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Read a lot this week. Submitted my rough draft of the dissertation proposal. Checked out five more books from the library that I have yet to open: Ethics by Spinoza, Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guatarri, Phenomenology of Spirits by Hegel, The Testaments by Atwood, and Flashlight by Choi. Read so much about automated data fusion & Citigraf & the associated horrors. I’m scared I’m headed to tinfoil hat territory the way that I’ve been increasingly thinking of the totality of surveillance we endure every day.
I’ve been especially moved by this article from WIRED by Arthur Holland Michel called “There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain.” This paragraph especially:
“The NYPD official showed me how he could pull up any city resident’s rap sheet, lists of their known associates, cases in which they were named as a victim of a crime or as a witness, and, if they had a car, a heatmap of where they tended to drive and a full history of their parking violations. Then he handed me the phone. Go ahead, he said; search a name. A flurry of people came to mind: Friends. Lovers. Enemies. In the end, I chose the victim of a shooting I’d witnessed in Brooklyn a couple of years earlier. He popped right up, along with what felt like more personal information than I, or even perhaps a curious officer, had any right to know without a court order. Feeling a little dizzy, I gave the phone back.”
So that’s been occupying my thoughts lately.
“Anything you feed your brain it will internalize. Anything you feed the internet it will kill." Taylor Swift becoming a sts studies critic. The new album featuring a song about Hamlet’s Ophelia is genuinely so exciting to me. Ophelia and her associated tropes were so formative in my high school years (like the hysterical woman, fridging, the elusive teenage girl, the bond between an “unhinged” woman and the natural world, all the Teenage Suicides-esque). & I’ve been watching The Summer I turned Pretty. Balancing it all, if that isn’t too indulgent. Still trying to enjoy things in the descent into whatever this is.
Aside from that, really been revamping this site, although still feeling very far from where I want it. In the meantime, it’s been very fun, especially as the summer wraps. August feels more like the end of the year than ever this time, and I go back and forth between relief and grief about this.
I’ve finished some books too this week, not just online articles, including: Endling by Reva (which I loved and will be thinking about for a long long time and will hopefully write a post dedicated to only it soon), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Graham Jones, Shuggie Bain, The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro. Still working through A Theory of the Drone by Chamayou and just started Audition by Kitamura. More soon.
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