Mayfly Four
Proposing truth ~ Carnivals of outrage ~ Abandoning the middle ground ~ Ethereum's handbrake ~ We are more like a moment than this moment right now ~ The emporer's new avatar ~ Amusement arcade
Proposing truth
“I’ve always thought of the statements I make more as proposals than truths. That’s why I’ve never taken it as personal loss if anything I’ve said has been proven wrong. It’s about trying out a position.” — Dag Solstad, in the Paris Review.
A carnival of outrage I
I wasn’t going to weigh in on the Megan Markle royal shitshow. Celebrity culture is not for me. I find the royal soap opera uninteresting and pity the poor humans caught up in it by birth. And I’m a pragmatic republican. A hereditary head of state is obviously an affront to any kind of democratic principle, but I can accept the status quo so long as royal power isn’t exerted, or too expensive.
I will say, however, that this mess does all seem a good example of The Darkenment. And mimetic desire must play a part in choosing sides. Nuance has disappeared. Baseless opinions are defended vehemently. Colours are nailed. The orchestrators get paid by clicks, and any involvement just further mushes the brains of participants, observers, and commentators alike. It’s a carnival of outrage.
A carnival of outrage II
This week, a policeman has been charged with the murder of Sarah Everard. There has been a national outpouring of anger that women live afraid of physical violence from men. A vigil was held on Clapham Common and the police made four arrests. The police have been criticised for their rough handling by their boss Home Secretary Priti Patel, by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Cressida “Menezes” Dick, Commissioner of the Met, faces more opprobrium. Nigel Farage, failing to read the room — or at least only seeing a few weirdos standing shiftily at the back — implored everyone to stop demonising men.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but, Sarah Everard’s murder is a terrible crime. Women should be able to live their lives without fear of violence from men. They should be able to voice their anger peacefully without arrest.
Trying to look beyond the outrage, and failing to read the room myself, I ask:
What is it about white middle-class photogenic Sarah Everard that has made her murder the trigger for a national conversation when dozens of murders over the last year have not?
How do politicians who are “deeply concerned” about police handling of this vigil — which despite the idiotic optics was not, rightly or wrongly, unusual for large gatherings where passions are inflamed — reconcile that with their desire to increase police powers to interfere with peaceful protests? Don’t look where they point while they pick your pocket.
How do politicians who are “shocked and appalled” with Everard’s murder reconcile that with their systematic defunding of the criminal justice system which makes abuse against women much harder to prosecute?
OK, this is provocative, and you could argue that I’m the idiot shouting all lives matter when discussing black lives mattering, and this isn’t the time for this discussion…but I’m interested in getting behind outrage, so…should we consider violence against women to be inherently worse than violence against men?
If the answer is no, then move on. If the answer is yes, then why?
The justification might be that aggressors are almost always men. I understand the anger this causes. But I don’t think it follows that this makes violence against women worse. The gender of the aggressor is not the fault of male victims, so should crimes against them be considered less important?
The justification might be that, on average, women are less physically stong than men. I have some sympathy for this point of view, and it seems kind of natural and admirable for the stronger to protect the weaker. But again, the relative strength of the aggressor is not the fault of the victim. Even if a victim was as stong as his aggressor, does that make the crime less bad? The end result is the same.
Unless I’m missing something, I think, when unpacked, the view that violence against women is worse than violence against men comes from the same place as paternalism. The kind of paternalism that at best offers benevolent protection, but at worst considers women prized chattels to be controlled for the honour of the group. It implies women are not equal and independent actors. In other words, it could be part of the problem.
The view is also a confession that male life, especially young male life, is considered more expendable (in the UK more men are murdered than women at a ratio of between two and three to one). While I don’t think this is sustainable on moral grounds, it probably is on evolutionary grounds. (Men, like sperm, are cheap and disposable. Women, like eggs, as the rate limiting factor for population growth, are more reproductively valuable. But this takes us into a whole other discussion about why we can’t base our ethics on biology…)
Finally, if violence, coercion, and the exertion of power will never go away in either interpersonal or social relations, rather than making a show of lamenting this fact, how do we minimise the damage it does? How should we work on both our own personal psychology (the will to power), and the way we structure our societies? Nietzsche & Foucault anyone?
Abandoning the middle ground
I stopped giving money to the Guardian. I realised something. I never read it. It doesn’t update much during the day so its news is old. Its thought and opinion is mostly reflex, shallow and ill-thought out. It has become a self parody. It’s not just the Guardian. The newspaper sits uselessly in the middle of an axis that runs from up-to-date breaking news to well-researched considered analysis. It no longer serves my needs. A better combination for me is Twitter and the financial press for headlines and breaking news, and a smattering of other sources like blogs, the London Review of Books, and others for more considered longer pieces.
Ethereum’s handbrake
A few weeks ago I asked how can bitcoin really become standard for daily use if every transaction inevitably becomes more expensive because of the way it’s designed? I discussed this question with someone in the industry. They told me I was right, it can’t. “That’s not it’s job,” they said, “or at least it can’t be now. That’s the job of Ethereum. Ethereum is for transactions, like cash; and bitcoin is for storing value, like gold”.
Looking into Ethereum a bit more, its handbrake is less strong that Bitcoin’s. Its block time — i.e., how long it takes to add a transaction to the ledger — is much shorter, and it’s approach to proof of work is supposedly more efficient. However as far as my understanding goes, it still has constraints of energy and time that will only grow as it is used more. So my question remains.
Meanwhile Iran, one of the most energy rich nations in the world, has been suffering rolling blackouts because…because bitcoin miners are exploiting its cheap energy.
지금 이 순간 보다 더 순간 같은 우리들
“We are more like a moment than this moment right now”.
This lyric is from this song, which is two years old now but new to me. It’s insubstantial but strangely satisfying; and worthy of comment, I think, because it sounds like it could have been made any time in the last 40 years.
Culture seems to have got stuck at some point. Think how different 1962 besuited pop was from ‘68 Sargeant Pepper psychadelia, from ‘76 disco and fusion, from ‘79 punk, from ‘83 George Michael on a yacht, from ‘88 second summer of love, from ‘93 Seattle plaid, from ‘95 Metalheadz, from speed garage in the new millenium. How did art and literature change in those decades? How different was 2000 from 1980 from 1960 from 1940?
How different is 2020 from 2000? How can Nathan Barley still be current?
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m just too out of touch. Maybe it is the curse of middle age to feel this way.
But it seems to me that the great flowering the internet should have brought has instead splintered culture into a thousand genres that now just repeat and refine what went before. I’m not the only one to have noticed this. We mark time by tiny alterations in the cut of jeans and the marketing cycles of white trainers:
Dunks < Vejas < Airforce Ones < Reebok Classics < Stan Smiths < Converse All Stars < Air Max Ones < Dunks.
New music samples the sample, not the original. It’s all the same stuff but with added pretense to irony. Sometimes its even better than the original.
The only thing that seems at all new — that makes me feel part of a different generation — is gender fluidity.
Whither the next twenty?
The emporer’s new avatar
In this week’s nutty nifty news, Beeple’s first 5,000 days sold for $69m, the third-highest auction price achieved for a living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney. Soon after…
More. A reader put me on to virtual clothing, or ‘contactless fashion’. Crypto fashion week 2021 has just finished, and there are shops like Tribute Brand and The Fabricant (nothing to do with Michael, I’m sure, although there is something about his ‘hair’ that…).
I’m starting to think perhaps this isn’t all just an elaborate joke from creative directors who are too-clever-by-half. While people have been trying to make this happen since before Second Life, might the curation of online personas so heavily practiced on Instagram during lockdown be going to the next level?
Will this turn out to be something genuinely different in the 2020s?
Is this the proto-singularity?
Amusement arcade
I consume, therefore I am. And you? I know you came for the pseudo debate, but stay for the reviews and menus.
Visual
Having watched the second half of Adam Curtis’s new series I feel a bit softer towards these films now. I had made an error of knowsys. I shouldn’t critique them as essays designed to communicate reasoned knowledge, but instead as art designed to communicate felt knowledge. Looked at this way, the bewildering hopscotch through narratives, video offcuts and absurd interludes — and conclusions like bubbles that float just out of reach and pop if you ever catch them — all become an honest strength of the work, rather than an inherent weakness.
Of course the series had to finish on a note of optimism. After spending hours decrying the flaws of individualism, Curtis floats an impending operant conditioned social credit dystopia in which it will be squashed, before telling us its OK, we can shape our own world.
Bravo Adam, it takes a lot to get 500 minutes of this consumer’s addled attention.
Audio
Just the warmest, most engrossing, hypnotic, repetitive slice of Theo Parrish…
For something more bucolic melancholic, The Horse Loom…
Food
I made vegan moussagne (moussaka / lasagne) for the mother of my children on mother’s day. Fake meat and cheese is almost universally grim. It’s expensive processed crap that tastes awful. If you don’t want to eat meat, just stick with the veg and don’t turn to some alternative industrial slop. Masked with plenty of paprika, cinnamon and cloves is tasted ok this time.
Links
A handy list of our cognitive biases from Visual Capitalist.
An amazing distraction that lets you layer different data sets on maps of London.
And Chernobyl hits different this year…