This is a post that I had originally published on Medium on July 6, 2021.It has since fallen behind a paywall and so I am republishing it here.
Last night, while so many in the city were perched on sofas, watching the Montreal Canadiens avoid elimination from the Stanley Cup Finals, I opted to walk to the Detroit River and catch the sunset.
The last time I had watched the sun descend below the Detroit skyline was three years ago, when my family and I were sitting on lawn chairs among a throng, waiting for it to get dark enough for the Ford Fireworks to begin.
This was the second year in which the bilateral fireworks display had been relegated to a secret location so it could be seen only from the safety of one’s living room. As such, it seems that this year there was a much larger than normal enthusiasm for setting off consumer fireworks to celebrate July 1st and July 4th, respectively.
I cannot tell you how many people set off fireworks in school yards and abandoned lots in Windsor, Ontario because this year, I spent July 1st on the coast of Lake Huron, visiting family. My parents live in Sarnia, which is just upstream from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. And it took me some time to find sleep during my visit because as soon as the sun set, families in the neighbourhood set off fireworks.
I remember that in 2017, there was a significant number of activists on my socials, demanding Canadians reconsider its genocidal legacy instead of celebrating Canada’s 150th “birthday.” But that widespread reckoning of the horrors of our nation’s past didn’t happen until this year, when the unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous children were confirmed. Those Canadians who had refused to read the reports of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, could no longer ignore this documentation.
This made for an extraordinary Canada Day this year. As I walked in my parents neighbourhood, I saw houses with Canadian flags at half-mast and orange signs in bedroom windows that read, Every Child Matters. And I saw evidence of the reaction to the reaction: a small lawn sign angled so that it could be read by passing cars: Unapologetically Canadian.
On Canada Day, my family opted to make our way to the Lake Huron shore and watch the sunset instead of fireworks. There was some cloud cover and a strong wind, but the piercing orange light was still a magnificent sight.
When we drove home, we passed a collection of families with several wagons of fireworks, settling down by the side of a city park. There were many small children who were visibly giddy with the prospect of the show to come. There may have been a 7-year-old, 8-year-old, 9-year-old, 10- and 15-year old among them.
I have to admit, it unsettled me to see these families celebrate Canada Day with fireworks. But then I reconsidered what was happening. Maybe these families didn’t love Canada Day. Maybe, like so many of us, these people just love fireworks. It’s just that our nation state have created laws, that they enforce, that regulate exactly when fireworks are allowed to be set off that coincide with events that they want to be celebrated.
And to me, the overwhelming evidence that this is the greater truth is betrayed by the fact that where I am from, there are only three holidays in which fireworks can be set off: New Year’s Eve, Canada Day, and Victoria Day.
This is a post that I had originally published on Medium on January 7, 2021. It has since fallen behind a paywall and so I am republishing it here.
I remember my first moments of 2020. I had slept badly and was up before our room had any sunlight to speak of. In the dark, I reached over to my nightstand and in fumbling for my glasses, pushed them over the edge. From the noise they made when they hit the floor, I knew I had broken my only means to read small print.
I thought, well, I hope that is not an omen telling me how 2020 is going to turn out.
When I retrieved the pieces from the floor, I found that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. One lens had popped out and it didn’t look like the frame was damaged. Maybe the optometrist could make it right when the store opened up the next day. I found myself with nothing to do but wait and not-see-so-well. Until then, I wouldn’t be able to read from any books or screens. By the end of the day, I tackled one of my year’s goals and started clearing out the garage.
This became one of the lessons I have learned from my years of new year’s resolutions: if I want to organize the house, all I need to do is put away my glasses.
Look, I know everything is going sideways at the moment. As I am writing this, there is a group of white supremacists being ushered in and out of the US Capitol building by complicit police. Closer to home, because our provincial government didn’t want to get in the way of people’s Christmases, COVID-19 has overrun my community and is now so unchecked that it was reported today that the local hospital is setting up a makeshift morgue.
And yet, I’m going to still write about what I have learned about making progress on my new year’s resolutions. Because I need to be stronger than 2021 and I need you to be stronger than 2021 as well.
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that yes, most new year’s resolutions fail because they are largely indistinguishable from a list we would devise if we were asked to write down ways to punish ourselves. I also want to recognize that changing habits is very difficult. There are some strategies that have been known to help and if you would like to learn more, I recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear as it is one of the kinder books about self-improvement that I’ve come across. That’s the source you should go to if you would like to know more about the behavioural science of resolutions. What I have to offer is … well, I am reluctant to call them life-hacks so let’s call them strategic interventions.
30 Days to Find the Love
I discovered this particular strategic intervention in 2008 some time after I had bought Nike+ running shoes. These were Nike runners with a sensor embedded under the sole that could capture running activity that could be transferred to your computer via your iPod.
Many of our self-improvement technologies like Nike+ or FitBits are devised to monitor and report on our activities back to us. Sometimes the real value of this self-surveillance is that the device will be more honest than our own estimations of how far we walked today or how many hours we were on social media. But mostly these devices are marketed on the appeal that they can award badges to us so we can be proud if we meet a particular target or if we have been consistent over a set number of days or weeks.
But I have learned through personal experience that this is not how these types of devices really lead to new habits. The real mechanism at work embedded in Nike+ runners is that they try to generate enough novelty so you will dutifully keep running long enough to discover the joy in the running itself, which will sustain the habit from there.
You don’t even need a special device. You just need a reason to try something new long enough to feel some benefit from it. Every year, Adriene Mishler posts 30 days of encouraging yoga videos on YouTube during the month of January. I had tried online yoga sporadically in 2020 but it was only after I had managed to take on a 30-day challenge, when the consistent practice paid off and I started feeling really good from getting a daily full body stretch. I now do yoga to embody that feeling and not to increase a streak in an app.
Use Narrative to Keep the Novelty Going
In 2008, when I got my new pair of expensive runners, I set a goal to run a 5km race. Then, as soon as I achieved my goal, I stopped running.
When I started running again in 2020, I wasn’t going to be fooled again. This time around, I used the Zombies, Run! 5K Training App to get me up to speed so I can run until I finish the 8 long seasons of Zombies, Run! The Zombies, Run! app is a mobile exergame that positions the listener as the character of Runner 5 whose job is to run missions for Abel Township, one of the few last outposts of humanity after a zombie apocalypse. I’m telling you, running with Zombies, Run! as your soundtrack during a global pandemic feels so poignant. Is the perfect time to invest in a story in which you are running from zombies not just for your own sake but for the sake of the lives of characters that you learn to care for.
That being said, even the power of story could not compel me enough to get me outside and run in the cold of winter. But then something unexpected happened. My son decided to run in the winter to prepare for soccer in the spring. Now I have the pleasure of running three times a week with my son, even when it is wet, grey and miserable. We somehow find the strength not to let each other down.
Curiosity and Delight are Better Motivators than Guilt
In 2020, I noticed that I wasn’t eating enough vegetables. Since I was working from home, I really had no excuse not to eat more healthy lunches now that my working space was either steps away from — or sometimes literally in — the kitchen. I got it in my mind that what I should do is to make some spinach smoothies as a means to efficiently deliver vegetables into my body. I ended up making them only once.
Fast forward to the day after Christmas and I found the need to completely unplug from social media. I opened an exceedingly difficult jigsaw puzzle and for the next several days, I laboured over its pieces while listening to the podcast, Home Cooking. As I am listening, I find myself pausing the show so I can search and bookmark recipes just mentioned. I start incorporating little food tricks that I have learned from Samin and Hrishikesh to my existing lunches. I make tasty lunches that occasionally feature veggies. I stop thinking of vegetables as a vehicle for vitamins and start considering questions such as where I can find local beans that have been harvested last year. Last Monday I bought Samin’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and reading it is a delight.
Breaking the bad habits of 2020
As I have been writing this, I have been switching tabs to Twitter so I can bear witness to the terrible events of January 6, 2021. I know it is absurd to write about good habits of running and eating more vegetables when there are white supremacists and a global pandemic threatening the lives of good people.
We, collectively, have much bigger bad habits that need to be broken.
To do so, we must find the love, share our stories, weave our experiences together, and connect them to our land. our history, and a better future.
This is a post that I had originally published on Medium on December 31, 2020. It has since fallen behind a paywall and so I am republishing it here.
There is a well-known conservative pundit who doesn’t believe that rap is music. To him, the statement “rap is not music” is a “fact” because he was told by his father — who studied music theory — that music has three elements: harmony, melody, and rhythm. Rap lacks harmony and melody and so ergo, it is not music.
Let’s put aside the absurdity that an application of logic can somehow invalidate the decisions of millions of people who have chosen hiphop to be the soundtrack of their lives. Applying logic to music feels absurd but there is historical precedent for the inclination to do so. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher that most of us associate with triangles, was known as both The Father of Mathematics and The Father of Music. Perhaps though it would be more accurate to call him The Father of Music Theory for his discovery that musical intervals are created by the length of an instrument (such as strings in a lyre) that follow simple numeric ratios.
You should watch Adam Neely’s illuminating September 2020 YouTube video “Music Theory and White Supremacy” if you want to learn how the music theory of Ancient Greece progressed until it ossified into the cudgel of The Harmonic Style of 18th Century European Musicians that continues to be used to bash jazz, hiphop, and other forms of non-European music to this day.
Neely’s explainer of how music theory has been weaponized is robust enough that even a non-musician like myself now feels like I can readily defend my musical tastes from logic.
But in one particular way, I don’t believe that Neely goes far enough.
Let me tell you a little-known story about Pythagoras’ discovery of the mathematics behind harmonics and his music theory: it was based on a lie of omission.
An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To his astonishment, he discovered that four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, which, when combined, allowed him to reconstruct the laws of music. But there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he reason its discordant sound. He therefore discarded it.
When what we see doesn’t match up with the ideal that we have been told, we throw out that disharmonious part of the world. It becomes unseen.
But if you look closely and if you work hard to describe what’s in front of you before casting judgement on what you immediately see… you will find a world that has fifth hammers scattered everywhere.
Here’s my favourite example. The zodiac is defined as the path of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (as they are experienced in the Northern Hemisphere) that brings a series of groups of stars called constellations into view. It was the ancient Babylonians who gave names to 12 of these constellations that we now associate with the signs of our horoscopes. The number 12 is significant. The Babylonians gravitated to numbers that fit into their sexagesimal number system, which means that they built their mathematics around a base of 60. We are so used to basing our numbers on ten (the decimal system) that twelve feels unnecessarily complicated. Yet we too have found it useful to divide our clocks into 60 minutes because it is so useful to divide an hour up in halves, quarters, and in five minute increments. And we too, like the Babylonians, have chosen to ignore the 13th constellation — Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer — that also exists in the path of the Zodiac.
It is one thing to completely dismiss stars in the sky that everyone can see. It is an entirely other matter to look at people who do not fit a prescribed category and announce them as deformed. It has been estimated that 1.7% of the world’s population is intersex but they are not considered as natural as the 1.5% of the world that are redheads. It is not coincidence that the same people who don’t believe that rap is music also have very strong viewpoints on the categories of gender.
I have resolved that in 2021, I will look out for more fifth hammers. I will record more observations that will bring into question the supposed ideals of the status quo and share them here, on Medium.
I have resisted the siren call of TikTok. But some of its videos are so powerful they leave their orbit and end up on other platforms and catch my attention. Case in point is the “I don’t think math is real” video. I enjoyed Hank Green’s response to its response.
This young woman is asking all of the right questions that don’t just lead to a greater understanding of math, but actually joyous understanding of math.
And I get frustrated that often the way we teach math right now ignores these questions. How did Pythagoras, a dude who didn’t even have a flushable toilet, figure out an equation that we still use and is still useful today? Thousands of years later!
A truth so true that it’s more true than reality is. Every point in our universe has some bluntness. Every line has some wiggle. But in Pythagoras’ mind, there was a perfect triangle that, one that no matter how far in you zoomed in, the lines were straight, the points were pointy. One in which for every right triangle the area of the square made by the hypotenuse was exactly the same as the area of the squares made by the legs of the two triangles added together. Exactly!…
The idea that we teach people the pythagorean theorem without teaching them that mathematicians build universes in their minds that are more perfect than the one that we live in, in some ways, that’s wild! Sometimes it is brought up, and sometimes the fact that Pythagoras built a CULT promising SECRET KNOWLEDGE about this stuff and then actually delivered on that secret knowledge that was extremely powerful and wild that you can create a universe in your mind, that also is sometimes taught but not always! I mean come on! This young woman asks, does math exist? I don’t know. Did Pythagoras discover his theorem, or did he invent it? Does math both exist and not exist? Is it an artifact of our minds, or of reality? No one knows the answer to that question! But let’s let people ask it!
Speaking of Pythagorus, some years ago I heard an episode of The Theory of Everythingthat kind of blew my mind when it suggested to me that math is a belief system.
Philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen tells us the story of Pythagoras and the fifth hammer and how Kant and Kepler both tried (and failed) to record the universal harmonies Pythagoras once heard.
An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To his astonishment, he discovered that four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, which, when combined, allowed him to reconstruct the laws of music. But there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he reason its discordant sound. He therefore discarded it.
What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? In The Fifth Hammer, Daniel Heller-Roazen lucidly shows how that fabled gesture offers a key for understanding ideas of harmony in the broadest sense of the term. Since antiquity, “harmony” has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has constituted a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the sensible world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal elements of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down in a set of ideal units. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.
So much of music is not considered music by white Western music critics if it doesn’t match white Western European music theory. Western European Music theory’s foundation is based on the work of Pythagoras.
When the foundation of math erases so much, perhaps the question of whether math even is real, is exactly the question we should be asking in this moment.
If you scroll down the left sidebar, it will tell you that in these parts you can get your fibre from MNSI and Bell Canada. Bell makes you enter your address and will confirm if your dwelling is fibre ready. MNSI coveys the same information but using a map. If your pushpin lands in green, you are good to go.
These are maps of internet coverage. We can also work backwards.
The Mozilla Location Service (MLS) is an open service, which lets devices determine their location based on network infrastructure like Bluetooth beacons, cell towers and WiFi access points. This network based location service complements satellite based navigation systems like A-GPS.
In response to this threat, I – along with with three fellow University of Windsor colleagues, Natalie Delia Deckard (Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminology), Bonnie Stewart (Faculty of Education) and Kristen Thomasen (Law) – organized an event. The evening of talks was entitled “Safer Communities in a ‘Smart Tech’ World” and it was held on January 22nd, 2020 at The Performance Hall at the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts. Chris Gilliard was our keynote speaker, Bonnie was our host who introduced the topic to our audience, Kristen spoke to some of the legal context, and I spoke about concerns using a network technology lens.
My short presentation is below:
Hello. My name is Mita Williams and I am the Scholarly Communications Librarian at the Leddy Library of the University of Windsor. I have a long standing interest in how we can use technology to make our cities better – and what I mean by better, is more equitable, more sustainable, and more joyful. Please subscribe to my newsletter.
For my short talk, I’m not going to talk about the direct threats to our neighbourhood safety and our feelings of community from the influence of Amazon’s Ring.
Instead, I am going to bring your attention to a designed secondary effect of consumers buying into Amazon Ring’s devices that could come into play even if the Windsor Police Service chooses not to endorse the service. I would like to introduce you to Amazon Sidewalk.
But before I do so, I would like to make it clear that Amazon’s Sidewalk project is not related to Sidewalk Toronto, which is a proposal Sidewalk Labs, which is itself is from a subsidiary of Google called Alphabet. Sidewalk Toronto is a proposal to turn Quayside – a waterfront neighbourhood in Toronto – into an integrated ‘smart city’ filled with sensors and new forms of public utilities created and maintained by private companies.
Why are both projects called Sidewalk? I believe it’s because while the city street itself is understood as shared public space, the sidewalk is a thread of public space that crosses private property. But that thread of public space is tenuous. In Windsor, almost half of our streets don’t have sidewalks on both sides of the street. On arterial and collector streets, there are 78 kilometres with no sidewalks at all.
Amazon Sidewalk is something that is not simple to describe. It was announced late last year and it appears to be in some form of beta.
You see, Ring Doorbells weren’t designed to just be doorbells that share videos to your neighbours, Amazon, and the Police. Ring Doorbells have been designed to share low bandwidth “wifi” (called a mesh network) so that each Ring Doorbell can provide coverage of about 500 meters away. It only took 700 Ring Doorbells to provide coverage of most of the Los Angeles basin. In doing so, Amazon created a private network that will allow future “Internet of Things” projects like a ‘smart dog tag’ that will tell you exactly where your cat is in your neighbourhood. But that’s the thing. Surveillance sounds awesome when you thinking in the context of your pet. It’s an entirely other thing when you learn that Amazon will be able to track you whether you buy their products or not.
I want to stress that there is nothing inevitable about Amazon Sidewalk. It will only be able to take root where there are willing consumers who have internet and if there is a regulatory space for the service to exist. Our next speaker, Kristen Thomason will address this legal space.
Before I give her the microphone, I would like to leave you with a reminder that there are many communities without internet. Canada’s North and many rural spaces don’t have affordable Internet. In 2017, 40% of Detroit’s population had no access to the internet at all.
To address this lack, is the Detroit Community Technology Project which seeks provide access to residents without through the Equitable Internet Initiative. This coalition of partners coordinate the Digital Stewards Training Program, which trains community members to build and maintain their own wireless communications infrastructure.
Instead of building a “smart city” perhaps we should follow the example of the Detroit’s Community Technology Project and build a “more equitable” “more just” and “more generous city, instead.
Related Reading on Amazon Sidewalk
I’m freaking out about this Amazon Sidewalk mesh network stuff. Here’s why:
1. Amazon is pushing WiFi so you have to send all your traffic through their access points. W/e, no surprises there. But did you know they can track you even if you’re not logged onto their network? https://t.co/F5pJNsFiT7
Yesterday I was at a full-day karate intensive. After hours of exercises, the day ended with the class being split into three groups. We were told to learn the names in our group. Then we were informed we were going to have a relay race of sprints, army crawls, and crab-walks.
We were told to cheer our teammates on by name. Such is the power of groups and group competition (including the fear of letting your group down) that everyone involved threw themselves completely into this relay. Myself included. All my bruises from that day came from the race.
I mention this short story because I was impressed by the deft application of group psychology. How else could you ask a room of exhausted people to dig in deep and give everything they had left to give?
I also mention this because today is Canada’s federal election and polls and as I write this, the polls are still open. The power of party politics and partisanship is an overwhelming force. But it can also be manipulative. Like the relay race, it’s worth noticing that our politics are designed to be this way.
I haven’t written much about this election because frankly, I’m mad at all the parties. I’m mad at the Liberals for breaking their promise to end ‘first past the post’ and I’m mad at the NDP and Greens who refused to consider ranked ballots as a step towards electoral reform.
It’s very telling that politics is frequently framed as ‘a race.’
Years ago – I think I was in on a high school field trip to New York City – I stumbled upon and bought a calendar illustrated by Lynda Barry and another woman cartoonist, that resembled this one. It featured amazing illustrations such as Elvis With Ponytails and most days were annotated with astrological insights and ‘on this day’ birth dates of writers and musicians that Barry loved.
I’ve always wanted to make my own version of the Lynda Barry Experience Calendar and every year, I make a couple half-hearted attempt to collect ‘on this day’ facts for my future calendar. Today, as I was organizing my Google Drive, I stumbled upon a spreadsheet where I started to collect calendar-worthy facts. Before I put it in a directory, I thought I would add an entry for today.
This is how I discovered that today is a day of Alexandrias.
I don’t know whether AOC was named after the Blessed Alexandria. Curious, I looked her up and learned that the Blessed Alexandria was not a saint (I thought only saints had feast days) but is considered as something that is new to me: a victim soul.
The concept of the victim soul derives from the Roman Catholic teaching on redemptive suffering. Such a person is said to be one chosen by God to suffer more than most people during life, and who generously accepts the suffering, based on the example of Christ’s own Passion.
At 14 years old, in March 1918 an incident changed her life. Her former employer along with two other men tried to break into her room. To escape them, Alexandrina jumped 13 feet down from a window, barely surviving. Her spine was broken from the fall. Until age 19, Alexandrina was still able to “drag herself” to church where, hunched over, she would remain in prayer, to the great amazement of the parishioners. During the early years, Alexandrina asked the Blessed Mother for the grace of a cure. She suffered gradual paralysis that confined her to bed from 1925 onward. She remained bed-ridden for about 30 years.
A group of Mennonite women suffer for years from mysterious midnight attacks, purportedly the work of demons come to punish them for their sins. Eventually, they discover the assaults are not the work of demons but of men—their own husbands, sons, and neighbors. While the men are held in a nearby city, working to make bail, the women gather in a hayloft to talk, and to decide what to do. They propose three options: do nothing, leave, or stay and fight. The book takes the form of notes from those meetings, taken by the only man they trust, August Epp. The format ventures towards tedium, but miraculously never gets there, and through August’s perspective manages to be both damning and dazzlingly hopeful. At one point, the old man whose hayloft they are squatting wanders over and demands to know what’s going on. “We’re only women talking,” replies one of the women. Indeed.
Do I have to tell you that her novel was an imaged response to real events?
Between 2005 and 2009 in an isolated Mennonite colony in Bolivia, women and girls (as young as 3) regularly woke up groggy and bruised, their sheets smeared with blood and semen. Some members of the conservative patriarchal community blamed demons; others attributed these reports to “wild female imagination.” In reality, nine men in the close-knit community had been breaking into houses every few nights, spraying the sleeping inhabitants with a drug designed to anesthetize cattle and raping them while they lay unconscious.
I’m slowly making my way through Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women. I had to admit, I had skimmed a not insignificant amount of the first two chapters of the 1991 anthology of Haraway’s early works because I wasn’t particularly interested in Haraway’s close examination of early primate research.
But for reasons I will soon explain, I’m now much inclined to properly read those early chapters. I now realize that Haraway’s work in studying early primate scientists is a significant foundation for future insights in her subsequent work, such as this one, that begins Chapter Three, The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology.
Part of remaking ourselves as socialist-feminist human beings is remaking the sciences which construct the category of “nature” and empower its definitions in technology. Science is about knowledge and power. In our time, natural science defines the human being’s place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. So science is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives. I would like to investigate how the field of modern biology constructs theories about the body and community as capitalist and patriarchal machine and market: the machine for production, the market for exchange, and both machine and market for reproduction. I would like to explore biology as an aspect of the reproduction of capitalist social relations, dealing with the imperative of biological reproduction. That is, I want to show how sociobiology is the science of capitalist reproduction.
Between World War I and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Organic form, with its hierarchical and physiological cooperation and competition based on “natural” domination and division of labor, gave way to systems theory with its control schemes based on communications networks and a logical technology in which human beings become potentially outmoded symbol-using devices. Life science moved from physiology to systems theory, from scientific medicine to investment management, from Taylorite scientific management and human engineering of the person to modern ergonomics and population control, from psychobiology to sociobiology.
This fundamental change in life science did not occur in an historical vacuum; it accompanied changes in the nature and technology of power, within a continuing dynamic of capitalist reproduction. This paper will only sketch those changes, in an effort to investigate the historical connection between the content of science and its social context.
In this paper, Haraway compares and contrast the biological research work of chimpanzee-studying psychologist Robert Yerkes and ant-studying “father of sociobiology” E.O. Wilson as a means to show the “transformation of biology from a science of sexual organisms to one of reproducing genetic assemblages”.
But there’s another reason why I want to give the attention needed to Haaway’s work. It feels timely again.
Some months ago at the library where I work as a librarian, one of the library staff told me that there were several requests for the library to get a copy of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I did some cursory research and found that it was a New York Times Bestseller from an Isreali academic.
And then I dug further to find out why a broad overview of the history of humanity was on the best seller list and found out that the works of Harari are adored by the CEOs of Silicon Valley:
Less than a decade ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a junior professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, stuck teaching a world history survey course because none of the senior faculty would deign to take it on. Today, he’s listened to and praised by the likes of Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, who reviewed Harari’s latest book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Harari speaks at the World Economic Forum at Davos, TED, and TimesTalks. At the time of this writing, his books occupied the top two slots on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list… And it’s all due to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book based on that survey course that no one else wanted to teach—a book that has leapt far beyond the original audience for which Harari intended it and has been embraced by the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
I haven’t read Sapiens but I have read this 6,500 summary called ‘If Sapiens was a blog post‘. And after reading a bunch of reviews of the book, I think I understand the hook of the book. From Slate Magazine again:
Another foundational idea in Harari’s take on history is that “fiction” is the superpower that has enabled homo sapiens to access unprecedented power over other species. The other primates can’t manage stable communities of more than about 150 members. But following what Harari calls “the Cognitive Revolution”—marked by the development of language—“large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.” It isn’t merely our big brains or our opposable thumbs that have made us the emperors of the planet; it’s our ability to work together en masse, mobilized by shared beliefs
Is this why Mark Zuckerberg was such a massive booster of Sapiens when it first came out? Is it because its premise that human civilization is dependent on story-telling is deeply attractive to those industries involved in creating movies, memes, and advertising platforms?
Zuckerberg explains his latest book-club pick on his personal Facebook page: This book is a big history narrative of human civilization — from how we developed from hunter-gatherers early on to how we organize our society and economy today.
Or is it because the men involved in Silicon Valley are highly invested in a particular telling of the story of sociobiology. From Laura Miller’s Slate review:
This idea isn’t new; sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson have often characterized religion as a fiction that creates advantageous social unity. But this argument often goes hand in hand with a macho strain of atheism and evolutionary psychology that trumpets both the obsolescence of faith in the age of science and an exaggerated focus on “selfish gene” scenarios in which a ruthless competition underlies every aspect of human existence. An even cruder version of the same attitude can be found in online communities of incels, pickup artists, MGTOWs, and other alienated men, with their pseudoscientific mythos of alpha and beta males and the women who will or won’t sleep with them.
In a Harari twist, Sapiens inverts evolutionary psychology’s usual fetishization of raw male dominance by stating that “even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence.” The pervasiveness of patriarchy among human cultures he regards as an enduring puzzle: “How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.”
Haraway’s 1979 comparison of early primate research and E. O. Wilson and her conclusion that “sociobiology is the science of capitalist reproduction” seems strangely relevant. Again.
Truth be told, the reason why I wrote this blog post is because of a cartoon essay.
Tim Urban of Wait But Why is currently publishing installments of his magnum opus of The Story of Us. And I’m somewhat disturbed that Tim Urban finds it necessary to explain our present day societythrough evolution and … sociobiology. Again.
The series is just starting and I’m not sure where the Story of Us will go from here. Maybe Tim will get to Haraway and other feminists for insight. But I doubt it.
This weekend, I’ve been reading up on the Xenofeminism Manifesto by the collective Laboria Cuboniks (2015).
Injustice should not simply be accepted as “the way things are.” This is the starting point for The Xenofeminist Manifesto, a radical attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century.
Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitable—from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself.
The XF manifesto itself is not long – its just over 4000 words – but the text is dense, layered, cryptic, and poetic.
Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!
This kind of language is why I’m trying to spend time with the text as well as reading supplementary articles to help me tease out its meanings. I found the two episodes dedicated to the text from the podcast General Intellect Unit as being particularly helpful to grounding the work in context. Without them, I would not have been able to understand this particular passage from Overflow 0x19:
Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease.
When I first read the text over, I completely glossed over the fact that Lisp and Scheme are computing languages, and so when the question is asked, is xenofeminism a programme, the question also raised is, is xenofeminism a program? And — what does it mean to think like the schemer or lisper? At the 48 minute mark of General Intellect Unit’s episode 028 (Xenofeminism, Part 2) was the explanation I needed:
Now this is a reference to the Lisp family of programming languages of which Scheme is a member and that the gist of why that’s important is that, if you are a programmer and you are presented with a problem, like, I dunno, taking a bunch of .csv files and sending them where ever, if you are using a language like Python then you sort of sit down and write Python that solves the problem. with Lisp or Scheme or languages from this family, these languages are so flexible that what you end up actually doing is you create a sublanguage where you can express the problem, then you use that to solve the problem. So, it’s a kind of classic thing about Lispers is that they end up writing their own languages that fit the problem domain and then solve the problem using that second tool.
“To think like a schemer or lisper” is never going to be a metaphor that is going to be widely understood or adopted, but it’s a powerful concept nonetheless. And I think I found a great example of this approach.
Alexis Hope: Building Joyful Futures
At the re:publica 2019 conference, keynote Alexis Hope gave a talk called “Building Joyful Futures” (ht) “a reflection on intersectional design with “sharp edges,” on the Make The Breastpump Not Suck Hackathon, and on the upcoming menstrual health hackathon, There Will Be Blood.
How do we build joyful futures? Who gets to imagine and invent them? And what can hacking a Breast Pump teach us about designing for equity?
Many narratives about innovation and progress center the “lone genius” and his or her (usually his) ambitions to change the world with a singular, visionary idea. But this is not how radically better futures are imagined and created—instead, they are created in community, often unrecognized and unsupported by institutions that broadcast visions of the future. As a technology designer at the MIT Media Lab, I challenge my institution to consider: whose voices must be centered in our innovation spaces to imagine and build many possible utopias and preferable futures?
I will share what my team is doing to change how institutions like ours undertake “innovation work.” In particular, we reimagine the hackathon—a staple in technology design spaces—to center equity and inclusion, focus on marginalized and stigmatized topics, value non-technical skills, and ask technologists to contend with systemic and policy issues. I’ll share the work that goes into organizing large-scale, inclusive community innovation events, lessons learned from the ways that we messed up and changed course, and where we’re headed next.
It’s not enough to gather a diverse group of people, expecting them to magically arrive at a radically better future. In fact, doing so is likely to surface tensions. Bringing people together to design for equity requires cultivating a spirit of joy and play, which helps people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. Approaching this work with a generative spirit, and prioritizing the comfort of people who have been made to feel unwelcome in innovation spaces, are key to both community-building and creative problem-solving. Joy and play act as strategies of resistance in toxic times — they help restore us so that we can do the difficult and creative work of tackling systemic problems, together.
In other words, Alexis and her team took the time to learn the full nature of a problem domain, built a community with those already in that space, and only then began to write the language of the program/programme to find the ways to address the problem.
I’m not sure Laboria Cuboniks would agree but this sounds XF to me.
