Sunday, 10 March 2024

The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi

I first read Primo Levi for a school project when I was 16, his words, "If This is a Man" and "The Truce" touched me very deeply. He is an exceptional writer, his prose is clear, lucid and devastating and the topics he covers are of such a hideous nature, the crimes so fundamentally awful, that it requires an author of such qualities to convey these images and messages.

"The Drowned and the Saved" is a different book but one no less powerful and impactful than his earlier works. He speaks with the benefit of 40 years further time to consider the implications of what happened during the Third Reich and he is no less clear in articulating the reasons behind what happened, the lessons he learned from his experiences about the nature of human beings and most interestingly towards the end, how his literature has been received by those persons (the German people) who bear the responsibility for the crimes committed by the Third Reich.

This book should be read by everyone involved in politics today. It is a warning call from a voice lost too early in tragic circumstances but who can speak with authority and clarity about things which we may believe are impossible in our current time but which many of those same Germans who bear responsibility would have had the world believe they were not aware either.

"For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty, and at the same time as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively been the witnesses of a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe. Incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say." 

 "Neither Nietzsche not Hitler nor Rosenberg were mad when they intoxicated themselves and their followers by preaching the myth of the superman, to whom everything is permitted in recognition of his dogmatic and congenital superiority; but worthy of meditation is the fact that all of them, teacher and pupils, became progressively removed from reality as little by little their morality came unglued from the morality common to all times and all civilisations, which is a common part of our human heritage and which in the end must be acknowledged."

Monday, 2 October 2023

Cory Doctrow - The Internet Con - How to Seize the Means of Computation


I really enjoy the way Cory Doctrow writes and puts forth his ideas. Many of them are quite complex and technical in their aims and design but I found this book to be an excellent introduction into both the solution and the problem caused by our modern big technology infrastructure. He's also no dogmatist and although we're on the same page politically, I can see how he would still be accessible to someone further to the right.

Erudite and clear. Sorry I'm writing the review on Amazon and Google, but as he points out in the book, the challenge of Big Tech is it forces you to use it if you want to be online.

https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/

Sunday, 30 April 2023

Daniel Cohen · To Monopolise Our Ears: What Spotify Wants · LRB 4 May 2023

The inevitable fate of Spotify, as it careers towards revenue free bankruptcy is an interesting case in point about who is actually making money from the way in which our economy and society is established and evolves.

Spotify seemed to have been destroying the music establishment by subverting the process by which people obtained music, but instead if one analyses the real direction of travel, it appears much more to be the outrider of the very forces who had been impacted far more by the first forces of the internet, the record labels.

Really it was they who were hammered by file sharing rather than anyone else (including musicians themselves) and it is they who coopted the streaming services to effectively become extensions of the record labels and the music industry.  

Now Spotify , despite it's success, has realized the Faustian pact it made and as it desperately tries to extract something for itself from the shitty deal it entered into, it has realized all to late that if you are the company that fronts a service but someone else makes all the money, then it is not in your company where the value lies and where the real control lies. Control is power and it has been a long time since Spotify has been in control of its own destiny.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/daniel-cohen/to-monopolise-our-ears 

Thursday, 5 January 2023

Adam Tooze - Chartbook #185 Inflation and distributional conflict - in 2023 not 1973! Also a response to the debate around that Blanchard thread.

Just got the latest Chartbook entry from Adam Tooze who is fast becoming my favourite economic commentator of all time.

You can find him on substack here.

Watching the whole debate in the finance world about what the path of interest rates will be or discussing whether inflation targets should be 2 or 4 percent strike me as akin to people shifting deck chairs on the deck of a sinking ship.

None of these things ever did really make a difference. The "market crash" we witnessed last year was simply the removal of some of the froth through zero interest rates being unwound. There has been literally zero transmission between those changes and the real economy thus far.  We are just at the beginning of a tightening cycle in terms of it's real implications for the real economy.

The whole thing is a sham. The real problem we have is that much of the worlds productive capacity is being driven by a system which focuses productive capacity on ridiculous things which are not doing anything to address any of the worlds challenges (weaponry, financialized investment services, technological developments to sell and market products, rockets to take us to Mars, murderous self driving cars).

Fortunately large parts of the world have realized this and moved away from it. However this does not include the Anglo-speaking world who also love building weapons. So that will end well.

Wednesday, 28 December 2022

Twitterers be Capitalists to

Been listening to a lot of my podcasters lately and given that a lot of them are fairly left wing, other than in the tech community, there has been a bit of silence around any potential move to Mastodon.  I couldn't quite understand this, particularly someone like Phoebe Roy complaining that the Mastodon interface is too complicated or that they just can't understand it.  Given these are all pretty technically savvy people I found it strange that they were seemingly so inept at using a fairly intuitive interface.  I mean for fucks sake we all grew up using the far more basic and clunky original message boards and chat functions of things like Yahoo which Mastodon is ten times better than.

But then it struck me, these are people with thousands of followers on Twitter.  They have both a significant social and financial stake in Twitter insofar as their careers are partly based on having a large number of people who follow them on Twitter and react to their postings.  They are part of the Twitter fabric and thus wont want to lose the social currency they have built up on the platform and which is inherently tied to the platform.  Like capitalists building up their capital, Twitters community of posters are building up their Twitter capital and the last thing they want is this fucking Mastodon thing coming along and diminishing it by creating an alternative platform which diminishes their social capital.  They will paasively resist it until the time comes to actively resist it.  

Just like a good capitalist defends their own capital against all alternatives....

Tuesday, 27 December 2022

The process of Creation

Art Spiegelman's "Maus" comics are probably, alongside "Barefoot Gen", the most impactful pieces of art I have been exposed to.  The way in which they bring together the hideous impact of racism, war and hate in an entirely different setting but using the same artistic structure moves me still to this day. They are very different projects insofar as the structure of the comics and the artistic style is quite different, but the gripping way in which they involve you in the protagonists very different stories is so moving, so well considered, so impactful. 

They are difficult pieces of work to invocate the term "love", can you "love" work which deals with such distressing and serious topics (hat tip to Christian Hunt for an excellent recent podcast on this) but I think I can attribute so much meaning and power to these artworks. In a way I love the way in which they have done so much to bring to our attention the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War.  Part of a long tradition of works which have sought to do this but which I think these art works have done more impactfully than the many other things I have read, listened to and watched on these topics.  They make you feel uncomfortable and are somewhat painful in their excoriating treatment of such awful topics but at the same time they so viscerally put you in the position of these nightmarish and entirely man-made situations... Intense, brilliant work by two very different masters of their very different but intensely meaningful artistic styles.


Monday, 28 November 2022

[The Washington Post] High-profile Republicans gain followers in first weeks of Musk’s reign

A very interesting article which highlights how Twitter is being hijacked by the right wing stalwarts but also shows how Truth Social is being suffocated by Elno.  Watch to see what happens as Musk explicitly backs de-Insantis against Trump....  It fucks Trumps investment which for Trump is not an acceptable state of affairs... Never separate a man from his grift.  This beautiful spider diagram shows the outperformance of Republican politicians on Twitter and the seeming slump in Democratic politicians.  What it doesn't show is the median incomes of the people who have left the platform.  Might be a challenge for the company in the long run when revenue falls below costs despite a 75% reduction in staff.
 
Goodbye Twitter...

High-profile Republicans gain followers in first weeks of Musk's reign

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/musk-followers-bernie-cruz/
 

 

 

The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi

I first read Primo Levi for a school project when I was 16, his words, "If This is a Man" and "The Truce" touched me ve...