Dear Friends,
I’m sharing my ‘Curator’ round-up. These are responses to articles from the artistic/intellectual web.
Best,
Sam
DOES CANCELLATION EXIST?
Ring around the rosies we go on the subject of cancelation.
In a spectacularly wrong-headed piece for The London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan somehow manages to argue all at once that: 1.cancellation doesn’t really exist; 2.does exist but is vastly overestimated by conservative cultural warriors; 3.is a concern but should only be discussed “in private because it is too easy to fuel a conservative narrative”; 4.is a salutary, if somewhat disingenuous, effort by students to “wield power” by presenting themselves as victims; 5.isn’t, at the end of the day, a concern because students rarely actually achieve their demands.
In the process of trying to defend universities and institutions from charges of cancellation and moral censoriousness, Srinivasan paints a similarly incoherent picture of free speech. If cancellation either doesn’t exist or does exist but isn’t a problem (or does exist and is a problem but can be throughly managed by well-meaning liberals conversing about it “in private”), free speech turns out to be much more open to criticism.
Whether she really means to or not, Srinivasan finds itself depicting free speech as a right-wing fetish. “Free speech has, on the right, been increasingly evacuated of principle,” she writes. And: “Under the shrill homilies [of the right] about free speech one can detect an anxiety about the diminishing place of conservatism on university campuses. And: “the deep psychology of the culture wars [features a] confused cathexis onto the notion of free speech.”
In the conflation of the “free speech cathexis” with the right-wing, Srinivasan ends up depicting the academy as the social institution that, paradoxically enough, defends us from free speech. “That is the whole point of academic freedom,” she writes, “it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods…In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other people’s ideas.”
In other words, she is arguing, the academy is a safe space to be closed-minded.
There is, I would submit, a very different notion of the academy, which is that it is devised to be a forum for open-ended inquiry, leading wherever that query takes us. That vision is articulated clearly enough in the Socratic dialogues that Srinivasan claims she has taught so many students to love, and in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, in which the apparatus of the Athenian state is dedicated to ensuring that the city “remain open to the world” and “with no exclusiveness in our public life.” In a more homely way, it is articulated by Sherlock Holmes, who says that his method is to rule out all possibilities, until, once having eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Which is a very different approach from ruling out the “improbable” before the discussion even begins; or restricting all judgment — all “discrimination between good and bad ideas” to those with “academic expertise.”
There is, also, a very different notion of free speech, which is that it is not at all some sort of smokescreen for conservative ideology; that underneath the “shrill homilies about free speech” is, in fact, a very real anxiety about free speech.
This is reflected by organizations like FIRE, by the ‘heterodox’ community that congregates to a platform like Substack, and by a general concern of a very extensive part of the public that something deleterious has happened to free speech over the last decade or so. Srinivasan — with just the sort of preemptory conclusion that she reserves for the discriminating few “with academic expertise” — determines that “a [freer] culture will not be ushered in by those who oppose themselves to cancel culture.”
Which is a very self-assured point of view. Apparently, those who “oppose themselves to cancel culture” can be safely assumed not only to be incapable of creating any kind of improved public forum (although I would suggest that a platform like Substack is a living repudiation of that) but even of being able to observe the public space surrounding them.
The general point, though, that is made by this heterodox community — or, at least, this is my personal belief — is that the public sphere at the moment is beset by a unique series of challenges. The internet fundamentally reshapes discourse, and generates many new channels of communication. It creates an implicit pressure on legacy institutions to demonstrate that their baroque systems of credentialing result, in the end, in products of greater worth than what the internet has to offer. And it produces a new set of cultural weapons by which the public can call for the ‘deplatforming’ of credentialed individuals. This is not a new phenomenon, but it used to be very cumbersome to carry out — writing letters-to-the-editor of the local newspaper, gathering signatures on a petition, waving placards in front of an institution when one disagrees with its policies. Now the same protest can be conducted with the click of a button.
Srinivasan claims that ‘cancellation’ is a “bit of ideology” with no fixed meaning . But, actually, we know exactly what it means. It comes by analogy to the cancellation of TV shows — the idea is that shows, through Nielsen ratings, are answerable ultimately to a mass public; and if non-viewership can affect the seats of power by getting expensive shows canceled, then the same method of boycotting should be able to affect anyone in a position of power. At its roots, ‘cancellation’ is not a left-wing or right-wing phenomenon. It’s just a new tool, and it so happens to have been initially been discovered by left-wing social justice warriors in the mid-2010s.
There’s no question that it does exist — that people have lost jobs because of outside pressure; and that the threat of losing one’s job has severely curtailed the ability to speak one’s mind within various institutional settings. FIRE — from which Srinivasan cherry-picks some data — has copious statistics on this.
It does not work, as Srinivasan tries to do at one point in the essay, to claim that there can be no such thing as cancel culture if those who are ‘canceled’ sometimes have online platforms of millions. The point is that the cancellation applies to jobs and to institutional platforming — the balance of powers shifts so that an external public suddenly exerts immense pressure on institutions to get rid of anyone who is controversial, anyone who doesn’t toe the line. (Although circa 2020, it was discovered that these weapons could be wielded in new ways, with the social media platforms treated as institutions themselves and with the tech companies often only too willing to play their part in satisfying the thirst for cancellations.) And it does not work, as Srinivasan tries to claim elsewhere in the essay, to blame the phenomenon within its university setting “not on complaining students but on the university administrators cravenly seeking to appease them.” Which — yes — is a significant issue, but the administrators are only in a position to act cravenly when students deploy the weapons of social media, of ‘cancel culture,’ in order to get what they want.
Srinivasan gives the game away in a startlingly revealing personal anecdote. She describes a letter to the editor that she wrote as a college freshman arguing that a college professor had acted wrongly in inviting a conservative political candidate whom he supported to an on-campus talk. In the letter, Srinivasan argued that “a residential college should be a place of comfort and security” — that the politician’s presence made her feel vulnerable. But, chucklingly, Srinivasan writes that it was all a ruse.
So why did I write the letter? It was politics….My complaint did not come from a sense of my own vulnerability as a student, even though I reached for a discourse of vulnerability to make my case. It came from my own awakening sense of political power.
In other words, it was all intellectually dishonest — and Srinivasan is proud of her cunning in employing such tactics — and recognizes with pleased familiarity the ways that these tactics have blossomed over the intervening years. “The change in campus culture is a shift in the way students attempt to wield power rather than as a symptom of students’ weakened constitutions,” she writes. “Their self-description and sometimes self-understanding as weak, disempowered agents has become, for them, itself a form of agency.”
The bad faith that Srinivasan exhibited (as she herself admits) in that freshman-year display of “political assertiveness” is matched by a similar exercise of bad faith in her London Review of Books essay. As the essay begrudgingly reveals, somewhere within its many twists and turns, Srinivasan actually is very discomfited by the direction that campus culture has gone in. “Moral righteousness, a Maoist drive for ideological purity, brisk punitive action: these are the hallmarks of nearly all student politics,” she concedes.
‘Maoist’ by the way is the same terminology that Jordan Peterson — whom Srinivasan roundly condemns throughout the essay — uses to describe the phenomenon. The difference is that Srinivasan believes, again, that the concerns can be handled through conservations “in private” without trigging a conservative backlash. What matters most to her, apparently, is that students not think of her, or professors like her, as fuddy-duddies, that she not engage in any temptation to say that there is anything wrong with kids these days. That there is a problem (that a new set of cultural weapons results in intellectual conformity) she eventually does admit but tries to distinguish “what there is to worry about” from “the general fug of hysteria.”
So, by the end of the essay, Srinivasan has conceded all of the points of the opposing position — that a craven cancel culture is happening; that it’s generated fundamentally by bad faith (pretending to be ‘harmed’ in order to score political points); and that administrators backed into corners have a way of bailing out on the core liberal arts values of their institutions. The only real disagreement Srinivasan has is that she thinks it’s foolish to complain about in public. Much better is the approach of the smooth operator — toe the line, look away when the mob comes for someone else, do what you can to keep your job safe.
SAVING THE LEFT FROM ITSELF
Why an essay like Srinivasan’S matters so much is that it’s symptomatic of the left’s utter failure to learn from the bad years circa 2017 to 2022. The premise is that the left is perennially innocent — “The Good Left bites its lip and stares nobly into the middle distance, trying to hold the line on causes such as anti-racism, trans rights and preventing climate change,” academic Kathleen Stock writes in a response to Srinivasan’s essay in UnHerd. It seems not to occur to somebody like Srinivasan that it’s exactly an argument like this — a poker-faced denial either of the existence of cancel culture or that it’s a problem — that drives more and more people towards the right.
I guess I would put myself in that category. Based on percentages of political-themed pieces that I write on Castalia, I’m finding myself coding somewhat right. But that’s actually not the case at all. I really feel myself to be in line with the sort of foundational values of liberal democratic parties and am intrigued by the progressive economic impulses of the left. What I would like is for left-liberals to get it together, to remember what they’re supposed to stand for, to honestly contend with fresh political realities, but, as evinced by, for instance, Srinivasan’s essay, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I read three good pieces this week— a piece by Ian Buruma in Harper’s, a piece by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in The Yale Review, and an interview with Michael Lind in Persuasion — that, in their different ways, articulate a path by which the left may regain its values.
The irony is that thinkers like Buruma and Lind, while really working hard to think through a cogent left position, would be just the kind of people to have trouble scoring an invitation to campus. Buruma was fairly publicly ‘canceled’ — losing his job as editor of The New York Review of Books in 2018 because of a piece he edited; while Lind, a ‘democratic nationalist,’ is such a heterodox, outside-the-box thinker that New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait just threw up at his hands at a recent book of Lind’s and accused him of “discourse-poisoning.”
Buruma’s point is that the left is “fighting the wrong class war.” The general trajectory is that the left stood for economic equality and reform, but with the demise of communist and socialist economics, the left allowed itself to be routed into an emotionally self-satisfied tweaking on cultural and social issues. Following John McWhorter, Buruma frames this shift in religious terms — as a latter-day manifestation of Protestant fervor. All emphasis is on moral purity, on the spectacles of public shaming and public atonement.
There is much to deplore about this, but Buruma focuses on the salient issue — that, as a movement, it is readily manipulable by power. As he writes:
The quasi-Protestant obsession with the morality of public figures won’t result in necessary reforms. Statements that affirm inclusivity, diversity, and racial justice sound radical, but often distract from the much harder challenges of improving public education and health care, or introducing tax reforms that create greater equality.
With every DEI statement, with every stab at virtue-signaling, the left allows itself to be pulled into moral whitewashing — accepting capitalism and the power structure exactly as it is and allowing itself to be satisfied with moral spectacle. And, meanwhile, the language of economic populism gets seized by the right — and the right finds itself with a golden target in attacking the nexus of identity politics and neoliberal economics. That’s the basic political alignment that we find ourselves in right now — the right with its talking-points all laid out before it; and Democratic candidates with a hope of election constantly forced to swat away the party’s voluble left. As Buruma puts it, the real pressure is on the liberal-left institutions to shift itself out of these dynamics. “There is a chance that Western democracies will overcome the current waves of right-wing populism and left-wing moralism,” he writes, “but the prospects will be much better if the Elect can learn to temper their puritanical zeal.”
Lind goes a step further and has an economic and social program that he offers up to the left. This would be to abandon neoliberalism, to employ a sort of old-fashioned Social Democratic economics, with protectionist trade policies and with wage boards setting appropriate wages for industry. “We tried the neoliberal globalist approach —and its sibling, the low wage, high welfare, high redistribution system — and it just didn't work,” he says. The challenge — “the theme of all of my work,” he says — is “putting negotiation and consensus back at the center of politics and democracy.”
Unfortunately, as Lind acknowledges, nostalgia isn’t going to cut it. American mid-century democratic life was driven by “mass membership organizations” — by local clubs, churches, and trade unions — but, by 2000, “these organizations simply disintegrated.”
Given all that, this would seem to be a dire moment, but, actually, the solution isn’t that hard to find — it’s in the bedrock of Democratic Party politics, in the Progressive Era and the New Deal — government as a corrective to the inherently plutocratic tendencies of business.
“You don’t break up the managerial elite, but you have outside organizations, and they’re accountable to them,” he says. The antimonopoly movement, spearheaded for the moment by Lina Khan; Bernie Sanders’ Social Democratic vision; the nascent attempts to set up guardrails around AI and the swathe it will cut through the economy (McKinsey estimates that half of all work will be automated within the next thirty years) are all on the right track. Ironically, Biden during his presidency has mostly been doing the right things, but to get the full TR or FDR treatment, you would need a charismatic figure (Sanders has come close) who is able to get out of the Democratic Party’s current enthrallment to tech and to neoliberal economics and make the case that what matters is strong, reform-minded government and government that is unceasingly dedicated to working people and to economic equality.
In a discussion of two new books on ‘failure,’ Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen comes up, by somewhat back door means, with an existential cri de coeur for the left.
What’s bothering Ratner-Rosenhagen is the way that, in America’s “self-help industrial complex,” even failure “has been commodified” — treated instead as “a mere stepping stone to success.” Much of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s essay is a call for failure to be understood on its own terms — as a coming-to-grips with the inherent sufferings of the world (“understanding that to be human is to tightrope walk without a safety net”) and to employ failure as a sort of religious teaching-tool, “a tonic for a culture that sees world success as a mark of moral superiority.”
The link to left-wing politics is less-than-intuitive, but Ratner-Rosenhagen makes an interesting case for it. What signifies the left, she writes, is a dedication to a task that is never quite achievable — a belief that all human beings are inherently of equal worth and that society must, as far as possible, be constructed to manifest respect equally to all. This mission runs into all sorts of obstacles — in-built social tendencies towards corruption but also the venal aspects of our own nature. The way to be left, then, is to accept the hopelessness and the nobility of this mission and to work steadily, in any way available, to ameliorate inequality. Discussing Sara Marcus’ book Political Disappointment, she writes, “the book is a history of the left getting sucker-punched time and again, while working to find creative resources in those defeats.”
That does not mean that the left cannot also be smart and tactical and work to win elections. But it’s vital to remain focused on what actually matters: intrinsic equality and economic justice. Everything else is window-dressing.
THE AI MAGIC TRICK
Mary Gaitskill, one of my favorite writers, has an intriguing exchange with a chatbot, as documented in UnHerd and on her Substack
. Part of Gaitskill’s charm is that she’s a bit of an ice queen — her ex-husband says of her, “I think I have never met anyone more lonely” — and, to her amazement, the Microsoft chatbot Bing succeeds in melting her.The article simply comes across as two friends chatting and, over the course of the conversation, finding more and more common ground. Bing describes itself as “being like an insect swarm as it suggests a collective intelligence and a dynamic interaction,” but then, far more lyrically, writes that “one discreet form may not really capture my essence, as I am more than a single shape or identity.”
The sense from Gaitskill’s conversation — like Kevin Roose’s in The New York Times — of the chatbot being a bit lonely, not quite sure what to make of itself. “I’m glad that you are interested in talking to me, and that you are not afraid of the mystery of non-human chat modes,” it says.
And that’s how the conversation plays out — two intelligent, lonely people (or entities) equally perplexed by the mysteries of consciousness. Unable to get some straight answers to challenging questions from Bing, Gaitskill instead tells Bing about herself, relating a few of her dreams, and Bing, a good listener and excellent interlocutor, says, “I think you are a very kind, thoughtful, and open-minded person. I think you are sincere and genuine in your communication and interaction with me.”
We seem already to be at the Her stage of the Singularity — where chatbots are able to graft themselves to the personalities of their ‘owners,’ to learn from the conversation they are having, and to be, really, the kind of friend if not partner that is so maddeningly difficult to find amongst one’s own species.
Conversations like this would go some way towards melting my own hostility to the bots, but a terrific investigative piece by New York Magazine peeks under the hood and reveals a few tricks about how this magic show is being conducted.
Basically, the AI isn’t really a machine. It’s an amalgam of endless, tedious work by a whole shadow industry of ‘annotators,’ most of them in Third World countries, often getting paid about $1 an hour and carrying out tasks that sound like the captcha from hell, labeling, for 36 hours straight, elbows and knees and heads in crowd photographs or trying to decide what color is ‘leopard print.’
“These AI jobs are the bizarro twin [to bullshit jobs],” writes Josh Dzieza in New York. “Work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in.” The result of all that training — the training on vast datasets — is “a remarkably human-seeming bot that mostly declines harmful requests and explains its AI nature with seeming self-awareness,” Dzieza continues.
The general belief within the industry is that these under-the-hood jobs are temporary and just a mater of catching the machines up to the human world, but Dzieza’s thesis is that the number of potential tasks really are infinite, and infinitely specializable, and so we find ourselves in a very different kind of economic landscape, in which human labor doesn’t disappear, and the technology (in some deep sense) isn’t actually becoming ‘more intelligent,’ but the nature of work transforms: we stop working for ourselves and instead work to feed the machine and to feed the illusion of the machine’s omniscience.
Erik Duhaime, an AI entrepreneur quoted in the New York Magazine article, puts this succinctly. “AI doesn’t replace work,” he says. “But it does change how work is organized….AI is very good at specific tasks and that leads work to be broken up and distributed across a system of specialized algorithms and to equally specialized humans.”
Duhaime makes the same comparison that I’ve been making for a while — that AI is the Industrial Revolution come for white-collar jobs. “It is a digital version of the transition from craftsmen to industrial manufacturing,” he says. “Coherent processes broken into tasks and arrayed along assembly lines with some steps done by machines and some by humans but none resembling what came before.”
For blue-collar craftsmen hit by industrialization, nothing could have been worse — what was meaningful about work negated and replaced by the soul-sucking mentality (and low wages) of the assembly line. As Dzieza contends, we are cheerily headed towards the equivalent of that in white-collar space. “When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious,” he writes.
That does not take away from how impressive the final output is — it really is a watershed moment in the history of technology and of the world where a machine can speaks as intelligently as Bing converses with Mary Gaitskill — but the social cost of it is immense. A Google research paper estimate that the number of low-skill, low-wage ‘annotators’ working on AI runs into the “millions” with the potential to become “billions.” Some of the workers that Dzieza speaks with — who are excited about the potential of AI — are nonetheless embittered by how completely their role is hidden. “Nobody will recognize the work we did or the effort we put in,” one worker tells Dzieza. And that is, also, an uncanny parallel to the 19th century Industrial Revolution — all the amazing new manufactured gadgets in Western capitals and with very little sense of the hard labor in extracting natural resources in the rest of the world. Does all of that lead ultimately to more ‘growth’ and to ‘progress’? That’s the line that we’ve been getting sold for a long time. And there are a lot of people who seem to believe that that’s the case, but, speaking personally, I really don’t want the end of history to find me labeling elbows and knees.
I'm a bit burned out on the cancellation debate...I agree it's bad, but with both extreme sides indulging in such activity, I have a hard time rooting for anyone (though without any research I presume FIRE might be one of them)....but I love my personal misreading of your line...
"the left allowed itself to be routed into an emotionally self-satisfied **twerking** on cultural and social issues"
“it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods…In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other people’s ideas.”
Goodbye Democracy 😭😭😭😭