The New York Times has published an article on AI-generated faces which strikes me as an informal litmus test of our humanity, or at least of neurotypical emotional response. Here’s how to work it.
Scroll through the mega-composite image at the top of the article — do it slowly, then quickly, then varying your speed — while listening to some emotionally triggering music, like, say, Max Richter’s Written on the Sky or On the Nature of Daylight. (Note: You have to be on the Times page to do that. But first click below to start the music. Or your own soundtrack selection.)
Watch what is happening in your emotional body. (That’s the body that diagrams like this one and research articles like this one attempt to map out.) If that body isn’t triggered — butterflies in your chest, throat tightening, eyes and facial muscles responding, mirror neurons alighting, spine tingling — then you may not be human.
Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary).
Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning democracies, both of those institutions are supported, at least in part, by the state, which is in turn supported by people according to their abilities (through taxation).
This article is cross-posted from the media ecologies blog e2mc.
While last week’s election has resulted in the announcement of a new president and vice-president, with leaders of many countries around the world recognizing those results (and with global markets rallying their apparent support), the current Trump administration has not recognized them. As with the debate over the scientific veracity of climate change, what we have with this election is two sides, each of which has decried the other as a source of disinformation.
President Trump and his proxies have repeatedly claimed to be victorious and accused the Democrats of “stealing” the election through massive “fraud,” with the “mainstream media” complicit, censorious, and biased in the Democrats’ favor. All of Trump’s supposed enemies—in the Democratic party, among Republican “never Trumpers,” in the media, and ensconced in various levels of government—are taken to make up a “deep state” that is untrustworthy, nefarious, and committed to stopping his administration from continuing what they have “started.”
On the other side, the election has been taken to be fair, having played itself out more or less according to expectations — with in-person balloting showing more support for Trump, and mail-in ballots, which in most states were counted later, showing significantly more support for Biden (albeit with pollster projections somewhat off, as in 2016). (One of the possible reasons suggested for that degree of polling error is QAnon; more on them below.) The fairness of the election, despite known challenges, has been confirmed by international observers. The margin of victory for Biden is clear and Trump’s protestations are taken to be largely or completely unfounded and intended to disinform the electorate and rile up his base of supporters. This interpretation has been more or less accepted by most major media organizations, with governments around the world supporting it through their congratulatory statements to the Biden-Harris team.
As with the issue of climate change (and to some degree with Covid-19), the questions surrounding these election results, especially for media attempting to cover those results, are therefore: which side should we trust, and why? Is there a factual basis for deciding between them, or should both sides be given “equal air time,” with voters and observers being left to “make up their own minds”?
One of the things I study is spiritual practices – which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as the things people do to enhance their capacity to live in accordance with chosen ideals. Those ideals can be defined in religious terms (for instance, as salvation, enlightenment, or unity with God) or in more secular and philosophical terms (as happiness, success, glory, power, longevity, and the like). They can be abstract (salvation, happiness) or concrete, specific, and even personal (Jesus, Guanyin). What makes the practices spiritual is that they cultivatecapacity. Their goal includes the assumption that there is something in us that can grow, improve, or increase in its ability to act upon itself in and with others (with those others sometimes being cosmic others).
In the Christian historical context, the concept of “spirit” has been juxtaposed against an opposite — matter, the body, the flesh, “the world” — that is considered inferior and opposed to it. But today’s popular usage has mostly supplanted that idea. When we speak of “team spirit,” someone being “spirited,” or something that is “in spirit rather than in letter,” we acknowledge this more generic use of the word. Spirit is what motivates us, what gives us strength, what makes us lively, vibrant, and connected to the world outside of ourselves.
In the current political moment of “the interregnum before the Interregnum” — where the second denotes the formal period between an election and the new leader’s assumption of power, while the first denotes the informal period between the vote and the announcement of its results — we see all kinds of spiritual practices in evidence.
Cross-posted from e2mc. Note that this post takes the Stoic strategy of preparing for the worst, so as to be pleasantly surprised when the worst fails to come to pass.
Deep breath, Americanos. Let’s brace ourselves for what may be the messiest, most litigious and disruptive Interregnum in U.S. history. (“Interregnum” = the 79 day interval between Election Day and the swearing-in of the next president.)
Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose origin is unknown and whose face is invisible, but whose presence is palpable.
Okay, it is Hallowe’en. Samhain, All Souls, Dias de los muertos. The veil between the worlds is thin, as they say. Which maybe just adds another layer to everything else.
But let’s stick with everything else. In this country at least, coronavirus cases are at their highest levels ever — topping 100,000 in one day for the first time, and close to 1,000 deaths. And there is an election coming… or, rather, swarming around us, with the very real possibility that no clear result will arrive on Tuesday, or at least be accepted by all. The prospect of no clear outcome feels like the kind of vacuum that will quickly fill with possibilities we don’t really want to imagine.
I’ve begun posting updates on media coverage related to the U.S. presidential election (and related issues, such as social media disinformation) on my blog e2mc, which I’ve restarted to accompany my course “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” Here is the latest post, which summarizes some key stories from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. I may cross-post some things here, but not everything. To stay up to date, go to e2mc.
For an observer of the politics of the “media ecosystem,” so much can happen in a single day, and even in a single newspaper (the Sunday New York Times).
Last night’s presidential debate was, in many ways, superfluous: if a U.S. citizen had not already made up their mind who they will vote for (or not already voted), it’s because they haven’t been paying attention.
But there is one factor pollsters and predictors of every stripe have not gotten good at accounting for, which can still have an impact. I call this the “secret ballot factor.” For all the things that went wrong in the 2016 presidential elections—the “horserace” media coverage that enabled a character like Donald Trump to take control of one of the two major parties, the levels of disinformation (from multiple sources) saturating so many levels of public culture and online media, and all the rest—this one factor has not been well understood nor extensively studied.
What I’m referring to is the psychological, emotional, and affective, dimensions underlying the secret ballot. The fact that Americans vote behind a privacy screen, and that no one will ultimately know who you voted for, gives the moment of voting a certain psychological potency: at that moment of (figuratively) “pulling the switch,” what you feel somewhere deeper than at the level of conversational culture can come through to the surface and voice itself through your pen-wielding hand. This is the level where people vote with their gut, not their head. (Mail-in ballots are different in this respect, and I’ll get to them in a minute.)
As I’ve been preparing to cover QAnon in my media course (and trying to keep up with it, since it’s really been ramping up ahead of the election), I’ve seriously begun to think of it is a work of evil genius. Let me explain why.
For starters, it’s worth reminding ourselves that QAnon was designated as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI last year, that dozens of U.S. congressional candidates (and a few representatives) have voiced support for it, and that President Trump’s Twitter feed is its most influential “superspreading” node. At last week’s nationally televised “town hall,” Trump refused to renounce the movement and instead nodded positively in its direction. Meanwhile, it is spreading rapidly in various forms not only in the U.S. but in Europe and around the world.
At heart, QAnon is an addictively interactive, video-game like, pyramid-schemey blob of a conspiracy theory, the ultimate in “conspirituality,” that has all the hallmarks of a new religious movement but with multiple entry points for different kinds of people. (As a new religious movement, it reminds me of the politically potent kinds of religious movements that China has seen a lot of, from the late medieval “redemptive societies” to Falun Gong.)
QAnon’s general subtext — that Donald Trump is taking on an elite global cabal of satanic and cannibalistic pedophiles, a group that includes everyone you most want to hate, especially if they are wealthy, liberal “globalists” of any stripe (but preferably Democrats) — is patently absurd. But that subtext is presented in a dizzyingly obfuscatory and beguilingly baroque, smoke-and-mirrors concoction that seeps into its followers’ psyches by engaging their hopes and fears in the most sinuously (and deviously) compelling ways.
Media+Environmenthas just published another article in its “States of Media and Environment” series, and this one should be of broad interest to environmental educators, media scholars, and environmentally concerned media users.
“Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact” draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. Four of the brief interventions in this multi-part article focus on streaming media’s carbon footprint, estimated by some to be 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (The Shift Project 2019). This startling figure is rising at a calamitous rate as more people around the world stream more media at higher bandwidth—now exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor in streaming media’s environmental impact is even less welcome: the deleterious effects of higher levels of electromagnetic frequencies that media corporations’ turn to fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology would exacerbate. These effects are well documented yet almost universally ignored. Despite all these findings, the notion abides that digital media are immaterial.
I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei’s superb cover design of my book. Cool.
Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead!
My course “Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice” starts from the premise that philosophy — at least as it has existed outside of today’s analytical philosophy departments — has generally been about how to live, and that the best philosophers around the world have offered detailed instructions on how to get better at that. Historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot has called those “spiritual exercises,” and some contemporary philosophers (including Michel Foucault in his last years and Peter Sloterdijk more recently) have tried, in some ways, to make it that again. Since that dovetails well with the current popular interest in spirituality, yoga, mindfulness, and other such things, I offer the course to provide some historical and cultural grounding to practices found in the spiritual and philosophical “marketplace” today.
It’s a survey course that moves from the ancient world (Greece, India, China) to today’s emergent spiritualities. We just covered the Hellenistic world last week, and one of the little tidbits I shared included some advice for living in difficult times. It’s intended to help students distinguish between the perspectives of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and specifically between what Stoics call the “view from above” — a kind of universe’s view on our lives — and what the Epicureans might have called the “view from within” (or the “argument from nature”). While the views below aren’t exactly demonstrative of these, I think they work in our present context.
I prefaced the comment by noting that I teach and research the cultural dimensions of the environmental crisis. (The spiritual practice course is a special course taught for my university’s Honors College.) That means that I’m as aware as anyone of the scope, scale, and difficulty of the challenges humanity is and will be facing in the coming decades — an awareness that is enough to make anyone a pessimist (no kidding). The Covid-19 pandemic has only made that awareness feel more acute. So these are ways of tempering a “pessimogenic” situation with what I think of as “realistic optimism.”
