Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1546
Inherent skepticism of all theories, Marx and value creation, learning to write lower case, doubt about the motivations of the UKs new adult content law framers, Jane and infrastructuralism talk
Good morning good morning. Greetings from Somerville. Sitting in the three-season room, looking out onto the street. Long-time readers will remember I re-panelled this three-season room and made it very pretty. She is playing Cities:Skylines. Boy I wish Cities:Skylines 2 would hurry up and come to the Mac.
Got to go on my afternoon walk with my landlord and friend Sean yesterday. Almost every day when I am in town, we take a nice walk to either Porter or Davis Square in the afternoon to run errands. It is lovely. We went to Porter. I bought groceries. You can only buy a six-pack of soda at a time, though. Gotta walk home. Anyway, really one of the highlights of my life, these walks.
Almost got the sleep situation sorted. I am becoming an absolute stickler for having the exactly correct sleep situation on trips. I have replicated the mattress here, and the three very specific pillows, and that is all great. The light, the temperature, and the comforter are all almost but not quite correct, though. It is enough to sleep, but I notice it. I am the princess and the pea, lemme tell you. I think I managed 9 hours of sleep, on 10 hours of time. Still feel a little tired. Still some lingering exhaustion from that covid. Sean asked if I was up for some hang time at like 8:30 and I was like “yeah sorry I am passing out soon.” Hopefully tonight I can go the distance a bit more.
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So, I am reading my Marx, it is fine. He is wrestling right now with how value is created in capitalism, which, you know, no good answer. A popular answer in that time was just that “if two people trade it’s because it’s beneficial to both of them so it has to create value cuz if it didn’t, they wouldn’t do it,” which isn’t much more satisfying than Marx, who insists no wealth can be created through trading of stuff, only of money and stuff. Or something. It is interesting to me that none of these people consider theft, power, wealth accumulated before laws and capitalism, and relative value when you’re poor vs when you’re rich, but all that came later.
Anyway I am only bringing this up because this is the first book where I’ve really made use of the Kindle Scribe’s newish feature where you can write your notes right onto the page, instead of highlighting some text and attaching the note to the text highlight. This new method allows the notes to show up on the page, right next to the text you are making a note about. It is not perfect — when you’re done writing the note, it puts a rectangle around it and makes the text flow around the entire rectangle. So you can’t, like, do what you do with a normal book and write over the words, or confine the text to the margin. But it is pretty good, and I enjoy it a lot.
Furthermore, it is making me take stock of my handwriting, which, basically, I hate. Sometime around 8th grade I switched to all caps handwriting because of a drafting class. I liked it, felt easier to do. But as the years go by, it gets uglier and uglier, and it gets more and more indecipherable. So, as I was making copious notes in Marx (I have issues with it), I decided I would start trying to write all my notes in lower case. So my handwriting now looks positively unhinged, but it does look more legible. So, progress. Some letters are more difficult for me than others. Lower case d’s and b’s are very hard. D’s are much harder than b’s. Weirdly, p’s are not hard. I keep accidentally writing upper-case n’s.
I worry that some day I will be appreciated as the intellectual giant that I am and a literary historian will mine my Kindle annotations for insights into my thinking, discover my proto-lower-case Marx annotations and write a thesis about how it exhibits signs of mental illness or something. But I am brave and I am not going to let this very likely scenario stop me from trying to improve my handwriting.
Also, regarding my reading of Marx and his “theories:” Do any of you read or listen to every single god damned thing under the sun and immediately try and find scenarios, situations that undermine the theory? Always? Like he is like “one person who has a bunch of salt will only trade away the salt he does not need,” which sounds pretty unobjectionable, but my mind, when I’m readign it is like “but what about this scenario or this scenario or he needs that salt but he needs another thing more.” I cannot help myself. Is it driven by a fundamental obsession with scientific method and the whole approach of a theory exists to be disproven? Is it driven by cynicism? Ego? I don’t know if I am making sense here, but it occurred to me last night while reading Marx I am relentless like this and it is possible other people are not. Because, with Marx, at least, boy does it kill the whole thing.
Been thinking a lot about the UK’s new online ID law, basically a law saying if you have adult shit online, you have to make sure that kids can’t see it, so now you have this ridiculous situation where Wikipedia is carding people. The tradcore internet left is verklempt about it, despite the internet manifestly, obviously, having lead us to fascism instead of the Louis-Rosetto-promised digital utopia, they really are sticking to their guns how we should keep the thing free and open. And on the flipside, these people who keep making these laws seem congenitally committed to making them absolutely as terrible as possible.
People like my old friend Taylor Lorenz are shouting from the rooftops that this law is censorship and fascism and the worst thing ever and definitely belies malevolence.
Personally I do not ascribe malevolence to everyone who wants a safer internet. I do not necessarily debate Taylors position that the people actually making and passing these laws are malevolent, though, because boy are they making these laws shitty.
It does not seem like rocket science to me to make a law in the ostensible spirit of these laws that maintains adult freedom of internet access, and parental control of what their kids see. It’s indeed highly suspect that these people don’t make these laws well. You could easily make a law that accomplishes what these people say they want, while alleviating the concerns of the internet free speech junkies, or at least the more moderate, parentally concerned ones.
First: There would be no weasel words, overly broad bullshit like “adult” sites. You would list very specific topics and items, in absolutely explicit ways (queue the internet’s mockery of Tumblr’s “female-presenting nipples”).
Second: You would default all sites to being not censored. Every single site that got censored would have to be individually judged to be problematic.
Third: You would do this with a non-political panel of judges or commissioners or something, constituted to prevent it from falling along party lines. I am, of course, making the assumpition that the government can even do this anymore, which is not a given, considering the current situation with the FTC, the FED, the CFPB, etc. But we will put that aside for now. The point is, congress wouldn’t get to decide which sites fall under this, and sites would have to be impartially judged to fall under this. The default is no censorship.
Fourth: There would be an appeals process.
Fifth: Congress could override the findings of the court/committee, but only in the direction of removing restrictions, not applying them.
The analogies are things like the FCC, like the CFIUS, like the way the EU endeavors to identify large-structurally-significant internet platforms in the DMA (with the addition of courts and default-to-no).
This is not hard! I think most Americans would support a law like this.
And, to Taylor’s point, I strongly suspect that in England — and the efforts absolutely, definitely coming to America courtesy of MAGA — are crappily written precisely because they are not intended to do what they claim. These are, almost certainly, bad faith laws.
Today at breakfast Jane and I sat out on the patio at the Ukrainian place and watched the commuters go by. I explained to her how to tell when someone was walking or biking to work (backpack, decent clothes) or getting a morning run in. We talked about commuter rail trains and reverse commuting and how commuter rail trains are not great for reverse commuting or weekend jaunts. We talked about speed bumps and traffic calming measures. It was great. My little infrastructuralist. This is the shit I signed up for with parenting. Pedantic conversations about commuter rail finances. Fantastic.
Shoegaze playlist for you this morning, all new stuff. New Steve Queralt (of Ride) is awesome. New Warlocks single very very promising, excited about the new album. New Rocket a big step forward for them. Very into this Molly band, know nothing about them.
Until tomorrow, find literary friend.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.