Matt Weber's Blog, page 4

The paradox of incrementalism; or, moderation is not a white flag

The title and theme of this post come from a famous essay by Yonatan Zunger written in the early days of the Trump presidency: Tolerance is not a moral precept. I think the original title of the essay was “Tolerance is not a moral precept. It is a peace treaty,” or possibly the same words with variant punctuation; and I like that a little better, because it underscores the same kind of divide that I’m trying to underscore here.

The essay was written in a time where reasonable people could suspect that they would be (as they should have, because they were) asked, or ordered, to tolerate intolerance, which is of course the subject matter of the “paradox of tolerance.” Zunger gives the paradox of tolerance the Gordian knot treatment by clarifying that it isn’t a good in and of itself, it’s a means to an end; if tolerance isn’t achieving its intended end, it’s not appropriate for the situation, and should be discarded or at least make way for tools that are. Reasonable people are tolerant of a wide array of differences because that tolerance allows us to live in peace. It follows pretty straightforwardly that tolerance of differences that threaten peace — for example, tolerating the oppression and hurting of certain kinds of people — doesn’t achieve the intended end of tolerance and should be avoided in favor of making sure people who are different in those ways can’t realize their goals. I don’t want to represent that this makes everything clear (the stated goal of “peace” doesn’t, e.g., invalidate John Lewis’ idea of “good trouble”; there are more and less Omelas-type calculations about what constitutes “peace” that might not admit bright lines; &c) but it is clarifying.

We’ve spent most of four years with Democrats largely in control of the federal government, headed by an older gentleman who generally tacks what passes, in the US, for center-left. (His personal culpability in abetting the war crimes of a far-right government in early 2024 is not ignorable, but I think it doesn’t bear that strongly on the subject at hand.) Early in his administration, instead of essays clarifying that bigotry should not be tolerated, we got some hope for structural solutions to some of the problems of US government: Mitigating the Senate gerrymander via statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, restructuring the Supreme Court to limit the influence of individual presidents on its composition, ensuring that all Americans have the right to vote, and ending the filibuster to pass far-reaching legislation when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.

We got none of it, and an activist far-right Supreme Court denied millions of Americans access to abortion during a unified Democratic administration. We’re facing the credible threat of a unified Republican government at the top of 2025, with publicly documented plans in place for mass deportations, gutting the federal civil service, and passing a nationwide abortion ban. That threat would be a lot less credible with a balanced court; with four new Senators from DC and PR; with electoral votes from same.

I don’t think of Biden as a do-nothing president. I’ve already mentioned one of the terrible things he’s done; on the side of the good are, among other things, his two major spending bills (both negotiated through vanishingly small majorities) and the vigorous renewal of antitrust in his FTC and DOJ. I think of Biden as a president who’s tried to do, and often succeeded at doing, big things through traditional means: Legislation and appointments.

But the things he’s done have not been big enough to prevent bigger things from happening that could undo, or dwarf, them all.

The paradox of incrementalism is: Huge threats can’t be diverted by small actions. The paradox of incrementalism is: Sometimes you have to change your democracy if you want to keep it. The paradox of incrementalism is: Going high when they go low is the best way to get shivved. The paradox of incrementalism is, I say with profound regret: Do, or do not. There is no try.

I could have said “moderation is not a moral precept” for better parallelism with Yonatan Zunger’s essay, but it’s not 2017 any more; the threats aren’t vague or ill-defined, the enemy is out of the barracks, the battles have well and truly begun and, in some cases, ended. There are few things I dislike more than gratuitous military metaphors, and if we’re all lucky I’ll look back on this and say “shit, that was gratuitous”; but states have already come for our trans siblings, our siblings who are or can be pregnant, our siblings risking their lives on border crossings full of razor wire and buzz-saws, our siblings speaking out about Palestine. I can’t get worried about anything as abstract as mistaking means for ends. What I’m worried about is surrender by another name.

I wish I’d thought of this way to say it years ago.

I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on in DEATH IN HER HANDS

Usually I wait until I’m done with a book to write about it, or at least until I’ve formed an impression; but I have a suspicion that the most interesting dimension of Ottessa Moshfegh’s DEATH IN HER HANDS may be the interim confusion. A few spoilers for the first 50% of the book follow, although I am genuinely not sure it matters; actually, the back cover copy for the book spoils more than I’m going to.

We are behind the eyes of Vesta, an elderly widow living with her dog in a new town, who’s just run across a note on a walk. The note describes a corpse: “This is Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. This is her dead body.” But there’s no corpse in evidence. Vesta decides pretty quickly that she’s not taking it to the police, but obviously she can’t get it off her mind.

We’re living in Vesta’s stream of consciousness more or less in real time, although she presses pause a lot to reminisce about her past, offer observations about her town and her habits, or, increasingly, invent details about Magda and her life. By the halfway point, which is where I am, she’s so stuck into the story of Magda—creating associates, suspects, backstory—that she’s thrown off her routine and starting to neglect the dog.

It’s hard to convey how deeply unhinged this all feels. Vesta is developing Magda’s story from a template for mystery novels that she discovered via Ask Jeeves (the book may be a period piece), but she doesn’t display any particular understanding that she is inventing rather than discovering. There’s a growing sense that the anecdotes about her late husband Walter are covering some kind of resentment, possibly rooted in a very deep injury; she says the decision not to have kids was mutual, but it’s clear that there’s a lot about her marriage that was driven solely by Walter’s preferences, and thoughts about mothering Magda are starting to recur. But these sympathetic readings are smudged by Vesta’s flaws: She is openly disdainful of her town and the people who live there, she describes Magda’s invented Belarussian family as abusive and criminal, she reels off pointless tangents all the time. The Karen energy is palpable.

Palpable enough that it feels like a trap. 

I don’t know what kind of trap. But I think I’m less confused about Vesta’s slow divorce from reality than I am about why we are taking so long to get to the point. It’s clearly super important to Moshfegh that Vesta comes off the way she does, dotty and lonely and probably doomed by her social limitations to remain both; but we’re spending so long establishing it that I’m hallucinating morals. Is this an attack on the privileged American woman, on the husband who (maybe?) confined her to a cramped and cold life, on the cozy mystery as an art form, on the conditions of the publishing industry that encourage writing genre to template? On the asshole reader who can’t summon sympathy for a widow alone in the woods? Or is the hallucination itself the intended effect, an invitation to interrogate why anything in a book has to have a point beyond the intrinsic interest it commands by just being what it is?

Further research is needed. Other than the inciting incident, nothing weird has actually happened yet; it’s all in Vesta’s head. But the back cover copy suggests it will not stay that way.

Actually, that’s not quite right. One other weird thing has happened. An accidental click during Vesta’s Internet session brings her to a website selling camouflage hunting gear; and Vesta, for no reason I can remember, decides to buy a black full-body hunting suit. Which is reflected portentously in a character who stands out from the rest, brothers and lovers and landlords: a black “ghoul” whom, thanks to a misplaced stroke of her pen, she christens Ghod.

Deeply unhinged, I said. 

That purchase was well timed; I might have set the book down if not for that extra infusion of creepiness. We’ll see how it shakes out.

Currently reading: BLUE PERIOD vol. 5, by Tsubasa Yamaguchi

“Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.”

My seventh-grade daughter had a dystopian fiction unit in her humanities class this year, so we went to the bookstore and I failed to induce her to buy PARABLE OF THE SOWER; she wanted THE HUNGER GAMES instead. So, fuck it, I bought PARABLE OF THE SOWER. I figured it would be around the house at least. And if I bought it, I might as well reread it, because it had been a hell of a long time. And, well, see above. I was not prepared for it to be set in 2024. The protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, starts the book aged 15; my oldest daughter (the seventh-grader) is 12.

I remembered from prior reads that the book’s slow apocalypse felt alarmingly plausible. Rather than a specific event that precipitated society’s collapse, and the book occurring on the canvas of a post-collapse steady state, PARABLE happens during a collapse that’s been going for a while at which society, though very bad, has not obviously hit bottom yet. The causes of the collapse aren’t super clear and that, too, is plausible. You know it by its symptoms, not by its inciting incident. Violence is high, people are poor, government is capable of little and willing to do less; migration toward opportunity is common even inside the US, because opportunity is so scarce. There’s a sense that some social trust has broken, some social fabric has torn, but there’s no moment of breaking or tearing you can point to, only the fact of the damage.

What I didn’t remember is just how much Butler got right. Science fiction shouldn’t be judged by the events it happened to predict, and we of course don’t live in Butler’s then-future; there’s not drugs floating around that make people want to set fires, there’s not hyperempathy syndrome, there’s not gangs invading neighborhoods in California. But the damage of climate change in Butler’s future, the scarcity of rain; California parched and scarred by wildfires; the president tearing down worker protections in the name of opportunity; the country slowly fragmenting into disconnected, semi-permeable regions… none of it’s exact, except maybe the wildfires, but it’s all very familiar.

Again, the point isn’t that Butler knew what was going to happen in 2024. Science fiction, no matter how far in the future it’s set, is always a diagnosis of the present; the accuracy of Butler’s 2024 is a testament to the accuracy of her diagnosis of 1993.

Currently reading: MAEVE FLY, by C. J. Leede, read by Sosie Bacon.

If you’re a fantasy reader in the market for a different twist on dragons, have a look at BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series — free to download on all the major retailers.

Murderbot on the small screen

I have a bunch of things in my drafts that I ought to push out, but what’s on my mind right now is Murderbot.

Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries are a melange of novellas, short stories, and a couple of novels, soon to be an Apple TV series, about an entity we can perfectly well call a cyborg; it is a SecUnit, short for Security Unit, and goes by SecUnit, except when it’s mad at itself and calls itself Murderbot. Its pronouns are it/it/its. SecUnit is unusual among SecUnits in that it has “hacked its governor module,” meaning that it is autonomous rather than bound to the commands of its corporate enslavers — as other SecUnits, cyborgs, and robots are. The Murderbot Diaries are, very roughly, the stories of SecUnit’s liberation and its subsequent work to liberate other nonhuman intelligences (and arguably some human ones) from corporate domination. This work involves a lot of ass-kicking, because SecUnit is a very effective ass-kicker and corporations don’t like letting go of their stuff.

This is all a reasonable summary of what the books are and a very thin picture of what they are like. What they are is — or feels to me, anyway, like — an almost deliberately generic corporate future; the bad trends of 21st-century American capitalism have more or less continued and stretched into space, all the horrible things are done by companies with forgettable hyphenated names like “Barish-Estranza,” and SecUnit’s faced with the problems you’d expect in this future: How can I stay safe and keep a low profile, how can I help other intelligences in positions like mine? The people SecUnit relates to are a melange of multicultural names who aren’t really individuated by personality until pretty late in the series. There honestly isn’t a lot to grab onto in terms of the worldbuilding.

What makes Murderbot remarkable is SecUnit’s voice: Straightforward, literal, and unpoetic, but also withering, yearning, avoidant, and even passionate. Some aspects of its thoughts are recognizably human, some recognizably not; and it’s its internal monologue that stirs up the ideas about gender, neurodivergence, and free will that make the books really interesting.

And, like: Voiceover exists, but TV at the end of the day is a visual medium. Murderbot has lots of great action in it, but I don’t think it holds up as an action story. It lives or dies on SecUnit’s voice.

Or, you know, not! I will be pleased and fascinated if I’m wrong about this. But the concern about the books’ reliance on access to SecUnit’s thoughts is so obvious that you’d hope any successful pitch for the series would have to have hit on a good solution.

Currently reading: LYORN, by Steven Brust.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Lincolniana

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it ~ all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war ~ seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address

It’s a commonplace to observe that Lincoln was a great writer, but only because it’s true. I’m in DC for the weekend, and we visited the Lincoln Memorial; I hadn’t noticed before that the second inaugural and the Gettysburg Address were carved on the wall, and I bored my kids to death by insisting on reading them. They’re such short pieces, but they hit so hard, and never in my life so hard as now.

America has always been high on its own supply, and from its inception it’s had a lot to answer for. But it’s hard not to look at Lincoln and think there has to be some good in a country that would raise someone with his talents up from his circumstances and hand him the power to take itself to war against its own evil.

That’s all oversimplified. I’m not a historian. But it does get me thinking about the value of inspiration; of ideals that move people to action, even in the breach.

Also I did not know, although I should have guessed, that Lincoln was a matter of the withering burn:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged.

Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address

WINDBURN WHIPLASH 50% off at Smashwords this week!

it is Read An Ebook Week (#ebookweek24 on your socials), which is a real festival appropriated by the Romans from the Picts and like Vandals and not a thing that authors made up to sell books.

So WINDBURN WHIPLASH is 50% off this week only on Smashwords! And about 100,000 other books are also discounted there, many to free. If you’ve burned through all your Christmas reads and need another batch of books on your Kindle, now’s a great time to stock up.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT preview out now!

Last year, on my birthday, I released a book. Maybe you read it? It was called WINDBURN WHIPLASH, the first full-length installment in the Streets of Flame series. 

The next book is called HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT. It covers, as one does, the next part of the story: Now that Zaya’s figured out how to win again, now that she’s resolved to help not just her son but everyone in Yemareir who’s hunted by a ker, what does she do?

That book is not out yet. I’ve still got major edits to do. But I wanted to release something on my birthday. Not least to remind myself how to do online publishing; but also because this part of the story has been done for a while, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t read it now rather than later.

So I’ve taken a page from the marketing of GIDEON THE NINTH and released the prologue and first chapter of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT as a digital-only preview, which you can read for the same price as BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, i.e. nothing dollars. 

Download the HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT preview!

The prologue takes the form of more long-form dragon journalism, which was always the intention; I like Shenireen Agama’s voice, and I have plans for her. The first chapter takes you into the main story of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT. There’ll be a preorder in due course, and I plan to publish the full novel on July 1. 

Small side note: One of the most fun things about the publishing side of all this is working with artists, and one of the most fun things about working with artists is seeing their roughs — which I invariably love as much as the finished product. I always feel faintly guilty about this, because if someone told me they liked my drafts as much as my finished work, it’d feel like they were telling me the hours of editing weren’t worth it. But what it’s really about is the sense of a glance behind the curtain, a look into the process of an art form I don’t really understand; and also, a bit, the sense of possibility, all the different ways a rough could transform into something finished. This is all a long way of saying that Thea Magerand, who does my covers, was kind enough to let me use one of her roughs as a cover for the preview, which is the kind of thing I’d have trouble finding the bravery to do if the shoe was on the other foot. Artists: They’re fantastic. 

ANYWAY. Enjoy the first few words of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT! And please let me know what you think.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Blue period?

I had a post in my drafts called “social media has lost its luster.” But after a little bit of engagement on Bluesky, the luster is back, and kind of scary. I got some likes and follows from creators I respect, and now the “would this make a good tweet?” bit of my brain is in overdrive. I had trouble getting to sleep last night because of this.

To be crystal clear, I have 17 followers and a post with like 20 likes on Bluesky. I have never done numbers by Twitter standards and I don’t imagine I’ll magically start. So this reaction of mine is not only a little disturbing in its own right, it’s also way out of proportion to any value I could possibly be deriving from the platform.

I’m not going to spend too much time dissecting or worrying about this. I’m just putting it in writing to keep myself honest—so if it doesn’t get better, I can’t fool myself into thinking it crept up on me.

Currently reading: BLUE PERIOD vol. 2, by Tsubasa Yamaguchi. No, seriously.

Minimalism vs. minimization

tl;dw: The big idea isn’t to cut out technology; the big idea is to use it thoughtfully, and manage its use, in ways that serve your objectives.

This is all fairly obvious shit when you hear it, but I at least am the kind of person who occasionally needs to hear it. It’s the kind of thing that, for example, helps me get over an undue sense of accomplishment at having largely quit social media, and instead try to think intelligently about what I might want to use it for. I’m not 100% that I can go back without the downside of compulsive use, but I am confident that I can try to use it with some intentionality and back off if the return isn’t there. My use case is trying to build some community around my books; so I’m trying to see what it’s like to build a well-calibrated follow list on Bluesky, share booky stuff, and see what’s what. I’m not following the academics, data scientists, and journalists I normally do; for the present experiment, it’s writers and friends only.

I mentioned on a closed, artisanal social network that I looked at the feed created by my first few dozen Bluesky follows and felt exhausted. It turns out that turning off replies in-feed made everything a lot better—I like my follows, but I don’t necessarily like their deracinated comments on posts from folks I don’t follow. But I still want to put a pin in that exhausted feeling. There might be some truth there that the sense of “ooh, Twitter’s back!” is covering up.

Currently reading: NEWBURN vol. 1, by Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips.

A trashed hotel room at 5:00 am

“The story of apes post-squeeze is the story of a bunch of people standing around a trashed hotel room at 5:00 am asking when the party’s going to start.”

… I made an immediate note of this searing burn purely for the language, but as I’ve listened to more of the video I’ve come to better appreciate the story Dan Olson is building here. In the first part of the video, where he’s describing the mechanics of the Gamestop squeeze, I felt like it was strictly redundant with say Matt Levine’s coverage, except that Money Stuff was coming out while GME was happening and Folding Ideas didn’t hit it until two years later. (“Strictly redundant with Matt Levine” doesn’t mean bad content, or just didn’t feel new to me.)

But a keystone of Levine’s whole persona is the air of a perpetually bemused technician just relating these insane stories he happens to be bombarded with; part of the whole move is shrugging his shoulders in incomprehension of the motivations of the actors, the better to appreciate the aesthetics of securities fraud or loopholes in CDS contracts or what have you.

Whereas Olson is a critic at heart. His goal is to understand the stories that animate the whole thing; that requires some elucidation of the thing, occasionally in depth, but mostly in service of the stories. I’m not through the video, but I think it’s going to be a richer analysis than Levine’s, in the end.

Currently listening: LITTLE EVE, by Catriona Ward, read by Carolyn Bonnyman.