For all that people complain about Alex Kurtzman’s alleged dictatorial habits, one of my biggest problems with the new Star Trek series is just how uncoordinated they feel. Like, it seems like every showrunner is doing their own thing, without much coordination from above, and nothing to prevent redundancy or contradiction. Within the last year and a half, we’ve had three separate plotlines about fleets of Federation starships getting hacked by AIs by using their networked interoperability against them; and then a fourth, similar plotline on Lower Decks about evil AI starships. We’ve had episodes called “Kobayashi Maru”, “Kobayashi”, and “No Win Scenario.” Within months of each other, LWD and Prodigy both did episodes with about using holodeck training scenarios to bring in continuity nods. The last season of Star Trek: Picard seems to ignore not just its first two seasons, but also the state of the Borg Collective as established by Prodigy, even as Prodigy works frantically to make its own canon match the backstory for Picard season 1. Discovery season 4 and Picard season 2 both aired plots about huge, mysterious anomalies threatening the Alpha Quadrant within months of each other. And on and on.
are these uncoordinated redundancies, or is this a small-minded vision of what is “star trek” based on rewriting one person’s half-remembered favourite episodes
Heidi and I began our week with a trip to the casting-supply store, which is in a part of the city that has tech offices, automotive specialists, and ramps to the highway. It was raining and the outside looked like a shed and the inside had none of the extra stuff art-supply stores stock near the register, like fruit-shaped erasers, botanical wrapping papers, or Frida-covered notebooks. The most recent flyer on the wall was from the 1990s. There was a young guy in a back brace for lifting, and he had a whole different take on art materials than we did, being more concerned with encasing our sculptures in polyurethane and other optimizations for frequent handling (at Burning Man?) than with our questions of surface and colorfastness, but we got what we came for, plus some other kind of wire. I also got Kelly green–powdered pigment that I did not need. I loved it there and hope the guy doesn’t see this so I can go back. I could know about the plaster store only by needing plaster. Being an artist is a good job for people who enjoy the banal.
Which brings us, inexorably, to Picard season three. Here,
Section 31—although mostly offscreen—is as evil as it’s ever been
depicted: We learn that not only did they engineer a bioweapon for use
against the Changelings back during the Dominion War, but they also
performed torturous medical experiments on Changeling prisoners of war.
The revelations presented are truly heinous—even difficult to watch—and
the entire season-long arc largely results from blowback against Section
31’s crimes against sentient life. And yet… the story pairs these revelations not only with complete legitimation of 31 as an organization, but complete acceptance
of its crimes on the parts of our ostensible heroes. Worf—you know, the
honourable guy? Whose friend, Odo, was deliberately infected with a
plague by Section 31 with the intent of using him to wipe out his entire
race? That Worf?—even calls them a “critical division of Starfleet
Intelligence.” There’s one glorious moment where Picard actually looks
sick upon hearing the extent of Section 31’s crimes; but then—arguably
in the face of thirty-five years of consistent characterization—he and
Dr. Crusher opt to compound them by executing a prisoner of war. This is
never mentioned again. Just another day at the office, I suppose. We
have, as an official, critical division of our humanist utopia of
Starfleet, an organization that openly commits war crimes… and it’s
just become part of the setting. It’s not even presented as a reason for
Jack not to join Starfleet. One wonders if it was mentioned in the
recruitment materials they gave out to the kids on Prodigy.
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Ben Davis: When you’re inside the art world, the art-and-politics conversation—an understanding of art as a vehicle for social transformation—permeates everything at such a deep level that people don’t even feel the need to justify it. But when you’re outside of that world, the idea of a relationship between art and politics is almost a complete non sequitur because of the nature of what art is: a leisure activity, or an extremely intellectually forbidding, inhospitable space. Most people think about art mainly through their experiences visiting museums as tourists or through news stories about how much money there is in the art market. It’s an interesting bifurcation in the conversation about what art is, and it produces all sorts of strange paradoxes.
What a crazy take Rachel. I am a long-time lover of the Fourth Plinth Commission project, it’s honestly one of my favorite public art projects in the world. It’s an incredible opportunity for probably millions (fact check me) of people to be exposed to contemporary art in a different context. Yes, it goes to mostly already very successful artists, and I don’t even mind that because I think some areas it’s really important to be further in your career to have the nuance and experience to be able to handle such a commission.
FOR THE RECORD: Whiteread’s plinth is one of my favorite sculptures of all time, I think she’s a bonafide genius and the more of her work that is out there the better we are as a society. THAT BEING SAID…
For Whiteread to defend this with, and I’m paraphrasing, “a lot of us very successful artists haven’t sold the works we made for this and they are in storage” is honestly such a BAD TAKE. To reduce the importance of public sculpture and art to such a capatilist based interpretation is so bonkers to me, and I know I am obviously projecting my feelings of public art onto Whiteread, but given her practice it feels so deeply contrary to what i get from her practice.
Also isn’t it Larry’s job to place the work? The gallerists, the dealers, the museums, the collectors to acquire it? How is this on the Plinth project to be responsible to what happens to the sculpture after the install is done? The exhibition of these sculptures in the square was always temporary, and never advertised it as anything else, so…this feels like a you problem, Rachel.
This feels like a conversation had with other collectors and fancy art world people at a dinner party, where everyone is commiserating with the price of storage and how much of their collection isn’t seeing the light of day and have you heard about free ports and I’m not sure I’m going to do Basel Switzerland AND Basel Paris because it’s just a little too repetitive and back to back but you can probably count on seeing me at Frieze NY and and and….
Moral of this story is not every thought and convo that other people agree with you needs to be an interview with a journalist or press release or however this made it out. Sometimes it’s best to keep these things behind closed doors. It’s not that I don’t know that the fabulously wealthy and successful are having these wildly egocentric out-of-touch conversations in their well-appointed rooms, I just don’t need them to shove them in our faces like it’s fact.
I wish she would Rachel WhiteRead the room…amiright?
Showing myself out.
artists make site specific work and then get mad that its not as desirable in other sites. money rots your brain ig.
Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, “economism,” views us as slaves to “incentives” and nothing more.
Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all “non-market” solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they’re begun, due to the “incentives” of the individuals in the government.
Economism’s major project has been to dismantle the achievements of the New Deal (Social Security, unions, public housing, limits on corporate power) and to discredit the very idea that we can or should attempt those sorts of bold initiatives.
In economicist doctrine, it’s actually impossible to make national parks or social security or public healthcare, and people are naive to even think we should try. To the extent that these things actually exist and thrive and please people in the real world, they are mirages — they don’t work in theory, so they must not work in practice, either.
It’s not that progressives ignored economists. Some 5,000 economists worked with FDR to craft the New Deal. But while FDR employed a lot of economists, his successors set out to create full employment in the profession — by the 1980s, there were 16,000 federal economists.
In “May God Save Us From Economists,” in the New Republic, Timothy Noah takes us on a whirlwind tour of the disastrous rise of economism and the changing currents that are finally deprecating its ideology and methodology — and not a minute too soon.
In 1944, Paul Samuelson called World War II “the economist’s war.” JK Galbraith did research for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey that concluded that military doctrine overestimated the usefulness of aerial bombing. Milton Friedman tried and failed to use economics to develop high-temperature alloys. The Rand Institute developed the post-war nuclear “Mutually Assured Destruction” plan using economists, not military experts.
After the war, economics became the language of Washington. By 1967, the DOT’s safety agencies took up economic models to determine when and how to deploy safety regulations. These regulations were weighed against a model that assigned a cash value to the human lives they’d save, and as that value changed from year to year, so did the regulations that were politically possible.
Today, the use of cost-benefit analyses that relied on arbitrary prices assigned to human lives is mandatory for all major regulations:
That means that federal economists aren’t just in charge of economic policies — at the Fed, say, or the Congressional Budget Office — but rather, they have the final word on all policy matters — every question has become an economic question. That’s the core of economism.
From the middle of the 20th century on, economism gave rise to a near-endless supply of annoyances, miseries and horribles.
For example, economists convinced Carter to deregulate the airlines and turn legroom into a commodity that you pay extra for. That was the brainchild of then-chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board Alfred E Kahn, an economist, who cheerfully declared “I don’t know one plane from another — to me, they are all marginal costs with wings.”
Most consequentially, economists gutted antitrust, declaring monopolies to be efficient and ruling any questions of corporate power out of bounds on the grounds that it couldn’t be measured or modeled in equations. This, in turn, made all other regulation a battle between concentrated sectors dominated by a handful of giant corporations and their would-be regulators. From here, it’s a direct line to both “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.”
Economism has had an enormous — and awful — impact on public health. It’s no coincidence that when Johns Hopkins sent out a call for survey data early in the covid pandemic, two of its signatories were economists and only one was an epidemiologist:
As Noah writes: “Think about that. Hopkins medical school is consistently rated one of the top five in the country. Yet even there, an epidemiologist dared not make an uncontroversial public health pronouncement in the midst of a pandemic without invoking the unimpeachable authority of two economists.”
Even Trump, who professed a hatred of “experts,” bowed before economism: it was his trade advisor Peter Navarro who got Trump to take covid seriously, not his public health team (Navarro’s PhD is in economics). And it was Navarro who got Trump to recommend useless — and potentially dangerous — hydroxychloroquine therapy for covid.
In 1992, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Gary Becker, who used economics to explain “criminal justice, marriage, and racial discrimination.”
Related to this is the fact that the Economics Nobel isn’t actually a Nobel at all — rather, it is part of economism’s drive to subordinate evidence-based science to economicist ideology. The prize was created 73 years after the Nobel by Sweden’s finance sector, who backed it with a perpetual grant, in a bid to establish that economics was a science:
Economism began to lose its shine after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, which saw renewed interest in Karl Polanyi’s 1944 anti-economism “Ur-text,” “The Great Transformation,” which argued that “economics was created by society and must be made to serve its needs.”
Polyani railed against the notion that the individual should respect economic law even if it happened to destroy him…. Nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the economistic prejudice.”
In the years after the GFC, Polyani’s anti-economism critique was updated and formalized into five major areas:
I. Excessive reliance on models. Famously, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics and demanded to know why they hadn’t predicted the Great Financial Crisis. Economic forecasting basically sucks, and even though it now consumes vastly more computing power and has vastly more data to crunch, it’s only made the most marginal and tenuous improvements.
Noah rejects the comparison of economic forecasting to weather forecasting: since 1984, economic forecasting has incorporated 20,000 times more variables with few improvements, over the same period, the time horizon for weather forecasts has grown from a few days to a few weeks (“Hurricanes no longer surprise us. Financial crises still do”).
Despite this, economicists continue to claim that models can solve our problems. In 1991, Larry Summers (ugh) said, “the laws of economics, it’s often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws and they work everywhere.”
Summers’ economicist doctrine was at work in post-Soviet Russia, where the models confidently predicted that an “open economy” would be unleash massive growth. Instead, it delivered “a semi-fascist and not terribly prosperous kleptocracy.”
II. Underreliance on data. As Ely Devons famously quipped, “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”
As Robert Skidelsky wrote, an economics that can’t validate its hypotheses empirically “has a strong tendency to slide into ideology.”
In the pre-economicist age, economists focused on “history and the dynamics of change.” These were the New Deal “institutional economists” of the 1930s, who were supplanted by the more math-heavy Keynsians and then the purely theoretical neo-classicals. These economists were seduced by “beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics,” which they “mistook for truth,” in the words of Paul Krugman.
The difficulty of finding data and the seductive power of models produced an establishment that dismissed the evidence before them, and common sense, as inconsistent with the theory and thus wrong. This is how the “virtual consensus” that minimum wage hikes increase unemployment was born, and it’s why the minimum wage stagnated at $7.25, lower in real terms that the minimum wage MLK marched against in 1963.
III. A rejection of society. At the core of economism is a rejection of the very idea of society (“There is no such thing as society” — M. Thatcher). The only way to understand our lives is to model us as individuals, making individual choices and expressing individual preferences. Economism gives short shrift to how individuals affect one another.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Garett Hardin’s 1968 hoax “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which purported to be a factual account of how people in communities persistently and reliably failed to manage common resources (Hardin, a eugenicist, was later revealed to have made the whole thing up):
The actual nature of how people manage commons is far more interesting. Eleanor Ostrom — one of the few women to have been given an economics “Nobel” — has devoted her career to analyzing and explaining the long, factual history of well-managed commons, some of which have been run successfully for centuries:
IV. A failure to understand “irrationality.” In the neoclassical model humans are present as “rational utility-maximizing agents” whose actions can be predicted by asking “What would this person rationally do to get the most out of their situation” (e.g. “What would I do if I was a horse?”).
In the early 2000s, the “behavioral economists” turned the profession upside-down by taking the radical step of observing how people actually behaved, which turned out to bear little relation to the homo economicus of the models.
This “irrationality” could also often be called “ethics” — for example, the decision in various “ultimatum games” to punish selfish people, even if it means getting less for yourself. You can view this as “irrationality” if your sole conception of human motivation is “how do I get more for myself?” But you can equally say, “I don’t like people who betray the social contract and I am prepared to go with less if it means punishing them.”
But by insisting that ethics are irrational, economism can actually do away with them. Michael Sandel’s 2012 book “What Money Can’t Buy,” offers examples of things that you shouldn’t be subject to market forces, like concierge medical services. A decade later, these have gone from examples of the unthinkable to actual products.
V. The prejudices of economism. Economists themselves are more likely to behave like “economic man,” “pursuing self-interest at the expense of cooperation”:
It’s one thing for a profession to be so different from the majority — but when that profession has elevated itself to the final arbiter of all regulation and government, its narrow composition and ideological blinkers start to tell.
Thus far, the response to this critique has been to reform the economics profession — the Hewlett, Omidyar, Ford and Open Society Foundations are all pursuing programs to make economics better. But Noah argues that it’s not enough to fix economics, we also have to restore politics as a project separate from economics.
Economics should be a tool in politics, but not a replacement for it. As a start, Noah proposes three political domains where economics does not belong:
I. Criminal justice. Get rid of private pretrail supervision, where people charged with a crime have to pay a corporation “user fees” for their ankle-bracelet and other monitoring, or rot in jail. Get rid of private prisons. Get rid of private immigration detention.
To the extent that these “save taxpayers money,” they do so by “running their facilities on the cheap.” Private prisons have “more assaults, more inmate grievances, more lockdowns, and nearly twice as many guns and other weapons confiscated from prisoners.”
II. Health care. After a century of “ever-more ambitious experiments to see whether medical services can be made broadly available on a for-profit basis” the verdict is in: “Every experiment failed.” Every private healthcare scheme fails for the same reason: “The market doesn’t want society to share equally in paying the cost of health care. It wants the biggest consumers (i.e., the sickest people) to pay more. A lot more. That’s how markets work.”
Private insurance failed when companies started “charging riskier customers higher premiums and avoiding very risky customers altogether.” That led to HMOs, which failed when “rising health care costs eventually made even premiums for HMOs too expensive.”
Then we let doctors buy interest in labs and drugs and machinery, charge unlimited fees, and become “entrepreneurs.” We shut public hospitals and let for-profits consolidate hospitals into massive chains. Prices went up. Care got worse. Failure.
Obamacare — which tries to have a private system paid for out of the public purse — has also failed, as costs have gone up, premiums have risen, and outcomes have worsened. We’re on track to outspend the budget for Medicare for All on a private system that delivers worse outcomes to fewer patients.
Many, many studies have concluded that private insurers can’t deliver better care at lower prices. Private insurers pay nearly double the rate that Medicare gets from hospitals.
III. The climate emergency. We are barreling towards a planet incapable of sustaining human life. There is no longer a “credible pathway to a 1.5C rise.”
The economics trade has an answer. In 2019, 28 “Nobel” laureates in economics called a carbon tax “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.” Three years later, emissions are up, not down.
Thankfully, the economicist answer to the greatest existential risk facing human civilization today is no longer the only answer we’re willing to try. The Inflation Reduction Act puts $369b worth of public money into directly subsidizing green energy and green tech.
“Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” —John F. Kennedy
On NPR Up First this morning there is an interview with nuclear expert Matthew Bunn from the Harvard Kennedy School, who puts the odds of Putin using nukes at 10 - 20 percent. This is not comforting at all. Even 2 percent is too high.
Some say: Putin won’t use nukes because doing so is irrational—NATO would put him in his place. Well, invading Ukraine was irrational. Implementing a broad conscription was irrational. Yet the most hawkish military commentators inside Russia are consistently getting their way, and they’re now clamoring for the use of nukes. If Putin is faced with battlefield defeat and/or the defeat of his regime, I’m not sure he would see the use of nukes as the most irrational option, especially since every move he makes is predicated on the belief that the west is weak and cowardly.
Let’s play this out. If Putin uses tactical nukes in Ukraine, what will the response be? The most hawkish members of NATO will likely respond militarily. If Poland or one of the Baltic states strikes Russian targets or gets embroiled in a war with Russia, then all of NATO (including the US) will be dragged in under Article 5 of NATO (the principle of collective defense). The distance on the escalation ladder between “tactical” nukes and ICBMs is short (this is why many reject the term “tactical nuclear weapons” outright and assert that the breaking of the nuclear taboo would be catastrophic). A direct confrontation between nuclear superpowers (Russia and the US) should be avoided at all costs.
Some say, well, NATO doesn’t have to respond with nukes. They could just strike Russian military targets, such as Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, using conventional missiles. Sure. But then NATO is at war with Russia and we are in WWIII, i.e. a direct confrontation between the nuclear superpowers of the US and Russia. We are where we were in the early days of the war when stupid but well-meaning people chanted and tweeted “NATO close the skies!”
Yet Biden resisted those insane cries, which were also coming from Zelenskyy and even some corners of his own administration. It turns out that the only upside of living in a gerontocracy is that Biden has lived through the age of mutually assured destruction. The present never rewards restraint—all incentives push toward the most hawkish posture. But history does reward restraint. Remember General Curtis LeMay hounding John F Kennedy to bomb Cuba’s missile sites and invade Cuba? Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, the psychopathic and grim calculus of Only a third of humanity would be wiped off the planet?
A question remains: What should the US do if Russia uses tactical nukes? First, implement more sanctions on Russia, including secondary sanctions on India and China if they continue to buy discounted Russian oil. (Though China and India might voluntarily ditch Russia if they used nukes.) Second, supply more arms to Ukraine, including missile defense systems and potentially more powerful arms. Such a move would still be escalatory but potentially the least escalatory of all the options. Ukraine has a highly effective military that has proven they can make good use of western-supplied arms. And of course, the goal at every juncture should be a negotiated settlement and end to this madness.
