Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls’s quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao’s police. Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi’s affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls’s mother.
As fascism burns across America, it’s important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.
Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope’s embers, and fan them into the flames of change.
It should sound plausible, but after hearing people emphasize how unpopular and fringe they are from 2020 all the way to 2024, only for Trump to win the popular vote, then seeing politicians, journalists, judges and CEOs almost universally embrace or surrender to these oh-so-unpopular and often illegal policies, let’s just say I have my doubts. Either the majority of America is indeed Nazi-friendly, or being unpopular has very little bearing on whether people will actually resist.
Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method. Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it’s only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.
As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between “open” (making better code) and “free” (making code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: “Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?” If you were an “open source” person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, “Does this new thing increase code-quality?” If you were a “free software” person, the question you had to answer was, “Does this make people more free?”
Google’s a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that’s not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked .
No code project survives contact with the computer, a brutal and unforgiving cognitive partner that ferrets out every error in your thinking, every trap you’ve unknowningly fallen into. Here again, Ullman shines in her renderings of the ferocious mental combat that programmers must do with their computers, grueling matches that are made all the worse by the certain knowledge that the only way to win the bout is to discover and fix your own flaws.
You see, Project 2025 isn’t just one roadmap for turning America into a doomed, corporate/christofascist hellscape: it is several such roadmaps, with many policy prescriptions that directly and violently contradict each other.
If this fracturing will be their undoing then I’m all for it. But I’m tired, so tired, of waiting.
Trump’s day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word “systemic”
But of course, Trump wasn’t intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.
This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It must reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can’t even see that it is an ideology.
And, I’ll sing this tune once more, this is why we NEED the humanities, and why they’ve been attacking them for years now, and this very outcome, the gutting of scientific fields, was entirely foreseeable, but there were far too many people who thought “yeah, who needs art, cultural studies, or things like gender or ethnic studies, because if we just put everyone in a STEM program, they’ll all become super-smart and won’t need those dumb things that are just a luxury anyway”… And so when the crisis came in 2008, far too many people just shrugged their shoulders as the gutting happened in humanities departments, all over the country, except in the most elite institutions, because luxuries like understanding human life and culture should be reserved for the leisure class, after all… those working class peons need to keep their eyes on the prize, which is working for a living at a PRODUCTIVE pursuit… /s
Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers’ ears!
For all its reputation as an entrepôt bolthole of a shady international elite, Dubai is a simpler proposition, one embodied by the sight in front of me, of countless revellers playing at the lifestyle of oligarch wealth, saving up for a year to be waited on by modern-day slaves for a fortnight.
I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.
I am ashamed to have visited. There are some experiences that journalism cannot excuse. I add nothing to the record by having gone. I thought the trip would present a grotesque tapestry that might disclose some new truth about the reordering of the world. It got the better of me. I imagined a gonzo-style reveal about ordering a mojito in Russian from an Indian barman while gazing towards Iran. All of this is possible, but none of it makes my visit worthwhile.
I knew it was all built with the modern equivalent of slavery, but I didn’t realize that this was the draw, that the international tourism was predicated on effectively being served by slaves and the attendant “I’m better than these people, fuck 'em” mindset.
which is far more depressing.
Yeah, I hope that no matter how much money I might some day have, I’ll never spend it like that.
I wonder if part of the thrill for some of those revellers is that of getting away with doing something illicit, something naughty. Maybe some know they’re exploiting others, and that it’s wrong, but hey, I’m getting away with deriving pleasure from that! If so, an extreme form might be the kind of abuse Tramp engaged in with ol’ pal Jeffrey – sexual pleasure mixed in with the sick, sadistic pleasure of getting away with abuse, in which case, the more horrific “the better.” Ugh.
If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science (“If you don’t want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment”) in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.
Reading the Bezzle right now on library loan. Thesr paragraphs really struck me
They were. Australia has a lot of beautiful plants and animals and most of them are, frankly, monsters. The eucalypt is no exception. Its reproductive strategy is to drop those heavy, oily leaves around its base until the trapped heat and the highly flammable oil consummate their tragic love affair and burst into flame. The ensuing forest fires reduce the eucalypts to ashes, but the same goes for all the plants that might compete with them. The difference is that eucalypt seedpods need fire to open up and release their seeds, and the fires that coax them open also eliminate all the canopy cover that might compete with them for sunlight, while the ashes of the fallen competing trees enrich the soil with nutrients.
That life cycle played out in Australia for millennia, but it’s been playing out in Southern California since the 1850s, when nitwit settlers imported them and planted them in an act of slow-motion arson that gives PG&E a run for its money in the competition to see who can burn down the state first.
It’s a universal truth that these incumbent communications companies love collecting public broadband subsidies, but they hate investing in broadband. From wireless companies that demand exclusive access to spectrum and then never bother to use it (and howl like enraged baboons whenever anyone proposes taking that fallow spectrum back) to cable and phone companies who demand billions in indirect subsidies (intra- and inter-city rights of way) and direct subsidies (billions in cash) and refuse to upgrade their switching or lines
It’s getting harder and harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I’ve had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them. What’s the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?
