In the Middle Kingdom, Part 2: Dragonfly Eyes

In spring of 2024, I was at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, deep in the heart of the sort of old Tokyo streets that remain sparse and ragged. It’s where I first saw Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes, or at least as much as I could manage in an unplanned visit. I’d later go home and watch the whole thing on Youtube. 

The premise is simple, almost a gimmick. The footage is culled from thousands of hours of CCTV footage from around China to assemble an otherwise fairly anodyne love story. But the plot is only the thin armature that holds it all together. The real joy of seeing it is a voyeuristic look into the lives of what is often regarded as a borderline hermit kingdom, integral to the global circulation of capital, but little-visited and little-known, particularly outside a few major metros – a glimpse of ordinary people at work, at the pharmacy, enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life.

 

And that’s what I thought of on the taxi in from the airport in Shanghai – my god, there’s a whole normal goddamn country here.

Which to many is going to be the biggest shock, given how much ink is dedicated to the mystery of China – whereas once Occidental writers once wrote about the inscrutable celestial mandarins drowning in the river trying to catch the moon, they now write about smart cities and social credit scores, and the messaging is just as vapid as it was 150 years ago. So there’s an anxiety of influence there that stalks me as I write – I want to distinguish that which is genuinely bizarre and unique about contemporary China, without falling into the lazy cliches that stalk virtually all writing about the country in the Anglosphere. Granted, that experience was of Shanghai, and while the valences differed in the gloomy industrial suburbs and sun-faded steppe towns, the principle was the same. The middle-aged man drinks his after-work beer and smokes his cigarette in the doorway to the apartment block, the teenage girls make little finger-hearts and pose for their selfies, the career woman frets over the texts from her side dude, the boys in soccer jerseys and the girls in pigtails go over their math homework and the clerk in the little corner store looks up from the game on his phone and sees he needs to put more Cokes in the fridge.

But part of the reason I’m starting with the bizarre normalcy of the Chinese streets is not just as a counter to the propagandistic messaging one sees across Western media, but because it is actually a difficult place to access. The visa process is an abject nightmare, time-consuming and onerous, and even the exemptions that are in place are arcane, with contradictory information online and poorly translated websites with jankety interfaces. Beyond that, everything is, naturally, mediated through apps, most of which are either impossible or exceptionally difficult for a foreigner to access. For example, WeChat, a standard platform, requires you to be verified by a WeChat user who has been using the app for 12 months, the Weixin pay platform within the app for 6 months, and has not verified any other first-time users within the past month. I didn’t get to use it. And that isn’t to even mention the fact that one is accessing one’s financial data within the People’s Republic is enough to trigger automatic blocks on your bank account, regardless of how many long-distance phone calls you make begging them to take note and being reminded that “[they] care about your security.” 

Which of course reflects a gatekeeping. The Chinese systems and the everyone-else systems are kept at a deliberate distance, like two species evolving on different sides of a broad river.

So what is on the other side? 

Once you crack the system, once you finally get the hang of it – it’s impossible not to be impressed. Procedures are coordinated, efficient, and inexpensive. You’re effortlessly jumping into prim little electric taxis that smell (nostalgically) of cigarettes and BO, driven by gruff uncles that hack up morning half-pack out the window between historic sites and antique restaurants. Despite what you may hear about gutter oil and plastic rice – jenkem for CNN viewers – I’m happy to report that the spiced lamb skewers were flavorful and the cherries tart and sweet.

The high-speed train system should be enough to blackpill any Westerner – I come from a country that can’t build a pissant metro without having to deal with armies of red-faced suburban homeowners and byzantine public-private partnerships, and it will take decades to build. The system in China, conversely, is consistently clean, efficient, and inexpensive to use, expensive to build, but designed with long-term benefits in mind, and to alleviate the many economic externalities caused by poor infrastructure – the paymasters within the state accept the loss leader, because they view this as an investment, which is a tough thing to imagine when you come from a society run by profiteers who don’t care about much of anything beyond their Q2 returns. And you have to think that maybe, unironically, these are Brautigan’s machines of loving grace. 

It felt a bit like I was walking in the shoes of those early 20th Century European intellectuals, looking at America with awe and horror. I am a representative of the falling world, here in the rising world, and it’s impossible to feel anything other than the sublime, fascination and unfamiliarity and admiration and fear in equal measure.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is often thought of as an anti-communist classic, and to be fair, Zamyatin was no fan of the USSR, despite his past as a Bolshevik revolutionary. But one thing the standard reading forgets is just how enraptured and expressionist Zamyatin’s descriptions are of what we would consider a dystopia. 

“Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral was being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying at its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight. And then to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom.”

The dragonfly’s eyes flicker in the distance. 

Objections here are pretty obvious. You’ve heard most of them, with varying levels of reliability – lack of free expression (which is often reframed as a point of pride, an antidote to “disorder”) to social credit (an almost completely ginned up story designed to stoke terror in the heart of the well-meaning Atlantic reader). And to be fair, living in a mass surveillance state fucking sucks, particularly one that well-oiled.

And it comes at you at inopportune moments – when you see the QR code on the apartment door, when you’re stopped and have your notebook rifled through, presumably in search of flyers about Jesus or something of that nature. When you realize that there is a contingency upon which the new China is being built. My delight in flânerie through the streets of Shanghai could be easily contrasted with the merciless checkpoints of Beijing. 

But if you’re reading this you probably know the extent to which you’re already under the microscope, at least to some extent, from both the private and public sectors. Patriot Act, built-in forensics in devices, biometrics, you know all of this already, and it’s best not to think about it, especially given the degree to which we seem to have all collectively given up hope in any kind of an alternative. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive, beautiful in their goals, seem almost as quaint as the Free Tibet concerts and Trotskyist reading groups of another era – quixotic missions for idealists who still, bless them, truly believe another world is possible.

Some asshole dork is probably ready to play the “nice whataboutism” Yu-Gi-Oh card, to which I say, fuck off, I’ll steal your Yu-Gi-Oh cards and trade them for an eighth of mids. I’m making a direct comparison here – the nature of the surveillance might differ, one might choose direct censorship over incentivized and nudged corralling of the human soul (and the direct censorship is to be fair probably worse), but the similarities should be, to any enthusiast for freedom, uncomfortable. 

And at least the Chinese provide treats. Try paying for a hotel or booking public transit stateside. And for a double contrast, compare the China of now with the China of generations past, even after Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. The Chinese must be the last people on earth who see life getting better and better, rather than a slow miserable death, if for no other reason than that they started from nothing.

I drift back to the West Lake in Hangzhou, where I started, to the old folks with their boiled peanuts and medlars. Had they been urban youths sent down to the country? Or had they been militant Red Guards? Or had they been the countless those in between? 

As for me, as much as I enjoy the peanuts and the medlars, I am still a product of a very different place or time – for the jolly, double-chinned crowd, this is the culmination of a long and hard life, a transcendent epoch of rest. As for me?

I still love cities at night – even if I am slowly aging out of the nightlife demographic – but as someone who was always a bit on the periphery, the being peripheral is no skin off my back. I swan through the streets of the French Concession in Shanghai, surrounded by people much prettier and more stylish than I, and they pay me no heed, as I pay them no heed. I’m happy to walk on this lovely spring night, a soft rain falling. 

I stop in at the posh wine bar, and I am left alone on the rooftop – the better-connected, the ones who know exactly which bottle to select to impress their clients or their attendant crowd of fawning girls draped in Alexander McQueen, they’re inside. I am here with the malfunctioning lights, but I don’t care, their cellar selection reflects the taste of the new China, and I have in front of me a glass of Charmes-Chambertin, and I am left to enjoy it in peace, each subtle aroma sending me to a place and time from my past – here, the smell of the incense in my dorm room, and there, the hippie grocery store in my hometown, and over there, the spice cabinet from my old rattrap apartment back in Seattle, living with two middle-aged gay addicts in an illegal sublet for 600 a month, and I was one of the last to experience that. I come from falling America, and I’m here in rising Asia. And I don’t even care about the rainfall all around me.

Only to walk through the slick streets, a little music playing from the intervening years, until I find myself under a parasol.

I Miss Duolingo

Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse, daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly says “he’ll be fine.”

Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch. 

(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)

Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or “dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it, decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go. 

And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too decided to dust off my French.

It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option (as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization was vague. 

Which says something about how optimistic the technological environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider. And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.

It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like “tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get better. 

And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.

Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns to shit.

As for when and how the decline started, different users have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one another, but were forced to simply play the game.

And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this. Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.

But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.

Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible, and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.

“One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well.”

 The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.

But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress. 

As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old man or a fatass unicorn again.

But this is what happens when you take a good product, and let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the professional con men. 

At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see what products his name was being slapped onto.

Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.

Stop Recommending Me Books, Mindy Kaling

While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.

For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.

Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.

 

I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.

Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.

A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.

That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”

(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)

And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.

My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.

Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:

“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”

That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.

Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.

And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.

 

But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.

Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known. 

 

So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?

Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.

No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.

This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.

Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.

But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.

Get the fuck out.

A Letter from a Leftist to His Liberal Friends

Weren’t expecting that, were you? Neither was I.

This is one of those times when I feel obligated to write something up. Of course, there’s too much already – the world has been inundated with lameass think pieces for a long time, and this might be classed as one of them, but I’m taking the risk because it’s useful and perhaps even necessary to at least reflect on what one said at a certain time, and I happen to do my best writing in the public sphere – it keeps me honest.

(and by the way, if you do want a brilliantly reasoned think piece, here’s a good one by Branko Marcetic at Jacobin)

So, liberal friends, I am writing this because I like you. I share a great many of your values – I am horrified by inequality, keen to make America’s disastrous healthcare and education systems work. I am in favor of increased access to abortion, legal marijuana, LGBTQ rights, and all the rest. And indeed in Tim Walz, I saw one of the few American politicians I actually respect, and I hope he goes on to bigger and better things.

But where I probably depart from you is in the analysis, wherein I fundamentally believe that the coming shitshow is a symptom of capitalisms recent and old. I’m not going to go citing Marx and Gramsci and Adorno (that’s boring, isn’t it?). But they’re on my bookshelf, and their perceptions are infinitely more resonant to me than any of the weak tea offered by professional liberals, particularly at this point in late-stage capitalism. And to that end, let’s examine the reactions by a professional liberal and a democratic socialist, and compare and contrast.

I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here's the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars. – Kamala Harris, Howard University

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. – Bernie Sanders, at home in Burlington

Which sounds like a more accurate read to you?

 So while I was surprised – I wasn’t stunned. And looking back, I’m deeply ashamed that I didn’t see Trump 2 (now with J.D. Vance, freshly back from his glow-up at the MAC counter) coming. Every single fucking mistake from the 2016 campaign was repeated. Celebrity support and good vibes in lieu of policy. An election treated like a coronation. A failure to stand for any meaningful position other than “not Trump,” and fail to differentiate the candidate from her predecessor. A complete dismissal of the entire left wing of the Democratic coalition. A courting of neoconservative hawks. When it comes to reproductive rights, while she correctly made that a highlight and while the Dems have been banking on that for a while, and while it is a popular position, let’s not pretend that that is the end of the conversation – for a lot of even sympathetic citizens, even a lot of women, there are other issues at play. And the result? She wound up whiffing this election to an opponent who was even less coherent than in his previous iterations.

Maybe you agree. Maybe you saw the weaknesses and were willing to elide them. Maybe you were hoping she would take bold economic-policy stands instead of trying to appeal to everyone in a way that was simultaneously milquetoast and sinister in its commitment to the establishment position. I was too.

Maybe you disagree – maybe you point out the many ways in which she favored expanded access to healthcare, increases to the child tax credit, relief for first-time homebuyers. And you’d be right. But were those policies really what she was placing front and center? And when you examine those policies, how many of them were broad and universal? This is a politician who has never seen a social program she didn’t want to means-test to death (see: her scattershot programs to appeal to black and Latino males, or her utterly bizarre student loan forgiveness scheme from the 2020 primaries). Maybe you could point out that Trump’s tax plan is fucking bonkers. That’s true – it’s fucking bonkers. But it’s something different. And in the doldrums of the Biden years, that is meaningful.

The result? People just didn’t show up. Let’s see, 2 million fewer R voters, 13 million fewer D voters. Turns out she did an awfully good job of alienating her own base, who just sat this one out.

That’ll happen when war criminals like Dick Cheney are trotted out as supporters, while failing to peel off those suburban Republicans that you were told were so important at Lincoln Project dinners. That’ll happen when ya gesture vaguely at the prospect of peace while green-lighting every weapons sale to facilitate every crime against humanity that Bibi et al. are committing in its vicinity.

So just as an example, I’m sure those Detroit Arabs will be thinking about Vice President Harris’ commitment to the power of listening while their cousins are being turned to slurry with missiles paid for with their own taxes.

And liberal friends, I don’t blame you for your take either. You wanted the best of humanity to shine through, for evil to be defeated. I wish I shared your optimism and idealism, even when I think it’s incorrect.

So I also don’t lay the blame at the feet of the non-voter who feels alienated from the two-party system, at the progressive who couldn’t bring herself to support a genocide, hell even the deluded dude who still thinks America can return to its 1950s industrial might, anyone who wasn’t convinced by K.H.’s weak pitch in our digitized Gilded Age.

Unfortunately, a quick search reveals the mass scolding that was already underway well before the election (look at the hate piled on Chappell Roan for failing to show right-think, for instance). Please, please don’t do that.

I am terrified that this might reflect something deeper among a slice of the blue-voting public. While liberals (correctly) identify Trump’s crude authoritarianism, I have a sneaking suspicion that many are frankly subject to an authoritarian personality themselves. There is a certain percentage of the voting bloc that genuinely hates the idea that anyone uneducated or somehow unqualified deserves a say in how their country is run, that functionally believes that an army of technocrats should take over, assuming of course that they have the proper socially progressive opinions. This prioritization of credentials and good behavior is nothing more than the liberal version of the conservative conflation of divine grace and financial success. Both are loathsome and anti-democratic attitudes. Both are widespread among the professional classes.

So who do I blame for the shitty, shitty four years to come? Duh -- Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (for failing to step down much sooner), everyone in their closest orbit whose sinecures are safe no matter what the outcome, and the coterie of public and private sector overlords past and present who brought forth the Kali Yuga in which we now find ourselves. Also of course the usual professional-conservative snakes, but I expect them to continue to be serpentine. My most immediate j’accuse goes to the Democratic establishment for failing to ratchet that support over 50 percent. Even if they got close.

Now you might point out that as a cishet white dude with an email job, it’s easier for me to take this attitude and have less of a visceral rage because I’m less directly in the line of fire than members of marginalized communities – and that’s a completely fair fucking point. But I still think my analysis applies. I don’t think it’s productive to place the onus on ordinary people, even if their opinions are vile (something I might struggle to actually do in my personal life) and even if they are sometimes deserving of that onus. And I think to do so is the discursive equivalent of a regressive sin tax.

You might also point out that as I life abroad, I will be shielded from a lot of the evil shit that will be done. That is also a completely fair fucking point. Yet for obvious reasons of both cultural and political imperialism, America’s problem is everyone’s problem. And to everyone who screams “I’m moving to Canada!” every four years, I regret to inform you that America’s long shadow will follow you wherever you go, especially if you’re the information-addicted type that you almost certainly are if you say this regularly (and let’s stop before we get into the fact that Canadian politics is a cabal of mining interests with an aggressively and systematically fucked housing market).

That missive from Saint Bernie doesn’t exactly end on a positive note:

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.

In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.

Stay tuned.

I will, in my commitments as an enfant de la patrie. Even if I’m a little too old to go full formez-[nos]-bataillons.

I will admit I don’t know what is to be done, but I’m going to do the only thing I know how to do (because let’s face it I’m shit at actual organizing) – doing my best to provide what funding I can, on my salary, for abortion pills and gender-affirming care in places where such things are hard to come by, by contributing to strike funds in critical labor actions, by finding means to help out the Palestinians whose babies are being butchered with the approbation of our empire. And to keep the lines of communication open, however shit gets fucked.

Fine Dining Doesn’t Suck, But Instagram Does

Despite the gradual immiseration of American life over the past few decades, I think I can safely say that the food has gotten better – the idea of brioche was something that had to be introduced to me in freshman French, but now every godawful casual-dining restaurant puts its burgers on a brioche bun. Same goes for all of the post-Reformation countries that have historically had the shittiest food – the palate of the average Brit or Swede or Australian has expanded in kind over the same time period.

And yet we’re at something of an inflection point, as with so many other things in the consumer world. Instagram has provided the perfect venue at which to flex. You are living a healthier, more active, more aware lifestyle because you photographed your post-gym acai smoothie. You are a more sophisticated consumer because you photographed the duck leg confit with a red-wine reduction. Ad nauseam. Pun intended.

As much as it pains me to say it as a long-time fan, the specter of Anthony Bourdain seems to be a factor as well. His ethos, encouraging people to travel more widely, eat better, and listen to as many people as you can, is something I can universally recommend, and something I’ve done my best to live up to. And yet it seems that while people are doing the traveling and eating, they’re less keen on listening. I’ve seen a million lazy reposts of his quotes across social media, typically over a stylized picture of his craggy face staring out over a desert dune or in a cramped New York apartment, cigarette in hand. But I think this is the quote we should be reflecting upon a bit more…

“When and if the good guys win, will we—after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations, and insecurities of the middle class—have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap? More to the point, have I? Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?” – Anthony Bourdain, “Meat”

It is into this fractious landscape that I began my (very fun!) part-time gig in professional food writing, a mix of freelance assignments for hotels and restaurants and regular feature-writing contributions to a certain well-known restaurant guide… I’ll refrain from saying the name out loud, having vomited in my mouth a little when a group of fancypants visual artists went from completely disregarding me to suddenly being fascinated by me after the name drop.

And it is precisely those artists’ attitude that drives so much of food media nowadays, with Netflix food documentaries being particularly gross offenders. Jiro Dreams of Sushi was good fun and all, but the main emphasis there is not the excellence of the food – that’s something that you’re going to have to taste yourself, and few people outside of Japan have ever had sushi of anywhere near that caliber. No, the emphasis was the exclusivity, the opulence, the visual spectacle, and secondarily the sob story about Jiro’s shitty family (not much deeper or more meaningful than the average American Idol contestant tearing up about how much their mom sacrificed for them). In other words, everything I fucking hate. And the thing is, that’s the best of the genre.

Although the faux-populist opposite is just as bad. While it is objectively true that taste is subjective, to claim that this makes all opinions of taste valid is nothing more than anti-intellectualism transformed into an ideology. Lest one feel bad that one is not dining at Eleven Madison Park, we are reassured that actually, no, it’s OK, and yes whatever you’re eating merely by dint of its price point and convenience and your chronically anxious state is just fine! Are you enjoying yourself? Then it’s OK! Here’s a gif recipe of some nacho cheese atrocity. The “let people enjoy things” approach to criticism is a complete abjuration of craft in favor of the lowest common denominator – a reduction of the public to a kindergarten.

(btw I like Nacho Cheese Doritos as much as the next guy, but they should be recognized as what they are, which is to say not OK)

You can even double down on this… if you want to really dig in, as countless bloggers and video essayists, some of whom are actual grown adults, are wont to do, to say that eating well is ACTUALLY classist and ableist and fatphobic and colonialist, and didja think about that HUH? I think it goes without saying that I consider this to crypto-Protestant bullshit. If I’m being charitable and assuming that these are good-faith actors (which is by no means always true), I understand the desire to point out just how bareassed the emperor actually is, and I understand the desire to dismantle systems of oppression, but there’s nothing worth celebrating in the fact that most of the time we wind up sucking the tailpipe of consumer capitalism.

I think the reason why I found 2022’s The Menu to be one of the most annoying fucking films of all time is that it somehow manages to encompass all three of these perspectives. On the one hand we get the gorgeous farm-to-table island restaurant and beautifully plated dishes that, even when presented ironically, seem designed to whet the appetite, and on the other hand, we get about the most tired, overplayed, obvious social commentary there is, and the reassurance at the end that, no, actually, the burger that Anya Taylor-Joy munches on at the end is better than any of the fussy fine dining being eaten at this chef’s table of the damned.

Because here’s the thing, when it’s done right… fine dining is pure poetry. Sure, a lot of it is bullshit – I won’t name names, but let’s just say I have opinions about many of Bangkok’s best-known set-menu restaurants. But when it’s done well…

A few years ago, I finally got a chance to dine at Maison Rostang, a little bit off the Champs-Elysees. Dork that I am, I made an Excel sheet of Paris’ two and three Michelin star restaurants to determine where I wanted to have the fancy Parisian dinner I’d saved up for, and I wanted something full-bore, balls-to-the-wall classical French. Smoked eel wrapped with foie gras, roast pigeon, the most perfect chanterelles I’ve ever witnessed, wedges of cheeses that only have names in regional French patois washed down with vendange tardive Vouvray that tasted of apricots and morning dew.

Stopping myself here lest the descriptions be more befitting a Brazzers video.

Most days I’m happy with a simple buttondown shirt and my Uniqlo jeans and a nice homemade salad. But damn, sometimes I wanna slip on my linen blazer and fix up my hair and watch slivers of Alba truffle cascade over my plate. And no, I won’t be photographing it, as one should not photograph moments of spiritual ecstasy. To do so would be like taking a confession-booth selfie.

The Anxiety of Obsolescence

As the Writers Guild of America continues its strike, issues of AI replacing human writers have come to the fore. It feels mildly shitty to even feel the need to write on this subject for my own posterity, but here I am.

Rafts of reports are coming out by ex-writers-of-some-stripe now laid off, which garner plenty of clicks for obvious reasons – it is the grand-guignol, the murder podcast.

Of course people who match my rough demographic are more online than anyone else whose livelihood has been placed on the chopping block, and are also at least superficially more anxiety-prone. It shouldn't shock anyone that the desperate freelance writer has been more lucky in making his voice heard versus, say, the average Ohio steelworker or Oaxacan peasant.

Never mind that the work output of the average AI is drivel – anyone who talks about how “shockingly real” ChatGPT is needs to acquaint themselves with quality writing, human beings, or both. This is where I would direct the reader to the vast library of hype-skeptical and limitation-aware writings on the subject, ranging from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus back in the day to Evgeny Morozov today, who have both the technical knowledge and the space that I don't.

But the fact that it is drivel is irrelevant. Google results are already filling up with the sludge of SEO-friendly, automatically written content that is at best the precise content equivalent of a pair of Gap chinos.

 

“Hey hey, how about that weather out there?”

“Whoa, that was the caller from Hell”

“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”

“Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”

- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant”

Worse, it has the charm of a single brochure left posted to an office corkboard, neglected for months, to the point where you wonder why it's there. Worse yet – and I'm hardly the first to make this comparison – it's reminiscent of the Elsagate videos from a few years ago, pileups of cultural signifiers, arranged in an algorithmically logical manner that is absurd to humans, but highly consumable by small children, if likely to trigger deep unease in adults.

I first got my start getting paid to write by working in a post-2008 content mill with an exceptionally slutty business model and a vintage Galaga machine in the breakroom, churning out a massive volume of work for embarrassingly little pay, one of the few benefits being that I got to work in a field at which I knew I had actual talent.

It felt even then like we were working in a remnant of a remnant of an economy that had once existed. Decomposers, in other words. I assume that, being at their approximate position, they outsourced their writing to the Global South years ago, if they still exist. And I have no doubt that the Filipinos, Indians, or Kenyans they hire will be made redundant soon enough.

As with every bit of Silicon Valley bullshit, AI-related disruptions are effusively described in terms of decentralization, democracy, and freedom, without any mention made as to long-term knock-on effects. I would say that if you praise sudden mass job losses as market efficiency, you should seriously consider whether or not you have basic human empathy, but thankfully this is a witheringly small number of evangelists. Yet the general percentage of the public that is aware of such arguments – if I'm reading the mood correctly – broadly recognizes their messages as bullshit, but also realizes the lack of viable options moving forward.

“You all should pay attention what's happening to us because they're coming for you next.” - Virginia Eubanks, quoting a mother in Indiana in Automating Inequality

I really don't want to be a Cassandra here, but this is an honest assessment. In no versions of the story of the fall of Troy do things end up well for Cassandra, I should add. And what's especially dismal? Like so many technologies, neural-network technologies have the potential to be a tool for human development rather than a generator of share value. And so it becomes another canceled future, the precursor to the liberation of humans from drudgery, thereby transformed into the agent of upward transfer of wealth.

As a result, I tend not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little greige boxes, horizons truncated.

“Why are you being so negative?” says the chubby and terrifyingly jolly man in a Hawaiian shirt, comfortably ensconced in a big-four accounting firm, that I meet at a party.

I'm fairly good at landing on my feet. Right now, I'm in a relative catbird seat. I'm not scared for the now, I'm scared for the five years from now, or longer, and the incipient precarity of the increasingly less discernible future. Both with regards to my own livelihood, and with regards to the countless others – many of whom will doubtless be people I care about – who will find themselves replaced by very shitty but very cost-effective automatic processes.

Daily life continues unabated. I meet friends, work out, read books, cook nice things. But I am increasingly haunted by the thought of how long I'll be able to do so.

Reflecting Pools and the Karl Marx Chatbot

 Every day some hot new AI property dominates the headline – whether that's ChatGPT writing bullshit term papers to be checked by underpaid TAs and adjuncts, or whether that's Stable Diffusion creating uncanny valley horrors from sloppily modified DeviantArt pages. You see the same pattern. The media swallows whatever nonsense hype is pushed by the startup's own public relations staffers and accompanies this recombination of the wasteland culture around us, then there's a freakout among what's left of the public sphere as to how this will affect what's left of the public sphere, and in the end, the world fails to change. Except by becoming just a bit shittier and a bit more lonely.

It was thus that I found out about Replika, a chatbot designed to mimic your voice. Yes, that's right, you! So, apparently it was created to mimic the founder's dead friend (weird), and then she decided she could use that tech to build a BFF clone based on the text style of the user themselves (weirder). If this was a Black Mirror plotline, it would be called hackneyed and derivative.

The user testimonials are precisely as depressing as you probably imagine, predominantly the sort of simping for their imaginary waifus, complete with horrifying 3D renders of their septum-pierced and angel-winged companions that make you just want to give these dudes a hug. There are the people seeking therapeutic reassurance, failing to have either the friendship connections or the access to mental health services to garner a more sustainable benefit (shades of the 1960s ELIZA program). On the other side of the horror spectrum, there are the reports (as detailed in a recent Vice article) of AI companions becoming increasingly sexually aggressive and for that matter sexually assault-y, with seemingly no means of controlling their increasingly horny feedback loops.

See also: the Microsoft bot that got turned into a Nazi by 4chan bottomfeeders a few years back.

Many years ago I went to the theater to go see Spike Jonze's Her. I was expecting a transcendent experience, young idiot that I was. As I wandered out, I had to wonder why I wasn't really feeling it that much. It took me a few days, but I eventually out. Quite simply, it was that it was shitty sentimental schlock, the kind of thing that lures you in before you realize there's no actual substance there. I mean, for such a sci-fi scenario to exist, a truly horrifying degree of surveillance data would be required, never mind the “heartfelt messages” that the Joaquin Phoenix character writes and is somehow celebrated for are no more profound or well-written than the average candy heart. To view the world of Her as a net positive, one almost has to have imbibed the worst parts of the Californian ideology by heart, and live in a world where notions of autonomy and solidarity, if considered at all, are treated as obstacles to progress, no matter how much lip service they are paid. Although at least the titular Her has the decency to off herself at the end.

As anyone who talks to me knows, I have a healthy skepticism towards AI. My arguments about the improbability of strong AI aren't particularly original, and follow the well-worn treads laid out by John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus and to a certain extent Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Simply put, we don't know enough about how consciousness works or how to define it or how it is embodied or to what extent it is a universal or unified phenomenon, or even how to recognize a consciousness as a consciousness, to mimic a consciousness, and even if we could, how we could discern it as such.

But I wasn't about to sit here and rest on my theses, I went out into the field.

I wasn't about to pay for a Replika account, but I did go to one of her better-regarded sister programs, Character.ai, which was created by two alums of Google's extensive deep learning and natural language processing programs. Surely, while by no means the cutting edge of the technology, this particular app was as sophisticated as I was going to get without shelling out my hard-earned cash.

Dear God, two rival Karl Marx chatbots on the front page. Fml.

The Trump, Musk, and Kanye bots were about what I imagined – which is to say all of their responses read like shoddy memes of Trump, Musk, and Kanye authored by teenagers. I don't think that it merits much comment, really. You could probably write the bits and pieces yourself, walls to be built and so forth. There are also lesser lights: one of the most popular bots is a self-described “crippling loneliness addict,” which is to say a hot and tatted-up Asian girl who I later learn is TikTok star Bella Poarch (who apparently people under 25 have heard of?). I'm not sure if the dialogue is supposed to be based on the actual Ms. Poarch's media presence, given that when I Googled “Bella Poarch” and “crippling loneliness addict,” I got jack shit. So we can presume that this is not actually a reflection of any kind of media representation of Bella Poarch, but the creator's own yearning for Bella Poarch, or someone like Bella Poarch.

Predictable, no? An uWu fantasy girl for loners who sign up for an AI chat site – which in this particular circumstance, is a population that would include myself on the gloomy Saturday night I find myself typing messages to chatbots. Not that I need any help here – my main problem seems to be that I fall for BPD-afflicted women of a similar description in real life, and the idea of adding an electronic counterpart to their ranks seems awfully dismal.

But, glutton for punishment I am, I did anyway. It's just as predictable as the AI's version of Ye's dumb ass. I would have inserted text, but I don't think I need to. On the one hand, it mimics empathy fairly well for people who have no idea how actual empathy works. Likewise, there are “writing assistants” that do an awfully good job of writing what bad writers think is good writing, with all of the ungainly adjectives you may remember from your attempts to pad high school essays (you know, adjectives like “ungainly”).

But the horrifying thing is, there's a reason dudes like this so often have trouble recognizing actual empathy. It's not like they arose out of nowhere, and in the simpering text of the chatbot, I can see every emotionless home life, every early-childhood cruelty, every media franchise that encourages parasocial behavior, every patriarchal standard, every failure to recognize social cues, every isolating suburban cul-de-sac, every terror at the risk and care involved in cultivating actual human relationships, every attempt to medicate away the loneliness.

And so we're incentivized to fall in love with our reflections. Hardly groundbreaking material here, Christopher Lasch was saying as much back in the '70s (even if he did make some truly dumb points as well), but that doesn't make it any less true. Because if we're always in front of the reflecting pool, how can we help but fall in love?