Adrian Selby's Blog, page 2

Books – Whiteshift

Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufman, is an easy book to recommend you read, in part because it is a thoughtful, detailed presentation of some challenging ideas and in part because its subject matter couldn’t (coronavirus aside) be more important. There are aspects to the thesis I don’t accept or understand, but I now accept, more clearly than before, that others just feel differently about the importance of their white appearance, but more generally, others feel differently about the salience and/or volume of ethnic change in their communities and always have done. What matters is how we go from here.

I’ve never before had a book challenge me to inspect my own identity, by which I mean, the concept of my own ethnicity. I’ve read very little on the topic, however, and I imagine this book falls foul of critical race theorists as much as it falls foul of the ‘racial genetics/white genocide’ types. Do please engage in the comments with your own thoughts if you have read or come to read this book. I’m always looking to learn.

Whiteshift sets out to demonstrate that whiteness, or white appearance, is in decline, that over the next century or two, there will be fewer and fewer people of white appearance. This has already caused populist surges of anti-immigration sentiment and stronger ‘in-grouping’ sentiments. Kaufman hopes to show that, to avoid the hatred and division caused by this, there is a need to understand better what it means to belong. He summarises the book thus:

I set out a vision for a new centre, which entails accepting the legitimate cultural interests of reconstructed, open ethnic majorities….The West cannot simultaneously accept large inflows and maintain culturally neutral immigration policies. Yet I am not arguing that it should adopt the exclusive East Asian model. A better solution is to balance liberal and minority preferences for more immigration with the restrictionism of ethnic-majority conservatives. The key is that the majority be an open rather than a closed ethnic group. (emphasis mine)…Minorities should not be compelled to assimilate to a state-defined national identity, but, like white majorities, should be free to express their ethnically distinct versions of the common national identity – an arrangement I term multivocalism.

So, if you’re like me, reading this in the book’s introduction, you’re bristling a bit, some alarms are going off in your head. Good. It’s a bloody difficult subject to think about and discuss. It’s highly emotionally charged and I almost didn’t come to write this post because of how emotive a response might be (well, in the ten or twenty people I get on average :) ). But it taught me that it’s precisely the fact that this topic is emotionally charged that makes it so important to take time to understand where the emotion comes from, and what one’s identity is.

Before I attempt to outline my concerns over his conclusion, and what I value in that conclusion, I’ll run over some of the things you’ll find in this book, but there are mountains missing, for it’s 550 densely data-driven and researched pages. It’s heavy going and took me a long time to read and process. If you have any reasonable interest in nationalism, ethnicity, racism and immigration this is an important read, however you swing.

Being new to literature on this topic, the most useful aspect of this book was its concept of ‘cultural markers’. Traditionally these have been religion, race and language. The distinction between the boundaries of these markers and the sense of one’s national identity is often blurred, but one’s ethnicity can be strongly defined without a single nation, for example through a common ancestry. Ancestry and nationhood are not identical, even if they are commonly intertwined. There are thus national myths and symbols that feed into the sense one has of one’s ethnicity.

Historically, the importance attached to each of these three principle markers has been different in different places at different times. In the US in the 19th century the Irish Catholic immigrants arriving caused an anti-immigration backlash from the Protestants keen to affirm their Anglo-Protestant identity. The American Protective Association apparently enrolled millions in support of it. It happened similarly in Scotland. The ‘religion’ marker remains an important source of positive and negative sentiment for Jews and Muslims (and traces of the Catholic/Protestant sectarian rivalry can still be found in The Old Firm football matches). Needless to say, skin colour has been an important marker for discrimination and anti-immigration sentiment for centuries, and that hasn’t changed.

Kaufman gives a good historical overview of the various flavours of anti-immigration sentiment over the centuries. He demonstrates that immigration restriction became a plank of the Progressive movement which advocated improved working conditions, women’s suffrage and social reform, while, up until the last decade or so, republicans and the right generally were more for lowering immigration restrictions if it meant markets could operate more efficiently through larger labour pools and the increased pressure that put on unions and their attempts to wage-bargain. This confounds our more recent experience of left and right wing sentiments on immigration. Nowadays, Catholics and Jews are part of America’s ethnic majority, the ‘concerning marker’ shifting to skin colour. Whiteness, in the last few years, has become a core ethnic trait among the right, and Protestantism, once the defining cultural marker of the United States, is nowhere to be seen in the national conversation. As an aside, Kaufman gives an interesting example to illustrate the distinction between ethnicity and nationality, regarding them as separate ethno-cultural dynamics:

“…(the separate dynamics are of) white ethnic decline and the attenuation of the white tradition in American national identity. Only whites will be concerned about the former, but conservative-minded minorities may be attached to white ethno-traditions of nationhood. That is, they will wish to slow changes to the America ‘they know’.”

Trump took a third of the Latino vote in 2016. The distinction is real even if it feels weird and Kaufman shows that the US religious right is multi-faith, pulling in conservative latinos alongside mormons, helping Trump to get elected.

Kaufman’s view on this more recent shift of concern to skin colour (and Islam is bound up with this) stems from the population explosion globally and the great disparity in wealth between the global north and south (yep, sounds like capitalism is causing the pressures of immigration). There has been a greater influx of immigrants to the global north, 2015 being a clear example of the pressure European countries were under. With increased numbers and increased pressure there always has been, he argues, a concomitant increase in anti-immigration sentiment; that the salience of immigration to the native population determines the level of anti-immigration sentiment, a fear he believes is grounded in the perception that the host culture, its myths and symbols, are under threat. He spends time demonstrating, effectively in my view, how anti-immigration sentiment was the real driver behind the Trump vote and Brexit. He also argues that the threat is routinely overplayed and misperceived as a result. In particular, the rise of social media in the last decade has increased the salience of all kinds of arguments on immigration and concomitantly increased and shaped the hostility of liberal and right-wing views on all of this.

The cohort of a given culture or nation that raises immigration concerns is, essentially, either conservative, authoritarian or both and that this mindset is more prevalent than the multicultural/cosmopolitanist mindset. He demonstrates how this latter mindset indexes heavily among graduates and the cultural elite, though it doesn’t index on wealth. He calls us the left modernists, and like many, he fears that there are some that are overplaying their hand with regard to inclusion, diversity and the necessity of signal boosting and valuing minority ethnicities over majority ethnicities. Needless to say I think he’s weak on structural inequality and racism. But there is absolutely a great discomfort in very many people regarding perceived change to their ethno-social environment. To be honest, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the extent of it, though I was, given there is a neural propensity in all of us to patternise, to seek order and predictability in the world which, presumably, lies in the evolutionary need to identify anything out of the ordinary or new as a potential threat.

Do I buy this as a causal factor? No. It makes sense, in a way, and I understand the mindset, but, in Kaufman’s words, I’m cosmopolitan. I’m comfortable with anyone’s cultural markers being different to mine, so long as they don’t impinge on mine, which I’ll return to. So if such deep drives aren’t affecting me, they need not affect anyone necessarily.

But conservatives and authoritarians exist. They’re classified throughout the book variously as ethno-nationalists or ethno-traditional nationalists (the former seeking ethnic homogeneity, the latter seeking to maintain the proportions of ethnic diversity present, or at least keeping the influx ‘manageable’, whatever that means.)

The persuasiveness of this book will be determined by the extent to which you believe the conservative mindset is legitimate. For all the data about the roughly 2/3 to 1/3 split between conservatives and what he calls liberals or cosmopolitanists, for all the data that shows that even in highly ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, whites tend to stick with their own, even while having more respect for their neighbours than less diverse neighbourhoods, the question that isn’t really asked is whether any of this is right.

It’s all very well asserting that because these conditions exist we must find a solution that respects them, but that’s only true if you feel the conservative mindset is as valuable as a more cosmopolitan mindset. I get how provocative this is, so I’m going to dig into that.

Who am I?

Here lies the great utility of this book, for it made me ask myself this very important question. It isn’t really a question about my beliefs per se, but a question about my identity and the role my beliefs and sense of belonging, that deeper emotional well that fills my heart, play in my identity.

What cultural markers are important to me? Not religion, I’m atheist, not colour, I couldn’t give a shit about colour. Language? Well, that made me think, I’ll be honest. I’m fine with people speaking different languages. But how well can anyone learn to understand and respect anyone else without the ability to speak each other’s languages? Whether it’s a common language or a drive to encourage us brits to speak a few more ‘like everyone else does’, the valuing of finding a way to talk to and understand each other is immensely important. How else do you progress society and resolve conflict if you cannot understand each other?

So I value having a language in common with people around me, even if I don’t mind whatever else they are and value. I can see therefore that I would find myself wanting to be surrounded by people that I could talk to, or, conversely, learning another language if that helped, such as I’d do if I wanted to move to a country that has its own language. But that’s about respect. I’d hope that someone coming to live in the UK would, out of respect, wish to learn English, because they would desire to understand and communicate better with their new neighbours. It’s something which I’d actually be happy about having to do as a citizenship requirement in any other country I wished to settle in, so I’d be happy to see it as a requirement (supported and funded directly of course) here in the UK.

Then I think about being Welsh. What’s interesting about the Kaufman book is that he returns to a point about this idea of civic nationalism, being proud to belong to a country, as being too weak a bond for anyone to build an identity around and seek to protect such an identity. For him, ancestry and tradition, though often bound up with nationhood, has the deeper pull. My sense of ancestry is tied to Wales the country (or province if you prefer!). But the rootedness I might feel in going home to Barry lies not so much in its history or the legacy of my family there as in my lived relationship to it.

My earlier point about my being cool with others’ cultural markers as long as they don’t impinge on mine is actually key to my identity. I feel like the tradition I’m part of in the UK has, through its democratic, economic and legal institutions, none of them perfect, created the capability for its citizens to speak truth to power, to demonstrate, to oppose, to satirise, to welcome and to tolerate (what Kaufman calls ‘negative liberty’). And in Kaufman’s conclusion, summarised above, he demonstrates the unresolvable problem of surgically separating notions of ethnic and civic sentiment. For his multivocalism is entirely civic but actually fundamentally important, and to illustrate this I want to talk about class and ska.

I said earlier that I didn’t really get why someone would value the colour of their skin such that they would seek to maintain it in their offspring and otherwise maintain proximity to it at the cost of discriminating against others. It seems like the least important thing in the world compared to the possibility of losing out on someone’s great sense of humour, creativity or empathy, never mind their distinct experience of this or other cultures they might know of.

I have only hazy memories of ska, except that it was all-consuming for me at the age of 11 to 12 years old in Barry, as nutty and cool to me now as it was then. I would pore over the Spillers Record Shop window displaying ska badges and patches at the centre of Holton Road (Barry’s high street), and I had a Harrington jacket that was covered in both. It was my pride and joy, along with my Sta Prest trousers and Fred Perry polo shirt.

Pretty much all the ska bands were mixed race. I never gave it a thought when I was watching them on Top of the Pops, or looking at their record covers. It made perfect sense of course, given the musical influences, which Madness talk about here (the whole interview is great!):

WOODY: Immigration shaped a lot of our musical landscape. Any ethnic influx that comes into the country obviously changes it, and London was just a brilliant melting pot of musical influences. The stuff that the Asians did, and the Jamaicans who came over in the ’50s – blimey, that was just an explosion. The influences they brought over were part of our heritage.

SUGGS: You had the second-generation of West Indian Brits coming through. You had Bob Marley on the Old Grey Whistle Test on TV. I remember going to the Roxy Club in Covent Garden, which was the punk club where Don Letts was the DJ, but there weren’t enough punk records to play so he would intersperse them with reggae tracks.

DON LETTS: There were literally no punk records to play, so I had to play something I liked, which was reggae: Big Youth, Prince Far I, Toots and the Maytals. Lucky for me, the audience liked it as well and wanted to hear more. So I guess it did turn a few people onto it.

SUGGS:  You had The Clash doing a version of Police and Thieves and, all of a sudden, what had been completely polarised was bleeding at the edges and we were all starting to share a little bit, musically and stylistically. Certainly all those old Mowtown records had a huge influence on us. The connection – and you can only make this in hindsight, because when you’re a kid you’re just listening to records that get you going – was reading about The Skatalites and that whole ska thing; just a load of guys in a studio making four or five records a day with very little ego. I found it was the same with Motown and the Stax
 people, you know they were churning them out. I think for us that was a great inspiration the whole time after progressive rock, when everything seemed pretentious and long winded.

LEE: All the band other than Woody were brought up on a diet of Jamaican and Motown music. Mike was more interested in the ruder side of reggae, like Wet Dream and Wreck A Pum Pum. It was easy to play as well. As the interest in ska and reggae grew, we dropped stuff like Walk On By and Lover Please.

MIKE: We were listening to Bob Marley but reggae then [in the late 1970s] wasn’t as good, I didn’t think, as the older stuff. It was more about the producers. There were stars, of course, in Jamaica but it was more of a team thing.

SUGGS: We used to love Linton Kwesi Johnson and Bob Marley. But we found the righteous, Rastafarian stuff out of our league in terms of burning down Babylon. Punk bands were doing contemporary reggae but to me it didn’t seem as realistic as us just playing the songs we liked. No one else was doing ska, so we found our niche. The political message of Rastafari also wasn’t necessarily as clear for us as it was for punk rockers. I understood it but it didn’t resonate for us. [But] we loved the attitude of people who smoked dope and wouldn’t just sit around in a huddle in their bedroom, they’d be bowling down the street. You started hearing reggae in punk clubs and then you start thinking, ‘Yeah, I like this.’ So you start going back, investigating where these tunes come from. It was like, I had friends who were into rockabilly, and they started looking into bluegrass and hillbilly, trying to find other stuff that was more obscure and elitist.

CHRIS: The Jamaican thing was really important, but we had so many influences that get overlooked, like Pink Floyd and Genesis.

SUGGS: I thought ska was just reggae. I had to go and read all these Trojan liner notes so I could come back and say, ‘Oh yeah, Prince Buster this… Prince Buster that’.

I was particularly fond of Madness and then discovered Monty Python before being besotted with The Young Ones. They tap into a vein of unhinged satire, parody and Lewis Carroll-esque humour that again feels utterly British. But these cultural markers sit alongside a previous generation’s Vera Lynn, or Carry On, or TW3. Ska (and punk) was as enmeshed in working class culture as The Young Ones and Monty Python were born of elite university graduates that appealed to all classes. Alternatively, Westminster, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace are the stalwart cultural symbols of the Establishment, filling souvenir shops. What any of these cultural markers mean to various cohorts of British citizens varies massively, but they are all legitimate cultural markers. Madness will have spoken to me much more faintly than it would have an older teenager growing up in north London. Kaufman’s multivocalism speaks to this:

“Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ has been an anthem for humanists, Nazis, Soviets and the European Union. If we stop thinking about national identity as a hymn sheet everyone has to sing from and begin to see it as a set of resources people shape in different ways, this opens up new vistas…national identity today is more of a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon which people take an active part in constructing.”

Here lies the crux of it. The ska bands took their influences from the Windrush generation, punk, Motown and wherever else and constructed a new aspect to British identity. Monty Python did the same, adding to the symbols that shape people’s perception of us around the world along with the Spitfire and our former Empire. And thank fuck for that, because when, alongside Britain’s positive contribution to the Enlightenment we have a shameful history of colonialism and slavery intertwined with it, we need an identity that isn’t entirely negative, because who can be proud of an identity that requires one to only say sorry and otherwise remain silent? For me, conservatives appear to pick a point in the past, a set of cultural markers and ethnic mix, depending on the ingredients, and then are calcifying it, holding the concept of belonging, of Britishness, to it, using it to ‘other’ what’s different. It is set, unchanging. It denies the possibility of ska if the cutoff date is set far back enough and surely fails because of that. Worse still, it also denies agency and sovereignty to anyone hoping to create new expressions of this nation’s identity, it ‘others’ any set of cultural markers of Britishness which, for example, ethnic minorities might hold with as much fervour as the set of markers rooted more in ancestry, be it our myth of King Arthur or our union movement. Set far back enough it denies us the NHS and Suffragettes, or the freedom to be gay.

But the biggest crime of the conservative mindset, and the anti-immigration and populist right mindset is not that its fuelled and directed by the new and old media billionnaires, which it is, but that it focuses on identity, on a set of ‘acceptable’ cultural markers, predominantly ancestral ethnicity and colour. Yet, as the Youtube satirist Jonathan Pie pointed out, and I paraphrase, you’ll find white nationalists, single mothers, Indians, Muslims and transgender people all rubbing shoulders in a foodbank and all proud, in their own ways, to be British. Inequality and poverty should unite us. The concept of class is being eroded, and while it’s as tricky to categorise as one’s identity, the erosion is removing one of the great unifying forces for generations past, a force which itself has created important ‘Britishness’ markers, such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Kaufman is right to point out that we need to build an understanding that many cultural markers represent Britishness (or any other nation’s sense of itself) and we don’t all happen to agree on them. And that’s ok. It’s ok at least in part because of the civic institutions that enable us to even talk about this, and the erosion of that is something which the authoritarians would love to have control of. It is, in opposition to Kaufman’s view, the civic institutions that enable the ethnic and cultural markers to vary, yet root themselves in us as my own identity is rooted in me, is precious to me, though it’s a cosmopolitan, welsh and socialist-lite, distinctly individualist identity. I value the melting pot, I value what Kaufman calls the contradictory tension in civic nationalism between the universality of our legally enshrined rights and the particularity of each distinct minority ethnicity’s cultural and foreign-national ancestry. For they blend, they are allowed to. The civic institutions empower us to evolve our cultural markers and allow us to savour some (The Open University) and regret others (Moseley’s ‘Rivers of Blood’) without denying their part of the tapestry exists. It is the recognition of them and their maintenance that offers a path to a more peaceful future and if there is a threat to our Britishness it is not from a would-be caliphate, it is from a disempowered majority being manipulated by authoritarian populists who have no use for a nation seeking to right the wrongs of social injustice and inequality. It is a hopelessness borne of decades of regional under-investment as economic globalisation and neo-conservative individualist agendas reign supreme. This erosion of wealth and pride and of belonging got people seeking to change the status quo only to find that the only meaningful sovereignty they could excercise wasn’t in regional assemblies and a fiscally empowered devolved government that might have replaced Westminster tyranny, but in the Brexit ballot box. The majority then voted in two elections for a government, cowed by its own right wing and other more populist parties, telling us that citizens and EU nationals with particular identity markers were the real culprits behind the falling standard of living we face even as they executed a decade of ideologically driven austerity that has left our community resources, our NHS, social care networks and industry in a state of near collapse if not destruction. It isn’t immigration that’s doing it, for all that its salience and volume is as high as its ever been. Kaufman is, in my view, effective at proving the importance of anti-immigration sentiment in all this.

Sadly, it’s taken the coronavirus sweeping through our country to refresh an awareness of our connectedness and of our government’s true power when it comes to protecting its citizens. Millionnaires are queueing for food behind the elderly and vulnerable; the least valued workers in our society, the contract cleaners, delivery drivers and nurses are now recognised to be essential to any semblance of normality, the foundation the elite once deemed invisible. Kaufman’s ‘weak’ civic institutions, embodying fairness, kindness and respect are surfacing again, though their wounds are plain to see.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

The header image was kindly approved for use by Toni Tye. To see more of her beautiful photos, head here.

For a far more robust analysis of Whiteshift, the ever excellent LRB has this review. My thanks to Darren Sharma for finding this and sending it to me.

The post Books – Whiteshift appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Janesville. A premonition?

I’m reflecting on the aftermath of a UK election result that I, personally, found disappointing. As with the Trump result a few years ago, there’s a fair amount of soul-searching and blame-pinning on the left. In games we call it a ‘post-mortem’ and it’s a reflection on what went wrong and what needs to change,...

The post Janesville. A premonition? appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Books – Janesville. A premonition?

I’m reflecting on the aftermath of a UK election result that I, personally, found disappointing. As with the Trump result a few years ago, there’s a fair amount of soul-searching and blame-pinning on the left. In games we call it a ‘post-mortem’ and it’s a reflection on what went wrong and what needs to change, what are the lessons learned.

But as I absorbed the result yesterday and this morning, I was reminded of a book I’ve been meaning to recommend on this blog, Janesville* by Amy Goldstein.

Janesville is a town built around and almost entirely reliant on, the once huge GM plant. Goldstein traces, through following a number of families’ and people’s fortunes, what happens to them and Janesville in the years following the factory’s closure.

This remarkable book offers a view into the American psyche I’d not come across before, both personal and nuanced. In particular, it offers a view of America’s working class in an industrial town that echoes the fate of industrial towns across the US, but also what I know of them in the UK, in particular the coal mining industry in South Wales, the evisceration of which politicised me as a teenager.

What I found interesting about Janesville was the response to the shock of so many thousands losing their jobs. As Goldstein traces the years after the closure, she is tracing the growing struggle of more and more families as poverty starts to eat away at them. The system, when most of Janesville had good incomes from GM, allowed those better off to donate to shelters and other charities that supported those their limited welfare system doesn’t, but when too many people rely on it, its flaws become apparent. There is a self reliance and will to charity, a fellowship in adversity that feels almost genetic in their mindset, and it echoes strongly the similar support networks that emerged in poor and rich neighbourhoods all over New York state in the aftermath of 9/11. But as the rising inequality and lack of opportunity in Janesville bites, as the hope fades and more and more people hit the breadline, I sensed a deepening frustration and anger, despair too, in the subjects of Goldstein’s study, even as they fought valiantly to support each other; fighting too, often futilely, to secure funds for retraining and re-skilling those without jobs.

What was particularly interesting was Goldstein’s evidence showing that those who retrained and reskilled were generally worse off than those who didn’t bother. It was eye-opening and counter-intuitive, initially, but just because there are a few ultra-rich in Janesville that are looking to find ways and raise funds to energise its community, it doesn’t mean that the structural difficulties of attracting investment and entrepreneurs to replace the lost production capacity can be solved. The Welsh valleys I think tell a similar story, after the demise of coal mining, as do the Lancashire and other coal mining communities. It’s given me pause for thought regarding my general view that upskilling is necessary if western economies are to reposition themselves in a global marketplace that finds greater profits in pushing heavy industry ‘east’ and ‘south’. That we need to upskill and prepare for an IoT-suffused and increasingly automated economy is obvious, but how we do it will be a central challenge of the next few decades.

The quality of life in Janesville, without good employment opportunities and a good income, suffered. Drug use, homelessness, suicide, poverty, all these things saddled the altruistic and charitable efforts with more and more demand. The system they have, more than here, leans on the self-reliance and sense of community to ‘pay’ for the support the state won’t. What’s interesting in particular about Janesville is that there weren’t more people who felt this was wrong, for while a few railed against such a wealthy country having no robust plan to help them, there were many who still abhorred ‘socialism’, or the idea that the state should better fund those who find themselves in need of help. There exists there an optimism, a gritty determination to keep pushing and seeing the positive, to meet the increasing welfare demands of their fellows with their own efforts.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, we can see why Trump succeeded. He spoke to the genes of these people, encapsulated a hatred of the globalism that took their livelihoods away, promised the jobs and the investment and tarriffs that would help them to rebuild their own communities. The irony is, of course, that this is big state investment and protectionism. But it’s not welfare, it’s not ‘handouts’. It was a promise to give them the means to continue as they did before. Poverty and decline in Janesville didn’t materially affect the character of the people, even under significant duress emotionally and mentally. It is all borne.

Here in the UK, with a decade of increasing in-work poverty, under-investment in the NHS, and in particular in social care, which moves the financial burden onto the NHS additionally, we see the rise of voluntarism, of food banks, of charities, of teachers feeding schoolkids or doing their washing. The weight of the burden of the broken, the homeless and the hungry now increasingly leans on the good will of individuals. We may not be able to rely on the state, and while such things are not a burden of the state, while the support we need isn’t sufficiently funded, the funds will not be found and the spiral picks up the pace. One need only look at the full-time carers of all ages in this country and the struggle they have, the cost they bear that the state doesn’t have to, to see that. It is an ideological pursuit by small state free market fanatics, or it would be if it wasn’t actually about the rich sustaining their position at the expense of the masses.

You may well disagree with such polemic, and this blogpost isn’t the place to elaborate a more nuanced argument, but Janesville taught me that people, their cultures, shape their attitude, define the elasticity of their conceptions of what governments can and should do, what people themselves can and should do. Janesville educated me by telling me a story about people.

After arguing in circles for years over what to make of various facts and the spin on them, Janesville makes me think that it isn’t facts alone that can change the world, it is stories and the people they are about.

 

*I’ve linked the book to Hive.co.uk. Hive allow you to donate a % of the cost of the book to an indy bookshop of your choice.

The post Books – Janesville. A premonition? appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Roadside Picnic & Beneath The World, A Sea

These two books, one old, one new, continue my lucky streak of ‘boundaried alien geography on earth’ novels that started with the amazing Southern Reach trilogy and continued with Tade Thompson’s award-winning Rosewater. Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells the story of Redrick Schuhart, a ‘Stalker’, which is the name given to those...

The post Roadside Picnic & Beneath The World, A Sea appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Books – Roadside Picnic & Beneath The World, A Sea

These two books, one old, one new, continue my lucky streak of ‘boundaried alien geography on earth’ novels that started with the amazing Southern Reach trilogy and continued with Tade Thompson’s award-winning Rosewater.

Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, tells the story of Redrick Schuhart, a ‘Stalker’, which is the name given to those who risk their lives breaking through the government cordon that surrounds an area once visited by aliens. The area is now a strange and deadly place but it is also full of artifacts that the Stalkers go in for, earth artifacts altered in strange ways by their proximity to the alien’s presence and alien artifacts, some of immense value. As with the other novels mentioned here, to enter this place is to be affected by it, and Red’s proximity and experience with it have damaged him, the stress of it not unlike PTSD. Unlike the other books, the Strugatskys present a place that is absurdly and unthinkingly hostile. Both Red and other stalkers, along with government drones, have attempted to map the Zone and on each occasion he enters we learn a little more of the metaphorical breadcrumbs (he actually uses scraps of metal for this purpose), and the fatal topography of the otherwise normal streets and roads now abandoned within the Zone. The dangers are inventive, refreshingly and truly weird (though perhaps I’m poorly read in the genre) and it creates a tremendous sense of tension and the fear Red feels inside the Zone as he seeks the spoils that will keep his wife and, later, his daughter fed. Inevitably with the Zone, government and corporate interest in the artifacts complicate Red’s life more and more as this short novel progresses. Inevitably, he must enter the Zone one final time at the climax of the novel, and go deeper than anyone’s ever gone for the ultimate artifact. It’s pacily written and hugely imaginative. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bona fide classic sci-fi novel.

Beneath The World, A Sea, written by Chris Beckett, was published earlier this year. A British policeman is sent to an alien conclave called The Delta, in South America to investigate the widespread murders of a native, humanoid species. There is a small colonial-like human settlement there amidst the settlements of people that have become ‘natives’. The Delta is part of a forest surrounded entirely by a place called ‘The Zone’, which removes all memories as you pass through it of what happens while inside The Zone. When Ronson arrives at The Delta to investigate the killings of Duendes, a strange native species to this alien forest, he is already unsettled by diaries he’s kept of his time and his actions in The Zone, reluctant to read them beyond an introduction he’d written to his present self that unnerves him. He learns that the Duendes are being slaughtered whenever they approach the settlements, but these mute and placid creatures offer no fight or threat except that in their presence, people’s deepest psychological drives and urges well up. What follows is Ronson’s unravelling as he gets more and more obsessed with the forest and, like the natives, less and less like the man he was when he entered.

Beckett’s book is as clever as it is straightforward. The plot progresses, but the clear thematic current inherent in the book is what this forest represents; it is a place only as hostile or dangerous as its denizens are capable of being. We cannot face an unflinching scrutiny of ourselves, it would end us, and those that live in the Delta cling to their civilisation desparately with varying degrees of success. I see what others have said regarding the parallels with Heart of Darkness and this brisk book examines a very similar theme. What makes it a pleasure is that the policeman, Ben, must discover, in a kind of twisted hero journey, who he is as the forest benignly pulls at and unravels him on his way to trying to achieve what he set out to do. He quickly finds himself wanting, as would we all. His descent is unputdownable.

The post Books – Roadside Picnic & Beneath The World, A Sea appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Every step you take…Part 2 – Surveillance Capitalism

“Maybe you don’t want to ask a question. Maybe you just want to have it answered for you before you ask it. That would be better.” Larry Page, 2014

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” Larry Page, 1998.

A couple of years ago I decided to quit Facebook. It was prompted by my concerns over the price we pay for our social media and ad-supported apps and platforms such as Google’s. Last month I finished what I believe is an essential framing and examination of this new form of capitalism – surveillance capitalism – and the power that the companies at its forefront have over us; a power quite capable of reshaping humanity in a way that capitalists and even dictators of the twentieth century could scarely dream of.

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism is an in-depth study of how our engagement with the internet came to be dominated by a handful of companies, and how the model of our engagement was discovered by engineers at Google and turned against us.

It begins with search. When we use a search engine we “produce a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns and location.”

These are behavioural byproducts, or ‘behavioural surplus’ and all the search engines, such as Yahoo, a giant at the time, had this data stored haphazardly. It was a Google engineer, Amit Patel, who had the insight that this collateral data about us was hugely revealing of our thoughts, feelings and interests. And it could be used. These flows of data could be recursively fed into the search to allow it to become more efficient.

The breakthrough that sent Google to the top of the pile was, Zuboff argues, driven by its need, during the dotcom bust that ripped through Silicon Valley, to stay afloat, to find a way to make significant money and retain its investors. During this early period the improvements to search leveraged off the data it could glean from our online behaviour was repurposed solely to improve search, i.e. it was for our benefit (as well as Google’s regarding its desire to become and remain the number one search engine).

Then, with the AdWords team tasked with making more money in the gloom of the bust, they decided they could leverage this behavioural data to match adverts to queries. Ads would be targeted to individuals based on the behavioural data Google had from them. It worked. Beyond their wildest dreams. It’s important to note it never asked if it could use the data this way. Beg forgiveness has always been the model. It’s obvious now how little chance anyone had of anticipating that this behavioural byproduct of our searches could be leveraged for profit without our consent. So they went on ahead as any good capitalists would do and exploited the freedom. Now the data would not just be used for our benefit, it would benefit the advertisers. Our benefits for using Google’s services are the price it pays to retain and increase their surveillance of us. The quality of their services comes at the cost of our privacy and our identities. Facebook followed, Microsoft later followed, Amazon follows. Our behaviour is the raw material they mine for their gold. We are not the product, we supply the raw materials for the product.

It seems like a leap, to say that Google was somehow all of a sudden all about surveillance. But it’s the logical conclusion of the business model and it was pursued, as Zuboff demonstrates, persistently and aggressively in all the years since behavioural surplus began to be weaponised.

In a nutshell, Google and everyone else relying on ads for revenue, makes more money if its advertisers see higher ‘click throughs’ on their adverts. That’s only going to work if Google can predict when it is best to serve us an advert. It gets better at this the more data it has about us. After all, if someone knows me perfectly, they will know exactly when I am in need of a product and will be able to surface it to me the moment I need it. This is advertising’s wet dream. Every sinew since the discovery of behavioural surplus has been strained in the pursuit of this complete knowledge of everyone. As they’ve learned more about us and improved their algorithms, so they’ve increased their profits, and they’ve ploughed that back into more research and more products, more partnerships, more acquisitions of other social media outlets such as Youtube most famously, to access their datastores of our ‘behavioural surplus’ and increase further their knowledge of us.

But also, it goes further, as Zuboff amply demonstrates. Better for advertisers and corporate partners if the knowledge these internet giants have of us is so detailed that they can use it to ‘nudge’ us, i.e. influence us so as to be even more likely to engage with its corporate partners, as was shown with Pokemon Go. Pokemon gyms and rare Pokemon would usually be found near the entrances to the shops and restaurants that paid Google to drive their players to them.

More chillingly, leaving aside the whole clusterfuck that is Cambridge Analytica, Facebook boasted to potential advertisers that it knew enough about the general sentiment of a particular cohort of teenagers using its site that it could surface in its news feed (no longer merely chronological) activity from friends that was more likely to create certain emotional states (envy, joy). This manipulation, it boasted, could be used by their ad partners to target specific products that spoke to those  moods that Facebook could choose when to influence through managing the news feed’s most prominent posts.

Example after example given in her book shows that it isn’t just about serving ads anymore, and hasn’t been for years. The acquisitions of Youtube, Linkedin, Whatsapp, Instagram, all for staggering sums, is small change in terms of the datasets they get access too. All these acquisitions are in fact bargains, presumably paying off the considerable cost with the data they can add to their existing stores that help them to nudge and target us better. The real goal is all-encompassing. It is, though I hesitate to use the phrase for its sensationalist tone, about herding users into behaviours that support the providers of goods and services affiliated with these platforms to maximise profit.

As alluded to in my previous post on this, the internet of things is going to complete the surveillance, and the work is underway. There are already cars that can shut down if you haven’t paid your insurance. There will be cars that monitor how you drive, and tweak your insurance payments accordingly. You’ll no longer be free to consider putting your foot down on that quiet country road and just enjoy the thrill because you’ll be informed that it’s added a surcharge to your car insurance. Driving for pleasure will involve a conscious weighing up of the financial penalties involved for increasing ‘risk’. Your autonomy will increasingly be moderated by cost/benefit decisions based on the advanced surveillance capabilities of the goods and services you use, from fridges to cars to gyms to school fees to healthcare, entertainment etc. in ways that benefit them.

All companies want is to limit risk by increasing certainty in their decision making and thus guaranteeing outcomes and profit. Behaviour in the real world is and will increasingly be capable of modification by these interconnected services. It’s not just about what we say anymore, the ‘text’, for with Alexa and surveillance cameras running on Google’s platforms, or funded by these internet giants partnering with cash-starved and grateful local authorities and governments, they can, via all these devices both within and without our homes, in our offices, in our streets, monitor how we behave, flag our patterns and breaks in them, passing it on so their partners can modify these services as they see fit. They can watch our body language, facial expressions, listen to the tones of our voices, analyse our grammar, what we misspell or emphasise and infer increasingly well what it means for all the services we might have signed up for, first for convenience and then because, as with mass social media now, there’s little else to choose. Our very selves are being harvested and analysed. Zuboff spells out the many efforts that their researchers are putting into these areas.

I could talk about Google’s streetview cars being equipped to gather up information about wifi networks without consent on every street they visited, leading to a lawsuit in Germany when it was discovered that it wasn’t just cameras recording, but active surveillance of people’s data being undertaken. Zuboff is strong on all the ways that they have exploited the ignorance and glacial pace of understanding and response of governments, while lobbying hard to protect their freedoms using billions of dollars to do it.

This is the present day. This is also recent history, though to anyone thirty years ago it would look like science fiction.

How do you fight it? Get off Youtube, stop using Instagram, Android, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Amazon, Microsoft… And there’s the problem we now face. You might think you can opt out, but can you really? You can request your data, but they will always track you with it. They say it’s anonymised but it is easy to de-anonymise. It’s like the question ‘What gives you the right to take this in the first place?’ was forgotten and we’re now in a universe filled with the assumption it was ok. The horse has bolted. The options for someone like me are pretty limited. Adblockers, different search engines, stop using Gmail, stop using Facebook, stop using Amazon, and I can’t even bring myself to do the latter properly.

Am I, as a budding author, committing publicity suicide by ignoring these platforms? Of course I am. It feels like I’ll become invisible, no longer part of the wonderful and rich conversation that’s ongoing between authors I know and love, the bloggers, the readers, the people I meet at cons, the influencers, the great and the good. I will lose potential readers.

I kept reading.

The latest book in this ouvre, out in the last few weeks as I type this, is Behind The Screen, by Sarah Roberts. It looks at the labour that’s involved in what she calls ‘commercial content moderation.’ And the story Zuboff and others are telling kind of gets worse. All of the platforms where people socialise or search en masse, where we’re able to express ourselves, they function successfully almost entirely as the result of an invisible army of generally contracted out, badly paid moderators who spend years filtering out and deleting the toxic contributions our fellow humans make to these platforms. For as little as one cent per upload, these moderators, often in the ‘Global South’ are asked to screen some of the most wretched content you could imagine. She interviews those who delete content on the likes of Youtube and Facebook all the obvious culprits like child porn, torture and mutilation of people and animals, but also discovered that, for example, in relation to the Arab Spring atrocities that were filmed and uploaded versus similar film of Mexican drug cartel killings used to inspire fear, that different standards are applied to each. The full-time moderators she interviewed had policy guidance, kept secret, that was, necessarily, reflecting of certain political values and affiliations, sometimes in relation to political events and requests from ‘authorities’ through to commercial partners. So, for example, atrocities in Saudi Arabia might get filtered more effectively than those of other political actors. Just recently Twitter admitted that it had run numerous ad campaigns on behalf of the Chinese government blatantly lying about the incarceration of muslims and civil unrest. As with the recent mass murder livestreamed on Facebook, it becomes clear reading this book that all these mass social media platforms would, without the work of these moderators, be absolutely rammed with obscene and dreadful content. The emotional and psychological toll on these workers hasn’t had the benefit of systematic and extensive study due to the NDAs that these platforms use to forbid them talking about their work or what they moderate and why. Only covertly could she interview these moderators over the eight years she’d been researching and they all reported varying levels of stress, unhappiness and an inability to forget what they saw. Many have no outlet to share their experience with, citing a desire not to pollute their relationships with it. As contractors, the platforms are sufficiently removed from having to be accountable for supporting and even training them. There exists no union to support them. No formal counselling support or funds to help them is offered by the companies they work for that win the contracts, let alone those directly employed by the platforms themselves. The latter at least are colocated and can comfort each other. It becomes apparent by the end of the book how the recent exposure of this labour market to the world by researchers such as her, along with the high profile content that gets through, like the streaming of murders, has forced the platforms to be seen to instigate some kind of code to abide by. As with all voluntary self-regulation, it is lip service designed to minimise reputational and litigational damage. Zuboff highlights many cases of such activity in her book too. Again, it is rational, where capital must always pursue profit and evade regulation.

These platforms do not and cannot pretend to aspire to free speech. The moderators laugh at the idea people could believe they can speak freely on them. The entire business model of our giant social media platforms run this tightrope of needing the content not to be so toxic that people leave the platform unwilling to be exposed to it, while drawing the greatest revenues from the controversy created by more polarised and/or extreme content.

The monetisation of these platforms we use to express ourselves tailors and shapes how it is we communicate, and it is shaped to maximise profit, obviously. We are drawn to controversy. All drama is conflict. These essential facts of human nature are exploited ruthlessly. These platforms aren’t guided by moral imperatives, nor do they promote a set of values. There is only a profit imperative and any values we perceive are driven by the need to maintain maximal engagement. If I create a Youtube channel devoted to longform critical appraisals of various current affairs, offering a balanced view with compound sentence structures and arguments thoroughly qualified and caveated I will simply get less engagement than if I tailor that channel’s content towards more extreme statements of opinion, in more emotive language, ideally more hostile and critical. If I give people something to react to, for or against, basically clickbait, I will get more engagement and more views and the platform will reward me with more money. Why would I do anything else to create me some revenue? The nature of these platforms promotes toxicity by design. And we’re all plugged in, any struggling to cut them out feels almost futile.

Consider also that the engagement enjoyed by almost any entity (celebrity, brand) of note on any of these mass platforms is stage managed, another area that Roberts covers. Contributions to these fora can be seeded and/or steered invisibly by brand managers employing fake users. I see a picture emerge of the entirety of mass social media as a brilliantly efficient engine for the rendition of our behavioural surplus to be used, without our consent (because nobody can wade through the intentionally convoluted small print) for the platforms and their partners’ profit by both design and the machinations of the fake content providers and numerous ‘botfarms’. All of it is thrives, too, because of the low-paid and psychologically damaging work of the moderators.

It feels like something’s wrong with mass social media, and indeed any site with a comments thread that allows anonymous users to contribute.

I think then about the smaller platforms, like the Reddit subs I visit, or even the Whatsapp groups I’m part of. These are smaller groups with identifiable individuals following voluntarily stronger codes of conduct, both formal and informal. They are small communities and as such they function with almost none of the problems of the mass platforms full of these effectively anonymous users, both real and fake. As one of the moderators of a weather information site pointed out, its comments were regularly bombarded with anti-gay messages. This was a weather information website. I’ve also wondered for a while at how even quite sophisticated content on Youtube, such as the output of philosophers, economists etc. attract comments and arguments and toxicity from participants who don’t demonstrate, by and large, any sense of having learned something. It never feels like a discussion of the content is taking place, that people have engaged and acknowledged shifts in viewpoint. What if the comments were disabled? It would kill the revenue coming from people’s repeat visits to sustain their arguments, but how much would we lose if we lost that? The raw content exists in a context that is significantly less profitable for the likes of Youtube. But the internet is a great place to put it, and free of the need (and the ‘freedom’) to go kicking each other to pieces over views we each find ‘retarded’, we could leave the content and cogitate on it more deeply, take our views to places more focused to constructive engagement. But we scroll the comments like we scroll our feeds, we stop on the offensive or funny or weird comments, stop for the comments we profoundly disagree with, make our patterns of inference and build our counters to their bullshit views convinced they need to be countered yet vanishingly rarely do we succeed. I don’t think I ever have changed anyone’s opinion on a mass forum and I’ve been at it for fifteen years.

There’s plenty of studies that have found that, for teenagers in particular, but also me these days, one closes a session on social media feeling worse than when one has opened it. It generally makes people feel less happy, consistently. I trust so little of what’s written, usually only by people who I’m sure exist because I’ve met them! I might as well have them on a private chatgroup and do away with all the other shit that comes with these platforms. I’ll state here that I’m no longer going to actively engage on Twitter, either. More and more I get halfway through a response to some post and think ‘this person doesn’t give a shit what I think.’ Whose opinion am I going to change as oppose to re-inforce either way? I signal boost other authors and creative works I admire, along with things I find funny or interesting. Occasionally I find something nice about my work to retweet. Then I read these books and see the price people are paying for my attention, the data we give up for another’s profit, the support of a platform that offers no support itself to the moderators paid a pittance to sustain the very model these companies rely upon. The whole thing stinks and we’re drowning in it, and it’s going to take over, device by device, camera by camera, phone by phone, every aspect of our lives and connect them to the corporations that provide our services. It ‘others’ us, appropriates not only our labour but our identities, in order, gradually, to shape them and herd us into more predictable patterns for profit – walk more with your fitbit to reduce health insurance, watch this content to reduce your school fees etc. etc.

I want to stay in touch with the people I love and respect. I’m going to have to learn how to do it a bit differently, and I hope they won’t mind the inconvenience that might cause if I ask them to join me somewhere a little cosier.

The post Every step you take…Part 2 – Surveillance Capitalism appeared first on Adrian Selby.

I can’t change my mind.

 

I’m left-wing. I think I know what that means, but I’m never sure.

I come from a family who have always been left-wing. Their arguments and their actions were hugely influential on my politics. I did once think that it was entirely because of that upbringing that I became left-wing; Labour to be precise, despite the flat white-drinking, sourdough bread-eating, middle-management lifestyle I have now (though this appears to be the last bastion of the left today, we’re told).

With the advent of social media I’ve become exposed more relentlessly to political viewpoints across the spectrum. Brexit has made it suffocatingly ubiquitous. Once I’d have been glad that so many people were engaged with politics. I think I still am, but I never see people convince each other of views they are initially opposed to. At best, people without a strong view might be swayed towards one or another viewpoint. Millions of us are just hurling our hyperlinks and jargon at each other and getting frustrated by how little any of it sticks. For the ultra-rich and the establishment this endless, incessant bickering among the ‘great unwashed’ is so useful I can’t help but think it’s the plan, for nobody’s angry with them for hoarding wealth, we’re all arguing about gender and ethnicity while working ourselves to death in zero hours contracts and using foodbanks to make ends meet.

I used to read The Spectator, The Times and Sunday Telegraph, along with The Guardian, The Observer and New Statesman. In all that time I don’t think I was ever convinced of anything a tory or a right-wing thinker had to say, while I was also not convinced of the wilder left-wing views of your typical Morning Star reader, or the entirely antagonistic attitudes of the big unions to capital. It hasn’t changed despite the ubiquity of political utterances in both social media and in the plethora of politically oriented think-piece sites that have sprung up, from Breitbart to Novara Media.

I read politics all the time yet I never seem to change my mind.

More and more it feels like I have a model of what is right and I reject arguments and opinions based on their inability to fit this model that I think best expresses a good state/private sector split with low income inequality and stronger wealth redistribution. I believe people should be given the self-belief, support networks and educational opportunities to pursue their ambitions, but should they succeed, they may enjoy many but not all the fruits of their innovations and qualities, because such success was built on the back of the aforementioned support; from colleagues and employees through to the infrastructure and institutions that maintain the framework in which people can focus on their ambitions rather than survival – education, law and order, energy, transport, healthcare, council services etc.

If they failed, they had a proper safety net from which they could regroup and go again, paid for by all of us; more than adequate welfare, social and mental health care, childcare support etc. It is a state (in the wide sense) that provides a framework within which its citizens have the best chance of thriving and doesn’t leave anyone behind, because why would you want to leave people on the floor and not give them a hand back up?

But if that view of a just and prosperous society comes from things I was told by my family and then things I read, why is it so impervious to alternative models of the best possible society?

I have seen, over the decades, the reasons people have given for their extreme wealth. It is, often, asserted that they earned that extreme wealth and so they deserve it. All of it. With it comes a view that anyone not as wealthy is somehow at fault for that, that they haven’t got what it takes. But there might also be, in there, notions of happiness tied to this excessive wealth accumulation that are entirely wrong according to the research (see Daniel Nettle’s ‘Happiness’ and the happiness data in The Spirit Level). There’s a prioritising of one’s own pursuit of pleasure over contributing to the pleasure or welfare of others, no matter how opulent and indulgent the form one’s pleasure might take because it is (a) right. This is a tangle of excuses as to why extremely rich people should remain extremely rich. I never understood, in my gut, how someone so incredibly wealthy could look to cement that status at such great expense to others, that they would lobby against any redistributive efforts. I’m called a commie for making this point, despite never advocating for total redistribution of wealth or that the state should run everything. Social media’s fuel appears to be straw men. Meanwhile, (see here and here) an oligarchy of the super-rich is created whose families, regardless of merit and through active suppression (lobbying, cronyism) and tribal identification, go on to maintain themselves at the top of the pile, somewhat giving lie to the belief that anyone, equally, can make it.

But there are so many, even among the poor, who, in their gut, think that if they can get extremely rich, it will be down to them alone. They, like me, project their own images of what people are or should be like, and what people should want, onto others. They have their own notions of human nature at odds with mine. Our arguments and exchanges reduce, inevitably and simply, to what we believe the world ought to be like because it either reflects human nature as we see it is or should be. I am criticised, for instance, for having views that have a false notion of what it means to be human. And I disagree!

And so more and more I find myself reflecting on our predispositions; what causes some to give to the homeless and some to bully and abuse them. Is there a description of what it means to be human that can explain why both responses to suffering exist?

Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baren-Cohen continues to fuel my thoughts, given it adds to an increasingly convincing corpus of research on the brain’s causal correlations to personhood and our predispositions, e.g. that we’re not naturally gendered at birth and that while both gender and empathy evolves in response to stimuli both immediate and sensory through to emotional and intellectual, we tend to either be more or less empathetic and so, more or less capable of finding the suffering of others intolerable. ‘Othering’ human beings to be able to commit acts of violence on them, or merely discriminate against them, correlate strongly with reductions in activity within the empathy circuit.1

If your empathy circuit is fully firing, you might literally be unable to cause them unnecessary harm. I won’t pretend my own circuit is overdeveloped. I do a bit for charities but give no time up for volunteering.

Nevertheless, I seem to struggle a lot more with seeing others’ suffering than many of my right wing interlocutors. It’s on a spectrum of course, this correlation I’ve noticed, but I sense a tendency towards a Cartesian, and so outdated, view of the sovereignty of choice and action in individuals in the views of right wingers, notions of developing minds as blank slates, of a person’s capacity to make and remake themselves as being absolute.

It’s interesting that in the bodies of research building up over time in disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience through psychology and sociology, they all appear to be pointing towards feedback loops between brains and the external micro and macro stimulus they receive as strongly influencing each other regarding what people are capable of conceiving as a set of choices or possibilities. Some people can grow up unable to believe they could manage a company, unable to believe they’d ever get that GCSE in Maths, or that they don’t deserve to be happy. Less controversially, people grow up just not wanting to be brain surgeons or barristers or carpenters, it just isn’t something that excites them as a person or ambition and so the ‘cones of possibility’ radiating from this moment are not limitless. One’s life defines one’s sense of what’s possible. There are things we could choose we cannot even cognise as choices. We cannot remake ourselves in the entirety, but that is not to rule out the possibility that external stimulus can, in the right neural bed, create radical change. Research such as Cohen’s shows that people with higher degrees of empathy innately care more for others because they simply can better cognise another’s suffering and respond emotionally to that. His book shows too it’s possible for a chemical stimulus to improve this, to actually change empathy levels. It’s as possible, then, to effect less invasive, more long-term change in people’s brains. Why wouldn’t we want more empathy? Can a significant empathic response be at all negative, of all the traits that make us up?

Insofar as I might have a moderately noisy empathy circuit, I believe it does help to explain why, when someone succeeds through the labour of others, I look to them to say, ‘remember their efforts, don’t exploit them for further personal wealth’. I don’t say ‘you deserve to keep every penny for yourself.’ When someone disagrees, it’s correspondingly hard to accept their reasoning because there are literally high enough levels of activity in my ’empathy circuit’ that it practically disallows me from agreeing; it simply doesn’t feel right. There’s a conflict at a pre-dispositional level to the idea I might strongly concentrate my wealth at the expense of those who helped me to acquire it. But my empathy circuit can be suppressed by all kinds of factors; anxiety, depression, tiredness, you name it. All affect my dispositions, temporarily, to various degrees.

If the stimulus we’ve received in our lives and the predispositional strength of activity in the brain’s various regions define the pattern of reality we believe makes the most sense to aspire to and pursue then these will, necessarily, differ between us. As such we’re always going to struggle to convince each other of our views. If it’s tied to empathy; if your ’empathy circuit’ simply isn’t buzzing enough to believe it’s bad to bully a homeless person, or even that it might not entirely be the fault of that person that they’re homeless, then I’m not likely to persuade you otherwise because you have enough data points to make a consistent model of reality that is more in harmony with alternative pre-dispositions. My model of the world is posited on something more primal than research, as is yours. What we believe makes a good society contains the necessary and tacit assumption that this society must allow for us to thrive within it, so our notions of a good society are, necessarily, different.

You’ve seen the solution. Brains have plasticity. Stimulus can trigger us to adjust these patterns, elements of them become dissonant to a change in our predispositions2. Reason and argument are tools that can expose new ‘data points’ to people and I think the problem is a function of the depth and breadth of our world model. Simpler models with fewer cohesive data points are easier to re-pattern. A persistence in our presentation of the rightness of a set of actions is necessary, so that should someone undergo a radical shift in life experience that changes the way their brain is wired, there’s a chance that our model of the world can influence theirs, it can help create or strengthen a disposition that causes a dissonance in their world model and instigate a change in values. High levels of empathy will diminish our ability to harm and tolerate suffering in others. It’s just a fact. I believe that if we could engineer our neural development to strengthening the ’empathy circuit’ we’d have a better world. Do you?

Baron-Cohen identifies at least ten related brain areas involved in empathy, which he refers to as the ’empathy circuit’. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is highlighted as a hub for social information, and the area in which our own perspective on events can be compared to that of others. The dorsal part of this region is involved in thinking about other people’s thoughts and feelings in conjunction with our own. In contrast, the ventral part of this region is more concerned with our own thoughts. Damasio has suggested that this region can store a record of the emotional valence of prior causes of action, positive for actions that turned out to be rewarding and negative for actions there were punishing. It has been shown that damage to this area of the brain can reduce empathy.

The ventral medial prefrontal overlaps with the orbitofrontal cortex also identified as part of the empathy circuit. Patients with orbitofrontal damage may have difficulty with judging social behaviour, which is seen as indicative of a lack of empathy. These observations about the orbitofrontal might be seen as linking empathy to the functioning of subjective consciousness, since it has been shown the activation in the orbitofrontal can correlate to appreciation of the subjective experience rather than strength of signal.

The orbitofrontal is close to the frontal operculum, which may be involved in assessing the intentions of others, and this in turn is close to the inferior frontal gyrus involved in the visual recognition of emotions. This connects to the inferior parietal lobe, part of the mirror neuron system, which reacts when observing actions in both ourselves and others. Further to this, the middle cingulate cortex is involved in the experience of pain in oneself and in others, while the anterior insula is connected to empathy via awareness of the body. Taken from here.I’m aware that my use of the phrase ‘pre-disposition’ is philosophically lazy, it’s shorthand at best but hopefully sufficiently legible shorthand for the point I’m trying to make

The post I can’t change my mind. appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Landmarks & Postcapitalism

With the third book’s first draft completed and no more deadlines at this point in time, I’ve begun recharging after years of frantic scribbling. The first book I chose to read after coming up for air is a book I wish I’d read before starting writing at all. I’ve read one previous book by Robert...

The post Landmarks & Postcapitalism appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Books – Landmarks & Postcapitalism

With the third book’s first draft completed and no more deadlines at this point in time, I’ve begun recharging after years of frantic scribbling. The first book I chose to read after coming up for air is a book I wish I’d read before starting writing at all.

I’ve read one previous book by Robert Macfarlane, his wonderful ‘The Old Ways’. ‘Landmarks’ is a celebration of language and how it shapes our sense of place. Each chapter takes an aspect of the natural world; mountains, heaths, water, woods. Through the people and the books that have shaped Macfarlane’s relationship with and love of the natural world, he begins to peel away the coma burying my senses and their ability to perceive it. These books have informed his life’s passions and this meditation on our connection with the land, the reciprocal relationship of both’s being. I’m motivated to read almost all the books that have shaped his life, for their writing is evidently wonderful, distinct and original as a result of each author’s love of and relationship with the natural world.

What’s wonderful about this book is not so much the very many wonderful phrases in the various regional dialects for aspects of nature -he calls this book a word-hoard – but the necessity of them in times past. When living with, working with and travelling through nature there was a great need to be able to delineate the landscape in a more granular way. A ballow is an East Anglian phrase for sandbank, while bentalls is the same region’s word for low-lying sandy flatlands. If we lack the words for the variety in our landscapes we cannot communicate what they are to anyone else. When I say that I cannot perceive the world as richly as Macfarlane can or our ancestors, I didn’t realise how much it had to do with language and how it shapes perception. I daresay philosophers would have a fine time with that statement, but Landmarks is compelling in making a case for how the world’s beauty and diversity are diminished in accordance with our changing language that has lost so many words and phrases to delineate it as we have lost the need to work the land and live with it and have its presence affect us.

Macfarlane gives a vivid example of a moor that was the subject of a bid to have it destroyed for a windfarm. The company behind the windfarm described the moorland as a ‘vast, dead place.’ But moorland is far, far from that. It is teeming with life, its variety is nuanced, it requires scrutiny to appreciate its beauty. To my eye I’m sure I would see a vast brown expanse, but it is because I simply lack the vocabulary to notice how wonderful it is and how much is going on in it. I cannot name the things I see so I cannot properly perceive them, I cannot give them their identity.

We once had vocabularies that could describe the entire topography of a place, both the things in themselves and also the phenomena as they are sensed. I told a friend about the word ‘petrichor’, which is the word for the smell after a rain shower that follows a long hot, dry period. He smiled instantly. We both instinctively knew the smell, but without the delineation in our consciousness we would not be able to call it out, to enjoy it as much.  Knowing its name means I can distinguish it but also seek it, I can engage more fully with the world and my sense of it. There is an interplay between language and reality and I wish I’d learned it before writing these last three books!

Of course, vernacular is always dangerous in a secondary world novel because the reader has so much else to process. But the incredible diversity of descriptive words and phrases multiplied by the many regions in even as small an island as the UK suggests that to model a secondary fantasy world with any meaningful fidelity, an author needs to be mindful of how much more sophisticated a character’s language would be as pertains to their environment. For all our modernity, we are encumbered and belittled in our sense and appreciation of the natural world to the extent we can no longer perceive what is before us as fully as our ancestors once could.

 

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism I picked up because there’s a story idea I have that would trace, albeit indirectly, the future decades from the present day, covering the lifetime of two girls who are, at this moment, teenagers. I need a credible take on how the world might move along in a time of huge social, economic and environmental upheaval.

Mason’s book argues that information technology, and specifically the internet connecting most of the world in a realtime communications and market network, is changing capitalism and will finish it off, for it is already dying. To prove it he provides a brisk and thoroughly readable history of capitalism through the lense of economics, showing the patterns of its mutations and how its latest mutation, ‘finance capitalism’, cannot survive due to the shock of the global network and infotech. It sounds very much like Marxism, but be sure that he is as critical of traditional Marxism and state led hierarchies as he is of the neoliberal ideology driving ‘finance capitalism’ and its unsustainable levels of debt and rising inequality coupled with low growth. He sees, in technology, a way to reshape our society by looking at how the knowledge content of our products, e.g. the internet of things, the feedback loops in the devices and services we use and enjoy, can be harnessed to increase their efficiency to the point where the labour required to manage them and enhance them drops. It’s a world of under-employment, and such a world cannot sustain capitalism for there will be too few people with the means to be the consumers capitalist economies require. A universal basic income is required but also, Mason argues, wonderfully idealistically, and I mean that, a growing population with the time to devote to alternatives to the current capitalist model. He uses Wikipedia as an example, and I’m sure Linux also applies; open source, voluntary efforts to create tools for humanity’s benefit. I can envisage also an open source search engine that, like Google did once a long time ago, uses the ‘behavioural surplus’ of our searches to drive improvements only in searching, not selling it to advertisers. It’s a world wide web with no Adsense and no monopolistic behemoth doing everything it can to keep us under surveillance in order to better predict and direct our behaviour to its own ends. He argues that technological innovation in manufacturing is stalling because the workforce is now non-unionised and atomised into precarious low-status low-income jobs that use in-work tax benefits to keep profits high through lowering costs. The only real jobs left will be the creators and entrepreneurs and the highly empathetic jobs that require nuanced and sophisticated human interaction. Funnily enough, teachers and nurses are quite low paid because these skills are undervalued at this time. AI could well take all the other jobs.

The transition to this future is woolly, but Mason attempts it. I laud him for doing so because what he gives is a fertile soil for one’s own musings on the way a transition could happen. I’m not going to attempt a summary because it is a complex and detailed read and one that assumes a familiarity with disciplines I’m not well versed in.

He is persuasive when he argues that the hierarchies required to ‘state-run’ things in the past were always more inefficient than the market, but now, with machine learning, realtime information networks embedded in all parts of a system, whether it be a nationalised railway or an automated factory communicating with its suppliers, more and more things can be run not for profit but for utility, they can be run better by something like the state. Once such a thing begins to run, once automation and the feedback and supply networks are thoroughly knitted into its operations, the costs are so low as to make the product or service itself incredibly cheap and thus end the concept of a market looking to create the assymetry of information required to gain market advantage and ultimately monopolise, driving up profit and prices. To the notion that it is the market that drives innovation, so this mythical product wouldn’t evolve as tastes evolve, it’s not that there are no jobs, the creatives would still work, they can still get paid. Indeed, anyone capable of making an original contribution to society could be rewarded directly, they could own their labour more fully than ever before.

Work defines capitalism. AI and automation are reducing work and in reducing work, they are reducing purchasing power. This in turn means the capitalist system requires debt to sustain GDP and debt is at an all time high and rising beyond any credible means of reducing it, even inflationary measures. The system is broken but we can see no way out of it. There is a growing population of people with nothing to lose and externalities to capitalism in the form of the environmental crisis and overpopulation that spell our doom unless we can change it all.

However hard it is to conceive, we can start and should start. I see in my children a generation not yet encumbered by the dogmas of my own. They can still create new patterns of existence, they can crowdsource their own solutions and their own critical mass. My generation can do it too, it’s just harder. I fund, very modestly, Wikitribune and Mozilla, organisations looking to put truth and people at the heart of the world wide web, using networks and, with the latter, scholarships to find new ways of doing things. It’s a start.

Mason’s book has given me a lot of new information to add to my model of the world and my political views, it’s educated me and energised me and I’m most grateful for that.

The post Books – Landmarks & Postcapitalism appeared first on Adrian Selby.

Books – The Sheltering Sky, The Damned United, The Raven Tower and Lanark

I’ve been busy finishing my third novel. While I was wrestling with it over the last few months I managed to read a few books I’m now ready to recommend.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, first published in 1949, is the story of Kit and Port Moresby, Americans full of fashionably existential angst deciding to go travelling in the wilds of the Sahara desert. A Penguin ‘Red Classic’, I decided to give it a go in order to shake up my reading habits. The tone is set within the first paragraph:

He awoke, opened his eyes…He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring

Full of the ennui of the aimless, wealthy western aesthete, Kit and Port eschew New York and a post-war Europe for something alien and, it feels, something to be masochistically endured. They bicker, they both need each other and yet can’t seem to find each other. With the handsome and intellectually empty Tunner that’s latched onto them, much to their frustration, they unravel both morally and mentally as the novel progresses. As with Anne Leckie’s The Raven Tower, which I’ll get to, it’s not a long book but it takes its time over what’s there. Bowles is a great prose stylist; his description of the madness of typhoid is peerless and I believe he is convincing in his depiction of the villages and ways of life of the people living in the shadow of the Sahara’s ergs. It is a space that easily annihilates people, present in every moment, every human cell.

You might be wondering why it is I recommend it, given what appears to be less than effusive praise. Like sand in a sandal, aptly, it’s been niggling in my thoughts as I’ve tried to shape what it is I might say about it. I’m not an astute interpreter of literary fiction, nor a competent guide to the layers within this novel, but I have no doubt it is a classic, because the sense of place, and the extremely well-painted protagonists, all the characters in fact, are conceived with great nuance and intimacy. The sentences of this book seem simple, but there is great labour hidden in every one of them.

 

The Damned United by David Peace will leave your fingers stained with nicotine, your head pounding with a hangover, desperate for another brandy, chasing every success like you’re chasing the dragon; a victory, euphoria, then emptiness, hate, despair. Love me. Love me. Love me.

Here is the story of the forty-odd days that Brian Clough managed Leeds United in 1974 along with the highs and lows of his career in football up to that point. It’s hard to recommend this book quite as thoroughly if you’re not aware even in passing of Brian Clough, one of England’s greatest football managers and easily its most charismatic. “Frank Sinatra? He met me once” is (more or less) the sublime one-liner that lays bare his ego and his self awareness of it. It’s the absolute blackness of despair and the shining heights of joy that constitute the only notes in this story, the conceit being that it’s in Clough’s mind. It is unlike any book I’ve read about football, or sport in general. It smokes forty a day, this Clough, and it jabs you in the eye and demands your worship and makes promises of glory it will deliver if you obey it utterly. It begins like this then never lets up:

Repetition. Repetition-

Fields of loss and fields of hate, fields of blood and fields of war-

Their sport upon the walls, their sport upon the floor.

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee…

In her shadow time.

On our terraces, in our cages, from Purgatorio we watch,

With our wings that cannot fly, our tongues that cannot speak:

‘Destroy her politics! Destroy her culture! Destroy her!’

But our wings are thick with tar, tongues heavy with her coin,

On our broken backs, our broken hearts, she’ll dine again tonight.

In her shadow place-

We are selfish men: Oh, Blake! Orwell! Raise us up, return to us again.

These civil wars of uncivil hearts, divided and now damned-

The old is dying and the new cannot be born-

By Elland Road, I sat down and wept, D.U.F.C.

 

We’re familiar with the phrase ‘hard sf”. I’d never thought of applying it to a fantasy novel until I read Anne Leckie’s The Raven Tower. It is narrated by a god that appears to be following Eolo, guard to the heir to the throne of Iraden who returns from the borders where he’s been protecting the realm to find that he has been replaced by his uncle. The god’s recollection of its own origin and its following of Eolo are two narrative threads woven together until they join near the end. Leckie does a fantastic and most thought-provoking origin story for this god and the overarching world-building that grows out of it, placing the events of Eolo’s story, the culture and history of Iraden and its own god, the Raven, solidly into the universe and its metaphysics. It is a slow book and to some it might read as a cold book, a book lacking heart, perhaps, for its narrator is, naturally, a most stoic and ancient thing, not human. Yet millennia of humans (and other gods) have, like waves on a shore, shaped and developed this god, who seems, at the end of this first book of a trilogy, to become a protagonist proper. I can’t recommend it enough if you’re after a quite different fantasy read. The last time I felt like this about fantasy’s possibilities was Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

 

War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.

I recently described Lanark by Alasdair Gray as ‘Mieville meets DH Lawrence’. Considered one of the great Scottish novels, Lanark is a fourth wall-breaking hybrid of new-weird fantasy and searingly accurate coming-of-age literary fiction centred around the titular character. It is broken into four parts that are presented out of order and I won’t give the game away regarding how it breaks the fourth wall, except to say that what at first seems like a well-worn ploy quickly turns into a bitingly clever and acerbic deconstruction of fiction writing. Lanark’s story of his childhood in Glasgow and then the agony of his teenage insecurities resonated powerfully with me. The autobiographical nature of the story – the character’s asthma and eczema mirroring the author’s – are brilliantly observed but are then turned on their head when Lanark wakes from a moment of crisis to find himself aboard a train to the city of Unthank, and eventually then into ‘The Institute’ in some parallel universe. This latter fantasy, this strange, alternate world and how it entwines with his former life, is fascinating in itself, rich with social commentary of course, for there are obvious parallels with Glasgow in Unthank. You might find Lanark a frustrating guide, an emotionally stunted protagonist that gets very little right, but his is a compelling and bittersweet journey as the book follows his life. Gray is a great scholar of literature and it’s worn richly here, without being showy at all. His prose is brilliant; Lanark is a masterpiece because the agony of living and failing is here, the joys that are there are cherished for their brevity and power. It is as close to truth as fiction gets. I’m reminded of John Williams’ Stoner. There is no higher praise I can give than that.

The post Books – The Sheltering Sky, The Damned United, The Raven Tower and Lanark appeared first on Adrian Selby.