Beka > Recent Status Updates

"To reach the stars, we will have to look away from our phones. We can get to other planets only with fusion rockets. We will develop fusion rockets only when we have fusion power. We will have fusion power only if we try to address climate change. We will address climate change only if people believe that it is happening...+ that will only happen if social media/algorithms are reformed."

"To be free, each of us needs the truth -- but factuality requires institutions as well as risk takers.
If freedom is the value of life, one of its forms is the self conscious labor of making freedom possible for others. Solidarity is the guiding light of a land of the free."

"We need the salve of solidarity in the hard logic of life.

Young people can become sovereign + unpredictable thanks to the care of others. The time needed to care for them can be organized only by common effort. As young people grow older, they need to be able to move -- out of school, out of the house, into futures that they can imagine + shape."

"Searching for facts risks hurting our feelings.

This version of fascism is, weirdly, a safe space.

You're fine the way you are; you have no need to learn. Reporters are enemies, since they might challenge you. Historians are to be ignored -- they rob you of your tribal certainties.

James Baldwin called truth 'freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.'"

"If we lose track of the difference between 'it is true' and 'it feels right', we are not free.
Forces greater than us will hack our brains to make it feel right."

"Lacking everyday institutions of factuality (local reporters who publish and upload local stories, in their town as well as others' towns across the country), all people have to go on are impulses amplified by social media."

"When we are open to facts, they help us to be unpredictable and therefore free.
Facts are not what we expect or want; they do not fit our prejudices but knock holes in them.
They challenge what people around us think.
Facts temper our minds to resist the machine's power to predictify us.
We cannot build without some sense of a shared reality."

"Without factuality, every form of freedom is manaced: if we cannot know how brains develop, then we cannot educate for sovereignty. If we cannot know how algorithms work, then we cannot confront the problems of social media. If we do not know how few people have how much money, nor see the barriers to mobility that keep us unfree. Without facts, we cannot measure the changing climate."

"...the political party that denies or ignores global warming/climate change also suppresses votes. Breaking democracy also breaks the ecosphere."

"Putting people of color in prison offers no social mobility except to newly employed guards, but it might leave white people feeling less stuck than others.
Sado-populism normalizes oligarchy; if I'm comfortable with stagnation because others are drowning, my attitude toward the high flyers will be one of supplication."

"Sado-populism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. It salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to enjoy the sight of others who suffer more. One group is reassured that, thanks to its resilience, it will do less poorly than another from government paralysis."

"Politicians who claim to oppose 'the system' are often called Populists. That is not always accurate; some of them are, rather, sado-populists. Populism offers some redistribution-- something to the people from the state. Sado-populism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived. It salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more."

"The notion that what was good about the state was that it arrested other people was a trap laid for white Americans; a preparation for social stasis and anger.
Tyrants make anxiety seem normal; they attach a threat to a group (in this case, Black ppl) and then boast to their supporters of having protected them from that threat. They substitute relief from fear for freedom, then teach citizens to confuse the two."

"Urban Americans are extracted from cities, where they would have voted, and placed in the exurbs or countryside where their bodies magnify the voting power of others; very often others who vote for politicians who run on the platform of building prisons.
Many of my students in the Connecticut prison were far removed from their home county."

On mobility as a facet of freedom:

"Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have. When prisons are built and filled, the bodies of prisoners increase the electoral power of the non-incarcerated people around them."

"To Hitler, any virtue that enabled people to accommodate one another was Jewish, be it constitutionalism in a state, contractualism in a market, class consciousness under Marxism, or the mercy of christian gospels. For Hitler, it all came down to Jews hindering Germans from seizing what they could as a race. Jews had to be removed so nature could be redeemed."

"The digital oligarchs themselves often have no idea what they are doing, aside from indulging in some vague competition with one another. They monopolize everyone's future and fill it with inbred silliness."

Whew, we have reached the chapter of Unpredictability, which includes thoughts on how phones, internet, and algorithms have been crafted to grab us, keep our attention, and take our time. 😩😩

"Freedom is the state in which we can affirm what we think is good, and bring it into the world."

My own thoughts while I absorb this book:

Positive freedom means places and policies (local and federal) that make inhabiting and moving about a place easier for all humans, all the way down to the least paid.
Negative freedom means we have freedom from things, from outright barriers and structures, but overall means that places are UN-inhabitable, because there is nothing built, nothing primed for us to build.

"If Havel is right, and unfreedom means predictability, then freedom must involve unpredictability. It is the 2nd form of freedom, arising from sovereignty/autonomy.

Sovereignty, or autonomy, takes work.
Havel did not dwell on this, having been raised in a prosperous family + having had an excellent education. We need support to become autonomous people, sovereign individuals."

"If what is normal is what everyone else does, then conformism can collapse into a single, meaningless dart point.
But if normal is what one *should* do, then an aperture opens instead into a realm of dreams, aspirations, + judgments. If Havel is right, and unfreedom means predictability, then freedom must involve unpredictability. It is the 2nd form of freedom, arising from sovereignty/autonomy."

"My world opened up through reading, a capability I owe to others. People brought me to books, and books brought me to people."

"When I am imprisoned in my own self, I can never get beyond the world as it appears to me, but thanks to empathy I get repeated appearances of that same world that are independent of my perception. It is empathy that allows us to know that the external world is real."

"My own unfortunate attitude toward my body was consistent with the broader American Mistake: from regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity.

It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit, and that was my next problem..."

"Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems.

Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?"

"The word 'De-occupation' is a word more precise than the conventional 'Liberation'. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty.
Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good."