📡 – 2023-01-13
Each day we find new ways to stray further from god’s (presumably electric) light, and new ways to fuel the never-ending culture war by assigning a political valence to otherwise mundane objects and situations.
The Discourse dú Jour mid-this-week has been: on the 9th, a story in the LA Times appeared with the headline “U.S. safety agency to consider ban on gas stoves amid health fears”. The piece describes the well documented fact that gas ranges produce emissions and particulate matter which are potentially harmful to the people who live with them. The piece reports on the possibility of federal regulation to help ameliorate those harms. Various municipalities, including San Fransisco and New York City, have already passed bans on gas cook-tops in new buildings over a certain size. A rep from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is quoted:
“This is a hidden hazard,” Richard Trumka Jr., an agency commissioner, said in an interview. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
This particular tidbit seems to have been the proverbial spark in the metaphorically gas-filled room. Republican lawmakers reacted to knowledge that something might be hurting them and their constituents, and that the government might (possibly, eventually, absent alternatives) use its resources to mitigate that harm as you might expect, given their reactions to lead paint, asbestos, cigarettes, seat-belts and a global pandemic.
Glossing over an apparent misunderstanding concerning the temperature of one’s mitts in proximity to a lit gas range, this is peak twitterbrain nonsense. Matt Gaetz has Imagined A Guy, and immediately (not coincidentally, I’m sure) applied an anti-Gun Control slogan to what he Imagines The Guy will do: come to his house and forcibly install an induction stove-top. An idiotic back and forth ensued, resulting in the CPSC – which normally communicates exclusively in shitposts – issuing a statement saying they were not, in fact, coming for the gas stoves.
Perhaps Trumka’s statement could have been reported with more context; perhaps Trumka spoke out of turn. But either way, as is usually the case, the consternation served a transparent rhetorical purpose: to paint the rather quotidian, de rigueur operation of a government offering protection and guidance as some sort of insane transgression of one’s God Given and Founding Father Enshrined right to inhale CO2 globulets like a flame retardant Hungry, Hungry Hippo.
A familiar Culture War wedge followed: folks on “one side” adopt some item or practice as a symbol of pride in their political leanings. Folks on the “other side” adopt the opposite of that thing, a performance aimed at cementing membership to their own in-group. The cycle then repeats, with folks on the first “side” entrenching and becoming more forceful in their demonstrations, thus creating an even more effusive performance of the opposite alignment, followed by further and further escalations in kind until we (speculatively) have massive gas ranges installed in the back of raised, super-duty pickup trucks festooned with Punisher flags, and/or custom induction stove tops engraved to read IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE IN SCIENCE with a dock for a single tarot card and a warming plate for sage bundles.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson developed the idea of schismogenesis, which David Graeber and David Wengrow discuss at length in their tome The Dawn of Everything. They use schismogenesis – lit. the creation of division – as one answer to the question ‘Why are some civilizations the way they are?’ It turns out, sometimes because some other civilization was the opposite. Difference – sometimes, if not often, superficial difference – is manufactured to advertise, or assure, that we are not like them. Those differences become mutually reinforcing: they do it that way, so we do it this way, so they REALLY do it that way, so we really, REALLY do it this way… until any vaguely practical reasoning is forgotten, replaced by purely aesthetic posturing.
In our scenario, the right is good at corralling their supporters around these aesthetic positions and mobilizing that then gathered critical mass to consolidate, protect and increase their power. The left is good at … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯??? The Democrats, at least, love to appear righteous about knowing better, but as a political bloc they very plainly don’t believe in the power or responsibility of government to operationalize that knowledge in the face of even minor partisan challenge. So instead of substantive, practical, policy-level discussions (or even self-introspective, parliamentary meta-conversation) we usually just get juvenile dunks. You’d think in a disagreement about fire, there’d be at least a few good burns. Alas.
Anyway! Here’s some stuff I liked from the last couple weeks!
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The second Tujiko Noriko record – Blurred in My Mirror – was a revelation in college. There was something foundation-shaking for me about the delicacy of her compositions against their palette … cloudy, atmospheric, noisy, with a close-then-retreating voice. This one, officially out today, is no different – it’s delicate, its intense, it’s sort of an emotional roller coaster, though it is altogether rather quiet. Highly recommended.
If I said “ambient record made entirely of slowed down Celine Dione samples” - what would you think? Because I am saying that.
Water Damage takes an essential aspect of Swans approach – the heavy, hypnotic, considered repetition of passages – and commits fully to it. “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation” is their apparent motto, and they crush. The lineup is, in fact, made of some Swans members along with folks possessing other bona fides. This one has been on heavy rotation the last couple weeks.
This is all I have to say about this.
Debacle is one of my favorite record labels and its head man Sam has started an imprint called Yield, focused on more electronic works. Shall we call it techno? Electronica? I don’t know. We can try. Anyway, the first full release is in pre-order right now, but this single by Paurl Walsh (of Medina/Walsh fame) is fully out and … it rules (full disclosure: Sam sent me a free download of this, but with no expectation I’d say anything about it publicly; I’m fully planning on forking over dollars for Pocket Worlds). Really looking forward to what Sam does with Yield, and this is the ground floor, folks. Get on in.
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The Leftist Case for Warhammer 40,000
Sounds From the Depths of a Texas Oil Basin
https://hyperallergic.com/792407/sounds-from-the-depths-of-a-texas-oil-basin/Upon entering, viewers are immediately engulfed in the recorded sounds of the Permian Basin. According to Co-Lab’s executive director and curator, Sean Gaulager, the recordings have produced a range of responses in gallery-goers, from deep calm to extreme anxiety. One visitor found the noises so disturbing that she had to leave almost immediately. Certainly, the recordings speak to a sense of vastness, of something much greater than the span of a human life. In the press release Peters refers to the piece as a “tuning fork … resonating with the frequencies of an industrialized landscape.” He seems interested in not only the history of the Permian Basin, but also the more general ways in which people experience landscape in relation to time.
Vigilantes for views: The YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India
https://restofworld.org/2023/youtube-scam-call-vigilantes/“Although [the pranks] are harmless, it still shuts down their operations. That doesn’t hurt the employees nearly as much as it hurts the bosses,” said Bingham. “The bosses lose money, and at the end of the day, it exposes it to the whole world.”
Browning said that his goal is to humiliate the police. “If I continue to publish and embarrass [the authorities], maybe at some point there’ll be someone … who is prepared to take action,” he said.
Ghosh, the former MET Technologies worker who now lives in Dubai, said he finds Trilogy’s videos disturbing. “Not everyone is doing fraud over there. Some people are doing their own work, doing good work,” he said.
Vinyl Grows For The 17th Straight Year, Taylor Swift Breaks Modern Sales Record
https://www.stereogum.com/2210268/vinyl-grows-for-the-17th-straight-year-taylor-swift-breaks-modern-sales-record/news/In a funny bit of irony, the report also states that only half of fans buying records actually own a record player.
Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on COVID vaccine “consistent with the value”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/moderna-may-match-pfizers-400-price-hike-on-covid-vaccines-report-says/But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market—with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer's price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.
Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-musk-drove-more-than-a-million-people-to-mastodon-but-many-arent-sticking-aroundFor many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely.
“Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realised how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s hard. Maybe we won’t go there,’” she said.
“It’s like the people that said ‘I’m moving to Canada’ when Donald Trump was elected. They never actually moved to Canada.”
The political economy of digital profiteering: communication resource mobilization by anti-vaccination actors
https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqac043/6960639Contemporary communication requires both a supply of content and a digital information infrastructure. Modern campaigns of misinformation are especially dependent on that back-end infrastructure for tracking and targeting a sympathetic audience and generating revenue that can sustain the campaign financially—if not enable profiteering. However, little is known about the political economy of misinformation, particularly those campaigns spreading misleading or harmful content about public health guidelines and vaccination programs. To understand the political economy of health misinformation, we analyze the content and infrastructure networks of 59 groups involved in communicating misinformation about vaccination programs. With a unique collection of tracker and communication infrastructure data, we demonstrate how the political economy of misinformation depends on platform monetization infrastructures. We offer a theory of communication resource mobilization that advances understanding of the communicative context, organizational interactions, and political outcomes of misinformation production.
Becoming apart: Drag and the practice of immanent resistance in postsocialist Belgrade
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13675494221144468This article considers forms of drag in Belgrade that are critical of contemporary Serbian society and analyzes ways in which drag both participates in, and critically relates to, the postsocialist transitional socioeconomic environment, especially the creative industries. Becoming a part of the creative industries (re)produces drag, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects as consumers, while the ‘becoming apart’ of drag offers possible sites of resistance to the dominant cultural, social and economic model. As some performances – by the Ephemeral Confessions collective, Dajana Ho and Dragoslavia – are critical of both current forms of capitalism and of cis-hetero-patriarchal regimes of gender and sexuality, as well as of the ethno-nationalist narrative that has shaped the region of former Yugoslavia, analysis of the Belgrade drag scene results in a conceptualization of a critical practice that is immanent to what is being critiqued – immanent resistance.
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It’s AGDQ - here’s some runs I liked!
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As promised, it has been a LOT of Dwarf Fortress on the Steam Deck (with occasional breaks for a round or two replay of Stephen’s Sausage Roll, when I figured out I could also install that on the Deck).
My first fortress was going rather well for a considerable amount of time. I don’t remember exactly what year we were in, but we had dug pretty deep, spread out pretty far and I was sending Dwarves to various corners of the continent to grab various legendary artifacts. The Fortress had a particularly popular Inn / Tavern, which would often host a large contingent of Human travelers from the nearby settlement.
Things started to go south when the first Werecoyote showed up. He was dispatched quickly by one of the squads, but his remains weren’t ever cleaned up for some reason, and started to create a miasma. I don’t know if Werecoyote Miasma can cause other Dwarves to turn into Werecoyotes? But not soon after, we had four Dwarves turn, and wreak havok on the Fortress. The squads mobilized quickly, but four Coyotes vs two squads is tough, just for the fact the squads have to travel between fast moving aggressors. I probably should have quickly assigned additional Dwarves to defend the Fortress – or trained more squads before this point – but most of the other Dwarves were holed up in a Warren for safety.
Anyway, eventually the Werecoyotes were dispatched and we started picking up the pieces when a Two Headed Giant and his Harem showed up. Knowing this would be tough, I sent most Dwarves BACK to their warrens, sent both Squads topside to deal with the threat and locked the hatch to the Fortress.
It didn’t matter.
It was a complete bloodbath, and long story short: the Giant and his Harem got into the Fortress and went absolute ham. Even the human knights partying in the tavern tried to help, and were decimated. Just absolutely vanquished; pulverized. The concerted effort of all my military dwarves, the armed humans and - eventually - whatever Dwarf was willing to pick up a sword and fight got the Giant down to near death (bleeding profusely, guts hanging out, etc).
But alas, the one remaining Dwarf, a 106 year old ceramicist with with two wives and bad spatial awareness, was not up to finishing the job. Simply refused. And so, the Fortress Eternal Planets fell that day, after a great defense was mounted, and thwarted, by a Two Headed Giant and his multiple wives.
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I’ve spent the first part of the year putting the finishing touches on the most recent version of a long running, on-again-off-again project: a piece of software which programs the notoriously difficult-to-use Yamaha FB-01 synthesizer. It is nearly done, at which point I’ll make a beta version available to Patrons in case they … have? … or want to … buy? an FB-01? lol. Once it’s fully done, after a good bout of testing, I’ll make it available on Gumroad for a few bucks.
This has been a great experience. I started writing the program to stop myself from buying a Digitakt at the start of the pandemic, and have learned a lot about synthesis, programming, MIDI, and 1980s prosumer product design in the process, which has been endlessly frustrating (the sysex implementation on this machine is insane; the manuals have mistakes and mistranslations; etc), yet rewarding. At the end of this, I think I’ll feel confident I’ll have somewhat rehabilitated a notoriously vexing machine, and made it relatively useful in a way it is not currently, even with other programmers on the market.
Of course, I am already considering what synth comes after this one … perhaps the Xoxbox, for which – I don’t think – there exists a freely available, modern piece of cross-platform programming software?
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That’s all for now! Let me know what you liked, what you didn’t, what you wanna see more or less of. And if you liked more of it, more or less, maybe tell your pals about 📡 - Hope you’re having a good start to 2023! <3