#consciously using this blog for writing and writing adjacent things

[callmehopeless]

I own so many sideblogs for so many perfunctory and stupid reasons that chances are you've interacted with me interacting with you without you realising it

I'm spread across the universe in tiny little fandoms, wafer thin and making Fallout New Vegas posts

[jacksprostate]

Was just wondering how you manage to replicate palahniuk’s style so well and also obviously write his characters?

Love your blog btw!

There's a few things that go into it!

Firstly, I have the advantage of, according to my friends, before I read any of his stuff my style was already kind of Chuck adjacent. I tend to be very rhythmic in my writing, I do like to have little repetitions, I like fun descriptions — similar to how he focuses on things reading aloud well, and favoring offbeat descriptions, his little ritual words, etc. That's my biggest secret, I just already wrote pretty close to it without knowing, so I didn't have a whole lot to change. Similar dog learning new tricks sort of deal. That said, there IS stuff I actively think about, especially with regard to character voice:

There's some things I'd call window dressing — minor changes that make it more recognizable. This would be things such as: the narrator does not get put in quotes, slips into 2nd person, using a rhythm where the dialogue tag goes in front (generally Tyler says, blah, not blah, Tyler says). That also makes it feel more active and present. I also like to outright include the occasional line from the book as a referential repetition, or a spoof on a line, I think that's the fun of fanfiction. But if those lines stand out glaringly it can be a sign you either need to change your style or maybe you're just trying to stick it somewhere it doesn't belong.

There's some bigger things: sentence variation is another thing I've invested pretty heavily in on my own and something I highly recommend any writer get in the habit of, but in trying to match his character voice I do consciously feel for when something is getting too long, specifically. The key with Chuck is he can have long sentences, but they're made out of short ideas. Long sentences often become grammatically incorrect as they're separate ideas jammed together for rhythm and sense.

He also shies away from adjectives; I kind of ignore this because I love a good adjective, but I've learned from it by making sure each one is impactful in its own way. Avoid superfluousness, keep things moving. He also shies away from stereotypical descriptions, I enjoyed building my confidence making weird ones. It's something I'm keeping going forward.

Another thing with his style is he loves fun facts. Fortunately I also love fun facts. To do those you have to keep it relevant, symbolic/metaphorical, purposeful, and simple. You can totally get complex, but only using simple building blocks. It's not to show everyone you know something, it's to build a little cliff to push the narrator off of. People don't need the detailed rockwork.

He often has little... almost like an aside? The narrator will ramble or think about something else for a little bit before getting back to the present. That shaky hold on the Now contrasts with how action focused everything is and allows moments of rest even if its still action.

As for character voice, the narrator; by following the above, you can get most of it, and then remembering his general view of the world to keep things in theme. He shouldn't be happy. He should have a lot of surpressed rage. Etc. Good character writing starts with a good understanding of the character, and that's real important for whoever your pov is. Always important to check if stuff passes the "he wouldn't fucking say that" test. When I have dialogue for him, it's almost an extension of his thoughts. I mentally read it to myself with the dull affect Ed Norton used for the movie monologue, really that shit was perfect. I usually can't keep a voice in my head like that but that one... yeah.

Tyler on the other hand I have to be pretty conscious about, sometimes I'll go back through the book and read some of his lines. He tends to be very direct. Very rarely uses names, it's tempting to use psycho boy or ikea boy all the time but it's the devil speaking. Tyler is direct, always serious even when he's laughing, his statements are not mitigated at all, if he is saying a pet name it is for its own impact not to soften any sort of statement. Rhythmically I find this directness difficult sometimes, but the 'Tyler says' dialogue tag makes it feel like a religious call and response on the narrators part and serves to soften things — but have that be the narrator's perspective and choice, not Tyler's. It's pretty heavily repeated in the book. Tyler also requires a "He would not fucking say that" test and I think I've gotten better at his dialogue over time (ex: retroactively, Tyler's dialogue in my psychoactive fish story s u c k s. I mean, it works, but I didn't really have a strong grasp on him at the time and while the actions sound like him, the words and delivery don't. Now though I think my snippets and the dildo fic are pretty strong!) A lot of it is just practice and tuning your ear. Reference the original material and try to dissect it.

Hope this makes sense :) if there's anything specific where you're like "how'd you write that" I can try to answer. Glad you enjoy my blog!

[delta-queerdrant]

banjos in space (Caretaker, s1 e1/2)

Prologue

A nice pickle we have landed ourselves into, Mr. Frodo! The internet informs me that there are 172 episodes of Star Trek Voyager. I am, in fact, capable of finishing things; just recently, I reread Middlemarch like an absolute fucking boss. I have written novels and completed thousand-mile road trips. Let us choose to believe that this project that I have quixotically set myself, for an audience of, approximately, no one, will be a successful one.

I will not be summarizing episodes. I expect these reviews to be 80% sentiment and 20% analyzing story mechanics. To crib a line from a podcast I like, this is a feelings blog about starships.

The prose will be more or less silly and stream-of-consciousness as the mood takes me. Despite being a Digital Native(tm), I have literally never figured out the trick of talking like I live on the internet, instead I alternate between sounding like Angela Chase writing in her diary and like a college professor who is prone to multisyllabic words, malapropisms, and deducting points for misplaced commas.

Hmm, I seem to be stalling.

Let’s Talk About Caretaker

I started watching Voyager midway through the series’ original run, so my fondness for these episodes is less weighted down with early adolescent emotion. Nevertheless, I was charmed.

Caretaker is just shy of being a banger pilot episode, and the whole first season is pretty strong if you compare it to, say, season one of TNG. (It’s a low bar.) We meet our two crews, we have a lively science fiction mystery that feels extremely Star Trek with its gentle horror-adjacent tropes and insistence on making the cultural referents of the twentieth-century US central to this multi-species science fiction universe. If nothing else, it’s a romp.

The worst thing about this episode, hands down, is Tom Paris, our bad boy rapscallion who turns a new leaf under duress. As a young person I received each of these characters in exactly the way I was meant to receive them; i.e. I found Tom Paris to be charming comic relief.

Does he become charming? In this episode I want to punch his face, a lot, and the sentiment holds throughout season one. It is, of course, the nineties, and so the only character with an unmarked identity (straight white male, not an alien or a hologram) is centered in the pilot episode of our ensemble show. In the process, he goes through a season’s worth of character growth in ninety minutes, to the detriment of future episodes.

The fandom was right and he and Harry Kim (whose only attribute here is BABY) have hilariously good chemistry. (”Look, I know those guys told you to stay away from me,” he purrs to Kim during the mess hall follow-up to their meet-cute.) Why do the good girls always want the bad boys? Don’t fall for his rakish charms, Harry, you can do so much better, even if you have only been given half a personality.

We meet the Ocampa, who seem to live in a subterranean shopping mall or perhaps an airport terminal, and the Kazon-Ogla, who are bargain-bin Klingons without the cool factor or (so far) cultural nuance. I do not love an SFF property with “good” and “bad” species, and find Janeway’s pivotal decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array a bit suspect as a result, but it is a Star Trek, but here we are.

Other than Robert Duncan McNeill, who has been given an impossible script, it feels like all of the actors know their assignments out of the gate. There are so many cute as shit platonic friendships in this show; I love B’Elanna and Harry’s rapport (”Starfleet”). Also, Neelix. I am going on the record here to confess that I am probably going to be a Neelix apologist for the duration of this rewatch. He is just a darling hot mess of a space hobbit, and I find Ethan Phillip’s performance weirdly compelling and nuanced. I won’t be papering over his sexism, which should have been handled with more care. But so far he is absolutely the most plausible and lived-in character in this whole ridiculous show.

Kate Mulgrew’s Janeway, of course, is a close contender. She is so fucking good from scene one (walking so fast to keep up with McNeill’s long gait) - just absolutely sparkling with charisma, and with a warm, self-assured carriage that makes her effortless at inhabiting this role. “Confirmed, a hot lady,” my notes read (yes I was taking notes about this rewatch for myself like an absolute nerd).

We don’t get much backstory for her in season one, other than here, where we meet her dry-toast fiance, and much more importantly, MOLLIE. I had forgotten about Mollie, and holy crap, never mind the trauma and pining and muted sexual confusion that will accompany this character on her journey through the Delta Quadrant - SHE LEFT HER DOG BEHIND!?

^^^ ICONIC. Mark can’t even get an arm around her shoulder because Mollie is the cockblocker of our hearts. Love this for all concerned

Anyway. Our characters are thrown together and overcome adversity, Janeway blows up the array, and we get a rushed conclusion and a mission-statement speech that all feel terribly unearned. There’s nothing much to say about the Maquis subplot here, because the show just... doesn’t grapple with it, at least not in the first season. The very premise that our intrepid crew can only operate this starship by adopting the political structure of the dominant majority deserves interrogation, but nah.

We were never going to get a politically radical Voyager. Still, we could have gotten a politically conscious one. It’s a shame, because these actors and even, I dare say, writers were obviously up to the task of having a more nuanced conversation about leadership and workplace politics and whether an ostensibly egalitarian society’s professional adventurer/diplomats can only function under a military command structure. 

But we’re at the beginning, and we don’t know any of that yet. Anything could happen! We’re lost in the woods, in the middle of our lives, looking for our way home. 

[matoitech]

not all there tonight

[strangertheory]

I had a thought and just had to share it with you. What if the Upside Down had its own "Upside Down"? What if there was another dimension within the alternate dimension of the human world? There are portals in the human world that lead to the Upside Down. What if there were also portals in the Upside Down that opens into another world? Could the Mind Flayer also invade that world and try to destroy it? What would this world even be? Sorry, that's a lot of questions.

The possibilities seem endless, don’t they? Thank you so much for Asking about my thoughts on this topic.

Is there only one “Upside Down” dimension that layers their current world? Do they have many parallel worlds or layers? Are there wormholes (Einstein–Rosen bridges) that lead to different locations and/or different points in time? Do we have worlds nested within worlds that can only be accessed from certain points because one must first pass through one layer in order to reach the next?

The question that I am the most passionate about (as you probably can tell if you have read other posts on my blog) is: are the different dimensions in Stranger Things meant to be understood as separate physical planes of existence and parallel universes as we have been allowed to believe thus far in the series, or are these separate “dimensions” eventually going to be revealed to be different layers of consciousness and memories within a human mind?

I created a few different hypothetical models that I would like to share with you. (Click “keep reading” if you’d like to view these models and read more of my thoughts on this topic.)

The most popular model for understanding the different dimensions in Stranger Things (which I think the majority of the fandom considers to be true currently as of the finale of Stranger Things 3) is what I’ll refer to as Model A1:

My first question is: can we be sure that this “Russia” is the Russia that exists in the same world as Hawkins, Indiana?

I created Model A2 because I would like to consider the possibility that the “Russia” that Hopper has been sent to may not be the “real Russia” but perhaps an “Upside Down Russia” instead:

But as you probably know if you’ve been reading the other posts that I’ve written on my blog: I don’t believe that either Model A1 or Model A2 (as shown above) represent a complete picture of what is happening in Stranger Things.

I favor a Model B representation of the way that the different “dimensions” in Stranger Things exist.

I hypothesize that Stranger Things is about a DID System and alters and internal worlds and that The Upside Down is an internal world.

I agree with @kaypeace21​‘s theory that the Upside Down is an internal world created by Will’s subconscious mind due to the extreme trauma that he’s experienced.

Based on my current thoughts about the possibility that Stranger Things is about a DID System I created a Model B1 and Model B2 that nests the different dimensions within each other because they are, I hypothesize, different layers of consciousness and “internal worlds” rather than other physical dimensions adjacent to our own.

I would also like to propose that it is hypothetically possible that Hawkins itself might also be an internal world and that there could still be a final “curtain” to be lifted that will show us what is “really” happening in Stranger Things within an “external world.” Please note: this second layer theory is my own hypothetical and should not be confused with kaypeace21′s DID theories that she writes about on her blog. Kaypeace21 theorizes that Will has dissociative identity disorder and that everything from within Will’s mind became real in the real world because Will has the subconscious power to manipulate reality itself. In contrast: although I am in agreement with the theory that Will Byers has DID and that many characters in the story are alters, I hypothesize (with Model B2, shown below) that El’s superpowers might only exist within internal worlds, that Will can only manipulate the “reality” of internal worlds within the DID System, that Hawkins is an internal world itself, and that perhaps in the real “external world” there will be absolutely no monsters or superpowers once we are shown this “real world” in Stranger Things season 4 and 5.

To visualize my “second layer” theory I created Model B2:

Model B1 and B2 are my current favorite hypotheses about what is happening in Stranger Things. I theorize based on current hints and clues in the series that Stranger Things is about a DID System with internal worlds and that they aren’t truly separate “dimensions” as we’ve been allowed to believe so far.

And I still have many other questions about the different dimensions/worlds in Stranger Things:

What exists in The Upside Down and what exists in Hawkins?

Are we always aware of when the characters are in The Upside Down? Were certain scenes in seasons 1, 2, and 3 taking place within the Upside Down or within another dimension/world and we weren’t (yet) made aware of it?

Is there a way that we can tell whether or not we are in the Upside Down like, for example, the spinning top in the movie Inception? (Inception is, incidentally, included on the Stranger Things 4 Video Store Friday movie list.) 

Could certain places that we have already visited in the series exist within the Upside Down or within another dimension state of consciousness?

I think that a few top contenders for spaces that may or may not exist within the same dimension “world” as Hawkins include:

the Starcourt Mall Basement with the “evil Russians”

Starcourt Mall itself

Hopper’s cabin in the woods

The Lab

“Russia”

Murray’s

The Hospital

I have so many questions, and I am on the edge of my seat looking forward to what kinds of plot twists and revelations we might have in Stranger Things 4 regarding the different worlds, dimensions, or layers of consciousness that may (or may not) exist in the story.

If you enjoy thinking about the Upside Down and the different dimensions in Stranger Things, you might enjoy my post about what I believe could hypothetically happen to the Upside Down in future seasons which is based on the hypothesis that the Upside Down is an internal world and that El and Will are separate states of consciousness within a DID System and sharing the same mind.

[viciousgracearc]

sh.adow & b.one thoughts ( contains spoilers! ) tw: racism ( this is just a thought dump and to explain why i’m not adapting the show’s racist elements in my portrayals )

disclaimer: just because i will not adapt the racist element as it appears in the show doesn’t mean i won’t acknowledge the book canon, in-universe prejudice and discrimination against the poc characters in grishaverse. 

so. the racism in shadow and bone. having watched all of the show, i now have some mixed thoughts about it. in the books, alina is assumed to be white for the most part. it is only at the end when we ( or at least i ) suspected that she is not entirely ravkan, and then the casting confirmed it. the kind of racism alina ( and mal ) faced in the show was never a factor in the books, despite rampant anti-shu and anti-fjerdan sentiment. the suli are painted as people who are displaced and mostly neglected by the ravkan government, and definitely treated with prejudice, but as far as i recall there is no specific slur directed at them either in book canon.

however, whereas alina’s ethnicity is vague in the books, it is crystal clear in the show that she is a biracial woman. i know that for biracial folk, experiences vary across the board, especially if you’re a biracial person and an immigrant or a refugee. alina is a war orphan. her mother’s country of origin is at war with her current country of residence. to an extent, i understand the level of animosity ravkans have against people who look like the threat / the enemy. people of color face racism and prejudice day in and day out, sometimes from white people, sometimes from fellow people of color. this is a grim reality with a long and studied history of racism and racial superiority creating divides between minorities and pitting them against each other.

was the racism necessary to the plot? it definitely adds layers to it. you have an orphaned girl of color in a mostly white people country. they discriminate against her and her best friend for most of her life, using slurs such as “rice-eater” and “half-breed”. but this country has a huge problem, and it turns out only this orphaned girl of color can save them from it, despite them alienating her consistently. now they need her help, now they call her a saint. this girl, who based on show-canon, feels so different and abnormal from the rest of her peers because her ethnicity is always pointed out and considered a bad thing. now she has to be a hero for a country that despises her... and not only that, now she has to do it under the tutelage of a white man. white man looks older than her; there is an obvious imbalance in their power dynamic, but he looks at her like his hope come at last and places her on a pedestal she doesn’t ask for. this same white man puts a collar around her neck and then effectively subjugates her by taking control of her power.

it... it kinda sounds bad, doesn’t it? it does. “but wait,” the volcra screeches. “via, are you fucking stupid?” it asks. “that’s not how the story ends! she overcomes!”

well, yes. but does it really make the rest of it any less insidious? alina is denied food, consistently picked on, and mocked, for being half-shu. it is prevalent in her show storyline and difficult to ignore. and thus it will be woven into everything that happens to her, and every decision that she makes will in turn, make us, the viewers, look back on it even if she herself doesn’t do so explicitly. i know the intent of including this racism element into her ( and mal’s ) story is to portray an accurate depiction of the POC experience as they maneuver white or mostly white spaces, or just spaces not catered to their specific ethnicity. but does it work? is it necessary? the irregulars, which is also a netflix show, did a great job at casting a young chinese woman in a lead role and a black man as dr. john watson without ever having to define their characters or their capabilities to move in the world by their race alone. as a half-chinese woman myself, it was empowering to watch a chinese girl able to take the lead and make bold statements and brave decisions without ever being bogged down by the limitations of her race. 

at the end of the day, it is a fantasy world. do you think if the racism isn’t there, the story’s going to be worse off than it is? personally, if they left it out, i think the story will be just fine. there are a lot of things that tie these characters together outside of their racial struggles, like... i don’t know, personality? circumstances? the need to save their country from a powerful tyrant? the struggle for survival in a constantly at-war nation? there is also the fact that this racism element they’ve introduced is inconsistent. so much directed against alina and mal because they want the viewers to sympathize with these two characters. some of it directed towards inej, another protagonist, whose story has a lot to do with how she was exploited because she is suli. but where’s the racism directed at zoya? at botkin? if there’s racism against the shu and if they call them rice-eaters, where’s the anti-fjerdan racism and what do they call fjerdans? ice-shavers? cold-dwellers? aren’t fjerdans ravka’s enemies too? but oh wait... fjerdans are white. nevermind.

speaking of zoya: in the books, especially in RoW, it was implied that she is white-passing, which is why she was never treated differently for being suli. however, show!zoya is NOT white-passing at all. she is very obviously a woman of color, and while i acknowledge that yes, poc can be racist against poc, i don’t really see zoya -- bully, mean girl, attention-starved, ambitious, ruthless zoya -- resulting to such a low blow. sujaya dasgupta herself admitted that in show canon, zoya experiences racism ( though it was never explicitly shown to us ), and consciously turns it against alina in the hopes of hurting another woman of color. don’t get me wrong, zoya is definitely a terrible person at the start of the series. she was classist and mean and she had a superiority complex, and that superiority complex comes from being a powerful grisha, something she worked hard for. she thinks alina doesn’t belong in the little palace, not because alina is shu, but because alina appears out of nowhere, is untrained but is already considered powerful / the solution to everyone’s problem, and has nabbed her old place as the darkling’s favored. the “you stink of keramzin” jab is more than enough to drive her point home and i don’t think “half-breed” is necessary at all. besides, from what it looked like, alina isn’t the only mixed-race grisha. grisha comes from all over, taking refuge in ravka because they’re the only nation that treats their grisha under acceptable conditions. so one would expect some diversity there, which zoya, having been at the little palace since age 9, would have been used to by now. i don’t really think there’s a lot of incentive for her in using a racial slur, and she’s lethal enough with words that she doesn’t need them to injure somebody. 

“via, stop barking and tell us what you’re going to adapt in your portrayal!”

okay, well. personally, i’m not interested in including the show’s racist element in any of my characters’ storyline ( alina, zoya, mal, ehri ). i acknowledge the anti-shu, anti-fjerdan, and anti-suli sentiments as they appear in book canon, but i will not use alina’s ethnicity as the basis of her “otherness” because i like the book canon explanation for that better. nor will i acknowledge that zoya called alina a half-breed, because my zoya is not white-passing zoya, and she knows infinitely better ways to inflict verbal harm than racism. zoya will also be grappling with being half-suli because she was exposed to anti-suli sentiments by her own mother as a young child. 

all my characters are of asian-adjacent ethnicities, and as an asian person myself, do you really think i am interested in reliving my traumatic racism experiences through the characters that i write in a fantasy world? with alina especially, it’s like she couldn’t breathe without someone pointing out that she’s half-shu. i think as much as it is important to show authentic poc experiences in art and media, it is also equally important to show poc solidarity, and to stop defining people by their race alone and to just let them exist as people. 

it doesn’t help that the show’s way of depicting racism is gratuitous, insulting, and feels like it’s catered more towards the white gaze than... you know, actual POC viewers? i understand people will disagree with me on this and that’s fine. this is just how i feel. given that shu-han as a nation didn’t even feature much in the books and we don’t know ANYTHING about them in a cultural context aside from the fact that their appearance is coded as east asian, the discrimination towards them really just hinges on shallow factors like how they look, what they eat ( ???? ), and how they are viewed as ravka’s enemy. it boils down to an east vs. west type of scenario ( and considering the barrage of anti-asian sentiment in our current political climate it’s... questionable at the very least ), and the racism element is not a profound expression of the poc experience but more like... a caricature version of it, once again, in my opinion.

“via, i can’t believe you used that many words trying to tell us you won’t include the racism in your portrayal.”

hey, i know. but a girl be having thoughts, a girl’s two brain cells be rubbing together, you know? this is me deep cleansing my brain by yoting my thoughts into the void. but yes, this is my take! i understand if you don’t feel the same way, but i just... i can’t feature the racist elements of the show in my blog, sorry (not really).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Horse Lords

Baltimore-based Horse Lords have been forging their own take on experimental rock music since 2012. The quartet, Andrew Bernstein (saxophone/percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass/electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar) and Sam Haberman (drums) weave together pieces drawing on divergent sources that include everything from 20th and 21st century classical music to just intonation tuning to African and Appalachian musical traditions to intricate polyrhythms and studio experiments. In a recent interview, Gardner talked about their approach to putting pieces together. “We generally write right up to the edge of our abilities. And sometimes slightly beyond. We’d had to scrap quite a few songs because they proved to be basically impossible to play... It keeps it interesting.” Ian Forsythe covered their newest release, The Common Task, noting that “Their nearly ten-year core pivots rhythmic and tonal ideas athletically, and their ability to pull elements from anywhere and everywhere is seemingly more fluid with each record.”

For this Listed, the four members runs down a list of live shows, recordings, blogs, movies, and books that have been on their minds.

Gleb Kanasevich plays Horațiu Rădulescu’s “Inner Time II for seven clarinets (Op.42b),” Baltimore. 2018 (Owen Gardner)

A near-hourlong ear workout, combining impressive sonic and structural brutality. The interaction of what these close dissonances do inside your ears with what the clarinets do in space (Gleb played live with 6 recordings of himself, meticulously arranged around the audience) is a haunting experience, celestial but with no concession to human music.

Maryanne Amacher — Perceptual Geographies, Philadelphia 2019 (Owen Gardner)

https://issuu.com/bowerbirdphilly/docs/amacherprogramonline

So much revelatory material has come out of the Maryanne Amacher archive so far, and particularly these loving reconstructions of her instrumental music. A lot more attention seems to have been given to “Petra,” which is certainly gorgeous and shows fascinating symmetries with the spatial/timbral concerns of her electronic music, but “Adjacencies” struck me as the Major Work of 20th Century Music. She wrote the damn thing in 1965 and it sounds fresh half a century later, which we can say of no previous piece of percussion music and not much written subsequently. I am slowly losing my mind waiting for Amy Cimini’s book on Amacher to come out, craving a deeper dive into her theory and methods.

Sarah Hennies, Bonnie Jones, Lê Quan Ninh, and Biliana Voutchkova at the High Zerofestival, Baltimore 2019 (Owen Gardner)

One of at least three great things Sarah Hennies did last year (Reservoir 1 on Black Truffle and the 90 minute cello/percussion duo “The Reinvention of Romance” being the others) was to take part in Baltimore’s High Zero festival, four mind-frying days devoted to free improvisation. This set was one of the highlights of 2019’s festival; each of the four performers having at least one foot in composed music (Ninh is a long-time Cage interpreter and Biliana has collaborated with Peter Ablinger) seemed to lend it a certain sureness and serenity, but ultimately their combined strength as improvisors (fastidiously captured by High Zero’s crack recording team) is what makes it such an engaging listen.

El Chombo — Cuentos de la Cripta (Owen Gardner)

A relentless tetralogy that nicely balances the rawness of ‘90s proto-reggaetón productions (the first volume self-identifies as “Spanish Reggae”) and the slicker, synth-oriented sound and settled genre conventions we’ve come to enjoy (or not) in the 21st century. This was helpful when working on “People’s Park,” not least for its insistent connection to Jamaican music. I can understand very little Spanish but I'm guessing the lyrics are not unproblematic; signifying language always disappoints.

Wallahi Le Zein! (Owen Gardner)

http://thewealthofthewise.blogspot.com/

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in African music, much more consistent and informative than the often yucky reissue market, which seems to prioritize awkward (and marginal) attempts at Western musical fads—as if what was available was not an impossibly rich and heterogeneous network of self-sufficient musical cultures but merely a broken mirror facing America. The archive of Mauritanian music alone makes this the most worthwhile stop on the information superhighway. There’s plenty of goofy drum programming and appalling sound quality if that’s your bag, but the rich variety of traditional musics is what keeps me coming back.

Miles Davis — On the Corner (Max Eilbacher)

Some might say Stockhausen serves imperialism but he did his little part to help cook up some of the most twisted American Jazz/funk jams ever. Davis only kept one cassette in his convertible sports car during the On the Corner sessions, a tape of “Hymnen.” He would take each member of the band on highspeed joy rides with the car’s stereo system on full blast. That same energy was channeled in the arrangement and editing. The convergence of a lot of different elements keeps this record on my top 10 list ‘til the end of time. The little detail of Americans taking concepts from European Neu Musik and making something incredibly funky and pleasurable is the cherry on top.

Olivia Block & Marcus Schmickler at Diffusion Festival, Baltimore 2018 (Andrew Bernstein)

This was an amazing pairing, with both artists playing in 8-channel “surround sound.” Marcus’ set was incredibly intense. Pure synthesis with a lot of psychoacoustic inner ear tones and unending overlapping melodies. It felt like the sonic equivalent of watching a strobe light at close distance. Olivia’s set was a slow creep, laying samples to create lush textures that were truly immersive. This was the kind of concert that reminds you of the awesome power of music.

Blacks’ Myths at the Red Room, Baltimore 2019 (Andrew Bernstein)

Blacks' Myths II by Blacks' Myths

I’m there for anything bassist Luke Stewart touches (see Irreversible Entanglements, his solo upright + feedback work, frequent collaborations with too many people to name). Blacks' Myths, his bass and drumset duo with Warren Crudup, is loud, noisy, and intense, and this set at the Red Room last year was particularly transcendent.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny — Out of the Blue (Andrew Bernstein)

Out of the Blue by "Blue" Gene Tyranny

I have probably listened to this record more than any other the last few years. Perfectly crafted pop songs segue into proggy funk jams and then into stream of consciousness drone pieces based around the doppler effect. I’ll put it on over and over again, an experience with an album I haven’t really had since I was in high school.

Bill Orcutt — An Account of the Crimes of Peter Thiel and His Subsequent Arrest, Trial, and Execution 2017 (Max Eilbacher)

AN ACCOUNT OF THE CRIMES OF PETER THIEL AND HIS SUBSEQUENT ARREST, TRIAL AND EXECUTION. by BILL ORCUTT

Legendary underground American guitarists from the most important American rock band also makes top notch conceptual digital audio art. Years ago I thought computer music lacked a certain sub cultural attitude. While this was/is not true, this 2017 release feels like it exists in its own world. High and low brow are in perfect harmony for this patterned enjoyable hellride of a listen. What if Hanne Darboven had to make art while working a full time job and dealing with mild substance abuse?

Lina Wertmüller — Seven Beauties 1975 (Max Eilbacher)

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42000553

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Beauties

During this pandemic I have been talking film shop over emails nonstop. I went through a big Wertmüller phase in 2018-2019 and as people are trading recommendations I usually try to recommend something by her. This film is the one that I keep reaching for. The email recommending this film usually starts as a draft with “this is really intense” and then I try to hearken back to my film school days and write about the male gaze, patriarchy, communism or something of that nature. I end up writing a bit, feeling like it’s way over the top for a casual email and then I end up deleting everything except “this is a really intense and beautiful film.”

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (Sam Haberman)

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/tom-oneill/chaos/9780316477574/

The last book I managed to check out of the library before it closed. Though it in some ways resembles works of conspiracy theory, Tom O’Neill is always straightforward in telling the reader that, though the official story of the Manson case is almost certainly not true, the actual details don’t cohere into any kind of Meaning. Every new discovery is its own digression that points to a new unknowable truth or unverifiable claim. This really inverts the normal thrill of conspiracy theory, which invites you to either buy into the story being presented or reject it all together, either path offering its own sort of comfort. Chaos offers no such comfort.

[dylancaledavis]

Actual Storytelling Advice #1 Writing a Scene: a demystification

A Book Series is a collection of novels. Novels are collections of chapters. Chapters are collections of scenes. Scenes are...well, what are scenes? This term eluded me for most of my writing life. I could say something was a scene (a la, watching a film and saying “what a great scene!”) But I didn’t know what I was saying was the “scene.” Was it when the camera changed? Was it when the character(s) were in a different location? Was there some deeper emotional resonance that indicated a scene break? (short answer? Yes.)

It was even more confusing in reading stories. Are chapters scenes? Are scenes arbitrarily determined whenever the author damn well pleases? (In amateur writing, yes.)

The truth is, scenes are the building blocks of story. So it came as a shock to me when I got into my MFA in Creative Writing program (shout out to Southern Illinois University) that I had never actually had a scene explained to me. (Thanks, Pinckney Benedict, for doing that.) And after I got the breakdown, my writing transformed overnight. So now I want to transfer this knowledge to anyone who will listen.

No matter what type of fiction we are writing, no matter the genre, setting, whatever, we will greatly improve it by using this simple formula:

1. Entering Emotion

2. Conflict Impeding Desire

3. Exiting Emotion

Sure, it’s always a lot more complicated than this, but these are the three phrases that should guide all scenes. But, let’s break them down individually so we can get a better understanding of their functions.

1. Entering Emotion

The entering emotion portion of the scene is the beginning. When a character walks into a room, gets into their car, finds the antagonist, sizes up the monster, goes into the cave, etc. They must start with (and our audience should know) what the POV character’s entering emotion is. This is usually tied to something called the conscious and unconscious desires (read Libbie Hawker’s book “Take Off Your Pants!” for a better explanation of that, though I will do another post which breaks that down another time).

So, if our character is entering a scene, we must establish what their emotion is. Are they scared? Happy? Timid? Worried? Exhausted? Bewildered? All emotions are viable. Here’s an example from something I’ve written. It’s Cyberpunk, so that should be your visual guide, here.

Coming home after a long day at the cricketflour plant, 5icmi slouched in his suspension chair. He didn’t want to go into Samsara, but the AVR world was a helluva lot better than his six by six capsule flat. Maybe he’d go to Ludmila’s club later, if he was feeling up to it.

“Whatever,” he said to himself.

What do we think the entering emotional state of this scene is? 5icmi isn’t happy, not by any stretch. He isn’t jovial (though he does seem a funny in a jaded sort of way.)

Primarily, what 5icmi feels in this scene is boredom. He doesn’t want to do anything, but he also doesn’t want to do anything else, either. This is important for the story because...well, why do you think? Humans intuit story. It’s ingrained in our consciousness. What do you think is going to happen to 5icmi in this scene based on your own intuitions? Is he going to stay bored? Are we going to have to follow a boring character in a boring ass story? No!

We shouldn’t waste audience’s time like that. Instead, we do this:

2. Conflict Impeding Desire

The “Impeding Desire” part of this will make more sense in a later post, as it's a concept I want to focus on by itself. For now, we’ll just talk about the conflict. Conflict is story. You cannot have a story without one (I can write a whole post about this, too, but let’s just accept that part as fact for the sake of brevity). Now, a lot of writers misunderstand conflict.

Conflict does not mean “fighting another person.” We don’t need physical conflict. Not every scene needs to be a fight scene (although, good fight scenes employ the exact same structure as any other scene, just watch this clip from “The Princess Bride.” PROTIP: Inigo’s entering emotion is “smug.”

What conflict is in storytelling terms is something that which gets in the way of a character. This could be physical or non-physical. Frightening or funny (or both). It is an obstacle at its core.

What makes a good conflict vs a bad one? Well, once again, humans intuit this very well in stories. If the character’s entering emotional state is boredom, what should the obstacle be? It wouldn’t make sense to suddenly have a romance conflict, right? It wouldn’t work if the conflict was starvation. Make the conflict reflect the character’s entering emotional state. Let’s return to 5icmi:

5icmi clutched the dangling omnis between his fingers. One by one, he inserted them into the microports on his occipital lobe. Once they were all connected, he flicked the switch and dove into Samsara.

His homeworld was a private one. He’d made sure to adjust his privacy settings so nobody could fuck with his AVR haven. He appeared on his deck overlooking a perfectly trimmed, green yard. A Yutag rifle was propped on the railing. 5icmi shouldered the rifle out of habit, not really caring if he actually hit anything. He aimed at a can atop a stump across the yard. That’s when he saw a face in the bushes looking up at him.

“Who the fuck is that?” he said, lowering the rifle.

“Hello stranger!” the face in the bushes said. They stood straight, and 5icmi noticed the avatar was at least 3 meters tall.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s a person in 5icmi’s private world! He’s not bored anymore, is he? See, we took details about his life at the beginning of the scene: He’s a VR junkie, lives alone, and is very bored. Then we spun them into the conflict. An unwanted stranger has come into his life (this will be another post, too, follow me to read that post!)

The character of this story seems stubborn and almost resigned to being bored all the time, but something impeded it. This will always happen in our scenes. It has to, otherwise the story doesn’t make us feel anything.

I hope that when you got to the part of the face in the bushes, your heart did the tiniest flutter. Maybe you blinked one more time than usual. Your skin went weird.

If it did, I transferred emotion from my character to you (yet another planned blog post.) If I did that, I did my job as a fiction writer.

And so finally:

3. Exiting Emotion

This last part of scene structure does double duty, because not only does it establish the end of the scene, but it usually marks the beginning of the next scene, as well (more on that in a moment.)

The exiting emotion of a scene should be the opposite or opposite-adjacent from the entering emotion. If your character is happy, they should leave sad, worried, disheveled, frightened. If they are sad, they should be happy, elated, or even just a flicker of hopeful. If they are angry, they should be calm or subdued. You get the idea.

The reason for this is because, when you have that miniature emotional arc in your scene, you’ve created movement in your character. Your character has changed, and humans like change. There’s nothing more boring than watching television static or paint dry. We call those things boring is because they don’t change in a meaningful way.

Characters have to change in a meaningful way, otherwise they become static. Scenes are where we get to make micro-changes to your character which will build atop one another to the big change they make at the end of the story.

But there’s something else about exiting emotions that is as, if not more, important.

Exiting emotions inform the next scene. We now know that the character will start scene A as happy and by the end of that scene they will be sad. So scene B starts with them sad, right? It would be weird to start each scene with your character as happy like they have a reset button.

But what does that mean for scene B? If they start sad (because of Scene A) then they should leave scene B happy or happy adjacent? Yes. This was one of the more difficult things for me to grasp when I started writing scenes. It feels clunky and artificial at first to write this way.

After a while, though, I noticed how much more emotional my writing became. My characters started changing, started feeling things. They’d go from happy to scared to hopeful to worried to resolute and I would want to follow them to their conclusion because they were on a journey. It was amazing!

Here’s the end of the scene, just so you can see a curated example:

5icmi raised the rifle again. He trained the laser point on the intruder’s face.

“How’d you get in here?” he said. The intruder put his palms up.

“There’s no need to be frightened, dear boy. I, too, don’t know how I ended up in your space. I was casually dining at the hubworld when suddenly, bloop! I froze and reloaded here. Now I can’t seem to get out!”

5icmi wanted to believe this person, but the smile on their face was toothy and hiding something.

“I’m getting out of here, get ready for a fucking report to the Samsara dev team,” 5icmi said. He rotated his arm to conjure the tool menu. He selected “exit” but nothing happened. He selected it again, nothing. 5icmi tried to remove the omnis plugged into his occipital lobe, but they were stuck. 5icmi looked up, and saw that the avatar had moved closer. The avatar was more hunched now. The smile painted on its face was much, much wider.

“Let’s chat, friend,” the avatar called up. “Just you, and me.”

So, 5icmi has gone from bored, to frightened. Neutral to negative. So what do you think his next emotion should be at the end of scene 2?

If you string enough of these together, you’ll have a short story or a chapter of a novel. If you do that 10 times, you’ll have a collection of short stories or a novel. It’s really all it is, but no one would know without the Demystification of scene structure!

Thanks so much for reading. I hope this has given you a more concrete understanding of how to structure your scenes and why emotion tied to plot is your best bet to keep a reader glued to your words.

Write on! Have fun! Wig some people out!

Until next time,

Dylan Davis

[lindoig5]

Days 10 and 11   Sunday and Monday - Antarctica at last!!!

Sunday

Sunday dawned dismal and foggy, with sub-zero temperatures and thick snow laying around from overnight falls. A good day to stay inside, but it is amazing how quickly the weather changes down here.  One minute it is bleak and miserable, within 5 minutes the sun is shining brightly with not a cloud in the sky - and 10 minutes later, it is snowing again.  The snow we have had has generally been in fine flakes, but some of the flurries have been quite dense and sting quite sharply if you are out on deck at the time.

We had two more lectures that day – one on interpreting ice charts (fascinating) and another on polar photography.  It would have been great to capture that one on video and audio – it was really useful from the technical camera perspective although I don’t think I learned anything about the artistic side of the subject.  Dan was the presenter and he is a great photographer but there was so much information in his lecture that most of it got forgotten before he got to the end.

It amazes me that people don’t get the message – at least some of the most important messages.  We have been told repeatedly that the vacuum-operated toilets are very sensitive and ’if it doesn’t come out of your body, it doesn’t go in the toilet’.  There is a bin for toilet paper that is cleared regularly by the Russian staff, but people continue to put it in the toilets.  They have become blocked at least 10 times so far and nobody can then use the toilets, take a shower of wash their hands in the sink for an hour or two until the crew cleans and resets the system.  I few times it has just been a single deck, but most times, the whole waste disposal system goes down and that inconveniences everyone – sometimes quite seriously and for quite some time.  If only people would heed the warnings……

During the morning, we encountered 3 humpback whales and spent a wonderful hour or so in their company. They were obviously inquisitive and followed us around (when we weren’t following them) and everyone got some wonderful photos.  A truly unique experience and quite a few of us were somewhat overcome by the emotion of the encounter.  Such magnificent gentle giants and everyone was touched by the experience.  At times they seemed to be showing off for us, rolling over and diving – they were probably just enjoying their lunch, but it really did seem that they were consciously interacting with us – at least with the ship, even if not the humans aboard, but I really do think they were playing with us too.

By now, we were getting closer to Cape Adare, our first Antarctic destination and we had a series of briefings before dinner in preparation for the big moment around 3am on Monday.

Just for fun - a Southern Fulmar - one of zillions.

Monday

We got our wake-up call at about 3.45am, but quite a few people were already on deck by then.  As we approached Cape Adare, the sun started to rise and the brilliant white of the icebergs leapt out at us.  Seeing the retina-burning gleam of the bergs against the inky black clouds and orange-pink band of the dawn along the horizon was most spectacular.

Our first glimpse of Antarctica could hardly have been more dramatic.  The massive bluff at the Cape was mind-bogglingly spectacular with the 4200-metre precipice at the end of the peninsula towering over us and many giant tabular icebergs surrounding us, sometimes less than 20 metres away.  Many of the floes had Adelie Penguins saluting us as we passed and dozens of South Polar Skuas were patrolling the beach looking for a meal of some of the last remaining penguin chicks still there.  We sailed up and around the Cape looking for a possible landing site but the sea ice was tight-packed against the shore and a landing proved impossible.  We had good views of the penguins (but not as close as we had hoped) and there was a giant bull elephant seal sunning himself on the ice and a few leopard seals prowling, hunting for a careless penguin or three.  There are a couple of historic huts on the beach – the dilapidated remains of Scott’s last hut and the more substantial Borchgrevink one – plus some modern NZ scientists’ huts and equipment temporarily required while they are doing some restoration work there.  We pass the same area as we leave Antarctica and hope we will be able to land at that time.  (Borchgrevink was a German expeditioner and the first person to overwinter on the frozen continent.)

The landscape is utterly stunning – quite overwhelming – massive volcanic cliffs, hundreds of square kilometres of snow-covered peaks glistening apricot-orange to rose-pink in the early sun, eye-squinting white icebergs all around, and the massive black cloud-topped Cape Adare brooding over us all.  The emotion of the view got to quite a few people today – perhaps it’s just the fact that we are all in such a remote and awesome environment but it fired the emotions for quite a few of us.  I have already run out of adjectives so feel free to add your own – just make sure you scatter lots of superlatives in there too because whatever we jointly come up with will be a poor shadow of the real thing.

The sea ice prevented us from getting close to the shore so we sailed away and to the east, around the Cape to follow the peninsula south into the Ross Sea proper.  The coastline is stunning (or have I already said that?) with cliffs at least 300 metres high and snow-icing many hundreds of metres thick (and many hundreds of kilometres long) on top of them.  We sailed south for a few hours to the Possession Islands – again massive dramatic cliffs, giant icebergs, inaccessible vertical sea stacks and guano beaches home to a few more thousand Adelies.  We sailed around looking for possible landing places and some of the crew took a zodiac in search of a landing, but again the sea-ice defeated us and we were obliged to head further south.

The route we took paralleled the coast and it was one amazing vista after another all the way down. We passed quite a few islands, none for which we had landing permits even if we could have but the whole way has been adjacent to spectacular snow-laded mountains.  Utterly awesome and unlike anything we have seen before.

I spent a lot of the day sorting photos, identifying birds and writing my blog with occasional interruptions to view the coastline, check out some minke whales, eat a meal or two, visit the Bridge to photograph more birds and do a little reading – finished another book at last.  (I read at least six e-books while we were away: probably more than I would read in a year at home.)

Not sure what tomorrow will bring.  We have changed course at least twice more because planned landings proved unlikely or impossible due to weather, ice or wind conditions.  We got quite a bit of snow in the late afternoon so we are now heading for historic Terra Nova Bay and should reach there about noon tomorrow. It has a bad reputation for extreme winds, but hopefully, that may drive some of the snow away and allow a landing – but we will know that around lunchtime tomorrow.

[almostarchaeology]

The Moggalithic antiquarian: party political broadcasts from stone circles

By Kenny Brophy (the Urban Prehistorian)

If a poll of Conservative members showed a majority of them were druids, Boris would be straight down to Stonehenge to dance naked for the seasons (Mark Steel, Independent, 28 March 2019)

Stanton Drew’s stone circles may not vibrate as wildly in the English consciousness as their easterly cousins at Stonehenge, however, they remain seriously impressive pieces of Neolithic kit. (Weird Walk, The Face 4.001)

Standing

Jacob Rees-Mogg, standing in the General Election, is standing in front of a standing stone. The parliamentary candidate (and current incumbent) for North East Somerset is asking everyone to vote Conservative in the December 2019 General Election in order to deliver Brexit. He is wearing a double-breasted great coat, almost invisible glasses, and a baby blue rosette the same size as the Nebra Sky Disk.

What was this WTF moment all about?

Was it just an innocent bit of eccentric electioneering fun that just happened to take place with a megalithic backdrop?

Or perhaps the film was an appeal to a certain kind of voter who craves the nostalgic fantasies of the English countryside, windswept standing stones, comical ‘scrumpy and western’ bands like The Wurzels, and Brexit?

Or was this short film altogether something more sinister?

I will ponder awhile on these questions during this post, but the reaction to the video was of even more interest to me.

#BrexitPrehistory

This troubling little video has garnered a good deal of attention. It initially dropped on 2nd December 2019 via Rees-Mogg’s own twitter account (with approximately 369,800 followers on the eve of the General Election ten days later). At the time of writing (13th December 2019) it has been viewed almost three quarter of a million times, and this is only on the Twitter platform.

The film is a particularly egregious example of what I have come to call #BrexitPrehistory (for it was not really about the election, it was about ‘getting Brexit done’) and it indicates the increasingly casual ways that prehistory is being used to make arguments for Brexit by leavers. However, the video also became a focal point for a lot of anti-Brexit (‘remainer’) sentiment, something I would also like to unpick here.

My contention is that we should not be using a prehistoric stone circle to make any kind of points about contemporary political and social challenges although it can be tempting to do so.

Stone circles like Stanton Drew, the one chosen by JRM as his backdrop, are neither leave or remain monuments. Yet, problematically, social media reaction to Rees-Mogg’s piece to camera suggests it might be both.

Petrified

First, let’s consider the video itself. It lasts all of 35 seconds, with a further final five seconds taken up with ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘Conservative Party’ branding.

JRM stands in front of one of the standing stones of Stanton Drew. The megalith is partially obscured by his torso and head, and he speaks while performing some half-hearted hand and body gestures. His stiff delivery style mimics the standing stones behind him, his petrified voters, a captive audience.

He narrates the following election message in his curious posh robot voice:

Adge Cutler sang the famous song: 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew.' 

I'm here by the standing stones in Stanton Drew, thought to be 4,500 years old, some of the most important stones in this country. 

And I want to get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

We must get Brexit done. Only the Conservatives can do that - a majority Conservative Government can get out of the European Union and make Brexit happen by 31st January.

Please vote Conservative and get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

This little vignette was based on the title of an Adge Cutler song, performed by his band The Wurzels, on the theme of joining the Common Market and the impact it might have on Stanton Drew, the village (not the adjacent prehistoric monument of the same name). Both just happen to be in Rees-Mogg’s North East Somerset constituency for which he was, at the time, standing for re-election, and has since been re-elected with a decreased share of the vote.

The song, 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew', is, depending on your perspective full of outdated, sexist, and racist, sentiments about foreigners and their stereotypical traits. Not to say geographically challenged as to the composition of Europe.

In the evenin' times I s'pose, we'll sip of our vin rose, Just like they do in the Argentine And we'll watch they foreign blokes, with their girt big 'ats and cloaks, Flamingo-in down on the village green. We'll 'ave to watch our wenches when they dark-eyed lads gets here, And the local boys'll 'ave to form a queue, They'll say "Ooh la la, oui oui," instead of "How's bist thee?"

Or as I have also seen it expressed, the song is a rather quaint musing on the exotic effects of becoming more closely integrated with Europe, and is in fact pro-European in sentiment, a parody of the prejudices of rural Little Englanders (oh the irony).

And the Druids Arms won't close till ver' nigh two, And we'll all drink caviar from a girt big cider jar, When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew!

Wikipedia more neutrally notes that in ‘…response to opening up of trade with Europe, Adge suggests what might happen to Somerset culture when Europeans come over’.

This slice of ye olde Englande nostalgia fits well with the JRM brand, apparently au fait with what the working class oiks get up to in their pubs and barns, using deliberately anachronistic terminology, and always wearing at least one item of clothing that belongs to clown.

In reality this is all a bit attention seeking, self-promoting an eccentric film in an election campaign where, by all accounts he had been side-lined by the Conservative Party machine for being too ‘off-message’ even for the Tories. He is, as the Daily Mirror describes him, a ‘disgraced Tory toff’.

Rees-Mogg smacks of a man who likes his stone circles rural, just like WG Hoskins. After all, this was indeed a sylvan spot before all those pesky roads, factories, and voters appeared in the surrounding landscape.

‘Views of Stanton Drew AD 1784’ (source: Dymond 1877)

Note that Rees-Mogg stands in such a position that the camera can only see the rural behind him, and no telegraph polls, roads, or other modern clutter. Another angle would have revealed a different temporal dynamic. He wants you to imagine this photo could have been taken in 1819 or 1919 because his persona is all about a timelessness that stems from a fear of change, of his privilege being undermined by progress.

Memes and mocking

Responses to the film have been largely restricted to social media, with almost no mainstream news commentary. On Twitter there has been a mixed bag of bemused, amused, and angry reactions, as well as some fine memes; a lot of this commentary has come from archaeologists, unsurprisingly.

Recumbent Rees-Mogg (Jonathan Last, @johnnythin)

Voting Conservative gets more Stonehenge (me! @urbanprehisto)

Response by @herbieherbie10 on Twitter

Others had some fun with the fact that the policy and belief system of Rees-Mogg is an anachronism, of the past, although it seems a little unfair to tar the people of the Neolithic with the same brush as this upper class twit.

Response by @snegreid on Twitter

We could be here all day having fun with this video and you can do so by looking at the many, many replies to the original tweet of the video.

‘Built by immigrants’

However, responses did not simply consist of cheap laughs at the expense of a feckless Tory MP. Some suggested that this short film was essentially a dog-whistle nod to the alt-right and far-right viewer of the video. In light of recent media coverage of far-right groups using megaliths in the south of England for rites and ceremonies (covered nicely in this blog post by Howard Williams), the choice of a stone circle could be viewed as at best naïve, or absolutely intentional, depending on your level of cynicism.

Archaeologists such as Cathy Frieman pointed out that it was important we acknowledge the tone of the video, and that it is no laughing matter.

Response by @cjfrieman on Twitter

In this respect should we be more careful about giving such tweets and political propaganda the oxygen of publicity? Certainly, it was interesting to see some responses on Twitter that we should not keep retweeting the original post (either to take the piss or offence) because this helps with the stats for the tweet and increases its visibility. When TV presenter and archaeologist Alice Roberts retweeted this, with a critique (of more below), she fired this little film into the timelines of over 200,000 of her followers. I am in a sense guilty of doing the same thing in this blog post, and it is the case that even mocking memes ensure a person, image, and message spreads across the internet like a virus.

Another theme that emerged in responses to the Rees-Mogg film was the apparent irony of using as a pro-Brexit backdrop a prehistoric monument that was ‘built by immigrants’ and which suggested we had close connections with Europe in prehistory.

Alice Roberts for instance tweeted: ‘How extraordinary that Rees-Mogg chooses to stand in front of a megalithic monument – which speaks so strongly of connections across prehistoric Europe – to make an isolationist statement!’

Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer of The Guardian (38K followers), tweeted: ‘Get the hell out of my favourite stone circle which, by the way, was built by immigrants’.

Response by @chiggi on Twitter

I don’t want to especially pick on these commentators, as the immigrants trope was suggested by lots of respondents, coming from a place with the best of intentions. And it reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s 2019 street artwork in Glasgow, Built by immigrants, which espouses a similar sentiment.

Jeremy Deller, Stonehenge artwork, Glasgow

Prehistory it seems is a blank canvas upon which we can project whatever we want to, fit into our belief systems, and bounce around within our echo chambers. And while I much prefer a narrative that supports partnership, immigration, and communal labour, over separationist and divisive arguments, I can’t help but feel uneasy about any attempts to use the prehistoric past to support or even justify our own belief systems.

The prehistoric story of stone circles should not be used to score political points.

Arguments that stone circles such as Stonehenge and Stanton Drew were ‘built by immigrants’ and had close connections to Europe and therefore we should retain those relationships today and into the future are, to my mind, as problematic as contrary arguments that, for instance, we have a long tradition of turbulent relationships with Europe, and that Brexit-like schisms are not a new thing.

Reactions to the film suggest leave and remain arguments are both claiming a form of legitimacy deep into prehistory, in the shape of Stanton Drew, which to my mind is both illogical and inappropriate.

Such arguments have become increasingly fuelled by ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope studies that suggest mobility in prehistory was commonplace especially when converted into newspaper headlines and stories. Yet our understanding of prehistory is complex and contested, and contrary views also exist. It is possible for instance to argue that at least some elements of Stanton Drew were constructed in the late Neolithic period (30th to 25th centuries BC), a time of ‘late Neolithic isolation’, even a Neolithic Brexit, according to archaeologists such as Richard Madgwick and Mike Parker Pearson. If we follow this line of argument, Rees-Mogg was correct – Stanton Drew is a leave monument. And, suggestions that stone circles are a common monument type across Europe, thus suggesting cultural connections, smacks of culture-historical thinking. No idea exists in isolation and the Brexitisation of prehistory is becoming tortuous.

The Brexit hypothesis

The use of Stanton Drew as a backdrop and theme for a political announcement about Brexit, and critical reactions to this that I have seen in social media are both symptomatic of what I have previously called the Brexit Hypothesis:

The proposition that any archaeological discovery in Europe can – and probably will – be exploited to argue in support of, or against Brexit (Brophy 2018: 1650).

Our discourse has become so entrenched in Brexit-thinking that we struggle to consider this stone circle without it becoming a synecdoche for our moral, ethical, political, beliefs. In fact, responses should have focused entirely on the wilful and inappropriate appropriation of a prehistoric megalithic enclosure for political ends as some contributors, such as Cathy Frieman, did indeed do.

Are we – the progressives, the liberal left, remainers – in danger of wanting to have our cake and eat it? At this politically dispiriting time, this is understandable.

A polarisation

There is always a depth and complexity to such issues, and this is reflected in the invisible, complex archaeology at the Stanton Drew circle JRM chose as his megalithic pulpit. An amazing geophysical survey in 1997 revealed a collection of concentric timber circles within the stone circle, and an external henge ditch. Hundreds of oak posts stood here in the Neolithic period (Davis et al 2004).

Stanton Drew geophysics results (source: PAST)

The visible megalithic Stanton Drew must be understood in the context of the organic invisible Stanton Drew. The visible political posturing must be read within the context of the invisible underlying currents given off that can perhaps be picked up on should receptive equipment be suitably attuned. As with actual, so with metaphorical geophysics: these undercurrents can be positive and negative. Rees-Mogg is attracting and repelling at the same time. That is what populist politicians – and magnetometers – do.

His deliberately divisive message is having the desired polarising effect.

The choice of site, the words, the message, of this short video are very much in the antiquarian tradition.

He is the Moggalithic antiquarian.

JRM the antiquarian, words from Dymond 1877

This is played out through his superficial understanding of the archaeological site, and an inability and unwillingness to interpret outwith his own value system. JRM uses the stone circle to valorise his world view and force that view upon others.

Yet stone circles can and should be kept out of our Brexit battles. They are no more an indicator of what Jonathan Last, in another great response to far-right use of prehistoric monuments, has called, ‘a conservative, nostalgic narrative of a lost rural England’, than they are surviving traces of an ancient utopia of free movement and European cultural cohesion.

Stone circles should be testament to the sophistication of Neolithic people. Stone circles should continue to be a source of wonder, mystery, the otherness of the past as demonstrated in Weird Walks zine #2. Their weird walk route around Stanton Drew, documented in the pages of this zine and The Face, is a wonderful counterpoint to the weird stiffness of the Rees-Mogg polemic. The stones should be hugged, and the stone circle is to be enjoyed, as is the visit to the Druids Arms pub afterwards.

Weird Walks Stanton Drew (source: Weird Walk #2 (2019), 30-1)

Prehistoric sites cannot, and should not, be viewed through a Brexit lens, whether leave or remain. 

We need to get back to seeing such ancient monuments through a camera lens and our own eyeballs.

We must take back our wonderful prehistoric monuments from the grasping hands and propaganda machines of opportunistic politicians, and avoid falling into their sinister traps.

***

Works cited:

Brophy, K. 2018. The Brexit hypothesis and prehistory. Antiquity, 92: 1650-58. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.160

David, A 1998 Stanton Drew, PAST 28. (Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society). Available online https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past28.html#Stanton

Davis, A. et al 2004 A rival to Stonehenge? Geophysical survey at Stanton Drew, England. Antiquity 78, 341-58. DOI: 10.1017/S0003598X00113006

Dymond, CW The megalithic antiquities at Stanton Drew, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 33: 297-307.

***

Thanks to guest blogger Kenny Brophy. Follow Kenny on Twitter @urbanprehisto. 

Read more by Kenny on his own blog, The Urban Prehistorian, and a previous guest post here.

Follow us on Twitter @AlmostArch, and pitch us your guest blog!

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

I’m five minutes in and already this seems like something beamed in from an alternate universe. Did this crowd just cheer “doctoral degrees” and then, specifically, “psychoanalysis”?

This big arena debate world where people cheer academic qualifications like wrestling belts is obviously Peterson’s world. And it’s really off-putting. He sits in his chair looking expectant and deep in thought, occasionally letting slip a brief acknowledgment of the surreality of the situation. Zizek, on the other hand, looks bewildered. When his introduction is concluded, he simply shrugs and does a brief facepalm.

Peterson, by contrast, barely flinches. He’s obviously used to this… And that’s the weirdest thing of all.

I’m not really sure what I’m in for here as I sit down to watch this. I’ve heard interesting things about this debate from those who have already watched it — apparently it’s not a complete waste of time — and so I have been tempted to give it a go for myself…

But I’m already aware of the kind of discussion I’m hoping for — and unlikely to get — and this anticipation is probably going to inform my viewing for better or worse…

So, first things first, I feel like I should declare my biases.

I like Zizek (generally speaking). He’s the sort of cantankerous sniffling voice I’m happy to have in the public sphere. I have a soft spot for him, in a way, because, perhaps like many other people my age, he was the first contemporary “Public Intellectual” that I paid any attention to; the first living philosopher I remember hearing and reading about.

However, that’s not to say I know his work all that well. The only book of his I’ve read with any seriousness is his first: The Sublime Object of Ideology — which is still a good read — but the majority of the rest of his written work is unknown to me. (Those films of his are, at the very least, entertaining.) I have, however, read a lot of his earlier articles and writings on communism, but I’ll come back to those shortly.

My understanding of Peterson’s general project is even more limited. I haven’t read his book. All I’ve seen are a few lectures and some click-bait “Peterson destroys…” YouTube appearances. That being said, I’ve found very little to admire or relate to in what I have heard him say. (I’ve previously critiqued one of his UK television appearances here.) But he’s nonetheless on my radar as a cultural figure and I have found his discussions around masculinity to be interesting, if only because of what he leaves out.

I want to briefly talk about Peterson’s views on masculinity because they seem integral to his overall position and you can see much of the same logic that is applied to this topic leaking out into his other opinions. For instance, on at least one occasion, he’s compared the modern “femininsation” of men to the Nietzschean death of God. It’s an apt comparison in some respects — although I’d take it more positively than he seems to do. His argument seems to be that men have lost their purpose, their drive, their grounding, like peasants without God, or a state without its sense of nationhood — the latter being a particularly important similarity, I think, when considering his popularity amongst hypermasculine nationalists. Point being: men are lost without their own inflated (and gendered) senses of self. Peterson is here to give it back to you. It’s not a bad project in and of itself, but he’s pretty terrible at it. His success despite this perhaps says more about the depths of the crisis that we’re willing to accept him as a savior.

What Peterson decries as taking the place of traditional gendered duties and positions within society is what he regularly defines as “contemporary nihilism”. This nihilism is, of course, a huge freedom to many others who have felt traumatically constricted by societal expectations and in contemporary philosophy more generally we have seen the emergence of a new nihilism which explores the outsider epistemologies of occultism with as much rigour as scientific rationalism — you could say it was precisely this crossover that gave the world Reza Negarestani — and so Peterson’s nihilism is, in itself, a very limited concept.

Ray Brassier’s old nihilism, for instance, is a nihilism that grounds itself on the “meaninglessness” of rational truth, which is to say, nihilism is an attempt to decloak oneself of the stories and “realisms” which we allow to structure (but also inevitably limit) our realities. Truth and meaning are not the same thing and so a life of facts and rationality is far closer to nihilism than the popular conception of the term allows. By contrast, despite warning of its dangers when it applies to something he doesn’t believe in, Peterson seems to champion the adoption of ideologies in order to give your life meaning. It is in this sense that he’s often positioned by some as fascist (or at least fascist-adjacent).

Masculinity, for Peterson, appears to be just such an ideology in being held up as an Idea that gives gendered subjects purpose and a sense of duty. But what is odd about this is how much Peterson otherwise critiques ideology. Because, for Peterson, it seems ideologies are only ever collective. Individualism, in particular, is not an ideology…

… And that’s ridiculous. As Zizek writes himself:

[I]deology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence — that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by a false consciousness.

He defines ideology as Marx does (at least implicitly): “they do not know it, but they are doing it“. Such is Peterson’s argument — don’t pay attention to any of that stuff which supposedly defines (or fails to define) your existence, just get on with it; tidy your room. (His insistence on personal cleanliness is, I’ve always felt, near identical to an army induction into self-presentation, and if that isn’t the ultimate immersion in ideology then I don’t know what is.)

Today, despite Peterson’s attempts to rehabilitate it, we see that the particular ideology of patriarchal individualism has been in crisis and so the left embraces the ideological crisis of masculinity, understood as a by-product of a broader crisis of patriarchal capitalism, in order to encourage the emergence of a new consciousness; the emergence of something altogether different. This is not to try and destroy men as such — well, okay, that depends who you ask… — but rather the ideology of Masculinity. In response to this general vibe, Peterson’s blinkered response to this is to try and save patriarchal capitalism by focussing on the individual and selling them an anti-feminist magical voluntarism.

What Peterson doesn’t get is that the argument is not that this crisis of manhood is a result of capitalism’s “failure”, per se — which is presumably why Peterson wants to defend its honour — but rather that this crisis is a direct result of capitalism’s own internal development and indifference.

(It would also be interesting to see what other takes people have on this, actually: “the feminisation of men” — a marxist feminazi psyop or a by-product of free market automation reducing the need for big strong physical labourers? You’d think Peterson, for all his citing of anthropological evidence, would be more on board with the latter, but he’s not… Responses on a postcard!)

The relevance of modern masculinity, and its crisis, to this particular debate is that masculinity is, more often than not, framed as an ideology in being not just a gender but a gender identity. To be a Man, in the sense that Peterson describes, is — sociopolitically and, that is, ideologically speaking — not that different from being a Communist. It is a declaration that says something about your view of the world and how people should expect you to act within it; indeed, how you should expect yourself to act within it. In this way, his is an individualised ethics — and that is how many contemporary men’s groups, for better or for worse, present themselves on both the left and the right, in defining masculinity as an ethics first and foremost — whilst communism instead strives for a collective and communal viewpoint, a “collective subjectivity”, a collectivised ethics, far broader than Peterson’s consideration of (but of course not ignorant to) these kinds of identity markers.

I want to keep this in mind going forwards because I think Peterson’s framing of masculinity actually gives us a good entry point for talking about communism (and his particular framing of communism) and this may help us understand just how flawed and limiting his conceptions of both these things are.

As I mentioned in passing, over the last few years I’ve started to read more and more of Zizek’s earlier work — particularly his articles on communism and, specifically, “the Idea of Communism“. When writing my Master’s dissertation back in 2017, reading a lot about Maurice Blanchot and his Bataillean conception of “community”, the Idea of communism emerged as a central framework through which the questions Blanchot (and others) raised have been continued into the present, and Zizek — as a writer and an editor — at one time contributed a fair amount to this discourse.

I’ve written a lot about the “Idea of communism” before on this blog, albeit under various different guises — the Idea of communism as an event horizon; as a “community which gives itself as a goal”; as a sort of ethical praxis in and of itself, a sort of politico-philosophical First Principle, rather than a solidified (statist) political ideal — it’s under the surface of a lot of my patchwork stuff.

To be clear, what I mean by the “Idea” of communism here is perhaps something akin to the Platonic Idea. To quote Plato himself, writing about his own philosophy:

There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be. For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of learning, but out-of much communion about this matter, and from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from there on nourishes itself.

The Idea, in this sense, is a sort of ephemeral thing, an event in a process of becoming. It is fuel for discourse and politics but is not, in itself, either of these two things. It’s something else unique to philosophy.

To many this may sound like the beginning of some wishy-washy apolitical intro to communism, but the intention here is to emphasise — what Deleuze & Guattari, in What Is Philosophy?, call — “the Concept” of communism. (This is, arguably, also the intention of U/Acc, in giving philosophical priority to the Concept of Acceleration over its conditioned political vagaries which leave the concept in the corner to their detriment — i.e. the rejection of a state-accelerationism on the same terms as a state-communism, with both being as sensical as the other despite how the latter is so often understood.)

The Concept, in this sense, is a provocation, an invention. To pin it down, to attack it or defend it, is to condition it and use it — which is fine in most circumstances — but there is always something that comes first which we mustn’t lose sight of in the process putting concepts to use. We must be “critical” — just as Peterson describes his preferred mode of thought, which we’ll discuss in a minute — by which I mean that we must not lose sight of the process of engineering which produces the concept when we put it to use. That is the purpose of the Idea or the Concept: that which philosophy always hopes to produce: the simultaneous product of and originator of thinking. (I’m writing on this in relation to accelerationism for somewhere else at the moment so I won’t go into this too much further or else I’ll start plagiarising myself.)

The Idea of communism, then, becomes this original seed which existed before the horrors of state-communism and continues to exist after them. It is a communism produced communally, lidibinally; a kind of communist consciousness; an outsideness; a view to that which isn’t. It is, in this first instance, the Idea of the future, of the new, of what is to come, held in the minds of those affected by it at the expense of that which is. When Kodwo Eshun called himself a “concept-engineer”, this is no doubt what he was positioning himself in favour of, and against the “great inertia engine”, the “moronizer”, the “futureshock absorber.” That’s what the Communist Manifesto calls for too. It’s a provocation, a call to revolution, not just of politics and economics but, more fundamentally, of thought and thinking.

Masculinity — reconfigured as a concept — (and femininity too, for that matter) can be thought of in much the same way, as a becoming, which may signify certain horrors, past and present, but as a future may instead be something which gives itself as a goal. And there is every chance that that goal might be unrecognisable to our current sense of the cloistered Ideal.

Like it or not, the best word we have for this process, related to gender anyway, is queering.

Everything else is cage.

Anyway, I’m rambling…

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, it has everything to do with Peterson’s opening statement.

The Idea of communism is seemingly an alien concept to him. The very Idea of philosophy seems alien to him, for that matter. He’s a man of blinkered systems and boundaries and “truths”, and to such an extent that “truth” ends up undermining his own arguments. His pursuit of an absolute logic — so common to many North American conservative pundits; “facts don’t care about your feelings” — only makes the holes in his reasoning more apparent. Encapsulated in a wall of logic that he has built around himself, he starts to undermine his own apparent superiority by being incapable of giving himself the room to breath and produce thought. He’s like a real life Vulcan, his ironic flaw being the bemusement which erupts from his consideration of the adaptability of those illogical and mentally vulnerable humans (read: leftists).

What makes this difficult for some to see, however, seems to be the effort Peterson puts into superficially privileging the opposite within his own work. Early on in his opening statement, for instance, he says:

It doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental — with this particular fundamental truth — which is that almost all ideas are wrong … It doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or something else’s ideas — they’re probably wrong. And, even if they strike you with the course of brilliance, your job is to assume that, first of all, they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive.

Such is philosophy — and, on that note, I’m reminded of a particular passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? where they write that the Greeks distrusted the Idea, the Concept, “so much, and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed the battlefield of destroyed rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet).”

And yet, for Deleuze and Guattari, the Concept doesn’t seek truth. It might emerge from certain judgments and appraisals, from thought, but truth is not its end. If truth were the goal for Marx and Engels, it might be called the Truth Manifesto. But it’s not. It is called the Communist manifesto because communism is its goal — a politics of multiplicitous and unruly communality.

Here we see the first glimpse of Peterson’s own nihilism — again, despite his apparent rejection of that -ism and its affects on thought. We might ask ourselves: What is it to introduce your position with a statement as vacuous as “almost all ideas are wrong”? Deleuze and Guattari, again, do a far better job of articulating the stakes of this suggestion which, again, seem totally lost of Peterson:

A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation. […] Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is “better” than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out, it bring forth an Event that surveys us. But did the earlier concept not do this already? If one can still be a Platonist, Cartesian, or Kantian today, it is because one is justified in thinking that their concepts can be reactivated in our problems and inspire those concepts that need to be created. What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?

From this we can say that the prevalence and continued existence of “Marxists” and Marxism is that the problems Marx (and Engels, of course) pointed to remain relevant today because we remain under the problematic system of capitalism. Many further concepts have been added to the arsenal but the original ground remains unresolved. Capitalism — as another -ism — endures for the same reasons. We have yet to settle the problem of capitalism as a response to the end of feudalism and instead treat the conceptual framework of capital as eternal rather than temporal, a being rather than a becoming.

Now, the Idea or Concept of communism can perhaps be summarised in similar terms. Communism is the name of a becoming-to-come, a postcapitalism. Peterson, instead, in wanting to rehabilitate what we already have, doesn’t get this. But still he continues to use the language of someone who does whilst nonetheless remaining trapped in his own circular argument.

For example, again in his opening statement, he calls Marx and Engels “typical” — as opposed to “critical” — thinkers because they accept things (that is, the problems of capitalism) as they are, as given and self-evident (to capitalism), and don’t think about their own thinking, which is to say that they also present their critiques to their readers as if they were self-evident. Peterson says no — these problems are inherent to nature, not capitalism. But in shifting the goal posts rather than engaging with the text directly he portrays himself as guilty of what he decries in them.

In doing this, Peterson sidesteps the entire point of the Marxist project, particularly as it is framed in the Manifesto: a project which attempts to systematise a deep understanding of capitalism (as in Marx’s Capital) and then critique the material reality of capitalism, provoking action against it (as in the Manifesto). If anything, Peterson might have come out of this better if he’d read anything but the manifesto. Instead, he misses the entire point, failing to get under the skin of Marxism because he fails to acknowledge its attempts to get under the skin of capitalist realism and reveal to us the ways in which that which is, that which we see and accept as the nature of reality, is instead a contingency. In this sense, “all ideas (capitalism tells you) are wrong” could be the brainlet summary of the Manifesto in itself, and in this sense, if it is an ideology, it is one which defines itself by what it escapes.

It is here that the circle of Peterson’s argument completes itself before its even really begun. What is it to critique critical thinking in this way? What is it to critique critique through naturalised tradition? Does this make Peterson a critical-critical thinker? Or is he instead just a critical-typical thinker? Either way, his is a position that eats itself. Peterson, however, seems good at supplying the gall to ignore your own inability to take your own medicine.

This is the entire problem with Peterson’s argument going forwards too, which might be summarised as: “Marx and Engels say that this is self-evident within capitalism and must be challenged — I say, actually it is self-evident within nature and nature is sacrosanct so back off.” Peterson’s form of “critique” is simply to take pre-existing critiques of our sociopolitical world and place them within a broader (supposedly) scientific context and, in the process, turn his own critical thinking back into (by his own definition) a typical thinking. He’s literally bending backwards over his own arguments.

Take, for instance, his analysis of the first “axiom” of the Communist Manifesto — his summary of Marxist historical materialism being that the very engine of history is economic class struggle. Peterson flippantly throws out the relevance of economics and says, sure, class struggle exists, hierarchies exist, but they exist in nature too so why are we so upset about them and put all the blame on economics?

In framing it this way, he seemingly misses the main point that our hierarchies are not “natural” — they are instantiated by capitalism as an economic system. To say that hierarchies have always existed ignores the sense in which economics defines class. It is to ignore the very nature of our hierarchies, in the present epoch, as economic — that is, how economics forms them — which we can interpret as not just being about how much your earn but also how much you are worth, connecting slavery to wage-slavery and encompassing the fallouts of both. Contrary to this, Peterson’s is the sort of argument that takes scientific observations of the natural kingdom and then uses them to reconstruct a sort of secular Divine Right of Kings. It is a gateway to a racist and eugenic thinking.

It is from this flawed analysis that Peterson goes on to make the point that went viral in the aftermath of the debate. He says:

it is finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that biological / anthropological data on that is crystal clear. You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power.

This clip has done the rounds online already, as it gets a very audible laugh from the crowd, and rightly so. It’s perhaps the most moronic comment anyone could make — but it is also a comment that can be split into a right half and a wrong half, further demonstrating Peterson’s circular reasoning.

People do rise to positions of authority through exploitation — that is true not just of capitalism but the feudalism that birthed it and it is also, arguably, true of the animal kingdom too (depending on how you define exploitation — the exploitation of behaviours, habits, circumstances?) — but it is also right to say that this is an unstable means of obtaining power. Rather than that instability meaning people don’t do it, it leads to the sort of resentment and protest that Peterson dismisses as unfounded. His entire logic system starts to fall into place. Reading the Communist Manifesto at aged 18 and presumably reading it with all the nuance of an 18 year old, Peterson has embarked on a career of self-fulfilling criticism based on the logical fallacies of a teenager.

From this point, it is very hard to take anything else he says seriously. What follows is a long, meandering and confused rant that ends with the basic point: “Actually, relatively speaking, the poor are richer now than they once were… As are the rich…” Thank you, Dr. Peterson. Truly insightful.

I’m left wanting to bail out at this point. I feel like I’ve wasted 40 minutes of my life but I try and stick it out for Zizek’s opening statement at least.

From the outset, it is far more interesting. Taking on the three topics of the debate’s title — Communism, Happiness, Capitalism — he considers the ways in which “Happiness” is not such a simple and virtuous goal for us to give ourselves, especially under a system like capitalism which does all it can to grab the steering wheel of our desires. (It’s an argument I’ve made myself before when writing about Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism — a communism that is “beyond the pleasure principle”.) Zizek says:

I agree that human life or freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness — no matter how much we spiritualise it — or in the effort to actualise our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival.

Zizek’s statement from here is actually quite brilliant, and subtle. He eschews any temptation to echo Peterson’s polemic book report and instead implicitly skewers everything wrong with Peterson’s own body of work and, indeed, the entire situation of their meeting under the cover of the debate’s own title. It’s very cunning.

For instance, he says a few minutes later:

Once traditional authority loses its substantial power it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are, today, a post-modern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No. His conservatism is a post-modern performance; a gigantic ego trip.

Whilst Zizek takes firm aim at Trump, Peterson lingers on the edge of his seat. You wonder how much he knows that he is also in Zizek’s sights. Whilst Peterson through criticisms at a 170-year-old target that just don’t stick, Zizek DESTROYS his opponent in a philosophical proxy war.

If Trump is, according to Zizek, the ultimate postmodernist president, Peterson appears, by proxy, to be the most successful postmodernist public intellectual — the attack-dog of YouTube conservatism, the spewer of the very postmodernism he declares his enemy through his snake-oil salesman act of Making Men Great Again as a neo-traditional ideology.

Zizek powers through point after point from here and everything starts to blur into one. It’s not easy to follow without the post-stream benefit of stopping and starting, but there is substance here — substance, I am nonetheless told by the better informed, that Zizek has already repeated again and again through his most recent books and public appearances. There is nothing new here, but it is in part worth listening to just to see Peterson’s face. He is out of his depth. And it shows.

Whereas Peterson’s history lesson is under-informed, Zizek’s history lesson, encapsulating the 20th / 21st century development of hegemonic ideologies, ends simply with a door through which Peterson blindly walks, being the capstone to Zizek’s own argument simply by being himself. Little else needs to be said. The undertone of Zizek’s argument seems to be: “You want postmodernism? You’ve just seen a masterclass… And wasn’t it shit!” It’s very entertaining.

But honestly, I’m burnt out. It’s hard to adjust to Zizek’s rapid-fire drive-by of our contemporary moment after Peterson’s lacklustre ahistorical ramble. Maybe I’ll come back and watch the follow-up back and forth at a later date… But I doubt I’ll want to blog about this any further.

UPDATE: This, from Quillette of all places, is spot on:

The debate about whether there’s a straight line from Marx to Stalin is an important one, especially given the revival of interest in socialism in the contemporary West. Everyone should want the key participants in that debate to be as well informed as possible. Marxists should want to sharpen their minds by having to confront the best versions of anti-Marxist arguments, while anti-Marxists should want a champion for their position who knows Marx’s writings inside and out. Unfortunately, as he’s shown on many occasions, Jordan Peterson doesn’t fit this bill.

[fatehbaz]

Wait, what's the anthropomorphism debate? If you'd prefer not to answer dw! I can look more into it online

Apologies in advance for this long post! I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so take what I say here with a grain of salt; I am not “an authority.” I’m going to hijack the ask to summarize “the ontological turn in anthropology.”

So: the ontological turn in anthropology from 2008-2012, and the debate about anthropomorphism

I’m sorry that I did not answer this sooner. I’m also sorry that this is going to be a very long post. You might know all this stuff already, so please feel free to disregard all this text! A recap for viewers who missed the previous episode:

This question was - I’m assuming - in response to me being a silly-billy and making a meme of a distressed, sweaty person awaking from a nightmare, to illustrate the anxiety that confronted me when I noticed that there has been some recent Tumblr discourse replicating the heated academic anthropology debate about anthropomorphism from around 2008-2012. I was at relatively progressive university, focused on ethnoecology at the time (a field of anthropology right at the heart of the discourse), so I was forced to participate!

Basically, the 2008-2012-ish period saw the relative “mainstreaming” of a movement to “decolonize anthropology and conservation/ecology” and uplift Indigenous/non-Western worldviews as an alternative to Western views of the natural world, and this movement was basically referred to as “the ontological turn in anthropology.” It sought to acknowledge that Indigenous cosmologies were legitimate - as in, Indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is very sophisticated, and therefore the cosmologies that maintained this knowledge ought to be given more credit. A major, if not the central, issue in this dialogue was how to prevent “intellectual colonization” by respecting the utility/validity of specific Indigenous worldviews like Buen Vivir, animism, totemism, etc. Thus, one of the most frequent and intense focal points of discussion and argument was “anthropomorphism” and animal emotion. Technical scientists were still uncomfortable accepting the environmental knowledge of non-Western cultures that believed in things similar to literal animism. The discourse was also deeply concerned with “the Anthropocene” and the climate/ecological crisis, and sought to uplift Indigenous relationships with ecology as examples of alternatives to capitalist resource extraction economies.

At the time, I fried my brain out while reading hot-take after hot-take about anthropomorphism - but I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so this subject might not be as overwhelming to other readers!

The discourse was extensive; and some Tumblr discourse I’ve seen lately seems to be asking similar questions that the 2008-2012 discourse also grappled with.

Many Latin American scholars - and Indigenous people - had been actively writing about Indigenous cosmology’s importance to anthropology/ecology/conservation for decades but especially since at least the late 1980s and early 1990s (especially Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, an anthropologist working in Latin America and since dubbed the leading scholar of “Amazonianist” thinking promoting the knowledge of Andean/Amazonian peoples). However, this movement begun to be taken much more seriously in American academia around 2008-2010, led by the influential writing of ecology-adjacent anthropologists and theorists like Bruno Latour, Phillipe Descola, and Isabelle Stengers.

This discourse and its mainstreaming coincided with the rise of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) - headed by Graham Harman, who was given more attention partially because of the rising popularity of his friend Mark Fisher, at this time. OOO played a major part in some of these discussions, since it basically (don’t quote me on this) allows for statements like “all other living things - and perhaps non-living things, but that’s more complicated - probably experience some strange alien form of subjectivity, and are therefore are potentially sentient at their own scale depending on how you want to define sentience.” Timothy Morton (who coined the term “dark ecology” - after which my blog was named) is/was a close colleague of Graham Harman’s. Morton sort of “bridged the gap” between the anthropology/ecology enthusiasts and the more space-y OOO theoretical stuff.

-

Anthropomorphism?

A sort of conclusion to this discourse, which was eventually acknowledged by many anthropologists and ecologists, is similar to Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “cosmopolitics”: Animals and plants have unique experiences and perspectives, probably very bizarre and strange to the human observer. Humans and other living things engage in “world-building” and may have an “interiority” that isn’t always going to match definitions of sentience or consciousness, and therefore it can be difficult to “translate” the experience of other living things in a way that humans can understand or relate. However, it is still worthwhile to attempt to translate the experience of other living things, partially by acknowledging that we live in a strange community of living things and therefore should value the biosphere as a community.

But I think Adrian Ivakhiv, an environmental scientist at University of Vermont, better summarizes this view of anthropomorphism which is gaining popularity. You can read the summary here, from December 2010.

You might recognize these themes from Tumblr discourse about animism/anthropomorphism. This is a discussion of how various human cultures conceive of other living things, and how living things, whether “sentient” or not, still “subjectivate,” and therefore participate in their own “world-building” at some scale.

“On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics.” December 2010/Janurary 2011. Adrian Ivakhiv.

Excerpts:

Either most existing entities are supposed to share a similar interiority whilst being different in body, and we have animism,  as  found among peoples of the Amazonian basin, the Northern reaches of   North America and Siberia and some parts of Southern Asia and  Melanesia.  Or humans alone experience the privilege of interiority  whilst being  connected to the non-human continuum by their materiality and we have  naturalism – Europe from the classical age. Or some  humans and  non-humans share, within a given framework, the same  physical and moral  properties generated by a prototype, whilst being  wholly distinguishable  from other classes of the same type and we have totemism –  chiefly to  be found among Australia’s Aborigines. Or all the world’s  elements are  ontologically distinct from one another, thence the  necessity to find  stable correspondences between them and we have analogism –China,  Renaissance Europe, West Africa, the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Central-America [6]. [“Who owns nature,” 2008]

These ontological options can be portrayed as follows:

This would be a world that demands an ontological politics, or a cosmopolitics, by which the choices open to us with respect to the different ways we can entangle ourselves with places, non-humans, technologies, and the material world as a whole, become ethically inflected open questions. […]

In her multivolume work Cosmopolitiques (1996–97) and publications that followed it, Isabelle Stengers (2005) forwards a “cosmopolitical proposal” that, unlike most forms of cosmopolitanism, does not presume the existence or even the possibility of a “good common world,” an ecumenically peaceable cosmopolis. On the contrary, her proposal is intended to “slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ‘good’” (2005:994). The “cosmos” of her cosmopolitics “refers to the unknown constituted by [the] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (2005:994). Such a cosmopolitics does not pre-assume what will count as “common,” whether it is “human nature,” “cultural differences,” or the laws and discoveries of science; or, on the other hand, gods, souls, spirits, or anything else that anyone might bring to the table.

Stengers’s call is echoed by Latour (2004b), Mol (1999), and Law (2004), who argue on behalf of a politics for building, enacting, or co-producing shared or common worlds — not worlds that posit “nature” as the “unique author of a single account” (Law 2004:123) propping up a “reality that is independent, prior, singular, and definite,” but worlds in which “everything takes effort, continuing effort” (Law 2004:131–132). Such methods and modes of knowledge-making recognize their own complicities in the worlds they enact; and they are political in the sense that they raise questions about how the world of associations — the society of humans and other entities — is to be organized. Seeing ourselves as cosmopolitically entwined with each other and the other others of the world means seeing ourselves as actively practicing ways of “worlding” or “world-making” (Wilson and Connery 2007).

More importantly, if world-building is something that all entities are involved in, then all are carving up, in their own way, what will qualify as subject and what will qualify as object. (…)

A balanced processual perspective, however, would be one that argues that all things participate in subjectivity — all things subjectivate — in their own different ways, which may be more or less like ours depending on the specificity of those things; and that all things participate in objectivity — all things objectivate, becoming objective, material, bodily data for other things — also in their own different ways, which are also more or less like ours depending on the specificity of the things.(…)

-

Sorry again for the wall of text.

Thanks for the ask!

[otherpens]

pleasepleaseplease tell me about Anne Rice fandom wank? If you don't want to that's okay I will google it but it's more fun hearing about fandom wank from fandom friends! *gets out the popcorn*

Okay, I was never IN it, so much as ADJACENT TO IT, (I wanted to be goth in middle school but I scare easily and still had one foot in the Christian youth group summer camp tomboy aesthetic and had zero disposable income, so never quite made it on an outward level, and I didn’t get into online fandom or anything until I was about 16 or so, so the main shenanigans that started all this shit were a solid 2-3 years in the past by the time I turned up,) but I’m a messy bitch who loves fandom drama and Anne Rice is legend in a bad way.

So AS FAR AS I KNOW/RECALL around the early oughties she puts a statement on her website that she is a Hard No on all fanfiction involving her books. And, like, intellectual property arguments aside, this is still somewhat in the Wild West of online fandom involvement and fan works really starting to hit something like the public consciousness with LiveJournal and blogs and forums and archives. Fans are nervy as fuck in this brave new world of...you can just write things...and put them on the internet...and pretty near anybody can find them and read them and maybe even give feedback. Only Anne Rice is like, hell to the fuck no, and starts sending out C&D letters in particular to more well-known fandom individuals/fic authors, apparently tying in some references to their own jobs and personal lives or whatever because she had her people dig for info to use as leverage, and nobody has the time/money/balls to take ANNE RICE to court, so of course they all just back the heck down. About the same time she has fanfiction.net remove all works based on her books as per a letter from her lawyers and that’s been the state of play ever since, as far as I can tell. You cannot find Anne Rice fanfic hosted online unless you already know where to find it. If it exists at all, it’s so far underground as to be functionally inaccessible even to seekers...because presumably, Anne Rice is looking for it, too, in order to destroy it. (And this is why fics of the time had DISCLAIMERS, like I started doing it on my old fics just because I saw other people doing it and didn’t understand why at the time or how it even constituted legal protection but yeah.)

Also she was like “Real people leaving negative reviews of my books on Amazon? Mmmm don’t like that.” (This was well after she’d admitted she refuses to let her manuscripts be edited, anymore.) Also anyone who didn’t like her writing was clearly just taking the wrong view of things because her authorial intent is all that matters, obvs. (Millennium Anne Rice is just about where all the fuckery kicks off, but she’s apparently continued threatening/doxxing people for negative reviews until quite recently so I have no reason to believe her attitude has changed.)

In the years following, Rice is kind of just continually doubling-down on her position, with fairly open disdain for the web/internet side of things and also going through some kind of religious transformation to what appears to be a much more fundamentalist Christian stance but I know way less about this particular aspect of her personal life and how it came out in her later writings so can’t comment so much, but...that’s a thing. That happened. And she went on to write some Bible fanfic of her own, so, uhhhhhh...but I guess whoever wrote the Gospels doesn’t have lawyers to send after her for her retelling of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Roughly five or so years back she starts to...I don’t know if relax is the word? But she basically is like “I don’t read fanfic of my work” which is FINE and apparently she isn’t hauling out threats of legal action against fic authors or whatever, now, which is...better, I guess, than her prior response. She’s also gotten more to grips with the world of online interaction with her fanbase because maybe she finally fkin realized no one wanted to leave phone messages to be transcribed and faxed to her in the year of our lord 2018. So UGH FINE she’s on the interwebs now but GOD HELP ANYONE who writes fanfic or criticizes her writing even on their own book review blogs, like...she will COME FOR YOU.

More recently she defended the author of that fuckin concentration camp ‘romance’ and yes Rice’s own chosen turn of phrase involved the term ‘lynch mob’ and ‘censorship’ because writers are the real victims when the readers take to the internet to sound off on authorial bullshit, apparently. (GROSS.)

So if her works are going to be adapted for a new era it’s going to be interesting as fuck watching this thin-skinned bigoted grandma respond to an audience that’s more emboldened to call out bullshit as they see it than ever before. I hope she cries.

[meganhannigan]

In Conversation with Ellie Medhurst - Fashion historian

Email conversation between me and her

Could you give a little description of who you are, what you do and how you identify yourself?

My name is Eleanor Medhurst and I'm a lesbian fashion historian. I'm a recent graduate of MA History of Design and Material Culture at the University of Brighton, and my current work is the writing of a blog about lesbian fashion history, Dressing Dykes (www.dressingdykes.com). I am 23, I live in Birmingham with my almost-wife and I identify as a lesbian.

How did your own personal style come about?

My personal style has developed gradually since I was a teenager. I began playing with an all-pink style when I was 16 or 17, inspired by Japanese street fashion and kawaii culture. More recently, I have enjoyed bringing elements from lesbian fashion narratives into my own style, enjoying garments and accessories with lesbian and/or queer connotations - ties, Doc Martens, suits, dunagrees, etc. I do, however, still try to find all of these things in my colour of choice, pink.

Is there a meaning behind your all pink style, why pink?

I have done a lot of thinking and researching around mine (and many other queer women's) decision to wear all/almost-all pink. I wrote my own BA dissertation on the topic and have presented my thoughts about it at various conferences (a blog post that I have written called 'Subverting Pink' is available here: https://dressingdykes.com/2020/08/21/subverting-pink/). While at first I was drawn to the colour through its use in Japanese subcultural fashion cultures, it began to take its own shape in my personal wardrobe. Pink has many cultural connotations, most of which revolve around ideas of stereotypical, heterosexual femininity. I believe that when it is worn by a lesbian woman, some of these connotations become twisted and rewritten. Additionally, the overwhelming presence of pink in my clothing, which I define as unapologetically lesbian, makes the colour unavoidable to anyone who sees me wearing it; I think that people may have to confront their own preconceived ideas of pink and its symbolism in a way that they do not when it exists on a smaller scale.

What made you interested to start documenting lesbian fashion?

I started becoming interested in documenting and researching lesbian fashion during my undergraduate degree in Fashion and Dress History. I believe that the most interesting fashion histories are the ones that involve normal people and their everyday clothing, rather than high fashion. The clothes that we wear can say so many things about ourselves, our lives and our communities, and this is especially true of lesbians, whose voices are so often silenced. Clothing can often speak when voices cannot. Also, I learnt on my BA and my MA how rare it is to read about lesbian fashion, even within a fashion history context. I wanted to change that.

What do you think the importance of lesbian fashion being documented is?

I partially answered this in my previous paragraph, but generally I think that the importance of documenting lesbian fashion is that it has so much to tell, and it has not ever been complied in one place. Of course, I know that I can only compile a certain amount, but I think that lesbians (and anyone who may be interested, but lesbians deserve to have spaces) should be able to find multiple lesbian fashion-related stories, photographs and histories easily.

There’s a lot more documentation of gay men’s fashion compared to gay women’s fashion. From a fashion historians view why do you personally think that is and what’s your opinion on it?

I think that lesbian fashion is often not seen as being fashion at all. Sometimes, this is because lesbian clothing can be consciously anti-fashion, or unfeminine. This does not mean that it is not important. Additionally, the most obvious gay men are those who are feminine, and femininity is more aligned with fashionability. The most obvious gay women, however, are those who are more masculine, and masculininity is normally outside the realms of fashion - for women, at least. This also means that the more typically 'fashionable' gay women are those who are not read as gay by most people's eyes. Sexuality, self-presentation and fashion is a lot less black and white than this.

How do you think your blog has impacted the community since you are documenting lesbians in fashion history where we were not represented much before?

I hope that my blog has had a positive impact on the lesbian community, as well as on other LGBTQ people and anyone else interested in fashion history! It is still in its early stages, but I think that I am doing important work with it.

On your instagram I’ve seen images of you wearing clothing saying ‘dyke’ ‘homo’ etc. What does visibly showing your pride for your sexuality mean to you and why do you do it?

This is an interesting question because my MA dissertation revolved around lesbian slogan t-shirts and their meaning/history. Part of why I wear t-shirts with lesbian or lesbian-adjacent slogans on them is to connect with the research that I've done there - I know that I am part of a lineage of lesbians who have used similar methods of visibility, such as those in the Lavender Menace or the Lesbian Avengers. I also think there is something important to be said about words like "dyke" or "homo" being used on t-shirts because they are words that have been, and still are, used as slurs. To wear them so visibly is not only a way to show pride in my own identity, but a way to draw attention to the inequalities and oppressions that queer people still face. A "dyke" t-shirt is an act of activism.

[tak4hir0]

AI Is Eating Software deepkapha.ai By Martijn van Attekum, Jie Mei and Tarry Singh Introduction Marc Andreessen famously said that “Software is eating the world” and everyone gushed into the room. This was as much a writing on the wall for many traditional enterprises as it was wonderful news for the software industry. Still no one actually understood what he meant.  To make his point he stated this example: "Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company — its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software." Marc Andreessen This was 2011.  Marc Andreessen TechCrunch Interestingly, Andreessen also said the following: "I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case...We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses." Marc Andreessen (Read the full blog article at his a2z VC fund) Little did Andreessen envision that the same software industry could be at risk of being eaten. Fast forward to 2019 and the very same software industry is nervous. Very very nervous! And the reason is AI. Especially for those who haven’t bulked up their AI warchest.  Acceleration Wave (2009 - 2019) - When Software Started Eating the World Andreessen was right.  The companies that embraced software in 2011 are the current market leaders in their respective fields, and the top 5 market capitalization companies worldwide in the second quarter of 2019 are all offering some type of software solutions (ycharts.com).  Concurrently, the period since 2011 has shown an unprecedented growth in the developments in AI. Although several key ideas about AI have been around for long, a number of processes have accelerated their potential use. First, computing power, in particular for specialized AI chipsets, has vastly increased. Second, the amount of training data for AI algorithms is exploding with the advent of data lakes and a fully connected internet-of-things world, expanding AI domains and decreasing the costs to train algorithms. Third, a large number of technological bottlenecks (such as vanishing gradients) have been solved over the last few years, massively increasing accuracy and applicability of existing algorithms. Lastly, the decrease in costs for cloud storage and computing plus the facilitation of distributed collaborative working, made combining highly specialized knowledge easier than ever before.  The extent in which Andreessen’s cherished software companies are weaving AI into their products is however often limited. Instead, a new slew of start-ups now incorporates an infrastructure based around the above mentioned AI-facilitating processes from their very foundation.  HyperAcceleration Wave (2019 - 2030) - AI Has Started Eating Software Driven by an increase in efficiency, these new companies use AI to automate and optimize the very core processes of their business. As an example, no less than 148 start-ups are aiming to automate the very costly process of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry according to a recent update on BenchSci.  Likewise, AI start-ups in the transportation sector create value by optimizing shipments, thus vastly reducing the amount of empty or idle transports. Also, the process of software development itself is affected. AI-powered automatic code completion and generation tools such as TabNine, TypeSQL and BAYOU, are being created and made ready to use.  Let’s quickly look at a few example applications of this hyperacceleration wave: Automating the coding process by having TabNine autocomplete your code with AI! DeepTabNine Tabnine It is trained on around 2 million files from code repository GitHub. During training, its goal is to predict each token given the tokens that come before it. To achieve this goal, it learns complex behaviors, such as type inference in dynamically typed languages. Once Deep TabNine developers realized the parallel between code and natural language processing, they implemented the existing GPT-2 tool which uses the Transformer network architecture. The inventor of this tool is Jacob Jackson, an undergraduate student and ex-OpenAI intern who quickly realized this idea and created a software tool for it. Getting answers to any question about your medical data As AI will create the query to get the answer for you! Here, a group of medical researchers created a tool that you can ask literally any questions on medical data and the AI generates a customized SQL query that is then used to retrieve the relevant data from the database. Speech Text to Generating Database Query automatically Question to SQL Generation It's called Question-to-SQL generation. They used RNN (a form of deep learning, an AI on steroids for text analytics) with Attention and Point-Generator Network. For those more inclined to exploring the technical part of this feel free to read their research here and software code here. So is it time the armies of database administrators (DBAs) to go home? Creating a beautiful website based on your sketch While AI translates your sketch into code! Want to build your website quickly? All you need to do is sketch it and this platform will use AI to create software code like html, css and js code ready in vue.js instantly. Sketch to create a website with AI Zecoda Easy, huh? Just input your sketch and voila! your website pops out at the other end! Find out more about this platform here. These are just a few examples of how AI is increasingly encroaching all parts of software development and eliminating mundane tasks of coding and programming rapidly! This is due to the motivation to automate the process of numerical analysis, data collection and eventually, processing and relevant code production. Researchers have higher-than-ever awareness and knowledge to infiltrate each and every problem at all levels with AI-powered software, from day-to-day anecdotes such as: Which kind of cookies shall we recommend to a customer given their shopping preferences? To large-scale, manufacturer’s dilemma, for example: How do we automate the production line in an individualized yet systematic manner? And finally, to the processing of building smarter, easier-to-use software that may even write code for you. Apart from assisted decision making, diagnostic and prediction, work of AI researchers and influencers have led to a hyperacceleration wave: Software powered by AI does not only achieve performances comparable to the human level, but creates something that would challenge an average person’s imagination and perception of their own abilities. A person can no longer tell apart the fake celebrity faces generated by generative neural networks from the real ones, or need not remember the name of every function they will use when writing a script. Imaginably, the wide application domains and near-human performance of AI-powered software will cause a paradigm shift in the way people deal with their daily personal and professional problems. Although some of us are pessimistic about, or in some extreme cases, consciously avoiding a world with overwhelming AI-powered software, there is not so much room for an escape. Amazon, Google, and even your favorite neighborhood florist, are actively (and sometimes secretly) using AI to generate revenue. Face it, or be left behind.   What would you do if you were BMW today? "At this point, no one can reliably predict how quickly electromobility will progress, or which drive train will prevail... There is no customer requests for self driving BEVs. (electric vehicles)" CEO, BMW A classic trap most big enterprises with established business fall for is getting micro-focused on existing business segments while losing sight on the slowly eroding economic and business climate. Tesla's story as an electric car is known to all but many may not know that it is the self-driving feature and the heavy use of AI in both software and hardware where the secret sauce lies. They have already driven 10 billion electric miles and the cars are collecting all the more data to disrupt not just the automotive markets but its adjacent markets in manufacturing, servicing, sales and in general mobility. Tesla's AI is eating all other automotive industry's business. A few weeks later after his annual address, the BMW chief had resigned. CEO's and executives who however do wish to proactively adopt AI should do the following 5 things Concluding thoughts 1) Have your AIPlaybook Ready Last year I did a keynote panel together with a few industry peers and I was asked if AI could eat software and I said "Yes". Take a listen. Any company that is not in possession of its AI Playbook, that is not armed with data, algorithms and machine learning models, is certainly going to find itself in serious quandary. An example of an AI playbook is to assess your firm's maturity thoroughly and plan for ROI driven projects. AI Playbook deepkapha.ai 2) Upskill and/or hire a (good) data science team Upskilling your staff to be able to drive your AI transformation is the key to success for any organization aspiring to become an AI company. We've advised several large-scale data-intensive projects and here are a couple of key arguments that executives should take to heart. In a couple of years embracing AI is not a matter of trend riding, but survival; To survive an era in which AI is dominating both market and software, CEOs and executives need to level up their mindset for successful adoption and application of AI within their enterprise, for which they either have to upskill or find a good data science team; Know your game: A good team helps you understand how AI will make your company survive; Examples are abundant in the industry and it is key for companies to pay attention to latest trends and launch several smaller projects to extract out the key projects that can be industrialized at scale. 3) Develop Algorithms & Execute Your Data-Play From Day 1 Upgrading your technical infrastructure that can develop the latest AI algorithms, process large quantities of heterogenous datasets, build and train both industry benchmarked and novel AI models is an important first step. Once that is established it is very critical to develop meaningful dialog channels to envision and dream project ideas that are pain killers and dive directly into solving those problems with data. Finally, executing from Day 1 on the "good-enough" data models and algorithms is where a true AI company can define its momentum and gain sizeable lead from its nearest competition. 4) Implement a distributed knowledge structure As access to the right data is a key to valuable AI solutions, ensuring access to data generated or acquired within the company and outside will be of crucial importance. Following this realization, pharmaceutical companies are starting to create central repositories of the data gathered in their clinical trials. Consequently, their data science teams will have access to a structured knowledge database they can use to train AI algorithms.  A second way to ensure the distribution of knowledge, is to set up a distributed collaboration structure. With the advent of software mimicking group processes from setting schedules, having meetings, or doing a brainstorming session, integration of knowledge and expertise should no longer be limited by geographical location. 5) Tap into AI start-ups with relevant knowledge Andreessen’s example of Disney buying Pixar in order to stay relevant has paid off for Disney, which sold for over 8 billion dollar in movie tickets this year, making Disney the second biggest media company (Forbes). Yet the latest developments suggest AI could also optimize movie-making processes. Moreover, as Disney is creating a consumer platform with Disney+, AI might form the necessary basis to ensure optimal usage of the data generated by this platform. When not wanting to build data science teams from scratch, collaborating with or taking over relevant start-ups might again be necessary for companies such as Disney to stay competitive. So yes, AI has started eating software. What are you going to do? ___________________________________________________________ About contributing authors Martijn v Attekum MD (Oncology) and PhD Dr. Martijn Van Attekum (MD, PhD) works as a data scientist in biomedicine at the University of Cologne. He is an experienced project manager and writer, and is skilled in genomics, oncology, and machine learning. As Visiting AI Researcher at deepkapha.ai he participates in ground-breaking deep learning projects on medical image analysis. In his free time, he is very much attracted to everything the mountains have to offer, such as climbing, hiking, and mountain biking. Jie Mei PhD Computational Neuroscience Dr. Jie Mei is a computational neuroscience researcher who has completed her studies at the Ecole normale supérieure and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She is currently based in Edmonton, Canada and is responsible for the growth of AI research department within deepkapha.ai and its companies. Her research interests include computational neuroscience, neurorobotics, machine learning and data analytics in healthcare and medicine. She is also an active startup advisor.

[seo1code-blog]

How to Leverage Your Blogging Skills To Boost Your Business

Blogging has become so ubiquitous that the word ‘blog’ is often used interchangeably with ‘website’. Like Facebook and Twitter, blogging has entered the common consciousness and even has its own spin-offs like micro-blogging. Even your grandmother probably knows what blogging is!

What a lot of people don’t know is how effectively blogging can be used to drive traffic to websites, forge long-term business relationships, and build brand loyalty.

That’s right: a blog can be an excellent tool to help you grow your business. If you haven’t thought about blogging in that light before,  it’s time to start.

In this post, I’m going to talk about how to leverage your blogging skills to boost your business.

First, hone your writing skills

The great blogs out there have highly talented writers behind them. In fact, the entire business of the internet revolves around the most basic and fundamental of skills: writing.

Sure, some people have a natural flair for words. But that’s no reason to believe that you can’t train yourself to be a skilled wordsmith. And when it comes to blogging, there are certain pillars you should always use to hold your posts together:

Headlines. These should be powerfully crafted and demand to be clicked on. They are what ultimately will drive readership of your blog. If you’re stuck for inspiration, use one of the many blog title idea generators out there to generate something that’s catchy without being clickbait.

Style. Know your voice and develop it to keep readers coming back to your blog. If you’re someone who tends to speak in a short and direct fashion, you should write that way too. In fact, in general when writing for the internet, steer clear of long, wordy phrases. Our attention spans are not the same as they once were. Keep it clean, clear and concise.

Structure. Break up bulky paragraphs with pull quotes or visual content to increase the likelihood that people will actually read your blog posts from beginning to end. Make a point quickly and then move on – in another paragraph.

Quality. Never publish a blog post without editing or proofreading it. Enough said. No excuses. Sloppy writing conveys a careless approach to business. Editing is an essential writing technique that far too few bloggers work at perfecting. Yes, it takes precious time. But it’s worth every second.

Next, apply your writing skills to your business

You’ve been honing your writing skills and they have improved dramatically. Now it’s time to take them and apply them to areas of your business other than your blog.

Many aspects of digital marketing rely heavily on writing. And the same pillars that make for a good blog post also make for a good social media strategy.

Consider this: you have to be a smart, snappy writer to stay relevant and ‘liked’ on social media. Use the experience you’ve gained from blogging to craft tweets that read like a good headline.

This is especially true for brands in non-viral markets. Case in point: Brickell Men’s Products. They sell men’s skincare products – not something that gets shared around social media very often. So they craft direct, creative social posts that appeal to their target customers.

The same extends to email marketing. This is like the bread and butter of successful eCommerce businesses. Craft simple, direct headlines and paragraphs in every email template.

It may help to think of each email as a mini blog post. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Ideally it will also include a call to action – in this case, one that encourages the reader to click on an email link and make a purchase.

Finally, collaborate with other writers!

Reaching out to other bloggers is one of the best ways to grow your business as you can exchange guest posts, product reviews and customer referrals.

Guest posts in particular lead to increased exposure for your brand and boosted traffic to your website.

You don’t have to limit your guest blogging to your particular niche. Find blogs and influencers in markets adjacent to your own, then share insightful, top-quality content that’s been well-written and carefully edited.

For example, if you sell cosmetics, you might try to collaborate with a fashion blogger. This kind of adjacent marketing presents a win-win situation: you get to promote your business, the blogger you work with gets freebies, and both of you gain new audiences and/or perspectives.

It’s hard to do things alone. The writing skills you have honed through blogging are extremely valuable so don’t be shy about reaching out to people to further your business endeavors. Paid outreach tools like Buzzstream and Ninja Outreach can make finding bloggers to collaborate with easier, as well.

In conclusion

Strong writing skills are the cornerstone of a good blog and they are equally essential to successful digital marketing campaigns.

While blogging offers a great way to talk about your business, you can successfully use the skills you use when blogging to build business sales and boost conversion rates with a little creative thinking.

I hope the above tips have helped you – do let me know in the comments below how you apply your blogging skills to spread awareness and boost sales!