The Antisocial Socialist

You're a nerd, right? You're a nerd who likes Galaxy Quest (1999) starring Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, and Sigourney Weaver. Sure you are. You want to hear some nerds talk about it for an hour or so? Why not!

Two Old Farts Talk Sci-Fi ft. Rachel A. Rosen "Galaxy Quest (Sigourney Weaver Pt 2)," is ironically the first part of a two parter about nerd comedy, sci-fi conventions, and Acting.

 It's the last day of the semester. I'm taking a course that will last all summer so that I'm technically qualified for my job that I've now been doing for a school year. It's been awhile since I've done one of these courses—which we pay for ourselves and no, most newer-than-20-years teachers do not get our summers off—and I didn't realize the extent to which chatbot-assisted plagiarism is commonplace. Technically the prestigious Queen's University has an AI policy but that doesn't stop everyone from making uncanny valley infographics using ChatGPT. Shameful really.

I was discussing it with a colleague yesterday and he confessed that he also uses ChatGPT to make his comments sound smarter and more polished. I said that I preferred blunt honesty and authentic voices that didn't plagiarize from writers like me, who were not compensated for the theft of our work by AI corporations. But we both agreed that the workload is being rapidly increased, both in courses and on the job, with the expectation that chatbots are reading and writing for us.

All of which is to say that chatbot companies must be burned to the ground for the survival of the species. Or rather, NIMBYs and revolutionaries must unite to stop this fucking scourge. It Could Happen Here's short monologue, "The Necessary War On Data Centres" details how this  is happening already and its potential to grow into a proper political movement. It's one of the most hopeful things I've listened to in a good long time.

Let's take our world back from the death cultists who want to burn it down and upload themselves into a machine consciousness.

 This one is very near and dear to my heart, and it is Wizards & Spaceships' "Indigenous Survivance For the Zombie Apocalypse ft. Daphne Singingtree." Daphne is a Lakota midwife, author, activist, and prepper, and she has both a fascinating life story and a perspective on surviving through climate collapse and collective action that I think everyone should hear.

Discussions of prepping usually stress me out. I don't have a go bag. I don't have a lot of useful skills. I do know my neighbours very well and can cook in a pinch I guess, but my plan to survive the collapse of civilization is not to survive it. I find Daphne's framing to be super helpful in both practical and narrative situations.

Also she was at Standing Rock so that part of the discussion is also amazing.

Anyway, check it out.

 Yep I'm back on my bullshit.

This week's episode is Tech Won't Save Us, "Do AI Chatbots Belong In Schools? ft. Tom Mullaney" 

I bet you're going to be real surprised at the answer.

The cool thing about this episode is that it looks at chatbots in the history of ed tech in general. I've often said that the ultimate goal for education is that you'd have 50 students or so warehoused in a classroom, completing modules on screens, disciplined by non-unionized babysitters, while a handful of teachers get paid to write and perform lessons. But that was overly optimistic; those teachers would get paid too much and you can have LLMs write it instead. 

It's not that all ed tech is bad. It's just that most of it, historically, has been 1) garbage and 2) in service of privatizing and degrading education. 

It shouldn't surprise me that the following approaches to combatting LLMs in schools have failed:

1) The catastrophic, world-destroying environmental cost
2) Intellectual property
3) The cognitive damage it does to children (we have accepted causing brain damage to children in schools, thanks to covid and sports)

Possibly all that remains is the legal liability battlefield. I've had some luck, when chatbots get forced on us, in pushing back by asking if lawyers have reviewed liability if one of the company's products causes the kid to kill themselves or commit a violent crime, given that its architecture is based on software that has caused kids to die by suicide and murder others. No one has seemingly thought about this so it's always a relief hearing tech journalists like Paris Marx and teachers like Tom Mullaney pushing back on the consensus that "personalized tutors" are maybe not a great thing to be inflicting on children.

Last night, I went to see Sumud + Clinical Silence at the Redwood Theatre, put on by East End Acts and featuring Omar El Akkad, Tarek Loubani, Dorotea Gucciardo, Jay Geerts, and Samira Mohyeddin, with a dance performance by Mona Ayesh. It was long, intense, and heartwrenching. As Omar El Akkad put it, there is nothing that you could say that will get me back in line in regards to Palestine. However. I make a point of not watching gory footage—not because I don't care, but because it doesn't help the victims in any way for me to be upset. Sumud in particular is shockingly graphic, featuring an American anesthesiologist who travels to Gaza to provide medical support.

( some details that might be triggering )

I'm hard to shock. These are all things that I know, objectively, and yet when I'm confronted with them so bluntly I can still be shocked. It's important to still feel things.

This afternoon, I went with ioplokon to see a rather spectacular production of Fiddler On the Roof in Yiddish. I was also genuinely moved—these are my people, this is the culture that I can be proud of, even if I'd be as at odds with it as Tzeitel and Hodel are. It's really well done and if they remount it wherever you live, go see it. In a juster parallel universe, Yiddish is my first language, and it was really beautiful to hear it spoken. Also the actor playing Tevye is just jaw-droppingly good.

Of course, there is one part in it where, having been evicted by the Tsar's men, everyone must leave Anatevka. While Tevye, Golde, and their two youngest daughters will find safety in America, Hodel is stuck in Siberia and Tzeitel and Motel will go to Poland, to an historically uncertain fare. Yente announces that she's going to Israel, and this got a smattering of applause from some people in the audience who do not see the irony in a story about a group of people who are routinely stripped of their homes and possessions and forced to uproot, under threat of extreme violence, over and over again.

(The irony was, I think realized in the production itself, which throws its strongest sympathies behind the socialist student Perchik and his vision of a better, multicultural, and just future.)

I don't have a particularly clever way to conclude it, beyond that I'm glad I saw both things, I hope other people will see them and talk about them.

I assumed Dreamwidth was down the last few days but nope, my VPN no longer likes it, anyway. Hi. Whoops.

Just finished: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. I loved this, I need you all to read it 1) to understand certain aspects of my identity and 2) so that I can scream about it with someone else. 

I want to particularly note the prominence of Exodus, which is a book/film that had a huge influence on me as a kid, turned me into an insufferable Zionist for a couple years, actually had a massive role in ending the Hollywood Blacklist, and no one ever talks about as a work of Riefenstahl-esque propaganda. Night Night Fawn devotes a large segment of its middle act to the film and its role in shaping Barbara's relationship with Israel, as well as with her husband and ultimately her son (who she names after a secondary character). 

Anyway, it is really good. Incredibly good.

Currently reading: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed. This is the third novella in The Annual Migration of Clouds, which I haven't read, but it follows a side character on a completely different story. So. Post-apocalypse, climate catastrophe, weird parasitic infection, society trying to rebuild. It's set in Alberta, which is cool. Henryk, who has made some kind of mistake that has led to a death back home, leaves his relatively safe community to travel to his uncle's much less safe village, where there are still raiders and bears. But, critically, there is a tree farm, which is vital in regrowing the forest. Everyone is deeply unfriendly to him. It's kind of cool reading the third in a series when you haven't read the other two because so much of the worldbuilding is backgrounded. Also, she's just a hell of a writer.

Just finished: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Yeah, I just don't know what to make of this one. I liked every element, including what I really do think is a deliberate distancing mechanism. But it didn't cohere for me. It was all sweep and no substance, if that makes sene.

I think there is a huge challenge when your main character and some of your secondary characters are poets, which is the same problem as making them the Greatest Investigative Reporter Of All Time. Stephen King got it right; he makes a lot of his writer characters hacks and frauds churning out work for an agent. Thierry, the main character in this book, is a tavern poet who draws the ire of the powerful through bawdy, satirical poetry, but we never see anything truly edgy from him. It's probably not my main problem with the book, but it's indicative of what feels like a weird kind of restraint to get down and dirty with the characters.

I do think it's good overall, but I wanted to figure out why people are so feral for this guy and I still don't know, beyond that he does really write beautiful prose.

Currently reading: Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. Speaking of getting down and dirty with the characters, this is much more up my alley, and holy shit. I was primed to like this after hearing a podcast interview with the author but it really is wild. It's the deathbed ramblings of Barbara Rosenberg, mother of Jordy Rosenberg, though it's a fictionalized Barbara and a fictionalized Jordy, and while she did die, they had reconciled to a far greater extent than the characters seen here. Barbara is a TERF and a Zionist and Jordy is trans and a Marxist. She's vile to him from childhood but as she sickens, she's increasingly and resentfully reliant on him. He barely appears in the present part of the narrative, except as a weird giant bird (she's on a lot of opioids) that's menacing her.

The other day I had drinks with a friend that I met over the internet who's visiting Toronto from New York, and we bonded over a shared love of Tony Kushner's Angels In America. She referred to the Roy Cohn character as "Cohn with Kushner's fist up his ass," which is really what's happening here. It's very much the voice of A Character but used in an incredibly skillful way to get across her interiority while also examining and critiquing her worldview. This is absolutely a real sort of person—I'm related to a lot of Barbaras, let me tell you—but it's also sort of elevated to this Shakespearean tragedy.

This book is hitting me hard. Barbara is a monster, yes, but she's a monster with depth and dimension and specificity, and as someone who often writes from the monster's point of view, she's just incredibly compelling. I can't imagine what it took for Jordy Rosenberg to write this. I would specifically anti-recommend this for a lot of people but I am enthralled.

Also very grateful for my own mom for not being like this omg.

Just finished: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. I don't have a lot to add since I'd almost finished it last week, but the final setpiece, a massive, multi-tactic demonstration, is really well done. 

Currently reading: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Time to start Aurora Awards reading. TBH I started one of the best novels—won't say which one—and found it very much unparsable in the way that some secondary world fantasy is just too much for me, so I moved on to this one. I'm around halfway through and the jury's still out.

This one is set in Fantasy Medieval France and follows a tavern poet who's recruited by the local provost to help him solve the murder of a duke who is running the country, since his brother, the king, suffers from an undisclosed madness. Great concept, cool characters, the setting is a breath of fresh air, and I cannot argue that Kay is a superb prose stylist.

And yet I almost always bounce off his work. There's a certain Tolkienesque narrative distance that I think works for Tolkien but feels peculiarly pre-modern. Objectively, I respect this as a deliberately alienating technique, but it means that I don't bond with it in quite the same way, and takes a tremendous feat of writing elsewhere to make me love it. It's entirely possible that this will hit that and I'm giving it a chance but so far I'm feeling that I like what he's doing but don't feel emotionally invested.

Okay so.

This.

This.

Wizards & Spaceships season 3 begins with this banger:

Didactic Fiction ft. Vajra Chandrasekera, Samantha Mills, and Gregory A. Wilson

Drop what you're doing and go listen.

This one was a financial crime one, so you know I'm into it. I don't know why I'm like this either.


( The Winning Bid )