Astra Taylor

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“They Dream Of A Co-op Model”

December 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I think Astra Taylor is wonderful, but I doubt her idealistic hopes for the Digital Age will be realized, not because of a lack of will, but because they’re antithetical to the very nature of a society interconnected by smart technology.

Getting rid of the corporate and government intrusion of personal data is probably as realistic as completely taming the Internet’s anarchic side. Those thorny things are with us for good. Unplugging will be all but impossible, especially as the actual plugs increasingly disappear. The Internet of Things will become the thing, and going in another direction will be a bridge too far.

There’ll likely be a growing number of splinter societies that attempt to retreat from the mainstream, but they’ll be tenuous and not necessarily positive. A lack of oversight of all kinds will become the norm. I think it has already.

There are policy solutions for combating, say, the excesses of the Gig Economy and other elements of Techno-Libertarianism, but there’s really none for the larger machine we’ve placed ourselves within, one that isn’t only political or idealistic but literal as well. It’s beyond control.

Does that make me hopeless or just a realist?

From Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post:

Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.

Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.

Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.

Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.

“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the conferees at the close of the two-day session.•

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“It Makes No Sense To Talk About The Internet As Separate From The Economy”

April 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The new freedoms of the Internet Age are great and in the aggregate we’re wealthier, but the dollars themselves are in far fewer hands than before we were wired. Astra Taylor, who’s made two excellent full-length documentaries (this one and this one), has a new book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which talks about the current wave of inequality fostered in part by the emergence of the web. Gawker’s Michelle Dean interviewed Taylor on the topic. The opening exchange:

“Question:

Can you boil down for me the main reason you think the internet isn’t the ‘democratizing’ force we were promised?

Astra Taylor:

Because of money. It makes no sense to talk about the internet as separate from the economy. In the mainstream pundit world, there are two camps. One would say the internet is ruining everything, or distracting, or addictive. The other camp would say the internet’s amazing, we’re all connected, and it’s going to bring about a new age of democratization of culture, and creativity.

It’s not [that I have] some revolutionary theory. But there was a disconnect between this chatter from a fundamental characteristic of our world, just sitting there, and I just felt like somebody had to address it. No one was talking about the role of finance and the way business imperatives shape the development of tech.

The web is not an even playing field. There are economic hierarchies, and there’s this rich-get-richer phenomenon. And it’s emergent of these massive digital corporations, you know, Google and Apple. They’re not the upstarts they position themselves as.”

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“Carnivals Come Cheap—The True Test Of Their Worth Is What Remains The Day After”

October 11, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Slavoj Žižek, that provocateur and performance artist, gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street. Thankfully, his rhetoric was short on his usual bullshit (smirking apologias for Stalin, for example) and long on common sense. The speech’s opening from the full transcript provided by Sarah Shin at Verso:

“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.

So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not ‘Main Street, not Wall Street,’ but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.

They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.

They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?”

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Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:

Žižek holding forth in a garbage dump, in Astra Taylor’s Examined Life:

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New DVD: Examined Life

February 23, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek is down in the dump in "Examined Life."

Following up the heady burst of fun that was her 2005 documentary Zizek!, filmmaker Astra Taylor keeps one foot planted firmly on campus with Examined Life. an interesting investiagtion into the minds of eight diverse academics.

Taylor presents a platform for ideas to Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, Peter Singer, Avital Ronell and Slavoj Žižek. Because of the static nature of talking about thinking, she has her subjects constantly walking, riding, rowing or rolling, as they delve into a variety of philosophical ideas, from cosmopolitanism to ecology.

While these thinkers are all superstars behind the ivy, they don’t all translate equally well to this format. For some reason, Hardt scolds himself for discussing the possibility of revolution while he’s in Central Park, as if it were an exclusive piece of land instead of a public venue that has served people from every economic strata. That park is one the egalitarian accomplishments of our society, not a place of aristocratic shame as he seems to believe. Others like Singer, Butler and Žižek make far more interesting points.

It would appear that the director had a little bit more time and money for her new film than she did for Zizek!, and she uses it well, showing off a strong sense of composition that was impossible to display with the breakneck schedule of her first feature. Taylor is growing as a filmmaker, and even though she might not be a hard-nosed interviewer as of yet, she knows how to provoke thought.

Read other Film posts.

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