Prelude

Some friends and I have built my most advanced Minecraft world yet. Lots of train tracks (there are little cars you can ride in), enchanted stuff, trading with the villagers...I won't bore you endlessly, but it's been really good fun to have a quasi-social thing to do. It's actually really fun—lots of little puzzles, creative freedom, the anarchic democracy of a collaborative effort.

Plus it's let me learn about server running, setting up ssh and other processes. Which is the basis for a lot of "screensharing" applications. You can throw video output through the ssh (secure shell) prot...

Where-Have-You Bin

The pschogeography of digital space, pixel land, cyberspace, non-space. The "fake" world that sits atop and beneath our wiggly, fleshy, bodied one.

The internet conditions our modern experience, so much so that the technologies themselves are symbols of a sort of thought, of experience. The "medium is the massage," and not merely purveyor of old ideas or hatreds. Although the Fukuyama-esque love affair with the "liberalising" force of the internet has by now died off, replaced by a sort of bland hand-wringing. Neoliberalism's lofty rhetoric and willingness to negate human ...

When Power Speaks of Freedom

⥤ A lack of consideration: can we trace it by silhouette?

The world is always too much, and there is not enough to know it by. What makes me think that life in a big city, with an "important" job would be any closer to reality than this? We only know what we ourselves see, and what we invent is a product of what we see (hence the power of propaganda, of discourse). Speaking of which: I worry I am slowly beginning to treat every online comment as if it were part of a misinformation campaign, having spent too much time reading about cybersecurity and various ingen...

It seems that the year, for all it's excess and near-pariah status, actually will be ending. And so we lose the symmetry of twenty-twenty, and find ourselves slipping into the future plus one, as we do every year.

Did you know that, under our current calendar system, the date 2020-12-27 will never occur again? It really makes you think, doesn't it?

While the ills and contagions from 2020 won't be leaving us behind, there seems to be a general optimism that 2021, while not The Year Where Everything Works Out, can't be worse than 2020.

I myself am taking a cautiously optimistic approach—it is a...

violence, begets: violence
begets, violence: begets
violence, begets: violence
begets, violence: begets
violence, begets: violence

Image by Evan Tremblay of The Manitoban student newspaper.

Only a few external links this week, as there feels to be a lot to dig into here, even if the articles themselves are shorter. Xiao Wu's post in particular is part of a larger paper (linked at the top of the article).

• Redress/Repress: What the "War on Terror" Can Teach Us About Fighting Misinformation
  Harvard Kennedy School. Alexei Abrams & Gabrielle Lim (2020)
  The authors here take a materialist approach to advocate "redressing" the sociopolitical root causes of both terrorism and misinformation. They argue that people flock to conspiracy theories (a prime example of politicized misinformat...

Who Decides (Who is Made to Suffer)

Disaster preparedness is not, in the end, the same as disaster prevention. The latter would require something that is, from our current vantage, inconceivable: the political will to abandon the pernicious practices that currently support our economy. It would require a reckoning with human agency, an acknowledgment that no matter the scope of the disaster, no matter the exertions of essential workers, no matter how many times we bleach and scrub, rinse and disinfect, all of this is merely triage. We keep washing, but our hands are not clean.
— Barrett Swans...

Lines of Capital

The year opened with titters and tweets of WWIII, and while we did enter into a period of global struggle, it was not initially against a human enemy. The first global pandemic in living memory has by now been a staple of everyday existence for almost four months (slightly longer for the internationally aware, the specialist, or über-hypochondriac).

The novel coronavirus Covid-19 spread globally from Wuhan, carried abroad by lines of trade and capital flow. The Chinese journal Chuang 闯 ("rush," "to temper oneself through difficulties") wrote «Social Contagion» back in February...

Presented here without much comment or context. Make of these words what world you will.

• Trump, Scorcese, and the Frankfurt School's Theory of Racket Society
• Are We At War? Rhetoric of War and Virus (TDOT)
• Resilience to Corona: Workers Collectives (Social Europe)

The pope advocated for a universal basic income, scientists discovered a two-dimensional particle in a "simple collider," a toilet was invented that identifies...users...by "analprint." Wildlife returned to cities in the absence of business-as-usual from human inhabitants. The internet is holding up under "unprecedented" loads from ...

Queerness as Whiteness
by Michelle Yuan

A Critique

An old problem: Is pride in an identity not wholly one's own (i.e. one derived from historical domination) misplaced?

Personally, I feel like the rejection of labels, including "queer" is almost the penultimate "queer" move. Worries about one's passing, performance, purveyance are universals to identity. Identity, like beauty, is a process of the subject, not a quality of the object.

I felt myself reduced to a woman, an Asian, a queer person, or a queer Asian woman — a series of labels instead of simply a person. In claiming these labels for...