The Breaking Time

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

Hating someone else's Congress

In every district but yours...

Interesting poll from Gallup last week confirmed something I'd suspected for awhile. Congress is unpopular. Really unpopular. Communism, lice, root canals, and Genghis Khan are more popular.

That's not news. So why aren't people actually throwing the bums out instead of talking about it?

Because people hate "Congress," the abstract legislative body, instead of their particular Congresscritter. On average 46 percent like their particular representative. That's hardly overwhelming support, but it's at least getting close to electable territory. 

Gerrymandering plays a big role in this, certainly, but this is also a classic bell the cat problem: people want great upheaval, as long as it's starting somewhere else.

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Prison gangs and the breakdown of the justice system

Photo by Mark Allen Johnson

Back in March, two local prosecutors in Kaufman County, Texas, were killed, probably by members of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood. They were targeted for supporting a federal investigation. The prosecutor promptly withdrew "for security reasons."

About a month later, a sweeping indictment charged that the Black Guerilla Family, also a prison gang, had corrupted 13 prison guards and turned the whole Baltimore jail into a stronghold.

Despite their ideological origins, both are more traditional syndicates now, dedicated to running extensive drug and crime empires. This piece, by an ex-con familiar with the Aryan Brotherhood, illuminates some key points about how they operate on the ground level.

But what's missing from the discussion is exactly how dire a breakdown of the justice system the power of prison gangs represents.

While the mafia, and every other bit of organized crime humans have come up with, had connections within prisons and was prepared for its members to do time, the entire structure relied on most of the members being out on the street most of the time. 

Not so with prison gangs. They started with most of their members behind bars. Traditional ways of breaking up criminal power structures (isolating members in different prisons, big racketeering cases), just helped them to grow.

So what can the state use against them? Round them up and send them to prison? They're just going back home. Solitary confinement? Their leadership is used to it, and can still communicate just fine. Their power's enough that they can even outright attack the state in a way the mafia never dared to (the Five Families actually killed those who went after prosecutors).

A more ruthless government might see the simplest solution as executing the prison gangs' leadership: it has them imprisoned, after all. But given the brutishly corrupt nature of much of the existing prison system, that would probably just open the door to even more human rights abuses, including to prisoners who aren't even part of the gangs. If the corruption's deep enough, like at the Baltimore jail, it might even give the gangs another tool to consolidate their power by eliminating their rivals.

And that's not even getting into the existence of pockets like Mountain Home that serve as out-of-prison bases and no-go zones for law enforcement. That bodes well.

Amazingly, we've managed to create a system that fails at both punishment and rehabilitation.

Poems (or essay, in this case) for Friday: Democracy

E.B. White wrote this in 1943. It speaks for itself:

We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on ‘The Meaning of Democracy.’ It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

Cash isn't going to disappear

This stuff is too damn useful

Cash isn't going to disappear. Not now. Not as electronic currencies get more advanced. Not when your mother starts using Bitcoin. Human beings will continue to use currency for a long, long damn time to come.

There are simply too many niches in an economy that using physical, anonymous objects to represent economic value fills for it to fade entirely. 

I bring this up because every once in awhile someone suggests that cash is on the way out, or outright encourages it. With Bitcoins' recent price surge, even as governments look at ways to regulate those that use it, there's more talk about how close we are to a cyberpunk cashless society.

Yes, potentially, if enough large sectors of the economy agreed all at once, the transition could go a long way to squeezing cash out in favor of say, Bitcoin or one of its eventual descendants.

But realistically companies start accepting Bitcoins out of convenience, and will accept their regulation for the same reason: no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb to the government. If you don't believe me, ask Wikileaks who won after national governments started leaning on the companies it relied upon.

Even as anonymous online currencies become more advanced (and potentially more appealing to some sectors of the grey market), hard cash occupies too much of an easy route to fade entirely.

Put it this way: it takes serious, ongoing technological innovation to try and keep an electronic currency one step ahead of the state, while it take serious, ongoing resources from governments just to feebly track the existing under-the-table cash markets. They're probably not in too big a hurry to turn over every stone, either, as the black market helped bail out the legal one during the last financial crisis.

It's hard to beat the basic fact that you can hand a wad of faded paper to someone and they'll give you something in return. Hell, if you really want to get innovative, you can even use dish detergent.

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

Ending rape culture: less apologies, more consequences

An apology would be good. Firing all three would be far better.

In the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict and the despicable reactions of CNN's commentators, there's a petition demanding a public apology from CNN.

That's laudable, but I think the approach leaves something to be desired. Rape culture's incredibly deeply embedded in many different parts of society, depressingly so. A big part of decreasing that is education and changing cultural norms. But consequences are also vital, and they don't get as much attention. While the military has an epidemic rape problem, for example, Helen Benedict's groundbreaking reporting found that "if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen." Something about the prospect of life in Leavenworth tends to focus the mind.

So whether organizations like CNN help spread this nonsense or not has far less to do with how apologetic they personally feel and far more to do with how scared they are of public backlash. Public figures stopped spouting as much racist tripe when it became clear it would ruin their careers and their social lives.

Likewise, vital as education is, rape culture will start truly crumbling when anchors, administrators, managers, and bosses that ignore or actively encourage it get fired or turned into social pariahs. It will take another hit when sentences for rapists are measured in decades instead of months, when police devote actual resources to catching them, and when prosecutors hand out less lenient plea bargains.

Deterrence and changing the power dynamic can, hell must, play a role in social progress if it's to have any lasting impact. Next time, the push should focus less on statements of repentance, and more on measurable consequences to show some change is actually taking place.

Poems for Friday: Spring Night in the Left Office

Dr. Adoke Yeka working late in Apac, Uganda. Photo from Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration.

This one, from Du Fu, goes out to everyone working late:

Flowers in shadow, palace wall at dusk,
Chirping birds are flying back to roost.
Stars move above the ten thousand doors;
The moon is big nearing the nine heavens.
Not sleeping, I hear a golden key;
In the wind, I think there are jade pendants.
Tomorrow morning, I have to present a memorial,
Again and again, I ask about the night.

Fighting for the ashes: Individuals tending towards savagery

Damn. That took way too long, readers, and you have my apologies. I've been embroiled in freelance and day job projects, and the Breaking Time has been neglected in the process. So let's start our return properly, with this piece from Damien Williams on the latest manifestation of the urge to smash everything.

The aftermath of an Aug. 8, 2011 attack that wounded two professors at Monterey Tec. Individuals Tending Towards Savagery claimed responsibility. Their statement, if you can bear to read it, is translated here.

I've spent the last few months trying to lay the groundwork for a better world. That's a bit pompous. What I've really been doing is sitting around writing about the philosophical problems of cybernetics and cyborging, and relating them to various television shows, because I firmly believe that people can be made to see more than the potential terror of technology if they can see it in entertainment and then made to think about it.

So the real world comes along to remind me what I'm actually up against, out here: The Group known as "Individuals Tending Toward Savagery" (and isn't that just a fantastically uplifting, human-centric name?) has claimed responsibility for the 2011 shooting death of Dr Ernesto Méndez, a leader in the field of biotechnology, and they've promised more of the same, and worse, for any nano- or biotech experts who continue to do work in the field.

All of this death and terror to try to prevent the fabled Grey Goo Scenario which has been inimical to nanotechnology since it became known to the public imagination. Now, the nature of these "anarchists" seems to more be one of posturing and half-tactics, rather than what many would claim a "credible threat"-- their claims of responsibility are spotty, while their threats are many and varied-- but that doesn't mean they aren't stepping up their game.

And for what? To scare people into a Luddite fear of technological advancement? To act as a reactionary, loom-smashing gestapo- boogeyman? What's gained by this? What in these tactics and aims makes this world a better place?

I'm reminded of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, and the story "Detonation." In it, a terrorist group (caveat: terrorists are not necessarily anarchists, nor vice versa) called the Red Right Hand seeks to devolve the world into a state of constant war, because the leader believes that it is only when we're at war that we reach our full potential. Or some utter bollocks like that.

You see, that line of thinking makes a valid argument. That is, if its premises were true, then its conclusion would necessarily follow. But what people always forget about the difference between validity and soundness is that validity doesn't make the premises true. "All aliens are secretly Jewish people and every Jewish person has a personal golem with them at all times. This is why I demand to see the Area 51 Records of the two golems recovered in the New Mexico desert in 1947." That is, technically, a perfectly valid argument. And also something I just made up, right now.

My point is this: what is it about smashing looms that makes people think we'll be better off? What is it about pure destruction that people tend to prefer to the work of creating and destroying, at the same time? Is it just that change is scary? Because, let me tell you, we've known that for about 10,000 years, so it's not exactly a startling revelation.

I only ask because it seems like the far better option would be to try to learn and understand as much about technology as possible, and then take all that loom-smashy energy and put it toward grassroots education of the wider culture. Make the real dangers and real benefits known to the whole world, and teach people how to not just blindly react to new tech.

Because this is a blind reaction. This is just fear on more fear on more fear. I don't see the world being better after this, I see it being more terrified. What's the point of that?