At first glance, it seemed an absurd way to make traffic safer, and Mockus was ridiculed in the press for pursuing it. But gradually, by making fun of drivers and pedestrians who didn’t follow basic rules and celebrating those who did, the mimes managed to transform the entire traffic culture of the city, successfully infusing Bogotá’s streets with common sense—or, rather, a sense of the commons.
The construction of the urban environment, a duty usually reserved for engineers, architects, developers, and the like, became, under Mockus’ mayorship, the responsibility of all urban inhabitants. His programs for Bogotá viewed citizens as political beings who are always already participating in the construction of their city, either with their good or bad attitudes.
“The mayor’s genius,” suggests Raymond Fisman, “was in recognizing that writing harsher laws or hiring more gun-toting policemen would be futile when confronted with a law-breaking culture. Instead he enabled Bogotá’s citizens to make change themselves.” Or as Mockus himself explains it, “Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules and are sensitized by art, humour, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”
Posted 1067 days ago.
Rushkoff’s aim is partly for the reader to see these billionaires and their projects as absurd, even silly. Again, I can see the attraction in such an approach. I have found it difficult to avoid snark and sarcasm in my own writing about some of these characters. But it strikes me in this instance as missing the mark. For one thing, while it may be that their most grandiose visions are highly unlikely to come to fruition, their point may not be to achieve their most ambitious ends but to take advantage of the opportunities created along the way—opportunities that involve further privatization, increased wealth disparities, and social exclusions of the kind we already see. The spectacle is part of the grift. It is no accident that organizations such as the Seasteading Institute incorporate their opponents’ ridicule into their sales pitches. When the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (2019 – present) did an animated short mocking “exit” strategies such as bunker-prepping and seasteading, the Seasteading Institute referenced the ridicule in its promotional materials.
Of course they would: being dismissed as quirky delusionaries is central to the narrative that tech escapists like to tell about themselves as misunderstood dreamers and unappreciated geniuses. It is, moreover, a kind of sales pitch sleight of hand. They count on us being too busy staring agape, laughing at the absurdity of the vision or lamenting the betrayal of tech’s emancipatory possibilities, to notice the conventional stench of extraction, dispossession, and colonial sleaze wafting in the air.
Posted 1075 days ago.
The houses, many of which were sitting empty for years, have become FREE SPACES that hold so much more than a roof over our heads. They are home to anarchist libraries, food distros, parties, film screenings, dinners, constantly re-arranging affinities, intimacies, and an endless tide of batshit ideas and inciteful possibilities. To live inside walls slated for demolition is to live outside of this world and against it. We are doing this because we want to. We believe in Nothing and we believe in Everything because “we” is undefined and always changing.
Squatting public housing helps us bridge divisions prescribed by society. Together, long-time unhoused residents and younger folks trying to build a freer city can understand our shared enemies, violent state forces seeking only to cleanse the neighborhood of its poorest and most non-compliant residents in attempt to squeeze the last drips of profit from stolen land while it still appears to belong to the crumbling empire. We are our neighbors, we protect ourselves, we protect each other.
Squat the world! Fuck private property, fuck landlords, and fuck the State!
—Anarchist Network of Ungovernable Squatters
Posted 1083 days ago.
A bit earlier today I crossed the nine-thousand word mark on the first draft of no. 41, which means I’m roughly about halfway through, give or take, the way these things usually go, and but it’s two and a half months or so into the writing of it; I won’t jinx the enterprise by saying anything about speed or weight or momentum, let’s just keep on with the keeping on of it. The idea is to be done with the volume and the season this year, so I’ll be brief and to the point—but here, at least, have a cover reveal. —See y’all in a bit.
Posted 1090 days ago.
But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pikestaff.
Posted 1159 days ago.
There was a bit of a break, wasn’t there. Let’s call it the mid-season hiatus, that excess of late-model broadcast television that led to such grotesque neologisms as the “mid-season finale,” I mean, really. While the story wasn’t progressing, we were finding a new house, and moving into it, and I was preparing for my first federal criminal trial which got postponed at the last minute (COVID) (not mine), and so have had to prepare for it all over again. We’ve already done the cover reveal and talked about the re-runs; here, have a gander at the new study, where the magic will be happening from now on.
The first draft for no. 40 came in at 21,219 words that were trimmed to a fighting count of 15,175, which might help to explain why it took so long. (Might not, granted.) And I’m in the very odd and highly magical space, here as we approach the end of the current volume, where I need a solution to a story problem and cast about only to find the perfect answer assembling itself from bits and pieces I’d stuck in earlier, on this whim or that, not at all knowing what I might need them for, or why, and on the one hand it is shivery spooky, this sensation, but any gift cuts both ways: shouldn’t I have meant to have planned it this way all along, if I had been paying attention? Genius is not luck, after all.
But nonetheless: I’ll take the luck. —No. 40, available now on paper; appearing here for free at the very end of this month.
Posted 1167 days ago.
The different truths are all true in our eyes, but we do not think about them with the same part of our head. In a passage in Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto analyzes the fear of ghosts. To be exact, if we thought about ghosts with the same mind that makes us think about physical facts, we would not be afraid of them, or at least not in the same way. We would be afraid as we would be of a revolver or of a vicious dog, while the fear of ghosts is the fear of the intrusion of a different world. For my part, I hold ghosts to be simple fictions but perceive their truth nonetheless. I am almost neurotically afraid of them, and the months I spent sorting through the papers of a dead friend were an extended nightmare. At the very moment I type these pages I feel the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Nothing would reassure me more than to learn that ghosts “really” exist. Then they would be a phenomenon like any other, which could be studied with the right instruments, a camera or a Geiger counter. This is why science fiction, far from frightening me, delightfully reassures me.
Posted 1199 days ago.
Foley was no innocent. He’d been down to Cooper Square and the Tenderloin, passed an evening, maybe two, in the resorts where men danced with each other or dolled up like Nellie Noonan or Anna Held and sang for the crowds of “f--ries” as they called themselves, and it would have figured only as one more item of city depravity, except for the longing. Which wasn’t just real, it was too real to ignore. Foley had at least got that far, learned not to disrespect another man’s longing.
Posted 1207 days ago.
This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination: yet does the perusal of his work become so tedious, that one never finishes it from the mere pleasure which it affords: It soon becomes a kind of task reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners. But manners have more changed since Homer's age, and yet that poet remains still the favourite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture. But the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry, which appear ridiculous as soon as they lose the recommendation of the mode. The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking and ingenuous, has also contributed to render the F--ry Queen peculiarly tiresome; not to mention the too great frequency of its descriptions, and the langour of its stanza. Upon the whole, Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves among our English classics: but he is seldom seen on the table; and there is scarcely any one, if he dares to be ingenuous, but will confess that, notwithstanding all the merit of the poet, he affords an entertainment with which the palate is soon satiated.
Posted 1215 days ago.
My purpose in looking back to that first era of widespread book reading is not, however, to emphasize the abundance of deep reading, or book reading, or leisurely time that we have lost. The more I’ve studied readers of the eighteenth century, the more I’ve doubted that we (by which I mean a historically fairly new “we”—people who can buy books but also must earn money, manage households, walk dogs, bath children) ever really had more time to read. I do not believe that the minutes crowded by messages, HBO series, and childcare today correspond in any direct way to time that we—posters and messengers, scavengers of the internet, wage workers and intellectuals—once spent with books. The readers I represent struggled to make room for the reading of books in lives that they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be crowded in the same way we perceive ours to be. They worry, like us, about other media forms that seem quicker and shallower and more enticing than books. They sense that round-the-clock entertainment and distraction might render book reading extinct. They dream of a future when books will find a wider and more attentive public. In focusing on book reading rather than on media consumption generally, my first gambit, then, is this: ever since people like us have had access to books, the time we’ve spent with them has been defined as fragile, hard to come by, and good to hope for.
Posted 1223 days ago.
