Two things I read today about paradoxical abundance (and one thing that isn't)
Em Reed on the ecosystem of free games:
In fact, things that are too abundant become a bit intimidating. The philosopher Georges Bataille called the immense output of solar energy that hits the earth beyond what existing organisms need to fulfill their biological functions “the accursed share,” which he theorized as an excess that underlies all life and must be wasted. It could be wasted on beautiful things, like artistic expression and non procreative sexuality, or terrible things, like war and violence. This excess can reinforce the existing order, as pressure release valve or monuments to its glory, or be used to disrupt it.
From that perspective, an uneasy element to abundance emerges, which explains our attempts to rationalize it. Think of the cringe with which you regard corny poetry or goofy fanart that seemed to flow out of you uncontrolled as a kid… the derision aimed at the cumulative monuments to this excess and abundance, like Deviantart or the sonic fandom. But isn’t this also abundance?
The firehose of passionate and strange work, mostly naive or indifferent to “good” game design practice represented by the “new games” tab on a site like itch.io (only one site representing one medium out of all human creativity has devoted itself to) can be overwhelming; how do you even know where to start? And the internet has made us more aware of this abundance, so knowing only an infinitesimal portion of it can be comprehended or archived for posterity can inspire a kind of dread.
Reframing Abundance - Em Reed
Em Reed
Cat Hicks on who counts as "technical" within software engineering contexts:
It feels incoherent but asks a completely coherent question of us. What can we do if we never have enough? This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough. I am not saying that suffering isn’t real, I’m saying it teaches us what all that richness will never fix. I have been afraid to check the mail and see a bill and afraid to go to the doctor and afraid for the future of our science is what I’m saying, and that is not how Technical feels, and yet I am the one who knows what I have enough to care about it. Without the ability to feel, part of the “enough” that Technical craves is continually novel ways to make people like me afraid.
Why I Cannot Be Technical
With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of
Cat Hicks
And, finally, here's a bonus one from Katharine Cross about the recent Supreme Court ruling and "sex based rights":
To protect one from sex-based discrimination is to protect one’s human dignity from being assaulted by the prejudices of others—by their perceptions, beliefs, delusions, opinions about one’s sexed body. But to invest someone with sex-based rights is to commit both them and you to a whole theory of sex that must be objectively defined, where there is something special about your very biology that entitles you to special treatment not deserved by others. This is the film-negative of a civil right.
That suits right-wing ends just fine. They have a clear ideological project that both denies human equality and creates sex castes. The idea of a sex-based right works within a framework of easily defined men and women, where never the twain shall meet. Democratic jurisprudence, meanwhile, has to take a different approach: that identity is not the basis of a special right, but merely something to be recognised by the law in its quest to ensure all receive equal protection.
To be legally cognisant of sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, et cetera, is not to argue that there are, say, ‘race-based rights,’ but that these are categories along which one may experience discrimination that violates both one’s dignity and citizenship. One is legally cognisant of sex-based discrimination so that one can protect the victim’s humanity from an attempt to cleave them away into a biologised category that implicitly deserves fewer rights. That is, after all, the corollary to any idea of identity-based rights.
The Potemkin Feminism of “Sex-Based Rights”
“Sex-based rights” are a Potemkin feminism that commit us to a theory of objective sex where there is something special about your very biology that entitles you to special treatment not deserved by others.
Katherine Alejandra Cross
So this is what I've been thinking about and reading. A joyous abundance that makes us uneasy. A hollow abundance that leads to fear. A fear that makes us all less secure.