Worth Reading In December/January

Weekly Reader

The scope of this kind of space opera also functions to demonstrate the limitations of ruling-class values. As the critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the traditional novel is a bourgeois literary form which is structurally dependent on a formal resolution, like the entry of one of Jane Austen’s heroines into a marriage contract, which upholds property relations and the social order. In contrast, science fiction is a genre that desires to boldly go beyond those kinds of constraints. By shifting the scale of action from the confines of modern life, defined by birth circumstances and job opportunities, to an infinite universe, it opens up an exploration of individual and social possibility without limits; once you’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, there’s no going back to passive late-capitalist life.

Capitalist systems are designed to pummel us into submission, preventing us from imagining life could be any other way, let alone allowing us to go on the offensive. But successful movements against tech elites’ further encroachment shows that the fight is not over. The resistance of the activists in Toronto is a recent example in a long tradition of Luddite action that smashed the technology that made their lives more miserable and targeted the capitalists who used it to hold power over them. Dismantling the machinery of capital is also an attempt to challenge the “form of society which utilizes those instruments,” Marx writes in the first volume of Capital. Their guerrilla tactics against one of the most powerful and richest corporations ever to exist demonstrates that even a behemoth can be stopped in its tracks and forced to re-evaluate its strategy.

I started listening to and thinking about “Alabama” a lot in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder in the summer of 2016, which was reminiscent of the murders of Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland, and countless others. I’d lay down and loop the song through my bedroom speakers because the sonic landscape that Coltrane conjures on the track suggests something about the temporality in which black grief lives, the way that black people are forced to grieve our dead so often that the work of grieving never ends. You don’t even have time to grieve one new absence before the next one arrives. (We hadn’t time to grieve Ahmaud Arbery before we saw the video of Floyd’s murder.) “Alabama” gives this unceasing immersion in grief a form. It’s there in the song’s disconcerting stops and starts, its disarticulated notes, its willingness to abandon virtuosity in favor of a style of playing that is repetitive, diffuse, tentative, and dissonant.

Regardless, digitization is not the problem. It’s a potential public good, representing an important step in the development of cultural productive forces. It means that all the diverse culture of the world can be made available rather than hidden or deleted from existence because of licensing restrictions or creative differences. It means that old film or music, for example, can be eternally preserved and infinitely shared, instead of going up in smoke or rotting in vaults because it isn’t considered profitable.

In fact, in many cases the only thing keeping a piece of media alive is either a digital library or file-sharing site, while confusing copyright schemes may prevent fragile works from being digitized at all. As tech journalist Benj Edwards argued in 2012, pirates perform an important service by preserving old software, including games, programs and other copyrighted but abandoned data that many writers and researchers rely on.

With an attention-grabbing snare snap, the title track begins this blistering collection. Overall, their sound doesn’t deviate too far from the blueprints of Against’s muses, but there’s also a lot that’s distinctive about it. Bearing little resemblance to the hoarse bellow of Discharge vocalist Kelvin Morris, Jerry Clarke’s parched and gaunt-sounding voice adds an extra sense of urgency to the apocalyptic roar of “All Too Late,” “Pain Never Ends,” and “Mao.” “Burned Beyond Recognition,” meanwhile, throws in pinches of T.S.O.L., Adolescents, and others from the Southern California beach punk scene that was going on at the time. As L.A. hardcore extended into the ’80s, Final Conflict, Diatribe, and other members of SoCal’s anarchist peace-punk contingent, attest to Against’s local influence, despite the fact it would take years until they would finally be heard by the rest of us.

Weekly Reader

If he ever conceded so, Obama would likely insist nevertheless that the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as maintaining faith in the American project. “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama writes in another excerpt published in The Atlantic, “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.” But he clearly understands, too, as Biden surely does on some level, that our situation is bleak. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.” It’s a passage far less inspirational than it is chilling—evidence that as determinedly as he might disparage cynicism, Obama knows exactly what horrors await us in the years to come and that the curmudgeons and cranks on the left are, again, substantively correct about the trajectory we’re on.

But this collection and operationalization of biometric data — at the border, at the entrance to an office, on the floor of a warehouse — is not some neutral means for assessing the risk a given individual poses, with respect to Covid-19 or any other hazard, any more than biometric data in general simply represents the reality or perceived reality of someone’s identity. Such biometric forms of control replicate already existing biases about who must bear the brunt of surveillance technologies, marking out particular populations for more intensive scrutiny. This was true when concerns about terrorism after 9/11 led to the sorting of foreign workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, and noncitizens into “desirable” and “undesirable” categories, as David Lyon explains in Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life. It was also true with predictive-policing algorithms, which, as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have intensively catalogued, were first deployed against Black populations.

The great myth that underpins policing in the United States is that it remains a purely local affair, with police responding to the safety needs of individual neighborhoods. Setting aside the numerous federal law enforcement agencies, the grants to municipalities from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the nationwide professional and fraternal organizations that cops belong to, what unifies police in the United States today is their global reach. It is common today to hear criticisms of the militarization of US policing. But beneath this trend is a much-older process that has ebbed and flowed over time: the globalization of US policing.

Debs’s approach to the “popularity question” differs from one of his ideological heirs, Bernie Sanders. After languishing in minor party obscurity through the 1970s, Sanders dropped the most radical planks of his platform (including socializing the economy’s commanding heights) and gained political office by pursuing policies thwarted not by lack of popularity but by the plutocratic order. Often, his goal has been less to gainsay prevailing opinion — though he’s done plenty of that, too — than to press for public sentiment to be reflected in public policy. Popular social democratic reforms like taxing the rich, funding public programs, and boosting worker power are his bread and butter.

If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.

Weekly Reader

In the late sixties and early seventies, before she was known as an author, Morrison was a Random House trade editor who almost singlehandedly introduced black radical activists to mainstream American readers. No single editor or major publishing house has surpassed Morrison’s contribution in the intervening four decades. Cofounder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton (To Die for the People, 1972); prison activist and Black Panther field marshal George Jackson (Blood in My Eye, 1971); and Angela Davis (Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 1974) were all published by Morrison at Random House. Morrison did not necessarily embrace these ideologies, but believed it was invaluable that they circulate in the marketplace of ideas—despite their demonization by the U.S. government.

Booker, as a Black politician, is obliged to perform hope for America’s future even as its legacy of racialization and oppression is being brought to bear on him. He has to recognize that he’s being fundamentally devalued by the institution he has invested in (which, indeed, has a long legacy of such devaluing as part of its role in maintaining racial hierarchy). His rhetorical negotiation of the tension between his power as a Senator and his power as a Black man marks his saturation point. He has to stand up and defend a racial justice bill with the entire force of his history as a Black man against the bureaucratic “neutrality” of a procedural argument. It clearly pains him to do so, and the institution eats that pain without any regard for him as a person or his well-being. And the next time it comes up for a vote, he’ll have to do it again.

Riley was also most generous, as generous, with people who didn’t have anything traditionally productive going on, who wanted to be in the mix and hang out or make time; no one needed to justify their existence to be close to him, they were accepted as people… he pulled them close, not what they did, and he would be very cool to them…. it’s nice to see that kind of acceptance. He would also bring massively successful people into the mix as just another friend, or transpose them from one milieu to another… “this is my friend who happens to just churn out comics for a living… that’s how she pays her rent… this fool here makes movies… you guys would totally get along and you have to meet them…” and so we did… and they would be along for the ride or off to the sideline or taking part in some back room somewhere or hearing some story about pissing on a statue in Europe, everyone in the circle as if they had been in the mix with him since he was young in Denton… and that would be a trip for them too.