Writing on the Internet

American Stranger has a new post about the tyranny of writing on the Internet. It goes a long way towards explaining the way I blog, actually:

Writing on the Internet immediately threatens ‘authors’ with their ‘audience’ — the moment one stops thinking of oneself as an isolated performer on stage is when conversation can begin, but doing this requires the abandonment of all concern for developing one’s ‘craft.’

My “writing” is what I do in published articles, stories, and papers—aside from a couple of experiments with culturemonkey, I’ve never been able to think of my blogging as writing. It’s an entirely different, and for me significantly inferior, practice; a hobby, not a vocation.

Ecuador’s New Constitution Grants Inalienable Rights to Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

With the public ratification of its new constitution last week, Ecuador has for the first time anywhere in history granted inalienable rights to nature. The new constitution also includes strict egalitarian provisions about food production, water access, and protection for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes.

As the Guardian link makes clear, this unprecedented act stems in part from Ecuador’s custodianship of the Galápagos Islands and in part from its long history of abuse at the hands of multinational corporations:

The origins of this apparent legal tidal shift lie in Ecuador’s growing disillusionment with foreign multinationals. The country, which contains every South American ecosystem within its borders, which include the Galapagos Islands, has had disastrous collisions with multi-national companies. Many, from banana companies to natural gas extractors, have exploited its natural resources and left little but pollution and poverty in their wake.

Now it is in the grip of a bitter lawsuit against US oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco, over its alleged dumping of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Amazonian jungle over two decades.

It is described as the Amazonian Chernobyl, and 30,000 local people claim that up to 18m tonnes of oil was dumped into unlined pits over two decades, in defiance of international guidelines, and contaminating groundwater over an area of some 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) and leading to a plethora of serious health problems for anyone living in the area. Chevron has denied the allegations. In April, a court-appointed expert announced in a report that, should Chevron lose, it would have to pay up to $16bn (£8.9bn) in damages.

Chevron, which claims its responsibilities were absolved in 1992 when it handed over its operations in Ecuador to the state-owned extraction company, Petroecuador, immediately set about discrediting the report. A verdict on the case is still thought to be a long way off, and Ecuador’s government could face US trade sanctions for its refusal to “kill” the case.

It remains somewhat unclear what this law will mean in practice, especially in the context of a country whose economy is so heavily dependent on petroleum extraction. However things shake out, though, this should be a fascinating test case for protection of the environment outside the failed paradigms of property rights on the one hand and “securitization” on the other.

Here’s the full text of the relevant articles, including an intriguing bit of commentary that suggests a codified right to civil disobedience in defense of the environment: “Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.

There’s still more at MeFi. This has received almost no press in the States, but it’s an amazing and very important development, definitely worth keeping your eyes on.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

Good News for culturemonkeys (All about the 1950s)

Never say Hollywood can’t learn from its mistakes. The producers have figured out how to please everyone: maintain earnestness regardless of the inherent absurdity of the genre, be ‘topical’ by way of empty allegory, be spectacularly violent, never stop moralizing. Meet these requirements, and a great deal of variety is possible: one has free reign to be jokey or serious, bright or gloomy, undisguisedly sexist, racist, homophobic, or none of the above, ‘critical,’ or ‘wish fulfillment.’ Or all of the above. These labels are simply not the creator’s responsibility. Restore the superhero’s propaganda function, in short, and in so doing prove Sontag’s thesis that “pure camp” is always so for the future and not the present.** The comic book-loving nerds of my generation are now faced with the dubious realization of our pubescent dreams: the nerds have taken over Hollywood, and the responsibility thus falls to the Figure of the Superhero to ‘teach us’ something about the “human condition.”

Good news for culturemonkeys: Ryan has a great post on superhero cinema over there. (And here too.) It’s more or less the definitive post on Dark Knight. But a few quick thoughts. First, I think Acephalous’s attempt to rehabilitate the film from attempts to understand it solely as a “balls-out obvious apolog[y] for the authoritarian, repressive ‘excesses’ of global capitalism” is instructive, and definitely worth reading.

Second, Ryan writes that we are currently experiencing the”repetition-as-farce of the ’50s”—but this doesn’t strike me as a new phenomenon. Isn’t it more the case that post–war American culture is perpetually returning to the ’50s as a site of degrading, doomed unity?

This is to say that Jameson’s claim that WWII is the moment of highest American nostalgia par excellence is, I think, fundamentally correct, with the revision that it’s more the period from Dec. 1941 to August 29, 1949, the day the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. The ’50s are the memory of “the good ’40s” combined with and juxtaposed against the reality of 8/29/49—they are the dawning but perpetually unfinished recognition of how it all will go / is going / has already gone wrong. In other words, the ’50s themselves were a repetition-as-farce the first time around of the ideologically unacceptable, apocalyptic shock at the end of the previous decade—and we find ourselves going back to the ’50s for answers whenever we get shocked again.

That’s why, when 1973 is the year of disaster for American capitalism, Happy Days premieres in January 1974.

Bad News for culturemonkeys

Bad news for culturemonkeys: Around half of the world’s primate species are at risk of extinction. Even the recent surprise discovery of a kind of hidden Gorilla City of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas—more than primatologists believed were alive—can make me feel better about this.

Wordle

One of my students showed me Wordle the other day, and it’s already one of my favorite Internet widgets. Steamboats Are Ruining Everything has a fun Wordle of Moby-Dick (click to enlarge):

While I of course prefer a Wordle of some of my own writing at culturemonkey:

Day 2

Day 2.

* Firefox 3 has been released.

* In the last few days I’ve noticed a number of people fantasizing that John McCain might drop out of the race before the Republican Convention. It’s not impossible, but it’s definitely not likely, no matter how poor a match for Obama McCain keeps turning out to be.

* Ryan has thoughts on Danny Boyle’s Sunshine at culturemonkey.

* Battlestar Galactica concept art from Ralph McQuarrie, whose Star Wars ceoncept art I’ve linked to previously. Via Cynical-C, who also has the hard proof demonstrating why humans are doomed.

Good Ecology and Bad: Wired Magazine on Ecology

Two from Ryan: ‘Nukes not so clean or green’ and Wired Magazine’s hippies-suck special on ecology. The latter actually dovetails fairly nicely with the ecology post I put up on culturemonkey last night, both as a striking example of the sorts of myopic conclusions you’re driven towards when you only think inside capitalist markets and as a nice lead-in to the (forthcoming) second half of the series, which will deal with ecology as a program for the conservation of nature vs. ecology as a program for the regulation of nature.

But mostly the Wired issue stands as a noteworthy testament to what happens when you allow an unholy trinity of technopositivity, kneejerk know-it-all contrarianism, and fierce resentment of hippies to drive your coverage: even your good insights get drowned in smarm.

Given the above priorities, Wired is forced down a peculiar chain of reasoning:

1. There are multiple environmental crises in progress.
2. Climate change is the most immediate of these.
3. Therefore in all matters we should ignore any and all considerations but the most short-term carbon calculus, no matter what the consequences will be with regard to the other crises.

This probably makes a lot of sense if you’re marketing a magazine to nerds who like being right and who hate any criticism of technocapitalism, especially when it comes from dirty hippies—but it doesn’t make any sense as a basis for environmental policy.

* Priuses are stupid because used cars still exist!
* Nuclear power has no relevant drawbacks whatsoever!
* Same with Frankenfoods!
* If you define the scope of the environmental crisis incredibly specifically you can conclude old-growth forests harm the environment!
* Same with organic agriculture!
* We’re screwed no matter what we do, and anyway, don’t people like it a little hotter?

Color me unimpressed.

This from the last link will probably serve as the intro for the zizecology 2 post:

In his 1992 best seller, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore derided adaptation as “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our own skin.” Better to take Stewart Brand’s advice from the opening page of the original Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” We’re in charge here. Let’s get to work.

kidding on the square

I’ve put together another experimental post on science fiction theory for culturemonkey, this one playing with Greimas squares, subgenres, and Olaf Stapledon’s wonderful novel Star Maker. As with others, it’s a bit theoretical and a bit undercooked…

Saturday Potpourri: Immortality, There Will Be Blood, Comics, Zombies, The Affluent Society

Saturday potpourri:

* Science is still teasing me with dreams of immortality:

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

* At culturemonkey, Ryan’s got an essential take on There Will Be Blood that I think people who have seen the movie should be very interested in reading. (There’s a good sidebar on No Country for Old Men too, the movie with which There Will Be Blood will forever be paired.) Click the [+/-] for a brief, spoiler-laden excerpt.

In TWBB one gets the impression from Eli, a grotesque parody of Christianity as both the paradigmatic model for non-capitalist politics and a type of show business, that stories can no longer be seriously invested in. Instead we learn to see Plainview the same way he sees others: “I see the worst in people. I don’t have to look past seeing them to get all I need.” In the much-criticized final showdown in the bowling alley, this impression of God and his earthly salesmen is rendered painfully concrete. It’s the scene where the film’s facade of realism, though always unsettled, is strained to the point of absurdity: the priest recants, he is made to suffer for his sins, and behold, his milkshake, it hath been drunk! But not even the grand narrative of entrepreneurial capitalism can survive past the last shot. The realization that has been building over the course of the film, in the form of Plainview’s increasingly strained encounters with Standard Oil and the unstoppable expansion of monopoly power it represents — that the individual capitalist is no longer a suitable vessel for the daemon of capital — comes at last to fruition, and so with the resignation “I’m finished,” the lights go out. The camera apparently hasn’t the right to follow. But is it irrational hope to wonder if nostalgia for the end of a distant era can reflect any light back on the end of one still present? Or has Plainview eaten that as well?

Not to toot my own horn, but I think there have been some interesting points made by both Ryan and myself in the comments of that post, too.

* Sci-Fi Weekly has a good interview with George Romero on Diary of the Dead and what’s next for the definitive zombie franchise.

Romero: I have this balls-out comedy zombie thing that I have wanted to do for three years. It’s basically the coyote and the roadrunner. It’s one human and one zombie. You can do a lot of damage to a zombie and it still lives. So I just had this idea that I’d love to do that as almost a cartoon. That’s the one that’s closest to my heart, but I don’t know if anyone’s ever going to get it enough to say, “OK, we’ll finance that.”

* Although most people have been saying that the writers’ strike won them a good deal, delightful crackpot Harlan Ellison insists the writers actually got taken for a ride.

* It has become so much part of conventional wisdom that affluence is a problem that it is hard to imagine that attitudes were ever different. The media is full of stories about problems that allegedly owe much to our affluent lifestyles, including environmental degradation, social inequalities and even mental illness. Daniel Ben-Ami at the Spiked Review of Books remembers John Kenneth Galbraith’s excellent The Affluent Society as a prelude to launching a broadside attack on it.

* And at the Valve, John Holbo says Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics is the best work of literary criticism of the last year. I’ve been meaning to pick this up; now I have no excuse not to.

Philip K. Dick Link Explosion

I’ve been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I’ve linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called “the Shakespeare of science fiction”:

* “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it’s the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life. [+/-]

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place — processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak — this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues — if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory — should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?

* R. Crumb’s comic, “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.”

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut. [+/-]

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we’re going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

Death Zen

To compliment my culturemonkey post on death and the apocalyptic last Friday, here’s just a little death Zen.

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another.
—Shunryu Suzuki

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying, or lamentation—this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.
—Dōgen

Perfectionism is slow death.
—Hugh Prather

Monk: “How should I escape birth and death?”
Shih-kung: “What is the use of escaping it?”
—Zen mondo

I Will Survive

It’s my week to post at culturemonkey again, and I wound up getting a little bit philosophical. The topic is nominally the nuclear sublime, but it really would up being more about immortality and the imagination of the future. As I say over there, I’m just trying something on for size, I’m not sure I’m ready to make a down payment.

Singularity Summit

At culturemonkey, Ryan steals my thunder with a great post on the Singularity, building off yesterday’s MetaFilter post on the subject. I seriously was just about to post this. See you over there.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

UPDATE: Keep ’em coming! I’ve added a whole lot more below.

It was my week to post at culturemonkey this week, and I delivered with a post about the motivations for apocalyptic fantasy, what it is and what it’s for. Check it out. Comments, criticism, and elaborations of all sorts are very welcome.

While writing the post, in connection with Ryan’s theory that the most salient feature of apocalypse in science fiction is the way in which the same images are simply repackaged for us over and over again, I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the ‘net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor:

Fantastic Universe, August-September 1953

Kamandi #1, 1972

The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

Cloverfield, 2007

Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, 1999

Planet of the Apes, 1968

The World Without Us, 2007

Escape from New York, 1981

D.C. Countdown teaser poster, 2007

A.I., 2001

And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Let me know in the comments what I’ve missed…

UPDATE: Stealing a few more ideas from my commenters:

Part of a campaign promise during the elections in 1978 to bring the “Statue of Liberty to Madison.” As a result of this effort the Pail and Shovel Party (Stu was one of the major masterminds) was given the Politician of the Year award for keeping the most campaign promises of any Wisconsin elected officials. The Daily Cardinal was outraged by this expenditure and actually burned it down. The following year after re-election the Statue was rebuilt. A security guard was placed inside of the head after getting an ice fishing hut permit.

Deus Ex Level 1 (video game)

World War I poster

Independence Day (amazed that I missed this one)

Thundarr the Barbarian (My favorite so far. Here’s Skot’s description from the comments:

In the ’70’s Saturday Morning cartoon “Thundarr the Barbarian” the Statue is shown in a decayed state at the start of each show, and there’s an episode where the evil wizard Gemini imbues the statue with life (but better than in Ghostbusters 2) and an awesome flame-throwing torch! The basic concepts and story ideas for that show came from the fertile but sometimes repetitive mind of Jack “King” Kirby, who also created the Kamandi comic book for DC, as seen above…

The latest Smashing Pumpkins album, Zeitgeist (2007)

Eerie-in-retrospect book cover from Bluejay Books, 1985. The artist’s name was Thomas Kidd. (Thanks to revdoug for the email)

UPDATE 2:

Brett emailed in with a great screenshot of the Statue of Liberty in The Fifth Element, which has not been destroyed but rather swallowed by an expanding New York megapolis.

UPDATE 3: Jeff from Gravity Lens sends along this wild image from the recent D.C. Comics “Sinestro Corps” storyline:

Tim in the comments leaves behind links to the Statue of Liberty under threat in X-Men and Children of Men:

And another album cover, this one from New Jersey’s own God Forbid’s fourth album, IV: Constitution of Treason:

UPDATE 4: Jeff sends along two more, one the usual sort of doomsday image and another desecration of a very different sort:

UPDATE 5: Commenter Ty may have found the earliest example, “The Next Morning” from the Feb. 24, 1887 edition of Life:

UPDATE 6: Later, Ty came back with two more, first from an alternate-universe Statue’s destruction by helicopter in Batman Forever

and the other a much-longed-for clip from the statue’s appearance in Ghostbusters 2. I can do him one better, though: Google Video has the clip.

Google Video has also got Spaceballs, too, naturally, as well as Superman being thrown through the torch in Superman II.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7856985522976157958&hl=en

UPDATE 7: Over night a few more links were added in the comments, including this beauty from 1889, J.A. Mitchell’s The Last American:

as well as two video-game scenarios, World in Conflict and Command and Conquer: Red Alert:

Elsewhere in the world of video games, Eman Resu also points us to the Resident Evil 3 trailer, where the replica Statue of Liberty outside the New York, New York casino in Vegas is used to signify for apocalypse:

UPDATE 8: Another cool one from the comments, a comic-booky illustration (don’t know what year it’s from, unfortunately) given the title “Cloverfield Monster Revealed!” on Flickr:

(Identified! It’s from the “Dinosaurs Attack!” Topps trading card series.)

UPDATE 9: Here’s a nice still from Ghostbusters 2 I just found in the Fark thread on this. Incidentally, the Fark link coupled with the Boing Boing link plus a few other big ones (National Review Online?) makes this the most popular thing I’ve ever posted by a mile, eclipsing even the “Our Brains Don’t Work” link on Backwards City from back in 2004. It’s kind of amazing.

UPDATE 10: rootbeer277 founds some pictures of the Statue in Superman IV here:

Elsewhere in the comments people have provided video links for related scenes from Twisted Metal 2 and National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

And Traveler sends in a still from Deep Impact:

UPDATE 11: Wow, they’re still coming in. Lady, That’s My Skull writes in with two more from the comics, Atomic War #1 (1952) and Incredible Hulk #206 (1976).

And Anonymous points us to this Audi ad from the early 1990s:

UPDATE 12: It’s been a few days and this post still keeps getting hits. It’s getting close to 25,000 people now, which is astounding.

First, from the comments, MagicManky has the Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back parody:

Also in the comments, Slade leaves links to a number of sought-after images of the broken Statue of Liberty overshadowed by the Statue of Justice in Judge Dredd, both film and comic:

Finally, in what’s likely to be the last image I add here for a good while, Viktor emails an Italian propaganda poster from World War II which reads “Here are the liberators”:

Everyday Life in Arcosanti

Ryan’s got a second arcology post up over at culturemonkey, built around photographs and reflections from his trip last month to Arcosanti, Arizona. It puts my post last night to shame. Definitely check it out.