work in progress

27 April 2023

what im workin on

Soo I've been WORKING on several essays that have yet to congeal into postable posts. While I generally don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good, they're longerform stuff I'd rather spend time and attn with vs posting half-assed versions of just to post.

but in the meantime, my writing block has let up for the first time in years and i'm feeling an itch to put shit out into the world. so! here's a short list of what i've been reading and thinking with.

moral panics

mastercard vs imgur porn

i decided i was dumb to have kinda ignored porn and sw more broadly in my mastodon post the day imgur announced it was banning NSFW content lol. evidently this is due to some new Mastercard regulations that are being enforced at the behest of an evangelical fash group exodus cry, previously ihop (lol), that's also behind a ton of nefarious stuff globally. ive got a post in the works thinking through the imgur stuff, but it surprised me that the fact a bitch cant search for noncon porn anymore dates back specifically to the april 2021 new mastercard regulations. not even law! mastercard is now kinkshaming me directly! ohh noo, mastercard...my free access to kinky vintage porn...nooo dont take it away....id do Anything...yes, anything.....

amy de'ath, max fox, rahul rao - sex panics, capitalism, and the global right -

i went to a talk hosted by, incredibly, an org fashioning itself Historical Materialism on Tues, and i am BUZZING. do not want to summarize the takeaways because i'd likely butcher them tbh but i was really invigorated by the talks and their helpfully very well flagged interlocutors. lots of discussion of fetishism and abstraction, two marx concepts which i really wish i had a better grasp on and am excited to read more on. on my reading list now are, among other things,

moishe postone - anti-semitism and national socialism -

finished this one immediately and was like Fuck damn this feels both very helpful and frighteningly relevant. i don't think i can summarize this one helpfully to be honest with you, i think i'd make some critical vocabulary errors trying. definitely worth the read, with the caveat that it's pretty marxist in terminology and can't really be translated outside those terms IMO (thus me not making the attempt). making me want to read time, labor, and social domination, postone's opus.

endnotes - the logic of gender: on the separation of spheres and the process of abjection -

speaking of marxist jargon. . . i'm halfway thru this but would not have even started if not for max fox's shoutout because hot damn this is theoretically dense. it's got that classic marxist text energy where i alternate between saying to myself "damn why didn't i think of that, that DOES follow straight from capital" and "damn i will never be smart enough in marx tm to fully understand any of this." a girl can dream. this tries to answer the age old question "why/how is womens/reproductive labor made unwaged, and as a result, why/how does capitalism require and proliferate particular structures of sex and gender" with rigor and precision. probably the authors would take fault with those terms, as they introduce more rigorous and precise ones and reject the framing of the question in the old binaries, but those are like, the stakes of the argument. stay tuned for when im literate enough in marxist feminism to translate to the common tongue.

stuart hall et al - policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order -

this seems to be another touch point, similar to postone's essay, for marxist takes on moral panics. not sure i have the bandwidth at the moment, this is like an actual book not an essay, but on the list for when i do.

techie stuff

raytracing in one weekend ( ) + real time rendering ( )

my atypically apolitical interest of the moment is graphics programming lol. i'm working through the book real time rendering w some friends from recurse. most of it is going over my head but that's fine, it's a Tome! the next few chapters are on physical rendering / ray tracing, so i wanna work through some ray tracing exercises so i know like, what that is how it works. will say optics was not my strong suit in physics but that's okay we'll manage!

tech learning collective ( ), over the wire ( )

someone linked some anarchist techie collective notes in a chat im in recently, one hyperlink led to another and i spent a bit of time reading heartbreakingly naiive technoanarchist takes on what "we" should "do" to "manifest" the "dream" of the "internet". im more of a luddite myself philosophically, but one take i did find interesting was that we need less programmers and more sysadmins if we're gonna be able to use tech for anticapitalist causes effectively. this is a somewhat intuitive thing considering many programmers learned it for work ("to build more exploitative apps" generally, i say as part of that ecosystem) and almost all "learn to code" programs are focused on job-readiness. versus, it's sysadmin and more fundamental knowledge-of-how-to-tape-things-together skills that would be needed to un-cloud-ify and de-monopolize web hosting, and on a broader scale to dream up more promising ways of interacting and organizing digitally.

obviously i'm rather skeptical of the idea that if enough individual anarchist citizens try hard enough, they can bootstrap together infrastructure to parallel the scale of major industry. not least of which because it is rarely industry money that builds the infrastructure, it's generally public (state) money, thus absolutely crumbling infrastructure paralleling the rise of neoliberalism in the us. but like. yeah probably it's a good idea to know how these things work a lil more if you want to do anything dangerous interesting w them.

i generally enjoy becoming more fluent on the cli and comfortable messing around on servers, so i think i'll keep hacking away at over the wire challenges when i have the time in between all my other hobbies lol. there's also the tech learning collective, but aside from their free content they seem to mostly be on hiatus in terms of hosting events.

tbh would love a pal in this endeavor, im a social learner. hit da email address below if you are also a baby protocol nerd +/ amateur sysadmin and wanna learn together.

a brief syllabus on the archive, psychoanalysis, and the desire for history

so in the middle of dicsussing the sections of

christopher chitty - sexual hegemony: statecraft, sodomy, and capital in the rise of the world system

about homosexuality and the desire for history, i reread

carolyn steedman - dust: the archive and cultural history

a book which which is in part about historicizing the desire for history, which led to me remembering it heavily cites

jacques derrida - archive fever: a freudian impression

which turns out to be a book which takes

yosef hayim yerushalmi - freud's moses: judaism terminable and interminable

as its primary subject. yerushalmi turns out to have another book that gets brought up somewhat surprisingly in neither archive fever, nor dust, that is

yosef hayim yerushalmi - zakhor: jewish history and jewish memory

which is an extended examination of the desire for history (or often, absolute lack thereof) throughout rabbinic judaism's history.

in thinking aloud to myself as to why neither dust (about the desire for history) nor archive fever (about many things because this is derrida lmao, but partially about the psychoanalytic desire for history/archive, which is for yerushalmi jewish in content) cite zakhor, and being reminded of the rather poorly-aged sections of totem & taboo, i remembered that carolyn steedman wrote another banger of a book before dust,

carolyn steedman - strange dislocations: childhood and the idea of human interiority

which is a book i've only read sections of but really enjoyed, and which is about (to quote the blurb) "how the individual and personal history that a child embodied came to represent human 'insideness'" and "the part that Freudian psychoanalysis played, between 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and reformulating the Victorian idea that the core of an individual’s psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood." which just seems overwhelmingly in conversation with many of the above texts. which is also interesting, considering that dust itself almost entirely neglects to talk about psychoanalysis (and thus freud's moses and the middle sections of archive fever, except in passing) and the psychoanalytic account of history. why? since carolyn steedman literally wrote a book on that subject?

so

i've got myself a little constellation of texts-in-conversation, and while I have yet to reread archive fever and strange dislocations, i'm very much looking to put these texts together in an interesting way in the near future. stay tuned!