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we can’t begin those discussions until we say, as a society, we want to at least try subordinating these potentials to the democratic project, rather than allow capitalism to do what it wants

I say in FALC that this isn’t a blueprint for utopia. All I’m saying is that there is a possibility for the end of scarcity, the end of work, a coming together of leisure and labour, physical and mental work. What do we want to do with it? It’s perfectly possible something different could emerge where you have this aggressive form of social value.

I think the thing that’s been beaten out of everyone since 2010 is one of the prevailing tenets of neoliberalism: work hard, you can be whatever you want to be, that you’ll get a job, be well paid and enjoy yourself.  In 2010, that disappeared overnight, the rules of the game changed. For the status quo to continue to administer itself,  it had to change common sense. You see this with Jordan Peterson; he’s saying you have to know your place and that’s what will make you happy. To me that’s the only future for conservative thought, how else do you mediate the inequality and unhappiness?

I don’t think we can rapidly decarbonise our economies without working people understanding that it’s in their self-interest. A green economy means better quality of life. It means more work. Luxury populism feeds not only into the green transition, but the rollout of Universal Basic Services and even further.

Democratic politics is to a great extent a war of coalitions over what the great political economist James M. Buchanan called "the fiscal commons". Think of government as a huge pool of money. Control of government means control over that pool of money. Parties gain control by putting together winning coalitions of interest groups. When a party has control, its coalition's interest groups get more from the pool and the losing coalition's interest groups get less. So, yeah, it matters who wins. When Democrats are in charge, that's great news for public-employees unions and General Electric's alternative energy division. When the Republicans are in charge, that's great news for rich people and Raytheon.

we shouldn't expect government with a moderate, centre-right House to look a lot different from the moderate, centre-left government we've got now.  

Nevertheless, people are going out of their minds stomping heads and warning of streets teeming with sexual predators because we are all phenomenal dupes willing to pick up the propaganda partisans put down. Our minds have been warped by relentless marketing designed to engender false consciousness of stark political brand contrasts. It's as if Crest is telling us that Colgate leads to socialism and Colgate is telling us that Crest leads to plutocracy and all of us believe half of it.

Henry James did the limited third person really well, showing us the way to do it. He milked that cow successfully. And it’s a great cow, it still gives lots of milk. But if you read only contemporary stuff, always third-person limited, you don’t realize that point of view in a story is very important and can be very movable. It’s here where I suggest that people read books like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to see what she does by moving from mind to mind. Or Tolstoy’s War and Peace for goodness’ sake. Wow. The way he slides from one point of view to another without you knowing that you’ve changed point of view—he does it so gracefully. You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don’t have the sense of being jerked from place to place. That’s mastery of a craft.

Any of us who grew up reading eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction are perfectly at home with what is called “omniscience.” I myself call it “authorial” point of view because the term “omnisicence,” the idea of an author being omniscient, is so often used in a judgmental way, as if it were a bad thing. But the author, after all, is the author of all these characters, the maker, the inventor of them. In fact all the characters are the author if you come right down to the honest truth of it. So the author has the perfect right to know what they’re thinking. If the author doesn’t tell you what they are thinking … why? This is worth thinking about. Often it’s simply to spin out suspense by not telling you what the author knows. Well, that’s legitimate. This is art. But I’m trying to get people to think about their choices here, because there are so many beautiful choices that are going unused. In a way, first person and limited third are the easiest ones, the least interesting. 

to preach that story is conflict, always to ask, “Where’s the conflict in your story?”—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things

The first decade of her career, beginning in the sixties, included some of her most well-known works of fiction: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. Each of these works imagined not just worlds, but homes, homes that became real for her readers, homes where protagonists were women, people of color, gender fluid, anticapitalist—imaginary homes that did not simply spin out our worst dystopic fears for the future like so many of the apocalyptic novels of today, but also modeled other ways of being, other ways to create home.

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real,” Le Guin once said. “But they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

“Fake rules” and “alternative facts” are used in our time not to increase moral understanding and social possibility but to increase power for those who already have it. A war on language has unhinged words from their meaning, language from its capacity as truth-teller. But perhaps, counterintuitively, it is in the realm of the imagination, the fictive, where we can best re-ground ourselves in the real and the true.

you can’t find your own voice if you aren’t listening for it. The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it’s doing. Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry. And so we get prose that goes clunk, clunk, clunk. And we don’t know what’s wrong with it

You emphasize the importance of understanding grammar and grammar terminology but also the importance of interrogating its rules. You point out that it is a strange phenomenon that grammar is the tool of our trade and yet so many writers steer away from an engagement with it. In my generation and for a while after—I was born in 1929—we were taught grammar right from the start. It was quietly drilled into us. We knew the names of the parts of speech, we had a working acquaintance with how English works, which they don’t get in most schools anymore. There is so much less reading in schools, and very little teaching of grammar. For a writer this is kind of like being thrown into a carpenter’s shop without ever having learned the names of the tools or handled them consciously. What do you do with a Phillips screwdriver? What is a Phillips screwdriver? We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying, “You too can write!” or “Anybody can write, just sit down and do it!” But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.

In your book on writing, Steering the Craft, you say that morality and language are linked, but that morality and correctness are not the same thing. Yet we often confuse them in the realm of grammar. The “grammar bullies”—you read them in places like the New York Times—and they tell you what is correct: You must never use “hopefully.” “Hopefully, we will be going there on Tuesday.” That is incorrect and wrong and you are basically an ignorant pig if you say it. This is judgmentalism. The game that is being played there is a game of social class. It has nothing to do with the morality of writing and speaking and thinking clearly, which Orwell, for instance, talked about so well. It’s just affirming that I am from a higher class than you are. The trouble is that people who aren’t taught grammar very well in school fall for these statements from these pundits, delivered with vast authority from above. I’m fighting that. A very interesting case in point is using “they” as a singular. This offends the grammar bullies endlessly; it is wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, it was right until the eighteenth century, when they invented the rule that “he” includes “she.” It didn’t exist in English before then; Shakespeare used “they” instead of “he or she”—we all do, we always have done, in speaking, in colloquial English. It took the women’s movement to bring it back to English literature. And it is important. Because it’s a crossroads between correctness bullying and the moral use of language. If “he” includes “she” but “she” doesn’t include “he,” a big statement is being made, with huge social and moral implications. But we don’t have to use “he” that way—we’ve got “they.” Why not use it?

Google and Facebook know how to utilize negative emotions, leading to the new system-wide goal: find personalized ways to make you feel bad

in Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies, where he notices that ‘it seems strange to assert that anything as broad as a class of technologies might have an emotional tenor, but the internet of things does. That tenor is sadness… a melancholy that rolls off it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention, of overloaded awareness, and of gaps between people just barely annealed with sensors, APIs and scripts.’ It is a life ‘savaged by bullshit jobs, over-cranked schedules and long commutes, of intimacy stifled by exhaustion and the incapacity by exhaustion and the incapacity or unwillingness to be emotionally present.’

Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way.4 As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.

Unlike the blog entries of the Web 2.0 era, social media have surpassed the summary stage of the diary in a desperate attempt to keep up with real-time regime. Instagram Stories, for example, bring back the nostalgia of an unfolding chain of events – and then disappear at the end of the day, like a revenge act, a satire of ancient sentiments gone by. Storage will make the pain permanent. Better forget about it and move on

By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue. Organic life cycles are short-circuited and accelerated up to a point where the personal life of billions has finally caught up with cybernetics

The price of self-control in an age of instant gratification is high. We long to revolt against the restless zombie inside us, but we don’t know how.

Sadness arises at the point we’re exhausted by the online world.6 After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard. The sheer busyness and self-importance of the world makes you feel joyless. After a dive into the network we’re drained and feel socially awkward. The swiping finger is tired and we have to stop.

Much like boredom, sadness is not a medical condition (though never say never because everything can be turned into one). No matter how brief and mild, sadness is the default mental state of the online billions. Its original intensity gets dissipated, it seeps out, becoming a general atmosphere, a chronic background condition. Occasionally – for a brief moment – we feel the loss. A seething rage emerges. After checking for the tenth time what someone said on Instagram, the pain of the social makes us feel miserable, and we put the phone away. Am I suffering from the phantom vibration syndrome? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were offline? Why is life so tragic? He blocked me. At night, you read through the thread again. Do we need to quit again, to go cold turkey again? Others are supposed to move us, to arouse us, and yet we don’t feel anything anymore. The heart is frozen

If experience is the ‘habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them,’11 the desire to anaesthetize experience is a kind of immune response against ‘the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment’.

unlike burn-out, sadness is a continuous state of mind. Sadness pops up the second events start to fade away – and now you’re down the rabbit hole once more. The perpetual now can no longer be captured and leaves us isolated, a scattered set of online subjects. What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the ‘slow cancellation of the future’? By scrolling, swiping and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign – and failing

Millennials, as one recently explained to me, have grown up talking more openly about their state of mind. As work/life distinctions disappear, subjectivity becomes their core content. Confessions and opinions are externalized instantly. Individuation is no longer confined to the diary or small group of friends, but is shared out there, exposed for all to see.

Snapstreaks, the ‘best friends’ fire emoji next to a friend’s name indicating that ‘you and that special person in your life have snapped one another within 24 hours for at least two days in a row.’19 Streaks are considered a proof of friendship or commitment to someone. So it’s heartbreaking when you lose a streak you’ve put months of work into. The feature all but destroys the accumulated social capital when users are offline for a few days. The Snap regime forces teenagers, the largest Snapchat user group, to use the app every single day, making an offline break virtually impossible.20 While relationships amongst teens are pretty much always in flux, with friendships being on the edge and always questioned, Snap-induced feelings sync with the rapidly changing teenage body, making puberty even more intense

The bare-all nature of social media causes rifts between lovers who would rather not have this information. But in the information age, this does not bode well with the social pressure to participate in social networks.

dating apps like Tinder. These are described as time-killing machines – the reality game that overcomes boredom, or alternatively as social e-commerce – shopping my soul around. After many hours of swiping, suddenly there’s a rush of dopamine when someone likes you back. ‘The goal of the game is to have your egos boosted. If you swipe right and you match with a little celebration on the screen, sometimes that’s all that is needed. ‘We want to scoop up all our options immediately and then decide what we actually really want later.’25 On the other hand, ‘crippling social anxiety’ is when you match with somebody you are interested in, but you can’t bring yourself to send a message or respond to theirs ‘because oh god all I could think of was stupid responses or openers and she’ll think I’m an idiot and I am an idiot and…’

The metric to measure today’s symptoms would be time – or ‘attention’, as it is called in the industry. While for the archaic melancholic the past never passes, techno-sadness is caught in the perpetual now. Forward focused, we bet on acceleration and never mourn a lost object. The primary identification is there, in our hand. Everything is evident, on the screen, right in your face. Contrasted with the rich historical sources on melancholia, our present condition becomes immediately apparent. Whereas melancholy in the past was defined by separation from others, reduced contacts and reflection on oneself, today’s tristesse plays itself out amidst busy social (media) interactions. In Sherry Turkle’s phrase, we are alone together, as part of the crowd – a form of loneliness that is particularly cruel, frantic and tiring.

What we see today are systems that constantly disrupt the timeless aspect of melancholy.31 There’s no time for contemplation, or Weltschmerz. Social reality does not allow us to retreat.32 Even in our deepest state of solitude we’re surrounded by (online) others that babble on and on, demanding our attention

distraction does not pull us away, but instead draws us back into the social

The purpose of sadness by design is, as Paul B. Preciado calls it, ‘the production of frustrating satisfaction’.39 Should we have an opinion about internet-induced sadness? How can we address this topic without looking down on the online billions, without resorting to fast-food comparisons or patronizingly viewing people as fragile beings that need to be liberated and taken care of.

We overcome sadness not through happiness, but rather, as media theorist Andrew Culp has insisted, through a hatred of this world. Sadness occurs in situations where stagnant ‘becoming’ has turned into a blatant lie. We suffer, and there’s no form of absurdism that can offer an escape. Public access to a 21st-century version of dadaism has been blocked. The absence of surrealism hurts. What could our social fantasies look like? Are legal constructs such as creative commons and cooperatives all we can come up with? It seems we’re trapped in smoothness, skimming a surface littered with impressions and notifications. The collective imaginary is on hold. What’s worse, this banality itself is seamless, offering no indicators of its dangers and distortions. As a result, we’ve become subdued. Has the possibility of myth become technologically impossible?

We can neither return to mysticism nor to positivism. The naive act of communication is lost – and this is why we cry

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge

Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook's users to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook's investors made their conduct illegal.

Today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.

Such a tool would allow someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook vegans get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters.

In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers

the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to.

anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some surprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.

If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.

Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet). Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We're rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.

As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web.

Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

For users who have privacy needs -- and other needs -- beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.

helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we'd be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet