SICK WOMAN THEORY

Just read this EXCELLENT piece by Johanna Hedva. A truly heroic woman. She reminds me of a friend of mine in Melbourne who never ceases to humble me with her courage and strength. Love to all people suffering with chronic illness in a world that was not built to care for you.

Here is a little excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing. It has an important message for all people, not just those suffering from chronic illness.

"I used to think that the most anti-capitalist gestures left had to do with love, particularly love poetry: to write a love poem and give it to the one you desired, seemed to me a radical resistance. But now I see I was wrong.

"The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

"Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt."

Read the full article.

Post-Capitalist

Guy Rundle so often says what I am thinking. This is part of what he has to say about the Turnbull Government's recent 'innovation statement' for Crikey. I note it here mainly so I will always be able to find it.

"The final problem for those imagining they can revive old-fashioned capitalist growth from an innovation economy is the trickiest -- technical innovation now points in a post-capitalist direction. As m'colleague Keane noted, Big Media/Big Copyright are the least innovative groups around, still interested in things they can "channel", rather than spread via networks (you can't put a tollgate on a network. Canals -- i.e. channels -- are what tollgates were invented for). But it's not just Big Media. The more innovation shifts us towards zero-cost production and innovation, the more that the entire edifice of capitalism becomes a mere rent-seeking process -- in the same way as the once productive edifice of feudalism became a rent drag (via land) on capitalism in the 19th century.

"Thus, the day the innovation statement was announced, Tesla announced the release of its new battery, which will allow for the storage of renewable home-generated energy. So an end to jokes about whatcher gonna do with yer panels when the sun don't shine, ha, ha. The clue to the intent of this development is in the name -- Nikola Tesla has become the patron saint of post-capitalist development occurring within the capitalist frame, because he proposed a system of unmeasurable electricity distribution, and was stymied and ruined by nascent Big Electricity. Turnbull and others believe that this trick -- the Edison trick -- can be repeated in our era. It's the Edison process -- develop idea; build it; take to market; $$$$ -- that they're relying on here.

"But it's not going to happen that way again, and the degree to which that's not happening, or unhappening -- the degree to which the value substructure of capitalism is being undermined by genuine innovation -- is now so fast that current governments must regard it as present opportunity and challenge not a future one. Otherwise "innovation" policy will simply be misplaced, as this one is -- a money spray across a rent-field. Everyone -- from one-note classical liberals, to communists who want a massive re-up investment in technology for human liberation -- can see this is a farce waiting to go on. The only people who believe in it are the political caste, who need to be seen to look busy, and who will be looking for corporate boards to be on in a decade or so's time. Very innovative indeed."

Cory Doctorow on copying

Out of all the writer/intellectual types in the world that I know of, Cory Doctorow is the one who's views most closely reflect my own on a pretty big range of stuff. I first became aware of him while listening to Slate's short-lived podcast 'Stranger Than Fiction' in which Tim Wu interviews famous science fiction authors about their work.

I am ashamed to admit that I am yet to read one of his books, but I sure have read a lot of his interviews and articles. I LOVE what he has to say about copyright and intellectual property. In the Slate podcast that was the topic that really arrested my attention. A little transcript:

Tim Wu: Why don't you tell us a bit about what your thinking was when you first did that [used creative commons licenses on his novels] and whether you were afraid. For many authors, their book is their treasure, and the idea of just putting it out there for free seems unthinkable, so talk us through what some of your considerations were when you decided to take that step.

Cory Doctorow: So where I've netted out is that using creative commons licenses to allow people to share electronic copies of my books benefits me in three important ways and the first one is economic. I think that when you let people download free e-books, they buy more print books and certainly that was more important in 2003 when my first novel came out when there weren't a lot of e-books, but even today selling print books matters a lot.

I also think that they buy more e-books as well. I think that people are motivated to buy e-books by not just coercion or the inability to get a book without paying for it, but also by the feeling that they're doing the right thing. It's already the case that if you take any popular book that's on the shelves, you can get it for free on the internet. I give it to you for free and ask you to continue supporting my career and people by and large have been very willing to do that. It's the 21st century, and if you're making art that you don't think people are going to copy, you're not really making contemporary art, because there's not really anything we can do to stop people copying things they want to copy.

And then the final dimension here is the moral dimension. When I was seventeen as I'm sure when you were seventeen, I just copied my ass off. I copied every single thing that mattered to me. We taped CDs, we... I don't know if you remember, but when we were in elementary school, I think it was Brian Cox's dad, had access to a free photocopier and so we'd buy copies of Asimov's and photocopy them and hand around the best stories because that way we could all share them. And many of us grew up to be Asimov's subscribers and in my case an Asimov's contributor and it was because we were able to copy them that we did. So for me to say to other people "when I was copying that was just like legitimate artistic background that people do on their way to a career in the arts but when you copy it's theft," to me that just reeks of hypocrisy.

Tim Wu: Now many authors as I've said are very protective of their work, what would you say to someone who just said "it's my work product, I invested my soul in it, how can I possibly put it out there for free that just seems wrong to me".

Cory Doctorow: Well I guess I would say to them that, presuming your work is widely known and appreciated enough that people even bother to take it without paying for it, some fraction of your audience is going to take it without paying for it. And in an ideal world where you're actually trying to feed your kids instead of merely get indignant, you wanna have a path that leads them from being outlaws to being inside the law, to being legitimate customers. And the way you do that is not by shouting at them and telling them that they're dicks, because that's kind of something that'll get their back up and keep them on the other side and polarise the debate. The way you do that is by appealing to their better nature, by showing that you're a reasonable person who doesn't pretend that he or she never copies. You show them that everybody copies, it's just part of our lives, and that copying is a feature and not a bug. You act as though you inhabit the same reality as they do and appeal to them to do the right thing.

PKD on reality

"It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.' That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

"But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

"Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not."

- Philip K Dick

Magical thinking

Can a lucky charm actually influence future events? Science wants to know.

"To initially test this possibility experimenters brought participants into the lab and told them that they would be doing a little golfing. They were to see how many of 10 putts they could make from the same location. The manipulation was simply this: when experimenters handed the golf ball to the participant they either mentioned that the ball “has turned out to be a lucky ball” in previous trials, or that the ball was simply the one “everyone had used so far”. Remarkably, the mere suggestion that the ball was lucky significantly influenced performance, causing participants to make almost two more putts on average."

From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superstitions-can-make-you/

This doesn't work because the ball is actually magic. It works because human brains are freaky. I think we can reliably use ordinary objects to help ourselves focus, relax or even remember certain things. Stay tuned for my new project: Science-Based Superstition.