House Democrats Hoping to Stifle Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Are Only Hurting Themselves

The 116th Congress has only been in session for a week, but some senior Democrats are already dismayed by one new kid on the block. In a Politico report published Friday, several members criticized Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the record – an unusual choice, especially when the target is a freshman who’s had little chance to establish herself as a lawmaker. “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” said Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.” Ocasio-Cortez has publicly criticized the party, often on Twitter, for what she sees as its entrenched centrism.

Politico went on to explain that senior Democrats are put off by more than Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account. Some Democratic representatives objected to a grassroots campaign to put the congresswoman on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and were affronted by her opposition to new House rules that include pay-as-you-go or PAYGO restrictions. PAYGO requires the House to match any new spending with proportional cuts, and critics generally consider it an obstacle to the welfare expansions that left-wing Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez are likely to favor.

Some conflict between Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, and senior Democrats, who are generally to her right, was inevitable. But the criticisms included in the Politico piece were not framed in ideological terms. “She needs to decide: Does she want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said one unnamed Democrat described as being “in lockstep with Ocasio-Cortez’s ideology.” They added, “There’s a difference between being an activist and a lawmaker in Congress.” Others worried that Ocasio-Cortez’s fame could cost the party seats. Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat from New York, said that she’d counseled the congresswoman against backing primary challenges to fellow Democrats in the future. Ocasio-Cortez’s own record – she ran as a primary challenger and supported similar bids from other left-wing insurgent – appears to concern them, as does her affiliation with Justice Democrats, which endorsed her and other insurgents in 2018.

It’s not clear from these criticisms that senior Democrats understand the reasons for Ocasio-Cortez’s run, or her victory over incumbent Joe Crowley. One party aide told Politico that people “are afraid of her” and her viral tweets, a sentiment that reduces the congresswoman to emotion and affect. But her stardom has discernible origins that counter such a simplistic depiction of her rise to power. Ocasio-Cortez’s popularity is tied to her ideology, which incorporates both her policies and her hostility to establishment politics. She is an insurgent, and that’s exactly why people like her.

by Sarah Jones, NY Magazine/Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Brendan Smialosky/AFP/Getty
[ed. See also: How AOC is Changing the Game (Current Affairs), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has more Twitter power than media, establishment (Axios).]

Lord Sundance

[ed. Sleazy weirdness from the 60s. For your pleasure...]

Charlie & Njc

Ivan Shishkin, Birch Grove
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[ed. Looks like a normal approach shot. Where's the green?]

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Remembering Clarence Wood, a Hunter in the Truest Sense of the Word

I heard about Clarence Wood passing the other day. I was sharpening my machete on my parents’ porch in Honaunau, Hawaii, of all places. Leaves were green overhead, birds singing and bugs buzzing, and chickens scratching under the steps, and it was tough to get my bearings in the sudden storm of memories swirling in my head. A lifetime of memories of my friend, a world away in the Arctic — but also a place that feels even further away: the past.

Nothing about the news was the way I wanted it to be. Clarence was in his 80s and has been in a lot of pain the last years, suffering, and this fall his house caught fire and burned; then a dog attacked him, and finally on Christmas Day, in an opioid stupor, he was terribly scalded and medevacked to Anchorage. No, no part of that was how I wanted to remember this man.

Instead, I traveled back to my first memories, along the Kobuk River in the 1960s — cold winters then, with folks hunkered down in small cabins and sod igloos, eating from their caches and sigluaqs, meat and fish and berries they had gathered earlier in the season. My family lived in the dimness of our tiny sod home, buried in the ground and drifted under snow, with mice and shrews for company, Kerosene lamps for light, caribou most meals, and the only surge of excitement in our day was if a human visitor appeared.

On those rare times that my brother and I spotted a dot moving on the ice — a dot that wasn’t an animal — we’d shout, “Travelers! Travelers coming!” That’s what folks called people who came off the country. When you’re alone for weeks or months almost nothing is a bigger deal than seeing another human out there on the land.

The traveler who showed up most often at our place there at the lower end of Paugnautaugruk was an Inupiaq hunter from Ambler, a man in his mid-30s, lanky and friendly, with cropped black hair and a handsome face already scarred by frostbite. The young man’s name was Clarence Wood.

My parents were new to the Kobuk then, and attempting to live some of the old ways: hunting and gathering food and furs, drying sinew to use for thread to sew skins into clothing, stuff like that. Life wasn’t like today; our connections to each other were shared stories, and memories — there was no electricity in the villages yet, no telephones, no TV, definitely no clicking on Amazon and, poof!, here comes your new ax or snowshoes. People lived by their own skills and few had jobs. Nearly everyone hunted, and back then Clarence was already a hunter that others talked about.

I wouldn’t say everyone liked him. He was young and relentless, constantly out on the land no matter the conditions, and maybe already a bit too successful at it. And he wasn’t from the upriver villages. He was prone to bragging, too.

His stories were plenty amazing, but he liked to improve them. And who can say, maybe he did get that wolverine with a screwdriver, and that swimming bull moose with his knife. After all, he could find his way across the Brooks Range in winter without a map, and certainly the wolves, bears and caribou he brought home grew to be beyond counting.

Times were changing fast. Dog teams were being replaced by the first snowmobiles — Snow-Travelers, we called them — and traversing this country back then was serious, at times deadly. Nearly everyone passing our place would stop in to warm up and visit and ask about the trail. Many a friend and stranger alike would spend the night on a caribou hide on the floor and get a fresh start in the morning. People didn’t rush like we do now. The one thing everyone had plenty of was time.

Over the years, Clarence spent countless nights on our floor, countless days on our bearskin couch, drinking coffee and telling stories, teasing us boys, watching my dad bend sled runners, waiting to see what my mom would pull out of the wood oven. He’d peer over his shoulder out our Visqueen window that flapped in the wind, checking the weather. He never appeared to be in a hurry but usually didn’t stay long. “Well,” he’d announce, put down his cup, and rise. “Thank you much!” Outside, he’d shoulder into his parka, big hands reaching in his pockets for cigarettes. I can still hear the clink of his metal lighter. And out he’d head, disappearing again into the land. (...)

Now, so many years later, it almost doesn’t matter which of a thousand stories I tell, or what season, what year, Clarence was usually there, or passing by, or had just left. In January 1970, when three men were murdered below our place, Clarence was the last one to see them OK before the crime. When Keith Jones’ sod igloo next to ours caught fire and burned — there was Clarence on the ice, the first to spot the flames. When that mail plane went down, midwinter, up at Plane Crash, Clarence somehow again was passing by and the first on the scene.

Even though Hunt River, the area where I grew up, was his favorite place, if you talked to villagers hundreds of miles away in Huslia, or in Anaktuvuk, or homesteaders up the Ambler River, or whalers up the coast in Point Hope, they’d say similar: Clarence Wood traveled there, too.

by Seth Kantner, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Nick Jans

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One More General for the ‘Self Licking Ice Cream Cone’

Before he became lionized as the “only adult in the room” capable of standing up to President Trump, General James Mattis was quite like any other brass scoping out a lucrative second career in the defense industry. And as with other military giants parlaying their four stars into a cushy boardroom chair or executive suite, he pushed and defended a sub-par product while on both sides of the revolving door. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that contract turned out to be an expensive fraud and a potential health hazard to the troops.

According to a recent report by the Project on Government Oversight, 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals retired to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for the defense industry between 2008 and 2018. They are part of a much larger group of 380 high-ranking government officials and congressional staff who shifted into the industry in that time.

To get a sense of the demand, according to POGO, which had to compile all of this information through Freedom of Information requests, there were 625 instances in 2018 alone in which the top 20 defense contractors (think Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin) hired senior DoD officials for high-paying jobs—90 percent of which could be described as “influence peddling.”

Back to Mattis. In 2012, while he was head of Central Command, the Marine General pressed the Army to procure and deploy blood testing equipment from a Silicon Valley company called Theranos. He communicated that he was having success with this effort directly to Theranos’s chief executive officer. Even though an Army health unit tried to terminate the contract due to its not meeting requirements, according to POGO, Mattis kept the pressure up. Luckily, it was never used on the battlefield.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise but upon retirement in 2013, Mattis asked a DoD counsel about the ethics guiding future employment with Theranos. They advised against it. So Mattis went to serve on its board instead for a $100,000 salary. Two years after Mattis quit to serve as Trump’s Pentagon chief in 2016, the two Theranos executives he worked with were indicted for “massive” fraud, perpetuating a “multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and patients,” and misrepresenting their product entirely. It was a fake.

But assuming this was Mattis’s only foray into the private sector would be naive. When he was tapped for defense secretary—just three years after he left the military—he was worth upwards of $10 million. In addition to his retirement pay, which was close to $15,000 a month at the time, he received $242,000 as a board member, plus as much as $1.2 million in stock options in General Dynamics, the Pentagon’s fourth largest contractor. He also disclosed payments from other corporate boards, speech honorariums—including $20,000 from defense heavyweight Northrop Grumman—and a whopping $410,000 from Stanford University’s public policy think tank the Hoover Institution for serving as a “distinguished visiting fellow.”

Never for a moment think that Mattis won’t land softly after he leaves Washington—if he leaves at all. Given his past record, he will likely follow a very long line, as illustrated by POGO’s explosive report, of DoD officials who have used their positions while inside the government to represent the biggest recipients of federal funding on the outside. They then join ex-congressional staffers and lawmakers on powerful committees who grease the skids on Capitol Hill. And then they go to work for the very companies they’ve helped, fleshing out a small army of executives, lobbyists, and board members with direct access to the power brokers with the purse strings back on the inside.

Welcome to the Swamp.

by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol/Wikimedia Commons/Department of State

[ed. Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone: a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself (Wikipedia).]

Hostile Waters

Hostile Waters (Seattle Times)

Part 1: Orcas thrive in a land to the north. Why are Puget Sound's dying?

Part 2: The orca and the orca catcher: How a generation of killer whales was taken from Puget Sound.

Part 3: FAQ: A primer on the critically endangered southern resident killer whales.

[ed. Heartbreaking.]

Off-Roading, Chopped Joshua Trees, Overflowing Toilets: Our National Parks During a Shutdown

I’m running this piece because the destruction of national parks during the shutdown is strong evidence of the decay in social capital. While history shows again and again that old farts bemoan the decline in morays of the young, it’s still disturbing to see large groups of people take advantage of a lack of supervision at national parks to trash them. If they can’t show some consideration in a context like this, how can we expect citizens to pull together when the Jackpot comes?

I remember watching the 2011 Steven Soderberg movie Contagion and finding it to be far too optimistic about how the public would react to a pandemic. Contagion has the US being put under quarantine for six months to prevent the spread of a deadly, high communicable disease. There’s no consideration whatsoever about how people are supposed to support themselves, as in pay their mortgage/rent, electricity and other bills, or how the many that need prescription drugs are supposed to get them (as in how are they to be produced and distributed if everyone but emergency workers are to stay at home). In other words, it was completely unrealistic about the ongoing human effort needed to provision society and clean up its garbage.

While the movie did show some signs of social breakdown, like looting, it also portrayed the government as effective in maintaining a great deal of order, like closing state borders. But it also depicted people lining up to get food rations and only some scuffles breaking out.

The US simply does not have remotely enough social cohesiveness to handle a six month quarantine and then a relaxation of it, including rationing of the vaccine as limited supplies were distributed. This country is full of guns. You’d see too many people doing as they saw fit in a time of breakdown. And that’s before questioning whether our government, which has significant outsourced activities, would have the managerial ability and operational capacity to respond effectively to a crisis of this order.

If Brexit crashes out at the end of March or after an extension, we’ll get a picture of how well governments cope with national emergencies after decades of neoliberalism and demonization of public service.

By Annelise McGough. Originally published at Grist

Ever wanted to cut down an iconic Joshua tree in order to create space for some off-roading? No? Well, we thank you. But during the government shutdown, some fine folks did just that.

National parks are filling with garbage, and not just the kind that comes in trash bags. Since the government shut down 20 days ago, Joshua Tree, which is about the size of Delaware and located two hours east of Los Angeles, has been forced to reduce its number of rangers from 100 to only eight. The lack of staff is making it difficult to keep up with the mayhem that is illegal off-roading and road creation, damage of federal property, overflowing garbage and toilets, out-of-bounds camping, and the chopping down of literal Joshua trees.

by Yves Smith/Annelise McGough, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: NPS via National Parks Traveler

Sidewalk Flowers

How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives  ~ Annie Dillard

JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith, Sidewalk Flowers

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[ed. See also: A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read and In Defense of Boredom: 200 Years of Ideas on the Virtues of Not-Doing and Attention, Multitasking, and the Habit of Mind That Sets Geniuses Apart (Brain Pickings).]

The Weight I Carry

I weigh 460 pounds.

Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will.

The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of 30 or more. My BMI is 60.7. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. I’m 6 foot 1, or 73 inches tall. My waist is 60 inches around. I’m nearly a sphere.

Those are the numbers. This is how it feels.

I’m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and don’t visit New York much, so I don’t have a feel for how subway cars move. I’m praying this one doesn’t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop, because I’m terrified of falling. Part of it is embarrassment. When a fat guy falls, it’s hard to get up. But what really scares me is the chance that I might land on somebody. I glance at the people wedged around me. None of them could take my weight. It would be an avalanche. Some of them stare at me, and I figure they’re thinking the same thing. An old woman is sitting three feet away. One slip and I’d crush her. I grip the pole harder.

My palms start to sweat, and all of a sudden I flash back to elementary school in Georgia, standing in the aisle on the school bus. The driver hollers at me to find a seat. He can’t take us home until everybody sits down. I’m the only one standing. Every time I spot an open space, somebody slides to the edge of the seat and covers it up. Nobody wants the fat boy mashed in next to them. I freeze, helpless. The driver glares at me in the rearview mirror. An older kid sitting in front of me—a redhead, freckles, I’ll never forget his face—has a cast on his right arm. He reaches back and starts clubbing me with it, below the waist, out of the driver’s line of sight. He catches me in the groin and it hurts, but not as much as the shame when the other kids laugh and the bus driver gets up and storms toward me—

and the train stops and jolts me back into now.

I peel my hands from the pole and get off. I climb the stairs to the street and step to the side to catch my breath. I’m wheezing like a 30-year smoker. My legs wobble from the climb. I’m meeting a friend near Central Park, at a place called the Brooklyn Diner. I’m 15 minutes early, on purpose, because I have to find a safe place to sit.

The night before, I had Googled Brooklyn Diner interior to get an idea of the layout. Now I scan the space like a gangster, looking for danger spots. The booths are too small—I can’t squeeze in. The barstools are bolted to the floor—they’re too close to the bar, and my ass would hang off the back. I check the tables, gauging the chairs. These look solid—the chair seems okay; yep, it’ll hold me up. For the first time in an hour, I take an untroubled breath.

My friend shows up on time. By then, I’ve scouted out the menu. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. A few bites and the shame fades. At least for a little while.

By any reasonable standard, I have won life’s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I’ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me—writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I’ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We’re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn’t swap with anyone.

Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long, naked look in the mirror.

My body is a car wreck. Skin tags—long, mole-like growths caused by chafing—dangle under my arms and down in my crotch. I have breasts where my chest ought to be. My belly is strafed with more stretch marks than a mother of five. My stomach hangs below my waist, giving me what the Urban Dictionary calls a “front butt”—as if some twisted Dr. Frankenstein grafted an extra rear end on the wrong side. Varicose veins bulge from my thighs. My calves and shins are rust-colored and shiny from a condition called chronic venous insufficiency. Here’s what it means: The veins in my legs aren’t strong enough to push all the blood back up toward my heart, so it pools in my capillaries and forces little dots of iron up under my skin. The veins are failing because of the pressure caused by 460 pounds pushing downward with every step I take. My body is crumbling under its own gravity.

Some days, when I see that disaster staring back, I get so mad that I pound my gut with my fists, as if I could beat the fat out of me. Other times, the sight sinks me into a blue fog that can ruin an hour or a morning or a day. But most of the time what I feel is sadness over how much life I’ve wasted. When I was a kid, I never climbed a tree or learned to swim. When I was in my 20s, I never took a girl home from a bar. Now I’m 50, and I’ve never hiked a mountain or ridden a skateboard or done a cartwheel. I’ve missed out on so many adventures, so many good times, because I was too fat to try. Sometimes, when I could’ve tried anyway, I didn’t have the courage. I’ve done a lot of things I’m proud of. But I’ve never believed I could do anything truly great, because I’ve failed so many times at the one crucial challenge in my life.

What the hell is wrong with me?

What the hell is wrong with us? As I write this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 79 million American adults—40 percent of women, and 35 percent of men—qualify as obese. The obesity rate among American children is 17 percent and climbing. Our collective waistline laps over every boundary: age, race, gender, politics, culture. In our fractured country, we all agree on one thing: second helpings.

As every fat person knows, there’s no such thing as a cheap buffet—you always pay later, one way or another. Fat America comes with a devastating bill. According to government estimates, Americans pay $147 billion a year in medical costs related to obesity. That’s roughly equal to the entire budget for the U.S. Army. But the money is just part of the cost. Every fat person, and every fat person’s family, pays with anger and heartache and pain. For every one of us who can’t shed the weight, there are spouses and parents and kids and friends who grieve. We carve lines in their faces. We sentence them to long years alone.

I know this from experience. I also feel it like a burning knife right now. Because my sister, Brenda Williams, died seven days ago, on Christmas Eve. (...)

Brenda was 63 and weighed well north of 200 pounds. Her feet swelled so much that she could hardly wear shoes. Her thighs cramped so bad, with so little warning, that she was afraid to drive. For years, she dealt with sores on her legs caused by the swelling. They leaked fluid and wouldn’t heal. In late December, one of the sores got infected. Brenda was tough, so by the time she admitted she was sick, she was in deep trouble. Ed took her to the emergency room in Jesup, Georgia, as Alix and I were heading to Tennessee to spend Christmas with Alix’s folks. My brother called at two in the morning on Christmas Eve and said that things were getting worse. We tried to sleep for a couple of hours, got up, and got on the road. The infection turned out to be MRSA. It spread so goddamn fast. We were somewhere outside Asheville when my brother sent a text: She’s gone.

The funeral was on my mom’s 82nd birthday. She cried tears from the bottom of the ocean. She lived next door to Brenda and Ed for almost 20 years—we moved her there after she retired. She spent so many nights telling stories around Brenda and Ed’s dining-room table. Now she won’t go back in their house. All she can see is the empty space where Brenda used to be. The infection was the official cause of Brenda’s death, but her weight killed her, sure as poison.

What happens when someone close to you dies? People bring food. (...)

Guys like us don’t make it to 60.

Some of us rot away from diabetes or blow out an artery from high blood pressure, but a heart attack is what I worry about most. My doctor likes to say that in a third of the cases of heart disease, the first symptom is death. Right now, my heart tests out fine. But I can hear it thumping in my temples, 80-some beats a minute even when I’m resting, and I know I make it work too hard. Sometimes, when it’s quiet in the house, I close my eyes and listen to it strain, praying that it won’t just stop like a needle lifted off a record. Every day I wonder if this is the day I might keel over in my office chair or at the bookstore or (God help me) at the wheel of my car. At 460 pounds, I’m lucky to have made it this far. It’s like holding 20 at the blackjack table and waving at the dealer for another card. Without a miracle, I’m bound to bust.

by Tommy Tomlinson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Courtesy Tommy Tomlinson

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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Opté Digital Skin Care

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[ed. Wow, wonder what that's going to cost? (probably $20, but cartridges: $299!). See also: Procter and Gamble’s Opte wand is like a real-life beauty filter for your skin (The Verge)]

Max Beckmann, The Prodigal Son

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Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Anders Petersen, Café Lehmitz
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404 Page Not Found

The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I was five years old. My father was with me; I remember him working his magic, getting the modem to hum its infamous atonal tune. The purpose of this journey was to see if the internet had any answers to my persistent questions about how railroad crossings worked. We opened a search engine, probably AltaVista, and quickly found a Geocities webpage devoted to railroad crossings from around the world. I still remember the site’s black textured background, its grainy, white serif typeface, and the blinking gifs of railroad crossings positioned on either side of a slightly off-center text header.

I’m a digital native, older than most. Because my father worked for the federal government, our household was an early adopter of the internet. As I grew up, so did it. When I was a child, for example, the internet was still indexable; you generally found websites through directories and webrings. Favorites meant something, because finding what you were looking for often took quite a bit of time. When search engines became the norm, around the time I was in elementary school, this analog directory hunting was replaced with the ubiquitous Google search. Which is to say I witnessed it all, and as a particularly lonely child, I witnessed it rather closely: Neopets in elementary school, the birth of Myspace in middle school, the rise of Facebook in early high school, Instagram in late high school, the internet culture wars of infamy as a freshman in college, Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica in graduate school.

Writing in 2008, the new media scholar Geert Lovink separated internet culture into three periods:

First, the scientific, precommercial, text-only period before the World Wide Web. Second, the euphoric, speculative period in which the Internet opened up for the general audience, culminating in the late 1990s dotcom mania. Third, the post-dot-com crash/post-9/11 period, which is now coming to a close with the Web 2.0 mini-bubble.

For those my age, this tripartite history of the net begins at number two, with the anarchic, sprawling, ’90s net, followed by the post-9/11, pre-iPhone variety (including the blogosphere and the fulcrum moment that was Myspace), and ending with today’s app-driven, hyper-conglomerate social media net.

Like many people my age and older, I miss the pre–social media internet. The new internet knows this, and it capitalizes on my nostalgia as it eats away at the old internet. It amounts to an unforeseen form of technological cannibalism.

Admittedly, the phenomenon of the self-eating internet may not be obvious when we think about it in the abstract; we need to break it down into its constituent operations. For example, I open my Instagram account to post on my Instagram Story feed that I’m writing this essay about internet nostalgia. There I can attach kitschy gifs to my story like fancy stickers—I look at my options, and the offerings remind me of various moments from my online past. There’s an image of sparkles that takes me back to the flash-based dress-up games I once played as a tween. There’s another gif with glitzy text that reads “Don’t hate me cuz I’m beautiful,” recalling the emotional trials of my Myspace days. And there is yet another gif that features a computer that bears a suspicious resemblance to the “My Computer” icon from Windows 95. These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there.

The Hell of Beautiful Interfaces

The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis “capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love”—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.

The reason the tech literati don’t wring their hands more is obvious: the artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless. The persistent erasure of what are essentially frozen experiences, snapshots of our lives, nakedly demonstrates how tech monopolies value the human commonality and user experience so loftily promoted in their branding—they don’t. And this is especially true in an era where involuntary data mining, as opposed to voluntary participation, is king.

Of course, these same writers have devoted several books to the history and culture of what Lovink identifies as the “scientific period” of the web, the one populated exclusively by elite scientists, researchers, and geeks, and given over to the BBS days of early computing, before graphical user interfaces and web browsers made the net accessible to the lowly amateur. And countless hagiographies and histories have been written about the technology of the internet and its “inventors” hailing from the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). But the users of those technologies and services can only be found in the data point or the footnote, transformed into an anonymous bleating mass a world below the visionaries who built the platforms that now alchemize our consumer preferences into chunks of fool’s gold. Meanwhile, the genuine experiences of users are ignored, despite the fact that the internet has always been deeply and irrevocably personal.

by Kate Wagner, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Nichole Shinn
[ed. See also: Tumblr.]

The Dark Forest

Why We Should Really Stop Trying to Contact Aliens

Experts are more and more convinced there’s probably intelligent life out there. Our first impulse, being friendly Earth types, is to reach out and say hi — from 1977’s Voyager to SETI@home, we can’t wait to meet the neighbors. Some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, caution that this may be a lethal mistake, and others say, “Naw, not to worry.” Yet here we are, scanning the night skies, visions of Close Encounters in our heads. A recent work of science fiction, though, contains a stunningly convincing argument that we should shut. The. Hell. Up. Hiding wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. The Fermi paradox, its author asserts, suggests that everyone else already is.

The book is The Dark Forest, the second volume in the unforgettable Three-Body trilogy by Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Cixin’s writing is beyond smart — it’s brilliant — and it's science fiction of the best kind, with mind-boggling ideas and perceptions, and characters you care about. His concept of the dark forest, though presented in a work of fiction, is chilling, and very real.

The Axioms of Social Cosmology

In The Dark Forest, a character suggests the creation of an area of study called “cosmic sociology.” She describes it as a means of understanding the interactions of distant civilizations who know each other only as dots of light, light years away. It's based on two simple, inarguable axioms that would be true of every civilization, regardless of the life forms it contains or where it is in the universe:

• Survival is the primary need of civilization. This is the most basic desire of any life form, right?
• Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. There’s potentially competition for resources, including minerals, water, life-capable planets, etc.

To complete the picture, the character says, one needs to understand two other important concepts:

• chains of suspicion
• technological explosion

Chains of Suspicion

When one civilization becomes aware of another, the most critical thing is to ascertain whether or not the newly found civilization is operating from benevolence — and thus won’t attack and destroy you — or malice. Too much further communication could take you from limited exposure in which the other civilization simply knows you exist, to the strongest: They know where to find you. And so each civilization is left to guess the other’s intent, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

You can’t assume the other civilization is benevolent, and they can't assume that about you, either. Nor can you be sure the other correctly comprehends your assessment of their benevolence or maliciousness. As one character tells another in the book:

Next, even if you know that I think you’re benevolent, and I also know that you think I’m benevolent, I don’t know what you think about what I think about what you’re thinking about me. It's convoluted, isn't it? 

Does the other civilization see your opinion of them as a reason to relax, or to conquer you and take your resources? How can you possibly know what to make of each other with a certainty that satisfies your desire for survival? Inevitably, neither civilization can afford to trust the other, There’s just no way to discern another’s true intention from so very far away.

Technological Explosion

You do know that a civilization that contacts you is capable technologically of at least that much. But this is all you have to go on in your assessment of the threat level or their ability to defend themselves against an attack from you. You might think that a civilization that considers itself advanced could relax, secure in its military superiority at the moment of first contact. But contact with you could be just the impetus needed for the other civilization to shoot ahead technologically — progress is non-linear, as shown by our own tech explosion in just 300 years against the millions of years we’ve been around. By the time an invading force traverses the vast expanse of space — likely over the course of years, if not centuries — who can know what awaits them? No civilization can be confident of its power relative to the other.

The person listening to this in The Dark Forest responds, “So I have to keep quiet.” After a pause, he asks, “Do you think that will work?”

Nope. “To sum up,” says the first speaker, “letting you know I exist, and letting you to continue to exist, are both dangerous to me and violate the first axiom.” So, he continues, “If neither communication nor silence will work once you learn of my existence, you’re left with just one option.” Attack.

As if what’s already been argued isn’t scary enough, he reminds his listener, “Extrapolate that option out to billions and billions of stars and hundred of millions of civilization’s and there’s your picture. The real universe is just that black.”

Welcome to the Woods

Cixin’s dark forest metaphor goes like this:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life — another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.

And here’s us with our desire for contact:

But in this dark forest, there’s a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing before it shouting, “Here I am! Here I am!”

So the answer to the Fermi paradox may simply be this: Civilizations aware of the dark forest concept are wisely hiding.

by Robby Berman, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A rebuttal, but perhaps in the end largely irrelevant re: global climate change, nuclear and biological weapons, gene editing, AI, politicians, and other existential threats - see also: The Great Filter (or, it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself).]