Abuse

The defence forces in Australia are in the news again as places where people have been abused, and I guess the important issue is whether or not there have been little cultures of abuse, little breeder reactors, insulated from justice by management. There is a level of abusive practice in the background - reading advice columnists like Prudence @ slate.com furnishes examples, and if you've ever been to or played competitive sport you will have your own.

This abuse is theoretically marginal, but there are a couple of things that worry me. The first couple are from Zizek. Zizek thinks that the rights-based subject is by definition a vulnerable porcupine, who can't experience unwelcome events except as harassment or abuse. He also quotes Ayn Rand's hymn to money (in which she says that without money, the only way to sort out power relations is guns or mobs) as giving the game away: money is (in capitalism) an instrument for domination.

The second couple are from the 'war on terror'. The kill/capture missions, as described by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman and others, are a relentless pounding on people taken to be enemy soldiers. But some of them are very young, all of them are very misguided, and it isn't clear that there are attacks on the sources of misguidance, or that the strategy is headed toward making an ommelette. This may be a phantom resemblance, an artifact of feeling that anyone you can film for 8hrs, you can capture or negotiate with. Second, more obviously, the enhanced interrogation techniques that are brutal, and the lingering strong support for Bush-era torture. People still occasionally give the game away, that waterboarding is not merely functional - its also satisfying a power instinct, that this is punishment.

Another interesting correlate for me was something Amanda Marcotte put in a footnote on some anti-feminist pushback that included very low verbal abuse - vulgarity and namecalling. She pointed out that some abusers had posted pornography, intending it to be taken as hate speech.

The Toffler's (Future Shock etc) apparently suggested that the way you make money becomes the way you make war. I think we could be in the middle of one of Heidegger's reconfigurations. We were in a time when we considered ourselves blankly useable, possibly useful, in which there isn't any obvious way of evaluating goals against one another. He called it the default of the Gods - the closing over of the sky. There are no longer super-personal entities to relate your behaviour to. You can't resolve on any God and so you settle on none. You can't agree on any future, and settle for a future no closer than the end of your nose. We are going into a time when every practice will refer itself no longer to use, but to abuse. Where Heidegger complained of the emptiness of enframing, we will try to substitute a fullness of violation, of raw power. Google will try to do good, but find it is smothered by accusations of abuse and Government intervention because it turns out what they intended for good is experienced by people as bad.

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Clive Palmer

Annabel Crabb on Clive Palmer's proposal to rebuild the Titanic.  Seriously, someone should get him to a specialist.

Capitalism

I have no good references for this, but I think of capitalism as specifying:

How Money Uses People to Make More Money.

This definition (for me) makes the business school / economics assumption that the purpose of a business is to turn some money into more money logical, by narrowing human motivation to just their cash equivalents. Pro-capitalism positions would tend to say that this misses the concomitant fact that to make money, you have to meet a human need, but I think the meeting of the needs of the human who notionally owns the money at the expense of clients and workers for the business, tends to discourage that. The humans who 'own' the money have to serve it relentlessly or it will migrate to or get captured by other humans who can tend it more effectively. I always think of the 'Ton' in Regency England, where living off your fortune meant marrying to maintain your fortune, which meant spending enough to keep up with rich class. Every decision was warped by this one fear - will our money run out on us, leaving us to reduce our lifestyle or heaven forfend, work!

Pro-capitalist positions will also point to the virtues obtained under capitalism - the material wealth, the vigorous uptake of innovation.  These, though, are neutrals.  Capitalism would not end slavery, workhouses, introduce schooling for all children, or preserve the environment.  The benefits to human life are side effects.  The good side effects are not combated, the negative side effects are. What is defined as negative sometimes has a corollary justification to money (climate change might, universal education might now, although not before 1900), but if that corollary were convincing, money would be invested spontaneously.  Capitalism is not the summum bonum.  It has to be a part, not the whole, of your ideas of good human outcomes.  This idea might explored in 'The Darwin Economy' which I should maybe read, although I think it is more about the fact that evolutionary stable strategies in nature and Nash equilibria in business-style games are described by a single theoretical structure.  The Darwin Economy probably points out that Nash equilbria (local minima in which neither player can move to a better strategy without losing out to the other) can occur which are not nearly Pareto optimal, and suggest that we need to selectively breed (or otherwise put evolutionary pressure on) corporations and markets to edge toward Pareto optimal benignity.

There is an interesting theorist of technology called W. Brian Arthur, whose book 'The Nature of Technology' captures a lot of the true things you can say.  It would have been a better book with more Heidegger (Equipment as a starting point for understanding Human Being can't not be informative about technology), but it's still excellent.  He has put out an article recently called 'the second economy' in Mckinsey's (registration-walled), but summarised and expanded upon at theatlantic.com.  Essentially, he's pointing out that equipment 'works'.  It doesn't just increase productivity, it produces. It finishes things. The Second Economy is the automatic economy. Arguably, we've always depended on this - farming depends on the productivity of fruiting trees and plants.  But trees and plants are not doing information work, and they aren't Turing-complete in being able to work indefinitely accomplishing who knows what (is that a fair use of Turing-complete in a sentence?  Possibly not).

 This would change my original definition to:

How Money gets things done to Make More Money.

There is much speculation about the singularity, about the second economy becoming independent of the humans who think they own it.  Charles Stross' Accelerando does a wonderful job of imagining it while keeping at least one tippy-toe on the ground.  It could happen.  Well before it does, he notes, Money will migrate toward it.  Google and Facebook and Intel and so on are that beginning.  Amazon has bought a warehouse-robot factory to turn all its warehouses over to robots (rather than abuse humans into robot-form).

(One difficulty with trying to recognize this is that it might mean people don't take money seriously any more, in which case you lose the good of capitalism (anti-nepotist, results oriented, energized, innovation-attracted) with the bad.  And people are no better off, because they've migrated to thinking that (detached cool/ethical validation/family affection/etc) is the only thing worth having, and they'll put that on a pedestal until it kills them too.)

* Is that Turing-complete?  Turing-complete means a language of instructions that can articulate write, read and delete, conditional execution and repetition (loops) - perform the functions of a Turing machine and be implemented by a Turing Machine.

Umm, Integration

I don't usually listen to commercial radio, because why would you? - but finding , myself sans iPod I was listening this morning. They were doing a bit about remembering the names of ypur coworkers - people you occasionally deal with and always need help from but who don't enter your sociality. The hosts had been around and met everyone the day before and now had a 'pop quiz.'

They had a girl, the last one. Make conversation: 'Where do you work?'
'In - oh, don't say it?' - she broke off responding to signs from someone off-mike - 'Ok, ummm integration.'

What do you think umm stood for? Racial integration? That would be quite a useful work area for a popular radio station to have. Mathematical integration? Probably not. Gender or other minority integration? No.

I bet it was product integration, and you don't say that out loud because this radio station is like the domesticated warren in Watership down. There's some things we don't talk about. The not very hilarious hyuckster's of the morning show are, in the end, some money's way of making some more money.

It's not wrong to have that role - most people do. It is a bit wrong to hide it, and if you want to hide it that should be your cue that it is a bit wrong.

(Of course, given the station, minority integration might actually hurt their audience figures more, so I can't be sure.)

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Clive Palmer

My wife noted a tweet the other day that amused her.  It was a link to the story of a person suing Clive Palmer, mining magnate, because Clive had accused them of treason, with the apt conclusion 'Worst. Public Sphere. Ever.'

Australia's national discourse is pretty low-grade.  When you compare it to the life in Britain, it suffers terribly.  It's partly being less stratified by class, so that buffoons like Andrew Bolt, sensible people (can't think of any), and outright loonies (Janet Albrechtsen) all have to share the same paper.  A great many arguments degenerate into 'we (Australia) don't want X, do we?' about things that opinion polls clearly show are 50-50 propositions.  'We' is not Australia at all in these articles, just 'my social circle of right-thinking people'.  There was an article in The Age from Austhink Consulting who provide argument mapping software and services which made the case for gay marriage on the grounds that 'we' don't want to enshrine two-state sexual valence systems* as the law.  'We' (Austhink Consulting and Age readers) may not, but 'We' Australia were still, in fact, significantly divided.  It was disheartening to see an arguing consultancy assume the ground of their conclusion, apparently without realising it.

Clive Palmer has been in the public's face for a while:
1.  Arguing that his great wealth is good for Australia and is entirely merited by his sagacity and good character (and hence that everything should be ordered to benefit him as much as it now does, or preferably more.) and
2.  Throwing tantrums befitting a two-year old and throwing accusations in a way befitting a man descending into dementia.

Try as I might, I can't not imagine him as a morbidly obese tick that doesn't know when to let go, and thinks its blood mine is entirely of its own creating. A leading Australian.

Worst. Public Sphere. Ever.

Indeed**.

*my free translation.
** Well, having said that, ridiculous idiocy about your outside context and power are together more than they are apart.

Employment

The toil of work is a curse. There is work which is not toilsome, but it seems to me that actually existing capitalism tends to drive work toward toilsomeness. Making a movie is a joyous creative act, but not if its Transformers, and not if most of the work for the creators is not creative choices but trying to get funding, defuse strikes, fire people, incorporate box office building names and their terrible advice.

There is a heroic capitalism of inventing things, having insights and taking risks; but it quickly degenerates into a race to the bottom between copycats - who can tighten the belts of their suppliers the most? Who can lead consumers to pay most while getting least?

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The Internet and the end of Capitalism

This week I gave money to a few worthy institutions - wikipedia, paul sheeky from triptree, and others. They give good things without asking a price, and my gifts were scaled to be more than I would actually pay if they did. I think if we were ever to come out the far side of capitalism as Marx anticipated, it will be through this distributionist approach. The end of inequality is achieved when each of us treats others needs as our own, until my needs are being met from the generosity of others, not because I demand a price to be alienated from my labour.

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Perpetuity

Have you noticed that there are a lot of perpetual motion machines, insanely efficient engines or pumps or gearboxes or power generation systems on the internet?

I think most of them survive indefinitely because to seriously test them would often require that they be professionally constructed, instrumented into a high quality test rig, and then tested by independent professionals, all of which are beyond the reach of inventors.  Until that happens, the inventors can continue releasing video's of themselves with mockups, diagrams about how they work, and excited testimonials.  They always approach universities and research institutes and companies looking for investment and validation, and they almost never get it.  Who wants to spend $500,000 to show that something is not a perpetual motion machine?  If the claims are more compatible with thermodynamics, they are still likely to violate other constraints - be impossible to build, or be unmaintainable or just unbalanced.

What is needed is a sort of reverse KickStarter or Pozible, in which sceptics, institutions and companies volunteer small amounts of their resources to collectively clear away the rubbish by testing it properly.  There is no shame in NASA spending $5000 to disprove an outlandish claim if many other institutions joined in.  Perhaps it could be called KickOuter or ImPozible.

(Interestingly, the best candidates would still attract the most funding (except from bully-boy sceptics, I suppose).

SmarteCarte

Travelling with a small child necessitates luggage and a cart. The SmarteCarte's are dispensed from a vending machine and cost $4. I imagine $3.80 of that pays to maintain the vending machine and 20c the cart.

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