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Dotted with “death villages” where crops will not fruit, the region of Inner Mongolia where the Bayan Obo mine is located displays Chernobylesque cancer rates. But then again, the death villages are already here. More of them are coming if we don’t do something about climate change. What matter is a dozen death villages when half the earth may be rendered uninhabitable? What matter the gray skies over Inner Mongolia if the alternative is turning the sky an endless white with sulfuric aerosols, as last-ditch geoengineering scenarios imagine? Moralists, armchair philosophers, and lesser-evilists may try to convince you that these situations resolve into a sort of trolley-car problem: do nothing and the trolley speeds down the track toward mass death. Do something, and you switch the trolley onto a track where fewer people die, but where you are more actively responsible for their deaths. When the survival of millions or even billions hangs in the balance, as it surely does when it comes to climate change, a few dozen death villages might seem a particularly good deal, a green deal, a new deal. But climate change doesn’t resolve into a single trolley-car problem. Rather, it’s a planet-spanning tangle of switchyards, with mass death on every track.
not 100% convinced i follow this argument but i do enjoy the rhetoric flourish
Counting emissions within national boundaries, in other words, is like counting calories but only during breakfast and lunch. If going clean in the US makes other places dirtier, then you’ve got to add that to the ledger. The carbon sums are sure to be lower than they would be otherwise, but the reductions might not be as robust as thought, especially if producers desperate to cash in on the renewable jackpot do things as cheaply and quickly as possible, which for now means fossil fuels. On the other side, environmental remediation is costly in every way. Want to clean up those tailings ponds, bury the waste deep underground, keep the water table from being poisoned? You’re going to need motors and you’re probably going to burn oil.
To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that and pasture for a massive meat and dairy industry? For that and the forest we’d need to take carbon out of the air? Not if capitalism keeps doing the thing which it can’t not keep doing—grow. The law of capitalism is the law of more—more energy, more stuff, more materials. It introduces efficiencies only to more effectively despoil the planet. There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here and lose sight of the essential. In each of these scenarios, on each of these sad, warming planets, the Green New Deal fails because capitalism. Because, in capitalism, a small class of owners and managers, in competition with itself, finds itself forced to make a set of narrow decisions about where to invest and in what, establishing prices, wages, and other fundamental determinants of the economy. Even if these owners wanted to spare us the drowned cities and billion migrants of 2070, they could not. They would be undersold and bankrupted by others. Their hands are tied, their choices constrained, by the fact that they must sell at the prevailing rate or perish. It is the class as a whole that decides, not its individual members. This is why the sentences of Marxists (and Marx) so often treat capital as agent rather than object. The will towards relentless growth, and with it increasing energy use, is not chosen, it is compelled, a requirement of profitability where profitability is a requirement of existence.
If you tax oil, capital will sell it elsewhere. If you increase demand for raw materials, capital will bid up the prices of commodities, and rush materials to market in the most wasteful, energy-intensive way. If you require millions of square miles for solar panels, wind farms, and biofuel crops, capital will bid up the price of real estate. If you slap tariffs on necessary imports, capital will leave for better markets. If you try to set a maximum price that doesn’t allow profit, capital will simply stop investing. Lop off one head of the hydra, face another. Invest trillions of dollars into infrastructure in the US and you’ll have to confront the staggeringly wasteful, slow, and unproductive construction industry, where laying a mile of subway can be twenty times as expensive and take four times as long. You’ll have to confront the earthen monsters of Bechtel and Fluor Corp., habituated to feeding at the government trough and billing fifty dollar screws. If this doesn’t chasten you, consider the world-historical inefficiency of the US military, the planet’s biggest oil consumer and, unsurprisingly, also the planet’s main oil cop. The Pentagon is an accounting black hole, into which the wealth of the nation is ploughed and from which no light emerges. Its balance sheet is a blank.
surely this leaves out the possibility of a subtle but important shift in systemic behavior due to changing social attitudes and legislation?
As I read this collection, I found myself thinking about an early debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke about the possibility of a political black modernist art, a debate framed in terms of the relationship between art and propaganda. Du Bois famously declared that “all art is propaganda and ever must be”: that is, all cultural production under capitalism necessarily serves ruling interests, so black artists have an obligation to take the side of the oppressed. Locke rejoined that propaganda (or, in more contemporary terms, protest) “perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it leaves and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens or supplicates.” Both ultimately describe the conditions of art, and reveal the falseness of the binary between “political” and “middle class” poetry I described previously. However, if one is to avoid the poetry of pity, which provides an affective release for the oppressor, or of cheap solidarity, which can preclude historical and political understanding of domination, the question is how one is to take sides. The strength of Heaven Is All Goodbyes in this regard is that it manages to transcend empty sloganeering and refuse the seductions of easy pessimism, bombastic militancy, or unearned optimism. Its value is not its interpretation or representation of the world, though poetry inevitably represents, and representation is an interpretation of the world. Rather, it invites readers to examine their attachments; it helps generate new concepts and encourages aesthetic and political experimentation; and it invites readers to a world, this one, where we might live otherwise.
idk this book but im intrigued by this analysis
[...] Given Bourdieu's central role in developing practice theory, it would be surprising for him to suddenly come down on the side of structural determinism, arguing that people are simply recipients of large-scale social forces. Instead, Bourdieu's theory of taste hinges on his understanding of the habitus - the set of embodied dispositions that people acquire as they are socialized and that they exercise when making judgments of taste (among other things). For Bourdieu, the concept of habitus provides an alternative to visions of people as either free-willed autonomous subjects or unthinking vehicles of structural dynamics (see Sterne 2003, 376). People acquire the sensibilities that constitute their habitus in worlds full of the myriad entities Hennion describes: a person's taste in music is going to be shaped by how the people around them act, the forms they encounter music in, and a host of other situational factors. Because people in similar social positions grow up under similar conditions, they end up with a similar habitus, and the mystery of how tastes come to mirror social structure is at least partly resolved (Lizardo 2014, 346).
Conventional ways of thinking about access mislead researchers into thinking that, once they have cracked through the black box's wall, knowledge will be waiting there for the taking. But access is not an event; it is the ongoing navigation of relationships. Access has a texture, and this texture -- patterns of disclosure and refusal -- can be instructive in itself. When I interviewed junior employees, they were often worried about what they were allowed to say to me, even when I had signed the same nondisclosure agreements they had. In contrast, CEOs and founders usually spoke quite freely, sure in their ability to define the parameters of the permissible and to draw the corporation's limits into strict, punishing existence at will. The social structure of the firm shimmered into view through these interactions.
Chapter 6, "Parks and Recommendation," builds on that discussion of space by examining a set of spatial metaphors commonly used by the makers of music recommendation: pastoral metaphors that figure technical workers as gardeners or park rangers who tend to the music space and the listeners who travel within it. Many critics have argued that such metaphors naturalize the work of machine learning, mystifying how it actually works. I offer a different interpretation, suggesting that developers find pastoral metaphors useful because they describe an ambivalent form of control: while the people who manage the music space are aware that they determine a good deal of its structure, they also understand their work as tending to lively data sources beyond their influence. Analyzing these metaphors helps us interpret how the makers of music recommendation think about their power and responsibility in relation to the objects of their labor and to music more generally.
We have no shortage of explanations that place the blame at the foot of capitalism itself: in the ceaseless production of desire that capital demands. The musicologist Eric Drott (2018c, 333), for instance, convincingly argues that the promotional materials for music streaming services "transfigure plenitude into a form of lack." These services provide users access to the catalog, and then suggest that the size of the catalog is a problem that they can solve for those same users, keeping the wheels of capital moving. The cultural critic Jonathan Cohn (2018, so) follows a similar line of reasoning, arguing that recommender systems operate in "bad faith," framing choice as a "burden" to be relieved rather than as the location of users' agency, which recommendations diminish.
These explanations are not wrong; they reach for large-scale dynamics of desire and production. But they do not capture the local reasoning of people working on these systems, who feel the reality of overload in their everyday lives and come to understand their work as a form of care for users who are similarly beset by the paradox of choice. If we want to understand the logic of people working in these systems, we cannot reduce their efforts at understanding the world to "bad faith" or the epiphenomena of capitalist machinery. This does not mean that the makers of music recommendation can't be wrong about themselves, their users, or the cultural dynamics they try to understand. They may indeed be caught up in large-scale processes in which their ultimate function is the ongoing production of consumer desire. But the political economy of the music industry does not directly determine how people working in these settings make decisions or think about their work.
My goal here is to understand how recommender systems make sense to their makers -- how they work, who they're for, why they exist. To do this, we need to understand overload. Overload haunts the utopian fantasies of the information age, lurking beneath dreams of exponential growth and threatening to turn computing's successes into failures. It feels real, it feels new, and it feels tightly bound up with contemporary technologies of media circulation. And yet as we've already seen, its newness is old. What seemed like a natural response to on-demand streaming in the 2010s also seemed like a natural response to the ocean of CDs in the 1990s.
Mythological discourse is conventionally understood to be concerned with form over content abstract types over concrete instances. Roland Barthes (1972, 143) has argued that myths' abstraction lets them function as "depoliticized speech": by tying together timeless cosmic orders and ordinary historical experience, myths naturalize the archetypes and structures they contain, giving historical contingencies "a natural and eternal justification, ... a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact." In computer science, abstraction is also a central practice and value, which identifies underlying coherence by disregarding details considered extraneous. To suggest that collaborative filtering and prehistoric ant trails are the same kind of thing requires just such an abstraction, shedding the many features that might distinguish them in favor of a timeless, underlying unity. Critics of computer science have, echoing Barthes, suggested that this commitment to abstraction has made the field "antipolitical" -- aggressively dismissive of historic particularity [...]
We can think of these myths as scaling devices. They establish the scope of discussion, indicating that we are not talking about minor acts of coding but about enduring problems of existence. If the ordinary work of programming seems boring -- like staying put all day and typing -- these stories reimagine telling computers what to do as transformative action on the largest possible scale. As the linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine (2016, 228) argues, "scale-climbing" is an ideological operation: by claiming the broader view, people try to encompass one another within their own explanatory frameworks (see Gal and Irvine 1995). Epochal software stories set human species-being within a computational frame, recasting practically all social activities as precursors to their narrators' technological projects. David Golumbia, in The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009), has adapted a term from the philosophy of mind -- "computationalism" -- to describe this expansionist tendency in the rhetoric of computing, which enables software to alternately lay claim to the future and the past: new companies figure themselves as both innovators and inheritors of timeless truths.
Identifying these myths as myths is a first step toward reimagining our situation, making received wisdom contestable by reinstalling it in historical time (see Bowker 1994). We can locate overload in concrete situations, with all the particularities that abstraction scrapes away. But we can also analyze how the myth works, as a story that is intellectually productive and world-enframing for the people who tell it. In anthropological terms, we can take myths not as falsehoods to be disproved but as keys to their tellers' cosmology: their worldview, their sense of the order of things, their background theory of society and of existence more generally.