Traverse Fantasy

I followed an independent tech journalist for a while because I don’t trust most big news firms to report on technology (or, really, most things) without falling in lockstep with the demands of the spectacular economy—that is, to manufacture demand because someone needs to buy all this shit to keep the lights on. And I liked this particular one since frankly I trust women in the field far more than men. Vocal fry has a disarming effect on me. But over the past few months, I noticed how she became increasingly cagey towards so-called artificial intelligence. Even in a video about how LLM firms are starting to target women, because the adoption of a technology by women is a sign of its adoption by wider society (which LLM firms had thus far failed to attain), she awkwardly gestured towards the poor average consumer who just uses LLMs to search and summarize online information, and that this is a genuine use-case which LLM firms prey upon (sure, why not?). I like to think of pop punk ban...

I’m considering this post to have been co-authored by my partner. She had seen the movie closer to when it had come out, and she told me it quite frustrated her because it felt like a movie gesturing towards a big statement—about school shootings in particular—without actually committing to a statement and doing something totally different instead by the end of it. All I had heard was that it involved children being turned into actual voudon-style zombies, and was surprised that what I thought was part and parcel with its premise was more like a twist out of left field. She didn’t spoil the whole thing in case I wanted to watch it later, but it took me a while because I am not super into horror movies (I would say except that now since horror has become the statement genre, but…), and I only just got around to it this weekend. Oh boy. So, it’s certainly trying to gesture towards school shootings, right? The narrator’s opening monologue clearly evokes the community trauma of a classroo...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...