Ten Things That Will Disappear

Got one of those chain e-mail messages from who knows who or where, ending with the exhortation to pass it on. My comments follow each of the titular things. Read at your peril. (I could nit-pick the awfulness of the writing of the quoted paragraphs, but I’ll just let that go.) Before commenting, however, let me point out that the anonymous writer behind this listicle assumes that systems will function long enough for predictions to prove out. The last two years have already demonstrated that the world is entering a period of extreme flux where many styles and functions of social organization will break down irreparably. Supply chain difficulties with computer chips (and relatedly, fossil fuels) are just one example of nonlinear change that is making owning and operating a personal vehicle far less affordable (soon impossible for many) than decades past. Impossible to predict when breakdown reaches critical mass, but when it does, all bets are off.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills. 

Despite its popularity among the general public, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS link ends in .com, not .gov) has been under attack for generations already with the ostensible goal of privatizing it. Financial trouble is by design: the USPS is being driven to extinction so that its services can be handed off to for-profit alternatives, jacking up prices in the process. So yeah, it might fail and go away like other cherished American institutions.

Offered Without Comment 18

From Joseph Bernstein’s article “Bad News” in the Sept. 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

Compared with other, more literally toxic corporate giants, those in the tech industry have been rather quick to concede the role they played in corrupting the allegedly pure stream of American reality. Only five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said. “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.” A year later, suddenly chastened, he apologized for being glib and pledged to do his part to thwart those who “spread misinformation.”

Denial was always untenable, for Zuckerberg in particular. The so-called techlash, a season of belatedly brutal media coverage and political pressure in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s win, made it difficult. But Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its [political] content?

Razors, Rules, Laws, and Zuihitsu

As a sometimes presenter of aphorisms, felicitous and humorous turns of phrase and logic interest me as examples of heuristics aimed as parsimony and cognitive efficiency. Whether one recognizes those terms or not, everyone uses snap categorization and other shortcuts to manage and alleviate crowded thinking from overwhelming demands on perception. Most of us, most of the time, use sufficiency as the primary decision-making mode, which boils down to “close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.” Emotion is typically the trigger, not rational analysis. After enough repetition is established, unthinking habit takes over. Prior to habituation, however, the wisdom of sages has provided useful rubrics to save unnecessary and pointless labor over casuistry flung into one’s way to impede, convince, or gaslight. (I previously wrote about this effect here).

As categories, I pay close attention to razors, rules, laws, principles, and Zuihitsu when they appear as aphorisms in the writing of those I read and follow online. Famous rules, laws, and principles include Occam’s Razor, (Finagle’s Corollary to) Murphy’s Law, Godwin’s Law, Jevon’s Paradox, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (do your own searches if these escape you). Some are quite useful at dispelling faulty thinking and argumentation. Café Bedouin (see blogroll) has an ongoing series of Zuihitsu, which has grown quite long. Many ring fundamentally true; others are either highly situational or wrong on their face, perhaps revealing the cardinal weakness of reduction of ideas to short, quotable phrases.

I recently learned of Hitchens’ Razor (after Christopher Hitchens), usually given as “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” According to the Wikipedia entry, it may well have been reconstituted, repurposed, or revived from other sources stretching back into antiquity. Caitlin Johnson, a notable aphorist I’ve quoted numerous times, uses Hitchens’ Razor to put the lie to claims from the U.S. war machine and its dutiful media lapdogs that the “situation in Ukraine” (whatever that is) demands intervention by Western powers lest the utility bad guys of the moment, the Russians, be allowed to run roughshod over its neighbor Ukraine, which (significantly) used to be part of the now-defunct Soviet Union. As with many controversial, inflammatory claims and assertions continuously heaped like a dog pile on hapless U.S. citizens with little time, few resources, and no obligation to perform their own investigations and analyses, I have only weak opinions but very strong suspicions. That’s where Hitchens’ Razor comes in handy. Under its instruction, I can discard out-of-hand and in disbelief extraordinary claims designed to whip me and the wider public into an emotional frenzy and thus accept or support actions that shouldn’t just raise eyebrows but be met with considerable dissent, protest, and disobedience. Saves me a lot of time entertaining nonsense just because it gets repeated often enough to be accepted as truth (Bernays’ Principle).

Staring at the Sun

/rant on

Remember when the War on Christmas meme materialized a few years ago out of thin air, even though no one in particular was on attack? Might have to rethink that one. Seems that every holiday now carries an obligation to revisit the past, recontextualize origin stories, and confess guilt over tawdry details of how the holiday came to be celebrated. Nearly everyone who wants to know knows by now that Christmas is a gross bastardization of pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, cooped by various organized churches (not limited to Christians!) before succumbing to the awesome marketing onslaught (thanks, Coca-Cola) that makes Xmas the “most wonderful time of the year” (as the tune goes) and returning the holiday to its secular roots. Thanksgiving is now similarly ruined, no longer able to be celebrated and enjoyed innocently (like a Disney princess story reinterpreted as a white or male savior story — or even worse, a while male) but instead used as an excuse to admit America’s colonial and genocidal past and extermination mistreatment of native populations as white Europeans encroached ever more persistently on lands the natives held more or less as a commons. Gone are the days when one could gather among family and friends, enjoy a nice meal and good company, and give humble, sincere thanks for whatever bounty fortuna had bestowed. Now it’s history lectures and acrimony and families rent asunder along generational lines, typically initiated by those newly minted graduates of higher education and their newfangled ideas about equity, justice, and victimhood. Kids these days … get off my lawn!

One need not look far afield to find alternative histories that position received wisdom about the past in the cross-hairs just to enact purification rituals that make it/them, what, clean? accurate? whole? I dunno what the real motivation is except perhaps to force whites to self-flagellate over sins of our ancestors. Damn us to hell for having cruelly visited iniquity upon everyone in the process of installing white, patriarchal Europeanness as the dominant Western culture. I admit all of it, though I’m responsible for none of it. Moreover, history stops for no man, no culture, no status quo. White, patriarchal Europeanness is in serious demographic retreat and has arguably already lost its grip on cultural dominance. The future is female (among other things), amirite? Indeed, whether intended or not, that was the whole idea behind the American experiment: the melting pot. Purity was never the point. Mass migration out of politically, economically, and ecologically ravaged regions means that the experiment is no longer uniquely American.

Interdisciplinary approaches to history, if academic rigidity can be overcome, regularly develop new understandings to correct the historical record. Accordingly, the past is remarkably dynamic. (I’ve been especially intrigued by Graham Hancock’s work on ancient civilizations, mostly misunderstood and largely forgotten except for megalithic projects left behind.) But the past is truly awful, with disaster piled upon catastrophe followed by calamity and cataclysm. Still waiting for the apocalypse. Peering too intently into the past is like staring at the sun: it scorches the retinas. Moreover, the entire history of history is replete with stories being told and retold, forgotten and recovered, transformed in each iteration from folklore into fable into myth into legend before finally passing entirely out of human memory systems. How many versions of Christmas are there across cultures and time? Or Thanksgiving, or Halloween, or any Hallmark® holiday that has crossed oceans and settled into foreign lands? What counts as the true spirit of any of them when their histories are so mutable?

/rant off

Advertising Everywhere (redux)

While working, I half listen to a variety of podcasts via YouTube, usually minimizing the window so that I don’t see the video. Some report that long-haul truckers are also avid podcast listeners (presumably discarding AM radio); who knows? At any rate, I find it dispiriting that nearly every podcast has attracted sponsors and now features unavoidable, in-your-face advertising on top of ubiquitous exhortations to like, subscribe, ring the bell, and buy merch. Ads are sometimes read live, no longer being prerecorded bits during regular commercial breaks. Segues into ad reads are often tortured, with tastelessness being an inverted badge of honor somehow.

I get that for those who have made podcasting their primary incomes, opining on anything and everything ad nauseum (sorta like me, actually), sponsorship is what keeps them stocked with peanut butter. Why do I still tune in? Well, some are actually entertaining, while others are exceptional clearinghouses for information I wouldn’t otherwise gather — at least when not pedantic and irritating. Good thing I’m only half listening. Case in point: a few weeks back, the DarkHorse Podcast (no link) announced it would begin doing ads, but to make the bitter pill easier to swallow, free endorsements (unpaid ads) would also be presented. Right … more of what I don’t want. In characteristic fashion, the two hosts beat that damn horse well into the afterlife, softening none of the irksome content (at least for me). Although legacy media (e.g., radio, TV, magazines, newsprint) has always required forfeiting some part of one’s time and attention to ignoring or filtering out ads, streaming services and online blockers have done away with much of the unwanted marketing. Perhaps that’s why I’m exasperated at it now being unavoidable again.

With this in mind, here’s my promise to you, dear reader: I will never monetize this blog or put it behind a paywall. I won’t even put up a tip jar or coffee mug to entice micropayments. The blog will also never connect to Facebook or Twitter or any other platform. This blog is totally free and unencumbered (except the ads WordPress puts in, which are relatively easy to dismiss and/or circumvent). Maybe I’m fortunate that I earn my living elsewhere and disavow any desire to be a pundit, influencer, or media figure. Those folks are uniformly unenviable, especially when distorted by their own celebrity so that they forget who they are. Instead, this blog will remain what it’s always been: a venue for me to work out my ideas and secondarily share them.

The Chirographic Mind

The backblog at The Spiral Staircase includes numerous book reviews and three book-blogging projects — one completed and two others either abandoned or on semi-permanent hiatus. I’m launching a new project on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), which comes highly recommended and appears quite interesting given my preoccupations with language, literacy, and consciousness. To keep my thinking fresh, I have not consulted any online reviews or synopses.

Early on, Ong provides curious (but unsurprising) definitions I suspect will contribute to the book’s main thesis. Here is one from the intro:

It is useful to approach orality and literacy synchronically, by comparing oral cultures and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures that coexist at a given period of time. But it is absolutely essential to approach them also diachronically or historically, by comparing successive periods with one another. [p. 2]

I don’t recall reading the word chirographic before, but I blogged about the typographic mind (in which Ong’s analyses are discussed) and lamented that the modern world is moving away from literacy, back toward orality, which feels (to me at least) like retrogression and retreat. (Someone is certain to argue return to orality is actually progress.) As a result, Western institutions such as the independent press are decaying. Moreover, it’s probably fair to say that democracy in the West is by now only a remnant fiction, replaced by oligarchic rule and popular subscription to a variety of fantasy narratives easily dispelled by modest inventory of what exists in actuality.

Here is another passage and definition:

A grapholect is a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing. Writing gives a grapholect a power far exceeding that of any purely oral dialect. The grapholect known as standard English has accessible for use a recorded vocabulary of at least a million and a half words, of which not only the present meanings but also hundreds of thousands of past meanings are known. A simply oral dialect will commonly have resources of only a few thousand words, and its users will have virtually no knowledge of the real semantic history of any of these words. [p. 8]

My finding is that terms such as democracy, liberalism, social justice, etc. fail to mean anything (except perhaps to academics and committed readers) precisely because their consensus usage has shifted so wildly over time that common historical points of reference are impossible to establish in a culture heavily dominated by contemporary memes, slang, talking heads, and talking points — components of orality rather than literacy. And as part of a wider epistemological crisis, one can no longer rely on critical thinking to sort out competing truth claims because the modifier critical now bandied about recklessly in academia, now infecting the workplace and politics, has unironically reversed its meaning and requires uncritical doublethink to swallow what’s taught and argued. Let me stress, too, that playing word games (such as dissembling what is means) is a commonplace tactic to put off criticism by distorting word meanings beyond recognition.

Although it’s unclear just yet (to me, obviously) what Ong argues in his book beyond the preliminary comparison and contrast of oral and chirographic cultures (or in terms of the title of the book, orality and literacy), I rather doubt he argues as I do that the modern world has swung around to rejection of literacy and the style of thought that flows from deep engagement with the written word. Frankly, it would surprise me if his did; the book predates the Internet, social media, and what’s now become omnimedia. The last decade in particular has demonstrated that by placing a cheap, personal, 24/7/365 communications device in the hands of every individual from the age of 12 or so, a radical social experiment was launched that no one in particular designed — except that once the outlines of the experiment began to clarify, those most responsible (i.e., social media platforms in particular but also biased journalists and activist academics) have refused to admit that they are major contributors to the derangement of society. Cynics learned long ago to expect that advertisers, PR hacks, and politicians should be discounted, which requires ongoing skepticism and resistance to omnipresent lures, cons, and propaganda. Call it waking up to reality or simply growing up and behaving responsibly in an information environment designed to be disorienting. Accordingly, the existence of counterweights — information networks derived from truth, authority, and integrity — has always been, um, well, critical. Their extinction presages much graver losses as information structures and even the memory of mental habits that society needs to function are simply swept aside.

For Sale: Journalistic Integrity

Already widely reported but only just having come to my awareness is an initiative by Rolling Stone to establish a Culture Council: “an Invitation-Only Community of Influencers, Innovatives, and Creatives.” The flattering terms tastemakers and thought leaders are also used. One must presume that submissions will be promotional and propaganda pieces masquerading as news articles. Selling advertising disguised as news is an old practice, but the ad usually has the notation “advertisement” somewhere on the page. Who knows whether submissions will be subject to editorial review?

To be considered for membership, candidates must sit in a senior-level position at a company generating at least $500K in annual revenue or have obtained at least $1M in total institutional funding.

Rolling Stone‘s website doesn’t say it anywhere I can locate, but third-party reports indicate that members pay either a $1,500 annual fee and $500 submission fee (one-time? repeat?) or a flat $2,000 submission fee. Not certain which. Just to be abundantly clear, fees would be paid by the submitter to the magazine, reversing how published content is normally acquired (i.e., by paying staff writers and free lancers). I’d say this move by Rolling Stone is unprecedented, but of course, it’s not. However, it is a more brazen pay-to-play scheme than most and may be a harbinger of even worse developments to come.

Without describing fully how creative content (arts and news) was supported in the past, I will at least observe that prior to the rise of full-time creative professions in the 18th and 19th centuries (those able to scratch out earn a living on commissions and royalties), creative work was either a labor of love/dedication, typically remunerated very poorly if at all, or was undertaken through the patronage of wealthy European monarchs, aristocrats, and religious institutions (at least in the developing West). Unless I’m mistaken, self-sustaining news organizations and magazines came later. More recent developments include video news release and crowd sourcing, the latter of which sometimes accomplished under the pretense of running contests. The creative commons is how many now operative (including me — I’ve refused to monetize my blog), which is exploited ruthlessly by HuffPost (a infotainment source I ignore entirely), which (correct me if wrong) doesn’t pay for content but offers exposure as an inducement to journalists trying to develop a byline and/or audience. Podcasts, YouTube channels, and news sites also offer a variety of subscription, membership, and voluntary patronage (tipping) schemes to pay the bills (or hit it big if an outlier). Thus, business models have changed considerably over time and are in the midst of another major transformation, especially for news-gathering organizations and the music recording industry in marked retreat from their former positions.

Rolling Stone had always been a niche publication specializing in content that falls outside my usual scope of interest. I read Matt Taibbi’s reporting that appeared in Rolling Stone, but the magazine’s imprint (read: reputation) was not the draw. Now that the Rolling Stone is openly soliciting content through paid membership in the Culture Council, well, the magazine sinks past irrelevance to active avoidance.

It’s always been difficult to separate advertising and propaganda from reliable news, and some don’t find it important to keep these categories discrete, but this new initiative is begging to be gamed by motivated PR hacks and self-promoters with sufficient cash to burn. It’s essentially Rolling Stone whoring itself out. Perhaps more worrying is that others will inevitably follow Rolling Stone‘s example and sell their journalistic integrity with similar programs, effectively putting the final nails in their own coffins (via brand self-destruction). The models in this respect are cozy, incestuous relationships between PACs, lobbying groups, think tanks, and political campaigns. One might assume that legacy publications such as Rolling Stone would have the good sense to retain as much of their valuable brand identity as possible, but the relentless force of corporate/capitalist dynamics are corrupting even the incorruptible.

Review: Back to Our Future

David Sirota, author of Back to our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now — Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything (2011), came to my attention (how else?) through a podcast. He riffed pretty entertainingly on his book, now roughly one decade old, like a rock ‘n’ roller stuck (re)playing his or her greatest hits into dotage. However, his thesis was strong and appealing enough that I picked up a copy (read: borrowed from the library) to investigate despite the datedness of the book (and my tardiness). It promised to be an easy read.

Sirota’s basic thesis is that memes and meme complexes (a/k/a memeplexes, though Sirota never uses the term meme) developed in the 80s and deployed through a combination of information and entertainment media (thus, infotainment) form the narrative background we take for granted in the early part of the 20th century. Children fed a steady diet of clichés, catchphrases, one-liners, archetypes, and story plots have now grown to adulthood and are scarcely able to peer behind the curtain to question the legitimacy or subtext of the narrative shapes and distortions imbibed during childhood like mother’s milk. The table of contents lists four parts (boldface section titles are Sirota’s; descriptive text is mine):

• Liking Ike, Hating Woodstock. How the 50s and 60s decades were (the first?) assigned reductive demographic signifiers, handily ignoring the true diversity of experience during those decades. More specifically, the boom-boom 50s (economics, births) were recalled nostalgically in 80s TV and films while the 60s were recast as being all about those dirty, hairy hippies and their music, drugs, and sexual licentiousness, all of which had to be invalidated somehow to regain lost wholesomeness. The one-man promotional vehicle for this pleasing self-deception was Michael J. Fox, whose screen personae (TV and film) during the 80s (glorifying the 50s but openly shitting on the 60s) were instrumental in reforming attitudes about our mixed history.
• The Jump Man Chronicles. How the Great Man Theory of History was developed through glorification of heroes, rogues, mavericks, and iconoclasts who came into their own during the 80s. That one-man vehicle was Michael Jordan, whose talents and personal magnetism were so outsized that everyone aspired to be “like Mike,” which is to say, a superhero elevated beyond mere mortal rules and thus immortalized. The effect was duplicated many times over in popular culture, with various entertainment icons and political operatives subverting thoughtful consideration of real-world problems in favor of jingoistic portrayals.
• Why We (Continue to) Fight. How the U.S. military was rehabilitated after losing the Vietnam War, gifting us with today’s hypermilitarism and permanent wars. Two principal tropes were deployed to shape public opinion: the Legend of the Spat upon Veteran and the Hands Tied Behind Their Backs Myth. Each was trotted out reliably whenever we needed to misremember our past as fictionalized in the 80s.
• The Huxtable Effect. How “America’s dad” helped accommodate race relations to white anxiety, primarily to sell a TV show. In contrast with various “ghetto TV” shows of the 70s that depicted urban working poor (various ethnicities), The Cosby Show presented an upscale black family who transcended race by simply ignoring the issue — a privilege of wealth and celebrity. The Obama campaign and subsequent administration copied this approach, pretending American society had become postracial despite his never truly being able to escape the modifier black because the default (no modifier needed) in America is always white. This is the most fraught part of the book, demonstrating that despite whatever instructions we get from entertainment media and pundits, we remain stuck in an unresolved, unhealed, inescapable trap.

Feeding the Frenzy (redux)

Black Friday has over the past decades become the default kickoff of annual consumer madness associated with the holiday season and its gift-giving tradition. Due to the pandemic, this year has been considerably muted in comparison to other years — at least in terms of crowds. Shopping has apparently moved online fairly aggressively, which is an entirely understandable result of everyone being locked down and socially distanced. (Lack of disposable income ought to be a factor, too, but American consumers have shown remarkable willingness to take on substantial debt when able in support of mere lifestyle.) Nevertheless, my inbox has been deluged over the past week with incessant Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertising. Predictably, retailers continue feeding the frenzy.

Uncharacteristically, perhaps, this state of affairs is not the source of outrage on my part. I recognize that we live in a consumerist, capitalist society that will persist in buying and selling activities even in the face of increasing hardship. I’m also cynical enough to expect retailers (and the manufacturers they support, even if those manufacturers are Chinese) to stoke consumer desire through advertising, promotions, and discount sales. It’s simply what they do. Why stop now? Thus far, I’ve seen no rationalizations or other arguments excusing how it’s a little ghoulish to be profiting while so many are clearly suffering and facing individual and household fiscal cliffs. Instead, we rather blandly accept that the public needs to be served no less by mass market retailers than by, say, grocery and utility services. Failure by the private sector to maintain functioning supply lines (including nonessentials, I suppose) during a crisis would look too much like the appalling mismanagement of the same crisis by local, state, and federal governments. Is it ironic that centralized bureaucracies reveal themselves as incompetent at the very same time they consolidate power? Or more cynically, isn’t it outrageous that they barely even try anymore to address the true needs of the public?

One of the questions I’ve posed unrhetorically is this: when will it finally become undeniably clear that instead of being geared to growth we should instead be managing contraction? I don’t know the precise timing, but the issue will be forced on us sooner or later as a result of radically diminishing return (compared to a century ago, say) on investment (ROI) in the energy sector. In short, we will be pulled back down to earth from the perilous heights we scaled as resources needed to keep industrial civilization creaking along become ever more difficult to obtain. (Maybe we’ll have to start using the term unobtainium from the Avatar movies.) Physical resources are impossible to counterfeit at scale, unlike the bogus enormous increase in the fiat money supply via debt creation. If/when hyperinflation makes us all multimillionaires because everything is grossly overvalued, the absurd paradox of being cash rich yet resource poor ought to wake up some folks.

Channeling Contagion

Caveat: rather overlong for me, but I got rolling …

One of the better articles I’ve read about the pandemic is this one by Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate (a publication I’ve never heard of before). It reads as only slightly conspiratorial, purporting to reveal the true motivation for lockdowns and social distancing, namely, so-called herd immunity. If that’s the case, it’s basically a silent admission that no cure, vaccine, or inoculation is forthcoming and the spread of the virus can only be managed modestly until it has essentially raced through the population. Of course, the virus cannot be allowed to simply run its course unimpeded, but available impediments are limited. “Flattening the curve,” or distributing the infection and death rates over time, is the only attainable strategy and objective.

Wedding mathematical and biological insights, as well as the law of mass action in chemistry, into an epidemic model may seem obvious now, but it was novel roughly a century ago. We’re also now inclined, if scientifically oriented and informed, to understand the problem and its potential solutions management in terms of engineering rather than medicine (or maybe in terms of triage and palliation). Global response has also made the pandemic into a political issue as governments obfuscate and conceal true motivations behind their handling (bumbling in the U.S.) of the pandemic. Curiously, the article also mentions financial contagion, which is shaping up to be worse in both severity and duration than the viral pandemic itself.