Winding the Clocks of Windsor

This morning I started to write a longish Talking Tuesday post about something else, but lost steam the longer I worked on it.  I sense we are all rather fatigued by the season we are in, and perhaps I don't need to add my voice to the fray.  (There are so many other people writing extremely articulate things I am a bit surplus to the requirements).  

Some of my ennui is my reading stack at the moment.  After reading three intellectually-stimulating-but-dense books in quick succession (but in tandem with some lighter reading), I need to read something else for a while.  I plodded through Anthony Esolen's latest book last week with ill humor, as it was rather like force-feeding turnips rather than a feast of delightful things.  Full of vitamins maybe, but lacking in taste.  

I confess I was disappointed, as I expected better from the brief tome.  Esolen strikes me as an erudite and learned man who could add a lot to a conversation about the pursuit of Truth, goodness, and beauty, but instead, he chooses to spend more than 2/3rds of the book sounding like a cranky old man.  I suppose I am tired of reading about the reasons why a deep understanding of the human condition is important and more interested in simply pursuing that knowledge for myself.

I have a long list of people to whom I owe letters, and it seems that there are never enough hours in the day to write them.  (If you are one of those people: I'm sorry!  I will get to it, I promise!)  My pre-quarantine stamina has not returned as I'd hoped, so I find I must carefully pace my days in order to get through them and remain present with my children and their ever-changing needs.

So, with that in mind, I present something charming and interesting, with the added bonus of a bit of history: the clocks of Windsor Castle, which will all be wound by a single conservator this week in preparation of the time change this weekend.  

photo by Antonio Olmos

Several of the clocks featured were given to Queen Victoria, which interests me because I am currently obsessed with the Masterpiece show about her.  

And thus was the white wedding dress born.

I couldn't get past the pilot when it first aired (I forget why exactly, as it is the sort of show that is right up my alley), but have loved all three seasons and am eager for the fourth.  I bought a book of Albert and Victoria's correspondence because I am so interested in their relationship, brilliantly brought to life by Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes:

The show reminded me how much the world changed between the beginning of Victoria's life and the end.  She was born in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, and died at the turn of the 20th century.  Wars, revolutions, social and cultural change, the Industrial Revolution: the 19th century is so full!  

In any case, it is a highly diverting rabbit hole to fall into at the moment, and I am grateful for it.

RIP: Mac Davis

I saw over the weekend that Mac Davis had died and felt a pang of regret over his passing. Davis' Burning Thing album formed part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and Honeysuckle Magic remains a particular favorite of mine. 

 

Mac Davis was better known for other songs, such as In the Ghetto, Don't Cry Daddy, and Memories,
all covered by Elvis in his late 1960s comeback, but Burning Thing is a work of beauty.  Every song tells a story, and in finest folk tradition, you have to listen to the end, just to find how it all turns out.  

 

My dad had the album on an 8-track and played it in the car quite a bit when I was growing up.  The family vehicle had an 8-track player for most of the 1980s.  I bought the LP of Burning Thing in college and thankfully made a cassette recording of it, but all my records were lost in one of the numerous moves of my early 20s.

 

I sort of miss the tactile solidity of an 8-track.  We had Seals and Croft and Gordon Lightfoot on 8-tracks and I still enjoy listening to those albums, albeit in CD form these days.  I know, I know, I'm a Luddite.  But at least I'm peaceful?

Talking Tuesday: Sanctuary

 I finished Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Survelliance Capitalism a week ago, and while I stand by my initial thoughts about it, there were some interesting things she brought up in the final few chapters that I wish she had parsed further.  This is my main criticism of books like this: too much diagnosis, not enough prescription.  As I wrote previously, David Brooks' recent Atlantic article is a elegantly written piece that better articulates much of what Zuboff is arguing, using social science as the dive point.

That said, here are some additional thoughts I have about both Zuboff and Brooks.  Technology (used here to refer the Internet) is embedded in our lives, and short of some wide-scale catastrophe, screens will be part of our lives and our children's lives, and with it, the social media services that form the scaffolding for Internet use.  Social media encourages a kind of Narcissus-like fixation on the self that prevents users from both being able to self-differentiate from tribe, but also to see the other side of an issue.  By allowing ourselves to be lured into spending much of our lives online, we lose the ability to formulate things for ourselves as our attention spans and capacity for deep thought erode, our vocabulary narrows and with it the range of possible thought, and the small predetermined menu of options given us by the tech industry begins to feel like an inevitability, and indeed, the small parameters of our lives (Zuboff, 467). 

Ceding so much power to a handful of tech companies in the form of limitless data collection (the so-called shadow text of any online interaction) means we all live in glass houses with no exit.  Aside from being a guaranteed path to madness, it throws aside centuries of hard-won dignity, individual responsibilities and obligations, and the ability to make a life of one's own (Zuboff 185, 469).  Zuboff proposes that humans have the right to sanctuary, a place where private life can occur and flourish, where the spirit can fly and be at rest (Zuboff, 5, 477).  Such opacity is a basic human dignity, and should be protected against incursions by an increasingly aggressive capitalist mien. 

Matthew B. Crawford makes a similar argument when he writes about the attentional commons in The World Beyond Your Head: that the right to occupy public space free from noise and advertising is increasingly available only to those who can afford it.  Taking that point a step further in Why We Drive, he notes that the attentional commons has even colonized your car, so that now even your driving experience, formerly one of individual agency and freedom from the relentless demands of commercial life, is peppered with data mining and advertising opportunities, further degrading our attention and increasing distractability (Crawford, Why We Drive, 307-308).  "Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations?' (Crawford, Why We Drive, 298, emphasis in original).  Moreover, as Zuboff notes, "In this new product regime the simple product functions that we seek are now hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled mixture of software, services, and networks.  The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying" (237).  It's no longer enough to make a useful thing.  The thing must be "smart" and provide goods back to its maker in the form of data.  Consumers do not want or need "smart" things, but Big Tech's survival depends on convincing large swathes of the population that such things are better than their "dumb" alternatives.  Because: advertising and legibility produce huge profits for a handful of powerful people.

The public sphere is now given over to making humanity as legible as possible to both the tech companies and the governments that have climbed in bed with them, gobbling up data about our habits, preferences, private thoughts and letters, political leanings, religious faith, purchases, health history, and much more.  When was the last time you were in a public place that did not have a screen in it, or loud music playing?  Even if the music is inoffensive, it is still an intrusion into the private space of your mind, and the ability to think deeply without distraction or commercialization.  

There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that is in a converted row house.  The dining area is in what was the living room portion of the house, and was formerly cozy and intimate, with small tables, a roaring fire, and dark wood.  The food was a bit pricey, but very good and fresh.  It felt like a quintessential English pub.  A few years ago, the owners decided to install three 60" television screens in the 200 square foot dining room, making it difficult to maintain eye contact with a dining companion and conversation of any sort impossible.  (I don't care how intentional you are about resisting screen distraction, when three 60" televisions are on and blaring in a 200 square foot room, you cannot ignore them).  The best one can do in this new and "improved" space is to hope that whatever is on the screen something inoffensive like a ball game and your food comes quickly so you can get the meal over with.  It does not inspire me to eat there.  Even outdoor spaces have been colonized for advertising and data collection, as cities install sidewalk chargers for mobile devices that also hoover up any data in the vicinity.

Zuboff points out many other troubling aspects of social media and Big Data, including the ability of Facebook or Google to quietly engineer elections or subvert democratic process, without people ever being aware of such machinations (298-303).  It turns out that democracy is an existential threat to the economic model of Big Tech.  The big firms of Silicon Valley are not regulated by or overseen by the government but have enormous power over how things actually work out legally and otherwise in society, all done beneath a shroud of secrecy.  Ironic really.  Silicon Valley puts everyone in a glass cage, but expects to be able to live in peace and quiet in an iron fortress with no more than a "trust me" assurance that no stones will be lobbed our way.  "The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise....These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes" (Zuboff, 327). 

Living in a glass house is psychologically paralyzing.  Everyone has the right to have secrets and anonymity, or at least they should.  We need places of refuge, places of quiet sanctuary to keep ourselves together and grow strong and resilient.  "Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question "What have you got to hide?"  But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of 'disconnected' time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself.  The real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing" (Zuboff, 479, emphasis in the original).  

We need opacity for the sake of our souls, and true human flourishing is found in the protection of private spaces for the individual and family.  The health of our minds and bodies rests in qualities of "contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment.  These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society" (Zuboff, 479).  Life involves a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, and we stand to lose a good deal if we blindly hand over our privacy in pursuit of safety and security.  There is mystery in the unknown, deep intimate knowledge that can only be gained in an unrestrained milieu.

Unfortunately, as a societal measure, individual privacy entails a great deal of social trust, which is in great decay in the present time.  David Brooks notes the many ways we do not trust each other or our institutions, and how much that has changed in the last 50 years or so.  It is also true that the decay of trust is somewhat cyclical in societies, and share common features.  Brooks writes: "People feel disgusted by the state of society.  Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread.  Contempt for established power is intense.  A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene.  It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation.  Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system.  These are moments of agitation, excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion" (Brooks, The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, hereafter Brooks, Oct 2020).  While Brooks does not explicitly say so, I would also argue that these moments follow what Yuri Slezkine details as apocalyptic millenarianism, in which a disenfranchised minority group seizes control of power and culture to try to achieve a utopia, usually through violent means.

The current drive to utopia is in reaction to the individualism and liberation of the Baby Boomer generation, whose drive to pursue their own happiness placed much of society in a precarious and insecure position.  Boomers had the benefit of an older generation that provided foundation security, but that foundation is now long gone.  Families are rarely intact these days, and the economy is a disaster of unfettered raw capitalism, undigested through the laws of democracy.  Many younger people have been excluded from financial and personal security, and now seek it in any form possible, even if that means social credit systems, government and Big Data surveillance, and the general loss of privacy as a norm and right.  

Writes Brooks,

"Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.  Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

Attachment theory says that several dichotomies or dyads exist within all of us, that either bind or alienate us from our circumstances.  Either we feel safe or at risk, lost or at home, broken or whole.  Capitalism is heavily invested in making our attachments insecure--feeling unsafe, lost, and broken--so that we will be more likely to buy the products and services that promise to alleviate those feelings, or at the least, surrender our data so that we can be aggressively marketed to about our attachments.

Social trust is part of the larger picture of attachment, and the collective experience of the past 40 years or so has betrayed trust again and again, as institutional leaders are shown to be morally or financially corrupt (or both), institutions seek to shore up corrupt leaders rather than root it out, and the economic system fails to serve a large percentage of people.  The reason why institutional health is important is that institutions are supposed provide the basis for personal formation as well as a place to belong.  Instead they become performative and sterile, unable to do any of the hard work of transformation.  "The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  And that's at the macro level.  

On a personal level, our close social interactions are fraught with instability and moral liquidity. "The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  The instability of the economy means shallow roots in physical communities, as people pull up stakes to go where the jobs are, rather than staying close to family and friends who provide the thick bonds of social trust.  While we don't need to be intimately attached to society at large, we do need to be securely attached to one another to flourish, and when we attach securely to one another, that thriving ripples out into larger society.  This bonds are frayed and worn, notes Brooks. "In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away.  Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress [or conversely, absentee parents who leave children to fend for themselves]" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  

In short, we live in a time of chaotic instability and distrust, where finding a secure place to belong and flourish is increasingly rare.  When we cannot trust those around us, we try to make ourselves invulnerable, impermeable to the hurts and disappointments that could be shared in trustworthy relationships.  We look for external ways to measure trustworthiness, and Big Tech is all too happy to oblige, for the price of your private self in the form of data mining.  True intimacy declines in the face of such external measurements (Zuboff, 206-207), and is replaced by entertainment and abstraction.  We seek security in rigidity, ideology, and tribe (Brooks, Oct 2020).  It follows that we are in the midst of a grave existential crisis.  The job of culture is to respond to common problems, but when the problems change, the common response must shift as well, which is almost always fraught.

"The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society.  People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.  The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust.  There's no avoiding the core problem.  Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

So how do we rebuild trust and provide refuge for ourselves and others?  Mostly in the small invisible ways that will not show up on a news feed, or help us economically or socially climb a ladder of success.  It is in cultivating virtues of reliability and dependability in ourselves.  Providing a soft place to land for those we love.  In challenging ourselves to make promises--being open and vulnerable in a radical way-- and hold fast to those promises, we extend a fragile branch of trust to others around us.  If they are able to return it to us, then trust builds.  Trust breeds truth, and vice versa.  So the path to trust is a long one, and will not happen overnight.  

Vulnerability in relationships is hard, because we don't want to be hurt, particularly if we have been hurt badly in the past.  But I think we humans hunger for vulnerability.  I see it in the stories we tell ourselves--the books that are lodestones of culture.  We want to be in intimate relationships, but not all of us know how to achieve that sort of radical vulnerability.  It means handing the inner most parts of yourself over to someone else and trusting that they will hold them and not use them as a weapon against you.  It means having faith that the people you love and trust can hold not just the air-brushed public self, but the flawed inner self--your worst self on your worst day.  We can't begin to trust people with our worst selves if we are forced to live in glass houses with no exit.  

We need places of sanctuary--places free from prying eyes and listening ears and glowing screens.  It is not enough to pursue invisibility within the glass house.  We need fortresses of refuge, behind thick solid walls, curtained windows, and manned defenses.  Keep secrets--yours and others.  Get to know the landscape of your place in the world through real, lived experience.  The future is likely to be digital in many ways.  That does not mean we have to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of inevitability or cede our private lives to the glass-housed public square.  

Build a fortress, and guard it with your life, even if only in your mind.

Sources:

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Crawford, Matthew B. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Yarn Along: Life in Squares

 ~knitting~

Another finished object!  I've been working steadily away on my Beamer (more on that below) but took a brief break to knit up this quick little project.  

 

I had bought two skeins of cotton yarn in the spring, after I discovered how much I like having a lighter knitted layer around my neck in the "shoulder" seasons, and knitted it up quick-like one week. 

It is slightly smaller than I had originally envisioned, but it works well enough with a pin and some creative draping.  I used the Casapinka pattern as a stitch guide again, and I like the look of it on a larger gauge very much.

The Beamer is going okay.  I've probably knit every lace line twice by now, since I keep making mistakes and having to tink back to figure out where I went wrong, but I'm enjoying the process more than I thought I would.  

It's not exactly the sort of knitting I can do while watching something I have to pay attention to, but I'm still eager to work on it most days.  It will be a lighter wool layer that I'm excited to work into my wardrobe.

 

~reading~

 

Well, I wrote about Shoshana Zuboff yesterday, and it is still a slog--rather like eating raw vegetables before getting to dessert, as opposed to nice lovely roasted vegetables.  In my case, I ate the dessert first in the form of my re-reading of the All Souls Triology and am midway through a second read of Time's Convert (still think it could have used some editing, but enjoy visiting that world despite it).  I also finished Slezkine, and wrote about that earlier in the month.

But I'm more than half-way through the Zuboff and am looking forward to cracking Anthony Esolen next. Rod Dreher's latest, Live Not By Lies, also showed up this week, but my husband is having first crack at that one.  We're trading the Zuboff back and forth, both frustrated by the lack of serious editing and overly flowery writing.  Vegetables, vegetables.  

~sewing~

 Kinder Chinners!  I made a big batch of these in February at the request of our school's violin teacher.  They are used on the end of a violin to cushion the chin, and are helpful especially for younger violin students.  The teacher approached me again in September to ask for 20 more for the current kindergarten class, and I was happy to make them for him.  I set up an assembly line, and while I wasn't able to knock all 20 out in one session, I did get them done over several days time, working in small increments.  

 

For whatever reason, I've found I have to break up my working time into smaller pieces right now, or I can't finish my day with any steam at all. My entire daily rhythm is a bit different these days, as I try to front load as much as I can, since I always feel rotten by late afternoon and cannot muster much to get through the last shift of the day with the kids.  So I try to make whatever dinner bits I can do ahead in the morning, and leave an hour or two in the afternoon for sitting and staring.  

~watching~

Well.  I've hit a kind of lull with that.  I couldn't get into this season of Endeavour and gave up less than one episode in.  (I'm so sick of the labyrinthine plots that make no sense whatsoever, even at the end of the program).  I had a migraine this past weekend that laid me out flat, but it was of a piece with the way I've been dragging myself through my days since late summer.  When I'm tired and stressed, I tend to go back to old favorites.

Bloomsbury Group

 I rewatched some stuff about the Bloomsbury group, which I find weirdly fascinating.  (Fascinating in the way that you can't stop looking at a car wreck).  The first is a more recent BBC series called Life in Squares, which is mostly about painter Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolfe's lives. I also revisited Carrington, a slightly older film about painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey, both of whom feature in the cast of characters in Life in Squares but on the periphery.  

Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington

I'm pretty sure I read Strachey's Eminent Victorians as part of my senior college thesis on T.E. Lawrence (otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia), but wouldn't have understood the Bloomsbury context as well as I do now.  Fair warning, the series/movie are not for everyone.  The Bloomsbury group was rather radical in breaking social conventions, and some will find that off-putting.  Personally, I found both quite thought-provoking.

Charleston Farmhouse by Vanessa Bell

 I did finally watch the entire first season of Poldark, after trying it several years ago and not really getting into it.  (I know!  I was surprised too!  But I just couldn't get into Aidan Turner, and the story line seemed tired to me at the time).  Aidan Turner still doesn't do it for me, but I really enjoy watching Eleanor Tomlinson (who plays Ross Poldark's kitchen maid-turned wife), and the 18th century context of Cornwall and the mining industry there are interesting to me.  I had to take a break after the intense season 1 finale, and don't really know when I'll get to season 2.  

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza on Poldark

Watching Eleanor Thompson in Poldark reminded me that she played Darcy's sister Georgiana in Death Comes to Pemberly, which I watched when it came out and really enjoyed, so I rewatched that and enjoyed it just as much the second time.  Probably more so, since I enjoy watching Matthew Goode and James Norton even more now.  Matthew Rhys' performance as Darcy is subtle and lovely.  I had forgotten a lot of the details, so it was fun to not know what was going to happen.  I rewatched Sense and Sensibility at some point this month (is there anything better than the late great, brilliant Alan Rickman as Col. Brandon?  I think not), and am planning to revisit other Austen films as I have time.

~garden~

My Mr. Stacky planter kind of went nuts with the kale and lemon balm, although the dill and thyme died pretty quickly.  The lemon balm started out as a dodgy leggy looking thing, but quickly exploded into lush greenery.  I couldn't separate the root ball, however, and so it was poking out of one small area of the Stacky planter.  Yesterday, I pulled out the lemon balm and transplanted it to a bigger area so it could spread out.  (You like my super classy plant stand?)

I am enjoying cooking with lemon balm and chives, and hope to bring the plant indoors when it gets cold.  I know there are lots of medicinal uses for it as well, and hope to experiment some with that this winter.

  I'm experimenting with seeing whether the lemon balm stems will root, so I clipped four healthy looking stems and stuck them in the empty spots left in the planter on the second tier.  I harvested some of the bigger kale leaves and made a nice sausage soup with them yesterday.

 I also took one of my bigger Boxwood basil plants (in front of the big planter box) and put it into a pot, in the hopes of bringing it indoors for the winter as well.  I prefer cooking with the Boxwood basil better than Sweet Basil (even though those did prolifically well this summer also), and hope to keep it going.

 

And in other news, the tomato plants are ridiculous.  They are taller than me now and full of ripening fruit; I'm having to get quite creative to keep them staked and vertical, hence my weird strings and wires contraptions hanging from hooks high up on the walls.

There are finally two tiny cucumbers on the vines, but they are ripening VERY slowly.  Not sure we'll beat the frost on them, but it is fun to see them there after months of nothing but male flowers.  I've harvested about a dozen pole beans, but turns out my kids don't like them, and I'm allergic to them, so my husband has been eating them raw.  I probably won't plant them next year.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: The Age of Survelliance Capitalism

 

I've been slogging through Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  Her book is important, but it would greatly have benefited from a strong editorial hand, as she is very wordy in a way that is frustrating to read.  That said, there have been some real gems in the book so far.  Her main insight is that the big tech companies that run our world (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter) are all in the business of shaping human beings into something off whom they can make money.  In other words, consumers who are merely the sum total of their desires. In order to do so, these companies have decided it is better to ask forgiveness than permission to smash through existing landscapes, and often not even to ask forgiveness.

The mantra of "move fast and break things," plus the increased fear after 9/11 has meant that not only do these companies regularly get away with it, the government is colluding with them to do so.  When the government pushes back against the lawlessness, they find themselves greatly outmatched by the money and resources available to these behemoths.  I found that part particularly disheartening.  She writes that capitalism is never meant to be eaten raw, and that it should be cooked through the democratic processes of government and society, but the current system is bypassing all those things to present us with a rather raw state of affairs.  Mostly without our consent.  

Writes Zuboff: "Survelliance capitalism's ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts.  Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world's information.  One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks" (127).

Furthermore, these men ask us to "trust them" when called to account for their actions.  It's a sorry state of affairs, to be sure.  Zuboff's book is important, as I said, but it could be much leaner, and it seems like so much of what she writes about is stuff commonly acknowledged at this point: namely that Big Tech wants to shape everything about us for monetary gain, including our private lives, leaving nothing beyond Big Data's reach.  We must, in the way of Seeing Like a State, be made as legible as possible as human beings, and our behavior must be channeled and corralled into acceptable (read: profitable) avenues.  Unpredictable human behavior means lost revenue opportunities.  Therefore, the more a company can guide the user into predictable behavior channels, the more reliable the profit. 

What the internet initially offered was the promise of individualized experience and greater access to information, within an interconnected human framework.  The Internet was held out as scaffolding to thicken the ties that bind us, but in truth, it has served as an acid bath, dissolving much of what holds us together.

In a more elegant rendering of this same thought David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: 

 "We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

...

When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind" (Brooks, The Atlantic).

Essentially, the business model pursued by Big Tech has so completely changed our human landscape, it is almost impossible to bridge the gap between the analog and digital generations.  The analog generation has learned to work in the digital age, but still fundamentally thinks of the world in analog.  Digital natives have a hard time understanding the world before the Internet; online existence is presented with a predetermined menu of options, based on previous behavior, movement, and interests, all controlled by shadowy figures, cloaked in secrecy, who are accountable to no one; certainly not the paean users of their products.  They are not interested in gaining or retaining our trust, rather we are the product to be shaped for profit only, discarded when no longer useful.

I'm not sure what the solution is, given the reality of the world today; it is not possible for most of us to go off-grid and make shift for ourselves.  I'm not even sure it is desirable, after seeing the effects of the isolation of the pandemic, for off-grid life is necessarily isolated.  

We are meant to be in human community, bonded together by common goals and mutual affection and trust.  I suppose one solution is to live as much life off-line as is feasible, and to find some bright red lines to guide usage, while understanding that no matter what steps we take to protect our privacy, any online activity is going to be tracked in some way.  We must do what we can to curtain the prying eyes and deafen the listening ears.  

References:

Zuboff, Shoshana.  The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power.  New York: PublicAffairs/Hachette, 2020.

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Talking Tuesday: The House of Government

I finished Slezkine's House of Government over the weekend, hereafter called HoG.  Some of this post is taken from my original thoughts about it in July, but I've tried to add more context here.  I tape-flagged many passages, particularly in book one (his nearly thousand page tome is divided into several books, each with several chapters, organized by theme and chronology).  

As I wrote previously, Slezkine is at pains to tell the story of Bolshevism as a story of a sectarian religion that overcame the secular authority to establish its own theocracy.  By Slezkine's reckoning, the Bolsheviks were the first revolutionary force to succeed in taking over the State to do so.

Slezkine's epigraph

 Slezkine spends the entirety of chapter three on a long discussion of apocalyptic millenarianism both in the West and elsewhere, from the time of the earliest Christians right up to the present, across different religions and contexts, before tying it all off in a neat bow that places the Bolshevik/Marxist movement of the 19th century into that larger cultural impulse that emerges every so often in the face of major economic or societal change.  

 The urge is to find something better in the face of something terrible or unknown.  Since the Reformation, that urge has manifested itself in a search for a positive form of utopia, which until that point, had a nihilistic connotation.  After the Reformers (rightly called revolutionaries by Slezkine), the concept of utopia acquired the hopeful patina of achieving heaven on earth.  It is not a coincidence that the experience and understanding of time ceases to be a vertical spiral and turns into the hard horizontal line of progress as we understand it today. 

This dovetailed nicely with my re-reading of Laurus in May for a book group, and the subsequent articles by Vodolazkhin the group also read.  The (newly positive) idea of achieving utopia is part of the apocalyptic impulse, and the people who get caught up in these millenarian movements stand ready to use violence and coercion to achieve it.  The violence is a feature, not a bug, and every religious reformer and secular revolutionary have used it to try to achieve a purified state on earth.  

This point was driven home to me after I read an article by Gary Saul Morson on Leninthink, which examines the language Lenin utilized in service of the Bolshevik revolution, and the violence and terror that he openly pursued and engaged as part of the new order.  The thing that struck me about it, was that not only was violence and terror a feature, not a regrettable bug, but Lenin saw its continuance as necessary to the continuance of the Bolshevik state, not just as a means of establishment.  To wit, State-sponsored terror was actually written into the 1936 Soviet constitution because of Lenin's thought on the matter.  It helped me to understand Stalin as the fullness of Lenin's thought rather than someone who took it off the rails.   

 

Building socialism and marching into a rational future.

 Slezkine goes on to detail how the Bolsheviks transitioned from a small exiled sect of true believers in Marxist orthodoxy, to their evangelization campaign (otherwise known as the suppression of the kulaks and forced collectivization), settling into power and feeling the disillusionment that utopia (Slezkine calls this "the real day") had not yet appeared.  It is a reckoning that happens with all apocalyptic millenarian movements: the failure of the end days to arrive.  Each movement deals with this failure differently; for some it is the end of the movement, and mass suicide follows.  Many cults of the 19th and 20th centuries went this way.  Some decide that the end of days should be understood allegorically, and adjust their teaching accordingly, particularly as they become institutionalized (but separate from the ruling apparatus, notably).  Christianity goes this way after Augustine.

 

The original Bolsheviks, the "Old Bolsheviks," as they came to be called, found themselves plagued with ennui and psychological illness after the conclusion of the Civil War.  Revolution had not gone beyond Russia's borders, as confidently predicted, and indeed, was not succeeding in Russia in the way Marx and Lenin had written.  Famine was everywhere due to brutal collectivization in the grain-growing regions of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, plus grain requisitions by the State to fund the massive industrialization effort, and attempts to rationalize architecture of the medieval cities in legible ways (described well by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State) were stalled or incomplete.  It was The Great Disappointment.

The House of Government.  It is difficult to convey the scale of the place, but it is massive.

 The House of Government itself was part of this re-imaginging of the urban space, and took a staggeringly long time to build.  It was a huge complex on the river across from the Kremlin, with multiple entryways and doors, plazas, and amenities.  It housed thousands of people, plus a laundry, cinemaplex, theatre, gym, hair salon, post office, day care, primary school, medical clinic, social club, grocery store, laundry, cafeteria (to release the women from the drudgery of cooking family meals) and a radio station.  There were 505 apartments housing more than 2600 people.  The House was to provide a launchpad into the future of socialism, where life would be a seamless movement of work and home, a gathering of comrads transcending the homely bounds of filial piety.

The imagined Palace of Soviets.  The scale is also difficult to render here, especially if you haven't been in Moscow and cannot conceive of the size of this.  The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a massive, massive structure.  People are ants in comparison.  The Palace was meant to dwarf the Cathedral by some good bit.  This sketch won the design competition.  Slezkine has the other finalists' drawings in the book, but this one was designed by the architect of the House of Government and fit the vision best.

 

 

Rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior (on the original plan and to original scale).  The people in the foreground give some sense of size, and there are two complete worship spaces inside the building, the grand upper and the slightly more modest lower church.

The House was to be part of the larger Palace of Soviets plaza, planned on the site of the Christ the Savior Cathedral, situated on the opposite side of the river behind the Kremlin.  The Palace would be a place of pilgrimage, a new symbol of the Soviet Union, a holy site suitable for thousands of worshipers to commune with Lenin's greatness, and contemplate their place in the universe.  Or more to the point: how they were participating in the building of socialism.  Shortly after the completion of the House, the cathedral was blown up to make way for the Palace, but a supreme act of irony, the ground proved too marshy to support the gargantuan structure, and so the foundation pit yawned open for more than two decades before being converted into a public swimming pool.  (The Cathedral was rebuilt on the site in the 1990s).   

 

The Palace of Soviets complex, as imagined with a rationally redesigned street plan.  Moscow is a medieval city with few straight streets (it looks rather like a wagon wheel that radiates out from the river and Kremlin).  The Bolshevik architects aimed to tame it, rationalize it.  They did not succeed.

 The Bolsheviks were in a great hurry, with the weight of history upon them, feeling the urgency of the Revolution, for many of them had not really imagined it in their lifetimes.  The Real Day was exceedingly slow in coming.  The world-wide revolution had not only failed to arrive, the Old Bolsheviks had somehow failed to carry out their own vision.  The New Economic Plan put forth by Lenin after the Civil War was a semi-capitalist concession to the famine and economic catastrophe of forced collectivization, but it was to become the foundation for all the Five-Year Plans that followed.  The Bolsheviks understood that their generation was flawed, having been raised under the monarchy--the original sin that could never be overcome--but they hoped they could build a socialist utopia for their pure Soviet children.  

 

Lenin's Mausoleum.  It is surprisingly a small and intimate space.  The man responsible for Lenin's preservation, Boris Zbarsky, survived the Purges of the 1930s, only to be arrested shortly before Stalin's death.  He died in 1954.  His son, Ilya, carried on his work until his retirement in the late 1980s.

 

Lenin's death in 1924 hit the core of them very hard, as there was no clear way forward.  Lenin himself was somewhat adrift after Sverdlov's premature death of Spanish flu sometime in 1919; Sverdlov had been the architect of the Soviet State, and oversaw most of the administrative details in the first years, serving as Lenin's right-hand man, confidante, and enforcer.  (It was he who ordered the execution of the royal family).  Sverdlov had been a leader of the inner circle of Bolsheviks from the earliest days of exile.

 

Stalin, by contrast, had lingered at the outer edges of the Bolshevik core from the beginning, being hard to get along with and less well-read than the others, but managed to elbow aside Trotsky and claw his way to the top upon Lenin's death.  The Old Bolsheviks were disillusioned enough by the failure of the Real Day to arrive that the (often contradictory) changes to the socialist dream that Stalin put forth (including the Five Year Plans) were barely challenged.  Those tasked with writing the first socialist works of literature were on constantly shifting ground, as Stalin consolidated his power and his vision became the only vision possible.

By the 1931, however, things seemed more settled.  Huge industrial projects like the Dnepr Hydroelectric Dam were nearly complete, and factories were being built in the thousands.  The House of Government was complete and inhabited by the most senior members of the government (except those who lived in the Kremlin, like Stalin and Bukharin, although Stalin's family had apartments in the House).  Situated across the river from the Kremlin, the House residents had easy access via the Stone Bridge.  

 

The planners of the House acknowledged that its design was not in keeping with the ideals of socialism, which sought to overcome individualism and family ties with State partisanship and comradely ties, but they also realized that some intermediate measures must be taken on the way to that ideal.  The concession of private apartments instead of universal communal barracks was to provide the first cracks in their theocratic foundation, as people formed families and brought their possessions into the House and generally took on the habits of the bourgeois they were meant to replace.

 

In the early 1930s, it seemed that most of the Soviet Union had made its conversion, rid itself of its internal enemies, and what was needful was evangelists of the Revolution to take the mission beyond its borders as well as the active building of a rational socialist society within the USSR.

 

The assassination of Kirov in December 1934 changed everything.  The sudden and violent loss of Kirov proved that socialism wasn't as stable as everyone believed, that there were still enemies hiding in plain sight.  

 

Slezkine points out that throughout history, when societies experience wide scale or rapid change or unrest, there comes the need for a scapegoat.  Someone must be to blame for the ills of society, and the pressures build up until a suitable target (or targets) can be found.  (Rene Girard has written at length about scapegoating as a sociological phenomenon).  The act of scapegoating, until recently done by interrogation and execution, usually apart from the formal legal apparatus, is a way of releasing tension and bringing things back to center.  Scapegoating is the driving force behind the witch trials of the late Elizabethan era and beyond, lynch mobs of the 19th century, and so forth.  In the USSR, following Kirov's death, a great questioning arose amongst those in power: how had this happened?  Were there really saboteurs everywhere?  There must be more enemies hidden from view, who must be exposed and thrown out or the Revolution will fail.

Thus began the Great Terror.  Stalin started with the inner circle first.  Anyone with even a loose association with Trotsky or the Socialist Revolutionaries was arrested, interrogated at length, and then imprisoned indefinitely or exiled to a gulag in the Far East, usually without a formal trial.  The circle expanded far beyond that, and quickly, to the mass arrests of 1937 and 1938, with mass executions.  

 

It is unclear to me why the scapegoating in this instance was so large in scale, but the method follows a well-worn track.  As with all instances of scapegoating in ages past, for no discernible reason, it died down after 1938.  There were still arrests, interrogations, exile and executions, but the mass scale of them was over. 

 

After Stalin's death, there were whispers about what had happened, but no one dared talk of it openly until Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Politburo in 1957, in which he acknowledged the mass executions and exile and so-called excesses of the 1930s, but it was still up to the victims to pursue formal rehabilitation, a process that required an Old Bolshevik to vouch for you or your relative in writing.  By 1957, there were almost none left alive to do so.  Those who survived exile returned broken and old beyond their years.  Many were left in limbo, dependent on relatives with no access to pensions or any other State support, and their children cut off from education and opportunities to advance (for the sins of the father shall be visited upon his children and his children's children).  Only the rehabilitated (even after death, rehabilitation was possible) could consider entering the Soviet Kingdom of Heaven. 

 

The true believers were mostly ascetic hard workers--the Revolutionary monastics, the original disciples, tasked with the conversion of the country.  They kept long hours, leaving the care of their children to peasant-nannies and babushkas.  Even though they formed families (and reformed them frequently, changing partners and apartments with ease), they sought to form their children in the tenets of their faith, so their children could inherit the earth.  (Tellingly, the women of the Revolution had to choose between having a family or participating in the Revolution; they mostly chose Revolution). The Old Bolsheviks were the intelligentsia who had no place or role in Tsarist society and great readers of classical literature.  They undertook to educate their children similarly give their children a place in the new Soviet order. 

 

It was this reading education that ensured their children would never become true believers, their moral imaginations formed not by socialist texts, but rather by the literature that had excited their parents: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Swift, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, and many others.  The children of the true believers would go on to control the levers of power after Stalin as members of the nomenklatura, but they were never truly invested in building socialism in the way that their parents were.  Raised by grandaparents or in orphanages after their parents were swept away by the Terror,  the children carried out the motions of faith with little or no belief.  By the 1980s, the USSR's spiritual core was completely hollow.  The Old Bolsheviks' zealous faith passed away after a single generation.

All Souls Enchantment

 

I think I've only mentioned my love of A Discovery of Witches in passing here, but it bears repeating.  I love this series!  The television drama series is a great adaptation of the book (I'm very eager for series 2 in January).  Like all great adaptations, the book and the visual drama inform one another, talk to each other.  

Sometimes a movie or tv series convinces me to read the book; in the glut of unedited novels currently in the universe, it is often hard to spot the gold from pyrite.  (I say that as a writer who is increasingly despairing of modern publishing).  The English Patient was one such, and I remain convinced that book and movie are complementary to one another, and that full understanding of the beauty of each is best had in the presence of the other. The movie is a visual feast and visceral truth, and the book is a poetic rendering of the human condition. I love them both equally.

Pavillion of Women was another one that I liked the movie (not outstanding, but interesting) and read the book. The book blew me away, it was so fabulous. Very occasionally I like a movie better than the book, but usually the book is more fleshed out.

Re-watching A Discovery of Witches rather reminds me of the joy of seasons 1 & 2 of Outlander, which were excellent adaptations that spoke to the text and informed it, rather than the grudging viewing I've done since early in season 3, when the writers went off the rails with the story line.  I don't know why I can't quite quit the drama series; I'm so annoyed with all the things the writers have changed from the books for no good reason, and then have to catch up in ways that don't make sense.  On the other hand, when they nail it, they really nail it, so I guess the system of periodic rewards keeps me coming back?  I dunno.

I read the whole All Souls triology this spring, and then Time's Convert, an add-on novel that explains the backstory of some of the supporting characters.  It is a world I enjoy escaping to, and I found myself coming back to the series this month.  Matthew B. Crawford's book was great, and while I'm only about 100 pages from the end of Yuri Slezkine's doorstop of a book, I am a bit stalled on it mentally.  

So I restarted the first book, A Discovery of Witches, and watched series 1 again.  After reading the book, the adaptation is even more brilliant, as I could fill in details from the book in my mind.  It made for a very rich and satisfying viewing experience.  There have been few enough of those in the past six months, and I'm grateful this one seems evergreen.

Outlander writers: take note.