Month: December 2018

in hindsight, only men could make teen sex comedies

[Roxane] Gay is fascinating on the “goodness” of girls – as a societal requirement, as an often impossible standard; on how often being good is a matter of being “one who knows how to play by the rules and cares to be seen to be playing by the rules”; who knows how to be liked… Above all, on goodness as vulnerability, not least because she knows, in the most visceral way possible, what that can mean. One day, when she was 12, a handsome classmate took her on a bike ride to an abandoned shack in the woods where a pack of other boys, fuelled by drink, were waiting. “There is a before and an after,” she writes, in Hunger. “In the after I was broken, shattered, and silent.”

Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us’, The Guardian, 27 December 2018

GROSS: When you were 13 and you had friends who were girls, did you understand anxieties from a girl’s point of view? For example, something I think you handle really well in the film is how a 13-year-old girl might deal with it if a boy, you know, just a little bit older than her tries to come on to her and to push her sexually to a place that she’s not ready for. It’s so uncomfortable and awkward and embarrassing for a young, inexperienced girl to say no.

BURNHAM: Yeah. You know, honestly, I don’t think I knew that perspective when I was that age. And I think – I mean, I didn’t do anything equivalent to what that boy does in that scene, but, you know, part of the movie for me was trying to go back and investigate that time and realize that there was a whole other population of people experiencing maybe the exact same circumstances I was experiencing from a different perspective.

And even in film, you know, there’s this sort of teen sex comedy which is, you know – in hindsight, only men could make teen sex comedies just, you know, that teen sex would only be comedic. Of course that seems like it’s from a male perspective.

Director Bo Burnham On Growing Up With Anxiety — And An Audience, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, December 27, 2018

Obedience to the elders and the reproduction of their thought.

That led to the three books you mentioned plus another to come that are indeed a cycle about rewriting radical modernity. Not that this is the only alternate path through the archive, but it’s an attempt to suggest a different relation to the archive in general, to see it as a labyrinth rather than an apostolic succession; a kind of “no-dads” theory, but full of queer uncles and batty aunts…

I find it enervating when people simply try to squeeze the present into the old patterns set by Walter Benjamin or whomever, and add just a tiny bit of novelty to how we read such a canonic figure. Why not read other people, or read the present more in its own terms? Ironically, to best honor Marx or Benjamin one should not simply be their exegetes. So my job is to corrupt other people’s grad students. To be the odd uncle (or auntie) who whispers that one can dissent from the great academic patriarchy (and even its subsidiary matriarchy) where one only succeeds through obedience to the elders and the reproduction of their thought.

Alexander R. Galloway — An Interview with McKenzie Wark, b2o, April 7, 2017

Academia is about – especially if you are a woman – academia is about hierarchies. It is very much about knowing your place and kowtowing to the people above you and knowing when you are allowed to speak and not and who to cite and who not to, not for good political reasons but because of the politics of who you are aligning yourself with.

Hannah McGregor, “Episode 3.12 Not Nice, Not White, and Not a Lady with Tara Robertson“, Secret Feminist Agenda [around 26 minute mark]

To improve energy security, we need to make infrastructures less reliable.

Redefining Energy Security

To arrive to a more accurate definition of energy security requires the concept to be defined, not in terms of commodities like kilowatt-hours of electricity, but in terms of energy services, social practices, or basic needs. 1 People don’t need electricity in itself. What they need, is to store food, wash clothes, open and close doors, communicate with each other, move from one place to another, see in the dark, and so on. All these things can be achieved either with or without electricity, and in the first case, with more or less electricity.

Defined in this way, energy security is not just about securing the supply of electricity, but also about improving the resilience of the society, so that it becomes less dependent on a continuous supply of power. This includes the resilience of people (do they have the skills to do things without electricity?), the resilience of devices and technological systems (can they handle an intermittent power supply?), and the resilience of institutions (is it legal to operate a power grid that is not always on?). Depending on the resilience of the society, a disruption of the power supply may or may not lead to a disruption of energy services or social practices.

… To improve energy security, we need to make infrastructures less reliable.

“Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security“. Kris De Decker. Low <– Tech Magazine.

From McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory

The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.


Theodor Adorno

At the base of contemporary cynicism is fact that men and women learn by experiencing rules rather than ‘facts’

Paolo Virno [[014]]

Ever get the feeling you are playing some vast and useless game to which you don’t know the goal, and can’t remember the rules? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there’s no umpire, no referee, no regulator, to whom to announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t even know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be? Ever get mad over the obvious fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table rigged, and the fix — in? Welcome to gamespace. It’s everywhere, this atopian arena, this speculation sport. No pain no gain. No guts no glory. Give it your best shot. There’s no second place. Winner take all. Here’s a heads up: In gamespace, even if you know the deal, are a player, have got game, you will notice, all the same, that the game has got you. Welcome to the thunderdome. Welcome to the terrordome. Welcome to the greatest game of all. Welcome to the playoffs, the big league, the masters, the only game in town. You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it.

001 – Mackenzie Wark

“Play” was once a great slogan of liberation. Richard Neville: “The new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and they’ll suffer society’s penalty).” Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredome of the player with endless rounds of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same. Play no longer functions as a foil to critical theory. The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game, the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it.

016 – Mackenzie Wark

All games are digital. Without exception. They all come down to a strict decision: out or in, offside or onside, goal or no goal. Anything else is just ‘play’. Game studies scholar Jesper Juul: “The affinity between computers and games is one of the ironies of human history.” But not at all surprising. From the start, games were a proto-computer — machines assembled out of human motion, inanimate materials and the occasional dubious call by the referee — to make a decision, a yes or a no. Sisyphus — founder of the Ismithian games — is condemned to a useless labor which is at the same time useless play, in that it cannot bring about a decision. The rock he rolls never crosses a line. It rolls right past the notional top of the mountain, and overshoots the bottom of its own momentum. But in Katamari Damacy, things are different. Rather than the rolling of the ball being entirely useless, now it is entirely purposeful. Time, like space, no longer harbors indifference. Brenda Laurel:”…even the smallest fragments of your idle time have been colonized…”.

079 – Mackenzie Wark

But Carnegie’s values were not that of a librarian.

Free to All ultimately brings into focus a vision of loss. The act of reading—which for much of the nineteenth century enjoyed a tradition as a rich social activity—had given way, in just a few decades, to the Carnegie mold of machine-like order. Information transfer was now reduced to cold efficiencies, where the library and the librarian functioned only to get books into the hands of readers. Van Slyck concludes with a recognition of what we traded for Carnegie’s riches:

By defining library efficiency as the quick delivery of books into the hands of individual readers, the Carnegie program supported larger cultural trends that encouraged libraries to ignore the issue of how readers used the materials that they did borrow. In contrast to nineteenth-century social libraries which were established specifically to facilitate an active sharing of ideas, the efficiency-driven public library of the twentieth century defined reading as a solitary activity. In the process, the library lost its potential to serve as a site—literally and figuratively—for public discussion and debate. 5

With a self-important sense of purpose, Carnegie hoped to benefit the common good by shaping the public institution of the library in his own image. But Carnegie’s values were not that of a librarian.

from Scott W. H. Young’s Andrew Carnegie, Librarian