Category: rants

No Going Back to Normal

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m reading a collection of essays called The New Possible in which the authors discuss their visions of what the future should look like and how we can get there. It was published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and the first piece, by Jeremy Lent, talks about the kind of balanced civilization we need to develop.

Early in the piece, he asks:

Does it seem like, as soon as one crisis passes, another one rears its head before you can even settle back to some semblance of normal?

And then, discussing not just Covid but the Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, he points out:

Ultimately, there is no going back to normal because normal no longer exists.

It’s an argument based on the deep flaws in neoliberalism. I don’t disagree with either his thesis or his goals, but I think I’d put the bit about normal differently:

We shouldn’t go back to normal because normal sucked.

Now these days, what with the Stupid Coup (a term Rebecca Solnit came up with that fits my perception of things), many of us, including me, would take the old normal. After all, they’re destroying parts of the government that worked well – like the Weather Service and NOAA – and making those that needed some changes, such as the understaffed Social Security offices and Veteran’s care, worse.

That’s not the mention the blatant racism of the “anti DEI” campaign, one that wants to eliminate Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from our history. (It was disgusting that the baseball team that brought Robinson into the majors went to the White House despite the grifter’s efforts to erase him.)

All the flaws that exist in what passed for normal are still there and being made worse – bombing and union busting and mistreatment of immigrants – while people who shouldn’t be in charge are destroying the good stuff.

A couple of months of this and most of us – me included – would really love a return to normal. Except, like I said, normal sucked. Continue reading “No Going Back to Normal”…

In Praise of Inefficiency

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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At the beginning of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas she discusses a 1996 paleontology project in a cave on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska where the scientists, while looking at animal bones, found human remains.

They immediately stopped work and consulted with people from the Tlingit and Haida tribes who live in the region. After some discussions, it was agreed that the scientists could continue, but that if they found it was a sacred burial site, they would stop. And they were also required to share their findings with the tribes before they were published.

In this case, it was not a burial site and the eventual outcome of the work showed that the bones of the person they found were related to the people living there and that they went back more than 10,000 years.

But what got me were not just the results, but the fact that the paleontologists stopped and consulted with the people native to the region. That does not fit into the modern focus on being “efficient.”

Meeting with people takes time, especially when the way the paleontologists look at the world and the way indigenous cultures look at the world are often at cross purposes. It’s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.

But they didn’t, and the end result was useful to everyone. It just took extra time. And it treated people who were affected by the work with respect.

That brings me to how democracy should work. The people who are affected by decisions need an opportunity to discuss the matter and actually be heard. This is slow. It’s not efficient. But it’s vital to making a government that people can believe in.

I’m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It’s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I’m more likely to get out and walk if I have an errand to run. So I try to run my errands in opposite directions, even if I could combine them in one, and I stretch them out over a couple of days when I could do them all at once.

It’s a purposeful inefficiency. It’s not careless or sloppy. And that’s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.

Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods – though they are often structured with a lot of annoying rules that you only understand if you spend a lot of time going to council meetings. And much of that has become pro forma: you have comment period and then the council does what they were going to do anyway.

You often don’t get the impression that anyone is listening.

So what if, say, you were going to fund housing for homeless people and you actually spent a great deal of time talking with the homeless people in the area about what they needed and what they wanted. I’m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.

It also probably wouldn’t add as much to the coffers of the local developers who make their living getting city contracts to building housing for low income people who are never consulted about what kind of housing they need and want.

It’s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can’t afford a place to live. Continue reading “In Praise of Inefficiency”…

Showing Up

personby Madeleine Robins
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A hand-lettered protest sign upside down, propped against a green plaid couch.Like five million of my fellow Americans, I spent Saturday, April 5, outdoors in the company of a few thousand neighbors, protesting the policies and behavior of the Executive branch, and the lackluster resistance by the Legislative branch. Here in San Francisco we were lucky: the sun was bright, the skies were blue, it was comfortably warm, and the minimal police presence appeared to be there to manage traffic. There were speakers at the rally I was at (albeit with a very underpowered sound system that made the speeches hard to hear) covering the gamut of areas of concern, from illegal deportation to attacks on civil rights, to tariffs, to the defunding of damned near everything I care about (National Parks, education, medical research, museums, etc.).  We waved our signs, chanted some chants, generally let the world know that we are angry–enraged–about the actions the current president and his minions have been taking since January 20. Then, as the rally wound down I wandered over to public transit and rode home in company with some of the folk who had been at the rally too (as evidenced by the signs and sunburn I saw around me). However angry we in the aggregate might be, the folks at the SF rally were polite and entirely non-violent; there were kids in strollers, elders in walkers, folks in wheelchairs, just… everyone.

My own personal bubble is filled with people who are concerned about the way things are going and how much worse it could get, so I was startled to encounter people in San Francisco who didn’t know that the rallies were happening. Not that they disapproved, they weren’t aware (when I stopped to get a coffee, the barista saw the sign I carried, asked what was going on. When I told her, she moved my coffee order up to the front “so you won’t be late”). I know there are  people in my neighborhood–yes, even in San Francisco–who think the actions of the current administration are just dandy (although I do wonder how they’re feeling given the state of the stock market right now). I think it’s important for me to remember that there are a lot of different ways to feel about right now. I don’t know how the small conservative cohort of my neighborhood feels about the rallies–one guy I ran into rolled his eyes at my sign, but said “at least you got a nice day for it.”

So what was the point?

Showing up. Being there among others who are as frightened and angry as I am. Part of the tactics being used to dismantle the government and disrupt social norms is to persuade us that we’re each in it alone, that we have no power, that we have no voice. But I felt good about showing up. I felt good that there were others–thousands of others in my city, and millions across the country–who also showed up.

Showing up doesn’t fix things, any more than Senator Cory Booker’s magnificent 25 hour filibuster on the Senate floor fixed things. Not everything one does creates a fix. But showing up creates solidarity, underscores the problems being protested, energizes the people there with an energy that can spill outward and onward. It can show the people with power who are wavering about taking action that there is pressure to act rightly. And it can get people off the bench: a lot of the speakers at the rally I was at encouraged people to do the things that create solutions: volunteer, run for office, make phone calls, rattle cages; there were places to sign up to do all of those things, and those tables were busy.

I know people in other states whose weather was not as fine as ours in San Francisco. They stood out in the cold and the rain, bundled up and with umbrellas and rainbows, and they showed up. I stand in solidarity with all of them.

A Week in the Life…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the final throes of the thesis-writing. In five weeks, my thesis will be submitted for examination. This means the complete thing needs to be done by this Friday. Sounds fine? Except… this Saturday is Passover. Some friends helped me with some of the shopping and I’ve ordered everything else for delivery plus the fresh stuff at the market), but I need to have the flat clean (since I will be hosting) and the kitchen made as proper as I can. I come from a family that had special dishes for the festival, but my health makes a whole bunch of things not possible and complete kashruth is one of them. I do a best-I-can version, which is not at all suitable for anyone religious.

I do some thesis, do some Passover prep, meet another deadline, deal with the latest panic (my mouse died over the weekend, for instance and my printer is currently sulking), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, do some of my exercises, wonder if I’ll get any sleep, worry about my mother (who has COVID, as do two of my close friends), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, and so on until I can sleep. It will all be sorted by Sunday, and then I will quite possibly not wake up for 36 hours.

Tomorrow I have coffee with a neighbour. Normally I would ask to not do anything extra this week, because I’m already doing 18 hour days, but he’s very seriously ill and can be quite difficult even when he’s well and I cannot leave it long. So… tomorrow.

I will have to send someone a note about a Wednesday meeting. It’s with a local candidate. We have elections on 3 May, you see. I really need to talk to him and I’ve tried and tried and failed and failed and finally he comes to the Jewish Community Centre and it’s the Wednesday before my thesis has to be sent and before Passover. His timing is so bad.

He should have asked to see us last week, or left it until the week before the election. The timing suggests that he really doesn’t see antisemitism (or us, as the local Jewish community) as a high priority. Also, his office gave me the run around when I offered to talk to someone about why things are the way they are at the moment – and this is part of my academic expertise and I can be really useful… The staff of two politicians have given me the run around. I so miss my previous self, who was asked about things! Anyhow, I’ve decided not to offer my knowledge and understanding to politicians any more. I’d rather meet my deadlines and enjoy cooking for Passover.

Other people are asking me about things, which is a bit of a relief. My big insight for today is that it’s actually very easy to identify who is marching for hate and who is marching with hope that they can improve the wrongs of the world. It’s not what side people take (the good side of history that so many people claim right now… not actually how most of the world operates).

The way people march tells us so much. Look at the body language and listen to the slogans. Do the slogans provide methods to effect change, or are they declamations that lead nowhere. Does the group prevent others from passing, or block access to anywhere? How angry are the people, and what reasons do the slogans give for any anger? Do marchers stop and talk and listen, or do they simply shout, or do they accuse strangers of… almost anything. Telling strangers who the strangers are and shouting in their face is the issue here: actual change agents talk and listen, because change happens when people can see they’re a potential part of solutions. Those marches that breathe fire and brimstone and don’t take a moment to stop being angry, those marches where (as happened this week) a group surround a single stranger and bullies them – they’re the marching equivalent of Nazis in the 1930s. This doesn’t mean their cause is terrible: it means that these particular people are bullies.

Look at how people march and what specific goals they aim to achieve with the march, and whether not even a small part of those marching bully anyone watching or anyone trying to get past and you get a good notion of whether they really care about others… or whether they are informed by hate. If you don’t want to carry that hate with you, you need a way of winding down.

My way is often thinking about food. I have learned a whole new bread-making method in the last few weeks, entirely to handle the antisemitic hate I encounter. This week is not about that bread, however: now that I’ve sorted out how I will obtain all the things for cooking, I have most of a menu for Saturday night.

We begin, of course, with the ritual things. I have horseradish (it cost an arm and a leg, but I have some – it’s simply not in season in autumn) and matzah. I will serve the matzah with charoseth. My father’s charoseth recipe is wonderful: apples and almonds and sweet wine made from Concord grapes and enormous amounts of cinnamon.

After the charoseth, there will be the traditional eggs and potatoes, to be dipped in salt water. I have organic free range hen’s eggs from my local egg farmer ($25 for 60 large eggs, for those tracking the prices of eggs), and also a little packet of quail eggs. There will be no chopped liver – I have the ingredients (the liver is in the freezer) but intend to eat it on Friday week.

After that, of course, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah dumplings) both of which I make according to old family recipes. The main course is roast chicken (with lemon and garlic) and vegetables. The roasted vegetables will be potato and lotus root. I haven’t decided all the side dishes yet, but there are two types of pickled cucumber, and the same kind of ancient olives that grew near Jerusalem around the time the Temple fell. There is a story behind why these olives grow in Australia, and that story has family connections.

I was going to make cakes (an orange-almond one and a choc-nut one) for dessert, but I think we’re skipping dessert and going straight to afters. The Passover meal I grew up with is far, far too large for modern Australia. A friend found me chocolate macaroons and I have dark chocolate, and the best organic dried muscatels from a local farm. I will have fresh figs with this, and maybe some other autumn fruit. I may make one of the cakes during the week… or I may not.

Tomorrow, to give me time away from my computer on such a busy day, I shall make bagels. That’s the last of the flour and yeast. Tomorrow lunch is the last of the rice and the last of the nori. Step by step I sort my world, and then I cook the big dinner on Saturday.

II live such a simple, slow life.

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in August, 2019. I’m still here, still holding on to hope. We aren’t all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.

Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essays called “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness, and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me as well as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But the constant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaults on democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.

What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, such disregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and air water, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for our lives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not become the enemy?

I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistance is. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are many possible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person. Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters in front of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’s businesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). I wore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Those memories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember how frustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of 100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and so forth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friends still got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did were wounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave up hope that the senseless carnage would ever end.

But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching and chanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduring lesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, over and over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guess history, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling down a slope create a landslide.

My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when I saw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were a terrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parents were active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party” in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became the target of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillance since 1947.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalized citizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “went underground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and using only cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of those havens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretly watching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd to me to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time. Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard, terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Not unscarred — it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention to myself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better, more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from the mid-60s by Carl Oglesby (I think) on my door. I searched for it on the internet and couldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being a time to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another, and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, and equality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness, racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government, then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: we of the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.

This is what I tell young people today. I remember what my parents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or another during the Cold War:

Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, not just what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness. Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balance in your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.

Who Gets to Be Strong?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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When I speak to women about self defense and their ability to fight back, I sometimes get told “It’s different for you because you’re big.”

It’s true that I am larger than the average woman. I am, in fact, about the size of the average U.S. man – or was, at least, until I began some of the inevitable shrinking that comes from age. I also have a pretty classic mesomorph body – sturdy, broad-shouldered, and so forth.

I am, in fact, larger than Mitsugi Saotome Shihan, under whom I studied Aikido for years, and was, in fact, also somewhat larger than my karate teacher back in the 1980s, who I think was around 5’7” and weighed about 140. It should go without saying that both of them could kick my ass, and still can, even though they’re in their late 80s now.

Which is to say that one thing spending half my life in martial arts has taught me is that size doesn’t matter. In fact, part of the lore of martial arts is that training makes it possible for small people to fight effectively.

Size can be intimidating – I’ve had large male friends explain to me that they never got into fights because no one wanted to start trouble with them. Though come to think of it, that was guys who were basically good natured. Guys with a chip on their shoulder tended to get into trouble no matter what size they were.

I might be big enough to telegraph “not worth the trouble” but I’m certainly not big enough to be intimidating to troublesome guys. But I do also have an attitude.

You can be small and still have attitude. I still remember back in my early days of Aikido coming into the women’s dressing room and hearing one of my fellow students – who was maybe 5 feet tall – say, “I was training with this guy who didn’t think women could do this, so I threw him over there and then I threw him the other way.” She was demonstrating hand movements as she spoke and I recall thinking that I was going to be very careful when I trained with her.

Here’s another thing: no one ever takes me for a man. I mean, I’m large for a woman and my voice is relatively deep – I used to be an alto, but my singing range is more tenor these days, maybe almost baritone. Not to mention that I’m loud and I’m hard to shut up.

It might be the hair – I have lots of it. Or my hips. Anyway, something about me tells people I’m a woman, and no one ever assumes I might be trans. Continue reading “Who Gets to Be Strong?”…

In Troubled Times: This, Too, Shall Pass

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in April 2023. It’s a good reminder.

I started a blog series, “In Troubled Times” after the 2016 presidential election. Folks I trusted said that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. That’s true now, too. You can read the first installment, “Becoming Allies,” here.

I came of age in the 1960s, demonstrating for civil rights and marching against the Vietnam War. I never burned my bra, but I volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the years before Roe v Wade. I am not bragging about my activist bona fides. I was one of many, and rarely in the forefront. However, I remember all too well the feelings of both elation and futility. The energy and inspiration of being surrounded by thousands of like minds, filling the streets of San Francisco, chanting and singing. We thought that if we could sing loudly enough and joyfully enough, we could change the minds and hearts of the nation’s leaders. And then came a day when many of us realized they were not about to listen to us. The war raged on, now captured on television in our living rooms.

That feeling of powerlessness was one of the driving forces behind my debut science fiction novel, Jaydium, by the way. My heroine is initially trapped on a dusty, barely-habitable planet at the back end of nowhere, and through a series of shifts through time and parallel dimensions, she ends up on an alien planet where she has the chance to change history by stopping a war. It’s about both re-engagement and the quest for peace (and I was tickled when Tom Easton of Analog praised the latter as unusual and laudable.) Writing it reflected my personal journey from withdrawal to participation.

I vividly remember how, in the late 1960s, my father, who was born in 1907 and lived through two world wars, pogroms, the McCarthy witch hunts, and more, would talk me down from desperation. When I was in a panic about the Cold War maneuver of the moment, he never dismissed my concerns; he was just coming from a broader perspective. And he was right. We got through those years without blowing the planet up.

Now I find myself in the position of being an elder—a crone, if you will. My earliest political memories date from the mid-1950s, including the terror of HUAC, the pervasive suspicions, racism, misogyny, and antisemitism that no one questioned. When I was a bit older, the anti-communist hysteria had faded somewhat (depending on where you lived), but not the rest. And always, in the years before oral contraception, sex meant fear of pregnancy. I knew girls in high school who got sent out of the country and returned the following year or so without their babies. Later, in the late 1960s/early 1970s but still before Roe v Wade, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. And heard many stories. Looking back, I cannot believe how ignorant I was about so many other issues.

I do not mean to brag about my life experiences or to enter into a contest of which times were worse. Each generation faces its own trials, and each generation is convinced that theirs are world-ending, worst-ever scenarios. This is one of many reasons why we need generational memory (not to mention history books!)

Goethe wrote: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” It’s horrible that we have to fight these battles over and over, playing eternal whack-a-mole with the agents of hatred. That’s why we need all the allies and moral ammunition we can get.

I am mindful of the old joke, “In my day, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.” I see no benefit in comparing one disaster to another. For the person affected by a catastrophic event, whether it’s an attack on them as a member of a vulnerable group or a purely personal tragedy, loss is loss, fear is fear, and grief is grief. Instead of belittling someone else’s pain, we have the opportunity to use our own as a wellspring of compassion and understanding. The lesson from history is not that those times were more terrible than those we face today. It’s that they passed. Sure, you might say, they were taken over by new, awful things.

But sometimes, either by a cataclysmic change or the slow progress of justice, things get better. Not all things, not for everybody, and not all at once. Small victories add up to shifts in consciousness. One of my antidotes to despair is to complete the following sentence:

“I never thought I would live to see…”

  •  People walk on the Moon
  •  A Black person become President
  • Same-sex marriage become legal
  • A woman Vice President

Now fill in your own.

I believe that many of the crises looming over us are reactions to those victories. Two steps forward and one step back. But the movement of history is on our side. Rights once gained are not easily (permanently) revoked. Once marginalized groups are accepted as deserving of respect and dignity, it’s a lot harder to take that away.

Right now there are many attempts to take away human rights and dignity. And lives, often for trivial excuses. It seems we are living in a time when vicious, outrageous, hate-fueled behavior is on the ascendency.

These times, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, we are called upon to protect the vulnerable and minimize the harm inflicted on them.

It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.

But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.

If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).

But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:

Tech Enshittification:

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.

Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.

I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.

The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.

“AI”:

AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.

The Network State:

This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.

I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.

This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning. Continue reading “It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government”…

The War on Infrastructure

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.

One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.

Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.

At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.

I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.

We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.

We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:

We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.

And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.

But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House. Continue reading “The War on Infrastructure”…