“They’re trying to get back to the idea of having actual intellectuals again.” Contributing editor David Graeber discusses the current state of the American intellectual at the April 6th launch party for Baffler no. 22 and his new book, The Democracy Project.

I am honored by Evgeny Morozov’s description of the Free Software Movement, but I would like to correct a few specific points.

1. “Open source” did not replace the Free Software Movement. We are still here, still spreading the idea that the users of computing deserve to control their computing. We have more influence in some other countries than in the US. See gnu.org and fsf.org.

2. The article refers to “the Linux operating system”, but that term is a misnomer. The system people have in mind, when they say this, is basically the GNU operating system that I launched in 1984 to give users control over their computing. Linux is one system component, developed by Linus Torvalds starting in 1991, which filled the last gap in the GNU system. Since the combination is much more GNU than Linux, it is appropriately called GNU+Linux or GNU/Linux. See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.

3. The article mentions the General Public License. Actually, it is the GNU General Public License. I wrote it for the GNU system; but anyone can write and release software under that license. Hundreds of GNU programs, and thousands of other programs (including Linux) use this license to liberate their users and resist conversion into proprietary software. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html.

4. How the use of web services affects users’ control freedom is an important question, and our first proposed conclusion is that you should not entrust your own computing to a service that does it using software chosen by the service operator. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html.

Sincerely,
Dr. Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
Boston

In her report, Joffe-Walt says disability is rising as a means for the federal government to subsidize workers whose skills don’t align with the current industrial climate and as an appealing way for states to sweep former welfare cases under the rug. Disability claims are, after all, a federal expense. “There are now millions of Americans who do not have the education or the skills for the current economy,” Joffe-Walt says, and “disability programs have become the default plan” to help them.

Sure, the National Review Online and Breitbart.com considered Joffe-Walt’s reporting a brilliant, eye-opening effort with a high potential to “spread the word about the importance of disability reform,” but a number of other outlets questioned its validity. “Listeners are invited to conclude that many kids are brought onto SSI who really don’t need the help, [and] that overly lax program requirements and loopholes, exploited by the ‘disability-industrial complex,’ have produced exploding caseloads and an unsustainable budget problem,” Harold Pollock wrote on the Century Foundation blog. Others also contended that Joffe-Walt had skewed the numbers in order to make her case. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Economic and Policy Research—among others—took TAL to task for misinterpreting data. The most damning criticism came from attorney Jennifer Kates in an analysis published last week: “Joffe-Walt’s reporting very closely tracks a set of talking points disseminated by a handful of linked think tanks,” Kates writes, including the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—talking points also disseminated by Nicholas Kristof in a series of New York Times columns, subsequently debunked, about spongers in Kentucky who kept their children out of school in order to game the system. But This American Life is sticking by the story. “We know of no factual errors,” said host Ira Glass.

Should it surprise you that TAL is giving oxygen to right-wing bromides about greedy bureaucrats and work-shy benefits recipients? In a word: no. As I said in my essay about TAL for Baffler 20, the show’s primary aim is to make upper-middle-class folks feel good about themselves, not to advance critical thought.

“Trends with Benefits” is the very sort of quirky narrative journey I criticized in my essay. Glass begins the broadcast by talking about Hale County, Alabama, a place where roughly one in four residents receives federal disability assistance: “Well, last fall, this reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, who’s with Planet Money—she went to Hale County to try to figure out what was going on there,” he explains. “Her experience there was the beginning of a six-month long obsession with our nation’s disability programs.” Glass’s coy set-up to the piece downplayed any suspicion that Joffe-Walt would be regurgitating talking points put forth by the Cato Institute—she was following her bliss, like a stamp collector, or someone on a yoga kick. Or as law professor James Kwak puts it on his blog, “the story boils down to the idea that disability benefits are valuable, so people are trying to get them, framed as some sort of epiphany.”

Meanwhile, Joffe-Walt’s interactions with those outside the public radio demographic can be disorienting, to put things mildly. Her wanderings take her to a woman named Ethel Thomas, a disabled former nurse’s aide with a bad back. “In your dream . . . world . . . if you could have . . . a different job that you could do with your back . . . what would that be?” Joffe-Walt asks haltingly. When contrasted with the rapid-fire clip at which she narrates the story, her molasses-paced delivery leaves the listener with the impression that she struggled to find words a bumpkin might understand. Poor Thomas doesn’t seem to pick up on the generous cues to spell out a life plan for the TAL listenership: it takes her ages to answer the question, including a nine-second silence that Joffe-Walt and her producers let play out in real time. When Thomas does respond, it becomes apparent that the only white-collar types she’s seen work in the disability office—and that, we’re told, is where Thomas dreams of working, too. This excruciating interlude underscores the social class divide between TAL listeners and persons on disability assistance.

“[T]he story as a whole suffers from the . . . facile extrapolation from the individual story to national policy,” Kwak writes. When I criticized TAL for making a habit of “massaging painful realities into puddles of personal experience,” I never realized just how damaging that habit could be.

The Baffler and MAKE present “Don’t Forget to Eat!” at the Plough & Stars this Friday, March 8 from 5:30 p.m. till 7 p.m., in honor of AWP 2013.

There will be music, boozing, and schmoozing, plus some fun semi-literary performances by Baffler and MAKE editorial staff, including Ailish Hopper, John Summers, Christopher Janke, Fred Sasaki, Julia Story, and Eugenia Williamson. Musical accompaniment by folk-y band Billy Blake and the Vagabonds.

Žižek: A seduction—to be successful—has to imply a moment of impotence and failure, in the sense that you playfully acknowledge your limitations. Seduction never works with perfection. People are totally wrong when they think that they should present themselves as perfect, blah blah blah blah.

I talked with a sex adviser who told me, when you have a couple where the guy’s impotent, the worst thing to do is to give him some bullshit like, “Don’t think about, just do it spontaneously.” This is where you kill him. He told me one way to do it is to tell them to imitate a purely externalized bureaucratic procedure. Like, you want to make love, okay, sit down with your partner and make a Stalinist plan.

First your fingers (she says) then put your hand on my breasts (she says). Now (he says) you put your finger into my ass. Then you get totally caught in these bureaucratic negotiations. And then usually somebody says, “Fuck it, why don’t we just fuck, let’s go.” The point is you can only do this spontaneously after you have been bureaucratic. It can get eroticized . . .

Žižek: There’s an Indian guy in Cambridge [Pranav Mistry], who developed “SixthSense,” okay it’s still primitive, he didn’t commercialize it, but it points towards the future. A simple mechanism: you have a camera, a small one, digital, on your head. You have a kind of a projector on your breast, and you are connected to the net through a cellphone in your pocket, and it works like this. The camera identifies the object in front of you. Because it’s connected, the computer can identify them. And then immediately the Internet gets the data about the object and projects them onto any plain surface. You interact with a real object, but at the same time you can project on them all the data.

And I think it’s an interesting thing because the effect is a kind of magic. Objects answer you, telling all about themselves. It must be wonderful to do this in seduction. Okay, it holds also for women, but from my male chauvinist perspective, I look at the woman and it’s projected on her. She likes anal sex, she likes her breasts pinched, she likes this music, she likes that. You get instant data on the girl. This is ideology at its purest. And isn’t it how our real lives are structured? Let’s say you are an anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, or anti-black racist. Isn’t it exactly the same what happens when you see a real Arab or Jew or black guy? You project on him all your racist knowledge. You see that he’s evil, a danger to you, or whatever, blah blah. I think it’s a perfect metaphor for our spontaneous ideology . . .

This new collection follows Petrushevskaya’s celebrated volume of “scary fairy tales,” There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, which Anna co-translated and Penguin published on Halloween in 2009. A New York Times bestseller, one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year, one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and the winner of the World Fantasy Award, the collection was praised by James Wood in The New Yorker as “A revelation—it is like reading late-Tolstoy fables, with all of the master’s directness and brutal authority. A WONDERFUL BOOK.”

So come to the event, or buy the new collection, and join in the discovery of Russia’s most accomplished and beguiling living writer. “Russia is a land of women Homers, women who tell their stories orally, just like that, without inventing anything,” Petrushevskaya, 74, has said from her home in Moscow. “They’re extraordinarily talented storytellers. I’m just a listener among them.”

Come to the event this Monday, buy the book, listen in.

Happy Valentine’s Day!]]> 2013-02-06T02:37:48+00:00 http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2013/01/aaron_swartz http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2013/01/aaron_swartz#When:19:44:27Z The Baffler’s contributing editor Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11. Only 26 years old, Aaron’s accomplishments, both technical and political, were stunning, as detailed elsewhere. And his interests and talents were amazingly diverse, as displayed on his blog, Raw Thought.

To us, he was a friend, colleague, and inspiration. He loved The Baffler, instantly saw the point of reviving it, and played an indispensible role in making that happen. He began working with us in 2010, just weeks after our headquarters moved to Cambridge, and continued steadily through the rebuilding in 2011 and the publication of three new issues in 2012. His sudden death cuts short our discussions of a greater and more permanent role for him, a prospect he appeared to relish—“Yeah, definitely interested,” he wrote on December 29. “I’ve been swamped with holiday stuff, but should have more time starting the 7th.”

Aaron’s contributions, whether technical advice or editorial suggestions and admonitions, showed his incisive intelligence, political passion, and sweet humor. His nature was evident to everyone who worked with or near him. (His presence at the dinner table invariably made the editor’s little daughter blush with giddy adoration.) And so we seethed at news of his indictment by a bullying federal prosecutor bent on criminalizing his political activism. In July 2011, several days after the indictment, we wrote:

The real purpose of the indictment is to terrorize advocates for open access at a time when corporations and their allies in government feel themselves under siege by hackers. Aaron, then, offers an excellent opportunity for the government to reassert its role as a security service for powerful institutions and their clients, a role that it’s been bungling of late. Threatening him with a long detention signals a coming counter-offensive against the more democratic culture for which he and others like him stand, and once again illustrates the Obama administration’s awful zeal for prosecuting whistleblowers and anti-secrecy activists. The U.S. Attorney should withdraw the indictment, apologize to Aaron and his family, and busy her office with real criminals.

Aaron, alas, spent his last days hounded by a prosecutor determined to make an example of him. He was probably the sweetest and gentlest person we ever knew. We loved him, and we miss him already.

John Summers