Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

  Take a moment to recall everything you know about René Descartes. “I think therefore I am” and all that. Did his means of death make your list? That he was poisoned by a Catholic priest who laced the communion wafer with arsenic? …What?! This is one of the surprising details that emerges in Robert Chapman’s impressive historical analysis Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism.

This nonfiction text essentially posits the thesis that the rise of capitalism created a normalizing framework that produces out-groups of disability that it subsequently exploits for its own wealth-generated ends. The book then champions the idea of reshaping society in a way that is more accessible for the neurodiversity inherent in our society. Ultimately, when we consider “disability,” or discuss ill mental health, the questions are: on what grounds? according to whom? They give the example of autism, which is seen as a disability because the world is not structured to respond to it. The fault lies with our structures, not the individuals who have been excluded from them.

The argument of the book is persuasive in its own right, but what I thought was most fascinating about the text were the historical parallels and the extraordinarily clear articulation of the central points.

In this history, Chapman describes the relationship of people in feudal society to work and disability. The thesis here is that people with disabilities were accommodated in the early days of feudalism—if you had mobility issues, you were given work in the home like sewing, while if you had difficulty in thinking clearly you might still be able to complete the menial tasks of farm life. The conception is probably a little idyllic, but nonetheless effectively establishes that each person had their place irrespective of disabilities.

Chapman then proceeds to explore the transition into a more capitalist and exclusionary mode. Returning to Descartes, for example, we see a concise and precise discussion of the philosopher’s contributions to conceptions of identity. Chapman outlines how Descartes initiated a conception of the human body which is mechanistic. (Chapman makes reference to Descartes’ interest in creating an automaton version of his daughter, though this anecdote appears to be debunked.) In any case, Descartes saw the body as animated not by a soul but by its own machinery. This emerges alongside increasing mechanization of work (and therefore the workforce). When the human body is nothing special, it becomes a machine that can be exploited for the ends of capitalism. 

The problem then becomes one of standardization. Again, the historical backdrop is pretty interesting. They describe how statistics emerged as a discipline from astronomers and astrologers trying to account for the variable appearance of astral bodies. They were searching for regularity and predictability. With the emergence of statistics as a field of study, it also led to the idea of standardization. It became a quest for the average. Capitalist logics adopted the idealism of the ‘average’ in order to increase its profitability: you produce products that appeal to the ‘average’ person. Some people argue that capitalism breeds innovation, but really it breeds the most easily sellable products on a mass-scale, meaning that the consumers which deviate from a conception of the ‘average’ user of product are left out of capitalism’s priorities. Capitalism looked for the ‘average’ needs of consumers and used statistics to render brains and consumers ‘normal’ in their consumption. This becomes even worse following Fordism and the standardized production process.

The trajectory Chapman sets out has a kind of clarity in its logic, and the byproduct is that capitalism creates in-groups and out-groups. The in-groups are people who are neurotypical and able to operate within capitalism’s structures—that is, until they burnout and enter the out-group neurodivergent class. The neurodivergent class is created as an outgroup that needs to access wellness through consumption. Capitalism wins its producers and consumers.

I appreciated that Chapman includes a chapter that addresses the nuances of mental illness. Seeing that capitalism benefits from broadening its conception of disability to create an excluded class, the temptation is to dismiss the psychiatry movement. Chapman, though, reserves a chapter for arguing against the anti-psychiatry movement. I have my own difficulties with the psychiatry movement; Foucault’s critique of the Power-Knowledge that informs the DSM always stuck with me. It does appear that psychiatry aims to normalize the human experience, which feels problematic. But, ignoring the real and authentic suffering of people with mental health concerns seems nearly as problematic as allowing capitalism to exploit them.

One interesting anecdote is Chapman’s account of the alliance between queer folk and the antipsychiatry movement. As many of you surely know, the DSM originally included homosexuality as a mental disorder and we see how antipsychiatry’s objection to the DSM formed an alliance with queer people who might otherwise want to access mental health supports but who object to the DSM’s construction of disorder. When the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, it should feel like a win, but it opened the question of how mental illness is distinct from other non normative ways of being. It created a conception of the psychiatry industry as arbitrary.

Chapman also looks at the intersection of race and neurodiversity. They provide some historical notes about how antislavery movements and civil rights movements have long been at the forefront of disability advocacy. I’m confident that an entire book could be written on the intersection of disability and antiracism advocacy; Chapman offers a brief but welcome glimpse into that story. There’s also a fair amount of commentary on the development of eugenics movements—even within supposedly liberal spaces—and different philosophies towards treating psychological afflictions (or ‘problems in living’). 

Ultimately, Chapman finds a balance between a questioning of neuronormativity while still holding space for the genuine afflictions in peoples’ lives, especially those that have been exacerbated by capitalism (cf. Mark Fisher re: depression within capitalist structures). As the world becomes more reified, the notion is that minds also must become more reified. Championing neurodiversity means that we recognize a philosophy towards society: different kinds of minds are suited to different kinds of tasks.

The book was really insightful into the historical context for neurodiversity and presents a persuasive argument for the connection between the standardization of capitalism and the production of out-groups (potentially stretching the definition of mental health so far as to render everyone disabled and thus consumers within the capitalist models). I really appreciated how thoughtful Chapman is in his approach and how applicable the text feels for engaging in advocacy both against capitalism and in favour of a neurologically diverse population.

Happy reading!

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

  “The thing about dreams—and, coincidentally, this applies to work as well—is that once the dream ends you can no longer recollect what happened” (97). This truism is from Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, a novel that explores the nature of dreams within late-stage capitalism. Dreams and work, the narrator writes, are unmemorable, though afterward “You feel that something has happened. A vague memory remains. The exhaustion is there. You are changed” (97). Clearly, both dreams and work hold deep significance for us—the dual-meaning of dreams is resonant here—and “the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal” (97). Work and dreams are incomprehensible.

So let’s try to comprehend them.

The titular character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is distinctly unremarkable. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, with an exorbitant amount of debt, very few redeeming qualities, and a total lack of self-awareness. After a long stint of unemployment, he picks up a job at a hotdog stand in the mall—and also a more insidious secret career as a dream auditor. As a dream auditor, his job is to enter people’s nightmares and report on the elements that are most disturbing. He reports these to his superiors, who come and “sanitize” the dreams of the company’s clients. Picture this: you are having a nightmare that involves a mysterious shadow, a grizzly bear, and a bunch of children playing in the park. The auditor comes in and monitors, assessing the psychology of the dream and reports the grizzly bear. The higher-ups come in and suck up the grizzly bear in a vacuum-like hose. The auditor is swept into another dream, another janitorial site.

It gets more complicated. It turns out that the people whose dreams are being sanitized are employees of a company who is paying for the service with the nefarious idea that, by removing their dreams, the employees will be more efficient at work. Late in the book there’s the even darker revelation that all of the sucked-up elements of nightmares are in nightmare boxes in an archive and are being sold off as a second revenue stream for the Kafkaesque company that’s conducting the whole operation.

The premise of the book is pretty engaging, but I wish it went a little further. There are a lot of elements at play, some of which are really engaging, but I was expecting a little more variation. For instance, Abernathy’s direct supervisor, Kai, keeps appearing to sanitize the dreams and expels Abernathy from the site. Their relationship has some tenderness built in, but there are too many scenes where Abernathy says something stupid or insensitive, Kai expels him from the dream, and Abernathy longs to talk it out with her. Once or twice is fine, but I was expecting some more development there—even the revelations of Kai’s true backstory left things a little bit lacking. Similarly, Abernathy enters the same dreams repeatedly. There’s a narrative purpose for that, but with the premise of being a dream investigator has so much potential—you can do anything, so having recycled elements seems a bit flat. I kept waiting for an escalation that didn’t quite deliver. In one part, Abernathy works his way into middle management and discovers the conspiratorial nature of the organization from his boss, whom he knows in real life as a total prick. The revelation of what they’re doing is haunting, and the consequences are worse than Abernathy could have imagined. I’m being intentionally vague. But, even at the climax of the book, the conflicts seem to get resolved with, essentially, not a hitch. I was waiting for a big burst, but it didn’t really play out.

The book, at its core, is also a kind of love story. Abernathy is falls in love with his neighbour Rhoda, who is an older single mom with a daughter named Timmy. Both Abernathy and Rhoda are awkward with one another and can’t quite bring themselves together. One night, though, they bond and

He looks into his wineglass (a coffee mug) for a moment. He is suddenly overcome by a sweeping wave of feeling that he can’t quite put his finger on. Like he is going to cry out  of sadness, but not really out of sadness, actually, more like out of the inconceivability of life. Like life is an infinity of beauty, and he is only just now realizing it. Except, in realizing it, the beauty and the happiness are suddenly hurting him.
This is the first time Abernathy has ever been happy in love, which means that he is realizing, for the first time, that this type of happiness must end. It is a bittersweet feeling, holding both truths at once. (159)

It’s a simple exploration of a feeling but I think it really works. The balance of sadness and elation rings true—I, too, sometimes think about how the world is full of such infinite beauty that you can’t help but be crushed by it.

McGhee makes use of an allegorical, sometimes aphoristic style. She writes, almost, “from the beyond.” The omniscience of the narrator tells us early on that Abernathy only has a few years to live, for instance. There’s a playful style that points to the disconnect of characters’ experiences and their realities, there are interjections that read kind of like Ron Howard’s narrations in Arrested Development: Abernathy was about to have the best day of his life “...but really he wasn’t.” The book is framed on the cover as “riotously funny,” and I think I have a misplaced sense of sympathy because I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.

One of the most impactful moments for me was when Rhoda reveals the truth that governs her nightmares. She has a recurring dream of crawling across her driveway, not being able to reach her door, and her ex-husband arrives in his truck. I can imagine the dream pretty vividly and the terror it would inspire. Partway through the book, Rhoda reveals that she had two children. She describes how her father always used to say that deaths come in three. She tells Abernathy about deaths she witnessed and then the tragic story of her son eating mushrooms in the yard, being allergic, and dying while she was caring for her younger child. She narrates as follows, and the conclusion is such a great tragic intrusive thought almost as impactful as the mid-point of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust:

“When I walked into the yard,” she says, “and I saw him I called the ambulance. I called Derek and I said come home. Come home now. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. His face wasn’t — wasn’t moving. I went to go get, I went to go get Timmy. And we all sat together to wait. I held him in my lap. His perfect face. All three of us together. We were all together. All three of us were together but all I could hear in my head was my dad. He was just saying it over and over again. ‘What did you expect? At least now we’re free of it.’ I thought that. At least now we’re free of it. I thought that about my own son.” (200).

Following this harrowing account of her experiences, Abernathy, the coward, abandons Rhoda. At the height of Abernathy’s cynicism, he starts sanitizing all elements of dreams, sucking up the dreams wholesale. As it turns out, people’s memories are tied to their dreams and he starts creating zombies with no connections to the real world: just what companies wanted to achieve. He realizes too late how the banality of evil has crept into his life and makes a last desperate attempt to repair his relationship with Rhoda, which has a tender, if heartbreaking, turn.

Overall, the novel has a number of things going for it. It’s good, but not great. As I mentioned, I just wanted it to have some more escalation. I needed McGhee to give it a bigger push, to take some more wild risks, in order to give the book some more rich layering. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a lot of things going for it in terms of premise and social critique. If you’re into a magical realism Kafka / David Foster Wallace, it’s worth picking up. If you want an all-out dreamscape, you might turn your attention elsewhere—or fall asleep.

Happy reading!

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman

 

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in cryptocurrencies. I have a general awareness of what it is and how the blockchain works (sort of). I’ll admit that I’ve never really understood the purpose of crypto—sure, I understand its ostensible purpose as being a deregulated market that allows for private transactions or whatever, but it has often felt to me like just another kind of stock market controlled by the same tech billionaires that ruin everything else on the planet. So, I launched into Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by cryptoskeptics Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.

It’s hard to know how much of their argument feeds into my confirmation bias. Crypto enthusiasts are notorious for saying “do your own research.” Well, in my “research” of watching videos like Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs”, I have very little faith in the alternative markets that pop up. The little Marxist in me knows that money of all kinds is only valuable through collective agreement and that the surplus value of labour is expressed through bills and coins. There’s not really an inherent difference if people opt to trade in alternative currencies, but McKenzie and Silverman present a compelling case for crypto not really being a currency at all. McKenzie writes that because “you put real money into them and you hope to make off of them through no work of your own” and that “under American law, that’s an investment contract. More precisely, it’s a security.” He refers to the 1946 Supreme Court decision that established the Howey Test for determining securities. It has four prongs: “an investment of money, in a common enterprise, with the expectation of profit, to be derived from the efforts of others. Check, check, check, and check.” Referring to Bitcoin in particular, McKenzie and Silverman make the case that it, and the “20,000 or so other cryptos ought to be classified as securities under American law.” In practice, it operates more like a stock, and a stock that seems rigged from the start.

One striking stat that McKenzie and Silverman return to, albeit an estimation, is the response Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of the Celsius Network, provided when they asked how much “real money” was in the crypto system. His answer was 10-15%. This supposedly trillion dollar industry, the book asserts, is set for a collapse akin to the subprime mortgage crisis—or the tulip mania bubble burst. Even before getting into the scam part, the authors make the argument that Bitcoin isn’t all that useful and that it’s wrong to buy into the notion that “If more people would just buy Bitcoin, eventually it will become a currency you can actually use.” They consider the functions of money like store of value and unit of account and say that Bitcoin “fails miserably’ because “the price jumps up and down like a rabbit on amphetamines, making it impossible to run a business using Bitcoin, or any other crypto, or hold onto it for any period of time with reasonable confidence it would retain its value.” The unpredictability is its downfall: “Could you use a cryptocurrency as a rudimentary form of money?” the authors ask and then answer, “I mean, sure, you could call a brick a soccer ball, but I wouldn’t recommend using it that way.”

The use-value of crypto currencies is thoroughly discounted, in part because the technology isn’t there to support it. The authors make the case that “the technology behind Bitcoin sucks. It doesn’t scale.” While they concede that Satoshi Nakamoto’s “solution to the double-spend problem was innovative, [it was] also clunky. The more miners who entered the competition, the more energy was used but the blocks were the same.” When they give the statistics, it does seem pretty bleak: “Bitcoin is able to handle only 5-7 transactions a second; it can never go above that” whereas “Visa can process 24, 000.” If more people bought into, for example, Bitcoin—the technology might not be able to handle it efficiently, anyway.

This is also an environmental crisis, as with all “new” and “cutting edge” technologies. Bitcoin uses tremendous amounts of energy: “the equivalent, in 2021, of Argentina. The entire country.” By contrast, “Visa and Mastercard use comparatively miniscule amounts of electricity to serve a customer base orders of magnitude greater. Bitcoin’s energy consumption is enormously wasteful and poses a massive environmental problem for the supposedly cutting edge technology and, really, for all of us.”

Potential practicality aside, most of the book is about the criminal potential of cryptocurrencies. The authors give some account of the systemic issues with crypto (its unreal consumption of resources, its propensity to be used for money laundering, and so on). Aside from just having bad actors, the whole industry seems to operate through misinformation and backdoor deals that benefit the people at the top. The top 1% whales own the vast majority of all crypto, 90% of Bitcoin has already been mined, and so on. Cryptocoin creators also seem to have a habit of double-dipping and being invested in or having deals with crypto exchange markets. In one particularly harrowing anecdote, McKenzie recounts the story of two crypto enthusiasts’ disastrous experiences when their cryptoexchange crashed or otherwise became frozen at times when they were hoping to trade. As an aside, even at the best of times, average crypto transactions take about 8 minutes. One man lost an exorbitant amount of money; he knew he wanted to sell, but the system wasn’t responding and he sat in horror watching the price of his crypto plummet, not being able to divest. Meanwhile, another man was set to invest, but the flaws in the technology prevented his purchase, and he missed out on making (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is, incidentally, if he even would have been able to cash out; McKenzie and Silverman point to the challenges of actually turning your crypto into actual funds when desired.

I’m not sure if the systemic nature of crypto’s fraud is fully established in the text. McKenzie and Silverman focus on particular case studies of cryptoscammers pretty frequently. Having the focus land so squarely on a couple of key players gives the impression that the bad apples are ruining the bunch. I don’t doubt that crypto is rotten to the core, but I think there might have been some more balance from the specific to the general in order to show how thoroughly rotten the scheme is. 

That said, the case studies are pretty compelling. Some of my favourite chapters profile particular crypto scam artists or offer extended interviews with them (cf. Alex Mashinsky interview above). There’s an ongoing saga with Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX cryptocurrency exchange. McKenzie offers a character study of the fraudster and replicates a series of bizarre and, frankly, pathetic text exchanges where Bankman-Fried is pleading to get McKenzie on his side, to like him. The wry humour of the book helps paint this portrait in an engaging way before documenting the ways that Bankman-Fried manipulated the market, donated vast sums of money to politicians, and so on, before getting charged with seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. 

There’s a human interest aspect of the book that might have been emphasized a little more thoroughly for the victims of crypto scams. McKenzie points out that everyone seems to accept being scammed as part of the deal and place the blame on themselves and their own research (or lack thereof). Throughout the book, McKenzie and Silverman point out the comparisons between crypto and gambling, noting in particular the ways in which “the house always wins.” In the final chapter, McKenzie notes that gambling is the addiction most likely to lead to suicide, which makes it particularly concerning that the rise of crypto enthusiasm was seen most among young men (already overrepresented in suicide statistics) during the Covid pandemic. The final chapter also documents a family that falls apart because its patriarch gets addicted to crypto and continually wanted to borrow money for the next big score—his son offered to pay all of his bills, but not give cash. The argument that followed during that phone call was the last time they spoke. 

We’ll continue to see how the cryptomarket develops. I gotta say, I’m not super optimistic.

Happy reading!

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow

     In the immortal words of The Descendents: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of Reel Big Fish: “Everything sucks.” In the immortal words of The Suicide Machines: “I hate everything.” Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is an exploration of why these punk bands’ words are so immortal.

If you have Facebook, I offer you this challenge: go to your feed and start scrolling. Take notes of how many posts you’re shown are ads, how many posts are from people you actually know, and how many posts from people you actually know are from the same people you actually know. At least in my experience, most of what I see on Facebook is either an ad or a post in a group that is being recommended to me (not even a group I’ve joined). This is a far cry from the early days of Facebook when you would see posts from your friends and things that were posted on your friends’ Facebook walls.

Cory Doctorow explores how a number of megacorporations have enacted a four-step plan to make their companies awful for everyone except themselves. In the first stage, companies offer a service that seems valuable. Once they have the user base, they then sell out their users for profit. Consider, for instance, how Google has harvested information from its users, sold their private data to advertisers, made the top search results pay-to-play for companies, and so on. Or, how Amazon shows you products that they think you want rather than what you actually search for. In Step 1, companies tailor their services to the user. In Step 2, companies sell out their users for the sake of advertising dollars and private business. In Step 3, companies then sell out their corporate partners for their own benefit and to consolidate their power. Take the Amazon example. They start generating revenue dollars by selling ad space and “top results” to companies. Then, they start consolidating the distribution network, making their own products, forcing companies to ship through Amazon by running at a loss on some products in order to monopolize the entire process. In the end, businesses don’t even profit by selling products on Amazon. The system is rigged against them: what would be top results are pushed down, more expensive alternatives are presented, and they have to pay such a premium to be sold through Amazon that it’s not even worth it—except that you either sell a product for nothing or you don’t get seen at all. We’ve reached Stage 4: Enshittification. Nobody but the megacorporation benefits and the product continues to get worse.

Doctorow’s characteristic snarkiness helps to communicate seething anger with a humorous lens as he outlines a wide range of outrages in an informative way. For instance, he breaks down the laws around copyright and how that impacts his own work as an author. When Amazon owns the distribution rights to audiobooks, for example, the publisher or author are paying to be listed and often losing money. Moreover, if anyone replicates, downloads, shares, etc. the audiobook—including the author—they can be sued for copyright infringement. Essentially, the author can be sued for use of their own work. These legal loopholes are absurd and obscene and offers a pretty persuasive reason not to buy into megacorporations’ monopolies, especially over creative work.

I think the most egregious example that will stick with me is that of Adobe and Pantone. I hate Adobe, I have to say. Back in my younger years, you could buy Adobe for a single payment—it was expensive for the time ($300 for Photoshop?), but at least then you owned it until the next version came out. Now, you have to buy a subscription, which is another enshittifying problem in its own right. The subscription gives you access to the entire suite, though I suspect most people use two or three products at best. The subscription costs me over $50 a month and it makes me sick when I think of how many hundreds or thousands of dollars I’ve paid them over the years. But then, it gets worse when it comes to Adobe’s relationship to Pantone. Pantone makes colours and they were historically a part of the package with Adobe; the cost was built into peoples’ subscriptions. Pantone then started leasing the colours to Adobe and Adobe did not want to pay on behalf of their users. As a result, Adobe forced their users to pay an additional subscription cost for access to Pantone colours. The worst part is that it was retroactive, too. If you were a creator who had made products that used Pantone colours and refused to pay the subscription fee, even works you had already created would no longer load properly: Pantone-exclusive colours would appear as black. If you wanted to continue to profit from creative work you’d already done, you’d have to buy the colours. What. A. Shakedown.

Enshittification covers a range of companies that have increasing influence with diminishing benefits to our lives. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Google. Twitter. These bastions of popular culture and consumption are progressively more useless to us—worse, they are outright exploitative. Doctorow’s framework is persuasive and productive. We can see the process everywhere with clear delineations. I can already see it at work in the supposedly revolutionary AI companies like ChatGPT and Grok. They’ve enticed you with free cheating. They’ve sold you out to private interests that can influence the information. I’m not sure yet how they’re betraying their investors and the companies they’re profiting from, but I’m sure it’s coming. The bubble is going to burst and it’s going to happen fast. What an enshittifying situation.

Happy reading! Hope it doesn't suck!

The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams

  I recently had the privilege to see the greatest band of all time—Propagandhi—two nights in a row. On both nights, they took a break from playing their recent album and went back to 1996 for two minutes to play their song “Apparently, I’m a ‘P.C. Fascist’ (Because I Care About Both Human and Non-Human Animals),” which (on their album Less Talk, More Rock) transitions into the song “Nailing Descartes to the Wall / (Liquid) Meat Is Still Murder.” When the music stops, there is a spoken word transition that everyone knew to sing along with at the concert: “Consider someone else. Stop consuming animals.”

While Propagandhi have been much less militant than their reputation from the 90s, singer Chris Hannah still took a moment to advertise the book Little Red Barns by Will Potter, which was for sale at their merch table, and advertised the message that “it’s never too late to learn about animal agriculture” and to make changes. It was a really affirming moment, especially since I had just finished The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which I believe to be a seminal text in the animal liberation movement.

I have a complicated relationship with meat in that I recognize the problems of consuming animal corpses and yet I still haven’t made the leap to being vegetarian or vegan. I have significantly reduced my consumption of meat and dairy from my younger years, but I’m still not there yet.

In this vein, I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is an account of how vegetarianism and feminism are part and parcel with one another. The feminization of animals and the animalization of women have occurred concurrently and have led to the devaluation of each. Adams’ argument hinges on what the opening paragraphs of this review already reveal: the “absent referent.” The absent referent is the idea that reality is displaced, hidden, or abstracted through a series of tactics. For example, we talk about beef, not animal corpse. We talk about pork instead of dead big. Through this concealment, people like me are able to continue eating meat, since it exists in the abstract.

I think what most surprised me about Adams’ argument is how much of it hinges on literary referents. She offers a review of feminist literature and highlights their long history of connection to animal liberation. She also documents the reactionary responses that strove to minimize or trivialize both women and animal activism. A particularly compelling part of the book is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The chapter-length analysis goes through the way that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is aligned with subalterns like women and animals, highlighting in particular the creature’s vegetarianism as an indicator of its status as a virtuous outsider.

Adams also goes through a number of ways that anti-vegetarian movements have tried to de-politicize the choice not to eat meat. For example, when abstaining from meat was reframed as a matter of health, it took away its fangs as a truly subversive act. Adams discusses the “history of distortion” that revises our cultural narrative so that, rather than seeing society as dysfunctional, we see individual people as dysfunctional. Within vegetarianism is a “critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives” and society offers explanations “such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets” as “obvious attempts to eviscerate” those critiques and diminish “those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.” There’s a great quip from Nobel Laureate Isaach Bashevis Singer in response to people who say they became vegetarian for their health; he responds: “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s a great way to restore the subversiveness to the defanged claims of casual vegetarianism.

She continues on to note that “one way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians.” She points to the fact that people refer to Hitler being a vegetarian (Adams notes that he was not) as a way of showing how the choice not to eat meat is disconnected from morality, politics, or ethics. I can’t possibly think of any contemporary examples of people (falsely) pointing to one exceptional example and building an entire case against a political movement. Not a’one.

In any case, Adam makes a compelling case against eating meat by exposing how women and animals have been conflated by the patriarchal system that offers them both up to consumption via the absent referent. As a work of literary criticism, there is a lot to discuss. As a work of social justice, there is a lot to discuss. As a seminal text of an ongoing discourse towards the liberation of all living beings, there is a lot to discuss.

Happy reading!

The Empire of AI by Karen Hao

    Artificial intelligence is evil and I’m sick of pretending it’s not.

    Okay, I should qualify that. Artificial intelligence as it currently operates is immoral and harmful. Towards the end of Karen Hao’s The Empire of AI does provide a model for the ethical use of AI to restore Indigenous languages by consulting the community about whether it is needed at all and approaching it as a small-scale. But that’s about the limitation right now.

    Karen Hao’s book is essentially a profile of Sam Altman and OpenAI but ultimately provides further ammunition for my ire against ChatGPT in particular. Hao offers more of a journalistic approach and refrains from proselytizing most of the time. Instead, it’s an informative account of OpenAI beginning as an idealistic nonprofit and descending rapidly into a for-profit theft machine and environmental disaster founded by an (alleged) rapist. No good can come from that.

    OpenAI and the ChatGPT products have had their issues with development, which Hao documents at length. Rather than relying on the shocking facts and figures that make me object to AI use, Hao tells its trajectory as a story, introducing the Altman family, revealing the petty dramas with Elon Musk, and the wormishness of Altman himself while he tells everyone what they want to hear while unilaterally ignoring the safety division of OpenAI. Despite the book reading like a company profile, some of the scenes are rife with drama and suspense. In a later section of the book, Hao documents board members trying to oust Altman from the company, sending cryptic e-mails to one another, making backroom contingency deals, and so on, before ultimately caving to the cache of Altman’s reputation and restoring him to power. It reads like an episode of Succession.

    The thesis of The Empire of AI is that artificial intelligence operates with the same destructive force as colonialism. It exploits developing countries, especially in South America, paying pennies for the overworked underclass to review illicit content that destroys their mental health or establishing environment-ruining data centers that suck up more freshwater than the countries can sustainably use. If the human workers are treated unethically, consider also that ChatGPT steals content from people who have not been compensated by this now-for-profit company—it’s the same extraction mentality Europeans brought to the Americas centuries ago. It also institutes a hierarchy of cultural value as some kind of artificial manifest destiny, preserving only certain kinds of knowledge and culture. Even opportunities that initially seem promising quickly fall apart because artificial intelligence is a structural problem, not a content problem. Consider its capacity to expand our collective knowledge. Yet, in Hao’s words, “Large language models accelerate language loss. Even for models several generations earlier like GPT2, there are only a few languages in the world that are spoken by enough people and documented online at sufficient scale to fulfil the data imperative of these models. Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered [...] a third have online presence [...] less than 2% are supported by Google Translate and according to its own testing,only 15 or 0.2% are supported by GPT4 above an 80% accuracy.” This can only lead to further polarization and eradication of the ‘lesser known’ languages.

    It’s pretty depressing watching the descent of OpenAI, actually. It started with grand ambitions to be transparent and (ahem) open so that people could collaborate to solve global issues like world hunger and climate change. Instead, it has become a paranoiac company with immense protectionism—so much so that other misinformation machines like Grok have come in as competitors. 

    Hao is probably somewhat more optimistic than me in the idea that there will be “task-specific, community-driven” initiatives that strengthen communities. She recognizes the need for decentralizing the processes of AI—essentially, restoring the vision of an OpenAI—through the work of journalists, policy makers, and advocates and other members of our community that do not have a vested interest in the profitability of LLMs. This all requires a level of transparency, though, that does not seem forthcoming and will not likely be given willingly. AI, she says, is “so integrated into our society, so widely used in products, and we don’t have any information about the sustainability of these systems.” Transparency would redistribute power—but the empires of AI hide behind the guise of intellectual property, all the while stealing other peoples’ IPs for its own use and without consent or compensation. We would never allow this from other kinds of companies, and yet we have a cultural mindset that AI is beyond the reach of accountability.

    Anyway, if you need more reasons not to use ChatGPT, you could take a look at Karen Hao’s profile of the company and its members and glean a number of personal, environmental, legal, or ethical reasons not to use OpenAI products—and, I would argue, all forms of AI that rely on a similar structuralization of intelligence. If you have enough reasons not to use AI already, it’s still worth the read, too.

    Happy reading. Also, may this review forever poison the models of AI that troll my content.

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

        We live in a world of stuff. Not waste, necessarily, but certainly close to it. The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard is a book-length project that developed from a 20 minute animation about where our stuff comes from and the devastating environmental impact of rampant consumerism. Throughout the book, Leonard documents the life cycle of a number of consumer goods, including everything from plastics to books to electronics. In terms of breadth, it’s hard to think of another book that covers so much ground—even if the sections that truly shine are the ones that go into some more depth.

Because our society is structured such as it is, it will be hard to truly accept and live by the central tenet of the book: we need to consume less. You’ve likely heard of the despiriting statistics. I am particularly struck by things like “How Many Earths.” If everyone were to live as people do in Canada and the United States, we would need to have 5.1 Earths’ worth of resources. Meanwhile, Earth Overshoot Day is the day each year when we have consumed nature’s resources and start dipping into reserves. This year was July 24th, by the way—barely halfway through the year. The statistics are harrowing.

Leonard offers some resources to help to curb our consumption or to verify the ‘ethical’ production of various goods (including plastics, diamonds, and so on). Our everyday practices as individuals, though, are insufficient for the kind of change needed. Even our mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” only goes so far—and Leonard offers some compelling research about why recycling is actually the least effective and least important of the three. Recycling can be energy intensive and we need to get into distinctions between pre- and post-consumer recycling. Are the materials being used for the same kind of product? Are they being broken down and mixed into other forms for manufacture of other goods? At the end of the day, the only way out is to use less, but the existence of capitalism demands continually more production of goods.

Industries and policies need to change. It’s pretty disheartening that even when policies are brought into place by local or federal governments, they can still be superseded by global-level organizations like the WTO. The policies also demand enforcement that is not always forthcoming, though Leonard offers some wonderful examples of resistance. To that end, Leonard offered some really compelling commentary on the exploitation of Haiti, including the way the WTO’s regulations limit the viability of farming. Also, Philadelphia burned a bunch of waste in incinerators (don’t get Leonard started on incinerators!) and sent the ash to Haiti. This is not allowed, and the United States had to clean up the waste. Leonard documents going to the Mayor’s event in a kind of flash mob demanding action, and she followed a boat carrying waste to ensure they didn’t drop it anywhere it wasn’t meant to go. One port they stopped at mysteriously was ablaze and the waste had to continue its journey. Ultimately, they dumped it in the ocean—but they were brought to justice. Moments like that are inspirational, but we need continual pressure to ensure that polices are established and enforced.

The other two big ideas I think are worth exploring further are externalized costs and extended producer responsibility. As for externalized costs, those are all the resource costs that companies get away with using without paying for. For instance, the environmental costs or degradation to the natural world as a result of their manufacturing processes are not seen as something companies need to pay for. Essentially, the costs are externalized to communities that feel the impact while not impacting the company directly. As an aside, I appreciate that Leonard talks about economics and the GDP as an insufficient metric for measuring it. The GDP fails to account for resource loss and externalized costs and simplifies to the point of meaninglessness. The other key component that I think we need to advocate for is extended producer responsibility. This means that companies are responsible for the entire lifecycle of their goods. Environmental choices have often been displaced onto consumers (e.g. I could buy post-it notes or recycled post-it notes). EPR suggests that the company producing the goods needs to take responsibility for the post-consumer life of their products. Having EPR policies would be a complete gamechanger for how we create goods and distribute them.

Overall, The Story of Stuff serves as a great primer for key issues in consumption and environmentalism. The sheer number of topics Leonard covers—and the statistics themselves—are overwhelming. It’s unfortunate because on the one hand I want to really focus in on one aspect of waste and try to advocate for improvements, but the book also shows how interconnected all these policies are. It’s as though we need to take responsibility for everything because, really, we do. My hope is that having these conversations leads to direct action and I hope you’ll join.

Happy reading and advocating!