The Dish

Thomas Flores considers the appeal of technocrats, tracking their rise over the past half-century:

Politicians are an easy object for derision, even among themselves. Calling a decision “political” is a sure-fire way to impugn it. Technocrats promise a different style of governance, one in which expertise and objectivity matter more than venal political calculation. In a way, the desire for technocratic rule hearkens back to Plato’s conception of the philosopher king who rules with wisdom and knowledge.

Technocratic rule holds yet another promise, that of a value-free politics.

The vexing political issues of our day that enjoin us to deeply consider our political values — climate change, racial relations, and privacy in the global war on terrorism – are in part the cause of political conflict. So the prospect that these troubling questions ultimately have technical solutions remains tempting, since it allows us to evade the political act of reconciling our values to ourselves and to each other. TED talks are perhaps the most prominent public forum for such thinking, promising that technological change and creative thinking hold the key to human progress, rather than struggles over value questions such as justice and equity, as cultural critics such as Evgeny Morozov have argued.

Yet we cannot escape the political, no matter how hard we may try. All forms of politics, even anti-politics, are embedded in political values. A desire for technocratic politics constructs an ethos of rule favoring certain values – expertise as a form of political legitimacy and economic efficiency as the goal of economic policy – over others. Technocrats may offer us improved economic management, but not an escape from the importance of values in politics. Political questions are, in the end, political.

In his review of Bleeding Edge, Jason Tanz dubs Thomas Pynchon a “prophet of the post-Snowden era”:

The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century. It’s hard not to see Anonymous in one character’s desire for “good hackers around interested in fighting back” against the Web companies “screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys.” Hard not to see everything from SecondLife to BitCoin in “DeepArcher,” a virtual world in which avatars conduct encrypted transactions far from government’s reach. Hard not to see AT&T and Verizon in one character’s prediction that the Internet, once connected to cell phones, would become “a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”

For all his famed paranoia, Pynchon never fully casts his lot with the conspiracy theorists, although it’s clear they have his sympathies — even the 9/11 truther that pops up in these pages. I guess this could be considered a spoiler, but no regular Pynchon reader will be surprised that Maxine’s mystery never gets fully defined, much less resolved. As usual, Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.

Recent Dish on Pynchon here and here.

“In my experience, metal isn’t for angry people,” says Leah Sottile:

And that got me thinking: Is it possible that listening to angry music could make people happier? Do hours and years of loud riffs and screeching vocals pummeling your ear drums actually mellow you out?

It’s a theory backed up in a recent study conducted by Maya Tamir and Brett Ford, researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In one study, 175 people were asked to participate in role-playing exercises where they had to either confront a person—like a cop interrogating a suspect—or collaborate with someone. But before the role-playing began, the subjects were allowed to choose from a selection of music to aid in evoking the emotions they would need: Anger, happiness, or neutrality. It was up to them to choose what they wanted to hear. “Music is often used as a way to manipulate emotions, I just had people decide how to manipulate their own emotions,” Tamir says. The subjects were also asked questions about their emotional health, happiness, and feelings of social support.

It’s no novel idea that someone might choose to rev themselves up with aggressive music before a engaging in a tough task: A fourth quarter tie-breaker, a tense salary negotiation. And no surprise, the folks who chose angry music had no problem completing their tasks.

(Video: Judas Priest performs in 1982)