I almost hit a dog today. It was scary. There was this woman with two beautiful big shaggy dogs. Unleashed, of course. When I approached in my car, one of the dogs threw itself into the road. The only reason I managed to brake in time is that I was driving a lot more slowly than I usually do on this road because I was trying to decide where to turn. 

The owner ran into the road after the 🐕, and that’s when the second dog decided to join the fun and jumped out into the road, too. We were very lucky that there were no more cars coming at that moment. 

It’s very unpleasant to think I could have become a dog killer today. 

What I wonder is if people think playing the violin, speaking Spanish, playing baseball, coding, etc are so cool and important, why don’t they fucking learn? Why appoint a poor kid as a proxy for your fantasies?

I find it creepy that people who don’t even have kids yet order books of “fun children’s stories that teach kids (ages 2-6) the foundations of computer coding without needing a device!”

It’s like a kid isn’t even allowed to exist as a fantasy without what’s perceived as currently marketable skills. 

Bobbitt (the fellow I first learned about the erosion of the nation-state from) theorized that the newly neutered national governments will try to legitimize their power by demonstrating that they can protect us from global threats (terrorism, cyber warfare, pandemics, etc.). As always, he was too optimistic. 

As we can see, the newly neutered national governments are legitimizing themselves by offering material for our Facebook and Twitter activities. Hey, who can blame them? It’s surely easier to fire off incendiary tweets than to fight viruses or terrorism.

Klara is so used to hearing that papa is at work that now she calls him “Papa work.” Even when he’s sleeping, he’s “Papa work.”

Finally, the sheer injustice of it got to me. “Mamma works, too,” I informed her.

“Work?” she said. “Work papa.”

“Mamma works!” I said. “I just made tapta soup. And did laundry. And folded. And picked up this mountain of toys. Mamma work!”

“No,” Klara said. “Papa work. Work papa job.”

“I also have a job!” I hollered. “See this book? I wrote it! Mamma work!!! Mamma job!”

“Mama llama?”

“No! Klara’s mamma! Me! Work!”

“Papa? Papa work,” Klara concluded. “Mamma nose. Mamma eyes. Papa job.”

It feels like I lost this argument for the moment.

César Rendueles’s Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia is one of the books I’ve read for my study of neoliberalism. It’s a really great book that I highly recommend. Rendueles mocks wide-eyed digital utopists with the brutality that they richly deserve. I want to offer a couple of quotes to illustrate:

“The Internet, I argue, is not a sophisticated laboratory in which delicate strains of the communities of the future are being developed but is instead a rundown zoo housing the decrepit forms of age-old problems that still haunt us, though we prefer not to see them” (26).

“Judging by its impact on the media, an update to Twitter’s timeline is received as a social change as fundamental as the Neolithic Revolution” (27).

“The Internet may be the embodiment of the public sphere, but in that case we would have to accept that the objective of civil society is amateur porn and cat videos. This is not anecdotal. Empirical studies systematically find that the Internet limits cooperation and political critique rather than stimulating it” (38).

The central idea of the book: Neoliberalism adopted sociophobia as a social norm, and smartphones, apps, Facebook and Twitter are helping spread sociophobic tendencies. 

This is in tune with Bauman’s ideas about the erosion of sociability and sociality in the service of liquid capital.

Great book, highly recommended.

What nationality are you deep inside? Take the quiz!

I’m Japanese, it seems. They have Ukrainian as an answer but apparently I’m very far removed from Ukraine in my personality type. 

I decided to stop introducing myself to students and signing off in emails with my first name. It never worked anyway. Students stubbornly prefer to use my very unpronounceable last name or, at the very least, address me as “Professor”. I think they sense how incompatible this false camaraderie with my standoffish and formal teaching persona.

One of those cases when it’s impossible to say which vision of womanhood is worse.

So I started reading massively on the subject of neoliberalism and what I have discovered is that theoretical sources on the subject tend to be extremely well-written. Even French theorists write in a clear, accessible, engaging way, and if you’ve ever read French theorists, you know that they are not known for the accessibility of their writing.

I think I will compile a bibliography of my favorite sources and share it here on the blog because the subject is fascinating and deserves to be widely explored. This is something you can actually read for fun, and I can’t say that about many other subjects of theory.