21 November 2018

P.S. As it turns out, "fascist alt-right troll" spells out FART. Yes, I do find that funny. Does that make "antifa" Anti-FART (with all that implies, including self-combustion)?



     Explain a bit about the Geneva School’s approach to labour mobility and what it revealed about their ideological framework more generally.     

     Right, well this is kind of a shadow subplot in the book that I wrote and in retrospect I wish I had drawn it out more but it’s something that I realize after writing the book that it’s sort of happening without me drawing the reader’s attention to it. But what’s happening is that things change over the course of the 20th century. And at the beginning of the 20th century the frame of reference for people like Hayek and Mises and Haberler is really the Hapsburg Empire and then the Danubian Basin or the area of Eastern Europe that is comprised of the different nation states that succeed the Hapsburg Empire. And when they are looking at that space they’re actually pretty doctrinaire in their support of the freedom of labour to move from one site to another. For Mises especially, I mean in his early work he is quite orthodox about the absolute necessity of the freedom of labour. That labour, like all other factors of production needs to be able to go where it’s most needed, and in his mind this is a salutary process that will probably lead to the kind of dissolution of some nations, but then it might lead to their recombination in different forms once they’ve emigrated, and there’s no central problem with this. He saw nationalities and ethnicities as unmoored from this or that territory. They should be able to form themselves in emigration as much as in the places they are ancestrally rooted to. So this is still a kind of 19th century vision of the great migrations that moved people from Central and Eastern Europe to North America and also the huge migrations that were moving internally from the countryside to the city that really drove the industrial revolution. So it’s quite absolute in its belief in labour mobility as a principle, this early Austrian position. What changes is really world wars. So the second world war produces a situation in which human mobility is now perceived as quite an acute national security threat, particularly when you think about the way the entire Japanese population was brought under suspicion as kind of a 5th column of the Emperor. The German population was, too, but to a lesser extent, stigmatized and brought under suspicion, even if they had been there for generations. And what people like Mises said, looking at the situation was effectively, this is a problem but it’s a temporary problem, but for the time being, let’s try to conceive of a system of global capitalism that doesn’t rely anymore on free labour mobility. So they say, given these constraints, what might we see as a provisional working model of something that could still work. And in that kind of, “let’s bracket this for the moment” state of mind, someone like Haberler comes up with the theory of comparative costs, which makes in sort of formal international trade economics terms the argument that if you have enough movement of goods and capital then you can profit just as much from free trade and free capital policies as if you had free movement of labour. He produces a kind of epistemological foundation or alibi for a “closed borders for people” position, not, I think, because he has any inherent antipathy towards foreigners or people of different races but because the circumstances of the borders that came up in the course of the second world war are sort of being taken seriously.    

     It’s telling perhaps that while Neoliberals are capable of cultivating such a utopian disposition toward markets, they are sort of realists when it comes to the boundaries of the nation states for ordinary people.    

     Oh absolutely, I think that’s unquestionable and the way that this develops only drives that point home all the more clearly. Because what we get in the course of the 20th century is not just two major world wars but also migration from the global South to the global North in significant quantities that we haven’t seen since, well, of course, the mass forced migration of slavery that effectively founded the United states, and the movement of Asian labourers to the western United States and to Canada and Australia in the late 19th century before it was shut down by exclusion acts. But when you get into the post-war period of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, you start to get the movement from French colonies, and then the former French colonies into the French metropole, you get guest workers arriving in large numbers from places like Turkey and Morocco into countries like West Germany and the Netherlands, and you get people from places like the British Commonwealth and the former British Empire migrating into the United Kingdom. So the creation of a multicultural and a multiracial Europe, a multiracial Britain, a multiracial France, a multiracial Germany, brings home this quote unquote problem of a clash between different cultural styles in a way that Neoliberals now are forced to confront. And the way that they confront it is exactly as you say, not exactly inspiring in the evenness with which they apply their principles to people as they do to goods and capital. What Hayek concludes in the late 1970s, looking at Margaret Thatcher’s policy, which was to effectively end immigration from countries of the global South if she had her way, this is her official position at that time, Hayek supports it. He doesn’t come out in principled opposition to that and say, even, that, you know, people deserve the same rights and movements that capital does. That would at least be a kind of honourable libertarian position, you could say, but he says, no, people are a special kind of factor of production in effect and they can be very disruptive. And, as he says, the kinds of origins of racialism come from the inability of the long-standing residents of countries to extend their welcome to newcomers. He creates and analogy to Vienna on the arrival of large numbers of Jews from further East in Eastern Europe and Russia. And he says, well, when the Jews arrived they were unable to assimilate quickly and they ended up being a disruptive force and they actually ended up producing anti-semitism. Their presence produced anti-semitism.    

—Quinn Slobodian interviewed by Daniel Denvir

11 November 2018

Let Them Hang




Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend:

        * '+'   means a pictures with an identifiable person
        * '-'   means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or
photoshop
        * '[+]' means the photo is widely available
        * '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.

? that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of
where the images come from.

        * [#]   means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about
its origin

The photos, in order:

- [+] Boston Dynamics robot dogs running
+ [+] woman wearing a keffiyeh with an assault rifle in the back of a
pickup truck
- [+] gender-balanced, faceless people in a crowd ? maybe a demo,
maybe a concert, probably in Europe
- [ ] Instagrammy composite photo of a skinny woman's arms, four hands
flipping the viewer off
- [ ] people eating, maybe communally, faces blurred in photoshop
- [+] stock photo of an athletic woman running on a race track
+ [+] composite photo ("harveryaftermath") of blacks and whites working
to save kids in a flood zone
+ [ ] poor Latin American kids, maybe in school, with a boy hiding his
face behind paper, bandana-style
- [ ] a punching bag hanging in some sort of crude training camp
- [1] composite photo of two white men crouching behind a mound, one
with a rifle, one with binoculars
- [+] two helmeted motorcyclists pulled off by he side of a remote road,
maybe coordinating
- [ ] arbitrary 3D-rendered thing (a "network" I guess, but quite
unusual ? interesting detail)
+ [ ] outdoorsy white woman, long hair flowing, resolutely digging a
trench
- [ ] hippyish white man (probably), framing a house
- [ ] someone welding
+ [ ] infrastucture-ish composite: white guy working on a tower
scaffold, container ships
- [2] ambiguous photo of someone burning branches, distant crowd visible
through the smoke
- [+] composite: car burning, small group of people in a burning forest
        source:
https://tineye.com/search/5db3c04fd14bd706fae384a44674a21bdcb9d457/
- [+] misc boats in a flood zone (also Hurricane Harvey, in Houston)

More details:

[1] The two men crouching behind a mound is cropped from an image that
appears in several articles about westerners who joined ~local forces to
fight ISIS
        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3049019/Peshmerga-s-foreign-legion-fighting-alongside-defeat-ISIS-workers-ex-soldiers-brave-men-world-teaming-Kurdish-forces.html
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-normal-guys-from-the-uk-and-us-who-have-given-up-their-day-jobs-to-fight-isis-in-syria-10195105.html
        https://beta.al-akhbar.com/Arab/19873/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B4-%D9%8A%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%B1-3-%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AE%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%88%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%88-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B8%D9%87%D9%88

[2] the photo of someone burning branches comes from an image
("dakota2.jpg) that appears widely on college essay?selling websites
to illustrate a webpage called "law-enforcement-essays.html", with a
bias toward "racial profiling essays" and "essay on police corruption"
        https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=1-nmW9WJIu3isAeVr6KYDg&q=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&oq=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3...628.3317.0.3913.5.4.0.0.0.0.116.320.3j1.4.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0.0...0.LHWyEv-PD5c

That last bit is interesting, because it suggests something that had
never occurred to me: essays-for-sale websites being used to identify
specific students' political leanings. Maybe some enterprising
journalist can take that one on ? by using reserve image searches to
identify where ~stock photography is used on anonymous, cloned
essay-selling sites.

Other possible follow-ups that could shed light on where this site comes
from:

- language analysis, to see where else the phrasing is popping up
- identifying faces (for example, the woman digging a trench)

One really interesting find: Reverse image searches turn up one more
photo that didn't make it into the final production, called
"hangingrose.203ee432.png," which was to appear in a section called "Let
Them Hang ..." It's a homebrew photo (not available elsewhere) of a
bouquet of flowers, hanging upside-down on a wall, above a US-style
electrical socket. That seems like a pretty sophisticated proposition: a
sentimental appeal phrased in the passive voice but strongly suggestive
of political violence as a tragic, forlorn necessity. I have
screengrabs. Who "they" are who'll be hanging is left to the reader's
fantasy. The phrase "let them hang" comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night (1.3), but it's attained a slightly meme-like status in a variety
of music circles:

        https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22let+them+hang%22


—Ted Byfield on nettime

8 November 2018

Windows96 is that guy from Arcade Fire? He's the root cause of all nostalgia in music since early 2000s. I don't think so... I thought he was from brazil


 

Presently they're linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms . . . down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyber-thugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined...
"Some nice foot-lover sites too," Eric comments casually. Not to mention more forbidden expressions of desire, beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there.
It surprises Maxine how populated it is down here in sub-spider country. Adventurers, pilgrims, remittance folks, lovers on the run, claim jumpers, skips, fugue cases, and a high number of inquisitive entrepre-nerds, among them Promoman, whom Eric introduces her to. His avatar is an amiable geek in square-rim glasses wearing a pair of old-school sandwich boards that carry his name, as do those of his curvaceous co-adjutor Sandwichgrrl, her hair literally flaming, a polygon-busy GIF of a bonfire on top of a manga-style subteen face.
"Deep Web advertising, wave of the future," Promoman greets Maxine. "Thing is to get position now, be in place, already up and running when the crawlers show up here, which'll be any minute."
"Wait—you're actually seeing revenue from ads on sites down here?"
"Right now it's weapons, drugs, sex, Knicks tickets . . ."
"All that real recherché shit," puts in Sandwichgrrl. "It's still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonizers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There's already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web—"
"Is that," Maxine wonders, "like, 'Ride the Wild Surf'?"
"Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything'll be suburbanized faster than you can say 'late capitalism.' Then it'll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they'll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom'll have to saddle up and head somewhere else."
"If you're looking for bargains," advises Sandwichgrrl, "there are some nice ones around the Cold War sites, but prices may not stay reasonable for long."
"I'll bring this up at our next board meeting. Meantime maybe I will just go have a look."
It isn't a promising neighborhood. If there was a Robert Moses of the Deep Net, he'd be screaming, "Condemn it already!" Broken remnants of old military installations, commands long deactivated, as if transmission towers for ghost traffic are still poised out on promontories far away in the secular dark, corroded, untended trusswork threaded in and out with vines and leaves of faded poison green, using abandoned tactical frequencies for operations long defunded into silence . . .  Missiles meant for shooting down Russian prop-driven bombers, never deployed, lying around in pieces, as if picked over by some desperately poor population that comes out only in the deepest watches of the night. Gigantic vacuum-tube computers with half-acre footprints, gutted, all empty sockets and strewn wiring. Littered situation rooms, high-sixties plastic detailing gone brittle and yellow, radar consoles with hooded circular screens, desks still occupied by avatars of senior officers in front of flickering sector maps, upright and weaving like hypnotized snakes, images corrupted, paralyzed, passing to dust.
Maxine notices that one of these maps is centered on eastern Long Island. The room has a familiar look, austere and unmerciful. She is visited by one of those rogue hunches. "Eric, how do we get into this one?"

—Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge