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The Baffler
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[...] I read about housing inequality in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and find that this story is so often a story of mothers and children. These are the people our society claims to love and support above all others, and yet their suffering is endless and untenable, and the reason is simple, really: they are not good workers. Often, they are not workers at all. What good are they? What do they produce? Why should our country take care of them, if they cannot buy their way into safety? Isn’t the inability to purchase safety proof that you deserve whatever harm befalls you?
This is the story Americans have been sold: the one that pardons the powerful and makes us pay for our own numbness. We submit to a story that tells us we will be good—that we will be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules, as long as we forget that there are rules. We enter the castle gates because there can be no danger here, no cruelty, and no adulthood, for as long as we believe: we will be saved not just from the harm that comes to those who are of no value here, but from the knowledge that they even exist. The dream still works, and it will work for at least a little longer. Buy a ticket. See if it’s worth the price.
aaaaahh
For the old rich, an Ivy berth means status preservation. “You’ve got people trying to make sure their kids don’t fall down a class, basically,” said Kara, a consultant who asked to go by a pseudonym so as not to offend her clientele, which includes Middle Eastern royalty and scions of multinational conglomerate fortunes, as well as teachers and hairdressers. “They want what we all want, which is for their kids to have it at least as good as they do.”
It’s a different proposition, of course, for parents who came from less. In their careers, they might have seen Ivy grads glide ahead on the viscous trails left by alumni networks. Here, the thinking is: “I want to buy my kid into this system that I had to claw my way into,” Kara said. “I’d like to help them skip a few steps on the Monopoly board if I can.”
Who can blame them?
yep
If you had to construct a higher education system de novo, and you were given only two prerogatives—to transmit generational privilege while projecting an air of meritocracy—it would be hard to improve on the current setup. If the emotional well-being of young people were a priority, however, you might want to start fresh.
Students at high-achieving public and preparatory high schools have suffered a historic escalation of stress and burnout at application age. Guidance counselors see college-going students treating stress as a sort of “cultural currency” among their peers. Public health researchers have identified admissions anxiety as a cause of teenage substance use.
love it
If elite college admission is a ritual of class selection, with a cottage industry of private escorts administering the rites, then here is its deeper psychological function: instilling a sense of desert into the future ruling class. For the investment banker’s son from Phillips Exeter who gets into Yale as a varsity rower, the natural question is, well, how couldn’t you get into Yale. His response: Why don’t you ask all my old classmates who didn’t? As well you might. Maybe they would holler about busting their butts; or perhaps they’d have some ideas about how the entire system is an elaborate lie.
It is common for dreams to involve nonsensical objects or borderline categories. People who are two people, places that are both your home and a spaceship. Dreams explore the statespace and in doing so warp and play with the categories, the dimensions of perception itself, stress-testing and refining. The inner fabulist shakes up the categories of the plastic brain. Their authoring avoids a phenomenon called overfitting. Overfitting, a statistical concept, is when a model is too sensitive to the data it’s been fed, and therefore stops being generalizable. It’s learning something too well. For instance, artificial neural networks have a training data set: the data that they learn from. All training sets are finite, and often the data comes from the same source and is highly correlated in some non-obvious way. Because of this, artificial neural networks are in constant danger of becoming overfitted. When a network becomes overfitted, it will be good at dealing with the training data set but will fail at other similar data sets. All learning is basically a tradeoff between specificity and generality in this manner.
The most common way to get around the universal problem of overfitting is to expand the training set. But for real brains, the learning process that produces our experiential landscape relies on the training set of life. That set is limited in many ways, highly correlated in many ways. Life alone is not a sufficient training set for the brain. Dreams prevent our brains from overfitting our experiential statespace, blurring categories and taking unlikely trajectories. The fight against overfitting every night creates a cyclical process of annealing: during wake the brain fits to its environment via learning; then during sleep the brain “heats up” through dreams that prevent it from clinging to suboptimal solutions and models.
ooh i like this
The paymaster for Rich’s story was a tech giant, as is so often the case now, and it was not at all a coincidence that his epic about climate change unfolded not as a polemic but as a narrative human drama. Nor was it a coincidence that Rich’s essay curiously lacked a critique of capital’s sway over American politics or the power of our entrenched oligarchy and the central role these forces played in our Losing Earth. This is because the book-to-film complex is bolstered by two imperatives that now govern our nonfiction almost without exception: foreground story as an ultimate good, ahead of deep personal insight, literary style, investigative reporting, or almost any other consideration that goes into the shaping of written work; and do not question too closely the aristocracy of tech and capital that looms over us, the same people who subsidize the system that produces America’s writing. It’s impossible to say whether Rich had these considerations at the top of his mind as he shaped the piece, but it doesn’t matter. The power of book-to-film in American writing is in how it sits at the edge of the consciousness of every writer, editor, and podcast producer, a dark energy of the entertainment market that drives wealth and reward. You just have to tell a gripping story and leave the powers-that-be unnamed.
[...] Epic is just one more publishing vehicle that can’t make money by actually publishing. The company’s real money comes from presenting itself as a curator of elite content, which it offers to brands like Ford and Google in the form of long-form reporting: “Epic story hunters travel the world in search of true stories that reflect a brand’s spirit and ethos,” their business description read until recently, when Vox Media completed an acquisition of the company for an undisclosed sum. “Epic turns the stories into documentary films, magazines, books, video games, photo essays, live events, and speeches that express a brand’s values.” This is, of course, the logic of this moment—that what you might have once thought of as literary publishing is, when you get down to it, just high-status corporate content generation.
fuck me
[...] The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview. Which is a workable definition of the kind of writing most easily converted into IP.
This circumstance didn’t emerge because a handful of tech companies suddenly started competing to buy all the stories that American writers can produce. Anyone with an interest in the history of American letters already knows how in the 1950s the rise of the MFA workshop system produced an imperative toward a show-don’t-tell, narrative-first formula for fiction writing. This was, in large part, because the first prominent director of the first prominent workshop program wanted to cultivate a kind of writing that supported American political orthodoxy—a detail that has important echoes for today. Work that placed story ahead of political or moral considerations had the convenient feature of being unthreatening to power, and it was this kind of writing that the program managed to make into the unquestioned standard for quality in American fiction. More than half of the MFA programs that arose in the wake of Iowa’s rise—funded by donations from the CIA and by America’s mid-century corporate patricians—were founded by graduates of this program. Over time, many readers and critics came to see workshop-style writing as the standard for quality fiction, and many still do—a fact that writers are aware of, ambiently or otherwise. Writing has always involved some level of accommodating power and public taste.
And we can name the trash this system encourages for what it is. It isn’t that we lack writers who can write well—just like many trash novels written to fit market demands in the fifties hold up well today. Writers have always had to work with and against a marketplace designed by the rich and powerful. But I personally can’t help feeling alarmed and enraged by the ways writers are now driven by incentives to fill the needs of creative executives working in Amazon’s film studio. It feels wildly dispiriting to see how much my friends and I casually accept the idea that we should craft our work to fit a commercial imperative—the entire system of our writing and reporting now being market-tested and data-driven and robbed by financial forces of much of its lasting value. There is a part of me that wants to grab all the rewards that come from this system, but it’s the part of me good writing is meant to kill.
But the discipline of thought is not generalization; it is detail, and it is personal behavior. While the government is “studying” and funding and organizing its Big Thoughts, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem.
This is splendid prose. It is disastrous advice. Leave aside the implicit belittling of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other examples of “plan-making” and “law-making” that tens of millions of Americans have felt very grateful for. Look to the present balance of forces: the structures of legislative, electoral, ideological, and financial control in the United States are deeply entrenched, highly resistant to citizen initiative, and virtually without exception geared to the needs of the country’s largest industries and banks. Nothing those plutocrats do not wish to be done will be done in America, even if a hundred million Little Thinkers “go ahead on their own.” Only if that hundred million organize themselves and coordinate their efforts—in other words, become Big Thinkers—is there the slightest hope for wresting control of our country from this corporate/financial oligarchy. Berry himself has been an exemplary activist in his day, especially in opposing the strip mining that has disfigured much of his lovely region. Unfortunately, the coal industry out-strategized the activists—not to mention deploying vastly greater financial resources. But would any degree of uncoordinated private individual virtue have had better luck stopping them?
No amount of recycling, farming right, eating right, being neighborly, or being personally responsible in other ways will matter much if we don’t subsidize solar and wind power, raise mileage requirements, steeply tax carbon, drastically reduce plastic production, kill coal, and provide jobs for all those whom these measures would disemploy. (We could put them to work on infrastructure and renewables, which we would invest in with the proceeds of steep wealth and corporate—especially energy—taxes.) In a face-to-face society, virtue is the right lever. Unfortunately, we live in a mass society, thoroughly bureaucratized and institutionalized, dense with complex systems, which only large aggregations of people (or money) can move. We need more, not fewer, plans, laws, and policies, but democratically formulated ones.
amen