Feb 28, 2025 4 min read

You Should Read - Feb 28

Uchiyma Gūdo (wearing a hat) and his fellow anti-imperial conspirators.

I have been looking for a job for more than 18 months now. On days of frustration, I describe applying for jobs as akin to playing the lottery - my chances seem similar whether I buy a ticket or not. It certainly often seems like a futile effort.

The fight against the MAGA-DOGE coup feels similarly futile. Today is the economic blackout. My initial impulse was to say boycotts of this nature are pointless and ineffective. But it is not. It brings people together in a collective activity to loudly reject the fascist takeover of our government. It exercises that muscle. That is a great effect in and of itself, regardless of what tangible economic impact the boycott may have in one day or one week.

I'm meditating on something called "the fundamental koan", espoused by a mid-20th century Zen organization called the FAS Society. This koan is a modern formulation, not a traditional Tang-dynasty story-riddle. It goes like this:

"If nothing whatsoever will do, what will you do!"

And, this morning I had a job interview, the result of a blind job application with no preexisting reference or recommendation. So, not futile after all.

Five Things

This Is Really Hard (But We Are Not Quitting): Reflections on Kindness and Resoluteness (Rebecca Solnit)

Not only are Americans, on the one hand, urged to be eternally impossibly happy, as in free from all care and anxiety, but on the other hand--or from some other camps--we're encouraged to regard anger as incredibly useful. Sometimes the manifestation of anger is treated as the right sign of care, and displaying that rage as the work itself, as if you just wanted to be the right kind of person exhibiting the right feelings for the right audience (and social media is very good at encouraging this performativeness). But the job is to do the job, I believe– to address and try to change what you're angry about, if you're angry. Or if you're not. You can do that work whatever you feel. The job isn't to be happy, sad, angry, unfeeling, or anything else; it's to do the work to oppose this destruction.

Building Counterculture (A.R. Maxon)

The billionaire scam is the cumulation of all the lies my country (which is the United States in case you didn't know) was founded upon. The lies are: (1) that human society doesn't exist, so we bear no responsibility to one another as a global human family; (2) that some people matter and all others do not matter, and that those who matter have a natural right to dominate and possess and use and kill those who do not matter according to their wants and whims; (3) that, for those who do not matter, life must be earned, and creating profit for those who do matter is how it is earned, so those who fail to earn life in this way and yet remain alive are enacting a theft deserving immediate harsh punishment; and (4) that violence is a redemptive act when enacted by those who matter against those who do not, while even the notion of the idea of the possibility of future violence by those who do not matter in response to all this violence represents an unacceptable violent threat against the people who matter, a threat that demands immediate vindictive retribution.

We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk (from 2020, Salon)

Government, as experienced for much of the 20^th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent... In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, characters interact with the government either through past military service or in the law literally made manifest in code. Real power is reserved for entrenched wealth. For Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, politics is visible but is driven by corporations either bending states to their will or actively routing around governance. These dystopias are the logical culmination of a political project designed to fundamentally limit what government can do for people and expand what it can do for the wealthy.

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism (New Socialist)

No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable. Even the most depraved Power Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering for its own sake. Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.

53 Days to Andor Season 2...

The Wabbit Trail

Selections from my Wikipedia searches over the past week.

Something I Made

Last week I wrapped up two more classes from my graphic design certificate through RISD. This is my final project for Design II, a portrait of the zen anarchist martyr Uchiyama Gūdo. Gūdo was executed in 1911 for his role in a plot to overthrow the Japanese emperor. His one existent contemporary image shows him wearing a broad brimmed hat, so I emphasized that, plus a quote of his about priests needing to "hold both a rosary and a bomb." I find working with gouache paint challenging, but I'm pretty happy with the final result, particularly the text.