I cite

Dmitri Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices

Dmitri Orlov: Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse.

What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk - "Social Collapse Best Practices" - and I thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term "best practices" has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than "good ideas," initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It's a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.

In organizations, especially large organizations, "best practices" also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to "think outside the box" whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn't feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think - a box better suited to the post-collapse environment.

Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That's just not the case. The old ways of doing things don't work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let's go through some specifics. We'll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can't easily get more because they don't have any credit. Prior to collapse, it's good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can't unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

James Galbraith: House Financial Services Committee Testimony

James Galbraith: Obama Isn't Doing Enough to Solve the Financial Crisis | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.

The Treasury plan, if put in place as described, would have a perverse effect on the distribution of wealth. To guarantee bad assets at rates above their market value is simply a transfer to those who hold those assets. It would enable them to convert those assets, sooner or later, to cash. The plan would thus preserve the wealth of bank insiders and financial investors, while failing to prevent the collapse of the wealth of almost everyone else.

Desire is to law as drive is to ? (2 )

I think that one answer Zizek gives to this question is act. Desire is law as drive is to the act. As real, the act is the founding moment of the symbolic, the vanishing mediator between what is not yet and what is already.

But I am troubled and confused by the equation of drive and act. It doesn't make sense to me. The idea seems to be that "the Real is not a hard external kernel which resists symbolization, but the product of a deadlock in the process of symbolization" (110). The drives are another way of designating this deadlock. And so is objet a. And so is subject of lack. And so is the act constitutive of the subject, the object in it more than itself.

The failure and the space of symbolization are the same; hence drives are both failure and opportunity, something old and new. Being stuck is a modality of beginning again. Where God closes a door He opens a window. Getting fired is a chance to realize one's dreams.

Every crisis is an opportunity. Just look at it differently.

No wonder I'm depressed.

Desire is to law as drive is to ? (1)

For a while now, the theme of escaping the dialectic of law and desire has appeared in psychoanalytic approach to political and legal theory. Foucault's History of Sexuality provides one version of this theme. There are others. The Slovenian school, I have Zizek in mind, can be read as attempting to provide a response to the critique of Lacan's account of the constitutive relation between law and desire: desire is not all there is; one also needs to consider drive.

So desire is to law as drive is to what? Law's founding gesture? The beyond of law? The Real permanently shaping and eluding law? And if any of these answers are correct, what do they mean for politics? That desire is to law and drive is to revolution? This seems unsatisfying, I think, because it becomes just another version of constituted and constituting power or even of the police and politics of the order of things and the enthusiasm of the revolutionary moment.

But what if a better answer is desire is to law and drive is to biopolitics?

In The Indivisible Remainder, Zizek asks:

is the alternative of desire and drive, of lack and positivity--the alternative between, on the one hand, remaining within the constraints of the negative ontology of lack, of man's constitutive 'out-of-jointedness,' and so on, and, on the other, yielding to the pure positivity of drive qua the eternal return of the will which wills its object for ever--truly the ultimate unavoidable alternative of our lives?

No one will be surprised to learn that the answer is no. There is a third position. This third position involves the gesture of vanishing mediation, an idea that Zizek develops through his Lacanian rereading of German idealism. Before looking at the third position, here is the political version of the problem at hand:

it is easy to suspend the big Other by means of an act qua real, to experience the 'nonexistence of the big Other' in a momentary flash--however, what do we do after we have traversed the fantasy? Is it not necessary to resort again to some kind of big Other? How are we to avoid the painful conclusion that the experience of the nonexistence of the big Other, of the act qua real, is merely a fleeting 'vanishing mediator' between the two Orders, an enthusiastic intermediate moment necessarily followed by a sobering relapse into the reign of the big Other? What corresponds in the domain of politics to the resigned conservative notion of revolution as a transitory moment of liberation, the suspension of social authority, which unavoidably gives rise to the backlash of an even more oppressive power.

Zizek then asks:

What are the modalities of the big Other which emerges after the experience of its nonexistence?

Cynicism is the answer he introduces and rejects--there is more to the morning after than saying "thanks for a great time, I'll call you later." What, then, is the answer?

a gesture of precipitate identification, of an act not covered by the big Other's guarantee.

With such a gesture I "recognize myself in my symbolic identity-mandate." Such a gesture isn't provided by the big Other. It constitutes the big Other. It seems rather like adhering to an identity one gives oneself.

But this isn't terribly convincing. It seems to combine both the fact that 'the big Other doesn't exist' with its collapse, the fact that the big Other is the order of the lie, of law and its transgression, with the big Other's collapse. I'm not claiming that Zizek confuses these. Rather, I'm claiming that it seems that his argument moves between these different modalities.

But it doesn't seem to me that these are 'two sides of the same coin" or a change in one's attitude toward the non-existence of the big Other. Why? because one can know full well that the big Other doesn't exist but believe that others believe it exists. The decline of symbolic efficiency designates the collapse of this belief. Differently put, the non-existence of the big Other becomes "for-itself."  To then suggest that the next step is having this non-existence turn in and for itself doesn't work. Why? Because it conceals the prior elimination of the conditions of communicability. Without the communication of the notion (hey, none of us believe) the collapse cannot become in and for itself. Or, put another way, there is no big Other to register the fact that no one believes it exists.

Back to Zizek's argument:  Zizek emphasizes the Lacanian point that there is no Other of the Other, no metaguarantee for the symbolic. And he says this is not a deficiency but a positive feature--it's the knowledge we share that cannot be grounded in something external to that shared knowledge, something which would distance us from our connection. What concerns me is the status of this sharing. The decline of symbolic efficiency refers to the loss of the supposition that there is something, let's call it meaning, that is shared. So, not only is there no external referent (the regular condition of the big Other's effective non-existence) but there is no sharing.

How does Zizek explain Lacan's position:

Lacan asserts that it is this very impossibility which links an individual to his spiritual substance: the collective substance emerges because individuals can never fully co-ordinate their intentions become transparent to each.

and, somewhat later:

far from depending on a kind of minimal co-ordination individuals were able to reach in spite of the opacity of their true intentions, the spiritual Substance emerges as the way to avoid the impasse of this opacity by presupposing the co-ordination of intentions as already given in the purely virtual Third Order of impersonal rules...

We never fully know what others intend. They are opaque to us. The social substance images as a supplement to the impossibility of knowing the other. So, manners tell us what to do when we meet strangers, come into contact with others, etc. But, the problem is that Zizek's point here doesn't address the decline of symbolic efficiency. It is still part of an account of how it is that the symbolic order is possible in the first place.

He continues:

if individuals were able to coordinate their intentions via shared knowledge, there would be no need for the big Other, for the spiritual Substance as a spectral entity experienced by every individual as an external In-itself.

This seems to me to hint at the conditions of possibility for the decline of symbolic efficiency: we don't need a big Other anymore. Shared knowledge coordinates our activities, not as the result of our conscious communicative efforts but as materialized in networked communications, bureaucratic protocol, the discourse of the university, and biopolitics.

hotel night

hotel night
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Sullenberger: Pay cuts driving out best pilots - Yahoo! Finance

This is particularly gripping in the wake of the untenable claims from Wall Street that any compensation caps risk driving their 'best people' out of the business. What can this mean? Particularly if the best people were the one's who created the mess? It's like rewarding a CIA official for reporting false intelligence that results in unjustified preemptive war.

If we think that the words mean what they say, then it must be the case that Wall Street thinks that people who have devastated the economy must be rewarded--and that they are threatening politicians who want to limit them. So it must be a political struggle carried out among the most privileged sectors of the capitalist class. The hedge fund and CDO types say that they will help others become looters if they don't their rewards. And these hedge fund types are called the best people. What makes them the best? That they are willing to take the risks necessary to gut entire industries, loot pension funds for pilots and auto workers, gamble retirement funds--and make a fortune for their handlers who are of course complicit in the looting.

Let me put it another way: the claim that these are the best people means that this chaos, this collapse, is collateral damage at best and a job well done at worst. It was the goal.

Sullenberger: Pay cuts driving out best pilots - Yahoo! Finance. US Airways pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger told the House aviation subcommittee that his pay has been cut 40 percent in recent years and his pension has been terminated and replaced with a promise "worth pennies on the dollar" from the federally created Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. These cuts followed a wave of airline bankruptcies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks compounded by the current recession, he said. "The bankruptcies were used to by some as a fishing expedition to get what they could not get in normal times," Sullenberger said of the airlines. He said the problems began with the deregulation of the industry in the 1970s. The reduced compensation has placed "pilots and their families in an untenable financial situation," Sullenberger said. "I do not know a single, professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps." The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, the air traffic controller who handled the flight and aviation experts to examine what safety lessons could be learned from the Jan. 15 accident which all 155 people aboard survived. Sullenberger's copilot Jeffrey B. Skiles said unless federal laws are revised to improve labor-management relations "experienced crews in the cockpit will be a thing of the past." And Sullenberger added that without experienced pilots "we will see negative consequences to the flying public."

I'm not thrilled with my lead in to this excerpt. But I've kept it here as a marker of my own failure to think well in a situation of crisis and upheaval. For the last few days I've been marvelling at the genius of Machiavelli and Lenin. The former can think about such crisis. The latter risked using it. People all over are expressing more anger and outrage. Conservatives try to push against this with 'nationalization' as the bogeyman (in an ultimate horror showdown with zombie banks?). But regulation of markets, control over banks, restoration of jobs, the elimination of economic inequality, assurances of places to live and basic health care, people are screaming for this all over the country, way ahead of government and the media and light years beyond theorists in the academy.

Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be? | Media and Technology | AlterNet

Twitter Nation Has Arrived: How Scared Should We Be? | Media and Technology | AlterNet.(excerpts)

There is evolutionary logic to the building Twitter surge. The progression has been steady from blogs to RSS feeds to Facebook. But Twitter brings us within sight of an apotheosis of those aspects of American culture that have become all too familiar in recent years: look-at-me adolescent neediness, constant-contact media addiction, birdlike attention-span compression and vapidity to the point of depravity. When 140 characters is the ascendant standard size for communication and debate, what comes next? Seventy characters? Twenty? The disappearance of words altogether, replaced by smiley-face and cranky-crab emoticons?

How can you not hate a site that encourages people to post, "At the park -- I love squirrels!" and "F@*K! I forgot to tivo Lost last night." How can you not want to slap these people with a mackerel? It's no coincidence that the second-most Twitter-happy people on Earth are the Japanese, the undisputed champions of self-infantilization. Twitter provides the closest thing most people will ever get to their very own paparazzi or reality show, a trail of imagined eyes on their every move, thought and taste.

Chief among the Twampions of the Human Spirit is the tech journalist and blogger Clive Thompson, who has been on self-appointed Twitter guard duty since 2007. In the first conceptual defense of microblogging ever penned, Thompson concedes in Wired that tweets are often grating and vapid. But, he argues, over the course of hundreds and thousands of individually insufferable tweets, eventually an "ambient awareness" is achieved that creates greater empathy toward, and understanding between, groups of people. Within the patterns of minutia about office life and television habits, argues Thompson, dwells an online cosmic consciousness.

Twitter and other constant-contact media give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist -- you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

The problem with Twitter Journalism is the same as with communication. Twitter can provide stick-figure snapshots, nothing more. Worse, the constant posting and following of these snapshots takes up lots of precious time, sucking up and fracturing the dwindling number of solid blocks of minutes that remain after checking e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, and other now-routine diversions.

But Twitter is unique and more dangerous because of the rolling, inherently content-less and bite-sized nature of the tweets. It reflects and feeds an autistic culture unable to focus on anything but the tiny feed box in front of it, and even that only when medicated. Programs like Tweetdeck (currently in public beta) are working to perfect a permanent desktop scroll and filter -- an intravenous Twitter drip.

Dwarves on crack

Dwarves on crack
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Schipol

Schipol
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

True (ish) confessions

Thanks to folks for commenting. I responded but screwed up with typepad so the responses didn't register and then I got busy. I'm in the Netherlands but will be back tomorrow and, I hope, more responsive.

But now the confessions.

20 years or so ago I slept in train stations and airports. I've spent nights in the airports in Frankfurt and Helsinki, on the floor in train stations in Budapest and Amsterdam. Now, I'm fortunate enough that someone will pay so that I can stay in a hotel near the airports. It makes things easier. And it also, I think, lets me acknowledge and appreciate some of the small joys of hubs.

Schipol is more joyful than Heathrow (and I think Love, Actually is one of the best movies ever. Really.) Schipol is a better medium for mashing up different folks. More food. More transport. The guy who served me some pasta tonight was like a young Mr. Bean. His co-workers laughed and repeated this; he seemed tickled. But it was late and maybe an excuse to giggle.

In narrow fields, you meet folks again and again over the years. So it's important not to be a jerk--not just because it's mean to be a jerk but because you meet the same people over and over again. And the little insecurities of one's early years fade away but the friends come back--if you weren't a jerk early on. I am forever grateful to people who took the time to read my stuff years ago. It might have been small, but now it's part of our story, how we met, how we learned about each other's projects.

Maybe these aren't the confessions that create stimulating academo-porn. But they still feel like something. I might be getting too old for so much travel--the experiences are more than lectures; they go all the way, to people and our lives. It makes it more than a job, but this more is quite a lot. Especially when one tries to combine political conviction and corporate donors; it's not that the people are not sincere; everyone has lofty ideals. And we don't mention what this really means, when there is a lecture that proclaims death to capitalists as the nobility clap and nod. Quite right.

But what is radical and what ideals are involved. Whose ideals? Those who foot the bill? Or those who provide the evening's entertainment?