I’m glad to see some political groundswell against these data centers.
In late July, I took a tour with my choir through Eastern Oregon. To get there, we drove along the Columbia River on I-84, and one of the shocking new features of that highway is the huge data centers built along the river next to the dams at Hood River, Cascade Locks, and The Dalles. They are enormous, out of human proportions, and blandly ugly. They are uglier than the wildest phantasm of Socialist brutalism dreamed by a 1980’s Cold Warrior. Their presence by the river is a third theft, not just water and electricity but beauty, too.
We need data centers. Locate them somewhere else, and the power is dirtier and the water more scarce. I worry, though, about the scale of these buildings. There have always been upper limits on the economies of scales. Build too large of a factory, and there will not be enough workers. These buildings, these massive industrial park blanknesses, do nothing that you can see with the naked eye except turn electricity into steam. They have few workers. Everything goes in and out through a wire or a pipe.
Do we need this many data centers? Even under the logic of capitalism, which I am more friendly to than most I know, price is the outcome of a vast behavioral computer. Prices aren’t working right now. There’s a thumb on every scale. Vast stores of work and value and resources are being fed into a fire underneath a cauldron that might never come to boil.
I can’t bring this to any more of a coherent conclusion other than we need a global emissions tax system.
I think this is a great video for Bernie Sanders, and I hope he recovers quickly.
I was pretty turned off by some acquaintances crowing about how “Bernie Bros” need to get in line behind Elizabeth Warren after being hospitalized. I thought it was in very poor taste. Elizabeth Warren has been my dream candidate since before the 2016 primary, but I don’t believe that either of the people posting in favor of Warren would be supporting her if Bernie wasn’t soaking up the criticism of defining the left edge of politics.
I will have an extremely hard time deciding between Sanders and Warren if the primary is still contested when Oregon votes. They are far and away my first and second choice candidates. But part of the lesson I took from 2016 was that some people voted by trying to scry the winds and choosing the best candidate that would get a huge majority, and other people voted to change the weather. This time around, I wanted to help create the weather.
The plane of possibility is shifting so very quickly. I don’t think Beto O’Rourke has a chance in hell of moving forward as a presidential candidate and I think it was a remarkable act of hubris for him to run in the first place, but I’ve been so delighted by his choice to stop triangulating and confidently and plainly state his gun control realism: “…I want to be really clear that [gun buybacks are] exactly what we’re going to do. Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell them to the government.” Júlian Castro and immigration, Jay Inslee and climate change, and Marianne Williamson (!) and reparations serve the same purpose (I loathe Williamson, but she got to a truth when she referred to the “dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country,” that Hillary Clinton, hobbled into ineloquence by her politician filter, tried to get at with the “deplorables” comment ).
Against the backdrop of these legitimately courageous positions, Joe Biden seems like a man from another time, like an old social studies textbook or an old government building with trash bags covering the water fountain next to a laminated sign warning about lead testing. One of the most important functions Bernie Sanders serves in this primary is to deflate Biden’s self-satisfied narrative of his legislative record in the Senate. Sanders has kept to a very consistent moral compass in his life in public service on domestic issues as well as foreign policy issues. Biden has done the best he could to help the most number of people–once the interests of the powerful have been satisfied. Most politicians do that calculus, all that changes is who is considered powerful. Sanders seems not to, and that is the heart of his appeal to those who have put their hope in him.
I’m rambling now, but all of this is to say that when I read that post prematurely dancing on Bernie Sanders grave, it felt to me like that person was choosing to pretend that the issues that are most important to me because they will define my adult life–student loan debt, housing, the climate, single payer healthcare, LGBT employer nondiscrimination–are all less important than perpetuating animus against a politician who has completely transformed the way that Democrats are talking about these issues. If there’s a candidate like Hillary Clinton running in this race, it’s Joe Biden, and it wasn’t good enough for me in 2016 and it isn’t good enough for me now. Please, by all means, vote for Elizabeth Warren and get excited about her policy ideas, just don’t be shitty about the person who cleared the way for her ideas to be viable.
Last week Gillette released an advertisement called The Best Men Can Be (25m+ views) which in 90 seconds presents this masculinity pageant: toxic masculinity has been perpetrated by men forever, now the #MeToo movement has shed light on it, now nothing will be the same, we’re not afraid of it because men can be better, here’s a couple of clips of men already being better.
This morning, I read this plainspoken line in Heather Havrilesky’s new book of essays, What If This Were Enough: “We are living in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonesty.” There’s a fever going on right now and the dead-end racist, sexist bluster that is destroying our governmental infrastructure by pushing out government workers, the two documentaries about the fraud and waste of the Fyre Festival (resplendant in its stupid fucking novelty spelling), and Tony Blair grinning like a naughty schoolboy as he struggles to defend himself against the characterization of Davos as “a family reunion for the people who broke the modern world” all seem to be in dialogue with each other.
We’re also trapped in this this slow motion racist gaslighting sparked by a group of white boys from a Catholic school harassing a man they assumed had no power. When the public gave that man power through their attention, their parents circled to protect them and used every connection they had to take it back. A friendly CNN interviewer and the President helped them do it.
Last year, the Canadian government asked the Pope for an apology to the Inuit and Métis peoples for the role the church played in operating genocidal boarding schools and orphanages for Native children. A spokesman for the Pope responded: “After carefully considering the request and extensive dialogue with the bishops of Canada, he felt that he could not personally respond.”
Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington, when asked if he felt like apologizing for his actions, said “I wish we could’ve walked away and avoided the whole thing, but I can’t say that I’m sorry for listening to (Phillips) and standing there.” In his written statement, he wrote, “I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me”.
Here’s what connects these phenomena: We are living through a time where the mechanism by which privilege perpetuates itself—by controlling the story and by controlling what context gets incorporated into the story—is becoming more and more nakedly visible as the divide between those who are benefitting from current political, cultural and economic conditions and those who must change those conditions in order to have a thriving future is becoming wider. Privilege is the power to say “you didn’t see what you saw. And if you did it wasn’t that bad. And if it is that bad, you should see what this other person did. And if you still have a problem with that, Jesus said ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'”
It’s bullshit.
Here’s why the Gillette advertisement is bullshit, too:
Gillette’s shaving products do not play a significant role in gender-based violence or economic inequality. They did not, for example, run a PSA about not using single-use plastic items.
The advertisement perpetuates a fantasy alternate history where toxic masculinity was a thing that nobody knew was wrong, then #MeToo happened and men realized it was wrong and changed the world. You can’t simplify the narrative like that without performing the same erasure that toxic masculinity needs to perpetuate itself.
Gillette continues to sell rectangular razors to men in tough blue and gray boxes and oval razors to women in pretty pink and green boxes.
Gillette apparently believes that you solve toxic masculinity by being tough and intervening in fights and shouting positive affirmations at your daughter in the mirror*, as opposed to, say, looking at pay inequalities and family leave policies in their company and supply chain.
You cannot credit with–or protest–Gillette changing the culture of masculinity without imputing authority over masculinity to Gillette. Both sides reinforce the desired message, which is that buying Gillette is being a man.
*Which was very cute, I’m not a monster.
Pointing all of this out pedantic, because we all have a baseline expectation that power and bullshit go together. The government is so clogged with bullshit it cannot perform even the most basic functions. The church is so full of shit that people stopped going then discovered what a better social adaptation that is. Institutions that used to police bullshit like universities and newspapers now support themselves by distributing the bullshit (plus, we know that they only ever policed bullshit for white dominant culture, so even calling them the bullshit police is itself a kind of bullshit). Brands are bullshit, but they also seem to kind of work and are kind of accountable to the public sometimes so we give them feedback with love or scorn because that sometimes works and nothing else seems to work.
Gillette has total control over its workplace. It has control over its products, its marketing. It has a lot of influence over the city and state in which it has offices. It did not choose to make change in those spheres in which it has a lot of power. Instead, Gillette is trying to change the way you think about masculinity, which is a power that you have to give it.
So gender progressives have to pretend that liking an advertisement means supporting women and gender troglodytes have to pretend that their honor was sullied by a razor blades and queer folks have to pretend that a company that differentiates its products by gender are going to teach men to protect nonbinary kids and on and on and on…
I think all of that pretending has a cost. I think every time that we do it we erode, just a little bit, our ability to see what else could be possible, what real change would look like. Resisting, though, is not cute and feels useless. In my own real life, where I have total control over me, someone asked what I thought of the Gillette ad and I just shrugged and didn’t say anything.
The Giffords shooting is one of those news events where I have a crystal clear memory of where I was when I heard the news and what exactly I was doing. I was at my high school’s Alumni Weekend. These weekends are heavily attended by the classes that graduated the two years before, with declining attendance thereafter as people become constrained by the larger tides of their lives. Usually the biggest pool of attendees comes from those with families in the area, or those who are attending school in the greater Los Angeles region.
I was in our school’s Commons, hiding out in the area where there was plentiful tables and chairs and internet access. There were two types of people there, a handful in all: social media junkies, like me, people for whom a couple of hours without access to Facebook and Twitter is an insurmountable burden; and type-A executive types for whom checking email and messages frequently is part of their job description. It was a pretty random group of people. There wasn’t anyone else from my class, the ties of the school the only thing we had in common.
And once I saw the story, I remember turning to the woman next to me, and asking her if she had heard the news about the congresswoman from Arizona. In that moment, it felt like one of those events for which I could invade another person’s solace. And I saw the look in her eye, like she had been thinking about the same things that I had. Thinking about whether this was the beginning of a long period in which people with guns could destabilize an entire nation, the beginning of the period in which law and order and the democratic vision would crumble under the power of a single madman. We had no knowledge of the shooter, only the knowledge that this was a time when things could go bad.
There are 6 days of class left in the school year, and it is pretty safe to say that I have checked out at this point. I guess that this had to come at some point. The sad fact is that I have been so busy taking this semester week by week that I never realized how close to the end I was. Now that I realize this, I can’t think about anything else. On another (possibly related) note, I have been spending ungodly amounts of time in the Comic Book Reading Room (MILL). I have recently finished three titanic titles, giants in their field. I figured that I would write this in the style of a New Yorker film review, in light of Anthony Lane’s thinly veiled contempt for the form.
hammer & jack 