När jag växte upp på 00-talet var alla överens om att Internet inte var på riktigt. Kanske gällde det speciellt vi som växte upp där. Internet låg över världen som en dubbelexponering, men alla var överens om vilken av bilderna som var den riktiga. Vi som levde stora delar av våra liv på nätet tyckte visserligen att det var serious business, men det var också något självironiskt bakom det. Ingen skulle ha hävdat att USAs invasioner av Irak och Afghanistan som på ett liknande sätt formade min uppväxt var “serious business”. Om något verkligen är på allvar säger man inte att det är på allvar.

Tidsandan fångas kanske bäst av den obegripliga animen serial experiments lain, där Internet deltar som ett obegripligt surrande som bryter in mer och mer i verkligheten parallellt med att huvudpersonen Lain bygger sig en större och större dator. Ungefär samtidigt blir världen (och animen) mer och mer obegriplig. På samma sätt tog sig Internets inbrott i verkligheten till uttryck som obegripliga flashmobbar, Wikipedia som alla vet att man inte kan lita på, skolskjutningar och hot om olika terrorattentat.

Men Internets kanske största genombrott i verkligheten var piratkopieringens andra guldålder. I takt med att samhället kopplades upp kunde det digitalas löfte, gratis oändliga kopior av allt som existerar digitalt, infrias i form av kraftigt ökad tillgång till media, framför allt till musik som inte krävde lika mycket bandbredd som video. Vi som redan levde på internet blev plötsligt grindvakter till en flod av musik och de senaste biofilmerna hemma i soffan för alla normies. Internet var för oss magi: ockult i bemärkelsen okänd kunskap som kunde översättas till makt i köttrymden.

Det är därför som operationerna och senare rättegången mot The Pirate Bay tillsammans med FRA-lagen var så viktiga delar av min uppväxt. De var verklighetens symmetriska intrång i Internet. De visade oss hur totalitär staten och majoritetsverkligheten är; de måste hela tiden söka total kontroll över varje elektron i verkligheten och varje bit i cyberspace, samtidigt som de förstås alltid misslyckas i det korta loppet. Total kontroll är omöjlig. Det är därför världen inte har stagnerat helt.

För oss hackers var framför allt rättegången mot The Pirate Bay ett ofattbart kränk, inte för att de gav sig på några rätt tveksamma nördar (utom Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, som verkar hygglo) eller ens den stora warezkranen, utan för att de var så töntiga när de gjorde det. Henrik Pontén stod där i vittnesbåset och svamlade om “Ifpiss cider” (IFPIs seeder), och de här ärketönterierna skulle av någon anledning kunna påverka oss? På vårt Internet? Som de vi nedlåtande kallade gammelmedia betraktade som en obegriplig astralrymd och som myndigheterna inte ens hade ord att beskriva? De hade inte ens respekten att förstå oss innan de krossade oss som löss under kapitalets och statsmaktens stålskodda kängor.

Den upplevelsen är en av de mest radikaliserande jag varit med om (de andra är att försöka leva som trans i samhället samt att få barn; båda förtjänar separata texter).

Vi vet alla vad som händer sen på 10- och 20-talet. Dubbelexponeringen kollapsar, internet sipprar in överallt, det klibbar sig fast i allting och märks överallt som en dovt dunkande spänningshuvudvärk som aldrig går över, som ett ständigt surrande i fickan. Verkligheten är inte lägre begriplig. Boomers, som helt saknat naturlig immunitet mot Internet, får sina hjärnor smälta av Internet i sin nu fullt utvecklade och mycket farligare form på Facebook under pandemins isolering och börjar tro på konspirationsteorier som aldrig fått fäste för tio år sedan. Ryssland kanske gör något med det amerikanska valet på något sätt, eller så gör de inte det. Kina gör nåt med barnen på TikTok, men ingen förstår vad, varför eller hur. Det börjar talas om olika sociala smittor “på sociala medier”, och kanske är IS spöke som aldrig verkar dö i fart med att elda på svenska muslimers rimligenvälgrundade misstro mot svenska myndigheter. Eller är det kanske också en psyop från Kreml? Världen ter sig nu fullständigt obegriplig. Ingen har en aning om vad som händer, och, värre, man får en stark känsla av att de som bestämmer inte heller har det. Vilka de nu är.

En del saker är sig lika efter kollapsen. Vuxna oroar sig för dagens ungdom ungefär som när hårdrock och rollspel fördärvade ungdomen på 80-talet. De medier vi under bloggåren föraktfullt kallade för “gammalmedia” är fortfarande förbluffande ointresserade av att bevaka internet, och gör det ofta med samma valhänthet som på tidigt 00-tal. Ett typiskt exempel är P1s Medierna, som glatt uttalar Mastodon som man uttalar metadon och därmed verkligen visar att de inte precis är nere med kidsen. Med vilket jag menar oss i 35-40-årsåldern som flyttat dit efter att Elon Musk började demolera Twitter på allvar. Redaktionerna verkar helt enkelt inte veta hur man undersöker eller bevakar händelser på Internet, och verkar inte heller vara intresserade av att lära sig.

Till deras försvar kan man säga att en av de mer direkta effekterna av Internets kollaps in i verkligheten är att reklam i allmänhet och deras reklam i synnerhet kraftigt sjunkit i pris, vilket lett till en kris för i stort sett alla publicister och utslagning av många nischade och oberoende media (tex Arbetaren, som har en ärorik historia men idag är en betald blogg). Det är svårt att tänka sig att det är en situation i vilken man kraftigt rustar upp sin journalistik.

Beträffande det digitala löftet om distribution hamnade vi till slut i den sämsta av världar. Streamingtjänster som Spotify och Netflix betalar nästan lika dåligt för artister eller skådespelare som piratkopiering, men kommer med en statssanktionerad beskyddarverksamhet där pengarna går till bolagen själva. Det blir nästan töntigt tydligt att när skiv- och filmbolagen under 00-talet grät över olika artister och filmskapares försörjning om de inte fick upprätthålla sina distributionsmonopol i flera livstider tänkte de på sina egna yachtpengar.

Ännu mer ironiskt blir det när man ser till den nuvarande strekjvågen i Hollywood, där techbolag argumenterar mot upphovsrätt eftersom de vill kunna träna sina innehållsgeneratorer på skådespelare eller författare för att sedan kunna sparka dem och genom en teknologisk trollkaren från Oz-manöver tvätta äganderätten till innehåll. Motsvarande manöver är redan igång för skribenter och supportpersonal. Plötsligt är det ombytta roller. Det är nu vi som en gång kämpade för en minskad upphovsrätt som istället använder upphovsrättsanspråk för att försöka skydda oberoende författares, artisters, och skådespelares rätt till en skälig ersättning för sitt arbete.

Välkommen till den fullt utvecklade postmoderniteten.

#Swedish #theory

Our first child was born in early autumn 2022, almost perfectly timed with the latest energy-driven stagflation. Due to a combination of economic factors (in particular, the skyrocketing mortgage interest rates and cost of food) and the whole new parents' situation, we have very little money to spend, and even less time to spare. For at least the coming year or so, we will have to mostly make do with what we have.

This seems like a good time for some Nietzschean amor fati. To rise to meet the conditions, I will declare that I willed it so, I made it so. This year for my New Year's resolution, I resolve to Not Buy Anything.

Of Flying Cars and Moore's Law

There is a second reason behind this decision. Like David Graeber in his essay Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, I have for a while felt like there is something wrong with technology.

To take an example, I am writing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro. This machine is wonderful despite being ten years old; still fast enough for me by a good margin. I'd consider replacing the battery with a new one (it's still running on the original one). The only reason I would even consider upgrading it is that Apple has stopped rolling out OS updates for it, which also blocks my ability to develop apps for newer versions of iOS or macOS, including some for macOS necessary quality-of-life improvements to SwiftUI. I fail to see how this is not a blatant case of planned obsolescence, but for now, that is beside the point.

Before the new M1 Macs, every subsequent model of Mac except the virtually identical 2015 model was worse. The keyboards were more error-prone, the ports disappeared for no good reason, and there were no marked performance improvements. In particular, I don't need more performance (though I sometimes do need programs and webpages to be less inefficient). The M1 Macs are also worse; they don't have the MagSafe connector, a lifesaver in a cramped household with two adults, one baby, and one dog, and they are unable to drive two screens.

I grew up as a bottom-feeder on discarded late 1990s technology when a two-year-old computer was junk. Using a 10-year-old machine would have been inconceivable. This was when clock speeds were cranked higher every year and when storage went from holding megabytes to gigabytes, to hundreds of gigabytes, and then finally to terabytes. It seems to me that about when Moore's law changed from giving us faster computers to computers with more cores, other things started to change too.

The concept of a Pareto front might be useful to explain this. Whenever we optimise something as complex as a computer, there are trade-offs involved. Therefore, there isn't usually just one optimum but many Pareto-optima, equally good configurations with different trade-offs, none of which is a total improvement over any other in all aspects. Your computer can, for example, be optimal concerning power, portability, or energy efficiency, depending on which variable you prioritise. This leads to a frontier of equally optimal outcomes for (in our case) a given state of technology, the current Pareto frontier. The kicker is that as users of technology, we may value some properties over others, which means that our Pareto frontier may not be the same as the industrial one.

As technology improved, trade-offs became less and less severe between generations of hardware, with each new generation being essentially a Pareto improvement over the previous generation. Ultraportable laptops got acceptable screens, SSDs became large enough to replace most mechanical drives, and CPUs became fast enough to save power and therefore give even the most brütal gaming laptop an acceptable battery life (as long as the GPU was off). This meant that the Pareto frontier under the current level of technology grew to encompass most needs for most people, which crucially meant that each new model for most users was an improvement in something they cared about without any sacrifices, simply because everything got better.

At about the same time, we started hitting diminishing returns for the most possible improvements. What the improvement budget now affords us is slightly different trade-offs, but not equally distributed. Some fields show easier gains, which invites new trade-offs. This means that for most people, most upgrades are a lateral move at best, and often a partial downgrade. I lose the trip-free charging connector, my multiple screens, or the regular USB ports I still need, but I gain burst CPU speed I don't need, or battery life I only sometimes appreciate. To sell units, manufacturers must rely on increasingly unmotivated planned obsolescence driven by software, or social manipulation to manufacture demand.

In other words, the downturn in productivity that Graeber observes holds for computers too. I was promised advanced cybernetic implants, quantum computers, and general AI in four years and they can't even make the Google Glasses we were promised in 2013 a reality ten years after its announcement. Even the simulation technology Graeber means has replaced all technological progress is a disappointment. The current advances in “AI” shows no actual improvement in reasoning. Rather, the current advances in large language models are stochastic parrots perfectly follow Graeber's thesis. They're not so much about intelligence as a dual sleight of hand: hide the labour like in the mechanical turk, and make it appear to be intelligent without actually being so.

The true tragedy of our time is not that technologists insist on building the dystopian nightmare of Ready Player One as the fact that they can't even get that right. Imagine a broken torment nexus, stomping on a human face forever.

At the same time, products get more expensive and/or more enshittified as companies rush to extract more profits in the new nonzero-interest rate economy. All in all, it's a great time to lay flat and feed from the bottom.

#English #theory

Most modern computers — for now — are time machines. Like arctic ice sheets or tree trunks they are sediments upon sediments of historical baggage, layered on top of each other. You boot a computer into 1976, take a brief tour through the 80’s, before landing in the early 00’s where we remain to this day.

While this happens, a similar negotiation happens to the display through a process called mode setting, which essentially moves the time machine into higher and higher screen resolutions, each with a corresponding flicker of the screen. Earlier versions of Linux-based systems were designed by well-trained software engineers who could only conceive of systems in terms of interchangeable lego-like bricks.

One of the consequences of the lego brick fetish was that in addition to the flickering of the various boot programs (also the work of software engineers), there would be additional flickering as the lower-level bricks which knew only of the display hardware as abstract things handed off control over the screen to higher-level software that knew how to produce high-resolution visuals using modern graphics cards. The end result was a boot process that flickered in and out of consecutively less and less pixellated visuals until it finally arrived at the level where you could comfortably read the text.

These days, more display-related functionality has been moved into the lower lego bricks, and there is consequently less flickering.

My experiences working with these systems — and more important with their failures — were so formative that I still think in terms of them whenever I see a jagged edge of something that exposes a bit of the inner workings of a process that should have been hidden from me.

I find ruptures (and continuities) like the idiosyncrasies of the x86 architecture particularly interesting because they allow us to mark time. One of the things that have bothered me lately is how much slower time seems to move than in my youth. Nothing seems to be invented, from franchises to technology, no new political ideologies appear, etc. And most alarming of all: I, now in my 30’s, still feel like I understand youth culture, broadly speaking. I have clear memories of how clueless my parents were. For my entire life I have identified as old and grumpy, but my social age still has not managed to catch up with my biological age it seems.

Then some time ago, I was visiting a class for my training in academic teaching as a Ph.D. student. I remember walking around in the classroom, a classic slanted lecture hall, observing the students. A few of them turned to speak to me, since it turned out I had briefly TA:ed them in earlier courses, and I realised as they were turning from their friends I could see the flicker. They were switching from whatever mode of communication they were using natively to whatever legacy common layer they were using with other people.

I turned around in the room and realised I saw several cultural cues I could not read. Someone dressed as what I would have described as a male jock, but with bright nail polish. Was that a weird student thing, or part of some other cultural layer? I couldn’t tell. I saw stickers I had no idea what they meant. Proof of a vibrant culture I was not privy to.

And I thought: Thank god, at last.

#theory #English

In this post I discuss identity and uncertainty, coming out, and the strategic problems with working inside identity politics trough a personal experience and the recent debate about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria. Content Warning: mention of transphobia, discrimination against LGBT people, and gender dysphoria.

I was once asked by a woman at a meeting with an LGBT book club if I “was even out”. I did not know what to say then, but I should have answered “I don't know”, and the present day-answer is a resounding “no”. This is an attempt at untangling why I could not answer then, what that answer would have meant, and what changed.

The woman asking the question certainly meant no harm. Earlier in the evening she had told us about her personal experiences of grievous discrimination as a lesbian. This was one of the reasons I could not give her a straight (ha ha) answer. It would have been rude beyond imagination to tell the truth about how I felt; that the only thing I had was a deep-seated and persistent dislike for my gender identity and the social relations it entails, and that I felt that the categories of gender did not serve me. How could I tell someone who had fought their whole life for their right to exist in a certain framework of identity that I do not know how to live in it? So I mumbled until the topic of conversation moved on.

I want to stress that for all I know she would have understood me, had I tried to explain. This story is also one about the tyranny of low expectations, in a sense. But most of all, it is a story about my own information poverty (PDF link). The problem was not so much that the space was not safe enough. The problem was that I was rubbish at understanding my own gender identity. That type of understanding is not something you learn out of a book (as I had tried, desperately); it is a doing and not a reasoning. I had at least ten years' experience of reasoning, and very little of doing.

Of course, I could also paint a picture about the Old Guard against The New, of rigid Identity Politics against free-flowing Queer resistance. I think identity politics, meant as the politics of generating an identity and then fighting for its recognition, is form rather than content. It is just one of the main forms that politics of any kind can take in the West. To me, identity politics is a tactic, not a strategy. We rally under whatever identity banner is needed, never forgetting that the banner is only there as long as it serves whatever long-term strategy we have. Any identity is at the same time both oppressive and liberatory; the trick is to make that work to your advantage.

However, whenever an identity is deployed tactically, the conservative counter-move will immediately construct a no-man's land in between positions. This makes any subscription to such an identity politically charged, and often has severe personal consequences. It is not something one does on a whim. This is why we even have a process of “coming out”. If coming out was not an act of magic, materially changing reality by ritual action, it would not be a Big Thing.

All of this, of course, wreaks havoc on experimentation. It is not anybody's fault; it is simply the rules of politics.

One of the current battle lines of (identity) politics is gender identity, and specifically trans identities. Therefore, as an example of a strategic undermining of experimentation and self-knowledge, I will use the recently deployed term Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). The term was popularised by an article in PLOS ONE and describes a situation where young adolescents “rapidly” become trans, hinting at social contagion as a driving factor. In regular-person speak; kids are becoming trans because it's hip. This angle was recently pursued in a television program i Swedish state media (link in Swedish).

ROGD is obvious junk science. The PLOS ONE article had a correction published, and was heavily critiqued by professionals (for an overview, I would recommend Julia Serrano's excellent piece on Medium). Among the most serious problems of the paper was the recruitment of parents (without any verification) from anti-trans forums, some of whom seem to have been directly abusive towards their children. The situation was similar with the Swedish TV program; no trans children were interviewed, and parents showed clear signs of being less than supportive, at best. Later, one of the “children” (a trans man in his 20's) appeared on Twitter (thread in Swedish), refuting the claims about him made by his mother, whose first name, voice, and face was shown on prime-time national television. The superhumanly measured and very adult response is even more gut-wrenching viewed in the light of his mother's performance on the show.

ROGD is grown organically on transphobic parents. It uses common tropes we all know; parents' alienation from their teenage children and vice versa, worries about The Youth Of Today, and the general disdain for young persons presumed to be “female”. It mobilises them for FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt of the type that always grows readily where entrenched assumptions are challenged. The main point is not to change the scientific consensus on trans issues; that is probably too hard. Like climate change denial junk science, ROGD uses the veneer of science, rather than actual science, to instill doubt and create the appearance of uncertainty. This will salt the earth for in particular trans youth interacting with clueless people (and institutions), even if they are well-meaning, which is why ROGD is an amplification attack. It exports the bigotry of transphobic parents and makes it look like a legitimate and “cautious” medical position.

The situation becomes even worse considering that in the current power dynamic parents have reason to worry about their trans children. If, generally speaking, being trans were no harder in than being cis, there would be no need for trans rights activism.

The key counter to these tactics is, I think, to lower the barrier of entry to experimentation. Tumblr and fandom in general did wonders here, but there will of course be others, and we should all start thinking about what they should look like. Good old public education (activism, I mean activism) is also an effective counter. And science is on our side here; there is a reason they had to recruit from transphobic parent forums to get their material and publish in fast-and-loose journals.

Just listen to me, I already sound like I am in the trenches.

Oh, and remember: conservatives always lose in the end.

Picture originally from British Library's collection Sensuous life in the trenches, used under CC-BY-NC 4.0. I know it is very on the nose, and I am sorry.

#theory #English

#fiction, #theory, #diary, #Swedish, #English.