Screen vs Life

Dutifully and begrudgingly masked up to run necessary errands in Coburg, I regularly encounter fellow Melbournian’s with their masks around their chins chugging on their cigarette as though their life depended on it. And I don’t say this to complain of loopholes in Melbourne’s emergency laws, or to demand tougher penalties for those not properly wearing their masks. If you want to smoke while wearing your mask as an ankle bracelet, I couldn’t give a monkey’s left testicle. I do however highlight this particular type of encounter because it highlights the ludicrous principle underpinning mandatory masks. We must wear masks, we are told, to protect others . Because masks limit opportunities of unknowingly spreading coronavirus - not catching coronavirus - the principle is that we take responsibility for the health of others . In fact, it is selfish to speak of personal responsibility for one’s own health. And as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton is fond of repeating, taking re...

Competition has, in the humanities, become a very dirty word. Along with the notion of personal responsibility, it is largely denounced as a somewhat unnatural proscription of neoliberal policies that has been foisted upon academics and cultural workers, who are believed to be more inclined towards collaboration and cooperation.  Competition is here characterized as a cut-throat practice where individuals engage in malevolent and underhanded tactics to greedily accumulate resources for themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Competition is understood as a fundamental characteristic of free market capitalism; a zero-sum game which atomizes communities and valorizes narcissistic self-interest. This understanding of competition as the opposite of cooperation is a dire misunderstanding of the concept. It is a misunderstanding that underwrites the social justice activism of many humanities scholars, and the astonishing delusion that they are above such base practices. ...

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the ...

Today I read a BBC article entitled “ How Economics Killed the Antibiotic Dream ” wherein the author characterizes the impending antibiotic crisis - fueled by factory farming practices - as an outcome of greed and free market capitalism. This argument is subject to some of the same flaws as the one which advocates the introduction of taxes to curb the consumption of meat - and sugar for that matter - as a means to address a different health crisis: obesity. The article points to increasing Western wealth as the source of the problem, arguing that as average household incomes increase, demand for meat increases, incentivizing farmers to increase their supply. Brutal factory farming techniques are the logical outcome of such demand as farmers rush to cash in on the potential profit and supply this demand. According to this narrative, this directly leads to the use of low dose antibiotics to curb the spread of disease among the animals, who are kept in extraordinarily unsanitary ...

Only days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who stated that violence was a reasonable response to the ideas expressed by Milo Yiannopoulos. The violent protests that have since erupted at Berkley University to prevent Milo from giving his final talk on his extremely successful “Dangerous Faggot” tour, indicates that many others on the progressive left believe that this is a perfectly reasonable position. As elaborated in my previous post What’s so bad about Nazism?, it is my opinion that meeting ideas with violence is a fundamentally fascist tactic which creates the climate of fear and oppression that protestors claim to be fighting against. There are three more points about Milo that need to be made in order to develop a bit more clarity about the issues at stake in the Berkeley riots. 1. The mainstream media and opponents of Milo consistently describe him as far right. This may well be true of many of the opinions that he is known for, however, the fundam...

Dear Carolyn, As Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th US president tomorrow I am reminded of what I have lost in the build up to the 2016 election.  It is odd that we are no longer friends given that as an Australian I have no direct stake in the US politics. But you, as a recently naturalized citizen and ten-year resident of California, are directly affected. I knew when you sent me that message that you were trying to find out if I needed to be cut like a cancer from your life. You asked for photos of family, for updates on work, on life more generally, and what I thought about the upcoming US election. My response to this last question was deliberately vague. But in the end I didn’t keep secret my political leanings. As I daily witnessed a Facebook feed awash with pro-Hillary, pro-socialist propaganda, posted by you, posted by just about everyone one else I knew and worked with, it felt necessary to also start sharing the bits of news and information that I h...

The steady stream of commentary that continues to slam popular TV shows like GoT for perpetuating "rape culture" is logically untenable. The crux of the argument is that such TV programs are overly reliant on sexist tropes, which function to reinforce patriarchal authority and female oppression out here in the real world. A principal presumption bolstering this argument is that the representation of women getting raped by men is a trope; one that furnishes the plot with a female victim, and provides the male protagonist with the motivation he needs to spring into heroic action and save the day. In GoT, this trope certainly remains prevalent, however we must also acknowledge the prevalence of the trope of the "disposable" male, which sees countless male characters deposed and mutilated. Let's go through some notable examples: Theon "Wreek" Greyjoy is raped and castrated with the assistance of two sadistic women. Gendry, the bastard heir to t...

Adapting computer game technologies for educational purposes is a practice is from a novel concept. Some recent developments, like the mod for Minecraft, MinecraftEdu , appear to have the potential to win kids over (children are very good at knowing when they are being tricked into learning). A conversation with fellow educators at THATCamp Melbourne yesterday highlighted a significant problem with current business models for funding these experiments in a university context. One colleague expressed a desire to find an existing program and tool that would allow her archaeology students to learn archaeology through a virtual experience, specifically a type of program modelled on RPGs. This colleague also indicated that she once worked with a Professor in the USA, who developed a prototype along these lines, and knew that the achievement of such a project was well beyond the type of budget that she could generate, as well as beyond her expertise. The fact of the matter is...

Net neutrality is a particularly hot topic at the moment, and most proponents of net neutrality incorrectly reproduce the myth that this regulatory intervention will vouchsafe equal internet access for all. In this video internet philosopher Stefan Molyneux untangles the political web that has lead to broad support for net neutrality.  The key insight to take away from this is that any type of government regulation of economic activity functions to strengthen monopolies, because it is enacted on behalf of, and to benefit powerful lobby groups. Likewise, net neutrality represents an increase in governmental regulation of the internet, with significant implications for the quality of services available to consumers, for the privacy of internet users, and for businesses who are economically vulnerable when governments change the rules of trade via amendments to law and policy. An important video which has informed a shift in my own position on the topic.

Transcendence (2014) is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, better known for his work as the cinematographer who filmed Christopher Nolan's works since Memento. Transcendence is the  story of a leading Artificial Intelligence  (AI)  researcher, Dr Will Caster (Johnny Depp) who strives to create AI capable of the full range of human emotions. Following his mortal wounding by neo-ludite terrorists, Will, with the help of his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his colleague Max (Paul Bettany), Will’s consciousness is digitalised and uploaded to the web. In a Frankensteinien turn, Max immediately rejects the creation as monstrous distortion of Will’s former self, and eventually joins the terrorist cell that deposed him of his corporeality. Evelyn is henceforth moved to protect the digital remnant of her husband, and literally goes underground in New Mexico. Here, with Will’s ability to generate financial resources, Evelyn oversees the construction of an expansive faci...

As a university tutor, I read a lot of scholarship critiquing traditional and digital media from a Marxist perspective. Most striking is the somewhat baffling reiteration that “personal responsibility” is a bad thing. Let me elaborate via particularly pertinent example. In 2009 the scholars Laurie Oullette and James Hay published a paper proposing that reality television programs are a symptom of our neo-liberal context. They argue that the narratives of programs such as The Biggest Loser and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy effectively instruct people on how to modify their conduct and assume personal responsibility for their health, their finances and general welfare. The “problem” identified by Oullette and Hay is that these responsibilities were once, under pre-1980 Keynesian economic regimes, assumed by the State (presumably ensuring universal access to key services). According to their reckoning, the ascension of neoliberal economics has led to the shrinking of governments ...