Tech Bubble Consumer Dispatch #1
A roundup of what I'm reading, watching, and listening to
Hello, this is going to be the first of my regular recommendation roundups where I'll talk about some music, books, essays, movies/shows I've really enjoyed or want to share with you. I initially had this scheduled to come out on Wednesday but paused it after Trump’s election to add a few recommendations that I think are relevant given the deregulatory crusade we are about to suffer. I’ve also got a piece out today for Fast Company that focuses on three key tech nightmares rushing towards us with Trump that were fueled by Biden’s administration: the return of crypto, Elon Musk’s play for a shadow presidency, and “defense tech” keen on using AI to terrorize and brutalize migrants (as well as surveilling and killing people).
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Political economy of tech
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuillan
This book is one of my favorite’s and certainly one of the most important reads on artificial intelligence you can hope to find. Resisting AI offers stark moral clarity and analysis that lays out what’s at stake with the proliferation of algorithmic systems that are being designed and deployed to augment the discrimination, exploitation, and violence our society relies on to function. An excerpt:
The struggle against the fascization of AI precedes AI itself. It’s not that AI first comes into existence and we then have to tackle its dodgy politics from scratch, but rather that AI is already part of the system’s ongoing violent response to the autonomous activity of ordinary people. Instead of having to invent a plethora of new remedial measures, we can build on the long history of community solidarity generated by people’s resistance to exclusion and enclosure.
The very generalizability of AI and the way it comes to bear on different communities and constituencies creates the potential for this resistance to cut across race, gender, sexuality, disability and other forms of demographic division. If the whole of society becomes subsumed by algorithmically ordered relations and enrolled in machinic optimization, then society as a whole also becomes a site for contesting the imposition of those power relations. AI’s generalizability and its intensification of social crisis creates a position from which to question the totality of social relations.
One of Trump’s earliest beneficiaries will certainly be the financiers, startups, and firms centered on artificial intelligence. Trump surrogates like Marc Andreessen who are keen on making billions off of the sector (and seek to use it to further their political projects) have made clear they believe regulations are anti-American (and somehow akin to murder). Silicon Valley’s premiere reactionaries are eager to subordinating every sphere of daily life to artificial intelligence, and in increasingly violent ways: to terrorize migrants, non-White communities, workers, and political opponents, to name a few.
McQuillain’s book offers a lucid framework for understanding the technology at play here, its political/social/economic/cultural consequences, the various actors shaping and driving its development, as well as the ends to which it is being deployed.
Artificial intelligence as it's currently constituted is interested in prediction, surveillance, discrimination, securitization, dispossession, terror, regimentation, and a host of other phenomena that are as far removed from social good as you can imagine. In the driver's seat are the latest wave of capitalists to commit themselves towards re-legitimizing the purer forms of hierarchal rule and spectacular violence capitalism enjoyed until it was tainted by democracy. The clearer we are about this, the easier it will be for us to talk about the algorithmic systems we oppose and the algorithmic systems we desire—as well as how to get there!
Read the book!! It has had a profound influence on me and structures a great deal of how I think about algorithmic systems.
Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia
There is a huge hole in technology criticism since David Golumbia’s passing. We are blessed to get one last book from him, a forthcoming magnum opus about the hodgepodge of ideas, actors, movements, historical forces, and technologies crashing down on us at the moment. I encourage you to check out all of his work, but especially The Politics of Bitcoin which still remains one of the most authoritative explanations of crypto’s fundamentally right-wing orientation (no matter what its loudest shills insist).
An excerpt:
One of cyberlibertarianism’s chief effects is to minimize or eliminate the power of democratic governments to choose which technologies fit their vision of a healthy society. In practice, this means quieting or altogether muting the voices of those who insist that democracies must have the power to decide which technologies are beneficial for their citizens. For democracy to mean anything, there must be actual political mechanisms (legislative, regulatory, and judicial) through which governments can exercise this power beyond the almost exclusively deregulated free markets that cyber- libertarianism advocates. Some versions of democratic oversight of technology take the form of abolition (Benjamin 2019; Selinger and Hartzog 2019; Stark and Hutson 2022); others, heavy regulation (Bracha and Pasquale 2008; Pasquale 2016, 2020) or licensure (Pasquale 2021). These approaches have been so thoroughly muted by cyberlibertarian discourse that many of us do not even appreciate that they are possible. Not only are they possible, but the future of democracy depends on the ability of citizens to reclaim that power from the companies and technologists that have so effectively undermined it.
If this interests you, check out Golumbia’s talk on the subject. The book comes out November 12.
Posthuman science fiction
Radix by A. A. Attanasio
I've been revisiting science fiction that was influential to me as a child: for the first few years I started reading the genre, I was incredibly obsessed with posthuman narratives that featured some sort of artificial god. I was getting seduced by the Singularity cult, I was losing my faith in God, I found it very fun and fascinating to imagine what sort of societies would emerge if God were tangible and real. Save for a few, their plots have escaped me so I thought it would be a fun chance to see what ideas/lessons made their way into my worldview.
Radix was not the first I read but one of the weirdest ones by far. I won’t spoil much: the plot takes place in a far future Earth and follows a child straight out of A Clockwork Orange as he becomes a human/man/god. It’s written by a mystic who lives in Hawaii and believes in a syncretic version of various Eastern religions as far as I can tell (another thread that pops up again and again in science fiction I like is a universe where sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature, and nature accommodates divine acts).
Neverness by David Zindell
Another novel that, again, I don't really want to say much about because it is so strange but rest assured it figures technocratic elites, posthumans, gods, tech as nature and vice versa, and an ancient cosmic scheme/plot/war/conspiracy. Enjoy :)
City Pop
I was introduced to city pop a few years ago by some weeb friends and it led to me to some of my favorite songs:
Junko Yagami - Yozora no Earrings
One of my favorite songs to start the day with and a staple for my morning playlists.
Yukiko Okada - Futari Dake no Ceremony
For a while, there was a theory that Kanye West’s “Never See Me Again” was a suicide note in part because it was believed Kanye sampled this song and because Okada killed herself shortly after making the song in the 80s—the theory has been debunked for a few reasons, but chief among them is the fact this song isn’t actually sampled by Kanye. Great song though.
Brazilian & Japanese jazz / funk
One piece of music music ethnography I highly recommend looks at return migration between Japan and Brazil, the construction of race and national identity in Brazil, and the role of music in identity formation in a country as vast and diverse as Brazil. Specifically, the focus is on Japanese Brazilians—who represent the largest population of Japanese descent outside of Japan (about 2 million)—living in Sao Paolo between 1990 and the early 2000s.
As fascinating as that paper was, it didn’t really get me to listen into much more beyond what little I did (some Brazilian funk and psychedelic rock + Japanese jazz). It wasn’t until about two years ago, around the time I truly dove into city pop, that until Youtube’s algorithm started aggressively pushing cross-pollinated Brazilian and Japanese jazz to me and introducing me to some of my favorite songs/albums/genres since. Here I’ll offer a two recommendations from my favorite artist in this strain, Masayoshi Takanaka:
This song is off my favorite album from him, Brasilian Skies! It’s also my favorite Takanaka song. It has almost everything I want in a song: it’s long as hell, large, and roving—full of fun sounds that build and evolve and disappear along with the vocals, features playfully shifting threads, and underneath there’s a growing rhythm you can dance to or get lulled into a daydream by. I play this album on a loop for most of my fiction writing sessions and constantly loop this song over time.
My second favorite album of his and such a fun little adventure, you should go in blind!
And that’s it for this week! Next week there will be a new essay on Monday and I’ll be promoting some writing of mine that’s coming out in the next print issues of Boston Review (an essay asking how we can steal capital, intangible assets, and computational infrastructure from Silicon Valley) and The New Republic (a book review of AI Snake Oil).
Until then, adios!
Loving the music. Having been born in the 80's in Japan, these tunes feel like home.
Thanks for so many interesting recommendations.