Mother Jones: My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard

Well worth the long read.  Particularly if you're fond of dystopias. As Bauer states,

"My job will always be to deny them the most basic of human impulses -- to push for more freedom."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer

Dystopic Diversion

I'm in a mood to read some dystopias again soon.  I need to add a few of these options to my list (mixed with some other dystopia-related reading).

• Shortlist: 20 Dystopian Novels - I haven't read The Windup Girl, The Chyrsalids, The Iron Heel (high on my list), Article 5, The Drowned World (also high on my list), or Uglies (Eryn just got the whole series).
• Wired UK - 10 Best and Worst Dystopian Works - I haven't read (or watched) The Trial by Kafka, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and I will never read the Divergent Trilogy (good lord does it sound awful).
• On Such a Full Sea by Change-rae Lee.  Definitely need to add to my library list.
• 1984 on stage 
• Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and the End of the World - interesting differentiation between the words.

The Circle

I'm conflicted about The Circle.  It's not the most well written book I've read.  And the main character is annoying.  Perhaps appropriately, given she's very believeable as a self-involved, thinks she's helping by forcing others to participate in her definition of normal and progress via social media, assured of her own self-importance and great-things-are-due-me, idiot. And Eggers is heavy handed with his theme over his storytelling, leaning in favor of Orwellian quotes and a semi-one dimensional set of characters and sheep-like public, almost to the point of melodrama.  Then again, it's a dystopia, and I allow some leniency for effort in that category. A bit of hyperbole is generally the rule if you're trying to take an idea to its extreme.  And the idea that Google might take over the world bit bit, erase the concept of anonymity and push it to the extent where facial identification determines your presence in every bit of digitized media ever uploaded to the environment, is amusing.

Where it's creepy is where it aligns with my own big organization experiences.  Rankings on your social network participation.  And this statement, which aligns surprisingly with my own company's mission and commitment to acting like a cohesive enterprise: "we here at the Circle have been talking about Completion a lot, and though even us Circlers don't known yet just what Completion means, I have a feeling it's something like this.  Connecting services and programs that are just inches apart."

However, I'm not sure I believe in the short run any company is capable of forcing that sort of acceptance upon everyone.  And Tuesday I was at a two hour lecture about the other side of the coin.  Bitcoins for anonymity.  Semi-covert websites for anonymity of trading and avoiding the impact and monitoring of business and government.  And how to curate your personal information when it comes to giving away your fingerprints to Disney.  Your face to Microsoft and your XBox One.  And your license plate to some start up that wants to tie it to your Facebook account.  It was a great presentation.  The presenter showed us IR for the Kinect and how it tracks your pulse via your face.  How to make a trade for Bitcoin on the corner, live.  How to order fake gift cards, live.  And how to get arrested by the FBI if you try to hire a hitman.  It's obvious there's a real tension between what he called the little brothers - corporations trying to collect information about you.  Big brother - the government trying to collect info.  And swaths of society trying to stay out of those systems and off the radar.

Real people are much complex and ambivalent than in Eggers' book.  But he's right that critical mass can tip the balance.

It Can't Happen Here - Follow Up Reading

After reading It Can't Happen Here, I ordered the proceedings of Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference.  The good thing about having access to the Minnesota library system is it includes being able to lay your hands on collections produced at SCSU.

I was only interested in the two papers on It Can't Happen Here.  The first, A Middle-Class Utopia, was passable.  James T. Jones focused on the dystopic aspects of the book, addressing the 1.) political utopia, 2.) the philosophical/anthropological utopia, 3.) the historical utopia, 4.) the prophetic utopia, and 5.) the satiric utopia.  He goes on to postulate that as far as dystopic fiction, it may fall short of the definition by not resulting in "the total defeat of the individual" (225), a criticism I've level at many books which aspire to be dystopic.  It's an interesting assertion, because It Can't Happen Here reads like a dystopia and shares a lot of the traits of a dystopia and, I'd call it one, right up until the end where hope takes root.

Reading It Can't Happen Here With College Freshman by Judy F. Parham is much less interesting.  It felt like a lot of excuse making for her students.  They're average readers.  The text reading level fluctuates wildly between pages.  There's too much contemporary history for a modern reader.  They don't have the reading skills to handle satire and dystopias in general.  There needs to be a lot more prep to appreciate the context, including writing satires of their own and dystopias of their own.  I don't disagree with the joys involved in that last statement, but in the end it seems to boil down to, "I didn't have the smartest, most-experienced, readers."

It Can't Happen Here

While I was reading Ishmael, Daniel Quinn made reference to Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here.  I looked up the book to determine the reference, and it intrigued me.  Dictatorship in the US pre-WWII?  It had all the makings of a dystopia.  My favorite kind of novel.

I have to say, I enjoyed it.  Immensely.  I read a warning that the references might be a little dated and difficult to understand, but I've had enough American history that there was very little that snuck past me, even in a paper copy where I could hop to Wikipedia every time I saw a 1930's era name.

It really is rather amazing how little the environment has changed in some respects since 1936.  And I realized while I was first thinking that that 1936 was closer to my year of birth than my year of birth is to know.  Much closer.  Favoring the bankers, yet speaking out against banks?  Complaining about taxes?  Liberty measles instead of liberty fries?  Religious hysteria and use of big media?  Complaining that a small percentage of the populace (actually) owns 40-60% of the wealth? Tying patriotism to places it doesn't seem to belong?  It's all there.  Lewis' dictator, Buzz Windrip, isn't particularly cunning as he comes to power, but Lewis' point isn't the machinations of how he comes to power, but rather that it could happen and that all the things associated with fascism could happen in the US, with a distinctly US flavor of folksiness.  Likewise, the hero, a newspaper editor of the middle class, Doremus Jessup, isn't fully flushed out, but he's both a representation of the middle class, and a character who's forced to experience the wide range of behaviors under a fascist government so we can see them all at work

I appreciated that Lewis is an excellent writer.  I can see why he gained his status as the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in writing.  Glowing, witty, prose hopped out in unexpected places and I found myself enjoying some of his style as much as the topic and story.  I don't often laugh out loud at a particularly well-written bit of writing, but it happened to me more than a few times in It Can't Happen Here.

I'll close with a few of my favorite passages.  Not the planks and platform of Windrip, but some bits and pieces that stood out to me:

Doremus' daughter Sissy, on the nature of grabby men (277):
"They always, all of them, went through the same procedure, heavily pretending that there was no system in their manual proposals; and to a girl of spirit, the chief diversion in the whole business was watching their smirking pride in their technique.  The only variation, every, was whether they started in at the top or the bottom."

On detention camps and torture (285)
"All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette.  And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe."

After Doremus is put in a detention camp and mistreated and sees those he knows beaten and starved and worse: (288)
"He simply went on."

On a particularly American version of the ideological struggle and how it's tied to religion and patriotism (358).
"He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism.  But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.  For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.  To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson."

Hyperbolising the reach of a potential enemy (369):
"...conscience compelled him to reveal that his Mexican superiors were planning to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine."

A Dictator's Guide To Urban Design

A fascinating article   I find the comments despairing that America has it equally bad with a suburban layout to be rather strange.  Suburbia is historically driven by economic and social (including discriminatory) reasons, not by plutocrats and fascists controlling our ability to gather.  And it's not that difficult to gather (30,000 of us on RAGBRAI) and it's not even that difficult to live close to work.  You have to be willing and it may come with a cost, but you can certainly make that decision and many of the current generation are doing exactly that.

Reminds me of Kyle asking about the Lego movie and whether it was a dystopia.  Lots of soaring buildings.  Walled off access to other Lego "lands".  All sorts of physical barriers right down to how the Legos are allowed to be put together.  Watch the movie and look for the town square...

"...a way for autocrats to squash dissent through urban design."

Euphoria

Eryn and I took a stab at playing Euphoria this evening.  It's the game of building a better dystopia that we backed on Kickstarter some time ago.  A lot of people backed it as it raised 20 times their goal.  It's been in our queue to try out, but we had a lot of other games to play first.  I was a little worried about how long it would take to learn given all the pieces, but the rules were quick to apprehend, and once we got going, we even figured out a bit of the strategy on our first run.  Although I think as it's a resource/placement game, playing with more than two people would make it much more fun.  Too often one of us was chasing the other's lead instead of carefully planning.

The goal is to build a better dystopia and manage your workers - the dice - to collect resources and products and crate new workers, open markets, dig tunnels, and score points.  The workers are represented by the dice and the pips are important as having workers too smart - total pips - results in their understanding of the predicament they're in, and they flee the coop.  All the while the levels for the various areas increases as resources are collected, changing the collection strategy and opening up your henchmen who provide some special actions and bonuses.


I won the first game, but it was within a point of each other.  I suspect the only thing that helped me was that one of my henchmen let me place my new workers right away. My second worker was too smart for his own good though, and took off.  The markets, where you can score victory points, are tricky because if you're not careful and contribute, you have to suffer a penalty or choose to play catch up and eliminate the penalty.  For example, every three rolled on a worker for me cost a resource.

Reclaiming your workers/dice from the board requires a turn, as does placing one.  Coupling that with the danger of them getting too smart (you roll all of them when you pop them off and the total roll determines whether one takes off) requires some strategy.  If you have three workers, you're pretty sure you'll get less than a 16.  Four or more, it gets dicier (ha) and you're more likely to lose a worker  Although you can choose to only pull three and hope the other one pops off because someone else wants your resource spot.


Excellent game play.  Fast.  Lot of thinking, even in a short two-person game.  I'll definitely be pulling it out next board gaming day.  The stack of minions is pretty sizable.  Basically two card decks.  I like it that I can find people I know in the deck.  Here's the two people I went to Run Lola Run at the Trylon with last night.


This one is pretty cool.  Not having to pay a resource is powerful as the variation in resources means you're generally short of at least something you need.  The minions are tagged to one of the four factions on the board, so it's in your interest to focus on a faction as pushing it's progress level to maximum allows you to score a point for each minion in that faction.  Matthew looks pretty shift with his sash.

Dystopic Highways

I should turn that into a song. It would be catchy I think. "Dystopic highways, authoritarian byways...dum, de, dum, de....I AM A BOOT STAMPING ON YOUR FACE FOREVER!!!!!"

Oh yeah. That's the stuff with which I could oppress a population. Perhaps not as good as my boss's inadvertent country title, "Cold Husband, Warm Car", which is destined to be a Minnesota classic, but I could get some mileage out of my song on the punk scene.

Pooteewheet had noticed this license plate in our area before, and she finally managed to snap a picture with her cell phone. It could be a Lucas fan, but I prefer to think it's someone else in love with the idea of making everyone live in a repressive society.

Dystopic Corner - Scorch and Brave New World

A.D. Nauman's Scorch was much more dystopic than Imprint. There's no escape in this novel. Arel Ashe, the main character, is surrounded by advertising and libertarianism, both taken to the extreme. There's no where she can turn that she isn't confronted with in-your-face ads. In her car. At her job. In every t.v. show. In her apartment. Likewise, libertarianism has been taken to the extreme, and good citizens complain about the big brother government of the past, the unproductiveness of the homeless, and that everything is simply better unregulated, although the effects on individual freedom are in many cases the reverse of what might be expected. When society starts to fracture, one side embracing libertarianism coupled with Christianity, the other side embracing compassionate housing for the homeless, the result isn't what you'd expect, and Arel finds herself in the middle of two extremist camps that seem strikingly similar, both willing to kill, neither fixing what's wrong with their society. It's a good dystopia when the description of the problems don't sound that much different from your own society.

Nauman has some clever bits in her writing, although I swear she's oversexed. But sex is a prominent feature in most dystopic works as it tends to take everyone's mind off of rebellion. Both Brave New World and 1984 feature their share of bonking. Nauman pokes some fun at Orwell's 1984, noting that in her society they keep turning it into new remakes for television all the time, but her book more closely resembles Huxley's Brave New World in tone. Both have mommy attachments - Arel to her mother, the Savage in BNW to Linda (although her attachment to him is questionable in the same way you question a meth mom's attachment to her child). Both have a character who learns something about opposition to the current society via books. Arel from the backroom, discarded waste in a library that is now devoted to videos, all commercial in nature; the Savage from his copy of Shakespeare. Both have a character that seems at first to be against their society, but at points seems more frustrated that they don't fully belong and can't get all the things they truly want. When Arel gets a taste of respect after her successful screenplay, her non-mainstream boyfriend and book-learned ideals temporarily disappear. Likewise in BNW, Bernard Marx for a while becomes the conduit between the populace and the Savage and finds contentment in having a bit of superiority and fame. They embrace what is easy when it is offered. Revolution is too hard.

I read a sizeable part of Readings on Aldous Huxley Brave New World (Literary Companion Series) while donating platelets and finished up early this week. The book is a number of critiques on aspects of Brave New World, and because there are more than a dozen, suffers from a bit of repetition. But there were some good ideas once you cut through the boring bits, and it's enlightening to see the criticism change over 80 years, from complaints about how bolshevism and atheism make BNW a reality, to 50's and 60's concerns that BNW is here, to later essays which aren't as alarmist and are content to examine the characters, their relation to other literature, and the role of love in this particular dystopia. I was particuarly interested in David Sisk's excerpt from Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias, but at $108.00+, it had better be in the interlibrary system, because at that price my interest in dystopias starts to seem like a soma habit. Transformations examines one of my favorite topics, namely that stripping characters of their names is a dystopic tradition (Logan's Run, THX 1138, etc.), and it's interesting to ponder why so many authors find this to be so central toword dehumanizing an individual.

I can't remember which author used it, but I was particularly enamored of the idea of the zero horizon dystopia. I've never been convinced that any other type is a true dystopia. After all, if there's any sort of hope, any sort of escape, even for the reader, then how dystopic can it be? True dystopic heroes are doomed. Like Arel burning to death at the end of Scorch. Winston Smith being tortured in 1984. 503 being surgically altered in We. Or the main character going insane at the end of Brazil (which treads the liminal - did he escape, or didn't he?)

I flushed out my wishlist on Amazon with all the dystopic works listed so that the Amazon recommendation engine is almost reset in what it perceives to be my preferences, spitting up all sorts of dystopic options in addition to information architecture and search engine optimization. I wonder if the government will look at that combination and offer me a job designing new web sites?

Dystopic Review - Imprint and The Holy Land

I picked up Imprint from the Interlibrary Loan System because within the library taxonomy it had been filed under “Dystopia”. It is not a dystopia. It has a few dystopic tendencies: a pervasive police force (with unknown directors), a disappearing populace, rampant drug use (joysticks – candles infused with drugs, in this case) and sexual liasons (both classifiable under opiates for the masses), a corporate overlord motif and a soylent green motif.

But none of these makes it a dystopia. They make it depressing. They make it not as good of a life as you might expect to lead given your current life. But they don't make it dystopic. You can escape the world of Imprint, or at least your status/position/unhappiness within the world of Imprint. You can earn credits and buy things you want. The more money you earn, and the potential to earn is open to most of the characters in the book, the better your access to the things you want and the people with whom you want to rub elbows. While memory seems to be shortened, in most respects it's a choice to not remember, not some sort of brain scrubbing imposed by the state. While there's a hint of forgetting because of industrial waste, the central point of the book isn't the forgetting, but that many individuals are overcoming the forgetting, and those that remember the best move up. The people who disappear, those that are forgotten, are for the most part not disappearing at all (despite the soylent gray), but leaving their old lives to pursue careers as musicians, archivists, freelance hit men, and opposition members. Everyone is making choices: choices about whether to keep a baby, whether to ally themselves with corporations, the poor, the rich, or their own interests, whether to give up an old life or boyfriend. Examples are everywhere in the book. Loss of memory isn't an issue of indoctrination, it's a matter of a resource-poor environment without much hope. But hope certainly isn't dead.

There is escape in Imprint, and that's just not the sign of a good dystopia. Some escape their old lives to pursue new jobs. Some escape their old relationships. Some escape their old economic bounds. And some harvest genetically mutated embryos to merge emerging traits and make themselves almost superhuman. The old system is failing, but there is obviously the promise of something better.

It could be argued that the characters exist in a dystopia that is now being rectified, much like Logan's Run: resources are running low; the environment outside the city and the playground of the rich is inhospitible; only the rich really have access to resources and they use them for personal pleasure, power plays, and financing super weapons, rather than improvements to the society. But based on those criteria, almost all of human history has been a dystopia which dilutes the term to meaning nothing at all.

I found The Holy Land, which doesn't purport to be a dystopia, more dystopic than Imprint, although it's obviously satire. Zubrin claims to have been inspired by War With the Newts, and the influence is clear, although Capek's Newts is incredibly dry in its humor, and Zubrin goes over the top in his farce (I preferred Newts, as Capek's style seems almost serious at times, which is more in line with my sense of humor). I posit it's more dystopic because the galactic culture involved is unavoidable. It's everywhere. And the results of its incompetence are mirrored everywhere. You get the feeling that there's no way to avoid it, no way to escape it. That's the nature of a dystopia.

But Zubrin's book isn't about unavoidable fates and the extension of societal tendencies to create inescapable environments. Rather, he's created a satire about the situation in the Middle East, transposing Minervans as Israelites, the U.S. as the Middle East (and a small group of U.S. citizens - people from bits of Kennewick, Washington - as Palestinians), and galactic culture as the U.S. and world culture. The result is very funny, and does exactly what a satire should, draws out the ridiculousness of the situation in any other context. The National Review reviewed Zubrin's book, and addressed it from the perspective that the Middle East was crazy (my words, not their words - a loose paraphrase). They're wrong about Zubrin's intent, or at least the totality of his intent. He's working on more levels than they're willing to cop, but perhaps they're wearing self-imposed blinders. The first level is the obvious one, that the situation in the Middle East is crazy, and reposited as it is in The Holy Land, it's obvious in any other context. On a second level, post 9/11, the U.S. looks just as crazy in some respects, and the repositioning of the context of the U.S. as the Middle East at large isn't so far fetched with the focus on over the top patriotism, corruption, and self-interest. There but for the grace of God, as the saying goes - ironic given the role of the U.S. in the book. Finally, the U.S. (the real one, not the literary one) can be positioned as the galactic union: bureaucractic, insular, obsessed with profit regardless of the consequences (even to themselves), unable to comprehend those who aren't on their level. Zubrin takes time to mock those involved in current affairs at every turn and at every level, allowing the reader to see the U.S. as them, the U.S. as it could be, and the U.S. as it is, all at the same time.

I recommend his book. Parts of it are extremely funny, and as a Romeo and Juliet story about the Middle East, Zubrin has put a lot of thought into what he's trying to say behind the farce of a galactic circus, shrinking Iowans and South Americans, corrupt U.S. officials, and terrorism on an intergalactic scale.