Spoils of Failure

No defence against the indefensible. The space between words and things is once again total. No defence against the indefensible. The space between words and things is once again fatal. All naming is already murder: serviced muck on the killing floor. Soft-violence as pragmatic necessity: bullbaiting with the starved dogs of rhetoric. An arena sport like no other. Bring on the organ-grinders, carnival barkers, snake-oil paddlers, pork-barreling mouthpieces. Parceling out concerted blows of categorical reification. Deep bites with self-confirming payloads. Live seed for excessive entitlement and a snare for every congenital impulse. Absent a shot, we are condemned to be at war with words. The function of representation comes to grief when words lose their connections with things – in short, when language represents itself. Mark Poster, The Mode Of Information

Submitted by Immortal — Apr 23, 2025

Law-code and executive power – architect’s plan and builder’s craft. Gene action is the prime mover, the great absolver. Mining green gold to spill black ink, to drink it from the troft and cut in on the sugar. Surrender the commons to the bootmarch of biotech, served by back-pocket ivory towers and pump-priming federal courtesies. With science comes rhetoric. Couched in terms of life-maps and holy grails, cybernetics and feedback transducers: the language of sociobiology. All handmaidens for dangerous crossings and hand-wringing policies. Safe guards to thrash the parliament of defects and disposed workers to the scrap heap of oblivion. Give us perfection on polymer scaffolding. Give us ghetto walls bricked word by word. Give us eugenics in seasonal colours. Give us new life over telegraph wires. The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule – and also like the modern corporation or political body – has become just another part of the informational network, now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other. Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life

Submitted by Pestilence — Apr 23, 2025

In the given process, sabotage is a necessary resolve – a determined line of defence. In the given context, obstruction is a necessary control – a vested right to exclusion. Sanctioned, stamped and filed on the hallowed grounds of fiscal security: the front line which fortunes all depend. From the courtiers in the halls of Versailles, to the grab-mongers who warmed the seats in Uruguay, the message is clear: these promises will never eventuate. Armed with trace-chain and pack-saddle on a roughshod crusade to capture, to enclose, to clog arteries and fill silos, because the last frame broken is the first scrap claimed. Scarcity is woven into law. Values frozen into code. We are delivered, reduced to the sum of all variables, aggregated, correlated and collapsed as so much data. Sorted as targets and prospects through the means and metaphors of war: by design, by disinvestement, by self-eviction – a quiet withdrawal. Marked and managed with GIS precision. Take the knight, leave the pawn. Geodemographic solutions for predictive indexing. Bold jargon, kind euphemism for the consigned spaces to live out our days. Running our heads against walls of words, against apologists for hype, against regimes without borders, and the rest follows from it. Manoeuvres of restriction, delay, and hindrance have a large share in the ordinary conduct of business. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Pricing System

Submitted by The Void — Apr 23, 2025

Sound the alarm, get an ambulance, ready a statement: for reactive critics, for the OCI, for the rest of the back end. In these museums to living history, lined with the artifacts of threat, risk management is a precondition for every colour of self-defeat. Mandate piled on mandate, verdicts stacked high, dust-covered and time-worn, signed by solicitors general and bound by library services. A mounting legacy of heroic solutions and failed actions that can't be normalized and interpreted away – used to placate all the lives shamed and denied. Custom is the greatest of weavers: devoid of useful memory and locked in fixed movements. No small madness confusing symptoms with cause. A convenience of definition. Condemnation narrowed to a point. Better to drill it in. Benign as a bullet, meanings are inseparable from purposes. We want to do something, and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results, than we must use certain definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose... I.A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching

Submitted by Lake of Tears — Apr 23, 2025

Unsheathe the final report, the digest of findings from the task force commission on is this really happening. A lot of cant about law and order. The daunting calculus of an enduring failure. What must be tolerated? What does it take to mitigate disaster? And how long? How long to file a shiv arrogant enough to puncture the great trust? Whether red tape inquiries or blue ribbon initiatives, the race to the bottom crowns everyone for their efforts. Skin the blubber on Walkerton and the Westray Mine and the muscle works are bleak. At bone: the pumping mantra of mala prohibita and the obituary is complete. Regulations with the shelf life of milk and rye. And formal charges that of cut flowers. Argued into obsolescence. Interests valorized, benefits conferred. The race to the bottom yields avenues of success. But the race to the bottom is not without redress. The hounds will be along soon. One last goodbye to the spoils of failure. One last goodbye to the stock rewards. Here they come. Criminal justice fails in order to project a particular image of crime. Jeffrey Reinman, “A Crime By Any Other Name”

Submitted by Corpse Defiler — Apr 23, 2025

All that is solid melts into air. Yesterday's snow-job is today's sermon. A grab-bag of causal narratives and teleological refrains. Welcome to the promised land: Athens without slaves. But it doesn't wash, and it never will. Well-rehearsed conclusions can't remediate the end. When the World Bank serves unilaterally, the burden of mythmaking is to clothe each flaccid turn. To hammer each loose nail. To collect each roadkill. Sovereignty delivered on a plat. As a pillion passenger to southern deregulation. A shining example of neoliberal salvation. Which fashioned the axe for rate-of-return (and cross-subsidization). The gentle hand of economic renewal. The cruel hoax of the information commons. Between the poles of opulence and squalor there is no immaterial. Between the poles of access and control, there is no third wave. --- The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form if physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. George Gilder, Microcosm

Submitted by Lake of Tears — Apr 23, 2025

Nothing is more damning, is more disarming. Nothing is more draining, is more damaging than lethal infirmities of transcendent guarantees: the living negation where the map burns the territory. --- Let mortals beware of words, for with words we lie, can say peace when we mean war. W.H. Auden, Hymn to the United Nations

Submitted by Infernal Flame — Apr 23, 2025

Necessity is the plea for every extension, for every elaboration of the twin gospels of service provision and security restraint: the folded geographies that demarcate all worth. Called or not the arbiters will come. Called or not biometrics will come. Technologies do their definitive labour on wedding nights. Sensory organs meet calculating engines. Eurodac fucks Privium in the penthouse of Control Data. But be warned: when the body is the input, when the body is the witness, when the body is the passport, inscribed and immobilized. Necessity will bring severed hands, forked-out eyes, and ripped-off limbs scattered along frontiers and abandoned in gutters as the dregs of desperation. --- The goal of technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable. Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology

Submitted by Lake of Tears — Apr 23, 2025