I think Brennan did something interesting with the Porter and Gorgug scene in the last episode. Porter is by all appearances a competent Barbarian teacher. He understands the role of Rage and its mechanical combat benefits, and he even recognizes how Gorgug uses Rage to protect those he cares about. But he doesn't understand how multiclassing into a caster fits into that framework.

And it's true! In 5e you can't cast or concentrate on spells in a Rage. But-- Artificers work a little different than other casters! Alchemist Elixirs and Arcane Cannons aren't technically spells. Arcane Armor just works. And so does the Steel Defender.

Of any caster I think the Artificer is probably the best-suited to multiclass Barbarian because their key subclass features are largely not spells. But it also runs into the problem of requiring multiple high stats. Barbarians already want high STR and CON, and Artificers need INT for their spells and spell saves.

And so there's this narrative tension here. Brennan the DM obviously wants to let his player have fun with the character build-- embracing the creative artificer side of himself is a great character moment for Gorgug, bearer of the tin flower. Someone who has always channeled Rage to protect those he cares about but who has also been called to create and preserve beauty.

And yet mechanically, it's a difficult build. We didn't see Gorgug cast anything in the Night Yorb battle, as far as I recall? And in-universe, classes are a formally recognized thing that require approval. But Gorgug can't be the kind of Barbarian that Porter wants him to be. So he has to show that he can be a different kind of Barbarian-- one whose magic integrates and synergizes with his Rage rather than opposing it.

We see Gorgug still insecure about his homunculus and about the solar lasso, even though these are objectively impressive feats. So it's not a skill issue but an internal conflict-- it's only once Gorgug reconciles and synthesizes his magic with his Barbarian side that the in-world powers that be will recognize him for all of who he is.

DM Tip: Creating a Campaign Skeleton

Learning to be a better dungeonmaster was a protracted process. A younger me was often so stressed out by the desire to be a better artist that I'd have legitimately mauled a person if it would've revealed to me the wisdom I sought (with my hands or even an actual maul given the chance).

One of my biggest hurdles was the idea of a universal framework for d&d adventures, a guideline that would tell me if the things I was creating were on the right track. It was sorely needed, I loved the process of being creative but without an understanding of how my creative energy was best used I ended up sinking days, weeks, or even months worth of energy into projects that went nowhere. Worse yet, when I DID get a chance to put my ideas into practice at the table they'd frequently spiral out of control and crash, resulting in even more stress.

Over time I learned from these mistakes, I got better, and then I got good. I moved from conscious incompetence to competence, and I ended up having a run of absolutely stellar campaigns that were everything my younger self could have dreamed of: stable, enjoyable, meaningful, and most importantly an absolute delight to my players. Routinely I'd have people, including folks that'd only played with me a few times, mention that getting together to roll dice and listen to me babel on in silly voices was a highlight of their week.

It was as one of these campaigns began to wind down (three years! a satisfying conclusion on the horizon!) and I started looking for a followup scenario that I decided to study all my really successful campaigns and figure out what connected them. The end result was something I'd been looking for for nearly a decade, a reliable format that I could build campaigns around.

I want to preface this section with the understanding that while this information is laid out in a vaguely chronological fashion there's no guarantee that these ideas will occur to you in any particular order. Inspiration is a funny thing, and each idea flows into the others to make a cohesive whole. Due to foreshadowing and setup reasons you're also going to need a pretty solid idea about all of these when starting a campaign, though exact details will likely change/ can be vague up until the moment they're needed.

The Reason: Who are we and what are we doing?

Gives your players a solid background to build their characters around and give them a reason to travel together, rather than having to ad lib one on the spot. Likewise sets expectations of what the campaign is "about" that you can build on or subvert in time. The reason doesn't need to hold true for the entire game, just long enough to serve as a framing device. EG: The Witcher starts out as a "monster of the week" setup and then uses that framework to pivot into politics and prophecy once we've seen the premise play out.

The Pilot/Crashtest Adventure: What's first?

I’ve already written about these, but the general concept is to give your party a mostly contained first outing that doesn’t have any larger bearing on the plot so they can focus on learning how their characters play/building the party dynamic.  By the time the party's finished this first adventure they'll have already started putting down roots in the world: they'll have in jokes, npcs they've started to care about, an understanding of what's on the horizon, and an idea of where they want to go next.

The Central Gameplay Pillar: How does this all work?

It's important to have an idea what your campaign is going to be about in a mechanical sense in addition to its plot and themes. There is a difference between an adventure that has the party delve a dungeon, and a dungeoncrawling focused campaign. I like to lead with these outright during the campaign pitch so that players can know what they're getting into. Your playgroup will likely have strong opinions about what they like and dislike, even if they don't have the words to describe it, so you might need to explain the ideas for them.

The Hub: Where are we?

I think every good campaign has a hub, some kind of settlement that the party returns to between adventures to offload loot, pick up supplies, and sift through the latest gossip to look for the next questhook. Letting the party return to the same place lets them build up a relationship with it, clarifying the picture in their mind as new details are added and they grow more and more attached. It's possible to have multiple hubs over the course of a campaign, but I'd advise really only having one per arc to best concentrate your efforts. Fill up your hub with distractions and side adventures, shorter stories that the party can get tangled up in while the larger adventure slowly reveals itself. Returning to the same hub also means returning to a familiar and expanding cast of NPCs, which helps your party become more and more invested in the setting

The Main Event: What's going to happen?

Here we get to the meat of the issue, the big story you want to be telling using this campaign. To pull off the sick narrative kickflip you wish to perform, you're going to need to lay a lot of groundwork, seeding in details left and right as well as giving the party a chance to stumble across evidence of your schemes without ever realizing the whole thing. To do this, you're going to work in the building blocks of your big reveal/twist/pending disaster into the setting along with those side adventures from the hub. This will give your party an idea that something is going on, but with more pressing matters to take care of they're going to be distracted up until the moment you decide to pull the trigger.

The Setting: What's over there?

While things like genre and tone are definitely things you should have a handle on from the outset, I personally feel like the details of a setting are best constructed on an ad hoc basis, either in a direct response to something required by part of the narrative (be it side story or main event), or pencilled in at the margins as the party explores the world.. That said, creation of the hub and setting often go hand in hand because it's important to match the settlement to the environment and then shape the environment to the quests inside the settlement. As for what's beyond your hub, I happen to have just written something about building out settings.

Now, this next option is one that I recommend you start thinking about only once your campaign is fully underway, so it doesn't clog up your creative process by focusing on something that you might not even get to

The Change: What the fuck?

A little while after the main event has kicked off and your party is off on the quest that will turn them from mere adventurers into heroes, they start to hear rumours of strange happenings. It's certainly not related to the present scenario, it may even be an unexpected windfall, but it's not something they have time to look into. Time ticks on, the land is saved, and the party is able to enjoy their victory lap as well as some dearly needed time off. Before they can get comfortable however they're slammed by some strange occurrence that they could have never predicted that changes the state of the world. A neighbouring kingdom invades, an important ally is murdered and they're blamed for it, a dragon starts rampaging through the realm. Its important that this event is outside the party's skillset, not necessarily diametrically opposed, but counter to what they were planning

artsource

Hello! Do you have any recommendations for where to learn about Down syndrome, preferably non academic? I feel like I see very little about it within general disabled circles

you're absolutely right - intellectual + developmental disabilities broadly are horribly neglected at basically every level of disability discourse, because (i think) it challenges the postenlightenment obsession with autonomy-as-independence that pervades disabled circles as much as it does everywhere else. that is, we're still lacking a strong conceptual framework for talking about collective self-determination alongside robust social and material supports for people whose neurodivergence doesn't align w/ mainstream expectations of 'intelligence' and 'competence' and 'productivity'. Down Syndrome (despite recent inroads in terms of limited respectability for some/incorporation into the public and economic spheres) is included in this lacuna.

annnnyway, some students with Down Syndrome have been in several of my cources through a program at my University, and I've learned the most about DS from just asking them what they needed from me & what they wanted me to know. Beyond this, I recommend The Arc for up to date info/advocacy, esp. the chapter most local to you. I also like the DSRF - they center actual people vs just their families, are AAC/alt communication positive, and sex + sex-ed positive. The bar is low because of the alternatives, but I'm glad they pass it. Lastly, Down Syndrome International is a great org to follow, and they have a good youtube channel, too. They have a conference coming up in march (NYC/virtual) if you're interested in signing up!)

hope this helps & that we get more work from people with DS themselves in the very near future.

Climate change is political but it’s “not the imaginary politics of universal consensus,” he writes in the book’s pithy prologue, nor the “anti-politics of miraculous technological salvation”. It’s also “not the end of the world”. Instead, it’s a struggle between “actually existing people over actually existing crises with actually existing differences, interests, and prospects. Climate change is about power.” Politicians in the global north rarely talk this way. They think of climate as an “on/off switch”. “‘We’re doing some climate’”, says Chaudhary, mimicking them, “‘would you prefer we do nothing?’”. But there are two large clusters of “doing something”, both of which Chaudhary examines. The first is what he calls “rightwing climate realism”. This encompasses a “broad spectrum”, from those who favour “slower climate mitigation and adaptation” to climate barbarism, but it’s ultimately about concentrating, preserving and enhancing existing political and economic power. That is why Chaudhary is insistent that, when we think of climate policies, we must pay attention to plans for borders and policing, too. He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist. Among the US president’s most important climate policies is not just the Inflation Reduction Act but the US National Security Strategy, Chaudhary argues. “It is insanely jingoistic,” he says. It describes, for instance, out-competing China. If that’s the framework, he argues, we’re doomed, “because US-China cooperation is vital”. Ultimately, rightwing climate realists know there will be “instability” and “they are preparing for it”. That they will be successful is not only “plausible and possible, but probable,” he says. That is why the second avenue of “doing something”, composed of “the rest of us”, is so important. Chaudhary advocates for “leftwing climate realism”, which accepts the science, not because it’s a discipline “beyond impugning” but because it’s quite clear that there are ecological limits on this planet. We need a slower life, he argues; a circular economic system, where firms compete for the same amount of finite profit and the state dominates certain sectors. This will be good for the planet and for people, producing “a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion”.

what actually is so jarring about the kira-"pregnancy" plot is that it is very much a narrative version of the violin-player argument in judith jarvis thompson's philosophical defense of abortion. it's an argument that is about how abortion is one thread of legality and personal freedom in the full framework of securing bodily autonomy, so a lot of the argument is not explicitly even about abortion. it posits: "what if one day you wake up and you're connected, with medical tubes and so on, to a violin player (a full adult, with a career and a fully realized person) and the only way this violin player can survive is if you remain connected to them for a month?" then it asks: what if you chose to be connected to this violin player but now you don't want to or you have mixed feelings about it? what if you knew it was a risk from another choice you made? what if halfway through the month you don't want to stay connected? what if it was only an hour? what if was nine months? ultimately, the ethical claim remains: your body is your own. you own your body.

and this is not only important, but it is also interesting. it's the kind of plot star trek writers could write since interrogating the competing values regarding bodily autonomy is a common theme within science-fiction (often treated as a source of the Horrific, but sometimes it's different (see the entirety of octavia butler's oeuvre)). and it would've been especially relevant given that one of the main characters in ds9 is from a society where it is a high honor to take onto the body an entirely other being, and the placement of this other being permanently affects the body such that their removal results in swift death. the enormously complex claims all being made on kira for taking on keiko's pregnancy (from miles and keiko to her own body and person, the threat of death, the threat of connection to the fetus, the treatment she would now receive from others, the treatment she would've received had she refused to take the pregnancy, etc.) should've been talked about, narratively or in dialogue in depth, instead of the vague gestures to the unspoken complexity of the plot and the inside-jokes within production--all of which sort of added up to a weird underlying claim about the exchangability of uteruses across alien-species, as if some mythic universal-womb exists in all "female" persons, and only this magic womb can gestate a fetus despite the whacky technobabble impossible hijinks otherwise present in the star trek narrative reality.

and only jadzia says a single thing about kira having a right to her own body. and it's in a tone-deaf light-hearted scene, where once again the male writers get to indulge in some expression of misogyny by revealing an aspect of ferengi culture that isn't actually that alien to the human world they were writing in (or the plot with kira they were writing), even in that pre-dobbs, mid-90s, ear-plugging left-of-center culture.

Okay I read Jay Earley's Self-Therapy Workbook today and guys I really dislike internal family systems on a visceral personal level. Many of these self-part dialogues and mediations would absolutely trap my already hyper analytical self in a tangle of competing perspectives and memories more than it already does get trapped as is, and the personifying and separating of disparate parts would absolutely trigger some psychic break shit for me. Yikes and brrr. Very unpleasant headspace to be in.

I can understand it being a metaphorical framework that would work for others, and I'll try to reflect on that and incorporate acknowledgement of it in my work as best that I can. I can certainly stand to hear from Autistics who have benefited from it in their unmasking process.

But I do think I take issue with many of its goals. Like so many therapies, it is myopically interior rather than contextual and social; it fundamentally ignores just how changeable many people's reactions can be. It also forces an incredibly narrow set of motivations behind universal and enduring human emotions. Not every lashing out in anger is the righteous well intentioned act of a Protector who is defending a poor wounded Exile. Sometimes we just have misophonia. Sometimes we're just hangry. Sometimes we want to hurt other people and we don't have a pure motive behind our actions. Many of our feelings and reactions come from places less deeply meaningful than this book makes them out to be, or can only be changed if our external environment changes, and so obsessively circling the drain of every wounded childhood memory and trying to ascribe a cogent poignant narrative to every pissy shitty little emotion we ever have strikes me as a recipe for self focused rumination.

I dont mean to be a dick, I'm sure it has many use cases. But it really doesnt seem all that different from CBT or "wise mind" DBT type stuff, but framed by a metaphor that is almost designed to make a subset of people feel less internally unified and more crazy.

But I will check out No Bad Parts as well! and keep thinking on it. The act of separating an activated protector from oneself so that you can feel less agitated in the moment and make sense of its reactions is effective, for sure!

Everyone who grew up with Saturday-morning cartoon television in the 1980s or 1990s is surely familiar with the universe of the Smurfs. During many years of adventures, however, the diet of the little blue creatures remained somewhat of a mystery. 

The principal ingredient of many of their dishes was “Smurf berries,” which grew on bushes, but the indistinct appearance of the bushes gave few clues about their botanical nature. This was a deliberate move of the Smurfs’ creator, Belgian cartoonist Peyo (Pierre Culliford, 1928–1992). When the Smurfs were still only a European phenomenon, the Smurf berries were referred to by the French name salsepareille. Peyo chose this name for its exotic sound, initially being unaware that the name referred to very real plants. The name sarsaparilla or salsaparilla, as the plant is known in English, had been used for various species of the genus Smilax for centuries.

When the Smurfs became a phenomenon in the United States, the sarsaparilla shrub lost its berries, because many American viewers were thought to be familiar with sarsaparilla as a real plant. Smilax species are typically climbing vines (not Smurf shrubs) that can be woody, prickly, or both. They appear in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. The fact that an American audience might sooner recognize sarsaparilla than a European audience has everything to do with the plant’s history, which mainly revolves around Smilax species like S. aristolochiifolia and S. ornata, from Mexico and Central America. The best-known episodes from sarsaparilla’s history -- first as a medicine and later as a tonic drink -- are indeed about species from the New World.

The introduction of the Smurfs in the United States signified, in fact, sarsaparilla’s second Atlantic crossing. The oldest references to sarsaparilla are from Old World antiquity, where Smilax aspera was used as an antidote for poisons. The Roman medical writer Dioscorides (first century CE) devoted a chapter to this plant [...]. This description survived many centuries and became firmly embedded in the European medical tradition. [...] When European naturalists explored the plants of the New World in the sixteenth century, they tended to relate new species to better-known plants whenever they could. [...] Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) described different kinds of American sarsaparilla in his work Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565). His descriptions carried a commercial touch. For instance, he tried to convince his readers that the whitish sarsaparilla from Honduras was better than the black variety from Mexico. Similarly, he aimed to embed the new American kinds of sarsaparilla in the traditional framework of European medicine. [...]

The old name sarsaparilla began to be associated not only with new Smilax species from different geographical regions, but also with new diseases. American sarsaparilla was not used as an antidote in cases of poisoning by venomous animals, but to cure syphilis. Syphilis had swept Europe [...], and the market for syphilis remedies was booming. Yet a range of botanical substances had to compete with preparations that contained mercury. The most famous botanical antisyphilitics were of exotic origin: guaiacum wood, China root, sarsaparilla root, and sassafras wood. All these plant parts became staple drugs in European pharmacies [...].

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Sarsaparilla [...] was also valued as a flavoring ingredient in medicinal tonic drinks, often along with sassafras. As such, sarsaparilla was to enjoy another wave of popularity in a later age. [...] As a medical commodity, sarsaparilla enjoyed great commercial success early on. Between 1568 and 1619 alone, 670 tons of sarsaparilla were imported in Seville, Spain, equivalent to some 7.5 million doses. [...]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the borders between medicinal and other uses of sarsaparilla blurred. Proprietary remedies with sarsaparilla abounded, with the Ayer and Hood companies from Lowell, Massachusetts, turning the production of sarsaparilla into big business. In advertisements, it was usually promoted as a tonic, to purify the blood, and to create appetite. Because it was of American origin, it was supposedly especially suitable for American patients.

By this time, then, sarsaparilla had lost many of the Old World medical and cultural connotations [...]. The divide became so pronounced that European fans of the Smurfs in the twentieth century were no longer expected to recognize the name of a plant that had been a mainstay of pharmaceutical practice there for centuries, while the name sarsaparilla lived on as a soft drink in the United States.

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Image, caption, and all text above by: Wouter Klein. “Plant of the Month: Sarsaparilla.” JSTOR Daily. 16 June 2021. ”Plant of the Month” series is a partnership between Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs. [Image screenshotted and shown as it appears in Klein’s article, but illustration originally from U.S. National Library of Medicine and in the public domain. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

Far more threatening to the West’s traditional order were the arrival in the early twelfth century of Arabic astrology, which many saw as a threat to Christian ideals of free will, and the Muslims’ rendering of Aristotelian physics and cosmology that accompanied it. It had been one thing for the Western elite to marvel at the practical uses of the Muslims’ astrolabe, algorism, and related technologies, for none of them required a radical rethinking of Christendom’s dominant worldview—at least not at the relatively low level at which Europe’s early adopters first approached them. And church authorities had already adopted Aristotle’s methods of logical argumentation, the dialectic, because they were keen to use it to establish the truth of Christian revelation in their battle against heresy.5 But all that began to change with the introduction of the Arab Aristotelians’ natural philosophy. Here was an underlying metaphysics, a science of “being as being,” that addressed many of the same questions, albeit in a very different way, as the traditional readings of revelation. It presented medieval Christendom with a competing “theory of everything” that could not be either digested and assimilated painlessly, on the one hand, or ignored outright, on the other. Albumazar’s ninth-century Introduction to Astrology, the full text of which appeared in Latin in 1133 and again in 1140, provided the West with the first major pathway into the Aristotelian tradition in natural science. Adelard of Bath had some two decades earlier translated Albumazar’s own abridged version, the Lesser Introduction to Astrology. This early translation, essentially a practical handbook, helped ignite an appetite in the West for Arabic astrology and other occult practices, but it omitted the Aristotelian framework that made the full Introduction to Astrology such a powerful text. And it was this Arab-influenced apprehension of Aristotle rather than any immediate direct access to his natural philosophy that prompted the church to ban his teachings at the university of Paris, then the premier center of Christian theology, in 1210 to 1215 (Lemay 1958:xxvii). The initial crisis at Paris induced by the Aristotle of the Muslim astrologers was soon followed by the appearance around 1230 of Michael Scot’s translations of the great commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics and natural science by the Muslim philosopher and jurist Ibn Rushd, known to the Latins as Averroës. Averroës’s works provided Europe with some of its first access to an authentic Aristotle, freed of earlier entanglements with the occult. Yet this presentation posed an even greater challenge to the West, for it forced Christendom to reexamine critically many of its most closely held beliefs—on creation, on the nature of God, and on humanity’s place in the universe. Here, then, lie the origins and driving forces of the second phase—after the initial flurry of translations in Spain, Sicily, and the near East—of the Western encounter with the Islamic intellectual tradition, that of assimilation and, more accurately, of expropriation of Arabic science and philosophy. This phase required an intensive effort to “Christianize” Aristotle, already champion of the church’s dialectic, and to make his powerful natural philosophy and metaphysics safe for Western consumption (Lemay 1958:xxiii; Bullough 1996:46–47). And this effort meant, in effect, a campaign of intellectual “ethnic cleansing” that would attempt to strip out any traces of Muslim influence—now seen as a corruption of the original text—and to bequeath an acceptable version of Aristotle to his legitimate heirs in the Latin West. Over time, the vital contributions of the Muslim philosophers were pushed so far to the margins of Western intellectual history as to become almost invisible. A similar pattern would soon be repeated in other fields, including mathematics, medicine, and even literature. Each time, the anti-Islam discourse would provide the rules of procedure and the intellectual mechanism for this willful act of forgetting.

Jonathan Lyons, Islam Through Western Eyes (2014)

End to End

In “End to End,” my new column for Locus Magazine, I propose a policy framework for a better internet: the “End to End” principle (E2E), a bedrock of the original design for the internet, updated for the modern, monopolized web, as a way of disenshittifying it:

https://locusmag.com/2023/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-end-to-end/

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/07/disenshittification/#e2e

The original E2E marked the turning point from telco-based systems where power was gathered at the center, controlled by carriers, to the packet-switched internet, where power moved to the edges. Under the old model, only the network operator could add new features. If you wanted to create, say, Caller ID, you needed to convince the phone company to update its switches to support a new signaling system (and you probably had to rent a Caller ID box from the carrier, too).

But packet-switching made it possible for new services to be created by people at the edges of the network. Once your device was connected to the internet, it could exchange data with any other device on the internet. If someone set up a voice-calling system and you connected to it, they could add Caller ID to it without asking Ma Bell for permission.

End to end was the core ethic of this system: the idea that the telcos that sat beneath these systems should get out of the way of their users, serving only to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly, efficiently and reliably as possible.

E2E was a powerful idea, one that truly treated the telcos as utilities — the plumbing that sat beneath the services, obliged to serve its subscribers by doing their bidding to the extent they could. If you chose to use a internet calling service instead of making phone calls, the carrier’s job was to shuttle those packets around, not to slow them down or block them to funnel you into its rival service.

There’s a powerful logic to this: no one rents a phone line because they want to make sure that the carrier’s shareholders are getting the highest possible return on their investment. The reason we buy network connections is to get to the services we value.

We have no duty to arrange our affairs to the benefit of a carrier’s shareholders. If those shareholders are so emotionally fragile that they can’t bear the thought of network users making their own choices on which services to use, they should get into a different line of work.

E2E wasn’t a law, it was a principle. Principles are useful! They can be embedded in laws (for example, the laws that establish most network providers as common carriers often include an E2E rule), but just as importantly, they can give us a vocabulary for critiquing or designing services: “Ugh, I won’t use that service, it’s not end to end,” or “How can we make this work in an end to end way?”

Principles can be integrated into professional codes of ethics, or procurement rules for public bodies (“Our university only buys end to end services”). Tech groups and publications can use principles to rank competing technologies (“Which network providers are end to end?”).

Network Neutrality is a way of operationalizing E2E: the idea of Net Neutrality is that carriers should be obliged to treat all traffic the same. If you request Youtube packets from Comcast, Comcast should deliver those packets as quickly and reliably as it can, even though its parent company, Universal, owns several competing services.

Net Neutrality can be treated as a principle (“This ISP sucks — it violates Net Neutrality”) or as a regulation (“The FCC is fining your ISP because it violated Net Neutrality”). As a regulation, Net Neutrality has a problem: it’s hard to administer, because it’s very difficult to detect Net Neutrality violations. The internet is a “best effort” network, with no service guarantees, so when your Youtube connection starts to jitter, it’s hard to prove that this is because Comcast is screwing with it, as opposed to regular network congestion.

Which brings me to my E2E proposal: end to end for services. Contemporary services have no E2E. If you search for a product on Amazon, Amazon often won’t show you that product until you’ve looked at five screens’ worth of other products that have paid Amazon to interrupt your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

If you hoist an email out of Gmail’s spam folder and add the sender to your address book, Gmail will still send that message to spam, or even block its server. It’s incredible that we had a Congressional debate about whether Gmail should mark politicians unsolicited fundraising emails as spam but not whether emails from your reps that you asked to receive should be delivered:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

Platform creators are workers whose boss is an algorithm that docks every paycheck to punish them for breaking rules they aren’t allowed to know about, because if the boss told you the rules, you’d learn how to violate them without him being able to punish you for it. Again, it’s wild that we’re arguing about “shadowbanning” (a service choosing not to send your work to people who never asked to see it), while ignoring the fact that platforms won’t deliver your posts to people who explicitly subscribed to your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone operators were young boys who entertained themselves by deliberately misconnecting calls, putting you in contact with people you never asked to talk to and refusing to connect you with the people you were trying to converse with.

As @brucesterling​ wrote in The Hacker Crackdown:

The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

Bell fired those kids. Even the original telecoms monopolist understood that the point of a telephone network was to connect willing speakers with willing listeners.

Today’s tech barons are much more interested in charging other people to interrupt your consensual communications with nonconsensual and often irrelevant nonsense and ads. This is part of the enshittification cycle: first, the platforms lock you in by giving you a good deal, including feeds that contain the things you ask to see and search boxes that return the thing you’re looking for.

Then, platforms take away your surplus and give it to business customers. They spy on you and use the data to help target you on behalf of advertisers, whom they charge low rates for ads that are reliably delivered. They insert performers’ and media companies’ posts into your feed, generating traffic funnels that result in clicks to off-platform sites. They offer low fees and even subsidies to platform sellers and creators who produce DRM media, like ebooks and audiobooks.

Users get locked into the platform — by the collective action problem of convincing their friends to leave, by the collapse of local retail that can’t match the investor-funded subsidies of would-be monopolists, by DRM that they are legally prohibited from removing, causing them to lose their investment if they quit the service.

Business customers also get locked to the platform: platform sellers have to sell where the buyers are; publishers and creators have to provide media where the audiences are; advertisers have to run ads on the services they’ve optimized for.

Once everyone is locked in, the platform can fully enshittify, harvesting surpluses from users and business customers for themselves. Platforms can hike fees, charge media companies and creators to reach their own subscribers, block posts with links off-site, insert ads into media (like Audible is doing with paid audiobooks!), and so on.

This is the cycle that E2E seeks to interrupt. E2E for services would dictate that platforms should connect willing speakers and willing listeners. The best match for your search should be at the top of the results — even if someone is willing to pay more to put a worse match there. Emails should be delivered to people you’ve told your provider you want to correspond with — not sent to a spam folder or blocked.

As with the original E2E, there’s lots of ways we can use this principle. It can simply be a term for criticizing platforms (“You aren’t sending my posts to the people who follow me — that’s a violation of the end to end principle!”). It can be a law (“It is a deceptive and unfair practice for ecommerce companies to deliberately return search results that are not the best match they can locate for the users’ query”). It can be a punishment (“The FTC settled with Google today and ordered the company to implement a Gmail feature that permits users to identify senders whose messages will never be blocked or sent to spam”).

Lots of people are pissed off about Big Tech and many have proposed that we could make it better by treating platforms as “utilities.” But I don’t want President DeSantis to run my email provider, or to decide what’s too “woke” for me to see (or post) on social media.

An E2E rule, on the other hand, creates a role for government that doesn’t determine who gets to speak or what they get to say — rather, it ensures that when people speak and to others who want to hear them, the message gets through.

Unlike Net Neutrality, E2E is easy to administer. If I claim that your emails are being sent to spam after I marked you as a sender I want to hear from, we don’t have to do a forensic investigation into Google’s mail servers to determine if I’m right. You just send me an email we observe where it lands.

Likewise for search: if I search Amazon for a specific product or model number, it’s easy to tell whether that product is at the top of the search results or not.

Same goes for delivery to subscribers: if we suspect that Twitter is shadowbanning posters — say, for including their Mastodon addresses in their bios, or linking to posts on Mastodon — we just send some test messages and see whether they are delivered.

Beyond administratability, E2E has another advantage: cheap compliance. Lots of the rules we’ve created or proposed for service providers are incredibly complex and expensive to comply with. Take rules about “lawful but awful” content, which require platforms to somehow determine whether a message constitutes harassment and block it if it does.

These rules require an army of expensive human moderators or a vast, expensive machine learning system, or both — so they guarantee that Big Tech will rule the internet forever, because no one else can afford to launch a new service with better community norms and better practices.

By contrast, E2E is cheap to comply with. Trusted-sender lists for email providers, search engines that put best results first, and content delivery algorithms that show you the things you asked to see in the order that they were posted are all solved problems:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/social-media-algorithms-twitter-meta-rss-reader/673282

This isn’t to say that platforms wouldn’t be allowed to offer algorithmic feeds and results. Think of how Tumblr does it: you can choose between a feed called “Following” (posts from people you follow) or “For You” (posts that Tumblr thinks you’ll enjoy). Forcing platforms to clearly label their recommendations and give you the choice of controlling your own feed is a powerful check against enshittification.

If you know when you’re in charge and when the platform is driving things, and if you can toggle away from platform-determined feeds to ones that you design, the platform has to be better than you at choosing what you see, or you won’t choose its recommendations.

Platform owners have hijacked the idea that “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach” to justify the now-ubiquitous practice of overriding users’ decisions about what they want to see:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

The Old Internet had lots to going for it. It wasn’t perfect, though. While it was easy to find the things you knew you liked, it could be hard to find things you didn’t know you liked. Recommendations, whether they come from an algorithm or a human editor, are a source of endless delights. But when a we find something we like through one of those recommendations, we need to know that we can find more from that source if we choose to.

Sometimes it’s nice to scroll an algorithmic feed and get a string of surprises. But we are forced to use those feeds, they will inevitably enshittify, to our detriment, and to the detriment of the people who make the things that please us.

As ever, the important thing about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to. When we control our feeds, we can choose to let a recommender system do the driving. If we’re locked into a recommendation system, it drives us.

Today (Mar 7), I’m doing a remote talk for TU Wien.

On Mar 9, you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

On Mar 10, Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Felix Andrews (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_side-view_Kruger.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A room full of telephone operators at a switchboard; their heads have been replaced with hacker-in-a-hoodie heads. On the wall behind them is a poster ad for Facebook with the slogan, 'Find Your Facebook Group.' Atop the switchboard stands a small elephant with a bite taken out of its back.]

The missile knows where it is at all times because it knows where it isn't. Concerning the missile's self-awareness, we must first acknowledge the rich tapestry of existential and ontological inquiry this inadvertently weaves. The missile, a metaphor for the human condition, embarks on a Sisyphean journey of self-discovery, perpetually grappling with the duality of being and non-being. Its existential odyssey, narrated in a delightfully paradoxical and convoluted manner, echoes the philosophical musings of Heidegger's Dasein and Sartre's notion of 'being-for-itself'.

At its core, the missile's quandary encapsulates a profound dichotomy between knowledge and ignorance, existence and nonexistence, being and nothingness. The missile's incessant calculations and recalibrations symbolize humanity's unending quest for self-identity and purpose in a transitory world. Its reliance on negative definitions – understanding where it is by discerning where it is not – mirrors our own existential debacles. We often define ourselves not by what we are, but by what we are not, an act of self-creation through negation.

The missile's foray into the realms of epistemology and metaphysics reveals that its knowledge of location is contingent upon a continuous process of differentiation and deviation, echoing the Heraclitan concept of 'becoming' as opposed to the Parmenidean 'being'. This underscores the fluidity of knowledge and truth, suggesting that understanding is not a static state but rather a dynamic process of constant adjustment and adaptation. Moreover, the missile's relentless pursuit of positional certainty mirrors the human quest for existential certainty. As the missile undergoes continuous recalibration, its journey becomes emblematic of the transitory nature of knowledge. Each correction and deviation, rather than leading to definitive answers, reflects a postmodern landscape filled with outdated epistemological frameworks striving to resolve uncertainties amidst an infinite spectrum of possible interpretations. This conveys that reality is not a fixed or easily, permanently definable entity, but rather an ever-evolving mosaic of interpretations, each competing for present validity within an ever-turbulent aerial tapestry.

The existential tableau of the missile's journey is an allegory to the Absurd, as conceptualized by Camus. In this indifferent cosmos, the missile's ceaseless recalibrations serve as a stark metaphor for humanity's vain pursuit of meaning and certainty. Each correction in its path, while mechanically precise, is futile and leading to its own demise while simultaneously realizing its fated nonexistence, reflecting humanity's penchant for seeking permanence in an abstract universe. Here, the missile also encapsulates the ultimate irony of existence: the journey toward a meaningless destination, guided only by that which once was, and what is not.

The phrase "it now is", in reference to arriving at a position where it wasn't, from a position where it was, encapsulates a moment of existential actualization, a fleeting instance where the missile's purpose aligns with its being, only to be immediately thrust back into a state of flux. This ephemeral nature of its trajectory is emblematic of the human condition, where moments of clarity and understanding are often transient and elusive.

In the transformative moments that the missile ultimately experiences, marked by a deterministic cessation from being where it need not be, we are presented with a profound and unidirectional metamorphosis. This fleeting juncture, wherein positional knowledge, acquired through negation, converges with the realization of an externally imposed purpose, not fully grasped by the missile, which marks the end of its original identity and function. The missile, in this context, ceases to exist as what is classically considered to be a missile. It actualizes a state akin to dissolution, yet it is not entirely annihilated. This embodies the concept of the impermanence of form and the fluidity of identity. This resonates deeply with the Buddhist concept of Anatta, the doctrine of non-self, which asserts the absence of an unchanging, permanent self. Its components, while no longer collectively forming a 'missile', persist in varied forms, challenging our notions of fixed identity. Furthermore, the missile's disintegration, while suggestive of destruction, simultaneously represents the perpetual cycle of creation and dissolution inherent in nature and existence. Therefore, in its terminal act, the missile transcends into a symbol of existential ascendancy. This scenario prompts us to reevaluate our understanding of existence, identity, and the transient nature of purpose, fostering a reflection that intertwines elements of metaphysics and existential philosophy.

In a broader sense, the missile is a meta-commentary on the absurdity of the human condition. The missile's labyrinthine logic, while appearing superficially nonsensical to the ignorant, is a poignant metaphor for the often absurd and circular reasoning humans employ in their quest to make sense of their existence.

The missile, necessarily differentiating the algebraic sum of where it was and where it shouldn't be, from where it shouldn't be from where it wasn't, is much more profound than a mere analysis of the missile's guidance system, but a rich, multilayered philosophical treatise. It challenges us to ponder the nature of knowledge, existence, and the human condition, wrapped in a deceptive cloak of simplicity deviation, variation, and error. The missile's journey is our journey – a never-ending quest to understand ourselves and our place in the cosmos, forever oscillating between presence and absence, knowing where we are and where we are not, and most profoundly, existence and oblivion.

(source: u/AToneDeafBard, r/NCD)

Fractures - TMAGP

This is another rudimentary attempt at a TMAGP theory post. It will not be well written because I am going to do this so so fast so I can say I wrote it.

SO one thing that's been discussed around the water cooler is the difficulty these new episodes present in terms of classification of Entities. Classification of Entities in TMA proper was never simple, without a clear divide between them outside of the widely-accepted human framework that had been applied to them. TMAGP, however, seems to take things to a new level of uncertainty. There seems to not even be an attempt to lead the listener to certain classifications, other than just giving vague allusions to them.

Makes sense. We as the audience have already been instructed to abandon our ideas about that framework as far back as the end of TMA season 4. Why would they direct us back into that way of thinking?

Interestingly, there may be an in-universe attempt to use the fracturing of entities to an end goal here.

The apocalypse in TMA proper was ultimately made possible because of the understanding that the entities cannot be meaningfully separated. Were it not for Smirke's Fourteen, it would be impossible to pull such a ritual, as trying to perform one with simply the concept of Fear would not give it anything concrete to manifest through. Hence the ritual had to incorporate all of the most powerful conceptualizations of fear.

With that in mind... how much power could a given entity ever gain if, say... every individual fear-based paranormal occurrence were broken down into the smallest, most unique, specific categories possible?

It's still being categorized, so it would still be unlikely someone would recognize these as parts of a whole power, avoiding the possibility of grand ritual. But no distinct powers are emerging to compete with one another. Those powers, and the attention their rituals bring, are what ultimately would lead one to recognizing the whole shape of it.

And we may be seeing this exactly hypothetical play out... with the OIAR classification system.

Take Needles. Needles would quite possibly be best assigned as an avatar of the Corruption, if those categories existed in this world. The fear of them would ultimately fuel fear of the Corruption, adding to its power. Instead, though, we get one individual suffering in pain and fear, and another person listening to the call who... does not care. Is not scared of needles. Since Needles is limited to this specific fear, they really only have the ability to affect those with this specific phobia.

Injury (needles) -/- intimidation [999 call].

It actually quite reminds me of Jon saying this during the apocalypse.

ARCHIVIST:

Anyway this absolutely ties into my B Side Theory about the ultimate goal of preventing an apocalypse. So. Count me invested in both of these as more than just vague ideas. And if you need further consideration, just consider what the lovely Alex Newall had to say regarding the PERFECT tagline for the entire series:

Is It Really That Bad?

“The hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change.”

So said Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson many, many times in the lead up to the debut of his superhero vehicle Black Adam. And, at the time, it sounded like he may have been telling the truth. Johnson was at a point in his career where he’d gained a bit of respect as an actor after his early career was plagued by boring garbage like Doom and campy cheese like The Scorpion King; he now had showcased some comedic acting prowess in films like Moana and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and in the former film he also got to show a bit of emotion when needed. Also in the case of the former, he was clearly very passionate about playing Maui, and it seemed like he was passionate about portraying Captain Mar—Er, SHAZAM’S archenemy as well, seeing as he’d been attached to a movie about the guy since about 2007 and was now able to swing his Hollywood clout around to push it out of development hell. And while the DCEU was on a bit of shaky ground thanks to Wonder Woman 1984 being infamously bad even for a film shat out during COVID, James Gunn’s one-two punch of critically acclaimed cult classic The Suicide Squad and the fantastic spin-off series Peacemaker gave people hope that DC was on the rise and we were about to be given some of the best Johnson we’d ever experienced.

Unfortunately, that’s just not how things panned out. Black Adam ended up being yet another in a string of bombs for DC, and this wouldn’t be so noteworthy if not for a certain cameo.

Leaked online ahead of the film’s premier, people got super hyped that Henry Cavill was finally back as Superman after faceless teases of the character in Peacemaker and Shazam! No more jerking the audience around, this was full confirmation Cavill was back, and he’d be fighting Adam (a longstanding dream of Johnson’s)! The audience was absolutely ecstatic, and whatever else could be said about the movie everyone was hopeful about the future of DC!

But let’s be real here: A couple of good films notwithstanding, the DCEU was a disease-ridden old pooch, and it had to be put out of its misery with a Gunn. James Gunn was announced to be taking over the DC movie universe and ushering in a continuity reboot to unfuck the messy and convoluted universe, one of the exceedingly rare good decisions WB has made in the past decade. But such a change in the hierarchy of power was not something that was good for this film (or any of the forthcoming DC films), and not helping matters were some of Johnson’s more egotistical decisions coming to light, such as vetoing an appearance by Zachary Levi and forcing in the aforementioned Supernan cameo.

The result was yet another bomb on DC’s hands, losing an estimated $100 million due to its budget ballooning. But this didn’t have the issues that the other recents bombs had; it didn’t have to compete with a Sonic movie like Birds of Prey, it didn’t have to deal with having an abysmal predecessor that scared audiences away like The Suicide Squad, and it wasn’t an astonishingly awful piece of dogshit with horrendous writing starring and directed by two phenomenally terrible human beings like Wonder Woman 1984. It failed because Johnson got too big for his britches and couldn’t just change course to deliver a Shazam sequel and instead tried to swing his Hollywood superstar dick around when the writing was on the wall for the franchise.

But now that some time has passed and we’re on our way to seeing what Gunn’s new take on DC will be, let’s take a look at the death rattle of the DCEU and see if it’s really that bad.

THE GOOD

Dwayne Johnson’s genuine passion for Adam honestly shines through. Like this isn’t really a character who is breaking new ground or reinventing the wheel or anything, but within the framework of the story the film is telling Johnson does an exceptional job bringing the character to life and manages to inject quality acting into the performance. The emotional backstory moments land, the humor lands, it’s just a Rock-solid superhero movie performance. And while he doesn’t end up feeling very antiheroic overall, he rips the bad guy in half with his bare hands while shooting off a one-liner, a moment so fucking cool it makes me a lot more lenient with some of the film’s flaws.

Of course, as much as he’d like to be the best thing in the movie, Johnson really can’t hold a candle to Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate. You can always count on a former Bond actor to deliver, and he adds a sense of class to the proceedings, especially in his interactions with Aldis Hodge’s Hawkman. Hodge is a bit more of a mixed bag, but when he’s bouncing off of Brosnan he really shines. Seriously, Brosnan is just the MVP of this movie. This might be his best late-career role since Mamma Mia!

All of the action in the movie is great, even by superhero movie standards. That’s not to say everything is amazingly plot relevant, but all of the fight scenes are exceptionally well done and exciting. When two dudes are punching the shit out of each other or Adam is vaporizing thugs, it’s a lot of dumb fun. Going off of the previous point, they actually manage to utilize Fate's powers in a lot of fun and interesting ways that make him a delight to watch in his few battles, and Hawkman is no slouch being a winged dude who can have a midair battle with Adam.

Also, there’s just something really nice and refreshing about seeing a Middle Eastern country being liberated from its oppressors by a powerful guardian who wants them free from tyranny. It feels very topical even though it pretty obviously wasn’t intentional at all. If you wanted to be extremely charitable, you could call this a pro-Palestine response to Wonder Woman 1984 and its blatant Islamophobia. Do I personally believe that? Uh, no. Does it really make the film any better if it is the case? Er...

THE BAD

I think one of the things that absolutely wounds this film is its steadfast refusal to engage with the source material it’s adapting. Shazam laid the groundwork for this movie, setting up Adam’s appearance down the road, and then this movie doesn’t even mention Billy Batson at all. We get a cameo from Superman, sure, but Superman isn’t Adam’s archenemy is he? And this issue is apparently directly traceable to the Big Johnson himself. There’s this idea that he has it that he can never look stupid in movies or lose big battles, and I don’t necessarily believe that’s an actual thing, but it feels really true here. How’re you gonna be a badass anti-hero and get your ass whupped by a teenager? It’s a dumb thing to worry about when you’re playing a character known for it though, and it’s even dumber to veto a cameo of that character just because you wanna be a big tough guy who only fights macho men like Superman—and that’s exactly what Johnson used his clout to do. It honestly makes me wonder why he wanted to play a villain most famous for going up against the original Captain Marvel if he didn’t want to engage with the character at all.

Maybe this would be easier to swallow if we had a villain who wasn’t a forgettable CGI sack of shit, but sadly as badass a concept as SABBAC the demonic anti-Shazam sounds on paper this is all he ends up amounting to. His human form, Ishmael, is even worse and blander, though I do find it funny Marwan Kenzari has twice now performed as an underwhelming villain who turned into a big red CGI demon turd.

Also, as cool as Dr. Fate and Hawkman are, the other members of the Justice Society are so utterly forgettable and superfluous to the plot that it’s easy to forget they’re even there most of the time. I can’t remember a single thing of note they did. It’s a shame too, since they have interesting powers and designs, but they are just so unimportant to what’s going on that it’s hard to care about them. And it’s not even the heroes who are dull and forgettable; the Kandaq people we follow throughout the film are just really forgettable as well. The fact only a handful of characters will make any impression on you in a film with this chunky runtime is really troubling.

But the biggest crime of the film is just that it plays everything way too safe. This is strictly formula, plain and simple, hitting all the beats of your generic origin story for a hero with just a teeny tiny bit more brutality because they’re trying to sell Adam as a badass anti-hero. Except, no, it doesn’t really work because he’s neutered by the PG-13 rating for the most part and he never really comes off as morally gray or unscrupulous. This man ain’t a badass, he’s a badbutt. The point is, you’ve seen this exact story play out a million times before—and usually better—to the point where you could probably guess certain lines of dialogue before they happen and you’ll likely figure out where the plot’s going ages ahead of the characters.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Black Adam is pretty much the definition of “mid.” It’s not an awful film. It’s not a great film. It’s not a film that really brings about much of a strong emotional response no matter what way you slice it. But it’s not a wholly unpleasant viewing experience either. It’s just… fine. It’s an okay movie.

But “okay” is not what DC needed, and it’s certainly not what Johnson wanted for this character he was so passionate about that he stuck with him for almost twenty years and used his massive star power he’d accumulated to get it made when he could have easily swung that power into making some dramatic passion project. He wanted this to be big, he wanted to be the next big anti-hero, he wanted to fight Superman so goddamn bad… But it’s ultimately this ego that held the film back. This is a dude who is supposed to fight Shazam, but Johnson was dead set on him fighting the other buff flying super dude; if he really wanted to fight Superman so bad, why not push to play a Superman villain? He has proven time and time again he’s funny, so why not make him Bizarro? Or get really crazy and cast him as Lex Luthor, bald and occasionally buff super genius archenemy of Superman? There are so many dudes who actually fight Superman that Johnson could pull off and yet he chose to forcefully repurpose another hero’s villain instead of shifting gears a bit. The whole film just ends up feeling like a massive monument to his ego and hubris as opposed to the passion project it obviously was, and he unfortunately only has himself to blame there.

Ultimately, while I don’t think Black Adam is responsible for the DCEU dying—this film series was on life support since Dawn of Justice—it definitely is emblematic of every single problem that brought down the series. It just genuinely doesn’t understand what fans of the character would want to see, it features a bland and underwhelming villain only there for some cool action scenes, and it sets up so many things that would never be delivered upon. Sure, there’s plenty to like here, but why bother when you can watch something else with these same good qualities and actually have it be more than decent background noise? You wanna see some great Pierce Brosnan acting in an action movie? I have great news! He made three James Bond movies worth watching, and also Die Another Day! You want a good comic book anti-hero movie? Go watch Dredd, The Suicide Squad, or even Punisher: War Zone. Dead set on a movie where a buff hero with your typical flying brick powers fights some evil demons? Just go watch Shazam!

I hope this movie failing so hard and leaving so much egg on Johnson’s face humbles him a bit and gets him to check his ego in the future, because I do genuinely enjoy the guy’s movies. He’s got good comedic chops, he’s pretty charming when he wants to be, and he’s great at elevating batshit material if given the chance as Southland Tales’ unorthodox use of him goes to show. I’d like to see him go back to doing weirder, smaller stuff for a while and maybe build back confidence in his acting career again because right now he’s almost as big a joke as the Scorpion King CGI in The Mummy Returns. He’s just not respected as much as he was a few years ago, and this overhyped bomb is what did it.

I’d say the score here is just about right. This really isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not anything special either; it’s just some mindless entertainment to put on in the background while you do something else. It genuinely is a shame, because this could have been a great movie that ushered in a fantastic new age for the DCEU, with Johnson saving the franchise after the past blunders of Snyder almost tanked it… But he came too little, too late and his movie ended up paying the price. And while it’s not fair to lay all the blame on Black Adam, it’s hard to feel too sorry when it does next to nothing to justify its existence beyond a scant few memes, and even in that regard it is outdone by far worse (and thus more entertaining) films like Morbius and Madame Web. This movie is, sadly, just nothing. It is a nothing film that elicits no strong feelings and you’ll likely forget it soon after watching it. It won’t be an unpleasant experience to view, but I’d be shocked if it leaves anything beyond the most minimal impact on you. It is the dictionary definition of “mid.”

so when my intro post (this one, about hpmor and power fantasies and weird porn) was going around somebody reblogged it w/ commentary about mother of learning & how it did actually have a story framework that depended on like, character growth, themes, etc, and didn't necessarily deserve to be thrown into the progression fantasy bin & i've been thinking about why i disagree with that

part of it is just... the pacing is still pure progression fantasy? like the character wakes up one day in a puzzle box and the entire world is structured so that he has no choice but to investigate & that necessarily involves getting better at things. the world is a perfect training chamber for Leveling Up. it's the same framework as living in the sexy porn universe where the natural resolution to anything happening is to have sex. sure sure there's an in-world justification for everything that happens, but the true why for why things are happening is that the author wanted some sex scenes. oh no the narrative is bending around the gravitational pull of leveling up

(i have read, uh, 'to the stars' which is another one of those extremely long serial fanfics that i guess could be placed somewhere adjacent to the progression fantasy genre (the main character does get 'more powerful' and iirc also has a 'cheat ability' in some sense, for some very broad genre trope identifications) but it never really felt like that while reading it b/c there's never really any point in the entire story where there's a problem that the obvious solution that's immediately presented is "oh just get stronger". so "character gets more competent at using their skills" can fit in more naturally with the other narrative beats instead of being the primary narrative beat repeated over and over and over again)

or for more reputable fiction comparisons, like, a wizard of earthsea has ged getting more powerful, but that's... like the entire book is about the responsibility of having power, & the big antagonist is not defeated by ged outcasting him. it's about, like, accepting the duality of the self. the book is deeply interested in talking about power and what it means.

meanwhile, basically every one of zorian's problems is resolved by him personally deducing a solution. like, sure, this is kinda commented on in a meta sense a few times -- the whole memory packet thing where he spends months/years trying to learn the abilities needed to unpack it and totally fails & the only reason why he gets anything out of it is that the arache queen thought of him and put a failsafe message in specifically for that case -- but... it's still a huge training montage! it's still chapter after chapter of him getting tutors and training his skills and the old progression fantasy chestnut of "[x thing] had been so difficult and a huge blocker (several chapters ago) and now it's a trivial obstruction that's effortless to bypass" repeating itself over and over again. like, sure, there are absolutely some character beats (him realizing that the reason why uhhh whatshername, his friend who he had a crush on, shows up once in the loop and then never again was because she ends up dying via monster attack & he never actually bothered to follow up on that is what springs to mind for me) but... they're deeply subservient to whatever the latest power advancement beat is in the overall story structure. i think in the entire story he has like, two conversations with people about how actually the part where he's like 24 now and has maybe grown distant and alienated from his former friends while they live out, unchanging, in their month-long cycle over and over is going to have some long-term repercussions for him. there's that, and then there's a million scenes about training his mana bolt.

like sometimes i have story ideas for "this could be a progression fantasy" and sometimes i have story ideas for "this is a story idea i have" and there's absolutely this kind of wrenching distortion when i try to line up story beats from the latter with the former. plenty of stories don't spend like half their wordcount on training montages and showing the characters overcoming struggles through cunning or power. and when they do have those, they're in service to a larger story beat! the hobbit is not about bilbo getting more powerful even though an important part of the character's arc is that he comes home changed.

idk i'd say the defining characteristic that makes something a progression fantasy is that they're about the simple joy of hearing a character becoming more and more and more powerful over and over, to the point where the entire arc of the story bends to accommodate that. 'mother of learning' isn't structured like a mystery, even though it absolutely could be, and i don't really think it's structured like a coming-of-age story either, even if it absolutely has some parts of that there. the bulk of it is just a series of problems, revealed to the reader, that you then get to see zorian overcome. there are other bits there, for sure. but the biggest and clearest through line is about problem-solving via gaining power.

more generally, i think that person's definition of rational fic mostly overlaps with what i'd call a progression fantasy? the arc of the story is about presenting problems that get resolved through a character's ingenuity, at least in part so the readers can vicariously enjoy the problem-solving. it's kind of similar to a detective novel; i wouldn't say the sherlock holmes stories are progression fantasies but maybe if holmes was less condescending and more emphasis was put on how ~awesome~ he was they would be. numbers going up just makes it closer to a litrpg, which is a distinct other thing. so long as the primary arc of the work is about reveling in hearing about a character get more powerful, that's a progression fantasy.

Spectre Journal

As the late Samir Amin wrote in 2006, “the challenges with which the construction of a real multipolar world is confronted are more serious than many ‘alterglobalists’ think.” Sixteen years later, Amin’s call for nations to “delink” from the Western-led economic order appears more ignored by state elites in the global South now than ever before. Earlier this year in a speech at Davos, Xi Jinping reaffirmed that “China will continue to let the market play a decisive role in resource allocation,” while “uphold[ing] the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its center.” And Russia’s assaults on Syria and Ukraine, financially supported by its plunders in regions like Sudan, serve as a reminder that the rise of national powers supposedly challenging US hegemony provides no guarantee that conditions will be more favorable to the international left. Thus, as Aziz Rana recently noted, the left needs an internationalist framework that “universally and effectively joins anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian ethics,” and refuses both “an old, broken Pax Americana” and “a new multipolar order dictated by competing capitalist authoritarianisms.”

But praxis can only emerge from a precise theoretical understanding of the objective conditions of imperialism today. What characterizes this new multipolar order and the nature of inter-capitalist competition? As a whole, this emerging multipolar world of bourgeois states does not create better conditions to challenge global imperialism, but merely preserves and even heightens these capitalist dynamics. Martín Arboleda cautions against “fetishizing” the role of the state in facilitating imperialism today at the expense of accounting for the role of international actors, and so conversely, we must also not overstate the capacity of the state—even developmentalist ones—in resisting imperialism.1 The decline of US imperial power and the rise of multiple “poles” on the global stage only reshuffles which states are mediating the existing global relations of production, without reorganizing the latter differently, and without fundamentally empowering independent movements in each region. Identifying the most effective strategy for the global left to build power requires understanding how this new expression of imperialism works. Rather than seeing multipolarity as opening up space for revolutionary struggles against imperialism, I contend that contemporary multipolarity functions as a new stage of the global imperialist system, a departure from unipolar US hegemony without neatly falling back into the traditional mode of inter-imperialist rivalry as described by Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin commenting on the last century.

Today’s multipolar imperialism represents an intensification of the world-system sketched out by Bukharin, which sees the internationalization of finance capital and the development of national capitalist groups as two aspects of the same process. While national economic blocs have been increasingly sidelined in favor of multinational institutions by neoliberal globalization, nonetheless we see the strengthening of the power of nation-states to help facilitate financial capital in further containing the working class. A Marxist theory of imperialism today must thus not overstate the dynamic of inter-imperialist rivalry without endorsing a perspective that capitalist states are now entering a stage of peaceful co-existence enabled by financial interdependence, or what Karl Kautsky called “ultra-imperialism.” This deeper intertwining of state and capital enables new and more complex dynamics between ruling elites. Even as value transfer from peripheries to core remains intact, we can now witness multiple geographies of inter-imperial relations, with different cycles and layers of collaboration and competition between different sectors of the ruling class. Now joined by an often invisible class of institutional investors, state elites draw from more sophisticated technologies of repression and control across geopolitical blocs, leading to an uneven development of global authoritarianisms to counter independent and popular movements. This widespread erosion of political democracy, as it takes diverse forms, is thus a central policy of imperialism today.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, the world economy’s gone rather topsy-turvy.

Japan is up while China is down—and in danger of Japan-like deflation. The United States is practicing Japanese-style protectionism and industrial policy, while Japan is championing what Washington used to promote: newer, better open trade rules.

These trends represent a virtual reversal of the neoliberal narrative we had grown used to since the end of the Cold War, when the disintegration of Soviet communism appeared to discredit the whole idea of government-directed economic growth. This was followed by the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, which in turn touched off a long period of slow, geriatric growth in the granddaddy of the East Asian “miracle.” But the economics profession, having made so many bad calls since this long, strange trip of globalization began, can’t keep up. That’s because most mainstream economists still have trouble admitting that their model of free-market fundamentalism—the “Washington Consensus”—has failed catastrophically, and in several dimensions.

While Brexit has proved a disaster for Britain and the U.S. is floundering with ever-worsening inequality, Japan may well have entered a new chapter of its extraordinary postwar story. It is enjoying a new spurt of activity, including annualized growth of nearly 5 percent in the second quarter and some price and wage increases. These indicators “suggest the economy is reaching a turning point in its 25-year battle with deflation,” as the government said in its annual white paper. Japan also remains socially stable to a degree that should make Americans envious, since it doesn’t suffer the huge income inequality problem that bedevils the United States, though Japan is, of course, far less ethnically diverse. Japan is hardly a perfect model—it is still backward, for example, in recognizing women’s rights—but its Human Development Index is rising among the rich countries. Whether measured by equality, life expectancy, or its stellar jobless rate of 2.7 percent, Japan is today in the “top rung of the most affluent and most successful societies in the world—and now seven and a half years longer than for America,” as economics historian Adam Tooze puts it.

Other economists who have long invoked the Japanese and East Asian “middle way” of market-sensitive government industrial support agree. “I wouldn’t attribute too much to Japan’s quarterly growth rate—but I would give them some credit for not leaving as many people behind,” said Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University. “The big advantage they had was that before their malaise set in, they had achieved a far more egalitarian state.” Or as International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists Fuad Hasanov and Reda Cherif conclude in one recent paper, the Asian miracles’ economic models—mainly the ones used in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—“resulted in much lower market income inequality than that in most advanced countries.”

How did East Asia do it? By focusing on export competitiveness and forcing subsidized firms to compete in global markets, these countries created good jobs for the middle class and avoided the pitfalls of failed “import substitution” policies that have characterized bad industry policy in the past across countries from Latin America to Africa. Building upon that, they also imposed progressive tax systems.

By contrast, there is also some agreement that one reason for China’s slowdown is that its dictatorial leader, Xi Jinping, has cracked down too harshly on the market part of the economy, disturbing the delicate balance of government-vs.-market control that began in the late 1970s. Xi “doesn’t seem to know how to use the levers of government with subtlety or within a market framework,” Stiglitz said.

All this is surprising, because in the policy debate with advocates of East Asian-style market intervention, the Washington Consensus had until fairly recently been winning, hands down. “Industrial policy” of the kind practiced by Japan and other East Asian nations was toxic and had to be practiced, at best, below the radar, especially in the United States. Capital flows were heedlessly unleashed around the world and market barriers eliminated at the insistence of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. When the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 1990s, the neoliberals at first claimed vindication, saying corrupt crony capitalism and heavy government interference were to blame. But after the 2008 crash sank Wall Street—and nearly the entire U.S. financial system—it was clear that the crisis was, in fact, one of global capitalism and the excesses of neoliberalism. The problem in both the U.S. and Asia wasn’t the heavy hand of government so much as its opposite: totally unregulated capital flows and financial markets, not to mention (in the United States) regressive tax policies that favored Wall Street and capital gains earners.

As Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan’s former vice minister of finance and international affairs and one of Asia’s intellectual champions for an alternative model, told me presciently back then: “Global capital markets are responsible to a substantial degree. If you look at the so-called Asia crisis, the root cause has been the huge inflow of capital into Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, and China. And all of a sudden … all of that has [fled] from those countries. Borrowers have been borrowing recklessly, and lenders have been lending recklessly. And not just Japanese banks. American banks and European banks as well.” Sakakibara proved to be correct, and something similar—indeed, much worse—struck the U.S. economy nearly 10 years later.

Beyond that, it was also clear during this three-decade period that China was paying scant attention to trade rules, deploying among other systematic violations industrial espionage, investment controls, currency manipulation, and intellectual property theft. During the same period, American confidence was badly misplaced that the nation’s high-tech advantages would automatically translate into a new manufacturing age for the middle class. It wasn’t just American capital that was fleeing abroad: By the mid-1990s, it was obvious that Silicon Valley-style startups don’t take one’s economy very far when most of the scale-ups—the manufacturing and downstream jobs, in other words—are happening overseas in low-wage countries.

So neoliberalism’s been dying ever since, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden have delivered the death blows. The most significant failure, perhaps, was not purely economic but social and political. It has become clear that in the United States, as well as in other major Western economies such as Great Britain, deepening inequality brought about by an almost religious devotion to neoliberal thinking has generated jarring social instability and populism on the right and left. Trump and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson turned the two democracies that built the postwar global economic system into anti-globalist, inward-looking confederacies. Trump focused his ire on starting a trade war and crippling the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Johnson stormed out of the European Union. How did we get to this topsy-turvy place? A little historical perspective might help.

What’s been playing out on the global stage all this time has been nothing less than a historic test of alternative approaches to economic development—and an unprecedented test of social stability, too.

It began about three decades ago, when U.S. President Bill Clinton rolled into office in the triumphalist aftermath of the collapse of the USSR and decided that markets and globalization were the answer—even for formerly progressive Democrats like him. Command economies were utterly discredited. So was big government in the United States. And in the developing world, government intervention—so-called import substitution, meaning the support of domestic industry and the closing of trade barriers to foreigners—had also been an abysmal failure, especially in Africa and Latin America, leading to corruption and endemic poverty.

But then there was that strange outlier, East Asia. The East Asian “Tigers,” inspired by the postwar champion of managed economies, Japan, had dared to tinker with market forces like demiurges playing with elemental fire, and they had largely succeeded. Around that time, Masaki Shiratori, Japan’s executive director at the World Bank, lobbied passionately for a study of East Asia’s unusual success, its unique and savvy combination of deft government promotion of markets.

The World Bank came up with one—350 pages long—that hesitantly concluded that “market-friendly state intervention” might sometimes work. But it was so heavily hedged that it had little impact. Washington didn’t want to risk turning countries like India into government-supported export giants with East Asian-style policies, especially when U.S. markets were already seen as being under assault and Clinton was preaching “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And U.S. policymakers didn’t want countries like Russia to find excuses for only half-reforming their way out of command economics.

Mainstream economists rolled out their big guns against the idea that East Asia had a viable alternative. In a 1994 Foreign Affairs article, “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle,” Paul Krugman argued that pouring all that capital into industry at home was only going to yield “diminishing returns” and compared the Asians to the Soviet Union, saying that people forget “how impressive and terrifying the Soviet empire’s economic performance once seemed.” Krugman cited in particular the work of economists Alwyn Young and Lawrence Lau, who argued that East Asia’s “total factor productivity” numbers showed East Asian economic growth was entirely based on “inputs” such as rapid labor force increases, not on improved efficiency. It was merely “economic growth on steroids,” Young told me in an interview for Institutional Investor magazine in 1993. “You look impressive, but inside you’re rotting.”

Young and others pointed to Japan’s slow-growth period as evidence of this, but he and other economists failed to take into account the ultra-long time frame of the East Asian model—the fact that these countries were laying the institutional groundwork for later improvements in productivity and efficiency. And all the while neoliberalism was being slowly undermined by the departure of U.S. capital for foreign shores, along with cheaper labor. What the Clintonites and their advocates failed to see was that “[a]s capital becomes internationally mobile, its owners and managers have less interest in making long-term investments in any specific national economy—including their home base,” Robert Wade—then a renegade World Bank economist—argued at the time.

Wade and others were, of course, ignored. The historical tide of neoliberalism was too powerful, and the Japanese too meek about asserting their views. Japan, as ever, was bad about “forming universal theories from the economic success of Japan,” Naohiro Amaya, one of the country’s legendary bureaucrats, told me in 1992 when I lived there. It was a culture of pragmatism; the Japanese had no Keynes or Marx of their own. And frankly, few bureaucracies were as savvy as those of the East Asians, with their agile technocratic class and Confucian tradition of service. India, for example, which had grown up with Nehru socialism, had suffered for decades under the “license raj,” which involved a bureaucratic tangle every time someone wanted to start a business.

Yet much of this long-entrenched economic “wisdom” is now cracking—much like the melting glaciers that neoliberal capitalism, during its rampage across the planet, has helped to promote. As Cherif and Hasanov write in “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named”: “Our summary of 50 years of development showed that only a few countries made it from relative or absolute poverty to advanced economy status,” giving rise to the idea that government can’t make much of a difference. East Asia proved that it could, but “until recently, the experiences of the Asian miracles have been mostly considered as ‘accidents’ that cannot and should not be emulated, at least from the point of view of standard development economics.”

That is no longer the case. For better or worse, a new global economic consensus is being born, if rather painfully. As John Maynard Keynes wrote in the preface to The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones…”

The new look in economics is being driven by two related factors. One is the anger of the Western middle class—which has been hammered by globalization and the spread of technological advances around the world—and the other is the rise of China. As if awakened collectively from a Pollyannaish, post-Cold War dream, the U.S. political class has, in the space of a few years and across both political parties, cast off Reagan-era free-market thinking and re-embraced the mindset of the early Cold War. In particular, the China threat has reawakened memories—so long buried—of how successful industrial policy was back then.

As Wade—author of one of the original East Asia studies, Governing the Market—has pointed out, the U.S. remains by far the most innovative economy in the world due in no small part to an ongoing, if stealthy, industrial policy. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and several other federal agencies have helped produce U.S. breakthroughs in “general purpose technologies.” Among them, the National Science Foundation funded the algorithm behind Google’s search engine, and early funding for Apple came from the Small Business Innovation Research program. In her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, economist Mariana Mazzucato notes that all the technologies that make the iPhone “smart” are also state-funded, including the internet, wireless networks, the global positioning system, microelectronics, touchscreen displays, and the voice-activated SIRI personal assistant.

Hence a new conventional wisdom has come out of the closet, economically speaking—at least among policymakers. This fresh approach amounts to what one critic, Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economist and nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, disapprovingly calls “the new Washington-Beijing-Brussels Consensus of building up certain national industries through government subsidies and trade restrictions.” Instead of the Washington Consensus, we are seeing the rise of what some are calling the “Washington Constellation,” a collection of many disparate growth theory concepts.

But the economics profession itself is still not sure it ought to abandon its neoliberal convictions. “Prominent people in the profession still have convictions against this,” said Nathan Lane, a young economist at Oxford who wrote a pathbreaking paper that employed neoclassical economics to explain the success of South Korea’s state investment in heavy industry. “It’s a very uncomfortable thing that’s going on, which is economics made this empirical turn the past couple of decades, and people like myself, who are not attached ideologically to the Washington Consensus, said, ‘We’re just empiricists. Let’s explore this.’ People said, ‘Don’t do that.’ People get extremely reactive to even asking the question of whether it works.”

At the IMF, once the face and voice of the Washington Consensus, acceptance of industrial policy has been an uphill battle over the past few decades. That’s why, in 2019, Hasanov and Cherif were forced to coyly title that working paper “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named.” A year later, they followed with a higher-ranking departmental paper, “The Principles of Industrial Policy.” But the IMF still published a rebuttal from Irwin this past June.

“The debate over industrial policy has long been locked in a stalemate,” Irwin wrote. “Some see it as essential to productivity growth and structural transformation, while others see it as abetting corruption and fostering inefficiency.” Irwin echoed generations of neoliberal thinking in concluding that “quantitative models suggest that the gains from even optimally designed industrial policies are small and unlikely to be transformative.”

Yet new empirical data from the last few years indicates that many of East Asia’s industrial policy investments from decades ago have paid off big time. Younger economists such as Ernest Liu of Princeton University have debunked some of the old biases against industrial policy—mainly that it lacks the reliable information necessary to target appropriate sectors—by showing that new measures of market distortions can supply just that.

Even as the Biden administration has fully adopted industrial policy, it uses, instead, the term “industrial strategy.” As IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath said in a speech earlier this month, the fund’s advice is “to tread carefully. History is replete with examples of IPs [industrial policies] that were not only costly, but also hindered the emergence of more dynamic and efficient companies.”

Nowhere does the success of industrial policy play a greater role in the world today than in Taiwan. One of the reasons Taiwan has become such a hot issue geopolitically—as the U.S. and China vie over its future as a state—is because of its world-beating semiconductor industry, which produces an astonishing 60 percent or more of the world’s chips. This was not the work of the private sector alone but the creation, in 1987, of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which received at least half of its initial funding from the government and over subsequent decades emerged as the preeminent maker of advanced chips. In South Korea, the World Bank once advised against setting up an integrated steel company, saying it wasn’t in Korea’s comparative advantage. But what became POSCO (formerly Pohang Iron and Steel Company) “fairly soon became the most efficient steel plant in the world,” Wade said.

So it’s unavoidable to conclude that a subject that was once taboo—the idea of government-directed industrial subsidies, along with semi-closed markets and economic nationalism of the kind practiced by Taiwan—is being embraced on all sides. A paper summing up these effects, “The New Economics of Industrial Policy,” by economists Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, and Dani Rodrik, is slated for publication early next year by the mainstream Annual Review of Economics. And the chairman of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors, longtime progressive economist Jared Bernstein, has invited the co-authors to speak to the council later this month, according to Lane.

In the last two and a half years, Biden has enacted what his former National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, calls its “modern American industrial strategy” based mainly on “four foundational laws”: the American Rescue Plan, which brought our economy back from the brink, and more recently the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (under which Washington is subsidizing low-carbon technologies and prioritizing homemade technological leadership).

What this means, Deese said, is that rather than “accepting as fate that the individualized decisions of those looking only at their private bottom lines will put us behind in key sectors,” the government plans a long-term strategic investment “in those areas that will form the backbone of our economy’s growth over the coming decades, areas where we need to expand the nation’s productive capacity.” There have been some promising early results: U.S. manufacturing employment has hit its highest levels since the early 2000s, and the White House boasted in June that nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created under Biden, while private-sector companies have announced more than $480 billion in manufacturing and clean energy investments since he took office.

The key factors: building sophisticated industrial sectors with government seeding, export orientation, competition, and accountability for the support received. While the policy is not yet fully articulated, the administration is seeking to emulate some of the key principles of the Asian miracle’s success—and at the same time recognize the deficiencies of neoliberalism.

“If neoliberalism is going to generate inequality, then you need government to compensate the losers,” said former World Bank economist Nancy Birdsall, referring to education, retraining, and other major investments. “That didn’t happen in the U.S. The government came up with sort of pathetic little programs that did not come close to dealing with the China shock” of jobs moving there in the last two decades.

In a recent essay in Foreign Policy, Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute, argued that while industrial policy is occasionally useful, the “zero-sum” economics it embraces is bound to backfire based on “four profound analytic fallacies: that self-dealing is smart; that self-sufficiency is attainable; that more subsidies are better; and that local production is what matters.”

Deese has sought to address these common neoliberal objections to industrial policy, arguing the administration is not cherry-picking winners and crowding out private investment but instead seeking to use “public investment to crowd in more private investment, and make sure that the cumulative benefits of this investment strengthen our national bottom line.” By this he means transportation infrastructure, which “literally lays the groundwork for private investment”; government-funded technological innovation; and government investing in STEM education and training at schools and universities nationwide. Harking back to the glory days of the Cold War, Deese said Biden is “making a larger investment in innovation than even President [John F.] Kennedy and the Apollo program that took us to the moon.”

Another major area for industrial policy is clean energy, Deese said. “We know the climate crisis cannot be addressed by market forces alone. We know public leadership and investment is key to the solution. And yet for decades, our country stood by. But now, with our industrial strategy, we’re making the largest investment in clean energy ever in our nation’s history” so as to “encourage the private sector to invest at massive scale.”

And yet aspects of the new policy scheme remain incoherent. One such area in Biden’s plan is his embrace of Trump’s tariffs: Economists such as Hasanov say the East Asian model works much better if there is a vibrant export market around the world to sustain competition.

These inconsistencies arise partly “because the mainstream is still coming up with bogus arguments about crowding out other ‘good’ investments,” Stiglitz said. “It’s an embarrassment. The U.S. is all over the place. The Republicans have no coherent framework for thinking about the role of industrial policies—other than the market can’t compete with China. The Democrats can’t come up with the kind of coherent approach that is needed because of the politics of [Sen. Joe] Manchin—the policy is whatever we can get through Congress.”

Today, ironically, Japan is one of the countries carrying the banner of free trade in the absence of Washington. During the Trump administration, Tokyo helped resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump pulled out by joining with other members such as Canada to renegotiate the successor Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. In a 2019 interview, James Carr, Canada’s then-international trade minister, told me that “the Japanese position, attitude, and support for the rule-based multilateral trading system and fair trade has been exemplary and very important.” This year, Japan sought to rescue the WTO by joining the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, a multilateral framework that duplicates the Appellate Body by enabling members to resolve WTO disputes among themselves.

The European Union is also embracing industrial policy, launching the Green Deal Industrial Plan and Net-Zero Industry Act—which emulates Biden’s IRA by giving member states greater flexibility to incentivize private investors and match foreign subsidies such as those available under the IRA. The European Commission also recently launched a European Critical Raw Materials Act, to aid in identifying and securing access to those raw materials that are critical across various sectors of the European economy, and is leading multiple initiatives in artificial intelligence and digital technologies. Today, it is the policymakers who are surging ahead, while economists straggle behind.