Friday, April 19, 2019
Glenn Greenwald humiliates NPR idiots over Julian Assange Arrest
NPR IS ANTI-PROGRESSIVE PROPAGANDA FROM CORPORATE DEMOCRATS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEC7UfkEWQQ
Suicide and The Plague of Fantasy
Captivations of the
Algorithmic Ego
Colin Wright
Against the lures of the
imaginary, Jacques-Alain Miller has defined psychoanalysis as “an invitation
for the subject to abstract himself from the ineluctable modality of the
visible and renounce the image in favour of the signifier.”[1] How crucial a
clinical orientation this is, in our Society of the Spectacle, becomes
clear when we consider the recent phenomenon of ‘suicide porn’…
In its juxtaposition of sex
and the passage à l’acte, this precise phrase invokes the
digital mediation of the death-drive today. According to the Urban Dictionary, ‘suicide porn’ involves going online to
look “at dangerous objects or places and to fantasize over causing
yourself harm/death using them. The warm feelings this brings up”, the
dictionary claims, “are psychologically gratifying, rather than
sexual.” Of course, our focus on jouissance exposes the falsity of this last
distinction: the signifier ‘porn’ is far from being a mere analogy here, and it
indexes an enjoyment that will not be psychologised.
The issues raised by ‘suicide
porn’ have risen to prominence in the UK because of the tragic case of Molly Russell. Aged just 14, Molly took her own life in
November 2014 after months of viewing ‘self-harm porn’ on her mobile phone via
her Instagram account. Sadly, Molly’s case is not an isolated one. In January
2018, Ursula Harlow, aged only 11, also committed suicide
following prolonged exposure to suicide porn sites, prompting her mother to say
“if I could turn back time I’d destroy her phone”. Behind a pretence of mutual
self-help, these kinds of sites encourage users to swap hints and tips on the
best methods for ending one’s life. Many also involve exchanging graphic images
of self-harm: lurid ‘selfies’ of lacerated arms dripping with blood prompt
appreciative comments from fellow ‘cutters’, along with helpful advice on how
and where to make the incisions.[2] Molly’s
father, Ian Russell, accused Instagram of “helping her to die”, not simply
because it did little to curb the proliferation of such sites on its platform,
but also because its algorithms ensured his daughter’s entrapment within an
“echo chamber” of suicidal voices. He is right! Recursive data-profiling means
that once you search for these sites (or indeed stumble across them),
Instagram’s software points you in the direction of more of the same,
effectively interpellating you as a ‘fan’ of suicide porn. Social networking in
this instance means connecting around a common identification with death, the
speech of each echoing in a self-enclosed bubble of the imaginary. It seems
that Molly’s initial online search for support with her depression took a
tragic turn because algorithms amplified exponentially the echo of her own
complaint (in precisely the way Lacan argued against).
Is this not a new algorithmic
mutation of the ego? The ego has always been a kind of iterative sameness
machine, and as Freud’s shrewd reference to the myth of Narcissus warned, at
its heart lies a deadly effect of capture by the image. But the digital
redistribution of narcissism seems to have unleashed its mortifying aspect with
new ferocity. Where once the mirror stage required a symbolic Other to pin the
ego to an image in an imago, there is little or no such symbolic mediation
now. Instead, the ego is delegated to a computational Other whose algorithms
are programmed primarily to make jouissance circulate as a surplus from which
capital can profit. The result is not so much subjects of the signifier divided
by alienation as it is consumers of a limitless jouissance that also consumes
them.
In this sense, we should
probably be sceptical about the attempts to make another Other exist that could
police the problem that ‘suicide porn’ names.
The UK government’s Science
and Technology Committee has responded by launching an enquiry into the links
between social media usage and young people’s mental health, something about
which the Education Policy Institute already produced a report in 2017. The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock
even arranged a personal meeting with Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, in order
to seek assurances about the platform’s response to Molly’s case. Whilst
Mosseri made a number of no-doubt sincere commitments – for example,
“Sensitivity Screens” that will blur images of self-harm, as well automated
prompts for people who search for them to contact the Samaritans – these
measures seem impotent before what some social media theorists have referred to
as “algorithmic governmentality”.[3] Foucault’s
concept of governmentality was always meant to push beyond state-centric models
of top-down power, towards a microphysics of dispersed and productive power.
How much more pertinent does this become as we voluntarily submit ourselves to
datafication by the likes of Google and Facebook? As is clear in the area of
high finance and the stock markets, computational transactions have an inhuman
agency that now far outstrip any individual’s ability to know, let alone
control, them. The University Discourse ultimately real-ises the S2 of a
knowledge decoupled from an S1 that would master it. Hence the new algorithmic
ego.
To return to the invaluable
clinical indication Miller’s comment gives us, it is arguably only the
discourse of the analyst that can support the subject’s attempts to extract
itself from the “ineluctable modality of the visible”[4] which has such
deadly effects today. Renouncing the image in favour of the signifier means
risking a step outside algorithmic echo chambers, the better to hear the speech of
the Other.
[1] Miller,
Jacques-Alain, "The Sovereign Image", The Lacanian Review: Hurly
Burly, No. 5, Summer 2018, p. 42.
[2] This recalls
Lacan’s comment on ‘self-flagellation’ in Seminar XVII: “I am speaking of
the mark on the skin, which, in this fantasy, inspires nothing other than a
subject identifying itself as the object of jouissance” (Lacan: 2007. p.
49)
[3] See also
Galloway, Alexander and Thacker, Eugene, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
(Electronic Mediations), Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
[4] This beautiful
phrase was in fact coined by James Joyce in Ulysses.
First They Came for Assange
Apr 16, 2019 YANIS
VAROUFAKIS
THENS – My meetings with
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange all took place in the same small room. As the
intelligence services of a variety of countries know, I visited Assange in
Ecuador’s London embassy many times between the fall of 2015 and December 2018.
What these snoops do not know is the relief I felt every time I
left.
I wanted to meet Assange
because of my deep appreciation of the original WikiLeaks concept. As a
teenager reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I, too, was
troubled by the prospect of a high-tech surveillance state and its likely
effect on human relations. Assange’s early writings – particularly his idea of
using states’ own technology to create a huge digital mirror that could show
everyone what they were up to – filled me with hope that we might collectively
defeat Big Brother.
By the time I met Assange,
that early hope had faded. Surrounded by bookcases featuring Ecuadorian
literature and government publications, we would sit and chat late into the
night. A device on top of a bookshelf emitted mind-numbing white noise to
counter listening devices. As time passed, the claustrophobic living room, the
badly hidden ceiling-mounted camera pointing at me, the white noise, and the
stale air made me want to run out into the street.
Assange’s detractors have been
saying for years that his confinement was self-inflicted: he hid in Ecuador’s
embassy because he jumped bail in the United Kingdom to avoid answering sexual
assault allegations in Sweden. As a man, I feel I have no right to express an
opinion regarding those allegations. Women must be heard when reporting
assault. Only the violence that men have inflicted upon women for millennia is
viler than the disrespect and denigration to which women are subjected when
they speak up.
I recall saying to Julian
that, had it been me, I would want to confront my accusers, and listen to them
carefully and respectfully, regardless of whether official charges had been
brought. He replied that he, too, wanted that. “But, Yanis,” he said, “if I
were to go to Stockholm, they would throw me in solitary and, before I got a chance
to answer any allegations, I would be bundled into a plane heading for a US
supermax prison.” To drive the point home, he showed me his lawyers’ offer to
Swedish authorities to go to Stockholm if they guaranteed that he would not be
extradited to the United States on espionage charges. Sweden never considered
the proposal.
During Assange’s years in
Ecuador’s embassy, in circumstances that the United Nations deemed “arbitrary detention,” many friends and colleagues mocked
his fear – and lambasted me for believing him. Last September, the historian
and feminist intellectual Germaine Greer summed up that belief on Australian
public radio: “He won’t be extradited to the United States,” she said
derisively, blaming Julian’s lawyers for misleading him into fearing such an
extradition while collecting his book’s royalties.
Now he is languishing in
Belmarsh, a notorious English high-security prison, in a windowless basement
cell with even less fresh air and light than before. Unable to receive
visitors, he awaits extradition to the US. “Let him rot in hell,” is a frequent
response from good people around the world who were incensed by WikiLeaks’
release of Hillary Clinton’s emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election,
which blew fresh wind into Donald Trump’s sails. Why, they ask, has Assange not
released anything damning on Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Before I explain why his
detractors should reconsider, let me state for the record my personal
frustration with his support of Brexit, his injudicious attacks against his
feminist critics, his editorializing in favor of Trump, and, crucially, his
communications with Trump’s people. I expressed this frustration to his face
several times.
But castigating WikiLeaks for
not publishing leaks that damage all sides equally is to miss the point.
WikiLeaks was established as a digital mailbox where whistle-blowers could
deposit information that is true and whose revelation is in the public
interest. This is WikiLeaks’ sole obligation. By design, it cannot control who
leaks what; its technology prevents even Assange from knowing a
whistle-blower’s identity. If this means that most leaks will embarrass Western
powers, that is WikiLeaks’ great, if imperfect, service to us – a service that,
to my frustration, was diminished by Julian’s editorializing.
Recent developments prove that
his current predicament has nothing to do with the Swedish allegations or his
role in aiding Trump against Clinton. With Chelsea Manning in prison again for
refusing to confess that Assange incited, or helped, her to leak evidence of US
atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the best explanation of what is going on
comes from Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first CIA director and now US Secretary of
State.
Pompeo described WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile
intelligence service.” That is exactly right. But it is an equally accurate
description of what every self-respecting news outlet ought to be. As Daniel
Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky have warned, journalists who fail to oppose Assange’s
extradition to the US could be next on the hit list of a president who
considers them the “enemy of the people.” Celebrating his arrest and turning a
blind eye to Manning’s continued suffering is a gift to liberalism’s greatest
foes.
Besides liberalism, Assange’s
persecution by the US security-industrial complex has another victim: women. No
woman, in Sweden or elsewhere, will get justice if he is now thrown into a
supermax prison for revealing crimes against humanity perpetuated by awful men
in or out of uniform. No feminist goal is served by Manning’s continued suffering.
So, here is an idea: Let us
join forces to block Assange’s extradition from any European country to the US,
so that he can travel to Stockholm and give his accusers an opportunity to be
heard. Let us work together to empower women, while protecting whistle-blowers
who reveal nefarious behavior that governments, armies, and corporations would
prefer to keep hidden.
Behind Trump’s clash with the Fed: Looming economic crisis and class conflict
18 April 2019
Nick Beams
The repeated calls by
President Donald Trump for the US Federal Reserve loosen its monetary policy
and provide a further boost to the stock market expose the economic and political
reality behind the mask of official ideology.
In his latest remarks,
contained in a tweet last Sunday, Trump said the Dow Jones Industrial Average
would be 5,000 or even 10,000 points above its present near-record level if the
Fed had not tightened interest rates last year. He demanded that the central
bank resume the program of “quantitative easing,” under which it poured
trillions into the financial markets in the wake of the 2008 finance crash.
For more than three decades
the stock market has served as the primary financial mechanism through which
the American ruling class has carried out an unprecedented redistribution of
wealth from the working population to the rich. Under Democratic as well as
Republican administrations, the Dow has risen 17-fold since 1985 on the basis
of a relentless assault on workers’ jobs and wages and cuts in education,
health care and other social services.
Under Obama, the Dow rose more
than 250 percent. Under Trump, it has risen a further 32 percent.
The official refrain has been
the lie that “there is no money” for schools, health care, housing or pensions,
while unlimited sums have been squandered to pay for more yachts, private
islands and Manhattan penthouses for the modern-day aristocrats, along with new
and more deadly conventional and nuclear weapons to prepare a new military
Armageddon.
Wealth and income inequality
have reached record levels, consolidating the rule of the financial oligarchy
over every aspect of American social and political life.
Trump is simply declaring
openly what the Fed has been doing throughout this period, behind the official
pretence of “neutrality” and “independence”—and demanding that it do more of
it.
If there are objections to
Trump’s comments from the New York Times and other key sections of
the political and media establishment, on the grounds that they infringe on the
Fed’s “independence,” it is not because of any disagreement with the
fundamental direction of his policies. They are concerned that Trump is seeking
to transform the US central bank from the instrument of the ruling class as a
whole into that of his own faction. But Trump’s factional opponents within the
ruling elite base themselves on the same forms of financial parasitism as those
sections for whom the real estate swindler-turned president speaks.
The legal mandate of the Fed
is to adjust monetary policy so as to ensure stable prices and maximum
employment, irrespective of the ups and downs of the stock market. But the Fed
has been directly tailoring its policies to prop up the financial markets since
the stock market plunge of October 1987, when Wall Street fell more than 22
percent in a single day and the then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan announced that
the financial spigots were open.
This led to what became known
as the Greenspan put: That when the markets began to falter, the Fed would be
ready to step in to boost them with the provision of cheap money. Greenspan did
make one attempt to curb what he termed “irrational exuberance” in 1996, but
such was the adverse reaction from the financial elites that it was never again
attempted.
From then on, the official
mantra was that it was impossible to tell if a financial bubble was in
formation and the markets had to be given their head, with the Fed intervening
to support them when their speculative activities gave rise to a crisis.
This program was intensified
after the financial crash of 2008, when the government doled out hundreds of
billions of dollars to bail out the banks and the Fed initiated its policy of
quantitative easing, providing trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money to
ensure that the speculative binge continued and expanded.
At the same time, it was
insisted that corporate taxes had to be continually reduced. This has now
resulted in a situation where, as a recent analysis revealed, 60 US
corporations, appropriating billions of dollars in profits, paid no tax in
2018, with some receiving a tax refund.
Trump’s latest intervention is
accompanied by the claim that the US economy is powering ahead and could grow
even faster if only the Fed stopped holding it back. But rather than indicating
strength, Trump’s ultimatums express a deepening crisis and fear that the
financial house of cards will collapse unless still more money is pumped into
the system.
Claims of the underlying
strength of the US economy are belied by basic facts. The present interest rate
of between 2.25 percent and 2.5 percent is one of the lowest in economic
history, but the Trump administration wants it cut by at least 0.5 percent.
The stock market, bloated by
financial speculation, is like a drug addict who demands more as his underlying
health continues to deteriorate. When the US financial markets neared bear
market territory earlier this year and Wall Street demanded that the Fed halt
its policy of incremental rate increases, the Fed snapped into line and
Chairman Jerome Powell announced it would abandon its efforts to “normalize”
interest rates, leading to the latest rally, which has pushed the Dow to within
a few points of its record high.
At the end of 2017, Trump
claimed that the trillions of dollars handed out in corporate tax cuts would
cause the economy to roar ahead with expanded investment and the provision of
well-paying jobs. This lie has been exposed as the vast bulk of the money the
tax cuts provided has gone for share buybacks and other parasitic means of
pumping more money into the coffers of the rich.
Now the global economy, upon
which the US economy is dependent notwithstanding Trump’s claims of the success
of his “America First” program, is experiencing a significant slowdown after a
brief upturn in 2017.
In its latest economic
outlook, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global growth,
warning that 70 percent of the world economy was undergoing deceleration, a
phenomenon concentrated in the advanced economies, including the US. Those
warnings have been underscored by the announcement on Wednesday by the German
government that it was halving its forecast for economic growth in 2019 to just
0.5 percent.
The Trump administration is
frightened by the prospect of a recession, or even a significant slowdown in
the economy, fueling the growing wave of strikes and protests and transforming
it into a social explosion, not only in the so-called rust belt areas that
voted for his presidency, but across the country.
These fears extend beyond the
White House. In a recent essay, the head of the hedge fund Bridgewater
Associates, the multibillionaire Ray Dalio, warned that when there is a “very
big gap” in the economic conditions of people, a downturn can lead to conflict
and “revolutions of one sort or another.”
With interest rates already at
historic lows, Dalio said he was “worried what the next economic downturn will
be like, especially as central banks have limited ability to reverse it.”
It is above all the fear
within the ruling elite of growing socialist sentiment in the working class
that underlies both Trump’s self-proclaimed war against socialism and the
bipartisan attack by the ruling elite on democratic rights.
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