Life and Death …

“… the shutting down and subsequent rebooting of the planet presently underway may not in fact be a collection of ad-hoc measures that will fade as the contagion does, but that the coronavirus may come to serve as the catalyst for a new kind of society built upon the forms of digitized subjectivity that are forged within the unique historical circumstances of the pandemic.” —Ian Alan Paul, The Corona Reboot

I’m writing today, on the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, and two weeks since I had major cancer surgery, to take a much longer look at where we are heading, as usual with the foundation of a half dozen or more books I read in the past few months. My own mortality as well as those of the people I love weigh heavily on my mind, etching in sharp relief the simple truth that we just are not here very long. Even a very long life that nears a century is a terribly small part of the sweep of history, both because of the limitations of individual experience AND the impossibility of truly understanding the scope of what is unfolding as we are living through it.

During the year since my mother died—prematurely in some respects, but also at age 83, not really cut short—everyday life has changed dramatically due to the pandemic. Perhaps it was premonitory, but my mother died after a weekend at the Gateway Skilled Nursing Facility in Hayward (where she was sent by Kaiser after the doctors there checked all the boxes that said she was ready to enter rehabilitation), the same Gateway facility where more elders died than any other place in Northern California in the first months of the local outbreak of Covid-19. So perhaps she was spared that indignity, but her own death was hastened by the overworked, inattentive staff maintained by the corporate overlords there when they didn’t notice for more than 12 hours that her oxygen levels had fallen dangerously low. She suffered brain damage and could no longer speak the next morning, and she died that evening after being rushed back to Kaiser. We felt lucky to be at her bedside in her last moments, watching her fight for life against the inevitable, and giving her what comfort we could. It was heart-wrenching, but it was real. Life is death and death is life…

And life is life, too! On May 31 my second granddaughter, Spinoza Bente Sphere Manning Hasan, was born, and she’s a delight. Following Halloul who joined us in May 2017, I can’t tell you how personally lucky I feel to have a growing extended family; it fills me with such love that it’s almost painful! Halloul and I get together at least twice a week to play for a few hours, and soon I hope I’ll be able to take both kids when Spinoza gets a bit older and more mobile. Halloul’s intellectual growth, sophisticated 3-year-old syntax, and all around playfulness is endlessly entertaining.

After months of weird dislocations imposed by the pandemic, we managed to book a whole season of outdoor events for Shaping San Francisco’s Fall 2020. This has gone extremely well, in spite of frequently smoke-filled skies from unprecedented wildfires, and having to hold down the number of people who can attend any given event. Perhaps that has even accidentally helped, since our events have been mostly full with waiting lists, unlike the hit or miss we were used to over the past decade. I was able to take part in all the events until two weeks ago when I had cancer surgery. (We also have been able to maintain our income, thanks to the ongoing support of our donors, and some help from federal and state emergency grants that we were able to get.)

I got the bad news in July, after noticing a bump on my left cheek in January, that I had metastasized melanoma tumors. The doctors at Kaiser seem very capable and I’ve received excellent treatment I think. After the scary diagnosis, they put me on an experimental immunotherapy treatment that uses monoclonal antibodies to boost my immune system’s ability to target T-cells at this particular cancer. There were practically no side effects, and after three treatments, the tumors had noticeably shrunk. I had surgery on October 13, a parotidectomy to remove most of my salivary gland and neck dissection to remove about 30-50 lymph nodes. After 9 hours I woke up and was happy that my brain seemed ok. I soon noticed that the left side of my face was numb. I had been warned that I may be partially paralyzed for months or longer, but happy to say, most of my facial muscles are already working again after two weeks. I still have a massive numb area on my lower left cheek and jaw where the Frankensteinian scars run, and I have weirdness with my lips and mouth so eating and chewing are mostly the same, but not quite. I can’t purse my lips the same (Adriana and I have a daily Kiss-o-meter to check my progress) nor can I gargle properly. And the worst outcome is that my voice is not working. I can speak in a hoarse whisper. The doc says I have to wait 30 days to see if my voice returns, and if not, then we can look into further medical treatment to restore it. Ugh. It’s the worst of this for me. The best news is that the pathology report came back after 9 days and showed that I had no cancer! They found some dead cancer cells in the remains of the tumor, but no spreading to my lymph nodes and nothing still alive at the time of surgery. So it seems that the experimental treatment had a miraculous effect and already killed the cancer. My surgeon was truly surprised at this outcome. Score one for high-tech medicine!

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory. —Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018

During this past year I have been slowly dropping off of Facebook. I still go on a couple of times a week for a quick perusal, but the experience has lost much interest for me. I can keep track of a lot of people I know around the world there, and occasionally it’s still a good way to connect with distant friends or events. But that kind of semi-urgent checking, the repetitive reloading, compulsive posting, all that is far in my rear-view mirror. I am more often on Instagram these days, mostly because I like photography, but it too is beginning to lose my interest. Twitter I never got, and have never regularly checked, same for LinkedIn, and I never even got accounts at other social media platforms. So if you’re trying to get me to notice an event, an invitation, or just have a conversation with me, please write me at my email (proof that I’m an old fogie I suppose).

Ruminating on my own diminishing involvement with the Internet as a social space, I have as usual been reading voraciously. I have devoured a couple of dozen books since the summer, and spend at least 2-3 hours a day reading books. That alone ensures that I spend a lot more time in my head than I do in the manufactured circuits of “connectivity” that claim to be intensifying or deepening our relationships to each other—a patently false claim.

My skepticism of course goes back forty years at this point. When we started Processed World in 1981 I’d already been ridiculing the modern office and the accoutrements of the dawning Information Age from the cubicles in which I was temping in 1979-1980. Living through the ensuing decades of digitization hasn’t really given me any reason to alter my fundamental disdain, even though I’ve been involved in so many projects that depend on the Internet, from our archive at foundsf.org to my blog here at nowtopians.com, and all the many online links that connected dissenting bicyclists, gardeners, and programmers, to anti-war activists, anti-racism projects, and to flourishing expressions of human diversity and beyond.

I used to depend on photocopiers where I worked or in copy shops to get my ideas onto paper and then I’d spend hours stapling and taping flyers to poles all over town. After we started publishing a 48-64 page underground magazine three times a year, I’d rush to the Processed World mailbox almost every day in the hope of finding another wonderful or complicated or angry letter from a reader far away. I was craving communication and recognition long before blogs and websites and social media accounts codified that pursuit into the commercial channels that force all that attention into generating profits for someone several steps removed. I look back on the pages of Processed World with a weird combination of pride and embarrassment—we were definitely way ahead of the curve in terms of what we were experiencing and writing about and the way we responded to it at the time. But we missed so much! Our analysis was so primitive! How much are we missing now as we try to grasp how life is changing around us? It’s incredibly difficult to see the forest for the trees while you’re in the middle of it.

Logic Magazine has been publishing for a few years now, and I look forward to each issue. It’s gotten better as it has gone along, and I’m happy to see a descendant of Processed World in them (albeit, one that has far surpassed the quality of analysis we were doing in the 1980s). Donna Haraway was interviewed in Logic Magazine #09 “Nature” called “A Giant Bumptious Litter: Donna Haraway on Truth, Technology, and Resisting Extinction” where she ricocheted across some of the themes I think about all the time:

If the public-private dichotomy was old-fashioned in 1980, by 2019 I don’t even know what to call it. We have to try to rebuild some sense of a public. But how can you rebuild a public in the face of nearly total surveillance? And this surveillance doesn’t even have a single center. There is no eye in the sky.
Then we have the ongoing enclosure of the commons. Capitalism produces new forms of value and then encloses those forms of value—the digital is an especially good example of that. This involves the monetization of practically everything we do. And it’s not like we are ignorant of this dynamic. We know what’s going on. We just don’t have a clue how to get a grip on it…
The kinds of conversations around technology that I think we need are those among folks who know how to write law and policy, folks who know how to do material science, folks who are interested in architecture and park design, and folks who are involved in land struggles and solidarity movements. I want to see us do much savvier scientific, technological, and political thinking with each other, and I want to see it get press. The Stewart Brand types are never going there.

A new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, by Tim Hwang (former head of global public policy on artificial intelligence for Google), also from the folks at Logic Magazine, offers a framework to understand the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes reality of the Internet economy, which is based overwhelmingly on advertising. How can multiple multi-billion dollar corporations all keep growing and consolidating their power based on advertising—especially when you think about how much you and I and everyone we know either A) ignores said advertising and/or B) have taken steps to block it online, to fast forward through it on TV, and generally do whatever we can to avoid it?

During the last decade of web 2.0 in San Francisco, with its attendant influx of tech bro’s, tens of thousands of private app-based taxis clogging our streets, the shocking explosion of high rise luxury apartments, and the general draining away of whatever was interesting about this city, I have wondered how long this pyramid scheme would keep going. The money, the money, where is it coming from? Advertising! How is that possible? Even though Shoshanna Zuboff and other sharp critics have brilliantly unveiled “surveillance capitalism,” even that concept gives the corporations too much credit. Her analysis leans heavily on her experience with and rejection of B.F. Skinner at Harvard in the early 1970s (as does a number of other analysts), but behaviorism is a weak reed and only works some of the time and in specific and limited contexts (imho). We are not programmable robots after all, even if the business model and sales pitch of the advertising behemoths like Google and Facebook depend on convincing advertisers that we are.

Hwang has studied the economics of online advertising and pushed aside all the hype to focus on the various bits of truth buried in the cacophony:

The full economic impact of ad blocking worldwide is huge. Adobe estimated in 2015 that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue is lost each year to ad blockers… more than all the revenue generated by Facebook that year … On mobile devices, close to 50 percent of all click-throughs are not users signaling interest in an advertisement, but instead accidental “fat finger” clicks—users unintentionally clicking on content while using a touch-screen device. In 2009, one study estimated that 8 percent of internet users were responsible for 85 percent of all advertisement click-throughs online… In 2014, Google released a report suggesting that 56.1 percent of all ads displayed on the internet are never seen by a human. One 2017 report by Comscore found that this problem is particularly pronounced for ads purchased through the programmatic ecosystem. A staggering number of those ads are never seen by anyone at all. (pp. 79-82)

He shows the remarkable parallels between the “programmatic ecosystem” of automated advertising markets and the high-speed trading of stockbrokers and the relationship of such automated markets with a degradation of information available to actual humans. The eventual result is a disconnect between prices and the worthless items being sold (in this case “attention”). That’s all bad enough, and unfortunately Hwang is a typical libertarian from Silicon Valley insofar as he proposes that this system be allowed to implode in order to replace it with better, more honest markets for online life. But before he capitulates to that logic he almost lets himself think about the social implications of the kinds of relationships we’ve been channeled into by the dictatorship of online advertising imperatives.

The need to create a liquid market in human attention influences the architecture of the social spaces of the web. Commodification requires attention to be legible: in other words, the internet must structure “engagement” in a way that is easy and accurate to measure.
Social interaction between people is mediated by structured tags such as “like” and “favorite” because these render sentiments easy to measure. Even features that we take for granted, such as requiring user registration to create a profile, are building blocks designed to support the delivery of advertising online… This is more than simply enforcing a certain kind of product design. We have been taught to interact with other people online by platforms built to buy and sell attention. One wonders if that will constrain the social possibilities of the future. (p. 116-117)

A number of writers have gone well beyond wondering about that and are trying to analyze what we are living through. One of my favorite, albeit seriously depressive, intellectuals is Italian autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi. I’ve read a number of his works and blogged about some of them in the past. The last time I got into Green Apple Books in San Francisco’s Richmond District I came upon a dense philosophical 2015 book by him called AND: On the Phenomenology of the End: Sensibility and Connective Mutation (Semiotexte: Foreign Agents Series). Given my own upswelling forebodings about the state of the world, the title called out to me, and after a quick glance I bought it. It turns out to be hard going, a dense philosophical treatise that lacks focus and swims around and may have been poorly translated. Still, there are so many insightful moments that I still think this is an important book.

Bifo makes a number of penetrating observations to argue that humans are undergoing a social mutation induced by widespread trauma. As I consider the PTSD-like symptoms of so many friends and acquaintances that seem largely Trump-induced (and the broader fears of violent racists and sexual predators being given carte blanche to pursue their barbaric goals), trauma does seem to be a central experience of our time. The trauma of watching the climate collapse slowly but surely is also impossible to fully digest or hold. As Bifo argues “Only those events and bodies that are neither too large or too small, nor too fast or too slow to escape the human grasp can be objects of historical action and political will. What is too large or too small, too fast or too slow to be visible, perceivable, and manageable belongs to the sphere of evolution, not of history.” (p. 276) In other words, he doesn’t really think we can organize ourselves to deal with something like climate change, given its multi-generational time span; nor can we address the steady alteration of a sense of self that has been imposed by the simultaneous speed-up imposed by the firehose of online information, combined with the social isolation imposed by the reduction of our interactions to the code and needs of an advertising-driven social media world.

The establishment of a connective format of interaction between humans reframes social composition. It is true that dissident thought is possible, and that dissident enunication is also possible. But those uttering such dissident enunciations are in effect renouncing communication, because the format that makes communication possible is inept at conveying messages that are not compatible with the code. (p. 246)

Having already surpassed 3000 words, I’m going to pause here. I will pick it up in the following post in the next days, adding in a number of other books to the discussion. The hope is that to begin to sketch out the enormity of the transformation underway, in terms that go well beyond the tired clichés of leftist polemics or the hateful absurdities spewed from the traditionalist (now neo-fascist) right… The embedded role of technologies in our psychic universe, and how they are rewiring our thinking and expectations, goes hand in hand with a larger process of redesigning global capitalism during this fraught moment of crisis, bringing forward years-long efforts to replace humans with machines, and increasingly, to replace human life with machine life in a way that challenges Marx’s theory of surplus-value as much as it potentially vacates the role of the working class in its own liberation.. More to come.