Wednesday!

* In Galileo's time, science was clashing with religion; today, Robinson believes, we're living in a "Galilean moment" again, in which climate change means science has become politicised. This time, though, the clash is with capitalism. "There are cultural forces in our society which say, you can save the world or else you can make a profit, and they'll say sorry, we have to make a profit. So we have a strange religion now." As his global-warming-themed trilogy, which ends with 2007's Sixty Days and Counting, shows, a major theme for Robinson is ecological sustainability, and he stresses today his belief that "the climate crisis is an emergency." Another interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, this one focusing on his new time travel novel, Galileo's Dream.

* Fun graphic analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, including Inside UFO 54-40, the only CYOA with an impossible-to-reach ending.



* The rhetoric of Google's suggested searches. Via Ezra Klein, who summarizes:

For instance: the most popular searches beginning with "how 2 ..." are "how 2 get pregnant" and "how 2 grow weed." Searches beginning with "how might one" tend to be about music or, weirdly, Andrew Jackson.

More titillatingly, people asking "is it wrong to" tend to have something sexually indecent in mind. The top results are "sleep with your cousin," "sleep with your stepdad after your mom has died," and "like your cousin." Searches beginning with "is it unethical to" tend to be about white-collar crime and animal rights.

One notes, at least in my geo-targeted region of the world, the top suggested result for "is it wrong to" is actually "is it wrong to sleep with your sister."

* Yesterday's Daily Show had a pair of fantastic clips: one on the Berlin Wall and another on Sean Hannity flagrantly lying (with video!) about the size Michelle Bachmann's health-care protest.

* Chart of the Day: Rock Music Quality vs. U.S. Oil Production.

There's nothing I love better than interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson.

TB: I understand that you live in a utopian community [called Village Homes, pictured above and below; images by Michael Corbett]. How does that work? Is it pre- or post-modern?

KSR: A little of both, I guess. The model is an English village really; about eighty acres, a lot of it owned in common, so there is a “commons” and no fences, except around little courtyards. There are a lot of vegetable gardens, and the landscaping is edible, meaning lots of fruits, grapes and nuts.

It’s really just a tweaking of suburban design, but a really good one. Energy mattered to the designers and we burn about 40 percent the energy of an ordinary suburban neighborhood of the same size. That’s still a lot, but it’s an improvement. Village Homes was built in 1980 or so; if every suburb since then had followed its lead, we would have much less craziness in America, because the standard suburb is bad for sanity. But that didn’t happen, so for the 1,000 people who live here it’s a kind of pocket utopia. Not the solution, but a nice place to live right now, and it could suggest aspects of a long-term solution. It’s been a real blessing to live here.

Light posting the next few days while I attend the 2009 Society of Utopian Studies conference. Be back at full strength soon.

Dollhouse, Flashforward, and a few SF links.

* Both Dollhouse tonight and Flashforward yesterday were noticeable improvements over a string of weak episodes, but problems persist. On Flashforward, the characters remain essentially interchangeable ciphers, with almost no tension or mystery surrounding their relationships or their individual participation in these events. (This is perhaps the one area where the show really should have cribbed more from Lost.) But the tease that China may have been involved is a nicely paranoid reading of the disastrous consequences of the Flashforward for the Western hemisphere and a clever post-9/11 twist on the novel, which has no such subplot—and the connection of the isolated L.A. office to a larger investigatory framework has been much needed. And the episode was just more fun.

The Sierra episode of Dollhouse was good, but I can't help feeling as though the show is being quietly retooled yet again; the actions of most of these characters just aren't commensurate with either half of last season. In particular, most of last season was devoted to a multi-episode arc in which the Dollhouse staff struggled to stop the dolls from "glitching"—but now the exact same glitches are considered perfectly acceptable to everyone involved. Echo is allowed to openly discuss her newfound continuity of memory without consequence or even particular interest from the staff, while Victor and Sierra are apparently now allowed to openly date. What has happened to account for this radical shift in Dollhouse policy? Dr. Saunders's disappearance and the generally chaotic atmosphere that plagues the Dollhouse week to week should incentivize them to keep a closer eye on the dolls, not give them freer reign.

Likewise, the idea in the episode that the Dollhouse staff had been "misled" about Priya's situation—a fairly clear attempt to retcon one of the characters' most heinous crimes—doesn't really hold up to scrutiny; patients in mental institutions can't consent to secret medical experimentation (or, for that matter, sex slavery) any more than kidnapped women can. There's no excusing what's been done to Priya either way, and that Topher supposedly believed he was somehow "helping" her barely qualifies as a fig leaf. I think I preferred the harder edge of Original Recipe Adelle and Topher 1.0.

Other things rankle, too. The violent final scenes in the Evil Client's House are well-acted, but the sequence of events makes little sense outside the heat of the moment. What did Priya and Topher think was going to happen, and why were they so utterly unprepared for what obviously would? Topher would have given her a ninja update at the very least.

Seeing so much praise for this episode from critics and the Twittotubes just shows again how badly people want this show to be better than it really is. I'm still enjoying Dollhouse, but abandoning the 2019 arc and failing to sign Amy Acker as a regular are starting to look like fatal flaws for the series. Even an heavily hyped episode that (for once) didn't focus on Echo doesn't compare to last season's stellar second half (1.6-1.11 and 1.13). I hope the upcoming focus on Senator Wyndham-Price and the inevitable introduction of Summer Glau help pick things up.

No new episodes until December, in any event.

Meanwhile:

* Harlan Ellison has won $1 from Paramount Pictures in his suit regarding Star Trek's "The City on the Edge of Forever." In fairness, $1 was all he asked for.

* Christopher Hayes reviews Ralph Nader's "practical Utopia," Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!.

* And Gregory Cowles reviews Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City for the New York Times.

Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate-­reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human-­interest ­stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.)

Looks good.

Ralph Nader, novelist.

There have been some interesting Infinite Summer posts about whether Infinite Jest "counts" as science fiction—see, for instance, these two at Infinite Tasks and this from Chris Forster)—so I thought it might be interesting to run through some of my standard classroom definitions of science fiction and see how the book shapes up. (My notes on this are older than the Wikipedia page and mostly cribbed from Fred Chappell, but most of these definitions appear there as well.)

To begin with, there are a few classic definitions it clearly doesn't meet.

...a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.
—Hugo Gernsback

Versions of this notion of "scientific prophecy" pop up whenever science fiction is discussed, and Infinite Jest pretty clearly meets neither criteria; its speculations are philosophical, not scientific, and it is surely a satire, not some coherent futurism.

Another take:

Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the "willing suspension of disbelief" on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.
—Sam Moskowitz

I would defy anyone to claim that their willing suspension of disbelief is not frequently and fatally challenged by the hyperbolic "hysterical realist" elements throughout IJ. "FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER: BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER" (398) is not a sentence calculated to brace a spirit of credulity.

Still another:

Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.
—Norman Spinrad

This is usually the last definition I offer my students in my introductory SF lecture, and the one I usually argue is the most important. SF is, as much as it is anything else, a discrete, recognizable set of consumer practices and preferences—and here, too, Infinite Jest is clearly not science fiction because it isn't branded as science fiction in the marketplace nor is it consumed as science fiction by "science fiction fans." IJ pulls in dollars under an entirely different brand, mainstream literary fiction—which is a perfectly cromulent brand, if that's what you're into, but it's not SF.

So, then, 0 for 3. Not a great start. But there are other definitions of science fiction that do cast a strong light on Infinite Jest:

Science fiction is the search for definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mold.
—Brian Aldiss

Here science fiction collapses into a special category of existential literature, in which the SF aspects are merely the engine motivating the text's more-central philosophical speculations. The science-fictional elements in Infinite Jest, it seems clear to me, are operating almost entirely on this level—each inventive speculation in the novel drives existential speculation about how we might be able to live in ultratechnological modernity in the shadow of the death of God. (Side question: is Infinite Jest "in the Gothic mold"? I'd have to pull out an entirely different set of quotes to discuss that question fully, but in its massive textual sprawl, its strong tendencies towards melodrama and hyperbolic excess, and its palpable atmosphere of both individual and familial tragedy I think we could have the start of a fairly strong case.)

We come now to the two definitions I use most commonly in my writing and teaching, which are (I concede) are completely in conflict with one another. But I think—I hope—it's a productive tension. First is Darko Suvin, who inspired Fredric Jameson and most of the Utopian school of SF theorists I primarily read:

SF is, then, a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficent conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment. —Darko Suvin

There's a lot to pull out there, but the key words are "estrangement," "cognition," and "imaginative framework alternative." What Suvin argues in his work is that the defining characteristic of science fiction is the pwower of defamiliarization that allows us to see our own world more clearly (and maybe for the first time), which is accomplished through the sort of intricate, even obsessive world-building confabulations SF is famous for. In particular, Suvin and his successors argue, SF expresses the desire for another kind of life, whether explicitly (as Utopian fiction) or implicitly (the desire for a plausible alterity expressed in negative in most dystopian, anti-Utopian, and apocalyptic fictions).

Infinite Jest, it seems to me, is pretty deep in the murky swamp that divides this sort of SF from more generic Utopian/dystopian political satire. The trouble for any Suvinian analysis of Infinite Jest, I think, comes in the unstable irony I was going on about earlier in the week; as Infinite Tasks lays out in detail, O.N.A.N.-ite politics is not in any sense a imaginative framework alternative to the present. It's a series of gags. Wallace's world-building just isn't on the level. It's no coincidence, to take but one example, that a close reading of DFW's references to the Gentle administration and the start of Subsidized Time c. the year 2000 would seem to place the "Limbaugh administration" around the year of the novel's composition in the mid-1990s, and therefore somehow impossibly concurrent with the Clinton administration that is also occasionally referenced. Infinite Jest is our cracked self-reflection, not another world.

And finally there's Delany, who rejects political readings of SF in favor of a definition focused on wordplay, and really on the pleasure of the text itself:

In science fiction, "science"—i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as "His world exploded," or "She turned on her left side," as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible.
—Samuel Delany

This literary-linguistic pleasure, I think, is quite clearly a huge part of the pleasure of IJ for those of us who are enjoying it; the way in which, 400 pages in, we find ourselves now able to parse a sentence like this one:

All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton's eighteenth summer, of Subsidized Time, the advertised Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became the O.N.A.N.T.A., and some Mexican systems analyst—who barely spoke English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data—this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn't know enough not to treat Clipperton's string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. (431)

There is surely something Delany could recognize in this sentence and the subtle mental acrobatics required to make sense of it; if this isn't quite science fiction, exactly, it seems to me it's something very close.

On the question of irony—where I left off last time, and where Infinite Zombies' Daryl Houston starts off in his latest post—it's a little difficult for me to know exactly how to read this week's section on the Reaganesque presidency of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. The signposts for reading this section as a satire are all there, not just in Gentle's OCD and Howard-Hughes-style obsession with cleanliness but also in the complete vacuity of C.U.S.P.'s political agenda—but it is difficult to tell whether the narrative's apparent contempt for environmentalist thinking is an aspect of the satire or the motivation for it. Gentle's political party, the Clean U.S. Party—an unlikely political coalition comprised of "ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owel-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers" whose first platform was organized around the ingenious plan "Let's Shoot Our Wastes Into Space"—is organized around an anti-ecological version of supposed environmentalism that understands "American renewal" as "an essentially aesthetic affair" (382). This is, then, a fairly pitch-perfect satire of ecology as ideology, the empty apolitics of the sort "we can all agree to" that looks for consumer-friendly solutions to the environmental catastrophe caused by consumerism itself. This is our moment: "a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splattered" (382).

I can think here of nothing so much as a DFW quote on addiction Daryl highlighted in his own post:

An activity is addictive if one’s relationship to is lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and really needing it. Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign. But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problesm for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problem it causes.

Consumerism, I think, clearly qualifies, as Wallace shows throughout this section.

In IJ, it's our malignant addiction to a consumer lifestyle that leads to Gentle's experialist mandate, the outsourcing of environmental costs to Indian reservations and our partner "enemy-allies" (385) in O.N.A.N. It's this malignant addiction that leads us to build wasteful and inefficient fusion reactors even though they have the "generating-massive-amounts-of-high-R-waste part down a lot more pat than the "consuming-the-waste-in-a-nuclear-process-whose-own-waste-was-the-fuel-for-the-first-waste-intensive-phase-of-the-circle-of-reactions part" (1029n150).

In the end it leads even to the forcible gifting of most of New England to Canada as the Great Concavity/Convexity, hollowed out and glass-walled with giant fans blowing our toxic air northward (385). There's a fair critique of NIMBYism here, as well as the perpetually empty promise of near-future technological millennialism that has been so deftly exploited by the partisan right-wing and their corporate allies to preempt all environmentalist reforms over the decades. There's a critique of the politics of Othering, too, the need for "some people beside each other of us to blame" (384) and the national ennui that apparently comes from a post-Soviet, post-Jihad era with no "Foreign Menace" to distract us from the problems of our own making (382). (What, we skipped China?) And there's, yes, a critique of the left-wing, more-eco-than-thou granola set in (among other things) Gentle's addictive obsessive-compulsive cleaniness and C.U.S.P.'s easy consumerist ethos, though frankly this critique seems much more of the strawman variety than most of Wallace's jokes.

But is this scattershot, unstable irony all there is here? A pox on everybody's house? Is there any place for the reader of Infinite Jest to imagine a non-hypocritical, anti-consumerist politics? Do we really have no stable interpretive ground on which to stand? History seems in this novel to have somehow calcified into an inevitable trajectory of decadent disposability, and the only suggested response for the educated observer of these trends seems accordingly to be a bitter, smug withdrawal. I want to see DFW as getting past mere smugness into something more viable, but he doesn't make it easy. The only way out of this trap of hopeless cynicism that I can see so far lies in the unstable irony inherent in the novel's own presentation, its cartoonish and over-the-top hyperbole. Here, it's the fact that all this information is literally being conveyed to us through the well-respected and politically responsible medium of video puppet show, organized around Mario and his father's penchant for the "parodic device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges, magazine articles, and historical headers" (391). But I'm not sure irony alone is enough to get us out of smugness—I'm just not sure yet if the novel gives us much hope for escape from the surreal banality of turn-of-the-millennium American life, hope for something after or beyond consumer culture. We've already seen in IJ the transcendental existential threat of the Entertainment, which clogs entirely our ability to want anything besides it. Elsewhere, as with Gately, we see that addictions can in fact be broken, that renewal is difficult but still possible—but where is that hope here?

The use of the phrase "years right around the millennium" in the same footnote I cited above contains, I think, an important ambiguity for all this—from what point in the future, and from what cultural assumptions, are we to understand this book actually being composed? Is it a moment where this sort of perpetual-motion fusion suddenly somehow works—a time in which the miracle works? A moment in which the Entertainment, or something like it, has destroyed the culture entirely? Or, perhaps, a moment that is not "a terrible U.S. time for waste" for other, more politically hopeful reasons—a moment where, beyond belief, we have somehow managed to change?

Can addictions only be beaten when they originate in an individual's excess? When an addiction is communal—when it is ideological and so totally normalized—what is our prescription for hope?

Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations or heretofore unexpected reserves of good will for the franchise—or maybe J.J. just nailed it—but I found Star Trek surprisingly good. And "good" is an amazing accomplishment given the self-contradictions inherent to the project:

1) innovate and revitalize a franchise that, let's face it, is built almost entirely on the bedrock of nostalgic repetition;
2) do so while further hamstrung by the excruciating prequel format.

But Abrams strikes a more or less successful balance, aside from a few hamhanded "R2-D2, meet C-3PO" moments and a little too much handholding and lampshade-hanging.

As is probably to be expected, the prequelization provides both the worst parts of the movie and its primary source of narrative pleasure. As a certified member of the Nitpicker's Guild I confess I was a bit annoyed to see how little effort was made to stick with the original continuity, even granting the timeline shift. Many of the gadgets had different behaviors and limitations than in the original show; no one knew Romulans were related to Vulcans until part of the way through the original series; Chekhov didn't join the ship until later; Pike wasn't the first captain of the Enterprise; etc, etc, etc. (You can fanwank most or all of these away with "The USS Kelvin Changed Everything," but that's not very satisfying. Clear lines of cause-and-effect matter, especially in time travel stories.)

That this cherished original continuity is essentially bulldozed permanently by the film is pretty unfortunate and will, I think, permanently damage the franchise in the eyes of its loyal and notoriously defensive fanbase, especially as fifty years of strict adherence to Roddenberry's particular Utopian vision has not prepared them well for our heroes to lose a planet, much less the entire timeline.

But at the same time it is quite fun to see these characters meet each other, and Abrams does an amazing job of capturing the feel of the original series (all the way from aesthetics right down to the level of contrivance and occasionally nonsensical plot points). That the actors playing McCoy and (especially) Spock are very good mimics of the original actors helps things along a lot as well.

It's also astounding how apolitical the film tries to be; I went in with the idea of writing a post about neoliberalism and Star Trek and it just didn't give me much to work with. Now, this is a neoliberal, United Nations fantasy of the future, to be sure, in which difference only exists to be flattened out—but that's really true of almost all Trek, DS9 and some other choice episodes excepted. (There's also a making explicit of the longstanding metaphorical connection between Vulcans and Jews, with a Vulcan Holocaust followed by a choice between diaspora, assimilation, and resettlement in a "new colony," but I don't know what to do with that yet.)

Star Trek (2009) is no better or worse, politically speaking, than what Star Trek's always been: a fantasy of what the world would be like if consumer capitalism had no labor or environmental costs and American military-cultural hegemony was pure, stable, and uncomplicatedly good. It remains our defining ideological fantasy, in other words, the thing that blinds us still to the sort of world we're really living in and the sort of future we're actually creating.

So it's no surprise that at this point my thoughts turn to the mediocre, to the unchosen, to the radicals and the subaltern and the dissidents. What becomes of difference in this future? We see these people only sometimes, in the background: Sisko's dad, Picard's brother. Usually they exist only to be made Star Fleet officers or good Federation citizens by the end of the episode, and we see no one like this in this movie at all. The lack of flexibility in this narrative template has grown, I think, exhausting, and it's for this reason that over the years I find myself much more drawn to presentist and mundane SF, or apocalyptic futurity, or to anti-Trek futures like Firefly, the first few seasons of BSG, or Samuel Delany's Triton.

But all the same every so often it's nice to come home again.

Just one request: no more product placement, please; there's no money in the future, much less corporations...

Sunday!

* Your attention please: Arlen Specter would like you to know he is not a loyal Democrat.

* 'The Politics of Climate Hacking: What happens if one country decides to start geo-engineering on its own?'

"This is not at all hard to do," Granger told the audience, declaring that "a single large nation"—especially a nuclear power, which might act with relative impunity—could easily exercise the option. A run of bad news from the climate scientists might convince a government that the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet was accelerating, and that Earth's low-lying areas were facing an imminent rise of 3 feet or more in sea level. "If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?" Morgan asked. (One could equally envision a left-leaning, low-lying European nation with the same inclination.) Geoengineering "turns the normal debate over climate change on its head," he and some co-authors wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. Getting nations to agree to cut their greenhouse pollution has proved to be the ultimate free-rider problem, as the biggest nations must all cooperate or the planet will keep getting warmer. The Pinatubo option creates the opposite dilemma: As the discussions in Lisbon made clear, any of a dozen nations could change the global temperature all by itself.

It's becoming increasingly clear, I think, that international political actors view geo-engineering as the option of first resort; there are still no serious coordinated efforts to reduce carbon emission, so radical a dereliction of duty as to amount to a suicide pact—unless they've convinced themselves they can jury-rig some ad hoc solution as the crisis escalates.

* See also: the world, 4 degrees warmer and An Introduction to Global Warming Impacts: Hell and High Water. All via MeFi.

* Alain Badiou on the communist hypothesis.

"But that reduces your communist adherence to nothing more than a faith! Rather than look at its practical impact upon the twentieth century, you just say, 'Oh, well, that wasn't pure, it wasn't true to the idea, but I know the idea itself remains right.' That's a form of faith."

"Maybe, but faith is a great thing sometimes."

* Does DC own Superboy again? Via io9.

* Join Alex Greenberg on a trip to the retro-future.

ads without products has a neat post on icons and the Utopian possibility of universal chat, featuring this pleasing narrative from artist Xu Bing. Via @SEK.

Seriously, I have pink eye. That's just absurd. Here are some links.

* Utopia is now: curing cancer by virus.

* Dystopia is now: New York is talking about taxing Internet porn. What's 4% of free?

* How the Crash will reshape America.

* Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Via American Stranger.

* Salute to British comic creators.

* Is Final Crisis "the death knell of the 'mad ideas' school of comics writing"?

* Nate Silver tries to statisticize the Oscars.

* Goodbye, Dubai.

* And Candleblog directs us to the official Trilogy Meter. Pretty good, but they got Back to the Future 2 wrong; it's not only better than the original, it's the greatest cinematic achievement of all time.

All the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand. That they are not used for that purpose is to be attributed to the total mobilization of existing society against its own potential for liberation.

Every so often, when I can, I like to share snippets of what I'm reading for my exams. Yesterday it was Herbert Marcuse's "The End of Utopia," in which he argues that a functionally limitless technological horizon which finally eliminates the realm of necessity demands in turn an aesthetic-erotic revolution in values. This one's short and good. Check it out.

Even on the left the notion of socialism has been taken too much within the framework of the development of productive forces, of increasing the productivity of labor, something which was not only justified but necessary at the level of productivity at which the idea of scientific socialism was developed but which today is at least subject to discussion. Today we must try to discuss and define--without any inhibitions, even when it may seem ridiculous--the qualitative difference between socialist society as a free society and the existing society. And it is precisely here that, if we are looking for a concept that can perhaps indicate the qualitative difference in socialist society, the aesthetic-erotic dimension comes to mind almost spontaneously, at least to me. Here the notion "aesthetic" is taken in its original sense, namely as the form of sensitivity of the senses and as the form of the concrete world of human life. Taken in this way, the notion projects the convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play. It is no accident that the work of Fourier is becoming topical again among the avant-garde left-wing intelligentsia. As Marx and Engels themselves acknowledged, Fourier was the only one to have made clear this qualitative difference between free and unfree society. And he did not shrink back in fear, as Marx still did, from speaking of a possible society in which work becomes play, a society in which even socially necessary labor can be organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men.

Last one for awhile.

* The UFO-themed art of Esther Pearl Wilson. Via io9.

* Bruce Sterling on geo-engineering: We are (lousy) climate engineers, so we might as well get good at it.

* Three years undercover with identity thieves.

* Critical Studies in Television: Essays on Dr. Horrible. Via Whedonesque.

* Neuroscience on how we read. Via Boing Boing.

* And the National Science Foundation is not quite as Utopian as Kim Stanley Robinson led me to believe.

Cool pair of posts at Ads without Products and Infinite Thought on kill-counts in video games. Here's A w/o P:

The other mode of play, however, offers what we might call a utopian revision of the game played in the first part - if a vision of war can ever rightly be called utopian. This is the multiplayer mode, where you sign on and can join a game set in one scenario or another against other human beings who have logged on to play against you. In each case, you pick a side to join - the Americans, or in the case of most of the scenarios, some sort of Middle Eastern army or resistance movement, a hybrid I suppose of the Iraqi national army and Hamas. But, in order to make the game fair and attractive to players, whichever side you select you choose from the same sets of weapons, and have the same ability to call in airstrikes or UAV reconaissance missions. Asymmetrical war has been rendered symmetrical for the sake of fun and sportsmanship - it is an odd sight to see, F16s flying over a photorealistic Falluja dropping clusterbombs on American Marines, but one that you accept for the sake of the game. Suspension of disbelief, a fair fight, a kill-to-die ratio of approximately 1-1 in the case of all but the best and worst players, whichever side they prefer to fight on.

Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N. 1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

George Orwell, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," 1946.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Cathy Davidson has some questions. Via Bérubé. Just a taste:

If the Frankfurt School's idea of critique is rooted in a horrific historical moment, one in which intellectuals were not just derided but jailed and killed, if the major theorists of the late twentieth century, virtually all of whom consider critique to be foundational to their method, came of age in the 1960s in the midst of struggles, riots, assassinations, unjust wars, and radicalism generated by a sense of political urgency and agentive hopelessness, what will the cultural criticism of the future look like for eighteen year-olds who voted for the first time for an utterly improbable and historically unlikely president who won. In other words, in the gross world of power politics and partisan politics in the U.S., what happens if what no one could have predicted was even possible a year ago could, through concerted collective effort, become possible?

Two on S.F: 'A Defense of the Genre' and 'Science fiction doesn't have to be gloomy, does it?'

Monsters, Maniacs, and Moore is a 1987 BBC documentary about "comics messiah" Alan Moore, including a running Q&A sequence in which Moore fields hostile questions from himself. Be sure and stay tuned for the collision of nuclearity, utopia, madness, and apocalypse in Part 4.

One of the things that hangs over everybody is the nuclear issue. For the first time, there is a strong possibility of everybody dying on the same day. And, I think, that it's not stressing the point too far to say that if every concept you ever loved, if every ideal you ever cherished, every person, every institution, could be completely leveled and wiped away as if it had never been within the next four minutes—then what wouldn't you do?

When you see the whole world geared up for that sort of act of mass destruction, then a Charles Manson, or a Richard Speck, or a Yorkshire Ripper becomes the merest bumbling out.

It doesn't even matter whether we ever fire these missiles or not, they are having their effect upon us now, because there are a generation growing up who cannot see beyond the final exclamation mark of a mushroom crowd, there are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere.

I'm not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it—but I think that it's very very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act perhaps a little oddly. And during the course of writing [Watchmen] I found myself thinking, if that's true, if I could be gone, completely gone, within the next two minutes, then I wanted to be very very sure that I felt okay with myself and with the world.

I believe, in some sort of strange fashion, that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that would not have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in one line and the Seventh Calvary in the other. We have no got an awful lot of mid-ground between Utopia and apocalypse. And if, somehow, our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons anymore, that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we have got to come up with something else to do with our time, they will have the right to throw up their arms and let down the streamers and let out a resounding cheer.



Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

(via Cyn-C)

Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always contained an element of fascism. It wasn’t just that a cuckoo notion like Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” those celery stalks of lone skyscrapers surrounded by a verdant wasteland, was meant to simplify life, but that it was in some basic sense meant to replace it.

Charles Taylor considers contemporary architecture and its "starchitects" in the context of the controversy surrounding Frank Gehry's latest and largest project, the planned Atlantic Yards stadium in Brooklyn for the New Jersey Nets.

Gehry might have taken The Life and Death of Great American Cities as an anti-text. With its interior “public space,” its super-blocks, its potential for creating what Jacobs called “border vacuums” and the attendant crime that always accompanies such areas, in the way it cuts itself off from the neighborhoods around it and cuts them off from each other, Atlantic Yards represents the sort of thinking Jacobs discredited nearly fifty years ago.

Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods?