I cite

Critical Theory and Climate Change 2

My remarks today are oriented around reading the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Concept of Enlightenment."

As with the introduction, the opening of the chapter resonates with Rousseau in it's articulation of a paradox: the aim of Enlightenment is the elimination of fear and the establishment of sovereignty (men's sovereignty). Enlightenment overcomes superstition and nature becomes disenchanted. And yet "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (3). Why? This is the puzzle of the chapter.

The version of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno investigate comes from Francis Bacon. For them, he is exemplary of the scientific attitude that replaces enchanted nature with usable nature, a nature that men can dominate (along with dominating other men). Man's knowledge is the ground of his power and power is associated with technology: "Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of other's work, and capital" (4). Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this kind of technological or instrumental thinking is "ultimately self-destructive": it eliminates "any trace of its own self-consciousness." Mystery and the "wish to reveal mystery" are extinguished.

It's worth pointing out that this is an odd claim. One need but recall the Freemasons who brought together both instrumental reason and cultic mode of association based in ritual and mystery. But this is not their concern. Rather, they are occupied with the separating out of science from philosophy, the emergence of a science that doesn't inquire into meaning but substitutes "formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive" (5). "For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (6).

Now even though they associate the scientific attitude with "bourgeois economy in the factory" and with "the exploitation of other's work and capital," Horkheimer and Adorno project the separation of science from philosophy, that is, the process of the disenchantment of the world, much further back, back to Greeks and the replacement of animism by logos. Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics absorbed mythic versions of primal matter, just as the myths had absorbed "the primal matter of nature" into personified deities. Enlightenment continues the process, conceiving Greek thought, too, as superstitious in its association of truth with universals.

What's the problem with universals or why does Enlightenment think that universals are just forms of superstition? Horkheimer and Adorno explain that Enlightenment sees "in the authority of universal concepts" "discernible fear of the demonic spirits which men sought to portray in magic rituals, hoping thus to influence nature" (6). Universals are, from the perspective of Enlightenment reason, illusory. Universals try to bring matter under concepts. Enlightenment, though, approaches mastery over matter differently. Mastery involves measurement and use, calculability and commensurability.

The path of disenchantment, or the process of Enlightenment, proceeds via confrontations with myth, encounters with resistance. As each resistance is overcome, Enlightenment gets stronger. Its ideal, then, is the unity of thought, the great unitary system that makes everything numerable, calculable.

Weirdly, or dialectically, Enlightenment depends on and even produces the myth that it is always overcoming. This makes it totalitarian insofar as even that which is ostensibly opposed to it reproduces and strengthens it. For example, myths were narrated, recorded, and collected. This means that they are also accounts that present, confirm, and explain -- tendencies that drive Enlightenment. Rituals, too, are activities that try to influence events in the world. These instrumental dimensions continue and intensify as Greek thought divides logos from the "mass of all things and creatures." In this dividing, "the world becomes subject to man" (8).

Horkheimer and Adorno write:

Myth turns into enlightenment and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator toward men, He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them (9).

The world becomes just a bunch of things for men to use, for men to have power over, "the unity of nature" rather than a wondrous world in all its mystery, diversity, and unknownness. But notice who is doing the making here: the man of science. We don't see any kind of craftsmen or farmers or people who work with their hands who might have another relation to the things that they make. This is not accidental: correlative to the unity of nature is a certain kind of self-identity, the unified self of abstract identity. So nature as a mass of all things and creatures corresponds to a particular sort of abstract self. It's like: rabbits are the same no matter who is engaging with them.

Of course, this is different from the perspective of magic. The magician is one with a special power to alter nature: he can pull rabbits out of hats, turning an empty space into a space that can spontaneously manifest life, and this with just a few magic words. We can contrast this with the laboratory: rabbits are just elements in experiments that any scientist can reproduce. Neither the rabbit nor the scientist is unique.

So myth goes over into Enlightenment. It has already elements of Enlightenment within it. And the reverse holds, Enlightenment itself becomes engulfed in myth. Horkheimer and Adorno develop this idea in a discussion of the principle of immanence, "the explanation of every event as a repetition" (12). As I understand it, what they are saying is that instead of their being the space for something new, whether that something is miraculous or accidental or a product of human agency, the principle of immanence sees events always as products of causes, causes that can be understood in terms of uniform laws and tendencies that are knowable and predictable. For them, this reproduces the basic structure of myth in so far as in myth what happens to the hero is a matter of fate and, in fact, as the myth will show, he deserves his fate; he will commit some sort of act for which retribution is justified. Hubris, for example, leads the hero to step outside his place, think himself a god, and create his own doom -- as an oracle no doubt warned him. The structure of myth precludes something new, something outside its structure. And the same is true for Enlightenment: "all possible discoveries can be construed in advance. and all men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation" (12).

There is a political dimension to this claim. Prior to Enlightenment (they don't say when), there was "unmediated lordship and mastery," that is, the injustice of inequality. With Enlightenment this injustice is both dissolved and preserved in the form of the excision of the incommensurable. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market does not enquire after one's birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of the commodities that can be bought in the market. Men are given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other" (12 -13).

So it's not just that bourgeois law says all citizens are equal. And it's not just that, say, population models treat each person as an interchangeable composite of demographic characteristics. It's that in a society characterized by commodity production individuality itself resembles the commodity form. The uniqueness of each is a characteristic of all. Everyone is an individual so individuality is a characteristic of everyone. It's what they have in common. The Enlightenment subject is the abstract individual.

For Horkheimer and Adorno abstraction exerts a "leveling domination." It makes everything in nature repeatable. And via industry it ordains repetition. As the social level, this manifests in collectivity, a herd or horde that negates the actual individual. Their example is the Hitler Youth as a triumph of repressive equality. So we can see how Enlightenment is totalitarian -- it results in a form of abstraction that manifests in the repetition of the same.

The gap between subject and object is not simply conceptual. It has a material basis in actual domination, expressing "the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free" (14), that is, those who have others working for them, looking after them, securing their basic needs, in other words, an upper class. They learn ideas of "order and subordination in the subjection of the world" (14). Their thought reproduces this order as it equates truth with fixed distinctions and regulative order and dismisses magic, mimesis, the image, and knowledge of the object.

In contrast, for people at earlier stages, "primitives," the world is quite different. There isn't such a strong division between subject and object. The "Natural" is intricate. It brings with it the element of surprise; the transcendent is the unknown, "whatever in things is more than their previously known reality" (15). The basic concept here is mana as the name for this primary undifferentiated unknown. This unknown is viewed as sacred. Now Enlightenment thought says that primitives projected their terror of the unknown onto things out of fear. Horkheimer and Adorno say this isn't a projection at all "but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men" (15). They write:

"When the tree is no longer approached merely as tree, but as evidence for an Other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical." (15)

The concept or name of a thing is thus separate from the thing; there is a difference between concept and object such that the concept is not the object -- they are separate. This simultaneity of identity and non-identity is dialectical thought and it's present in Homeric myth as well as modern science. But it is impotent, Horkheimer and Adorno say, because it preserves the fear that it attempts to overcome. Man thinks that knowledge will make him free from fear. Everything has to be known, brought inside, because "outsideness is the very source of fear" (16). In myth, there is the balance of life and death, fortune and misfortune, fate and retribution, the closure of the cycle of nature. In Enlightenment there is a similar principle of equivalence that effects a similar closure -- "equivalence itself has become a fetish" (17).

Critical Theory and Climate Change 1

In June 2020, I was supposed to be on the faculty of the Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Humanities Center in London. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, this, like everything else, was cancelled. As a way to give myself some structure, I've thought to start posting some of the reading and thinking that I was planning to do for that course. At this point, I don't know whether this will happen with any consistency, but I thought I'd try.

The intuition behind my course is the sense that there are claims regarding the newness of climate change, especially with regard to (1) the challenge climate change presents for critical thought and (2) the ways to address this challenge. In these posts/lectures, I will consider some of these more closely. At the outset, I am skeptical regarding the claim for newness as well as of the response to the perceived newness, as will become clear. Nevertheless, I hope to draw out aspects of these texts that are still helpful (in other words, to engage in sympathetic readings, although, who knows, they are just as likely to be symptomatic readings; what they might be symptoms of I cannot say).

I have three provisional wagers that I hope to explore in these posts/lectures:

1. Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment presents advance versions of some of the arguments most prevalent in climate change writing in the humanities;
2. This resemblance, foreshadowing, or prefiguration is a clue to the assumptions that give climate change writing in the humanities their basic shape, namely assumptions regarding the limits of reason and politics.
3. These assumptions are driven by an anti-communism that prevents them from escaping the confines of capitalism.

Introduction (commentary on xi -xvii of the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Press edition, 1982)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critical rejection of the conceits or premises of European modernity. The basic argument regarding the self-destructiveness of Enlightenment, not only Enlightenment's limits --enabling impediments -- but the dangerous effects of these limits/impediments, repeats Rousseau from "The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" -- the more we know, the less we know. Although Horkheimer and Adorno don't refer to Rousseau directly, they appear to gesture to this text when they write "The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress" (xiv). "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" is a story of the fall into civilization, of how a free being becomes neurotic and enfeebled by its dependence on the opinions of others. For Horkheimer and Adorno, we pay a price for scientific achievements -- more questions, confrontations with the limits of our knowledge, and a decline in other dimensions of understanding -- just as Rousseau's "civilized man" loses the capacities of so-called natural man. The limits of Enlightenment re-embed us in myth, in an irrationality that, the more we try to escape, the more deeply entraps us, again just as Rousseau's civilized man is ultimately fearful and enslaved. Enlightenment's push for freedom produces an all the greater unfreedom.

To illustrate the point regarding how knowledge turns into its opposite we can point to confidence in scientific methods of inquiry. Measurement, data gathering, model generation, predictions, etc have been accompanied by a loss of confidence in (denigration of) other forms of knowledge and theorization:  interpretation/hermeneutics, critique, imagination, "women's ways of knowing," rich description, folk knowledges, etc. In political science we see this in the bizarre positivism that insists on all sorts of "rigorous" methods to prove common sense or tell us that common sense is wrong (as with a claim  that class inequality has a damaging impact on democracy). A more contemporary example might be Big Data and algorithms. In 2008, Chris Anderson argued that theory was dead, over. Big data enables the discovery of correlations -- knowing why things correlate doesn't really matter if we know that things correlate. "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Models, theories, and interpretations are no longer necessary. Understanding is old school, outmoded.

Where Horkheimer and Adorno go further than Rousseau is with their explanation of why Enlightenment turns into its opposite. Their answer concerns the social forms that sustain thought, that enable scientific production. The problem is in the institutions that make thought possible. This element of their argument comes from Hegel. Recall how in The Philosophy of Right Hegel emphasizes the institutions of civil society and the state that are necessary for the idea of freedom to realize itself in the world. Freedom depends on the institutions and practices that transmit and secure it. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth it not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life" (xiv).

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the form consciousness assumes is a form of unfreedom -- conformity, fear of deviation. This form is a product of social institutions and the habits and mindset they produce.

"The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics -- cliche-like -- have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation" (xiv).

Language becomes debased. Any ideas or expressions that don't conform to the dominant mentality are condemned. We see both elements in critiques of theoretical jargon. On the one hand, jargon can be so cliched as to be a prison, absolutely incapable of expressing anything original, complexity and obscuring attempting to mask the fact that actually nothing new is being said. On the other hand, the critique of jargon is anti-intellectual, reinforces a generalized attempt to rule out complex thought, and operates to police and marginalize theoretical work. So here the critique of jargon affirms the dominant mentality and rules out critical thinking. Both hands are true at the same time.

Before too quickly acceding to Horkheimer and Adorno here, it's important to situate their argument in the broader set of criticisms of mass society circulating mid-century. At the same time that the social welfare state, emerging as a result of the post-war labor-capital compromise, was beginning to secure social benefits for ever wider portions of the population, its institutions came under fire for generating conformism and stifling individual creativity. There is something to be said about the critique of commodity culture. After all, rather than promoting individual consumption, post-war economies in the west (particularly the US) could have invested more in the development of social consumption as had been done in the thirties. But Horkheimer and Adorno don't take their argument in this direction. Instead, they level it at the loss of individual freedom and creativity, offering a version of the argument Hannah Arendt would make ten years later in The Human Condition.

"On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which we serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses growth with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind" (xiv -xv).

My ungenerous read here is that Horkheimer and Adorno are simply elitists and it makes no sense that they have somehow been viewed as theorists on the left. The victim in their sad story is the individual who disappears because of the rise in the overall standard of living. Notice: they don't make a class argument that says that increases in capitalist productivity immiserate the workers such that immense plenty is accompanied by immense deprivation. They don't present an "unjust state of life" in terms of racism, imperialism, sexism or other kinds of inequality prevalent at mid-century. Neither do they blame private property and the pursuit of profit for functioning as barriers to the greater justice expanded productivity enables. It's hard to know what to make of the idea that the rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is deplorable. This is a critique of technocracy and the administered society, that is, a critique of the possibility of using public institutions for the public good. It is one whose basic categories render it unable to distinguish between capitalist consumerism/mass democracy, soviet socialism, and fascism.

For Horkheimer and Adorno what lurks behind the administered society of mass culture and mass consumption is fascism: "progress becomes regression" (xv). That Germany did not pursue rigorous de-nazification after the war is true, but it's not their point. That the US brought over all sorts of Nazi scientists and assimilated them into US life is also not their point. Their point is more abstract, a point about the entanglement of rationality and social actuality. The rational is manifest in the social practices and institutions that produce it. Enlightenment ultimately means/leads to self-destruction: the destruction of the self, as a free and rational self, in positivism (scientism, technocracy), bureaucratic conformism, and mass culture.

the political problem of "and"

Hito Steyerl:

So what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an "and" - as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal? In relation to what is the political concatenation organized? Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated - even if they might not be so popular? And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains, than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?

Another example of how the capitalist state is killing us

From the Washington Post:

UNNATURAL CAUSES SICK AND DYING IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA: Since the turn of this century, rates have risen for whites in midlife, particularly women. In this series, The Washington Post is exploring this trend and the forces driving it. Related: Wholesalers sent pills to drugstores that fueled the opioid epidemic

 

A decade ago, the Drug ­Enforcement Administration launched an aggressive campaign to curb a rising opioid epidemic that was claiming thousands of American lives each year. The DEA began to target wholesale companies that distributed hundreds of millions of highly addictive pills to the corrupt pharmacies and pill mills that illegally sold the drugs for street use.

Leading the campaign was the agency’s Office of Diversion Control, whose investigators around the country began filing civil cases against the distributors, issuing orders to immediately suspend the flow of drugs and generating large fines.

But the industry fought back. Former DEA and Justice Department officials hired by drug companies began pressing for a softer approach. In early 2012, the deputy attorney general summoned the DEA’s diversion chief to an unusual meeting over a case against two major drug companies.

“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” recalled Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the diversion office for a decade before he was removed from his position and retired in 2015.

Rannazzisi vowed after that meeting to continue the campaign. But soon officials at DEA headquarters began delaying and blocking enforcement actions, and the number of cases plummeted, according to on-the-record interviews with five former agency supervisors and internal records obtained by The Washington Post.

The judge who reviews the DEA diversion office’s civil caseload noted the plunge.

“There can be little doubt that the level of administrative Diversion enforcement remains stunningly low for a national program,” Chief Administrative Law Judge John J. Mulrooney II wrote in a June 2014 quarterly report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In fiscal 2011, civil case filings against distributors, manufacturers, pharmacies and doctors reached 131 before dropping to 40 in fiscal 2014, according to the Justice Department. The number of immediate suspension orders, the DEA’s strongest weapon of enforcement, dropped from 65 to nine during the same period.

“Things came to a grinding halt,” said Frank Younker, a DEA supervisor in the Cincinnati field office who retired in 2014 after 30 years with the agency. “I talked to my fellow supervisors, and we were all frustrated. It was ridiculous. I don’t know how many lives could have been saved if the process was done quicker.”

The slowdown began in 2013 after DEA lawyers started requiring a higher standard of proof before cases could move forward.

Top officials at the DEA and Justice declined to discuss the reasons behind the slowdown in the approval of enforcement cases. The DEA turned down requests by The Post to interview Mulrooney, acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg, chief counsel Wendy H. Goggin and Rannazzisi’s replacement, Louis J. Milione.

The agency provided a statement from Rosenberg:

“We combat the opioid crisis in many ways: criminally, civilly, administratively, and through robust demand reduction efforts.

“We implemented new case intake and training procedures for our administrative cases, increased the number of enforcement teams focused on criminal and civil investigations, restarted a successful drug take back program, and improved outreach to — and education efforts with — our registrant community.

“We have legacy stuff we need to fix, but we now have good folks in place and are moving in the right direction.”

The Justice Department, which oversees the DEA, declined requests to interview Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates.

The department issued a statement saying that the drop in diversion cases reflects a shift from crackdowns on “ubiquitous pill mills” toward a “small group” of doctors, pharmacists and companies that continues to violate the law.

....

Drugs are manufactured by high-profile corporations such as Purdue Pharma. They rely on a lesser-known network of distributors, some of which are also multinational corporations. The distributors serve as middlemen, sending billions of doses of opioid pain pills to pharmacists, hospitals, nursing homes and pain clinics. The U.S. prescription opioid market generates $10 billion in annual sales.

There are thousands of distributors among the 1.6 million people and companies that hold DEA licenses to dispense drugs, but three of them — McKesson, Amerisource­Bergen and Cardinal Health — account for 85 percent of the drug shipments in the United States. These companies, which together collect about $400 billion in annual revenue, supply the corner pharmacist as well as giant medical centers.

For years, the DEA had taken a hands-off approach to the prescription drugs flowing out of the distributors. The companies had been reporting their drug sales inconsistently or not at all. They had been largely left alone as the DEA focused on doctors and pharmacies.

“The distributors had been ignored for years and years and years,” John J. Coleman, the third-ranking administrator at the DEA in the mid-1990s, said in a recent interview.

In 2005, the Office of Diversion Control, under Rannazzisi, launched its “Distributor Initiative” and briefed 76 companies about it. The new campaign pitted the DEA against an industry with close ties to lobbyists, lawyers and politicians in Washington.

On Sept. 27, 2006, the diversion office sent a letter to distributors across the country, reminding them that they were required by law to ensure that their drugs were not being diverted to the black market.

“Given the extent of prescription drug abuse in the United States, along with the dangerous and potentially lethal consequences of such abuse, even just one distributor that uses its DEA registration to facilitate diversion can cause enormous harm,” Rannazzisi wrote in the letter.

Five months later, D. Linden Barber, then-associate chief counsel for the DEA diversion office, wrote to DEA supervisors across the country, telling them to be vigilant. Abuse of prescription drugs, he said, had become “greater than the abuse of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.”

Under Rannazzisi’s initiative, distributors would have to monitor their sales in real time, withhold drug shipments if they detected suspicious activity and report those red flags to the DEA.

The diversion office deployed two weapons to ensure compliance. The first was an “order to show cause,” which permits investigators to begin a process to stop drug shipments from warehouses. The second was an “immediate suspension order,” which allows the DEA to instantly freeze shipments of narcotics from facilities where an “imminent threat” to public health exists. The immediate suspension order was especially dreaded by the distributors.

Younker, the former DEA supervisor in Cincinnati, said the agency had no other choice.

“The distributors could have stopped what was going on, but they didn’t,” he said. “They were doing the bare minimum. Why would you want to cut off a customer that’s paying you $2 million a year? They have sales reps and sales quotas and bonus structures and employees of the month. Everyone was making a lot of money.”

...

In late 2011, Rannazzisi’s office filed warrants to yet again inspect the records of a Cardinal warehouse. Investigators alleged that the company was overlooking escalating oxycodone orders from pharmacies in Florida. The DEA was also targeting four drugstores supplied by Cardinal in the state, including two CVS pharmacies.

Rannazzisi’s office obtained an internal Cardinal email from 2010 showing that the company’s own investigator had warned against selling narcotics to Gulf Coast Medical Pharmacy, an independent drugstore in Fort Myers, Fla., citing suspicions that the pills were winding up on the street.

Despite the warning, Cardinal hadn’t notified the DEA or cut off the supply of drugs.

Instead, the company shipped increasing quantities of pain pills to Gulf Coast. In 2011 alone, Cardinal sent more than 2 million doses of oxycodone to Gulf Coast. The wholesaler typically shipped 65,000 doses annually to comparable pharmacies.

...

That summer, lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry intensified on Capitol Hill. Several members of Congress, led by Reps. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), were proposing a measure that critics said would undercut the DEA’s ability to hold drug distributors accountable.

Four major players lobbied heavily in favor of the legislation, called the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act. Together, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal and the distributors’ association, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016, according a Post analysis of lobbying records.

In July 2014, Rannazzisi was asked to explain his opposition to the bill in a conference call with congressional staffers.

“I said, ‘This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations,’ ” Rannazzisi recalled telling them. “ ‘What you’re doing is filing a bill that will protect defendants in our cases.’ ”

His remarks enraged Marino, the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on regulatory reform.

In a Sept. 18, 2014, congressional hearing, Marino tore into then-DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, Rannazzisi’s boss. By then, the legislation had passed the House; the bill was about to be introduced in the Senate.

“It is my understanding that Joe Rannazzisi, a senior DEA official, has publicly accused we sponsors of the bill of, quote, ‘supporting criminals,’ unquote,” Marino said. “This offends me immensely.”

the disappearing individual

On a commes de garcon fashion show:

"The theme for her show was “Invisible Clothes.” And in seeming contradiction to that idea, she offered some of the most outsize, extreme and extraordinary notions: kilts that were as enormous as a tent, trousers that could hold a veritable crowd within a single leg and a giant hood that took on the proportions of a sarcophagus. This wasn’t so much a line of clothes destined for your closet as it was a statement for the season — for the times."

"There were elements to these clothes that recalled past Kawakubo collections, such as their flatness, which reduces them to two-dimensions, their almost monstrous size and the sheer discombobulating nature of them. They are not, in literal terms, invisible.

In these enormous creations, you can often make out the silhouette of the body even as the garments extend far beyond it. It’s as if a child has pulled the bed sheets over his head and declared himself invisible even though the shape of his body can be seen beneath the blankets."

 

Facebook and US electoral politics

from the New York Times

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

...

This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

...

“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

Continue reading the main story

 

 

This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

Facebook, from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

The news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

Dying white women

from here

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

Washington Post series on rising mortality among middle aged white women

from here

White women have been dying prematurely at higher rates since the turn of this century, passing away in their 30s, 40s and 50s in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in small-town America, according to an analysis of national health and mortality statistics by The Washington Post.

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent.

The Post’s analysis, which builds on academic research published last year, shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites. The statistics reveal two Americas diverging, neither as healthy as it should be but one much sicker than the other.

In modern times, rising death rates are extremely rare and typically involve countries in upheaval, such as Russia immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In affluent countries, people generally enjoy increasingly long lives, thanks to better cancer treatments; drugs that lower cholesterol and the risk of heart attacks; fewer fatal car accidents; and less violent crime.

But progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating.

This reversal may be fueling anger among white voters: The Post last month found a correlation between places with high white death rates and support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Laudy Aron, a researcher with the Urban Institute, said rising white death rates show that the United States’ slide in overall health is not being driven simply by poor health in historically impoverished communities.

“You can’t explain it away as, ‘It’s those people over there who are pulling us down,’ ” Aron said. “We’re all going down.”

For this article, The Post examined death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breaking the information down geographically, county by county, by level of urbanization and by cause of death.

Big cities and their suburbs — metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people — looked strikingly different from the rest of the country. The Post divided these populations into urban and rural categories, with the rural population encompassing smaller cities as well as small towns and the most remote places.

The statistics show decaying health for all white women since 2000. The trend was most dramatic for women in the more rural areas. There, for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died at the turn of this century. Today, 296 are dying. And in rural areas, the uptick in mortality was noticeable even earlier, as far back as 1990. Since then, death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent.

In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

In Victoria County, Tex., a rural area near the Gulf Coast, deaths among women 45 to 54 have climbed by 169 percent in that time period, the sharpest increase in that age group of any U.S. county. The death rate climbed from 216 per 100,000 people to 583.

Lisa Campbell, medical director for the Victoria County health department, said a third of adults in the county are obese, roughly in line with the national average. Also, 1 in 5 smokes — well above the national average — and people can still light up in restaurants and other public places.

Campbell said she has been struck by how many white women she knows who have some kind of cancer.

“It’s kind of weird, actually,” she said.

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Researchers circled the dying-whites phenomenon for several years before clearly recognizing what they were seeing. In 2014, the increase in the death rate of relatively young white women was right there in the CDC’s massive annual report on American health, but it drew no comment in the introductory highlights. Readers had to scrutinize Table 23 on Page 109 to spot the trend.

Other reports were more explicit. A 2013 study at the University of Wisconsin looked at the geography of death and discovered that mortality for women of all races had risen in 43 percent of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. Men’s mortality had risen in only 3 percent of counties.

Also in 2013, a sweeping study, “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” from the National Research Council and the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine showed a broad “health disadvantage” among Americans, compared with people in other affluent countries.

Aron, the Urban Institute researcher who co-authored the study, wrote in January 2014 that “increases in mortality are especially pronounced among white women of reproductive age, not a group we generally think of as being disadvantaged.” Last year, she and two co-authors published a separate article highlighting the perplexing number of white women who are dying prematurely.

Then, in November, Case and her husband, Angus Deaton, another Princeton economics professor, published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Deaton had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, an honor that added media gloss to the dying-whites study. Suddenly, it was a national story.

Other researchers weighed in, debating aspects of the Case-Deaton statistical analysis. For example, their study played down differences in gender; Case and Deaton contend that the noticeably higher death rates for women were largely driven by smoking patterns.

Communicative capitalism Chinese style

"In 2015, four of the world’s top 10 Internet companies ranked by market capitalization were Chinese, according to the data website Statista. China is now the world leader in e-commerce, with ordinary Chinese using their phones to invest, buy groceries or pay for street food."

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In the past five years, China’s Internet population has soared. There are now almost 700 million Chinese Web users, about 20 percent of the world’s Internet users.

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The focus on beauty and self-expression resonates in particular with Chinese women, who are a rising consumer force. A 2012 Boston Consulting Group report estimated that female earnings in China will grow from $350 billion in 2000 to $4 trillion in 2020. 

“Meitu sits at the intersection of two exploding forces: Chinese mobile use and rising Chinese women,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University in Beijing.

“I don’t know if they saw that coming, but they went with it.”

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“Nowadays, when girls go out, it just means finding a place to take pictures and post them on social media,” she said. 

Though you’d think that an app designed to “beautify” your face might inspire feelings of inadequacy, superfans insist it gives them confidence, providing an escape from real-world pressure. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/a-viral-selfie-app-with-1-billion-downloads-is-shaping-chinas-start-up-culture/2016/08/03/c89e985a-4348-11e6-b34c-ced7e11f0ca6_story.html?wpisrc=nl_draw2&wpmm=1

"There's a special place in hell for criminals who launch hedge funds"

Holly Wood in the Village Voice -- best millennial writing on Bernie:

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

...

f anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!