The Things My Hands Do

sweep and wash the floors
scrub the tracks for the shower doors and the sliding door to the back, scrub the doorframes, scrub the shower doors
scrub the toilets, the bath, the shower stall, scrub the counters, clean the hairbrushes and combs, clean the mirrors
clean the stove, bleach the sinks
put and take dishes into and out of the dishwasher, put them away
put and do and take and fold the washing
clean the doors and doorknobs
clean the window gutters
sweep the stairs
rake the front garden, water and weed the front and back, water the inside plants
take the rubbish down to the bins, take the bins out and bring them in
clean the kitty litter, buy and haul the kitty litter, cleaner, bleach
vacuum inside, vacuum the car, empty the vacuum cleaner, recharge it and put it back together
clean the keyboards and screens and mice
handle the mail and the banking, the endless tracking of small sums of money

they do this as though Trump isn’t raving, as though the ice-shelves aren’t breaking

On the nightstand

dreams of integrity

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

The Third Man

Last weekend I watched The Third Man – had never seen it, had always put it on when I was really too tired to watch anything. Wish that image of Orson Welles (small tower of black) walking into the bright sterility of bombed out buildings and a Ferris wheel had been in my mind much earlier. It would have explained the Millennium Wheel outside the Houses of Parliament so well.

(It’s not the wheel: it’s the 800 years of slowly successful struggle against the divine right of kleptocracy that lie in ruins behind it.)

We Can Be Heroes

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through a new book at my local County Facility, a history/memoir of the Vietnam War. One photo drew me: black and white, the author in uniform, standing next to his wife, with his baby daughter in his arms. They were in 3/4 view, a nice column of light falling down the figures, profiles, baby blanket, uniform jacket, beret, knife-edged trouser-crease - It was a semi-relaxed, semi-formal portrait of a soldier about to leave for war.

And it struck me then, that this is the story. Not the war and what happens there, the battles, wounds, deaths, wreckage, survival. That is the aftermath. The story is this: a man leaves the company of women and children to enter the company of men. Only then is he able to be a man. Only then is he able to find or create or be part of a story. Only men have stories. Women and children don't have stories.

(And that's why The God of Small Things was such a massively popular book. It resonated particularly with women and children. They loved it. Among other things, for me, it reminded me of the hard work of being a child; how hard it was to learn buttons and buttonholes, work cardigan sleeves over the long sleeves of a blouse, not lose the bus-fare in my pocket while I was running around at lunchtime, playing chasey.)

By chance the Faithful Dinner Companion and I were catching up with Season 1 of True Detective (DVDs from our local County Facility) a few weeks ago. And there was the same story: 2 detectives, reluctant partners, over many years & through many vicissitudes, solve the case and come to accept each other's fundamental humanity. Both get divorced during the course of events.

We are inveterate watchers of bonus material, the Faithful and I, and so we heard the writer describe the detectives as heroes, flawed human beings, certainly, but heroes.

It seems I keep having to be reminded of the tenets of patriarchy. It's like trying to see the air itself, they so surround us. The hero narrative depends on taking men out of the company of the women and children, separating them from themselves and each other and then, in the current orthodoxy, having them overcome vicissitudes to re-recognize brotherhood, if not wider community. 

Considering the way increasing numbers of the poor and dispossessed have battle to survive, we should completely rejig the notion of heroism.

In fact, we should junk the current hero-narrative. It is a form of self-aggrandizement; it enables the self-deception which allows those in power - who have power or who take it - to act as they please in relation to everything outside themselves.

Living in Fifth Century Gaul

And so, finally, to the post imperial, post democratic United States. I have been struck for years by the resemblance of the current United States to the western Roman Empire of the 5th century.

There have been many causes going back many years: the 1973 oil embargo, the Vietnam War and the death of the War on Poverty, the desegregation movement and other rights movements which produced counter-revolutions. By themselves these things may not have created an epochal divide. Reaganism was the quickener. For thirty or forty years after Nixon, in the world at large, the socioeconomic landscape was changed by invasion, the drug trade (greatly expanded during and after the Vietnam War) de-industrialization, Friedmanite economics, judicial and military coups, and disaster capitalism.

Increasingly, since 2000, the general picture resembles Western Europe in the late 4th century:

"Curtains and masses of courtiers separated [Emperors] from the subjects: in public the rulers appeared almost as automata, stiff in robes and protocol... Within their palaces... they gave audience only to foreign ambassadors and important subjects; for advice they relied on a consistorium, consisting not of the freely chosen "friends" of unofficial standing of the Early Empire but mainly of executive officials. These in turn supervised an intricately ordered bureaucracy... which reached into the urban levels. From the praetorian prefects downward all "were inflamed with a boundless eagerness for riches, without consideration for justice of right," or as other writers put it bureaucrats sold "smoke," i.e., promise of assistance with the machinery of government which was not given in reality - heaping up their piles of gold while the Empire in the west went to pieces"- (1)

"[H]eaping up...pieces" is familiar to us as the revolving door - lawmakers passing bills lobbyists/industry groups have written in full expectation of lucrative employment within those industries when their stints in lawmaking/the Administration are over.

"The more the Empire tottered, the more evident became repression and terrorism. The concept of lèse majesté remained a potent tool to strike down opponents" - (2)

Lèse majesté (the surveillance state replacing the emperor) is one of the most savagely punished crimes we have: consider the punishment of whistle-blowers who inform us of the nature of what official secrecy hides (e.g., Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange), or the sheer extent of official snooping (Edward Snowden).

The opponents are not foreign governments with squads of hackers; the opponents are the domestic citizenry, who must be kept in their place, literally by means of militarized police forces equipped with weapons from the never-ending production of weapons for the never-ending wars abroad, or made to accept the new global order by means of increasingly complete economic insecurity.

As well as the "War on Terror" and the enlargement of the surveillance state, other broad societal programs of repression are steady features of everyday life:

The war on drugs and its disproportionate application to people of colour;

The war on public education prosecuted at the elementary and high school level by means of decreased education budgets, unfunded mandates, severe inequality between schools in well-off districts and the rest, and the overall demonization of the system presented as the Charter School movement; prosecuted at the college level over the last 20 years by means of grotesquely increased price of tuition,associated crippling, often lifelong, debt, and now by such budget cuts as will reduce faculty and increase tuition costs even further;

The war on unions conducted since Reagan used the U.S. Army to break the PATCO strike in 1981: the demonization of public servants as members of the only large unions left; the destruction of the Post Office (begun by Nixon) and consequently, of the Letter Carriers Union; resistance to unions by employers large and small, most notoriously by the most profitable or successful entities (e.g. Amazon and Walmart).

Enough repressions to withstand the comparison, then.

There are some further general developments to separate the late fourth century from the earlier fourth, and previous imperial centuries:

"The cities declined or disappeared, the aristocracy became independent of the imperial administration, and the Christian church adopted a very ambivalent attitude towards the state" - (3)

(If the whole Church has not become ambivalent about the State, certainly the Christian right agitates, sets out to obstruct, legislates and murders its least white-patriarchal, authoritarian components.)

The later destructions of the middle class are either further developments, or they are consonant with the textures and shapes of life we already experience.

The broadest political and economic remarks come from Tom Engelhardt's article picked up by Salon:

1 - 1% elections - where candidates belong to dynasties as often as not, and all seek the backing of billionaires months before they got before the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. Once elected, the candidate will enact programs to favour the same billionaries

2 - The privatization of the State - from Hillary Clinton's Gmail account and the outsourced electronic surveillance of virtually all electronic communication to the use of private corporations to supplement U.S. Armed forces (Blackwater the most well-known), the war on terror has brought unprecedented secrecy to the affairs of state, with all the corruption that guaranteed secrecy so temptingly offers

3 - The de-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency - the hamstringing of government by agreement (e.g.: the repeated debt ceiling crises; the letter from John Boehner and 47 Senators to the government of Iraq, undercutting foreign policy already in progress; the desultory debating of war authorization for military action against ISIS, while the war begins and continues without authorization), combined with the reduction of the Presidency to funding and knuckling under to the state's security apparatus

4 - The rise of the national security state as the fourth branch of government - its staggering growth and its equally staggering non-state agents; the Department of Homeland Security as a de facto second Defense Department; the use of drones, domestically, to monitor internal U.S. communications in conjunction with the CIA, which is now also breaking down the separation of analysts and spies (and so obliterates the long-crumbling border, this side of which the CIA might not actively operate)

5 - De-mobilization of the American people - the huge demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam eras have been made invisible even when they occur, as the media under-reports or fails to report them; widespread objection to the deployment of military force has been undercut and by the privatization of the military, on the one hand, and the end of the draft on the other - (4)

The privatizing of state security, the secretizing of ever more realms of illegally gathered data, the governmental obsession with weaponizing itself to the almost total abandonment of programs benefitting ordinary people (the repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicare, privatize Social security, the student loan racket, the actual reductions in funding the WIC, SNAP, and Headstart programs among the most notorious) are one aspect of the changing political and social landscape.

Culture Crash (5) describes the destruction of the intellectual middle class as the destruction of post-War cultural consensus. Timberg's arguments / observations / conclusions, chapter by chapter:

Introduction - Down We Go Together – 2008 crash + job losses, LA Times layoffs – changing shape of economy & society – creative class is not big tech

1 – When culture works – the necessary conditions for culture (artists need very little money to produce, except in times of high rents which you have to spend time earning the money for

2 – Disappearing clerks – knowledgeable disseminators of culture, book store, music store clerks – stores close, that cultural filter & educator is lost - Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Lethem

3 – Permatemps & content serfs – sessions musician have lost work which supported their original work – Kodak & Instagram – crowd funding at a tipping point – faster media making it more difficult for long-term projects (novel, string quartet) to pay for their own creation – the occasional success is publicized & hides the massive failure, artists not being able to continue, not being able to earn a middle class living in creative fields – state budgets for the arts down, corporate also – the point where recession turns into depression – NY's soundtrack & advertising jingle economy has collapsed b/c of sampling & digitizing

4 – Indie rock's endless road – a very few massive bands make most of the money – touring cannot pay; there's no time to write or recover – merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) cannot cover the costs – other job losses mean smaller audiences at live concerts – musicians get 6% of their earnings from records

5 – Architecture meltdown – starchitects and nothing else – middle class houses are no longer architect-designed, as they sometimes were – full time employment with intern wages – commercial building has slowed to almost nothing – young architects leaving the field – construction costs going down, fees are based on costs – rookie design work disappearing (full page illos in magazines, e.g.) – after “recession” magazines spend almost no money on illos or photography – public building also down – e.g. museums – exit recession not into a world of stability & health (architect's family has no medical insurance)

6 – Idle dreamers – demonization of artists, who mostly work hard & want middle class stability in order to go on working – artists have trouble getting paid – Nixon & Spiro Agnew demonizing “long-haired” artists / hippies (Vietnam) – Dan Quayle - "newsroom elites sneering at America" – news outlets devoted to celebrities – celebrity-industrial complex – rabid faux-populism – obsession with economics has destroyed all other considerations

7 – The end of print – plight of newspapers (scandals of inflated circulation figures & advertising charges not mentioned) – new media worst abuses of old economy: production speed-up, sweatshops, piecework, low or no wages, interns, while huge profits for the owners (e.g. Huffington Post) – loss of newspapers = loss of consensus news sources – the revolt against expertise – crooked politicians & fraudulent business executives favoured by collapse of investigative journalism – real magazines operate at a loss, go out of business or are funded by non-profits & foundations – television has erased the pre-television past, no historical perspective

8 – Self-inflicted wounds – semiotics & deconstruction have left academic discourse impenetrable, essentially privatized and increasingly irrelevant to life outside academe: how can value be asserted in such language? – non-championing of “English” has led to lack of a common language – Pauline Kael's influential anti-intellectualism (“the art-house audience,” “the atmosphere of incense burning” that greeted some foreign films) – Cage and Warhol thrilling but destroying consensus – liberal consensus attacked from both sides: collateral damage of New Right's anger & left's postmodern putsch. All trends come together in internet, Kael → flame wars, all opinion equally valid – market worship means no real criticism/critical dialogue – food has replaced art as a field of discussion and knowledge

9 – Lost in the supermarket: winner-take-all – the fabulous(ly wealthy) few, the many struggle or give up – e.g. CEO pay: how can some work be 10K times more efficient or valuable? – societal balances against winner-take-all effects have disappeared (monogamy, progressive taxation, public good, trust-busting, unions, child labour laws) – Star Wars and the blockbusterization of everything - (6)

10 – Epilogue: restoring the middle – how?

Apart from these factors undermining or destroying broad cultural consensus, Timberg also details the aiding and abetting of "the 'skyboxing' of America" by the effects of digital technology. Richard Esgow shows the effects of Silicon Valley's economic biases / assumptions / practices resulting in the further impoverishment of the already poor.

Esgow:

1 - Tech products become the byproducts of a money-making scheme rather than an end unto themselves - resulting in products which aren't so much "better mouse-traps" as hypable into near-monopoly / monopsony, from which position they can manipulate the market further, apply downward pressure to wages and suppliers, and freely engage in other abuses

2 - Even inspired leaders internalize a worldview which places profits over humane behaviour - e.g., the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses

3 - The culture encourages a solipsistic detachment from reality, even as its brute economic strength colonizes everything it touches - e.g., the effect of Silicon Valley's wages structure on San Francisco, as real estate prices rise the the city becomes more inhospitable to the poor

4 - The Valley gets fixated on lame...buzzwords which often come down to using tax loopholes to undercut other vendors/suppress suppliers' prices

5 - Silicon Valley’s culture...increasingly produces monopolies which "suppress wages, overcharge consumers, mistreat suppliers, and drive the economy increasingly off-course"

Buzzwords provide the verbal fog which enables 1 and 5 to sound vaguely compatible with equality of opportunity, democracy, social equity, or whatever other populist concern might raise its head; they function as social / cultural / conceptual anaesthesia; they are inherently deceptive.

Timberg identifies the bulwarks against the winner-take-all society the United States' had produced. Progressive taxation has become tax exemption for the corporations and the rich; trust-busting is a thing of the past; the public good is rarely mentioned (e.g. in the case of publicly-owned airwaves, or the necessary number of Federal meat-inspectors); unions are under attack (see above); child-labour laws are continually weakened by high rates of failure among minority school students...

And so we circle back to "the dissolution of the supports for the imperial order" which Starr examines in the collapse of fifth century western Europe.

" ... [T]hree vital supports for imperial unity - the position of the emperor, the central administration, and the army - had vanished; the cities were much weakened and destroyed; the aristocracy had greatly changed its way of life [retreating to country estates]" - (7)

I think we have crossed a similar epochal divide, that we are now outside the old American hegemony and outside the old America.

(If you find arguments from the ragged remains of ancient evidence - digs and pot-sherds and chance-preserved documents - so much unsubstantiated fluff, too much subject to bias/whimsy/special pleading,  Peter Turchin's work shows population dynamics to be the underlying engine of these changes.)

Timberg mentions divorce many times in connection with the GFC-accelerated destruction of the cultural middle class. Economic stress often results in divorce. But Empires don't go gentle into that good night. Where's the blood in all this?

Here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .

Minorities, women, children, and the homeless are being raped, injured, jailed, and murdered into sub-serf status by militarized police and for-profit prisons, by voter ID laws and other state legislation intended to nullify Federal law.

Nor was it solely the government which exhibited barbaric brutality. The sophist Libanius, a proud partisan of ancient culture, believed in the crudest of magic and exulted at a famine in the city where his son died; Egyptian papyri attest that in the Nile valley men with official influence could physically assault the weak with impunity - (8)

Engelhardt doesn't know how to name the new reality. I first trained as a mediaevalist. If he doesn't know what to call it, I do.

---
(1) Starr, Chester G., The Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 476: a Study In Survival, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. 165.
(2) Starr, p. 166.
(3) Starr, p 167.
(4) See also Maddow, Rachel, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power, New York, Crown, 2012.
(5) Culture Crash: the Killing of the Creative Class, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015
(6) See also Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future? New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
(7) Starr, p. 176.
(8) Starr, p. 166

I am in favour of Wikileaks.

Thomas Jefferson imagined a democracy of yeoman farmers informed of the affairs of their state and government. A full elementary school education of the late C19th was designed, when you look at the tests, to enable a farmer or small business-owner (the stock and seed store, the hardware store) to converse and put a point of view equally well to his neighbour and his senator.

By the end of the first decade of the C21st, we have a governement operating in almost total secrecy, and journalism as sycophantic, self-interested and uninvestigative as Pravda. After 40 years of consolidation every newpaper is owned by a corporation totally dependent on the Federal goverment for its powers and profit: Fox News and the rest depend on broadcast licences controlled by the FCC (buy those Commissioners!); the other networks, owned by comglometates which are ultimately heavy weapons-systems manufacturers, utterly dependent on Pentagon contracts.

Such confluences of interest do not make for transparency; political donations and spin in return for money is too simple and compelling an equation in a culture where the quarterly profit-sheet is literally the most important thing on earth.

Most large corporations pay no income tax: the profits are in off-shore tax-havens. The electorate has to be kept in the dark about the spin, about the bank-government financial deals, about the significance of the congressman-senator/congressional aide / lobbyist revolving door and what it costs (health-care, education, infrastructure). Because the electorate pays for it all. And because it pays for it all, he electorate has to be told that the war, the privation, the lack of education, health-care, infrastructure, housing, retirement, pensions – are all for its own dire and immediate good; belt-tightening for the war on drugs, the war on terror, the children, the troops, the flag, freedom, the continuance of the American way in the greatest nation in history. There is no heavy engineering here except for weapons-manufacture – aerospace companies, helicopter gunships, smart bombs, stealth bombers, military space-shuttles. The bridges need repair? The States and Counties don’t have the money, even if the original engineering firms still exist. The too big to fail banks have that money, because Congress and a President gave it to them, against the will of the people, and another President surrounded by bankers goes on giving it to them.

Frontline reveals to us that our tax-dollars pay for baka bazi boys for the Afghanis we need on our side: sex-slavery and gang-rape of minors. Baka bazi’s been a Central Asian custom for at least two thousand years. Well, we are great respecters of custom, here: secret and undeclared war is a custom; dropping drone-bombs on wedding-parties is a custom; training the military and police for South American dictators is a custom; indefinite detention is a custom; rendition is a custom; torture is a custom; bailing out billionaire bankers is a custom; shooting and killing old women after breaking down their doors because the FBI had the wrong address for a drug-bust is a custom; arresting and killing people for driving while black or hispanic is a custom; death in custody is a custom; promoting the killer cop is a custom; generating homelessness through catastrophic illness is a custom; homelessness by fraudulent mortgage is a custom; death by denial of medical insurance and care is a custom.

The U.S. government has become an outrage against its own citizens and everybody else.

Wikileaks is an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, a perfect case of Yin and Yang.

The leakers are not spies. They have not sold secrets, in secret, to a foreign power. Bradley Manning is in jail. His target was the electorate, the people who pay and do not know what they are paying for, and how. The leakers are employees of the institutions they disclose from; in the military they are often from military families, brought up on the sacredness of the flag. If these are the people disgusted, in my book that adds up to the standard of “the reasonable person”.

Leakers are not spies; they are whistleblowers. Assange is not a spy; he’s a publisher. His target is the electorate. He’s absolutely correct in characterizing the U.S. government as a conspiracy. The essence of conspiracy is concealment. The only counter to that is publication.

The Gibbon and the Mirror

I saw a documentary once about the effects of western tourism on places environmentally unsuited to coping with it – specifically national parks in Africa. A hundred yards from the tourist hut, which was nicely constructed in the local style, was the smoking midden, which contained the remains of used tampax, metal food cans, broken kettles and mirrors. At the edge of the midden was one of the native gibbons with a fragment of mirror, changing the angle of the mirror, looking at his face edgewise, side-on, frontally, changing expression…

That's us. The world a non biodegradable midden, and ourselves watching mirrors, lenses, screens, our personae and reflections.