Structures of Interaction | Reflexivity

Stephanie Jo Kent

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SELF-IMPROVEMENT

snapshots of the moment (a podcast)

01/11/2024

Organizing Required

“This is my job. If I’m being asked to do more than my job, I can say no. If they fire me, they’re — that’s like way worse for most employers. So you do have a lot of power as an employee, I think especially if you’re organizing and unionizing and talking with everyone that you’re working with on your level. You have so much power to actually get what you need and not be exploited in the way that most people are.” —Charles Hobby Transcript of the Reading Transcript of the Conversation Show Notes Credits Transcript of the Reading The masses who settled into remote or hybrid work during the pandemic are waking up to the fact that Zoom-mediated labor isn’t all it was promised to be. Instead of being liberated from unnecessary drudgery, demands on their time have ballooned, they feel permanently on call, and some can’t shake the sense that they’re working harder than ever for less pay… Disabled employees . . . demonstrated [that] nearly everyone could do their jobs just fine by telecommuting… Remote work has benefits for all. …The pandemic and remote work turbocharged techno-solutionism, leaving us with the impression that Zoom alone could allow us to claw back everything the ever-expanding demands of the office had been stealing from us. Unfortunately, outsmarting capitalism requires something more than one weird trick that bosses hate. We have to stop believing that technology, in and of itself, will emancipate us, and instead embrace our collective power to shape how technology is used. That requires organizing. –Katherine Alejandra Cross, “Remote Workers of the World, Unite!”, WIRED (June 2023). Transcript of the Conversation Stephanie Jo Kent: All right. Today I’m delighted to welcome to the show two guests: Charles Hobby, returning, our podcast engineer, and also Stellan Vinthagen, who is a scholar-activist working on resistance. I am very curious what conversation the two of you might have about this excerpt from WIRED Magazine about organizing and remote work in the times that we’re living in. Either of you want to dive in? Charles Hobby: I guess I can just introduce myself to Stellan because it’s the first time I’ve met you. I’m super excited to chat. Currently, I’m a remote worker, and one that is being exploited and abused in my own way. Reading this article — actually, Steph, I did read the full article. I don’t know if that’s cheating, but — Stephanie Jo Kent: Cool. No, you’re welcome. Charles Hobby: — I did. Yeah, it is a very interesting topic that I don’t — Yeah, I feel like this has been the promise of the internet since I don’t remember; that Arthur C. Clarke quote from the ’60s saying that, “The internet would liberate us to do whatever we wanted and be wherever we wanted and work from wherever we want.” It’s interesting that it’s just happening now in the 2020s and is immediately becoming completely corrupted and destroyed. So, yeah, that’s where I’m coming from, I’m someone on those front lines. Stellan Vinthagen: Thank you. Well, yeah, I’m very much a remote worker too. I have both the privilege and the curse of being a tenured professor at UMass. But my work is mostly research, which means that I work from elsewhere not really from campus. I would say that the advantage of that is that I have a lot of freedom to decide myself what kind of work I do and when I do it. The curse of that is that I’m supposed to deliver a whole lot of things and it means that I work a lot more hours than what I’m supposed to. Charles Hobby: Is that built into the position? My remote job is very much more like basically online customer service with a few extra roles added to it. But I’m very much a responder to stuff rather than — it sounds like you’re much more like — a little more interesting than what I’m doing, but also a little more, you set what you want. Or are you under the dictation of what other people want from you? Stellan Vinthagen: It’s taken me quite a while to figure out, but what I have learned is that my employers — they only look at the numbers of how much I produce. So I can very much decide the content, but I need to deliver books, articles. I need to draw in research funding and these kind of things. But that means also that I have a lot of freedom to decide on the content. But I think what comes with this is an over-exploitation of work and hours, but also the possibility of using your content, the work, towards a service of activism and social change. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Charles Hobby: Cool. Yeah. I’m curious. It seems like a different exploitation, because I feel like almost all — most work is exploitative, in the way that it works in this country and probably most countries, where it’s like my body, my time, my life is being taken for someone else’s benefit. What’s so interesting about, I think, remote work is that the body part of the exploitation is removed from it, which I think is scaring a lot of employers because that’s such a easy physical way to control someone. So I think what this article hints at is all these even sort of creepier and potentially scarier versions of that theft of yourself. Like if they’re saying basically like, “Well, if we can’t have your body anymore, we’re just going to have access to you and to your house and to everything that you’re doing on your computer, because it’s our computer.” It’s just like suddenly so much — that physical theft has now become almost, like, conceptual and metaphysical. It’s weird to navigate because we’ve never really done it before. Stellan Vinthagen: No, I agree. There are many versions of how this exploitation happens, of course. I think the crude version is to measure then, how active are you at your computer? What kind of movements are you doing? What kind of sites are you looking at? What are you doing? How efficient are you in doing the certain different tasks? So that’s a detailed control. But then the kind of control that people like me are facing is a different one where it’s a matter of looking at the output, that you’re supposed to be in the international frontline of a certain discussion, and you need to publish in certain journals, you need to deliver. That is then not measured in time, which I think is definitely a matter of both a privilege and a curse because you will put in a lot more time than what you are supposed to. Charles Hobby: How long have you been a professor? Stellan Vinthagen: Nine years at UMass. Before that, I was a professor in Sweden. Charles Hobby: Okay. Did you notice a big — or maybe not even a big, did you notice a change in how your responsibilities were measured or demanded with COVID changing a lot of the way people interacted online, or? Because it sounds like your job has always been, unfortunately, just — yeah. I’m just curious if the COVID aspect and Zoom mentality has really changed the way people are demanding even more from you. Stellan Vinthagen: Yeah. You must experience a similar thing. All the time there has been this ongoing experimentation with the increasing amount of emails and the pressure to respond quickly on that, so that’s always been there. And then the output, as I said before: output delivery, but not that you’re present at your office. So it’s been remote in that sense, even before COVID. With COVID, I would say that there was a brief period of a couple of months when it was beautifully quiet because people hadn’t really gotten into booking Zoom meetings and all that, so things became very slow. That was a beautiful opportunity that I could return to and tell about the contrast. But then after a while, it became incredibly many Zoom meetings. That pressure has increased, I would definitely say. I’ve seen a lot with my students; that they lose energy, motivation, orientation. There’s been really psychological effects of studying remotely. Charles Hobby: Yeah. I think the article is written by a professor and one of the things they mentioned was that, if I was teaching a class of 200 people, I’m not able to look at everyone’s eyes and where they’re looking and what they’re doing. The fact that now the response to teaching people online was to monitor every single individual’s attention level through AI platforms to make sure they’re looking at the screen and not looking at other browsers. So quickly did it turn into this rather than — because that’s the thing about natural interaction is that when we’re talking on a computer like this, I feel compelled to look at you and always be looking at you. I can’t go get a cup of coffee or excuse myself or maybe look out the window. It’s like a fake way we would interact because of this digital element, where it’s just like — I don’t know what it is, if it’s just politeness or something. Because we’re not in the same room, we feel like we need to just be overly attentive. I think students are feeling like they have to be in Zoom meetings. Like I shut off my camera at a certain point because it’s just like I’m sitting in an hour-long meeting doing nothing, but yet I’m forced to look at the screen where I can get shit done, I can play a game, I can walk my dog and still be at this meeting and contribute identically. Yeah, we’re all now forced to just sit and be lifeless because I feel like that’s what the people running the place demand in the same way that they demanded my body at other jobs,

41 min
10/14/2023

Babel (Part 2): The Necessity of Violence

“Part of what the author has documented scholarly throughout this entire fantasy, historical alternative reading of history is the potential that is unleashed or released when terms from different languages are uttered into a space or are inscribed, and sometimes it’s written, inscribed into a space, presented somehow in space and really importantly in time, more or less simultaneously.” —Stephanie Jo Kent Transcript of the Reading Transcript of the Conversation Show Notes Credits TW: (Spoilers) Transcript of the Reading Then there was nothing to do but wait for the end. How did one make peace with one’s own death? According to the accounts of the Crito, the Phaedo, and the Apology, Socrates went to his death without distress, with such preternatural calm that he refused multiple entreaties to escape. In fact, he’d been so cheerfully blasé, so convinced that dying was the just thing to do, that he beat his friends over their heads with his reasoning, in that insufferably righteous way of his, even as they burst into tears. Robin had been so struck, upon his first foray into the Greek texts, by Socrates’ utter indifference to his end. And surely it was better, easier to die with such good cheer; no doubts, no fears, one’s heart at rest. He could, in theory, believe it. Often, he had thought of death as a reprieve. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy. He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace. Still, facing the moment, he was terrified. They wound up sitting on the floor in the lobby, taking comfort in the silence of the group, listening to each other breathe. Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca’s Troades, of Lucan’s Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quoted to them Cicero, Fiorace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance. —Rebecca Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History (2022). Transcript of the Conversation Stephanie Jo Kent: Glynis Jones is both a professional and hobbyist language learner, a linguist translator, and teacher by trade. She’s proficient in English, Chinese, and Russian. Glynis, welcome back to the Structures of Interaction podcast. Glynis Jones: Thank you for having me. Stephanie Jo Kent: You bet. How are you doing? Glynis Jones: I’m doing all right. A little tired, but mostly good. Stephanie Jo Kent: Good. Do you want to brag a little bit about the program that you’re accepted into this summer that you’re getting ready to go to? Glynis Jones: Yeah. On July 4th, of all days, I’m heading up to my first summer and a four-summer master’s degree program for a Middlebury Language School in Russian. So I already have a master’s degree in Chinese. Figured I should get a master’s degree in my second second language. Yeah, I’m probably going to end up going to some of the career panels up there, which are mostly titled things like Foreign Language Opportunities in the Intelligence Community, — Stephanie Jo Kent: Awesome. Glynis Jones: — which for me is going to be anthropology. Stephanie Jo Kent: [brief laughter] Someday I want to have a conversation with various folk about what I termed to myself guerilla research. I think officially they call it studying up. Glynis Jones: Mm-hmm. Stephanie Jo Kent: Anyway, so that’s very exciting for you, congratulations. I hope that it leads to all the great things that you wish. Glynis Jones: Thank you. Stephanie Jo Kent: You bet. This is Part 2 of a reading from Babel, and we left off in Part 1 with the first command to translate, which we didn’t identify you as the reader of the Mandarin text there. But then that comes up again several times in this second series, second part in this two-part series. What do you think is happening in that moment? Or maybe we should back up and like set the context a little bit, just an overview. Where are we? What’s going on in this part of the story? Glynis Jones: The important context is probably that I have only read this ending, I have not read the whole story. But from what I understand at the ending, all of our heroes are gathered at this tower, this perhaps Tower of Babel, and are faced with a decision to destroy it in order to protect it. So we’re watching the psychology of what’s happening for them as they’re realizing the reality of that choice. So it seems like when they are saying the word in Mandarin — fanyi, which means translate, which the author notes has an etymology that literally means to turn over — something is being released from these silver capsules, some incredible force that is contributing to the destruction of the tower. Stephanie Jo Kent: Right. These silver capsules, I can’t remember the exact term they used for them, they’re like columns or bars that are made from some kind of silver, which might be the regular metallic silver that we think of. But the idea that translation — and it’s paired, so it’s the Mandarin term and the English term together and something about the combination of a meaning being uttered in two languages that have some amount of distance between them. Sometimes it’s a lot of distance, sometimes it’s not so much. Part of what the author has documented scholarly throughout this entire fantasy, historical alternative reading of history is the potential that is unleashed or released when terms from different languages are uttered into a space or are inscribed, and sometimes it’s written, inscribed into a space, presented somehow in space and really importantly in time, more or less simultaneously. I love this imagery of turning over, that the release is both, something goes out into the world but also something is given up, it’s let go of. So there’s some power in what’s happening there in terms of language and humans, our communication with each other when we’re using language and languages. And then the symbolism of how she’s written this story, that these — all of them being translators have made this decision. I love the phrase you said, “To destroy the Tower of Babel in order to protect it”. Glynis Jones: Yeah. Again, not having read the entire book, I don’t have the full context for why they’re needing to protect this. But we get this sense that there’s this impending opposing force that they’re watching for on the horizon; that they do not want this force, meaning perhaps an army of some kind, to get to this tower. To me, what you were talking about with the original word and the translation of the word being like there’s some disconnect between them. Of course, there’s always going to be an imperfection. The power of the way that that’s harnessed in this fantasy world is almost like nuclear fission. It’s a splitting of a term into its original form and its translated form, which creates this problem, this explosive reaction, which is true in translation. So that’s something that they as translators are guardians of, stewards of. But it’s a power that can obviously can be destructive. They’re using it to destruct in order to protect. What they’re protecting is not letting that power get into the wrong hands is what it feels like. Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah. I love that. I love the atomic level breakdown. I’ve been more and more thinking of it as organic. That, yeah, there is the destructive part, which is when we technologize it, when we try to make it into a systemic structure that’s rigid and locks dynamics in place, and taking that apart has to happen with some destructive force. But the everyday act of translation, the everyday act of words coming into the world and of us talking with each other, and communicating with each other, and me using a term and you using a term, even if we’re both in English, but just playing back and forth, what does that mean? “Are you using it the same way I’m using it?” “Oh, no, I was going over here and you’re going over there.” And how do we come to the middle? And then to bring that kind of extra onus of another language in and what its subtle differences are, to me, that’s cellular; that’s at the nuclear level of here are these molecules generating proteins, generating actual life. Life doesn’t come about because of the mixing of things that are exactly the same, life comes about and continues because of the mixing of things that are fundamentally, inherently, essentially different. So this process of translation is actually so alive. It’s the aliveness that tries to get captured by technology and locked in to a certain pattern. So, yeah, I’m just really taken with how this author has so masterfully collected so many examples of words that are very close but not quite, and played with the potential of those differences in thinking about, wow, if we could just really understand the organ

27 min
09/15/2023

Babel (Part 1): An Arcane Translators Revolution

...the clues I picked up on would be it's a tower. I know that the name of the book is Babel, and so that makes me think of the Tower of Babylon. And then we have these references to -- at the very end where we paused for this section, Robin is seeming to activate some kind of power through a force of translation. So that gives me a sense that like -- immediately makes me think of Library of Alexandria. There is some kind of linguistic, and I use that word to mean language, academic knowledge that's being protected here or some kind of language power.

20 min
08/16/2023

Adventures of the Body

Guest: Charles Hobby Reading: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, page 89 Full Transcript

21 min
07/17/2023

Ideology and Imagination

“It’s like it needs to be imaginary before it becomes real. Well, there’s like a cyclical, the chicken and the egg, which was first? I guess reality was probably first, but it can’t — for us to interact with it, we need to imagine something before we can put it into action. —Charles Hobby Transcript of the Reading Transcript of the Conversation Show Notes Credits Transcript of the Reading Ideology, noun, an imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full. So we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above, and so is science. Although it, the different one, the special one by way of its perpetual cross checking with reality tests of all kinds and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming, buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader. —Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, p. 41) Transcript of the Conversation Stephanie Jo Kent: I’m delighted to welcome our guest, Charles Hobby, to the podcast today. Charles is the host of When Will It End, and is the producer of this podcast as well. Hello, Charles. Thanks for being here today. Charles Hobby: It’s nice to be on this side of it. Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah. Charles Hobby: It’s fun. Sometimes I get jealous listening in, so this is good. Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s good. Well, that’s great. We always have you primed as a stand-in to rescue us. Charles Hobby: Though this is very different podcasting than what I’m used to, so I’m usually just — I don’t have to do anything, so this is much more investigative and intense than maybe I’m up for, but I guess we’ll find out. Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, I guess, yeah. I think having an open conversation is really all that I want here too. Pretty relaxed and just, what’s our understanding? What comes to mind based on this prompt from this reading? Ideology is something. Charles Hobby: It’s interesting. I don’t even know. Obviously, I think the context-lessness of this conversation is important to you and the podcast, so I don’t need to know too much about “The Ministry of the Future”. But the very first sentence, I don’t even know if I agree with that definition. Stephanie Jo Kent: Interesting. Charles Hobby: Or that ideology is something that can be defined as something that, just it’s that. I think it could be that, but I think it could also be other things. Stephanie Jo Kent: What is not here? What seems not included by — he’s saying ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, everybody has one. Charles Hobby: Well, he’s saying that it seems to us that ideology is a necessary feature, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. And then also he used the word “imaginary”, I find really interesting because I think some ideologies are real relationships based on real situations. Stephanie Jo Kent: Huh! All right. Now I’m like, okay, we have to go back and parse this line by line. So maybe it’s not quite as loose a conversation, but I feel like, oh, we’re not even understanding it in the same way yet, so that requires a little bit of work. The definition, ideology as a noun is an imaginary relationship to a real situation. Okay, there’s a real situation and something in our relationship to it is imaginary and you are not sure you agree with that or you found that part interesting? Charles Hobby: Both. I do think that some ideologies are imaginary, but I don’t know that all ideologies are imaginary. I think some are really based on real experiences and their relationship to that real situation. I don’t know that there’s always anything lost in that bridge. What do you think of that word, “imaginary”? Because in my mind something like thinking about how we as people can change those structures of politics, I don’t know what tagging imaginary onto someone’s belief system does to that belief system. Stephanie Jo Kent: Right, I can see that. But I think what he’s trying to do is establish a framework that’s even deeper. Belief is one form of ideology, science is another form of ideology, your political perspective is a form of ideology. To me, they’re all in effort to put language onto an experience, and language is never the same as the experience itself. So I think that’s, to me, how the imaginary comes in. Charles Hobby: I guess so. I never studied philosophy and I think I always got a little bored with the signifier and the signifying and whatever that was because it is true — I guess in some ways, obviously all languages translation. But I think that that specific word imaginary really — it just connotates some sort of falseness, which I don’t know. Stephanie Jo Kent: Wow. Charles Hobby: Maybe I’m just taking the wrong feeling from that word, but for me, like an imaginary friend doesn’t exist. Stephanie Jo Kent: Sure, no. That’s cool, because I think of imaginary in the sense of imagination. There’s a way in which neither one exists, the imaginary friend doesn’t have a material corporeal form. But there’s an idea in your head about this imaginary friend that you interact with and it gives you a sense of communication. I’m imagining all kinds of things that I hope will happen in the future, forecasting them based on whatever, whatever, whatever. It’s just not here yet and we’ll live into it and it’ll be like that or it’ll be different from that, or there’ll be some overlap. Charles Hobby: Okay. So you’re thinking Kim is using the word imaginary as meaning in the mind? Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah. Charles Hobby: Yes, that makes sense to me. To me, I was feeling like it was almost dismissing someone’s ideology because it felt like it was a non-existent relationship. But I guess that’s true. It’s a way that we think about something that’s happening and what we want to happen. Stephanie Jo Kent: Then he basically says, usually when we say ideology we’re like, “You have an ideology and I don’t agree with it because you’re messed up in what you’re thinking.” Then when I think it seems to us that ideology is necessary is that everyone has one. The piece of the communication, then, is how do we work back and forth between them? Charles Hobby: That’s very cool. Maybe philosophy isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I’ll probably check it out. Stephanie Jo Kent: Probably is. Charles Hobby: We’re always translating, whether it’s just between two people trying to figure out what to have for dinner or countries trying to figure out how to deal with each other. It’s like language is always acting as a translation, and then I guess the mind is all we have as our translator. Stephanie Jo Kent: Perception mixes in some kind of way. What’s fascinating to me is that we both read this passage and I had an immediate positive association and you had an immediate negative association. There’s this word that I’ve been using a lot in the last year and I think it’s the right word from communication, it’s called phatic, P-H-A-T-I-C. It’s about the feeling that you get from the use of the word. It could be about the person’s tone, it could be about anything, but it’s really about how does it land emotionally? Charles Hobby: Yeah, because I feel like if the imaginary had been replaced with ideology noun, what conceptual relationship to a real situation or something — less to do with like imagination and more about thought; that would’ve definitely felt different. Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s interesting. I think it’s pretty cool that he puts science in the same category then he separates it out and he’s linking it as cognition. It’s a necessary aspect of cognition. Charles Hobby: What do you make that Kim doesn’t include politics in the list? Stephanie Jo Kent: Let’s see, what does he say? Charles Hobby: We have worldview, philosophy, religion, but to me political ideology is the one I think of first. Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, I think it’s the one that we’re being force-fed right now. It’s the one that’s on the high stage acting out, it’s high drama. But it’s a worldview, I think. I think politics is the action of trying to implement the worldview. Charles Hobby: Okay. I see worldview; I guess politics is a subset of worldview. I feel like so much of the world is political. Almost everything important is political in some sense. Stephanie Jo Kent: Everything important is. Charles Hobby: If I were Kim, I would’ve put that in the list. Stephanie Jo Kent: Why isn’t it in the list here? I wonder if it’s not in the list because — oh man, are we going to go back to signified in signifier? But the object of the ideology is politics. Charles Hobby: Okay. Stephanie Jo Kent: I don’t know. I’m making it up. Charles Hobby: Great. I think that’s what they all did too, so that’s fine. Stephanie Jo Kent: Right? Charles Hobby: So y

28 min
06/01/2023

The Topic of Death

“So he wants to die deliberately and he’s considering who to ask. These, I presume, are people or gods with whom he is close. The choices strike me as having an inherent performative quality. If he’s a god, other people regard him as such and so his death is going to have meaning. Even if he’s not a god, if he’s just a person, death has meaning. Who you ask has meaning.” —Michael J. DeLuca Transcript of the Reading Transcript of the Conversation Show Notes Credits TW (suicide) Transcript of the Reading Eventually, I considered it the topic of death. I could kill myself now, probably. This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings. Even willing ourselves into nonexistence did not work for long; eventually, we would forget that we were supposed to be dead and start thinking again. Yeine could kill me, but I would never ask it of her. Some of my siblings, and Naha, could and would do it, because they understood that sometimes life is too much to bear. But I did not need them anymore. The past two nights’ events had verified what I’d already suspected: those things that had once merely weakened me before could kill me now. So if I could steel myself to the pain of it, I could die whenever I wished simply by continuing to contemplate antithetical thoughts until I became an old man, and then a corpse. And perhaps it was even simpler than that. I needed to eat and drink and piss waste now. That meant I could starve,and thirst, and that my intestines and other organs were actually necessary. If I damaged them, they might not grow back. What would be the most exciting way to commit suicide? Because I did not want to die an old man. Kahl had gotten that much right. If I had to die, I would die as myself–as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child. I had blazed bright in my life. What was wrong with blazing in death too? Before I reached middle age, I decided. Surely I could think of something interesting by then. –N. K. Jemisin. The Kingdom of Gods, Book 3: The Inheritance Trilogy (2014, p. 1036). Orbit/Hachette Book Group: New York. Transcript of the Conversation Steph: Today’s guest is Mike, longtime friend, webmaster of my digital domains. Mike is an author and the publisher of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Welcome, Mike. Mike: Hello. Thank you for having me. Steph: It’s very exciting to have you and to talk about our reading today. What did you think about our reading? Mike: I feel that I was less offended by being thrown into a contemplation of suicide than I might have been at other times in my life. The older we get the more the specter of death is a part of life, not to get all goth about it. I also think of it in the context of the one Nora Jemisin book I’ve read, which was not from this series, but the other one. What’s that title? Steph: The Broken Earth? Mike: The Broken Earth Trilogy. I found the view of humanity in that book to be cynical. This jived with that impression. In a way I was somewhat disappointed about, because I want Nora Jemisin to have a less cynical view of humanity, though I know it is not fair for me to expect that of her. Steph: So there’s some cynicism coming. I have two thoughts right off the bat. One is that this episode might need a trigger warning because of the content. And I’m not sure about the cynicism, at least that may be a global discourse that we should look at more. This particular passage is about one of the gods, not the humans. Mike: I totally didn’t catch that from the passage. Steph: Right out of the gate, quote, “This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings.” But what’s interesting, this is one of the gods reflecting on the possibility of their own mortality. Mike: I wasn’t sure if I was to read that metaphorically. Fantasy being what it is, you can have a character who is a god in one setting and a regular person in another setting. I happen to be reading my kid The NeverEnding Story, in which for the second half, Bastian is basically the God of Fantastica. Steph: The other names in here are also gods. But what struck me as I was rereading it is how much it is reflective of the human experience in relation to coming to grips with our own mortality. Mike: I’m struck by the performative aspect of it, which I think is something that absolutely comes up among humans considering death and suicide. I don’t think it comes up to everyone. Steph: When you say performative, tell me more about what you mean. Mike: Well, he — is this a he? I think it is. Steph: I think it’s a male, yes. Male god, Sieh. Mike: So he wants to die deliberately and he’s considering who to ask. These, I presume, are people or gods with whom he is close. The choices strike me as having an inherent performative quality. If he’s a god, other people regard him as such and so his death is going to have meaning. Even if he’s not a god, if he’s just a person, death has meaning. Who you ask has meaning. Steph: Yes. That’s good. Mike: I have not been close enough to suicide in my life…I mean, I can get really dark. My neighbor shot himself in the face when I was in high school. He did not leave a note. I really don’t think that guy considered the consequences of his actions or the impact because it was terrible for everyone except him. Steph: There have been a couple suicides that have been fairly close to me. A very brilliant deaf mathematician that I was an interpreter for, killed herself, and my sister-in-law’s brother killed himself. My assumption is, is that the state of being that a person is in to take that act is so despairing, they’re not able to comprehend what the impact is going to be on other people. I hear what you’re saying about, I think, the performance in this excerpt, this passage of a god contemplating his own mortality is also to recognize, like he says, what would be the most exciting way to enact his own death. The excitement piece is where the performative part comes in, I think. What would be the way that would have the most impact? That’s part of his intention. Mike: It’s these lines at the end, “If I had to die, I would die as myself, as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child.” So that goes over my head. And obviously there’s some context in the pantheon as to what those roles represent. I think of Osiris, who was the sun, and also a god of wisdom. Gods played different roles to different adherents. Steph: Would it be anthropomorphism to make a god like us? Because as I was reading it, I was thinking about processes in my own life and aging, and as you said, we think of things differently the older that we get. Things that weren’t on our register before, or they change in their importance or significance. I think of youth not thinking that we’ll ever die, and the things that we undertake not knowing there’s risk or not having a conception of how that will play out over time. And then coming to that point of it really is about the body, and that this god in this story has become weakened, whatever way, that he’s now vulnerable to the things that mere mortals are vulnerable to; that he could starve himself to death, that he could die of dehydration, that the organs that he’s through the powers of being a god has never had to worry about before because they could easily be replaced or regrown or whatever, now. It’s the regenerative capacity of his godhood that has passed, but then he’s also trying to take agency in that event. Mike: It strikes me that this is different from the way an alive person in the world could contemplate their own death. Because again, as you say, if you’re thinking suicidal thoughts, maybe you’re not thinking clearly and you’re having a hard time considering what could come after. I totally understand that. But even if you’re not, if you’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer, having lived through that recently with a couple of my relatives, I imagined that a lot of what they were thinking about was the social expectations of grief and of the anticipation of grief. So maybe people think this way, but they don’t articulate it to the people around them, I would think. Unless they have someone that they have an incredible trust in to not freak out. What is the best way for me to die? Well, you’re already thinking about something that humans mostly shy away from. I’m trying not to, now. Because of these deaths that I have seen in my life, I’m trying to think according to a conventional wisdom that I’ve heard: death is part of life. It’s a thing that happens in your life. You’re born, and that’s a process everyone goes through. You go through puberty, which is a process most people go through. There are these milestones, and death is one of them that just doesn’t have anything on the other side. So I try to think of it that way, but I don’t talk to a lot of people, frankly, about thinking of it that way. I think because there’s this… taboo is not the right word, but — Steph: There’s social practice. Mike: Yeah. Steph: That’s fabulous. I mean, I can bring in this concept of structures of interaction now and say we’re in a culture, and it may be different in other cultures, but we’re definitely in a mainstream culture in the United States where death is not an open topic. And the contemplation of how one might die, when, where, with or without control of the circumstances, with or without intention as to whether it’s a meaningful death, whether it’s a death that serves a purpose, or if it’s just the natural death that occurs in a life. The articulation of this passage, if I think about a structure of interaction, is there’s an individual, in this case the god Sieh, who’s verbalizing, putting into language some thoughts about mortality and the inevitability o

20 min
05/02/2023

National Insecurity

“…what does classified information do? I think the metaphor that we’re intended to bring to it is war, spying, national secrets, and the vulnerabilities of huge things like infrastructure. I imagine that the individual instances of it are far more idiosyncratic and personal.” —Michael J. DeLuca Transcript of the Reading Transcript of the Conversation Show Notes Credits Transcript of the Reading Steph: This is an excerpt from Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, beginning on page 175. It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about the missing Inspector General report, that the classified version came skimming across my desktop, as if in proof of that old maxim that the best way to find something is to stop looking for it. Once the classified version turned up, I realized why I hadn’t had any luck finding it previously: it couldn’t be seen, not even by the heads of agencies. It was filed in an Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from those holding top security clearance. Because of my position, I was familiar with most of the ECIs at the NSA, but not this one. The report’s full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN, which translates to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read this. I was most definitely not one of them. The report came to my attention by mistake: someone in the NSA IG’s office had left a draft copy on a system that I, as a sysadmin, had access to. Its caveat of STLW, which I didn’t recognize, turned out to be what’s called a “dirty word” on my system: a label signifying a document that wasn’t supposed to be stored on lower-security drives. These drives were being constantly checked for any newly appearing dirty words, and the moment one was found I was alerted so that I could decide how best to scrub the document from the system, but before I did, I’d have to examine the offending file myself, just to confirm that the dirty word search hadn’t flagged anything accidentally. Usually I’d take just the briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon as I opened the document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through. Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. Here was everything that the journalism I’d read had lacked, and that the court proceedings I’d followed had been denied: a complete accounting of the NSA’s most secret surveillance programs, and the agency directives and Department of Justice policies that had been used to subvert American law and contravene the US Constitution. After reading the thing, I could understand why no IC employee had ever leaked it to journalists, and no judge would be able to force the government to produce it in open court. The document was so deeply classified that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be immediately identifiable. And the activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted. One issue jumped out at me immediately: it was clear that the unclassified version I was already familiar with wasn’t a redaction of the classified version, as would usually be the practice. Rather, it was a wholly different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The duplicity was stupefying, especially given that I just dedicated months of my time to deduplicating files. Most of the time, when you’re dealing with two versions of the same document, the differences between them are trivial—a few commas here, a few words there. But the only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title. Whereas the unclassified version merely made reference to the NSA being ordered to intensify its intelligence-gathering practices following 9/11, the classified version laid out the nature, and scale, of that intensification. The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from target collection of communications to “bulk collection,” which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance. And whereas the unclassified version obfuscated this shift, advocating for expanded surveillance by scaring the public with the specter of terror, the classified version made this shift explicit, justifying it as the legitimate corollary of expanded technological capacity. The NSA IG’s portion of the classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” noting that existing surveillance legislation (particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) dated from 1978, a time when most communications signals traveled via radio or telephone lines, rather than fiber-optic cables and satellites. In essence, the agency was arguing that the speed and volume of contemporary communication had outpaced, and outgrown, American law—no court, not even a secret court, could issue enough individually targeted warrants fast enough to keep up—and that a truly global world required a truly global intelligence agency. All of this pointed, in the NSA’s logic, to the necessity of the bulk collection of Internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection initiative was indicated in the very dirty word that got it flagged on my system: STLW, an abbreviation of STELLARWIND. This turned out to be the single major component of the PSP that had continued, and even grown, in secret after the rest of the program had been made public in the press. STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private internet communications as potential signals intelligence. Such fraudulent redefinitions ran throughout the report, but perhaps the most fundamental and transparently desperate involved the government’s vocabulary: STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s inception in 2001, but in 2004—when Justice Department officials balked at the continuation of the initiative—the Bush administration attempted to legitimize it ex post facto by changing the meanings of basic English words, such as “acquire” and “obtain.” According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched for and retrieved” them from its database. This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that the agency’s goal was to be able to retain as much data as it could for as long as it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing the act of data being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely, an algorithm) querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any conceivable point in the future—the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past. Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (2019) Published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company New York Transcript of the Conversation Steph: Today’s guest is Michael J. DeLuca, a longtime friend and webmaster of my digital domains. Mike is an author and the publisher of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Welcome back, Mike. Mike: Thank you, Steph. I’m excited. Steph: Right. Today we’re talking about this excerpt from Edward Snowden’s book, Permanent Record. How did it land with you, this section, this reading? Mike: I have some context for this. I mean, I bring some context. I have a computer science degree. I briefly held a government security clearance of “secret”. For one year, I was allowed to look at minor secure documents, and boy, was I bad at it, that job was not for me. And then also, what this makes me think of in this moment is ChatGPT, the AI that generates text, which didn’t exist when Snowden wrote this book. But the wealth of data he talks about in this excerpt is just such a wealth of data as what is fed into a machine learning “AI” like ChatGPT or one of those art-generating AIs. It makes me wonder what horrific machine intent is gazing on all of our data even now and what it makes of it. Steph: By machine intent, you literally mean by an intelligent conscious computer? Mike: Absolutely not. The reason I put AI in quotes, “artificial intelligence”–I’ve got a whole ax to grind about this if you’d like to hear me grind that ax. Artificial intelligence is a concept that was created in science fiction. Asimov and all, you’ve read those books, we’ve talked about them. The thing that is referred to as AI now is referred to in direct reference to the concept from science fiction. It is an attempt

37 min
11/03/2020

“What’s crazier–plants speaking, or humans listening?”

An excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, pp. 318-322, read by Steph. Transcript: “A lot of evidence suggests that group loyalty interferes with reason.” Maidenhair and Watchman trade smirks, like he’s just told them that science has proven that the atmosphere is mostly air. “People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.” Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.” Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand. Maidenhair inspects Adam, as through a lab’s two way mirror. “Can I ask you something else?” “Anything you want.” “It’s a simple question. How long do you think we have?” He doesn’t understand. He looks to Watchman, but the man, too, is waiting for his answer. “I don’t know.” “In your heart of hearts. How long before we pull the place down around us?” Her words embarrass Adam. It’s a question for undergrad dorms. For bar rooms late on a Saturday night. He has let the situation get away from him, and none of this—the trespass through private land, the ascent, this fuzzy conversation—can be worth the two extra data points. He looks away, out on the ravaged redwoods. “Really. I don’t know.” “Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?” The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges. And it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.” “Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flair. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?” He has seen the graphs, everyone has. Ignition has only just started. “It’s so simple,” she says, “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking, “Is the house on fire?” `A shrug, a sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.” “And you want to observe the handful of people who are screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.” A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group…” “. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?” “Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—” “—or lots of people would already have—” “—with six billion other—” “Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two thirds of the planets’ net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.” “Can’t tap the brakes when you’re about to hit the wall.” “Easier to poke your eyes out.” The distant snarl breaks off, audible again in silence. The entire study begins to seem to Adam like a distraction. He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize. Maidenhair breaks the silence, “We aren’t alone. Others are trying to reach us. I can hear them.” From Adam’s neck down to the small of his back, hairs rise. He’s huge with fur. But the signal is invisible. Lost in evolution. “Hear who?” “I don’t know, the trees, the life force.” “You mean talking? Out loud?” She strokes a bough as if it’s a pet. “Not out loud. More like a Greek chorus in my head.” She looks at Adam, her face as clear as if she just asked him to stay for dinner. “I died. I was electrocuted in my bed. My heart stopped. I came back and started hearing them.” Adam turns to Watchman for a sanity check. But the bearded prophet only arches his brows. Maidenhair taps the questionnaire. “I suppose you have your answer now about the psychology of world-savers?” Watchman touches her shoulder. “What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?” Adam doesn’t hear. He’s just now tuning into something that has long been hiding in plain sight. He says, to no one. “I talk out loud sometimes. To my sister. She disappeared when I was little.” “Well, okay then, can we study you?” A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world. Adam puts out his hands to steady himself and touches only a swaying twig. Held high up above the vanishingly distant surface by a creature who should want him dead. His brain spins. The tree has dragged him. He’s twirling again by a cord the width of a vine. He fixes on the woman’s face as if some last desperate act of personality-reading might still protect him. “What . . . ? What are they saying? The trees.” She tries to tell him. Recorded July 24, 2020 Location: Belchertown, MA The post “What’s crazier–plants speaking, or humans listening?” first appeared on Reflexivity.

8 min
11/02/2020

In-group Realignment

An excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, pp. 232-238, read by Steph. Transcript: Four years at Fortuna College come down to one afternoon: Adam in his spot in the front row, Daniels Auditorium. Professor Rubin Rabinowski at the podium—Affect and Cognition. Last lecture before the final exam, and the Rabi-Man is surveying all the experimental evidence that suggests—to the delight of the oversubscribed class—that teaching psychology is a waste of time. “Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief, perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cueing—all the biases you’ve learned about in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.” Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision and independent thought. “Here are the performances on several different evaluations designed to conceal what they were testing. Most of the second group were tested less than six months after they took this course.” The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant. Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightening, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses. “The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it. “So why, you may ask, do I go on talking, up here? Why go on, year after year, cashing the college’s checks?” The laughs are all sympathy now. Adam admires the brilliant pedagogy. He, at least, he vows, will remember this lecture years from now, and its revelations will make him wiser, no matter what the studies show. He at least will defy the indicting numbers. “Let me show you the answers you yourselves gave to a simple questionnaire I had you fill out at the beginning of the semester. You’ve probably forgotten you ever took it.” The professor glances at the average answers and grimaces. His lips tighten in pain. Snickers across the room, “You may or may not recall that I asked you then whether you thought you’d . . .” Professor Rabinowski fiddles with his tie. He windmills with his left arm, grimaces again. “Excuse me one minute.” He lurches off the dais and out the door. A murmur passes through the auditorium. Thuds come from the down hall—a stack of boxes tipping over. Fifty-four students sit and wait for the punch line. Faint, swallowed sounds fill the hallway, but no one moves. Adam scans the seats behind him. Students frown at each other or busy themselves with notes. He turns to look at that magnificent woman who always sits two seats to his left. Premed, fawn-colored, pretty without knowing it, binders full of neat handwritten notes, and he thinks again how glorious it would be to sit in Bucky’s over a beer with her and talk about this astonishing class. But the semester ends in two days, and the chance is as good as lost. She glances his way confused. He shakes his head and can’t help smirking. He leans in to whisper, and she reciprocates. Maybe the chance hasn’t vanished. “Kitty Genovese. The bystander effect. Darley and Latane, 1968.” “But is he okay?” Her breath is like cinnamon. “Remember how we had to answer whether we’d help someone who . . . ?” A woman shouts from below for someone to call an ambulance. But by the time the paramedics get their ambulance onto the quad, Professor Rabinowski is dead of a myocardial infarction. “I don’t understand,” the premed beauty says, in their booth at Bucky’s. “If you thought he was demonstrating the bystander effect, why did you keep sitting there?” She’s on her third iced coffee, and it bothers Adam. “That’s not the point. The question is why fifty-three other people, including you, who thought he was having a heart attack, didn’t do anything? I thought he was jerking us around to make a point.” “Then you should have been on your feet and calling his bluff!” “I didn’t want to spoil the show.” “You should have been up in five seconds.” He slams the booth table. “It wouldn’t have made any damn difference.” She flinches into the booth, like he meant to hit her. He puts up his palms, leans toward her to apologize, and she flinches again. He freezes, hands in the air, seeing what the cowering woman sees. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” Professor Rabinowski’s last lesson. Learning psychology is indeed pretty much useless. He pays for the drinks and leaves. He never sees her again, except for the following week, from four seats away, for two hours, at the proctored final exam. . . . He’s admitted to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountain side overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and laying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad clouds of stars. After two years, the other grads take to calling him Bias Boy. In any discussion of the psychology of social formations, Adam Appich, master of science,a is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests. He consults with his advisor. Professor Mieke Van Dijk, she of the sublime Dutch bob, clipped consonents and soft-core softened vowels. In fact, she makes him confer with her every two weeks, in her office up in College Ten, hoping the enforced check-in will jump start his research. “You are dragging your feet over nothing.” In fact, he has his feet up, reclining on her Victorian daybed across the office from her desk, as if she’s psychoanalyzing him. It amuses them both. “Dragging? Not at all. I am utterly paralyzed.” “But why? You make too big a deal about this. Think of a thesis . . .” —she can’t pronounce the th—”as a long seminar project. You don’t have to save the world.” “I don’t? Can I at least save a nation-state or two?” She laughs; her wide overbite quickens his pulse. “Listen, Adam, pretend this has nothing to do with your career. Nothing to do with any professional approval. What do you, personally, want to discover? What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple of years?” He watches the words spill from that pretty mouth, free from the social scientific jargon that she tends to drop into seminars. “This enjoyment you speak about . . .” “Tsh. You want to know something.” He wants to know whether she has ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say, robust. He feels a weird need to tell her how he got here, in her office, looking for a thesis topic. Wants to draw his entire intellectual history in a straight line—from daubing nail polish on the abdomens of ants to watching his beloved undergraduate mentor die— then ask her where the line leads next. “I’m interested in . . . unblinding.” He steals a look at her. If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic. She purses her lips. She must know how good that looks on her, “Unblinding? I’m sure that must mean something.” “Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribes’ beliefs?” “You want to study transformative potential as a function of strong, normative, in-group favoritism.” He’d nod, but the jargon bugs the crap out of him. “It’s like this. I think of myself as a good man. A good citizen. But say I’m a good citizen of early Rome, when a father had the power, and sometimes the duty, to put his child to death.” “I see. And you, a good citizen, are motivated to preserve positive distinctiveness . . . “We’re trapped by social identity. Even when there are big, huge truths staring us in… ” He hears his peers jeering, “Bias boy.” “Well, no. Clearly not or in-group realignment would never happen.” “Transformation of social identity.” “Does it?” “Of course. Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote, to having a major party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.” “How old are you anyway?” Professor Van Dyke laughs. Her fine high cheekbones pink out; he’s sure of it. Tough to hide, with that complexion. “Topic, please.” “I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . .” “. . . while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalt

15 min
11/01/2020

Photosynthesis

Transcript: A reading from The Overstory by Richard Powers. 2018, p. 124. It’s a miracle,” she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antenna arrays form up into thylakoids discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious gingko. Too many zeros, their eyes glaze over. She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe. “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear and love became possible.” They think she’s nuts, and that’s fine with her. She’s content to post a memory forward to their distant futures, futures that will depend on the inscrutable generosity of green things. Recorded July 15, 2020 Location: Belchertown, MA The post Photosynthesis first appeared on Reflexivity.

2 min

10 Episodes

snapshots of the moment (a podcast)

Creator

Stephanie Jo Kent
Years Active

2021 - 2024
Episodes

10
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© Copyright Stephanie Jo Kent except where noted. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US license.
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Structures of Interaction | Reflexivity