Rad Geek People's Daily

The Medium Is The Message? Well no, not really, that’s not really right. But maybe to give the billboard slogan a tweak: The Limits of the Medium are the Limits of the Message.

People will be naturally prone to focus most of their efforts on the medium through which they interact with the most people. A vast majority of people who interact with my work, for example, do so by reading my pieces, not by viewing my social media posts. My written work is the central focus of my professional life, while my social media posts are essentially an afterthought.

But what if that balance is reversed? It bends a person (or a movement) around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay. Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts.

That’s how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr. to an X influencer like @Catturd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It’s one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant.

This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There’s a Can you top this? dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes. In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

— David French, Why Elon Musk Is The Second Most Important Person in MAGA
New York Times, 3 March 2024.

What I’m Reading: some poems by Richard Brautigan, a real weirdo of the San Francisco and Pacific Northwest counterculture. Here’s one that he first wrote in 1967, which was first distributed as a mimeo broadside circulated in Haight-Ashbury by the Diggers^[1] then republished in a series of chapbooks, newspapers and books. This copy’s from the paperback of his 1968 selected poems anthology.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace^[2]
Reprinted in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1.

1. ^[1]More specifically, by the Diggers’ mimeo publishing operation, the Communications Company. (Source: Wikipedia)↩
2. ^[2]I went to find a copy of the poem because of its title-drop appearance in Adam Curtis’s 2011 BBC documentary series. The Curtis documentary is artfully constructed, involving, and really watching on the whole, considered aesthetically as a sort of techno-dystopian cyber-socio-political collage made out of rambling thoughts and historical materials. But also, considered on the substance of its content and argument, it is a wrongheaded, deeply confused and soemtimes really deranged sort of random walk through Great Recession vintage artsy-progressive techno-paranoid conspiracy theorizing, or sub-theoretical conspiratorial musing, about intellectual pseudohistory and the international bankers and The Machines and the world-haunting Spectre of Neoliberalism. Anyway, I like the poems better.↩

There is no crisis on the border that is not the obvious and direct result of the crisis of the border. There is no social, economic or humanitarian problem that would not be immediately, near-instantaneously and forever wiped away just by letting people out, letting them be and letting them pass. There is no heavy-fisted enforcement measure, no clever technical fix or gracefully-executed political or diplomatic pirouette that can fix the disastrous consequences of the past decade of rock-headed, mean-hearted, senseless and shambolic attempts at locked-down border policing and restrictive immigration policy. There is no policy solution to the crisis except for the urgent, simple, utterly obvious solution of allowing for massive, order-of-magnitude increases to the numbers of people legally allowed to immigrate openly to live, work or study in the United States, regardless of their nation of origin. That’s all.

Instead, Congress has spent years debating bipartisan compromise bills to further fund border policing, and the Biden administration, whatever liberal sentiments it may preen itself for, has actually spent years now perpetuating and institutionalizing the most destructive features of Trump-era border enforcement and asylum policy. This has been utterly shameful in its conception and multidimensionally disastrous in its execution. The Harris campaign’s open and utterly cynical embrace of this record, and promises to escalate it with more and more of the same, is despicable and appalling.

Around 4:40 am on Friday, a national power outage hit Venezuela. More than ten hours later, electricity is still out in most of the country. After a small surge, the average nationwide connectivity levels have fallen to 17.9% according to VE Sin Filtro, a digital rights watchdog of NGO Conexión Libre y Segura. The situation feels eerily similar to March 2019, when the country was plunged into darkness for a week amidst a political struggle for the presidency—traumatic days for many Venezuelans. While a short-timed outage had hit the country on Tuesday night, the reasons and geographic origin of this outage are not clear yet.

Yet, according to experts, it was a matter of time before another nationwide blackout in Venezuela following years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment that destroyed the power grid—alongside repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions.

. . . Following a decade-and-a-half long Chavista tradition of blaming adversaries when facing power grid failures, Nicolás Maduro blamed the national power outage on a fascist attack. His Minister of Communications, Freddy Ñanez, had previously described it as an electric sabotage led by the opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. Diosdado Cabello, who is debuting as Minister of the Interior, also said that the culprits will face justice. González had been summoned for today, a third time this week, by General Prosecutor Tarek W. Saab as part of the case against the opposition’s dispute of the results. The summons threatened González if he tried to “run away” or obstruct justice.

Amidst the outage, Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López says that the Armed Forces are being deployed along the entire border of the national territory and they are in perfect civic-military and police union. Padrino said military tactical and non-tactical vehicles are being deployed to transport and mobilize citizens as part of Plan Centella.

— Caracas Chronicles, Another Nationwide Blackout In Venezuela
August 30, 2024

Que se vayan todos.

See also:

• GT 2023-07-24: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): There Is Not Enough Functioning Equipment To Convert The Gas Into Fuel
• GT 2019-03-07: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): 900
• GT 2017-07-08: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): Pro-government militias wielding wooden sticks and metal bars stormed congress on Wednesday