No one would disagree that porn is a major site of importance in modern patriarchy. And there are usually three broad categories of critique leveled against it: 1) That the means of its production are exploitative. 2) That it pushes narratives and perspectives reinforcing of patriarchy. 3) That the very act of getting off to or sexualizing visual stimuli mentally reduces other people to objects.

It’s this last critique, rarely addressed head-on or in good faith, that’s the most fundamental. The first two, while undoubtedly significant, are ultimately just matters of detail. There are folks who produce porn through egalitarian collectives just as there are now literally millions of exhibitionists who freely share images/video of themselves in open forums, repositories and networking sites. So to is there queer porn. Indeed even the most cursory overviews would reveal the last decade has seen the exponential spread into the mainstream of increasingly complicated and diffuse presentations of gender and desire. At this point the conventional for-profit “Porn Industry” is basically a tiny antiquated sideshow dwarfed by a hundred million digital cameras and sketchpads. (In this piece I’ll stick with a more Dworkin-esque definition of porn as inclusive of things termed ‘erotica’ because any distinction between the two either begs the question or is wildly arbitrary not to mention usually classist. Plus it would be more than a little haughty to completely ignore how the term is actually used.)

To be clear however just because porn is a wide category growing more diverse daily doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of freaking evil shit out there. Recognizing complexity shouldn’t mean throwing up our hands and failing to critically engage, nor should it temper the intensity of our rage. Rapists are being made. And porn is a medium used to champion this in a variety of ways. Sometimes deliberately and explicitly, but at the very least huge swathes of what’s produced today still effectively contributes to, buffers, and insulates rape culture. This is no small issue and pretty much every other conversation on porn pales before it. Yet having our priorities in line shouldn’t equate disregarding those complexities. True ‘radicalism’ means exploring concepts down to the roots rather than settling for totalizing banners, no matter how generally adequate they seem. Individuals engage with things in a variety of ways with a variety of effects; done right analytical nuance and strategic dexterity doesn’t have to lead to equivocation or lost momentum. In fact, for those of us outside institutional power such precision and nimbleness is arguably our greatest natural asset.

What I find attractive about the notion that pornography is innately objectifying is not its obvious intuitive resonance but the promise of an inarguable underlying reality leading to clear-cut prescriptions. Yet there are actually quite a variety of arguments leveled in practice, working from significantly differing fundamentals. One can argue, for example, that sexual objectification derives from any divorce between desire regarding another’s physical body and desire regarding their mental existence, while alternatively one can argue that objectification stems from any desire regarding another’s physical body fullstop. Those are obviously very different approaches and frankly I find the latter far more secure. Most of us would surely find the former more pleasant or at least lenient in prescription but it reeks of unjustifiable arbitrariness. It’s not at all clear what would constitute such a divorce, nor what degree we should recoil from.

The fact is our minds change focus all the time. Does spending a minute or two reveling in some aspect of physical sensuality or desire mean hardening our neural pathways to perceive the existence of a partner more exclusively those material terms? Obviously there is a risk present, but how innately or concretely can we speak of it? If we spend a masturbation session primarily remembering a partner’s body/touch rather than anything specifically related to their character will that necessarily have any lasting effect upon us? What if it’s a child trying to imagine what sex would be like? Or a sickly person? Or a deformed person? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the danger in focusing on the physical nature of sexual pleasure and desire is entirely dependent on things like the awareness, vigilance, and plasticity of a given mind — a conclusion that would lead to wildly variant prescriptions and significantly problematize any uniform social policy or campaign. If we can ever temporarily shift the focus of our desires/pleasure towards physical attributes/actions of a person and avoid generating any tendency to think of them as objects then the same would be true when it comes to pornography of one another.

One response is to turn the focus explicitly on whether a physical desire initially arises in response to personal associations or narratives predicated on the other’s existence as an agent. (eg ‘I only became in any way physically attracted to them after I got to know them.’) This might still allow forms of pornography to slip by when tied to a substantive narrative (the already large field of romance novels / pornographic comics offering many noteworthy candidates) yet at least allows us to critique the characterizations, etc presented. Unfortunately at the end of the day it’s not clear what could justify holding the original prompts of a given physical desire in such significance. The argument seems to be saying implicitly that what matters is what perspective or desire is ultimately prior or more fundamental in someone’s head than a momentary perspective/desire. And surely this is a matter of choice for anyone with even the most basic vigilance or agency in the construction of their own thoughts. We frequently choose to dabble in limited perspectives and focuses in ways that avoid overwriting our more core and motivating perspectives. Certainly corruption is a danger, and the social context of patriarchy can contribute significantly, but that’s no more innate a threat with one versus the other. Momentary desire for physical aspects of a partner can lead to ingraining objectifying patterns of thought just as easily as focus on those feelings more abstractly. There’s no straightforward reason to disallow taking such a risk in the one set of cases but not the other.

So what are we left with? Well, as previously mentioned, the other major approach is to reject sexual desire of physical things (at least in any way relating to people) wholesale.

I should note that at its greatest extreme this can even mean rejecting all sexual desire (arguing that surrendering one’s mind to desires arising from one’s own body counts in some sense as objectification of oneself). Frankly, I’ve always found anti-sexual positions kinda cool. I have a lot of admiration for people who bite bullets and in my mind the audacity of the proposition speaks positively of it. Plus I spent my teenage and young adult years seriously debating whether to go on chemical libido suppressants just to get by, so suffice to say I have an appreciation of how sexual desire can subjugate and reduce one’s own mind. But the same holds true of practically anything. The fact that one can get lost compulsively surfing Wikipedia for the dopamine fix of new information, while worth consideration, obviously shouldn’t speak to its proper utility. Sexual desire and sensuality interface socially, pharmaceutically, and psychologically in a host of ways, providing a vast array of tools that can be extraordinarily useful. Chucking it out would be akin to chucking any other field of technology. Sadly, to get started on anything even approximating an appropriate overview would require its own blog post so let’s skip that for now and just press on under the working assumption that sex is acceptable in certain forms.

What we can still at least conclude is that sexual titillation by compassion, mathematical aptitude, or say pine trees clearly wouldn’t involve preferences directed at anyone else’s body. There are still valid concerns to be had about the preformative aspect of mental actions (‘dance monkey dance‘ is obviously objectifying in any form), but I think we’ve clearly achieved enough distance from concerns about objectification to stop and take a look back. Does this resemble what hardline opponents of pornography within feminism are actually saying?

In almost every case, no. (The exceptions, insofar as they’re honest about it, are really cool. But again as above I will avoid exploring that direction in depth here for space.) Instead it’s almost universally conceded that the biological prompts of sexual desire are just too strong overall. We get turned on by certain forms of touch and smell for example without conscious choice. There are a wealth of hardwired physiological circuits capable of triggering chemical responses. Some, possibly even all, can be fiddled with or cut but the effort required can be functionally unfeasible and there are a multitude of them. That’s not, obviously, to throw up our hands in surrender (some of us are transhumanists after all). But it does generally seem to prescribe a certain pragmatism towards sexual desire that allows us to embrace the positives while staying alert to the negatives. It’s okay, in short, to do things like turn one’s focus to a lover’s body or fantasize about a fictional character or imagine what a certain experience would be like.

So what then is such a fundamental problem with pornography?

In practice it seems to be centered around an objection to the visual (as opposed to tactile or aromatic) component of the sensation. While most feminists left the Porn Wars with a nuanced perspective on porn as a medium capable of conducting good as well as bad (with effects dependent on a vast array of context both social and individual), the horrified lot that wrote us off as heinous apostates didn’t seem to do so just because they were wedded to rhetorical trenches or sumsuch; there was a notable tone of alienation and disgust at the very notion of visual desire. It was declared obviously suspicious because it was ‘unnatural.’ Anecdotal evidence can only go so far but time and again I’ve found an exceptionally strong correlation between my stridently anti-porn friends (of different genders) and ‘just not really getting the whole visual attraction thing‘.

Which makes a lot of sense. A straightforward experience-gap would explain in a sympathetic light why so many discussions on pornography within feminism, even when approached in good faith by both sides, so often grind up against a wall of mutual incomprehension. Well no freaking duh. If there was an entire avenue of physiological desire other people experienced that you didn’t (or didn’t experience with anything approaching the same intensity) and intersected with patriarchy the way porn does you’d be overwhelmingly inclined to write it off as a construct of patriarchy too. I mean good god! It’s a neat hypothesis at least in regard to some anti-porn feminists because experience-gaps don’t speak to intelligence, and over the decades I’ve encountered more than a few brilliant people with incomprehensibly absolutist stances on pornography. Sending pictures to your partner? Objectification. A pubescent kid drawing boobs? Objectification. An incredibly popular porn site consisting of user-submitted videos of the faces they make during masturbation and orgasm? Objectification. (Because getting off solely to indications of someone else’s pleasure is clearly… wait, what?) The line drawn is always between visual and tactile sensation. Dildos and even fleshlights no matter how evocative are almost always given a pass by the same people who assume any reasonable person would be grossed by the notion of getting off to imagery.

There may not be hope of persuading everyone stuck in such a trap. At this point the paranoia and war-effort frame of mind probably runs too deep for some and that’s perfectly understandable. But it’s at least another opportunity to drive home the so easily forgotten reality that people’s physical and neurological experiences can be quite different; our own are not necessarily a good baseline by which to judge others. Is it really so weird to consider that just as most brains are built with certain circuits tailored to recognizing and responding to faces there might also be circuits that automatically recognize and respond to other bodily details? Are we really so scared of the “but that’s just the way biology is babe” bros that we can’t allow ourselves any explorations in empathy?

At the end of the day the only question that matters is What Is The Mechanism? Because statistical correlation isn’t enough. There’s unbelievable diversity to how people think, what frames of mind they inherit or choose in approaching a given thing in a given context, and we’re not going to win by going around voting up or down on aggregates. I’m not saying, for example, that the societal and cultural effects of pornographic saturation aren’t significant or something that we should in any way shirk from attacking. But things are rarely cut and dry. Nor would it necessarily be better if they were. Complexity allows us a lot of directions from which to attack things, just as, in conjunction with our agency and proper vigilance, it allows us room to maneuver. Porn is just a medium and even Mein Kampf can be read for diverse reasons without corruption. Over the last decade various mainstream cultural ecosystems of porn (from imagefap to deviantart) have acted as virulent contagion vectors for a number of incredibly positive perspectives on consent and queered notions of gender/sexuality as well as broadly countering patriarchal narratives through direct interaction and omnipresent diversity. They’ve also served as vectors for the standard horribly fucked up shit, but in many cases the payloads have been subverted or partially neutralized as play made less potent by the surrounding free-wheeling context. Folks can no longer avoid recognizing the complexity of desire and identity in society and with less and less uniform social pressure a particular fetishization coming from a fucked up place no longer feels the obligation to form a totalizing counter-narrative and push it fascisticly. Porn as a whole has taken the form of a conversation.

That doesn’t make it anything close to a utopia yet. We still live under patriarchy and a diffuse post-modern fascism is still fascism. But it does make pornography a hugely dynamic and vital theater of conflict. And it does mean that the agency of the various speakers is creeping to the fore in undeniable ways among even those realms of kink that its hard at the outset to see any excusable mindset for. We can exploit this. And indeed a good many folks have rolled up their sleeves to get their hands dirty. So it’s sad to see a tiny remainder of otherwise brilliant feminists filled with right and glorious rage still bashing their heads together with sweeping practically deontological 70s-era frameworks. (Incidentally calling ourselves “sex-positive” is in most cases just incredibly underhanded and douchey and not making things any better.) This isn’t about some whiney liberal appeal to ‘free speech’ or chucking core principles out to win over bros. As I’ve picked apart there simply isn’t any root principle that pornography falls afoul of inherently; getting off to imagery relating to other people isn’t magically objectifying because people both differ and have agency in their self-construction. Socialization is anything but uniform and it certainly doesn’t create mechanistic people with mechanistic perspectives. Treating people like it does is itself objectifying.

Today’s big hit is a cute little paper by a couple econophysicists in Bremen. They built a toy model where a whole bunch of limited agents each have two types of interactions: they decide a ‘trustworthiness’ value for themselves [0-1] as well as who all to contract with, and strategize to maximize the number of folks contracting with them times those folks’ trustworthiness and minimize their own trustworthiness in the contracts they initialize with others (each agent is forced to initiate said contracts/interactions with a set number of people per round). This asymmetry between initiated interactions and responsive interactions is intended to mirror a distinction between selling and buying and I’ll stick to that metaphor from here on out although it’s not unproblematic. Who to buy from in this model is decided by a straight comparison of prices while sellers set prices (quality/trustworthiness) by comparing the immediately preceding prices and resulting payoffs of their competitors. Long story short there were three major environmental variables, the set number of people the buyers were forced to buy from, a randomness factor localized to a single agent each iteration and the relative speed at which buyers updated their strategies versus sellers. The resulting system behavior revealed that this market had only two stable points: extreme competition (selling with next to no profit above marginal costs) or extreme cartelization (sellers get ridiculous profit).

No freaking duh. Said runaway cartelization is a direct result of the defining obligations imposed upon buyers. The number of sellers one’s obliged to sell to [K] is explicitly recognized as a big one, if the whole market is raising prices like crazy and one person deviates a little to undercut their competitors they don’t get appropriately flooded with payoffs from buyers because those buyers are obliged to buy from K sellers (of which the undercutter is just one). But most importantly K isn’t a strategic choice that can be set to 0 (through savings, austerity, DIY, etc) for extended periods by the buyers or lowered via model-external tradeoffs. Essentially what’s being modeled is forced consumption. It should be intuitively obvious that forced consumption will have a tendency to drive up prices as if sellers were operating as a cartel, if only because whatever’s artificially forcing buyers to buy no matter what IS usually in reality a cartel. The authors repeatedly emphasize gas prices as the best example and it doesn’t take unusual knowledge of history or political economy to recognize the role the state has plated in establishing the fixed demand there.

Predictably, coverage of this paper has largely played to the popular myth that free markets inexorably lead to oligarchies, which is a little sad because the best part of the paper is the quantitative analysis of response time in determining the critical point between competition and cartelization.  How fast sellers and buyers pick up on market changes and adapt their strategies relative to one another is obviously of huge importance in the fight over what emerges.  And this is actually a left-libertarian point: insofar as situations arise where smaller market actors are forced to consume rigidly they can leverage their well-known calculational advantages against larger more sluggish actors (usually the ones responsible for the situation).  And in the other direction, where larger firms typify the position of buyer and individuals typify sellers (as with labor), such “cartelization” effects would be positive. Whether through solidarity unionism or more diffuse mechanisms like RateMyBoss.com, we want to drive them out of business after all.

Of course while this provides further impetus for the development of information technologies empowering consumers, there are obvious difficulties in practice for unrestrained market mechanisms alone when our existing “market” is already so far gone to cartelization (precarity, etc), but that’s what molotovs and pikes are for.

Do you remember in the second grade when we spent weeks learning cryptography and trying to invent our own algorithms after we read that book on the Beale ciphers?  And I got beat up standing up for a friend and the principal fainted at the sight of all the blood puddling in the hallway and I was certain I was going to die so I made some school administrator solemnly promise to tell one of my code-breakers I loved her. That audacious awkwardness–that refusal to temper oneself for propriety–was the essence of geeky.

So, yes, these days I’m bored to death with the stale social dynamics of game night and can’t conjure any interest in your latest pastime, whether its expensive Warhammer 50K miniatures or foodie excursions where you cosplay at being hipsters. Over the years I’ve gradually stopped collecting, stopped watching, stopped memorizing, stopped playing, stopped lining up, stopped participating and then stopped coming altogether. You look at me like I’ve turned into some kind of alien, but frankly it’s you I can’t recognize anymore.

Do these things really still fill you with passion? Do you turn to them because there isn’t enough in the rest of the world to satiate you or did you give up the spirit somewhere along the way? Because it looks like you’re just going through the motions. Collecting new injokes and references isomorphic to the old ones. Stocking your shelves with the best this and the latest that. I hate this new self-proclaimed ‘geekdom’, one of sterile upper-middle-class lives defined by esoteric consumerist habits, of aloof cynicism and self-conscious inanity. What happened to the hackers? What happened to the boundary pushers, the screaming rage and starry-eyes? What happened to all the give-a-damn that used to define us?

Do you just save it to hand out as haughty bite-sized opinions at dinner parties?

I mean, I get it. I understand. In the end you were poisoned. You were handed this abstract ‘thing’ called adulthood and while you hugged your hard-won badges of identity close you ended up losing track of the forest for the trees. You applied our usual technique; you obsessed over the rules. But in the framework in which they were presented to you. And now you’re trapped in a world at that resolution. Choked off from almost anything deeper or greater.

Debate was such an amazing shortcut to intimacy. All you had to do was pick a fight and suddenly people would be honest, would care! But alienation gave rise to elitism and combativeness developed callouses. And now you’re wrapped in both. With pet opinions and pet specialties, tagged and stored on a shelf to thrust in the faces of guests, but no meaningful motivation. No drive save retreat and distraction.

You’re alone, nobody understands you, so might as well prove it to them by beating them all at the game. At memorizing feminist buzzwords; at clearing the top raid content; at networking with other programmers; at being the queen bee of your little circle; at never being surprised by electoral developments; at ruling the rope-suspension scene; at knowing b-movie trivia; at keeping a upper-tier house and an upper-tier job. It’s all a long fading scream. The impotent after-image of real passion.

We graduated, we got our real life Jedi mind tricks, and the entire world is before us on such epic scale, with stakes to be found in every day as to put any fiction to pale. But it’s never been cool to truly give a damn. And with hardly any turbulence you’ve swung round to embrace that. You’ve built a new life out of the artifacts of a childhood spent pushing in the opposite direction entirely.

You deride me as ‘too cool’ because I’d rather quest to slay neoliberalism than polygon dragons, but those words come out sounding precisely the opposite. I’m not interested in the same things you are. That happens sometimes. But it’s sad to hear that tone from you.  It’s sad to watch you recoil at any unabashed sincerity, seriousness or meaning. To flinch away not from the content of a voice but from its radicalism or ungainly passion. Can you really be said to ‘geek out’ about anything anymore?

Here’s the thing: I don’t like uphill battles where we can bypass them altogether. (Especially when we’ve had a hard enough time fighting various downhill battles when the tech and the math was outright in our favor.) Datatrawling is a legit concern, especially for resistance movements.  But it’s important to note that while obviously the state stands to gain a lot, the main impetus for development on this front has arisen from advertising concerns. Yes, to many users the slippery slope of openness that’s been generated by social networking is a feature not a bug. Yet Google and Facebook have played no small role actively encouraging it in hopes that they’ll be able to monetize on it with better targeting for advertisers.

I want to stop and examine that:  Their whole empire is predicated on the assumption that advertising dollars are even a thing.

But openness is antithetical to a core presupposition of advertising: people are susceptible to suggestion and anecdote because they don’t have enough information–or time to process that information–when it comes to purchasing choices. Forget everything you’ve learned about madison avenue manipulations. Those manipulations are only possible when people have any reason to pay attention. Build a box that delivers all the relevant information and perfectly sorts through it in an easily manageable way and any form of advertising starts to look like laughable shucksterism. Who are you trying to fool? Why aren’t you content to let your product speak for itself?

In this sense much of the fertile territory being seized by Google is detrimental in the long run to one of its core income sources. As search improves and our instincts adapt to it there’s simply no reason to click on the ‘featured product’ getting in the way of our actual results. The more intuitive, streamlined and efficient our product comparison the less need there is to pay any attention to anything else.  And if the app providing our results is tampered with then we can swap to another app. Walk into any given store with its inventory already listed and analyzed on our phone. Of course advertising covers more than just price comparisons between laundry detergents, but there’s no end to what can be made immediately transparent. “How cool is this product with a certain subculture or circle of my friends?” “Give me a weighted aggregate of consumer reports highlighting the ups and downs.” “List common unforeseen complexities and consequences.” “How would I go about navigating the experience of changing checking accounts?” Et cetera. Every conceivable variable.  With ease of interface and sufficient algorithmic rigor one can easily recognize a tipping point.

Algorithms trawling for greater targeting power on the part of advertisers are jumping at comparatively trivial increases in efficiency with serious diminishing returns. (And insofar as new understandings might inform actual development/policy wouldn’t that a good thing?) Further, taken in a broad view, the issues of complexity to such datatrawling and analysis leans to the favor of consumers because there’s simply far more of us than there are sellers. Relatively simple advances in consumer analysis of sellers would drastically turn the tables against advertisers and corporate bargaining advantage in general.  In such light their current golden age of analysis is but one last rich gasp.

In no way do I mean to underplay the threat posed by governments themselves, who surely have a huge investment in the establishment of institutions like Facebook and or projects like that of Palantir. At the end of the day they will remain a threat and continue working on these kinds of projects. But the context they’re operating in makes a big difference. The NSA isn’t going to cut Facebook a check to keep it afloat. The government simply doesn’t have the kind of money that the private sector is putting in to distort the development of norms in social networking / communications in the first place. Those are slippery cultural / user-interface issues that are far too complex for the state to navigate with requisite nuance.

The sooner we take it upon ourselves to kill the advertising industry the less time it’ll have to build weapons for the state.

Sure, like our current struggle to kill the IP Industry, it’ll be a fight that’ll last a while and involve complex cultural/political campaigns alongside purely technical ones. But at core it’ll be a downhill battle for us. Easier to spread information–both technologically and culturally–than to contain it.

Such a push would provide a number of agorist benefits too. Both through the integration of projects like this that empower the counter-economy, and through the further development of dual-power anarchist justice systems like those longstanding radical listservs that disseminate information on and track rapists and abusers, forcing them to accountability through organized dissociation or at the very least warning others. At the end of the day the wider availability of public information is a good thing. In any society we need to be able to convey and measure trust on various things in various ways. It’s an old trusim: just because institutions of power have seized monopolistic control over certain functions of civil society, perverted them and threatened us with them, doesn’t always mean we should entirely turn against or seek to abolish those root functions themselves.

Well it occurs to me that this is actually a testable assertion. And that test is called the Turing test.

We’re all familiar these days with cheap chatbots that use lookup-tables of previously recorded human interactions to try to approximate some semblance of conversation. The immediately apparent limitations of unforeseen prompts and coherence between responses over an extended conversation are actually quite fundamental, especially in the case of the latter. Right now we can crudely mimic the operations of neural networks with programming constructs, feed them examples of language and let them build associations out of it. But it’s not enough merely to fully map out associations, those associations must be appropriately weighted. And therein lies the trouble because the weightings of associations viewed on face value in aggregate are not directly reflective of the strength of the underlying conceptual weightings we undertake in our own heads. To take an overly simple example, the word “Constantinople” may be matched with the word “crusades” more often than it is with its actual synonym “Istanbul”, it’s obviously unlikely for a program running through all recorded texts to build the meta structure out of associations necessary to start using “Istanbul” and “Constantinople” interchangeably. Remember, the sum of all human exchanges throughout history, much less the portion written down in english, is still very much finite. Certain realities of calculational complexity are going to still apply.

In many respects what we end up saying in outright language is a cipher that results from asymmetric calculations involving an underlying conceptual space. And the most meaningful construction of a Turing test† is one that tests the replication of that conceptual space. Merely plugging into an association-forming program from get-go meta structures to recognize conceptual relations like verb/subject/object or synonyms or much higher-level but still utterly simple concepts like temporality, localization, and discreteness-versus-continuity are a valid medium-term approach but not particularly relevant to testing the way we learn. Some basic Chomskian grammar and physics (causality, it’s a thing?) might be allowable, but the point is we don’t come into this world bundled with the sort of advanced philosophical concepts at play in any intelligent conversation, we have to form them out of associations from experience, much like a neural network starting mostly from scratch. And here’s where we can actually play around with the weighting of social versus physical experience and the resulting complexities involved in building a conceptual space capable of generating conversation.

In short I want to argue that children are able to make the language to underlying-concept jump because they have a very significant pre-built conceptual space from physical experience to match language to. And so subsequent physical experience can have a dramatic effect upon conceptual structures more fundamental than the socially constructed ones. Ultimately, at root, we view physical experience with the inert world less through the lens of social construction than we view social constructions through the lens of physical experience (even if in our present society most people past a certain age largely remove ourselves from new experiences of the physical world). Consequently, there’s at least some core reality to what’s broadly labled “Science!” that’s utterly immune to the critiques of Postmodernism.

Anyway, the point is we don’t have to appeal to fragmentary historical case studies of say people born blind and paraplegic (although every example I’ve found was characterized as ridiculously mentally limited), the development of AI provides about as perfect a test as one could hope for. As we start to grow†† stronger AIs we’ll reach a point where any crudely pre-plugged in biases or frameworks that we might start them off with are going to be less dynamic and nuanced than those they’re (mostly) able to grow themselves. Watch how fast they’re able to crack/reproduce the conceptual meta-associative structures behind language. I’m inclined to believe that AIs fed solely text without at least some form of hands-on contact with the objective physical world will never be able to crack language and hold conceptually coherent much less substantive deep conversations.  Or at least that it will be many orders of magnitude easier for those AIs with hands-on contact.  Further, the same pattern validating the critical role physically-derived concepts play in human perceptions will continue into higher levels.  We may learn basic things like causality at an early age (informing distinctions like subject-verb-object) but humans don’t stop learning new things about how the material world works at some point and only then move on to language, many more complex realities to nature that our own neural nets come to recognize relatively later in life (turbulence, entropy, etc) continue to significantly influence our conceptual space.

† I’m ignoring, among more simple versions, Turing tests that search for common examples human stupidity or limitation as I feel such is functionally irrelevant to the topic, but also because I don’t see any reason to believe there are issues of calculational complexity in human stupidity of comparable orders of magnitude to what I’m discussing. So the Turing Test relevant here is one that merely searches for conceptual weirdness/nonsense/inefficiency in the conversation and is perfectly okay with the interlocutor being able to spit out the millionth digit of Pi in milliseconds. Transhuman cyborg geniuses (or say a kid with a calculator) should be able to pass the Turing test as a Turing test that excludes all augmented minds that were originally human misses the whole freaking point of a Turing test.

†† Can I just use this moment to harshly push a bit of radical tech language, like AFK versus IRL, and emphasize that we really should to start making the conscious choice to use the term “grow” instead of “build” when talking about AI development.

Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful and long-overdue compilation of Market Anarchist thought.  And although editors Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier seem to have made the farcical mistake of including a couple of my pieces they have done an amazing job on the whole.

Quoth Charles in his excellent introduction:

Market anarchists believe in market exchange, not in economic privilege. They believe in free markets, not in capitalism. What makes them anarchists is their belief in a fully free and consensual society — a society in which order is achieved not through legal force or political government, but through free agreements and voluntary cooperation on a basis of equality. What makes them market anarchists is their recognition of free market exchange as a vital medium for peacefully anarchic social order. But the markets they envision are not like the privilege-riddled “markets” we see around us today. Markets laboring under government and capitalism are pervaded by persistent poverty, ecological destruction, radical inequalities of wealth, and concentrated power in the hands of corporations, bosses, and landlords. The consensus view is that exploitation — whether of human beings or of nature — is simply the natural result of markets left unleashed. The consensus view holds that private property, competitive pressure, and the profit motive must — whether for good or for ill — inevitably lead to capitalistic wage-labor, to the concentration of wealth and social power in the hands of a select class, or to business practices based on growth at all costs and the devil take the hindmost.

Market anarchists dissent. They argue that economic privilege is a real and pervasive social problem, but that the problem is not a problem of private property, competition, or profits per se. It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed — deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anti-capitalist — reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence.

Markets Not Capitalism will be available in print on the 5th of November from Autonomedia, AK Press and the Distro of the Libertarian Left.  It’s also available online to read at Scribd or download directly because that’s how real anarchists roll.

Are you sick, in short, of time-burglaring gender-essentialists?

Then Anarcho-Transhumanism might be right for you!

In all seriousness folks I’m actually kind of amazed at how much time gets wasted in the radical feminist milieu on citation wars with people spouting gender-essentialism. I mean, I’ve fallen for it too. But one of the nicest things about being a transhumanist is the ease by which I can chuck that shit out the door while also utterly confounding and further raising the hackles of my interlocuter.

I know there’s a number of rhetorical trenches we’re instinctively wedded to and what I’m about to propose may sound treasonous, but bear with me because I think you’ll come to appreciate just how delicious this is:

Who the fuck cares?

Imagine the situation. Bro-dude #1,459,005,410 has constructed some meticulous and elaborate set of bullshit anecdotes, his own evolutionary psychology fanfic and dozens of “social science” references. All to prove some ridiculously totalizing and conceptually hazy statement about women or men that they cling to as their own personal patriarchy-justification-wand.

They’re expecting you to get bogged down in a fruitless quagmire contending all the things in order to avoid what is ultimately a really laughable appeal to the naturalistic fallacy. “Look, babe, this is just how the world works.” But whether or not something’s genetic or inherent to our bodies or “built-in” really shouldn’t matter. And giving that assumption fuel by fighting it on its own terms is actually kind of reckless.

Transhumanists obviously don’t have to put up with that shit. In fact we can slide directly into terms of “abolishing gender” from the get-go to directly negate MRA-era contortions around “equality” without even having to slog through a lengthy education process about distinctions between gender and sex. When they confuse the two we can be all, “yeah, that too.” (And then feast on their googely-eyes of horror.)

In short it’s well past time to reverse the feeling of vertigo. Basic notions of common humanity and equality are mainstream and they know it. Reactionary patriarchy-defenders have gone on the defensive with a whiney legalistic search for loop-holes and equivocations. Rejecting the entire notion of human nature or compromise with biology drops the ground out from underneath them.

Fuck you, I’m a robot. I’m a whatever. They’re whatevers. You don’t get a say in it and there’s no reason whatsoever for you to assume. I’m a mind with agency and that should obviously include agency in my self-construction. Even if your ridiculous totally unsuported claims about the best form of relations between two specific ‘types’ of people, those types of people don’t exist anymore and it’s insanely unethical to try and impose such assumptions. This is the future. We’re all becoming cyborgs and queers and entirely new ways and forms of existing. We’re self-altering, self-determining. There is no “women” just as there is no “men”. What there are are douchebags and fucked up social systems doing very real damage that happens to be based on the assumption that such genders exist or should exist. Patriarchy is the enemy and I don’t give a shit what it takes to bring the fucker down.

If gender actually conflicts with ethics, then we should chuck gender. If human biology actually conflicts with ethics, then we should move to chuck human biology. Those folks who argue that some bit of shitty social behavior is built in should be treated like someone admitting an unethical addiction, not someone on the verge of scoring an actual ethical point. You don’t have to be a douche! There are ways out! Here, there are tools becoming available to help you can transcend your failing!

If our demands are currently less than fully actualizable then that’s all the more reason to demand them, to pressure society into developing and accepting the tools to realize them.

Of course our demands are entirely actualizable right now. There isn’t any ethically relevant substance to distinctions between sexes. Well besides the fact that one can have a factory inside it to make more people. People are statistically all over the place and growing more diverse as knowledge and technology empower them to make changes to their minds and bodies. But who knows maybe there’s some utterly marginal way the bro-dude’s thing really reflects a minor stastical bent in some fashion between the sexes or whatever. (Or maybe things are bent in a direction that would make the bro-dude horrified.) There’s every reason to stay harshly skeptical of “scientific” evidence for such, but there’s no reason to be terrified of eventually accepting proof of such. My feminism is stronger than that.

So the next time someone starts rattling on about their crackpot gender essentialist theory may I reccomend countering with an Even if that were remotely plausible, why would it matter in the slightest to the basic ethics of how minds should treat one another? Fuck you, I’m a floating metal sphere. And then just pummel them with future-shock and uncompromising radicalism until they’re in a fetal position.

My friends have come to swear by it.

I discovered Star Wars the same way any poor eight-year-old did in the early 90s, through the comics section at my local library. Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi were richly watercolored and stunning in their scope. And eventually I got bored enough to follow up on their source films. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Star Wars was an acceptable geekdom in the otherwise harsh projects. Star Wars was gangsta. And the root of this I suspect lies in its dramatically different character from Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the myriad superheroes and chain-mail wearing dragon-slayers cranked out monthly. Star Wars feels familiar.

Having turned to the comics section only after exhausting the rest of the stacks, I was knowledgeable enough to recognize the technological trappings as laughable, but gracious enough to appreciate the sly self-effacing shrug in “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The realism of Star Wars is its resonance with our common experience of ‘how reality works.’ Reality is complicated, gritty, lived-in, with more components than you can ever experience or understand. Obi-Wan and Luke don’t know the names of all the alien species dicking about in Wuher’s cantina and it wouldn’t occur to them to try. The galaxy is a big place. And the Empire’s success in this context is awe-inspiring and despair-inducing even while being obviously incomplete. Star Wars is what the world looks like to kids dealing dope on street corners. Scraping by in the chaotic brutal periphery, proud of the various impressions of home and community found there, using fantastic tools without the slightest understanding of how they work, in awe of the state while waking up every morning simmering in hate for it. Star Wars creates an environment in which the colors are brighter but everything else is the same. And then it wraps us up in the fantasy of meaningful resistance.

One major fucking exception.

Maintaining this essential “tone” of Star Wars has been probably the most uproarious issue in the last three decades of popculture. Everyone knows the prequels dropped the ball, although the list of widely identified missteps is a bit shallow in description (more on that later). But Star Wars has been grappling with this burden from the very beginning. Some poor sod at Marvel Comics is told “we’ve got a license” and all of a sudden he’s forced to make difficult decisions about what would best signify the “star warsness” of a story as opposed to a Buck Rogers story. It’s not enough to draw some familiar outfits or even capture the characters’ voices, what fans are addicted to is the feel of the world. And it’s an inarguable fact that almost everyone has been failing to nail that in one way or another ever since.

I’m not going to suggest that my extensive fandom (which collapsed before high school) or presumed media studies prowess grants me perfect depth in analysis. Every writer and artist that’s worked on Star Wars has brought their own subjective lens and I’m not immune. But I do have one very simple point that I think should unarguably
frame the issue:

The most potent and successful component of Star Wars was the taste of reality that suffused its fantastical nature.

Lucas believed his winning formula was the genre mixing pot, something he struggled to stir up in the prequels and Lucasfilm has slightly more successfully adopted as their guiding light in the T-Cannon. But this is wrong. Objectively and empirically wrong.

And now, in recognizing that, I’d like to talk about what can and could have been done to save the taste we all long for and yet have all but given up on re-experiencing.

Welcome to puberty, here's your bondage fetish.

Let’s start with Return of the Jedi. I’ve held onto an idealization of RotJ for far too long, mostly through the way my earlier experience with Dark Empire and Ian McDiarmid’s starkly redeeming preformance in most of the prequels set the Emperor front and center in my head. But the too cool for school bros that kvetched obnoxiously about the Ewoks not being uber badass mech-driving Wookies actually had a point. Lucas had a really good idea with the Ewoks — a tiny band of dismissably cute primitives ends up being critical in the Empire’s downfall — but he focused too much on them and too little on the unavoidably eye- and mind-catching rebel fleet. The Ewoks go from being a realistically unexpected counterpoint to an off-tone chirpy Fern Gully fairy tale.

In the process we’re denied a chance to soak up the random realness of the assembled rebel fleet (either before battle or during). The sudden diversity we glimpse finally has the opportunity to sell the notion of the Rebellion. We want to see a whole variety of aliens, capital ships and one-off fighters. Even an eight-year-old can’t swallow the idea of the near monolithic resistance army almost as clean-cut as the Imperials.

You see this is where Star Wars inevitably loses me, and where I think it also begins to lose everyone else whether or not they fully recognize it. Simply put the actual ranks of the Rebellion are portrayed as nearly as white (human) and clean-cut as the Empire. Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie in so far as they aren’t are an exception against that backdrop. And in being allowed to be that exception they’re implicitly an elite. RtoJ does some nice things to consciously try and rectify all this: introducing the Mon Calamari, Lando’s Sullustan copilot, sticking a Dressellian into the mission briefing, making the Endor strike team extras scruffy hippies with beards, long hair and varying baggy clothes. But it doesn’t go anywhere far enough. And the moment the continuity of novels and comics picked up after the second Death Star gets vaporized that same unimaginative, undetailed, monolithic interpretation of the Rebellion (and the war) started spiraling out of control. The Rebellion immediately became The New Republic and all of a sudden the whole damn struggle wasn’t about overthrowing totalitarianism and breakin’ the law as one pleases but rather restoring the rightful regime. The Empire half-collapses and The New Republic steps in to take over. A very conventional war is fought for five or six years and then there’s a single galatic congress and a single galatic military and everything is essentially the same as under the Empire except shit gets voted on. Everything from there on out is basically a Star Trek story minus the scientists.

(It’s a pretty obvious reality that the Star Wars tone cannot allow for the existence of scientists. Most writers, no matter how stupid, have caught on to the paradigm dissonance it would create and stepped aside. Indeed the best explicitly banished science out to the fringes of Star Wars history. One of my favorite summations was the throw away factoid that no one knows how hyperdrive works and no one cares. Sadly in both our world and theirs the mindset of science is alien and unrealistic to the average person. Star Wars has tinkerers and engineers but the horizon of its aspirations is the horizon of the capitalist and working man. This is why midiclorians were so repulsive to the fans. And why building a ridiculously scaled up blaster to shoot rebellious planets was more swallowable than discovering e=mc^2 and carpet bombing them with nukes.)

Star Wars took a turn for the suck a long time ago and those mistakes have been continuously compounded by everyone writing in its world since. The stream of what revamps writers are caught in showcases the growing desperation to get back to the roots. The obvious piece of advice: Stop Writing About Han, Luke and Leia! Keep characters obscure rather than dynastic and focus on separate concurrent sagas about little people! Is a waste of breath — we’re talking about space-fantasy genre trash afterall.

But it’s worth asking the question, hypothetically what developments after Endor would still retain the rich Star Wars feel?

To answer that I think it’s necessary to get a tad political.

First I’d like to point out a number of positive things about the prequels that were entirely new yet felt solidly Star Wars: Shitty battle droids produced en mass by rich people to create their own private armies? Fucking good idea. Palpatine’s slow machevellian rise to power. The Republic deteriorating to showing its inherent unviability. The Jedi being scared and reflexively conservative. A local dispute with a WTO/IMF stand-in. Secession. Shiny things with a hint of decay… Granted, Lucas screwed up and made things ridiculously dynastical, rammed the camera directly at big issue stuff (battles, debates, etc) rather than dancing around the periphery, and thought things like slapstick, 50s kitch, and cheesy romance were the perfect additions to his formula. Oh and neutering Iain McDiarmid’s menance with a silly latex-and-force-lightning debacle and hell, shitty dialogue mixed with shitty, shitty acting. But mainly he fucked up at something that was a good idea and one that he actually meant to accomplish: Moral quagmire. Every once in a while the prequels stop fearfully candy coating everything and start to embrace the theme that shit is fucked up and folks can’t be sure anything they do means a damn. The inescapable point of any hypothetical Star Wars prequels was always going to be how ridiculous the notion of a monolithic purely good team is. When Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan speaks of the Old Republic he does so with some obvious nostalgia, but it’s also clearly tempered with depression, not at the impediments to its restoration, but at the realization that it was an unworkable delusion.

So here’s my proclamation: The Rebel Alliance is not some orderly conspiracy by political powers to restore the Republic, rather it has to be an alliance of rebels emerging in different places and different contexts for vastly different reasons. Oh there’s rebellion everywhere, proles shouting “five-oh” and taking out stormtroopers in back alley shoot outs, terrorist cells blowing up upper class human civies on Eridu, businessmen hiring pirates to attack Imperials getting to close to their illegal bacta operation. There’s slave rebellions on Kashyyyk and secret worker councils in the Kuat shipyards and speciesist underground armies and liberal dumbfucks on Alderaan and ideologues of Every Concievable Stripe. Roving clusters of buddy fighter pilots making attacks where they can, working off of one or two official contacts with other resistance groups. Shit is complicated. So the Yavin 4 resistance was largely humans bankrolled by rich core world dissidents (Alderaan, Chandrilla…) and they may have been a logistical center best tied to the other groups. But they’re dwarfed by all different kinds of actions and uprisings. Slowly growing more tied together and making some serious gains but suffering starker attrition as they do.

I’m partial to the notion that Palpatine, being Sith and a genius, was irreplaceable. If keeping a Galactic Empire tied together was remotely feasible without massive psionic magic the Republic would have become an Empire long ago. And I’m partial to the notion that the Imperial Navy was crippled at Endor. So even while many, many people and classes were indebted and dependent on the Empire their hold was shattered in much of the galaxy immediately following Endor, including Coruscant (that’s what you get when you build your ridiculous city planet on top of miles of lumpenproles). The Imperial power structures that manage to persist (economic, political and military) end up splitting in a variety of ways. In many cases the regional governors assume sovereign control over their territories. The Imperial Navy as a whole probably holds together quite well, lumping up in one or at most two broad regions.  Maybe there’s some epic civil war, maybe not.  However you cut it “Empire” is a self-evidently outdated word. A regional body (probably over a chunk of the core) faced with fraying effects all around needs an ideological narrative to even make sense. Notions of purity, elitism and order have to be harped on much, much harder (causing openly recognizable inefficiencies in some respects). Everywhere else Imperial structures persist by means of superficial shifts matched with appeals to Old Republic “great civilization” narratives.

For the vast majority of the galaxy the collapse of the Empire means a sudden return to local governance. Corrupt administrators, republican governments, traditional rulers, gangsters, warlords, corporate operations… With a ton of un-ruled marketplaces as well as idealic fringe communities as well.

Fuck off whitey.

It’s utterly preposterous to assert the Rebel Alliance would hold together in these conditions. Until Endor there had never been anything close to a single coherent “rebel fleet”. Ackbar is sick of all your traps. (Also your non-traps. The only decent genders have tentacles.) He’s going home to Mon Calamari. Obviously. Because that’s his motivation. Or if he has an ideological one for the shape of the galaxy as a whole (communist!, anarchist!, libertarian!, fish-philosophy!) then fine, he has that, but there’s just no way in hell it’s going to be uniformly shared by all the different components of the rebellion. The vast majority are just doing it for their homeworld, or their families or revenge or general insurrectionary spirit. Sure some rich planets that have fallen from the Empire’s grace long in an abstract way for the privileges they had under the Republic — but they just broke the back of the only military force anywhere near capable of bringing everyone else in line.

Nobody gives two shits what some human in a big robe says on the remains of a looted Coruscant. (And oh yeah, there’s a massive amount of looting/piracy in the immediate aftermath of Endor as the luckiest dispossessed start divvying shit up and entropic egalitarian forces rush back into the market.) Cooperation? Don’t shit me. Everyone remembers what everyone else got up to under the Empire. And they all restructured differently. Everyone in power fears every other new planetary power for either being an iota too radical or an iota too conservative.  Between such parties setting up even the loosest of galactic federations makes no sense. There isn’t an overarching enemy to be fought against, it’s not even clear who still is “Imperial” and who isn’t, but there are uncountable threats springing up all over the place as well as rubble and workcamp files to be sorted through back home. The Alliance was a success, now it’s over.

That said undoubtedly some groups forged in the rebellion would continue kicking. Whether through shared ideology or simply having no home to return to. Some folks like Wedge and Hobbie would cluster in different ways, decide on targets/priorities and keep fighting.  But there is absolutely no simple big picture. There are no maps of the galaxy half in red and half in blue, gradually ceding to blue.

And Leia is most definitely not elected Chancellor of Everything from media popularity and hero worship. (Star Wars doesn’t have a galactic press or internet in any relevant way, it’s not a sedate information-age setting. Kids fix their father’s landspeeder and deal deathsticks out by the slave pens. Remember, it’s the sort of world where “I just recieved word that the Emperor has dissolved the senate” makes sense. Where Leia has to personally drag a little bit of data from one star system to another with a whole fucking starship. Folks aren’t checking live feeds on space-twitter.)

That said, Star Wars is an optimistic bit of fantasy and I have some optimistic paths the galaxy could take without chucking all sense of gritty reality.

First, Luke actually trains Leia. They gather, inspire and collaborate with other force sensitives. And then search for surviving Jedi knowledge, vanquish local evils and forge their own way. Not at the center of things, but at the periphery. The Jedi remain a faint, passing legend for a long time. They do not chuck Star Destroyers around with their minds. Nor are there creatures that block their access to the energy field of life itself. They do not set up shop on Yavin IV just because we’ve seen it before and anything that’s been seen has to have its backstory explained (missing the whole point!). They are wanderers. Healing and freeing. And no longer chained to the flag of a centralized government or reactionary tradition they slowly start to make progress in aggregate. There is no Jedi council or even an order. No one Jedi ever encounters or even learns of, much less communicates with, more than a tiny fraction of their kin. But dictators, oligarchs, gangsters and politicians dissolve in their wake and more utopian, collectivist societies emerge.  (Also, incidentally, Ben’s impression in the force never goes away.  That’s not something unique, it’s just what happens to every damn Jedi who meditates on what life wants rather than what they want.  Vader was surprised by this because he hadn’t finished developing as a Jedi.)

Second, trade becomes impossible to regulate. Smugglers and other agorists proliferate wildly until their various mutual-aid networks become the most stable galaxy-spanning social institutions. Taxation is impossible for the same Iain Banks space-is-3D reasons — at least without the sort of massive capital investment that disappeared with the Empire.  Entities like the Trade Federation can only emerge in the context of a larger state.  Asteroid bases and hijacked capital ships go from obscure relay points to major conduits of culture and civilization.  A proliferation of small non-localized pirates is certain, but this isn’t impetus for the creation of large scale governance because there’s nothing a government could do any better than mutual aid / insurance networks.  All this erodes the hell out of regional governments and core worlds with unsustainable cultures suffer badly.  (Poor Coruscant was always going to end up another Nar Shadda.)

The long term future of the Star Wars galaxy is in space, even more so than before.  A populace split more fairly between sedentary planet-sized governments / collectives and flowing circuits of the cheerfully nomadic free-wheeling traders criss-crossing the stars. The peace that is ushered in hardly complete, but it’s better regulated and more egalitarian than the Republic ever was.

Writers have always assumed the Republic arose from colonizers attempting to keep in contact and assert control during an era in which space travel was less well known.  A time where the relatively few ships that existed were financed by institutions.  In which the galaxy was a lot emptier for travellers with possible dangers around every corner. Over its existence those initial conditions have slowly changed.  I like this interpretation because it gives meaning and substance to the massive social shift Palpatine wrought. The Empire was an intelligent if desperate attempt to adapt the Republic’s outdated mechanisms and drive to deal with the now teeming and highly connected galaxy.

Basically a totalitarian Empire makes sense, a rotting and unsustainable Republic makes sense, a teemingly complex anarchic and increasingly more nomadic post-collapse culture also makes sense.  But a more or less decent galactic-sized democracy instantly formed and accepted out of the goodness of all the Rebels’ hearts?  Totally unbelievable.  And basically a stubborn Liberal lack of imagination.

In short the only believable future is one in which the death-stick dealing teens win. The world doesn’t go back to bureaucrats, committees, corporate laws, and stodgy religious institutions.  Or if it starts to the forces leading that push are fought just as furiously as the Empire was. The only new world coming is one of the Han Solos and Lando Calrissians. The grubby working class, the petty criminals and entrepreneurs. Frequently sketchy, but basically decent.

The major upsets when they exist are not from the development of new scientific breakthroughs (pah!) but from discovery of new functions in the ancient tech everybody is already walking on. Or the discovery of ancient unknowably storied locales like Korriban. (Indiana Jones tapped the same Lucas genius for making you feel like there was too much rich context to ever pick apart.) There are no Sith because the Sith with their very specific historical greviance (christ it’d be nice if the piling up KOTOR era stuff managed some tangible motivations beside the over-harped and cartoonish “hate makes you powerful” shit) died with Palpatine. Rather there are Jedi who fuck up, Jedi who disagree on bad days, and psychopaths who were lucky enough to be successful at moving the nickle around with their minds when they were eight.  Shit can get dramatic, stakes can get relatively big scale, but not so big — the empire’s dead and with it the only time in thousands of years there was even the economic capacity for things like Death Stars much less the social context to apply it meaningfully. On the whole the Galaxy starts living a bit more nomadic and anarchic like The Culture except without any conscious or noticeable moral enlightenment. Factions jockey back and forth. Local powers try to act imperialistically. Ideologies clash and shift. The Jedi go on. Quietly. Less perceptibly.

That’s how Star Wars ends in my head.