Commie Curmudgeon

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Thinking About the Class Gap in File Sharing

I’m having a few bothersome, scattered thoughts, because I’ve started to listen to, and crave, new music again. I’ll start out by reposting something I wrote in a comments section in Chuck’s blog about the issue of file sharing:

When we talk about file sharing, I can’t help being conscious of the class-related technology gap. For file sharing you need the right programs, sound card(s), burner, and probably broad band or some other high speed connection - all the up-to-date equipment. I don’t have all that stuff, and I don’t think most people of limited economic means do. Official studies were recently done which revealed stuff that should be obvious - even while people in the lower income brackets have begun to gain some access to computer technology and the Internet, there is a big gap in terms of which income brackets have access to broad band and other up-to-date equipment (as well as which income brackets actually know how to use the latest equipment).

Print items should be more accessible, but you need better equipment in order to download and even print books without it becoming a big pain in the ass or even costing as much (especially when you consider labor time) as going out and buying the hard copies.

Once again, the people who benefit most from this great Net-based "democratization" are the children of the affluent, mostly based in the suburbs. We can talk about how great it is for people to get their music for free, but the initial investment definitely costs, and now the main medium for learning about that music becomes your up-to-date computer. Somehow, that doesn’t seem as democratizing, at least for the "lower" classes, as, say, discovering emerging rap acts because they’re doing their stuff right on your street in the South Bronx or even learning about a new band because they’re playing a local punk dive and/or you’ve found their cheap vinyl releases at a local record store that anyone could just walk into. (But, of course, those references are about 30 years old, and the "cutting edge" these days demands a lot more initial investment.)

Am I Just Stuck in a Technological Time Warp?

Some people might just say my problem is that I’m stuck in the '70s. Actually, technologically speaking, it’s more like I’m stuck in the 1990s. (I still have a beeper, which I’m very happy with, and I can’t stand the thought of getting a cell phone. Part of the problem is the expense; the other part is that I get very annoyed at all these people on the street and on the bus talking on their cell phones, and I don’t want to be like them.) But in terms of my musical tastes, for better or for worse, I’m far from these people stuck in the ‘70s. At my age, I should be content listening to old, original punk rock, just like a few people I know. (Actually, most people in the U.S. probably think that a 44-year-old would be content listening to Steely Dan or Boston/Kansas or Peter Frampton – but I’ve always hated that mainstream ‘70s crap, especially the stuff they played on typical American radio.) But right up through the late 1990s, I was pretty good at navigating down obscure avenues of contemporary Goth, industrial music, global/world music, and electronica (which most people just called "techno" at the time).

I used to be on a few reviewers' lists for techno, industrial and Goth music, right up through '98 or '99, and back when I actually had full time jobs, I could buy a new CD or two every week. I then let myself do without that stuff for a few years, mainly because of my economic limits. But it was only a matter of time before I would get the cravings back again...

...which may be happening right now. A few weeks ago, my mother gave me a little money for my birthday and insisted that I spend it on some form of "entertainment," because she felt that I never get the chance to enjoy that sort of thing anymore. (Wow, it was just like being a teenager again…how else can I manage to regress these days?) That was just a couple of days before Dead Can Dance played in New York and I thought about running out to see if I could find last-minute tickets, but then it seemed like too much of an effort, maybe because of my temp work schedule or the week of torrential rain that we were enjoying. So, instead, I made the mistake of getting to the CD stores and rediscovering techno and trance music.

I Love(d) Techno!

Mostly when I’ve conversed with other politically minded bloggers (on the blogs or off), I’ve talked about rock music, especially the old punk stuff, because that’s where radical political people on the Internet most often go, especially if they live in the U.S. But one secret that not many people know about is that I was finished with the vast majority of rock music by the early-mid '90s, and between about '93 and '99, I really, really liked techno. I did still like a few Goth and industrial bands, and I had a very high opinion of the anarchist bands (Crass, whom I still love, and Chumbawamba, whom I consider to be quite a mixed bag these days), but I found most "indy rock" pretty boring compared to all the new stuff that was happening in techno. By the mid-late '90s, for a variety of reasons, I also got to like Indian music a lot (as well as Indian food and art and some other things from that part of the world) so I went through a very strong "global" phase (with a focus on early Asian Underground) that lasted for several years. But I also liked a lot of more electronic-sounding techno, from ambient to hardcore, and so much trance, especially Goa trance. (By the way, despite the name of the genre, Goa had relatively little to do with Indian music; it had much more to do with neo-hippie rebellion – which didn't really interest me, except that it crossed with some interesting activism. In fact, Goa trance was the only techno music that I learned about from political activists, because it was sort of the theme music for some Reclaim the Streets actions. And, come to think of it, those RTS parties were probably the only raves that I ever went to.)

That was all a while back, and I thought I was sort of done with it all. But, unfortunately, I found the old tastes coming back strong last week when I browsed through those CD racks. I got myself a new trance compliation, which is pretty standard/middle-of-the road for trance compilations (it’s called Trance 3.0, from Hypnotic Recordings), but I still enjoyed it more than enough at the first listen. And there was all too much other stuff in the racks that I might have bought if I had the money.

Currently, I have a little less of a taste for the "global" stuff and I’ve gotten to like more of the old hardcore. But in the current scene, there are so many variations and offshoots of hardcore, it’s impossible to figure out which music compilations might be closest to the 145+ bpm music that people simply used to call "hardcore." I suppose much of it became jungle or drum’n’bass; some of it, for a while, was gabba. And there’s all this talk about "happy hardcore" - what the hell is that? (Is it anything like the stuff we used to call "handbag"?) And how is that different from just "hardcore"?

Too Little Access, Too Many Niches!

Needless to say, it would be very difficult for me to become adequately learned in these fragmented areas of sub-sub-quasi-counter-culture. Since I am 44 years old and am struggling a lot to make a living (and since I have become such a wicked recluse), hanging out at clubs and "underground" parties is pretty much out of the question for me. (Plus, I don’t like all those drugs, and even if I did, I couldn’t afford them.) I am thinking about buying more music on CDs again, but - in case I haven't made this clear enough yet - I do not have enough money. To reiterate what I said on Chuck's blog, it’s becoming very evident to me that being "cutting edge" requires a lot of financial investment these days...unless you’re very young and are connected to the right party scene. Though - then again - taking a look around today, I don’t even see real countercultures or subcultures. Everything is so fragmented... To see and keep track of all these minute niches, you probably have to be some kind of quantum physicist. (Meanwhile, how much of that is real, spontaneous fragmentation, and how much is just marketing?)

So, I'm probably not going to get too involved in all this stuff, even at the level that I was able to be involved in the '90s, but it’s probably all just as well.
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P.S.: "Band" Names and Compilations

Oops… I wrote all this stuff about techno, but I only named bands outside of techno! Well, I can offer a few "band" names and compilation names from the stuff I liked in the various genres of techno...

Global/Asian Underground – Transglobal Underground, Loop Guru, DJ Cheb i Sabbah, Joi

Trance - A thousand different acts mixed together on trance compilations. I liked The Secret Life of Trance, Volumes I and II, Planet Earth Records. Also, something I picked up randomly, called Trancefusion (Instinct), which contained something pretty good from High Lonesome Sound System. I loved Orbital, at least their first three albums, Orbital 2 most of all. Also liked Future Sound of London (who did trance when they weren’t insanely ambient). And I guess you could include Sabres of Paradise (though they were maybe pre-trance; I've seen them called "acid house"; I'm not as familiar with the solo stuff that Andy Weatherall did later).

Goa Trance - I don’t think people are actually supposed to remember the individual acts collected on Goa Trance compilations (that’s part of the fun – the glorious anonymity). I’ve got three or four of these compilations; they’re all called "Goa Trance" or "Psychedelic Goa Trance." I think my favorite is one from BMG France (don’t remember where or how I picked it up). I’m going to dig into my CDs and tapes later, maybe I’ll be able to fill in more details.

Hardcore - I particularly like the Speed Limit 145 bpm+ compilation (Moonshine Recordings). I think I'd also include Atari Teenage Riot, an anarchist band from Germany that eventually ended up in New York City and who knows where else. (Someone once told me in a conversation at Infoshop.org that ATR were not really anarchists and they weren't really "digital hardcore," not like the bands that he knew about. But I don't know anything about whatever he knew about.) I guess you could include The Prodigy here, too, though they didn't do the insanely fast stuff with the speeded up voices... But I think their music has been very hard-driving at times, and very good.

Ambient - Autechre, The Orb, Future Sound of London, and the Artificial Intelligence compilations, I and II (on Warp/Wax Trax!/TVT). Also, one of my favorite bands of all, Saint Etienne, might fit in here sometimes, though they got called all sorts of other things, from acid house to trip hop, and crossed over into the indy rock area.

Well, that's not exactly what the story said. What this report from Reuters said is:

Researchers in Finland who did the study found that workers who felt they were being treated fairly had a much lower incidence of coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in all Western societies.

"Most people care deeply about just treatment by authorities," study author Mika Kivimaki of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health wrote in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine. "Lack of justice may be a source of oppression, deprivation and stress."

The second paragraph was a real revelation (just kidding). I wonder how much money went into the study to reach these brilliant conclusions. Do you have to be as cynical about these matters as I am to see something very unintentionally funny about this?

But now I wonder... Suppose a person has an automatic distrust of "authorities" and assumes that people with power will far more likely than not end up using that power unfairly. Suppose that somebody already knows that there is very little justice and "oppression, deprivation and stress" are built right into the system...

Maybe armed with such knowledge a person will be less likely to "care deeply about just treatment by authorities," because s/he would not expect any such thing to begin with. Perhaps that would lessen the risk of heart disease.
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P.S. Another good line from this article:

Rania Sedhom, a labor and employment attorney with Meyer Suozzi English & Klein in New York who commented on the research, said a parallel study in the United States could find even more dramatic results because of the longer American work day.

I was talking to a friend the other day (who is also an old comrade from a few anarchist groups in years past) about the recent crushing defeats of labor at General Motors and the related company Delphi... We were wondering if, when and how the constant battering of working people here in the U.S. would finally lead to an eruption of a revolt. It seems unfathomable that this will not eventually happen, so never mind if; the questions are how and when. It may take a few decades, and it may at first happen in ugly and uncoordinated ways. But unless there is a sudden resurgence of effective old-style left-liberal reform (unlikely), the pressure will have to boil over one day.

When I first read about the impending salary cuts at Delphi, I thought I was reading a typo. Sixty percent seemed incredible. Many of us have had to take a pay cut amounting to fifty or sixty percent because of the loss of a job, not in order to keep the same job. Many people, upon losing their jobs, end up working at other jobs that pay half the hourly rate. I could have done that at some point, but instead, I merely continued temping so that I earned about half of the annual salary that I used to (or actually less for a couple of years) but didn’t lose in hourly pay (albeit with all benefits and security completely vanishing). But for workers to lose 60 percent of salary at the same firm and job...as Robert Kuttner says in an informative article found at Common Dreams (originally from the Boston Globe), "that gets your attention."

This article also delves a little into the more atrocious features of the General Motors deal, the activities of the United Auto Workers, and the inspiration that this event is providing for other corporations that want to coerce their workers into unprecedented concessions:

The United Auto Workers union has agreed to save General Motors over a billion dollars a year in health insurance costs. This is a disguised pay-cut, since workers will now pay more out of pocket for their healthcare.

The union leadership was so eager to help GM survive that the UAW filed an unusual suit intended to block its own union retirees from challenging the negotiated health-benefit cuts. Now Ford has just reported a $284 million third-quarter loss, and wants the same kind of deal the UAW gave GM.

When we take a good look at the events of the past week, "gets your attention" begins to look like an understatement. A more appropriate reaction would be utter disgust. As the World Socialist Web Site accurately describes it:

The degeneration of the American trade unions has long been a repugnant spectacle with tragic consequences for the working class. But the events of the last week in Detroit have underscored a basic rule of thumb: never underestimate how low the labor bureaucracy can descend in its services to corporate America.

The week began with the agreement by the United Auto Workers union (UAW) to grant historic concessions to General Motors, including the company’s demand to cut billions of dollars worth of health care benefits for its 750,000 workers, retirees and their dependents. The agreement will impose enormous hardships on former auto workers and their families, including the imposition of hundreds of dollars a year in out-of-pocket expenses for premiums, deductibles and emergency room visits.

It will also cut the pay of active workers, and establish for the first time the framework for a "defined contribution" as opposed to "defined benefit" health care plan - thus marking the beginning of the end of guaranteed benefits.

The WSWS also pulls no punches in describing the UAW’s activities in court:

Anticipating a wave of legal challenges by retirees against both GM and the union itself, the UAW filed a complaint before US District Court Judge Robert Cleland in Detroit asking the judge to legally sanction the agreement with GM. According to the Detroit Free Press, "legal experts immediately suggested that they took such an unusual step to keep disgruntled retirees from challenging the union’s right to negotiate such concessions and tying the deal up in years of litigation."...

What does all this mean? The UAW has gone to court to strip its retirees and their families of the right to defend themselves through legal means. In the end, if the federal judge accepts the argument that the UAW is the legitimate legal representative of the retirees, these workers and their families will have been deprived of a basic democratic recourse - the right to seek redress through the courts - that is normally available to all citizens. In other words, their association with the UAW will leave them even more powerless to resist the depredations of GM than if they had been nonunion employees!

That last line above deserves to be read again: The workers would have had more power to fight back if they had not joined their union! Situations like this should put an end to the antiquated romanticization of trade unions that happens so often in the context of sloppy leftist groups here in the U.S. And this should also discourage those "anarchists" who still somehow think that working with trade unions will help us to pave the way to a workers' revolution. If a revolution ever takes place, it will be one against the government, corporations and trade unions alike.

Quinlan Vos has a good, concise post on alienation at his fine libertarian Marxist (or "Marxian") blog, Boredom Won’t Get Me Tonight. I particularly like these lines:

Alienation has become a popular concept in general culture now, however it has a very different connotation the way most people use it than the way in which marxians like myself use it. In popular terminology, it is a psychological phenomenon, individual, a matter of things "appearing estranged, separate, alien", it is an emotion, something to be cured by therapy and individual self-realization, so that people can go back to being obedient little consumers and producers. My view, and the view of those who have appropriated the marxian idea, however, is extremely different. For me, alienation is an eminently social condition, it is not a matter of things 'appearing' alienated, but the fact that things really are alienated, separate, fragmented, estranged. Whether people 'feel' it or not, they really are alienated. Psychology can no more cure it than alcohol, and self-realization will only be possible upon the inauguration of the era of communism. The fact that many people don't feel alienated is a more interesting thing to look into.

(Emphasis added.)

The new bankruptcy law goes into effect tomorrow, October 17. How does this law passed by the great United States Congress (both Republicans and Democrats) affect us? I did a quick search, and the headlines alone show many possible ways:

New Bankruptcy Laws Could Hurt Overwhelmed Families

Single moms will feel new bankruptcy law

New Bankruptcy Law Could Sink Katrina Survivors

Will new bankruptcy law stifle entrepreneurship?

‘Even before the new changes, bankruptcy laws were racially biased’

Economic Slavery for consumers and small business owners?

Student debt will pile up as new bankruptcy law goes into effect

New bankruptcy law gives tough lesson to owners of residences

Uneven impact feared in new bankruptcy law

New law steers struggling consumers to credit counselors - who have their own problems.

Bankruptcy fees could skyrocket

I don’t buy new books very often these days because of my dire financial condition, etc. But after reading those Web sites that I talked about in my last post, I simply couldn't help picking up a copy of Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace.
I'm in the third chapter right now, and I am greatly enjoying this. This is the first book I have bought in a long time that isn't centrally focused on social theory, history or politics. But, I'm finding that it actually does cross those areas quite a few times, in discussing history and literature connected to the book's main subject, the theory of multiple (fourth, fifth, and even tenth) dimensions in the universe. The central focus of these chapters is naturally scientific, i.e., the discussion of how geometry helped scientists to explain and conceptualize the existence of dimensions that we are unable to perceive, and how advanced mathematics has helped physicists to become more convinced of the possibility that these dimensions exist. (And, as I mentioned in my last post, I like this area of speculation very much because it is a way of acknowledging the limitations of our perceptions as human beings while exploring areas beyond our perceived realm through rational and scientific means.) However, these advancements in science have also given inspiration to all kinds of artists, social satirists, and revolutionaries. Kaku makes this particularly clear when he discusses the way that the idea of the fourth dimension fascinated people in North America and Europe as the 19th Century progressed into the 20th. Some ideas about the fourth dimension and an alternative universe had already inspired Lewis Carroll (who was also a mathematician) but later, as the 20th Century got underway, they would also become an inspiration to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali (especially in his painting "Christus Hypercubus"), and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

I never knew that a heated argument about the fourth dimension and related discoveries and observations regarding radioactivity had taken place among the Bolsheviks after 1905. But Kaku explains exactly how this happened, especially in these two paragraphis:

After the Czar brutally crused the 1905 revolution, a faction called the Otzovists, or "God-builders," developed within the Bolshevik party. They argued that the peasants weren’t ready for socialism; to prepare them, Bolsheviks should appeal to them through religion and spiritualism. To bolster their heretical views, the God-builders quoted from the work of the German physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, who had written eloquently about the fourth dimension and the recent discovery of a new, unearthly property of matter called radioactivity. The God-builders pointed out that the discovery of radioactivity by the French scientist Henri Becquerrel in 1896 and the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in 1896 had ignited a furious philosophical debate in French and German literary circles. It appeared that matter could slowly disintegrate and that energy (in the form of radiation) could reappear.
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A split developed within the Bolshevik party. Their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was horrified. Are ghosts and demons compatible with socialism? In exile in Geneva in 1908, he wrote a mammoth philosophical tome, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, defending dialectical materialism from the onslaught of mysticism and metaphysics. To Lenin, the mysterious disappearance of matter and energy did not prove the existence of spirits. He argued that this meant instead that a new dialectic was emerging, which would embrace both matter and energy. No longer could they be viewed as separate entities, as Newton had done. They must now be viewed as two poles of a dialectical unity. A new conservation principle was needed. (Unknown to Lenin, Einstein had proposed the correct principle three years earlier, in 1905.)

Kaku also discusses ways that the concept of the fourth dimension was used by social critics in Great Britain. Some of this is more familiar territory for me. For instance, I have been long aware of the works of H.G. Wells during this period, particularly his novel The Time Machine. As Kaku points out, Wells explored the idea that the fourth dimension might be time. By traveling through this dimension, the protagonist in The Time Machine is able to visit the distant future. However, the main subject of the story that unfolds isn’t the future of the fourth dimension but the future of class struggle. I've been long aware of that fact and of Wells' socialist views. Yet, I find Kaku’s descriptions of these connections refreshing, and I particularly like the way he wraps it all up:

...[T]he future of England is a land where the class struggle went awry. The working class was cruelly forced to live underground, until the workers mutated into a new, brutish species of human, the Morlocks, while the ruling class, with its unbridled debauchery, deteriorated and evolved into the useless race of elflike creatures, the Eloi.

...The social contract between the rich and the poor had gone completely mad. The useless Eloi are fed and clothed by the hard-working Morlocks, but the workers get one final revenge: The Morlocks eat the Eloi. The fourth dimension, in other words, became a foil for a Marxist critique of modern society, but with a novel twist: The working class will not break the chains of the rich, as Marx predicted. They will eat the rich.

Among those blogs that are just quotes from, and links to, other sites and blogs, one of my absolute favorites is The Lumber of the World. That's where I discovered another very favorite site, Dialectics for Kids. Needless to say, this site isn’t just for kids. I think anyone who hasn’t done a lot of advanced studying of dialectics (myself included) could get a lot out of this site.

For readers of Commie Curmudgeon who aren’t Marxists or Hegelians, maybe a simple definition of dialectics is in order. That’s something that we can get right from the page, What the Heck Is Dalectics? (designated "for big kids"):

Dialectics is a tool to understand the way things are and the way things change. Understanding dialectics is as easy as 1 - 2 - 3.

One - Every thing (every object and every process) is made of opposing forces/opposing sides.

Two - Gradual changes lead to turning points, where one opposite overcomes the other.

Three - Change moves in spirals, not circles.

These are the three laws of dialectics according to Frederick Engels, a revolutionary thinker and partner of Karl Marx, writing in the 1870s in his book Dialectics of Nature. Engels believed that dialectics was "A very simple process which is taking place everywhere and every day, which any child can understand". This web site is dedicated to proving his point. In fact, if you understand the first four pages of this site, you already understand the basics of dialectics.

Those first four pages referred to above are pages for supposedly younger kids, but I found them to be equally delightful and refreshing. I particularly liked the page for "ages 7 and up," The ABCs of Change, which begins like this:

Do changes go around and around like day and night, winter and summer, always coming back to where they started? Or is there really a spiral, sort of like a circle, but not coming back to the same place.

I think that is a beautifully simple description of the dialectical progress of history discussed in some of Marx and Engels’ works. This page also provides some very nice examples of the spiral of change that can be found in almost any child's day-to-day experiences.

A - An Acorn falls in the woods. It sprouts into a tree that eventually makes new, and different Acorns.

B - You're walking along and you happen to trip. Next time you're more careful to keep your Balance.

C - It's the big game. You're team starts to lose and you're feeling bad. But then you feel great when your team makes a Comeback.

D - A baby doesn't know how to use a bathroom so we use Diapers to keep from having a mess. When a toddler learns to use a bathroom we're glad that there is no more need for the Diapers.

E - Whether it's plants or animals, those best adapted to their environment survive, and the other species die out. This is the basis for Evolution.

Speaking of Evolution... This site also led me to some fascinating material on the origins of life and the universe. That’s because of the page, Dialectics of the Universe, which quotes from a book Hyperspace, by the physicist Michio Kaku. This page is linked to another page, The Top Ten Stories of All Time, which, though not written by Kaku himself, is an engrossing summary of his ideas about the "turning points" in the birth and evolution of the universe, starting with the Big Bang.

To me, some of the descriptions here are far more interesting than any creation myth you’re likely to find in some religious text. For instance:

As described by Michio Kaku in his first five stages, the universe emerged from a point smaller than an atom - the Big Bang - and has been expanding ever since. For 380,000 years after the Big Bang radiation was so intense that atoms could not form. When the universe cooled enough for electrons and protons to stick, it came to a dramatic turning point - radiation passed into the background and the universe burst into light. For the new stage of matter to begin, the electromagnetic attraction of electrons to protons had to become stronger than the radiation left over from the Big Bang that kept knocking them apart. Today, thanks to the WMAP satellite, we have photos of the baby universe just after it became visible. Click here for a photo of the newborn universe.

After I read this page, I became much more curious about the work of Michio Kaku, so I went to the Kaku site, where I found some fascinating articles and, after that, to the Official String Theory Web Site, which, through its exploration of the idea in contemporary physics known as "string theory," leads to all kinds of riveting discussion about the origins, shape and evolution of the universe, the Big Bang (in more detail) and the situation that might have preceded the Big Bang. I have to admit that in many cases, even on the "basic" pages, I could not completely grasp the concepts, and most of the formulas on the "advanced" pages seemed like a foreign language to me. Much of this material left me wishing that I had more of an aptitude for advanced physics. But I also appreciated the mental challenges that these pages presented, and I appreciated being made more curious about things far outside of my immediate world, perceptions, and time.

I used to call myself an "agnostic" because I always felt there were many things beyond the world that we see and know, and that we had to admit to ourselves the possibility that reality as we know it might be only a narrow fragment of the universe as it actually exists. But I've revised my "religious" self definition and now would consider myself completely an atheist. That is because, while I believe in the existence of things far outside of our perceptions, I don’t believe at all in any of the superstitious and magical thinking that comprises the stuff that people would recognize as religion.

I like one article that Kaku wrote, comparing the human race in its present known universe to carp swimming around in a pond. We are like those carp, unaware of the things that exist beyond this pond. But as we discover more indications of a world outside, we may learn that there is a lot more to the universe than what we knew. I think it’s great for people to use the tools that they have to explore as much as they can. It’s great to try to move beyond the condition of those simple carp. But it’s one thing to explore and deduce rationally through the use of advanced tools, quite another to make up ridiculous stories and ask other people to believe them, or to rely on stories invented by frightened people many thousands of years ago. We may just be carp (relatively speaking), but that doesn't mean we have to believe a bunch of crap.