Hyperlink Your Heart - TV

The Ancaps

2022-09-03T18:26:00+02:00

Much has been said already about the fact that HBO’s documentary series “The Anarchists” is not really about anarchists, and by people far more capable of making the argument than I. Nonetheless, I do have some thoughts on that and other aspects of the documentary.

My overall impression of the documentary is that it is philosophically vacuous and insincere. “Anarchism” is defined superficially by the characters in what is essentially an examination of interpersonal drama. The history of Anarchism proper, and its inherent conflict with capitalism is not explored, but neither, really, is “anarcho”-capitalism or the ideas behind it, on their own terms or otherwise. The community is simply mined for drama and spectacle. The main propaganda points of the doc lie in the fact that “freedom” is just implicitly associated with laissez-faire capitalism, and the appropriation of the word “Anarchism” and anarchist symbols by the right, a long-running project.

The Inherent Contradictions of Ancapitalism

Though the documentary has little interest in examining them, the cracks and contradictions in the ideology do show through.

I think it is safe to say that everybody who enthusiastically embraces an extreme capitalist ideology thinks that they are, or will be, the boss of whatever enterprise they are involved in. Of course this produces tension when it turns out that somebody’s property rights, and a lack of any critique of property or the hierarchies it produces, makes subordinates of people who consider themselves entitled to be in charge.

The Anarchapulco conference that the documentary focuses on was not organised in a non-hierarchical manner from its conception because anarcho-capitalism does not renounce all hierarchies, only the existence of the state. Jeff Berwick, the founder and apparent “owner” of the conference behaves throughout as if organising the conference is something that an employee should be doing on his behalf, with his own role limited to giving a keynote, receiving adulation, and partying.

The first such employee we are introduced to is Nathan Freeman, who apparently had a leading role in organising the conference for several years after attending the initial one. It seems to me that Freeman thought himself and Berwick were partners in the endeavour. Berwick obviously saw things differently, and replaced Freeman in 2019 with an outsider.

Tragically, it seems like Freeman couldn’t cope with this humiliation, and essentially drank himself to death. Berwick didn’t even offer condolences to his family, because he’s an enormous piece of shit.

There are a number of aspects to the circumstances of his death that a documentary that was an honest examination of anarcho-capitalism would interrogate. He fell victim to a crypto scam shortly before becoming sick. What is the anarcho-capitalist perspective on this kind of crime? What does history tell us about private money and its effects on society? It’s glossed over as an unfortunate, unavoidable risk of “freedom”. He had no insurance, and his family had to rely on charity to pay his medical bills. What is the anarcho-capitalist perspective on the provision of healthcare? The question is not even asked.

Interestingly, John and Lily, the young couple who flee to Mexico after being arrested on drug traficking charges, do form a critique of the hierarchical, commercial nature of the Anarchapulco conference, and start their own alternative conference called Anarchaforko. It’s a bit unclear the extent to which this is organised at all rather than just people showing up and doing whatever, but it seems to work, and I would love to hear more about how this fits with their apparent objectivist leanings. But of course we get nothing like that.

Stateless in Mexico

Probably the funniest aspect of the documentary for me is that the participants seem to think that Mexico is “more anarchist” than the US, just based on the general vibes. Mexico, of course, does have a state, and I don’t have any reason to think that it is “less of” a state than that of the US.

I think this sense of “anarchiness” is probably the result of a few different factors. Many of the ancap immigrants are relatively wealthy, and apparently speak little or no Spanish. They are essentially just squatting on top of Mexican society, with no real connections to it, and using their wealth to extract what they need from it. The Mexican state protects them, as states generally protect the wealthy. They have little negative contact with it, and don’t hear about other people’s negative interactions with it as they would in the US, because they don’t speak the language. They’re just living in a little fantasy colonialist bubble.

Some members of the community are not so well off, and they do have negative experiences with the Mexican state, ranging from dealing with bureaucracy to being pursued, threatened and arrested by the police.

Although Lily Forester is a member of the latter group, it is her concluding statement on the existence of the state that best sums up the general attitude:

I just want to be left alone, like, a state can exist if it’s going to leave me alone.

On a personal level I can relate, especially given what she went through, but it’s a far cry from the moral clarity of this Fannie Lou Hamer quote:

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Any meaningful conception of freedom can’t ignore that other people are subject to repression or exploitation, but that is exactly what these ancaps constantly do - the Mexican state is fine because I’m a rich foreigner and it leaves me alone, capitalist hierarchies are fine because I’m on top of them.

M’Aidez!

As I mentioned above, the primary participants in the documentary fall roughly into two groups - one comprised of relatively wealthy entrepeneurs like Berwick and the Freemans, and the other of struggling working class people like Lily Forester and John Galton, Jason Henza, and Paul Propert.

Though both groups are motivated by more-or-less the same ideology (Henza claims himself and Forester are not ancaps, but I don’t really see much distinction between anarcho-capitalism and voluntaryism or agorism myself), the differences between their circumstances is stark. The wealthy run their businesses from their lavish properties while the rest do odd jobs, deal drugs, and otherwise hustle to survive while living in marginal circumstances. As Thaddeus Russell notes:

It’s very easy to escape governments, banks and states if you’re already a Bitcoin millionaire. If you’re like John and Lily, you’ve got no resources, nothing, it’s hard, it turns out, and dangerous, in fact, to be an anarchist in Mexico.

The tension between these two groups is discussed at several points. The drug dealing and other illegal activity (like the theft of a Bitcoin ATM) are an inconvenience for the wealthy, and the unhinged Paul Propert is a potentially deadly threat to everybody, but they have no solutions. Everybody is just on their own to fend for themselves.

The documentary explores the backgrounds of Galton, Forester and Propert in some detail and finds a variety of broken homes, substance abuse problems, and other traumas. Like the characters themselves, it doesn’t seem to consider for a moment that the source of these traumas is the very social system that they cling to so tightly.

Nonetheless the clearest critique the documentary has for the anarcho-capitalist project is the lack of solidarity and support that those lacking means, and in dangerous circumstances, receive from the community, and what this would imply for an anarcho-capitalist society. Erika Harris, who ends up feeling alienated from the community and leaving Acapulco for Belize, makes this plea for mutual aid after John Galton is murdered, and Lily and Jason are on the run:

There’s an emergency among us, how will we respond? With shelter, with safehouses, with passage over borders if necessary … We need each other to get this done. I mean, we need each other just to move one inch forward.

Unfortunately, her plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

America Wins Again

2020-12-21T20:27:00+01:00

This post contains spoilers for the TV show “The Queen’s Gambit”

I loved pretty much everything about The Queen’s Gambit, and as you’ve probably gathered if you’ve read any of my other posts, I don’t have much to say about things if I’m not complaining about them!

What I do feel obligated to talk about, however, are the differences between this show and “For All Mankind” in terms of how they deal with the Soviet Union. I’ve written previously about how “For All Mankind” re-imagines the space race such that the USA remains the underdog after several successful Soviet moon landings - erasing real Soviet accomplishments in favour of fictional ones, and providing an impetus for the US to include women in its space program, something that it didn’t do in reality until the 1980’s.

The Queen’s Gambit does not rewrite history to the same extent. The chess world was dominated by Soviet players in the 50s, 60s and beyond, and the show acknowledges that readily, with “The Russian”, Vasily Borgov, being Beth Harmon’s ultimate opponent. Her breakthrough somewhat reflects that of American prodigy Bobby Fischer, so it’s not unprecedented. However, where For All Mankind featured a number of real-life historical figures, all the competitors in The Queen’s Gambit are fictional.

In a way, however, Beth’s real opponent is not Borgov or any of the other men she defeats on the road to face him, but herself, her emotional problems, and her addictions. The games she plays are almost entirely without malice, with just a touch of smug arrogance on occasion, and everybody she faces ends up with enormous admiration for her. This is especially true of the Soviet players she faces, who almost seem happier to have been beaten by her than they would have been to have won. What cold war political animosity is present comes mostly from her CIA handler, and is treated as a ridiculous, petty distraction by Beth. Doesn’t he know that there’s chess to be played??

For All Mankind, in contrast, has that animosity at its core. Its the motivation behind all of the American government’s actions in the show, though not necessarily of everybody at NASA, while the one Soviet character seems to validate their suspicions.

The Queen’s Gambit’s portrayal of the Soviet Union is actually extraordinarily sympathetic as a result of being viewed through the lens of chess enthusiasm. Whereas at home chess is a niche interest, when Beth arrives in the USSR she discovers that it is a national obsession. At home her prospects are probably akin to those of Benny Watts, the US chess champion before her - obscurity, and a dingy basement apartment at best. In the USSR she is mobbed by an adoring crowd after every match, which she plays in a dedicated chess hall instead of whatever spaces are available. She even has to adopt their strategy of cooperating during adjournments before she is able to achieve victory, with a team of all the chess friends she’s acquired on her journey advising her on how to approach the rest of the game - an apparent admission of the superiority of collective cooperation over competition and individualism.

The final scene sees Beth slipping her handler’s grasp on the way to the airport. She wanders the streets of Moscow unmolested to find the old guys playing chess in the park, and they greet her warmly before inviting her to play. There’s a distinct sense that she has found a home here, where the game she loves is played openly in the park instead of hidden away in the basement, as in the orphanage where she grew up.

Although this series is still about an American character and mostly set in America, it is much closer to being the view from “the other side” that I hoped for in my previous post.

Stars Trek - Failures of Imagination

2020-09-08T23:29:00+02:00

This post contains spoilers for the TV show “Picard”

Star Trek: The Next Generation, and its follow-ups, Deep Space 9 and Voyager, are some of my favourite TV shows. They are set in a future post-scarcity utopia where poverty, disease and war (amongst humans and most of the alien species they encounter, at least) have been largely eliminated.

Although they sometimes deal with deep topics, like the humanity or personhood of artificial intelligences, the economic reality of their universe and how it came about goes largely unexamined. There is no money, we are told (except sometimes, when there is). There is property, apparently, but whether it works the same way as property does today is not discussed. Abundant energy and the technology to conjure most of the essentials of life from thin air mean that nobody goes hungry, but whether everybody can have the opportunity to own a vinyard in France without inheriting one is a question that goes unasked.

The utopianism is usually established instead through a gentle mocking of the preoccupations and vices of present-day society, or lecturing about how humanity has moved past them. A bemused Picard takes a cigarette offered by a 20th century character on the holodeck, and coughs aggressively. Imagine smoking! Even the Ferengi, themselves caricatures of grubby, grasping capitalists, are shocked at our stupidity when they learn about tobacco. Janeway lectures the omnipotent Q about resolving conflicts with diplomacy instead of violence. An arrogant 20th century revival is revealed to be a buffoon when he demands to be allowed to speak to his lawyer. No lawyers here sir - this is the lawyerless utopia of Lionel Hutz’s nightmares.

Occasionally the admonishment is more direct - such as when Sisko time travels to a ghetto in a North American city, in our near future, looks directly into the camera, and says “sort your fucking shit out”.

The point is that in the Star Trek future, society is better than it is today, but its material basis is vague to the point of absurdity. It’s unfortunate, because that would be an interesting topic to explore, but it is what it is - light-hearted science-fantasy more concerned with the personal growth of characters than with the economic basis of their society.

A Shallow Dystopia

Star Trek: Picard, the latest attempt at continuing the Star Trek franchise on television, is set, in contrast to its predecessors, in a fractured, broken society. The Federation has turned inward, failing to live up to its values of diplomatic and humanitarian outreach. Money has returned with a vengeance, and nobody does anything unless they’re getting paid. There’s a disaffected, under-appreciated working class, who apparently don’t even get the same quality of replicators as other sections of society. Where characters in other series’ have interests and hobbies, in Picard they have vices, addictions and psychological damage. One character constantly has a fat cigar hanging out of his mouth and nobody is shocked about it because he looks, just, so cool.

In a show without an established universe, these aspects would be unremarkable - just a different set of assumptions about human nature and the future development of society, and with different stories to tell. In Picard, the departure from the previous utopianism is not examined, much less explained, and it is jarring.

But the above examples are trivialities compared to a problem that is at the very heart of the show. Toiling alongside the human workers are a class of sentient android slaves whose abolition and genocide by the Federation serves as a major plot motivator.

More than a Fistful

These are the “Datas on every starship” that Maddox expresses a desire for in the TNG episode “The Measure of a Man”. In that episode (one of the best in the Star Trek canon), Picard defends Data’s personhood and his right to self-determination. He’s ready to sacrifice his career over the possibility that his society would view even one android as property. In Picard, the same character disagrees with the ban on “synthetics”, but hardly comments on their genocide, or their previous condition of slavery. He quits Starfleet over their failure to provide humanitarian aid to the Romulans, not over the fact that the Federation had somehow come to rely on slave labour. Apparently, he would be perfectly happy to return to a situation that he fought to prevent when he was Captain of the Enterprise.

It’s a disappointing missed opportunity. It seems to me that the show wanted to say something about the socio-political situation in America today, but utterly fails to understand that situation, the shows that came before it, or the character of Picard.

If it really wanted to portray the dissolution of a utopia, a crumbling society betraying its ideals, it could have done so by clarifying the nature of the Federation economy, and provided some systemic explanation for the introduction of slave labour, money, and inequality, where those things did not exist before, or at least some believable political force pushing for those things. Picard could have been cast in the role of defending the fundamental rights of the Androids from a society that is determined to exploit them, as he has many times in the past. Perhaps he could even have taken on the new role of defending the rights of human labourers, whatever the reason that they’re suddenly being disenfranchised. It could have been a great opportunity to introduce some economic depth to the Star Trek universe that has long been lacking.

Instead, we get a complete mess where exploitation is ignored, the dissolution of Federation society is apparently due to infiltration by an inherently sinister other, and the androids are the ultimate villain for not being sympathetic to their oppressors or being understanding about the genocide of their race.

Devs - Spirituality as a Service

2020-05-18T17:56:00+02:00

This post contains spoilers for the TV show “Devs”

I liked Devs a lot. It looks at the quasi-religious reverence in which tech entrepreneurs are held in some quarters (most notably amongst themselves, perhaps) and asks, what if this but literally? What if these people were literally gods, or creating a god?

The plot centres on a software engineer named Lily, whose boyfriend is murdered by their boss, Forest, after he attempts to steal some code from the company they work for. The code in question is for the Devs system - a quantum simulator that extrapolates the past and future events of the entire universe from any sample of matter. Lily becomes suspicious of the circumstances of her boyfriend’s death, which is made to look like a suicide, and starts to dig around.

Unfortunately much of the plot, and particularly the climax, rest on a concept that I found it hard to suspend my disbelief about (and I don’t mean the premise of the Devs system).

Several of the main characters are aware of future events, up to a certain point, thanks to their quantum computer’s simulations. They do not attempt to alter their behaviour in even the smallest way, even just to see if it is possible, instead slavishly repeating every word and action they’ve observed.

If it were just Forest, and the lead systems designer, Katie, who acted like this, it might be understood as a consequence of blind faith, or a wilful misunderstanding of causality because reality doesn’t suit their purposes. Forest is single-minded in his pursuit of this technology because he believes it can resurrect his dead daughter - Devs is his church, determinism is the creed, and anything that calls it into question is heresy.

But this notion is dispelled in a scene where a roomful of people are shown a simulation of a few seconds into the future, and mirror it exactly - apparently it is actually a feature of this universe that it is actively difficult to behave contrary to the prediction. I think the reality would be the opposite - it would actually be difficult not to act differently once you were aware of future events. I think you would do so instinctively, and accidentally. It wouldn’t be a violation of causality, because the simulation would also be a cause, with its own effects.

So this concept strains credibility, and works only on a allegorical level - the low-level developers are dazzled by a brief tech demo and its promises while the higher ups are simultaneously in thrall to their own hype and aware of the lies it is based on and the limits of their knowledge.

It also makes the climax of the show absurdly predictable. As soon as we hear that the simulation breaks down at a certain point, and it has something to do with Lily, we know that Lily is going to do something that contradicts the predictions of the simulation. None of the supposedly smart characters in the show demonstrate any awareness of this obvious fact, and it’s frustrating. It is only redeemed because seeing the climax coming reflects the characters’ foreknowledge of the future, in a way.

Overall, it’s interesting enough and well enough written that these problems are easy to look past. Some of the imagery is fantastic, such as the would-be god-developers working in a giant fractal computer floating in a vacuum, completely isolated from the world they’re trying to understand. It’s also a tonal masterpiece, full of haunting establishing shots, temple-like sets, and an unsettling soundtrack. Worth watching for that reason alone, to be honest.

For All Mankind

2020-04-14T16:48:00+02:00

This post contains spoilers for the TV show “For All Mankind”

“For All Mankind” is a strange show. It reimagines the space race of the late 1960s in such a way that the USA is the underdog, with the USSR beating them to the moon by a month. While NASA’s failures are compounded by the crash-landing of the Apollo 11 lander, the Soviets rack up another victory when they land the first woman on the moon. Eventually the Americans get their act together and land a woman on the moon as well, and from that point on the two superpowers are neck and neck in space.

The strange thing about this is the extent to which it reflects reality, but just displaces it in time. The USA were playing catch-up for much of the space race, with the USSR achieving all the important early milestones: first artificial satellite, first animal in orbit, first human. The moon landing has so overshadowed those achievements in the popular consciousness that it is the only conceivable starting point for an alternate history like this. By giving it to the USSR, the moon landing becomes Sputnik.

The USSR did achieve another first of particular relevance to this show: they put the first woman into orbit, in 1963. Though female cosmonauts were not a permanent feature of the Soviet space program, female astronauts were not a part of the US space program at all, and they didn’t put a woman into space until 20 years later.

Interestingly, though the fictional Soviet moon landing featured an actual cosmonaut (Alexei Leonov, who conducted the first spacewalk in 1965), the female cosmonaut is not Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, nor any of the women in her program, but a completely fictional character. The show has no problem giving a nod to Mercury 13 candidate Jerrie Cobb in the form of fictional Molly Cobb, but the Soviet women receive no such acknowledgement.

It’s not all bad. The premise feels like it is asking us to celebrate the USA for an egalitarianism that it never possessed, but the drama doesn’t necessarily reflect that. The women face opposition and scepticism as to their abilities - maybe not to the extent that they would have in reality, but it’s there. Gay characters have to live their lives in secret without any attempt to pretend that it could have been otherwise. America’s continued participation in the space race is unequivocally driven by militarism and suspicion. The Soviet cosmonauts even get a few humanising moments, but they are ultimately cast as a sinister other.

It is sad that even now, nearly three decades on from its collapse, the Soviet Union can only ever be condemned for its failures, never acknowledged for its accomplishments. I suppose this show goes further than most in that regard, but it maintains an unquestionably American perspective, with fictional Soviet victories serving merely to encourage America on to even greater heights. It would be nice to see something from the other side some time.