Nomadland-poetry or lack of prose?

In this day and age, when no movie access should be taken for granted, it took me till July 23rd to finally find the time and place to watch the Oscar-winning “Nomadland.” The movie strikes me in theme since it is a portrayal of our homeless elderly, who only have the means of an RV, SUV or van to travel around the United States’ southwest and survive on seasonal jobs that are ripe for the unionless, benefits-free corporations of Amazon and Wal-mart. The movie works best at setting the stages of realism, both physiologically and mentally. It lacks the depth or personified statements that went into Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book, but regardless shows this horrifying new reality of our elderly being used for seasonal employment, deprived of proper living conditions, all due to our governments not supplying them with adequate pensions funds in which to live off of. In this circumstance, your only choice is becoming a modern version of a nomad. The genesis of this new reality is the 2008 financial crash. The only choices for work are often Amazon or WalMart, in which the film refrains from any harsh criticism of and even somewhat romanticizes this new form of life. That is the most abhorrent part of the film, but otherwise it flows beautifully as a work of poetry. Living this way can easily seem Thoreauian from a distance, but where exactly and how do you shit? What food are you living on? Yes, they meet as a friendly collective in an RV park and that helps in the means of physical and mental survival, but what happens when inevitable medical needs arise? The only drugs to buy are south of the border, a funny irony in America’s dependence on Mexico for affordable medication. Besides Frances McDormand’s apt job as lead character, I find it more remarkable the actors who playing themselves such as Bob Wells and other minor characters that McDormand runs into. Their portrayals are even more striking. The sometimes dangerous romanticism of some type of hippyism is present in the film, but it does not leave it most striking attribute: the powerful realism. Chloe Zhao has hit upon this point and shows again how people that we don’t want to think of are ever-present and growing in our society. The term middle-class is quickly extinguishing and survival is the main focus of life. This example shows the very fine, almost invisible line between comfort and the situation we all could end up in or at least a variant thereof.

Capitalist reform versus the beyond

Analysis of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology” and Martin Hagglund’s “This Life”

I often commemorate Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” with a chill of both being awe-struck for its gripping diagnosis but at the same time, a grim reminder of our present labyrinth of capitalism. Events such as Capitol Hill on January 6th, the farmers revolt in India and even the Reddit revolt on Wall Street have done nothing to change this, but also have me realize that there is a certain amount of cracks forming in the globalism base. For the most part, people know that the present system is unjust. We cannot get too dreamy, especially without any clear vision of what our future should be, as Fisher aptly pointed out. I am an admitted realist and part of me wants to turn to Piketty for ideas on capitalism reform but Martin Haaglund makes you want to see beyond, even though he does not offer any clear vision himself, which to be fair, was not the intention of his book. One was an economical continuation of the equally ground-shattering “Capital”, the other is an argument for secularism and how it applies in todays world. Before I analyze Haaglund, it is hard not to now want to look beyond the wall and see the formations of something else, something different. Too often there is revolt such as the summer of 2020’s George Floyd killing, without any substantive change. We should seek somewhere that is different and clearly has equity and quality of living at the center of what it is trying to form. A society that emphasizes our freedoms to be ourselves and not be hinged to our mere survival.

Martin Haaglund’s “This Life” is one of the two recent, yet pre-Covid books that are still worth analyzing in this 2021 context. Haaglund deceivingly starts out on the merits of secular faith but it turns into a post-capitalism argument. It is a critique of both traditional religious faiths and socialist agendas that are still thinking within the frame of capitalism, are still caught in the ever-lasting, evolving labyrinth. Haaglund doesn’t care as much for the now and less for the past, but more to an envisioned a future. This I embrace, perhaps out of being raised Presbyterian. As secularists, it is a necessity that we try and make our world a better place. One idea he has is for all of us to have the right to decide how we spend our time. Our morality depends on the type of political/economical system we create. We should not be bound to others to give us structure. “Leading a satisfying life is not to achieve a state of consummation, but to be engaged in what I do and put myself at stake in activities that matter to me(pg. 18)”.

Haaglund’s philosophy is in many ways a secular take on Marxism. Marx was another fighter for us to be able to self-determine how we spend the most precious element of time. We should be able to think beyond our own survival, otherwise those above us are in control We must be allowed to all have the proper material resources and have access to a full education. It does not mean we are free from labour and as Haaglund adds what Marx offers is not a solution but a “clarification of a vital problem.” The possibility of freedom must always be the mission statement. This goes against the mighty wall of capitalism, that is all about the priority of excessive profit, the alienation of labour, exploitation of our time and money, our life being commodified and democracy insufficient at best.

Haaglund amusingly takes a strong swipe at our new age adulations and often misrepresentations of philosophies of Buddhism and Stoicism. Haaglund has no time for any philosophy that promotes detachment in its doctrine. Suffering is a key element of life. Life is a struggle and we will embrace this struggle. As Karl-Ove Knausgaard writes “death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever strived for ceases when life does and it makes life meaningful too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious”(pg. 117). Beyond suffering, we have to be fighting for a transformation, a way of etching out our own freedom within the confines of life. This is the ultimate existential quest.

Capitalism now has wage labour for most of us, which is only a kinder form of slavery. We produce more commodities while having less and less means of buying them. We produce more items while needing less people to produce for the sake of greater profit. Haaglund asserts that the exploitation of workers is a necessity for capitalism to work. Yet few of us still seem to realize this. To gain greater profit margin, corporations use tricks such as hedge funds, advertising and surveillance information. Many forms of work right now are simply an extension of serfdom and do not represent any kind of freedom in any sense. The most important statement of the book and the one I cannot help but savour comes on page 269 when he says “for democracy to be true to its own concept of freedom and equality, capitalism must therefore be overcome.” Haaglund is instigating a new mentality of overcoming the mourning present in “Capitalism Realism.”

While Haaglund, like anyone else I know of, does not offer any clear path alternative to capitalism, he certainly thinks certain Marxist principles should exist. The means of production should be for a common cause. Governance is meant to be collective. Yet that is stuck on being an ideal rather than a clear pragmatic application. Regardless, Haaglund wants us to overcome what he thinks are our limitations on reforms all being proposed in the context of capitalism, while we are unable to think past it. In other words, we are still in the frame of mind Mark Fisher tragically resigned himself to.

Haaglund even goes after the other author’s work I am anaylzing: Thomas Piketty. Piketty is stuck in thinking the context of capitalism according to Haaglund. The mode of production in capitalism inevitably always comes to a crisis. Alienation. We have all been there now. Working for the sense of cost limitation or maximum profit. A job that lacks any meaning. Most assigned the role of consuming commoditities. One of our resounding answers in recent times is an ugly form of nationalism. This overshadows or fails to grasp economic inequity. Our democracy today offers socialism for the rich and forced individualism for the rest. Any racial equity conceivably achieved is again unsatisfying if done in the context of capitalism. To go along with Rosa Luxembourg, any social reforms are a means to an end of something along the lines of a revolution. Haaglund insists the answer is beyond what we can see now. This is a religiousity vein shown by someone who ironically is a committed secularist. We first need to define capitalism(which he does in his own form) and then think beyond.

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology” is not a contrary point of view to Haaglund’s but as was said, stays in the context of today minus the massive factor of Covid. His first goal for this book is to analyze countries he did not address in “Capital”, mainly those beyond the Western world. The word Marxist or revolution is not present with Piketty. Piketty mainly wants to play the role of an academic and diagnosis what ailments capitalism has and leave it up to us what to make of it.

Piketty excels as a historian. Yes, we are definitely less impoverished as global citizens than we were from say, 1720-1770 or earlier but we lost our ‘egalitarian period’ of 1950-80. This time period owes its successes to progressive taxation. Historically, it might interest us, as neglible a point it is in todays context, that in most medieval kingdoms the Church owned 25-33% of all private property. A more important historical conclusion is that extreme chaos causes change. This definitely can be shown in todays context. 1950-80 was spurned by the chaos of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2. It is in this extremity that capitalist reforms and reforms only can come.

In this updated version of “Capital”, Piketty commits to the necessary project of analyzing the effects of colonialism. Colonialism resulted in slavery, which had existed since the Ancient Greek and Roman Empires and it played a prominent role in the forming of our present-day modern world. Even more prominent is the effect of the highly criminal manner in which slavery ended. Usually, such as the case with the UK ending slavery in 1833, slaves were not compensated and were bounded to just a slight upgrade from slavery to long-term labour contracts. This relates to the lack of freedom as Haaglund talks about. The slave owners in contrast were almost always given massive compensation. This shows the priorities of the governments of the day were still on the side of the wealthy slaveowners. Countries such as Haiti are still paying the price for these policies, as France’s embargo forced Haiti to pay out millions to their past slaveowners. The after economic shocks of this still last till today. European coloinalism from 1500-1850 had the dual strategies of military domination and displacement or extermination. After Spain invaded Mexico in 1450, the population fell by 90% by 1600. The colonies exemplified economic inequality at its worst which is why they are repugnant to anyone these days who are descendants of the colonized. Education was reserved for the non-colonized. By WW1, this ironically meant a near self-destruction of the UK and France as they had become economically dependant on their own racist, colonial prisons.

It is important to weigh in on India and China. With India, their past empries of Maurya and the Mughal never ruled over all of present-day India. When the British Empire emerged there, one result was the escalated Hindu/Muslim tension that continues strongly today. The creation of Pakistan and Bangledesh meant that only 14% of today’s India is Muslim. Another important result is that while India’s caste system is ancient, it was greatly intensified during the British colonial period. In todays India, inequity is so deep that still over 50% of the population defecate outdoors(pg. 356). Piketty asks the question anyone with Marxist inhibitions needs to: why ws the most wealth, specifically from 1500-1800, set primarily in Europe? The answer is in military expansion and colonialism. This left it clearly above other empries such as the Ottoman and in China. The Opium War in China from 1839-42 was to force the Qing empire into selling opium to Europe. In the 20th century, this habit of military might and colonialism(in a different form, usually funded dictatorships)continued with the United States. In the Middle East, the colonialism enhanced by oil has made it currently the most inequitable area of the world. In that part of the world you see small populations, often undemocratic and dependant on their oil exports. Piketty’s answer to the European wealth during capitalism is in the historic cause, and that it is a deliberate, not a ‘natural’ process.

While Piketty resigns himself to saying “things will probably be much the same in the future”(pg.469), he is adamant in sticking to the thesis that the problem is not capitalism itself but unregulated capitalism. If only we can “transcend the nation state”(hasn’t globalism done this?)and re-install progressive taxes. He agrees with Haaglund in the indirect sense that we have to go beyond what we did after WW2. However, solutions such as the German-based workers right to vote and have seats at their companies board seem not only stuck in the confines of capitalism, but seem out of touch when a huge number of our workers are through temp agencies. Sure, less progressive taxes=decrease in economic growth and access to education is vital but is the answer again to just fix them or to go beyond? “Make the world great again”seems to be an empty chant void of meaning.

Russia and China’s past delvings into Marxism or at least its variancies of communism have led to its present form of hypercapitalism. Lenin’s tendancies towards social democracy fell to Stalin’s authoritarianism in the Soviet style of vast numbers of incarcerations. While economic and educational growth flowered in the Soviet Union till at least the 1950s, the current result is that Russia is one of the most inequitable nations on the earth and past Stalin practices of incarceration of political opponents are obviously still present. Piketty feels we would all be better off if the world had more Mikhail Gorbachevs, not just in Russia but everywhere. A vision of social democratic and economic reform minus the revolution. In China’s case, it at least had a planned stage approach to switching to capitalism, which has undenyingly helped the country’s middle class. While the World Bank and the IMF enforced “shock therapy”upon Russia to exude the capitalistic triumph in the extreme, China has stabilized private ownership since the mid-2000s at 30%(pg. 607) and actually has more of a mixed economy than the West does.

On a global scale, most of the world is in a state where the country’s private assets well outpace any public ownership, meaning that most countries are in state of permanent debt. Piketty has always glaringly frowned upon debt and views it as a major problem with capitalism he would like fixed. He also is adapt at pointing out what statistics are distracting and which ones are worth paying attention to. Look at the national income before the GDP. The GDP does not pay heed to equitable distribution of income and wealth. The overall lack of transperancy on giving us access to those using tax havens or the details in legislations that make most of us pay tax yet exempt those using private jets(France’s carbon tax). After this, Piketty is stuck. The status quo still strongly resides with the hyperwealthy. Unions have been bottomed out. Even conventional religion has lost prevalence. That leaves us afloat with QAnon and other conspiracy theories, which is in itself a desperate grasp at any sense of power, delusional or not. Economic dire straits, meaning people have lost or are under danger of losing their basic needs pushes them to the extreme. We have to hinge onto WallStreetbets for a desperate claim at somehow beating the ultrarich at their own game. I cannot see either Haaglund or Piketty approving of this.

High inflation could be blamed for the end of the 1950-80 boom era but our current economic sufferings can be linked to high debt and a long stagnation of income. These are all choices of those who secure political and corporate power. Tax wise, Piketty proposes three different progressive taxes. First is an annual tax on property(property tax), a property tax on inheritances(I get it but for many like myself this is a slap on the face of what little we have to give our children) and an income tax. Indirect taxes should be abolished(I totally agree). Corporate taxes must be increased. Some type of UBI is needed. We can set the minimum basic income for individuals at 60 percent of average after tax income. This amount would decline as one’s level of income increases. UBI is built within capitalism and is simply a shift in capitalistic policy. This does not mean however it is not worth pursuing as a reform. Reforms themselves are often a more effective route to take than any empty revolution that others are eternally waiting upon.

Piketty’s ideas, which were unspoken of before he wrote “Capital” have now become almost dishwater-like bland, since to his credit, they are now integrated into the mainstream voicebox, even though, they fall short of becoming government policy. Piketty however has ideas that are in themselves ‘fragile’ in the sense of becoming a global trend or legistlation and moreover lacking a futuristic vision of the possible alternative that Haaglund mentions. We all need to dig deeper and truly talk to one another about what should come next. Originality and creativity are a must.

Musings on Thomas Bernhard

During my recent reading of “Concrete”, which was one of many readings of Bernhard, whom I originally took as a dark alluring figure of modern literature that I admired in form and wanted to hopelessly emulate myself, a thought came to me that did not change direction but added another complexity. Part of me came to despise him, a type of achtung, perhaps helped during the times of Covid desperation and outbreaks of malicious police violence. The solipsism which dominates his work has no place for me anymore in this time when the emphasis has to turn back to the we over the I. The self-hatred, hatred of country, hatred of other seems out of reach with which I want to attain in both ideals and direction for my late middle age life. If this is my final conclusion, however, I refuse to leave Bernhard without at least giving him a fair text analysis. I cannot leave Bernhard shallow but rather swim through all the deep waters. Besides “Concrete”, I have experienced “The Loser”, “Correction”, “Wittgenstein’s Nephew” and “Extinction.” There may be others that I fail to recollect.

Bernhard is a self-flagellating misanthropist who turns his hyperbolic lyricisim into works that keep the readers like myself enthralled and amazed in his originality that some have tried to copy out of love for the writers’ writer. He makes his characters purposefully not likeable. This can make the books at times appear to be a tizzy of hatred against his homeland, against those he deems unworthy intellectually speaking, but I think it is best to first interpret where Bernhard is coming from. Bernhard is coming from a post-Natzi Austria that he has little forgiveness for and believes there were obvious lessons to be learned that his country failed to do so. Hypocritical and limited thinking is present, led culturally by what he called a “brainless Catholic spectre”(“Gathering Evidence”).

In a manner of speaking, Bernhard is a more aggressive version of Mann, in particular from “Magic Mountain”. The main character seems to be degrading in physical health and is infused in a continual state of bitterness and anger. Instead all he can turn to is escape. The extremity, the Mannian characteristic comes out in “Concrete” when he openly states that “we must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task.”(pg.4) Was the grand mission of his literature adventure an attempt at some sort of authenticity of the native homeland he hated? A plea for Austria to have some type of intellectual individualism? Yet the protagonists dont fit into this country. They are often failed musicians, skilled but not skilled enough to have prominence, lacking the essence of originality. This is brought out in works such as “Loser.” The “Loser” showcases a Bernhard premonition of any failure to reach a genius level in your craft, such as Glenn Gould, exhibits a tone of self-dissatisfaction that continues to plague Bernhard throughout his writings.

My major critique of Bernhard is the misogyny prevalent in his work. The question of whether this stems from his illegitimate birth. The protagonist is often bitterly contemptuous of any female presence, blaming her for his woes and she is devoid of any intellectual merit. This reminds me of Nietzsche. Misogyny is not the only limitation. Bernhard is essentially a nihilist and is rejecting the entire human condition(a claim made by Charles Martin in “The Nihilism of Thomas Bernhard”). In “Concrete”, the main character comes to terms on how friendship has never existed in his life, but more so, how he has never needed anyone, never imagined he needed anyone but without anyone else, he has become “tiresome, unbearable” and “sick.” “If I am nauseated by all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of publications by other people, I should be unutterably nauseated by my own. But we can’t escape vanity and the craving for fame.”(pg.34) I have to consider not so much how much Bernhard makes me think but overall if he is unhealthy for my mentality, no matter what brilliance he displayed in a literature form.

Yet I would not be writing this if I did not feel that Bernhard was a great writer. The most striking of his formal innovations is his pervasive use of repetition as a hallmark narrative device, which can be found in at least three distinct aspects of his work: first, he tells essentially the same story over and over again in each of his novels; second, every significant word or phrase in each of these novels is endlessly repeated and permutated; finally, his stories are regularly recounted by narrators who claim to be merely repeating what has already been said to them by first-hand observers. He is even more brilliant in his spot-on description of the human being, which is the ultimate goal of each great writer. An example is “friendship-what a leprous word! People use it every day ad nauseam, so that it’s become utterly devalued, at least as much so as the word Love, which has been trampled to death.”

Actively he can be interpreted as giving voice to the loner. “The fact of the matter is that I love being alone”, he says, adding one of his offensive societal punches against the status quo when adds that “people love animals because they are incapable of loving themselves. Those with the very basest of souls keep dogs, allowing themselves to be tyrannized and finally ruined by their dogs.”(pg. 53 “Concrete”).

As a writer, he disdained traditoinal narrative tools such as plot, climax and development of characters. He was more a phenomenologist, looking in areas such as music, in which he saw a world superior to our own baseless social interactions with others. As a loner you cannot end up having much of a rich narrative and what is there instead is a intrapersonal look upon one’s self and their failings put in a humourous tone, a narcisstic self-hatred that dominates his writings. Most of all, he asks if we fail out of our own vanity and self-absorbed ambitions? Failure and self-absorption are the focus of his writings. Berrnhard is the writer of nihilism. “No doctrine holds water any longer; everything that is said and preached is destined to become ludicrous”(“Concrete” pg. 107) and any personal utopian breakthrough is not attainable. Bernhard is a wrtier who emulates an orignality that makes him standout but for most is too hard to swallow.

Review: Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Nearly fifty years ago Shoshana Zuboff was a graduate psychology student at Harvard, where she got to experience the thinking of B.F. Skinner. Skinner, one of the most pivotal psychologists in the last fifty years, sets the precedence for the latest development of capitalism that we are now currently under. Skinner was a determinist who rejected any notion of free will and his behavioural reinforcement strategies have commonly been adapted in our public institutions, such as those we see as troubled children at school. The reinforcement is based on the principle that your past actions can lead to a petty reward. Skinner’s opererant conditioning chamber was to prove that all our behaviours can be completely modified and free will is a false theory. His schedules of reinforcement could reliably shape precise behavioural routines(pg.296). Skinner’s tool was an inspirational behavioural modification technique for the surveillance capitalist industry. You can change ones behaviour without the person being aware. Again, the determinism shifts from the self to the outside instigator. The current surveillance capitalists are simply following Skinner’s lead model. To BF Skinner and his operant conditioning, behaviour is contingent, conditional and therefore, freedom is either a false notion or irrelevant.

The book is an in-depth illustration of how this twenty-first version of capitalism is invading our private spaces, turning us into subjective slaves of the blind totalarianism that exploits the information we possess and in turn, wants to take over us. To begin, we are now in a world where more people have access to the internet than electricity. Through the internet the individual has rendered exclusive control of their private information to the outside perpetrators. Our private information is raw material or behavioural surplus. The two main exploiters of this are Google and Facebook(those two are definitely the main prececents of surveillance capitalism but more time could have been given to Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple and others who are benefactors of this capitalist system). As the industrial capitalism from the twentieth century has been vastly modified, the exploitation is now more centered on our inner selves instead of solely ruining our planet. This is a daring claim and at first you cannot deny that we are rapidly destroying our planet and the main purpose is still having us purchase and consume at lightening speed, but where the revenue comes from is now more focused on having us invaded as individuals so that the capitalist world knows us completely. The rich data comes from us, but never for us.

One of Zuboff’s main claims is that what Google and Facebook have done have been strategical conscious choices and not some type of technological inevitability, as is often used as an accepted argument. Zuboff quotes Max Weber in saying “economic ends…are always intrinsic for technology’s development and deployment”(pg.16). Economics provides the objective and technology provides the means. We should always be wary of technology’s uneven path of continual change.

Foundations of Surveillance Capitalism

We have to accept that capitalism is the most successful systematic ruler in setting what is determined as a public need. Today’s most important social justice groups(eg. BLM) use Facebook and other social media sites as their main if not sole communicative device. Small businesses see it as a ruling convenient necessity for advertising to potential customers. The current rate of economic/technological change has spiraled to a state that I will term violent. Covid has of course helped enflame this violence but it is not the ship itself, rather only a few additional sails on what was already a massive Titantic. The ship has come from structures of neo-liberal actions such as deregulation, privitization and lower taxes for the wealthy. Other sources of this Titantic are the fall of the public corporation but most important is the increase in the power of the shareholder and their unwarranted need for maximization of profit at all times. The Titantic was already sailing when Google and Facebook came aboard. Pre-Covid, “nearly half of the US population lived in functional poverty”, in part due to the 2008 recession, which the majority have never overcame. Zuboff refers to Thomas Piketty’s economic equation of r>g, showing the in our times, the rate of return on capital far exceeds the rate of economic growth. In other words, we are back to a time of inherited wealth being a mark of ones fate much more so than any conception of meritocracy. With surveillance capitalism being the overall ruler, are we now a version of the medieval serfs during our own feudalism?

In its beginning, Google was using its search engine data to reinvest in making a better product for its users. Then the shareholders came and demanded maximum profit, a standard story for the corporate world. The significance of this is that the shareholder demands spurned or indirectly bred the beginning of Google’s submission into surveillance capitalism. The post 1980 structure of shareholders power, enforcing maximization of profit, along with a significant decrease in public trading companies, set the ship in place for Google’s current form to sail. The first step was to use targeted advertising on individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers(pg.74-75). Then based on what is termed by Zuboff as “behavioural surplus”, Google started to attempt to read its users minds and sent ads to each individual user that they thought would appease to them. Google presented itself the third party advertisers as having a mathematical certainty on which ads were most efficient to send to each individual consumer. This began a “one-way mirror irrespective of a person’s awareness, knowledge, and consent; thus enabling privledged secret access to behavioural data”(pg.81). This is the behavioural surplus. Larry Page and Sergey Brin went “from being just another couple of very smart guys who couldn’t figure out how to make real money”(pg.84)to multi-billionaires, thanks to being the main instigators of surveillance capitalism(profits went up 10% from 2002-2004). Unlike industrial capitalism, the emphasis had now shifted to extraction instead of production.

Zuboff continually repeats that she fears that we will be wiped out of our self-determinism or free will(terms itself are highly up for debate as in their precise defintions and how they are applicable in our world). Will we be exiled from our future actions because they will be pre-determined for us? The insight on how Google was involved with Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign is noteworthy. It “compiled significant data on more than 250 million Americans including a vast array array of online behavioural and relational data collected from users of the campaign website and third party social media sites such as Facebook……We knew who..people..were going to vote for before they decided”(pgs. 122-23). Ten years later, Google was amassing prominent funding from the far-right such as the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute. As Google evolved beyond its search engine, bought YouTube and delved into Android devices, it has become unprecedented in gaining prominence of at least some amount in each of our lives. Androids are open sources, which give developers of applications easy access to each users behavioural surplus. An app is set to track you and its about time all of us were aware of this. Zuboff has to be complimented for making this clear to her readers. “Even the most innocent seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing and dating apps are ‘infested with dozens’ of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioural surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting”(pg.137). Then there is Google Maps, with its added tool of Street View. Cars used by Street View have been proven to encrypt personal information from people’s homes such as names, telephone numbers, credit information, passowords, messages, e-mail and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behaviour, medical information, location data, photos, videos and audio files(pg.144). The more you learn about Google, the darker it gets. It is the current form of what we historically connected to the CIA and the KGB. Google and its endless amount of third-party users is its own powerful spy agency, likely with even greater capabilities than any governmental institute, even if it has another purpose for finding out about you. Google has successfully invaded of little was left of privacy and now even invades the time to ourselves that we termed as solitude.

By 2016, according to the Guardian, Google and Facebook combined had 20% of global ad spending. Ninety percent of growth in advertising was because of them(pg.162). This inspired Microsoft to turn to surveillance capitalism. They first released Windows 10 in 2015 and by 2016 acquired LinkedIn. Now it had the world’s most famous professional network. This was the means to give Micosoft behavioural surplus. It had access to 450 million consumers and qualitatively a comprehensive knowledge of one’s professional status. I needed to add this to show that surveillance capitalism is not solely a story of two corporations and the rest does not have any gravy. The system now in place is their for any major player and has set the course for future capitalist ventures.

There are six declarations for a surveillance capitalist corporation: we claim human experience as raw material for the taking, we turn an individual’s experience into behavioural data, we own the behavioural data conferred from the individual, we own the right to know what the individual’s data says, we can decide how to use this data and we always have the right to take, to own, to know and to decide how to use an individual’s data. We have been conquested by Google, Facebook and all other surveillance capitalist players. This was able to happen under lawlessness conditions. In conculsion, they have convinced us we cannot live without them and in turn, have grown expendentially in power, all for the benefit of the major shareholders.

The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism

Every activity we do is meant as an opportunity for data about ourselves to be conquested by the major players. There are no limits on data being available. Everything the human being does is now being turned into a commercial objective. Zuboff quotes Langdon Winner, who correctly points out that the changes and disruption that an evolving technology repeatedly causes in modern life is accepted as a given of inevitability simply because no one has ever bothered to ask whether there” were other possibilities.” No one has questioned technology turning into our determinant, taking away our own, which in this context is how self-determinism should be defined. The surveillance capitalists setting the structures in place for how we live our day to day lives.

In 2015, Google’s purchase of Alphabet Sidewalk Labs was a greater display of its ambition to control every aspect of our lives. To turn what is left of the public into private. The city is now meant to be privatized, as free internet kiosks installed in New York allowed Google to siphon information of both users of the kiosks and nearby WiFi users. Information on public transit is shared with companies like Uber, so they can figure out where it is they will find potential customers. In one of many of Justin Trudeau’s brain freezes as Prime Minister, he joined arms with Eric Schmidt and Alphabet as they were planning to install the “Smart City” in one section of southeast Toronto. Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, said he was “excited thinking of all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge(pg.232).” Unknown to Zuboff at the time of publication, but in one of the brighter moments for those of us fighting back against surveillance capitalism, Toronto, under opposition that forced the city’s government into stalling on a final decision, prompted Alphabet Labs to pull out of this arrangement and thus it never came to pass that Toronto was ‘Googlicized.’

Another major revelation for me from the book is when we take a closer look at the idea of a smart product. “Each smart object is a kind of marionette for all its ‘smartness’, it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives”(pg.238). The smart product’s purpose is for exporting information from us. It is that simple. It has nothing to do with making any product better. Access to location as a requirement is a prime example of its intrusion. The information smart devices export from you are not necessary for the product to operate. Worse, the information exported from you is sold to an unknown third party who will send it another party and so on. Your personal information is spilled all over the place for nothing in return, except for perhaps some petty conveniences. To say it best, “there was a time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you”(pg.262). The smart products are everywhere and have no limit in diversity(from dolls to television sets to workout bikes).

When the author started her analysis of Facebook, I found it appropriate to revisit the now ten year old film, a favourite of mine from the 2010s, “Social Network.” The film was from a time when Facebook was reverred, before any Cambridge Analytica, before Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, before the growth of hate groups prompting terrorist acts and before any Mark Zuckerberg support for oppressive governments(Philippines). I liked the film because it took a critical eye at what was then unwittingly beloved. David Fincher brilliantly interpreted Facebook as a disruption of “online privacy, intellectual property and internet misogyny”(The Nerd Daily). He sees how we as a society, easily interpret it as a utilitarian need, much like we once thought of the telephone. While the film is not perfect in factual content, it does capture the mind of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and how they psychologically thrive. The term Social Network itself is born out of an elitist or wanna-be elitist idea of a frat club that to fit into requires you exposing yourself, making yourself volatile for the possible reward of acceptance or the loaded term, “friends.” Friends, thanks to Facebook, is now a term that is a loose contingency(put your hand up if anyone has ever blocked you or unfriended you). A friend means more that you got my attention(traditionally done through a frat means of prank jokes and exploits). Facebook evolved from a simple relational/sexual purpose to now a political sphere. The different forces are aiming for some type of fantasial control. The thinking is not much beyond what we experience in a video game or a casino and this is a purposeful intention of Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanders. Every thought of yours is meant for Facebook, which allows it in turn to be exploited. It has become a drug of a conceptual necessity. A tag or photo of you is a perceived self-promotion(which most of us have seemingly bought into) but it really is an addition to Facebooks behavioural surplus. The worst part of this social media addiction(especially for those who know no world before social media) is that you are a sheep around the pack of wolves. If you garner attention the hatred will inevitably come. If you don’t you face the agonizing reality that no one cares either because you are not important or all the other users are too preoccupied in promoting themselves. Facebook, in some ways more than Google, helped to slay privacy. From a business perspective, Zuckerberg was wise to allow the product to grow first before it embellished itself in self-directed advertisements. The downfall of the film in a decade old perspective, is that it is too kind to Zuckerberg at the end, actually giving him a non-elitist morality, which he shows no signs in real life of having. Humanity, thanks to vital instruments like Facebook, cannot overrun its “asshole” tendancies. The “asshole” tendancies in fact, are a large reason why Facebook has continued thrive instead of dissolve. Zuckerberg has knowingly given space to hatred and allowed it to thrive as an anonymous legality under his jurisdiction. The decrepit Zuckerberg explanation that Facebook is a simple means for the world to reach out to one another was never what it was meant to be.

One of the most remarkable projects of surveillance capitalism and interesting narrative in the book is the story of Pokemon Go. Google Maps gave birth to this idea. Pokemon Go was a large scale capitalist project meant to quickly identify large-scale human behaviour and “driving it towards guaranteed outcomes.” The summer of 2016 project turned out to be a perfect mapping instrument for human behaviour both in public and private spaces. The treasure hunt of finding virtual Pokemon creatures in open spaces gave you game awards and points. Human behaviour in turn, was controlled on a global scale. Gameification is one of surveillance capitalisms most effective tools. Gameification allows a company to “tune, herd and conditon the behaviour of its customers or employees towards its own objectives”(pg.314). Pokemon Go’s real alterior purpose was successful. Within a week from July 6, 2016, it was the highest grossing app in the US, more than 60% of its downloaded apps were in daily use and it was played on average close to 45 minutes a day per user. It drove people on foot to various businesses within the city they were playing. Nintendo’s shares skyrocketed. Google shifted its usual advertising cost from cost per click to cost per visit. McDonalds and Starbucks got involved and appeared to be incredibly successful. While the appeal of the game soon diminished in this society of low attention span, the payoff was a permanent model for surveillance capitalism. It was true immersion of the virtual and the outside world, along with being a rich source of private information for third party sources.

Instrumentarian Power for a Third Modernity

A traditional totalitarian regime’s method of control is through violence and propaganda. A surveillance capitalists method of societal control is through behaviour modification, much more quiet and arguable longer-lasting. Both methods rely on exploitation. “It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow”(pg.381). China is perhaps the best equipped at this behaviour modification on a national level. China’s behaviour modification depends upon distrust and exploitation. Citizens are ranked on past behaviour and that installs a fatality to any future choices an individual makes(think credit rating but not limited to only the financial institutions). China’s system of surveillance control has an added purpose of political control. Regardless of nation, the instrumentarians, as Zuboff likes to call Google, Faceboook and the others, have succeeded almost 100% in gaining a type of control over our lives. They now want to eliminate randomness and accidents. Surveillance capitalists, however, do not have the foresight to see our societal vulnerabilities. Eliminating the anomaly in an age of globalism, where our daily digital actions or “breadcrumbs”, leave us less and less guarded each and every day. Introspection is discouraged and happiness is promoted, as whatever is interpreted as happiness is more likely to turn into consumer actions, which in turn, provides information for their behavioural surplus. Melancholy and empathy are beyond numerical metrics and the promotion of what is perceived to be in vogue is meant as a determinant for your actions and being.

We are ill on our addiction to the drugs the virtual world offers. An ‘unplug’ study revealed “emotional anguish summarized in six categories: addiction, failure to unplug, boredom, confusion, stress and isolation”(pg.446). We have our machines, we freely let them embed themselves within us and in turn, develop a compulsive need. We are now wanting the external virtual world to construct our identity. Facebook’s main contribution to this is the “Like” button. Studies have shown that the continual comparison with others who are subjectively more successful than us only creates a more negative picture of what we feel about ourselves. An even bigger dilemna is that thanks to our addiction, when we feel negative about ourselves, we don’t know what else to do except continue browsing and mentally comparing ourselves to others with the toxic belief that it will make us feel better. This type of inferiority complex is part of the flagrant term ‘cancel culture'(lacking precise and accurate defintion. The closest is how Geoffrey Miller puts it, as a process in “which online mobs are roused by outrage to appeal to authorities to ruin someone’s life because they said something ‘offensive. This defintion is lacking in both seeing how it nourishes one’s ego, that it can go well beyond what someone says and is often not so much about punishment but someone having to explain their past actions. Regardless it is the best depiction of the term I have seen yet.), as in when another deemed more successful than us is ‘taken down’. It often comes from a place of us feeling more nourished and validated as individuals. Zuboff makes the vital reference to Sartre’s “hell is other people.” We have now ‘no exit’ from the Big Other of the virtual world. The Big Other flourishes when we follow the tides it sends, creating behavioural surplus, which turns into revenue. In this capitalist stage many of the players feel as if there is a guaranteed outcome(it will have to be studied how much or how little Covid has affected this). We as consumers have a radical indifference or unawareness for the sake of effortless connection. We are a means to the surveillance capitalists ends. “The actuation and modification that quietly drains the will to will, the forfeit of your voice in the first person in favour of others’ plans, the destruction of the social relations and politics of the old and slow and still unfulfilled ideals of self-determining citizens bound to the legitimate authority of democratic governance”(pg.488).

Conclusion

We must overcome our radical indifferences to how the surveillance capitalists are taking us away from our own being. A BF Skinner argument would say that we should stay being the we. In other words, be obedient or even better, be unaware to who is ruling us. Zuboff goes as far as to predict a type of extinction if this trend continues. We have in our midst a totalitarianism, which is as Hannah Arendt put it a place “where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon”(pg.518). A functioning democracy is perhaps our only saving grace. The plasticity of capitalism has to be matched by another idealogue of thinking. In its current form, capitalism is creating and thriving upon the chaos. It is mindlessly accepted as the standardization for society. Zuboff awakens us to what it is currently doing to destroy us in this surveillance mode. The individual is dying along with will and self-identity, however you want to define those terms, you know at least that part of you is eradicating.

Law and Order

You think you are entitled

when they are not themselves

in anger, unsettled, intoxicated

unsure of meaning. Just like you

in the depths of your pool,

swimming clear blue with no

surety of direction under the chlorinated

water of summer steam. They are castrated

from your mind, by the bullet just fired.

That is the beauty of the bullet

No explanation is required.

The channel is changed without pause.

Empty Classroom

I sit directly across from where I once met him

he was 9 or so

a year or two ago

they confiscated me a drama class

for grade 4

now there was no memory to recover

but a photo is a reinsurgence

of what you thought your brain leaked out long ago

 

I can’t sell any T-shirts of him smiling

Those who put flowers along the entrance

pink roses, petunianas and daffodil gold

His hand was twisted behind his back

They tear gassed him to a trance

Castrated with a drive for death

and to collect back payments

from the Thompsons Funeral Home

Toronto Sun smeared that he had a knife

Reddit said he was a thug

Unlike myself, they never saw him smile

one gap between the front teeth smile

A circle game of imitation without sound

A white, middle-aged man

shakes his head

at what he doesn’t understand.

Garden

Today is the day

to begin ripping the plants stabbed into the body

of the earth, take the child from the mothers clutch

It is time to start over, this path has been trodden on before

The clutch, the hands ingrained into earth

A dismantling will continue to the day

that the heart no longer grasps air

The weeds of the past seasons will not easily let go

Use shovel and hand, sort and manifest your body towards the root.

See what was done, where the earth bleed and howled in pain

This day you are only you, dig what you can

And hopefully a future tense will prevail.

Mosquito

According to hashtag,

what we call the mosquito

we do not think of a subject, nor a being

We acquaint infestation

a sonic invasion

Say this is not how my backyard should be

a I sit with sun, whiskey, red maple tree.

 

The mosquito must go

Stamped out by a swat.

Gone

If up to me,

they will never be seen again.

The yard is only meant for I

and invited guests-

Not for those whom we believe

are carrying disease

while not understanding

that our own symbiotics

such as the rat

from hand to mouth

killed an entire continent.

 

When Reading “Second Coming”

What is the countercurrent?

It is not the Erineyes,

it is a revolution call.

Just an updated version

from what many preached before.

Malcolm and Fanon spoke of structure.

We must burn till it is built.

Self-empowerment.

 

Now is not the time to listen to Philip Glass’ “The Hours”

there is too much ringing in your ears

bloodshot eyes from the night before.

Early June and its not only green

its this epitome

the world is flooding away

Parts of the island are lost each year.

The ones who can walk away

Don’t care

Now its a question of who will stay.

 

The red-winged blackbirds song

A song for what is beyond the determinant.

As night time beckons

and she just wants to fly.

We are the felines

thinking prey

in a sugar-coated speech

We’re all in this together.

Lets embrace

the brown paper bag of hope.

 

Any spiritus mundi must believe

that the rivers can flow to all of us

The ghostly spirit of Lycaon.

Don’t bother with the meat

for the golfing fascists to eat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Camus’ “The Plague” and what it asks of us during Covid

Camus’ 1947 novel “The Plague” or “La Peste” is not in itself a book meant for a reader looking for a traditional in-depth narrative of individual character development.  It is Camus applying his philosophy of absurdity in a contextualized societal framework of chaos and inhumanity.  The book in itself is the struggle to attain meaning, in the classic existential mode of a world that cannot give it to you.

The novel is set in the fictional resort town of Oran in northern Algeria, along the Meditteranean.  Camus uses Oran as a conception of a people not accepting of their own fate, not realizing the futility of their own lives, with or without the plague.  “Treeless, glamourless, soulless, the town of Oran ends by seeming restful and after awhile, you go complacently to sleep there.”  Oran is us globally.  Ignorant we are of our past, stuck in the drudgery of modern capitalism and unaware of much beyond the immediate.  We are limited to our own “force of habit.”  The linkage the book has to our current Covid crisis and to 2020 in general is how at the beginning it portrays the people of Oran as being immersed in daily commerce, in denial of any plague even when it becomes clearly present, magistrates who are afraid to take any action, supply constraints of vaccine and the anger of the crowds.  This is Camus telling us that nothing is learned from history.  Our human behaviours are cyclical in some ways and perceived progress is in many ways an abstraction.

The main character is Dr. Rieux, the voice of the author himself.  In the book Rieux is fighting for the others health.  He will not confine himself to faith.  He refuses resignation, to consent to fate.  Fate is to be fought against, even if the result is inevitablity turned against you.  From his own philosophy, Camus branches out to other viewpoints that he portrays in various figures in the book.  Rambert is a journalist who first just wants to leave the town after it has been infested and see his wife, but in the end, resorts to volunteering and helping out others.  Grand spends endless amounts of time trying to find the perfect first sentence to begin his book.  This self-indulgence he can eventually able to break free from and help others.  There is Cottard, who fails at a suicide attempt, but then seemingly goes insane during the plague and has a shooting incident near the end of the book, when the town is seemingly recovering.  Cottard actually could not face the plague ending.  Life before the plague for him was unlivable.  The obvious opposite to Camus is Paneloux, a priest who at first gives a sermon blaming the plague on the residents of Oran, saying this is a judgement of God, until he ends up questioning his own faith after seeing a boy scream at his moment of death.  After this, all Paneloux can do is fight for salvation.  According to Paneloux, we must try to love what we cannot comprehend.  That is one of the base points of religion.  Tarrou is interested in being a saint but at the same time does not believe in god.  He brings up the question of how do we do good without faith in a higher authority?  How do we pull the ethical out from a world of determinism?  As a child, Tarrou saw the execution of a child(his father was a prosecutor).  Tarrou appears to have a self-realization that a lot of what composes society is death and murder and as an individual, he has to attempt to look beyond.  In the end Tarrou is a victim of the plague but not without putting up a fight against the inevitability of death.  In this, I see a battle won because he fought against the inevitability.  He would not accept fate.

The town is first hit with a rat infestation, as hordes of dying rats are lying out in the streets.  When the plague is accepted as actually happening, capitalist life and purpose is gone for all except for the medical workers such as Dr. Rieux.  The town is closed off and in what Camus calls despair.  “The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.”  A mentality sets in of always expecting the worse.  This is a significant relation as to what is happening now and the book itself is one explanation of why the novel has seen such a huge revival in attention, even though among Camus’ writings, it is not nearly as famous as “The Stranger” and arguably not as enjoyable to read as works such as “The Fall.”  We can also relate to todays victims in our medical, long-term care and grocery store workers, who go about their jobs with a “dreaded perseverance.”  Before the despair, there was denial.  Oran’s citizens could not grasp any lockdown of capitalism and then possible mortality.  When they do grasp onto the circumstances, it is often too unbearable for them to face.  Characters like Rieux are able to plod on in the face of this, while others are overcome.

The plague needs to be accepted for what it is and in turn, we must find joy in this vulnerability we are forced into.  Happiness can be attained, such as when Rieux goes out nightswimming.  Susceptibility is not to be denied, it is to be embraced.  In regards to suffering, all we can do is minimize it.  To Camus, while the plague will go in peaks and dives, it will never actually end.  We are always living through a silent, invisible plague or at least the possibility thereof.  Some have suggested that “The Plague” was a symbolic reaction to the Natzis invading Paris.  There are sections in the book that give this credence but I do not see Camus being someone who bases his writings on a singular event, without looking at a more universal picture.  Regardless, the immediacy of trauma or fatality never leaves us.  We can only ask, what does the plague mean for humanity?  We should know that the universe is amoral.  While highly debatable to say the least and ignoring the economics, Camus sees suffering as randomly distributed.  Tell that to some of our minority and financially challenged communities during our current epidemic.

I think that the book is a literal interpretation of the title.  Camus immersed himself in the history of past plagues, such as the up to 50 million that died in the 1300s, 1630 in Lombardy and Veneto that killed 280000, London’s in 1665 and China’s eastern seaboard in the 17 and 1800s.  Plagues are actually historical incidents that are merely concentrations of a universal condition.  When the plague comes to Oran, the first thing it brings is “exile”, both literally and metaphorically.  “Moreover, in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbour, each had to bear the load of his troubles alone.”  Fear is not an abnormality when we are all living in it.  Many of us in the last few months have had a similar, if not exact type of experience.  We have had to resort to exiling ourselves from what we had before and this has meant a retreat back to solitude.  What was taken for granted has to be abandoned or left behind, whether it is tickets to the Raptors NBA games or work equipment that you left at your workplace.

In the end, Camus wants us to fixate on how we endure with the knowledge of our weaknesses.  Rieux in some ways is similar to Camus’ Sisyphus, as in he keeps going, knowing that any ultimate victory is not an option.  In Rieux’s case, death will not be defeated, yet you keep up the fight.  The fight is what gives you “decency.”  When any possibilities of joy come, the chance to truly enjoy the shards of light in life, then you must do so.  “For nothing in the world is worth turning one’s back on what one loves.”  To love is one way to live life.  If we look deeper, to those we truly love, to those simple activities that give us breath of life, then the outside window does not appear so grey.

Regardless of whether any of us feel Camus’ interpretation of a societal pandemic is applicable in many or any ways to what is currently happening in 2020, I find myself more in a need to ask questions resulting from rereading the book.  This is perhaps what Camus wants.  From various angles, the book is not so much about the pandemic ravaging Oran, but more of how we will act as human beings.  Some of our injustices have been become more lucid.  This is despite that in 2020, we are now on a radical level of speed in comparision to 1947, in a day and age of devices, less in-depth thought and a low level of patience.  Is the concept of a plague meant as a symbolism for how we will harm each other?  Is the plague part of our original sin, part of our fall?  I have heard head-scratching is good for you when there are no assumptions made.  Covid-19 has throttled many of our past understandings of how to live life logistically.  What will social interaction now mean?  How will our already vastly changing workforce now be altered even more?  Do we not now need to think of giving everyone enough to live a decent life on, no matter what their employment predicament is?  Our industrial, twentieth century mode of thinking, where employment is an assumption and we have a thin social safety net to fall back on, should not only be challenged, but severly altered.  UBI should not be seen as an abstraction but an option that needs to studied in what form it can benefit society the most.  Finally, do we simply go back to what was, or do we ask deeper societal questions of ourselves and try to define the “new normal” ?  The former is closing your eyes, the latter is a necessity.