12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #9

No 9: We live in a 'post feminist' epoch.

The implication of this claim, supposedly analogous to such terms as
'post industrial', is that we have no more need for feminism - in
politics, law, everyday life - because the major goals of that
movement, articulated in the '70's and '80's, have been achieved. On
all counts, this is a false claim; the 'post feminist' label serves
not to register achievement of reforming goals, but the delegitimation
of those goals themselves.

My reply:

Delusion no.9 is even further from my area of expertise. I will be tempted to look at both sides of the gender divide and the 'battle of the sexes', but will attempt to restrain going too much into the male condition, staying on the topic raised.

In large part, I see this as a true 'challenge' to the delusion posited, but my reasons for thinking so have nothing to do with the unequal female condition. It doesn't affect me, and has seeming little effect on the women I know well, (other than to make them stronger people, perhaps, which I count as no bad thing). Rather, to me this is another symptom of the ever-growing capacity of a certain kind of super-system to adapt, assimilate and eventually neutralise alternative systems of thought/politics/social behaviour. Ironically, the growth of academia provides this super-system with a powerful tool to assimilate such alternative propositions, as departments of specialist study are set up, entrained to funding sources and constrained to a model of production initiated by the Royal Society hundreds of years ago. In other words, observation separates the observer from the observed, and this can cut the heart out of an alternative proposition as all those who had the wit and the personality to broker their 'movement' to the masses find themselves 'legitimised' by default. "Turn on, tune in and drop out" became a radio station catchphrase. Consciousness expansion became a recreation from the 9 to 5.

Feminism became legitimised, not because it worked, but because it settled for being listened to. Its proponents should have remembered whoever it was (Greer?) that said "if you're looking for equality, you're not thinking big enough" (paraphrase), because as I see it, men and women are not equal. There is ascendancy and subjugation at every level of each person's condition, all across the board. Men treat women like shit across the world, and men humiliate themselves for the amusement of women in their turn. Nowhere is it truly equal, and the greater trends of inequality that feminism addressed could only be affected if it was recognised that this chaotic game of swings and roundabouts will perpetuate itself regardless. Thus you do not try for equality - instead you must try to hold your system outside of that greater one you wish to change, using its self-cohesive identity as a spur for change within the greater system until eventually that system settles to a new form around your one. That which you try to change, changes you. Don't try to change anything - just exist as you wish to and watch everything else change to meet you.

The reason this may not make any sense is that I haven't really tried to articulate it before. Interpret as you wish.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: Reply

Reply (to the replies) by the progenitor of this little discussion, my mother Patricia Howard:

Guys this is really exciting for me, thank you for your terrific
replies so far, much to ponder, I will reply tomorrow, I have a little
point on Ben's chaos theory which might be worth mentioning. Kris
Suskind raises a scary vista, a society without laws, boundaries
principles or just at a very basic level common decency where true to
Nietzschean philosophy the law of the jungle applies. What is new? It
seems to me that Bush and his kind have met their own realities face
to face in 9/11 and the Muslim Fundamentalists, they are mirror images
of each other.

Our dependence on oil is no longer subconscious we know that we are
to blame because of our dependence on oil for the rapidly advancing
global warming. Oil has peaked, Bush is the dying scream of an
obsolete way of life. The radical Muslims are his hateful and hating
shadow world.
Have to be quick tonight as I must meet with the salt of the earth
tomorrow, those who are trying to save the planet in their local way.
Saving food miles and much much more, the brown earth people of
Wexford. I am privileged.

To pick up a point in 'Ben's Chaos Theory' - quote 'that very small
changes can result in very large changes to the state of the system
over time' It is very interesting to note the weather - a beautiful
calm day not a puff of wind, about mid afternoon a tiny puff caresses
the face, by nightfall a full blown storm has gathered force. The
weather can be predicted, but only accurately to about one week hence.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #10

Number 10: We have no need for History

In recent decades large areas of intellectual and academic life-political thought and analysis, economics, philosophy - have jettisoned a concern with history. Yet it remains true that those who ignore history repeat it;as the recycling of unacknowledged cold war premises by the Bush administration in Iraq has devastatingly shown.

My Reply:

This is less my area, so there'll be less of a point to my ramblings.

It is interesting to look at the actions of the Bush administration under the assumption of their ignorance of history, but its probably truer to say that the people who elected him are the ones ignorant of history. Take this little nugget, gleaned from a progressive blog site at http://www.inthesetimes.com

In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

History is not their enemy, it is their target. To be the writers of history, means to be the winners. This is the Plan for the New American Century - they want to take over the world. Or keep taking it over. I think they stand a good chance too, because we all depend on 300 million under-educated, overfed sheep to reign in their worst excesses.

History as a warning, serves only those who have a discerning eye for detail and the truth so that they can pick out the propaganda from the reportage. History as a tool, served only the winners. But now there is the internet, and everyone can write their own history. The problem then becomes, no one can read all that history to decide the ultimate truth, no more than one can talk to everyone in the world to get the popular opinion. So the history being written remains the preserve of those who have the biggest broadcast bandwidth.

I did warn that there wouldn't be much of an overall point to this!

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #11

No 11. The World is Speeding Up.

This, a favourite trope of globalisation theorists, confuses acceleration in some areas, such as the transmission of knowledge, with the fact that large areas of human life continue to demand the same time as before; to conceive and bear a child, to learn a language, to grow up, to digest a meal, to enjoy a joke, to read a poem, to make a pot. It takes the same time to fly from London to New York as it did 40 years ago, ditto to boil an egg or publish a book. Some activities - such as driving around major Western cities (Dublin!), getting through an airport or dying - may take much longer.

My Reply:

Number 11 could stray very much into the territory of subjectivity of existence. If we are not part of a True external reality, then we are merely experiencing a construct of our own senses and beliefs, which are quite malleable. The acceleration of knowledge acquisition forces the mind to view its own beliefs, and thus its own state, as less permanent all the time. Thus the 'world' of experience is literally speeding up, since no one part of it features as a fixture or landmark for quite as long as it used to. However, this is easy to say for someone who has never borne a child, which is an easy state alteration to achieve (many a slip twixt...) but much harder to move out of again short of the natural 9 month term. Other examples abound, as shown below.

The question that still holds for the accelerationista's after this argument is made, is that if experience is in fact subjective, and reality is in some way a construct of our self-consciousness (we think, therefore everything is) - well then, why is there an accelerating wave of biological science along with knowledge-based science, that could alter even such things as pregnancy terms, unless we are imagining for ourselves a future where thought and the external effect that it creates come closer and closer together, until cognitive causality is almost instantaneous.

It is the implication of the unfettered potential of human science, that in order to 'keep up' with it, we would not be able to remain human ourselves. The essential characteristics of human consciouness, never mind physiology, wouldn't hack it when things really start speeding up. The keywords as to why this is, for those who don't really get what I'm driving at, are massively parallel and non-selfhood.

Other replies (from Kris McGlinn):

Reminds me a little of Icarus.

This kind of makes me think about another question I have wondered about. At what point can we say we exist in the same world? For instance, I am aware of animals in the wild...does that mean that they must be aware of me in some sense? Or can I be aware of realities that other people I share this world with are unaware of, just like they may be aware of realities that I am not aware of...and at what point can we say we no longer exist in the same world?

I suppose what I am really getting at is, if there is some correlation between myself, the technology I use, my environment and the humanity I identify myself with (including its history and current technological advancements), then at what point do I become human? and how do we agree what it is to be human? and is there a point at which we can say we are no longer human? or is the entire concept of humanity as misguided as concepts of individual identity ( i.e. there is no division, we are all one)?

Kris.

Here is another thought for those interested in Numerology with a little bit of mythology mixed in (to be taken with a pinch of salt). Number 11 has caused us to question our reality, and of course 9/11 is brought up which is inextricably tied to the collapse of the twin towers. The twin towers are similar to the pillars of heracles which were also seen as gateways from one world into the next (see also Dantes Inferno). The twin towers were the pillars that opened up into the new world of america, these have now fallen. In their place we have ground zero, a term normally associated with the aftermath of a detonation of an atomic bomb (I believe the germans also called the remnants of their burnt out cities ground zero at the end of world war 2).

What will be raised up from the ashes in the place of ground zero? Will it be a reflection of the collective state of consciousness if not of the whole world, at least of the western world (I wont go into the implications of the phallic patriarchal giant tower, maybe that is for the feminists)? But I suppose what interested me was the point that was made, in that Bush sees his own reflection in islamic fundamentalism. If this is so, and the dots we join around 911 reflect how we choose to interpret the events building whatever narrative we feel gives our lives meaning (the events may be completely random, unpredictable and chaotic)...then what part of us does Bush and islamic fundamentalism reflect? Possibly our subconscious realisation of a dependence on oil and the part this plays in the bolstering of the oil barons, along with the suffering it brings to the people of the middle east?

Kris.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #12

Number 12: Human behaviour can be predicted.
In the name of a supposedly "scientific" criterion of knowledge,
scholars are berated for not predicting the end of the cold war, the
rise of Islam, 9/11 and much more besides. Yet many natural sciences -
seismology, evolutionary biology - cannot predict with accuracy
either. Human affairs themselves, even leaving aside the matter of
human intentions and will, allow of too many variables for such
calculation. We will never be able to predict with certainty the
outcome of a sports contest, the incidence of revolutions, the
duration of passion or how long an individual will live.

My reply:
Isaac Asimov is probably to blame here, for writing the 'Foundation' sci-fi novels, wherein a galactic utopian civilisation is built on the work of mathematician Hari Sheldon, who constructs a model of humanity that can predict large-scale trends with complete accuracy. But this was written before the widespread work began on chaos theory, which says that very small changes in beginning conditions can result in very large changes to the state of the system over time. This means that unless you can know with arbitrary precision, the state of the system now, you cannot predict its behaviour over time. Most complex systems are also chaotic. The problem is not one of modelling (which is what people expect the scientists to do), but of data gathering (which is what they *should* actually do, and build the models after to help confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses).
Even if you could have sensors placed around the earth's atmosphere and oceans in a grid with 1cm intervals, and even though the mathematical models for fluid dynamics are perfectly accurate , you cannot measure the current state of the weather with a fine enough precision to predict more than a weeks worth of weather with accuracy. You can't even predict the behaviour of liquid in a small pot with accuracy using fluid dynamics.

Thus the only way to gather enough data on our 'reality' that you could predict its behaviour, is to measure and store its quantum state. Now if you have a large enough quantum computer (say one with the same number of quantum states as the reality you're measuring), you could store this measured quantum state and run it in simulation to 'predict' the behaviour of the 'real' system. There are three problems with this. Firstly, the computer would run no faster than the reality so it wouldn't really be a prediction at all. Secondly, perhaps more importantly and for various reasons that I mostly forget, in order to replicate a quantum state you have to destroy the original - so there would be no reality left to observe the results of the prediction, except inside the prediction. Thirdly, the quantum computer that you built was originally part of the quantum state that you're trying to simulate, so in trying to measure it and simulate it, you need to replicate it inside itself, and then destroy it outside of itself.

Hopefully that's enough paradox to adjudge the whole idea of predicting human behaviour as pointless.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged

In a broadside at the accepted wisdom of the plutocracy, Fred Halliday posited 12 delusions of modern times. Attempting to engender discussion among family and friends, my mother broadcast this series over email and I took the forum floor with my ramblings.
Here, since mum has no blog of her own yet, that series will be reproduced along with any answers that were forthcoming from the family and friends she broadcast to. Counting down, we start with number 12.

Thanks to Fred Halliday for unpermitted reproduction of his 'delusions': Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI).

Another great eye, but still ever watchful

Now that's some cool space fireworks!

Stirring it...

Recently went and stirred the shit on the www.gamedevelopers.ie forum, under my forum name of catbert, in a thread addressing the debate over the value of new-ish undergraduate courses in game development. Here is an abridged version, highlighting the main points and counter points:

catbert:

Doesn't it ever seem to those working in academia that the games companies don't actually deserve what they're looking for? After you slave over a hot student (pun intended) for four years, wouldn't you rather send them anywhere else but the games industry?

I'm not going to go trawling for figures to back this up, but having read this article - it's clear that some world-class graduates are going to be employed in those games companies in four years.

Yet what can they expect? This isn't a government defence contract, they're not going to be rolling in cash, and still they'll be expected to work a full-time intensive grind until they burn out after five years. If an industry treats its employees in this way, why should they get the best?

Some of the games degrees [on offer in Ireland] have been accussed of deceiving prospective applicants into thinking that the sub-par education they offer will get them a job. Maybe they do. But an industry that treats employees as asset collateral with a 5-year half-life, could be accused of a greater deception - that the job is worth having in the first place!

*rant over >:) *

When pressed on my claim that industry workers have an average 5 year career, I had to go and find the article I had read on it so many months ago. Damn them. Happily, I had Google to hand (when does one not?). This was backed up by a later reply (see Idora's reply below) quoting the original IGDA white paper :

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/40/23

Specifically, this: "When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem."

Then there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing on the issue of crunch-time, or intensive long-term (oft-unrewarded) overtime prior to a games shipping date.

Darragh: it would be very hard to maintain [any] sort of lifestyle when you're working from 9am to 1am in the morning..

Omen: that is an exaggeration and its one that really needs to be kicked out, because it simply shouldn't be true. Thats one of the reasons I left Rockstar, because I simply wasn't prepared to work like that.

Peter_b: I've only worked a short big of overtime here and it was all highly compensated, both financially and in grub .

Kyotokid: we worked quite a bit of overtime to get MotorStorm out the door....so crunch does exist.
omen: Yes, crunch does exist, but you can say no.

Now, I actually enjoy crunch time, as it exists in the areas in which I work. And I said so, but I also had to get back to my point:

But I reiterate my original point - games companies, like all the entertainment industries, are guilty of 'selling' the jobs they offer based on the associated 'coolness' of the product they produce. No developer recruitment ad ever shows a picture of an office, they show Lara Croft.
So who are they to point fingers at the universities for mis-representing themselves?

In cinema, 'runners' work 16 hour days for no pay simply for the chance to be on a film set. How much of what should by rights be remunerated to a skilled individual worker, is actually withheld by games companies just because the junior employees accept it as 'the cost of working in games'?

It was shortly after that we got a real reply, addressing the crux of the argument in general and not just nit-picking the corners off my hasty scribbles:

Idora:

catbert wrote:

Doesn't it ever seem to those working in academia that the games companies don't actually deserve what they're looking for? After you slave over a hot student (pun intended) for four years, wouldn't you rather send them anywhere else but the games industry?

the point of the origin of this discussion is that there perhaps isn't as much slaving 'over a hot student' as there probably should be…

catbert wrote:

Idora and/or some other industry folk (was it the panel at the GameOn conference in DIT? Refresh my memory Idora) have been accusing some of the games degrees of deceiving prospective applicants into thinking that the sub-par education they offer will get them a job

Gotta be careful on this one – this comment was made in relation to *some* courses (and not necessarily degree courses either) that simply rebadge existing courses and call them games

Also, it's not a matter of deserving them. We have jobs; some graduates want them; end of.

catbert wrote:

omen wrote: I'd take that article with a pinch of salt It was written by the Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association. Ask Idora if he is worth his salt.

The figures quotes are from the first QOL survey done in 2004 by the IGDA in preparation for writing the QOL White Paper. More info and highlighted stats here (incl. full survey source data for those interested):- http://www.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php

Overtime is necessary at some point in most industries (every job I’ve ever had anyway). And as others have pointed out – there more than a few companies/industries where OT isn’t compensated fairly or at all. How about teachers/lecturers with all that lesson prep time, for example?

While there are many games companies not compensating employees for OT, and many that seem to think crunch is the ONLY way to do it, there are also many that do compensate for OT (e.g. bonuses, stock/stock options, time in lieu, overtime, etc.), and many more that work hard to do little or no overtime at all.

[ For those new to the industry or unfamiliar with the term ‘crunch time’ is extended/intensive overtime, i.e. working 12 – 14 hrs a day every day for a week or working a normal 8 hr day but having to work EVERY day, including weekends, for a month ]

For the record – I am now on my third games industry job and have worked crunch only once for 2.5 months and that was only because I was starting a new job, helping organise the Awakenings conference AND had a (self-imposed) major deadline looming. In the first year of my current job we have worked on multiple projects (sometimes simultaneously) and have worked approx. 50 HOURS overtime in total on those projects without any crunch. There are a few folks on this forum who could tell you similar stories

catbert wrote:

I reiterate my original point - games companies, like all the entertainment industries, are guilty of 'selling' the jobs they offer based on the associated 'coolness' of the product they produce.

Catbert, while I agree with most of the individual points you’ve made (but not the overall thrust of your argument), this one is verging close to WTF? territory.

It’s sales – using a poster of Lara Croft or the ‘coolness’ factor to attract the brightest and best is absolutely acceptable, above reproach and NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with unrewarded crunch time

So I thought to wrap it up around there:

Excellent, a response worth reading. In the end, although I still say games companies take advantage of the illusions of young enthusiasts simply because they can, I too fall on the side of: its not about deserving a job. No more than luck exists, to deserve is not a personal attribute.

If someone falls for the gd's hype, thats their problem, just like coming to college expecting to be spoonfed an education is the problem of all under appreciative welfare state scions. But thats another debate...

Needless to say, the debate goes on. Some useful things were said though, and we all ended up…well, probably none the wiser. Such is the way of the social consensus wisdom of the web – sometimes all the equal voices harmonise and come together in a great hosanna to enlightenment; sometimes, its just babel.

AAAAARRRGH!

Dear God I'm busy!

If all the effort required to invest myself in all areas covered by my interests, pays off, then I shall be rich beyond riches, but only in whatever metric is suggested by the phrase "pays off"...

Half the time required for a nuclei to undergo radioative decay

07.41am, Sunday morning 14 January 2007. About a year and a half after everyone else, I finally finished HL2. Quite worth the extended attention, I feel. But sorry to say, the delay was not of my making. Fucking Bastard Steam-Mongering Pieces of Shit (it's not bad language, that's their official name!) left a game killing bug right at the beginning of the last section. And here's the crazy part - it's a bug that is completely explicable to even a rigorously logical person though the internal consistency of the ingame narrative.
To elaborate - I got stuck at the beginning of the level entitled 'Our Benfactors', just after Gordon enters the Combine Citadel and has his gravity gun ungraded for free (nice Combine). The way forward hit a junction - a choice between a corridor blocked by a forcefield, and one blocked by a low metal railing. Well, what choice? Clearly a low metal railing is within our power to overcome? But no, for it became apparent that somehow after entering the Citadel, we lost the abilty to jump. Legovers were never a part of the control set, so the low metal railing appears to have stymied us. Nonsensical? Perhaps not. When life gives you lemons, even if they make no sense, do you first ask - why would I be getting lemons? That's just stupid. OR, do you assume that life knows what it's doing, and instead ask - what am I gonna do with all these lemons and no booze?
In a computer game - a triple A game with a 5 year development cycle, no less - similar assumptions apply. After all, logically speaking, why put a low rail across the only forward path? It makes no sense unless the novel inability to jump is an intended gameplay development. But why, suddenly, should we be unable to jump? Is gravity stronger inside the Citadel? Well hardly. We were jumping and prancing about right up until they confiscated our weapons - wait, the weapons! The gravity gun has been augmented by crazy Combine localised field technology! Could it be that its new potency must be traded against a kind of gravitic inertia? It seems plausible - nay, given the clear evidence of our denuded jumping capabilty, it seems definite. So that's the way the game system has gone. I guess we have to look for another way forward.
WRONG! NO! DO NOT PASS GO! DO NOT COLLECT BREEN'S HEAD-ON-A-STICK! In fact, return the game to the person you pirated it off and deny it your game of the year vote, cos you ain't goin noplace, son! Its just a fucking bug, disguised as a plausible gameplay feature with such improvidence, one can only suspect the hand of the horned one himself to be at work in the bowels of Valve.
It's a bug that you can't jump over the tiny, pointless fence at the start of the final section of HL2, and if you don't hold it within your mind that this is not necessarily a self-consistent, logically sound world that you are experiencing, you are in danger of treating the bug as a consequent feature of game-world attributes entrained to a plausibly real-world logic.
Which sucks, cos then there's an hour or so of fruitless level-wandering, back-tracking and head-scratching as you ponder on how to proceed, before concluding that reality demands this to be regarded as a hopeless cause, and the premiere game of 2005 is relegated like somebodies least favourite pair of underpants.

Or at least that's what happened to me, until I got my machine on broadband a while ago, got some free time a bit ago, and got around to investigated where it all went wrong a second ago. And so one blog ago, I finally finished HL2.
Not bad.
8/10


Somewhere along the line there, I wanted to ramble onto a thread of thought regarding human cognition and self-consistency. But its late, or rather early, so instead I'll just point here - and hope that one can access it. If not, perhaps another time!