Blasphemous Geometries

The American Dream is SPENT: Two Visions of Contemporary Capitalism

At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see. Surplus capital and surplus labour exist side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering and unmet needs. In the midsummer of 2009 one third of the capital equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 per cent of the workforce were either unemployed, enforced part-timers or ‘discouraged’ workers. What could be more irrational than that? – David Harvey The Enigma of Capital (2010)

In my previous column, I cast an eye over the different ways in which strategy games depict the world and how these distorted visions of reality mirror the distortions that affect people when they become part of large institutions, such as governments and corporations. In that column, I discussed strategy games such as Civilization V (2010) and Europa Universalis III (2007) and god games such as Populous (1989) but I omitted to mention games that set out the simulate what it is like to run a business. Continue reading The American Dream is SPENT: Two Visions of Contemporary Capitalism →

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Regendering corporations

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Here’s a blog-post transcription of a recent “tweet-lecture” by Jess Nevins about a paper titled “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms”, which looks at the dangers of performative maleness (and ways of countering such) in “High Risk Organisations”such as oil drilling rigs. In short, the oil companies wanted to reduce the number of worker injuries, and did so by switching the cultural attitudes that ruled the workplace from rugged individualist machismo to a more cautious collectivism… which didn’t just change the company culture and safety record, but the emotional attitudes of the workers themselves:

Employees became comfortable sharing their problems at home with supervisors, as a way to help maintain group safety. One worker, first thing one morning, told his coworkers about his sick child and said: “This is what I’m dealing with at home. If you all would please keep me focused and understand if I’m a little distracted, I’d appreciate it.”

The authors: “Workers displayed raw fears in our presence, with no indication of shame.”

One inexperienced worker precipitated a shut-down because he followed the advice of his physically intimidating coworker. After error analysis “this exchange led to a larger team discussion about the need to guard against one’s potential to intimidate, however unwittingly, or to be intimidated.” Production goals on the rigs “were stated in relative terms rather than absolute numbers,” which workers saw as concrete evidence of the company’s concern with safety over profit and the bottom line.

One of the oil rigs made light of the mistakes by establishing the “Millionaires Club,” made up of workers whose mistake cost the company millions of dollars. “To become a member was not a source of shame, but rather a mark of being human.”

One worker described “how he had become less blaming and more attentive to others’ feelings” from the emphasis on learning from mistakes. “You realize you need to change when you see a look on someone’s face after they made a mistake like that–and you see the hurt. Because that’s something you don’t want to cause.”

[…]

The money quote:

“A man is a man when he can think like a woman,” which means “being sensitive, compassionate, in touch with my feelings; knowing when to laugh and when to cry.” The authors add that “several interviewees corroborated this view, offering definitions of manhood that similarly emphasized humility, feelings, approachability and compassion.”

Imagine, just for a moment what a country run by a government that had been “regendered”- not by swapping out all the men for women, but by redefining its goals – might look like.

In the final section the authors provide a theoretical how-to for undoing corporate gender. “By consistently putting collectivistic goals front and center, cultural practices anchor men to work goals that connect them to others. Men’s sense that others’ well-being is at stake in how they perform their jobs gives them a compelling reason to deviate from conventional masculinity when the work requires it.”

(Emphasis mine.)

I dare say there’ll be more than a few guys reading this and thinking it’s some liberal feminist plot to emasculate men. If you’re one of them, I invite you to read it again; the point isn’t that men need to act like women, it’s that there are clear benefits to everyone – at both the personal and organisational levels – when men act less like macho dicks.

And if that’s still sticking in your craw and making you want to shout at someone, then I think you’ve just provided your own confirmatory data-point.

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Google Books decision not quite the triumph it’s made out to be

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Ah, the striking down of the Author’s Guild/Google Books settlement – a victory for creators and publishers, and a sharp stick in the eye of a cocky monopoly!

Or is it perhaps a stymieing of innovation wrapped around a bone thrown to the copyright maximalism lobby? Ryan Singel sure thinks so; the whole thing’s well worth a read, even – or perhaps particularly – if you’re opposed to the Google Books project, but I’ve plucked out a few highlights:

The decision was widely praised — including by digital rights groups — perhaps in no small part because it dealt a setback to a company that often forces us, without asking first, to reconsider what it means to live in an information age. Take the project of photographing every house and every road in the world as one big example of that hubris.

But that celebration is a shame, because the world will be poorer for the decision.

Here’s the benefits you won’t be getting, as enumerated by Chin himself in his decision.

“Books will become more accessible. Libraries, schools, researchers, and disadvantaged populations will gain access to far more books. Digitization will facilitate the conversion of books to Braille and audio formats, increasing access for individuals with disabilities. Authors and publishers will benefit as well, as new audiences will be generated and new sources of income created. Older books — particularly out-of-print books, many of which are falling apart buried in library stacks — will be preserved and given new life.”

Who won then? The copyright whingers.

[…]

Google was sued not for selling out-of-print books, but for digitizing books and then using snippets from copyright works in search results.

You’d think this was something authors would like.

In fact, there’s a huge business known as Search Engine Optimization that focuses on getting people’s copyright work — their websites — to rank higher in Google search. The math is simple: Ranking highly in Google search equals income for that copyright holder.

But those who want to opt their website out of Google’s search can do so with a simple file known as robots.txt that tells search engines to go away. Google Books offers a similar opt-out for authors.

But authors felt that copyright meant they had total control over their work and that it was unfair that Google made money off search ads on search result pages that included snippets of their work. So they sued.

The authors would have lost in court.

[…]

Chin also suggests that Google will get a search monopoly if the settlement were approved.

That’s ridiculous.

Google already has a de facto search monopoly in the U.S. because its search engine is markedly better than those of its competitors. And even without the settlement, Google will continue to include in its search results snippets from the books it has scanned without permission. Blocking Google from selling and displaying orphan books won’t prevent Google from retaining 70 percent search-market share.

[…]

Killing off the one promising digital library at the behest of copyright maximalists and jealous competitors is no way to get a dithering Congress to make a decision that will benefit the public, especially when our Congress is more interested in partisan stupidity than social good.

Indeed, Congress’s recent record on copyright has largely been to strengthen the hand of copyright owners. Copyright terms were extended again in 1999, to life-plus-70 years, and 120 years for corporate copyrights — done to protect Disney’s Mickey Mouse franchise).

With the caveats that (a) I’m not a lawyer and (b) I’m slightly more familiar with the UK’s copyright laws than those of the US, it does seem to me that the authors cheering this nose-bloodying of Googoliath are in fact cheering a decision that has effectively negated a potential new income stream for themselves and their fellow creators, and which hands further leverage to corporate copyright holders who are certainly no less underhand and interested in easy profits than Google themselves. Sure, you’ve prevented someone else from profiting from making your own work more findable… during a period where dead-tree bookstores are shutting their doors in swathes, and other digital distributors are gouging a 30% rake-off from all sales made within their gorgeously-landscaped walled garden.

It’s not quite a Pyrrhic victory, but it’s pretty close.

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Proustian neuroscience

In defiance of the title, I’ll keep this brief. (Yeah, I know, I know; some days I even crack myself up.)

A bit of advice I’ve heard a lot with relation to creative writing – moreso with poetry than fiction, but far from exclusively so – is the deployment of “the telling detail”to create versimilitude. You know the way a writer drops one or two close detailed observations into a scene, and they somehow make it all the more real, easy to visualise? (Like the Mastercard sticker of the shard of glass that pins someone to the back wall of a shop, f’rinstance, which I read in a story a few days back and just can’t get out of my head.)

Well, it turns out that may be tapping into a way that our brains store interrelated information. Like the way sometimes you forget a major facet of some event you experienced – say, the important speech given by someone at a conference – but you can remember some irrelevant little detail, like the way their blouse clashed with their Powerpoint slides? There’s a neuroscientific mechanism for that. (Maybe.) [via BigThink]

In response to external stimuli, dendritic spines in the cerebral cortex undergo structural remodeling, getting larger in response to repeated activity within the brain. This remodeling is thought to underlie learning and memory.

The MIT researchers found that a memory of a seemingly irrelevant detail — the kind of detail that would normally be relegated to a short-term memory — may accompany a long-term memory if two synapses on a single dendritic arbor are stimulated within an hour and a half of each other.

“A synapse that received a weak stimulation, the kind that would normally accompany a short-term memory, will express a correlate of a long-term memory if two synapses on a single dendritic branch were involved in a similar time frame,” Govindarajan said.

This occurs because the weakly stimulated synapse can steal or hitchhike on a set of proteins synthesised at or near the strongly stimulated synapse. These proteins are necessary for the enlargement of a dendritic spine that allows the establishment of a long-term memory.

“Not all irrelevant information is recalled, because some of it did not stimulate the synapses of the dendritic branch that happens to contain the strongly stimulated synapse,” Israely said.

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Is it still OK to laugh at our fear of laughing at scary stuff?

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I’m not sure, but I think I’m going to do it anyway. Via SlashDot, CNN reports that some European TV networks are yanking some old Simpsons episodes from the rerun carousel in case the nuclear-disaster related plots upset anyone in light of the Fukushima crisis. (Bonus and presumably unintentional lulz: check the URL for the CNN piece! Nuclear jokes? Ew!)

Look, I’m no expert on humour (understatement of the century, yeah), but I don’t think it takes an expert or a particularly thorough survey to say that a great deal of the stuff we laugh at is funny because we’re afraid of it. This is the root emotion behind unacceptable ‘othering’ humour like racism or sexism (The Other must be mocked, so that we can feel larger and stronger than it!) and disablism (we make tasteless jokes about less able people because, deep down, we’re terrified to think how badly we’d cope with the same disability); such fears divide person from person, and should be erased rather than strengthened.

But fear of disasters, of the world itself? I think that’s a uniting emotion rather than a divisive one; our fragility in the face of chance events is one of the clearest indications that we’re all in the same lifeboat.

To be clear, I’m drawing a distinction between jokes about a specific event (a stand-up comic making light of Fukushima right now would be pretty tasteless, for instance, and making light of the human suffering caused by 9/11 fits in the same bracket) and making jokes about generalised existential risks. There have been nuclear crises before now; if there hadn’t been, jokes about them probably wouldn’t be as prevalent as they are. But does a fresh disaster merit this kneejerk cotton-woolling response? Is there a period after which nuke jokes will become acceptable again, and if so, how long is it? When will it become acceptable to run shows or movies that have images of the World Trade Centre in them, or should we go back and sanitise everything, airbrushing the WTC out of history like the cigarettes of the stars of the silver screen era?

Isn’t humour one of our best ways of coming to terms with the essentially hostile nature of the world we live in? Can we not rely on ourselves and the reactions of others to police the boundaries of taste, or should we leave that to the media companies, whose definitions of taste seem increasingly defined by their need to pander to dwindling audiences defined by political demographics, or to governments (whose political motivations are even clearer than those of the media)?

I ask these questions because I honestly don’t know the answers. I feel instinctively that there’s a difference between making jokes about the suffering of specific individuals and making jokes about the sorts of suffering that might possibly assail any of us at any time… but that’s easy for me to say from the privileged position of having never lost someone close to me through a natural disaster or act of terrorism. But to come at it from the other end, if we start deciding that some risks are too serious or topical to make light of, where does the line get drawn? How many people have to be offended for a joke to be considered tasteless? Just one? A certain percentage?

And what would we have left to laugh at?

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