The Politics of Trolling: A Few Reflections

It seems to me that the label "troll" is much misused. Certain lazy writers will apply it to any criticism. Straightforward political commentary, or satire, are routinely mislabeled this way.

A troll is not merely someone who disagrees with you, or who even happens to annoy or offend you in their disagreement. A troll is someone who makes it their business to annoy you or offend you with disagreement. They do not address themselves to the world at large, but make a point of going specifically where they are not wanted. They enter other peoples' civil conversations in uncivil fashion. "Stop your talking among yourselves and address me!" they demand, putting others on the spot, and often demanding they answer absurdities and irrelevancies, often absurdities and irrelevancies which the troll themselves recognizes as such, or otherwise endure their attacks (though in fairness, they also mean to go on attacking you regardless of what you say).

This is because they are uninterested in an exchange of ideas. They are not even interested in persuading others. Rather they are the self-appointed police of what is acceptable, meting out punishment to those they see as unacceptable, or even disrupting it. They cannot shut other people down by command, but they can waste their time, and still more, make them miserable. They can confuse and distract, disgust and offend, embarrass and wound. They can, in short, harass them, sabotage them, bully them.

That last word is critical. Bullying is something those with more power do to those with less; something those who feel less inhibited do to those who feel more inhibited. The exploitation of the asymmetry is critical. And the asymmetry itself points to a reality not often owned to which is that, in practice, bullying tends to go from right to left.

Writing those words, I could almost see the right-wingers foaming at the mouth with rage.

I remind them, however, of the way I have defined trolling here--not simply any critical or satirical statement, but a statement presented in this particular way, for this particular effect.

I remind them, too (or explain to those who have not read this blog before) that not everyone they think of as left really is of the left--with many a practitioner of "identity politics," for example, really a right-wing nationalist whose nationalism simply happens to attach to a traditionally marginalized group.

Finally I remind them that, as a rereading should suffice to confirm, my statement is not absolute. I do not say here that bullying can never go from left to right, just that it is less common (I suspect, much, much less common), because it so much less consistent with their values, and so much more dissonant with them; while their practical situation reinforces this.

The reason is that it is those on the left who value reason, freedom, openness, fairness. Many a self-identified conservative insists that they are all about these things, but conservatism is, at bottom, defined by a more guarded attitude toward them. Conservatism is founded on a skepticism about reason, especially in the realm of human affairs. Its respect for freedom is limited by its fear of what "too much" freedom might mean. It is, accordingly, more concerned with order--with enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules--and more accommodating of irrational bases for action, not least authority and prejudice (in the broad sense of the term), and the sacrifice of openness and fairness to them.

Moreover, those on the left are convinced that they have reason and fairness on their side. They want, need, to persuade others of their rightness. At the same time, those hostile to them can and do exploit their commitment to dialogue and fairness by sucking them into exactly the position where they wind up trying to defend themselves in a legitimate fashion against the unfair tactics of a troll.

One can go still further and consider certain attitudes, certain kinds of behavior--an admiration of self-assertion and aggression for their own sake, even when, or because, this goes along with callousness and meanness, with inegalitarian and even anti-egalitarian sentiments or presumptions. Being an "asshole" is hardly a deep or sophisticated basis for a political ideology, but there seems no shortage of those who treat it as if it were that, and it would be tough to argue that the "cult of the asshole" is not something more prevalent on the right, much of which, in the age of "greed is good," status politics and the rest, positively revels in such attitudes.

There is, too, the not insignificant reality of who actually has power. We live in a profoundly unequal society, with regard to wealth and status, and it is those who are on top, those who are comfortable with things as they are and ferociously hostile to those who would have them another way, who determine what is allowably respectable and mainstream in speech and expression. By and large, the further to the right one is, however much they may complain (and do they ever complain!), the safer and more secure they can feel; the further to the left one is, the greater the risk they take when they express themselves, the more easily are they put on the defensive and faced with the outrage of a mob. (Bill Maher may pal around on his show with Steve Bannon and the rest of the Breitbart crowd. Can you picture him similarly paling around with genuine Marxists? Of course not.)

There seems every reason to think that this does make a difference with regard to how often a person will act out in this way, whether they end up aggressor--or victim. And it seems pointless to deny this all in the name of that pseudo-fairness which assumes that both sides must be equally guilty or equally blameless in a given situation.

On the Word "Entitlement"

As James Cairns observes in his recent book The Myth of the Age of Entitlement, the term "entitlement" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a legal right or just claim to do, receive or possess something"--and this is its usual, conventional meaning. However, as he also points out, psychologists' different use of the word equates it with false claims to such rights and claims, reflective of narcissism--extreme selfishness and grandiose views of oneself to which they expect others to pander. "You are acting very entitled" one might chide another individual they think needs a "reality check" and a "privilege check"; someone who needs to "get over themselves"; someone they think needs to be brought "down from the clouds," and "welcomed" back "to the REAL world" (awful, awful phrase, which will probably one day get its own post here).

The second usage is not a description of a matter of fact, but an accusation. And that second, accusatory usage would seem to raise the danger of turning the first usage, any usage, into such an accusation; of turning a mere report or acknowledgment of legal rights or just claims into a way of undermining or denying such rights and claims by declaring the claimant of an entitlement to be a selfish, deluded narcissist. Moreover, given the way in which society misuses and abuses the language of "moralistic" scolding to legitimate inequality and injustice and worse (evident in the manner in which people use the word "deserve"), it would seem in danger of systematically misusing and abusing the word in exactly this way.

And indeed, that is exactly what has happened.

Consider how we in the United States refer to our social safety net--to the Social Security that provides a measure of protection to the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled. This are all other such programs are consistently called "entitlements" in common usage, and the double-meaning is all too evident. They are undeniably legal rights to those for whom they are intended. Sane people would recognize that they are a just claim as well--not only because society is obligated to provide for its most vulnerable members, but because everyone pays into the system in the expectation that if and when they need this program, it will be there for them.

However, from the very start a significant and influential swath of opinion has been fiercely opposed to the existence of any such program, and even the principle of mutual aid underlying it--begrudging the contributions they make, and even the idea that human beings have any obligations to each other (with the frothing-at-the-mouth meanness-wrapped-in-pseudointellectualism of the Ayn Rand-loving "libertarians" who befoul the Internet and every other public space only the most blatant such expression).

Of course, this swath of opinion has only grown more vocal and influential as the country has continued its rightward march from the 1970s to the present. And this, too, is at least as evident in every usage of the word "entitlement" in reference to a program like Social Security. In fact, the attitude, and the usage, have progressed so far that ostensible progessives use the word "entitlement" to beat down working class discontent with the erosion of their social protections, wages, benefits and prospects in the neoliberal era--as New York Times film critic A.O. Scott so shamefully does in his review of 2016's Manchester by the Sea (in which he "accuses" figures like the film's protagonist Lee Chandler with a sense of entitlement as "white working men" to a "working man's paradise").

What is as notable as such usages of the word "entitlement" is the ways in which the word is not used. Working class people, especially working class people whose ethnic background makes it clear that they are disadvantaged by class and not race in a society and a discourse neurotically hostile to acknowledging class at all, are charged with being "entitled" in this way--with being unreasonable narcissists for expecting to be able to find work, and then when putting in their hours on the job, live in something better than abject poverty.

However, those whose sense of entitlement is arguably greatest in terms of their expectation that society really will cater to their needs above all others, and press hardest and most successfully for it are, it is difficult to deny, not those who have least, but those who have most. In the neoliberal age that tells the poorest and weakest that they are "entitled" narcissists for having any expectations at all from life, the economic conventional wisdom is that all economic and social policy, all political life, must revolve around creating the good "business climate" conducive to profits. Which, in practice, means that the needs of wants of business (low or nonexistent taxes, massive subsidies, weak and nonexistent regulation) come before the wants and even the needs of everyone else (be it tax equity, public services, the protection of consumers, labor, the environment).

Yet, "no one" considers neoliberalism to be an expression of the sense of "entitlement" of the affluent.

In the 2008 financial crisis, as bailout followed after bailout, transferring the consequences of institutional behavior by banks and brokerages whose stupidity and irresponsibility beggar description from private balance sheets to public, government balance sheets, and in turn precipitated fiscal crisis and economic crisis that rocked the political system to its foundation with consequences we are still witnessing today, there was much criticism--but few thought, or dared, to say that the financial institutions which demanded these bailouts "acted entitled." (Indeed, in the seven hundred and twenty pages he devoted to this revolting history, Tooze did not use the word, or any synonym for it, even once.)

Of course, those who hate welfare for working people have innumerable excuses for the corporate kind. Much of it, they would argue, is not corporate welfare at all--pointing to such things as the risibly lame "Tax breaks are not subsidies" argument (debunked here). Where such dodges are insufficient, they contend that, well, those corporate types getting the welfare--or as they prefer to call them, the entrepreneurs--are the "wealth creators," the ONLY wealth creators (the natural world on which we rely, the working people who actually staff their companies by the thousand and million, the public services supporting their activity are not wealth creators, only parasitic scum in contrast with the "God on Earth" that is the wealth-creating entrepreneur), and they have to do what they have to do.1 In any event, There Is No Alternative.

But don't you DARE call them entitled you entitled plebs!

1. It does not seem excessive to say that the neoliberal's attitude toward the "entrepreneur" is a near-parody of Hegel's attitude toward the state in The Philosophy of Right--God on Earth.

The Writing Life in an Age of Bullshit Jobs

"What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" David Graeber asked in Bullshit Jobs.

One can equally ask--why so little demand for novelists and filmmakers, painters and sculptors, dancers and musicians?

My first thought regarding this issue was the answer C.P. Snow and John K. Galbraith gave to that question--that it reflects elite priorities in an industrial society, which are, above all, "growth," for which read profits, and have more confidence the "shock troops of capitalism" will deliver them than any arts types.1 More recently I considered the possibility that the explosion in the range and convenience of electronic, digital media was the key factor, bringing on a "post-scarcity" age in regard to word, and image, and sound, at the very time that readership collapsed--all as ours has been an age of scarcity in every other area.

Both these ideas still seem persuasive to me. Yet, reading Bullshit Jobs Graeber had me rethinking the matter yet again, not least the possibility that this may be another instance of that perverse tendency he identified in our economic stage at this curious stage in its development, its rewarding people in inverse relation to the actual value of their work to other people.

"But artists aren't useful people!" you protest?

Okay, perform this simple thought experiment, the next time you think of artists and the arts as somehow "unimportant"--a world without them. For the moment, let us not concern with the fine arts and high culture that, it must be admitted, are enjoyed by a comparative few and think of what even the "cultureless" many have. Picture the aesthetic element removed from every article we use, from our consumer electronics to our cityscapes. Picture your life without every note of music you have ever heard, every film or TV show you have ever watched, every video game you have ever played.

Would you not feel that your life has been impoverished, perhaps gravely so? So much so as to diminish the value of the technological achievements of which we make so much? Those worshipping at the Church of Apple foam at the mouth and reach for their torches and pitchforks if someone tells them their iPhone is not the telos of five billion years of evolution, but would people value their phones so much without the content they access through them--content created overwhelmingly by artists?

Does the existence of corporate law as such mean as much to you as what would have just been lost?

1.Anyone not taken in by the silly Edisonade propaganda and the idiot cult of the tech billionaires so beloved of the libertarian/neoliberal right (Atari Democrats as well as Reagan Republicans) knows that in real life the vast majority of working engineers and researchers are poorly treated. However, when that is how "late capitalism" treats what it supposedly regards as its most precious workers, one can well imagine how much more shabbily it treats artists.

Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road--The First Great Novel About Bullshit Jobs?

Time and again I have been struck by the absence of fiction in any medium--print literature, film, television, anything--which even makes a serious attempt to depict work. People have jobs, we hear about them incessantly, but where what they do is concerned, we either get glamorized, sensationalized nonsense (as with the cops, lawyers and doctors that a visitor from another planet might think are ninety-five percent of the work force), or nothing at all.

Some respond by saying that the reality of work is simply not entertaining. We get legal dramas where lawyers' work seems to consist entirely of dramatic courtroom speeches and confrontations in high-profile murder cases because what lawyers really do is just not all that interesting. I do not dispute that this is at least partly the case. But I think it falls far, far short of a complete answer. After all, even if writers might not necessarily write whole works about that reality, there would be some acknowledgment, here and there, in the occasional popular work, something more in those films which are fewer than they used to be but which still get made that aspire to art.

One explanation to which I have long inclined is the view that the avoidance of work is a matter of those who write the novels and films and television shows simply do not know very much about the world of work as the vast majority of people experience it, with Hollywood an obvious case.As David Graeber remarks in his book Bullshit Jobs,

Look at a list of the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays and you are likely to find barely a single one that can't boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree. The film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste.

Take, for an example, Joss Whedon-- hailed the world's "first third-generation television writer" a generation ago. Only a slightly more extreme version of the culture industry as a whole, virtually monopolized by the "liberal" elite of the coastal big cities, it is inconceivable that this kind of thing cannot have consequences for their frame of reference.

However, some fiction indicates that the problem isn't that writers don't know (even if this surely goes for a good many of them), but that there isn't so very much for the writers or anyone else to know--because (even if this is admittedly worth knowing in itself) work has substantially become a matter of bullshit jobs, not least the sort of bullshit job in which the apparently gainfully employed person does little to no work, to little to no useful end. There are not many such works, but they do exist, with the single most striking example in my mind Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, which contains a scene reminiscent of the cocktail party anecdotes with which Graeber begins his book. John Givings (Michael Shannon, to those of you who only saw the movie), visiting with the couple living next door to his parents, the Wheelers, asksFrank Wheeler (Leonardo diCaprio) about his work at Knox Business Machines--"Whaddaya do you there? You design the machines, or make them, or sell them, or repair them, or what?"

Frank lamely responds

"Sort of help sell them, I guess. I don't really have much to do with the machines themselves; I work in the office. Actually, it's sort of a stupid job. I mean there's nothing--you know, nothing interesting about it, or anything."

And from what we see of Wheeler at his actual workplace, his description of his duties in the company's "Sales Promotion" department ("where nobody worked very hard except old Bandy") seems accurate enough. He and his colleagues come into work and then do not do very much but take up space in the office, drink and attempt affairs on their lunch hour, and sometimes cover for their colleagues' more extreme dysfunction, like Jack Ordway, representative of what happens to those who have been here too long, moving "from one glass cubicle to another," his career "distinguished by an almost flawless lack of work," and, save for those days "when a really bad hangover laid him low," walking around the office, charming others and making them laugh. Still short of that point, Frank nonetheless suffers from vague but severe discontents that threaten to tear him and his wife and his family apart, leading to a half-baked plan to relocate to Paris, and in the end domestic disaster.

The outcome is extreme, but far from inconceivable, and overall Yates' novel so powerfully dramatizes the dynamics Graeber's book discusses that I think it merits recognition as the first great novel first great novel about work in an age of bullshit jobs.

Moreover, it would seem that its accomplishment exerted an influence even before the novel was rescued from obscurity by Sam Mendes' film adaptation. While little read in the half century between its original publication and the screen version, those who did pay attention to it seem, disproportionately, to have been writers, while Yates had an interesting personal connection to one of the bigger (and more work-inclined) pop cultural phenomena of our time, Seinfeld. The show's cocreator, Larry David, dated Yates' daughter Monica for a time, and even wrote a Yates-like figure into the early episode "The Jacket."

Looking back, I am struck time and again by George Costanza's experience of work--how much of the time he does nothing, how he is constantly befuddled regarding his bosses' expectations of him. In "The Barber," after taking that job from Mr. Tuttle, the mystery of the Penske file is opaque, the broader situation Kafkaesque. Later, working for the New York Yankees, George makes a point of looking annoyed so as to create the illusion that he is busy, and builds a shelf under his desk so that he can discretely take naps during the work day. I never took it all that seriously. But it strikes me that Seinfeld, perhaps thanks to Yates' influence, had at least something to say about bullshit jobs as well.

A Note on Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

In his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Richard Hofstadter pointed to four principal sources--business, organized religion, "Jacksonian democracy" and "progressive education."

It was easy enough to understand business, religion, and even Jacksonian democracy being listed, but I couldn't help wondering, why put progressive education on a level with them? Certainly no one would consider what he meant by progressive education (the Rousseau-Dewey tradition) as at all comparable in its effect as those other forces even on education, let alone American life.

A significant clue lay in the ideological characterization of these four forces. Hofstadter identified two of those forces with the right--business and religion--and two others with the left--Jacksonian democracy and progressive education. Such an identification seems to me awkward. Others (myself included) read Jacksonian democracy as right-wing populism, not the other kind. Additionally the progressive education of Hofstadter's time was not without conservative roots--not least, in its accommodating students' expectations with regard to career to an economic system which cannot give everyone "the good job."

The strain involved in putting progressive education into this grouping as if it were somehow equivalent to the others, the problematic characterization of these four forces, gives me the impression that in line with the liberal centrism toward which he was tending by this time Hofstadter wished to create an image of ideological balance. He ended up with a false balance, as the centrist version of balance so often tends to be, obscuring the reality that anti-intellectualism, at least where it has counted, has overwhelmingly come from the right.

Review: Armada, by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline followed up the success of Ready Player One with Armada, in which he clearly meant to produce another work of the same kind without too ostentatiously repeating himself. And so once more we receive a young adult novel about an IRL loser who goes on a virtual action-adventure that might change everything for him, and everyone else, drenched in '80s geek culture nostalgia-flavored pop cultural references (often, the same references), our hero's useless knowledge about which actually proves helpful to him and the rest of the good guys.

Still, he takes considerable pains to differentiate the assembly of those elements. Instead of an ill-treated, impoverished orphan in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, the protagonist, Zack Lightman, is a present-day suburban kid raised by a loving mother who, despite being a single parent working as a nurse, and cut off from her own family, is well enough off that he doesn't have to worry about paying for college; while he identifies closely with his deceased father, the mystery of whose death obsesses him, and proves central to the story's course.1 (It seems that dad might have been onto something, just before he lost him . . .) Zack is also not the overweight, virginal social outcast of the first book. He has real-life friends, and has even had a girlfriend with whom he has been intimate. (No wondering if doing it with a robot counts as a first time, here.) Instead of a struggle of the little guy against corporate power it is humanity vs. the aliens, and rather than a scavenger hunt across a virtual world, he, and all of us, prove to have been fighting in the real world all along.

As one might guess from what has been changed, and how it has been changed, and the fact that Armada appeared in 2015 rather than 2011, Armada is the product of what, at least to go by what one saw in the mainstream, was a more complacent time, with the recession declared officially over, and the public shrugging off the energy shock--and a complacent book.2 Discovering what was really going on Zack thinks to himself that humanity's seeming disregard for all its grave environmental problems--the exhaustion of the fossil fuel supplies, the wrecking of the climate and the rest--was not self-destructiveness after all, but the necessary price of a grand plan to meet an alien menace, and considering it declares that it "filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species." (I repeat: forty years of neoliberal-neoconservative-postmodernist disaster and all the grief and despair they have wrought were really just us getting those nasty aliens right where we wanted them!3 The irresponsibility of making such a claim at a moment like this cannot be overstated.)

As one might guess from all this, too, it is also a less original work, with the premise making for a less fluid integration of pop cultural homage and action-adventure. Ready Player One's mix of nostalgia and adventure was rooted in the reality that its quest was a monument to its maker's obsessions. There is an extent to which such nostalgia is connected with the mystery of his father's passing, and what he became part of, but this is not a puzzle the hero puts together significantly, but rather a collection of clues that remain as just clues until others reveal the truth to him, and which become quickly overshadowed by that other, far bigger mystery--"Just what do the aliens want?" In all that it seems less evocative of its pop cultural references than derivative of them (not least, Wargames and The Last Starfighter), while the freighting of the dialogue with generally more obvious references making it sound like a geekier version of the writing for Gilmore Girls, and no less grating (at perhaps its most painful in the first meeting of Zack and Alex).

Alas, even on an action-adventure level it did not quite equal the first. While Armada's space battles are consistently well-written, fast-paced, dense, coherent, the elements of them seem generic rather than evocative, nothing coming close to the wacky extravagance of the climax of Ready Player One; or its intensity, the more so because of the enemy's facelessness, and the point made early on that it was not all as it seemed, which made it clear to me that this was not really going to be settled by fighting. Indeed, reading the battle comprising the last quarter of the book I was simply impatient for the story to get on with the explanation of what that was instead.

Ultimately the answers Zack gets raise still more questions, opening the door to a sequel. A story that followed Zack's pursuit of their answers has its potential, but I suspect that making it really work--making it ascend above the serviceable but generally generic book he produced this time around--will not be easily reconcilable with a desire to give the reader more Ready Player One. Perhaps it is for that reason that a direct sequel to his 2011 hit is reportedly what we can next expect from Cline.

1. Yes, the protagonist was named after the hero of Wargames, because apparently Cline didn't give us enough of it the last time, and yes, this is not wholly irrelevant given the decision that has to be made at the climax.
2. Alas, watching politics grow increasingly radicalized in the three years since, it is clearer than ever that the complacency was a luxury of the privileged and sheltered.
3. This aspect of the story was a reminder that, despite Ready Player One's post-energy shock, post-Great Recession angst and appeal to the masses against a corporate villain, it was not a sophisticated political critique, actually being quite conventional and conformist in many a respect, not least in the biography of James Halliday. In the early '80s fewer than a tenth of American households had personal computers. That the son of a machine operator and a waitress had one, and so many other of the day's electronic goodies, is not impossible, but certainly less common than one might think. That a kid from a blue collar Rust Belt family, while still far from the tech hubs of the day, without social connections or capital or even a high school education, managed to launch a gaming empire at that relatively late date (this is long past the moment when Gates and Jobs were getting their start), is little more than the fantasy of tech-entrepreneurship so beloved of libertarians and their fellow travelers pushed to its outermost limit--pure right-wing economic propaganda.

An Anorak's Thoughts On Ready Player One (Film Adaptation)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

As a bestselling pop culture-soaked and action-packed young adult sci-fi novel set in a safely near future on Earth, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One at first glance looks like obvious material for a Hollywood blockbuster. On closer inspection, however, one sees that it lends itself less easily to adaptation to a blockbuster movie than one might guess.

The book's looseness is certainly a factor, with its numerous incidents, the sometimes significant lapse of time between key events, and general sprawl. The way the book is written is still a greater factor in this. Narrated by the protagonist (Wade Watts), the story is substantially told rather than shown (as is so often the case when the first-person point-of-view is employed), not a minor point given the significance of the characters' back stories, and the world building. There is the associated fact that we spend so much time in Wade's head, sharing his considerable angst, and watching him work his way through the intricate puzzles--by way of which, we indirectly share OASIS creator James Halliday's own angst as well. All this is also bound up with two key traits of the book that make it problematic from the standpoint of content as well as form, its bleakness and its gleeful, almost Baroque geekiness of certain very distinct flavors--the challenges Watts having to overcome deeply based in '80s era geek culture.

The thick detailing of all this gives the story its emotional charge, and none of it translates easily to the screen, especially within the framework of a fast-paced action film (even one drawn out to a 140 minute length). Much of the content is not the sort of thing a major studio picture would convey even if it could. Bleakness did not stop the Hunger Games series from being one of the most successful franchises of all time, but the mass audience's appetite for dystopia is finite, and was already waning well before shooting started on this movie.

It is worth noting, too, that the Hunger Games saga offered a more grounded vision, rather lighter on the science fiction trappings, arguably easing much of the audience into absorption in the events on screen. (Indeed, this seems to me sufficiently the case that I used it as a reference point in discussing alienation effects in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry--or more precisely, discussing the minimization of such effects for the sake of dramatic interest.) The extent to which the book is utterly saturated with (often obscure) geek nostalgia, and how central the minutiae of that nostalgia is to the puzzles the hero spends so much of the book unraveling, is even less forgivable. Halliday was an anorak par excellence, with the quest he laid out for his successor itself an extreme realization of the geek fantasy of others' coming to share one's obsessions rather than treating one as an awkward bore because of them (and along with it, the fantasy of one's "useless" knowledge changing and even saving the world), and it is hard to picture a commercial film treating anything like that faithfully. It is harder still to picture a major film having the hero play through one retro video game after another, reenact one old classic of geek cinema after another--dramatizing to any extent the portion where Wade Watts has to act out the role of Zack Lightman in a Wargames simulation, completing the task by remembering every beat and line of the movie.

Naturally it is implausible that it could have been a purist's film, and indeed it was not. It seems predictable enough that the quest was scaled down to conveniently fit in a two hour movie, and the events of the narrative played out over days rather than months.

It is only slightly less predictable that the back story and world-building are also trimmed--in this case, to the minimum necessary for minimal coherence, with the inevitable voice-over confined to an expository beginning and the conclusion. The film downplays the bleakness of the scenario considerably in the process. The ruin of the world is only briefly and vaguely alluded to. The combination of energy scarcity, environmental collapse and economic crash, the Mad Max-ish condition of much of the country, are not mentioned at all. Our first glimpse of the Stacks, so vividly horrible in its poverty and ugliness and harrowing danger in the book, instead presents them in images so bright and vibrant and colorful it actually looks like a fun place to visit, even if one would not want to live there--and despite putting more images of graffiti-covered urban decay on the screen than any comparable film of this century, the film practically shrugs it off. Likewise the villainy of Innovative Online Industries, its ambitions for OASIS, its reduction of human beings to serfs; the resentment felt toward it and opposition engendered toward it; are treated slightly. (Even the more personal aspects of their anguish are downplayed, with the aunt Wade lives with made to seem less horrible, and the tensions of Halliday's home life when he was growing up in the '80s elided.)

The same goes for the geekiness. In the challenges Wade had to face the film emphasized grandiose action-adventure set pieces over puzzle-solving. In what remains of the mystery the film privileges a Citizen Kane-like pursuit of "Rosebud" (the characters actually use the term more than once in the film), which is, alas, Halliday's failed romance, over the pop cultural obsessions in which Halliday so immersed himself. All of this helps the film keep the pop cultural references easy, marginal to the mechanics of the quest, and usually both, while being less '80s geek oriented. (We get, for instance, a Saturday Night Fever-themed dance scene at one point, which is quite the divergence from the matter of the original.)

Ultimately the spareness with the information so abundant in the narrative, the strategic changes so critical to turning a cult book into a mass-appeal entertainment, took its toll not just on the book's sense of immersion in the virtual world of the OASIS, and the pop culture of a bygone time, but that more conventional matter, characterization. Simply put, Wade, Halliday and the rest are less troubled and less interesting figures. Art3mis' motivation is reduced to simple revenge for the destruction of her father (about which we know only because of a few lines), a less compelling motive than her original, grander aspirations, and less compelling, too, than the revenge narrative of the character who originally acted on such motives in the novel. For all the lush CGI the film does not quite do justice to the vastness and variety of the OASIS as conceived in the book, while the "real world" outside it seems insubstantial, along with the stakes in the competition--which, after the revision of the puzzles and the compression of the time frame, felt easier than it ought to have done.

The movie does improve as it goes on. At the climax the film becomes more faithful to the source material, not quite attaining the visually spectacular hyper-geekiness of the final battle, the movie version scaled down by comparison, but still very recognizable and about as satisfying as one might hope for from the Hollywood version. As one who enjoyed the book on its own terms this was some compensation. Still, while Ready Player One is considerably better than average as blockbusters go these days, not only proving fast and slick and visually flashy, but a bit more original and with a bit more sense of fun than most, it falls well short of matching the oddity and extravagance, the texture and tension, and the epic feel of the first, print, version of Wade's adventure.

Reading Ready Player One: A Few Thoughts

When Ernest Cline's Ready Player One first came out (2011) I was pretty much burned out on science fiction. (This was about the time when I put together the first edition of After the New Wave, thinking of it as an act of closure, which it really proved to be for a while.)

And even before I decided to take a break from it I was paying little attention to the young adult-oriented work that was getting so much press then, because my glances at it gave me the impression (accurate, I think) that it did not offer those things that most attracted me to science fiction--conceptual originality and audacity, elaborate world-building, political teeth. And as Cline's book got rather less media attention than, for example, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games saga (or even Veronica Roth's Divergent), it was easy for me to forget about it until the movie came out and got people talking about it again.

Yet, looking back it seems to me that Ready Player One is a quintessential piece of early twenty-first century fiction, because of the way it draws together so many of the prevailing tendencies of the period so far.

There is post-cyberpunk--by which I mean that what we have come to think of as cyberpunk tropes (extremes of wealth and poverty in a decaying society, super-corporations, exploding information technology) were presented without the ostentatiously avant garde narration and prose style once associated with the original, '80s-era cyberpunk fiction, making for a more straightforward and accessible (and for most of us, more appealing) narrative.

However, reflecting that it was 2011 and not 2003 or 1997, this particular post-cyberpunk work's bleakness is informed by the experience of the 2006-2008 energy crisis, the Great Recession, the element of apocalypse and dystopia so fashionable in those years; while similarly fashionable the protagonist is a young adult.

And of course, there is the sense of nostalgia, the density of pop cultural reference, that had so come to suffuse popular culture in general and science fiction in particular by that point, with in both cases an emphasis on the things of childhood in the '80s, and especially the geekier things of childhood, like video games.

There is even a nostalgic element in the centrality of virtual reality in Cline's world that those with short memories may find it difficult to appreciate today. In the '90s, after all, we were all promised that immersive virtual reality, and indeed immersive virtual reality as our primary manner of engagement with the Internet, was just around the corner, but then it wasn't, and when Cline wrote his book it still wasn't, instead looking like a flying car of the digital age, one of many. (Only years after, circa 2014, did VR seem to get its second wind, and even with the number of VR users in the U.S. expected to approach 40 million this year, it remains far from certain that the technology has truly arrived.)

Reading the book I found that where the pop cultural invocations had only a faint charge for me, or none at all, Cline's enthusiasm comes through, and it can be infectious. Cline's book, however, impressed me as more than just a reflection of the pop cultural and science fiction zeitgeist of the time. Some aspects of his future are fairly well thought-out, especially but not solely its VR technology. (Just what will happen to hotels in a world where no one travels, for example?) The book also impressed me with its sense of humor, containing as it did some laugh out loud funny bits. And after the mid-point I had to force myself to put it down when I needed to, something I haven't been able to say about a work of fiction in far too long.

Toby Young, Again

Initially I was surprised to find that Toby Young was a real person--in the sense of the film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People having been (loosely) based on the true story he recounted in his memoir and its sequel. I happened to read it, and found Young an amusing, even mildly interesting figure given his particular set of quirky experiences on the fringes of wealth and celebrity, and his candid discussion of the hungers that drove him, rare enough that it seemed worth note. (Who doesn't want a good time? Who doesn't know that a good time is mainly had by the rich in our profoundly unequal social order, and that for scrawny, nerdy-looking types like Young, getting rich and famous is pretty much only their shot at that? Being an intellectual--even to the slight degree to which he could claim that--doesn't mean one is without such desires.) His sociological eye was no match for his famous father's (indeed, he was surprisingly clueless on some points, not least just how extraordinarily privileged he has been), but that he had one at all seemed something.

Reading those works it was clear that Young had opted for a different path from his accomplished parents' extraordinary lives of public service and intellectual inquiry, favoring a crass, hedonistic individualism instead. At the end of How to Lose Friends, though, it seemed he had recognized that path's shallowness (as well as its futility for him) and moved on.

The years since have made it clear that he has not--and in a most unfortunate way. Instead of a life devoted to chasing wealth and glamour and sex, he continued his rebellion against mom and dad by endlessly and often viciously championing the most backward, reactionary politics around--attacking wheelchair ramps, mocking the appearances of the working-class kids who defy the odds to go to Oxbridge, championing eugenics--and like pampered idiots who have no idea how good they have it since the beginning of time, whining about how "You can't find good help these days," while being awfully smug about being "politically incorrect" in that way that has become so tiresomely standard for the pathetic yet utterly loathsome people who become alt-right trolls (and bullies in general).

"Debate Me!" Screamed the Troll

The Internet troll's demand that you "debate" them is a demand that you submit to trial at a moment of their choosing in a court where they are judge, jury and executioner as well as prosecutor; with only yourself for an advocate, no time or opportunity to prepare your case, and on Twitter, a 140 character limit to each and every statement for the defense.

Some debate, that.

Remember, friends--no one is obliged to stop everything they're doing and defend their opinions to an anonymous stranger at any and all times. This is all the more the case if the person called on to defend their opinions is a private individual unaccountable to the public, and absolutely the case when the person making the request shows every sign of doing so in bad faith.

The Laziness and Cynicism of "Subjectivity"

"It's subjective," people so often say.

Most of those who hear that word nod and grunt like Tim Taylor at Good Neighbor Wilson's utterance of Big Thinks from behind the fence.

But what does the word really mean?

Not what people think it does, usually.

Often what we're talking about is quite objective. (After all, those subjective feelings are usually in relation to some concrete thing, place, person, incident.) But we cannot explain what we want to convey in a satisfactory way.

Sometimes this is a matter of simply not having thought the matter through properly.

This may be because doing so simply does exceed our capabilities. In which case not so much can be done about it (at least, by the person so frustrated).

But often it is a matter of being too lazy to try and think the matter through.

Other times we say "It's subjective" because we have thought things out--and we know that we don't really have an argument, we're really being unfair and we know that we'll come off badly when we try to explain our untenable position, but damn it, we want what we want, and we're willing to play dirty to get it.

When something is really important, be very careful of people who try to fob you off with "It's subjective."

On the Word "Entitlement"
4/13/19
Understanding the Word "Cool"
5/4/17
On The Word "Deserve"
10/21/12
On the Word "Lifestyle": A Postscript
5/18/12
On the Word "Lifestyle"
11/19/11

Review: Greenhouse Summer, by Norman Spinrad

The climate crisis has become the subject of rather a large body of science fiction over the years. Where that body of work is concerned it seems to me that Norman Spinrad's contributions to it, rarely mentioned, are unjustly overlooked; that he was ahead of the curve in addressing the matter when he did, and even decades later, far more successful in doing so than many of the attempts seen since then. Entering some of his prior works in a minor though not uninsightful way (like 1991's Russian Spring), before the turn of the century he devoted a full novel to the theme, Greenhouse Summer (1999).

Reading the book I was less satisfied with it than Russian Spring overall, its patches of brilliance marred by creakier portions (like its treatment of computer technology, and the thematically appropriate but dramatically flat conclusion to the central intrigue). However, by and large it gets the nuances right. Spinrad gets, for example, that the phenomenon will be experienced differently in different regions, generally as a disaster though not always so (we have the equatorial "Lands of the Lost," but also "Siberia the Golden"); that climate change has no clear end point, so that an already damaged world might have to face worse still in the absence of radical, remedial action, with much the same uncertainty and political wrangling we do now (his characters confronting the complete, life-eradicating catastrophe of "Condition Venus"); and that this will surely have consequences for society, the structure of which will, in turn, determine the possibilities for facing the problem (the syndicalists have inherited the Earth in his scenario, and it seems to him that therein lies such hope as exists in it). From a more literary standpoint, Greenhouse Summer impressed me in that, while Spinrad did not shrink from the horror suffered by the worst-hit places, he managed to be colorful, even satirically humorous (not least, in the airship tour of the Lands of the Lost conducted by Colonel Qaddafi very, very displeased about having been cheated by tricky foreigners during the construction of the Great Man-Made River, or its Paris reinvented as New Orleans). Indeed, when I reviewed Gordon Van Der Gelder's original anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse some years ago, and more recently, the "solarpunk" anthology Glass and Gardens, I found much to like, but was confirmed time and again in the sense that such virtues, on such display in Spinrad's book, were all too rare in their stories, and in climate fiction generally.

The Cowardice of Consumer-Bashing; or, Neoliberal Environmentalism

The environmental movement has taken numerous forms, and indeed, just about every conceivable form with regard to ideology, so much so that one must be careful in generalizing about it. But it seems safe to say that mainstream environmentalism, like mainstream everything else today, emerged in the neoliberal era, and accommodated itself to that era. Despite the unavoidable clash between the demands of environmentalism and the prerogatives of capitalism (not least, the impossibility of infinite economic expansion on the basis of a finite resource stock), it has been neurotic about appearing even mildly critical of the socioeconomic system, let alone engaging in radical critique and proposing large solutions to large problems.

Instead it has preferred to couch its criticism of society's thrust in terms of a vague "we"--as in "We failed to heed the warnings," or "We went on with our wasteful ways"--that blurs together all of humanity, drawing no distinction between the chief executive officers of ExxonMobil and BP, and starving children in the Sahel. This explicitly asserts the "sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" that "we all possess equal powers to make history," making them accessories, often quite knowing accessories, to the irresponsibility of those who actually hold the levers of power.1 Only the most obtuse, ill-informed or shamelessly dishonest can claim that the key political decisions regarding energy and climate, for example, were made by the public, or even represented it--when these institutions went to such great lengths to lie to the public, to confuse and distract it, to combat even the principle of its having a say (what neoliberalism, after all, has been about in the end), and then when that public voted for sane policies, overrode it. (In 2008 Americans voted for a President who promised an end to fossil fuel subsidies, cap-and-trade, a Green Jobs Corps. Instead they got the "all-of-the-above" energy policy that put into practice his opponent's running mate's cry of "Drill, baby, drill!")

Indeed, where it has been more targeted in its criticisms, environmentalism has emphasized the subjective and individual--looking away from the fact that over seventy percent of greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the operations of just one hundred corporations, thinking about which not only takes us far closer to the root of the problem given those corporations' practical control over what gets made and how, but because of their size, organization and resources generally are better able than anyone else to change all that, and in the small number of organizations involved an excellent focus for thought and action about solutions; in preference for talking up the carbon footprint of seven billion individuals. It is, they make very clear, incumbent on the individual consumer to sacrifice by choosing carefully, paying more--rather than incumbent on the manufacturer to provide the greenest products available at any given price (and the thought of regulation to that end, anathema), ignoring the realities of power, and equity. The consumer has already lost a major option when, the political system having failed them by refusing to provide adequate public transport, they are forced to buy a car and drive many, many miles in it just to have a job. When buying that car they are restricted to buying what they can afford from the models that an oligopolistic car industry is prepared to market--something it has done in line with its preference for selling not just old-fashioned gas-burners, but more vehicle per customer. But it is the consumer that it lambastes.

In it all one can see a retreat of environmentalism into an austere, misanthropic, religiosity which thunders against the consumer, "You have had it too good for too long!" (especially naked where it seems to positively gloat over the idea of civilization's crashing down and a Great Die-Off taking most of humanity with it and taking the rest back to the Dark Ages). The attack on the consumer, too, can appear a sort of compensation for their failure to influence the genuinely powerful--or shabbier still, their taking their frustrations out on those in no position to resist. It bespeaks real failure. Hopefully, rather than bespeaking it, it will admit it, abandon what has not worked, and think of what might--intellectual and moral courage rather than cowardice, in a readiness to admit that realizing its goals may make the ultra-rich unhappy, and a preparedness to think big. I, for one, am convinced that at this late stage, nothing less than a 100 percent-renewable-energy-and-large-scale-geoengineering moonshot can save us from catastrophe, and the sooner we see the obvious taken for granted, and properly acted upon, the better.

1. The words are from C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite.

Why I Am Sick of Hearing About Cowspiracies

It seems that today meat-eaters can hardly go a day without being subjected to a moral harangue about how their dietary preferences and nothing else is dooming the planet.

Anthropogenic climate change is an indisputable fact; so is the rapidity with which it has been unfolding; and the same goes for the necessity of serious action on it. Additionally, no reasonable person denies that meat production is a less efficient use of our resources than other forms of food production, or that it contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. Yet, the actual scale of meat production's contribution to the problem, and the range of options for redressing that contribution, are wide open to question. Where the oft-cited documentary Cowspiracy claims that this alone is responsible for over half of greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture altogether (of which meat-raising is but a component) is rated by the Environmental Protection Agency as responsible for under a tenth of the total.

Someone is clearly wrong here. But surprisingly few people seem to be taking the trouble to work out who it is, critical assessments that might establish the validity or invalidity of the Cowspiracy analysis strangely lacking--as a Google search, and still more a Google Scholar search, will demonstrate. It appears there are only a handful of pieces from comparatively marginal sources out there, underlining the fact that outright climate change deniers have infinitely more media access than those who question the allegations of "Cowspiracy."

The result is that the intellectual basis for the assertions of Cowspiracy seems far from firm--even as those haranguing the meat-eaters automatically go to the most extreme solution. Virtually no one claims that we must respond to the problem raised by the greenhouse gas emissions transportation generates by abolishing the movement of people and things. Few even suggest doing very much to rationalize our use of transportation, most promoting alternative technologies that would permit people to more or less go on living as they do (like the electrification of vehicle fleets). However, abolition is exactly what those placing the stress on meat production, without preamble, insist upon--apparently uninterested in the reality that not all meat production is equally problematic (a substantial difference existing between, for example, the environmental impact of chicken and beef); and not all methods of meat production are equally problematic, either (evidence existing for grass-fed beef as actually a possible offset to other emissions). Indeed, where one might expect that those who are most insistent on the destructive effects of meat production would be champions of investment in, for example, the cellular agriculture methods beginning to show real promise, just as they champion renewable energy, they do not speak of it at all.

It is a remarkably categorical attitude, which can easily give the skeptic the impression that vegans have simply found outsized claims about meat production's contribution to climate change a useful addition to their list of arguments. That, perhaps, the fossil fuel industry that has fought so long, hard, dishonestly and successfully against curbs on its activity, or even the reduction of the colossal subsidies it enjoys ($5 trillion a year, if one counts externalities!), finds it convenient to have the heat turned on someone else . . .

And of course, that all this is simply another case of, in typically bourgeois fashion, trivializing every aspect of economic life into a "lifestyle choice," and what is more, casting aside any regard for equity, as mainstream environmentalism has too often and too long done. This sort of argument tells the well-off that it is not their mansions and Hummers and jet travel that is the problem (implying that they can go on indulging in all this without guilt), but the beleaguered prole who at the end of the day finds a burger more tempting than the plate of beans they want to hand him (not incidentally, in a country where it is the "elites" who turn up their noses at red meat meating as gauche); these lower class types they regard as so backward and reactionary as to justify any callousness or contempt.1

Rather than turning the fight against the real issue of climate change (and contemporary agriculture's genuine contribution to it) into an attack on the dietary choices of have-nots, one ought to acknowledge that our food production (of which meat production is a big part, but even there, still not the totality) is one of many dimensions to the problem, while as in other areas of life, the emphasis should be on meeting people's needs (I must admit that I am not convinced that a vegan diet really is best for each and all through the entirety of their life spans) in sustainable ways. Even if one accepts the extravagant claims about meat production's contribution to climate change (and as yet, there seems to me much room for doubt), the imposition of veganism on seven billion people in response is a last resort, not Plan A.

1. For a discussion of this sensibility, see Owen Jones' interesting book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.

Review: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones

London: Verso, 2011, pp. 352.

As the rather charged and frankly offensive title of Owen Jones' book, Chavs, implies, his concern is with the recent social history of the British working class, and the ways in which that class has been depicted and understood by British society at large. In particular Jones concerns himself with the alleged disappearance of the "respectable" working class--the image of working class people as gainfully employed, law-abiding, functional contributors to the society in which they lived--and its replacement by the image of working class Britons as "chavs"--vulgar, bigoted, anti-social louts, apt to be drunk, violent, criminal.

In considering this transformation Jones, to his credit, gives due to quite concrete facts of social history, with the catastrophe of Thatcherism playing its part in the story--for the neoliberal turn she pioneered and each and every one of her successors continued to promulgate (not least the "New Labor" she regarded as her greatest achievement) did in a manner of speaking wipe out the old working class. The collapse of the British industrial base amid the worldwide Volcker recession and homegrown monetarism, and the privatization of the housing stock, and all that accompanied and followed them, eliminated the enterprises and institutions that provided the working class with both steady, remunerative work and the benefits of a community--the factories and coal mines, the labor unions that organized those who worked in them, the council estates. What remained in their place, casual, temp, ill-paid--and atomized--work in the "service" economy, and at the same time fantasies of soaring to the top in a world where celebrities and the like are richer and more exalted than they ever were before (for instance, becoming a soccer player like superstar "chav" David Beckham), was no substitute in either monetary or social terms. All of this did undeniable, considerable damage to that class's members individually and collectively, as many were turned from, one might say, proletarian to lumpenproletarian.

However, as Jones declares in his extensive overview of the treatment of this strata by the typically reactionary British media, the image of these people as chavs was pure neoliberal propaganda, the declaration that "We are all middle class now" promoting the illusion that the worthier element of the working class had "moved on up," leaving outside that class only the incorrigibles who had only themselves to blame for their misfortunes. Underscoring this was the lavish, sensationalized attention paid to the evidences of the dysfunction of the non-respectable working class that remained. Much of this was superficial--whining about their dress. ("What ever happened to working class men wearing suits and ties?" right-wing social critics whined.) Some of it was more serious. (The alleged propensity of the working class to neglect its children is an obvious example.)1

As always, it is comforting for the privileged to think that the comfort they enjoy is wholly and unimpeachably earned and deserved by them and not enjoyed at the expense of anyone else; that those who are not so privileged are, when one cannot shrug off their deprivation so easily, the authors of their own miseries. It is more comforting still to think of them as not contributing at all, but as parasites, scrounging off the taxes of "respectable people," dragging down the economy, while debasing the quality of urban life with their anti-social behavior--for one can still less make claims on behalf of a parasite than they can of people who merely made a muck of their own lives.

In line with all this it is comforting for them to make much of working class bigotry. Comforting to say that the more affluent--enlightened--segments of society are "post-racial," and that the only reason society as a whole may not be so is the lower orders. It is convenient, additional proof of the crudity and backwardness that condemns them to their place at the bottom of the heap, that adds to their discomfort with their obvious and severe dysfunction--while being yet another excuse for deflecting any claim on their behalf. That they think they should be living better--why, that is mere "entitlement," and a racist entitlement at that. Besides, when they so clearly have no empathy for others, why should anyone care about them?

Reading it all I found Jones' case to be as robust and lucid as it was depressing. And as tends to be the case with worthwhile books, it left me thinking a good deal about its implications--not least, how a shallow and sanctimonious and commonly hypocritical parody of anti-racism becomes an excuse for a vicious classism that, ironically, has worsened the problem of racism. Because when right-wing populists (read: fascists) court the votes of the working people abused and exploited, snubbed and insulted, by the mainstream parties of the liberal/left as well as the right, they can say, no, their appeal has nothing to do with our abandonment of working class people and their interests in favor of catering to the super-rich, and everything to do with their racism. So that it is only right and fair that we continue along the path of woke neoliberalism--which only worsens the problem in a vicious cycle. In that, it strikes me, Jones' book offers insight into much more than just Britain's working class at the time, but the trends in British life generally since then (e.g. Brexit), and the destructive ascendancy across the Western world and beyond.

1. Altogether reading the criticisms of this strata I got the impression that those who traffic in the "chav" stereotype simply took an exhaustive list of racist stereotypes about inner city African-Americans in the United States, scratched out whatever epithet the list maker used for African-American and wrote in "English working class" instead.