Is this thing on?

On Saturday, February 10, a group of skaters and also probably some other people who feel very strongly about this kind of thing mobbed and demolished a self-driving car in the streets of San Francisco. I’m still unclear if this was all spontaneous or planned, but it eventually went up in flames, which was very punk rock either way, from an objective standpoint.

The car in question was a driverless taxi operated by Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. (AKA Google) subsidiary which seems to be the only significant player in the self-driving car market. Many of the Midwesterners I interact with still wax poetic about self-driving cars as if they’re a near-future hypothetical that exists only in the realm of speculative science fiction and civic debate. Usually I don’t have the heart to tell them I drove past one of these f*ckers on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona nearly every day during college, which was last year.

Anyways, five days before, on February 6, a Waymo hit a cyclist in San Francisco. In May 2023 one killed a dog.

The Pope has an in-house AI guy now, though, so maybe we’ll get the answer to some of our burning associated theological questions. Do all dogs killed by self-driving cars go to heaven? Do the self-driving cars who kill dogs go to hell for dog murder, or just the people who make money off them? Who is making money off AI in the first place? (Hint: not me).

Thank you for reading this blog directly from a website on the world wide web via a domain which I own hosted by an independent publishing platform with no ads. That’s probably the most archaic way you’ve engaged with media all week. It’s also probably safer, more private, and more family-friendly than any of the Earth’s most ubiquitous and powerful social media platforms. For example, on Facebook, you could be watching monkey torture videos right now instead.

As I scroll on through hundreds of AI generated children staring at wide-eyed dogs, I realize there are also hundreds of monkey videos. Some are trapped and buried in soil and mud; others appear to be restrained in the spokes of bicycle wheels and bamboo fences. In some of the more popular videos, the monkeys are being slowly constricted by snakes. There’s endless peril, in every conceivable size and shape. In another video, there’s movement inside an infant monkey’s ear. Slowly, a small grass snake emerges from deep inside its ear cavity. The monkey screams.

I highly recommend that piece, by David Ferrier, if you can stomach it. The Platforms are also still killing it at their age-old mandate to facilitate the antics of wannabe stochastic terrorists. Some things never change, and I think that’s beautiful.

Really you should just shut up and be grateful you have reliable access to the internet in the first place, enshittified or otherwise. You should perhaps feel less optimistic about your access to reliable news and information about the grass and other stuff you can touch outside, though — unless you live in New York, where your “local” “paper” is apparently racking in ten figures annually from subscriptions alone.

My guess is we’re about 10 years away from the critical tipping point at which journalism undergrads will become functionally indistinguishable from music theater majors. Both journalists and music theater majors come from predominantly white, wealthy, college-educated backgrounds. Both journalists and music theater majors receive a technical education that is largely inapplicable to the extant job market. Both journalists and music theater majors quickly learn the concept of transferable skills upon graduation. Both journalists and music theater majors are routinely surveilled by foreign intelligence agencies, assaulted with projectile weapons by police, and killed by the Israeli Defense Forces. Both groups also sometimes talk to muppets as if they are real people.

Speaking of the IDF, journalism, and music theater majors, Haaretz confirmed last week that the Israeli military’s psychological operations group created and ran an undercover propaganda Telegram channel called “72 Virgins.” The channel was targeted to Israeli civilians. It featured graphic gore videos of IDF members torturing and killing Gazans, accompanied by captions referring to Palestinians as “rats” and “roaches” being “exterminated.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jasbir Paur’s concept of the right to maim recently. I still haven’t read the book, but her original essay from 2015 is foundational to my understanding of contemporary Gaza.

Maiming functions as slow but simultaneously intensive death-making, as targeting to maim is an accelerated assault on both bodily and infrastructural fronts … In this complication of the temporalities and processes, the speed of biopolitics turns not through distinctions between fast and slow, quick and languorous, but rather the intensification and amplification of ‘life itself’, and in fact, ‘resistance itself’ as a target of neglect, damage, and speculative rehabilitation.

If slow death is conceptualized as primarily through the vector of ‘let die’ or ‘make die’, maiming functions as ‘will not let die’ and, its supposed humanitarian complement, ‘will not make die’. Maiming masquerades as ‘let live’ when in fact it acts as ‘will not let die’. For example, the IOF policy of shooting to maim, not to kill, is often misperceived as a preservation of life. In this version of attenuated life, neither living nor dying is the aim. Instead, ‘will not let die’ and ‘will not make die’ replaces altogether the coordinate ‘make live’ or ‘let die’. It is not only the right to kill but the right to maim being exercised as the domain of sovereignty. What kind of sovereignty is being articulated when the right to kill is enacted as the right to disable, to target both bodies and infrastructure for disablement? This element of biopolitics entails targeting for death but not killing.

I’m not an expert in Foucauldian biopolitical theory or whatever. Here’s what I do know:

• Among those Gazans who have been lucky enough to survive the bomb strikes and ground offensives, permanent physical disabilities, including amputations, are rampant. A month ago, CNN reported an estimate that more than 10 children lost legs in Gaza every day. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s more horrific than that. Orphaned toddlers with amputated hands.
• As of February 12, at least 28,340 people had been killed in Gaza since the attacks began, including at least 12,150 children. At least another 67,984 had been injured, including at least 8,663 children.
• 85% of Gazans are now internally displaced, which is a nice way of saying nearly two million people are currently homeless and on the run. The entire population is being starved.

There have been 47 mass shootings in the United States since the start of 2024. I’m getting texts that somebody shot up the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City, Missouri this afternoon, so make that 48. Click and post.