they wouldn't be able to get a thing to eat. "There's no credit. He's not got any coal left." And so on. "There's no credit here." Lots of times, many times, plenty of times [inaudible] draw any money. They'd call -- what they call overdraft. They'd maybe leave owing the company something. They'd take out insurance, and what they call smithing. That's to sharpen their picks and augers, whether they need them sharpened that month or not, they'd still take the money out for it. [Inaudible]. You had to have your coal and everything, your Monabell, your shooting stuff, you bought --</p><p><b>What was that?</b></p><p>Monabell, they call it. That's what you shoot coal with. That was the old mining.</p><p><b>Like little bits of dynamite?</b></p><p>Like dynamite, same thing, except little.</p><p><b>Could you spell it? Monabell?</b></p><p>I found one of those old coins, that says 'Monabell' coins. I think I can find it for you in a few minutes. I'll get it for you. I'll give it to you, if you want. That's what you got to give to get the Monabell with. Sold you the sticks. Of course, a little later on, after I went to work, they didn't do so much of the hand loading. Some sections did, but then they were mostly starting with the machinery and mechanical loading.</p><p><b>But you're saying that half a shift's gone -- say it's noon. Half a shift's gone, and the check layman has picked a few checks off of coal cars. Say your coal car -- or say your dad's coal car. Somehow he'd report that down to the story at one o'clock, and your mom could go down there at one thirty, and she could only get the four hours worth, or the four loads of coal worth of groceries?</b></p><p>Well, whatever amount it added up to. Maybe not even get that much out of coal. Maybe those four car loads of coal -- [inaudible] might be but two or three dollars clear, maybe a couple dollars clear. You know, maybe not even that. Maybe he already owed for it, when you take out for all the different overheads, you know, you might say.</p><p><b>So a smithy overhead, even though a person's auger tools might not need it done?</b></p><p>Might not need sharpening that ...</p><p><b>Couldn't a miner sharpen his own tools anyway?</b></p><p>Yep. You still had to pay for it. They'd treat you just the same. My dad did do that. We had a blacksmith's shop, my dad sharpened his own tools.</p><p>[Recording interrupted]</p><p><b>You're saying your dad had a blacksmith's shop, and would sharpen tools for other people. Would he charge other people?</b></p><p>No, he didn't charge them. He would do a good job. In other words, he could sharpen these augers [inaudible] the coal with them. Seemed like the [mine's] blacksmiths really didn't care or wasn't very good at it. It'd be hard -- they wouldn't sharpen them with the right turn, they wouldn't cut the coal real good.</p><p><b>You mean the company one, blacksmiths?</b></p><p>Uh-huh. He'd sharpen a lot of fella's augers just as friendship. Out of friendship for them. He was good at it, he could make them good.</p><p><b>Now he's a miner, living in a town, but he has hogs on the hill and --</b></p><p>No, we had the hogs on out of the corporation now. We couldn't have them inside the corporation.</p><p><b>Oh.</b></p><p>But the corporation reached right down here, the town did. We had a cousin. My cousin lived on down there, so we could raise hogs down on his property. But we did have cattle. We had cows.</p><p><b>In the corporation land?</b></p><p>Uh-huh.</p><p><b>And the blacksmith place -- I know it wasn't a shop, it couldn't be a big shop.</b></p><p>A little room in a barn. [Inaudible] He had the tools and so forth.</p><p><b>Now that's a favor, sharpening somebody's augers and stuff. Did anybody in town do any kind of favor for him in turn?</b></p><p>Not that I ever remember. </p><p><b>But if somebody mining a lot of coal, and not well off, but maybe comfortable, would he maybe take a little money to sharpen their auger?</b></p><p>I never did know him charging any money to sharpen his auger. I never did.</p></div>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-74655315801821639802022-08-12T08:57:00.004-07:002022-08-12T11:19:39.780-07:00Science Fiction, Technology, Technoscience, Innovation: Some Quotations<p>Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface to Mary Shelley's <i>Frankenstein </i>(1818):</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">[...] the novelty of the situations which it develops, and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield [...]</p></blockquote><p>Félix Bodin, preface to <i><a href="https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Bodin_-_Le_Roman_de_l%E2%80%99avenir/Pr%C3%A9face">Novel of the Future</a> </i>(1834):</p><p></p><blockquote>Si jamais quelqu’un réussit à faire le roman, l’épopée de l’avenir, il aura puisé à une vaste source de merveilleux et d’un merveilleux tout vraisemblable, s’il se peut dire, qui enorgueillira la raison au lieu de la choquer ou de la ravaler comme l’ont fait toutes les machines à merveilleux épique, qu’il a été convenu de mettre en jeu jusqu’à présent. En offrant la perfectibilité sous la forme pittoresque, narrative et dramatique, il aura trouvé un moyen de saisir, de remuer les imaginations, et de hâter les progrès de l’humanité, bien autrement puissant que les meilleurs exposés de systèmes, fussent-ils présentés avec la plus haute éloquence. </blockquote><blockquote><i>If ever anyone succeeds in creating the novel, the epic of the future, he will have tapped a vast source of the marvelous, and of a marvelous entirely in accord with verisimilitude [...] which will dignify reason instead of shocking or deprecating it as all the marvelous epic machinery conventionally employed up to now has done. In suggesting perfectibility through a narrative and dramatic picturesque form, he will have found a method of seizing, of moving the imagination, and of hastening the progress of humanity in a manner very much more effective than the best expositions of systems presented with even the highest eloquence.</i></blockquote><p>Karl Marx, <i>The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte </i>(1852):</p><blockquote><p>The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. </p></blockquote><p>Joseph Brodsky:</p><blockquote><p>By its fullness, the future is propaganda.</p></blockquote><p>Walter Benjamin, "On Scheebart" (written 1940-ish; in <i>Selected Writings</i> 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott):</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Scheerbart's great discovery was that the stars could be used to plead the cause of creation before an audience of humans. He had already used the voices of animals to plead this cause. The fact that a poet is enlisting heavenly bodies to speak on behalf of creation bears witness to a very powerful emotion.</p></blockquote><p>Herbert Marcuse, <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Marcuse_Herbert_Studies_in_Critical_Philosophy_1973.pdf">'Karl Popper and the Problem of Historical Laws'</a> (1972):</p><p></p><blockquote>Moreover, ideas
and efforts which once were 'Utopian' have been playing an
increasingly decisive part in the conquest of nature and society,
and there is awareness of the tremendous forces which may be
released and utilized through the encouragement of 'Utopian'
thought. In the Soviet Union, science fiction writers are being
taken to task for lagging behind science in their dreams and
phantasies and they are told to 'get their imagination off the
ground' (<i>New York Times</i>, 9 July 1958). Political interest in maintaining the status quo rather than logical or scientific impossibility
today makes real possibilities appear as Utopian. </blockquote><p></p><p>Don Ihde, <i>Existential Technics</i> (1983):</p><blockquote><p>Only now interpretation of a text across past temporal distance cannot remain the only direction for contemporary hermeneutics. It must also turn to the 'possible worlds' of the future. Such an exploration in a radical sense, of the imaginative hopes and possibilities of humankind -- and particularly those becoming horizontal in technological society -- is called for as a prospect for hermeneutics. I am calling for not only interpretation across the past, but across the future, in which one concrete and necessary task is the 'science fiction' of a possible hermeneutic. In short, the projective hermeneutics is one which looks at 'texts' across possible futures, the futures made available in technological culture.</p></blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, <i>Science and Public Reason</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote>To facilitate the commercialization of biotechnology, the United States, and the
European Community and several of its member states, adopted laws and regulations to control not only laboratory research with genetically engineered organisms
but also their purposeful release into the environment. [...] Risks that once were considered speculative and wholly unmanageable [...] came to be regarded as amenable to
rational assessment in accordance with sound scientific principles. Apocalyptic
visions and the rhetoric of science fi ction yielded to the weightier discourse of
expert advice and bureaucratic practice. The research community coalesced to
persuade the public that the risks of biotechnology could be assessed in a reasonable
way and that earlier fears of ecological disaster were mostly unfounded. </blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':</p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Technological innovation often follows on the heels of science fiction, lagging authorial imagination by decades or longer.</p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Sheila Jasanoff, 'Imagined and Invented Worlds':</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Imaginaries, as we have argued throughout this volume, occupy a hybrid
zone between the mental and the material, between individual free will
and group habitus (Bourdieu 1990), between the fertility of ideas and the
fixity of things. Most importantly, however, sociotechnical imaginaries can
become integrated into the discourses and practices of governance, and
thereby structure the life worlds of larger groups, including entire nations
and even transnational communities.</p><p>[...]</p><p>Science fiction, I suggested in the introduction, is a repository of sociotechnical imaginaries, visions that integrate futures of growing knowledge and
technological mastery with normative assessments of what such futures
could and should mean for present-day societies. Utopic or dystopic, these
fictions underscore the self-evident truth that technologically enabled futures are also value-laden futures. Science fiction stories express fears and
yearnings that are rooted in current discontents, either signaling possible
escape routes or painting in morbid colors the horrific consequences of
heedlessness in the present. They thus offer a deeper look into-possibly
even predictions of-what harms societies are most desperate to avoid and
what good they may achieve through foresight and imagination [...]</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Bernard Stiegler, <i>Technics and Time III </i>(2010):</p><p></p><blockquote><p>We have been considering adoption as a process of protean interiorization by which I can affectively adopt/interiorize a cat, a child, a father,
or in a <i>moral </i>sense a maxim, <i>religiously </i>a belief, <i>technically </i>a tool, <i>socially
</i>a lifestyle, <i>politically </i>an idea of a <i>We</i>, <i>epistemologically </i>the understanding
of a rule-adopting/interiorizing here means exteriorizing: my emotional
affect, my moral behavior, my religious practices, my technical gestures,
my way of life, my convictions, my actions, the carrying out of a rule as
the concept synthesizing a diversity. </p><p>Becoming is not future, I might say with regard to the question of
adoption, which is also necessarily fabulation. This means that adoption
is not adaptation, since it is invention. An adoption without invention is
the failure <i>and </i>the enticement that engenders deception and malaise, as
reactions compensating for a flawed action. </p><p>The fact of becoming is today essentially a technological fact. In the
human domain, becoming always has something to do with the technical fact that preceded genetic origins of humankind, and that is in fact
as old as the cosmos. If it is true that becoming consists of a group of
changing states linked by cause/effect relationships, there can hardly be
any doubt that the totality of these sensory changes defined as "beings
we are ourselves" is today largely and manifestly determined by changing
technological states. If the to-come is not the future, there is no future
without the to-come, but there is a to-come without future. </p><p>The to-come without future is called the <i>mechanical</i>; the confusion of
to-come and future is called the <i>mechanism</i>. </p><p>The to-come, which is today in its broadest tendencies the fact of technology, is subsumed to technoscience as an activity conceiving, in an
ever-narrowing relationship with marketing, the evolution of technology-while submitting to the systematic dimensions of technology as
they emerge from a technical system as it becomes mnemotechnical. </p><p>This to-come is what today is not being thought, not only because
technics, as the dynamic process of individuation, is still largely ignored
(despite the work from which <i>Technics and Time</i>, I and 2 tries to draw
lessons), but because technoscience itself is not it, even while it is an instance of the effective implementation of retentional criteria. </p><p>This un-thought is not un-identified in the sense in which something
forgotten is not thought: it is largely thought and felt to be unthinkable, and this is why as such it forms the very core of the anguish of malaise,
closing perspectives to knowledge while enclosing them within the agitated know-how of a badly thought technology.
The opposition between technology and subjectivity still today inhabits the banal framework in which anguish and malaise are expressed in
the form of increasingly invasive and anguished chatter. It can only be
thought beyond, passing by Husserl and Heidegger in their difficult relationship to Kant, while coming slowly back to us through Nietzsche.
In "subjectivity," we must come to understand-beyond representation
as conceived since Descartes and beyond the banal, poor opposition to
objectivity that must be transcended-the will to which we hold beyond
this subjectivity. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>Bernard Stiegler, <i>Technics and Time III</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Technics has not found its role in the metaphysical cinema: it does not
exist, as such, in any rigorous sense; it is nothing more than a correlative
of theoretical philosophy. [...] But today it has become inconceivable not to
take actions with quite revolutionary consequences (in the sense of the
"Copernican Revolution") as a result of the fact that science, formerly
the domain of pure theoretical reason, now having become technoscience, calls out daily for "practical" outcomes (in the Kantian-that is,
moral-sense): its porosity between theory and practice is perpetually
mcreasmg. </p><p>It nonetheless remains <i>entirely unthought</i>. </p><p>Is it possible, then, to ignore the fact that technoscience is also the
means by which science becomes science fiction, i.e., becomes a cinema, a
science bursting with images, models, and simulations that have become
real-we might call them <i>chimaeras</i>--ontological lures that must also
be perceived through <i>doxa </i>as teratological and diabolical realities? This
question of the devil, of chimaeras, and of science fiction is all the more
pressing in that it is also the question-and its desired response-of the
industrialization of tertiary retentions in the culture industry's production of symbols.</p></blockquote><p>John Locke:</p><p></p><blockquote>For should the Soul of a Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Prince’s past Life,
enter and inform the Body of a Cobler, as soon as deserted by his own Soul, every one sees, he
would be the same Person with the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions: But who
would say it was the same Man?</blockquote><p></p><p>Avital Ronell, <i>The Test Drive:</i></p><blockquote><p>If Nietzsche had discovered something like the essence of a future science, it may well be the case that exposed itself to him in the way great discoveries are made, namely, when thought 'catches it in flight without really knowing what it has caught' [...] In other words, Nietzsche continually offers a model for cognition that cannot simply account for itself or maintain its results within the assumed certitudes of a controlled system of knowledge.</p></blockquote><p>Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:</p><p></p><blockquote>Cyberspace as disembodied representation rehearses themes of Oriental exoticism and Western penetration. [...] Cyberspace opens up, flowers for him -- a "fluid neon origami trick."</blockquote><p></p><p>Langdon Winner:</p><blockquote><p>But the failure of technocracy in one definition -- the definition suggested by the theory of elites -- does not mean that the power and position of technically trained persons in political life ceases to be a problem. That there is apparently little solidarity or common purpose among such persons does not in itself speak to the issues raised above about participation, representation, or limited government . It merely denies one possibly way that technology and political power might be connected. The elite conception of technocracy is, it seems to me, a good example of a case in which "a <i>picture </i>held us captive." [...] The idea here is that of a cohesive group based on the knowledge it holds rising to power and authority. in science fiction and political theory both, there is a tendency to dramatize the upward thrust, hence the titles "new brahmins," "new mandarins," "new priesthood," and "new utopians." And if one sees society in terms of strata or class levels, the strongest being on "top" and the weakest at the "bottom," then one begins to expect that those who hold new social power will move "upward" and like mountain climbers at the top of Everest be somehow visible up there [...]</p></blockquote><p>John W. Campbell, 'Non-Escape Literature,' editorial in <i>Astounding </i>(Feb 1959):</p><p></p><blockquote>It happens that science fiction's core is just about the only non-escape literature available to the general public today [...]</blockquote><p></p><p>E.M., 'Preface' to <i>The Man in the Moone </i>(1638)<i>:</i></p><blockquote><p>To the Ingenious Reader. Thou hast here an essay of Fancy, where Invention is shewed with Judgment. It was not the Author’s intention (I presume) to discourse thee into a beliefe of each particular circumstance. Tis fit thou allow him a liberty of conceite where thou takest to thy selfe a liberty of judgment. In substance thou hast here a new discovery of a new world, which perchance may finde little better entertainment in thy opinion, than that of Columbus at first, in the esteeme of all men. Yet his then but poore espiall of America, betray’d unto knowledge soe much as hath since encreast into a vast plantation. And the then unknowne, to be now of as large extent as all other the knowne world. That there should be Antipodes was once thought as great a Paradox as now that the Moon should bee habitable. But the knowledge of this may seeme more properly reserv’d for this our discovering age: In which our Galilaeusses, can by advantage of their spectacles gaze the Sunne into spots, & descry mountaines in the Moon. But this, and more in the ensuing discourse I leave to thy candid censure, & the faithful relation of the little eye-witnesse, our great discoverer.</p></blockquote><p>Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, <i>Fighting Theory</i>: </p><blockquote><p>Science, in brief, enfolds at once the scientific method, natural philosophy, and the work of poetry. It invents an ever-surprising relation to the world. Sometimes literature itself finds a new stylistic figure for which science then goes on to get a patent.</p></blockquote><p>Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, <i>Fighting Theory</i>: </p><blockquote><p>William Gibson, who writes cyber-punk novels, invented virtual reality. It's now a tool of warfare in addition to its other qualities and uses, but this invention first appeared in science fiction. Although this may seem bizarre and very 'American' to the French, we have to recognize that science fiction has been the site of considerable inventions; the fiction, literature, cinema,, and poetry of the scientific method are imagined before our eyes, as in the film classics The Matrix or Total Recall, where mutants appear and stake out their territories. Science, for the most part, now goes it alone, often subordinated to the destructive needs of war, of institutionalized hostilities. Nietzsche reminds us that science was connected, in the beginning, to astrologers, sorcerers, and music, and so science, when it still belonged to the realm of the imaginary, made promises, and it promised too much. In astrology there is an excess of promise, a hypercomprehension that always surpasses the knowledge base from which it stems.</p></blockquote><p>Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, <i>Fighting Theory</i>: </p><blockquote><p>When science was not yet working for corporations, governments, states, it knew how to inflate the rhetoric of promise, and this was very important for our Dasein, according to Nietzsche -- he doesn't yet say Dasein, but he's almost there. </p></blockquote><p>Hannah Arendt, 'The Archimedean Point':</p><p></p><blockquote>Moreover, the enormous technological consequences which finally gave testimony to the immense power increase of men in the modern age were predicted by no one, neither by the scientists themselves -- who even today, I am told -- still have an inclination to look down upon engineers as mere plumbers -- nor by the historians. (The only predictions came from people like Jules Verne, that is, the predecessors of science fiction.) But, if anyone else should have predicted them, or should have foreseen them, is it not likely that he would have concluded that the increase in human power would be accompanied by an increase in the stature and the pride of man? This, however, has not been the case.</blockquote><p></p><p>Paul Virilio:</p><blockquote><p>As we knew already, speed is the old age of the World.</p></blockquote><p>The Mountain Goats:</p><blockquote><p>New dreams for the Rat Queen!</p></blockquote><p>The Mountain Goats: </p><blockquote><p>I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow [...]</p></blockquote><p>Yuk Hui, <i>Recursivity and Contingency:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">[...] in the spirit of eschatology one may ask: Is this completion of humanity a revelation or a catastrophic becoming? We are asking this question, as most of the sci-fi movies do, since we are living in an epoch of technological uncertainty and instability. Cybernetics, the accomplishment of metaphysics, is the force unifying 'humanity' through globalization and neocolonization. In other words, we can use the vocabulary of Gestalt fpsychology in claiming that technology becomes the ground instead of the figure. The noosphere becomes the most dominating sphere on earth, overriding the biosphere. [...] Any future philosophy that ignores the question of system is fundamentally deficient.</p></blockquote><p>Hans Jonas, <i>The Imperative of Responsibility</i> (1985):</p><p></p><blockquote>[...] there mere knowledge of possibilities, though certainly insufficient for cogent prediction, is fully adequate for the purposes of a heuristic casuistry that is to help in the spotting of ethical principles [...] [In a thought experiment, the perceived possibility] can now take the place of the actual occasion; and reflection on the possible, fully unfolded in the imagination, gives access to new moral truth. But this truth belongs to the sphere of ideas, that is, it is just as much a matter of philosophical knowledge as is the truth of that grounding first principle we have yet to supply. Accordingly, its certainty is not dependent upon the degree of certainty of the factual, scientific projections which provided paradigmatic material for it. Whatever the ultimate accreditation for this kind of truth -- be it the self-evidence of reason, an a priori of faith, or a metaphysical decision of the will -- its pronouncements are apodictic, whereas those of the hypothetical thought experiments can at best be probabilistic. This is enough where they are meant to serve not as proofs but as illustrations. What is here contemplated, therefore, is a casuistry of the imagination which, unlike the customary casuistries of law and morality that serve the trying out of principles already known, assists in the tracking and discovering of principles still unknown. The serious side of science fiction lies precisely in its performing such well-informed thought experiments, whose vivid imaginary results may assume the heuristic function here proposed. </blockquote><p>Ella Parker, Compact #1, March 1963:</p><p></p><blockquote>After much thought I decided to come out into the open and approach the
Housing Manager, what an imposing title that is. I went into some detail about
what I’d been told by one of his men, and please, is it true? I really piled on the agony. I found it an absorbing hobby, which I do, but I neglected to tell
him of the life of ease I oould enjoy if he really did forbid me to continue
publishing, he wrote back, asking what kind of equipment I had; he assumed I
used the usual type home printing apparatus, and, please, could he have a copy of my magazine to show at a council meeting when they discussed my case? I did
some soul searching, I can tell you. I toyed with the idea of letting him assume
what he liked, in case he should disapprove of what I was actually using and
with-hold his permission, but, clear thinking won the day. If I lied, and later
there were complaints about the noise, they could, and would be justified, in
chucking us out of the flat. I didn’t want this to happen, as those of you who
have visited the old. Pen will understand. I told him the truth, that I have an
electric Gestetner, I also sent him a copy of ORION #28. I heard nothing more for months.</blockquote><p>Bishop John Wilkins: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">And here, one that had a strong fancy, were better able to set forth the great benefit and pleasure to be had by such a journey. And that whether you consider the strangeness of the persons, language, arts, policy, religion of those inhabitants, together with the new traffique that might be brought thence. In briefe, doe but consider the pleasure and profit, of those later discoveries in America, and wee must needs conclude this to be inconceiveably beyond it. </p></blockquote><p>David Russen:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">But the Title that the Translator gives it (when he calls it a Comical History) seems to be too full of Levity, and unbecoming that Gravity which a Treatise of so serious matter doth require. For though it be interlaced with much Matter of Mirth, Wit and Invention, of things even doubtful, or meerly feigned, and so in some sense may be ranked with Sir Thomas Moor’s <i>Utopia</i>, Don Quixot’s <i>Romantick Whymseys</i>, or <i>Poor Robin’s Description of Lubbardland</i>; yet it is throughout carried on with that strength of Argument, force of Reason, and solidity of Judgment in the Demonstration of things probable, that it may not be unbecoming the Gravity of Cato, the Seriousness of Seneca, or the Strictness of the most rigid Peripatetick or Cartesian; and instead of Comical, may deserve the Epithete of the most <i>Rational History of the Government of the Moon</i>.</p></blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>Belying the label "science fiction," however, works in this genre are also fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic. Shelley's lab-generated monster turns murderous because he is excluded from society by his abnormal birth and hence is denied the blessings of companionship and social life enjoyed by his creator. Jules Verne's Nemo, a dispossessed Indian prince driven by hatred of the British colonialists who exploited his land and destroyed his family, seeks freedom and scientific enlightenment in the ocean depths. Biopower runs amok in Aldous Huxley's imagined world, overwhelming human dignity and autonomy in the name of collective needs under authoritarian rule. Equally concerned with the interplay of social and material innovation, but reversing the emotional gears, Edward Bellamy's look backward from an imagined 2000 offers, first, an optimistic account of a new social order and only secondarily a foray into technological unknowns. And as a dystopic counterpoint, George Orwell's (1949)<span> </span><i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i><span> </span>presents a world of totalitarian thought control overseen by a technologically advanced, all-seeing, all-knowing, 24/7 surveillance state-whose real-life counterpart Edward Snowden, the whistleblowing, twenty-first-century American contractor, famously revealed in the US National Security Agency. Oddly, though, many nonfictional accounts of how technology develops still treat the material apart from the social, as if the design of tools and machines, cars and computers, pharmaceutical drugs and nuclear weapons were not in constant interplay with the social arrangements that inspire and sustain their production.</blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':</p><p></p><blockquote>Bringing social thickness and complexity back into the appreciation of
technological systems has been a central aim of the field of science and
technology studies (STS). Historians and social analysts of technology have
worked in tandem to remind us that there can be no machines without
humans to make them and powerful institutions to decide which technologies are worth our investment (Winner 1986). This literature resists the
temptation to construe technology as deterministic. STS scholars tend to
bristle at the evolutionary economist's language of strict path dependence
(David 1985; Arthur 1994). STS accounts recognize that history matters, as
indeed it must, but reject the notion of rigid lock-ins in favor of a more open
sense of agency and contingency in society's charting of technological possibilities. Many aspects of the presenting face of technological systems are
socially constructed (Bijker et al. 1987). The stamp of conscious or unconscious human choice and user preference marks the design of objects, their
weighting of risks and benefits, and the behaviors they encourage, exclude,
or seek to regulate (Calion 1987; Jasanoff 2006).
Less frequently encountered in the STS literature, however, are conceptual
frameworks that situate technologies within the integrated material, moral,
and social landscapes that science fiction offers up in such abundance. To
be sure, the normative dimensions of science and technology do not fall
wholly outside the scope of STS analysis. STS scholarship acknowledges that
science and technology do not unidirectionally shape our values and norms.
Rather, and symmetrically, our sense of how we ought to organize and govern ourselves profoundly influences what we make of nature, society, and
the "real world."</blockquote><p></p><p>Sheila Jasanoff, 'Restoring reason: Causal narratives and political culture'</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The tragic open-endedness of the Bhopal case so many years later speaks to
features of public knowledge making in India that we will return to later in this
chapter. For now, let us flag chiefly the lack of anything approaching a defi nitive
epistemological resolution: a time and place when all the major participants came
together to agree on a common understanding of what had actually happened and
what should be done on the basis of that shared knowledge. In the absence of such
a moment of truth, multiple narratives of responsibility and blame continue to
fl ourish in Bhopal, on the look-out for new external audiences or events to legitimate them. Yet this very lack of resolution can be seen as a form of learning – not
the kind that necessarily leads to regulatory change or institutional reform, though
both did happen in the disaster’s wake (Jasanoff 1994), but rather the kind that,
through its very incompleteness, reveals the impossibility of taming a cataclysmic
event through necessarily imperfect managerial solutions. The open-endedness of
learning at Bhopal offers in this sense its own redemption, by negating the possibility of forgetfulness.</p><p>[...]</p><p>Learning from disaster emerges out of these stories as a complex, ambiguous
process – conditioned by culture, yet not easily forced into univocal, totalizing,
national narratives. It is in the raggedness of accounting for tragic experience that the
possibility of cultural reinvention ultimately resides.</p></blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, <i>Designs on Nature:</i></p><p></p><blockquote>In the environmental arena, both fact and fiction lent credence to worries about human error and lack of foresight.</blockquote><p>Sheila Jasanoff, <i>Designs on Nature:</i></p><p></p><blockquote>If Frankenstein played on primal fears of supplanting divine order with
man’s imperfect understanding, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World broached
themes more suited to the midcentury’s secular, totalitarian experiments.
This was a world of graded, standardized, and denatured human beings, manufactured like the orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasies to meet the needs of
an all-powerful state. Turned into instruments of others’ interest, people were
deprived of uniqueness, autonomy, and free will. Yet the eugenic ideas that
found nightmarish expression in Huxley’s novel were enthusiastically
embraced by Western progressives and intellectuals in the early twentieth
century. Just five years before the publication of <i>Brave New World</i>, Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a giant of American jurisprudence,
wrote in Buck v. Bell: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to
execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing
their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad
enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles
are enough.” [...] Eugenic theories motivated the U.S. Immigration Restriction
Act of 1924, which discriminated against Jews and people of southern
Mediterranean origin. Not until the excesses of Nazi eugenics, culminating in
the Holocaust, were these ideas substantially discredited as a basis for
policy. [...] Indeed, in socialist Sweden, a forty-year program of forced sterilization based on eugenic principles ended only in 1976. Meanwhile, seemingly
untouched by the Nazi experience, U.S. biomedical researchers’ desire for
knowledge ran ahead of ethical concerns for the protection of human subjects right into the 1960s.</blockquote><p>Paul Feyerabend, <i>Putnam on Incommensurability:</i></p><p></p><blockquote>English does not cease to be English when new words are introduced or old words given a new sense. Every philologist, anthropologist, sociologist who presents an archaic (primitive, exotic, etc.) world view, every popular science writer who wants to explain unusual scientific ideas in ordinary English, every surrealist, dadaist, teller of fairy tales, ghost stories, science fiction novels, every translator of the poetry of different ages and nations knows how first to construct, out of English words, an English sounding model of the pattern of usage he needs and then to adopt the pattern and to 'speak' it. [...] I should add that incommensurability is a difficulty for philosophers, not for scientists. Philosophers insist on stability of meaning throughout an argument while scientists, being aware that 'speaking a language or explaining a situation means both following rules and changing them' [...] are experts in the art of arguing across lines some philosophers regard as insuperable boundaries of discourse. </blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-40864742632284876672022-08-04T07:42:00.005-07:002022-08-04T08:07:12.364-07:00Stretchers #19: I Can I Did CandidThis is a piece I wrote for <em><a href="http://www.craterpress.co.uk/">Hilson Hilson: The Poetry of Jeff Hilson</a> </em>(Crater, 2020), edited by Richard Parker. It is mostly about a poem in Jeff's book <em>Stretchers</em> (Reality Street, 2006), and also a bit about <i>Latanoprost Variations</i> (Boiler House, 2017).<div>
<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid</b>
<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">“As a poet, I knew to be gentle.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’
<br />“Show the ferret to the egg.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">I.</div><div>
<br />Imagine we’re off swimming in the river or, even better, <em>down by the creek</em>.</div><div>
<br />Now imagine today everybody wants to be a good egg, with <em>infinite</em> wanting. So if you shout, “Last one in’s a good egg!” exactly zero of us get in. We sort of start Zeno’s paradoxing into our Speedos etc. One wants the others to enter the water earlier than oneself so that, <em>heh heh heh</em>, one can be that egg.</div><div>
<br />So in this way “Last one in’s a good egg!” could be a good example of perverse incentive design. Or it might just be deceptive incentive design: it strongly seems to be trying to do something, and that very seeming is what makes it do something else.</div><div>
<br />But then, at the other extreme, imagine the more familiar scenario, a day of broad consensus that being a rotten egg is as bad as it gets. On such a day, a single yell of “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” and in we all splash, not so much as stopping to take off our socks and shoes. So that’s good, transparent incentive design, even if the results are again quite homogenous across the group. More about our socks and shoes in a moment. What we see in both examples is the power of naming, or more specifically the power of labelling within a hierarchy, to steer action and shape subjectivity. As the poet Timothy Thornton writes:<br /><blockquote>eggs haribo
<br />eggs boxset
<br />eggs poirot
<br />eggs amagansett
<br />
<br />eggs powerful
<br />eggs underfunded
<br />eggs sporcle
<br />eggs countermanded </blockquote><blockquote>(Facebook post, 15 April 2020)</blockquote><p>It’s probably this power of naming that tempts poets to cultivate wriggly, creaturely poems that seem to perhaps articulate forms of social organisation different to those the poets have experienced and, in some sense, different to those they can imagine. What if instead of (say) laws or economies or bureaucracies, we had sonnets or stretchers?</p>The thing is, between these idealised extremes of infinite appetite and infinite aversion, there stretches a vast possibility space of diverse leaderboards (and leaderlessboards) where diverse armoured and storied embryos vye to define us, shape us, steer us, and bring us together while also keeping us apart. “Third one in’s an eggs toxteth,” etc. “Penultimate one in’s an eggs liar’s paradox,” etc. I think most of these floating ascriptions have a quality that first two earlier examples don’t have. These ones filter and sort. In a very basic model, they filter according to a pre-existing distribution of desire and aversion, merely revealed in our response to the yell. We discover in what proportions each of us wishes to be or to not be which egg. In a more nuanced model, albeit with the energy of neoclassical economics, these ascriptions filter <em>first</em> on that basis, and <em>then</em> on the basis of revised desire and aversion reflecting the various skinny-dippers’ updated theories about one another’s mental states and intentions, and then again, and then again, and so on, probably accommodating ‘strategic’ action, and probably converging on various Splash equilibria. I’m not sure yet, but I think you could probably rig a Turing machine out of skinny-dippers moving to and fro hesitantly, craftily, hungrily, imploringly at the edge of the limpid plunge-pool in strategic search of their preferred egg statuses, implying that with enough time and energy you could <em>run an entire universe filled with conscious life</em> by shouting <em>just </em>the right set of egg opportunities, say, “4th one in is a rotten egg, 3rd one in is a good egg, 6.022×1023th one in is an egg amagansett!” etc. to <em>just</em> the right gang, <em>just</em> the right that one summer that seemed to last forever. Eggs nihilo: something comes from nothing when it is <em>egged on</em>. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch though.
<br />
<br />Jaden: “I don't got the time to put you on the stretcher (<em>stretcher</em>) I am here and I'm still flexing (<em>flexing</em>).”
<br />
<br />Another way of labelling the same topic is the governance of the commons. The diversification and spread of digital social architectures in the 2000s and 2010s has probably both enriched but also colonised the social imaginary of the governance of the commons -- the recipes Marx scorned to write because, as he perpetually pointed out, he didn’t yet even know about microwave ovens or for example activated charcoal -- or at least it has colonised the more abstract, ethereal regions of that imaginary. In the simplest version, you just add “social” or “networked” or “crowd” to some older aspiration. Let’s simply crowdseize the means of production, etc. Crowdone in’s a crowdegg. Uber, Twitter, and all the virtual valorisation machines of the internet are still very much capital, capital more human than ever in its capacity to absorb and co-ordinate human and more-than-human investments of affect and cognition, in its capacity to twist a buncha-jewels-inna-bucket like it’s a kaleidoscope of crystalline personality godhead, or in other words, its capacity to make Wogan economies out of Wonga economies. The evolving interest in virality and permutability of several of Jeff Hilson’s <em>Latanoprost Variations </em>(Boiler House 2017) is inflected by the voice of specifically digital algorithmic curation and suggestion. So the recommendation “You might like” becomes “You might liken” or “You might not liken,” spreading across the page like the proliferation and crumbling of fungi and algae / cyanobacteria symbiotic composite organisms, like <em>likens</em>. Similarly, ‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ is a witchy eco-poem, a little redolent of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations,’ and an extended meditation on Google’s “did you mean to search for.” That said, I don’t really think it is<em> Google’s </em>“did you mean to search for”: it’s a broader exploration of the concept of being asked if you meant to want what you did not quite manage to want. Part of what is exciting about these poems is that they often manage to not be about the internet at all.
<br /><blockquote>… & on the twenty sixth day I was up with the lark to root out the scottish dock I didnt find it instead I found a red star thistle I rubbed myself with which withered me to a stalk & on the twenty seventh day ...</blockquote><blockquote>‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ </blockquote>I was searching for an egg and “I didnt find it.” There isn’t actually an egg in <em>Stretchers</em> poem number nineteen, ‘... smile your in candid trench,’ but there <em>is</em> an <em>eggs conspicuously missing</em>. The line in ‘... smile your in candid trench’ is “the last one in is a thistle.” One of the ways that <em>Stretchers </em>often feels sort of curiously generous and inclusive is that even when it leaves things out, it keeps them in. The ‘correct’ versions of the idioms, proverbs, collocations, scraps of nursery rhyme etc. faintly accompany their morphed and mutated versions. These unspoken words can be sinister presences too. The egg is missing, and so is the shell: “I’ve some blonde / bombs” implies the word “bombshell” and puts into interplay the objectification of femme bodies with the objectification of the enemy, the target to be neutralised. And the poem begins “smile your in candid trench”: it begins, in other words, not only with a warzone, but with a hidden “camera.” The candid trench could well be the stretcher itself. And of course a <em>camera</em> and a <em>stanza</em> share the etymological metaphor of being a <em>room</em>, perhaps a room stretched to capacity.
<br />
<br />This failure-to-appear also appears in later writing. The Incredible String Band are a British psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. In <em>Latanoprost Variations</em>, what is missing from the title of ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is ‘String Band.’ It is obviously a poem about how music can, like a room, bring people together. Music brings people together, for example, in the sort of somatic or subter-songfulness of language and of all semantic interaction; in dancing; in a kind of affective commoning where we mosh and/or emosh together in tandem; in dismissive, gatekeeping interactions like “Oh, you say love your daughter? Name her first four albums”; and in Spotify’s recommendations and the broader patterns of digital persuasion architecture and surveillance capitalism in which they participate. It is a poem, in other words, like a lot of Jeff Hilson’s poems, interested in how societies (or assemblages or networks or bands of individuals or dividuals) are put together or how they might be put together. If we read it as a utopian poem, then the “incredible strings” become the amazing and currently slightly implausible linkages that bind together utopian society. String Theory helps these implied ligatures to feel vaguely angelic and ectoplasmic. But these incredible strings are <em>not there</em>, they are only implied, they do not make us a band, we did not form a band. “I didnt find it.”
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<br />Instead, there is the word ‘Canterbury’: maybe recalling the Knight, Squire, Franklin, Summoner, Pardoner, Manciple, Canon et al. of Chaucer’s <em>Canterbury Tales</em>, while the invisibility of ‘String Band’ also allows an implied ‘Shrinking Man’ to scuttle in or ‘Hulk’ to smash in, along with the superhero genre generally, and its often flamboyant celebration of well-divided labour: cf. e.g. Marvel’s Eggs-Men, this one scrambles brainwaves, this one fries you alive, etc. In this poem the gesture toward an estranged or detourned or evolved or utopian together-yet-apartness is (I think) quite a broad gestural sweep. Think of buying a song as a 1 and not buying a song as a 0. Given enough time and energy, and an immortal listener, I think you could <em>run an entire universe filled with conscious</em> life on a Spotify playlist equipped with just the right recommendations algorithm.<br /><blockquote>if you liken the incredible string band try hatfield and the north you listened to aphex twins heres an album you might not liken you listened to supertramp and kate bush you might not liken this song you listened to swell maps this week liken to try the wilde flowers?
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<br />(‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’)</blockquote>Egging your MP is like detonating a small material symbol of a bomb. It activates associations of assassination. It also activates associations of what Chantal Mouffe, back in the days of high third way neoliberalism, quite reasonably theorised as agonistic democracy, politics as a real fight with real stakes but with the violence magicked away. But whether you’re shouting “Fuck you, here, the egg” or “Seventh one in is an eggs candid” or “Third one in is an eggs floaters,” or whether you are shouting, “The first tranche of pool-divers are gold eggs, the second are silver eggs, and the third are bronze eggs,” the cultural form of the hierarchy will never be a neutral frame, but always an active agent. In other words, earlier on I had to clarify that in our made-up scenario, everybody actually <em>wanted</em> to be a good egg. That’s because if you just shouted, “Last one in’s a good egg!” where norms of individualist striving prevail, the meaning of “last one” would overwhelm the meaning of “good egg,” and everyone would assume <em>eggs good</em> were the new <em>eggs anathema</em>. Nice eggs finish last. </div><div><br /></div><div>And on the other hand, if you just<em> </em>shouted “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” where norms of solidarity prevail, the meaning of “last one” would probably overwhelm the meaning of “rotten egg,” with everyone assuming <em>eggs rotten</em> were the new <em>eggs non-contributory assistance</em>. And again, it’s in the middle territory stretching between these two idealisations where the precise force of the hierarchy (or leaderboard, procession, parade, queue, <em>race</em>, or something else) is various and probably unpredictable. It is somewhere in that vast stretch where you get the weird forms of commons governance suitable to the leavings of advanced industrial colonial capitalism, the weird forms of equity that are not just inert negations of hierarchy, which are not just “horizontal organization” that are really the same old vertical hierarchies lying on stretchers. Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and stuff like that.</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">II. </div>
<br />When you say someone is a ‘terrible liar,’ it can be a sort of autoantonym, meaning two distinct somewhat opposite things. The worst liars are often the best liars. There is an essay at the back of <em>Stretchers </em>(Reality Street 2006), “Why I Wrote <em>Stretchers</em>,” that talks about that title <em>Stretchers</em>. The preoccupation with virality and the fractal is here too. “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.” But do they really tell stories? Or is this a lie? Are some of them just nonsense? A stretcher is where you lie when you are hurt. It’s that old paradox: how far can you trust a liar sharing their lying practice?
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<br />Maybe what is less well acknowledged is how leaky and spready that Liar’s Paradox is. <em>Everything</em> that is said about lying is a bit suspect, because whoever is saying it is thinking about lying. And is there a kind of listening, adjacent to misinterpretation, that can also generate lies? If so then everything that is said about lying is doubly suspect, because whoever is <em>listening</em> is thinking about lying. Stretching and lying strongly imply yoga. Also, utopia: the thing the genre (if that’s what it is) has been stuck on since More’s <em>Utopia</em> is the enclave form. Who’s the last one in before the gate slams? Who is outside? The ones who walk away, the ones who were not born in time, the ones who would tear it to shreds, etc.? The sleeper woken, the time traveller? What makes any utopia better than a billionaire’s gated climate fastness? Is utopia constitutively stretched, always managing to include more than it reasonably should? The title of <em>Stretchers </em>comes from Mark Twain’s <em>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</em>:<br /><blockquote>YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of <em>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</em>; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.</blockquote>A bit of a stretch. Entertaining ideas just over the edge of feasibility. Allowing things to work that shouldn’t or don’t really. Epistemologically, there may be an “OK just this once” aspect to anything that is a bit of a stretch: let it slide, but don’t update your deeper convictions on the basis of what just slid by. <em>Don’t</em> learn from it. When you stretch a piece of fabric, sometimes you control its translucency. If there are words or imagery printed on it, they may mingle with the imagery of the world below. Stretching an image can also reveal an infrastructure of threads, a sort of secret lattice or honeycomb shape bound together with the shape of the ink.
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<br />There is an experiment you can do where you hold your fingers in front of your face, and then keeping your gaze fixed forward, gradually draw your fingers apart. Eventually you’ll come to a point where your fingers are in the ‘shadows’ and you’re not sure if you can see them or not. Or, you can see them, but what you can see isn’t the sort of phenomenon that stereotypically characterises the constituents of vision. Or they are neither “in” or “out” of the enclave of your visual field. Bataille writes in <em>The Story of the Egg</em>, “She played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.” In Dublin in 2008, a woman named Ann Dooley was blinded in one eye by an egg thrown by eighteen-year-old David Morgan. Before I got glasses, in order to bring distant objects into focus, I used to curl up my forefinger and look through the pinprick ‘lens,’ or more often just manually distort my eyeballs with my fingers. It was fine, we’ve all been brainwashed by Big Optometry. And when an eyeball is stretched wrong, the visual field degrades. There is an essay at the back of <em>Latanoprost Variations</em>, “On ‘Latanoprost Variations<em>.</em>’” Latanoprost is topical eye drop used to treat open-angle glaucoma. Glaucoma is becoming besieged by ‘shadows.’ They bunch around the periphery of your visual field and march inward. Latanoprost relieves pressure. “Latanoprost” was printed on a pen found by the poet under a bed. Something astonishing I’ve noticed is that darkness is literally not black. When I shut my eyes in the sun, of course I see a sort of taupe orange. But even in the middle of the night, I don’t think what fills my visual field can be described as blackness. It’s a flock of colour or colour-like qualia, and there <em>is</em> black, I think, but there is also at least as much silver and grey. We live in a world where darkness is literally not black.
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<br />Does ‘... smile your in candid trench’ tell a story that contains many other stories? It might be a time travel story. I am writing in 2020. A day ago Matt Hancock tweeted: “Thanks to the nation’s resolve, horseracing is back from Monday. Wonderful news for our wonderful sport.” A bit of a stretch. There are also questions of elasticity: that is, whether these poems unpinned from the page would snap back into another shape. If something has been stretched, energy was involved in deformation, and that energy may be stored in a specific pattern suitable to a specific agency. Winding a clock is just one familiar example. Anything can be interpreted in this way.
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<br />Sometimes stretching the truth can be boasting. Is poetry a kind of boasting? British people supposedly don’t like boasting. Walt Whitman contained multitudes: did ye aye? Then again, where’s the counterexample? Which people <em>really</em> say: “We love boasting, come round to ours and boast? Big boasters us.” The USA? Cape Verde, Egypt, Ghana, Iran, Mozambique? I kind of don’t think any do. If <em>Stretchers</em> are boasts, they are <em>mostly</em> very gentle and self-effacing boasts. More like the kind of naturally occurring boast when someone is very tired or drunk or high or just forgetful and they keep repeating themselves, and the repetition is actually a kind of odd (almost extra-linguistic) cognitive sharing, a kind of telepathy, insofar as it gives you a special kind of peek deep into their skull, behind many of the usually intervening layers of potential guile. Or like a toddler who runs into a room and shouts something strange. Or like when someone keeps repeating themselves. If a boast is a way of valuing yourself too highly, what is its ethical status within a system where value is systematically misascribed?
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<br />If it tells a story, it might be a time travel story, partly because I am writing about it after almost twenty years. Partly because it raises the possibility of disordered or reordered time with <em>hysteron proteron</em>, the rhetorical trope where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, as in “I put on my shoes and socks” or “I took off my socks and shoes.” How can the time traveler who visited utopia in a temporally disordered fashion avoid accusations of boastfulness upon their return? How can utopia be communicated through the particularity of any less-than-universal subjectivity? The rich man is the eye of the needle, and entry into heaven is as tricky as threading the needle through itself. And / or if everyone has to see for themselves, is the utopian economy heavily reliant on tourism? How’s the beach ecosystem? And / or, is it a poem about the kinds of things that can only ever be true retrospectively, that can never be true at the time? The poem is queer-gently gender-jiggling: “your it ling-boy who / fingered his walnut for sunny / delight.” In the game of tag, when you’re “it” you chase everybody. <em>They fle from me that sometyme did, they fle from me that sometyme will me seke</em>. When you are “it,” everyone who is “them,” who are they, he, she, etc., flee from you. Maybe you are the last one in before there is a first one in. Maybe you are the expletive subject, the “it” of “it’s raining.” If reality absolutely consistently fled shrieking from a vacuum, would it be indistinguishable from its flowing shrieking into that vacuum to fill it? Last one in is <em>named</em>, last one in is “it,” last one in doesn’t really exist. When a game of tag ends, and you were the last it, you feel weird about that.
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<br />The confessions of ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might unfold in a kind of peri-urban <em>locus amoenus</em> where eggs shy leap forward and lazily windmill arms and legs over Edenic plunge-pool-cum-thirst traps, clothing tugged funny, or else folded behind them on the rocks like gossamer idling on the wanton summer air and watched over by eggs brave. And / or ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might be a kind of pubescent sexual boast. This is one of the stretchers that first<em> </em>appeared in a chapbook in the early Naughties, the era of teen sex comedy box office dominance: <em>There’s Something About Mary </em>came out in 1998, and the second <em>Stretchers</em> chapbook itself fills the gap between <em>American Pie 2 </em>(2001) and <em>American Wedding </em>(2003). The American Pie franchise (continuing in 2020 with <em>Girls Rules</em>) springs from a virginity-losing pact of the hetero penetrative phallocentric kind: it’s a movie about “the last one in.”<em> </em>They are also movies about reasonable expectations of privacy being constantly confounded, about bodies brought shamefully into the light in ways that are somehow worse than anything the inspected figure could have possibly predicted, and yet not so bad. About becoming it, and it being fine.
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<br />The poem seems to end with a kind of biiig gesture toward polysemy, really a bit of a breakdown of meaning through multiplication of meaning. It is a candle burning at one fuse. Vowel variants are letters or pairs of letters that can make the same sound, and we’re told elsewhere that all mis-spellings in these poems are intentional. So here there’s a possibility here that every word is actually pronounced like a different word. Maybe “peel” is pronounced “pale,” and so on:<br /><blockquote>… vowel
<br />& variants all frail peel them
<br />like each other with our pen-
<br />tricks move along or you
<br />will lose it with that zee …</blockquote>“[S]o shoot me” -- that’s what you say when you’ve done something bad, but not as bad as your interlocutor is making out. And/or to downplay something really bad you’ve done. The play on a photo shoot is elaborated throughout the poem: on the one hand, violence as epistemologically generative, producing knowledge and/or things to be known, and on the other hand, observation and image-making as violent processes. The trench of “smile your in candid trench,” especially so close to “some blonde / bombs” and “every good girl deserve,” could be read as public space transformed into a theatre of war by misogynist gaze, expectation, and imperative (“smile”). <em>In camera</em>: what a strange way to say in private. Later, “hop hop has lost his lean his / wife could eat no floaters” is a reference to an old rhyme about a gendered division of labour (and / or dietary requirements: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean, / But, together both, they licked the platter clean”), altered to remove his name as well as hers, and perhaps to include suggestions of ‘hopping to it,’ of the collapse of individualist “lean-in” feminism, and of an inability to flash the shit-eating grins, or to let daily microaggressions be water off a duck’s back, left behind in the workplace when you go home for the night (“splashing off / sallys night feathers”). “Sally” is one of those names that feels plucked from folklore. It suggests a little attack, of course: so “sallys” is again one of those femme military puns. But it’s also again about mutualistic swarming behaviours -- ways of being together -- and about the division of roles within collectives, insofar as mixed-species flocks often divide into sallying species and gleaning species.
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<br />Rivers, roads, trenches, are said to <em>stretch</em>, which is strange because they don’t. Could it be a kind of weird metonymy, insofar as what stretches is the person who goes from one end to the other? Stretches their legs, maybe, but stretches their self, definitely, the elastic distortion of the self at the origin to the self at the end. The poem’s interest in things being out of order could be understood as a provocation about lived experience, about how the legitimacy of any voice of lived experience, whether it is the self speaking to the self or the self speaking to others, is stretched and transformed by temporal distances from the experiences of which it speaks. XYZ. The “zee” is, within British English, the less likely, the less canonical, the surprise ending.
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<br />“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” you might shout, and then it’s you. One thing about “last one in is a” as a model of surveillance is that you’re not confident that anybody <em>will</em> actually be watching who the last one in is. Everybody will be in mid-air with arms and legs windmilling. “[L]ast one in is a” has the aura of the last evaluation before the revaluation of values, or the apocalypse. Not the Final Judgment, more like the opposite: the judgment that is made when it is too late for it to trigger any process. The very last time somebody pays for something with money. A moment later, through the membrane, they receive their purchase as a gift. The need to “move along” or you will “lose it with that zee” raises the idea of staying put too long, and getting cross, giving up on that surprise ending.
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<br />Is there such a thing as the ‘baseline avant-garde’? That statistically inevitable presence in <em>whatever</em> you are doing or experiencing of traces of things that will by sheer chance be more widespread and/or significant in the future. Maybe poets cling to that sheer surface or hammer things into it. What if these poems, lurking in the heart of a Liar’s Paradox, haven’t been stretched at all? What if they’ve been <em>hammered dense</em>? Just like “your” could be the final state that “you’re” approaches, after only half the hammer blows. The blurring of the possessive “your” with the contracted pronoun and copula “you’re” suggests reification, becoming blurred with the things that you own, or alienation, being unable to be identical with the things that you are. The hammering-dense can be seen in the tendency for the end of one phrase to flow into the start of the next: “that time at that time,” which untangles to “that time at” (a stroll down memory lane) and “at that time” (some historical context). Nostalgia has an affinity with fascism -- golden ages, decline and degeneration, purifying fire -- but when society grows more fascist than it was, there’s got to be such a thing as antifa nostalgia too. Which is like saying they don’t make they don’t make nostalgia like they used to like they used to.
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<br />Is there such a thing as a ‘degenerative avant-garde,’ associated with the collapse of possibility and the closing down of potential? As political possibilities fall, as the eye, or whatever it is, stretches, as the ‘shadows’ march in from the edges, different sets of objects begin to welter and flicker and give up secrets. I’m not necessarily saying this is happening now, any of it. And I’m not really talking about immiseration. I don’t think I’m talking about disaster communism either, or building things back better for all. I’m talking about something probably a bit more trivial, about quite good things becoming estranged through their wrecks and ruins, and for a moment conveying visions of even better things. By seeing x decay into not-x, we might discover the why and zee. Of course, on one level, e.g. Johnson might make May ‘look good in comparison,’ May might make us ‘miss David Cameron,’ algorithmically governed fake news ecosystems might tempt us to ‘long’ for earlier more analogue phases of media ideology, the next phase of deepfake stretchers might tempt us to ‘long’ for the epistemological larks of 2020, etc. I don’t think that’s what I mean either. But perhaps that process is mixed in ambiguously with the other one, the one where objects crumpling and distorting reveal their never-before-seen facets. And maybe these two processes are not really distinguishable after all.
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<br />The series <em>BoJack Horseman</em> is built around the never directly acknowledged pun, “Why the long face?” BoJack Horseman, on the home stretch of <em>BoJack Horseman</em>, is contacted by an old acquaintance. “You’re tall. I need you to reach something for me.”
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<br />OK, now you’re just reaching.<br />
</div></div>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-48250425858428410702022-05-02T14:32:00.005-07:002022-05-02T14:58:23.756-07:00After Marina Tsvetaeva<p>like I say I’m in love with our unlovesickness,</p><p>with these feet never flitted out from under us.</p><p>how sweet to run my fool mouth, how sweet at each</p><p>accidental touch, the firelessness in my cheek.</p><p><br /></p><p>I like that what hurts my heart is not you,</p><p>I like that what hurts your heart is not me.</p><p>that you can hook up with someone, or look at them,</p><p>and feel, at my no pain, no pain of your very own.</p><p><br /></p><p>I love how what lives in my breast is mine,</p><p>how yours beats hardest and best within yours.</p><p>I love the word at your lips that’s not my name,</p><p>the void where no vow of ours ever flowers.</p><p><br /></p><p>for nothing by moonlight, little by starlight, for dawns </p><p>that draw far more than our limbs in fire, and for light I light </p><p>solely in dreams, to you I'm unindebted, irredeemably.</p><p>for you are not, I am not, my heart’s, your heart’s, hurt. </p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-48614760621151987232022-04-02T16:57:00.030-07:002022-08-12T11:22:07.849-07:00Dreams in SFF<p>My essay '<a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/wages-for-dreamwork/">Wages for Dreamwork</a>' is up on <i>Strange Horizons</i> (thank you editor Gautam Bhatia). It looks at a quite <i>specific </i>intersection of speculative fiction and dreaming (the dream taken up by logics of quantification and instrumentality, or vice-versa). </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8qQ8N_VAGMPyStevwaPQtEzHt_9FgjF0kFio5DDRyXNMrTKiKwqxhvMUOXU28VJHpHDPkrXu7MnC5v6juyUeofzhGCTfktvaSsA3ZUNocKrrGYwXcmw3JaZlh0q3dxjZ0wi0YlBzbwe64WGqz48fMzq9vvgr4LG6oRbep1Bpggpc_GEGsC7u26iQA/s1280/WalterLicinio-GenerativeArt-ArtificialIntelligence%20(44).png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Cityscape" border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1280" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8qQ8N_VAGMPyStevwaPQtEzHt_9FgjF0kFio5DDRyXNMrTKiKwqxhvMUOXU28VJHpHDPkrXu7MnC5v6juyUeofzhGCTfktvaSsA3ZUNocKrrGYwXcmw3JaZlh0q3dxjZ0wi0YlBzbwe64WGqz48fMzq9vvgr4LG6oRbep1Bpggpc_GEGsC7u26iQA/w640-h384/WalterLicinio-GenerativeArt-ArtificialIntelligence%20(44).png" title="AI Generated by Walter Licinio" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>AI Generated by Walter Licinio</i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Here are some other snippets about speculative fiction and dreaming, some of which drift from that intersection. I will try to keep adding (might add some poems and philosophy and science too).</p><p>From Ursula K. Le Guin's <i>The Word for World is Forest</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote>“But they only dream in sleep, you said; if they want to dream waking they take poisons so that the dreams go out of control, you said! How can people be any madder? They don’t know the dream-time from the world-time, any more than a baby does. Maybe when they kill a tree they think it will come alive again!” </blockquote><p></p><p>From Tlotlo Tsamaase, '<a href="https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/dreamports/">Dreamports</a>':</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">“Feeling lonely, bored, or uninspired?” the voice continues. “Dreamport allows consumers to manufacture their dreams into a new reality where anyone anywhere in the world can join, subscribe, and interact with each user’s Dreamport or even link one another’s into a network, a community. Create your own universe, events, games, or lover’s network.” The slogan expands out into the screen: “Dreamport: the new way to be social. Purchase with a once-off lifetime fee prior to our upgrade date that will have new users subscribing for a monthly fee. Your mind is the new web …”</p></blockquote><p>From Greg Egan, '<a href="https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/egan_04_22/">Dream Factory</a>.' James is observing the dreams of a cat, Pawpaw:</p><p></p><blockquote>It was mesmerizing . . . but the household would be awake soon, and James needed to be sure that his changes to the library really could damp down the prodding from the electrodes. He injected a keyboard-cockroach into Pawpaw’s dream, at full strength, and saw the swipe response it evoked. Then he set the dial to zero and tried again; there was nothing. At fifty percent, the dreamer noticed the incursion, but the reaction was tentative. The apps would lose their grip slowly, their decay seeming more like natural causes than foul play.</blockquote><p></p><p>From Kathleen Alcalá, 'Deer Dancer':</p><p></p><blockquote>Tater dragged herself back to the waking world. She might have been having a True Dream, but if that's what it was, it would come back. She would need to let the others know if it did. [...] When she was a child of eight, it became clear that Tater got the Dreaming. When she was fourteen, she was given her aunt's journal. Ceci was an original Dreamer, born in Mexico, raised in the US in secrecy by her family.</blockquote><p>[...]</p><p></p><blockquote>Sometimes the dream was clear and direct; other times, they could only speculate at what it meant, and what they were expected to do with the information. But no one doubted the authenticity of the dreams.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>From Sheila Jasanoff's <i>Uncertainty:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Recognizing the multiplicity of dreams that must be actualized is already at the core of many radical practices, as the Zapatista “world where many worlds fit” philosophy would suggest. Far more challenging is the act of moving in dialectical fashion from a dream state to waking existence, synthesizing a mixture of the two that neither delimits our imagination nor erases the hard work yet to be done of materially changing our surroundings. After a half century of being told that the radical demand for a transformed social and economic order was nothing more than a series of empty illusions, the choice to keep dreaming, even as we plant both feet firmly on the ground and in the streets, is exactly the kind of radical practice Le Guin would be proud of. </p></blockquote><p>From Sandra Newman's <i>The Heavens:</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>Often, she dreamed in the dream—or <i>the person she was sleeping as</i>
dreamed. These dreams were mostly of horses she was riding, which
reared and threatened to throw her off or flew uncannily into the
sky; or else she was playing a stringed instrument whose strings
broke, lashing her fingers.</blockquote><p></p><div>From Eric Schwitzgebel's '<a href="http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/DreamB&W.pdf">Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?</a>'</div><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>What might explain the rise of the opinion that dreaming is predominantly a black
and white phenomenon? It will likely have occurred to the reader that the first half
of the twentieth century was the pinnacle of black and white media. Black and white
photography was first made public in the 1830s, and became increasingly popular
through the early twentieth century. Although color photography was invented in
the 1860s, color photos did not become easily attainable to the public until the 1940s.
Motion pictures, invented around the turn of the century, were, from very early on,
occasionally hand-painted with colors, and two-color filming was sometimes used
in the 1920s (for example in Ben Hur). Nonetheless, motion pictures were overwhelmingly black and white until the late 1930s when a few ‘technicolored’ movies
such as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz drew huge crowds. It was not
until the 1950s that colored movies became commonplace, and even as late as 1960
a black and white film, The Apartment, was mainstream enough to win an Academy
Award for best picture. Black and white television became widespread after World
War II; color television did not become popular until the late 1960s.
It is surely not chance that this flourishing of black and white media coincided
with the flourishing of the opinion that dreams are a black and white phenomenon.
The question is what to make of this fact.</blockquote></div><div>From Theodor Adorno's <i>Dream Notes</i>:</div><div><div></div><blockquote>Two giant, black triceratops, as if made of plastic, furious, horrifying animals whom I disliked. While one of them looked on, the other attacked an ankylosaurus in an unspeakably ferocious manner. The ankylosaurus lay spread out on the ground (‘a base animal’). The triceratops used its horns to slit it open at what might be called the suture where its lower and upper half had grown together like an edible crab. It then removed the upper half. The internal organs lay in the lower half neatly distributed in compartments, each with a different colour, like a dish of hors d’oeuvres. The triceratops fell upon it and began to devour the different parts, each of which represented a different taste (concretism) – once again just like an edible crab. I was just thinking indignantly: but the triceratops are vegetarians, when I woke up. </blockquote></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8dvpT0hA0Lk" width="320" youtube-src-id="8dvpT0hA0Lk"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;"> Max Richter <i>Dream 13 </i>(minus even)</div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">From Yasutaka Tsutsui's <i>Paprika:</i></p><p></p><blockquote>“Come to think of it, I heard that rumor too,” said the social affairs correspondent who’d asked the very first question. “Her name was Paprika, that’s right. She called herself a ‘dream detective.’ She would get inside men’s dreams, then engage in some kind of sex act and thereby cure them of their mental hangups.”</blockquote><p>From Ursula Le Guin's <i>The Word for World is Forest:</i></p><p></p><blockquote>Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.</blockquote><p></p><p>From Nancy Kress's <i>Beggars in Spain:</i></p><p></p><blockquote style="text-align: left;">Camden said, “What about the need to dream?” <br />“Not necessary. A left-over bombardment of the cortex to keep it on semialert in case a predator attacked during sleep. Wakefulness does that better.” </blockquote><p> From Harl Vincent, 'Master of Dreams':</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>Other apparatus there was, whose purposes and uses Stanley could only conjecture. Delicate mechanisms, these were, and like nothing he had ever encountered. Some held crystal balls like those of the so-called mystics and seers. All were well worth investigation and all had some- thing to do with this amazing system which had been developed by the Master of Dreams — all of absorbing interest to men of science. </blockquote><p></p><p>From Dimension 20’s D&D actual play podcast <i>The Unsleeping City, </i>‘Timesquaremageddon Pt. 2’:</p><p></p><blockquote>[...] you can see it has the button-up shirt and the slacks and is like, ‘I need an SUV and two and a half children’ […] it seems like Robert’s dream, a young rich handsome All-American thing that he has summoned through the Golden Door in New York City to form a realm here for his own.</blockquote><p></p><p>From '<a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/sophie-robinson-poem/">art in america</a>' by Sophie Robinson:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">fevery dream in which i see a drunk <br />woman (me) doing shots & snorting coke from a key.<br />i tell her let me help you <br />& then i open a wound on her arm <br />& remove from the wound a giant plastic egg.<br />i crack the egg to reveal a small wooden sphere<br />& from it emerges a large white rat. don’t ask me how.<br />i put the rat on a leash & walk it back to my apartment.<br />i go to sleep in my dream petting the rat & wake up feeling good. <br />i give the rat breakfast which she eats happily. <br />i kiss her head. <br />i go back to the bar & find the woman (me) sicker than ever. <br />thin, sweating, with two black eyes & a purple arm. <br />i say hey what happened <br />& she says<br /><i>you shouldn’t have taken what you took the way you took it.</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p></p></blockquote><div>From Theodor Adorno, <i>Dream Notes</i>:</div><div><div><blockquote>Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are “ours”, but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit “the same world”. The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.</blockquote></div></div><div>From Thomas Nashe, <i><a href="http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf">The Terrors of the Night</a>:</i></div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imagination.</div></blockquote></div><div>From Theodor Adorno, <i>Dream Notes</i>:</div><div><div><blockquote>Next Tuesday old Hahn has his eighty-fifth birthday. I dreamt: what can one give to old Hahn on his eighty-fifth birthday, something he might find useful? – Answer: a guide to the kingdom of the dead.</blockquote></div></div><div>From Thomas Nashe, <i>The Terrors of the Night:</i></div><div><div><blockquote>There were gates in Rome out of which nothing was carried but dust and dung, and men to execution; so, many of the gates of our senses serve for nothing but to convey out excremental vapours & affrighting deadly dreams, that are worse than executioners unto us.</blockquote></div></div><div>From Theodor Adorno, <i>Dream Notes</i>:</div><div><div><blockquote>I was due once again to be executed – like Pierrot lunaire. This time, like a pig. I was to be thrown into boiling water. I was assured that it would be completely painless, since I would be dead before I realized what was happening. I was in fact quite free of fear, merely somewhat surprised by a technical detail: immediately after the scalding, cold water would be let in, as with a hot bath. So I was thrown into the cauldron. To my ineffable astonishment, however, I did not die right away, but nor was I in any pain. However, probably because of the additional water that had been let in, I did feel a pressure that seemed to increase inexorably. I realized that if I did not succeed in waking up right away, I really would die. Managed to wake up after huge efforts (physically in a poor state, bad neuralgia, in a condition between life and death, after dreaming of a visit from Luise Rainer that lasted until deep into the night).</blockquote></div></div><div>From Thomas Nashe, <i>Terrors of the Night</i>:</div><div><div><blockquote>How many sorts there be of them no man can rightly set down, since it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike. Divers have written diversely of their causes, but the best reason among them all that I could ever pick out was this, that as an arrow which is shot out of a bow is sent forth many times with such force that it flieth far beyond the mark whereat it was aimed, so our thoughts, intensively fixed all the day-time upon a mark we are to hit, are now and then overdrawn with such force that they fly beyond the mark of the day into the confines of the night. There is no man put to any torment but quaketh & trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the day-time we torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night-time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured. To nothing more aptly can I compare the working of our brains, after we have unyoked and gone to bed, than to the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into the dark shadow.</blockquote></div></div><div>From Theodor Adorno, <i>Dream Notes</i>:</div><div><div><blockquote>I dreamt that I had to take the exam for the diploma in sociology. It went badly in empirical sociology. I was asked how many columns there are in a punch card, and, as a pure guess, I said twenty. Of course, that was wrong. The situation was even worse when it came to concepts. I was given a number of English terms and was asked to give their exact meanings in empirical sociology. One term was: <i>supportive</i>. I translated like a good boy, giving the German words for supportive, assisting. But it turned out that in statistics it meant the precise opposite, something altogether negative. Taking pity on my ignorance, the examiner then announced that he would question me on cultural history. He showed me a German passport of 1879. It ended with the farewell greeting: ‘Now out into the world, my little wolf!’ This motto appeared in gold leaf. I was asked to explain this. I took a deep breath and explained that the use of gold for such purposes went back to Russian or Byzantine icons. The idea of the prohibition on images had been taken very seriously in those parts; only gold had been exempted. Because it was the purest metal, an exception was made for it. Its use in illustrations was followed by baroque ceilings and then by furniture intarsia, and the gold lettering in the passport was to be the last vestige of that great tradition. The examiners were delighted by the profundity of my knowledge and I passed
the exam.</blockquote></div></div><div><div></div></div><div>From Thomas Nashe, <i>Terrors of the Night:</i></div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>Even as one’s eyes glimmer and dazzle when they are withdrawn out of the light into darkness, so are our thoughts troubled & vexed when they are retired from labour to ease, and from skirmishing to surgery.</div><div><br /></div><div>You must give a wounded man leave to groan while he is in dressing: dreaming is no other than groaning while sleep, our surgeon, hath us in cure.</div></blockquote></div><div>From Selwyn Cudjoe's interview with Jamaica Kincaid:</div><div><blockquote>I don't really think I make these distinctions between dreaming and waking. This, again, goes back to my childhood [...] Your dream could tell you things about your waking life; it illuminates your waking life. [...] I used to be quite afraid because they could tell me things I didn't want to know, and I really believed all my dreams and took them very seriously. I still do, in quite the same way. So when I write about dreams, it's not really a dream, it's something that happens, but in this way.</blockquote><p>Le Guin being interviewed by Bill Moyers about <i>The Lathe of Heaven </i>movie:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O1bZe7bdXMw" width="320" youtube-src-id="O1bZe7bdXMw"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Ernst Meumann, 'On Reading and Writing in Dreams':</div><div></div><blockquote><div>I dreamt that I stood in an auditorium before the students and wrote on
the board the results of a long development. They were the words, “<i>The
result o f a disposition is being announced</i>.” This was the very vividly
spoken conclusion of a long exposition by which I believed myself to
have summarized everything in a most poignant manner. In the dream,
the words greatly impressed me.</div></blockquote><div>From Emil Kraepelin's dream corpus, trans. Heynick:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgtDhVxKUz9igRfZ2rh--c8n1i20ndyJ2OJdiuOF-pYwYUXa_QoJbXYgJth17b0MY9XHgOzHPCuX82DYjgIdPckP-NkiFRRd_i6L6uQBsufqcisfcP0nH1oVHJ3l6TQ85riooGw_A9RF2hAQfQjI-3mMPmiRgJ3h6WNIRQkN2XCs8BTaf2QkkHkeqjX" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="706" data-original-width="853" height="530" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgtDhVxKUz9igRfZ2rh--c8n1i20ndyJ2OJdiuOF-pYwYUXa_QoJbXYgJth17b0MY9XHgOzHPCuX82DYjgIdPckP-NkiFRRd_i6L6uQBsufqcisfcP0nH1oVHJ3l6TQ85riooGw_A9RF2hAQfQjI-3mMPmiRgJ3h6WNIRQkN2XCs8BTaf2QkkHkeqjX=w640-h530" width="640" /></a></div><br />Jacques Derrida, <i>Writing and Difference:</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i></i><blockquote><i>Madness, theme or index</i>: what is significant is that Descartes, at
bottom, never speaks of madness itself in this text. Madness is not his
theme. He treats it as the index of a question of principle, and epistemological value. It will be said, perhaps, that this is the sign of a profound exclusion. But this silence on madness itself simultaneously
signifies the opposite of an exclusion, since it is not a question of
madness in this text, not even to exclude it. It is not in the Méditations
that Descartes speaks of madness itself.) What must be grasped here is
that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than
the madman. Or, at least, the dreamer, insofar as concerns the problem
of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from true
perception than the madman. It is in the case of sleep, and not in that
of extravagance, that the absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin
becomes suspect, is stripped of 'objective value' as M. Guéroult put it.</blockquote></div><div>Michel Foucault, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire':</div><div><i></i><blockquote><i>Distinct from dreams?</i> I put it to the test: I remember dreaming that I was
nodding my head. I will therefore nod my head again, here and now. Is there
a difference? Yes: a certain clarity, a certain distinctness. But, and this is the
second stage of the test, can this clarity and distinctness be found in the dream? Yes, I have a clear memory that it was so. Therefore what I supposed
was the criterion of difference (clarity and distinctness) belongs indifferently
to both dreams and waking perception; so it cannot make the difference
between them.</blockquote><p>Walter Benjamin, '<a href="http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/benjamin-dream-kitsch1.pdf">Dream Kitsch</a>':</p><p></p><blockquote>The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. Dreaming has a share in history. The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety -- indeed, the range -- of dreams. </blockquote><p></p></div><b>Elsewhere:</b><p></p></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Diletta de Cristofaro, <a href="https://theweek.com/tech/1011851/how-sleep-aids-ironically-devalue-sleep">'The counterproductive promises of a "sleep goal"'</a></li><li>Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, <i><a href="https://mermaid-motel-depot.tumblr.com/post/659046524297347072/new-publication-soft-friction">Soft Friction</a></i></li><li>Eileen Myles, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56627/dream-56d2394c9f8e2">'Dream'</a></li><li>Langston Hughes, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46548/harlem">'Harlem'</a></li><li><a href="https://thenewbridgeproject.com/events/the-dream-turbine/">The Dream Turbine</a></li><li>Michael W. Clune, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2022/04/night-shifts-dream-incubation-technology-sleep-research/">'Night Shifts'</a></li></ul></div><div><br /></div><p></p><p></p><p></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-74660144441107307852022-04-02T05:59:00.003-07:002022-04-02T05:59:25.623-07:00Names in SFF<p> "People often ask how I think of names in fantasies, and again I have to
answer that I find them, that I hear them. This is an important subject in this
context. From that first story on, naming has been the essence of the artmagic as practiced in Earthsea. For me, as for the wizards, to know the
name of an island or a character is to know the island or the person."</p><p>Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Dreams Must Explain Themselves'</p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2020/12/names-in-sff-interlude-sexbot.html">SFF names #19: Sexbot interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/names-in-sff-interlude-scott-lynch.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #18: Scott Lynch interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/names-in-sff-interlude-gsu-boaty.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #17: Boaty McBoatface interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/names-in-sff-interlude-alice.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #16: Alice interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2016/01/names-in-sff-interlude-eggs.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #15: eggs interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/names-in-sff-ya-interlude.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #14: YA interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/names-in-sff-13-benedict-cumberbatch.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #13: Benedict Cumberbatch</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/names-in-sff-12-luke-skywalker.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #12: Luke Skywalker interlude</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/names-in-sff-11-catherine-rhoeas-papaver.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #11: Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/names-in-sff-10-bobby-shaftoe.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #10: Bobby Shaftoe</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/sff-names-9-justice-of-toren-one-esk.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #9: <i>Justice of Toren</i> One Esk Nineteen</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/sff-names-8-ged.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #8: Ged</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/sff-names-7-shevek.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #7: Shevek</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/sff-names-6-buhle.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #6: Buhle</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/sff-names-5-tom-pollocks-parva-pen-khan.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/sff-names-4-beth-bradley.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #4: Beth Bradley</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/sff-names-3-rumplestiltskin.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/sff-names-2-lucy.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #2: Lucy</a></p><p><a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/sff-names-1-winnie.html" style="background-color: white; color: #ff9900; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16.5px; text-decoration-line: none;">SFF names #1: Winnie</a></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-42840080731313217902022-03-18T15:14:00.002-07:002022-03-18T15:14:05.903-07:00Bitcoin and stone money: Anglophone use of Yapese economic cultures, 1910-2020<p><i>Finance and Society </i>have published <a href="http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/ojs-images/financeandsociety/FS_Walton_EarlyView.pdf">this open access academic article</a> about Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. <a href="https://twitter.com/jolwalton/status/1503860209059569667">Twitter thread here</a>.</p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-52415585061232086742022-03-07T12:57:00.006-08:002022-08-20T10:37:53.131-07:00The Owlsted League Table of Top Schools for Witches and Wizards<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Witch">Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches</a></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Week">Larwood House</a></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Earthsea">The Isle of Roke</a></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_University">The Unseen University</a></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Season_(novel)">The Fulcrum</a></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVhjkwretPM42WqnfBxv0aRMvh83d-DyM4zwQJklzQuePqKHXTYWp4TODQ5qZWUzZz10EzkaAtwsVvyFq9I0-u3HixRNPAFpl3bMuiOA8uRsiMkL6uNylbf4r1hUPWJO5jhXnk4EwCTC7__DtJAbHMu5xYpt48LXm3XrdvLbF65IPcx1Xpv4qQ8lv6" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1792" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjVhjkwretPM42WqnfBxv0aRMvh83d-DyM4zwQJklzQuePqKHXTYWp4TODQ5qZWUzZz10EzkaAtwsVvyFq9I0-u3HixRNPAFpl3bMuiOA8uRsiMkL6uNylbf4r1hUPWJO5jhXnk4EwCTC7__DtJAbHMu5xYpt48LXm3XrdvLbF65IPcx1Xpv4qQ8lv6" width="137" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-19820937022506399022021-12-27T08:58:00.007-08:002021-12-27T14:47:02.810-08:002021 Wrapped<p>This was going to be a list of 'non-work' stuff, but those lines have blurred quite a bit. </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Science fiction</b></p><p><i>Vector</i>, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. We did <a href="https://vector-bsfa.com/current-issue/">two issues</a>, with me settling into my new role of editor-rumored-to-be-at-large. Editing #293 (<b>Chinese SFF</b>) was mostly the work of Polina Levontin and guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang, and #294 (<b>SFF and Class</b>) mostly that of Polina and guest editor Nick Hubble.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://vector-bsfa.com/current-issue/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="768" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rLHfgRpLxUk/Yb9ZLQk4III/AAAAAAAALqs/oOu5x26N0JcgVaro1L-GOQ5kAXqVH-rVQCNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="170" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Cover art by <a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/cao-fei/">Cao Fei</a><span style="text-align: left;">.</span></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://vector-bsfa.com/current-issue/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="" data-original-height="1306" data-original-width="935" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Ml3sIZLqN34/Yb9ZJWJQFKI/AAAAAAAALqo/sxyEeJzYunEfiUSidoZdcFCF1rNq9N-_ACNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="172" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Cover art by <a href="https://sinjinli.com/graphic-design">Sinjin Li</a>.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>To check these out, become a BSFA member. (Some 2019-2020 issues are also now <a href="https://vector-bsfa.com/category/vector-complete-issues/">available to download</a> open access).</div><div><p>On my flying pink sofa, I zoomed around to some conferences and things. At the <a href="http://www.lsfrc.co.uk/category/events/">LSFRC</a> conference on Activism and Resistance I gave a paper called '<b>Abolish Money</b>': <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CAwxwzw9umWmkbtHyOpu02kOCSjmyz1hofQ9g68-o4E/edit?usp=sharing">the text is here</a>. And Francis Gene-Rowe and Avery Delany and I gave two versions of a panel about games, frames and flames: one at <a href="https://guide.confusion2021.uk/#prog/id:116">Eastercon</a> and one at the <a href="http://www.sfra.org/Past-SFRA-Conferences">SFRA</a> conference. My bit was called '<b>Liliputopia</b>' and was about post-scarcity and being small (like Ant-man is, sometimes): <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DCqohOjUESr06afsUtbi51XomPB7yuoOPA2_YbgOFIs/edit?usp=sharing">slides and notes here</a>. </p><p><a href="https://www.conspiresf.com/"><b>ConSpire</b></a> was an online mini-convention collaboration between the BSFA and the Science Fiction Foundation; sessions are on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDOh4WhQ7bKBOUoBN1SQTqQ"><i>Vector </i>YouTube</a>. </p><p>I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson's <b>climate change novel</b> <i>The Ministry for the Future</i>, <i>TWIIIIICCCCEEE</i>. <a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2021/01/kim-stanley-robinsons-ministry-for.html">Once for Aargh</a> with some emphasis on violence, <a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2021/12/kim-stanley-robinsons-ministry-for.html">once for STIR magazine</a>, with some emphasis on political economy.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>AI</b></p><p><i>Ghosts, Robots, and Automatic Writing: An AI Study Level Guide </i>from Cambridge Digital Humanities. Co-written with Anne Alexander, Caroline Bassett, and Alan Blackwell. This is a <b>textbook from the future</b>, looking back at the history of <b>text-generating AI</b>. (This wasn't a BSFA publication, although a few BSFA members will be getting complementary copies. It's also <a href="https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/ghostfictions">free to download here</a>). </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/ghostfictions" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="354" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YpRc4-mpeEQ/Yb9fjOw9h0I/AAAAAAAALq4/Cp18j5eLwfEDEyXK027KOZ7mKEAkW_1uwCNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="170" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Cover and design by <a href="https://kleineberg.co.uk/">Jana Kleineberg</a>.</div><p></p><span></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span><!--more--></span><br /><b>Climate</b><br /><a href="https://bit.ly/CommunicatingClimateRisk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img alt="" data-original-height="578" data-original-width="1024" height="181" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gOC0NiBvIvU/Yb9iQpnQGqI/AAAAAAAALrQ/gRHhkwTebXcazxJXA1FoyDnxd3RHrrhMACNcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="320" /></a></div></div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Cover and design by <a href="https://kleineberg.co.uk/">Jana Kleineberg</a>.</div><p></p><p>Not very SFF related, <i>or is it?</i> — <i><a href="https://bit.ly/CommunicatingClimateRisk">Communicating Climate Risk: A Toolkit</a> </i>from AU4DM and the COP26 Universities Network. Expanded second edition coming in 2022. <a href="https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/11/02/vector-editors-at-cop26/">Here's an extract</a> which explores links between SFF and climate risk communication. </p><p>See also the <a href="https://www.cdcs.ed.ac.uk/digital-humanities-climate-coalition">Digital Humanities Climate Coalition</a>.</p><span><!--more--></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Poems</b></p><p>Poems in <i><a href="https://interviewroom-11.square.site/">FLW</a>,</i> <i><a href="https://www.lleonardmuntanereditor.cat/producte/llengues-de-foc-antologia-de-poesia-anglesa-actual/">Llengües de foc: Antologia de poesia anglesa actual</a></i>, and <i><a href="http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html">Volume (for JHP)</a></i>.</p><p><a href="https://sadpresspoetry.com/our-books/">Sad Press</a> published books by Roz Kaveney; Ashwani Sharma, Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel; and Mira Mattar, and Kat Sinclair's is getting pretty imminent.</p><p>Roz's pamphlet was a limited edition riso collaboration with <a href="https://earthbound.press/">Earthbound Press</a>. We're down to our last few copies, so if you are tempted, don't delay.</p><span><!--more--></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Games</b></p><p><i><a href="https://sadpress.itch.io/sad-press-srd-collection">The Sad Press SRD Collection</a> </i>contains eight System Reference Documents. These are basically small generic tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), which can be played in their own right, or used as templates for other designers to make things (they're released under Creative Commons licenses).</p><p>Two other tiny TTRPGs I wrote this year, one to <a href="https://sadpress.itch.io/dungeons-dreaming">play in your sleep</a>, and <a href="https://sadpress.itch.io/walk-around">one when you're walking around</a>.</p><p>I contributed to the <i><a href="https://conjurations.itch.io/reliquary">Conjurations: Reliquary</a></i> zine (a collaboration with Ewerton Lua). I should have one or two spare copies soon, so if you'd like one let me know.</p><p>I also did some editing on <i><a href="https://typhosgames.com/shop/the-soul-sword-forge/">The Soul Sword Forge</a></i>, a double feature pretty seriously spooky OSR castlecrawl. One castle is upside-down.</p><p>We ran the <a href="https://itch.io/jam/applied-hope"><i>Applied Hope: Solarpunk and Utopias</i> games jam</a> and got lots of incredible entries. I'll be announcing some prizes in January (sorry it's taking so long!). There's a podcast episode coming soon too.</p><span><!--more--></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Coming soon probably</b></p><p>If all goes to plan, essays in <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-literature-and-economics/9E8FC7FF162FFC1E4B3461C3FAA0C7BE">The Cambridge Companion to Economics and Literature</a> </i>(on SFF and post-capitalism), <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Fifty-Key-Figures-in-Cyberpunk-Culture/McFarlane-Murphy-Schmeink/p/book/9780367549138">Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk History</a></i> (on Shoshana Zuboff), <i><a href="https://twitter.com/scifimedhums?lang=en">Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities</a> </i>(on measuring wellbeing), <i><a href="http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/">Finance and Society</a></i> (on bad comparisons between bitcoin and Yapese stone valuables), <i><a href="https://dhinfra.org/316/digital-humanities-laboratories-communities-of-in-practice/">Digital Humanities Laboratories: Communities of/in Practice</a> </i>(collaboratively written account of 'how to avoid becoming a DH lab')<i> </i>and <i><a href="http://strangehorizons.com/">Strange Horizons</a> </i>(on wages for dreamwork).</p><p>Edited collection <i>Utopia on the Tabletop</i> and <i>Climate Risk Communication: A Toolkit </i>(2nd edition) are also planned for 2022. I have a vague idea to try out material for the toolkit on <a href="https://medium.com/@jolindsaywalton/what-is-climate-risk-1af36b238309">Medium</a>.</p><p>There are future issues of <i>Vector </i>in the works on themes such as Greek SFF, SFF and justice, SFF and the future / applied SFF, SFF and modernism, and <b>SFF and libraries</b> / archives / information science. We're still <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oXqal0fIlQ5Ijqw2CfDXzZ9ls_vmF4Rk5PJxVou37eI/edit#heading=h.m0jmwj4df9l1">accepting proposals</a> for the libraries issue.</p><p>And hopefully some contributions to <a href="https://www.indexofevidence.org/">Index of Evidence</a>, the <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/law/research/projects/earth_law">UK Earth Law Judgments Project</a>, and maybe even a short story in the energy futures anthology <i>Phase Change</i>.</p></div>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-17631554121626519542021-12-21T13:55:00.000-08:002021-12-27T13:56:07.746-08:00Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future<p><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This review is published in </span><a href="https://www.stirtoaction.com/magazine" style="text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">STIR</span></a><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Consider supporting them with a purchase, donation, or subscription. I also wrote <a href="http://jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com/2021/01/kim-stanley-robinsons-ministry-for.html">another review here</a>.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-252fdeb5-7fff-d112-1b36-ca2b5cb4a601"><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 14.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim Stanley Robinson. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 14.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Ministry for the Future</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 14.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Orbit, 2020). </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In contemporary science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson is something of a titan. His books tend to be a little titanic, too: big in themselves, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">big disasters involving humans, nature, and technology. His characters are more often scientists, policymakers, and bureaucrats than space pirates or rampaging AIs, but the stakes are as high as in any multi-dimensional sci-fi caper. Sometimes those characters might save the world. Sometimes they rearrange the deck chairs.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Robinson is probably still best-known for the Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s. In good utopian fashion, it’s a tall tale in an exotic locale which, rather than being mere escapist fun, probes pressing problems in the real world. What happens on Mars doesn’t stay on Mars. No, it defamiliarises the world around us, and hopefully helps us to see its possibilities anew: if we could start from scratch (sort of), what laws and institutions would we choose? The more recent </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aurora</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2015) feels like a pained clarification: OK I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wrote all the stuff about terraforming Mars, but we </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only have one planet! Robinson’s chonkiest book is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Green Earth</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2015) </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> originally three chonky books </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which adroitly explores the intersection of science, policy, and climate. It paved the way for his latest, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Ministry for the Future </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(2020).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Ministry for the Future </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is a fizzling cornucopia pouring forth vignettes, micro-essays, lists, fictional eye-witness accounts, notes from meetings, and even prose-poem riddles, to peer ahead into the coming decades. It really tries to tell the story of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the whole planet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> refugees, billionaires, protestors, policymakers, partygoers, carbon atoms, caribou, all of us </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> while confessing that task to be impossible. The two threads that tie it all together are climate change, and the titular Ministry for the Future, established to</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 30pt; margin-right: 30pt; margin-top: 0pt; margin: 0pt 30pt;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own. [...] [The Ministry] is furthermore charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection [...] </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The vision laid out is guardedly optimistic. It is also evasive. Sometimes, a commitment to realism means finding ways to leave things out. Novels often tell us, “This happened, so that happened.” But this novel more often tells us, “This happened. Then that happened. Maybe they’re connected?” Nevertheless, I’ll plunge in with a summary, however crude. This novel definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The more summaries the better.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what does Robinson’s positive vision of the future look like? I think it involves six main factors. First, Robinson imagines a proliferation of diverse economic models, at many different scales, adapted to local settings. Within that pluralism, there is an overall trend toward re-commoning and democratising. He argues that there is a postcapitalism already rooted in a patchwork of existing movements: “</span><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a rearrangement of various elements of old plans [...] Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along.” But he also points to the importance of planning alternative economic arrangements in the abstract, even if many details must be provisional. When a crisis strikes, there must be models to turn to. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second factor is speculative climate technologies. Negative emissions tech draws carbon out of the atmosphere; scientists and engineers pump water out from under glaciers in an attempt to slow their slide into the sea; planes trail aerosols into the atmosphere like plumes of artificial volcanic ash; and vast tracts of the Arctic Sea are dyed vivid butteryellow to bounce more sunlight: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 36pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. [...] Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The novel is careful not merely to cheerlead for geoengineering. It’s very clear that techno-fixes are no substitute for deep political and economic system change. But nor does the novel dramatise any of the worst-case geoengineering scenarios, nor explore, in the words of Climate Engineering in Context, “the unequal capacity between states to research and deploy the technologies,” or how to empower “countries and demographics that will suffer from the changed environmental conditions that result from engineering the climate.” For what it’s worth, I think Robinson is far too soft on geoengineering. The unintended consequences of climate technology (or attempts at novel technology) is an area where hard science fiction could have a lot more to say.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Third, with palpable reluctance, Robinson gives state power a leading role. Another recent novel, Cory Doctorow’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Walkaway </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(2017), arrives at an optimistic future via a more anarchist route. Robinson’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ministry for the Future </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">might be read as a tacit rejoinder, saying: some things we can’t walk away from, however much we want to. Instead, Robinson has a consortium of central banks roll out a novel financial technology. They issue a “carbon coin,” initially valued at one coin per tonne of CO2 sequestered. Robinson imagines plain old carbon taxes too, to make market prices better reflect the real social and environmental cost of goods and services. However, it’s carbon coin that gets the limelight:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 40.5pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 36pt 12pt 40.5pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[...] the proposal for a carbon coin was time-dependent, like a budget, with fixed amounts of time included in its contracts, as in bonds. New carbon coins backed by hundred-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return, underwritten by all the central banks working together. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The logic here is that of money creation. These carbon coins are created out of nothing to pay for decarbonisation projects. The complexity of certifying decarbonisation, including the temptation to deceive </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> especially whenever you can get paid to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do something! </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gets noted, but not really dwelled upon.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The fourth factor is dethroning Big Tech, and adopting its tools for new purposes. The Ministry for the Future rolls out “YourLock,” a kind of socially-owned data trust platform: “a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy.” This sounds a bit better than Andrew Yang’s recent Data Dividend proposal (“Yang’s data dividend would ultimately reinforce existing inequities by playing corporations’ own game,” writes Edward Ongweso Jr. in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), although the devil’s in the details. The novel is also keen on blockchain, especially as a tool against tax evasion. However, it doesn’t dwell much on the carbon footprint of blockchain at scale (the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index would be a good reference here), or how useful a cashless society can be to authoritarian surveillance and control (something Brett Scott has written about eloquently).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rewilding and ecological restoration, including the creation of huge wildlife corridors, is the fifth major factor in this optimistic narrative. In a way, the novel itself is mimicking the goal of the Ministry for the Future. It seeks to uplift voices, to unstop the myriad strange throats strewn throughout nature. A vast and varied polyphony is assembled here, encompassing the human and more-than-human world. The novel even plays with non-human first person narration. These chapters are gleefully, nuttily anthropomorphic. It's not a sober, philosophical search for “what it is truly like to be a carbon atom”; it’s more like the carbon atom popping up like Clippie: “It looks like you’re trying to make the planet unlivable! Would you like some help?” </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think there are two wolves inside Kim Stanley Robinson. There is a strong reverence for the sanctity of the more-than-human universe. And there is the reverence for the extremely human scientific and bureaucratic nature-based solutions that rewilded those two damn wolves in the first place. One inspiration is the Half-Earth Project, “working to conserve half the land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves.” So while there is a chapter about what might be the founding of a new religion “to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet,” it’s really in this preoccupation with wildlife corridors </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> plus a few scattered scenes of natural description, as characters skirt over Antarctic ice, or observe the revelry of marmots amid Alpine wildflowers </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that Robinson conveys a sense of nature’s inherent value.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The novel also commendably pulls together the perspectives of slaves, prisoners, refugees, the displaced, the grief-stricken, the heat-scarred. At the same time, I do wonder about weighting and emphases here. For instance, refugees are an important part of the story, but a passive one. A new generation of Nansen passports are introduced, as international protection for the world’s vast and growing refugee population. But we don’t really see them in use. Similarly, popular protest and grassroots activism is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">declared </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every bit as significant as the politicking of politicians and non-government organisations ... but don’t quite get the column inches to prove it, notwithstanding some euphoric revolutionary fervor in France, plus some amazing stamina from Hong Kong. Automation and post-work imaginaries don’t really feature at all.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there are the paramilitary actors. And here we have this optimistic vision’s final puzzle piece. Blowing up things </span><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">–</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and often people. These paramilitary campaigns aren’t Leninist vanguards trying to seize state power. Rather, they aim to change the environment in which commercial power operates. “</span><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation.” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the same time, this violence isn’t just about incentive design. It’s also about self-defense, desire, justice, and revenge. It is personal.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 12pt; margin: 12pt 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was a question of identifying the guilty and then finding them and getting to them. The research and detective work was done by another wing. A lot of the guilty were in hiding, or on fortress islands or otherwise protected. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The paramilitary action happens mostly off-stage, like the battles of Ancient Greek tragedies. Mainly the novel focuses Mary and Frank, two characters at the edges of this underground war. At first I strongly disliked that decision. For a novel usually so intent on solutions, however uncomfortable and uncertain, it didn’t feel right to depend so much on these paramilitary operations, yet say so little about them: like they were someone else’s problems. But I think the decision has grown on me. Frank and Mary are at least what Vicky Osterweil calls “not-non-violent.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Frank seeks to join a paramilitary cell and is rejected; he tries to operate as a lone wolf but flounders. Mary heads up the Ministry, and approves the finances for its black ops wing, although she has no real idea what they’re up to. These are perhaps stories that don’t get told often enough: the stories of folks who don’t find themselves on the front lines, yet who also don’t distance themselves psychologically, politically, or ethically from those struggles. They do what they can. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 12pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If this is an optimistic vision of the future, let’s remember what counts as optimistic in 2020. This is still a future which contains almost unimaginable suffering and loss. Robinson gives us a glimpse of that, quite early on. Then he largely sets it aside. That early glimpse lingers throughout the book, and beyond. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is plenty to quarrel with in this book. It is a book about blundering on with as much wisdom and hope as you can muster, and it puts its carbon coin where its mouth is. A book like this is meant to spark conversation. I hope some sparks fly.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.8; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Slightly tweaked from published version.</i></span></p></span>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2618110206819162630.post-37459448960585230192021-12-12T11:22:00.002-08:002021-12-12T11:22:55.648-08:00Conjurations #1: Reliquary<p><i>Conjurations </i>is a new free TTRPG zine from Conjured Games, and the first issue, <a href="https://conjurations.itch.io/reliquary">Reliquary</a>, has a loose theme of relics. I contributed curator's notes on some cursed objects, drawn by Ewerton Lua for last year's Inktober challenge.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://conjurations.itch.io/reliquary" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="2048" height="373" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-J6bhGYtkF84/YbZLuuBjSsI/AAAAAAAALo8/mX489h96EvoG3uG9bDaWTU8HTFht9yOGwCNcBGAsYHQ/w531-h373/image.png" width="531" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p>Jo Lindsay Waltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03385802548895720626noreply@blogger.com0