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[...] When Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcuse arranged to meet at the Coupole in Paris in the late 1960s, Sartre worried how he could get through lunch without revealing the truth. ‘I have never read a word Marcuse has written’, he told his future biographer John Gerassi. ‘I know he has tried to link Marx and Freud. And I know he supports activist students. But I can’t possibly read his books by next week. Besides I don’t want to stop my research on Flaubert. So you join us. And if Marcuse gets too philosophical, if he uses the word reification just once, interrupt and say something provocative and political.’
In the event, over cassoulet, Sartre came up with an ingenious strategy for concealing his ignorance. He asked questions that suggested a greater familiarity with Marcuse’s works than he actually had. ‘Each time he answered, I picked out an apparent flaw in his answer to ask another question. But since the flaw was only apparent, he could answer my question to his great satisfaction. Thus his vanity soared happily.’ Indeed it did: as Gerassi put Marcuse into a taxi, the latter ‘shook both of my hands with genuine gratitude and said: “I had no idea he knew my work so well.”’
Grown-ups buy line-caught salmon, they don’t read Dialectic of Enlightenment. History has stopped and we live, don’t we, in the best of all possible worlds? In that best of all possible worlds, at the end of history, wrote Fredric Jameson in Late Marxism (1990), ‘the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool’. [...]
referencing a scene from Franzen's The Corrections
[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]
his suggestion that students try to imitate a page of text word for word (from memory) to learn how to write like the author, so you can feel your muscles working to achieve the same effect
A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time writing this? right? "so here's why the following issue might be important, useful, practical." I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I've read, you could boil that down to the opener.
[...] In order for your sentences not to make the reader's eyes glaze over, you can't simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we're going to be able to know the right word, even if that's the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.
Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist. I joined an underground party. I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a heroine of the revolution. [...]
Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system, followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people-buying groceries, paying bills-would unravel into confusion overnight. [...]
[...]
The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we 're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters- socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commercewho cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people who want change-change in its most drastic form . And socialism, with its quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too hopelessly pokey for us now. [...]
interesting point of departure for the problems with non-systems thinking. in this case, if banks crashed overnight, it might feel good on a semiotic level for those who have associated "banks" with "exploitation" and "capitalism", but of course it's not a lasting solution. you can't get rid of what banks represent unless you change the forces that produced banks in the first place. on the other hand, that's not a justification for keeping banks around!
basically not thinking dialectically enough. unsure if she knows that, and thinks other people don't, or if she missed that point somewhere down the line.
He grinned at me.
"You're very strange," I said.
"I used to think that was a compliment," he said. And his pleasure vanished.
It was at that moment that I thought there might be a bit more to Brian. Yes, he was weird. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too well that he was odd, and he suffered from it.
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[...] The only difference was that Brian wanted to smuggle money itself, and he had no compunctions about it. On the contrary, he reveled in the very idea, turned it over and over in his mind, found in it an entire life philosophy. And there he sat on my sofa, drinking my tea, explaining, completely without apology, how he was going to "arbitrage" the United States legal code so that he could build himself a banking system that afforded complete privacy for wealth. A system that, incidentally, made the world safe for crooks, thieves, money launderers, and any average citizen who should just not feel like paying his taxes - a side effect of freedom, he said, the price of liberty, can't be helped.
this is great inspiration wow
[...] How would it help if, in the awful and explicit way of computer systems, Reggie made clear what everyone knew-that there was a little fudging going on around the edges, so that providers could get a little extra and give a little more. In the absence of the machine, everyone could wink at these small rough edges. But Reggie-cute little Reggie with its guacamole-colored screens and the smiling face of an African-American man with AIDS-could make it all plain beyond deniability. "Don't do this," I said to the director. "Once you have this information, you'll have to do something about it."
But she was adamant. "The people paying for this system have a right to good data!" she declared.
In this way, the system became the justification for the system. We collected data, therefore it had to be "good" data. And since we could link one database to another, since it was possible to cross-check data here with data there, well, we should link them. And what was designed to store patients' information as a service for them, had somehow become the property of the "people paying for this system"- an agency of the federal government.
Many years and clients later, this greed for more data, and more again, had become a commonplace. It had become institutionalized as a good feature of computer systems: you can link them up, you can cross-check, you can find out all sorts of things you didn't set out to know. "I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day," said the insurance agent whose employee of twenty-six years knew all his customers by name. "The people who own this system have a right to good data!" said the woman who had set out to do a favor for sick people.
I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the "brain"; we say the machine has "memory." But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.
a pretty disturbing story of a client who wants his secretary's keystrokes monitored. she thinks of it as getting seduced by the promises of the system, though, whereas i would just call it drift